Jess sat momentarily speechless as she gazed at the stone, lime-washed cottage, complete with Jemima Puddleduck and her offspring swimming contentedly in a pond out the front of it. “It’s like something out of a picture book! This is where you live?” It definitely did not 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 obviously had grown into and try as she might, she could not conjure up an image of the little boy he’d once been with a beanie on his head at bedtime. Following him up the path to the front door, she paused to say hello to Jemima and received a hiss in return. It seemed she was not a duck after all but rather 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 past. 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 liked to have been a nosy rosy but she resisted the urge to wander over for a closer look at the pictures and instead soaked up the ambience of the rest 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 room 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 Ma 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.
Setting her laptop down on the table’s scrubbed wooden surface, she 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 tae or coffee?”
Shaking away the reverie, she smiled at his pronunciation of tea. “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 had 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 her 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, she thought; 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 had expected, she obviously wasn’t going to get it and 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 shaded 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 hot-footing it over to the smaller, friendlier city of Dublin.
“Aye, well, it was time for a change. I needed a fresh start. Ma 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 greedy girl’s slice 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 mumbled, chomping into the sandwich he had put together. He sat there chewing silently and she didn’t think he was going to answer her 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 a better quality meat.”
“I always try to buy free-range.” It sounded self-righteous even to her own ears and she guessed it was easy for her on her own to buy top quality meat but she’d seen how Brianna had to budget her shop and it didn’t leave room for free-range meats seven nights a week.
“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 had seen so far, she didn’t think relaxed and comfortable were part of his genetic makeup. 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 getting up, he began to clear the table.
***
“Oh, he’s adorable. You have to call him Wilbur—you know, like in Charlotte’s Web?”
“Aye, so long as you are not comparing me to John Arable.”
Hmm, the comparison had crossed her mind but she’d kept that to herself, impressed that he knew the name of the farmer who’d wanted to off poor Wilbur initially in the famous children’s story and she told him so.
“Ah, well now, you couldn’t be a pig farmer and not know the story of Charlotte’s Web. It was one of Amy’s favourites.”
“It was one of mine too.” She felt pleased to have found something she shared in common with Amy and that Owen had been the one to bring her into the conversation.
A moment later, her maternal instinct had thrown off its heavy overcoat, sunning itself as she sat cross-legged in the old barn on a pile of straw, feeding the newly christened Wilbur. The tiny, hairless pink bundle was slurping feebly at the bottle Owen had handed her.
“I feed him every two to three hours.”
“What? Even through the night?” Her eyes were wide at his dedication and she felt her tummy do a little flip at the thought of this large and gruff man caring so tenderly for the tiny piglet trembling in her arms.
“I put a drip bottle up at night. His last feed is at nine thirty; then he is on his own until the morning.”
That shattered the picture she had invoked of Owen trooping across the darkened fields in the wee hours with his heated bottle of milk, as did the frantic squealing of Wilbur’s healthy, hungry brothers and sisters as they vied for space, butting into their patient mother in the stall next to them. Owen had explained to her that Wilbur had to be taken away from his mother and siblings if he was to have any chance of survival. Overhead, a long heat lamp not unlike the old school classroom fluorescent lights warmed the wooden box stuffed with straw in which the tiny piglet slept.
“I try not to name the girls. I did it once when I was a kid, even though me Da told me not to. Broke my heart the day Florence was taken away.”
“Florence?” Jess looked up at Owen and saw that twinkle in his eyes again; she wasn’t sure whether he was having her on or not. “I didn’t think farmers could afford to be sentimental about their animals?”
“Hard not to be but I like to think I give them a good life before I pack them off to meet their maker or Sean O’Flaherty—the local butcher I use.”
She flinched involuntarily at the mental image of Sean O’Flaherty with a big white apron and long carving knife that flashed before her eyes. Owen was right, though, she thought. Perhaps it could be said that she watched far too much television but she had once seen an undercover expose on pigs being kept inhumanely by farmers who supplied well-known supermarket chains. Those poor animals hadn’t had much chance for wallowing or foraging, not like Owen’s fat, happy sows.
“They’re amazingly intelligent animals—pigs, you know—more so than any other domestic animal.”
She didn’t know but then it had turned out there was an awful lot about pigs she hadn’t known, like for instance the fact that pigs have very good memories and that the reason they wallow in mud is not because they are dirty—they were, according to Owen, extremely clean animals—but because they can’t sweat and the mud cools their body temperature down.
She had become a mine of information on all things swine, listening to Owen as he walked her around the first and closest of his paddocks. She’d watched him curiously out of the corner of her eye as he became positively animated, pointing out the area where the pigs wallowed before showing her the little huts or kennels they used for shelter. Initially, as he had held open the gate at the bottom of the garden for her and she’d wandered out into the paddock, she had felt slight trepidation at the sight of two hundred or so free-ranging pigs. However, once she realised she wasn’t going to be charged and trampled to death, she listened to Owen with interest. It was hard not to when he was so amazingly passionate about his animals. He was like a different person when he was amongst his pigs; it was as though he came to life. His enthusiasm for them was catching and she knew instinctively that from hereon in she would never pick up a packet of budget pork sausies in the supermarket again.
