I shrugged. ‘I can’t say I knew my mother all that well. Daddy’s been both for us. Both mother and father. Daddy and our Granny Morley were, I mean. Before we came here. I might be an Oliver by name, but I’m a Smythe by nature.’
Mr Price considered these words for a moment and then shook his head, ever so slightly. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I don’t see that at all. You are not a bit like your father.’
An ounce of extra stubbornness shot through me with this declaration.
Mr Price continued: ‘I don’t suppose you’re enjoying the current state of affairs much. I shouldn’t think it would be in your nature to seek out or prolong proceedings such as these. The strike, I mean. This business about the rents for the properties I own. It’s all a bit silly, isn’t it? That’s my take on it, if you want to know. It should never have come to this. Why are your father and his friends approaching things in this way, I ask myself? Why not just come to me straight away to discuss their grievances?’
‘You threatened to kick us off our land, that’s why.’
‘Did I? You heard that, did you? You were there, were you?’
‘No, I wandt there. But Daddy said.’
‘Daddy said?’
‘Aye.’
Mr Price gathered himself, folded his arms on his lower chest. ‘I would give you this land tomorrow,’ he said. ‘This tiny copse with a handful of good trees and clay that’s running down into the Levels? I would give it up to you tomorrow. Not to your Daddy, but to you. Not a Smythe, but an Oliver. Your Daddy is a brute. You are your mother’s son. What do you say to that?’
‘I … I don’t really understand.’
‘I’m telling you I would give you the land, where your Daddy’s built that house, tomorrow. It would be yours, officially. I would sign over the papers. There would be no further problems.’
‘But I woundt want it by myself. I would still want to live with Daddy and Cathy.’
‘And I suppose that’s it, right there. The thought of handing over your mother’s land to your father doesn’t sit well with me. Never has. But he just placed himself on it, didn’t he? He’d been after it for years and then, one morning, he just turned up and started building. And the first I heard of it, he’d already got the best part of a house up. Does that sound right to you?’
I said nothing.
‘You knew it was your mother’s land, didn’t you? Your father told you that much, surely?’
Still I was silent.
‘You knew that she lived up here, all her life? She inherited the land from her parents. And when she fell on hard times – which you’ll know all about, being her son – she came to me for help. And so I bought this land off her for a very high price indeed, and she should, would have been able to put herself back together again, start afresh, if it wasn’t for your father. And although this land is rightfully mine, and even after all that your parents have put me through, both when your mother was alive, and now that it’s just your father left causing me bother, I would happily sign it over to you, Daniel Oliver. I would give it to you out of the affection I held for the girl she was. But instead, your father seized it. He seized it from me when he had no right.’
I shrugged again. ‘No one else was doing anything with land.’
‘Maybe so. But that’s not the way the world works. That’s not how good, decent people operate.’
‘We’re decent people. We needed somewhere to live, is all.’
Mr Price looked me up and down and then walked around me towards his Land Rover. I thought he was going to drive away. I was feeling just a little bit proud of myself, like I had seen him off, like I had done one for the family, but he was not leaving just yet. He opened the door of the front passenger seat and reached into the glove compartment. He emerged with a clear plastic folder, containing a thick pad of documents, most in white, others in pastels: pink, yellow, blue, green.
‘I have the documents here,’ he said. ‘I am willing to sign the land over, officially, to you, Daniel Oliver. Look, you’re the named party.’ He pointed to the wording on the opening page. I saw my name laid out in black block capitals. ‘But knowing, as I do, that you would want to live here with your father – you are still a minor, after all – I have certain conditions. I need to know that your father isn’t going to be as hostile a neighbour as he has shown himself to be in recent months. I don’t want someone living so close to me who is going to give me a hard time, who is going to threaten my business and my property. Who would want that? Nobody. So you must tell him, first of all, that if he wants to be sure of a home for you all, and he wants the land to be in his son’s name – because he can be sure it will never be in his name – he must call off this stupid business. He must get those scroungers back to work, and he must make sure those rents are paid. Now I’ve spoken to the local farmers, and we’ve all agreed to up the pay a little bit. That’s only fair. And there won’t be any increases in rent for the next two years, and then only in line with inflation. Do you know what that is? No, well never mind. I’ve laid it all out in here.’ He waved the folder. ‘Here’s a letter to be given to your father, along with copies of the documents that I will sign if he agrees. That way he can think on it. He can weigh up the situation and make his decision. And then that’ll be that. Done.’
I took the folder from him and tucked it under my arm. ‘Are those conditions? That Daddy calls it all off?’
‘Not entirely,’ said Mr Price. ‘Your Daddy must work for me, from time to time, as he always used to. He must return to the fold. I used to own that man’s muscles, and I owned his mind. I owned his fists and his feet; his eyes and his ears and his teeth. How do you think he met your mother?’
‘I’ve never really thought about it.’
Mr Price made no answer. He folded his arms then unfolded them, and then placed them on his hips. ‘Just you get that message to your father,’ he said, pointing at my chest. ‘Tell him that’s all I want from him. I want to use him again. Him and that great, hulking body, the like of which I’ve never seen, not in this county, not in this country. Tell him I want to see those muscles tested, and those fists put to their proper use. Aye, I know he’ll never go round the houses for me, knocking about whoever I want him to knock about, like he might have done when he was a pup. But tell him I’ve got prouder work for him, if he’ll do it. Tell him I’ve found a man for him to fight.’
He turned his back on me and went back to his jeep. He drove away. Mud spat like shrapnel.
I had left my rake sticking straight up from the silt. It was the wrong tool for the job. I suckered it out of the ground, swung it over my right shoulder and bobbed up the hill to our house.
The front door was swinging, caught on a small, bouncing breeze with no particular direction. Cathy had left the door hanging so that this light, dewy wind could sweep the floors for us, and dance through the curtains, and the nooks in the walls, and leave our home with soft freshness and the smell of damp pollen and snapped greenwood.
‘Done with dredging?’ asked Daddy.