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Overview
It’s not shaping up to be a very merry Christmas. Clover Moon feels trapped in her life as a farmer’s wife. She certainly doesn’t enjoy hosting Fergus’s mother, Violet, who always finds new ways to publicly humiliate her unsatisfactory daughter-in-law. But would Violet ever seek a more violent way of expressing her disapproval? Violet is a medium, and the voices of the dead sometimes encourage her to do disturbing things. During her stay at the farmhouse, she claims to sense an intrusive presence. Fergus then discovers the dead body of a woman floating in their flooded cellar, and elderly Miss Bates, resident of a nearby senior home and a client of Violet’s, is missing . . . With her acute sense of human nature and gift for suspense, reminiscent of Barbara Vine, Gillian White will leave you guessing until the very end.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781480402201 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 03/19/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | NOOK Book |
| Pages: | 380 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Sleeper
A Novel
By Gillian White
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1998 Gillian WhiteAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4804-0220-1
CHAPTER 1
Deck the halls with boughs of holly,
Tra la la la la la-la la la.
They have done as the carol instructs. Christmas down at Southdown Farm. An appropriate place to spend Christmas with its cattle-a-lowing and the frosty wind making moan. Although metal troughs have replaced the gentle mangers and if it were to happen here it would be a sterile nativity.
Clover Moon's Christmas list lies crumpled and dirty on the farmhouse table, lost in a flutter of scruffy receipts—the items either ticked, ringed or scratched out. Clover does not have to join the rabble at Marks for her cakes, her puddings, her sausage rolls, mince pies, cranberry jellies, etc., etc. No, part of the Christmas ritual is that Violet, her mother-in-law, brings all that with her, home made and full of goodness just as Christmas fayre ought to be. She has her own well tried recipes, she doesn't need Delia Smith. And the turkey, fresh, of course, and enormous, comes straight from a neighbour's shed.
Lucky Clover.
But now, just one day after those shy communicators with death met in that Torquay bungalow, there is trouble afoot as a cow falls into a slurry pit. E64, commonly known as Daisy with the blind tit.
E64 for milk-recording purposes, pedigree name Southdown Bountiful. But which of these names does Daisy live up to? Which title suits Daisy best? E64, I'm afraid, because she is the only cow foolish enough to fall into the pit and she's done it twice before, so it looks as if Daisy has inbuilt destructive tendencies, like some unfortunate people are born to be accident prone and spend a good deal of their time in hospital casualty departments, tagged with a number, just like Daisy.
'That fence has been weak since the last time it happened,' moans Fergus Moon the farmer. 'I can't have mended it properly. Daisy has been eyeing it for some time now, but you'd have thought she'd have learned her lesson from the last frantic fiasco.' He sighs with resignation, commenting on her injurious behaviour as a doctor might mention a trying patient.
So Daisy falls in once again, not twenty miles from Wideacre Road where the spirits gather on damp afternoons. Clover Moon the farmer's wife receives the message by bleeper and gets straight on to Ernie Wakeham, the carrier, who has the wherewithal to pull poor Daisy out. If he can get his van to start. If the crank on his crane is working, as he so morosely informs her.
So it's neat, everyone here has a title: the farmer, the farmer's wife, the carrier and the cow, that most stoic and uncomplaining of creatures.
Curiously, over the last two years Clover Moon has suffered a personality change for the worse. It started very gradually and built itself up and up until now she has moved many miles away from the contented, loving wife and mother she was, happy with her lot.
As if she is being ill-wished.
Anxiety, anger and a sense of injustice have welled up inside her, and sometimes Fergus has seriously feared she might tumble over the precipice of madness and despair. Encouraged by her suffering husband, she visited doctors and therapists but alas to no avail. HRT was suggested but Clover refused hotly, saying, 'I am far too young at forty-three, and, anyway, when it comes I shall embrace cronyism, I shall celebrate my coming of age just as Germaine Greer advises.'
