“I don’t know if that’s my sort of thing, sir,” said Callum. “I do best as a sort of loner.”
“That’s probably so,” said Dodds easily. He had one leg up on his desk, and was idly letting an antique gold watch swing from its chain around his finger. “But a change of scene does us all good from time to time, even if it makes us say, ‘This is definitely not my scene.’ ”
“That may be true.” He was noticing the swaying watch dart its Tinker Bell dance off the walls. “That looks a lovely old watch, sir.”
“Yes. It’s more than a hundred years old—made by Robert Pennington of London about 1810, I think.” And he decided to tell him the story. “It’s the only trophy I ever won, and it’s the one I wanted most. It’s a Norfolk story, so a Norfolk lad will get the point of it. We lived on the Broads, and as long as I can remember, I loved sailing. My grandfather, Augustus Dodds, who lived up the river from us (smack on the river: when it was running dangerously high, he could dangle his feet in the water from his porch)—he gave me this nice little dinghy, which I sailed everywhere, morning, noon, and night. So when I was about fifteen, he asked me to come to tea, as he sometimes did, and to arrive at 4:15 prompt. If I made it on time, he would give me this watch. Now he knew that the tide turned at 3:40 on that day, and when the tide turns down with the current on the Bure, it’s carrying a weight of water, and no little dinghy is going to make its way up against it. So my trip on that afternoon, which with the tide I could do in half an hour, would take forever. So my grandfather was testing me to see if I knew my tides. Oh, yes—and this is important—he also made the condition that I could not leave my house before 3:30, and said he would check with my mother to make sure I hadn’t cheated. I knew my tides, and there was no chance, coming straight upstream on the Bure at 3:30 that afternoon, I could make it by 4:15. But I also knew that after the tide turns, the Bure, by a quirk of current, flushes some of its water all the way up a cutting near our house, to rejoin the main stream on one of its crazy bends three quarters of a mile above my grandfather’s house. A truly circular flow. I also knew that cutting had been dredged recently, so I wouldn’t get stuck. It would take me a quarter of an hour to work my way up the cut, but that left me plenty of time to come racing down the Bure in time for tea, tying the painter at 4:11. My grandfather was sitting on the porch lazily swinging the watch—as I notice I have been doing.”
“Does that mean I get the watch now, for coming on time?” said Callum.
“Afraid not, my lad,” said Dodds, laughing and surprised.
“Do you think your grandfather knew about the cutting?”
“I wondered about that at the time, or whether I pulled a fast one on him. But now I’m sure he knew, and wanted me to have the satisfaction of outsmarting him. After all, he was sitting there before I got there, and I got there by the only way there was. I think he just wanted to give me the watch.”
“A generous man.”
“Yes. I think about him often, checking the time for this or that, on this lovely old watch. The landscapes, here and there, were meant to be similar, flat, well-watered, under big skies, but look what we’ve done with this. And the watch was meant to be there to time the drift of sky and water, and here it is still ticking away in a filthy time and place. But thanks for listening to my story.”
“I liked it,” said Callum. “You were a kind of Odysseus, weren’t you, making all your voyages and knowing all the ins and outs on the Broads? The Odyssey was the only book I ever got to love in school. But that watch, sir, that’s a great prize, and you won it fair and true.”
“How do you get on with Sergeant Braddis?” Dodds asked casually, as he was taking him to the door.
“He’s a weird cuss, but I don’t let him get to me.”
“Right attitude. Well, good-bye, and think about giving the Artists a chance.”
“I will, sir,” said Callum.
Dodds was impressed with Callum—watchful, wary, but entirely his own man, he thought. He wondered if he would make it to the Artists’ party. Perhaps he was too independent to need other people’s good opinion of his work; if you’d come this far alone, why bother to attend to what was going on in other sketchbooks. Still, wouldn’t you, even if entirely secure in your own sense of direction, be at least curious where others were heading, even as you struck out on your own? But never mind Callum. Dodds was more concerned with Braddis. He had heard of the destruction of Callum’s sketch, and had been told that the sergeant had also confiscated another one, supposedly a nude. This was unacceptable behavior, making life miserable for a particular member of the platoon—so blatant that everyone had noticed it. Dodds had also heard of Braddis’s solo expeditions into no-man’s-land in the small hours. He thought there could only be one reason behind those, but to check his hunch, he would have to go to town himself.
Supper: scrambled eggs and warm water. Music: Schubert’s Cello Quintet. He and Margaret had attended a performance of the piece by the Guarneri, plus Rostropovich, at Queen Elizabeth Hall in London just after Benjamin Britten had died, in the spring of 1977. Britten had asked that they play the slow movement of it at his memorial service in Westminster Abbey— a nice instance of the public concert being a warm-up for the smaller audience. Listening to it then and now, it was clear why the composer wanted it: he would have liked the clean deliberation of the movement (literally picked clean, with all that pizzicato) advancing slowly to its gently measured, thoughtful conclusions, but suddenly swept away by the wonderfully agitated churning, a whirr of strings protesting that passion should never be so subdued. It happens twice, but measure reigns again at the end.
