Hindsight

by Peter Dickinson

  ‘My God!’ said Clumper, from beside Paul in the aisle.

  ‘I’ve got to stop this. Back to your desks, boys. Do set questions.’

  Nobody paid any attention. He was clumping towards the door when Chinnock called out, ‘It’s all right, sir. Mr Smith’s come.’

  The Man strode into Paul’s line of sight, heading purposefully across the gravel towards the fat man in green plus fours, who waved him away with angry gestures as soon as he reached the grass. The Man took no notice, but walked right up to the fat hunter and started to talk to him. Paul could hear that voice in his mind, The Man really angry, speaking his words slowly and not very loud, but completely flattening. Paul thought it might not work, used on an adult; and, yes, the fat hunter was arguing. The hunter next in line came up to join him. Stocky was crossing the gravel. The argument was going on, two against one, when Stocky arrived, but The Man said a few words and Stocky came hurrying back. The fat hunter put a whistle to his lips and blew. All the other men stopped shooting and came walking up the slope along the edge of the trees. Down by the lake three deer, almost as if they’d been waiting for their chance, raced into the open. Across the grass arena lay about twenty others, the ones near the guns quite still, but some of those which had got further struggling to rise or else twitching or threshing where they lay. The hind up by the gravel was still not dead.

  The Man paid no attention when the hunters gathered round him, but spoke only to the fat one who had been in charge. Some of the others shouted, or pushed forward and tried to get into the argument. Stocky came trotting back, carrying The Man’s Sam Browne with his first war revolver in the holster; all the school knew that belt because The Man often brought it along to show them when he was reading something like a Bulldog Drummond, where revolvers came in. The Man took it from Stocky and strapped it on.

  Somehow that seemed to settle the argument. He was in charge now. He spoke to the whole group. They moved apart, obviously unhappy and angry, but still doing what he told them. He came walking across the grass along the line of the slope, but after a few paces glanced up at the school. He halted and with his left arm made a sweeping sideways gesture. Without words and at that distance the command was still unmistakable. Several other form-rooms looked south and, no doubt, at all the windows boys’ faces could be seen, pale ovals behind the glass; masters with much more discipline than Clumper might have failed to keep their forms at their desks.

  Paul was dipping his pen when he heard a different-sounding shot, just one. Shoes and chairs scraped on the floor.

  ‘Better not,’ said Clumper. ‘He knows which window it is.’

  ‘Sunday drills all round,’ said Dent. ‘What does, Chinners?’

  ‘Killing the wounded ones with his revolver,’ said Chinnock.

  ‘Thank God,’ said Clumper.

  The Man said grace before boys’ dinner which he usually only did on Sundays. He held up a hand to stop the kitchen staff taking plates round.

  ‘Some of you may have seen that bad business this morning,’ he said. ‘It is the sort of thing which happens in wartime, when the men who know how to do it are away fighting the Hun. I have written to Lord Orne to tell him what happened. This afternoon nobody, and that includes praes, will go beyond the line of Painted Trees. The taxis will come for the First XI as arranged. Everybody else will join School Walk, with Mr Stuart and Captain Smith. Meanwhile the men who came this morning are going to search the park for wounded deer and dispose of them as humanely as possible. I shall stay to see that it is done properly, so Mr Hutton and Mr Stock will go with the taxis to St Dominic’s. It is unlikely that the men will find all the deer they have injured, but because of petrol rationing and for other reasons, only four of them will be able to come back tomorrow, so we will have to take over. I will tell you about the arrangements for this later. I suggest that if you are writing letters you do not make too much fuss about what has happened. Thank you, gentlemen.’

  Sunday morning was strange and beautiful. Only Freshers went to church. The rest of the school was organised into groups of three, each with a section of the park to search. A master, the Captain in Paul’s case, was in charge of several such groups.

  Paul and two 2b-ites, Hale and Porter ma., were given a curving valley to the north of West Drive, almost at the lodge gates, an area so far from the school that Paul had only crossed it once in his roamings. There was a copse on the left-hand slope. Paul decided to comb up the valley and back on the right, and then do the more difficult part with the copse.

  There must have been a slight frost in the night. The air had that smell, like wet iron, but by ten, when they started along the hillside, the sun was warm on their backs. The ground was firm, but a little greasy on top. Only a few fronds in the bracken clumps retained their gold; the rest had subdued to a deadish brown. The boys moved along the slope about ten yards apart, keeping in line. Their instructions were to search any cover where a wounded deer might lie, but to keep clear of moving deer, study them, and report any that seemed to be injured.

  Naturally all the deer were very wild and shy, and constantly on the move because of the search. Paul saw a troop of five scamper away north as he started up the valley; normally, seeing a human intruder at that distance, they would have left at a sedate and disdainful lope.

  Paul had his gun and had made the other two find sticks. They stamped paths through the larger bracken-patches and poked into the depths on either side. It was a slow process. After half an hour three hinds came running over the ridge, probably escaping searchers on the far side. One had a dark brown smear on its haunch and looked lame. They made for the copse. Porter found a last year’s antler and insisted on carrying it with him.

