Gentleman's Relish

by Patrick Gale

  Families dressed in the evening. It would have been too cold to stay naked but Lara suspected it also had to do with hot gravy and knives and forks. Supper was served in a big chalet beside the lake and they all sat apart with their respective families. Then there was dancing to records or a lecture but Lara usually pretended to be tired so she could go to bed with a book instead. Her parents quizzed her about the new family and seemed reassured to hear Wolf had said they were from Zurich.

  ‘Swiss,’ her mother said. ‘I was sure they must be.’

  Wolf’s parents were just as blond as he was. They must have been the same age as her parents nearly but they seemed far fitter. Her parents were both academics, grave and pale, helpless without spectacles whereas Wolf’s parents had muscles and looked like an advertisement for something to do with health and the outdoors.

  The next day her parents played them at badminton and, after dark, at bridge, so her mother must have decided they were All Right. Without clothes on one had to be more circumspect, apparently.

  Lara knew he was a bit older than her but had thought Wolf would take his cue from their parents and become her new friend. Something about the way he had touched her arms when showing her how to pitch and caught her eye and laughed when she hit Eileen on the head made her wake fully prepared to insult or cold-shoulder whatever playmates she needed in order to cement an alliance with him. But, after two days of childish company, he suddenly seemed more interested in Mr Johnson, or Johnson, as he called him imperiously.

  The Johnsons were the youngest couple in the camp. She was expecting a baby so wasn’t available for games so Mr Johnson, who was dark and handsome and worked as a PE instructor in a minor public school, was much in demand.

  Wolf needed to challenge him, for some reason, or at least to win his notice.

  ‘Race me across the lake, Johnson!’ he shouted at him. ‘Watch me dive, Johnson!’ ‘Johnson, how is my serve?’

  Mr Johnson was polite and obliging. He raced Wolf and Lara across the lake, easily beating them but complimenting them on their strokes all the same and showing Wolf how to splash less with his legs. He patiently watched Wolf’s repeated dives off the high board and spent some time helping him improve his tennis serve too but Lara could see he was uncomfortable, embarrassed even, at the Swiss boy’s bids for attention and she wasn’t surprised when he rowed his wife out to the Island after lunch. This was the one place children weren’t allowed and heavy with lurid mythology as a result.

  Wolf took control of the afternoon games as he had on the first two days. They played Masters and Slaves on the obstacle course and Vampires on the old tyres that dangled on ropes across the stream, but she could see, from the edge of spite that came into his commands, that he was unhappy. She still thought he was beautiful and she easily stayed on the right side of him by doing his every bidding faster and more tidily than the others so that he started calling her Tiger Cub, which she liked and hoped was a name that might stick. She had not forgotten, however, his odd foolishness in the morning and held back a part of herself in watchfulness.

  She fought genuine sleepiness after supper because there were charades that night. The Johnsons shone unexpectedly at the game, even pregnant Mrs Johnson, who was inclined to laugh too hard and get sweaty. Wolf’s family proved hopeless, either through insufficient informal English or a failure to understand that the game was meant to be amusing. Her parents were neither good nor bad, which was a relief.

  The next day it poured with rain. Several families donned clothes and drove off on cultural excursions, which would almost certainly involve the cinema, an entertainment the camp owners were far too principled to provide. Lara’s parents both retreated into books. She had almost finished her last one and needed to eke it out over several more nights so she joined a raggle-taggle band of children in the games chalet for ping-pong. Interestingly most had opted to stay naked though one or two, Lara included, appeared in clothes because of the cold but soon discarded them on the chalet’s old sofas and chairs so as to fit in. One boy retained just a Pacamac. More fancy dress than proper clothing, it whirled about him as he ran and began to stick weirdly to his skin where he got hot.

  Sitting out a game or two with Wolf, she found he was no less interested in Mr Johnson still but that now his thoughts had turned dark with obscure disappointment.

  ‘That Johnson is a bad sort,’ he pronounced.

