The Tenderness of Wolves

by Stef Penney

  ‘You got a sweetheart? That little dark girl–is she your sweetheart?’

  ‘Oh … Ida? No, she’s just a friend–we walk home from school some days.’ God! Did everyone in the county think Ida was his girlfriend? ‘No, I …’

  For some reason, he found he wanted to talk to Laurent about it. ‘There was a girl I liked. Everyone likes her actually, she’s real pretty, and real nice, too … At the end of term she asked me to a picnic. She’d never really spoken to me before … and I was really flattered. But I didn’t go.’

  There was the longest silence after that. Francis felt uncomfortable and began to wish he had not spoken of it.

  ‘Don’t know what’s the matter with me!’ He tried to laugh it off, not altogether successfully. Laurent put out a hand and patted him on the leg.

  ‘Nothing is the matter with you, mon ami. My God, nothing at all.’

  Francis looked at Laurent then. The Frenchman’s face looked very serious, almost sad. Was it him? Did he make people sad? Maybe that was it. Ida always seemed to be sad around him lately. As for his parents, well … they were gloomy beyond belief. Francis tried smiling, to cheer him up. And then things changed. They got very slow–or was it very fast? He realised that Laurent’s hand was still on his leg, only not patting him now; now it was stroking his thigh with strong, rhythmic movements. He couldn’t stop looking into the golden-brown eyes. There was a smell of brandy and tobacco and sweat, and he seemed to be glued to the chair, his limbs heavy and immovable as if filled with a warm, viscous liquid. More than that, he was being drawn towards Laurent, and no power on earth could have stopped him.

  At some point Laurent got up and went to the still open door to close it, then turned to Francis. ‘You know, you can go, if you want.’

  Francis stared at him, breathless and suddenly horrified. He didn’t think he could speak, so he shook his head, just once, and Laurent kicked the door shut.

  Afterwards, Francis realised he would, at some point, have to go home again. He even remembered the tool he had come for, although it seemed an inconceivable length of time ago. He was scared of leaving in case things went back to normal. What if the next time he saw Laurent he behaved as though nothing had happened? He seemed perfectly relaxed now, pulling his shirt on, with his pipe clenched between his teeth and clouds of smoke swirling round his head, as though this were a normal, everyday thing, as though the earth had not shifted on its axis. Francis was scared of going home, of having to look at his parents with these eyes, wondering, from now on, if they knew.

  He stood in the doorway with the flaying tool, uncertain how to leave. Laurent came over to him, smiling his wicked smile.

  ‘S … so …’ Francis stuttered. He had never stuttered in his life. ‘Shall I come … tomorrow?’

  Laurent put his hands on Francis’s face. Rough and tender, the thumbs traced his cheekbones. Their eyes were absolutely on a level. He kissed him, and his mouth felt like the centre of life itself.

  ‘If you like.’

  Francis walked up the path towards home, in ecstasy and in terror. How ludicrous: the path, the trees, the crickets, the fading sky, the rising moon, everything looked just the same as before. As if it didn’t know, as if it didn’t matter. And he thought, as he walked, ‘Oh God, is this what I am?’

  In ecstasy and in terror: ‘Is this what I am?’

  Susannah was forgotten. School and the concerns of schoolboys faded into a distant past. That summer, for a few weeks, he was happy. He walked through the forest, strong, powerful, a man with secrets. He went with Laurent on hunting and fishing trips, although he neither hunted nor fished. When they met anyone in the forest, Francis would nod to them, grunt curtly, his eyes on the end of the fishing line, or scanning the trees for signs of movement, and Laurent would hint that he was becoming a tremendous shot, eagle-eyed and ruthless. But the best times were when they were alone at the end of the day, in the forest or at the cabin, and Laurent would become serious. Usually he was drunk as well, and he would take Francis’s face in his hands, looking and looking as if he couldn’t get enough.

  Looking back, there weren’t so many times like that–Laurent insisted that he should not stay at the cabin too often, or people might suspect. He had to spend a reasonable amount of time at home too, with his parents. He found it difficult–ever since that first evening, when he had walked in to find them sitting down to dinner. He held up the tool.

