Famine Read online

  ‘Only just.’

  Season went to her dressing-table and began to take off her diamond earrings. ‘You haven’t asked me how my day went yet,’ she said.

  He stood behind her, so that she could see his face in the mirror. ‘I don’t have to ask. I know you were bored stiff.’

  She put her earrings away, and then she started unbuttoning her silk suit. Underneath it, she was nude, except for a small pair of white backless panties. She had a skinny, fashion-model’s figure, with small wide-nippled breasts and long, lean thighs. She took the comb out of her hair and began to brush it. She left her pants suit on the floor for Dilys to pick up later.

  ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘I wasn’t totally bored. The day did have its moments.’

  ‘Like when?’

  ‘A man came to steam-clean the rug in the hall. He was quite good-looking in an artisan kind of way. He told me he had eight children.’

  ‘Anything else?’ he asked her. His face was expressionless.

  ‘Mrs Lydia Hope Caldwell phoned. She wants me to join the Daughters of Kansas. She spent twenty minutes telling me what a great privilege it was and how it was hardly ever accorded to newcomers.’

  ‘What did you tell her?’

  ‘I told her I was overwhelmed, of course.’

  He watched her naked body in the mirror. He wondered if it was just her nudity he found so desirable, or whether it was her nudity combined with her sharp and critical personality. He stepped closer to her and laid his hand on her shoulder and kissed the side of her forehead. She kept on brushing her hair as if he wasn’t there.

  ‘Then, of course, you called your sister in LA,’ he told her.

  ‘That’s right.’

  He ran his hand down the soft curves of her back, and slipped it under the elastic of her pants, so that he was cupping the cheek of her bottom. The tips of his fingers were almost touching her vulva, but not quite.

  ‘You called your sister in LA and told her how sick you were of this darned farm. All these tedious acres of wheat, all these simple, honest farming folk. All these tractors and all these crop-dusters.’

  ‘All these down-home actuaries,’ she put in.

  ‘That’s right,’ he nodded. ‘And then you invited yourself to spend a few weeks in Beverly Hills, along with Sally, totally ignoring the fact that Sally has to go back to school, and that I’m going to need you this month more than I’ve ever needed you before.’

  Season stood utterly still, as if she was pretending to be a statue. Their two faces were reflected side by side in the mirror, and neither face betrayed anything at all. They were playing their usual game of testing, questioning, and teasing, to see whose façade cracked first. In New York, they had played it in fun, and only occasionally. Here in Kansas, it had started to become much more than an amusement, and much more to do with the survival of their relationship.

  Ed’s fingers stayed where they were.

  Season said, ‘I haven’t rushed into this, you know. I’ve had plenty of time to think about it.’

  ‘You didn’t mention it to me.’

  ‘Of course I mentioned it. What do you think we’ve been doing, every single night since we came here? Butting our heads together just to see how much it hurts? Ed, my darling. I’m bored with South Burlington, I’m bored with Wichita, I’m bored with the entire state of Kansas, God bless it, and I have to escape for a while.’

  ‘Is that it? You’re bored?’

  She gently reached behind her back and took his hand away. Then she went over to the bed and sat down. There was a silver cigarette box on her bedside table and she took out a Kool and perched it at the side of her pale-lipsticked mouth as if she was Humphrey Bogart.

  ‘Isn’t it enough?’ she asked him. ‘I used to be a magazine editor. Now I’m like something out of an A. B. Frost drawing.’

  ‘Who the hell’s A. B. Frost?’ he demanded. ‘For Christ’s sake, isn’t that typical of you? You complain that you’re discontented, and when I ask you why, you say that it’s because I’ve condemned you to live like some person in some picture by some goddamned obscure artist I’ve never even heard of. A. B. Frost, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘A. B. Frost was very well known,’ said Season, lighting her cigarette. ‘He travelled through Kansas and Iowa in the eighteen-nineties, sketching fanners. Good, devout. Godfearing, crop-loving farmers.’

  ‘You make that sound like a disease.’

  She blew out smoke. ‘I don’t mean to. But this bucolic existence is just about driving me crazy. I have to get away.’

  ‘You knew what it was going to be like. We talked about it for long enough.’

