by Sarah Hall
Lawrence becomes slightly petulant, his voice wavers.
It was a hard time for everyone. But you could have come anyway. She was our mother.
Yes, Lawrence, she was our mother.
Possession, inference, the terrible shared knowledge of Binny. There’s another long pause in what is already a deeply punctured conversation.
Emily knows all about the past, Lawrence says, I’ve told her. She always made an effort with Mum.
She does not know everything, Rachel thinks. Whatever power imbalance or folie à deux exists between her brother and his wife, she is certain Emily has little more than the basic facts about life with Binny at her disposal. Her brother’s naïvety is staggering. She wills herself not to point out the obvious: that it was an unpassable test to set, coming to the funeral against the wishes of her sister-in-law. That the death of their mother is, at the end of the day, none of Emily’s business. But the call is intended as placatory. The truth is, she does not like the idea of losing her brother, much as she has been telling herself that she could live with it. And for her brother’s sake, they should fix what needs fixing. He does not have the disposition for war; she can hear the upset in his voice. Better to subtly out-flank the wife.
Lawrence? Are you there?
She can hear murmuring in the background on the other end of the line, the occasional muffled outburst. Emily is monitoring Lawrence’s side of the conversation. Tell her to . . . If she wants to . . . Why doesn’t she . . . over here. Rachel can picture the scenario: her brother’s hand covering the mouthpiece, him trying to find some private space to talk. The small blonde woman flapping her hands spastically beside him, furious at being left out. Nor can her brother see what is really going on – women fighting with each other through him. Though raised in a house of its mastery, he seems blind to female psychology: the competitive undercurrents, the desire for control. In his mind the problem is likely to be due to the stress of the tragedy, the old Binny-Rachel conflict, and Emily’s concern – dynamics he understands or would like to imagine.
Just a minute, Rachel.
Lawrence says something to his wife. His tone is gentle, but firm. Caught between hard places. Emily has had months, years, to dig her trenches. But, influential though she may be, Rachel knows her own position is strong, perhaps the strongest. She has historic authority, simply from being the older sibling in a family where dysfunction reigned. She was neither soft-hearted nor patient as a sister, but she still held his hand all those times, opened tins of mince for dinner, got him to school and back. And there is rare status in being prodigal; it creates a void, a longing even. Lawrence wants a stable family. He needs Rachel, and always has.
Lawrence, she says. Are you there?
Yes, I’m here. Just one minute. Sorry.
There’s another muted outburst: Don’t apologise to her . . . She does not envy her brother’s position. He’s a decent man, and tries hard. He has always hated mutability and mess, ever since he was small. A boy does not flee from a bohemian household without the desperate ambition to be proper, and act properly. He does not go on to become a solicitor, to marry, to pay for IVF and care homes without some kind of moral drive. Rachel hears a door shut.
OK. Sorry. Two conversations at once. Go on.
Look, she says. Binny and I didn’t get along, granted, but that has nothing to do with you and I and we shouldn’t let it muddy the water. I just think we should meet and talk. Start from scratch.
Her tone is level, calm, exactly as if she were talking to volunteers, instructing them on sedation, how to inject or take a sample, inserting the syringe into the big muscles of the hindquarters. Be confident, you are in charge. First law of an argument: those who remain reasonable will make others seem unreasonable.
My feeling is no one else can fix things for us, she continues. You and I need to address the problem ourselves. You said as much last time we spoke. I’ve thought about that and I agree.
The tactics are manipulative. An agreeable-seeming sister repeating back to him his own idea. He sighs. He is thinking now, about what he thinks, what he wants. Emily is clever, Rachel knows, but she plays a negativist game, which is easy to undercut.
I’m glad you phoned, Rachel, he says. Because I do think we should try. I’d like to see you.
Great. How about the Saturday after next? We could go for a walk. We could meet halfway between here and there?
No, that’s OK. I’ll come up to you. I haven’t been back since the funeral. We can get a proper walk – maybe Blencathra?
Sure, if you can get up here in time.
I’ll leave early. I’ll get breakfast on the way.
Which will not make Emily happy at all, Rachel thinks. For a moment she feels vindicated, a petty triumph. But it was easy and perhaps unfair. Her brother loves the Fells; he is a nostalgic Cumbrian exile, rank and file. It does not take much to lure him home. His voice has altered; he sounds pleased, excited even. He would probably not admit it, not even to himself, but the idea of being untethered from Emily for a day must be heady.