MacIver sat listening with his Lagavulin in his paw, in the fire’s glow with the last of the loose planks he’d managed to gather, without tumbling down the chute again, from the ruined porch. Alas, if the cold held up, it would soon come to book burning. Neither the whisky nor the fire could quell his shivers. But he sat on after the music, thinking as he liked to do, about his boyhood on Loch Affric.
He did not have to close his eyes to be able to summon up the whitewashed stone house standing on its narrow lawn facing the lake, and the small boathouse off to the left. How many times had he rowed his dinghy on a breathlessly calm day across the house’s reflection in the lake, sometimes so clear that he believed he could detect, staring down on it, where the black paint trim was chipped or peeling; he imagined he could count the hairs around each claw on the brass lion’s foot, the massive door-knob set in the middle of the front door, and trace the figure in the oak around it. The water was pure and healthy at that time, but with a brownish tint from the bottom, which the trout hovering/browsing/nosing up under the banks shared, and perhaps a small hint of peat in the taste, like a good single malt.
Sometimes after school the boy could persuade his mother to let him take her for a row on the lake; at nine or ten, he found the boat still a little wide for him, but he would pull mightily, taking pride in the blisters, as he looped the oars in a big arc out of the lake and around and back into it, high enough to allow water to trickle down from the blades and off the handles and form a little puddle around his stout shoes. “Rest a little,” his mother would say, when they had reached the middle of the narrow lake. He would rest on his oars, and take in the steep russet hills rising around them, the house looking gravely across at them from afternoon shadow.
The quiet of these scenes, with the smallest lapping of water against the hull, sank deep into him, and he returned to them often. His mother in color and mood was always integral to them; he could see her in skirt and sweater, leaning back on the cushions with her legs tucked under her, a slender figure with wisps of auburn hair around her face, trailing her hand abstractedly in the water, rocking slightly forward each time the blade caught, always cool and serene, but usually, he later realized, somewhere else. Sometimes they would pause for a quarter hour or more, watching birds flying off the water and in the sky overhead, MacIver always sweeping the sky intent
ly, always hoping to show her the great golden eagle whose nest he knew on a crag high above the house. Occasionally his mother would become part of it, pointing out tricks of light on the water, cat’s-paws chasing into the shallows with the first breath of evening wind. Then they would head back, and it would be a point of pride with him that he could, by plotting his position against the opposite shore, navigate himself straight into the dark of the boathouse without having to turn around. But he let his mother help him. “A little more left hand,” she would say quietly at the critical juncture, and he would steal a glimpse of the corner of the dock as he made the adjustment. Then he would ship his oars and they would glide to rest in the little boat’s berth; he would tie the painter to the ring, gallantly hand his mother ashore, and carry his oars across his skinny shoulders up to the lonely house. Home is the sailor, home from the sea.
MacIver realized he seemed to be making some kind of tally of his memories, as though completing the inventory might tell him what his life amounted to. But why not? It was implausible that the account should be held open for future contributions. So let it rip! The lake and the eagle led him ineluctably on to the most astonishing and terrifying encounter of all—the story of the eagle’s egg. It had been a large temptation ever since the boys had observed that the big gold-ruffed bird had a mate keeping him company on the nest.
So in the middle of April when he was ten, Robert MacIver, urged on by his friends and schoolmates Hamish Morrison and another Robert, Bobby Nairn, decided to take an egg, in the temporary absence of its parents, from the nest at the top of the cliff above the loch. The nest was in a small stunted pine that jutted out over the cliff from a fissure in the granite. He reached in from below and took the nearer of two eggs. It was at least three and a half inches long, and quite wide too, and the texture of the shell to his first unseeing touch was distinctly rough. It weighed in his hand and felt warm as he cupped it carefully, scrabbling down the stunted pine tree using one arm and his legs for grip, and skinning the inside of his thighs in the descent; they had all come straight from school and were wearing their uniform grey flannel shorts.
Once down on the rocky ledge under the pine, he examined his trophy carefully; it was strongly marked with buff and ruddy brown dashes and streaks, and rounder—less pointed—than the woodcock’s and curlew’s eggs in his collection, though not as round as the pheasant’s. He was breathless from his nervous climb, and also in terror of the lurking fierce eye, hooked talons and beak, and giant wingspan from which he’d stolen it; he understood the same qualities were somewhere there, confined inside the shell in his soft hands. The other boys had gathered close, a knot of three tousled heads staring at the prize. He let them both hold it briefly, and they were reverent to it too. “The biggest and best we’ve ever touched,” declared Hamish. But he and Bobby both understood that the egg was Robert’s.
