by Tim Pears
Lottie walked on to the meadows by the river. They were filled with buttercups among the grass, as if the fields had been planted with heavenly fodder for some ethereal beasts. Horses in the Elysian fields or some such. The girl laid the gun down then let herself fall into the grass and lay there, amongst the sweet-scented plants. The clouds lifted. There had been no need for the marquee after all. The sun beat down. Insects buzzed around her head. She closed her eyes.
*
‘Miss Charlotte?’ The voice reached her from afar. ‘Miss Charlotte?’ It was familiar. The girl raised herself to her elbows and looked up. The under keeper Sidney Sercombe came over and stood above her. ‘Are you all right, miss?’ he asked. He held the gun. It was broken open and the shells were gone.
Lottie rose and walked to the river. She sat on the bank. It was mid afternoon. The lad came on after her and laid the gun down and sat on the riverbank some yards away. Lottie wondered how Sidney came to be there. Had he heard the gun go off? No. She had not shot it.
‘Mister Shattock saw you,’ Sid told her. ‘He asked me to keep an eye on you, miss, make sure you was safe.’
The girl looked across at him. The lad rolled himself a cigarette. It was strange to see him in his Sunday suit. He and the head keeper Mister Budgell wore fine attire for the annual shoots but otherwise dressed in everyday working clothes of frayed corduroy, aged whipcord. Sid licked his cigarette paper and rolled it tight.
‘I should like one,’ Lottie said.
Sid looked over, frowning. ‘I don’t know as I should, miss,’ he said, but she held him with an unflinching gaze and he relented. ‘Shall I roll im for you?’ he offered.
Lottie nodded. Sid placed the one he had made behind his right ear. He pulled a cigarette paper from the packet and rested it open and grooved between thumb and forefinger of his right hand. He teased a twist of tobacco from the pouch and pinched it out along the paper. Then it seemed he had a fresh thought or recalculation. He reached up across his face with his left hand and took the cigarette from behind his right ear. Holding the paper and tobacco in its place in his right hand, Sid rose and stepped across and gave the girl the cigarette and his box of matches. Then he returned to where he’d been sitting and finished rolling the one he’d interrupted.
When Sid had licked the new paper Lottie lit her cigarette and tossed the matchbox over. She inhaled smoke into her mouth then removed the cigarette from her lips and blew the smoke out.
‘Beg pardon, miss,’ Sid said. ‘But what made you go shootin? On yer own? What was you after?’
The smoke was foul and acrid and Lottie feared that it would make her cough or even vomit, yet she felt soothed. Whether by the smoke or the action of smoking she was not sure.
‘I planned to ride,’ she said. ‘I was going to go to the stables. But I was in a vexed state, Sidney. I did not wish to impose my condition on poor Blaze. Why should she suffer it? So I came shooting instead. I cannot remember why.’
This inconclusive response appeared to satisfy Sid. He smoked and watched the seagulls who came dipping and swooping along the river in the cooling afternoon. Lottie watched them too. They would go upriver and out of sight then reappear and come back down. Out of sight again then back the other way. The same birds or perhaps always new ones, she could not be sure. She knew they must be taking insects in their beaks but she could not see it. They seemed more as if they wished to dive into the water or become like ducks and float upon it but did not quite have the courage to do so. On occasion one came so close to the water that its claws brushed the surface like a raptor’s talons after fish.
The girl asked the lad if he had heard from his brother or knew aught of him. Sid said he had received a postcard a while back, which surprised him. He’d not been sure that Leo could even write, yet his script was fine.
‘What he wrote,’ he said, ‘didn’t make much sense, I suppose . . .’
Suddenly Sid stopped talking and sat gaping at the girl. He looked away then back at her, realisation dawning. ‘I is so stupid, Miss Charlotte,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. His message said: I shall return, and see you both again. Bin tryin a work out ever since who the both of us is. I ad a wrinkle twas me and Mother, and Leo was gone soft in the head. Now I realise this was a message for you, miss. He will return.’
