by Magnus Mills
It was difficult to tell whether anybody else shared my misgivings. The handbill was never discussed in public, but I assumed it would find little favour with the likes of Hartopp, who had a profound sense of fair play. On the rare occasions when I spoke to him, however, he made no mention of it.
I say ‘rare occasions’ because Hartopp was now constantly engaged in dealing with Hogust. Ever since the incident at the landing stage, Hogust had become an exceedingly difficult neighbour. He wasn’t openly hostile to Hartopp, but he clearly blamed him for the way he’d been treated by Hollis and Eldred. During the following days, minor instances of sabotage started to occur around Hartopp’s encampment. These were nothing serious, barely worse than ill-conceived practical jokes: guy ropes slackened, buckets of water overturned and so forth. All the same, their nuisance value soon weighed heavily on Hartopp. Obviously the finger of suspicion pointed at Hogust and his band of freebooters, who were assumed to be exacting some crude form of revenge. There was never any proof, of course, but it was generally agreed that they were behind the attacks. For his part, Hartopp quietly resigned himself to a life of unceasing watchfulness. After a while, though, a rumour began to circulate in which Yadegarian’s name was linked to the sabotage. It was a blatant attempt, the rumour suggested, to sow the seeds of discord between the various settlements. I had no idea where this rumour originated, but it gradually gathered momentum until it became widely accepted as a fact. Naturally, I was outraged. I knew Yadegarian well enough to be certain he would never stoop to such measures, so I decided to raise the matter with Hen.
It transpired that the rumour had failed to reach him, but he listened with interest as I recounted what I’d heard.
‘It’s preposterous,’ I concluded. ‘Yadegarian and his companions are completely harmless. The last thing they’d do is try and stir up trouble.’
‘You’re quite correct,’ said Hen, ‘but unfortunately they’re a minority, and minorities are the easiest to pick on.’
‘But I’m a minority,’ I said, ‘and you are too.’
Hen raised his eyebrows.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘we’d better be careful then, hadn’t we?’
I pondered these words as we gazed silently at the little group of tents in the south-west.
‘I don’t suppose,’ I said at length, ‘that Yadegarian could be persuaded to return the copper bath?’
‘I’m afraid not,’ replied Hen. ‘I’ve already spoken to him and he refuses to let go of it. From his standpoint the truth is plain to see: he saved an abandoned bath from vanishing into obscurity, he restored it to its original condition, and now he has the paramount claim of ownership. Furthermore, he thinks the only reason Isabella wants it back is because the weather’s turned nasty and she can’t bathe in the river.’
‘Very well argued,’ I remarked.
‘And he’s unlikely to change his mind,’ said Hen.
It was ten o’clock in the morning: the time had arrived for Thomas and Isabella to embark on their daily ‘progress’. We watched as they emerged from amid the sea of tents and headed along the river bank towards the crossing. They were all alone, which was unusual because they were normally accompanied on these excursions by Hippo, who invariably found some subject or other to discuss with the pair of them. As well as being a gifted orator he was apparently a very good listener too, and he always offered an attentive ear to Isabella. This was more than could be said about Thomas, who persisted in his habit of only half-listening. He seemed to live in a world of his own and spent many hours gazing into the distance, completely lost in thought. A sharp word from Isabella usually snapped him out of his reverie, but she still found his aloofness hugely irritating. Meanwhile, Hippo took advantage of the situation and became her trusted confidant. Thomas appeared scarcely to notice that Hippo was moving closer and closer (even his tent was next door to theirs), and showed no objection when he joined them on their strolls.
Today, however, there was no sign of Hippo, and they wandered alone. Presently they reached the crossing, where they stopped to observe Horsefall’s men collecting tolls from some newcomers. Despite the deteriorating conditions, there was a perpetual flow of people travelling back and forth over the river. Thomas’s Crossing (as it was now known) frequently teemed with activity, and it had become a highly lucrative source of income. All the same, I could tell Isabella was far from satisfied. Once or twice I saw her glance towards the south-west; then she turned and placed her hands on her hips before addressing Thomas. On this occasion it looked as if he was listening properly, and I guessed she was voicing her opinion about the copper bath. After a prolonged conversation, Thomas nodded his head in agreement and the two of them meandered slowly home. Down at the water’s edge, the tolls continued to be levied.
15
‘Since when has it been called Thomas’s Crossing?’ asked Brigant.
‘The title’s fairly recent,’ I replied.
Brigant absorbed the information with an indignant grunt.
‘Is there no limit to the man’s vanity?’ he enquired.
‘Probably not,’ I said.
I’d called in on Brigant on my way back to the north-west, and as usual we’d exchanged the latest gossip. I liked visiting Brigant because he could always be relied upon to make some disparaging comment about Thomas, a fact which I found most gratifying. Today, though, his primary interest lay elsewhere.
‘This Yadegarian,’ he said. ‘The fellow they’re all talking about.’
‘Oh, yes?’
‘Friend of yours, isn’t he?’
