Chapter 13
13
Jess sat momentarily speechless as she gazed at the limewashed stone cottage, complete with Jemima Puddle-Duck and her offspring swimming contentedly in a pond out the front. ‘It’s like something out of a picture book! This is where you live?’ It definitely didn’t fit with the hardened exterior of the man she was sitting next to. She’d envisaged him in a tumbledown shack, eating only wild foods he’d caught or foraged for himself.
In a burst of chattiness, he informed her, ‘Aye, the farm’s been in our family for four generations, but I renovated it fully before I moved back in. When I was a lad, my room could have been used for storing meat. I used to sleep with a woolly hat on.’
Jess couldn’t imagine Owen as anything other than the somewhat moody man he’d obviously grown into, let alone a little boy with a beanie on his head at bedtime.
She followed him up the path to the front door, pausing to say hello to Jemima and receiving a hiss in return. It seemed she wasn’t a duck, after all, but a goose. She nearly trod on Owen’s heels in her hurry to get inside. She’d once seen a show on when animals attack featuring a rabid goose, and she had no intention of being pecked to death in the wilds of County Down.
Once the door was safely shut behind them, she took a moment to survey her surrounds. The front door led straight into the living room, where the ceiling was held up by low timber beams bowed with the weight of a century or so. She watched Owen duck his head, obviously an automatic reaction, as he walked through to the open door at the far end of the room.
A fireplace full of kindling waiting to be lit, above which a heavy timber mantel housed a clustered group of framed photos, took centre stage in the room. Jess would have enjoyed a nosy, but she resisted the urge to wander over for a closer look at the pictures and instead soaked up the ambience of the room. The overall feeling it gave off was masculine, emphasised by the worn but inviting leather couch and its matching armchair. A Persian rug covered the bare timber boards, giving the room a sense of quality and cosiness. He was obviously a man of understated but good taste.
‘You must be parched. I’ll put the kettle on.’
Jess trailed behind him through to the farmhouse kitchen. Oh wow ! she thought, her eyes widening as she entered the light, airy space, because there, in pride of place, warming the room, stood a majestic old Aga. It was the oven of her dreams.
Owen caught her admiring gaze and shrugged. ‘Me mam had her put in way back when she and Da were first married. She always insisted she couldn’t cook on anything else. Have a seat.’ He gestured awkwardly to the chunky pine table, upon which she could see the outline of what she hoped was a dish of food covered by a cloth – she was starving. She reckoned all that bouncing around on the bus must have been the equivalent of at least an hour at the gym.
She set her laptop down on the table’s scrubbed wooden surface, pulled a chair out and sat down. If she closed her eyes for a moment, she knew she’d conjure up images of all the hearty meals this table had played host to and the stories that would have been swapped back and forth over it. Then she remembered why she was here. Perhaps not so many stories being swapped jovially. Perhaps Owen and his parents had eaten in silence, all too aware of the empty chair at the table for all those years after Amy died.
‘Would you like a cup of tea or coffee?’
Shaking away the reverie, she smiled at his pronunciation of tea as ‘tae’. ‘Coffee, white and one, please.’
While Owen set about banging mugs and opening the fridge, she cast her gaze around the kitchen. It was homely and inviting. All it needed to complete the scene was a rotund middle-aged woman with apple cheeks in a white pinny as she baked scones for the farm workers’ afternoon tea. There was a set of French doors at the end of the room, which flooded the space with natural light, even on a day like this when gloom pervaded the air outside. The doors opened out onto the back garden, and she peered out into it.
It looked like Owen was green fingered, judging by the sturdy-looking cabbages and, gosh, was that broccoli? Yes, she was fairly sure that’s what the tall spindly green stuff was. It had been a long time since she’d seen vegetables in their natural state and not in the bins at her local Tesco. There was a gate tucked away in the hedgerow at the bottom of the garden, and Jess hazarded a guess that behind that there would be fields. She was just wondering whether that was where Babe and his mates hung out when Owen set her drink and a plate down in front of her.
‘Oh, thanks.’
‘You’re welcome.’ His face turned ruddy as he added, ‘I made us a spot of lunch before I picked you up because I figured you wouldn’t get a chance to grab a bite on your way up.’
‘I didn’t, and I’m starving, actually – my goodness, I didn’t expect you to go to so much trouble. That looks delicious!’