  ‘Of course I knew what it was going to be like. Well, I had a fair idea. But it was what you wanted, wasn’t it? Even if I’d told you that wild mules wouldn’t have dragged me to South Burlington, you still would have found a way to get me here.’

  He looked at her for a long time. The way the bedside lamp shone on her long blonde hair, and cast those curving shadows from her breasts. ‘Do you really hate it that much?’ he asked her.

  She tapped ash from her cigarette and shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Maybe I’ll get used to it.’

  ‘Do you want me to give it up?’

  ‘How can you give it up? You’ve signed all the papers, you’ve taken out all the loans, you’ve made yourself responsible for the lives and jobs of hundreds of people.’

  ‘I could sell it,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, sure, you could sell it. And then you’d spend the rest of your life complaining because I made you give up the only thing you ever really wanted to do. Face it, Ed, that’s been your destiny since you were born. To reap and to sow, to plough and to mow, and to be a farmer’s boy.’

  He sat down next to her. She didn’t look at him, but smoked her cigarette as if she was racing to finish it.

  ‘It’s me, too, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘It’s not just South Burlington.’

  She still didn’t look at him. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘These days, I find it hard to separate one from the other. It’s just like you’re always telling Sally. The Hardestys are South Burlington, and South Burlington is the Hardestys. It’s one of those homespun equations that don’t make any logical sense, or even any genetic sense, but which people believe in like E equals me squared.’

  ‘I love you, you know,’ he said simply.

  ‘You love the idea of me. I don’t know whether you actually love me. Not me, as a person. Not me, as an educated and independent person who suddenly finds herself isolated by her husband’s chosen way of life – cut off from friends and style and civilisation. I’m getting neurotic, do you know that? I have fantasies of shopping at Gimbel’s. I wake up in the night with unnatural cravings for one of Stars’ pastrami sandwiches.’

  He took her hand. Her Tiffany engagement ring winked a tiny rainbow at him. ‘Listen,’ he said, hoarsely, ‘you can go to New York whenever you want. Fly tomorrow, if you feel like it.’

  ‘Ed,’ she said, slowly shaking her head, ‘that just isn’t the point. I want New York but I want you, too. New York on its own isn’t enough. I’m your wife, I happen to love you, but I also happen to have mental energies and psychological requirements which aren’t being fulfilled. At the moment, the two most important needs in my life are totally incompatible, and that’s the problem.’

  He stared down at the shaggy pink rug. ‘I don’t know what to suggest,’ he said. ‘You don’t want to stay here and yet you don’t think it’s a good idea if I sell the place.’

  ‘I think if you sold the place it would gradually destroy our marriage,’ she said. ‘Not straight away, but gradually and very effectively.’

  ‘So going to Los Angeles for a while is going to hold it together?’

  ‘I don’t know. But it’s going to give me some time to think. You too.’

  He said, unhappily, ‘I don’t think I feel like thinking. Not about us.’

  Season leaned over and kissed him, twice, ver
y gently and lovingly. ‘We have to,’ she said. ‘And if I were you, I’d go down to the kitchen and see if that omelette’s ready, otherwise you’re going to feel like you’re eating a window-cleaner’s leather.’

  He stayed where he was for a while. He felt tired, and trapped, and he wasn’t sure which way to move. Somehow, in New York, he had found it much easier to be positive, much easier to make clear-cut decisions. But on a farm like South Burlington, clear-cut decisions weren’t called for. You needed to sniff the wind, and make guesses, and alter your guesses to suit the changing weather. Farming was a life of constant compromise, and somehow the compromises were beginning to creep into his marriage.

  Maybe Season was right. Maybe if she took a short vacation in Los Angeles it would help them both. But on the other hand, maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe it would take them even further apart. After all, once Season began to mix with those Hollywood types, all those BPs and would-be movie stars, life at South Burlington would probably seem even duller than ever.

  Maybe she would begin to think of Ed as nothing more than a stolid farmer. Something out of A. B. Frost.

  ‘Are you going to bed now?’ he asked Season.

  ‘I was considering it,’ she said. ‘But I won’t if you can think of something else to do around here.’

  He shook his head.

