The Binding by Bridget Collins

Author:Bridget Collins [Bridget Collins]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2018-07-26T16:00:00+00:00

XVI

Darnay didn’t mention going back to Castleford again. Sometimes I wondered whether I’d misunderstood. Maybe he’d meant occasionally or for a few days at a time; surely this had been too long a stay to be a punishment? I tried to imagine Darnay’s father, but it was like one of those fairground boards with a hole for the face: I could picture the clothes, the gold watch and stovepipe hat, but his features were a blank. Then I tried to imagine what Darnay could have done, to be threatened with the insane asylum. It was like picking a scab, at once painful and irresistible: it occupied me while we planted turnips and cleared the stones and rolled the grass fields, niggling at me, itching in the corner of my dreams while I was asleep. Sometimes I wondered whether I should tell Alta – but tell her what? Tell her that something was wrong with him, but that I didn’t know exactly what? It was easier to keep it hidden, and to stare at her with a glazed, idiotic expression when she frowned and asked me what I was looking so thoughtful about.

The only cure was when I was actually with Darnay. When we were together, none of it seemed important. All that mattered was Splotch’s newest trick, or the fence I was showing him how to repair, or whether we could bag a couple of pigeons on the way home. Darnay, to my surprise, had never fired a gun. He was bad at it, laughing at himself when the shots went wide, and in the end he’d shoved the gun at me, saying, ‘Go on, Farmer, you know you’re dying to show me how it’s done.’ Alta mourned the pigeons when they thudded into the undergrowth, but she ate pigeon pie with gusto, whether or not Darnay happened to have dinner with us.

Spring widened into summer, like a river turning from a clear spate to a slow green ribbon. Alta was busier, now that the calves were weaned and she had butter and cheese to make; and then there was the sheep shearing, first ours and then at Home Farm and Greats Farm, so that for a few days we only saw Darnay briefly, when he came to see Splotch. But the day after the sheep were sheared, Pa unexpectedly leant on the pigsty wall next to me as I was feeding the pigs, and said, ‘You’ve done a good job, these last few days, lad. You can take the rest of the day off if you want it. I’ll get Alfred to do your chores.’ He reached over to scratch the sow’s back with a piece of twig. ‘You’d better wait for young Mr Darnay, so he doesn’t get under our feet here.’

It was unheard of, a holiday for no reason in the middle of summer; but I didn’t argue, and when Pa added, without looking at me, ‘Oh, and take that sister of yours with you,’ I realised that it was for Alta’s sake, because they were afraid Darnay would lose interest.

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