Death of a Huntsman (18 page)

He was lost in emptiness and found himself crying out like a child. His mouth slobbered as he groped for air. Then the saddle was there, and the mule, and her head far off, black and unaware.

‘It's like everything else,' he said. ‘Never know where you are. A boat can be two days late. Or half a day early. You never really know.'

If she was listening she showed no sign. For some moments he was under the impression that she had galloped far down the valley and disappeared. He shouted something. Masses of tree-heather, growing taller now as the valley descended, broke apart and revealed her, drawn up and waiting, only a yard or two away.

‘Did you say anything?' she said.

‘No. All right. Perfectly all right.'

‘Say when you don't want to go on.'

He could not check his mule. He seemed to be pitching forward, head first, down the track.

‘Did you hear what I said about the
Alacantara
?'

‘You mustn't worry about that.'

‘She may be early. She goes out on Wednesday. But you never know—she might be in at midnight tonight. She sometimes is.'

‘Today is Friday,' she said.

He knew that he could not have heard her correctly. He knew that it was only yesterday that he had fallen off the track. It was only an hour or two since he had emptied out his shoe, with its old sour smell of blood, like a dirty beaker.

‘You probably won't get a passage for two or three weeks,' he said.

She was too far away to answer, a dissolving fragment, under high sun, of pure white and pure black, like a distant road-sign that was the warning of a bend.

‘That's the way with this island. It's easy to get here but it's hell's own job to get away.'

Some time later he was aware of the undergrowth of pine giving up a pair of stunted figures in black trilby hats. He saw the canopy of a hammock, red-flowered like an old bed coverlet between the poles. He was saying, ‘Let me alone. Let me walk,' and then he was being lifted in. It was rather difficult lifting him in because of his leg and because only one end of the pole
could be held up. The other was in the ground, leaving one man free to lift him and set him down.

It was stupid about the leg. As they took him down from the mule he could not feel it at all. Its pain had become self-numbed like the pain of a tooth at a dentist's threshold. All his pain was between his eyes, brightening his vision so that the little flowers of the hammock pattern sprang at him, dancing pink and blue with fire.

‘What about you?' he said. ‘You push on. You've got to go. Anyway the plane is on Saturdays.'

‘That can wait,' she said. ‘That isn't important. The important thing is to get you down. We ought to have done it before.'

‘You'd got it all so clear,' he said.

The pole straightened. He was laying parallel with the sky. She wiped his face several times with a handkerchief.

‘How now?' she said. ‘Do you feel fit to go?'

‘Fit,' he said. ‘Absolutely.' And then in a moment of brightness: ‘Don't forget the handbag.'

‘I nearly would have done.' His impression was that she was crying. He was not sure. She kissed him gently on the mouth and said: ‘Take it easy. Easy does it.'

‘Easy,' he said. ‘That's what you said before.'

A few moments later the trilby hats began to carry him slowly, in the hammock, down the path. Easy, he thought, that was it. How easy it had been. A ship, a handbag on a bed, a hotel, a
leste
burning through the town, a rest-house, a track to the top of the sky. Easy: that was her word.

‘How do you feel?' she said. ‘Do you want them to go slower?'

‘No,' he said. ‘Aren't you really going now?'

‘No,' she said. ‘Not yet. Not now.'

Delirium exploded a moment later in stars of pain. There was a smell of camphor from the hammock sheet, anaesthetic, making him gasp for breath; and then, unexpectedly, he was aware of a strange impression.

He stared up at the sky. In the centre of it he could have sworn he saw a shadow, huge and descending, in the shape of the buzzard, holding the sky in its claws.

‘Easy,' she said, and ‘Easy' his mind echoed, remembering the shape of her mouth in the sun.

The next moment he began fighting. ‘I won't go!' he shouted. ‘I won't go! I won't let it happen to me!' But she did not hear him. The trilby hats did not hear him either, and with calm slowness they carried him forward through the valley, down under the scorning brilliance of noon, towards the sea.

