The Peacock Emporium(14)

He had based his ideas partially on a mix of the ideals of the great social reformers, a kind of utilitarian blueprint for living, and something in America he’d read about—a more communal way of doing things. It was pretty radical, admittedly, but he thought it might work out rather well. No, he corrected himself, he knew it would work out well. And it would change fundamentally the face of the estate.

Instead of the huge herd of Friesians—the rules and regulations about which, since the introduction of the Common Agricultural Policy, his father had repeatedly complained could turn a sane man into a raving imbecile—a hundred acres would be turned over to a self-supporting community. The participants could live in the derelict tied cottages, doing them up themselves with timber from the Mistley wood. There was a water source near there, along with old barns that could be used for small numbers of livestock. If they got in craftsmen and artisans, they could even start a studio down there, sell their pottery or whatever, perhaps giving back a small percentage of the profits in return.

Meanwhile the four fields on Page Hill, the ones currently turned over to sugar beet, could be divided into small holdings to allow local people to grow their own vegetables. There was a growing market for home-produced food, an increasing number of people who wanted to “get back to nature.” The Fairley-Hulmes would charge a minimal rent, and take food as partial payment. It would be like a return to the tenanted farm, a return to the ancestral ways of the family but without the feudal attitude. And the scheme would be self-supporting. Perhaps even profitable. If it worked really well, the surplus money could be plowed into some other project, perhaps an educational program. Like one that taught the delinquents in town something productive, perhaps about land management.

The estate was too big for one man to manage. He had heard his father say so a million times, as if Douglas himself were not quite man enough to be included in this. There was the estate manager, of course, the head herdsman and the farmhands, the gamekeeper and the odd-job man, but ultimate responsibility for what went on belonged with Cyril Fairley-Hulme, a responsibility he had held now for almost forty years.

The brief period of self-examination that had followed his meeting Athene had made Douglas realize he had never felt truly comfortable with the idea of inheriting the Dereward estate. It didn’t feel earned somehow: in an age when nepotism and feudalism were dying a slow death, it didn’t seem right that he should take on this self-aggrandizing mantle, that he, not yet out of his twenties, should assume a right to the estate and responsibility for the lives of all who depended on it.

The first time he had broached this with his father, the older man had looked at him as if he were a Commie. He might even have used the word. And Douglas, who was astute enough to understand that his father was not likely to take a plan that was only half thought-out seriously, had swallowed his words and gone off to oversee the disinfecting of the milking parlor.

But now he had a concrete set of proposals, which even his father would have to admit was likely to take the estate forward into the future. He could follow in the tradition of those great reformers: Rowntree and Cadbury, those who had thought that making money was an insufficient aim unless it led to social and environmental betterment. He conjured up images of contented workers eating home-produced food and studying to better themselves instead of liquefying their weekly wages down at the White Hart. It was 1965. Things were changing fast, even if the inhabitants of Dere Hampton were unwilling to acknowledge it.

He placed the pages neatly together, laid them reverently in a card wallet, and tucked it under his arm. He did his best to ignore the pile of letters to which he had yet to reply. He had spent much of the last month fending off complaints from ramblers and dog-walkers over the fact that he had erected a post-and-rail fence along the middle of the thirty-acre fields that led down to the wood to let the two sides for sheep grazing. (He had always fancied sheep. He still remembered fondly a youthful stay with a Cumbrian sheep farmer who counted his animals using an ancient and incomprehensible dialect: Yan, tan, tethera, pethera, pimp, sethera, lethera, hovera, covera, dik . . .) That the villagers could still walk down the field had not pacified them: they didn’t like, they said, being “penned in.” Douglas had been tempted to retort that they were lucky to have access to it at all, and that if the estate wasn’t made financially secure by such measures it would be sold off in parcels for development, like the once-grand Rampton estate four miles away. And see how they would like that.

But conscious that, as a Fairley-Hulme, he had at least to pay lip service to villagers’ opinions, he had suggested they write their complaints in letter form and he would do his best to address them.

He glanced at his watch, then tapped his fingers on the side of the desk, a mixture of nervousness and excitement. His mother should be preparing lunch. When his father retreated into his office for his usual half-hour of “paperwork” (often involving the brief closure of his eyes—just for resting purposes, you understand), he would present his ideas. And perhaps make his own, more contemporary mark on the Dereward estate.

Douglas Fairley-Hulme’s mother had not got off to a good start with Athene. She failed to see how anyone could. The girl was a wearisome sort, always making impossible demands of Douglas but rarely wanting to do anything wifely and supportive in return. But Cyril had told her she should try a little harder to make friends. “Have a coffee morning or something. Douglas says she gets bored. Easier for him if you two are friends.”