  ‘How do you mean?’ she asked.

  ‘He’s a pervert.’

  ‘No!’ Lara liked Mr Johnson and his funny, pink wife.

  ‘He stares too much. He was watching you girls in the water yesterday and he touched himself when he thought no one could see him. But I saw and that’s why he’s avoiding me.’

  ‘No he didn’t. I expect he just had an itch. I’ve had itches. There are water fleas in the lake sometimes.’

  ‘You’re too young, Tiger Cub. You don’t understand. He’s bad. You should be careful around him.’ Wolf looked less attractive when he frowned and she looked away and picked an oak leaf from between her toes.

  She had said hello to Mr Johnson on her way over from her parents’ cabin. He was defying the rain, heading for the woods with his binoculars slung around his neck and his bird book protected by a plastic bag. Perhaps he and his wife had had words and she wanted to be alone because of her heavy pregnancy. He looked a little sad, she thought, venturing off on his own and she would have offered to join him on his expedition only she had stupidly put clothes on and they were rapidly getting wet. When she grew up, she decided, a man like Mr Johnson would make a better companion than one like Wolf or his advertisement-shiny father.

  Bored of sitting out, Wolf initiated a game of Round the Table. Lara enjoyed this because she was fairly hopeless at ping-pong but deft at snatching up and slamming down the bat when it was her turn to hit the ball. She liked the permitted violence of it.

  The mood became wilder and wilder as more and more players were eliminated. Chubby Eric’s spectacles steamed up so much he had to beg for a pause while he rubbed them on someone’s discarded shirt and Eileen cracked a fingernail painfully when slamming down the racket and said fuck which induced near-hysteria. Lara was soon out too but didn’t mind because another round would soon be starting.

  Then Wolf, who had made it into the last four, was run out and he protested ridiculously. Everyone remembered how odd and silly he had been with all his showing off to Mr Johnson that morning and the older ones turned on him.

  ‘Well go if you’re going,’ Eileen said and everybody laughed because her fuck had earned her new popularity. Even Lara laughed, because it was quite funny even though she didn’t care for Eileen, and Wolf saw as he left and his eyes slid over her in a dismissive way that stopped the laughter in her throat.

  When they all gathered for supper that night, Lara discovered the Johnsons had left suddenly. Spirits were high on account of the way the weather had shaken up camp routines so there was skittish socializing between tables and word soon got around that they had been asked to go. Asked to go was the phrase always used when there had been a complaint – invariably against a man – involving staring, cameras or what Lara’s mother tantalizingly called unwonted attentions.

  Wolf ate with his parents at their usual table near the door. Nobody was gossiping with them and they were talking little to each other. Lara guessed Wolf had said something to his family during the spite-hungry tedium of the long, wet afternoon, which led to an official complaint. She was shocked to the core that he could do something so wicked and wondered if he was regretting it. Nobody liked a tell-tale.

  There was a lecture that night – a woman with an unfortunately high voice talking about Birds of the Cevennes – and only scant attention was paid. Lara stayed up for once and could sense a barely suppressed excitement among the adults. Sure enough, as soon as it was seen Wolf’s family had left the chalet, a kind of unofficial party broke out, with dancing and drinks, and she was hurried off to bed. Her parents r
eturned in unusually high spirits much later than they normally did. Her mother was actually giggling and Lara enjoyed lying in her bed and eavesdropping through the curtain while they thought she slept.

  When he tried to join them the next day, the children ignored Wolf entirely, by common, unspoken consent. The first girl he addressed directly was the newly popular Eileen, who dared to look right through him and acted as though no one had spoken. At once this became the first of the day’s games and everyone followed suit. He was swiftly maddened by it, as they sensed he would be, and punched Chubby Eric hard on the shoulder. When even Chubby Eric heroically contrived to ignore his presence, he stalked off, shouting at them in his own language.

