The Painted Tent

by Victor Canning

  That day was a Saturday and he finished work at mid-day. He ate a hurried lunch and then cycled up to Mr Samkin and borrowed his binoculars. From then until the light went he spent his time cycling around the countryside and along the paths in the Forestry Commission plantations looking for Fria. The wind was still blowing hard, but the rain had now slackened to occasional fierce showers.

  Smiler went to every high point he could think of and searched the sky and then the countryside for a sign of the falcon. But he had no luck. He went to Highford House. He sat there for half an hour, sweeping his glasses round and round. But there was no sign of Fria. At least no sign that he could recognize, though he passed one as he left the place by way of the overgrown garden. The limp, bedraggled mole-grey body of a dead shrew lay in the grass. And he would have been surprised – and delighted – if he could have known that Fria was watching him as he moved about the building and the garden.

  Fria recognized him. But that was all. She was no familiar dog or cat to come to him, eager to make herself known. She sat where she was and watched him go. Neither hunger nor thirst had worried her yet, but there was a difference in her which now informed all her movements and emotions. She had ridden the gale. The memory of her panic had gone but not, probably, the memory of the way she had finally used the wind to achieve sanctuary of a kind. Like all creatures, once she had done something the repetition of the act presented no fears. She learned by doing; and the more often a thing was done the more adept a creature became at it. Nature is a rough teacher, but her lessons stick, or else …

  Smiler cycled back to the farm with a long face and it was made longer when the Duchess reminded him that Sandra was coming to dinner – a return invitation which the Duchess had insisted he make because he had been to Sandra’s party. Smiler groaned, and groaned again when the Duchess said, ‘And what’s more, you’ve only got half an hour to bath and change before she comes. And, of course –’ she grinned and reached out and pulled his snub nose – ‘you’ll walk her home in the dark afterwards like a perfect gentleman. And you needn’t think you’re being untrue to that Laura of yours. She’s not sitting at home every night doing her knitting and mooning about you. Now get off with you – and don’t fuss about that bird. God’s hand is large and it casts a wide shadow over the world.’

  ‘Who said that?’ asked Smiler.

  ‘Well, I did of course. I just said it.’

  ‘Oh, I thought it was a quotation.’

  ‘Well, thank you, Sammy. But remember – there’s no wisdom in any book which wasn’t first spoken by someone.’

  Smiler paused at the door and with a grin said, ‘ Do I really have to walk her home?’ Then he ducked out of the doorway to avoid a cushion being thrown at him. The Duchess went off into the kitchen chuckling to herself. But once she was alone and the thought of Smiler’s falcon came back to her her face grew serious. She was remembering something Jimmy had said before she had told him not to stay at the farm any longer.

  ‘If freedom is your right, then it’s better to die than let any man take it from you. And, if needs be, it’s better to be hunted all your life than live in a cage.’

  That evening was not the ordeal which Smiler had thought it might be. Sandra looked very nice in a blue dress which contrasted with her fair complexion and blonde hair. It was curious. Smiler decided, how once you got used to something you almost stopped noticing it, like the slight prominence of her aquiline nose. In fact, too, the word aquiline pleased him because he had only recently discovered it in his reading and following Mr Samkin’s instructions never to pass a new word without looking it up in the dictionary – he knew that it came from the word aquila – the golden eagle. Hooked like an eagle’s beak … ‘ Well, be fair, Samuel M.,’ he told himself, ‘it wasn’t really as bad as that.’

  Over dinner the Duchess told them tales of her circus life and how she had been born in a horse-drawn caravan in a field somewhere on the south side of Dartmoor. When she was old enough she had worked with her mother selling the wooden clothes-pegs her father and brothers made from door to door, and posies of spring and summer flowers, until the day had come when she was a young woman and had met her husband, the Duke. She had gone into the circus with him and started her career as a fortune teller. But after he had died her heart had turned from the circus and, with the money she had saved, she had bought Bullaybrook Farm and retired.

