The Farm at the Edge of the World : A Novel (2016) Read online

  Contents

  Also by Sarah Vaughan

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Sarah Vaughan

  The Art of Baking Blind

  THE FARM AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD

  Sarah Vaughan

  www.hodder.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Sarah Vaughan 2016

  The right of Sarah Vaughan to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 444 79230 0

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.hodder.co.uk

  To Bobby,

  with love.

  She would concern herself with the business of the farm; rise early … bend her back to labour and count the strain a joy and an antidote to pain … She belonged to the soil, and would return to it again, rooted to the earth as her forefathers had been.

  Daphne du Maurier, Jamaica Inn

  Because the road is rough and long,

  Shall we despise the skylark’s song?

  Anne Brontë, Poems by Currer,

  Ellis, and Acton Bell

  Prologue

  The farm sits with its back to the sea, and the sharp winds that gust off the Atlantic: a long stretch of granite, hunkering down. For over three hundred years it has stood here, looking in at its fields of barley and its herd of Ayrshires, which amble, slowly cropping, russet bulks shifting against the lush, verdant green.

  It watches, this farmhouse, as permanent as the rocks, more so than the shifting sand dunes; sees the hedgerow that spills out to ensnare a rare driver – for few make their way to this spot, high above the sea. The details change with the seasons – the hawthorn burnishing then falling bare; the sky bruising then lightening after rain; the crops placed in shocks then gathered in – but the view remains the same: a ribbon of lane leading up and away from this lonely patch of coast, through a tapestry of fields, towards the heart of Cornwall and the rest of Britain. And, above it, always, hulking in the distance, the moor – brooding ochre and peat and grey.

  In the sunshine, all looks idyllic. This is a farm a child might draw: slate roof, whitewashed porch, near-symmetrical windows; one either side of the door with an extra one tacked on in the eighteenth century when the house was stretched. The proportions are good. A house assured of itself and built to withstand a wind that whips the trees into right angles, that blasts the panes with fat plashes of rain, that endures winter after winter. Two chimneys stand, and, from October to May, the tang of woodsmoke mingles with the ripe stench of the farmyard and the gentler smells of the coastline: the fruity reek of silage, of honeyed gorse and sea salt, wet grass and cowpats, camomile and vetch.

  On sunny days, the granite walls of the house, barns and workers’ cottages glow, warm and gentle, the stone glinting against the blue of the sea. Walkers, rooting out cream teas, drink in the view from the back garden – the fat-eared crops, the full-bellied cows, the surfers riding white horses across the bay. And then they hear the birdsong. A glorious melody so irrepressible, so unrelenting that it gives the place its nickname. No longer Polblazey, but Skylark Farm.

  Yet, when the skylarks stop singing, and the sky turns grey, the granite dulls to a dark charcoal. The farm becomes less inviting: bleak if not austere. Then, it is clear that the casements are in need of a paint, and that the garden – with its close-cropped grass fringed with clumps of woody lavender and thrift – is untended. A wizened crab apple bends over a rotting bench, and a tamarisk stripped of its leaves by a vicious wind, points inland. Skylark Farm – run by the same family for six generations, steeped in its history and secrets – shrugs on its traditional Cornish name. Becomes Polblazey once again.

  On such days, when the earth has been ploughed into great clods of soil, when the cobbles are slick with manure, when a murder of crows follows the tractor, the farm is at its most remote and unforgiving. For nothing lies beyond its cliffs and headland but the petrol-blue Atlantic – and then America, unknown and unseen. Then, it is a farm at the edge of the world. The sort of place where the usual rules can be bent, just a little, and any secrets stay hidden. For who there would tell? And who would hear?

  One

  Now: 30 June 2014, London

  She takes the opened letter and smooths it out on the kitchen table. It was never going to be good news. She knew that, as soon as she saw the official frank across the top of the envelope. This was it: the confirmation of Monday’s appointment in black and white with the trust’s name emblazoned in that institutional cobalt blue that conjures up the smell of disinfectant and tepid, overcooked food, and plump young nurses who call her ‘dear’ – as if her age and diagnosis gives them the right to bestow not just sympathy but affection. She does not want either. Just the thought of their eyes, brimming with understanding, makes her want to rage.

  Still. Just for a moment she had allowed herself to hope. To imagine a reprieve. That there had been a mix-up – and some other poor woman was receiving the news she had dreaded to hear.