But Clover Moon is not just annoyed, or disappointed, or irritated or depressed with her life. No, Clover Moon is furious. You can see this by the way she moves, talks, cooks, cleans, drives and by the way she has stopped making love to her husband. Busy with complaint, an intelligent woman who was told at school that she would go far, she never intended to settle down in the middle of nowhere and become no more than an appendage, the help-mate of a farmer, like a three-legged milking stool.
The farmer wants a wife, the farmer wants a wife ...
Her talents have never blossomed.
In mourning for herself she feels she has failed to stretch her soul.
But Clover cannot see that she is merely going through a phase. She sincerely believes she should never have been a wife, she should never have been a mother; she could have been a hot-air balloonist, an explorer of pyramids, a singer in sleazy nightclubs ... She doesn't know what she could have been if fate had played a more adventurous tune. But she puts the blame for this lack of knowing, for this awful injustice, squarely on the shoulders of Fergus the farmer, and her mother-in-law who is coming for Christmas—Granny.
Quite right. This is unfair, but you can't blame yourself for the traps you set.
And the only person who understands, the only one in the world who knows exactly how Clover feels, is the friend in whom she has always confided, the friend who agrees with her completely, the friend who is also arriving for Christmas—Diana. Bored, cynical, exotic Diana, with tumbling golden hair and a sharp, sad mind, who quests for fun and self-expression with a face as bland as a plastic doll's, who stokes and refuels Clover's rage as if it ever needed stoking.
An unholy bond if ever there was one.
Clover likes to moan to Diana, 'You gradually realize you've made this desperate mistake and you go round trying to tell everyone only to discover that they're all in the plot together, all in this subtle conspiracy. But worst of all are the old women, justifying their lives.'
'Oh, but Fergus is lovely!'
'Yes, Fergus is lovely and I should be on my knees at night thanking God for my blessings, a fact which makes me feel even guiltier for being such a dissatisfied bitch, but Fergus lives in a world of his own, not the real one,' says Clover sourly. 'And I have been driven to this. We don't have any fun any more, we're always too worried about money or the weather and I'm nearly old and what have I done with my life?'
'Divorce him.'
'Oh, I don't hate him!' cries Clover in distress. 'I don't want to hurt him. If the farm belonged to him instead of his mother I'd persuade him to sell and we could get away from all this. I could have a career, we could lead normal lives with weekends off and holidays like everyone else, and we'd have enough money for Fergus to set himself up as something else, a consultant probably, we could do anything we wanted. Christ, Diana, you certainly got it right when you turned him down.'
'But Fergus wouldn't want to sell up.'
'Who can tell what Fergus would like? He just echoes his mother.'
'You've been hammering on about this for so long you're getting boring,' Diana replies. 'Frankly, if you really feel so strongly you should do something, take action. You are his wife, after all. Persuade him to convince Granny to sell and stop whining on all the time, demanding help and release from your friends as if it's in their power to give it.' But Diana revels in Clover's moaning.
'She'd never sell, Di. She's still punishing him for marrying me! I should be pandering to my husband's needs as I used to, as she always did. And she's the type who will live on deliberately, get a telegram from the Queen just to spite me. And by that time we'll both be too old to start again.'
This is the sort of loose talk Clover likes to share with her friend Diana. Innocent enough. Common enough. And they both thoroughly enjoy it. Let us hope they know what they're doing with all this malicious complicity, which can easily turn so nasty and dangerous.
So here is the farmer's wife at Christmas and now, in this emergency, with a cow stuck in the slurry pit, Clover bangs down the phone and runs distraught fingers through her hair. It falls back into perfect shape. She is little and dark and quick, getting quicker by the minute as Christmas Day draws nigh. She wears neat, quick things like jeans and V-neck sweaters that slip off easily. She nips round her house in socks. All the Moons go round in socks because with all that shit outside they couldn't possibly wear shoes in the house.