  ‘Had to wait for him to come back.’

  His father nodded briefly. His mother turned round. ‘You were so long. Your father wanted to get it done before dinner. What were you doing?’

  ‘Told you, I had to wait.’ He put the tool on the table and walked upstairs, ignoring his mother’s weary cries about dinner.

  Trembling with shivery joy.

  Since relations with his parents were rudimentary at the best of times, they did not seem to notice a difference if he was silent or distracted. He spent the time between visits to Laurent’s going for walks, lying on his bed, carrying out his chores with impatience and bad grace. Waiting. And then there would be another night at the cabin, or a trip to a fishing lake, when he could be truly himself. Seized moments, intense and sharply flavoured, when time could dawdle like Sunday afternoon, or rush like a speeding torrent. If he counted the number of nights he had ever spent at Laurent’s cabin, what would it come to?

  Maybe twenty. Twenty-five.

  Too few.

  Francis is jolted from his past by Jacob walking into his room. He is grateful for the interruption. Jacob looks more agitated than he has ever seen him. Francis rubs his hand over his face as if he has been asleep, hoping Jacob will not see the tears.

  ‘What is it?’ Jacob has opened his mouth but nothing has yet come out.

  ‘A strange thing. The woman Line and her children, and the carpenter–they have left in the night. The carpenter’s wife is threatening to kill herself.’

  Francis gapes. The carpenter, whom he has never met, has been spirited away by his nurse. (So why did she kiss him?)

  Jacob paces. ‘It is going to snow. It is not a good time for travel, not with children. And I saw her, the night before last, in the stables. She asked me not to say anything. So I did not.’

  Francis takes a deep breath. ‘They are adults. They can do what they like.’

  ‘But if they don’t know the country … they don’t know how to travel in winter …’

  ‘How long before it snows?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘How long before the snow? A day? A week?’

  ‘A day or two. Soon. Why?’

  ‘I think I know where they might have gone. She spoke to me; she asked about Caulfield.’

  Jacob follows his thinking. ‘Well they might make it. If they are lucky.’

  An hour ago they came to the first trees, small and sparse to be sure, but still trees, and Line felt a rush of joy. They really are going to get away. Here is the forest, and the forest goes all the way to the lakeshore. It is almost as though they are already there. Her piece of paper tells them to go southeast until they hit a small river, and then follow it downstream. Torbin is sitting on the saddle in front of her, and she has been telling him a story about a dog she used to have as a child in Norway. She makes him sound like the dog in the fairy story with the soldier, with eyes as big as dinner plates.

  ‘You can have a dog too, when we find somewhere to live. How would you like that, huh?’ It slips out before she can bite her tongue.

  ‘Somewhere to live?’ echoes Torbin. ‘You said we were going on holiday. We’re not, are we?’

  Line sighs. ‘No, we’re going to go and live somewhere else, somewhere nicer, where it’s warm.’

  Torbin squirms round in the saddle to look her in the eye, a dangerous look on his face, closed and taut. ‘Why did you lie?’

  ‘It wasn’t really a lie, darling. It was complicated and we couldn’t explain it all to you, not at Himmelvanger. It was important that no one there kne
w or they wouldn’t let us go.’

  ‘You lied to us.’ His eyes are hard and confused. Per and the red-roofed church have made him a pedantic little boy. ‘Lying is a sin.’

  ‘It wasn’t a sin in this case. Don’t argue, Torbin. There are some things you can’t understand, you’re too young. I’m sorry we had to do it this way but there it is.’

  ‘I am not too young!’ He is angry, his cheeks red with cold and excitement. He is wriggling around now.

  ‘Sit still, young man, or I’ll give you a smack. Believe me, this is not the time for arguments!’

  But somehow in his wriggling he manages to stick his elbow hard into her stomach, causing her to gasp and feel a surge of anger. ‘Enough!’ She takes her hand off the reins and whacks him on the leg.

  ‘You’re a liar! Liar! I wouldn’t have come!’ he screams, and wriggles out from between her arms and slithers to the ground. His ankle buckles beneath him momentarily, then he picks himself up and starts to run off, back in the direction they have come.

