by Dick Francis
“Nolan did. And a good motive would have jailed him, you can’t say it wouldn’t.”
“The pregnancy test is a nonstarter,” I said. “Ingrid threw the empty box away, there’s no proof it really existed, there’s no saying if Angela used it or when, there’s no certainty about the result, there’s no knowing who she’d been sleeping with.”
“You should have been a lawyer.”
Mackie and Perkin came through for their usual drink and news exchange and even Chickweed’s win couldn’t disperse the general gloom.
“Angela pregnant?” Mackie shook her head, almost bewildered. “She didn’t say anything about it.”
“She might have done, given time,” Tremayne said, “if the test was positive.”
“Damned careless of her,” Perkin said. “That bloody girl’s nothing but trouble. It’s all upsetting Mackie just when she should be feeling relaxed and happy, and I don’t like it.”
Mackie stretched out a hand and squeezed her husband’s in gratitude, the underlying joy resurfacing, as persistent as pregnancy itself. Perhaps Angela Brickell too, I speculated, had been delighted to be needing her test. Who could tell?
Gareth gusted in full of plans for an expedition I’d forgotten about, a fact he unerringly read on my face.
“But you said you would teach us things, and we could light a fire.” His voice rose high with disappointment.
“Um,” I said. “Ask your father.”
Tremayne listened to Gareth’s request for a patch of land for a campfire and raised his eyebrows my way.
“Do you really want to bother with all this?”
“Actually, I suggested it, in a rash moment.”
Gareth nodded vigorously. “Coconut’s coming at ten.”
Mackie said, “Fiona asked us to go down in the morning to toast Chickweed and cheer Harry up.”
“But John promised,” Gareth said anxiously.
Mackie smiled at him indulgently. “I’ll make John’s excuses.”
SUNDAY MORNING CREPT in grayly on a near-freezing drizzle, enough to test the spirits of all would-be survivors. Tremayne, drinking coffee in the kitchen with the lights on at nine-thirty, suggested scrubbing the whole idea. His son would vehemently have none of it. They compromised on a promise from me to bring everyone home at the first sneeze, and Coconut arrived on his bicycle in brilliant yellow oil-skins with a grin to match.
It was easy to see how he’d got his name. He stood in the kitchen dripping and pulled off a sou’wester to reveal a wiry tuft of light-brown hair sticking straight up from the top of his head. (It would never lie down properly, Gareth later explained.).
Coconut was nearly fifteen. Below the topknot he had bright intelligent eyes, a big nose and a sloppy loose-lipped mouth, as if his face hadn’t yet synthesized with his emerging character. Give him a year, I thought, maybe two, then the shell would firm to define the man.
“There’s a bit of wasteland at the top of the apple orchard,” Tremayne said. “You can have that.”
“But, Dad ... ” Gareth began, raising objections.
“It sounds fine,” I said firmly. “Survivors can’t choose.” Tremayne looked at me and then at Gareth thoughtfully and nodded as if to confirm a private thought.
“But February’s a bad month for food,” I said, “and I suppose we’d better not steal a pheasant, so we’ll cheat a bit and take some bacon with us. Bring gloves and a penknife each. We’ll go in ten minutes.”
The boys scurried to collect waterproofs for Gareth, and Tremayne asked what exactly I planned to do with them.
“Build a shelter,” I said. “Light a fire, gather some lunch and cook it. That’ll be enough, I should think. Everything takes forever when you start with nothing.”
“Teach them they’re lucky.”
“Mm.”
He came to the door to see off the intrepid expedition, all of us unequipped except for the survival kit (with added bacon) that I wore around my waist and the penknives in their pockets. The cold drizzle fell relentlessly but no one seemed to mind. I waved briefly to Tremayne and went where Gareth led, which was through a gate in a wall, through a patch of long-deserted garden, through another gate and up a slow gradient through about fifty bare-branched apple trees, fetching up on a small bedraggled plateau roughly fenced with ruined dry-stone walling on one side and a few trees in the remains of a hawthorn hedge full of gaps around the rest. Beyond that untidy boundary lay neat prosperous open acres of winter plowing, the domain of the farmer next door.