There is no opportunity to wear smart clothes.
Her title, of course, is farmer's wife. On Happy Family playing cards she would appear on that three-legged milking stool gazing at the udders of a wide-eyed cow. Or perhaps she'd be standing on the doorsteps with a yoke across her shoulders, grinning. But Clover is far from a typical farmer's wife. I mean, where should she be, now? Out there in the yard giving moral support, poor Fergus, alone and in this weather, with only the sullen Blackjack to help him. And Blackjack, from the caravan, will want to be off early tonight to stay with his elderly mother in Plymouth to give him time to get round Safeway's before the Christmas Eve rush begins. But other than a giver of moral support what earthly use would she be out there keeping company with the cow? She could only stand on the edge of the pit, that dark, black lagoon, throwing her arms around and shouting. Giving advice where it's not needed. Anguished for the cow, holding it up with her own willpower, watching the light of hope drain from its terrified eyes.
'How awful to die like that,' thinks Clover Moon from the warmth and safety of her farmhouse kitchen. Struggling impossibly beneath the crust in that stinking, black porridge of excreta. She catches her breath in her throat and recoils from the horrible thought.
What right has Clover, in the grip of such bitter resentment, to see herself as a farmer's wife? The only right she can possibly have is by name—Clover. She could be one of the herd, couldn't she? But it is precisely that drear possibility that has surfaced after twenty good years of marriage to kindly Fergus—being one of the herd, becoming, for Fergus, just a help-mate, someone to turn the hay when he's busy, to pull on the end of the calving ropes, to clean out the parlour after the milking, to boil up the spuds and old cabbage leaves for the chickens. Someone like Fergus's mother, Granny, with hands all stiff and knuckly.
She'd nearly been caught in Granny's net when love was first in blossom and lay over the farm in all its pink and white sweetness. At the time she was too naive to realize what was happening; it is only now, with hindsight, that she sees through Violet Moon's little plot.
There is no good reason on earth why frozen peas should be worse than fresh cabbage. Why packet stuffing should be underrated, why anyone should cut the bottom off sprouts.
It ought to have been amusing. She ought to look back now and think of that time as funny. But it wasn't funny then and it seems even less comical now.
A bride and mother-to-be, Clover had, on Granny's advice, invited the neighbours round for a meal. All farmers and their wives, tough, grim women who could shear sheep and mend tractors and feed an army without prior warning. 'They all want to meet you, naturally. They'll be talking about you, Clover, wanting to see the kind of person Fergus has married.'
Clover struggled with common sense for she was a hopeless cook. 'Oh, I'm not sure ...'
'They'll think you very jumped up if you don't.'
After the invitations were out Fergus calmly mentioned that Mary Tremain, the one who had said on the phone, 'Delighted,' was cookery editor for The Farmers' Friend and a judge at the Devon County Show. Alarmed, Clover rang her married friends to beseech them for advice on what sort of meal she should cook. She hadn't asked Granny, or 'Mum' as she had to call her then—'Granny' slipped into common usage after the children came and, to be honest, Clover preferred the less intimate term. It didn't occur to Clover then that Mum had rigged this up intentionally. She rang Diana, who was not a good cook either, but an old and supportive friend.
'Something simple for goodness' sake. Don't try anything grand, remember ...'
'What's simple? How d'you mean?' White and brisk with alarm, Clover clutched the receiver. 'I'm going to be the laughing stock ...'
'Duck's always nice.'
'With a sauce?'
'Just apple. Don't attempt anything more difficult. Unless it's one you can buy and pour over, or you could go to Marks and get several packets of duck with orange and throw them together in a pan.'
'I can't possibly do that.'
'Why ever not? No-one would know. None of your guests would dream of buying a ready-made meal, I mean, The Farmers' Friend, and Diana's voice rose a notch, 'you're talking Mrs Beeton here, the ultimate real food freak. They probably kill their own meat and skin it and pluck it and disembowel it. They can probably tell which farm the meat's come from like wine connoisseurs ... you poor, poor thing ...'