Lottie nodded. ‘I know he will,’ she said. ‘I do not doubt it.’ She thanked Sid. The cigarette she held had long since gone out. She flicked it into the water and rose and said that she should get back. She let Sid carry the gun without objection. He followed close behind her. They walked up out of the buttercup meadows and along the hedges of the pasture fields and over the fence into the wood.
Sid said her name: ‘Miss Charlotte.’ She stopped and turned to face him. He stood stock still, watching something in amongst the trees. She followed his gaze. ‘I sin it before,’ he whispered. ‘Only once. Never sin it so early in the year.’
In this portion of the wood among a stand of conifers stood anthills. Upon one, a jay spread its wings. It shifted position and shuffled about. It took ants in its beak and pressed them into its feathers. Reached in between its feathers and took other ants out. Lottie could not see whether the bird then ate the insects but she thought it must.
‘What on earth is it doing?’ she whispered.
Sid did not look at her but kept his gaze fixed upon the jay. ‘I don’t rightly know, miss,’ he said. ‘I don’t think no one does.’
‘Won’t the ants bite?’ Lottie asked.
‘That’s one a the strange things about it,’ Sid said. ‘Mister Budgell reckons the bird seems to know to use the sort that don’t bite.’ He nodded, as if to some proposition of his own. ‘I hopes to find out the reason for this strange behaviour one a these days. There must be someone on this earth has an answer.’
They stood watching. The bird seemed in no hurry, but eventually it hopped and took off. Lottie watched the blue flash among its feathers disappear in the speckled shadows of the wood.
‘I need to tell my father something,’ she said. ‘We had best get back.’
She turned and headed on towards the house. The young under keeper followed.
Part Eight
IN THE WOOD
1
Leo, May–July 1914
There was a faint wind. It seemed to come and go. In, and out. In, and out. As if some unseen presence was breathing. The boy could feel God, breathing. The sky was a mottled grey. The moon broke through high up, above the grey. During the morning more and more blue came through, mottling white clouds, turning them wispy. By mid-morning the eastern side of the sky was clear blue. It was still murky in the west.
He slept in a wooden lean-to shed in an empty field. It was already early May but the night was cold. He woke trembling uncontrollably. He could not stop his teeth chattering, the top row and the bottom row knocking against each other. He thought he was sick but forced himself up from the ground and walked and realised that he was simply bone cold. As he warmed up, the trembling lessened. After a mile or two it had ceased.
In a wet, green wood there were still odd daffodils in flower, childish splodges of yellow. From a house he passed below came the sound of someone playing solo some kind of flute or horn. Smooth breezy melodies. He recognised neither the music nor the instrument. Towers of brick rose from the earth and through the trees and above them. No longer functional, they were like monuments to the men who’d built the mines beneath them.
He saw things that he had never seen before.
He watched a thrush fly directly along the horizon, from the south to the north, precisely, mathematically parallel to the land, its distance from him unchanging.
He passed a field of swans. Leo could not believe it. They looked like livestock there but could surely fly away. They were wild swans that had congregated in this field, perhaps summoned by some call inaudible to the human ear. Most sat upon the ground, their legs beneath them like women surrounded by their white skirts, and stretching
their long necks they grubbed with their orange beaks at something in the wet grass.
Another night he slept in a railway tunnel. When he woke, water dripped and splashed around him, seeping through the roof. The ground was damp and so was he. He wished that humans could sleep standing up, like horses. He rose and walked out of the tunnel and walked on along the railway line. The moist air smelled fresh from the rain. He counted out the paces from one telegraph pole to the next. The wire strung between them sang in the wind. It buzzed and swung. The track ran flat and straight across the crooked land but if he raised his eyes and looked ahead he could see that it always curved away, and dipped or climbed around the contours of the earth. If he paused and turned and looked behind he saw the track had deviated conversely.
