The Painted Tent

by Victor Canning

  Driving them back to the farm, the garageman eyed them in his mirror as they sat in the back holding hands and, because a silence had descended on them that he thought might freeze them up forever, grinned and said to Laura, ‘You’re the best-looking number, miss, that I’ve ever picked up from Eggesford and there’ve been one or two movie stars among them.’ Then with a wink, he went on, ‘Sammy here didn’t tell me he had such a good-looking sister!’ At that they all laughed and, somehow from that moment, the strangeness was gone from the two and they were Laura and Smiler and the months of separation dissolved like a river mist under the first warm rays of the sun.

  From that moment began the happiest week that Smiler could remember for years and years – which was not strictly true, but understandable, for the memories of the young are short.

  The Duchess took to Laura as though she were one of her own daughters, and a favourite one at that. And Laura took to the Duchess and knew at once that the red curls were no wig, and she helped with the cooking and in the kitchen as though she had lived in the house for years. The whole building was a babble of chatter and laughter and happiness which – when the two were away from the place – the Duchess would sit back and think about, sighing to herself with a mixture of quiet joy and nostalgia.

  The Ancients, because they wanted to and also because they knew it teased Smiler, brought Laura a posy every morning when they came to work – not a posy between them, but one each. They mock-quarrelled with one another as to which was the best, making Laura give a decision which she did, meticulously keeping the score even but wondering what she would do on her last day which would be an odd one. She need not have worried because the Ancients – as it turned out – knew better than to embarrass a lady. On the last day they brought a double-sized one between them. And, from the depths of the stone barn, they hauled out a girl’s bicycle which Jimmy was – or had been – hoping to refurbish and sell one day. They put it in order and Laura was free to roam the countryside with Smiler on his bicycle, both of them in working denims and shirts and Smiler’s haversack loaded with a lunch provided by the Duchess.

  One lunchtime Smiler took Laura into the bar of the Fox and Hounds and, while she drank cider, he had a glass of beer because he felt it was a more manly, grown-up thing to do when Laura was with him. But the gesture was spoiled when she said, ‘You don’t have to make such a face drinking it and from what I remember of you, you had a giddy enough head from a drop of cider without taking to beer.’ When Smiler protested and they quarrelled happily, the barman, Harry, came over. Winking at Laura, he said, ‘If he’s giving you trouble, miss, just say the word and I’ll throw him out.’

  But there were to be serious moments between the two during that week. The first came when Smiler took Laura up to show her his room and tell her all about his studies and about the peregrines up at Highford House, and a dozen other things. As he was talking Laura touched the little clay model of Johnny Pickering and said, ‘What’s this, Sammy?’

  Smiler told her, and her face grew serious.

  She said, ‘Coming from where I do, I won’t say that kind of magic doesn’t work, but there’s times when a body has no call to depend too much on it.’

  ‘What can you mean?’

  Laura smiled. ‘I’ll tell you when I have the mind. Right now you can walk me down this Bullay brook, of yours. There’s daylight for an hour yet.’

  They walked down the brook for a mile, and sat on the edge of a deep pool where, as the dusk thickened, a sea trout jumped and the small brook trout dimpled the water film as they fed from a drifting hatch of stone flies. The pipistrelle bats cut the darkening sky above them with fast and erratic wing-beats. Because their ears were young, they could catch the thin high notes of the bats talking to one another. After a while the talk between them ceased. Smiler held Laura’s hand and, a little later, Laura laid her head against his shoulder. They rested there in the slow vibrant bliss of their reunion while the world darkened softly around them. Suddenly from the thickets on the other side of the brook a nightingale began to sing – which was no surprise because for the right people nightingales have a wonderful sense of timing.

  That night Smiler wrote in his diary:

  Laura’s here, and gosh I don’t know whether I’m on my head or my heels. She’s more lovely than what I remembered her like – and just as cheeky and bossy which is super. Super. Super Laura. The peregrines tomorrow. (I am going to get a box with a key and lock this diary up from now on.)