I was a dark-haired, pretty and rather tiresome girl of seventeen when my mother and elder sister took me on my first visit to a house called
Orleans
, a short distance above a wide bend of the river and overlooking some miles of meadows, in the Valley of the Ouse.

It was one of those rare afternoons in July when the air was drenched in the scent of roses and the fragrance of hay lying thick-cut in field after field along the river as we drove up in the big landaulette taxi we had hired to bring us from the village station. It was very hot that day, in spite of a strong breeze, and with a remarkable shimmering light on all the distances.

This light had one extraordinary effect I shall never forget. As we drove along the road to the house we were, at one point, high above the valley on an open ridge. Below us we could see perhaps a mile of river winding in big curves, under hump-backed bridges of stone, among the rich flat fields of hay.

Suddenly I saw, repeated again and again, all along the stream, what I thought at first were flocks of pure white ducks. They seemed to be floating quite motionless, between dark green banks of reed. Then, as the taxi
dropped further and further down the valley, I saw that I was mistaken. What I had thought were ducks were really whole islands, purest white, of water-lilies, in the crown of their bloom.

‘I hope you're not going to sulk again, child,' my mother said.

I had not been quite myself that summer; I was probably outgrowing my strength, my mother would tell me. It was true that I was often sulking and I must confess I felt most like sulking when my mother called me child.

It is perhaps a good thing to make it plain, also, that I did not get on at all well with my sister.

Angela was a very determined person of twenty-five, fair-haired, healthy and ambitious, who was going to be married in October. Our visit to this house, with its attractive and un-English name of
Orleans
, was part of a long search for somewhere where she and Ewart Mackeson, her fiancé, a successful junior partner in a leather-tanning company, could live. Mr Ewart Mackeson was a person of ambitions too.

It was still fairly easy to get servants in those days and what Mr Mackeson and my sister were looking for was a house of twelve or fifteen rooms, with stables if possible, an orchard or paddock, perhaps a few acres of shooting, a lawn on which to play tennis and an entrance marked ‘Tradesmen' at the side.

Neither Angela nor Mr Ewart Mackeson understood architecture, beauty or anything of that sort. What they were looking for was quite simple. It was, as I once told
them with what I thought was a flash of enlightened sarcasm, suburbia in tweeds. Mr Ewart Mackeson was in fact an example of a type that has become more and more common with the passing years. He wanted to be an officer in a good suburban regiment, playing the country squire.

You might have thought that that sort of house would not have been difficult to find. The country is after all full of them. It is the sort of house that used so often to be called
The Grange
or
The Cedars
or sometimes even
The Towers
; it almost invariably had virginia creeper covering its red brick-work and well-kept gardens where clipped hedges of box enclosed beds of yellow calceolaria, blue lobelia and scarlet geraniums. It was a type of house—residence is really the right word—built exclusively by and for people like Mr Ewart Mackeson and my sister and in a way it was, I suppose, part of the country's backbone.

There is no doubt that houses have souls, but I suppose they reveal themselves only to certain temperaments to which they are suited. Certainly, that summer, no house revealed its soul to us. We must have looked at twenty or thirty altogether and all of them hopeless. If their views were entrancing their sanitation was primeval; if they possessed stables they were also next to the gas-works; if their gardens were delightful there were odours suspicious of mice in the bedrooms.

Everyone knows, I suppose, about these impossible characteristics of houses for sale and all I really want to make clear is that by that hot afternoon in mid-July I had
reached the point when I never wished to see another house. I had in fact made up my mind not to go to see
Orleans
. I had somehow worked up inside myself such an antipathy towards that house that I spent most of the morning lying at the bottom of the garden, staring into space, sulking.

It is only fair to say that I was very often sulking. One of my most frequent and formidable sulks was in fact about Mr Ewart Mackeson. From the first Mr Mackeson put my back up. It is not possible to explain it easily, but whenever he came into the room I felt myself begin to bristle. In fact there was even more to it than that. One of the first manifestations of my not being well that summer was a tendency to go off to my room and lie down, refusing to eat, when Mr Mackeson came to supper. My blood curdled at the thought of him and his invasion of our three-part feminine privacy.

