Genius stopped the ToteGote, let it gently down on its side and unshackled the sheep from the chain, dragging them over to Egan.
He chanted, ‘It’s a woolly molliday with Hairy,’ as he dumped the second sheep at Egan’s feet. Then he said, ‘We’ll never manage more than fifty. We could kill more, but we’d have to leave ’em up here, and it’s a big risk to do that.’
‘How do you mean?’ Egan asked.
‘Getting them down the ropeway, Eego. Doesn’t matter what, we’ll never manage more than three at a time. Take my word for it, boss, we’ll have our work cut out with fifty.’
Disappointed, Egan said, ‘I’d been banking on a hundred, and two days here at the outside.’
Genius said, ‘No. Logistics don’t allow. Lumpy shoots them, I collect them and you butcher them, bless their little woolly socks. But it all takes too much time, and time is in short supply around these parts. We can’t work in the dark. Have to use lights, we would, and livers and lights can be seen a long way.’
‘You and your livers and lights,’ Egan grumbled. ‘Livers means humans in your charming turn of phrase, I suppose.’
‘Take away a liver, got a dead man. Logic.’
Egan said, ‘Very well, then. Nip over to Lumpy and tell him to stop four more. But he might as well wait half an hour before he opens up. Them others have scarpered too far. If he waits a bit, they’ll maybe drift back nearer again. Make sure he knows what half an hour is: show it to him on his watch, will you, Genius?’
*
The LYF and Ray moved slowly up and away from the stream; a wren sang among the bilberry bushes, then fluttered up and away from them with so much more ease than their own earthbound, plodding progress, the tiny creature might have been subject to quite different laws of gravity. They began to cross sheep-runs on fescue turf, threading among the rock outcrops and the sides of small peat-hags, and Harry took them on to a run which led away along a contour for some distance before moving up along the easier ground.
They climbed again, making their way among boulders which were as tall as themselves, and then they had breasted the last rise before the plateau; they stood on a tangled hump of blanket-peat and gazed at the undulating expanse before them, stretching to the horizon where the fangs of peaks lifted across a distant, deep, glaciated valley. Ridges and folds hid dead ground, bogs gleamed here and there in patches among black and treacherous-looking acres. A vast litter of rocks was scattered around higgledy-piggledy, carried by glacier action during the Ice Age; and everywhere they saw the grey dots of sheep.
This was no lowland sheep-farming pastureland. This was the wet desert country, the high plateau between two thousand and two thousand five hundred feet. At certain periods of the year, during the gatherings, the scene would be alive with men and dogs from the farms miles away down the valley, and the sheep would be massed in pouring regiments or quasi-military squares. In the late winter, during the lambing, patient shepherds would trudge through Arctic blizzards which would kill a townsman in an hour, digging out sheep and new-born lambs from the deep drifts. But now no shepherds would visit the sheep, for there was no point in visiting them until some weeks hence, when the ewes would be selected for wintering. Walkers and ramblers shunned the area for the most part, because it was both uninviting and dangerous; they preferred the spectacular paths around the peaks from which the climbers swung from their ironmongery ten miles from the centre of the plateau. It was a lonely, brooding landscape.
‘Made it!’ Harry said, and laughed, throwing himself down and panting. The others sat or lay down also, dropping their burdens with sighs of relief. But they were all elated and excited, and as soon as they had recovered their breath, they were ready to go.
Harry pointed ahead and said, ‘That bog looks like a series of patches now, but once upon a time it all used to be joined together. What we’ll do is sweep round the edges with the old metal-sniffer, then do the bits in between.’ He smiled benevolently at his companions. ‘How does it feel, then? All excited, are we?’
‘Yes,’ they all shouted, with the exception of Ray, who had been discovering that Harry made him more and more uptight. Jesus, he thought. I better take a Krishna Consciousness course pretty soon, or TM. I always knew Limeys were crazy, but this is outasight, baby. My Life and Times on the Sea of Goddam Grass.
And they marched across country, Harry carrying the detector and leading the singing: ‘Hi-ho, hi-ho, it’s off to work we go,’ from Snow White (Disney and not the Brothers Grimm, Ray noted with a touch of real malice, then surprise. This bunch of meatheads was beginning to work on him, giving him a personality change. He’d need a shrink after Harry Krishna.) And Ray joined in, singing exaggeratedly and with ridiculous mime. Nobody noticed a thing.
