PORTRAIT OF A LADY

 

                                                                    Chapter Ten

                                                                 Life Without Bill

 

For Steve this was a time optimism and reflection. How had it come about? For when he compared his life now to what it was before, not to mention what was yet to come, he could hardly believe it possible. It was Old Man Farrah of course. That was the key to it all. It was not until fate brought him face to face with the old man that he started to be aware himself and of his emotions. At first he tried to dismiss it as being 'something' in the country air, but gradually, almost imperceptibly like a drug he began to be affected by this strange new feeling. It was the animals at first, when he began to realise that they trusted him. When the cows stopped running away when he walked among them; when they clustered around him and seemed to be pleased when they received a firm but friendly slap on their rumps. When the goats lost their aggression, content instead to give him a friendly shove, a signal that they expected a reward of carrot or suede. When the sows, more often than not surrounded with piglets, made no attempt to move, while he moved among them, but would continue to provide the fast food service to its latest litter. Not even when he stopped and lifted one off the teat to examine it would the sow complain, but merely wait for the little wriggling, sometimes squealing piglet to be re-connected.

          It had taken some time before Michael started to equate the animal behaviour to anything within himself, but the trust and acceptance he felt from them all was a new experience, and gradually he came to understand why it felt so strange. It was simple; 'trust', no more no less. No one had ever trusted him before he came to the farm and it was a feeling he liked.

          Even, he had come to realise, the time he had spent with Ollie, his only friend prior to Brook farm, was not based on trust but more on self preservation. What else would explain why Ollie had escaped that night leaving him to take the wrap? There had been no contact since, nor, as far as he knew, had there been any attempt to do so. Neither, Steve conceded, had he felt the need to try to trace his old friend. Fate had brought them together, but now fate had sent them on their separate ways. And fate might decree that they should never meet again.

          During those early years when he was learning to work for, and to work with Old Man Farrah, there were some difficult times early on both had learned to adjust to the ways of the other and rifts that might have seriously threatened to divide them became fewer. Sometimes angry words were followed by a period of reflection and that was enough. As with the animals the key to their improving relationship was trust. As he improved his ability with the animals, and as maintenance skills got better 'Bill' had entrusted him with an ever increasing level of responsibility. No longer did things just happen, and as the time went by Michael started to understand that things were made to happen. With a combination of trust, responsibility, skill and determination things happen to order, and he came to realize that it was in controlling the order of things that the emotion of satisfaction came to be.

          That was perhaps the first time he had consciously understood the meaning of emotion. Satisfaction pure and simple. To be able to recognise a job well done; to feel it and know the gratification in its execution. Even more so when he came to see for himself that something was good; rather that waiting for Farrah to point it out.

          Michael had learned to experience emotions that for reasons of self preservation he had hitherto managed to deny. Until now he had simply not allowed them to flourish. Perhaps this was to be expected in a newcomer to the range of feelings he had not previously experienced. Especially feelings that were bound up in a mutual attraction of one person to another. Gradually he come to like Bill Farrah; something he discovered to be mutual and over time this likeness had grown, and somewhere along the line it had changed to love. Not a sexual love, but rather that which a father might have for his son, or a son might have for his father. And it had been somewhere along the route of this gradual process that Michael had disappeared and in his place Steve emerged.

          But just as the emotion of love had come as a surprise, so too did that of grief. Farrah's death had hit Steve in a way that he would not have believed to be possible. Perhaps the uniqueness of the powerful emotion he had discovered; a love for the 'father' he had never had, was too strong for him.

          Whatever the reason Farrah's death had felled him, and it took a different kind of love to rescue him. When Jessica came into his life he was lonely and broken, going through the motions of living but not really alive. Only the knowledge that the animals needed and trusted him kept him going,, but even then he was just reacting to events, almost without conscious input. Just like an automaton. But then Jessie had become part of his life and everything had changed. A new world was beckoning.