  But no, here it is, in a letter to her GP, copied in to her. ‘Further to yesterday’s consultation with Mrs Coates …’ the oncologist, Dr Freedman, begins, and for a moment the use of the third person th
rows her: as if he is referring to somebody else. And then comes the crucial bit: ‘Following the liver ultrasound, it appears the malignant melanoma on her upper back that we removed has metastasised. A few spots were found on her liver. Surgery, at her age, is not advised.’

  She blinks. Inoperable. Not that she wants further surgery. The wound, which had required a general anaesthetic, itches, and was deep.

  ‘I have discussed biological therapies with Mrs Coates, but she declined them after raising concerns about the side effects. She understood that they would extend her life by a year at best. During our discussion, she was most insistent that I give a prognosis. I advised her that, without treatment, the average outlook would be less than a year.’

  Actually, Dr Freedman, she thinks, you gave the impression that a lot less was far more probable. ‘How long before it begins to affect me?’ she had pressed, and her voice – so dry throughout the consultation – had quavered, just the once, at that point.

  She did not want to envisage the pain, the extreme fatigue, the sickness, but she would rather know what she was up against. ‘Six months – even less?’

  ‘We can only give you the average outlook,’ Dr Freedman had said, and then he had nodded slightly: just the gentlest of nods, almost inadmissible. ‘No one can tell, but that’s not an unlikely scenario.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she had said.

  Death – something she had been so aware of since Pam, the last of her siblings, had died – had jumped a little closer. Six months. After eighty-three years, it would feel like such a short time. She tries to force a laugh at the thought that she has always been someone who puts things off; who needs a deadline. But though she can do a stiff upper lip, she doesn’t do black humour. It comes out as a mirthless cough.

  The only good she can find in all this – and she is trying so hard to do so – is that at least she knows. And while dying in her sleep, like Ron, her husband, might be the ideal way for it to happen, perhaps it is better to prepare. Maybe this is what she needs: this prompt to tie up loose ends. And to think this should come today of all days. June thirtieth. She has been dreading this anniversary. Seventy years. Most of her lifetime. The coincidence chills her. As if a shard of ice has pierced her core and remains, still frozen there.

  A drill whines. The builders next door are hard at work. Another loft conversion and kitchen extension to push a Victorian terrace upwards and outwards, though her neighbours – a young couple who work in the City – have only one child. Her parents brought up five of them in a terrace this size before the war. Then they were all evacuated – even Robert, ever the baby. And life irrevocably changed.

  She pours a mug of tea from a glazed brown teapot and warms her fingers around it. How has it come to this: that it is only now, with death so imminent, that she is considering trying to put right something she should have done years before? Everything – each recollection; every throwaway thought – leads back to that summer, that time she has tried so hard to forget.

  Her eyes flit to the PC sitting on her small mahogany table in the corner. Who is she trying to protect? Someone she once loved, or herself: ever fearful of recrimination, as cowardly as she was at thirteen? A lump forms in the back of her throat and she swallows. No time like the present. And she has so very little time.

  The computer takes a while to start up. Her hand grasps the mouse and she concentrates, the tip of her tongue out like a stalking cat’s, as she navigates to where she has saved the link. She smiles, a little sardonic. They are still using its nickname, though its more forbidding Cornish name seems more in keeping with the nightmares that have started to wake her: heart palpitating, nightdress soaked through with sweat. ‘Skylark Farm, Trecothan, north Cornwall. Run by the Petherick family for six generations. Offering self-catering and cream teas.’ For a moment, she is back in the sand dunes, listening to peals of birdsong – rapid, repeated, joyous. Fresh from London, she had been mesmerised by the speck that hovered, and anxious. ‘That swallow’s a bit high,’ she had said.

  She had been eight then: wide-eyed and entirely innocent. By the time she left, all that would have changed. And yet the farm remained the same. She looks at it now: solid, seventeenth-century. She glances at Maggie’s bedroom window – the room of the daughter of the house; decorated with rose wallpaper and that cast-iron bed – and then at her own, at the very end of the house, closest to the sea.

  It’s largely a dairy farm, now, according to the website. So no lambs bounding across the lush spring grass, no chill March nights spent lambing. A sudden memory and she is back in the lambing shed: the air ripe with crushed straw and mucus, the metallic stench of blood and brine. She has a flash of Aunt Evelyn: all thin-lipped dissatisfaction and disapproval as she watched her baby an orphaned lamb. She shuts away the image – and the others, the ones that surface in the early hours of the morning when the nightmares press upon her. She would never romanticise Skylark, or the family that lived there.

  And yet, for all that, it had been a place of refuge for an evacuee escaping the horrors of the Blitz. Quite literally, as the WRVS woman had told her mother, ‘a safer place to be’. It certainly felt cut off from the rest of Britain, towards the very end of a peninsula: the farm’s fields running to the edge of England, right down into the crystalline, tempestuous, unpredictable sea.