They began to sweep the first area, and in two minutes the note of the detector changed.
‘What did I tell you?’ Harry said. ‘We’ve got something right away. This thing’s marvellous!’
‘I hope it’s a gold cup or a silver bracelet,’ said Cheryl, as Simon began to dig.
‘It could be a long way down,’ Harry warned.
It wasn’t; in fact, it was almost at the surface, and Simon held it up with a grimace.
‘A bottle top,’ Peter said.
‘The treasure of the Sierra Nevada,’ said Ray.
Harry asked, ‘Why the Sierra Nevada?’
Ray explained lamely, feeling that he had been trapped into making a Harry-type joke; ‘Nieve, snow; nevada, snowed-on. Like the Snowed-on Mountains.’
‘Oh, yeh, I see,’ Harry said, and cackled. ‘Snowdon. Very good.’
Ray squirmed.
The others agreed that finding a bottle top was more, rather than less, encouraging. At least it showed that the detector worked in the field. They plodded on, taking turns. Then, faintly, they heard the sound of shots in the distance; four shots, then nothing more.
‘Somebody after rabbits,’ Peter said.
They turned up an ancient penknife, its blades rusted in immovably; it could have been ten years old. The first excitement began to wane, though Harry tried to keep it up, telling them what treasures might lie hidden underground. After an hour’s fruitless sweeping, they found another bottle top. Harry put a brave face on it, but privately he was thinking that something had better turn up soon, or the morale of the LYF would be seriously sapped.
And Ray was thinking that he had been wrong in calling them a bunch of meatheads. They were okay, or would have been okay in the absence of Harry, who was meatheaded enough to make up for all the others. Cheryl was a sweet kid, and so was Ann. He didn’t go much for Linda, who struck him as toffee-nosed. The young men had made no special impression on him except in a vaguely biological way, as theoretical sexual rivals in some situation which showed no signs of coming up. But why not see if anything could be made to come up? Peter was husky, false teeth or no false teeth, and there was something fine-drawn about Simon which might possibly indicate a steely core inside there somewhere… From the corner of his eye he caught a small movement beyond Harry’s back, as he swept glumly with the metal detector. An animal had leaped out of cover and was running uphill in zigzags, thrusting powerfully along with big back legs. Ray dropped back and joined Cheryl, pointing.
‘See,’ he said. ‘That’s some kind of rabbit, I guess. A Welsh rabbit.’
Cheryl said, ‘A Welsh rabbit is a meal, silly. A Welsh rabbit is cheese on toast.’
The creature, which was a mountain hare, leaped along with less haste now that there was obviously no pursuit, and vanished in a fold of ground. Ray took Cheryl’s arm.
He said, ‘Okay, honey. We’ll watch out. We see a load of cheese on toast galloping around, we’ll know there’s Welsh rabbits in these here hills.’
He put his arm round her waist, pulling her closer to him. She hesitated fractionally, then yielded; thigh touched thigh as they moved, a dreamy slow-motion process following the slow forward movement of Harry and his metal detector. Over to
one side, Peter nudged Simon.
‘He’s getting down to work,’ Peter said quietly. ‘I thought he fancied Cheryl. Just as long as he keeps his paws off Ann, that’s all.’
‘And Linda,’ Simon said.
Peter looked at him in surprise.
‘Linda,’ he said slowly. ‘Linda fancies Harry. Didn’t you know that?’
‘I know,’ Simon said hopelessly. ‘Don’t tell anyone, will you, Pete? Not anyone?’
Peter said, ‘Well, you poor old devil.’ Then he shook his head. ‘I won’t tell anyone: don’t you worry about that.’
