It’s all right. You can come out now. With a U-turn so spectacular it was positively political, David Archer changed his mind about selling the family farm for a mess of pottage. Seven million quid was, I believe, mentioned.
The move to Northumberland (Awa’ the Archers!) was all set, then David started sighing. Sighs that come up from your big toe and, after hammering ineffectually at your teeth for admission, sink back defeated. At first, he was simply wistful about nesting robins and gathering lilac in the spring, but then he started hearing his dead father’s voice and talking to a cow. “Oh Etty, Etty! You always held your service!” This is the sort of remark that suggests no obvious reply and, indeed, Etty said nothing, but I suspect it had nothing to do with ladies’ tennis.
Digging in his hooves and struggling with anything longer than two syllables, David cried: “It’s a gut thing. The land! This place is who I am!”
R.i.g.h.t. Now all he has to do is explain this lucidly to everyone who has been expecting a share of the bleeding carcass. Some of them lawyers. There is Kenton, his brother, who is on his way to Australia club-class on the strength of the now-aborted sale; Shula, his sister, who has been shopping for an equine swimming pool; Fallon, the belle of The Bull, who is planning to open an olde-worlde tea shoppe; and Lilian, his aunt, whose live-in lover has just skedaddled to Costa Rica with a lot of money and, according to Lilian, a little tart. Not to mention Ruth, David’s wife, whose face is cold and sour and set like the last pickled egg in a jar of vinegar on the counter of The Bull. There’s not a lot of “Whither thou goest I will go” about this Ruth.
I expect the whole dreadful imbroglio to end merrily with an Easter wedding very much like Cold Comfort Farm, which it so much resembles. Emma’s wedding breakfast, like Elfine’s, will be in a farm barn garnished with cow parsley and, quite possibly, cows. Please God, William, her first husband, doesn’t bring his shotgun and dog.
A Month in Ambridge returns on 25 March.