  ‘Torbin! Torbin! Espen!’ Line shrieks, her voice a shrill cry, yanking on the reins to try and turn her horse round, which it doesn’t seem to understand. It stops still, then doesn’t move, like a train arrived at a station. Espen, up ahead with Anna, pulls his mount round, and sees Torbin darting between the trees.

  ‘Torbin!’ He jumps off, with Anna in his arms, and gives her to Line, who has dismounted, leaving her horse where it is.

  ‘Stay here, I’ll get him! Don’t move!’

  He runs off after Torbin, dodging round trees and stumbling over fallen boughs. In a frighteningly short time, they are out of sight. Anna looks at Line with her solemn blue eyes, and starts to cry.

  ‘It’s all right, darling, your brother’s just being silly. They’ll be back in a moment.’ On impulse she bends down and puts her arms round her daughter, shuts her eyes against her cold, greasy hair.

  It is probably no more than a few minutes before they reappear between the trees. Espen’s face is set hard and he drags a cowed Torbin by the hand. But by then Line has realised that something far worse has happened.

  She and Anna have been searching, at first thinking, we’ll find it right away; a round, hard, steel object like a compass doesn’t belong here, it will stick out like a sore thumb. Line turns it into a game for Anna, with a reward for the one who finds it. The game soon palls: the ground here is particularly treacherous: humps of rock, ankle-twisting hollows, hidden rabbit holes and tangles of roots, crisscrossed with dead and rotting boughs. She can’t remember if she dropped it when Torbin hit her, or after, or when she was trying to pull the horse behind her. The tortured ground gives no sign of where they have been.

  She tells Espen she can’t find it, and Torbin sees the fear in their faces and shuts up. He knows it is his fault. All four of them start to look, treading in stoop-backed circles around the indifferent horses, pulling aside lichen and rotten leaves, sticking their hands into dark, clammy holes. Every direction looks mockingly the same: scrub pines growing and dying where they grew, falling and leaning in each other’s arms, weaving around them a matted, deadwood trap.

  Anna is the first to notice. ‘Mama, it’s snowing.’

  Line straightens, her back aching. Snow. Silent, dry flakes float around her. Espen sees the look on her face.

  ‘We’ll keep looking for another half-hour, then we’ll go on. We can work out the direction pretty well anyway. It was more important to know the direction to reach the forest. This is the easy part.’

  Once Torbin gives a cry and pounces, but it turns out to be a round grey stone. Line is secretly relieved when Espen calls a halt. She loves him for the way he takes command, gathering them together for a little talk, and picking the direction to go in. He points out that lichen gathers on the north sides of the tree trunks, so that is what they have to keep an eye on: where the lichen gathers. To Line the lichen looks evenly distributed, but she shuts this thought away, slams and locks the door. Espen will know; he is their protector. She is only a woman.

  Espen takes Torbin on his horse, and they move off silently. The snow muffles everything, even the clink of bridles.

  I go to the stables for no good reason, other than that I am thinking about talking to the women, but, to tell the truth, I am afraid of them. They look tough and alien and contemptuous, tempered by grief. Who am I to question them, I who have never been overburdened with charity and kindness, or even curiosity about my fellow men? The dogs at least are pleased to see me, crazy with the boredom of confinement. Lucie rushes up, tail wagging, her jaws stretched wide in that happy dog-smile. I feel an absurd rush of fondness for her, feeling her rough head under my hand, her tongue like hot sand. Then Parker is there. I wonder if he has been watching for me.

  This is the first time he has come to find me. The first time, that is, since he knocked on my door in the middle of the night and we made our bargain. Yesterday I would have been pleased; today I’m not sure. My voice comes out shriller than I would have liked.

  ‘Have you got what you wanted?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Why you came. It was nothing to do with Francis or Jammet. You wanted to see Stewart again. Because of something that happened fifteen years ago. Because of a stupid fight.’

  Parker speaks without looking at me. Carefully. ‘That’s not so. Jammet was my friend. And your son … well, he loved Jammet. I think they loved each other, didn’t they?’

