‘You’re welcome to try,’ Ikey said, quietly, as half-dressed boys gathered round, relishing the promise of a fight to relieve the fearful tedium of an autumn Sabbath. ‘The fact is, Piggy, I’m tired of watching a weed like you take it out on Scruff and as far as Horsey is concerned you’ll have to stop picking on him because he happens to be the son of my guardian’s new rector and I’ve been asked to keep an eye on him. Sorry and all that, old man!’
The murmur of conversation in the big room had ceased. Everyone there regarded Ikey Palfrey as an eccentric, given to elaborate jokes of this kind but championship of a first-termer, and a first-termer of Beanpole Horsey’s type, was carrying a jest too far, particularly if it entailed challenging the only boy in the dormitory who shaved. They moved closer, interested and expectant but Henley-Jones, senior boy in the House, said, ‘Well, you can’t leave it there, either of you. You’ll have to fight and you can’t do it today. Sunday fights are taboo.’
‘I’d be happy to oblige tomorrow,’ said Ikey, ‘but only on conditions. If I beat Boxall he doesn’t touch Horsey again, not until he’s played in.’
The nicety of the challenge intrigued them. Henley-Jones said after a moment, ‘That’s reasonable. I’ll get the gloves during dinner-break. We haven’t had a proper House fight for a year or more but you’ll get a hiding, Palfrey.’
Boxall said, angrily, ‘Look here, why do we have to wait until tomorrow? I’ll give him his rations now since he’s so damned hungry for ’em! It’s time someone took Palfrey down a peg or two!’ but Henley-Jones replied, as the five-minute bell rang, ‘Please yourself about that, Piggy, but if you’re caught fighting in the dorm a House perk has to dab whoever he catches and Toothy Gilbert is on duty today. He’s about half your size and you’d look damned silly bending over the radiator for him! If I were you I should go about it according to rules.’
There was a murmur of agreement. A properly organised fight was infinitely preferable as a spectacle to a dormitory scuffle ending in the contestants getting caned by the duty prefect, which was something they could see any old day. Ikey said, ‘There’s sense in what he says, we’d best make it tomorrow, Piggy!’, and he walked back to his own bed.
He had been grateful for Henley-Jones’ intervention for it was no part of his plan to leave things to chance and there was something that had to be done if he was to face Boxall in the Fives Court with any chance of beating him. He dressed quickly and went down in the boiler-room to consult Gobber Christow, the school lamp-trimmer. Ikey had a relationship with the school servants that his intimates found difficult to understand. Without hint of patronage he could talk their language and for two years now any favours demanded of them—the purchase of cigarettes, the backing of horses and other infractions of the rules where their services were in demand, Ikey had been chosen to bribe them. It was his familiarity with the world of sculleries, bootholes and furnace basements that had won from Gobber Christow a reluctant admission that he had once been a professional bruiser.
‘Gobber,’ he said, without preamble, ‘I’ve got to fight Piggy Boxall tomorrow afternoon. He’s a good deal heavier than me and his reach is longer. How would I go about beating him?’
Gobber had been boilerman at High Wood for twenty-five years and thought he knew boys. He screwed up his bloodshot eyes and summoned to mind the image of Piggy Boxall, mentally staking out the distance from solar plexus to chin and equating it with the weight, reach and spunk of Palfrey, a young gentleman who never forgot to tip him at the end of term. Ikey, making a guess at the reason for his deliberation, said, ‘It’s late in term, Gobber, but I could raise a bob or so.’
‘I don’t want no bob,’ Gobber said, ‘not ’till Christmas that is, but you can lick that long streak easy enough, if you mind what I say. You’ll ’ave to dance about out o’ reach of ’im for a round or two and wind him. Then you lets fly a right to the head and his guard goes up. Before it comes down again you land a left on ’is belly-button, hard as you c’n drive and down comes ’is guard agin. With any luck he doubles within reach and you c’n weight in left and right, many as you c’n land. Mind all I say and I’ll bet on you.’
‘Would you go over it with me again, Gobber?’
Gobber stirred his tea, swallowed a mouthful and got up from his box.
