A Conspiracy of Friends by Alexander McCall Smith Page B

thing—wine—Geoffrey rarely spent morethan three or four years in a job. He had trained as an actuary, but could not bear office life in the City of London. He had become an insurance broker in Cambridgeshire, and after that had bought, with the aid of a large loan, a garden centre in Suffolk. That had prospered, and he had sold it on and bought a country hotel. The hotel had failed, and he and Maggie had been reduced to near-penury, to be rescued by a friend who took him into partnership in a building-supply firm near Newmarket. This coincided with a rash of development in East Anglia that allowed an extraordinary expansion of the business and, in a very few years, a takeover bid by a larger firm. The proceeds of the sale of Geoffrey’s share were such that no further business activities would be required on his part unless he really wanted to do something, and he and Maggie had bought an old farmhouse in the country. Geoffrey, however, did not fancy a life of idleness, and so he acquired a pig farm about five miles from their farmhouse. He installed a manager, a young man from the village whose obsession—and sole topic of conversation—was the raising of rare-breed pigs. This venture, like many ventures run by passionate enthusiasts, proved highly successful, and also gave great pleasure to Maggie, who approved of British Saddleback pigs and enjoyed smoking hams in the old barn behind their house.
    “No more change for us,” said Geoffrey. “It’s pigs and more pigs from now on.”
    The farmhouse was of uncertain age, the safest conclusion, in Geoffrey’s view at least, being that it had “been there for ever.” And, unlike many modern buildings, which seem to have been imposed upon the land in an act of conquest, this house appeared to grow out of the land, as naturally as does a plant, or a hedgerow, or a tree. It was the materials used for its construction that gave this impression, of course: wattle and daub for the second of its two storeys, the daub being clay and sand from the land about, while the pinknessof the wash applied to it was obtained, at least in the beginning, by the mixing of the blood of oxen and the juice of sloes. The first storey was made of brick—tiny bricks, red as the land itself, uneven in their dimensions, fitting neatly into the hands of the men who laid them.
    The house was concealed from the road by trees that had been planted higgledy-piggledy, or had seeded themselves and been allowed to persist. A pond, overgrown at the edges by reeds, lay a few hundred yards away, and beyond that was a meadow, another meadow, and then a somnolent village with church and pub. It was, thought William as he drove down the farm road that evening, a perfect distillation of rural England; it could be nowhere else. And the beauty of it, the quiet, the utterly unassuming serenity of the place, made him catch his breath and swallow. It did that to him every time he visited, which he did two times a year, once in summer and once in winter.
    He drew up on the small gravel circle at the front of the house. Geoffrey’s car, an ancient and shabby Renault, was parked under a tree to the side of the house. Even this French car seemed reassuringly English in this setting: well used, understated, unthreatening in its functionality, going nowhere but not the slightest bit worried about that.

19. Moral Meaning and Iris Murdoch
    T HE DOOR TO the farmhouse was open, as it always seemed to be whenever William visited.
    “Don’t you lock?” he had once asked Geoffrey.
    “No. Not since we came here. We locked the door in Newmarket. Not here.”
    William, for whom the act of locking was second nature, shook his head in wonderment. “I have two locks,” he said. “And I know people with three.”
    Geoffrey looked regretful. “It seems such a pity to lock, doesn’t it? It makes you feel as if you’re living in a fortress.”
    “Which we are, I suppose.” And it would get worse, he thought; much