The night was warm and still, richly scented by livestock and wet grass, and lit by a near full moon. Shelley was carrying a torch in one hand and a basket in the other, feeling not unlike a nocturnal Red Riding Hood as she traipsed through the small copse next to the riverbank on the far western edge of their land. Though the way was mostly clear, the darkness over the fields was faintly unnerving, as was the occasional glimpse of amber eyes watching her from the undergrowth, and the birds that suddenly fluttered or squawked in the trees. She felt sure a thousand ghosts were following her, and as for the big bad wolf who might eat Red Riding Hood all up …
Smiling as she thought of the girls squealing and ducking under the covers whenever Jack told them that story, she pushed aside a leggy bramble and trudged on through the silvery darkness.
At last she reached the riverbank and there, just where she’d expected to find it, was the home-made tent that Jack and Josh used for their moonlight vigils. Josh had been particularly excited about this one, for their mission tonight was to spot an otter, in spite of none having been seen in this county since the 1950s. However, Josh was determined to find one, and if he didn’t, well, there would be lots of other things to spot instead.
Choking back a laugh as she found them fast asleep in their hideout with Jack leaning against a backrest and Josh lying across his lap, she quietly put down her basket and stood watching them, loving how peaceful and alike they were. Both had thick dark hair that curled and waved in no particular style, and when he was older Josh was clearly going to have his father’s strong jaw and large nose.
She smiled as her precious boy opened his eyes and put a finger to his lips. He moved carefully away from his father and crawled out of the tent. ‘Dad’s asleep,’ he whispered as he reached his mother. ‘He’s missed some really good stuff. I’ve seen everything.’
‘An otter?’ Shelley asked, sitting down next to him.
‘No, but there was a hippopotamus.’ Josh’s eyes were round with awe, as though he truly believed it. ‘It was enormous,’ he confided. ‘You should have seen it. It could have eaten us all up if it had spotted us.’
Shelley said gravely, ‘Lucky it didn’t.’
‘Yes, very lucky. There was a deer with two fawns who came to have a drink,’ he went on, still whispering. ‘I was scared for them, but the hippo didn’t see them.’
‘Wow,’ Shelley murmured. ‘Where is it now, do you know?’
‘I think it swam away, but it might still be somewhere, you never know.’
‘Well, you’d better make sure it doesn’t spot you.’
‘I will. We’re being very quiet.’ He was digging into the basket now, bringing out apples and cake and two thick-cut sandwiches filled with cheese and pickle. ‘I’ll save one of these for Dad,’ he said softly. ‘He might be hungry when he wakes up. Oh! Did you hear that?’
‘What?’ Shelley whispered, all ears and intrigue. After all, it might be the hippo.
‘It was an owl,’ he told her. ‘Ha! There it is again. I think it’s the one that lives in our barn. I’ll tell Dad about it when he wakes up.’
Shelley glanced over her shoulder, and seeing that Jack was watching them through narrowly opened eyes she had to swallow the surge of love that tightened her throat. Of course she’d known that he wouldn’t fall asleep while they were out on vigil, but she also knew that it made Josh feel brave and adventurous to think that he was in charge of keeping them safe.
‘You can go now if you like,’ Josh told her, biting into his sandwich.
‘OK, thanks,’ she replied. ‘There’s some squash in the basket and a bar of chocolate. Don’t let the hippo get Dad, will you?’
‘No, don’t worry, I won’t.’
Hearing Jack turn a laugh into a snore, she pressed a kiss to Josh’s forehead and obediently started back to the farmhouse.
A couple of days later Shelley was enjoying a rare few moments alone in the kitchen sorting through the mail, a small stack for her, one each for Jack and David, and another for issues requiring some sort of joint attention.
Opening an invitation to a friend’s wedding, she popped it onto her own pile as a reminder to RSVP with a definite yes – how long had it been since they were last in London? It seemed like another lifetime, another world, and actually it was. She made a mental note to ensure the event got marked up on the family calendar. This magnificent creation (the calendar, not the invitation) was half as tall and as wide as Jack, made by the children and hanging on its own space of wall in the kitchen. It was bordered in dried wild flowers, sketches of moles, rabbits, lambs and chickens; a Polaroid shot of Josh with his piglets, Wonka and Bucket; a photo of Hanna and Zoe under the weeping willow with Milady and Petunia; a blurred image of Jack and Shelley aboard Jack’s new tractor, and another of David dressed up as Father Christmas.
There was no other calendar like it in the world. It was theirs and they loved it as if it were the beating heart of their family.