But in the night things changed. He would have to take it back. His need to do so grew with the hours. He could not sleep, his bed not snug now against the wind off the lake, storming the pines to east and west of the house, the rain squalls drumming into the windowpanes. Lying there, he stared at the window, trying to see past the leaded mullions to the outside, but the dark was giving no quarter tonight, advancing right to the frame, black on deeper black. The trouble was the egg itself, which he had nested in a bowl shaped from his best sweaters in the second drawer. He had left the drawer open about four inches, so there could be some circulation of air around it. But in the night he had started having serious doubts whether this was enough. Maybe the power of the bird, curled inside its oatmealy shell—all that steely wildness driving to grow and be unleashed, maybe it needed to feel the great dome of sky overhead to endure its rounded confinement till it was ready. It was the egg that was haunting him. Maybe he was stifling it there in the drawer; he could feel it raging at him from among the sweaters, and despising him: what did he know about nursing anything this big and wild?
He would take it back first thing in the morning. It was a Saturday, not a school day, so his mother would sleep late. He knew from her minimal signs of disapproval (a shake of the head, a thinner line to the mouth, once a “Couldn’t you leave it for them?”) at his previous trophies that he should not show her this one. This one was different, bigger and crueler, and taunting him with a taboo: he shuddered to think what would happen to him if he bored his holes at each end and blew it clean for his egg collection.
Up before six, and out the back door, and up the track through the woods behind the house; the wind, tamer by dawn, was still gusting through the pines, spraying the stored rain on his head and sweater—the air as fresh and cold between his fingers as water from the burn. Up the sodden path, his gym shoes soaked (he had thought they would give him better purchase than the boots when he climbed the tree this time), carrying the egg in his right hand wrapped in a clean handkerchief; he didn’t want it smelling of him when it was back in the nest. Higher now above the lake, and brighter now as the trees thinned, grey clouds scudding fast and furious across the palest blue, quite a bit of silver behind him at the end of the lake, where the sun was massing for a breakthrough.
He came out onto the flat bare terrace of rock above the cliff. Some of the stones held puddles of water from the night’s storm. Over the lip of the cliff, the pine tree jutted, some of the rugged nest of twigs visible. But he couldn’t see if the birds were there. He put the egg down gently, still wrapped in its handkerchief, in a little hollow, and crossed the clearing to where there was a tall rock that would give him a better view. The nest seemed to be empty; clearly eagles started their sky patrol early. There was no point in his hanging around. He retrieved the egg, went straight to the tree, and began his climb again out over the overhang. It seemed harder today without his friends to encourage him and impress, and the red, flaky bark was now pulpy wet and slippery after the rain. Yesterday’s grazes were still tender under his overalls.
It took longer, but he finally climbed as high as yesterday’s mark, from which he could reach into the nest and leave the egg. He turned it in his hand so he could put it down in the nest and take the handkerchief away without jolting or dropping it. He reached in exactly as he had yesterday, and at that moment an eagle, with a terrifying scream, soared up at him from below the cliff edge, vast wingspan, wider than his father was tall, raised high and back, and talons extended.
Robert froze, his hand still extended into the nest, his head involuntarily tucked down hard against his arm. The bird sailed across the nest and Robert felt a searing-hot pain across the back of his hand and scalp, as the stretched talons scored a groove and passed over. Blood started coming down into his eyes, but he wasn’t yet aware of it. The shock of that looming fury from below the lip of the gorge galvanized him. He slid down the tree like a chute and scrambled tripping across the clearing, his only preoccupation being to get under the cover of the woods before the bird returned for its second run. If he was still in the open, he knew it would kill him; the only thing that had saved him so far was his clinging to the protection of the tree, which was hard for such a large bird to negotiate. He just made it back to the woods. He heard another fierce scream, and the flutter of powerful wings overhead, as he rolled tight as a hedgehog between a rock and the base of a pine.
He had scant memory of his stumbling descent through the woods. Apparently, he had pulled his sweater up over his head to stop the blood flowing into his eyes. His mother must have needed all her cool temperament to handle the sight of the gory little ghoul who had staggered through the kitchen door. He managed to say with some insistence that he was putting the egg back, as though the bird was being unreasonable. But his mother straightened that out: “Putting the egg back was the right thing; what he was punishing you for was your taking it yesterday. I never intervene in your woodland adventures, but right now I’m putting a two-month ban on all bird nesting. And don’t think your father will lift it when he comes back.” She had managed to repair the gash in the b
ack of his hand. “But I don’t think I should do your head wound. I can’t really see how bad it is through all the hair. I’m afraid we’ll have to go to Dr. Macleod’s surgery.” Which was no fun. The doctor shaved his head along the line of the talon’s gouge, and poured liberal amounts of iodine into the wound for cleansing, before closing the deepest part of it with four stitches. He did not yell, but the tears rolled down his face. “Cheer up, young Robert,” said the doctor, going about his work. “It’s not everyone who’s been scored by an eagle.” And indeed, he found that his wound, and the way he had got it, earned him considerable cachet in the playground. At recess his classmates would line up for the ritual bowing of his head.
CHAPTER 7
The Last Pulse of Reverie
Another poor night; there was no dramatic bolt of pain, but the screws of the fever were being turned tighter on him all around, he felt, and whatever tissues within were being racked, they were now, he imagined, paper thin and would soon tear away. He did not have what Margaret had had, but, whatever it was, it clearly had the strength to do the same job. And wasn’t that what he wanted?
Rules for Old Men Waiting Page 8