  When dinner was over they played three-handed cards and put records on the player, though neither Sandra nor Smiler thought much of the records because they were donkey’s years old. Then the old piano was opened up and Smiler, who in the past months had spent a lot of time on it and, having a good ear, had taught himself to play quite well, gave them some of the songs they knew and others that he had learnt from his father. While he played one of his father’s favourites, The Streams of Lovely Nancy, he wondered where his father was at that moment and how long it would be before he saw him and between them they could get all his troubles sorted out so that he could go full steam ahead with his ambition to be a vet.

  Walking Sandra back up the hill to her village afterwards it was very dark and half-way up the hill Sandra stumbled and took his arm to keep her balance. And then she kept her hand on his arm and, somehow, a little later Smiler found that she was holding his hand. He felt very embarrassed about it but clearly Sandra did not consider it anything strange.

  She said, ‘If you’re going to do all this studying why don’t you try to be a doctor? After all that’s a much better thing than spending your time with dirty old animals and birds.’

  Smiler said indignantly, ‘Animals and birds aren’t dirty – not if people keep them properly. And, anyway, being a vet is harder than being a doctor. After all, people can tell a doctor where they’ve got their pains and aches and, if he’s done his stuff, well, he ought to know how to treat them. But animals can’t speak. You’ve got to … well, sort of get into their minds for them and find out what’s wrong sometimes.’

  Sandra said, ‘You’ve always got an answer, haven’t you?’ And then, going off at a tangent, she went on, ‘I had a good look tonight, and you know, I don’t think that is a wig the Duchess wears. It’s her own hair. But why does she wear it in those tight little curls?’

  ‘If you’re so interested – why didn’t you ask her?’

  At the front door of Sandra’s house, she paused in the darkness before going in and said very politely, ‘Well, thank you very much, Sammy, for a very pleasant evening.’

  ‘Thank you for coming.’

  Sandra laughed and said, ‘And now, if you want to, you can kiss me goodnight.’

  Startled, Smiler blurted out, ‘Good Lord, I couldn’t do that!’

  Sandra giggled. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well … well, you don’t. You don’t kiss people unless you love them.’

  ‘And you don’t love me?’ asked Sandra teasingly.

  ‘Of course I don’t.’

  ‘Who do you love then?’

  ‘That’s none of your business.’

  ‘I don’t care if it isn’t. And, anyway, I kiss people because I like them and they’ve been nice to me. So –’ She leaned forward and gave him a smacking great kiss on the cheek and nearly poked his left eye out with her nose.

  Smiler turned and ran until he was out of the village. When he slowed up and began the walk back down the hill, he thought, ‘Gosh, girls … you have to be on your toes all the time with them, or you’re in trouble.’

  Half-way down the hill he had further proof of this which he entered at the end of his diary that night.

  The diary entry finished: … but I’m sure Fria can’t have gone very far. I’m going to spend all day tomorrow looking for her. If she’s lodged up somewhere I could bring food to her.

  Trouble tonight with that Sandra. I think she only does it to get me all muddled up. Which is what it does what with worrying about Fria and thinking about what Laura would say. Though you never know with her. She might
just laugh her head off. And to make matters worse that boy friend of hers (Sandra’s) must have been hanging around because he stopped me on the hill coming back and told me what he would do if I didn’t keep away from Sandra. I told him he could keep his old Sandra. And then he got nasty so – him being bigger than me – I said to put his head in a bucket and ran for home.

  Being a vet is much more difficult than being a doctor.

  I think it could have been Trevor Green that caused all the trouble in the barn and let Fria free. The pebble is still on Johnny P’s shoulders. Can’t see how it can ever fall off.

  ‘And so to bed’ – Samuel Pepys Miles!!

  6. First Steps Towards Freedom

  Smiler had an early breakfast the next morning, did his chores around the barns and the yard, and then spent the rest of the daylight hours searching for Fria. At times, when he met farm workers and the country people he had now come to know, it was a temptation to ask them if they had seen the falcon. But he held back from doing so because he knew how fast the news would travel round, and that would alert trigger-happy folk who just shot at anything that moved.

