Short story: Passing Through

A story from years ago that most of you won't have read

Photo by Nicola Anderson on Unsplash

It’s been a pretty wet weekend in Wharfedale, after the snow on Friday night and Saturday morning. I wanted to share some of my fiction today so it seemed appropriate to choose this one from maybe twelve years ago which concerns a rainy day on a farm in the Yorkshire Dales. It may well have stemmed from a Louise Doughty exercise on the old Telegraph Short Story Club where we had to start with ‘My mother never…’. I got a few stories out of that exercise, as I recall. This one was part of The Little Book of Northern Women which I put together as an e-book about ten years ago.

Passing Through by JY Saville

“My mother never mentioned the monsoon season.”

Irene looked past her cousin standing at the kitchen window. The morning drizzle had hardened into something more powerful but was still barely worth mentioning. Bill hadn’t been here long though.

“The rain doesn’t keep to seasons in the Dales,” said Irene. “It comes and goes as it pleases.”

Bill laughed. “You talk as if it was alive,” he said, and Irene smiled politely.

You talk as if it isn’t, she thought. Dangerous mistake.

Bill had wanted to return to his roots when his wife died, so he said, but he’d only visited his mother’s birthplace once as a child, and knew far fewer folk here than in the suburb he’d left behind on the South coast. His wife had handled Christmas cards, and Bill evidently hadn’t known who or what to expect when he arrived on the farm that was now Irene’s. He had pulled on a pristine pair of wellingtons just to walk from his car to the farmhouse door.

“Shame about the weather,” he said, plucking at his lower lip as he stared out into the yard. “I wouldn’t mind exploring the place a bit.”

“Well if you’re waiting for it to stop raining—” Irene stopped. She had been going to say he’d be there all year, but she didn’t want to put him off altogether, so instead she finished: “You could look at a map.”

“You could show me around, Irene. Introduce me to people; to the family.”

Irene sighed. Because she was past retirement age like him, Bill seemed blind to her continuing role in the running of the farm. He didn’t see the farm as a business at all, with accounts to keep and cashflow to manage as well as recalcitrant sheep to manhandle. If Bill was planning to stay in their house long, she’d have to make him understand.

“Do you have any histories of the area?” he asked.

“Not written down.”

“Not written down?” smirked Bill. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

How could she begin to explain to him about history that’s passed from person to person, in phrases, and the ways of working in and with the valley? It was either in you or it wasn’t. She was saved the attempt by the sudden entrance of her younger daughter Bonnie, hair dripping, kicking her boots off backwards into the porch as she opened the kitchen door.

“Major’s slid down the sodding bank,” Bonnie announced as she marched through to the old scullery. “I warned her this would happen.”

“What are you looking for?” asked Irene. “There’s some rope hanging by the door.”

Bill looked enquiringly at Irene but she ignored him. She could feel her chest tightening.

“Bonnie?” she called.

“Pony nuts,” Bonnie replied. “Where does she keep her sodding pony nuts? Why can’t she ever look after her own animals?”

Bill was smiling, as if this was just another sibling spat, Bonnie railing at her older sister like any teenager, despite them both being middle-aged.

“You’re not going to try and get him out on your own, are you?” asked Irene as Bonnie marched back out of the scullery with thick blue rope and a pocketful of sweet-smelling treats for Fran’s elderly pony.

“Who else is going to help me?” demanded Bonnie, gripping the door for balance as she hurried into her boots.

“I don’t know,” said Irene. She could hear the higher pitch in her voice and realised her hand was wavering near her throat. She snatched it back to her lap — no sense looking like a useless old woman, even if she was becoming one. “Remember Uncle Len though.”

“Mum,” Bonnie said, pausing to look at her, “It’s not raining that hard. I just don’t want the stupid animal breaking his neck trying to get out by himself. You can tell Fran — when she shows her face — she owes me some new boots for the ones I’m about to ruin.”

“Put my waders—” Irene stopped as the door slammed. The kitchen seemed suddenly quiet, and she jumped when Bill spoke.

“Len — that must be your brother-in-law, is it?”

Irene looked at the stranger whose mother had been her own mother’s sister.

“Uncle Len was your mother’s older brother,” she said, and waited for some sign of recognition or returning memory, but Bill looked confused.

“My mother didn’t have a brother,” he said.

“Did she never tell you why she left home?” Irene asked, getting drawn into the conversation in spite of herself. Bill might have turned up unannounced with a car-load of belongings and a vague intention to settle, if not on the family farm, at least in the valley, but Irene thought it stemmed from loneliness, and some idealised notion of how proper families behaved. As if anyone’s family was proper.

“I never thought to ask,” said Bill.

You assume we all want to leave, Irene thought. That some of us get lucky and some don’t.

“Well it wasn’t because she was bewitched by the bright lights of the big city,” she said. “She couldn’t bear to stay after Len died.”