  The sun returned with full heat at last and they spent the day swimming and basking, enjoying the woods and water with none of their recent savagery.

  Wolf and his parents were asked to leave too. Perhaps because it involved a child their own children had been playing with, this news was kept back by most of the parents for much of the evening but inevitably it leaked out because there was nothing more interesting to discuss over supper.

  In a thrilling development like something out of John Buchan, Mr Johnson had cleared his name by returning with an old army friend who was now in the Dorset constabulary. He had him challenge and question Wolf and his family before the camp owners. Wolf had refused to admit he was lying but in his ever-wilder accusations had let slip something about his father’s cameras.

  Bringing a camera to the camp was as strictly against the rules as men without wives. It transpired Wolf’s father had not only been busy taking surreptitious snaps of them all but that his wife had been carrying a concealed cine camera in her cunningly modified knitting bag. All film was confiscated and exposed and, in a final, glorious flourish, the policeman friend had insisted on inspecting their passports before the family was escorted off the grounds.

  ‘Germans after all,’ Lara’s mother said when she thought Lara wasn’t listening. ‘I told you I didn’t really care for her.’

  THE DARK CUTTER

  He crossed two fields, opening the gates wide as he went, then clambered onto a hedge, cupped his hands on either side of his mouth and called.

  They each had a slightly different cattle call. His older brother produced a low, booming sound midway between a moo and a foghorn. Their father’s call had two notes, the second lower than the first, and usually had a trace of words to it, a sort of weary ‘come ‘long’. His own tended to emerge as a sort of falsely cheery Hey-oop! with a rising note at the end. He hated raising his voice or trying in any way to seem different but, try as he might to imitate the others, his call always came out the same way.

  Fog had come in off the sea soon after dawn and was drifting inland as a succession of clammy curtains. The steers were Charolais crosses so in these conditions became almost invisible, their buff and off-white flanks barely distinguishable from the pale granite of the hedges and pearly grey of the fog. There was a distant low-lying field where they spent the night sometimes, grouped together out of the wind like so many companionable boulders. He was about to jump off the hedge to go in search of them there when he heard them – one crazily high-pitched moo first and then a chorus of baritone answers – and stayed put to call them again. There was another moo, closer at hand, before their great forms lumbered out of the surrounding grey.

  They were following one of their leaders, a burly, roundshouldered animal, whose lopsided horns had been sawn off a few months back when one threatened to grow into its cheek.

  He slid down off the hedge and, calling them again, waited until a few had come close enough to sniff and recognize him then began to lead them back the way he had come, across the fields to the lower yard. The trick was to walk slowly enough to hold their interest but with enough speed to keep them from merely falling to graze on a different acre. Luckily the herd had been in this run of fields for ten days now and was eager for change.

  As he walked, he heard their snorting breaths and felt the ground shake whenever one of them gambolled up a yard or two to his side. Occasionally, driven by an overflow of energy perhaps, one would mount another and ride it for a yard or two or a couple would suddenly pair off for a quick trial of strength, thumping their huge skulls together, eyeball to eyeball, fringe to fringe, then pushing until one yielded to the other. All about him now, they gave off what he thought of as their smell of contentment – a yeasty mixture of the sharp-sweetness of chewed grass with the sweaty tang of their pelts.

  He slipped back to close a gate behind them as the last stragglers passed through then hurried forward with a shout to encourage the herd to keep up its momentum. Seven times out of ten they came like this when called, not from obedience – he knew better than to credit them with that – but from hunger, curiosity or boredom. The other times, when they refused to come but simply ran in maddening circles or, worse, lay unbudgeably munching, tended to arise when the field they were in was still fairly new to them.

  Who was he kidding? There was no order or method to these creatures; sometimes they were cussed or flighty, sometimes they weren’t.