OK, shall we say the White Horse car park, at eight-thirty, nine?
OK. See you there. Hey. Email me your new address.
I will. Bye for now.
Bye, Rachel. Look forward to seeing you.
They hang up. She feels better. She might have invited him to the estate, but she is not ready to bring him in that close, not yet. Small steps. She makes coffee, takes it out into the garden, and sits on the wooden bench under the quince tree. Yes, she does feel better. Deep down, the thought of estrangement from her brother has been worrying her. And the idea of failing him has always bothered her. Lawrence. Little man, the house visitors all used to call him. How he hated not being big enough to take them on. He never understood Binny, why she favoured the ones she did; he could not get past the visceral dislike of their presence in the small cottage: the sudden forced intimacies, strangers coming shirtless from the bathroom, kissing his mother’s neck, looking at her rump or chest, some kind of hunger in them like starved farm dogs. What’s up, little man? Shoving past them to get out, his face aflame. Don’t get your trousers in a twist. If I were your father, I’d soon teach you some manners. The agonies in his face. His whacking of sticks against the porch roof and the tyres of their cars. Always talking about his friends who did have fathers: fathers who liked them, fathers who lived in the same house, who stayed. Always looking at Rachel as if she could explain, as if she could get him out of a fatherless world.
She’d collect him from school and walk him home along the river. Every rabbit warren and culvert and pile of leaves delayed their return. Will Jonno be gone when we get back? Will Derrick have finished mending the car? She’d let him linger, prodding dead birds and dumped badgers; she’d watch him from a distance. Will there be anyone home except Mum? I don’t know, maybe. He was pitiful, that’s how she’d felt then. Stupid. Only when he was a teenager and some girl showed him, or some friend revealed the details, did everything become clear. The atrocity of what they’d all been doing to his mother. The fact that she was complicit. Two years later he left home.
Rachel sips the coffee. It tastes too acidic. She needs to call the surgery back – the doctor has rung twice and left messages. Instead, she sits and watches the sky. The day and the weather feel split, still and mild at ground level, but the clouds above are moving fast and dark on currents of strong air. Her phone pings. She opens a text from Stephan Dalakis. A picture of the male, as promised, running in the enclosure. Since being found in the illegal trap in North Moravia by the Hnuti Olomouc patrol and the subsequent leg surgery, he has made a full recovery. He is pale, with almost white fur, perhaps three years old. She texts back. Magnificent.
Her thoughts drift back to Lawrence. They’ll walk; try to get along, build some bridges. Either something will take, or it won’t: these things can’t be forced. Emily will have to be dealt with later. Rachel and her brother have spent so little time together as adults, bu
t maybe they’ll have more in common than she thinks. With Binny mediating affairs, nothing was ever straightforward. With their mother gone, perhaps there’s a chance. The only way forward is to try. After another bitter sip, her throat stinging, she tips the coffee out onto the grass.
*
All week, rain. Big splashing drops on every surface like a child’s illustration of rain. Blue vanishing light and winds from nowhere, bringing slant, destructive showers, or fine drizzle. At night there is rain that exists only as sound on the cottage roof, leaving doused grass in the morning and pools in the rutted lane. The streams and rivers on the estate swell. Spawn clings to submerged rocks and reeds as the current tugs. The lake accepts the extra volume indifferently. And then, when it seems the rain will never end, there’s an explosion of sunshine, the startling heat of it through the cool spring air. Within days a green wildness takes over Annerdale. Dandelions come up, early meadow flowers; the moorland ripens, sphagnum, cotton grass, the white filament heads turning in the breeze. Rachel settles in. The fire in the cottage draws well, the place is cosy. A delivery van comes to the estate every few days with food – all she needs to do is supply an order. She hangs the Kwakwaka’wakw wolf carving over the mantelpiece. Her practical life seems simple. She gets into the habit of leaving the front door unlocked – it is a safe corner of the estate, and there have been no more lurking visitors. There’s less to secure than at Chief Joseph – no bear-proof lids on the bins, no summer mosquito plugs.