Gareth looked at our terrain disgustedly and even Coconut was dismayed, but I thought Tremayne had chosen pretty well, on the whole. Whatever we did, we couldn’t make things much worse.
“First of all,” I said, “we build a shelter for the fire.”
“Nothing will burn in this rain,” Gareth said critically.
“Perhaps we’d better go back indoors, then.”
They stared in faint shock.
“No,” Gareth said.
“Right.” I brought the basic survival tin out of my pocket and gave him the coil of flexible saw. “We passed at least four dead apple trees on the way up here. Slide a couple of sticks through the loops at the ends of this saw, and you and Coconut go and cut down one of those dead trees and bring it up here. Cut it as near the ground as you can manage.”
It took them roughly three seconds to bounce off with renewed enthusiasm, and I wandered around the decrepit piece of what Tremayne had truly described as wasteland, seeing everywhere possibilities of a satisfactory camp. The whole place, for instance, was pale brown with the dead stalks of last year’s unmown grass; an absolute gift.
By the time the boys returned, puffing, red faced and dragging the result of their exertions, I’d wrenched out a few rusty old metal fence posts, cut a lot of living hawthorn switches from the hedge and harvested a pile of the dead grass stalks from a patch near the last row of apple trees. We made a short trip down to the deserted garden to reap a patch of old stinging nettles for bindings, and about an hour after setting off were admiring a free-standing four-foot-square shelter made of a metal frame with a slightly sloping roof of closely latticed hawthorn switches thickly thatched on top with endless piled-on bundles of dried grass. While we watched, the drizzle trickled down the top layer of brownish stalks and dripped off to one side, leaving a small rain-free area underneath.
After that, by themselves, the boys made a simple square frame lashed with thickly crisscrossed hawthorn, which we could lean against any one side of the fire shelter to prevent the wind from blowing rain straight in. Gareth understood without telling and explained it to Coconut matter-offactly.
“OK,” I said. “Next, we find some flat dry stones from that broken-down wall to make a floor for the fire. Don’t bring very wet stones, they can explode when they get hot. Then we go around looking for anything very small and dry that will burn. Dead leaves. Bits of fluff caught on fences. Anything inside that wrecked old greenhouse in the garden. When you find something, keep it dry in your pockets. When we’ve got enough tinder, we’ll feather some kindling sticks. We also need enough dry wood, if you can find any. And bring any old cowpats you come across: they burn like peat.”
After another hour’s labor we had stacked under the fire shelter the remains of an old cucumber frame from the greenhouse and enough dry tinder to take kindly to a flame. Then, working with my hands under the shelter, I showed them how to strip the bark off a wet stick and make shallow lengthwise cuts in the dry deadwood underneath so that fine shavings curled outward and the stick looked feathered all over. They each made one with their knives: Gareth quick and neat, Coconut all thumbs.
Finally with a match, a piece of candle, the tinder of dead leaves and flower heads, the feathered kindling sticks, the cucumber frame and a good deal of luck (but no cowpats), a bright little fire burned healthily against the drizzly odds and Gareth and Coconut looked as if the sun had risen where they didn’t expect it.
The sm
oke curled up and out over the edges of the thatched roofing. I remarked that if we’d had to live there for months we could hang spare meat and fish under the roof to smoke it. Applewood made sweet smoke. Oak would smoke some meats better.
“We couldn’t live out here for months.” Coconut couldn’t imagine it.
“It wasn’t always sunny in Sherwood Forest,” I said.
We snapped all the smaller twigs off the felled apple tree and added them gradually to the blaze, then made the beginnings of a human-sized shelter by wedging the dead tree as a roof and rear wall between two live trees, bringing more hawthorn to weave through the branches, heaping onto the top and rear surface any boughs, dead plants and turves we could cut and thickly laying a floor below of grass stalks, the nearest thing to straw. Apart from a few drips, we were out of the rain.