Jess glanced down at her flat brown boots. She’d just squelched through a particularly boggy part of the paddock but her feet were still dry and her boots would clean up with a scrub under a hot tap, no bother. She might have got the bra wrong but at least she’d had the sense to wear sensible footwear. It was at that moment she’d nearly gone flying, tripping over those same said sensibly clad feet. It was all Owen’s fault, she thought, as he grabbed her elbow and steadied her; he had just pointed out the area in the paddock set aside for the pigs to root in—his words, not hers. As he caught sight of the look of horror on her face, he’d let rip with a loud laugh. It was only the second time she had heard it since he picked her up from the station and she looked at him startled as he informed her, “No, I don’t have a herd of rampant lesbian pigs! Rooting is the term we use for the way the girls forage in the soil.”
Jess had the grace to look sheepish and once he had stopped laughing, he had led her over to the barn, where she had met and fallen in love with Wilbur.
“Would you like to feed him?”
“Can I?” Her eyes were wide, taking in the pink bundle whose plaintive squeak was nothing like the robust squealing of the piglets she’d seen in the stall next door. It tugged at her heartstrings.
“Here, hold him like this.” He placed Wilbur carefully in her arms and she gazed down with adoration as he began to suck feebly at the bottle.
“Is it cow’s milk?” she asked.
Owen’s mouth did that twitchy thing at the corners again. “No, it’s a sow’s milk formula.”
She didn’t see his expression; she was too concerned about Wilbur. “What will happen to him?”
“Ah, well now, runts don’t have a great survival rate so I don’t know for sure but if I manage to get the little bugger up to a decent size, I will put him back on his mother once her other piglets are weaned. That would catch him up to his brothers and sisters in no time and prevent his mother getting a bout of mastitis.”
Jess cringed, remembering the terrible time Brianna had had with the breast infection. She wouldn’t wish that on any mum.
“Tickle his tum. They love that,” he said as the little piglet finished the bottle.
He was right, she thought, with delight; if Wilbur could coo, he would be cooing. She sat contentedly like that, rubbing his tummy until she saw his eyes beginning to shut. Gently placing him back in his box, she got up and brushed her jeans down. “You will let me know how he gets on, won’t you?”
Owen looked bemused for a moment before he nodded and then their eyes met and locked for a split second in an unspoken agreement that it was time to head back to the cottage. They couldn’t avoid Amy any longer.
***
“That’s her,” he said, plucking one of the photos Jess had spied on the mantelpiece earlier and holding it out to her. “That was taken a few months before she died.”
Jess was settled into the leather armchair and she placed the cup of tea he had made her when they’d come back inside down on the side table before leaning forward to take the frame from him. She didn’t know what she expected really, but the young girl who was smiling out at her made her draw a sharp breath.
Amy was quite beautiful. Her hair was dark like her brother’s but her skin was much fairer than his. They both shared the same startlingly light grey eyes, though. She looks just like how I always pictured Snow White, Jess thought, wondering at the irony of that as she mentally swapped the seventies orange-and-brown knit dress and the long straight hair, parted down the middle, for a long red dress with puffy sleeves and waves of shiny black curls. This was the girl she had come to meet.
“She looked just like me Ma,” Owen said, handing her another picture.
This one was a group shot, showing a much younger Owen. He looked like a typical boy with a shock of sticky-up hair, the kind of lad who would have pinged the girls’ bra straps in school. He also looked as if he would rather be anywhere than standing around having his picture taken with his older sister and parents. Mr and Mrs Aherne rested their hands on their children’s shoulders, their pride in their offspring evident as the foursome stood together frozen in time out the front of the cottage.
Jess couldn’t help but think it was a good thing that none of us knew what lay in store for us and our families. Mrs Aherne was indeed a beauty while her husband had that certain swarthiness about him—Owen had it, too, now Jess realised. His parents made a handsome couple. Amy, Jessica could see instantly, was the spit of her mother, and she would have grown into a stunning young woman given the chance. Owen was a real mix of both his Mum and Dad. He obviously got his dark colouring from his father. Their noses were identical, too; slightly bent to the right and with their heavy eyebrows, it gave them both an almost hooded, brooding look. They even had the same tall and rangy builds but Owen’s grey eyes and full mouth were those of his mother and his sister.
“I can see the family resemblance, alright. You were a handsome lot,” she murmured, handing him back the two pictures.
He gazed at them himself for a moment before placing them back on the mantel. “Aye, peas in a pod, us Ahernes.”
“Amy would have grown up to be a real stunner. She looked so much like your Mum.”
“Aye, she did. All me mates had a thing for her. I was the most popular lad at school thanks to her. As for Ma, she was Miss County Down when she met Da.”
Jess caught a glimpse of that rare smile as he crouched down to light the fire. “He used to tell me and Amy a tale about how he’d won Ma over with the gift of a pig and a bunch of roses.”
Looking at him over the rim of her mug, Jess was unsure where this story was going because it certainly wasn’t the romantic tale befitting the woman in the photo that she had been expecting.