  ‘That’s what I told Vee,’ she remarked. ‘Farming in Kansas is nothing but fertilising, furrowing, fooling-around and fornication.’

  He got up. ‘I won’t be too long,’ he said. ‘I have to call Charlie Warburg.’

  ‘Charlie Warburg? From the finance company?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  She frowned as she watched him walk across the room to the door. ‘He’s in charge of losses, isn’t he?’

  ‘Kind of.’

  ‘So what you were saying about that wheat blight – you were serious about that? Is it really so bad?’

  ‘I don’t know yet. It could be.’

  ‘Ed—’ she began.

  He paused by the bedroom door. She looked as if she was about to say something, but it was plain that she couldn’t find the words. She sat there, with her arms crossed over her bare breasts, and looked at him with an expression that could have meant I’m sorry, or I wish we’d never met, or anything at all. Ed waited a moment longer, and when she didn’t say anything, he closed the door and went downstairs.

  Three

  It was a quarter after six the next morning when the Hughes helicopter rose from the small pasture at the back of the South Burlington farmhouse and tilted its way north-westwards into the bright, snappy sky. The rotor blades flashed in the sunlight as it headed out past the hickory stand, and the flack-flack-flack of its engine was echoed by the outbuildings and the fences.

  Dyson Kane was at the controls. He was South Burlington’s most experienced flyer – a small, lightweight, white-haired man as sprightly as a jockey, with a pinched face and eyes that could have punched holes in leather. Dyson had smoked a huge briar pipe, with a bowl as big as a coffee-cup, but three years ago his doctor had warned him of lung-cancer, and now he sucked butterscotch Life Savers as if his life depended on them, and it probably did.

  Ed sat next to Dyson in the front seat, and behind them sat Willard and Jack. From the dark smudges under his eyes, it didn’t look as if Jack had slept too well.

  ‘Keep following the track,’ Ed told Dyson. ‘I’ll tell you when to turn off.’

  ‘Sure thing, Ed,’ said Dyson. ‘You’re the boss.’

  Ed turned around to Jack and said, ‘I don’t suppose you’ve had any more ideas since you called me last night?’ Jack shook his head. ‘I tested for everything. It sure isn’t rust, and it isn’t smut, and it’s no kind of mildew that I’ve heard of. But I’m keeping an open mind. We’ve had some pretty humid weather lately and mildew thrives in humid conditions.’

  ‘Is it worth spraying for mildew?’ asked Ed.

  ‘I suppose we could try dusting with sulphur, although I’ve never known sulphur do much for really serious cases.’

  ‘Any other options?’

  ‘Well, there’s a compound called Bayleton, but that’s not registered for use in the United States and we’d have to seek emergency exemption to dust with that. The same goes for that British stuff from ICI, Vigil.’

  ‘Would either of those do any good, even if we were allowed to use them?’

  ‘I don’t know. Until we get an exact analysis of what we’re up against, we’re only guessing. Kerry’s taken the samples over to Wichita, but there’s no telling how long they’re going to take to decide what it is.’

  Willard said, ‘I can’t believe it’s mildew. Mildew looks kind of greyish-green, you know and it usually breaks out before the grain forms. It affects the leaves so that photosynthesis can’t occur properly. But I can’t believe it’s that. We haven’t had an outbreak of mildew on South Burlington for fifteen, maybe sixteen years.’

  Dyson Kane suddenly said, ‘Jee-sus! Take a look at that!’ He angled the helicopter away from the track without waiting for Ed’s instructions, and took it out across the same stretch of field that Ed and Willard had visited the previous evening. Below them, Ed could make out the tracks of their Jeep through the wheat – but instead of the tracks running around the edge of the dark and blighted crops, they had now been overtaken by the darkness and swallowed up. Everywhere around, like a company of sad, arthritic widows, the rotting stalks hung their heads in the morning wind.

  ‘It’s spread,’ whispered Jack. ‘Fifty or sixty acres at least. Maybe more.’

  Dyson took them low over the field, so that their down draught left a flurrying trail in the wheat. They were flying at sixty or seventy knots, but as Ed peered through the purple-tinted plexiglass ahead of them, it seemed as if the ocean of crops had been stained by the blight as far as he could see, and as far as they could fly. He opened the air-vent, and the cockpit of the helicopter was filled with the warm, sour stench of decaying wheat.