Magician-like, Owen had whisked the cloth off to reveal a delicatessen spread that made Jess’s tummy grumble embarrassingly. There was a selection of thinly sliced cooked meats, fat black olives and sundried tomatoes nestled alongside a decent wedge of cheddar cheese, all to be eaten with rustic slabs of soda bread. This man really was an enigma – one minute he was gruff, the next the host with the most. She definitely preferred the latter.
‘Aye, it was no trouble. Tuck in.’
She didn’t need to be asked twice.
‘Did I tell you my editor liked my idea so much that he wants to run Amy’s story as a full-page article instead of just in the weekly column I write?’
‘No, you didn’t say.’
Whatever enthusiastic response she’d expected, she obviously wasn’t going to get it. But perhaps she was being insensitive, so she moved on.
‘So tell me,’ she asked between bites, the food making her feel brave, ‘and I know you said you didn’t want to talk about it over the phone, but I can’t figure it out. How did a lawyer living in London come to be running his family’s farm?’
‘Ah.’ He waved his hand. ‘It’s not that interesting a story, that’s all.’
She raised an eyebrow, and his mouth twitched at the corner. When his brow wasn’t furrowed, those uncannily coloured eyes of his softened, and they were really rather kind, she decided.
‘Why do you want to know?’
Sawing off a chunk of bread, she explained, ‘It’s the writer in me. I can’t help being nosy.’
‘Fair enough, I suppose, but there’s not much to tell except that when my marriage broke up, I decided I didn’t want to stay on in London. I’d had enough of life in the city. It was time to come back.’
‘London can be an awfully lonely place.’ Jess remembered her own aborted attempt to set up camp there before hotfooting it over to the smaller, friendlier city of Dublin.
‘Aye, well, it was time for a change. I needed a fresh start. Mam passed away eight years ago, and me da struggled on here, but his heart wasn’t really in it once she died. He got old all of a sudden, and it was too much trying to run the farm himself. So I made a deal with myself: I’d come back and give it a go for a year. See if it was a lifestyle I could stick with.’
‘You grew up here, though; you’d have known what it was like.’
‘Aye, true, but I hated the farm when I was younger.’ He stated this as a matter of fact. ‘Now I don’t know if it was the farm I hated or the atmosphere in it after our Amy died.’ He shrugged. ‘Sometimes you have to leave a place for a while to appreciate what it is you had.’
His words sounded prophetic to Jess’s ears. ‘I’ve been away ten years and I have no intention of going home for anything other than a holiday.’
‘Fair play to you; it’s five years since I came back, and I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. It’s a much simpler life, and I like it.’
‘Apart from the goldfish-bowl syndrome.’ She raised an eyebrow.
His mouth twitched again. ‘Aye, apart from that.’
‘Does your dad still live here too then?’ Jess cast her eyes about, as though expecting the senior Aherne to suddenly appear.
‘No, he showed me the ropes then handed me the reins. He went into a home near Dundrum a couple of years ago. He’s made some good pals there, and he knows the farm’s being taken care of, so he’s right enough.’
‘Oh, right, so the other listing I saw in the phone book belongs to your dad then. I passed through Dundrum on the bus on my way here. It’s very pretty.’ She carved off a wedge of cheese and began arranging it on top of a slice of prosciutto. ‘Gosh, this is so good,’ she mumbled, spraying crumbs over the table. ‘How much land do you have here?’
‘Twenty questions,’ he said, chomping into the sandwich he’d put together. He sat there chewing silently, and she didn’t think he was going to answer, but unlike herself, he obviously didn’t speak with his mouth full because once he’d swallowed, he told her, ‘The farm’s thirty acres, which works out at ten acres for every two hundred pigs I run. It’s boutique by comparison to the commercial piggeries, but we’re totally organic, and there’s a good living in it now that people are demanding better-quality meat.’
‘I always try to buy free-range.’ It sounded self-righteous even to her own ears.
‘Good for you.’
She couldn’t decide whether he was being smart or not.
Amy sat between them, a silent third party at the table, as they finished eating. Jess didn’t want to bring her up until she knew that Owen was relaxed and comfortable with her, though from what she’d seen so far, she didn’t think relaxed and comfortable were part of his genetic make-up. He hadn’t alluded to the reason behind her visit yet, so she decided to leave it for the moment. He was definitely more at ease when he was talking about the farm, so perhaps she should ask him to give her a guided tour of Glenariff and see whether that loosened his tongue.
‘Right-ho,’ was all he said to her request and began to clear the table.