11

The Hendersons’ had been immediately disappointing. The last farm, the Potters’, they’d loved. There, with its crumbling seventeenth-century stone farmhouse and outbuildings, they had looked out each morning from the sash windows of a barely converted stables over a wood and a stream. Not only was it beautiful, but they liked the family and were well treated. They ate good food every day, produce from the farm and others nearby. They rose early — Tom found this part difficult, due to his insomnia, but he didn’t mind as much as he thought he might — were brought small bottles of beer and bread and cheese at eleven am for morning tea, ate a long lunch, were given much less vigorous work in the afternoons, and often finished before five. Then had all weekend off.

In contrast, the Hendersons’ farm, also in the Auvergne, sat on a large tract of featureless, flat land overlooking a road, and the farm buildings were all new and ugly. The main house — painted a dirty pink, with an ornate, dark-wood verandah around three sides — sat low on the land and was dim and unwelcoming inside.

It became apparent quickly that the Hendersons were using the program in bad faith. Their farm was more a tourist destination for English holiday-makers than it was a serious farm, and this contravened a core tenet of the program, that the farm be subsistence-only, not commercial in nature. But they did grow organic vegetables over several large fields, in which Tom and Clara toiled daily, hoeing rows under surprisingly sharp autumn sun.

Peter Henderson was a bony, red-faced man, whose affability and jolly facade imperfectly hid a quick temper and cruel nature. It was obvious that he saw the program simply as a way to procure free labour. Unlike the Potters, who were anxious to show them the area — the village with its market gardens and historic buildings and bars and bistros — Peter expected them to work five long days a week, and on weekends too if needed. They only got Sunday free, when he left them to their own devices on the farm, which was too isolated for them to walk anywhere of interest.

Also unlike the Potters, whose food was good and plentiful, Clem lavishing upon them all manner of dishes — many of which she had learnt from French families around her and was eager to try out on her guests — the Hendersons catered to Clara’s vegetarianism by merely making more green salad, perhaps boiling a few green beans or carrots. After long days in the sun, Clara ate bread and lettuce and green beans or carrots every night, while the rest of them had chops and chickens and steak and lamb.

There were other complaints. The farm had three bungalows, plain weatherboard buildings that sat in the field behind the house. It was the off-season when Tom and Clara were there, and all three bungalows were empty. On their first day, while being shown around the place, Peter told them that if he found time to clean one out, they could move out of their caravan, and into one of the bungalows. The caravan was dingy and cramped, and, as tactfully as he could over the first week, Tom reminded Peter about the bungalows on several occasions. He offered to help organise them, to clean them up himself — he could do it after work during the week, and they could be in there by the weekend — and was every time given vague excuses. Peter would say there were things being stored in them, or they’d have to think about it, work out which of the three was best for them, and of course it never happened.

While Clara wasn’t that bothered about the bungalows, and didn’t particularly mind the caravan, Tom brooded. Even though he had always hated caravans — ever since a few childhood sleepovers in them, when he’d spend all night worrying about spiders and hating the musty smell — he told himself, and Clara, that it was the principle of it, that Peter was full of shit, and his outrage fed into other issues he had with their host.

Besides the family — Peter, Pauline, and the two boys, Benjamin and Barry — the Hendersons had a friend who worked for them, Thomas — or Tommy, as Peter called him. Thomas looked much like Peter — ruddy-faced, stooped — and like Peter did not have either the healthy complexion or robust physique of someone who worked on the land. He had followed Peter and his family over from England, when they emigrated four years earlier, and had lived in one of the bungalows for the first year to help them establish the farm, but now lived down the road a few hundred metres, in a cottage rented off a neighbour. Tommy had no wife or family, spent all his time at the Hendersons’, and seemed something of an honorary member of the family — like an uncle, or a lesser Peter — someone who was not especially loved by the boys or by Pauline, but who was useful around the place nonetheless.

He was also accident-prone and was the butt of all Peter’s jokes — at the time of their visit, his thumb was in a bandage, his nail having being ripped almost entirely off, and he kept knocking it on things and screaming in pain, which made Peter shake with laughter. But he worked hard, within his limited ability, did what he was told, and was doggedly loyal to Peter and the family.

With his constant injury, browbeaten demeanour, and limited usefulness, Tom suspected Tommy was kept around principally to make Peter look good — both as a reflection of his charitable nature, looking kindly upon this unfortunate old mate who was lonely and hopeless, and as someone against whom he could be favourably compared, what with his farm, his family, his money, his luck. Although, it was also likely that Tommy was Peter’s only friend. Peter — Tom and Clara came to see — was essentially a bully, and he bullied Tommy as he began to bully them. Although in fact he ignored Clara most of the time and would not meet her eye, except on the Sunday afternoon after lunch when his excessive, possibly inebriated praise over her orange cake began to give her the creeps.

