Perfectly Correct Read online

‘Someone else has to rear them. Another sheep if they’re lucky. Me, if they’re not.’

  ‘You hand-rear lambs?’ Improbable images of Little Boy Blue and Bo Peep flashed across Miriam’s urban imagination.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Isn’t it frightfully hard work? Do you bottle-feed them?’

  ‘I bottle-feed them. It’s always hard work at lambing. No-one gets much sleep at that time of year.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Mr Miles looked carefully at her as if to make sure that she was not teasing him with feigned ignorance. ‘You have to wake with the sheep,’ he explained. ‘Make sure the lambs come all right. Help them if they need it. Pair up the lambs with the right mother, make sure she doesn’t reject them. Get orphaned lambs fostered on to other mothers. All sorts.’

  ‘I never knew,’ Miriam said. ‘I thought farming was all machines these days.’

  Andrew Miles smiled one of his rare friendly smiles. ‘Not on this farm,’ he said. ‘I’ve only just got a television. Anyway, we have sheep and cows and hens. You can’t really mechanise beasts.’

  ‘What about battery farming?’

  He looked shocked as if she had said something terribly vulgar. There was a brief embarrassed silence. ‘I wouldn’t do that,’ he said finally.

  Miriam waited for an explanation of why not; but he said nothing more. ‘I don’t know anything about farming or the country,’ she heard herself say apologetically.

  ‘What’s your line then?’

  Miriam’s work sounded curiously evanescent to herself as she tried to explain. ‘I run a refuge for women whose partners are violent to them, in Brighton. And I work with alcoholic women who are trying to give up drinking. And I work with women who keep getting involved with the wrong sort of man.’

  Andrew Miles looked enormously impressed. ‘What do you do with them?’

  ‘I counsel them. I help them to change.’

  He looked at Miriam as if she were some kind of rare animal which had strayed into his kitchen. ‘Change?’

  ‘Women who drink or who seek violent men or uncaring men have to change themselves before they can properly leave,’ she said. ‘Otherwise they just find themselves in a similar situation with another man who is as bad. It becomes a pattern for them. I counsel them how to change their emotional patterns so that they can truly change their lives.’

  ‘Well now,’ Andrew Miles said, enormously impressed. ‘I never heard of such a thing before. And where did you learn to do that?’

  Miriam smiled. ‘I go on courses. I’m still learning. I shall be learning all my life.’

  ‘And you’re Miss Case’s friend?’

  Miriam nodded. ‘My husband and I used to share a house with her. We’re staying with her this weekend.’

  A guarded, almost frightened look came across Andrew Miles’s face at the mention of Toby. ‘Oh, I couldn’t live in a town,’ he said suddenly.

  Miriam, who did not follow the connection, looked surprised. ‘Why not?’

  He pushed back his chair from the table and started stacking the plates in the dishwasher. ‘So complicated,’ he muttered half to himself. ‘All these people sharing houses and changing their lives and learning.’

  Miriam laughed her seductive giggle. ‘We don’t do it all the time,’ she said. ‘Sometimes we do nothing.’

  Andrew looked up at her. ‘I would hope so,’ he said firmly.

  Miriam brought her mug over to the dishwasher, tossed the dregs in the sink and put it in the top rack. Andrew Miles returned the milk and butter to the larder, put the bread in a bread bin and wiped down the table. There was an intimate domestic atmosphere generated by this sharing of tasks. Miriam suddenly wondered, unprompted, what Andrew Miles would be like in bed. She smothered a giggle by bending to pick up a table mat which had fallen to the floor.

  ‘Would you like to see the beasts?’

  Miriam nodded. ‘If I’m not delaying you?’

  He led the way from the kitchen to the scullery, stepping into his boots and pulling his cap on over his thinning golden hair. He waited for Miriam to fasten her little boots and then led her out of the back door. He showed her the hens scratching in the yard and the little wheeled hen coops. He showed her a couple of guinea fowl which his mother had kept and which had survived her. There were lambs in the field nearest the house and two of them hurtled towards the gate when they saw him. Miriam petted them but Andrew thrust his hands in his pocket and would not touch them though they bleated for his attention.

  ‘They’re so sweet,’ Miriam said.

  ‘They’re for eating, they’re not pets,’ he said firmly. ‘They’ll have to forget they’re hand-reared.’

  ‘Can’t you keep them?’

  ‘I’ll keep the yow,’ he said. ‘But the little tup’ll have to go.’

  In a further field there was a small herd of creamy-coloured cows. ‘Charolais,’ he said proudly. ‘That’s a pedigree herd, that is. French cows.’

  ‘Why not English?’ Miriam asked.

  ‘Less fat on Charolais,’ he said. ‘The cooks don’t like meat with fat any more. It has to be lean. All the English varieties, good English cows, are too fatty. So we farm lean beasts now and the taste is all wrong.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s the fat that flavours the meat,’ Andrew Miles said solemnly. ‘But you can’t tell them that. Someone decides that fat is bad for you and nobody eats decent beef any more.’ He shook his head at the folly of fashion in food. ‘I can give you the finest steak you’ve ever tasted off these fields – but I’d go out of business if I tried to farm English beef. It’s all French. It’s all tasteless. And now they’re all going vegetarian.’

  ‘Toby cooks a lot of lentils,’ Miriam agreed.

  Andrew’s eyes widened in silent horror. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I imagine he would.’ He turned and gestured at a field beyond the cows. ‘Here is where we’re going to have the party when I get the hay in.’

  ‘A party? You mean you really are having the travellers here?’

  He looked at her. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well, the whole village seems to think that it’s a dreadful thing. Louise had Captain Frome on the telephone twice and then he came out while you were there.’

  ‘Captain Frome’s not the whole village. Some of them at the Holly Bush are rather looking forward to it.’

  ‘Looking forward to it?’

  ‘When the hay is in.’

  ‘What’s the hay got to do with it?’

  Andrew Miles looked at her once more, as if she were pretending to an ignorance which no adult could reasonably have. Then he pointed to the field where the tall grass was speckled with flowers. ‘When that’s cut, and all the other hayfields, you can put wagons on it, or tents, anything you like. It’s just grass. It’ll grow. And when the hay is in there’s a little break, like, before harvest and shearing. That’s when people always had parties, in the old days. You’ll have heard of haymaking?’

  ‘In books, yes.’

  ‘Well, after haymaking, and later again, after the harvest is in, people have their shows and their parties. That’s how it’s always been. So when they telephoned me and asked me if I had a field I said they could come, either after haymaking or after harvest. And they wanted to come soon. I think it’ll be fun.’

  Miriam giggled again. ‘They’re going mad about it in the village.’

  Andrew Miles shook his head. ‘Not all of them. A few of them, the newcomers, they’re all upset about it. But the other farmers and the lads in the Bush, they’re not worried.’

  ‘It may be more than a few people in vans,’ Miriam warned him. ‘It’s not so traditional these days. They’ll probably have huge electronic speakers and the music will go on all day and night. And there’s certain to be drugs being sold.’

  ‘Well,’ Andrew said tolerantly. ‘They’re just kids after all. They deserve a bit of fun.’

  Miriam could think of nothing more to say. ‘Thank you for showing m