Chapter 8
Beatrice
‘What are you wearing?’ Leaning on my tractor, I don’t bother to move to greet Arthur as he strides across the concrete in a shirt, suit trousers, and pair of leather shoes.
Following my gaze, he scans his outfit top to bottom and returns his eyes to me nervously as if unsure of what could possibly be wrong. ‘My grandmother told me I’m coming to work with you.’
‘I think you might want to leave the Armani at home for this job …’ I try and hide my smile.
‘You work in the pub, right?’ His brow furrows.
‘I do,’ I reply and he sighs in relief. ‘In the evenings. But you’re coming to work the farm with me. We’re pulling udders this morning, not pints, I’m afraid.’
Rubbing a hand over his face, he sighs and shakes his head. ‘I don’t have any other clothes.’
‘Not anything you don’t mind getting dirty? An old T-shirt? Trackie bottoms?’ It’s my turn to be confused. Who comes to a farming village in the middle of a farming county without even so much as a pair of wellies?
‘I packed for New York,’ he murmurs and my only reply is a look of perplexity on my face. ‘You know, New York, New York.’ He refuses to look at me when he speaks and hardly raises his voice above a whisper.
‘Let me get this straight …’ I begin, trying my hardest to hide my grin. ‘You thought that—’ An uncontrollable little chuckle bursts from me and I have to cover my mouth to catch it.
‘Don’t laugh,’ he grumbles, though a ghost of a smile is on his lips.
‘You thought you were off to America so packed all of your fancy suits but you’re actually having to muck out cows in Lincolnshire?’ I can’t stop my laugh as it shakes its way up through my chest and leaps out of me, stirring the pheasants from their slumber in the nearby bushes.
‘All right, all right,’ Arthur says after five minutes of my laughing, his cheeks growing a deeper shade of red with each passing second.
‘Didn’t your dad ever tell you about New York? Surely, you’d have known that’s where he was raised?’ I say, still laughing, and his face falls.
‘You’d have thought so, wouldn’t you?’ he says in a low voice, more to himself than to me. Arthur doesn’t speak again, only looks back at his grandmother’s house, then around the yard with a distant look on his face.
Leaving him to his own internal musings, I slip off into the grain store and dig through one of the old storage bins in the back.
Brushing off some of the dried mud and a few spiders, I take a set of overalls back over to Arthur who still stares at the concrete under his shoes, unaware that I ever left at all.
‘Here,’ I say, handing him the old boilersuit. ‘It’s probably been sat in there for a good twenty years, but it will be better than that.’ I gesture to his pristine white shirt and try my best not to picture what I now know lies beneath it.
Taking it from me reluctantly, he holds it up to his body and gives me an almost pained expression. I’m half expecting him to complain that he only wears natural fibres, or something that I’d need a loan to afford.
‘Thank you,’ he says with a grimace.
‘You won’t be on any runways in this but it will save you from a repeat of last night.’ It’s Arthur’s turn to blush, as though he had forgotten he’d stripped off in front of the woman that he was insulting only hours earlier.
‘I’ll … er … just go …’ He gestures to the barn, then gestures to the overalls before slinking off behind the door to change.
Why am I doing this? Helping this guy all whilst pretending that my first meeting with him didn’t send me home to cry until my head ached?
But what choice do I have? I need to work.
I need the wage his grandmother pays me.
And I certainly can’t turn down the double she offered me to take her useless grandson with me as some sort of farming handicap.
So, I’m stuck, playing nice with a man who has not yet once been nice to me, trying to pretend that his words haven’t hurt me.
What does it matter what someone like him thinks?
my grandad would say. And he’s right, Arthur Cavendish is nothing to me, no one important, so why should I be troubled by his opinion?
But there’s something so painful about hearing a stranger’s opinion of you.
That is their first and only impression, one look at me and that is their conclusion and clearly I have done something to allow him to think that.
How many others have looked and me and reached the same decision?
Before I run away with myself again and ruminate into yet another sleepless night, Arthur re-emerges from the barn.