  Inspired, perhaps, by the dawning realization that they were nearing the farmyard, where they were fed barley in season, and the familiar Dutch barn where they were bedded down in the coldest, wettest weeks of winter, one of the steers suddenly kicked up its heels and broke into an ungainly, farting run, taking the others with it. They surged through the second gate and he raced to shut it after them. As he secured it with a length of old barbed wire he grazed the inside of his wrist and swore softly.

  The herd was swallowed by a fresh veil of fog as it rounded the awkward corner above the farmyard. The hope was that his father and brother were ready for it with open gates and an open pen so the steers could pass straight to their destination. Sometimes some small thing, a laughing child, a darting cat, a fertilizer bag caught and flapping on the gorse, would panic them at the crucial moment and send them skittering back in a way that would be comical if it weren’t so irritating. An angry half-hour or more could follow in which they attempted to round the herd back towards the yards in an L-shaped field with all too many awkward corners where they could baulk and huddle. He wished at such times that they possessed a cattle dog. Not a spooky border collie, with those staring eyes, but a proper cattle dog, reliable and sturdy, like the ones Australians used, to help round the beasts back towards the yard. But his father hated dogs, having been mauled on the hand as a boy, so the wish was futile, at least while the old man lived.

  This morning they were lucky and the beasts ran, unstartled, into the main yard and down to the lower one where they could be sorted. The lower yard gate, a far heavier one than those they had passed in the fields and with proper fastenings, was clanged shut behind them. He then had to join his father and brother in trying to persuade the herd into the big pen.

  Like many parts of the farm, the lower yard had evolved by a subtle interplay of accident and necessity in which design had played little part. It was an L-shape, or a V, even, with gates top and bottom and pen and crush off at the farthest end. There was also a marked change in level where the yard turned a corner.

  As usual his brother had parked one of the tractors to block off one angle and placed a line of feeding troughs behind it so as to steer the animals towards the pen’s open gate. As usual the steers ignored the hint and surged down to the other, closed, gate, pressing their faces to it to peer out at the tantalizing fresh pasture beyond. When shouted at and chased, they simply ran back uphill the way they had come. They ran back and forth a couple of times, from the top of the slope to the bottom. Growing increasingly nervous and with one or two of them slipping and falling in the rush, until enough of them led the way into the pens for the others to be fairly readily chased and whipped into following suit.

  He hated whipping them. He and his brother had stiff lengths of blue plastic water pipe which extended their reach when trying to head the animals off but which w
ere inevitably used to prod and beat as well. Their father preferred the riding crop from his hunting days, which was shorter but had a little tassel of leather on its end ‘to pack a good sting’, as he liked to say.

  He knew this soft distaste in him was shameful and unmanly, that directing the animals firmly, with shouts and even kicks, was the only and the safest way. Yet he winced inside at the sound of whip on hide. He never whipped the face of a turning animal the way the others did and only used his hose when he was frustrated at some beast’s stupidity. They all talked to the animals as they worked, saying things like, ‘Get in, would you?’ and ‘Oh, you bloody thing!’ but he suspected he was the only one of them who, in his mind at least, muttered apologies too.

  As always he was the one to jump into the pen with the steers to direct them, four at a time, into the smaller pen and on to the crush. His brother would work the crush gates and neck-clamp and his father would peer into twitching ears and tick off herd and animal numbers in a muddy notebook. Being inside the pen was, he knew, the most dangerous job next to lassoing a steer’s swollen foot in the crush, one where you were likely to be kicked or crushed against the bars, but he was quite unafraid so knew he could do the job without hitting them. He liked to think he could calm the animals by talking to them in a kind, low voice as he waved them through the gate between the pens or out into the crush but knew they were basically wild at heart and wanted no man near them however kind-hearted. They hated this abrupt interruption of their freedom and the replacement of grass with shitty concrete and the clamour of cold steel. The crush weighed them as they passed through it and made a terrible oily clanking. Even briefly held in place in it by the neck, they invariably shat themselves soupily with the shock of it. The sharply grassy smell of the herd in the pasture was soon replaced all about him by the sourer stench of fear.