‘Sort of,’ I said. ‘We worked alongside one another for a while.’
‘When you were building the turf wall?’
‘Correct.’
Brigant regarded me for a few moments, then turned and peered at the ruined earthwork.
‘You know, it’ll never disappear,’ he said. ‘Not entirely.’
‘No,’ I answered, ‘I don’t expect it will.’
‘There’ll always be traces.’
‘Yes.’
Although he would hardly admit it, I sensed that Brigant was quite pleased with this outcome. Hitherto, the turf wall had provided unarguable evidence for his concept of a divided field; moreover, it gave him a perfect excuse to rail against the iniquities of the south. If the wall had vanished completely, he would have had far less to complain about.
‘Looks as if we’re in for more rain,’ he said, glancing at the sky. ‘Perhaps not this afternoon, but definitely later, and there’s going to be a lot of it.’
I left him adding yet another flysheet to his tent, and headed home. All across the field, people were battening down for the deluge which Brigant had predicted. There would be no need for a curfew tonight: as soon as dusk approached, everyone retired to their quarters and waited. The rain finally arrived around midnight, and it was much heavier than any of the previous downpours I’d witnessed. For hour after hour I listened to it hammering relentlessly on my roof, and it was still falling when daylight came.
Peering out through my doorway, I saw at once that disaster had struck. The river was flowing in a muddy torrent and had broken its banks in several places. Wherever I looked I could see sodden ground and tents awash. Conditions were especially bad in the populous south-east, where small rivulets criss-crossed the field and caused extensive flooding. Meanwhile, down in the far south-west, Yadegarian’s circle of tents had been completely flattened. Hurriedly I put on my boots and went to offer some help.
When I reached Yadegarian’s encampment I heard some disturbing news. It turned out that at the height of the storm they’d suffered a raid.
‘The copper bath’s been stolen,’ said Yadegarian, simmering with anger.
He showed me a trail in the mud where the bath had been dragged eastward.
‘Who was it?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘I didn’t see the intruders, but someone said it was men in iron helmets.’
Wh
en we examined the tents we made a further discovery.
‘It wasn’t the storm that flattened them,’ I said. ‘These have been let down on purpose.’
As the rain continued falling, Yadegarian’s people struggled to repair the damage. Obviously there’d been a deliberate attempt to dislodge them from their camp, and I suggested it might be wise to make a quiet and dignified departure.
‘Don’t be a fool!’ snapped Yadegarian. ‘If we leave the field now, it means they’ve won!’
‘But what if they come back?’ I asked.
‘We’ll worry about that when it happens!’
Yadegarian was in defiant mood, so I gave up arguing with him. Instead, we followed the trail of mud to see where it led. Unfortunately, it soon merged into the general mud surrounding the city of tents. The entire region was in chaos, and there was no indication of where the copper bath may have been taken. Yadegarian gazed at the turmoil with disdain, then marched back to assist his comrades. He declined my offer to go with him.
These days I was a comparative stranger in the south-east, so I roamed around unobserved, helping out where I could. Very soon I spotted Thomas and Isabella, who were part of a human chain conveying supplies and equipment to the worst-stricken areas. It was admirable work, and they were plainly keen to demonstrate that they were enduring the same hardship as their neighbours. I noticed, however, that the shimmering white tent remained wholly unscathed by the storm. Perhaps the stolen bath was hidden inside; perhaps not. Either way, my suspicions of the men with the iron helmets had been confirmed. The move against Yadegarian had shown just what they were capable of, and with some concern I wondered where they would turn next.
In the meantime, a huge question mark hung over Hippo. He’d played a dominant part in recent events and doubtless saw the seizure of the copper bath as a triumph. Even so, the floods had proved that he was not infallible. There was no sign of him amongst the bedraggled crowd, and I assumed he was keeping a low profile until the waters subsided. This was a wise precaution. It was Hippo, after all, who’d brought about the calamity by demanding the destruction of the turf wall. Thanks to him, an effective drainage scheme had been rendered useless, and now the consequences were there for all to see.
Oddly enough, though, the common view seemed to be quite different. As I wandered amid the debris, I began to overhear conversations about life in the early days of the Great Field. People said it was a haven of peace and tranquillity, where the grass grew in abundance, the sun shone brightly, and misfortune was unheard of. Others attested that they’d never witnessed flooding, or any other kind of catastrophe. (The majority of these claims, it should be mentioned, were made by newcomers who didn’t know any better.) Soon I heard murmurings that everything had changed with the advent of the turf wall. Not only had it divided the field into opposing halves, but it had also interfered with the natural flow of rainwater. Suddenly, the floods had become a regular occurrence. The turf wall, they concluded, was the cause of all their problems; and gradually the murmurings transformed into a clamour. Hadn’t Hippo warned them? And hadn’t they failed him abjectly? Oh, they’d tried their best to rid themselves of the turf wall, but the men who built it had been much too clever! The wall remained barely half-destroyed, running across the field like a scar that would never fade away! Now they were stuck with it for ever, but at least they knew who the culprits were!
