Wyld Dreamers

slowly though Daisy didn’t appear to mind.
Withdrawing his arm, the vet said: ‘She’s delivered the afterbirth alright. You can start milking her for colostrum now.’
‘What’s that?’
‘The first milk that’s usually left for the calf to feed on. Thicker, yellower than regular milk. I’ll call you when the blood results are back. If nothing shows up, you can start drinking the milk. That’s what Mr Stratton bought her for, isn’t it? You know how to milk a cow I take it?’
He snapped shut his bag and took off his apron, washed his hands in a nearby bucket. She wondered how clean they were.
‘I’d call the hunt today if I were you. They’ll come and take the calf away. It will feed the hounds for a day.’

11
Mrs Morle watches from her cottage window. Ever since that builder turned up, things have changed. That lazy lot, previously scarce until lunchtime, are now at the cottage by ten o’clock in the morning and willing, it seems, to take directions on digging trenches or laying pipes. Accompanied by not-infrequent laughter. Mrs Morle had not understood labouring to be fun.
Bob, for he’d come across to the cottage to introduce himself and shake her hand (and his were clean, she noticed), spent the first month re-tiling the cottage roof; brought a lad to carry tiles and the flashing. Julian and the other boys he directed from the scaffolding. Helen, his wife or partner, one didn’t ask these days, got one of the chaps to pick out old mortar so she could re-point the brickwork. Nimble-fingered, Bob said of her. And she got that dreamy girl, Maggie was her name, to strip the paint off the window frames. No doubt Mr Stratton would be pleased that his cottage might be watertight in time for winter.
The other girl, Amy, seemed to spend a lot of her time in the kitchen making the meals for them when she wasn’t working in the garden. She’d dug the whole plot over, mind, spread it with muck from an old dung heap in the back yard and planted broad bean seeds. Even cleared a bed for asparagus. Fancy food. Mrs Morle doubted it would grow.
Seymour still employed Mrs Morle to clean each week. Good job too, the place needed it. Amy, with a book in one hand and secateurs in the other, seemed oblivious to dirt. She crawled among the fruit bushes snipping the branches. Asked Mrs Morle not to chuck out the bottles anymore; the girl was going to make country wine from the fruits, she said, and rosehip syrup for sore throats. Mrs Morle tried not to wrinkle her nose.
Julian and his friends might be doing more work these days but it didn’t stop their parties. Sometimes when Mrs Morle woke in the night she could see lights in the house, even in the small hours, and when the wind was from a certain direction, she could hear music. How did they stay up so late and still get up in the mornings? Perhaps they didn’t need sleep like normal humans or did it have something to do with that man Gerald?
He was there too often for her liking. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it but she felt in her water he was untrustworthy.
Gerald ignored her. Nothing new in that, many of Seymour’s friends had done the same over the years. Took it in her stride. City-types, self-important and selfish, they couldn’t see that anyone else mattered, certainly not the cleaning lady. But with Gerald it was more than that: he made her recoil. It wasn’t that he looked scruffy, which he did, it was his expressionless eyes.
One time she’d come across him splayed across a sofa fast asleep, his leg sticking out from under a coat. She was tempted to lay a cushion over those line-scored cheeks, to press down on his pursed mouth. He was so still, she wondered hopefully if he was dead already. Unable to hear his breath, she flicked him with a duster. Not that she cared particularly but somehow it seemed necessary that his body should be taken out of the house as quickly as possible if he had gone. But his eyes snapped open and she flinched, shocked to realise just how disappointed she felt.
Amy wakes with a jump. Her chest and neck are clammy, her heart flutters. A dream about her mother again.
She pulls open the curtain a fraction. A glimmer of sunlight touches the slope where the grass has been flattened by rain. Cold air streams under the duvet, making her skin sting.
She reaches for the towel she used last night to wipe herself after she and David had sex and notices with relief that it is streaked with blood. Although she is careful, even obsessive, David complains, about using the diaphragm every time they have sex, you can never be a hundred per cent confident of contraception. Peering down, she sees her nightdress is spotted red, too. It’s a welcome distraction to deal with her period. Already the feelings stirred up by her dream are fading; her mother speaking to her soundlessly.
David rolls towards her and blows stale sleep breath into her face. She turns on to her side and stares out at the field now glowing in the light. He snuggles up to her, his erection pressing against her leg. ‘I want you again,’ he breathes into her hair.
‘I’ve got to milk Daisy,’ she whispers back.
‘Stay for a little while, Ames, you know you want to.’ He begins to pull up her nightdress.
‘I can’t, I’ve got to get up.’
‘Don’t be boring, Miss Amy Routine,’ he taunts. ‘Daisy can wait but I can’t.’
Her rump is bare now and he strokes her buttocks, biting playfully on her neck.
‘My period’s started anyway.’
David pushes her away. ‘You should have said,’ he says, and rolls over as she slips from the bed.
Daisy is waiting patiently at the gate. She meanders along the path, following the sound of the cow nuts