In places the railway was built upon a ridge and the boy looked out across rolling pasture. In others it was dug into the ground so that all he could see were high banks covered in scrub rising on either side. When trains approached, he stepped back and stood and watched the people inside framed like pictures, stationary, motionless, hurtling past him.
The stations announced themselves with large nameplates. Lostwithiel. Par. At each, Leo climbed onto the platform and studied the timetable printed there to reassure himself that he was one station nearer to Penzance. He also found a drinking fountain or tap and slaked his thirst. In St Austell he walked into the station café and bought a ham sandwich and an iced bun. Wilf had taken most of his money but left a few coins in the bottom of Leo’s pocket. He took the items and carried them until he was out of the town once more and sat on a bank and ate them. Around him the ground was dusted with specks of white powder, like a fine snow that had fallen briefly yet not melted.
At Burngullow station a branch line curved north amongst tall brick chimneys or towers. Leo looked towards white hills, which seemed in the soft warm light of evening to be of perfect conical design.
He thought that he would seek a hidden place to sleep, but the smell of meat cooking made him salivate. His footsteps led him in search of it. No, he had no choice in the matter. Half a dozen men sat around a pit of blazing logs. Leo watched from a distance. His stomach grumbled. The men’s faces, their clothes and hats, were white. Perhaps they were bakers, covered in flour. One of their number ladled stew into each man’s tin or enamel bowl. They ate in silence save for a kind of murmuring or low groaning of satisfaction. Then one looked up and gave a yelp of surprise, and said, ‘Dazed if I an’t seen a ghost.’
Others raised their heads. The one who had served the food said, ‘You’m be an idiot, Tozer, give me more’n a fright than any ghost. Come here, boy.’
Leo stepped closer to the fire, into the sphere of its orange illumination.
‘When one a these gannets is done you can ave is bowl, son,’ the leader said. ‘Sit yourself down.’
Leo did as he was told. ‘Beg pardon, sir,’ he said. ‘Tis I who thought you was all spirits.’
The leader told him they were working in the china clay pits. There was work for men like them – itinerants, tramps. They could stomach some days of it. Tozer there was hosing the clay off the walls of the quarries. Others wheeled barrow-loads up the ever-growing pyramids of waste. He himself had been loading ships at the docks down at Charlestown, carrying sacks of the white stuff up a gangplank all day.
A man finished his stew and belched loudly and spun his empty bowl in the air towards the man who spoke. He caught it and filled it and passed it to Leo along with a wooden-handled spoon.
‘Thank you, sir,’ the boy said, and ate. He could not tell what animal the gristly meat came from but he judged it one of the finest dishes of his life. There were potatoes and carrots with it, and other vegetables less easy to identify.
One or two of the men rolled cigarettes. Another filled his pipe. One man asked if anyone knew the gingernut maid amongst the women who scraped the blocks of china clay.
‘Never give up, do you, Frizzell?’ another replied, and others joined in with ribald observations. Leo could not understand everything that was said for each man seemed to speak with a different accent and most of these he had never heard before.
The leader turned from the fire, and called behind him, ‘Fancy another bowl, Rufus?’
There came no reply. Leo peered into the darkness. After a while his eyes began to make out indistinct shapes. He came to understand that he was looking at a donkey. When he had scraped his tin bowl he gave it and the wooden-handled spoon back to the cook and asked him quietly if the Rufus he had addressed was a beast.
The cook explained that the donkey had no name. It belonged to Rufus, who preferred to dine alone. He was one of their number but apart from them.
The man on the other side of Leo overheard and said, ‘He in’t never bin right since the Zulu War.’
‘Neither have you, Tozer,’ said the cook, ‘and you never even went.’
Their laughter had a bitter tang to it. The men passed round a flagon of rough cider. The boy sat amongst them. The cook gave him a blanket. He pulled it tight around himself and slept.