  The next morning as the first light touched the high wood crest behind Highford House, Maxie who had been stretching his legs with a walk came back to the house. He was reluctant to go down to his chamber and stood for a moment in the shadowed angle of a buttress by his water tank. The dawn chorus was in full song and the thickets and shrubberies were alive with bird movement. He watched a kestrel come across the field from the big chestnut and hover over the old garden below the tower. Maxie smiled to himself as the tiercel – who had passed the night on the tower-top – suddenly launched himself downwards and chased the kestrel away, racing and swerving after it with rapid wing-beats. The kestrel dived into the top branches of an old crab-apple tree by the wood and screamed at the tiercel as it went by.

  Keep off my patch, thought Maxie. As the tiercel came back and settled on the tower Maxie nodded upwards to the bird. Good for you old man, he thought. You look after what’s yours. A missus and soon you’ll have kids. You’re lucky. Oh, yes, lucky.

  He turned away and climbed through an empty window into the house and made his way to his vaulted chamber, memory plaguing him, and impatience growing in him because he had waited long now and had had no word from Jimmy Jago.

  Two hours later Smiler and Laura arrived at Highford. Smiler helped Laura to climb to the roof and they sat on the parapet together watching the tower. The tiercel was nowhere to be seen. Through the glasses they could just see the top of Fria’s head as she brooded her eggs in the recess. After about fifteen minutes, from high overhead, came a long drawn call of wickoo-wickoo. A thousand feet up the tiercel circled.

  ‘He’s brought her food. You just watch,’ said Smiler. As he spoke Fria shuffled out to the lip of the ledge, raised her head, shook her loose feathers into trim and flew off, rising with a slow flapping movement until she was well above the old oak. From high above her the tiercel dropped the jackdaw which he had taken as it flighted between two clumps of fir plantations. The bird fell slowly and Fria with quickening wing-beats flew up and under it, rolled over as it passed her, and came down in a short stoop and seized it.

  She dropped down and flew under the green canopy of the old oak and settled on her feeding-branch. The tiercel circled for a while and then, half closing his wings, came down fast to the tower. He pulled out of his dive, wings open, hanging for a moment above the recess ledge and then settled on the lip. He shook his plumage firm and sat on guard until Fria should have finished her meal.

  Laura watched him through the field-glasses. He sat full in the light of the morning sun which caught the bright yellow cere at the base of his strong blue-black beak, a bold glare in his eyes. His dark-crowned head and the darker streaks of his cheek and moustache stripes and the steely shine of his back and wings were like the armoured accoutrements of some arrogant, feudal knight.

  She said with a touch of awe in her voice, ‘Oh, Sammy, isn’t he the bonny bird? He looks like some noble prince in armour ready to fight to the death for his lady.’

  From that moment for both of them, the tiercel was named and became the Prince. Twenty minutes later Fria came back from her meal and the tiercel Prince dropped from the tower and beat away fast and low down the slopes of the parkland to disappear near the river.

  Smiler said, ‘ He’s away to the river for his morning bath.’

  They climbed down from the house and Smiler showed Laura the ladder he had made, explaining that he was not going to use it again until he was sure that the eggs had hatched.

 
They went back to their bicycles and rode off to go to Barnstaple. Laura wanted to do some shopping for presents to take back to her father and mother and friends, having said that morning to Smiler, ‘I know you don’t want to waste time shopping in a town but it’s got to be done – so we might as well get it over and then you won’t be fussing about it for the rest of the week.’

  It rained hard that afternoon. To escape it they went to a cinema and sat at the back, holding hands, and Smiler when he came to write up his diary that night could not remember even the name of the film they had seen.

