Dancing With the Virgins

‘Yes, of course. And that we wouldn’t know about it. Anything could have happened.’

‘But it didn’t.’

‘Well … not so far as we know.’

Mr Weston tried to recall a quick succession of boyfriends after Jenny had moved to Sheffield. All of them, he was sure, were men who were completely wrong for her. To Ben Cooper, Jenny sounded as though she had gone through those men like a woman looking for something she would never find, a woman whose better judgement had been cast aside. For what? A kind of penance? At one point, there had been an abortion. Jenny had not told her father at the time. His wife had told him about it, much later.

‘That was something I could never understand,’ he said. He shook his head, and Cooper saw the glitter of tears in the teacher’s eyes. ‘I never will understand it. Jenny always wanted children.’

And Jenny had hated her job, too. She had been good at it, had been promoted to supervisor, with twenty-five girls working for her. She had responsibilities and a better salary; she was well regarded by her employers and liked by her colleagues. But she had hated it.

‘She said it was a sweatshop. She really disliked that. She kept talking about the pressure, unattainable targets, the constant surveillance by managers to make sure you were always working, the tedium, the repetitiveness, the strain of being polite all the time to customers who didn’t want to speak to you. Oh, and the posters round the walls. They all said: “Smile”.’

Jenny had also been depressed by the rate of burn-out among her staff – even the best of them lasting little more than twelve months in the job. Many sacrificed themselves, as Jenny saw it, to marriage and to raising a family, purely as a means of escape.

‘She didn’t even manage to make any proper friends. She said animals were preferable to people. It might have helped a lot if she could have made friends. But Jenny said she barely had a chance to get to know any of her colleagues before they were gone. All the new recruits to these call centres now are youngsters, straight from school into their induction training, pulling on their telephone headsets and believing that’s what work is all about. In my position, I see them leaving school, full of hope, and I know what will happen to them. We do our best with them, you know, but that’s how a lot of them end up. Very sad.’

‘Did Jenny talk of escaping from the job?’ asked Tailby.

‘Oh yes. All the time.’

Of course she had talked of escaping; everyone did. She talked of working with animals, of being a veterinary nurse or running a wildlife sanctuary. But there was nothing she was qualified to do, and nowhere else she could go. Now and then she thought about her lost career as a radiologist. And those were the worst times, said Eric Weston. It was knowing it was too late that depressed her the most.

‘The one thing that Jenny really loved was the Peak District,’ said Mr Weston. ‘We used to bring her here as a child at weekends and in the summer holidays. Days out in Dovedale and at Castleton. When she went to university she joined a student walking club and they hiked over all the hills in the area. They did the whole of the Pennine Way one summer, staying at youth hostels. It was where she always came back to.’

Later, after her divorce, Jenny had again spent as much time as she could in the Peak District, walking, but often alone, since friends didn’t seem to last long. She had tried pony trekking a few times, said Mr Weston. But recently she had taken to mountain biking. She had her own bike at home, but had preferred to hire a bike from Peak Cycle Hire or from one of the Derbyshire County Council hire centres. Often she rode the trails created from the old railway lines. But at times, when she felt the need, she would leave the trails and set off on to the moors.

‘Yes, Ringham Moor was one of her favourite places,’ said Mr Weston. ‘We went there once as a family, many years ago. Jenny and John – that’s her brother – and Susan and me, a happy family together.’

And Mr Weston added that he thought, perhaps, Jenny might have been trying to recapture happy memories, a happiness that had escaped her in other ways. He didn’t know what had prompted her to take to the moors on that particular day. He didn’t know why she had headed for Ringham. He had no more answers to give.

Ben Cooper had walked away from the interview dissatisfied. Jenny Weston had not been anyone out of the ordinary. She had achieved nothing exceptional, and nothing extraordinary had happened to her during her lifetime. Could she really just have been another woman who had made all the wrong choices? If so, Jenny had been making the wrong choices right up until the moment she died. And one of those choices had been fatal.

6 (#ulink_b3ac1991-126b-57a8-919a-42982fc2bcb4)

The kitchen was the room the Coopers used most at Bridge End Farm. It had that familiar lived-in look which was inevitable with six people in the house, two of them children. Though Ben Cooper still lived at the farm, he had begun to find himself spending less and less time in the company of his brother and his family. He wasn’t sure why this was, when his mother was still upstairs and in need of his support.

Matt had already been driven indoors by the darkness that was steadily drawing in now. He sat at the kitchen table with Farmers Weekly, reading articles predicting more gloom for the farming industry. In the sitting room, Matt’s wife Kate and their daughters were watching cartoons on the TV.

‘We’ll be visiting Dad’s grave next week,’ said Cooper. ‘It’s the anniversary.’

‘As if I would forget,’ said Matt.

Matt turned the page of his magazine, but he no longer seemed to be focusing on the words. ‘Don’t say anything to Mum,’ he said. ‘You know it only upsets her. Now she’s stable, it would be nice if we could keep it like that for a while, rather than causing another episode like the last one. It’s not fair on the girls.’

‘We can’t just say nothing,’ said Cooper. ‘She’d be devastated if she knew we’d been to the cemetery without her.’

‘But if she really hasn’t remembered? Do we risk starting her off again? She’s been doing so well recently. It could set her back months, going over it all again, just because it’s the anniversary. It would be a kindness to let her forget.’

‘I don’t think it’s honest,’ said Cooper.

‘Some things are best not remembered. With luck, her memory will let her down.’

‘So schizophrenia can be a blessing. That’s nice to know.’

‘I didn’t mean that, and you know it.’ Matt put down the Farmers Weekly wearily and rubbed his face. ‘I’m sorry. It’s just –’ He shrugged. ‘There’s no end to it, is there?’

The brothers didn’t need to say any more to each other. It had all been said before, many times.

Kate looked in from the sitting room, releasing a burst of cartoon noise as she opened the door. Matt picked up his magazine again. Cooper had a book on the shelf that he was halfway through reading – Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. He always seemed to be years behind what everybody else was talking about. There was so little time to read. And often, like now, he couldn’t concentrate on what was in front of him.

‘Matt, do you know a farmer called Warren Leach?’

‘Leach? Leach … Where does he farm?’

‘Ringham Edge.’

Matt frowned over his pages. ‘I’ve heard of him. I don’t think I’ve ever met him to speak to. Dark-haired bloke, miserable sort?’

‘That sounds like him.’

‘What’s he done?’

‘Nothing that I know of. I just came across him on an enquiry.’

‘Ringham Edge. Small dairy herd, is it? And a lot of marginal land?’

‘Yes.’

Matt nodded and went back to his magazine. He turned a page, but found nothing he liked any better.

‘You know, some of them are in deep trouble,’ he said.

‘Who?’

‘Farmers like Leach at Ringham Edge. Small-scale livestock farmers, with no chance of diversification. But he’s only one of many, of course.’

‘Things looked pretty depressing up there, I must admit.’

‘It’s all pretty depressing. All of it.’

‘Come on, Matt. It’s not that bad.’

‘Yes, it is. It’s all gone to hell. I can’t see the time when farming will ever be the same again. Not around here, anyway. All the small farmers are going out of business. It’s too much for them. Far too much.’

‘Have you heard anything specific about Leach?’

Matt shook his head firmly. ‘I said I’ve seen him, that’s all. I don’t actually know him.’