A Country Affair by Rebecca Shaw Page B

It was windowless, so the only light came from the open door and two hurricane lamps hanging from the cobwebby ceiling. In addition, today there was Blossom Parsons, Phil’s young wife, holding a torch.
    “Morning, Mr. Spencer. Poor morning. You been on call all night?”
    “For a change, no, I haven’t, Mrs. Parsons.”
    Scott, from the first moment he had met her, had retained a certain formality when speaking to Blossom Parsons, for he was intensely aware that she fancied him and she made it abundantly clear even in front of her husband. Scott’s technique was to ignore her remarks as though concentration on the animal he’d come to see was taking up all of his mind. He went to have a word with the cow. He stroked her head and spoke softly to her, looked at her eyes to judge her temper, checked her gums to see if she was in shock.
    “Hold the torch for me, Phil, right here, please. Let’s see what’s come away.”
    “No, no, I can do it.” Mrs. Parsons laid a hand on his back as she leaned forward to get the beam shining where he wanted it. Her fingers began very subtly massaging his spine.
    “She’s not got rid of it all and she’s not well either. Got a temperature, I would think. What is she, about fifteen weeks?”
    Phil scratched his head through his balaclava. “Couldn’t say for certain, but about that.”
    “Look in your records.”
    “Do me a favor. Natural farming I go in for. If they’re in calf, they’re in calf and if they’re not, they’re not. Writing it down doesn’t put them in the club and what’s more it takes up my time.” Phil peered at the bloody mess surrounding the tiny, immature dead calf laid on the barn floor. “My bull knows his business better than me. Don’t need no pen an’ paper, he don’t.”
    “I see.” By this time, Scott had his hand in the cow’s uterus and Mrs. Parsons had stopped massaging him.
    “I’ll go put the kettle on, shall I?”
    There were some farms where Scott could enjoy a mug of tea sitting at the kitchen table talking farming, and there were some where he couldn’t. Applegate Farm came into the latter category. When he’d been offered tea the first time after a long, cold wait for a calf to arrive, he’d accepted and eagerly gone inside to get warm, but after the shock of seeing their filthy kitchen and the indescribable chaos that reigned in there, he had vowed he’d die of hypothermia before entering that kitchen again.
    “No, thanks, Mrs. Parsons. I’ve more calls this morning than I can cope with. I’ll just take a couple of blood samples and give Zinnia an antibiotic, and then I’ll be away.”
    “I’m real disappointed you won’t have a cuppa. I made cherry cake yesterday and there’s a slice left. Let me put it in a bag and you can take it home to finish your lunch with. Won’t be a minute.”
    “She should be all right now, Phil. Any ideas why this happened?”
    Phil shook his head. “None. Just one of them things.”
    “I’ve said this before and I’ve got to say it again: This place needs cleaning up. Milk produced here! God help us! No wonder Milkmarque says you don’t reach its hygiene standards and refuses to collect.”
    “There’s plenty of people’ll buy my milk. Don’t need no puffed-up officials, I don’t.”
    Scott held up his hand to silence him. “Say no more; I don’t want to know. Right. But it’s a disgrace. A complete disgrace. If I mention it in the right quarter, you’ll be in deep trouble, so make sure when I come back the day after tomorrow to see Zinnia that you’ve made a start. No, more than a start, actually done it. The cow barn, the yard, everywhere. Right?”
    “I heard.” Phil sniffed his disgust and turned on his heel back into the barn.
    Hoping to escape before Mrs. Parsons came out of the farmhouse with his cherry cake, Scott headed straight through the yard, out of the gate and across the farm track to where he’d left his vehicle. He had stored his equipment and