The fire suddenly roared into life and Owen took a step away from it, catching her bewildered expression as he did so. “Not exactly Cinderella, is it? But Ma had a soft spot for animals and roses—she planted all the bushes out the front of the cottage—and the wee pig Da gave her was a runt, not unlike your Wilbur out there. Ma called her Marigold and she grew up to be a very fat, spoilt old sow. The way she told the tale was that she took pity on the tiny runt and Michael Aherne the poor pig farmer who needed the love of a good woman. If the truth be told and you do the maths, Da got her up the duff. That was the end of her reign as Miss County Down because she had to become Mrs Michael Aherne and pronto.”
Jess laughed. “They were happy, though? I mean before Amy, well, um, before…”
Owen interrupted her. “I know what you mean and aye, they were happy enough. Farming was a hard life back then, though, and they had their share of hard times. I sometimes felt Ma wondered about what might have been, you know, if she hadn’t been forced to settled down so young. They both changed after Amy died, though, blaming themselves for a long time. They kept her room like a shrine for years and Ma used to sit on her bed, holding Amy’s teddy for hours on end. When she came out, all she would go on and on about was how she should have put her foot down and made us all leave the godforsaken North years ago.” His gaze flickered to the mantel. “She’d wanted us to go over to the family she had in Liverpool or even go to the States to start a new life. Da wouldn’t hear of it, though; this place was his home and I think she blamed him for not wanting to leave the farm. I can understand it, though. What would he have done? The farm was his life; he didn’t know anything else.” Owen shrugged. “I’ve learnt that you can’t rewrite the past, no matter how much you might want to and this farm is the only bit left of our past now, so I am glad we never left in that respect.”
“You said your Mum kept Amy’s room like a shrine? Would I be able to have a look? It would give me a real sense of her.”
He shook his head. “No, she got rid of everything in the end—took a couple of bin bags into her room and filled them. She was so angry—part of the whole grieving process, I suppose. It wasn’t long after that she got sick. Cancer like.”
“That must have been so hard for you and your Dad.”
“Aye, it was but she left us emotionally the day Amy died. For his part, though, Da never stopped adoring her. He always called her Bridgette his Beauty Queen and it didn’t really matter that she could never bring herself to forgive him for not wanting to leave Glenariff because he could never forgive himself. Amy was the apple of me Da’s eye.” His eyes moved toward the front door. “He was a great one for the stories. Do you see that old walking stick over there?”
Jess followed his gaze to where an umbrella stand housed a battered-looking black brolly and an old cane walking stick. She nodded.
“Well, it belonged to me Grand-da and it was Da’s wee joke that he kept it there because it would come in handy one day for beating all the boys off when they came a-calling for our Amy.”
Jess smiled at that, thinking briefly of how her mother would have kept a walking stick by the front door for quite a different purpose. It would have been used to hook any red-blooded males under the age of forty who came-a-calling around the neck, drag them inside and then marry them off to her first born.
“He stopped telling his tall tales after Amy died.”
They were both silent for a moment, Owen lost in the flickering flames of the fire.
Something was puzzling Jess, though. Owen had told her that that terrible day in Lisburn Amy had gone up to see a boy who, according to her best friend, wasn’t the least bit interested in her. Having seen her photo, Jessica couldn’t understand how any young man in his right mind could have been anything but smitten with the gorgeous teenager. She voiced her bewilderment and Owen frowned; it leant a harshness to his face and his voice grew bitter.
“Evie told us that Amy had chatted up the lad at a dance in Banbridge a few weeks earlier. She wasn’t shy in coming forward, our Amy. She had that awareness about herself that young girls have, you know?”
Jess nodded. Yes, she could remember thinking she was pretty hot to trot at the Blue Light Discos she had frequented many moons ago.
“Anyway, this lad—he didn’t belong in Banbridge and he should never have been at the dance in the first place because he was asking for trouble like. Sure enough, it wasn’t long before one of the local lads took umbrage with him talking to one of their girls and the dance ended with a fight. Amy was like you—into her stories. She was a right dreamer and she was always waiting for something exciting to happen and for her, that was it.” He picked up the poker and stabbed at the fire. “I suppose she saw the situation as a Romeo and Juliet scenario, you know? That whole forbidden love rot, and she was determined to see this fella again despite him telling her in no uncertain terms to leave him alone after the fight. He’d gotten a battering and he didn’t want any more trouble. She wouldn’t leave him be, though, even though there was no way in hell that lad would have even looked at her again.”
There was a hole in the story Jess just couldn’t figure. “What do you mean ‘one of their girls’?”
“We’re Proddies. It was a Protestant dance and this lad was Catholic. It was more than his life was worth to go near her again but Amy was motivated by fashion, not by politics, and she couldn’t understand why what religion you were mattered so much. ‘We’re all human beings, so why can’t we all just get along?’ she once asked our Da and he told her it wasn’t that straightforward. She just said, ‘Why not? It doesn’t seem that complicated to me.’ Then she shrugged her shoulders and walked away from him.”