The Dig Read Free Page A

in rare breeds, of working to grants, even of alternative livestock like buffalo, or vicuña, whose fleeces were selling for hundreds. But ultimately, in their bones, they were sheep farmers, both of them, and they had gone into it knowing they would never be anything else. They had buried themselves in each other and the small, modest, ticking-over thing they had created, and that was enough while they could manage it.
    He could not see this now, through the blur of the work. He could see it now only as a machine that he had to keep running, or it would seize up, and he was throwing himself at it relentlessly as if he were no more conscious than a part of the device.
    I’ll miss a watch, he thought. She won’t know this one time. It’s quieter now. We’ve done the glut and it was quieter tonight, just the one lamb. He accepted the factshe put to himself. I have to be okay for a while longer so I’ll miss just this one. She needn’t know.
    He blindly set the alarm for eight o’clock, drunk with tiredness. For a moment he thought he could feel the clock ticking, as if he felt right through it. The lamb’s heart beating in his hands. Her body under his touch. It’s time and touch, he thought. It’s these two things. It’s because we are aware of them. The draw to go upstairs and climb in next to her warm body was unbearable, but he knew he would not do it. He thought of the way he could feel right through her skin. I wonder if that’s why we get so desperate in everything. It’s like we’re touching something we weren’t ever meant to feel.
    He put the clock down on the table and lay down on the sofa and pulled the spare duvet around himself. It was the longest they had been apart. She had gone once before for ten days to help when her father had been ill but this was the only other time and he could not accept that it was permanent and that it was three weeks since she’d died.
    She went down to the horse to check on it and curry it and in her head there was a strange wistfulness that she did not have a horse of her own and had not ridden for years .
    It was a beautiful day, but cold, one of those false starts of spring .
    They were looking after the horse for a friend who was having a rough time and going through a divorce and had nowhere to paddock the horse and the horse had just arrived and had hardly made a dent in grazing the field .
    The horse was a placid horse but horses are great, instinctive animals and the mare seemed to have sensed the disquiet in her owner and was recently uncharacteristic .
    It was towards sundown but there was an hour of light left, especially on such a clear day, and when she got into the field the horse was watering at the pond .
    Most horses locally were cobs, but this was a hunter and was higher and more gymnastic .
    She walked to the horse, calling it, and began to pat its flank and the horse shook the water from its head and walked up from the pond with her .
    Beyond the pond, over the trees, the rooks were circling into a ministry and she watched them as they called and circled and she curried the horse. The horse seemed annoyed and took a few steps away and she followed it but stopped and looked for a while at the farm a few hundred yards off and thought of what was inside her. She felt a great feeling of wealth and happiness go richly and simply through her. And then the horse kicked her .
    That was her. She had no thought, and was just dimly aware of the world shutting off before her .
    Her brain was dead by the time he got to her and really it was just her body systematically following that he watched .
    He carried her the four hundred yards to the house but then turned and laid her down in the barn. He thought she would be furious if he brought her bleeding into the house .
    When the doctor came, her head was hemorrhaged into aubergine. The hoof had struck her with the force of a bowling ball traveling at eighty miles