Then there was Ben. Being new arrivals on the farm, Tom and Clara were naturally of interest to Peter’s children, who were bored a lot of the time in the flat, bare countryside, unable as they were to venture too far on their own, and having no friends within walking distance. Ben — who was twelve, maybe thirteen — was interested in Tom in particular, as an older boy to play with, learn from. He was shy, but insistent, and would approach Tom silently, with a wry smile on his lips, or appear out of nowhere in front of him, wanting him to play basketball against the side of the house with the makeshift hoop fashioned out of wire.

The games weren’t easy. No matter how many times it was wound and reinforced, the wire hoop was too weak, and after a few direct hits it began to sag and would need tending to, which Tom did with a ladder. Then the ball had only to hit the post on an angle for it to disappear into the brambles. So while some days Tom was happy to play, others he was exhausted and sore — not being accustomed to ploughing fields, or manual labour of any sort — and also resentful of Ben’s father, and on these days he avoided him, hiding in the caravan and playing the guitar as quietly as possible until dinnertime.

He felt bad. Ben was a nice boy, and — Tom found out about a week in — he was going through a hard time because his father was unwell. But Tom couldn’t help it. Knowing he was punishing the boy for the way they were being treated by his father didn’t mean he was any more able to stop himself doing it.

There was something wrong with Peter’s liver. They weren’t sure what yet or how bad it was, but there was a chance it was cancer. Tom and Clara were told of Peter’s illness only once they were in the car on the way to a doctor’s appointment in the dull regional centre fifteen miles away, where they were promised a few hours to themselves. It came up because the next visit they would be making into town would be for test results. The boys, in the back with them, became quiet as the subject was raised and Peter told Tom and Clara what he knew so far of his diagnosis.

Tom and Clara made the appropriate supportive and consoling sounds, but Tom didn’t really feel sorry for him. He hated him — for the way he treated Tommy, for the way he bossed them around and took advantage of their free labour. He had already decided to leave early — there was no way he was staying the full two weeks — and he couldn’t give a shit about the condition of Peter’s liver. But he could see how much his children loved him. He could see how upset they were about it, and he felt for them. Even if this feeling was undercut by the certainty that they would figure out soon enough that their father was an arsehole. They were still children and couldn’t quite see yet how he treated other people, or how he was seen by others. To them, he was still a hero. But it was coming, and Tom relished the thought. If anything, he didn’t want Peter to die soon because he didn’t want him to become a martyr to them; he wanted him to stay alive, at least long enough for the boys to grow up and see him for what he really was.

One day, Peter got Tom to grout tiles in the new bathroom they were putting in — ugly, faux-vintage tiles in French blue, with a pretentious cursive motif in white. He did this with a mixture of resentment and pleasure: resentment that he was being asked to grout their bathroom, which had nothing to do with organic farming, and pleasure because it got him out of the heat and dirt of the fields. He was lazy in the bathroom and sat around a lot and spent most of the time cleaning up after his shoddy work.

After school, Ben poked his head through the window, which Tom had opened for air and light while he worked, and asked him to play basketball with him. Tom told him he couldn’t play basketball because he had to grout the stupid fucking tiles, didn’t he. Ben was shocked. It was true, it had come out harsher than he had meant it to, more sarcastic, and immediately he regretted it. But he let it stand as Ben laughed in embarrassment and shrank away.

After that, Ben didn’t pay much attention to Tom. In fact, he sulked, and on the one day they all had off together — they had a picnic at a nearby lake — he essentially ignored him, which was awkward as it had become assumed that Tom would play with the children on such occasions.

At the end of ten days — they begged off with some lie about the next place needing them earlier than they’d thought — Peter took the opportunity, as he said his goodbyes, to criticise their work. Or Tom’s work — he didn’t have the guts to criticise Clara.

Clara was a girl, and not expected by Peter to work as hard as Tom, it was true, but she had stopped even pretending she was having a good time at the farm. She had virtually stopped talking to any of them at dinnertimes and other social occasions, and so, presumably, she would have come under fire, too, if Peter could have brought himself to speak to her in that way. Peter thought she was odd, probably, maybe even unstable — that she couldn’t be trusted to respond reasonably to any kind of critique of her time on the farm.

Even to Tom he was sly about it, sandwiching his comments between pleasantries, but he let the veil of affability drop from his face and voice when he said he had hoped Tom might have worked harder while he had been with them, but it was nice to meet him anyway.