‘I will that,’ he said, ‘a dozen times jus’ so as you don’t forget. Now I’m Boxall, pretty well a head taller …’ and the lesson continued, the pair dancing a gavotte round the confined space and the ponderous Gobber, blessed with strong stomach muscles, taking punishment without the satisfaction of being able to exploit Ikey’s rushes. Afterwards, as they drank more boiler-brewed tea together, Ikey said, ‘You don’t have half a bad time down here, Gobber, with nothing expected of you but to keep the lamps trimmed and the boilers stoked up! I suppose you’d think I was stretching it if I told you I envy you sometimes. The fact is,’ he went on, forgetting his usual caution, ‘I’m a bit of a misfit and sometimes I think I don’t belong out there at all.’ But Gobber, with the keen perception of the lowly and middle-aged replied, ‘I don’t reckon you do neither an’ I made dam’ certain of it long since but I wouldn’t let on if I was you, not even to me! It wouldn’t do, you see, for come to think on it you’re a bloody sight luckier’n the rest of us! You got the best o’ both worlds, so make the most of ’em and don’t forget—keep out o’ range, ’till he’s blown. Meanwhile I’ll see if I can get long odds on you, four to one mebbe.’
The fight after second school the next day followed the predicted pattern so closely that, looking back on it, Ikey wondered if the boilerman was clairvoyant.
Henley-Jones refereed and Ikey endured the storm of jeers from the gallery throughout the first three rounds when the enthusiasm of spectators spent itself in derisive shouts of ‘Mix it!’ and ‘Oh, stand up to him, Palfrey!’ but Ikey was never seriously rattled, bringing to the fight the same patience as he brought to all his complex personal problems. In any case he was in far better training than Boxall and came out of his corner at round four comparatively fresh, whereas the older boy was breathing heavily and resolved to make a speedy finish of it. Driven into a corner Ikey rode out a heavy punch on his shoulder then swung wildly at his opponent’s head. Just as Gobber had predicted Boxall’s guard shot up, leaving his solar plexus open to attack and the straight left that followed folded him like a penknife, so that several spectators cried ‘Foul!’ but Henley-Jones, revelling in his official role, shouted, ‘Balls! It was above the belt! Go in and win, Palfrey!’ and Ikey stood back to deliver the only telling blows of the match, two lefts and a right to Boxall’s head that brought him to his knees.
It was the first technical knock-out ever witnessed at High Wood and they would have made much of him but Ikey slipped away on the excuse of changing and, again making sure he was unobserved, sought out Horsey and led him into the cover of the beech plantation. There was a seat overlooking the cricket pavilion and they sat there in the dusk, Horsey tight-lipped and blinking nervously, Ikey without a mark on his face and triumph in his heart. He said, at length, ‘Well, you won’t have any more trouble from Boxall but you’ll still have to take it from the others. I can’t fight everybody and I wouldn’t if I could. It’s accepted that new kids should go through the mill!’
‘Why is it?’ Horsey asked, unexpectedly, and Ikey, mildly outraged, replied, ‘If they didn’t they’d get bucky and start putting on side.’
‘It’s funny,’ the boy said slowly, ‘we have Chapel twice a day and lessons read from the New Testament, but nobody really listens, do they? I mean, the Head might be reading the call-over list because nobody here actually believes in Jesus Christ!’
Ikey had the same disinclination to discuss Jesus Christ as any other sixteen-year old but he could not help wondering at the new boy’s detachment, as though he was a kind of missionary plumped down among a swarm of heathens, appalled by the hopelessness of his situa
tion and the improbability of witnessing justice or mercy. He said, uncomfortably, ‘It’s nothing to do with the Bible. You just got to learn to look after yourself! It’s not so hard as it seems at first and it gets easier every term,’ and then, recklessly, ‘You’ll be spending the hols on the estate and I daresay I’ll see something of you. Maybe I can give you a tip or two. You don’t have to play everything their way but you have to pretend to, like me.’
The boy looked at him curiously. ‘You mean you don’t believe in it either? In all this fighting and bullying? Because if you don’t, then why did you fight Piggy Boxall? I didn’t ask you to and I wish you hadn’t. I think fighting is uncivilised and stupid,’ and for some reason Ikey was humbled, the mantle of patronage falling from him so that suddenly he felt naked. He said, irritably, ‘It’s no use talking to you, Horsey! Your pater ought not to have sent you to a place like this,’ and he got up and stalked through the dusk towards the pool of light shed by the lamps of the quad arch. ‘Blast the kid,’ he said to himself, ‘he’ll make a lily of me if I don’t bloody well watch out!’
