by Tim Pears
‘Oh, you will love Weimar, Lottie. Your German relations will amuse and entertain you, I promise.’
‘They are not my real cousins. And Papa says I will not be able to take Blaze with me.’
‘Yes, but there are muscular horses in Prussia too – the Trakehners. This is I believe the most spirited warm-blood breed in the world. Come, Lottie. Back to work. We shall read some Fontane.’
*
At lunchtime Lottie went to the kitchen where until this year she had always shared her midday meal with the servants. She understood it was frowned upon now and her meal was served to her in the dining room instead. She went to the larder and returned with a tomato, an apple and a potato of almost identical size. She laid them upon the kitchen table. ‘Look at these, Cook,’ she said. ‘Which has the most water inside it?’
The cook was working at the stove and did not look at the girl or the items, but said, ‘I haven’t the foggiest, my lovely.’
Lottie shook her head. She turned to the three servants who had taken their places around the table for lunch. She repeated the question. ‘It might be important,’ she said. ‘If you find yourself in a crisis. A person can go weeks without food but you’d never last one week without water. You’d be really up the stick.’
The head gardener Alf Satterley said he would study the matter. He reached over and took up the tomato, rotating it in his hands like a cricket ball. He put it back. The apple he scrutinised likewise, then the potato. ‘I should a reckoned, Miss Charlotte,’ he said, ‘to decide by weight. Water I should say weighs more than the flesh of a fruit or vegetable. The potato weighs the most.’
Lottie made to speak but the gardener resumed. ‘Yet I do not believe it, for I consider bitin into each a them. And when I does consider it, I find the tomato has the most water. The spud the least. The apple somewhere’s in between.’
The others had followed what the old man said and now turned to the girl to hear her judgement. She frowned. ‘You are right. A lucky guess.’ She turned and said, ‘I suppose I had better have lunch now, Cook,’ and walked out of the kitchen.
*
After lunch, while waiting to resume her studies with Ingrid, the girl sat upon a sofa in the drawing-room watching her maid Gladys cleaning. She bent and dipped a cloth in a bucket of warm water and wrung it out till it was merely damp then wiped around the outside of picture frames. She climbed the stepladder to reach the picture rail.
‘Do you know,’ Lottie said, ‘what most of the grime you’re collecting is composed of?’
Gladys looked down at the young mistress. ‘I should say tis mostly dust, Miss Charlotte.’
‘House dust is largely made up of cells of the skin we shed. That’s what you’re wiping away.’ Lottie closed one eye. She balled her hand into a fist save for thumb and forefinger leaving a miniscule gap between them. She held this up to her open eye and said, ‘Thousands of infinitesimal flakes of dead skin.’
Gladys descended the ladder and rinsed the rag in the bucket once more. ‘I should prefer to think of dust as dust, Miss Charlotte, if I may.’
‘Or hairs,’ Lottie said. ‘Do you not find human hairs when you sweep the carpets? We lose about one hundred hairs a day from our heads. They fall out.’ She saw the look of alarm on the maid’s face. ‘We grow many more, Gladys.’
‘I suppose,’ the young woman said, ‘that Mister Shattock, the groom, his cottage must be clean’s a whistle these days.’
*
When she joined her father in the drawing-room for afternoon tea, Lottie found Alice Grenvil already there. She was in the act of pouring tea for Lord Prideaux.
‘Lottie, my darling,’ Alice said. ‘Will you have tea or lemonade?’
It was their custom for the maid to leave the tray upon the table, with cakes or scones, and Lottie would serve her father. ‘I shall cut the cake,’ she said. ‘Which would you prefer, Papa, ginger or fruit cake?’ She kept an eye on Alice. ‘Papa only takes a dash of milk,’ she said.
‘I know,’ Alice told her.
‘He cannot bear weak tea. Can you, Papa? And one sugar.’
Arthur Prideaux asked after Alice’s father, his friend Duncan. She said he was well but London life bored him. He wished to come home. ‘He says in his letter that the glory of our capital is the Thames flowing through it. But whenever he sees the river all he wants is to get a boat and row into the countryside.’ Alice asked Arthur if he did not feel duty bound to attend the Upper House himself. He told her that he felt no such obligation for he had nothing original to say on the sort of matters under discussion and would not inflict his views on other members, but that he did attend if called upon. When there was some abhorrent bill to be resisted, for instance. He relied upon Duncan to let him know if his presence was required.