  ‘Really!’ I utter a strangled sort of laugh. ‘What a strange way of putting it. You make it sound …’

  Parker says nothing. Lucie goes on licking my hand and I forget to move it away.

  ‘Really, I …’ Parker seems to have his hand on my arm, and although a part of me wants to fling it off, I don’t. ‘Really, I don’t …’

  I can’t believe I didn’t know. ‘What are you saying?’ My voice crackles like dry leaves.

  ‘Jammet was … Well, he had been married, but sometimes he also had … friends. Young men, handsome, like your son.’

  Somehow he has guided me away from the door, over to the dark corner stacked with bales of hay, and I am sitting on one of them.

  ‘The last time I saw him alive–it was in the spring–you know, he mentioned someone who lived nearby. He knew I didn’t judge him; not that he cared about that.’

  There is a half smile on his face. He begins to light his pipe, unhurried. ‘He cared about him deeply.’

  I smooth my hair into place. There are some loose strands that have slipped out of the knot, and I can see in the long light from the doorway that a couple of the hairs are white. I have to face facts. I am getting old, and my head is full of thoughts I cannot bear. I cannot bear the thought I did not realise what was happening. I cannot bear the thought that Angus hated him for it, for I realise now that he knew. I cannot bear the thought of Francis’s grief, which must have been–must be–extreme, secretive, unbearably lonely. And I cannot bear the thought that when I saw him, I did not comfort him nearly enough.

  ‘Oh God. I should have stayed with him.’

  ‘You are a brave woman.’

  This almost makes me laugh. ‘I am a stupid one.’

  ‘You came all this way for your son. Hating it. He knows that.’

  ‘And it has done no good. We haven’t found the man who made the trail.’

  Parker doesn’t jump in and deny this. He smokes for a minute in silence. ‘Stewart showed you the scar?’

  I nod. ‘He says you did it in a fight while you were on a journey.’

  ‘Not on the journey. After it. I’ll tell you a couple of things he probably didn’t say, and then you can make up your own mind. Stewart was promising. Everyone said he would go far. He was the right sort. One winter at Clear Lake he made a group of us go on a journey to another post. Three hundred miles. The snow was three feet deep before the drifts. The weather was terrible. You don’t travel in the middle of winter unless you have to. He did it to prove that he could.�
��

  ‘Was this the famous journey Mr Moody spoke of?’

  ‘It was famous, but not for the reasons he gave. There were five of us, to start with. Stewart, another Company man called Rae, Rae’s nephew, who was seventeen. The boy didn’t work for the Company; he was visiting the country. Then there was myself and another guide, Laurent Jammet.

  ‘As I said, the weather was bad; deep snow and storms. Then it got worse. There was a blizzard, and by some luck we found a cabin, a hundred miles from anywhere. The blizzard went on and on. We kept waiting for it to blow itself out, but it was one of those January storms that go on for weeks. We ran low on food. The only thing we had plenty of was liquor. Jammet and I decided to go and get help. It seemed like the only chance. We told the other three we would come back as soon as possible, left all the food there was, and set out. We were lucky. After two days we found an Indian village, then the weather got worse, and we couldn’t go back for another three days.

  ‘When we did eventually get back, something had happened. We found Stewart and Rae in a drunken stupor. The boy was dead, lying on the floor, suffocated on his own vomit. They never made much sense, but what I think had happened was this: Stewart had talked of what he called, “going out in a blaze of glory”. He joked about it. I think, when we didn’t come back right away, he gave up. He decided they should drink themselves to death. Rae and he didn’t make it, but the boy died.’

  ‘How do you know it was his idea?’ I am shuddering inside at the thought. The boy was the same age as Francis.

  ‘That was the way he thought.’ His voice is flat with disgust.

  ‘And then what? Didn’t they sack him?’

  ‘How could they prove it? It was just a tragedy. A mis-judgement. That’s bad enough. Rae went back to Scotland, Stewart moved on, and the boy’s under the ground. I left the Company. I haven’t seen him since.’

  ‘And the scar?’

  ‘I heard him criticising the boy. Saying he was weak and scared, and wanted to die. I drank then.’ He shrugs, without regret.