V
At the extreme north-west corner of the mere, beyond the maze of rhododendrons in which Ikey had lost himself in the snow, the ground rose steeply to a great outcrop of sandstone where the older woods fell away, oak, beech, sycamore and thorn, giving place to a straggle of dwarf pines and Scots firs that had crept down from the evergreen belt of the Hermitage plateau. It was here that the Shallowford badgers had their sets and from her eyrie at the top of the slope Hazel Potter could watch them lumbering to and fro, like paunched merchants in the streets of a sleepy country town. This was the spot she preferred beyond all others, for nobody ever came here now that Smut had turned horticulturist and it was here, under the overhang of a great, slabsided rock, that she had made her home.
It was unlike any other house in the Valley. Its hearth was a triangle of flat stones and its south side was open to sun and wind but inside it was always dry and warm, with a floor of crushed bracken, a wicker screen that kept out the slanting rain and cavities to store her modest utensils, a pitcher, a few tins, a stock of kindling, a roasting spit and some flour sacks that she used for bedding when the fancy took her to stay here overnight.
In the spring, when the woods below were opening their vast green umbrellas and the birds were busy all day in and about the shrubbery, she spent most of her time up here, composing her prose poems about the creatures she overlooked, cooking a mash of vegetables and rabbit meat in her iron pot and sometimes braiding wild flowers into her hair so that she looked like one of the allegorical goddesses for whom Edwardians blushed at the Royal Academy, the type of floral-crowned beauty painted by popular artists, like Henrietta Rae. When the sun was warm, however, she advanced even further into the world of the painters, throwing off her rags of clothing and sprawling naked on the jutting slab that was her roof. The sun warmed her through and the vantage point gave her a temporary affinity with starlings rushing down from the plateau into the puffs of pot-bellied cloud drifting down the Valley. Cataracts of sounds that were more expressive than words would slip from her tongue to lose themselves in the woods below, heard but unheeded by the stoat, the field mouse and a swarm of tits, wrens and robins in the thickets. She had as much company as she needed, for almost all things living between the red outcrop and the rhododendron forest below had come to accept her long ago. The badgers never gave her a second glance and neither did the lame vixen, nursing cubs in a shallow earth under the wreck of an eighty-year-old pine that had crashed into the Valley. The hedgehog passed her with his belly clear of the ground and the field voles, who frolicked on the stumps of charred firs, sometimes scuttled into the cave to look for dry leaves for their nests. During her long watching spells she took careful note of everything that went on around her and because she had the power of remaining utterly still she added a little to her store of secrets every day. She had her favourites, among them the otter, who occasionally left the mere and sunned himself on a rock half-way up the slope; and the old mad cat, who grinned at her over the remains of a chicken dragged all the way down the escarpment from the most easterly of the Periwinkle runs. She had often heard Will Codsall curse that cat and run for his gun when he caught a glimpse of yellow-white fur in the long grass but she never told Will where it might be trapped at the expense of an old hen. It had to live, she supposed, the same as the white-waistcoated stoat and the bridled water vole and the vixen who also raided Periwinkle runs. Here, where the bracken grew shoulder high, there was always movement and changing colours. Kingcups, willowherb, ragged robin and dwarf red rattle covered the ground near the overspill of the stream at the foot of the slope but nearer the summit grew cowslips, battalions of foxgloves, sea-pinks and wild thyme and in and out of this riot darted a hundred varieties of birds, some as familiar as the golden plover and as impudent as the magpie, others shy summer visitors who came back year after year, like the sand-martin and the monotonous cuckoo, one of the few birds Hazel did not welcome. She was not always absorbed by the panorama or the creatures going about their business between the haze that was the summit of Blackberry Moor and the more definite blur to the south, that was the sandstone cliffs of the Bluff. Sometimes, if the mood came on her, she could forget all else in a long, self-satisfying appraisal of herself, contemplating her golden-brown legs, her flat belly and her high breasts that were a source of special wonder to her for she could not recall anything more regularly formed, unless it was the spread of the lower branches of her favourite oak in the meadow a mile south of her eyrie. She would sit crosslegged and study herself minutely, beginning with her flower-decked hair