Tom was taken off guard — he was surprised Peter had it in him to talk so directly to someone like this — and the comments came across all the more unpleasant for being so out of the blue and in such a suddenly changed tone, especially as he stuck out his hand immediately after, his face an awful mockery of good cheer.

There was also an audience: Tommy, who was always on the periphery of conversations being held on the farm, loitering around the edges of all life there. While Tom stood silently, not sure how to respond, but heating up, Tommy became bright red, and led out a short, almost imperceptible gasp of disapproval.

Leave off, Peter, he’s alright, he said quietly. Think of all that wood he chopped the other day in the heat. And we did all the top field, didn’t we?

But Peter was unperturbed; he could handle Tommy. I have the right to speak my mind, Tommy, he said. I believe it’s best to say your piece and tell it how it is.

He was being earnest, sober, like he was duty-bound to speak the truth, as if it was unpleasant, but it was the right thing to do. The self-righteousness was galling. But Tom took his hand, anyway, while concealing great feeling. And although he barely spoke another word to him and barely met his eye, he felt this was too small a protest, too weak a response. He regretted ever after that he hadn’t spoken his mind to Peter in that moment — that he didn’t excoriate him for his treatment of Tommy, or for exploiting them, tell him what he and Clara thought about him fundamentally, as a person. For Peter couldn’t know, not the full extent of it, how much they hated him; he was too confident of his rightful place in the world, his unimpeachability. And Tom had basically just taken it from him.

They went from there to a farm a couple of hours away that was run by Jim and Penny, who were younger and hipper and more fun than anyone else they’d stayed with, although not as hospitable and charming as the Potters, and not in as nice a part of the country. They took them into town for drinks at the pub, and they had two nice, less-demanding children, one of whom had a speech impediment and enjoyed talking to Tom and Clara because he wasn’t embarrassed around them and it gave him practice.

That was, however, where Clara stopped talking to Tom, while they stayed in another caravan — one less dingy and cramped than the last — and they effectively broke up for a while. Tom regretted now how passive he was about that — how he’d just assumed her silence and unhappiness was about him and their relationship, rather than something else she might have been going through. He made no effort to comfort her or help her. He just pretended it wasn’t happening. At the time he was tired, fed up with everything, and felt kind of paralysed himself.

It was especially awkward because, being younger and hipper, Jim and Penny wanted to socialise after work and talk and drink around the table and discuss books and music, and play records — all things they would normally have loved, especially after the Hendersons, but they were in no mood for socialising. Besides, there was something in Jim and Penny’s eagerness for all this that felt forced, like a demand, almost as if it was part of the deal of staying there. It seemed as much about loneliness as it was any chemistry between the two couples. They wanted entertaining, and obligatory fun is not fun at all, especially when you have no energy for it.

Jim and Penny were isolated in their new home in France and had only met a few local families they could call friends. Mostly their contact with others was with neighbours, old French farmers who were exacting about farming traditions and had little to offer them besides sharp criticism over the neatness of their haystacks in the barn. Clara did her best and participated — tried, it seemed, to pull herself out of it by drinking and being friendly with Penny. Her silence with Tom, and with everyone else when she could get away with it, was only really noticeable to someone looking for it.

Clara spent most of the time with Jim and Penny being absorbed by the work. Penny taught her to make cheese, and Clara drew intricate and highly precise diagrams and illustrations of the process over many pages in her notebook. She then drew the vegetable gardens, noting the distance each seed was planted from the next, how deep the rows were hoed, which plants were companion planted with which. And after that she took copious notes about all manner of things to do with French farm life: at what time they herded the cows into the barns, the horrible ways neighbouring farmers treated their calves — tying them up in barns and never letting them out and force-feeding them so they would produce tender veal — the correct way to stack hay bales, so many things that Tom felt sure she would never use in her own life.

And she stopped speaking to him entirely. It happened gradually. He thought. He couldn’t really remember. He spent so much time pretending it wasn’t happening, to himself, to Jim and Penny, so much time being falsely affable and sociable, solicitous, pathetic, he now couldn’t remember what was real and what was fake. She was unhappy, he knew that: bored, lonely, who knows what else. Going through something. But he didn’t seem to have the energy to do anything about it. To even acknowledge it. They fell into bed together each night, sometimes drunk from the wine Jim and Penny plied them with. They had sex once, silently, in the dark, once in three weeks, but beyond that, never touched.

And when, at the end of their stay, Clara left for another farm alone — Tom was to return to England by himself a few days later — and Jim and Penny gave them a minute to say goodbye to each other, turning their backs to them at the station and teasing them to Go on! Give each other a hug, they obeyed.