‘Um, don’t suppose you’ve got anything a bit …
longer?’ He tugs at the legs of his overalls that sit like pantaloons just below his knees, his leather loafers still on, and the sight of his bare calves are enough to renew my laughter once more.
‘Bit taller than your dad then?’ I say between chuckles.
‘These were his?’ he says, wide-eyed, and I’m glad when he too sees the funny side of it all. ‘No wonder they don’t fit – he can shop for jeans in the kids’ section.’
Now I was hoping to learn a few more intimate details about my idol from his son, but I can’t say that was ever on my list of things to ask. ‘He looks so tall on the telly.’
‘That’s all camera tricks, and he’d kill me if he knew I told you this, but he wears lifts in his shoes.’ I gasp as though he’s just revealed that he’s secretly a Martian and Arthur laughs. ‘Yep, he’s only five eight.’
‘Well, you learn something new every day.’ I shake my head, trying to soften my grin. ‘Anyway, we’ve got work to do, come on.’
‘Um, Beatrice?’ he calls just as I reach the door of the tractor. As I turn around, he points to his exposed legs and Italian loafers.
With another stifled laugh, I head back into the grain store and find a pair of wellies that I think might fit and pass them to him. Murmuring a thank you, he tosses his own shoes to the side of the yard and slides the wellies on without a second thought.
‘It’s so flat,’ Arthur says after driving in silence for a few minutes, ‘and so empty.’
He looks across the farmland and shakes his head as though unable to believe what he’s seeing.
I follow his gaze, trying to picture my home through the eyes of someone who has only known the glitz and glamour of city life.
The sun is only just peeking out from the distance and its dim light settles in a haze over the countryside.
Farmland spreads for miles, and the only interruptions on the horizon are houses dotted sporadically around, or trees left with enough room to reach their branches out so wide they always look as though they’ve just woken up and are having their satisfying early morning stretch.
The landscape is so flat and so undisturbed that you can see the next town over miles and miles away.
Looking out over it now, it feels lonely, so much empty space, so much distance.
I can imagine it all being a little intimidating, like being plucked out of a bustling society and dropped into the middle of the ocean with no sight of land on the horizon.
I know, because I felt it too when I moved home from London.
Moving there at eighteen years old and only ever knowing this wide expanse of nothingness, it was like being thrust into the middle of a beehive, where bodies flit around you, a constant buzz of noise fills your head all through the days and nights, and where monuments loom over you, so every street, tube, café, bus, feels like claustrophobia personified.
I got used to it quickly enough, though, and now I feel the silence, the space, the isolation of home a little too much.
‘It was all under water once,’ I say, trying to distract myself with facts before I allow my thoughts to run away on their usual negative spiral. ‘The Dutch helped us drain the land centuries ago. Most of it is still below sea level.’
Arthur only hums in acknowledgement and continues his survey of the acreage around him. ‘Makes for good farming though,’ I say, quietly. Arthur says nothing.
Finally, we reach the destination of this morning’s task: the old fence in the back field.
It’s a job that has been on my list for months since the goats in the next-door farm chewed the wire and managed to pull down four fence posts last summer.
It’s a two-man job and since it’s only usually me, I’m actually grateful for another set of hands – even if they are those of Arthur Cavendish who is currently struggling to jump down from the tractor.
‘Where are the cows?’ he asks, still clinging on to the handle only the old guys have to use to hoist themselves into the cab.
‘The cows?’ I ask, huffing impatiently as he still takes his time disembarking.
‘Yeah, you said we’d be milking cows.’ I give him a little helping hand in the way of a gentle shove and he splashes down into the earth that the goats have kindly fertilised.
‘Was that necessary?’ Arthur turns back to me, splatters of mud tracing up his wellies and landing on the little patch of still-exposed skin above.
‘That was a joke. I’ll be milking the cows later.
You’d really think I’d let you anywhere near my poor girls on your first day?
Absolutely not. I thought I’d test out your skills on something a little less important.
’ I bypass the steps and jump down into the loam.
Arthur, struggling with his wellies in the thick muck, is far closer than I anticipated and I land almost on top of him.
With a wobble, I grip his overalls like my life depends on it and instinctively he wraps his arm around my waist to steady me before I end up arse over tit.