Ray and Cheryl halted; Harry moved slowly away, followed by Peter and Simon and the two girls, Ann talking quietly with Linda. From Cheryl’s viewpoint, standing with Ray’s thigh close against hers, Harry suddenly seemed a wholly isolated figure, a kind of solitary reaper making those unreal scything movements, slowed and futile in a landscape which appeared hardly to belong to this planet at all: an alien wilderness where a mad dwarf was working, watched by four visitors from outer space, while two others, herself and Ray, looked on in turn and with equal non-comprehension. Slowly, slowly, Harry and the four others moved away, and just as slowly they moved out of sight as she and Ray seemed to float in sunlight and birdsong round a tall outcrop of igneous rock. He turned her to face him and clasped her close, taking her lower lip between both of his, pulling gently, then kissing her deeply; her arms crept up round his neck, the fan of her left hand lying delicately below her gripping right. Birdsong and sunlight; then the sudden violence of her response.
They broke apart.
‘They’ll miss us,’ Cheryl said gaspingly. ‘We must catch up… Oh, Ray!’
Ray hugged her and said, ‘Sure, we’ll catch up on the others, baby. All the time in the world.’
And he walked her away from the rock, making no attempt to follow up his advantage. The others came into view, and the enchanted girl became aware for the first time that she was walking with flowers beneath her feet, yellow and blue and pink flowers.
She said dazedly, ‘Then you did mean what you said, Ray?’
‘Huh?’
‘I mean, about me being beautiful,’ she said with a soft assurance. ‘You really meant it.’
‘Sure did, honey.’
‘I felt you did when you said it, but it’s nice to have proof.’
Ray said, ‘You need more proof. Like in bed, honey.’
Cheryl no longer saw the flowers. She looked up at him, her eyes wide but her brain practical.
She said, ‘We couldn’t. Not at night. Too risky. But we could get up very early in the morning and go for a walk; we could find somewhere nice and cosy.’
‘That’s a date,’ said Ray emphatically, hugging her, then moving slightly apart as they rejoined the others. Ray looked smug and happy, and Cheryl radiant; but Harry was scowling and sweaty, still operating the detector but with his mind elsewhere.
He said to the couple, ‘Where d’you think you’ve been?’
Ray said, ‘Ah — we saw some varmint, kind of a rabbit I guess. It hopped over there a ways. We tried to find it.’
Harry said crossly, ‘Well, you can do what you like within reason, but I want Cheryl here. I might have been turning up all sorts of things. I might have discovered the eagles of the legion, and she’d have missed it!’
‘Did you find anything?’ Ray inquired innocently.
‘No. Well no, not just yet. Not for the moment. There’s a lot of ground to cover. It might take us half the week before we make a real find, but it could happen any time, that’s the point, and I want everybody there when it happens.’
He thought, What’s Cheryl been up to with this feller? She looks like the cat that got the cream. It’s my fault for not finding anything. I’m letting them down. Oh, please let me find something quick.
Harry made two more futile sweeps with the detector, then stopped to wipe his brow with a handkerchief.
Ray said, ‘Mind if I try?’
He took the detector from Harry and walked forward a pace, then swept the instrument round. Instantly the note changed.
‘Here we come,’ he said. ‘Another Roman bottle top.’
Simon dug. He had to go down ten inches, searching furiously, but at last he held something in his hand, smoothing off the incrustation of soil.
‘It’s a coin,’ he said. ‘It’s all sort of uneven round the edges, but it’s a coin all right.’
Harry thought, Trust that Ray to find it.
He said triumphantly, ‘There, what did I tell you? Pass it over, Simon lad, let’s have a look.’
Harry cleaned the bit of metal as best he could, then showed it to the others, who crowded round and stared at the little piece, brown and green. Linda peered closely.
‘It must be a coin,’ she said. ‘I can see writing on it.’
She took the coin and rubbed at it furiously.
‘There’s a kind of a gate thing in the middle, and a chain at the side. It says RE, then there’s a date I can’t read.’
Simon said, ‘RE could be part of Rex. A king.’
‘I can see a P, and another E. Let’s have another look at the date,’ Linda said. ‘Oh, now you can see it if you hold it like this, across the light. There’s a nine, and a six, and a three. Nine hundred and sixty-three!’
Ray said, ‘I don’t dig. Your Romans had been gone around five hundred years by then.’
‘Let’s have a look,’ Harry said heavily, and took the coin from Linda. ‘I thought so. There’s a one in front of the nine. Nineteen sixty-three. That’s no Roman coin; it’s an old threepenny bit.’