  She opens the timetable of weeks when the two cottages are available, and their surprisingly reasonable prices. Not completely booked up yet, which is curious given that it’s late June. The last two weeks in August are free. She hesitates. Should she really do this? She has terminal cancer: enough to contend with. She pauses for a moment, willing away the tears that prick and burn her eyes so that the image wobbles and blurs.

  If she does nothing she will die never knowing if she might have made things better, if she could have exorcised the demons that harangue her, not just at night, now, but during the day. She craves peace at the end of her life. And reconciliation. If there is a possibility she could achieve that, well, then it is worth the risk.

  With a sudden click, she highlights the box and is directed to the next page. Judith Petherick – Maggie’s daughter? – will email her back to confirm her booking if she will leave her details. She does, before her nerve fails.

  There. It is done. A couple of tears seep from her eyes before she wipes them brusquely away. She cannot quite believe it.

  After seventy years, she is going back to the farm.

  Two

  It is terrifying, Lucy thinks later, when she tries to be rational, how life can change at a single moment: as if a coin is spun to decide if it should continue merrily – or teeter and fall.

  As a nurse she knows this. Has seen the impact of a split-second’s loss of concentration: the mangled limbs and paralysis when a driver ploughs into another on the motorway; the drunken arguments that start with a shove and end with a knife; the prank – free-running along a rooftop, diving into a shallow lake – that seems such a good idea at the time, then ends as anything but.

  She knows it as a daughter, too. An accident – tragic, needless and preventable – took her father from her. Fred Petherick: killed when he slipped while running on the north Cornish cliffs.

  But she has never felt it as clearly as she has today: that sense of the mercurial nature of life. How one simple mistake – a ‘near miss’ in clinical terms – could shatter her entire world and expose its painful, terrible fragility; could lead to her wailing on her bathroom floor so that she barely recognises the woman staring back at her from the mirror, crimson-eyed, swollen-faced.

  One shift you can get over, she thinks, as she pulls her knees to her chest and hugs them tightly. But two: a mistake on top of a life-changing discovery? Two is too much, it seems. For it’s this combination that has made her world shatter – and exposed her seemingly happy life, here in London, as groundless. As insubstantial as a dandelion clock puffed by the breeze.

  She rocks her knees tighter as a fresh volley of sobs rac
ks her body. She needs to get a grip. Her mind whirs; her heart skips, jumps, flutters. Wired on caffeine, sugar and misery or a cocktail of all three. She hasn’t slept in forty-eight hours. And in that time, her life has been wrenched apart like a suitcase of inappropriate clothes: the contents turned upside down, sneered at, discarded.

  It had started yesterday morning. She had come in off her Sunday night shift, in the neonatal unit of the hospital where she works, bones weary, eyes aching, and had gone to take a shower upstairs. The disposable contact lens case on the edge of the sink had niggled; it wasn’t hers and Matt’s eyesight was perfect. A sliver of cold crept inside her; wormed its way in tight.

  Perhaps one of their friends had been around and had changed a lens? She ran through who it could be as she dried and dressed herself, but could think of no one. Better not to fret but to grab a couple of hours’ sleep. She stretched out, and tried to relax. Imagine you are back home, she told herself. Back at Skylark. Think of the headland – and imagine standing there: at the edge of the world, the very edge of the cliff. Drink in the view: Land’s End to your left, Devon to your right, the Atlantic stretching in front of you: aquamarine, then teal, then a deep, dark blue as it hits the horizon. Feel the stiff onshore breeze temper the heat of the sun, then blast you backwards. See the seagulls drift upwards; and a pair of seals, sleek and slippery, bask on the rocks beneath.

  It was no good. Though her body was weary, her mind whirred: feverish, over-analytic. Even the state of her bed bugged her: the sheets needed changing; Matt’s pillow was tinged with sweat. Perhaps she should just do it now. She swept back the duvet and, as she did so, saw a long hair curled midway down: just one hair, innocuous and easily dismissed, except that she was fair and this was dark. A luxuriant hair: the sort that belonged to a Spanish woman like Matt’s colleague, Suzi. And in that second, she saw them at the advertising agency’s Christmas drinks. Her head flung back as she laughed at something Matt had said. Her hand lightly touching his forearm to emphasise a point. Her whole manner just oozing sexual confidence. ‘She eats men alive,’ Matt had laughed, later, when Lucy had mentioned it. ‘Completely terrifying.’ Only now, he didn’t seem to mind being terrified.