The Various Read online

  ‘Don’t you have to work then?’ said Midge, curious to find herself in the company of an adult who was not forever frantically busy.

  ‘No,’ said Uncle Brian, standing in the cobbled yard, hands in his yellow corduroy trouser pockets, and staring up at the rooks in the cedar trees. ‘Not any more I don’t. Coming into a bit of money, old girl. Or at least I hope to be by the end of the holidays. I’ve got the land up for sale – some of it anyway. Come and have some soup.’

  The soup was homemade leek and potato, and very good it was too.

  ‘Used to be a chef,’ said Uncle Brian, ‘for a while.’

  There were not many things, Midge was beginning to learn, which Uncle Brian had not been ‘for a while’. He talked, as they ate their soup, of the numerous ideas he’d had for Mill Farm, cheerfully acknowledging his failures and seemingly not embarrassed to confess to his twelve-year-old niece that he was pretty hopeless as a businessman. He was interested in her too, and what life was like for her in London, not asking too many questions about school, and occasionally remembering bits of her past that she had forgotten or hadn’t known about – telling her at one point that he had some snaps of her with his own children, Kate and George, taken when they were tiny and on an outing to Bournemouth.

  ‘Or maybe it was Sidmouth. Or Exmouth. I’ve still got them somewhere. I’ll hunt them out later. You loved the sea, I remember. Kate could take it or leave it, George – poor George – was absolutely terrified, wouldn’t go anywhere near it. But you were in there like a shot.’

  Midge took a tangerine from the bowl of fruit on the table and dug her thumbnail into the soft spongy peel. ‘How old were we?’ she said. She suddenly felt comfortable. This was family. Uncle Brian’s children were her cousins. He was her mum’s older brother, and best of all, she realized – she liked him. He was cheerful and easy to talk to. Her mother could be difficult to talk to. She often seemed preoccupied, even in the middle of a conversation, on edge – and snappy. Uncle Brian was more relaxed. He didn’t appear to be continually wishing he were somewhere else.

  ‘Happy in his own skin’ – it was a phrase she had once heard Mr Powers, the oboist, use. He was talking to her mum about such and such a conductor. The words had struck her as being curious at the time and she had wondered what he meant. But now she thought she knew. Uncle Brian was someone who was happy in his own skin. Was she happy in hers? She looked at her freckled arms and thought about it.

  The kitchen where they sat to eat was a large room, and typical of the house generally in that it hadn’t been altered or redecorated in years. The doors and all the woodwork, including the great table at the centre and the tall Welsh dresser that held the crockery, were painted cream – or at least they may have originally been white, but cream they now certainly were. The floor was red-brick and worn into dips where the traffic of heavy boots had passed most often – at the threshold of the main door, in front of the Rayburn stove (also cream) and by the massive and badly chipped porcelain sink. The walls, whitewashed scores of times – though not very recently – were largely unadorned. There were no tasteful prints, no artful displays of kitchen utensils or gadgetry, no pinboards and no curtains. The single window, iron-framed and thickly coated with (cream) paint, looked out on to the farmyard where the car was parked. On the windowsill stood a fruit-bottling jar with a dish-mop in it, and next to that a container of Fairy Liquid. And that was about it. Above all, it was quiet. She could hear the fast tick of a small travel alarm clock, an old wind-up one, that stood high up on the great Welsh dresser next to a couple of pewter mugs.

  A solitary black-and-white photograph, ancient and now yellowing in its heavy black frame, hung on the wall to one side of the Rayburn. It was of a child, a girl in a complicated looking dress and high lace-up boots, sitting very upright on a wickerwork box. Her feet dangled a few inches above the ground, and she held something in her lap – Midge couldn’t make out what it was, some sort of strap with bells on it – as she stared out of the picture. The girl had a round and beautiful face, with a curling mass of fair hair and dark faraway eyes. In the background, pale and blurred, a clock face was just visible. Twenty-five past ten. The girl was smiling, but she looked uncomfortable. And who wouldn’t be, thought Midge, dressed like that.

  ‘Uncle Brian,’ she said, ‘Why are you selling the house? Don’t you like it here? I do.’

  ‘Do you?’ Uncle Brian seemed pleased. ‘You haven’t really seen it yet. Anyway, I’m not selling the house, just some of the land.’ They had come straight into the kitchen from the car, and apart from a glimpse of the dim flagstone hallway where a black spaniel lay (barely acknowledging their arrival with the briefest twitch of her stumpy tail), the rest of the house remained unexplored.