Checking the time, and satisfied she didn’t yet have to drive Hanna back to the village for a piano lesson, or remind Josh that he was on lawn-cleaning duty today (meaning collection of sheep droppings), Shelley took another refreshing sip of iced lemonade and opened a handwritten envelope addressed to her and Jack. Guessing from the crest on the seal what this little missive was going to be about, she unfolded the single sheet and discovered that she wasn’t wrong.
However, she was surprised, for the night of the tents, as they now called the inglorious fracas in the field with the Bleasdale twins and their yobby friends, followed by the dumping of all that was unsavoury at the manor’s gates, was only two months behind them. So a request from Sir Humphrey to run the hunt across their land this coming winter seemed a bit rum.
She put it on Jack’s pile with a smile. She knew already what he was going to say when he saw it, but as he enjoyed sounding off about the local hunt and those he truly objected to, she wasn’t going to deprive him of this golden opportunity.
‘Ma, where’s Pop?’ Hanna demanded, running in through the door with plaits flying out of their bands and a very Jack-like grin on her face. As a family they often read a book together in the evenings, and recently they’d become enchanted by H. E. Bates’s The Darling Buds of May. Jack performed rather than read it, making it even more engaging, and exactly, the children insisted with unbridled delight, like them, for the story’s Larkin family lived in a countrified Utopia just like Deerwood.
Ma Larkin, Shelley was often heard to protest, was nothing like her, since she wasn’t fat, not even close, nor was she a saucy minx, at least not while the children were around. Jack, on the other hand, was more than happy to be compared to the rascally Pop Larkin, as he thought it was rather a good fit. Or, a ‘perfick’ fit, as Pop Larkin would say.
‘The last time I saw Dad,’ Shelley replied, checking the time again, ‘he was baling hay in the bottom fields. We ought to be leaving in a few minutes. Have you seen Grandpa on your travels?’
‘He’s in the greenhouse,’ Hanna informed her, going to write on the calendar in green crayon while crunching into a carrot. They each had their own colours for the calendar, although they did get mixed up from time to time, which could be hilarious when they discovered that Jack was down for Brownies at six, or David was going for a leg wax on Wednesday morning after dropping himself off at the town hall.
It was much later that evening, as a thunderstorm racketed about outside cracking apart the heavens and sending switch lightning across the fields, that the whole family was in the kitchen with the windows and stable door wide open to let in the cooling air. Having finished their current favourite, spaghetti bolognese with lashings of Parmesan on the top, the children were now tucking into second helpings of another of Grandpa’s specials, plum crumble made with their very own fruit – picked by Josh and Perry, with fresh cream courtesy of Giles’s dairy herd.
Full to bursting, Shelley kicked back to enjoy the last of Kat’s home-made elderflower wine before starting the clearing up. She’d have help from Nate and Kat who’d brought Perry over for tea as they often did, while David, when he’d finished his own wine, would no doubt take off to inspect what havoc the storm had wreaked on his precious raised beds. Jack, she remembered, was planning to go out with Josh to try to put a dear little owlet back into the nest it had tumbled from. (Josh had tried to do it himself after discovering the owlet on one of his rambles, but he hadn’t been able to climb high enough on his own.)
For the moment, Jack was flicking idly through the mail she’d sorted for him earlier, while chatting with Nate about their cricket team’s fixture at the weekend. When he came to a stop she knew he’d reached the request from Sir Humphrey. His eyes came straight to hers, and the roguishness of his smile made her forgive him for calling her Ma Larkin when he’d come in for tea.
‘Are you going to answer it?’ she asked.
Nate regarded them questioningly.
Passing him the letter, Jack said, ‘We’ll send him our usual Oscar Wilde quote,’ and Shelley laughed. ‘The unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable’, with Jack’s usual addition of a blunt ‘No’, or ‘Keep your bloody progeny orf my land’, or ‘Pick on someone your own size’.
‘He’ll no doubt do the same as he does every year,’ Nate declared, handing the letter to Kat, ‘clog up the roads around us with hunt vehicles, let the hounds loose in our garden before they set off, and leave us to clear up the shit.’
David said in a fatherly scold to his sons, ‘They’re such an unpleasant family, those Bleasdales, that I worry about the way you antagonize them.’
‘So you want us to make friends with them?’ Jack asked, clearly more intrigued by the idea than surprised.
‘His wife, Jemmie, is adorable,’ Shelley put in, ‘so it’s not the whole family. And their younger son – I forget his name – is quite different from those ghastly twins, or so they say, I’ve never met him myself. And their daughter, Fiona, is just like her mother.’
Nate’s expression showed distaste. ‘If the younger son is the hothead who blasted me off the road the other day in his souped-up sports car, and I’m sure he is, then I’m here to tell you that he’s very much like the other males in his family.’