Peter and Simon and the girls groaned in unison. Harry looked up from the coin, and saw Ray staring at him sardonically.
‘How could it have got that far down?’ Peter said.
Ray said, ‘Some guy probably buried it so that some sucker would happen along with a metal detector and think he’d hit the Roman jackpot.’
Harry felt like hitting the American over the head with the detector; first of all nipping off with Cheryl, and now making his nasty little remarks.
But he said with restraint, ‘It’s a let-down. I do admit that. It’s quite a let-down. But it isn’t our fault, and it isn’t the fault of the machine. If there’s metal there, this thing finds it. Now what I suggest we do, I suggest we call it a day, and then tomorrow we’ll start over from the other side a bit: work over near where those shots come from. I bet we’ll find something then.’
Harry had persuaded himself by this time, and had cheered up considerably. He handed over the detector to Peter, and they all trudged away, backtracking to the tents, where they made tea and ate a skimpy meal of corned-beef sandwiches and apples. No one said very much.
Ann was thinking about Peter, and wondering whether they would find an opportunity to slip away together. After all, Cheryl had sneaked off with Ray, and earned no more than the mildest of reprimands from Harry.
They couldn’t have done much — a kiss and a few caresses, but Ann would have given a great deal even for that in the circumstances. She caught Ray glancing at Cheryl. There was something on there, all right… Under Cheryl’s bright blue anorak and dark blue sweater were Cheryl’s creamy breasts — peaches and cream, she had called them herself — and she thought now of Ray’s lean brown fingers. She shuddered: a little frisson of vicarious delight.
Watching her, Peter said, ‘Someone walk over your grave, then?’
He moved closer to her, and she regarded him thoughtfully, then whispered, ‘When you’re in your tent, at that side, and I’m in my tent, at this side…’
Peter looked at the tents, side by side, pitched with no more than a two-foot gap between them, if that.
‘Yes,’ he breathed. ‘When it’s late.’
She smiled at him, her features blurred with desire.
‘Yes, Peter. Not too late, though.’
They all tidied up after the meal, then Simon looked at his watch.
He said, ‘It�
�s only ten past four, for goodness’ sake. I thought it was about seven. What are we going to do?’
Harry pulled out two packs of cards.
‘We’ll play canasta,’ he said.
So they played canasta for a couple of hours, listlessly for the most part, in spite of Harry’s efforts to inject bonhomie and liveliness into the game. All his jokes, which two weeks before — no, even the day before, he thought miserably — would have had the LYF rolling about with laughter, now fell with the sound of a balloon half full of water dropping on a wet towel. He was beginning to feel desperate. He wanted them to enjoy themselves, not sit around like a lot of spare parts. And then he saw the hot glances exchanged between Cheryl and Ray; and again, unbelievably, between Peter and Ann. He’d always known that the latter couple had a soft spot for each other, and had been ready to encourage it up to a point, but he suddenly realised that the point had been passed without his ever having become aware of it. And Cheryl and Ray. Lord, he thought, all at once they all want to jump in bed. I’ll have to do something about this.
He put the cards away when the game ended, and then said to Ray offhandedly, ‘Pretty fit, are you, Ray? You don’t seem tired to me.’
Ray, who was hoping to be considerably more tired, with Cheryl’s assistance, by the time Harry woke up the next morning, grinned and said, ‘No. I’m not tired. We didn’t do all that much today.’
Harry said, ‘Good for you, mate. I’ve been thinking. It isn’t right for people to go digging in this ground with their hands. I mean, if the detector shows metal, it might be something sharp, jagged. Cut your hands.’
‘So?’
‘Well now,’ Harry said easily. ‘I’ve got a nice little spade down at Base Camp. How about nipping down and fetching it up for us, Ray lad? You’d be doing a public service.’
Ray said, ‘Aw, come on, Harry, it must be three thousand feet there and back.’
‘I shouldn’t think that’s much for a chap like you,’ Harry said, smiling pleasantly. ‘You’ve got mountains twenty thousand feet high back where you come from. What’s a little stroll to a strong, fit feller like you?’
Harry Doing Good Page 5