The surgery calls again. She arranges to have the scan and combined screening. It is not deferment exactly, not a decision. She does not know what it means. She tries to hold it all loosely in her mind, tells herself she can still go back, undo it. Things begin to come together on the project. The importation paperwork is completed, freight flights confirmed. She interviews candidates for the position of full-time assistant. Eleven in total, after a ruthless CV cull. The interviews are held in a room at Abbot Museum in Kendal – Thomas Pennington is chairman and sponsor there, naturally, and it is not far from Oxenholme station. The job goes to an earnest – and, she suspects, Buddhist – South African, who has cut his teeth in the game parks of KwaZulu-Natal, worked with jackals and other predators. A PhD in the UK, time in India. His credentials are excellent, an expansive mind, calm-natured. He arrives at the museum on a bicycle, which seems fitting. Twenty-four hours later he is invited to take up residency at the estate. She agrees to let Sylvia work on the project. The girl will have to muck in, get used to the order of things. She will have access to the quarantine pen, will be inoculated; she will be fully one of the team.
Rachel walks the estate, gets to know its broad rises, the woods, the lake circumference. The distance to the Horse and Farrier and the village Co-op is not far. She carries a stash of granola bars, and a plastic sick-bag when she drives, though she doesn’t need to use the bag. She thinks about calling Kyle, but doesn’t. It is better to give herself some distance, never mind the blossoming sense of guilt.
A few days later she is summoned again to Pennington Hall to be introduced to staff members. Among them is the gamekeeper, Michael Stott – the man, she is fairly sure, who was watching the cottage the day of her arrival. His frame and gait are familiar – the tipped shoulder, the rightful stride. He is lean, with carved cheeks and a sore mouth, hair so full and dark it seems false, given his age; he must be pushing seventy. His trousers look as if they’ve been made from tar. There is an immediate hostile crackle between them. He does not meet her eyes when she says hello, and the handshake is cursory, patronisingly soft. Within minutes, everything becomes clear, and she has the measure of him. Louveterie.
Much to our relief, Michael’s decided to stay on, Thomas says, standing between the two of them. He’s been here a very long time. His father worked with my father. He knows the country here like the back of his hand, don’t you, Michael.
Worked with not for, she notices. The modern sensitivities of class. Michael Stott sniffs and nods and says nothing. Behind the Earl’s statement is the question of whether and why he might have left. He does not look the type to retire – ever. A mutineer, then, who does not approve of the radical new project. And why would he, if he is the herdsman?
I’ll leave you two to get acquainted, Thomas says. Michael will be able to assist you with anything you need, Rachel.
He closes the door behind him, leaving the two of them alone. She’ll be damned if she’ll make small talk. No doubt Michael will want to stake his claim, assert his authority. Sure enough, after a moment he clears his throat, and offers her some advice.
Now then, Mrs Caine. You might want to park the car round the back of Seldom Seen. It’s hard getting anything through with it left so casual.
She doesn’t bother to correct his mistake. But she won’t have him think she’s town-bred and insensible.
I intend to. Once the ground’s dried out a little – don’t want to get stuck, Mr Stott, and have to be towed. That would waste everyone’s time.
Right. When is it your pups get here, then?
Pups. She holds his gaze.
Two weeks.
Michael takes a leather tobacco pouch from his inside pocket, removes but does not light a pre-rolled cigarette. He is housebroken, she can see, enough to shake her hand in front of the master and abide by the rules of the house. But it is clear that he is not happy. Not happy about being displaced in the chain of command, for she now holds a lateral position, perhaps even a higher position. Certainly not happy about the reconstitution of Annerdale, with its new apex predator. She, and they, represents dire competition, beyond his experience. The beloved deer, previously targets for the noble shotgun, are to become glorified dog food. Over the years her sensibilities have been honed. Michael is a king’s soldier: good at tradition and old orders. If he’d lived twelve centuries earlier, he’d have made substantial money for their pelts from Charlemagne.
She looks at his hair – real, unnatural, something oddly lusty about it. Good genes. They will have to find a way to work together.
We should talk about the health of the herds, she suggests. Next week suit you, Mr Stott?
Fine.
They do not fix a specific time or date.
The next day she sets up the office in the carriage house and for the following two days she answers letters and emails from locals, tries to educate and placate. There is more livestock in the east and north of the region; the correspondence is mostly from paranoid west Lakeland smallholders foreseeing escape and slaughter on an almost gothic scale. Concerned mothers. Photographs taken by French shepherds of bloody-necked flocks are forwarded to her. We do not want this type of thing in our country. She sends back links to EU collaboration projects. There are queries about compensation – how much will the estate offer per head for a kill if they get out? Despite the campaign the estate has tried to run, there is much ignorance and fear, much education needed. To each reply she attaches the project’s mission statement and an information sheet.