Letting it go, Shelley began clearing the table, while Jack and Josh went to return the owlet to the nest it had fallen from and the others peeled away to various parts of the house. Finally, just before dusk, with the rescue mission complete and the children getting ready for bed, Shelley and Jack put on their wellies and wandered into the sparkling wet fields to watch the artful Dodgy rounding up his sheep. It was rare for them to manage some time together without the children running and yelling around them, demanding attention, falling out of trees, getting stuck in hedges, and generally shattering the peace. Now, being just the two of them, they let the sounds of nature wash over them as they walked hand in hand through buttercups and clover and felt at one with Deerwood and all the beauty – and challenges – it had brought to their lives. They gazed out at the distant earthworks of an old hilltop fort far away on the southern horizon, and on to the ancient forest that bordered their land to the east where it was said Bonnie Prince Charlie had once hidden from the Redcoats, and on to the undulating patchwork of fields that stretched out around them as far as the eye could see.
At a kissing gate they took a moment to honour its tradition, then turned back to check on Dodgy’s progress, impressed and enchanted as always by how swiftly and efficiently he tended his flock.
‘So what are you going to do about Bleasdale’s letter?’ Shelley asked, turning her eyes skywards to where a hot-air balloon was going over.
‘Same as always,’ he replied, waving out to the balloon’s passengers. ‘I’ll send a polite note back explaining that if I want to get rid of a fox I’ll shoot it, clean and quick. Same goes for deer and rabbits.’
Although she knew very well that as a vet, as well as a compassionate human being, the last thing he’d ever be into was the torturing and terrorizing of animals, she still felt a surge of pride every time he confirmed it. They might not be quite as daft or romantically soppy as Ma and Pop Larkin, but there was no doubt in her mind that they were every bit as much in love.
As the heat of August drained away into the cooler and shorter days of September, and their finances stopped adding up, Shelley began to notice a change in Jack. She understood that he was worried about how they were going to keep the farm going when their savings ran out, but there was more doubt or concern exercising him than that. She could sense it, even though he steadfastly denied it.
‘We’ve always shared everything,’ she reminded him one night after he’d returned from a late shift at the surgery and they sat down to enjoy a drink together.
‘We still do,’ he responded, ‘unless you’re hiding something from me.’
Though his tease made her smile, and she felt reassured by the way he added, ‘We’ll sort everything out with this place, I hope you know that,’ she still couldn’t rid herself of the feeling that something else was on his mind.
A few days later she cornered him in the barn. ‘Something’s going on between you and the Bleasdales,’ she accused. ‘Don’t deny it, because I know when things aren’t right with you.’
His deep blue eyes lit with surprise, and then laughter, as he dropped his pitchfork and used an old rag to wipe the sweat from his neck. ‘I don’t know why you think that,’ he told her, ‘but I want you to put it out of your mind, because I haven’t heard anything from them since I let them know that we don’t want the hunt on our land.’
‘So what is going on with you?’ she pressed. ‘And please don’t try to palm me off with how worried you are about our finances because …’
‘That’s not palming off,’ he assured her, ‘it’s a reality. However, I have some news that might just help to turn things around.’
Intrigued, she waited for him to divulge it.
He shook his head. ‘I don’t think I should be the one to tell you,’ he said mysteriously, ‘but there is going to be a change around here if it all works out, that’s for sure.’
Impatiently, she said, ‘You can’t just leave it there. I need to know what you’re talking about.’ Then, out of nowhere, she heard herself saying, ‘Are you going to leave me? Is that what’s going on?’
He gaped at her in profound astonishment.
‘I’m sorry,’ she tried to laugh, ‘I’ve no idea where that came from. I guess … I’ve become paranoid about what’s bothering you and you have to admit, we haven’t made love very much lately.’
Appearing more stunned than ever, he swept her into his arms saying, ‘Then I think we should put that to rights without any further delay,’ and going to close the barn door, he carried her behind a giant stack of bundled hay and ordered her to take off her clothes.
Afterwards, still slightly breathless and laughing at how reckless and passionate they’d been, she plucked straw from her hair as she dressed and realized that she didn’t feel edgy or even worried any more – which just went to prove that they really must relax this way more often.
They did again that night, in the kitchen after everyone had gone to bed, realizing that the risk factor worked rather well for them. When it was over, and they had rearranged their clothes, they stood for a while looking at the bronze dancers in their niche. ‘They kind of ground me,’ Jack confessed, kissing the top of Shelley’s head, ‘or maybe they remind me of how lucky we are.’
She nodded. ‘I know what you mean.’ It wasn’t the first time she’d looked at the figurines and felt a kind of magic emanating from the movements that seemed so real, and she loved the fact that Jack felt it too.
‘And now,’ she said softly, ‘you’re going to tell me your news.’