‘Papa is not a country bumpkin, you see,’ Lottie said. ‘Whatever he claims. He follows events, but from a distance.’
‘Through field glasses,’ her father said.
‘Mama was more involved, wasn’t she, Papa? In improving the lives of people on the estate. People still tell me about her work. And in the village. She persuaded Papa to build the new school.’
Arthur Prideaux accepted a second piece of fruit cake. Alice tried it too and said that she thought their cook to be top drawer.
‘She is indeed,’ Arthur said.
Lottie stuck with the ginger cake. It was dark, almost black with molasses, and moist. She savoured its texture in her mouth, its spicy taste on her tongue.
‘Alice has a present for you, my dear,’ her father said.
‘Oh, yes,’ Alice said. She rose and went out of the room, returning carrying a long box or case. She laid it on the floor at Lottie’s feet and, kneeling, unclipped the catches and lifted the lid. She swivelled the case towards Lottie.
‘You know what a terrible shot I am,’ Alice said. ‘And frankly I have no interest in improving myself. Your papa says you almost certainly do.’
Lottie gazed at the pair of light Churchill guns. Then she jumped off her chair so that she too was kneeling on the carpet and hugged Alice Grenvil and thanked her profusely. She let go and studied one of the guns and ran her hands along the stock and the barrel and the decoration around the name E. J. Churchill.
Alice glanced up at Arthur Prideaux and smiled and he nodded to her, smiling likewise.
4
Lottie Prideaux opened the door to the library and walked in. The room was empty. She looked around for the magnifying glass. Her father used it to read the old almanacs and encyclopaedias, whose print was too small to read with the naked eye. The people of earlier epochs had better eyesight. This was, he claimed, but one of many measures of human decline. She found the instrument and removed her jacket. Though she intended only to borrow the glass, she hid it inside the jacket when she left the room. She walked across the hallway and up the stairs. She saw and heard no one, yet felt herself observed. The big house itself seemed to be listening to her, watching her, as she climbed the stairs.
In the attic nursery Lottie laid out the implements she might need upon the table. In the hours between tea and dinner she could expect to be undisturbed. The small hammer she had found in the cellar, amongst a box of tools that she believed might once have belonged to a cobbler, though she was not sure at all. The tiny nails or pins she’d begged from the estate carpenter, who said he used them when glazing windows and gave her a handful. The small, sharp pair of scissors were in the sewing kit that had once belonged to her mother. The slightly larger, blunter pair she’d found at the back of a drawer in her father’s desk. She had never seen him use them and did not believe he would miss them. The tweezers or forceps were her own. The board was an old bread or chopping board found in the shed in the back yard. She had two knives, one a penknife, the other a small kitchen knife Cook had missed at once and even now, six months later, would shake her head periodically and bemoan: ‘Wherever has it got to?’ Sid Sercombe had showed Lottie how to sharpen them, and given her a
whetstone, a small bottle of oil and a sharpening steel. The pipette she had been given by the new veterinary surgeon, Patrick Jago.
Lottie unwrapped the parcel the under keeper had given her that morning and placed the rat on its back upon the board. She spread out its four clawed feet and pinned them to the wood with smart taps of the hammer. The creature had been dead no more than twelve hours and smelled strangely like a dog. A sharp but not unclean aroma.
She counted the nipples or mammary glands. A row of five along each side of its belly. There were three openings above the tail: this, the vaginal; this, the urethral; this, the anal.
Lottie gripped the rat’s brown hair with her tweezers and lifted a pinch of skin above the urethra. Using the sharp scissors she inflicted a small wound. Then using her tweezers she lifted the skin and inserted the larger scissors, their blades unopened, into the wound, and poked them in from side to side to rupture the connective tissue and separate the skin from the muscle beneath. One of the scissor blades was rounded at its end and blunt. With this one under the skin and the other sharper one above, she cut the skin of the rat along the middle of its belly up to its thorax.