  The gale had dropped now to a steady blow from the northeast, driving great banks of high cumulus clouds across a pale-blue sky. Now and again there would be a fierce, brief shower. The Taw and its tributary streams were running high and some of the valley fields were flooded with the spate.

  Smiler cycled for miles to every vantage point he could think of and others that he picked off the one-inch-to-the-mile ordnance survey map he had bought of the district. He got wet and he got dry again, and he got tired and he got hungry. At lunchtime he called at the Fox and Hounds hotel bar and had a pint of cider and a plate of sandwiches. The barman was a jolly man with dark hair and long sideburns and wore a red waistcoat. As he served Smiler, he said. ‘ The Duchess’s nephew, ain’t you?’ When Smiler nodded, the barman grinned, thrust out his right hand, and said with a wink, ‘Here you are then, tell me fortune. Shall I win the football pools next week?’

  Smiler laughed, but as he ate his lunch the idea came to him that if he didn’t find Fria maybe the. Duchess could look in her crystal ball and get some information – though he had to admit that it was a slim hope.

  For the rest of the afternoon Smiler searched, using Mr Samkin’s binoculars and carefully putting them back in their case when he had finished each time. He saw plenty of birds. There were lapwings still flocking on the high fields, mallard, widgeon and teal flighting along the flooded meadows, and once a skein of geese moving high in a wavering line northwards against the wind. Buzzard pairs wheeled and soared over the dark pine woods, swans winged heavily up the river and kestrels hovered over the brown heather and dead bracken clumps in the forestry clearings. But Smiler saw no sign of Fria. But once, high, high up, two or three thousand feet, he guessed, he picked out to the north a small, dark crescent shape which was gone quickly into the blazing eye of the sun as a racing cloud-patch uncovered it briefly. It was a peregrine, Smiler was sure, but he couldn’t believe that it was Fria, riding so high and so confidently. A few seconds’ observation of the bird marked it as one that had been born to freedom and wore its liberty and powers untouched by any taint of captivity. Smiler was right, for the peregrine he briefly saw was a tiercel from the cliffs of Blackstone Point beyond Ilfracombe.

  With his glasses Smiler scanned the edges of woods and the clumps of isolated elms and oaks, seeking for the still graven shape of Fria perched on some high branch or merged against some tree-trunk. All he saw was the movement of wood pigeons and ring-doves and the black scattering of rooks and crows. Knowing that Fria was used to barns and farm buildings, he searched around field barns and hay stores and the roofs of the farmhouses – all without success. It was this knowledge that Fria might have chosen some building for shelter that took him with only half an hour of daylight left to Highford House, debating in his mind whether if he did not find Fria today – a Sunday – he could dare ask the Duchess for the next day off to go on with his search and promise to work the following Sunday to make it up. If it had been Jimmy Jago he had had to ask he knew that permission would have been given. But there was no Jimmy around now, and the Duchess had a funny little streak about jobs being done when they should be done. And, anyway, in his heart he felt that the Duchess had already given Fria up as lost for good.

  He went all over Highford House and the ruined buildings around it. He searched inside the red-brick tower, climbing as high as he dared until he met a great gap in the spiralling stone stairway. There was no sign of Fria.

  Despondently Smiler gave up the search and went back to where he had left his bicycle in the wild rhododendron shrubbery at the back of the house. He cycled away down the wet, gravelly, moss-patched old driveway. As he went a jay shrieked suddenly at him from a branch as though in derision.

  Fria watched him go. She was lodged within a foot of the top of the red-brick tower. Here, there had long ago been a fall of bricks from the curved side of the tower which had made a recess about two feet high and three feet wide. The recess ran back through the masonry to the inner wall of the tower, forming a shelf which was protected from the weather. Two bricks had fallen inwards from the rear wall making a hole through which one could look down into the well of the tower past a small section of stone stairway that still survived to the great gap that reached far below to the commencement of the stairs again. On the outside of the tower, ivy had grown up, rooted in the bricks twelve feet below. It covered one side of the recess and formed a leafy screen. Above the recess, stonecrop had taken root and formed pale green pads along an ornamental ridge. From the tower-top – where the seed had years ago been excreted by a thrush – a trail of bramble, touched now with new leaf spurs, cascaded downwards in a ragged sweep.