Lunch, when we finally ate it after a long forage, consisted mainly of finds from the old garden: some tubers of wild parsley, comfrey and jerusalem artichoke, a handful of very small brussels sprouts (ugh, Gareth said) and a rather bitter green leaf salad of plantain, dock and dandelion (double ugh). Never eat poisonous buttercups, I said, be grateful for dandelions. Coconut flatly refused to contemplate worms, the only things plentiful. Both boys fell on the bacon, threaded and grilled on sharpened peeled sticks, and such was their hunger that they afterwards chewed for ages on strips of the inner sweet bark of a young birch tree that was struggling away in the hedge. Birch bark was good nourishing food, I said. Gareth said they would take my word for it.
We drank rather scummy rainwater found in an old watering can, and boiled in a Coke can Gareth collected from the Shellerton House trash. They declined my offer to make coffee from roast dandelion root. Next time they went camping they would take tea bags, they said.
We were sitting in the shelter, the fire burning red with embers on its stone base a few feet away, the drizzle almost a permanence, the odd foods eaten, the end of the experiment not far ahead.
“How about staying out here all night?” I asked.
They both looked horrified.
“You’d survive,” I said, “with shelter and a fire.”
“It would be miserable,” Gareth said. “It’s freezing cold.”
“Yes.”
There was a pause, then Gareth added, “Survival isn’t really much fun, is it?”
“Often not,” I agreed. “Just a matter of life or death.”
“If we were outlaws in Sherwood Forest,” he said, “the Sheriff’s men would be hunting us.”
“Nasty.”
Coconut involuntarily looked around for enemies, shivering at the thought.
“We can’t stay out all night. We have to go to school tomorrow,” he said.
The relief on both their fares was comical, and I thought that perhaps for a second or two they’d had a vision of a much older, more brutal world where every tomorrow was a struggle, where hunger and cold were normal and danger ever present and cruel. A primitive world, far back from Robin Hood, back from the Druids who’d walked the ancient Berkshire Downs, back where laws hadn’t been invented or rights thought of, back before organization, before tribes, before ritual, before duty. Back where the strong ate and the weak died, the bedrock and everlasting design of nature.
When a dark shade of iron seeped into the slate-gray light we pulled the fire to pieces and doused the hot ends in wet grass. Then we stacked the remaining pile of applewood neatly under the fire’s roofing and started for home, carrying as little away as we’d brought.
Gareth looked back at the intertwined tree shelter and the dead fireplace and seemed for a moment wistful, but it was with leaps and whoops that he and Coconut ran down from there to re-embrace the familiar constraints of civilization.
“God,” Gareth said, barging in through the back door, “lead me to a pizza. To two pizzas, maybe three.”
Laughing, I peeled off my long-suffering ski suit and left them to it in the kitchen, heading myself for warmth in the family room; and there I found a whole bunch of depressed souls sprawling in armchairs contemplating a different sort of disastrous tomorrow where food was no problem but danger abounded.
Harry, Fiona, Nolan, Lewis, Perkin, Mackie and Tremayne, all silent, as if everything useful had been said already. Tight-knit, interlocked, they looked at me vaguely, at the stranger within their gates, the unexpected character in their play.
“Ah ... John,” Tremayne said, stirring, remembering, “are both boys still living?”
“More or less.”
I poured myself some wine and sat on an unoccupied footstool, feeling the oppression of their collective thoughts and guessing that they all now knew everything I did, and perhaps more.
“If Harry didn’t do it, who did?” It was Lewis’s question, which got no specific reply, as if it had been asked over and over before.
“Doone will find out,” I murmured.
Fiona said indignantly, “He’s not trying. He’s not looking beyond Harry. It’s disgraceful.”
Proof that Doone was still casting about, however, arrived noisily at that point in the shape of Sam Yaeger, who hooted his horn outside as a preliminary and swept into the house in a high state of indignation.
“Tremayne!” he said in the doorway, and then stopped abruptly at the sight of the gathered clan. “Oh. You’re all here.”
“You’re supposed to be resting,” Tremayne said repressively.
“To hell with bloody resting. There I was quietly nursing my bruises according to orders, when this Policeman Plod turns up on my doorstep. Sunday afternoon! Doesn’t the bugger ever sleep? And d‘you know what little gem he tossed at me? Your sodding stable girls told him I’d had a bit of how’s-your-father with Angela effing Brickell.”
