They had been waiting for three days now. Or five days if you counted from the first telephone call, which was when everything really started changing. It came as they were finishing dinner. The General, who was meant – though he still showed no signs of it – to be in the process of moving into a large cottage at the end of the drive, had said, ‘Who the bloody Hell calls at this hour?’ and Charlie had gone off to find out. He came back into the dining room twenty minutes later, looking very bleak.
‘MAFF,’ he said simply.
Nobody spoke.
‘They’ve found a case of foot and mouth at Tom Shattock’s place. They’re sending a man round here in the morning.’
His father groaned.
‘But, listen, you never know.’ It sounded very hollow. ‘We might be fine…We might be absolutely fine.’
‘Poor old Shattock,’ murmured the General. ‘And it’s definite is it? Confirmed case?’
Charlie nodded. ‘Plus there’s another one suspected. It’s definite all right.’
The morning after that, while a Ministry vet inspected their cattle, Charlie led the lilac-coloured Standards man into the library. He’d wanted to know the exact whereabouts of every livestock animal on the estate: for ‘future reference’, he said; ‘in the event of evidence leading us to suspect…’ But they both knew what that meant. Charlie had been as helpful as he could. Or as he could bear to be.
He listed everything. Every single one of their 542 sheep, including the pregnant ewes, the three-day-old lambs, the seventeen rare and precious Dorset Horns. He told the man about his prize-winning dairy herd, and about his magnificent Jersey bull. He even mentioned his beloved twin sister Georgie’s billy goat which since her shocking death (in a riding accident a year and a half ago) had been bought a nanny companion and allowed to roam freely among the animals.
‘And that’s it?’ said the lilac man, clicking the top of his stainless steel pen and slipping it neatly into his lilac pocket. ‘Nothing else? No pigs?’
‘No.’
‘No new calves unaccounted for?’
‘No. None I haven’t mentioned.’
Lilac man offered a measly smile: ‘No nasty surprises lurking in forgotten corners anywhere? It’s a sizable estate.’
Charlie averted his eyes. He was a rotten liar, and he hated lying, but there were two animals he’d left out, whose existence at that particular moment was causing his body to break out in a cold sweat. Caroline and Jasonette, an ancient couple of Highland cows, had been wandering the park at Fiddleford ever since he and his twin sister were ten. They had been delivered, all those years ago, as a birthday surprise from their mother: twin calves, one for each of her twins. He and Georgina used to spend hours with them during the holidays, lounging around on their hairy backs, taking them on picnics (or taking picnics on them). They pinned photographs of their cows on their bedroom walls at school.
Once, when the twins were still small, and the cows were still calves and the sun was always shining and his twin and their mother were still alive, someone had left the front door open and both animals had been discovered looking bewildered, side by side in the middle of the hall. Their mother (the General had been away at the time, or it never would have happened) hadn’t yelled about the valuable paintings or the boring Japanese urn on the side table. She’d behaved as if everything was completely normal, as if the two little calves were making a perfectly ordinary social call.
She opened the door to the drawing room, since it was ‘nearly drinks time’, and invited the calves to come in. They followed her, the way calves do. The children had fetched bowls of milk from the kitchen, and the five of them had stood about beneath the portraits of disapproving soldiers, while Mrs Maxwell McDonald conducted a jolly conversation with all of them, exactly as if she had been entertaining the local vicar. Charlie and Georgie thought it was the most topsy-turvy thing they’d ever seen. They thought they would die from laughing. And the calves had looked so sweet and confused in the middle of that big drawing room, and their mother had looked so happy. It was one of the last memories they had of her before she fell ill. She must have died less than a year later…
Charlie looked out of the library window over the frozen hills to where the village lay, and the church, whose tower he could see, and the churchyard where his mother and sister lay side by side…He looked back at the lilac-coloured penpusher, with his measly lilac-coloured grin.
‘Nasty surprises?’ he said coolly. ‘At Fiddleford? Certainly not.’
The Ministry vet checked in with Jo and Charlie at the end of the same day. He’d not completed his inspection yet, he said, and he would be back first thing in the morning to finish off.
‘No signs yet, though,’ he said. ‘So fingers crossed.’
It gave them false hope. They all four drank too much that night. And then in the morning the vet returned and within minutes he’d found one of the heifers was limping.
She could have trodden on a sharp stone. More than likely, she had trodden on a sharp stone. Or one of the other cows might have kicked her. Or she’d woken up feeling stiff. It could have been any number of things. But the people from the Ministry weren’t willing to take the risk. Later that night came the official confirmation. There would be no need to take further tests. The limp was evidence enough. Death warrants had been signed and the slaughtermen were booked for Wednesday morning.
Since then, time for everyone at Fiddleford had been passing abnormally slowly. Jo wandered the house with her notebook, making obsessive and pointless notes about facilities which might be required for her future paying guests. Grey and the General, for lack of tabloid newspapers to argue over (their favourite – almost their only – pastime for several months now), were reduced to watching housewives’ television. Charlie, meanwhile, dealt with the animals, the farm workers, and the people from MAFF.
On Monday evening he telephoned the Ministry to inform them that the heifer’s limp had disappeared. On Tuesday evening he called again to inform them there were still no signs of infection among any of the other animals. But it was too late. That night the last of the animals were herded together into outhouses. The pyre was already built, and the sheep crushes and the cattle stocks lay waiting.
The snow turned to sleet that evening, and a cruel wind blew. Grey McShane, in a futile attempt to lighten everyone’s spirits, had lit a fire in the dining room. There was no food in the house, since the garden was covered in three feet of snow, and nobody was allowed out to go shopping. But Grey found an ancient tin of spaghetti at the back of the larder, which he plopped into a saucepan and burnt and then, with absurd fanfare, carried through to the dining room.
He doled out a plateful to Jo, who looked at it for several minutes and then suddenly leapt from her chair and ran out of the room. Charlie found her vomiting over the kitchen sink.
‘Are you all right?’ he said.
‘I’m fine. Completely fine. You go back in.’
‘Was it the spaghetti, do you think?’
She laughed.
‘Oh Christ, Jo, I’m so sorry. This must be awful for you.’
‘It’s fine. Please. Never mind me. I’m fine…I’m fine.’
‘We could get a licence and you could go and stay in London until it was over.’
‘Certainly not!’ She made an effort to smile, but the smile turned into a retch. ‘Oh, God—’ She retched again.