  He wrote:

  The tiercel is the Prince. Laura named him after one look, bang on the nose. Had to take some eggs up to the village after supper from the D. to Mr Samkin. Laura stayed behind nattering to the D. Glad she did, really. Not very keen about Sandra seeing us because you never know what she’s going to say just out of devilment. Come to think of it both Sandra and Laura like doing that. Mr Samkin asked about Fria and I told him about Prince. I got a feeling that he already knew there was a tiercel up there. Shouldn’t be surprised if he is already paying a visit now and then to Highford. He’s a quiet one, but he’s all right. I wish the teachers at my stinking old school had of been like him.

  What Smiler did not write in his diary was that coming away from Mr Samkin’s he had run into Sandra who had said, ‘ I hear tell that you’ve got your girl friend staying at the farm for a week.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ Smiler had said indignantly. ‘She’s not my girl friend. She’s just some relation of Jimmy Jago’s and I’ll be glad when she’s gone so she isn’t tagging along all the time.’

  Sandra tossed her fair hair and grinned.

  ‘The only time I saw her tagging along you had a grin on your face like a Cheshire cat that had taken all the dairy cream.’

  ‘If you think that, you ought to get your eyes tested.’

  As he cycled back down the hill Smiler thought, with a moment’s crossness, that it was a funny thing that some people couldn’t keep their noses out of other people’s business. But by the time he got to the bottom of the hill he was saying to himself, ‘Samuel M., you didn’t handle that right. You should have just told the straight truth. Maybe that would have put her off for good.’

  See Flight of the Grey Goose.

  Back to Text

  10. The Moment of Decision

  If the time of waiting for Laura’s arrival had passed snailslow for Smiler, the days of her week in Devon appeared to race by. High pleasure seemed, like a glutton, to bolt and swallow the hours voraciously. They visited Highford at least once every day. Laura was disappointed that she would not be there when the young arrived, but she made Smiler promise to write and give her all the news of them when they showed. They cycled for miles around the countryside, fished for trout in the Bullay brook, went now and again for a lunchtime drink at the Fox and Hounds, and explored the river for miles up and downstream – and, by skilful manoeuvring, Smiler managed to keep Laura away from the village and Sandra.

  The morning of the day before Laura was due to go back, they walked the Bullay brook to the point where it ran into the Taw. They sat on a high bank overlooking the main river. A hundred yards downstream a heron stood in the shallows, fishing. A black mink ran along the far bank, scented them, raised its head, gave them a beady stare, and then turned back along its tracks and disappeared. A salmon jumped in the pool above them, bored with the long wait ahead until spawning time. A solitary early Mayfly hatched from the water. It drifted away on the film with raised wings to take the risk of a few moments’ peril from lurking trout before it could lift itself into the air to its all too brief freedom.

  Lying on his back in the grass, Smiler said, ‘ I can’t believe you’re going tomorrow. Where’s all the time gone?’

  Laura was silent for a while, and then she said, ‘Sammy, I got something to tell you.’

  Smiler rolled over on his elbow and looked at her. A small, serious frown creased her sun-tanned brow.

  ‘Well, what?’

  ‘Well, before I left home my mother told me there was something I had to do.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Well, she knew from me that although you were writing to your sister and her husband that you hadn’t told them where you were – except in Devon somewhere. And she felt that was all wrong. And … well, since I knew where they lived in Bristol from you, she said I had to go and see them on the way down and tell them where you were.’

  Smiler sat up quickly. ‘You did that?’

  ‘Yes. I stopped off in Bristol. And it’s a good thing I did. They’re both very nice and I like them.’

  ‘Albert’s all right. But my sister Ethel – you don’t know her. If she takes a mind to it shell be off to the police and – oh, Laura, why did you do it?’

  ‘Stop panicking like a loon. Your sister won’t do anything of the kind. They both promised me that before I exactly told them. And then… well, they gave me this for you.’

  Laura took an envelope from her pocket and handed it to Smiler.

  Smiler recognized the writing on the envelope at once. It was his father’s.’

  ‘It’s from Dad.’

  ‘Yes, I know. Your Albert said you have to have it urgently, but he’d no way of sending it to you.’

  Smiler turned the letter over. ‘You know what’s in it?’

