Sally went home from work, expecting to open her front door and see, as usual, Val in his armchair staring into space, with an assortment of pills and ointments beside him, the television not even on and the Guardian flung into a corner in disgust. But that day she opened her front door and found her husband up a ladder re-pasting wallpaper; the fire was burning, the windows were open and there were no pills in sight. When she came into the room, Val got down off the ladder, crossed to her, pecked her cheek, and relieved her of her shopping and took it into the kitchen. ‘What happened?’ she asked.
‘The pain went,’ he said. ‘I think my Mars passed out of opposition to my Jupiter.’
‘I don’t understand that,’ she said.
‘We were mad enough to move to the West Country,’ he said, ‘instead of somewhere rational, so what’s the point of fighting. We’ll live as the natives do. We’ll believe in astrology and I’ll join Scientists Against the Bomb and have a CND sticker on the car.’
‘There’s a laser printing firm starting up in Street,’ said Sally. ‘One of the parents told me. You could try there for a job.’
She shouldn’t have pushed her luck; she knew as soon as she’d spoken. (You have to watch your words, if you’re living with a depressive.) But Val didn’t react badly at all.
‘I might well do that,’ was all he said. ‘Find out the address, will you?’
And as for Pauline and Gerard, they had their best day ever in The Tessen and, after closing up, took Jax out for a walk, as had become their custom.
‘I still think bread at 90p the loaf is outrageous,’ said Gerard. ‘But I suppose if people want to buy it one shouldn’t stop them.’
Jax nosed and snuffed amongst spring grasses. Rain had been falling: the sun suddenly slanted from the west, out from under a line of heavy grey clouds onto wet new foliage, and everything was brilliantly, almost unbearably, acid green: the colour quivered all around for five minutes or so, subduing even Jax so that he returned to trot at their heels.
‘Growing old doesn’t matter,’ said Pauline. ‘Not even growing old and childless. All this remains. We’re just part of it: a product of it.’
Her husband tucked his arm in hers, without comment, and presently the colour scale returned to normal, and Jax took off again. Sometimes in the evening he would look melancholy and stare reproachfully at his new owners, and turn his head away even from Good Boy chocolate drops, and then they imagined he was missing the Harris household, but for the most part he was lively, cheerful and rewarding. Pauline fed him with high sausages and ham scraps when Gerard wasn’t looking: and Gerard the same, when Pauline wasn’t. Since Jax tended to be, if anything, underfed in their anxiety for his health, he did very well by these furtive arrangements.
Bernard and Flora had carved a fireplace into the cliff; Bernard had set up a clean, empty oil drum nearby and spent a morning filling it with water, so now they had a constant water supply. Their privy was the nearby quarry: they heaped leaves to make things decent, but used other people’s water closets in the towns and villages when they could. Birds sang, grass swayed and flowers glowed. It was as near paradise, Bernard and Flora thought, as could be achieved, there on the edge of the council rubbish tip. They were not lonely – there was a constant to-ing and fro-ing in the near distance, as cyclists rode up to deposit single wine bottles, or men on tracks dumped industrial waste (forbidden) – yet still they were private. Mostly those who visited the tip were householders who came with the boots of their cars filled with sacks of kitchen waste, or their roof racks high with discarded consumer durables. Here in the rural depths of the heart of the country, you can put out your trash and wait a week for it to be collected, and in the meantime the dogs, the foxes and the badgers will knock over the bins, rifle the contents, and spread your intimate rubbish over acres. So the communal tips are widely used.
Flora put two boil-in-the-bag curry dinners into the pan of water which steamed on the little peat fire. (Bernard had recently acquired a couple of sacks of burning peat; it burned with a mild heady scent, and left behind dense grey ashes, which she liked.) She squatted before the pan, the skin stretching tight and smooth over her knees. Bernard watched and pondered over his first day’s work at Avon Farmers.
‘The farmers come up and order by numbers,’ he said, ‘from the catalogue. I bring out the sacks, that’s all. Why do they pay me so much? And why me?’
‘You’re not straight,’ said Flora, ‘that’s why. It’s as Arthur said. You’ll keep your mouth shut, if it’s in your interest.’
‘But about what?’ he asked, as if she knew. ‘What’s in the sacks? This farmer today asked for lactose. Nothing wrong with lactose. It’s a form of sugar.’
‘Fancy you!’ said Flora.
‘I did A-level chemistry for a term,’ said Bernard. ‘I may be stupid but I’m not daft. But this geezer told me the lactose went in the milk, and brought it up to Marketing Board standards. Can that be right? Every tanker he takes in is worth ninety quid. If it’s low in sugar content it gets rejected. He wasn’t going to throw good milk away, he said. So he just tipped the lactose into the milk and then the results came up fine. If the Milk Board wants sugar, he said, they can have sugar! Why should I be penalized? Why should my cows be insulted? They’re good cows and they give good milk. It makes you wonder!’
‘Wonder what?’
‘What’s in the other sacks. Why we stay open at night, and why more people come by night than day, and why everyone pays with cash.’
‘I thought all that would be up your street, Bernard,’ said Flora, sadly. He was not renowned for his honesty, nor had his father been before him.
‘Tell you what,’ was all he said, ‘don’t let’s drink milk any more.’
With their curry they drank wine, which Flora had acquired from the Harris household over past months. It had been the Harris habit to buy their wine in boxes. Flora would open the packs when Natalie was out shopping, abstract a third of the wine, refill with water, shake well and then re-seal the containers. No one had ever noticed. It had been Bernard’s idea, and seemed to Flora not unreasonable, since she was so underpaid, and recently of course not paid at all.
Bernard put his arm round Flora and they spent a comfortable and cosy evening in the midst of their wasteland, watching the sun sink behind the Tor. Of such pleasures are domestic happiness made.