  ‘I love it here,’ said Midge. ‘It’s really cool.’

  ‘Cool enough in the winter,’ said Uncle Brian a little grimly. But he hadn’t misunderstood her, and went on – ‘Yes, I love it too.’

  Midge looked around the kitchen and said, ‘It’s so . . .’ she searched for a word, ‘ . . . friendly. And unspoilt.’

  Uncle Brian chewed on a piece of crust thoughtfully and regarded her. She looked like a typical city kid, this twelve-year old niece, dumped on him (and his own children) for the summer by her high-flying mother. Her jeans, T-shirt and trainers, as he was sure Katie and George would recognize instantly, had not come from the local supermarket, nor had her blonde hair been cut at the shop on the corner. The total cost of her outward appearance would probably be more than he’d spend on himself in two years. She was neat, sharp, and, if not exactly pretty with her overabundance of freckles and rather square jaw, she was certainly enough of a city-slicker to turn the heads of any of the lads in this backwater. Yet the words she had chosen in order to describe Mill Farm could be equally applied to her – friendly and unspoilt. He had been worried that she might not get on with Katie and George but . . . well, it could work out. The three children hadn’t seen each other since they were what, five, six years old? Before he and Pat had separated in any case. And now he was to have charge of the lot of them, right in the middle of everything else that was going on. But there. It looked like he’d be able to muddle along without too much disruption to his routine. Speaking of which . . .

  ‘Had enough to eat? Come on then, I’ll show you your room and you can get settled in. Then I must take poor old Phoebe for her walk. I take her out every day for a couple of hours, straight after lunch.’

  ‘Oh, couldn’t I take her out sometimes? Mum won’t let me have a dog. Wish she would,’ said Midge sadly, following Uncle Brian out into the hallway where Phoebe lay. The old spaniel raised her head slowly and gazed at Uncle Brian half expectantly. Midge thought that she hardly looked capable of a daily two-hour hike.

  ‘Well, to be honest,’ said Uncle Brian, rather sheepishly, ‘I usually stroll over the fields to the Crown at Withney Ham with the old gal. Have a couple of games of crib and head for home around three, half-three. Keeps us both sane. Of course,’ he added, a rather alarming thought coming into his head, ‘if you’re likely to be worried – about being here on your own for a couple of hours I mean – then I can always scrub round it. We only go for the company, don’t we, Phoebs?’ The dog raised herself into a half sitting position, waiting for a more definite signal than simply the mention of her name.

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ said Midge, for what seemed like the umpteenth time that morning. ‘I feel really safe here. Anyway, I’ve got my mobile. I could always ring if I needed to.’

  Uncle Brian looked relieved, if slightly guilty. ‘Well, come and have a look at your room anyway,’ he said. He stepped around Phoebe and led the way up the narrow wooden stairs, turning right at the landing when he reached the top.

  The room was a revelation. In keeping with the rest of the property, Midge had expected bare walls, bare floorboards and maybe an old iron bed. This room looked as if it belonged in a hotel brochure. There was an en suite shower and loo, m
atching materials on the quilt and curtains (which were swagged and fastened back to the walls with silk cords), a jug-kettle and teapot on the bedside cabinet – which also had its own little curtains. Everything looked clean, neat and impersonal. Midge was so surprised, she wanted to laugh.

  ‘It looks like a motel or something,’ she couldn’t help saying.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Uncle Brian, taking that as a compliment. ‘I was going into the bed-and-breakfast business at one stage.’ He chuckled. ‘This room was as far as I got.’

  Midge dumped her carrier bags on the divan bed (pink velour headboard and frilly-edged pillows) and decided she liked the room after all. It looked so silly and frivolous, plonked in the middle of the tumbledown chaos which was the rest of Mill Farm – like a wedding hat on a scarecrow – and Uncle Brian was obviously so proud of it, that she made up her mind to love it. ‘It makes me feel like I’m really on holiday,’ she said.

  ‘Good,’ said Uncle Brian. He pulled open the wardrobe door. ‘Look. Coat hangers and everything.’

  Midge wandered over to the window and looked out over the ravaged farm buildings to the sunny landscape beyond. To her left, the land climbed steeply up to a ridge, a long hill crested with a dense mass of trees. The hill was separate from the area of woodland they had driven through on their way to Mill Farm. It rose from the surrounding Levels like an island, or the humped back of some great beast, the thick forestation growing like tufted fur along its spine.