The brief silence which greeted this announcement wasn’t exactly packed with disbelief.
“Well, did you?” Tremayne asked.
“That’s not the point. The point is that it wasn’t any Tuesday last June. So this Doone fellow asks me what I was doing that day, as if I could remember. Working on my boat, I expect. He asked if I logged the hours I worked on it. Is this man for real? I said I hadn’t a sodding clue what I was doing, maybe it was a couple of willing maidens, and he has no sense of humor, it’s in a permanent state of collapse, he said it wasn’t a joking matter.”
“He has three daughters,” I said. “It worries him.”
“I can’t help his effing hangups,” Sam said. “He said he had to check every possibility, so I told him he’d have a long job considering old Angie’s opportunities, not to mention willingness.” He paused. “She was even making goo-goo eyes at Bob Watson at one time.”
“She wouldn’t have got past Ingrid,” Mackie said. “Ingrid looks meek and mild but you should see her angry. She keeps Bob in her sight. She doesn’t trust any girl in the yard. I doubt if Angela got anywhere with Bob.”
“You never know,” Sam said darkly. “Can I have a drink? Coke?”
“In the fridge in the kitchen,” Perkin said, not stirring to fetch it.
Sam nodded, went out and came back carrying a glass, followed by Gareth and Coconut busily stoking their furnaces with pizza wedges.
Tremayne raised his eyebrows at the food.
“We’re starving,” explained his younger son. “We ate roots, and birch bark and dandelion leaves, and no one in their right mind would live in Sherwood Forest being chased by the Sheriff.”
Sam looked bewildered. “What are you on about?” he demanded.
“Survival,” Gareth said. He marched over to a table, picked up Return Safe from the Wilderness and thrust it into Sam’s hands. “John wrote it,” he said, “and five other books like it. So we built a shelter and made a fire and cooked roots and boiled water to drink ...”
“What about Sherwood Forest?” Harry drawled, smiling but looking strained notwithstanding.
Coconut explained, “We might be cold and hungry but there weren’t any enemies lurking behind the apple trees.”
“Er ...” Sam said.
Tremayne, amused, enlightened everyone about our day.
“Tell you what,” Gareth said thoughtfully, “it makes you realize how lucky you are to have a bed and a pizza to come home to.”
Tremayne looked at me from under lowered lids, his mouth curving with contentment. “Teach them they’re lucky,” he’d said.
“Next time,” Coconut inquired, “why don’t we make some bows and arrows?”
“What for?” asked Perkin.
“To shoot the Sheriff’s men, of course.”
“You’d wind up hanged in Nottingham,” Tremayne said. “Better stick to dandelion leaves.” He looked at me. “Is there going to be a next time?”
Before I could answer, Gareth said, “Yes.” He paused. “Well, it wasn’t all a laugh a minute, but we did do something. I could do it again. I could live out in the cold and the rain ... I feel good about it, that’s all.”
“Well done!” Fiona exclaimed sincerely. “Gareth, you’re a great boy.”
It embarrassed him, of course, but I agreed with her.
“How about it?” Tremayne asked me.
“Next Sunday,” I said, “we could go out again, do something else.”
“Do what?” Gareth demanded.
“Don’t know yet.”
The vague promise seemed enough for both boys, who drifted back to the kitchen for further supplies, and Sam, leafing through the book, remarked that some of my more ingenious traps looked as if they would kill actual people, not only big animals like deer.
“Eating venison in Sherwood Forest was a hanging matter too,” Harry observed.
I said, agreeing with Sam, “Some traps aren’t safe to set unless you know you’re alone.”
“If Gareth’s confident after one day,” Nolan said to me without much friendliness from the depths of an armchair, “what does that make you? Superman?”
“Humble,” I said, with irony.
“How very goody-goody,” he said sarcastically, with added obscenities. “I’d like to see you ride in a steeplechase.”
“So would I,” Tremayne said heartily, taking the sneering words at face value. “We might apply for a permit for you, John.”