that reached to her waist and ending with a dedicated scrutiny of her supple toes, usually coated with the fine red dust of the rocks. Then she would leap down from the slab and fetch the burnished lid of one of her tins to use as a mirror, holding it up at an angle and glancing sideways at her shoulders, then moving it in a slow, tilted sweep, until she could catch a distorted glimpse of her rounded buttocks and the deep dimples above them. Usually she was pleased and would shake out her hair, raise her arms and wriggle like a savage beginning a ritual dance, exclaiming with the deepest satisfaction, ‘Youm bootiful, Hazel! Bootiful, do ’ee yer, now? Youm the most bootiful of all, for youm smooth an’ white an’ goldy and you baint much fur about ’ee, neither!’ If anyone living in the Valley below could have seen and heard her suspicions that she was mad would have been confirmed and perhaps someone would have set out to capture her and put her away for her own safety, but they would have been making a terrible blunder, for Hazel Potter was not in the least mad but simply primitive and her method of self-appraisal differed little from that of her sisters or any other woman in the Valley, twisting and cheek-sucking before a bedroom mirror. She was, moreover, probably the happiest woman in the Valley, or any other valley in the West, for her isolated way of life was accepted by her mother Meg and her brother Sam in his cottage below. She never harmed anyone or anything, if one excepted the rabbits she trapped and roasted or the gulls’ eggs she gathered and swallowed, and even when they did not see her for days at a time no search-parties went to look for her and bring her back to the Dell. They had long since given up sending her to Mary Willoughby’s school and she had completely forgotten what little she had learned there, so that at seventeen she could neither read nor write but seemed little the worse for it for she gave Meg far less trouble than had either of her three sisters when they were growing up and quarrelling with one another over men and ribbons. She would appear and disappear like a half-tamed bird and she made no demands upon anyone. Every now and again, usually during spells of bad weather, she would reappear in the Dell and eat sparingly from the family stewpot, or steal one of her sister’s discarded garments, but apart from this she fended for herself and even a conventionally minded soul like Edward Derwent did not remark on her when he caught a glimpse of her flitting across a glade or standing silhouetted against the skyline.
And yet, although exquisitely self-contained, there were moments in the spring of the year when Hazel was vaguely conscious of her isolation, when it made itself known to her by a curious sensation, a faint and remote pricking, located somewhere between her breasts, as though, without leaving a puncture, a sliver of gorse had got under the skin and was trying to work its way out.
At first she paid little attention to it but as the warm April days succeeded one another, and the murmur of the woods swelled so that it reached her rock like the wash of the sea, the pricking became more insistent and sometimes converted itself into a choking feeling in the base of the throat that made her eyes smart, so that she could no longer lay inactive staring down at the green umbrellas and would spring up, pull on her dress and plunge down the pine-studded slope to the rhododendrons and through the green tunnels to the mere and here, if she was lucky, she would see Sam, or Joannie, or old Aaron the osier cutter, and would forget what had brought her here in such a hurry.
It was during one of these brief melancholy spells, on a warm April day, that she saw something break the calm surface of the mere on her side of the islet. She was lying naked on her rock, screened from above and below by gorse and bracken and the landscape, usually so alive, was listless under the noonday sun. At first she thought the wide ripple was caused by the pike that Sam said had lived there since Old Tamer was a boy but soon she saw a swimmer moving slowly across the mere to the western shore. As she watched, surprised and a little alarmed, she saw the figure make a landing near the spot where Smut had hidden from the Heronslea keepers. She recognised him at once, even at this distance, and her heart gave a great leap of pleasure, as a tear, after hovering for a half a minute, splashed down her cheek and beaded a hart’s tongue fern growing on the edge of the rock. She jumped down into her cave, pulled on her ragged dress and without knowing why held up the shining lid to study her reflection, noting that she had a string of bird’s foot trefoil braided into her hair and also that she was smiling and that her eyes were moist. She stood still for a moment, pulling faces at herself and tossing her hair this way and that and said with deliberation, ‘I’ll bring un yer! I’ll show un the house, an’ mebbe he’d stay on a bit to watch things!’
Long Summer Day (A Horseman Riding By) Page 64