  Uncle Brian stooped slightly and looked over her shoulder as she gazed at the tangled horizon. ‘Ah yes, The Wild Wood,’ he said, and glanced at her. ‘We river-bankers don’t go there very much, you know.’

  Midge laughed, recognizing her cue instantly, ‘Aren’t they very nice people there, then?’ she said.

  ‘I thought you’d have probably read that one,’ said Uncle Brian. He looked up at the dark dense trees. ‘You’ll find this hard to believe, but I’ve never actually been in there. It was impossibly overgrown, even when we were children. The brambles and nettles are so thick around the edge – and all the way in, for all I know – that you’d need a bulldozer to get through it. I remember Chris and I making a pretty determined effort on one particular occasion. Or rather, I was determined and I’d dragged Chris along with me. We . . . well, we managed to get about three yards in, I think. Scratched, stung, ripped to shreds we were. We came home, clothes in tatters, bleeding, Christine crying. Mum took the stick to the pair of us, and that was it. Never tried to get in there again. Don’t suppose I ever shall now. The hill’s called Howard’s Hill. Been in the family for donkey’s years – since Noah was a boy, most likely.’

  Midge remembered their earlier conversation – still unresolved. ‘Why are you selling the land?’ she asked, and as she spoke she felt a sudden jolt inside somewhere. It was important to her, but she didn’t know why.

  Uncle Brian seemed not to have heard her at first. He was still looking across at the woods. Then he said, vaguely, ‘Oh, money,’ and looked at his watch. ‘Well, I think perhaps I’ll take that walk and leave you to settle in for a bit. Sure you’ll be OK?’ He was being a grown-up now, and doing that thing that grown-ups do when they don’t want to talk any more – changing the subject. ‘If you get hungry, just pick at whatever you can find. There’s fruit and biscuits and various odds and ends around. It’s all in the kitchen. I’ll be back sometime around three, half-three at the latest – and I’ll write down the number of the Crown now, and leave it on the kitchen table.’

  Midge followed him to the top of the stairs and watched him descend, crablike, sideways, as some people do, one hand on the dark wooden banister, his bald patch bobbing in the dim stairwell. She was reminded of his pale ankles in the car.

  ‘Come on, Phoebs, walkies!’ he called out, when he reached the flagstone hallway, and Phoebe, properly summoned at last, struggled to her feet and shook herself free from sleep. She stretched and ambled stiffly out into the sunshine, whilst Uncle Brian glanced at himself in the oval hallway mirror, running one hand through his untidy and thinning hair, as he searched in his pockets with the other for money. ‘I’ll just go and jot that number down for you,’ he said.

  Midge walked back along the landing corridor to her room, suddenly happy. She was pretty sure that she could get along with her uncle for a couple of weeks until her cousins arrived, so that made her happy. She loved Mill Farm, so that made her happy, ‘And,’ she thought, as she entered her room once again to begin unpacking, ‘I even love this silly room.’ So that made her happy too. She picked up her heavy hold-all and humped it onto the bed next to the carrier bags. On a sudden impulse, she walked over to the window, opened it, and looked out to see if Uncle Brian had disappeared yet. He was halfway across the yard, waiting for Phoebe, who was sniffing at the Wellington boot where the kitten was hiding.

  ‘Uncle Brian!’ she called, and he looked up, raising one hand to shield his eyes as he squinted into the glare of the sun above the farmhouse roof. ‘I’m really happy!’

  ‘Good!’ he shouted, ‘I’m very glad.’ The sun was too bright and he couldn’t really see her.

  ‘Do you mind if I explore?’ she said.

  ‘Not a bit. Watch out for some of the old machinery though. There’s all kinds of junk about. Make sure you don’t go and cut yourself or anything. Oh, and stay away from Tojo.’

  ‘Tojo?’

  ‘Whacking great tom cat. Black-and-white thing, big as a badger and much worse tempered. I’m not joking, Midge, he can turn very ugly. If you see him, don’t you go anywhere near him. He’d take your eyes out, given the chance.’ Not wishing to frighten the girl any more than necessary, Uncle Brian added, ‘But don’t worry, he doesn’t come in the house at all. He’s a barn cat – and worth his weight in gold when it comes to keeping the place free of rats. He’s just not for petting, that’s all. Stay away from him, and he’ll stay away from you.’