'There's six of them coming, Di, and I have since found out that Mary Tremain is the daughter of one of Mum's oldest friends so why didn't she warn me?'
'Doesn't matter now, don't waste your breath by dwelling on that. Don't start seeing it as a conspiracy. Violet might be a little protective, but nobody could be that vindictive.'
Clover, so naive, so hopeful, and oblivious of the fact that she was being ill-wished, put her mother-in-law's distant behaviour down to the fact that she wanted dear Fergus to marry a farmer's daughter, that's all, because it's a way of life, like being royal. She hadn't approved of Diana, either, when she was Fergus's fiancée. But Clover wasn't the vain, sophisticated Diana. Clover was sure that Violet would come round in time.
But the victory was Granny's.
Clover did duck. Three ducks, to be precise, hardly haute cuisine. Overanxious, exhausted with worry, she'd put them in the Aga so early that by the time she came to serve them up the meat had fallen off the bone and only the charred carcasses were left, grinning bonily from the Wedgwood dish. And the cauliflower, warming so long in the slow oven, was black too. The stench of burnt bones and pitted saucepans filled the farmhouse. But she dished it up anyway, way beyond caring, and laughed oddly when she set it unsteadily on the table.
She was sick from too much gin.
She dropped ash on the apple pie and no amount of wiping would remove it.
Fergus merely winked at her and she'd hated him for his patronage, she'd hated his mother, the farm, his friends, farming in general, herself. It might have been a trivial matter but it was very far from funny.
'Doesn't Judy Gilmour do them beautifully,' said Mary of the apple pie in her gentle, sternish voice. Hell. Diana was right. This woman recognized the pie that Clover implied she'd baked herself and when confronted like that Clover could hardly deny it. 'She's won several prizes with these apple pies and you can see why, can't you?' nagged the merciless Mary Tremain.
With the food fiasco over, they settled down to play cards. Steadily and surely, with a kind of quiet dignity, Clover drank neat gin from a tumbler.
'You've gone blue,' said Fergus.
Clover heaved and left the room, collapsed on the stairs directly outside and was carried to bed, singing her head off and farting. It was one of the two occasions in her life when she had been impossibly drunk, unable to remember what happened, even who she was. Sweat rolled off her. The room spun round. She prayed to God she would die.
And when she came down the next morning prepared to clear up the mess, she saw that Mary Tremain, cookery editor of The Farmers' Friend, Bob Tremain, Hilary and Mark Carter, Maggie and Joe Randall had not only washed up and put away but appeared to have spring-cleaned her kitchen. It was spanking, squeaky clean.
'They enjoyed themselves,' said Fergus evenly. 'They didn't go until after two.'
Congratulations were not in order. Did he think that her wrongs could be swept away by his smiles of forgiveness or her guests' understanding?
Clover, haunted by this for years, never tried again. She clung instead to her job in town, five years off for the children and then back to work where she was someone other than Fergus's wife, but in an estate agent's office, not the person she wanted to be, either. Far from it.
'Is the bass in?'
She should never have been a farmer's wife. Diana had the right idea, she'd turned Fergus down in the end. And Clover has never accepted the rustics' habit of entering a house without knocking, either. Here's Ernie the carrier in his grimy cap, in through her door without knocking, boots placed on the mat with care and casting his beady eyes around for tea.
'Yes, as you can see, I am in.' After all these years she still insists on this response.
Ernie, long and beany, takes no notice but sniffs at the drip on the end of his nose. It is too far gone for retrieval.
'Nasty night. The forecast is bad, very bad, they give snow for later.' And his word for snow is snooo, which imparts the feeling of falling and drifting so vivid is his intonation.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Sleeper by Gillian White. Copyright © 1998 Gillian White. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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