Holding up the flap of skin with the tweezers, Lottie separated more of the tissue between skin and muscle using the same scissors, lifting the flap away, first on one side, then the other. The world around her disappeared as all her concentration settled on the small carcass before her. With the sharper, smaller scissors she cut the skin in diagonal lines out to each of the four legs, and lifted the two flaps of skin out, and pinned them as she had the claws, with a nail at each corner. Now she could smell the slightly metallic odour of blood.
All the viscera were there dimly visible beneath the encasing wall of muscle. Lottie made a hole in the rat’s muscle wall beneath where she had done so in the skin and cut up through it, careful not to disturb what lay beneath. The muscle was thin from being stretched by the rat’s pregnancy and easier to cut than normal. She sliced up as far as the ribcage, then cut through the thin bone as well. Cartilage and bone breaking made a faint sound and was soon done. Now she could scent a rank smell of meat. She made diagonal cuts in the muscle as she had the skin and lifted it out in flaps on either side and pinned it likewise.
Lottie had been surprised to discover that she was not squeamish. The inner structures and workings of the small bodies Sid gave her were so engrossing. She picked up the penknife in her right hand with her tweezers in the left and delved into the rat’s innards. There was its diaphragm, separating the abdominal cavity from the thoracic cavity. There was the dark red liver. Beside the liver was the rat’s stomach. She lifted the stomach and found what appeared to be a further part of the liver, yet it was separate from it so could not be, surely. She consulted the anatomy textbook the vet had given her. There. It must be the spleen.
The small intestine was orange. She did not know why. It was covered by globules of white fat. When people spoke of guts did they mean the stomach only or the whole of the digestive tract? The small intestine fed into the slightly larger intestine. Where they met was an organ peculiar to herbivores, the caecum, where the cellulose they consumed was broken down. Humans possessed one but it had no function and was connected to the appendix. Or was the caecum another word for the appendix in humans? She could not remember. The one in this rat was a tiny lump of reddish matter.
The heart was a compact little fist, with the lungs on either side. They looked like nothing at all but she found her pipette and inserted it into the rat’s mouth and pumped in air and saw the lungs bloom. The heart that beat, boom-boom, boom-boom, and lungs that breathed in and out, in and out. How incredible they were. People didn’t realise.
Lottie was taking her time, she was aware of that. Affirming what she already knew, putting off the fresh discovery awaiting her. She moved aside the organs she’d identified and found another, surrounded by fat. Using the knife she cut away the fat to reveal a bean-shaped kidney. It was a similar dark red colour to the liver and the spleen. Perhaps a little more purple. There were many miniscule blood vessels attached to it.
The other kidney Lottie would have sought and studied to see how they each connected to other organs but her patience ran out. She beheld the womb or uterus, normally a long, insignificant ribbon of pale flesh; now it ringed the rat’s belly, a sausage curled around its innards.
Lottie counted the shapes inside. Six on one side, five on the other. Eleven rat babies. She cut into the uterus and carefully removed one of the foetuses. Attached to it by a pale umbilical cord was its dark red placenta. The foetus was tightly bound inside its amniotic sac. She cut this open and scraped it off, and studied the tiny, strange, embryonic creature before her. She could make out its head, its snout. The forelimbs, the hind limbs, all beginning to emerge from the blob of flesh. Were those not its eyes just starting to form? She could feel a kind of tingling sensation. These cells had multiplied and divided. Life was formed. Did people – her father? Her tutor? – not realise how extraordinary this was? No one had told her. It was something she was discovering for herself. Biology. The science of life. It was more fascinating than anyone could imagine.
Part Six
ON THE FARM
1
Leo, September 1913–April 1914
The day was Michaelmas, the twenty-ninth of September, 1913. The boy on the white colt rounded up the flock of one hundred and twenty ewes and secured them in a hurdled pen. The horse had taken to the work.