“And he was killed by a horse?”

Irene stared at him for a moment, then clamped down on laughter so that one small yelp emerged and she had to apologise it away as a hiccup. When Bill heard Bonnie say she was going to fetch a pony from a beck he assumed the pony was the dangerous part. That would have made Irene smile even if Major wasn’t placid, rotund and pushing thirty.

“He drowned.” She gestured through the back wall to where in her mind’s eye the crumbling channel rushed down the hillside behind the house. “Trying to fish a sheep out of the beck. The rain came on heavier, and they reckon the bank gave way.”

“So he was washed away?” asked Bill.

“He banged his head when he fell and there was nobody with him to pull him out of the water.”

Bill thought for a moment. “It must have been before you were born,” he said. “Yet the way you mentioned it to Bonnie made it sound like it happened last year.”

She wanted to say: Time’s all wrapped in on itself around here. But Bill would laugh, so she settled for: “The when of it doesn’t matter, it’s the how and the why we can still learn from.”

“True enough.” He nodded. “A tale with a moral.”

A moral they rarely had the luxury of acting on. Irene had been out alone in worse conditions than this often enough, and had this been how her mother had felt about it? If Irene had drowned before Fran was old enough to take over, the farm would have passed to Bill, she thought. Unless her husband had wanted it. That almost made her laugh again, so she smiled at her cousin and said:

“That’s part of how you have histories that aren’t written down.”

“Local legends,” said Bill. “Like the matriarchy at Glen Farm.” He laughed at that for a moment, then added: “Len having his accident gave you a nice pattern. Two daughters, then a daughter, two daughters, and another daughter.”

“You’re forgetting your own place in that,” said Irene, glad she hadn’t had to be the one to lose a son for the sake of a pattern.

“I had no place in it, until now.”

Bill still had no place in it, in Irene’s opinion, and neither should Fran. Unlike her aunt, Fran had been lured away by urban excitement, no word for nearly a week after a party in Carlisle, Irene out of her mind and Bonnie just left school and barely big enough to climb up into the tractor cab. Then a phone call from Glasgow: Fran was meant for better things and wasn’t coming home. Fifteen years of occasional postcards till eight years ago a taxi pulled up in the farmyard and disgorged the prodigal daughter with a rucksack and an impending belly. A short enough pause for no useful preparations to be made, then Jessica arrived and turned the place upside down.

“Morning all.” Fran stood framed in the kitchen door for a moment then flung her cap at the table and tousled her hair. “What’s wrong with Bonnie?” she asked, unbuttoning her coat.

Irene froze. “What do you mean?”

“I saw her coming down the hill, so I waved and she gave me the finger.”

Irene saw Bill frown and kept her face neutral, relieved and annoyed and exasperated as she was.

“Major’s had some trouble trying to drink from the beck; I don’t think you should keep him up there any more.”

“Nonsense,” said Fran, throwing her coat over the back of the chair beside the coat-pegs. “He likes it there, he’d hate to be kept away from his stream.”

You’d hate to have to keep a trough filled, thought Irene, but she said nothing in front of Bill.

“Did you do Jessica a packed lunch this morning or do I need to go fetch her?” asked Fran, her hand already on the door to the staircase.

“She’s got sandwiches,” said Irene.

Fran nodded and they heard the thump of her feet on the stairs, and the creak of the upstairs landing. Bonnie burst in from the porch a moment later, soaked to the knees from the beck, the rest of her nearly as wet from the rain.

“Nice to see she hung around to see if I was ok,” she said, peeling dripping socks off on the way to the scullery.

“Bill, those maps I mentioned are in the sitting room,” said Irene, but it took a pointed stare to make him take the hint and leave the room. Bonnie was still stripping off, piling wet clothes in front of the washing machine.

“Did she even ask how Major was?”

“Now Bonnie…”

“She hasn’t ridden him for twenty-five years, she doesn’t lift a finger, but she won’t let him go.”

Irene crossed the room and watched her daughter, crouched in her underwear on the stone floor, furiously cramming balled-up clothes into the washer. The fate of Major was just the latest battle in a long-running war. Like Irene, Bonnie had stayed behind and worked hard to keep the farm going when her sister took off, and like Irene she should have been rewarded in the end, but they both knew that Jessica changed things. Glen Farm had passed down their family for generations and the important thing was to keep that going.

“Go on and get dry,” Irene said. “I’ll put the powder in.”

Bonnie was barely halfway up the stairs when Bill reappeared.

“Bit nippy in the sitting room, isn’t it?” he said, before Irene had gathered her milling thoughts. “I’m surprised you haven’t got a radiator in there. Come to think of it, I haven’t seen any at all.”

Irene looked at Bill, and past him at the rain-spattered farmyard and the misty hills beyond. No point wasting time explaining anything; he wouldn’t last the winter here.