Chapter Eight: Joe

CHAPTER EIGHT

JOE

Jersey: May 1985

As Joe went back indoors he had the feeling that he’d seen the Hummel woman before. She seemed familiar. He couldn’t think how. He never went anywhere these days, not to socialise, like, and she didn’t look to be the sort of woman he’d have met taking Geoffrey for his appointments, or going to the Co-op, or stocking up on animal supplies at Brouard’s. He couldn’t place her.

The saucepan was bubbling on the hob, the steam pushing the lid so it rose and fell. James Watt had invented the steam engine from watching his mother’s kettle boil. He could see the picture now in his schoolbook, a little boy in old-fashioned knickerbockers staring at the stove. It took a particular kind of man, that, to go from seeing one thing, to discovering something else entirely. What did they call it these days? Lateral thinking. The fear and excitement. The anxiety. Would it work?Joe moved the pan to one side and the lid calmed down. Irish stew. He was good at that. He made it almost the way his mother did, neck of lamb boiled up with taters and carrots and onions. His mother made the stock from scratch, but Joe didn’t have time for that. He used Oxo cubes, crushed them up as he brought the meat to the boil, then let it simmer. He foraged like her, though, for wild garlic and other herbs, mushrooms in season, threw them into the pot. He made up a large pan at the start of each week and it did them for three days. Tasted better the longer it was left.

Joe wasn’t a fancy cook, but Geoffrey never complained. Fish on Fridays. Corned beef or sausages or hamburgers on the other days, though why they were called hamburgers he never knew. You could swear they hadn’t been near a pig in their life. More like the rissoles his daidí made in his shop, full of gristle and fat. Sometimes, on Sundays, he cooked a joint, a shoulder of lamb or a leg of pork with crackling. Chicken, too. That did them a meal for several days. He made desserts. Bird’s Instant Whip in the winter, or a rice pudding with milk baked in the Aga. He made sure they had fruit. An apple a day and all that, strawberries in the summer, or a tin of peaches with evaporated milk or Wall’s ice cream. He’d buy that in the Co-op, two slabs, Neapolitan for Geoffrey, vanilla for himself. It was a grand life. Joe wanted for nothing. He even owned half-shares in the farm.

‘Only fair,’ Geoffrey had said. ‘You invested your money and your time. And who else would I leave it to?’