As the people’s wrath fomented all around me, I decided I’d better make myself scarce. With this in mind, I sauntered casually away from the milling throng.
‘Just a minute,’ said a voice behind me. ‘Where do you think you’re going?’
I looked over my shoulder and saw a man approaching. He was wearing an iron helmet. I proceeded slowly for a few more paces, then stopped and allowed him to catch up.
‘Well?’ he asked.
‘My tent’s over in the north-west,’ I replied. ‘I’m just heading back to see if it’s alright.’
‘But there’s work to do here,’ he said. ‘Everybody’s supposed to help clear up the mess.’
He was a large man, with an outwardly menacing appearance, but he wasn’t being particularly unfriendly. Actually, his manner was reassuringly earnest.
‘I’d like to lend a hand,’ I said, ‘but it’s pandemonium at present.’
The man peered at the enraged mob which was seething and swirling barely a stone’s throw away.
‘Yes, they’re all rather upset,’ he remarked. ‘Still, they’ll soon settle down now they’ve found someone to blame.’
‘You mean for building the turf wall?’ I asked.
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘It was Yadegarian, wasn’t it?’
Even as we watched, a cry went up and the crowd started surging away towards the south-west. The man in the iron helmet looked at me enquiringly, and all at once I realized I hadn’t answered his question.
‘Well, yes,’ I said. ‘That’s more or less the truth.’
A Note on the Author
Magnus Mills is the author of A Cruel Bird Came to the Nest and Looked In and six other novels, including The Restraint of Beasts, which won the McKitterick Prize and was shortlisted for both the Booker Prize and the Whitbread (now the Costa) First Novel Award in 1999. His books have been translated into twenty languages. He lives in London.
Also available by Magnus Mills
The Maintenance of Headway
‘Whereas you can wait ages for a bus and three arrive at once, there could be some delay before such an original work of fiction comes along again’ Sunday Times
‘Mills is a true original in a world of clones. His sparsely written books somehow manage to make the everyday deeply bizarre, occasionally menacing and often funny’ The Times
Enter the weird world of the bus driver, a strange but all too familiar universe in which ‘the timetable’ and ‘the maintenance of headway’ are sacred, but where the routes can change with the click of an inspector’s fingers. This brilliant short novel is a gently absurd examination of the British bus system and its peculiarities, where the demands of the hapless passengers are virtually ignored and where it is fine to be a little bit late but utterly unforgivable to be a moment early.
‘An excellent, funny [and] intelligent book’ Daily Telegraph
‘Delightful ... This novel should be required reading for those in charge of our chaotic public transport system’ Daily Mail
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The Restraint of Beasts
‘A comedy which is as black as a pint of Guinness and as dry as a salted peanut’
Mail on Sunday
‘A heaving cauldron of black humour … You’ll never look at a stretch of high-tensile agricultural fencing in quite the same way ever again’ Time Out
Fencers Tam, Richie and their ever-exasperated English foreman are forced to move from rural Scotland to England for work. After a disastrous start involving a botched fence and an accidental murder, the three move to a damp caravan and soon find themselves in direct competition with the sinister Hall Brothers whose business enterprises seem to combine fencing, butchering and sausage-making.
‘Extremely unusual, finely crafted and funny’ Observer
‘A demented, deadpan-comic wonder’ Thomas Pynchon
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All Quiet on the Orient Express
‘Hilariously surreal. It’s a bit like the Coen Brothers directing an Alan Bennett play… Fantastic’ Daily Mirror
‘Mills is genuinely unique, but if he is to be placed anywhere in the jigsaw of literary history, he will have to slot between Albert Camus and Enid Blyton. [He is] one of the handful of British writers to work in a unique fictional universe’ Independent on Sunday
It is the end of the summer. The tourists have already gone, and now the sun is abandoning the Lake District’s damp valleys. Only a lone camper remains, enjoying the quiet. He plans to stay just long enough to prepare for a trip to the East. But then the owner of the campsite asks him to
paint a fence and he innocently obliges. Soon other odd jobs pile up until little by little he becomes ensnared in the ominous ‘out-of-season’.
‘Understatedly surreal, deadpan gothic, Mills is a master of the uncanny’ Esquire
‘Mills is a master of the cliffhanger and can make even the most deadpan behaviour compelling and funny… A deliciously sly comic fable’ Financial Times
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The Scheme for Full Employment
‘A unique talent … Mills’s novels are among the best and most original in recent English fiction’ Literary Review
‘Mills’ odd but wonderful books combine the language of a children’s story and the strange dry humour of Harold Pinter’ Daily Express
The Scheme was designed to provide an honest wage for an honest day’s labour. Men driving identical, rust-resistant Univans deliver Univan parts to strategically spaced warehouses. Simple, self-perpetuating and efficient, it seems destined to last forever. But when some drivers begin leaving early and developing delivery sidelines, the workforce is divided into two camps: Flat-Dayers and Early Swervers.