  Willard said, ‘This disease sure knows how to eat up a crop, and that’s no mistake.’

  Ed told Dyson, ‘Higher. Take her up higher. I want to see how far this stretches.’

  The helicopter climbed into the shining sky. Ed slipped on his aviator sunglasses, and looked around in all directions. The dark stain on the wheat now spread all the way southwards from the north-western trail to the banks of the Mystic, in an irregular shape that roughly resembled the state of Idaho. Jack’s estimate of fifty or sixty acres was conservative. From up here, Ed would have guessed a hundred.

  ‘We’ve got ourselves a real bad one here, Ed,’ said Willard. ‘I think we’re going to have to dust, and dust quick.’

  ‘Even before we know what it is?’ asked Ed. ‘We could end up doing more damage with crop-protection compounds than the blight’s doing on its own.’

  ‘We could end up with eighty-five thousand acres of rot,’ retorted Willard.

  Take it south,’ Ed told Dyson. ‘Let’s make a circuit round the whole farm, and see if there’s any more of this stuff.’

  ‘You bet,’ said Dyson, and the helicopter turned away from the blight-stained areas of wheat and beat its way noisily over the Mystic River and out across the silvery-golden stretches of South Burlington’s south-western acres.

  ‘What did Charlie Warburg have to say for himself?’ asked Jack, taking out a stick of gum.

  ‘He was pretty inconclusive,’ Ed replied. ‘He admits that all the loans we took out for equipment and farm facilities are covered by insurance, but he isn’t certain if an unknown blight is going to go down very well with the underwriters.’

  ‘It isn’t going down very well with me, either,’ said Willard, caustically.

  Ed said, ‘The whole crop’s protected, of course, under the Federal Crop Insurance Programme. That’s as long as we can convince them that this blight is officially a peril of nature, like a drought, or a hailstorm. But all they can do under the law is compensate us for the cost of putti
ng in the crop. They can’t pay us for any profits we might have made.’

  Dyson looked out across the farm. ‘Looks like your first year at South Burlington won’t be too happy, then. All work and no profit.’

  Ed nodded. ‘It could be worse than that. If we can’t isolate this blight, and find out how to lick it, then I daren’t plant again next year.’

  Willard leaned forward in his seat. ‘With respect, Ed, have you tried to think what your Daddy might have done, under the same circumstances?’

  ‘I’m not my daddy, Willard.’

  ‘No, I know you’re not. I don’t expect you to be. But your daddy was never averse to calling on his friends, whenever he needed a helping hand, just like his friends were never averse to calling on him.’

  ‘You’re trying to tell me something, aren’t you?’ said Ed, raising his voice above the roaring of the helicopter’s motor.

  ‘I’m trying to suggest something,’ said Willard. ‘I’m trying to suggest that when we get down, you might put in a call to Senator Shearson Jones.’

  ‘Shearson Jones? That old twister?’

  Willard shrugged. ‘He may be a twister, but he’s got himself some pretty powerful friends in the Department of Agriculture. What’s more, when your daddy died, he still owed your daddy for two notable favours, one of which was covering up for him over that wheat-dumping scandal in seventy-eight.’

  ‘Why should Shearson Jones still think he owes this family anything now that Dad’s dead?’

  Willard grinned. ‘Because this family still remembers, that’s why. And as long as there’s just one Hardesty around who knows what the upright and honest Senator Jones tried to do with a hundred and forty-two thousand tons of best Kansas grain, then the upright and honest Senator Jones is going to continue to smile whenever a Hardesty asks him to.’

  ‘That sounds like blackmail to me,’ said Ed.

  Willard grinned. ‘You might call it blackmail in New York City. Here in Kansas we call it mutual assistance.’

  ‘Hm,’ said Ed.

  ‘You don’t believe me?’ asked Willard. ‘You call him when you get back, and see if I’m not speaking the truth. You ask Senator Jones if the Department of Agriculture maybe can’t find some extra compensation for the victims of new and unusual crop diseases.’