Most people who came to watch him milk, and it could be hundreds over the course of the summer, were fascinated from a distance, but thought it was smelly and dirty and couldn’t understand why anybody in their right mind would want to get up at four-thirty in the morning and work right through till seven at night.
Including his ex-wife.
Kirsten had thought he was insane, but he loved it, and couldn’t imagine doing anything else in the world. He could have been a vet, and he’d thought about it long and hard. He was clever enough, his school exam grades more than adequate for the entry requirements, but he’d gone instead to agricultural college because the farm was in his blood.
OK, it was hard work, but he was young and fit and it didn’t hurt him. You had to do something with your waking hours, and the warmth of the animals and the relationship he had with them was all the reward he needed.
It was servicing the investment in the ice cream, clotted cream and cheese-making equipment and expanding the farm shop that made him tired and brought him stress, but that was only the other side of the coin, and he could deal with it.
Or he would be able to, if only Fran wasn’t so stressed out herself.
He let the first batch of cows out and let the next ten in. It never ceased to amaze him the way they came in, all bar the odd one or two, in the same order, to the same places every time. It made his job that much easier.
Too easy, really. So easy that he had far too much time to think, and all he could think about was the look in Fran’s eyes every time she saw him with Sophie. Which, when she was with them, was always. Sophie was his shadow, trailing him, helping with the calves and the chickens and the milking, asking endless questions, nagging him about having a pony, tasting the ice cream and chattering about the cheese, wanting to stir it and cut it and sieve it.
She was too small to reach right across the vat so he had to lift her and hold her, and she’d been known to drop the spoon into the vat. Not that it mattered if the paddles weren’t turning, but if they were still at the mixing stage, he had to strip off to the waist, scrub his arm and plunge it nearly to the armpit in warm milk to fetch the spoon out so it didn’t foul on the paddles.
Yes, she was a hazard, but he missed her now she was gone, and he knew Fran missed her too, although her presence just rubbed salt into the wound.
He sighed and let the last ten cows in. They were nearly all pregnant now. The last three had calved in the past six weeks, and it would soon be time to artificially inseminate them.
He was trying to build the herd on really strong genetic lines, and he’d got a young bull growing on his brother’s farm which had excellent breeding and was showing promise. When he was mature, they’d see about using him, but until then they did it the clinical way, in the crush, with a syringe of frozen semen.
He gave a hollow laugh.
Not quite the same, not for the bull or the cows. He could empathise. He’d done his share of producing semen for his and Fran’s fertility investigations and treatment, and it was the pits.
It was all the pits, the whole damn process. So many questions, so much personal intervention that in the end they’d felt like lab rats. He couldn’t remember the last time he and Frankie had made love for the hell of it.
Not had sex, not timed it to coincide with her ovulation, or gone at it hammer and tongs for a fortnight in an attempt at quantity rather than quality, or done it out of duty and guilt because it had been months since they had, which was the current state of affairs, but made love in the real sense of the words, slowly, tenderly, just for the sheer joy of touching each other.
Or, come to that, clawed each other’s clothes off in desperate haste to get at each other! There hadn’t been any of that for ages.
Years. Two years? Three? Damn, so long he couldn’t even remember what it had felt like. Certainly he hadn’t touched her at all since the miscarriage in April.
He propped his head against Amber’s flank and rubbed her side absently. The calf shifted under his hand, and he swallowed the sadness that welled in his throat. Would he ever feel his own baby like that, moving inside Fran, stretching and kicking and getting comfortable?
‘You’re getting a bit close, aren’t you, girl? Last milking tonight, and tomorrow you can go and munch your head off in the meadow till you have your baby.’
She mooed, a soft, low sound of agreement, and he laughed and let them out.
He still wasn’t finished. He’d milked them, but he had to flush the lines through and hose down the yard before he could go in for supper.
Not that he minded. The longer the better, really, because Fran would be in a foul mood and they’d eat their supper in an awkward, tense silence.
It was always the same after Sophie had been to stay.
‘Mirabelle’s got mastitis.’
‘Oh. Badly?’
‘No, just one quarter. I’ve given her a tube of antibiotic. It might be enough. I’ll watch her.’
‘Mmm.’ Fran poked the cake crumbs around on the plate and pushed it away.
‘Don’t you want that?’ he asked, and she shook her head.
‘No. I’ve had too much cake.’ Which was a lie. She’d hardly had any, but he wouldn’t know that. She pushed the plate towards him. ‘Here, finish it off. I know you’re always starving.’
He picked up the almost untouched slice of cake and bit into it in silence while she cleared her plate away and put it in the dishwasher, then she heard the scrape of his chair against the tiles as he stood. ‘That was lovely. Thanks.’
She took the plate from him. ‘Don’t lie,’ she said with a pang of guilt for giving him such a scratch supper on his birthday. ‘It was just a slice of cake, not a romantic candlelit dinner.’
The sort of dinner most wives would give their husbands on their birthdays. Shortly before they went to bed and made love …
A puzzled frown flickered across his face and was gone, leaving his eyes troubled. ‘Fran, what’s wrong?’
‘Nothing,’ she said, shutting down her runaway thoughts in case he could read them.
‘That’s not true. You didn’t eat your cake just now, you hardly had anything this afternoon—And don’t argue,’ he added, as she opened her mouth. ‘I saw you give that sandwich to the dog. And except for the time this morning when I was having my lie-in, you spent the whole weekend sending me off with Sophie and keeping out of the way. What the hell is it, love? Talk to me.’
She looked away, her conscience pricking. Had it been so obvious? She didn’t want to hurt Sophie, but having her there …
‘Frankie?’
She couldn’t. It was a real Pandora’s box and there was no way she was opening it now. ‘I’m fine. Just preoccupied. I’ve got a lot to do before tomorrow morning. You know what the end of the summer term is like—so many things to finish off.’
He just looked at her for a long moment,