  ‘OK, I will.’ Midge dismissed the idea of the fearsome Tojo – she was too happy to worry about some stupid cat. ‘Uncle Brian, I really like it here. It’s like . . . well, I really feel at home.’

  Uncle Brian moved into the shadow of a barn and turned again. Now he could see her.

  ‘Well, not so surprising perhaps. You were born here after all.’ He smiled at her, then saw her look of bewilderment. ‘Didn’t you know? Really? Has your mum never told you that? Well, we can talk about it later, if you like. Come on, Phoebe! Leave that poor creature alone.’ He wandered out of the shadow, continued across the untidy yard, and opened a rusty metal gate leading into a scrubby field, where rabbits fed undisturbed among tufts of thistles. The dog followed him through and he lifted the gate back on to its catch. The metal squeaked and clanged, a clear harsh ring in the peaceful sunshine. Another thought occurred to him, just as he turned to go.

  ‘In fact,’ he said, squinting once more at Midge, as she stood stunned, her hand holding tightly on to the window frame, ‘now that I come to think of it, you were born in that very room. I remember it extremely well. The telephone had been cut off, and I had to go for the doctor. But that’s where you were born, old thing – pretty well where you’re standing.’

  He strolled away across the field, kicking occasionally at a thistle, while Phoebe walked placidly beside him, ignoring the rabbits she was now too old to chase.

  Chapter Two

  THE SHARP EDGE of the old metal window frame was hurting her hand. She let go and looked at the mottled indentations across her palm as the circulation flowed back. Her knees felt funny, so she walked over to the bed and sat on the corner nearest the window. She was too low down to see Uncle Brian or Phoebe now. Her head was a bit swimmy, and she wasn’t sure if she wanted to cry. And yet she wasn’t unhappy, she found. She was overwhelmed. So many thoughts began rushing around her head that it was hard to catch hold of any of them.

  She tried to remember if her mum had ever said anything to her about where she had been born. Had she ever asked – ‘Mum, where was I
born?’ Certainly she had never been lied to, that she could recall. Her mum had never said, ‘You were born in London,’ or ‘You were born in a hospital.’ This thought comforted her a little. But the subject must have come up before . . . must have done . . . and then she did remember something. She had come home from school one day, junior school, and her mum was in the kitchen with a friend drinking coffee. Her mum was leaning against the sink, and the woman was sitting on the corner of the kitchen table. They were drinking from the peacock mugs, and they were talking about babies. Midge had walked between them to get something she needed for homework. The woman said, ‘It helped that the midwife was a friend of mine. We’d known each other for years. It made that whole hospital environment less impersonal. My next one, Seb, was a home delivery though. I made sure of that.’ The name ‘Seb’ had caught Midge’s ear. She’d never heard it before. And Midge’s mum had said, ‘Margaret was a home birth . . . my God! Is that the time? Sorry, Lou, I’m going to have to kick you out and make a dash for it.’

  ‘A home birth,’ was what she’d said. And Midge (now she remembered) was walking through the kitchen doorway back through to the sitting room and had briefly thought – ‘Where? On the carpet? In the bedroom?’ Then, she supposed, she’d more or less forgotten about it, but if someone had asked her where she’d been born she’d have probably said, ‘at home, I think.’ Meaning at home in the flat. She had never known any other home – had lived in Teck Mansions all her life. Teck Mansions. It was an impressive sounding address, but really it was a bit of a joke – just a rather run down Edwardian building, split up into six flats. Her mum owned the building – something that Midge had only recently discovered. ‘It used to be your Grandad’s – then it was left to Daddy, then to me. More trouble than it’s worth, half the time.’

  But she had been born here, at Mill Farm, in this very room. Maybe in this very bed. No, it would have been a different bed, of course. She looked around the room and wondered about all the other things she didn’t know – who else had been here? The doctor, presumably, and Uncle Brian, somewhere, (but not in the room surely?) Her dad perhaps? Was her dad here? Was he still alive then? Yes, of course. But it was all so confusing. Was her mum still living here at Mill Farm then? Phrases from overheard conversations, phrases that were usually murmured in low voices, ran through her head. Was she ‘an accident’, as she’d heard some babies were – unwanted, a teenage pregnancy? No! Her mum was married to her dad then. He’d died later, when she was four years old . . .