Salt by Jeremy Page Page A

Lincolnshire.’
    Below them, four small villages were lifting out of the soil, the sunlight slick on the wet tiles of the roofs.
    â€˜The Saints them villages are called, Lil’. Wiggenhall St Germans, Wiggenhall St Mary the Virgin, Wiggenhall St Peter and Wiggenhall St Mary Magdalen. It’s called the Saints here, everyone knows it as the Saints. It’s all ours - and I don’t want to be called Shrimp no more. I was christened George, and so I’m George now.’
    â€˜George,’ she whispers to buoy his spirits. She’d like to be called May, she wants to leave Lil’ behind, but she feels this is his moment to feel right about himself, so she says nothing.
    Armies of tractors are beginning to crawl into the fields, ploughing, pushing, dragging and sifting the soil as if obsessed with levelling the land.
    And Lil’ asks again, ‘But are we still in Norfolk?’
    George puts his arm round her, feels the dew in the blanket wrapped round her shoulders, and leads her inside.
    Yes, it was still Norfolk. Norfolk’s broad in the beam, full of soft fields and quite up to thwarting an escape. But they nearly made it.
    Â 
    During that first morning the details of George Langore’s plan were outlined. Using some connection dug up in his great-uncle’s farming past, and his own reputation for understanding bloodstock of all kinds, a position of gamekeeper-cum-stockman had been created at the Stow Bardolph Estate, a mile away. With it came this tied farm-cottage, three small outbuildings, a pigsty, animal pen, hen loft and lawn, part of which was laid out as a vegetable patch. For the past seven years it had been tenanted by Harold Flott, gamekeeper, who’d been known as a lazy farmer. Lazy and filthy. Year on year the estate’s pheasant stock had dwindled, escaped, fought itself in pre-shooting battles and pecked mercilessly at Flott’s ankles so that when the call was raised and the beaters marched, only the occasional wild, startled, feather-ragged pheasant took wing. Flott had left the house with a cup of tea still made and ready to drink and the crumbs of his midday snack on the table.
    Lil’ listened to all this as she lay on a couch drifting in and out of sleep. George talked nervously about pheasant rearing, training, pen design and bloodstock heredity till her eyelids finally fell with accepted weariness. George, at last silenced by the deep breathing of his patient, tucked the blanket round her, and stepped out into the milky morning sunlight of the yard. He did what any man would do: went straight to the sheds to sort the machinery, stocks, junk and rubble, eyeing what was useful, what should be salvaged, repaired, sharpened, tied, folded, turned and burned.
    At midday a grey Ford truck drove into the yard and a tall man in his seventies climbed out. A suit of fine worsted wool, leather boots polished like conkers. His companion, a plump, friendly woman, stayed in the passenger seat, cleaning the inside of the windscreen with a small flowered handkerchief.
    George came out when he heard the car, and both men leaned against the warm brick wall of the pigsty. Occasionally one or the other dragged his foot in the dirt, picked at the grass and moss that grew in the mortar, or looked speculatively at the cottage, the other outbuildings and the fields beyond. All this while the woman stayed in the car, until the heat of the day made her wind the window down, and George’s new employer took his cue and got back in.
    A few hours later, a pickup arrived, and two men jumped down from the back and swung some groceries, milk and eggs, blankets, wood and a few laying hens into the yard. From inside the cab, one of the men pulled out a used Gallyon & Sons Purdey side by side 12-bore and put it in George’s outstretched hand, along with several boxes of cartridges. It was a heavy gun with a butt of English walnut and an etched insignia of pheasants and geese