The opposition groups are more troubling. The Ramblers. The Farmers’ Union. They are organised and have funds. Towards the end of the second day, she opens a garbled email from a person or entity simply called ‘Nigh’, accusing the estate of a variety of sins, cruelty and corruption, satanic tendencies, and playing God. There’s a Virgil quote: Here we care as little for the cold north wind, as the wolf cares for the number of sheep in the flock. What does it mean? She smiles. If Kyle were here he would enjoy such a missive. Batshit crazy, he would say. Delete. For a moment she feels sad – not sad but wistful. Kyle. He was a good friend. She saves the email in a folder entitled ‘Cranks’. There has been no correspondence from any animal rights activists. The silence is not comforting, and does not necessarily mean inactivity. The project is in every way humane, but it will be on the radar.
The following morning, perhaps in response to her send-outs, there’s a small protest at the main gate of the estate, next to the CCTV camera. She receives a call from Hon
or Clark alerting her.
No need to come down. It’s all under control.
You’re sure? Rachel asks. I can come. I don’t mind.
Absolutely. It’s all under control.
She goes about her business, meets with Alexander at the local veterinary clinic. The waiting room has several people in it, but he invites her in, past the Gorgonian receptionist, makes them coffee, which she struggles to finish. He seems ill-suited to the environment of the clinic. He is wearing glasses rather than contact lenses, but the scholarly look seems imposed on his large head. They discuss keeping antibiotic prescriptions on site at Pennington Hall and the forthcoming implantation surgery. The telemetry equipment has been ordered from Arizona – a company she knows and trusts. Alexander is skilled, has performed a similar procedure a few times before, pit-tags, though not on a large canine.
Will it go in the abdomen? he asks.
Yes. A benign spot, but pretty deep. It can’t just slip under the skin or they’ll chew it out.
They bring up a picture of the device on his computer. The implant is state of the art – three inches long, including the transmitter and antenna, housed in a plastic sleeve and coated in physiological wax.
It’ll wall off in the body, she says. The radio signals are very good. And we’ll get other data – temperature, activity levels, heart rate, that kind of thing.
That’s bloody cool, he says. And they just get on with it?
They do. I’ve seen great results. It doesn’t impair hunting or effect breeding. We’ll have to do it in the quarantine pen – are you OK with that?
Yeah, fine. Not sure Sally could cope with them in reception anyway.
Leaning close over the screen, he smells of deodorant and sweat. He reminds her of the boys in school years ago, blunt, funny, without deliberate romantic charm, but somehow possessing it.
Afterwards, she goes to the shops, then returns to the estate. As she passes the main gate, the gathering seems to have dispersed. But that evening her attention is caught by a piece on the regional news. . . . The now-turned Willy Wonka of Wolves, who is no stranger to controversy . . . She turns the television up. A local news crew has filmed the protest. There’s a group of about twenty or so: a parked miscellany of walkers, agriculturalists, and upset housewives. A spokesperson lists their grievances to the reporter. The fence’s impact on the landscape, newts, birdlife, the view. The reintroduction of a now unnatural species. The restriction of public access to the estate. As the spokesperson is interviewed, the estate gate opens and Thomas Pennington strides down the driveway, looking – as Rachel has not yet seen him look – every inch like landed gentry. The camera focuses in. Top to toe tweed, a flaneur’s casual step. A cane! Oh Christ, she thinks, this cannot end well. He arrives and greets the crowd. The reporter’s tone becomes slightly hysterical as he conducts the interview. The wilder charges are put to the Earl: that keeping live prey inside a closed unit with predators is cruel, that the game enclosure bill was passed due to bribery. All are refuted, gracefully. Wolves hunt deer, he says, it’s simple evolution. And in this age of transparency and freedom of information, all bills are open to public scrutiny. A woman in the crowd calls out. You’re a danger to society. They kill people! Thomas Pennington turns to her. My dear lady, these creatures are no harm to you or I. You could leave a baby in a pram in the enclosure and it would be quite safe, quite safe. Rachel groans. There’s a swell of indignant noise from the protesters at such a suggestion. A baby! The scene looks like a pantomime. The publicity is terrible, and Thomas Pennington, she realises, is a liability. The reporter summarises to camera. Thomas bows his head slightly – thank you for coming – as if they had all been attending a tea party. He turns and walks back up the oak-lined driveway. The report cuts to his biography, sweeping aerial shots of the estate and old photographic footage of the microlight crash – the tangled frame, shorn of both its wings, a black patch on the ground where the contraption burnt. The insinuation – that the Earl’s projects fail spectacularly. The next report begins.