  Paul wasn’t sure whether to search the copse or leave it and simply report that a wounded hind was hiding there, but as they approached it, searching the slope beyond, the three hinds broke cover and ran away south, so the problem was solved.

  ‘We’ll go very quiet and slow,’ he said. ‘We’ll start at the outside, going round in a circle, and then we’ll do the middle.’

  Like all the woodlands in the park it was much more open under the trees than similar places which Paul knew at home. The trees were mostly oak and alder, and a few hollies. There were some nettle clumps at the edge, but no brambles—the deer seemed to keep them down. They were about half-way round when they heard a crash and a thump and a young stag broke out into the open ahead of them, racing away at a speed which showed there was nothing wrong with him. That seemed to be all, until as they passed a holly near the centre of the copse Paul heard Hale’s voice from the other side, deliberately calm.

  ‘Found one. Goner, I think.’

  It was invisible until you lifted a branch of the holly aside, a young hind lying on its side on the pale spiny leaf-fall. There was a black wound on its flank and streaks of black along its underside and smears on the leaves. It must have bled quite a bit. Paul crawled in and tentatively touched a hoof, then gripped the thin leg beyond. The limb was stiff and the deer did not stir. He hauled the animal out into the open. They stood looking down at it, Paul thinking, I have touched a deer. Pity it had to be dead. Porter and Hale experimentally took a pair of legs each and lifted. They could get it clear of the ground, but only by raising their hands to shoulder level.

  ‘Not like that,’ said Paul.

  Trying to work with the unhurried calm which he had found so impressive in certain adults, he untied the sling from his gun and used it to lash the animal’s legs together, then poked the gun through under the knot.

  ‘You take that end, Hale,’ he said. ‘Take your sweater off to make a pad on your shoulder.’

  They had to keep in step, and rest quite often, and the back of the deer’s head bumped and dragged on the grass all the way, but they got it down to the drive and found the Captain waiting. He gave them no praise, but sent them back at once to finish searchi
ng their section.

  Paul worked along the final slope in a sort of sad exhilaration, something to do with being out of doors on a warm gold morning at the end of the year, something to do with having performed what he thought of as an adult task with competence, something to do with the idea of having at last touched a deer. He felt no sense of horror. The horror had been yesterday. In fact he felt as though he had been part of a kind of magic which was undoing the horror, making it come right, and that by finding the dead deer they were being allowed to know that their efforts were accepted. It was the only way, he said to himself. I would never have touched a live one.

  After boys’ dinner First XI and praes went off to be beaters. They wore scarlet XI shirts over their sweaters and carried red flags made by Matron. Four hunters had come back with proper rifles, and the idea was that they would now work systematically through the woods and copses where any more wounded deer might be lying and try to finish off as many as they could. They would start with Lake Wood and the copses on the east of the park. Meanwhile a party under the Captain would go along West Drive and collect the five dead deer that had been found on that side. There were two wounded and unable to move, but not yet dead; during dinner The Man went out with the boys who had found them to finish them off. When he heard about this Paul felt a wave of shock. So easily his deer might have been in that state, and then the morning would have been quite different in his mind, just ugly and pitiful, not sadly glorious.

  The day changed for him, but only slowly. The first part of the afternoon was spent helping to carry two deer from a copse in the south-west corner of the park, well beyond the ruined chapel, back up to the drive. This was hard work, as they were full-grown animals and the ground was rough and boggy for some of the way. They used Paul’s carrying system but it didn’t work so well because the deer were heavier and longer in the leg, so that really it was a matter of four boys dragging them all the way. By the time he had done both trips Paul was muddy and exhausted. They piled the bodies on to the school’s rubber-wheeled baggage trolley and hauled them back to the garages, where they added them to the pile from yesterday. There were twenty-three bodies in all, inside the furthest garage because of foxes—stags, hinds, yearlings, fawns, a bloody hillock of fur and horns and hooves and marbly dead eyes. The morning seemed ages away as Paul looked at them. A lorry was supposed to be coming to fetch them on Monday.

  It was now nearly four, so he went and cleaned himself up, changed into his Sunday shirt, and started to look for Mr Wither to ask for permission to tea out and miss the film show. This was a formality, but The Man had told him to do it every Sunday so that the duty master knew where he was.

  ‘Seen Clumper?’ he asked Greatrex.

  ‘Gone.’

  ‘Gone?’

  ‘Haven’t you heard? Loader was there, looking for Clumper to report for his drill. Found him out in the hall in a bang-up bate, yelling at The Man in his Study about leaving and not coming back.’

  ‘Clumper in a bate?’

  Greatrex’s large stodgy face was alive for once with the joy of gossip.

  ‘Bang-up true,’ he said. ‘Saw him myself, off down East Drive in his buzzer, sixty m.p.h., luggage in the back seat.’