  From the ground it was almost impossible to see that the tower-top held Fria’s recess. But Fria, although she sat well back, could see everything that moved below. She had seen Smiler come and now she watched him go and, because she associated him with food and she was hungry, there had been a moment before his going when she had almost wailed from the sudden sharpness of the association twisting physically inside her. Hunger she had, but not thirst. Twice that day she had taken off into the steady wind and flown to the tower-top where the rains had formed puddles in the warped and dented hollows of the old lead roof sheeting that still remained there. And twice that day she had moved off in a slow, circular flight, low down, skirting around Highford House itself, beating with steady wing-flicks across the bullock pasture and then coming back in a fast rising flight to the tower recess. Flight was not now the panic-maker it had been. The wind was firm, a steady blow which she mastered and used easily so long as she was not called upon to perform any unexpected or skilful manoeuvre. On her second, non-drinking flight, she had dropped to the grass where she had killed the shrew. Mice and shrews she had eaten before and hunger spurred her search for this shrew. The shrew had gone, its limp body long ago seen by a crow and carried away.

  If Smiler had stayed another ten minutes he might have found Fria, for now, as he cycled down the drive a half a mile away, she suddenly wailed and moved forward to the edge of the recess. In the dying light she launched herself easily and flapped slowly across the abandoned, ruined gardens, moving more like an owl than a peregrine. She dropped her head and searched the ground beneath her. Even in the fading light, her great eyes – so big that if a man’s were in the same proportion to his body size they would have been inches wide – missed nothing. She saw a pale cinnamon moth climbing a dead willow-herb stalk, saw the slight heave of the ground where a mole worked unseen, and the slow draw of a dead leaf where a worm pulled it down into its tunnel. She was hungry, and hunger is the great dictator. A field-mouse poked its nose from under a rain-flattened patch of long-dead wild geranium. Fria saw the fine tremble of its whiskers, the small skin-movement as it creased its snout and flicked its eyes from side to side. Because the mouse meant food to her and she wanted it she sli
d up into the air a few feet. Her muscles were schooled by the desire in her to hang above the rodent. She hung on poised wings, her long primaries just trembling, the narrow wedge of her tail suddenly spread wide as she hovered like a kestrel. She did what many of her wild kin often did from time to time. Sometimes, indeed, they hovered, sharing the same field or orchard with a kestrel for at certain times of the year there was a strange amity between the two species.

  The mouse moved out from its shelter and ran in jerky, staccato movements between the tall grasses. Fria moved, following it, hovering still. Then, the excitement in her for food so strong, she raised her wings and dropped to the grass, thrusting out her legs, talons open to grasp the mouse. The mouse leapt away and scuttled to the safety of the root tangle of an old crab-apple tree. Fria, missing the mouse, hit the ground lightly but clumsily. She sat on the grass, folded her long wings over her tail, preened irritably at her slate-streaked pale breast and then wailed gently. After a few moments she jumped lightly into the air and began to quarter across the ground between the tower and the ruined house, hovering and watching the ground and then sliding a few yards to another vantage position. But nothing moved on the ground, and a steady rain shower, heavy, and pounding the ground with fat drops, blackened the sky and drove the last of the light from the day.

  Fria winged over gently and beat up to her recess. She shook the water from her plumage and then walked to the back of the recess and began to dress and preen her feathers. The night settled around her, steady with the noise of creaking branches and the whisper of the ivy leaves that screened part of the recess opening. Fria slept, forgetting her hunger and her anger. An hour later a bam owl that lived in a dead oak a mile away came drifting over the abandoned garden and took the field mouse which Fria had missed.