  ‘Of course not. I don’t open people’s letters. But from what Albert told me your father had written to him I do know that it’s some good advice. And that’s something that some folk not a hundred miles from here – don’t take to too gladly. Why don’t you open it and see?’

  Smiler opened the letter. It was a long letter in which his father explained what had happened to him to cause him to miss his ship, and how things had gone from then on, and a lot of chatty stuff about his doings. Reading it Smiler had a vivid picture of his father and his memory rioted with all the good things they had done together in the past – but all that was washed from his mind as he read the last paragraph:

  … Well now – to the real thing, Samuel M. I know from Albert and the police reports that the company sent me about most of your goings on. But the thing is – no matter how you’ve been able to look after yourself (and I’m really proud about that) – you’ve got the wrong end of the stick. O.K. so you didn’t pinch the old girl’s bag and you ran away from that place they sent you. But that wasn’t the thing to do and it no more is the thing to keep on doing. I don’t know when I’ll be back, but that makes no difference cos I should only make you do what you really ought to have done – if you’d used your noddle – long ago, and that’s walk up to the nearest copper and give yourself up. The police aren’t fools. The fact you run away tells them something was wrong, and the fact of giving yourself up will just make it more so. I’m not going to start sparking off and giving you orders. I know my Samuel M. All I know is that you got my advice – not orders – and I’ll know you’ll do the right thing. O.K.?

  Yours from the bottom of the world, but hoping to be home soon – lots of love, Dad. PS. They tell me you want to be a vet. That’s fine – but you can’t really settle to that until every things cleared up, can you? Chin up.

  Love again, Dad

  Silently Smiler handed the letter to Laura. As she read it he looked around him, at the sunlit river, and the green fields and the wood-sweeps of the valley-side. Above the high crest of the firs that hid the Highford hilltop from him he saw a handful of rooks sporting in the air, and far above them a pair of buzzards circling slowly on their broad wings. Fria and Prince were up there somewhere, Fria for certain would be sitting on her three eggs and in a couple of weeks they might be hatched … All this and his work with Mr Samkin and his pleasant billet with the Duchess to be thrown away, to be walked away from, perhaps for good, just because his father… A lump rose in his throat and he screwed his face muscles up to stop unwelcome tears seeping into his eyes.

  Laura handed the letter back to him. ‘Y
our father’s a fine and sensible man. Wronged you’ve been, but you’ve done nothing for yourself by running away. Oh, Sammy – I’ve told you that before.’

  Stubbornly Smiler said, ‘I never robbed that old lady – and I’m not giving myself up to the police.’

  Laura eyed him silently for a while and then she smiled and said, ‘You’ve got the letter. You know what your father thinks. I’m saying no more. It’s no place of mine to tell you what to do. A man must make his own decisions. So, Sammy, I’m saying no more about it.’

  ‘But it means leaving the Duchess, and the peregrines, and all my studying and –’

  ‘No, Sammy,’ Laura interrupted him and stood up. ‘I don’t want to hear anything about it. I know what you’ll do. Now come on, let’s walk up the river and have a bar snack at the Fox and Hounds and I can say goodbye to Harry.’

  And so it was that the subject was not mentioned between them again until a few moments before Laura got into the train at Eggesford to begin her journey home.

  Smiler gave her a kiss and a hug and then took from his pocket a sealed envelope and handed it to her.

  ‘Don’t open it now, Laura. In the train. It’s for you. It’s a kind of present. Well, two presents.’ He grinned suddenly. ‘You brought me a letter – now you got one to take back with you.’

  The porter came by them and, winking, said, ‘Come on now, miss. Can’t hold the train up. Parting is such sweet sorrow – but there’s always another time and nothing stops the grass growing.’

  The train pulled out of the station and Laura waved from the carriage window until the curve of the line hid her. Smiler waved back, and two thousand feet above Fria’s tower the tiercel caught the red flick of his bandana handkerchief and soared higher to chase a solitary buzzard, teasing it with short, playful, mock stoops.