“Is it?” she said.
The mechanically inept head of the family meanwhile was playing the Holy Fool, or just the fool perhaps, prancing around in the road like a jester. He was wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt and jeans covered in patches, even where they didn’t need patching, something that Viola resented as she was the one who had done the patching. Stylistically, the whole family was hopelessly out of date, even the farmer could sense that. He had seen the face of the revolting future—the local town’s youth parading in the precinct, ripped and pierced and held together with safety pins, and the juvenile hedonists who had followed in their footsteps, dressed as pirates and outlaws and Civil War Royalists. When the farmer was their age he had dressed like his father and had never thought twice about it.
“We were children of the Sixties,” Viola liked to say in later years, as if that in itself made her interesting. “Flower children!” Although when the Sixties were already over Viola was still wrapped neatly in her grey Quaker school uniform and the only flowers in her hair were from the occasional childish daisy chain, the flowers plucked from the edge of the school’s lacrosse field.
She lit a thin roll-up and gloomily contemplated the bad karma that seemed to be her lot. She drew heavily on the cigarette and then, in a touching display of maternal responsibility, lifted her chin so that the smoke blew over her children’s heads. When she got pregnant the first time, with Sunny, Viola had had no idea what it would involve further down the line. She wasn’t sure she’d ever seen a baby, let alone held one, and imagined it would be like getting a cat, or, at worst, a puppy. (Turned out it was nothing like either.) Inertia was her only excuse really when a year later she found herself pregnant again, this time with Bertie.
“Our saviour!” Dominic beamed when the engine had coughed back into life. He dropped to his knees in front of the farmer, his hands in prayer position above his head, and touched his forehead to the tarmac. Viola wondered if he’d dropped acid—it wasn’t always easy to tell as his existence seemed to be one endless trip, either going up or coming down.
It was only when this phase of her life was over that Viola realized that he was a manic depressive. The term “bi-polar” came a little too late for Dominic. He was dead by then. “Walking in front of a train can do that to you,” Viola said flippantly to her women’s soul drumming group in Leeds, where she studied for a part-time MA in women’s studies on the topic of “post counter-culture feminism.” (“Eh?” Teddy said.) The north in the Eighties was a hotbed of revolt.
“Grinning nitwit,” the farmer said to his wife when he got home. “Posh, as well. You would think the rich would know better.”
“They don’t,” the farmer’s wife said sagely.
“I felt like bringing the lot of them back here and giving them a plate of ham and eggs and a hot bath.”
“They’ll have been from the commune,” his wife said. “Poor kiddies.” The “kiddies” had appeared at the farmhouse door a few weeks ago and at first the farmer’s wife thought they were gypsies sent to beg and was going to shoo them away, but then she’d recognized them as the children who lived on the neighbouring farm. She’d invited them in and given them milk and cake and let them feed the geese and visit the Red Devons’ milking parlour.
“I heard they take drugs and dance naked in the moonlight,” the farmer said. (True, although it wasn’t as interesting as it sounded.)
The farmer had failed to spot Bertie before he drove away. She was still sitting on the verge, waving politely at the retreating rear end of the Morris Minor.
Bertie wished he had taken her home with him. She had spied through the farmer’s five-barred gates and admired his neat fields—the burnished cows and the fluffy white sheep that looked as if they had just been washed. She had seen the farmer in his battered trilby on his red storybook tractor trundling up and down those same neat fields.
She and Sunny had once wandered, unsupervised, into the farmyard and the farmer’s wife had given them cake and milk and called them “poor mites.” She had taken them to see the big red cows being milked (a wonder!) and then they had drunk the milk while it was still warm, standing right there in the dairy, and then the farmer’s wife had let them feed the big white geese that cackled and honked with excitement so that Bertie and Sunny had broken into hysterical giggles as the geese milled around them. It had been wonderful until the moment Viola, like a dark cloud, appeared to take them home and started hyperventilating at the sight of the geese. She hated geese, for some mysterious reason.
Bertie had managed to rescue a feather and had brought it home with her as a talisman. This visit had the quality of a fairy tale for her and she very much wished that she could find her way back to the magic farmhouse. Or be taken there in an old Morris Minor.