  Paul treated the news as a standard school rumour, interesting but probably mistaken. Loader was most unlikely to have understood what he saw, let alone reported it right. That was the reason why the poor chap was always in trouble, breaking school rules not out of cussedness, but because he’d got them wrong.

  ‘Oh well,’ he said, ‘bang goes my Eton Schol. Who’s duty master?’

  ‘Captain, I think.’

  Paul couldn’t find him at first, but then ran into him as he emerged into Long Passage from the green baize door that led to the entrance hall.

  ‘Permish to tea out, sir?’

  The Captain stared at him with his sullen, meditative gaze.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘But, sir …’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But …’

  He managed to cut the sentence short. The Captain had dished out Sunday drills for the use of that one syllable. For a moment Paul thought this was about to happen to him, but then the Captain seemed to change his mind.

  ‘The beaters are still out,’ he said. ‘You will wait till they return. You will then ask the head prefect whether the shooting has stopped. If it has, you may go.’

  ‘Oh, thank you, sir.’

  Paul went up to Schol to wait, filling in the time by scribbling his letter home.

  Now, after the predictable let-down of the afternoon, the curve of the day suddenly plummeted. The sharp decline began at the moment Paul reached into the slot in the locker-room for his gun and found it wasn’t there. This had happened before, old Dent teasing him by hiding it, always in some new place, but there wasn’t time to play the game now and search. He was late for tea already. He didn’t need it. It was only an old stake.

  But as he trotted down the slope towards the lake path Paul felt strangely unprotected without it. He realised that for the first time since the maimed deer had threshed their lives away, he was crossing the actual ground where it had happened. For the last thirty hours or so he had achieved a mysterious, detached acceptance of the slaughter—probably The Man’s doing, the way he had used his authority to stop the shooting and had thus asserted that the values St Aidan’s stood for had weight in the real world—but now the ugliness of the incident reasserted itself. The horror was not over. Scammell had told Paul that the hunters had only managed to kill three more wounded deer. That couldn’t be all. Somewhere in the chill beginnings of dusk there were deer wandering around the park with buckshot in them, the pellets burning into flesh, inward organs an oozing mess, pain like fire that would ease to a heavy ache when the wounds started to fester. And even the ones that were already dead, the ones The Man had shot to put out of their misery or whose wounds had been bad enough to kill them in an hour or two—their agony had been real, had happened, was part of the truth, could never be undone. When Paul had gripped the foreleg of the dead deer in the copse the touch of that stiff chill limb had been reassuring, had told him that the horror was over. But it wasn’t. It was part of the world and always would be, because it was part of himself, inside him.

  He ran faster. The change from summertime had lopped an hour from the afternoon, making his twenty-minute lateness seem much more. Night was not far off. There was going to be another frost. The nip of it was already in his nostrils. As he ran through the chestnut grove, though it was still light enough for him to see the far shore of the lake between the tree trunks, something like night fear gripped him. It did not fully take shape. He was still running really because he was late for tea, but in an unformulated way it was as though the spirit of the park, the life that belonged there and expressed itself in the trees and the bracken and the lake, but most clearly in the deer, was gathering itself out of these vague elements and becoming a coherent thing, a being, which, when night came and it was fully formed, would stalk the park sniffing for a victim, a symbol of its vengeance for the senseless cruelty of the hunt. By the time he reached the iron gate Paul’s pace, though nothing like a panic run, had become more urgent than a mere lope for lateness.

  As the metal clanked behind him he slowed. He didn’t want to arrive panting so that he couldn’t speak. The un-imaged fear (like the knowledge that a dream is about to turn into a nightmare though nothing terrifying has yet occurred) left him. He was on safe ground, and at Molly’s he would not only be safe, he would be happy again. She would restore by her presence the glow of the morning. That was really why he had been running so fast—to be with her. By the time he had passed the wooden door into the garden he was hardly panting at all.

  There were lights in the conservatory, faint still in the pallor of day, but suggesting comfort and warmth behind the glass. The palm trees, lit from below, curv
ed up in friendly silhouette. The conservatory looked like a bubble, with its own private world inside it. There was a boy in Midway called Colthurst whose uncle sent him science fiction magazines from America, and in one of these Paul had read a story about people travelling to and fro through the centuries in a sort of force-field, a bubble in time, which nothing could get into or out of because that would change the whole course of time. In the story they’d somehow managed to pick up a bacillus from the Black Death and brought it back into the future, but the writer had cheated in order to have a story at all. He should, Paul had thought, have somehow infected the future with an idea. But Molly’s conservatory was like that bubble. Nothing that happened in the outside world could touch it. Her first words seemed to say this.

  Paul found her sitting on his stool, toasting crumpets.

  ‘Sorry I’m late,’ he said. ‘What are you going to do about the black-out?’

  ‘It’s all right. Nobody can see us here.’

  ‘An aeroplane could.’

  ‘Don’t be absurd. Why should they bomb me?’

  She got up and let Paul take the fork from her.

  ‘I was hoping you’d bring me some lovely venison,’ she said.

  ‘I found a dead deer but I wasn’t allowed to keep it.’