The shepherd put a dark red, powdered iron oxide in an old bucket. He added linseed oil and stirred the mixture to a paste. Leo caught the first ewe with the crook and brought it stuttering on three legs to the old man. He examined each ewe. Some had fared badly in the summer from the fly. Others had damaged udders. Mastitis. He took the boy through ailments from which sheep commonly suffered. What he should look out for. The beasts were prone to scab, mange, worm. They could breed despite such conditions. As he had grown older this was one thing he had learned. Eye disease, foot rot. Another thing was that they could lie down and die from no apparent cause. ‘There’s naught the little sods likes better an dyin on you,’ the old man said. ‘I swear they thinks on nothin else while they’re grazin.’
The shepherd Vance Brewer wore a coat of dark grey fustian, a hard-wearing cloth with a heavy weft. He had a white moustache, part stained or burned brown from the cigarettes he smoked. His clothes smelled of Jeyes fluid and cider and tobacco. His breath stank of onions. He doubtless smelled of sheep, too, but so did Leo himself, and was no longer bothered by it. It had only taken him a week or two to become accustomed to the animals’ unpleasant odour.
The shepherd mouthed the ewes. As they squirmed in his grip, he winced from the pain in his hip, cursed and kicked them to subservience. The youngest had two teeth. These ewes he told the boy to mark upon the back of their heads. Leo dipped a short stick into the raddle and applied a little of the paste. Those a year older, with four teeth, he marked on the neck. The six-toothed ewes were marked between the shoulders and the full-mouthed in the middle of their backs. All these ewes, marked for tupping, Leo let loose in the field.
As ewes grew older their teeth continued to grow. They became long in the tooth, and often lost one or two. These sheep the old man called broken-mouthed. He told Leo to mark them on the rump, as he did those he knew to be barren.
Leo asked Vance Brewer why he culled every ewe who’d lost as much as a single tooth, even when her udders were correct.
‘Broken-toothed sheeps can’t eat turnips and that,’ the old man told him. ‘How’s they goin to give their lambs good milk?’
Leo said nothing. He put the ewes marked thus in a different pen. The gaffer would take them to market. Supposedly for slaughter, though Vance claimed that disreputable farmers bought cheap broken-toothed ewes and bred from them for a further year, if not more. Leo tried to imagine such a farm, meaner than this one, but could not.
After some time Vance Brewer asked the boy to tell him exac
tly how many he had examined. As some of these were already out of sight the boy had to count the larger group still within the holding pen, and subtract this figure from the number of the flock. This he attempted to do but could not, for the animals would not stay still. He climbed into the pen and tried again. They huddled close together and he could not distinguish one from another. His failed attempts amused the old shepherd, watching with an open-mouthed grin. Eventually the boy gave up.
‘You has to count em as you study em, see?’ Vance Brewer said. ‘Tis the only way. No one could do it else.’
‘Have you been countin em?’ Leo asked.
‘I have,’ the shepherd said. ‘Us have checked forty ewes. That’s one-third a my flock and I reckon tis time for our mornin croust.’
Leo shook his head. ‘You can count, Mister Brewer, and not just on yer fingers.’
‘You has to be a mathematician in this job,’ the old man said, tapping his skull, still grinning.
*
The flock was of long-woolled sheep. They were tough, short but bulky in form. All but two or three of the ewes were placid. They weighed around twelve stone each and the boy could not lift them. Neither could the old shepherd. Together they could.
The ewes’ faces were white, though their fleece came down in a fringe, veiling their eyes, giving them a coy appearance. Their fleece was hard-wearing and used in carpet-making. Vance Brewer claimed that Cornish long-woolled sheep produced more wool than any other breed in the United Kingdom. Leo did not know if this was true. The shepherd also said the animals could be sheared as young lambs.
‘Beautiful lambswool like you never sin,’ Vance Brewer said proudly.
*
Five days after Vance Brewer’s examination of his ewes Leo rode the colt and gathered the flock once more. The shepherd had no dog. There was not one on the farm. By the markings upon their backs they separated the maiden ewes from the rest. The old man wore a pinafore or frock he’d cut for himself from a sack. Again they mixed the red paste, but this time they raddled the rams, upon their breasts or briskets. There were three such. Vance Brewer put the old one with the thirty-two maiden ewes, and the young rams with the rest. ‘Eighty-eight between the two of em,’ he told Leo. ‘Think they’ll manage?’
