All Creatures Great and Small Read online

  She began a tour of the office while Siegfried hovered behind her, rubbing his hands and looking like a shopwalker with his favourite customer. She paused at the desk, heaped high with incoming and outgoing bills, Ministry of Agriculture forms, circulars from drug firms with here and there stray boxes of pills and tubes of udder ointment.

  Stirring distastefully among the mess, she extracted the dog-eared old ledger and held it up between finger and thumb. “What’s this?”

  Siegfried trotted forward. “Oh, that’s our ledger. We enter the visits into it from our day book which is here somewhere.” He scrabbled about on the desk. “Ah, here it is. This is where we write the calls as they come in.”

  She studied the two books for a few minutes with an expression of amazement which gave way to a grim humour. “You gentlemen will have to learn to write if I am going to look after your books. There are three different hands here, but this one is by far the worst. Quite dreadful. Whose is it?”

  She pointed to an entry which consisted of a long, broken line with an occasional undulation.

  “That’s mine, actually,” said Siegfried, shuffling his feet. “Must have been in a hurry that day.”

  “But it’s all like that, Mr. Farnon. Look here and here and here. It won’t do, you know.”

  Siegfried put his hands behind his back and hung his head.

  “I expect you keep your stationery and envelopes in here.” She pulled open a drawer in the desk. It appeared to be filled entirely with old seed packets, many of which had burst open. A few peas and french beans rolled gently from the top of the heap. The next drawer was crammed tightly with soiled calving ropes which somebody had forgotten to wash. They didn’t smell so good and Miss Harbottle drew back hurriedly; but she was not easily deterred and tugged hopefully at the third drawer. It came open with a musical clinking and she looked down on a dusty row of empty pale ale bottles.

  She straightened up slowly and spoke patiently. “And where, may I ask, is your cash box?”

  “Well, we just stuff it in there, you know.” Siegfried pointed to the pint pot on the corner of the mantelpiece. “Haven’t got what you’d call a proper cash box, but this does the job all right.”

  Miss Harbottle looked at the pot with horror. “You just stuff …” Crumpled cheques and notes peeped over the brim at her; many of their companions had burst out on to the hearth below. “And you mean to say that you go out and leave that money there day after day?”

  “Never seems to come to any harm,” Siegfried replied.

  “And how about your petty cash?”

  Siegfried gave an uneasy giggle. “All in there, you know. All cash—petty and otherwise.”

  Miss Harbottle’s ruddy face had lost some of its colour. “Really, Mr. Farnon, this is too bad. I don’t know how you have gone on so long like this. I simply do not know. However, I’m confident I will be able to straighten things out very soon. There is obviously nothing complicated about your business—a simple card index system would be the thing for your accounts. The other little things”—she glanced back unbelievingly at the pot—“I will put right very quickly.”

  “Fine, Miss Harbottle, fine.” Siegfried was rubbing his hands harder than ever. “We’ll expect you on Monday morning”

  “Nine o’clock sharp, Mr. Farnon.”

  After she had gone there was a silence. Tristan had enjoyed her visit and was smiling thoughtfully, but I felt uncertain.

  “You know, Siegfried,” I said, “maybe she is a demon of efficiency but isn’t she just a bit tough?”

  “Tough?” Siegfried gave a loud, rather cracked laugh. “Not a bit of it. You leave her to me. I can handle her.”

  FIFTEEN

  THERE WAS LITTLE FURNITURE in the dining-room but the noble lines and the very size of the place lent grace to the long sideboard and the modest mahogany table where Tristan and I sat at breakfast.

  The single large window was patterned with frost and in the street outside, the footsteps of the passers-by crunched in the crisp snow. I looked up from my boiled egg as a car drew up. There was a stamping in the porch, the outer door banged shut and Siegfried burst into the room. Without a word he made for the fire and hung over it, leaning his elbows on the grey marble mantelpiece. He was muffled almost to the eyes in greatcoat and scarf but what you could see of his face was purplish blue.

  He turned a pair of streaming eyes to the table. “A milk fever up at old Heseltine’s. One of the high buildings. God, it was cold up there. I could hardly breathe.”

  As he pulled off his gloves and shook his numbed fingers in front of the flames, he darted sidelong glances at his brother. Tristan’s chair was nearest the fire and he was enjoying his breakfast as he enjoyed everything, slapping the butter happily on to his toast and whistling as he applied the marmalade. His Daily Mirror was balanced against the coffee pot. You could almost see the waves of comfort and contentment coming from him.

  Siegfried dragged himself unwillingly from the fire and dropped into a chair. “I’ll just have a cup of coffee, James. Heseltine was very kind—asked me to sit down and have breakfast with him. He gave me a lovely slice of home fed bacon—a bit fat, maybe, but what a flavour! I can taste it now.”

  He put down his cup with a clatter. “You know, there’s no reason why we should have to go to the grocer for our bacon and eggs. There’s a perfectly good hen house at the bottom of the garden and a pigsty in the yard with a boiler for the swill. All our household waste could go towards feeding a pig. We’d probably do it quite cheaply.”

  He rounded on Tristan who had just lit a Woodbine and was shaking out his Mirror with the air of ineffable pleasure which was peculiar to him. “And it would be a useful job for you. You’re not producing much sitting around here on your arse all day. A bit of stock keeping would do you good.”

  Tristan put down his paper as though the charm had gone out of it. “Stock keeping? Well, I feed your mare as it is.” He didn’t enjoy looking after Siegfried’s new hunter because every time he turned her out to water in the yard she would take a playful kick at him in passing.

  Siegfried jumped up. “I know you do, and it doesn’t take all day, does it? It won’t kill you to take on the hens and pigs.”

  “Pigs?” Tristan looked startled. “I thought you said pig.”

  “Yes, pigs. I’ve just been thinking. If I buy a litter of weaners we can sell the others and keep one for ourselves. Won’t cost a thing that way.”

  “Not with free labour, certainly.”

  “Labour? Labour? You don’t know what it means! Look at you lying back there puffing your head off. You smoke too many of those bloody cigarettes!”

  “So do you.”

  “Never mind me, I’m talking about you!” Siegfried shouted.

  I got up from the table with a sigh. Another day had begun.

  When Siegfried got an idea he didn’t muck about. Immediate action was his watchword. Within forty-eight hours a litter of ten little pigs had taken up residence in the sty and twelve Light Sussex pullets were pecking about behind the wire of the hen house. He was particularly pleased with the pullets. “Look at them, James; just on point of lay and a very good strain, too. There’ll be just a trickle of eggs at first, but once they get cracking we’ll be snowed under. Nothing like a nice fresh egg warm from the nest.”

  It was plain from the first that Tristan didn’t share his brother’s enthusiasm for the hens. I often found him hanging about outside the hen house, looking bored and occasionally throwing bread crusts over the wire. There was no evidence of the regular feeding, the balanced diet recommended by the experts. As egg producers, the hens held no appeal for him, but he did become mildly interested in them as personalities. An odd way of clucking, a peculiarity in gait—these things amused him.

  But there were no eggs and as the weeks passed, Siegfried became increasingly irritable. “Wait till I see the chap that sold me those hens. Damned scoundrel. Good laying strain my foot!” It was pathetic to se