*
In the morning the men rose and walked north towards the tall chimneys and white hills. The one they called Rufus loaded bags on his donkey and set off west. Leo followed him. They walked along the highway. The occasional coach or farm vehicle passed them. Rufus did not acknowledge the boy dogging his footsteps. Neither did Leo close the gap of twenty yards or so between them. An odd, rancid aroma was in the air. He realised that it came from one of them, the man or the beast, he was not sure which. Perhaps both.
After an hour or so the man turned off the road and walked down a tree-lined avenue towards a large house. In front of the house was a semi-circular drive or turning area of shingle. Rufus followed a path around the side of the house. He left the donkey standing and approached the back door and knocked upon it. Leo stood beside the donkey, stroking its neck. It was not the animal that stank. A woman opened the door.
‘Any jobs want doin, missis?’ the tramp asked her.
The woman studied him for a moment. ‘You again?’ she said. ‘Either the seasons is slowin down or you’s speedin up yer rounds.’
‘I was just passin.’
The woman looked past him and said, ‘You got a lad with you now? Learnin the trade, is he?’
The tramp did not turn round but said, ‘He ain’t with me. I don’t know who he is.’
The woman returned her gaze to Rufus and screwed up her face. ‘You stink of old badger fat,’ she said. ‘I thought you washed it off come spring.’
Leo saw the man shrug his shoulders. ‘Still a mite cold at night,’ he said.
The woman led him into the kitchen garden and showed him a bed she wished dug over, and a pile of manure to be applied. She went to a shed and came back with a spade held upright in each hand like a queen bearing her sword and sceptre. She gave the larger one to Rufus and held the smaller spade towards Leo, beckoning him forward. He left the donkey where the animal stood and came and took the spade. The woman turned without a word and went back indoors. Rufus began to dig a trench at the side of the plot. Leo went to the other end and did likewise.
*
They walked side by side. The tramp allowed Leo to lead his donkey by the halter rope. Rufus walked at a slow pace. Leo glanced at him occasionally. He was a man of middle height. He wore no hat or cap. He had wild grey hair and a beard much the same. His skin was tanned and lined. His blue eyes were wide and staring and made him look startled by what he saw. Leo followed the direction of the tramp’s gaze, in case there were something notable, but could see naught save unremarkable hedges, and fields.
The tramp asked Leo where he came from. The boy told him a little of his childhood among horses, and Rufus said that he was a horseman of sorts himself in his youth. An illegitimate one. He had run away from home, for what reason he could no longer remember, and first worked, he said, as a strummer, one of a string of thieves who passed stolen horses from the West Country up to Lo
ndon. He was not proud of it but he was young at the time. After that, three years in a row he spent the spring as a stallion walker, taking a sire from farm to farm, to impregnate the female carthorses.
When he spoke to Leo, the old tramp did so with lucidity and ease, in a West Country accent little different from Leo’s own. Yet at other times as they tramped along the road Leo noticed that he muttered, as if in conversation with an invisible other, walking with them. Perhaps he addressed the donkey. At any moment, like Balaam’s ass, the beast would acquire from an unseen angel of the Lord the power of speech. Or was it God Himself whom Rufus addressed? The tramp walked slowly along the rough highway, mumbling to God.
In the middle of the day they stopped and ate the remains of the bread and cheese and ham the woman with the garden had given them. The donkey grazed the verge. Rufus said that he should have gone to America, really, as a clear-thinking acquaintance of his had done. This fellow had received a land grant in the Middle West of the United States.
Instead, Rufus said, he had made the mistake of going into the army. He went with the mules. ‘Now it’s just me and this deaf old donkey,’ he said. ‘And my friend that I live with, my old pal, when I’ve had enough a the road. I’ll introduce you, if you like.’
Leo asked if this abode of his would be on the way to Penzance, for that was where he was headed. Rufus said that it was.
‘You’ll like my old pal,’ he said. ‘He’s a good old boy.’
