The drained landscape is one of ditches, tracks and dog-leg roads; of remote farms, knots of trees and dark, fertile soil. Not a natural landscape at all, but a complex product of human intervention. Beautiful, all the same, Emma thinks, sadly, as she tips the shovel and wipes the blade on the soggy, rain-flattened vegetation. Beauty is truth, truth beauty – the phrase echoes from long-past poetry seminars. But truth is often not beautiful, she decides, feet wet, pieces of frog smeared on the ground in front of her. Presently, her life is full of unbeautiful truths, the foremost being that she is a coward.
The back door opens, and Dylan and James bolt out.
‘Did you do it?’ they yell.
Emma nods as they jog across the puddled patio and on to the sodden grass where they each commandeer a goal. She knows the drill. They will fire long balls at each other in a game designed to improve Dylan’s shooting and James’s goalkeeping, each hitting the deck when the ball comes back to them – their clothes will be filthy.
‘Let me get out of the way, before you start,’ she says, hurrying back to the house.
The atmosphere indoors is dense and earthy: a musty mix of wet washing and the ionised air from the dehumidifier, which is stiff and sharp, like crisp sheets and metal. Emma makes coffee and watches the boys. When she hears the familiar rumble of the van’s engine she steps into the hall and waits for Chris to appear. She needs to see him, to marry the man beside the memorial with the husband in the hall and confirm they are the same person. There was a time in their marriage when talking, like sex, was recreational, a chance to rub their ideas up against each other and experience some relief in the sharing. Now, she can’t fathom how to talk without making things worse. There is an inevitability about their conversations, as if they are trapped in an Edgar Allan Poe story where all interactions are a gateway to the protagonist’s worst fears. Emma has tried to digest the news and then, like a mother bird, present Chris with safely regurgitated bits. But every hopeful comment has a rejoinder.
‘There are moths that eat plastic,’ she told him, a while ago.
‘Know what else they eat? Wax,’ Chris said. ‘And guess what bees use to make their honeycombs? Yup. Not so good now, is it?’
She hears the gates open, the drag as the swollen wood scrapes the driveway. He has gone straight round the back. She returns to the kitchen and spies him on the patio, a cardboard carrier in each hand. The image of him standing beside the sandwich board recedes, and she watches, full of the waiting feeling each of his new ideas triggers: is this the step too far? And if it is, what to say?
SIGNS OF THE TIMES
The lads stop playing football on the puddled, churned-up grass and stroll over, elbows and knees caked in mud.
‘They’re not pets,’ Chris says, indicating the carriers. ‘They’re for farming. We’re going to be farmers.’
Emma steps out through the back door, clutching a mug of coffee. He wonders how she spent the morning. There’s usually something on a Saturday. Last week it was a coast and countryside clean-up at Rimrose Valley Country Park and the week before she was nurdling at Blundellsands, picking tiny pieces of plastic off the beach after an especially high tide for some national survey or other. He won’t ask in case she returns the question.
He places the carriers in the garage where it’s dry and Dylan and James help with the hutch. They’re almost as tall as him now, all arms and legs, twiggy: a pair of saplings. The hutch is a two-storeyed affair. The first floor houses semi-detached living quarters, each with a ladder leading to its respective ground-floor run. Ideally, they’d place it on the grass, but it could be spring before the ground dries and so, for now, they position it on the patio.
‘Well, this is a surprise,’ Emma says. ‘I’m not sure why …’
‘I’ve been thinking about it for a while.’
‘You never said.’
‘Rabbits are easy to dispatch,’ he explains.
‘Oh? Where are you sending them?’
Emma sips her coffee, and, with the lower half of her face hidden by the mug, it is hard to read her expression. There are lines around her mouth. He doesn’t know when they first appeared; they’ve sneaked up on him. ‘Wipe that smile off your face,’ his father used to say. Impossible for Emma: the skin that brackets her lips is stamped with the creases of every smile she’s ever made.
Before the boys were born, they used to go walking at the weekends and, on the way back from Pendle Hill, Whernside Peak or wherever, Emma would lounge in the passenger seat, trainers off, feet propped on the dashboard while she read to him: short stories, novels, poetry – she kept a stash of books in the car, some in the glove compartment, others stuffed into the pocket of the door. He wasn’t much of a reader; he’d never read any poetry unless he counted the Psalms, but there was a poem Emma liked about getting old. Maybe it was the way she read it that appealed to Chris: softly, pausing in places, like a prayer. Or perhaps it was the fact that its contents were so far removed from their present – oldness was abstract back then and prompted thoughts of possession rather than decline: Emma would be his until the end of everything. He remembers only one line: And loved the sorrows of your changing face. The words come back to him as he looks for anger or disappointment in the corrugations of Emma’s forehead.
She lowers the mug.
‘So, you do mean they’re easy to kill?’
It’s his cue to make nice and request forgiveness. Yet why should he? This year’s harvest was poor – the courgettes and runner beans were decent enough, as were the early potatoes, but the carrots split, the leeks bolted, and the Brussels sprouts keeled over. It was already wet when he dug up the remaining potatoes. Now, they’re festering in the storage bin, waiting to be exhumed by an unsuspecting Emma. Above them, the onions, strung from the roof of the shed like gold and red Christmas decorations, are decaying from the inside out; a gentle squeeze is enough to send a pulpy heart sliding through each neck. And, once again, thanks to the rain in Spain, there are gaps on supermarket shelves where there should be lettuces, broccoli and spinach. It’s not as if things are going to get any better. What does Emma think she’s going to eat?
‘Who gets to name the rabbits?’ Dylan asks.
‘It’s best if we don’t. They’re for meat. We’ll look after them and then—’
‘We’ll slaughter them!’
‘It’s not funny, Dylan. They’ll have a nice life here. Shelter. Food. Some babies. And after that …’ Chris shrugs and then, mostly to Emma, and all at once, like tearing off a plaster, he says, ‘We’ll go for three litters a year. Once the babies are eight weeks old, they’re fryers. You should feed them extra protein if you want to dispatch them any time before three months; otherwise they aren’t worth it. From three to six months they’re roasters – that’s what we’ll be looking at. Post six months they’re stewers.’
‘We talked about bees,’ she says.
‘Did I tell you about the hives in New York that produced this poisonous green honey? Guess what the main ingredient was? Antifreeze.’
‘Well, that’s New York … I don’t see what it’s – I don’t know anything about rabbits. How to look after them or—’