For just a moment he holds me, and I allow him to.
His face is so close to mine I can see the tiny speckles of dirt that have flecked into the stubble of his chin and his breath comes out in a soft cloud in the February morning.
Finally returning to my senses, I shove myself out of his grip and turn to stomp through the mud to put as much distance between us as possible.
‘Do you always have to dawdle? We’ve got work to do and you’re dithering about at the bloody tractor,’ I call over my shoulder with hot cheeks, and he rolls his eyes.
‘Sorry if some of us have never actually ridden in a tractor before. You do know people have lives outside of wading through shit all day?’ He too seems to regain some of his composure, and a little too much of his cheek.
‘Oh my gosh, you’re telling me there is another world outside of Lincolnshire?’ I reply with an exaggerated gasp. I think about my tiny flat in Elephant and Castle, and sitting down to write in cafés that shook each time a tube passed beneath it.
‘What do you need me to do?’ is Arthur’s only reply.
‘The fence needs fixing,’ I say. ‘I just need you to hold a few things whilst I do the actual work.’
With a huff from the both of us, it’s clear that neither one of us wishes to be here, so we spend the rest of the morning in relative silence.
Only speaking to grumble at one another for doing something wrong, I realise after the third hour of fixing fence posts that it would have probably been easier to just do it by myself.
The rest of the day plays out much the same. Arthur is useless at mucking out cows, he has no idea how to use any machinery without giving me anxiety, and he didn’t even bring his own packed lunch so I have to, reluctantly, share my sandwiches with him.
We sit in the old wheat field in the middle of the day and I watch Arthur eating my beautifully hand-made sandwiches with a scowl on my face.
‘Have you got crisps in this?’ he asks after his second bite.
‘Salt and vinegar chip sticks,’ I reply.
‘In a ham sandwich?’
‘Look, if you don’t like it give me it back and I’ll have it.’
‘All right, all right. I was only asking.’ He sighs and takes another bite. ‘Are you always this friendly to guests in this village?’
‘Me personally, or everyone else?’ I take a bite of my own sandwich, trying to remain as nonchalant as possible.
‘We’re nice to people who are respectful to us.
Guests don’t usually get the street party greeting like you, but if you haven’t already guessed, your dad is a pretty big deal round here. ’
‘So, you don’t think I’m respectful?’ Arthur asks, placing down his lunch and shuffling up closer towards me with his brows furrowed.
‘Don’t worry I’m only some “local weirdo” after all. What does it matter what I think?’
With that he leans back as though attacked by his own words.
‘Do you often eavesdrop on people’s conversations?’ A peculiar look crosses his face, as though he’s trying to be angry but his conscience hasn’t quite caught up and he clambers to his feet as though planning to run away.
‘Pretty hard not to when you’re practically shouting about it to your mates in my bastard local!’ I can’t help but raise my voice as I finally unravel and meet him on my feet so we stand face to face, like bulls ready to butt heads.
‘Perhaps if you didn’t go out of your way to make a spectacle of yourself, people wouldn’t talk.’ He flinches at the end of his sentence as though it’s someone else spitting those vile words.
‘Why are you even here, Arthur?’ I hiss, my blood boiling. ‘Is New York going to be the dumping ground for A-listers to burden us with their junkie kids from now on? Because if that’s the case, I want out.’
‘It’s nice to see that you still have pigeons out here delivering the news to you.
The fact that you’d so blindly believe such things explains a hell of a lot.
’ He turns his face from me and scoffs, ‘I don’t need to be here, doing this with you,’ before turning away and striding back down the field.
‘You don’t even know where you’re going,’ I call to him, suddenly aware that if I lose Ms Riches’ grandson on his first day, she will not be happy, and, most importantly, I won’t get paid.
‘It’s hardly bustling. I’m sure I’ll figure it out,’ he calls back, not bothering to turn around to face me.
In my frustration, my pent-up rage, I launch the crusts of my sandwich towards him and they burst into a thousand crumbs in his hair. He simply waves me off with his middle finger and marches down the barren wheat field without once looking back.