There was, for example, the instance of the coloured leather. One of Mr Mackeson's more enterprising business experiments was that of tanning leather in exquisite new bright shades. They were really exquisite, some of those chrome-yellows, scarlets, royal blues, emeralds, lime-greens and even pinks and pigeon-greys. The tanning of leather is not, I suppose, a very romantic occupation except to the chemists who conjure up the dyes and it was beyond me to grasp at seventeen that Mr Ewart Mackeson was himself a talented person, something of an artist in his way.

One evening that spring, anyway, he brought along to the house several samples of these bright new leathers to
show my sister. He wanted her to choose a colour—if she liked, several colours—so that he could have made for her a pair of shoes and a handbag to match them.

Finally Angela chose a pale green leather, almost the shade of an unripe bean. I did not say anything. A colour can be exquisite in itself and yet be atrocious, pure murder, for a certain type of person. I knew that that pale bean shade would kill my sister's pale hair and features, but I made no comment. And then Mr Mackeson said:

‘And what about you, Mrs Burnett? Wouldn't you like to choose something too?'

My mother was a tall pink woman who was sometimes inclined to gush. Alternatively she would simper. She, too, like my sister, was fair and pale. Although her body was angular and thin, she always wore long boned corsets and in summer carried a dark grey parasol to keep the sun from her face, with its unblemished complexion of china-rose. The result was that sometimes she had the appearance of being embalmed.

‘Oh! no I couldn't, Ewart, I couldn't. I really couldn't,' she said.

That was, of course, just a pose of hers; it was simply a case of protesting too much. The gush was far too obvious. And presently my mother, after more pressure from Mr Mackeson and more refusal and more protest from her, was choosing her own piece of leather.

‘That red, I think. No, the yellow. Shall I? I love the red—I do absolutely love the red. Like a tomato, isn't it? What shall it be, Angela? What do you say?'

Finally, of all things, she chose a yellow. It was a mustard yellow, unfriendly, chemical and hard. It was a hopeless colour for anyone except a dark person like myself, or even a coloured person, to wear.

But I still made no comment. My mother, I remember, made a few more gushing remarks about how heavenly and charming that shade of yellow was and how generous and too nice Mr Ewart Mackeson was, and then he suddenly turned to me and said:

‘Now, Laura, what about you? Come on now—what do you fancy?'

I suppose he was simply trying to be ordinarily civil and nice to me; I suppose he could hardly have done less than that. But suddenly I got up, looked witheringly at him and said with sarcasm:

‘No thank you. I don't want to look like a mustard plaster. Or something in a pea-green boat for that matter,' and then turned sharply on my heel and went upstairs.

The truth is that I was very fond of my sister. She was already a young woman, wearing woman's clothes, when I was eleven or twelve. I looked up to her with that distant heroine worship that only the very young can give and there was of course nothing at all to effect it or disturb it until Mr Ewart Mackeson appeared. It was very hard for me to accustom myself, though I did not consciously grasp it at the time, that my sister was going to be taken away from me.

From all this it is easy to see why, as I sat in the back of the landaulette taxi that afternoon, staring at the river,
the meadows of hay and the water-lilies that looked like crowds of pure white ducks in the simmering light of July, my mother should say:

‘I hope you're not going to sulk again, child, I hoped we'd got over that.'

I was in fact not sulking. I was really absorbed in that illusive trick of light that the afternoon had played on me. I was really entranced by the fact that a crowd of ducks had turned themselves into water-lilies and I wanted to be left alone with the idea, entranced, for a little longer.

That was why I said, as the taxi drew up at the iron gates of the house, under a long row of tall, flowering limes:

‘I'm not coming in. I'll sit here and wait for you.'

‘I shall not argue,' my mother said. She got out of the car and snapped up her dark grey parasol. ‘I shall not argue. There's no point in wasting breath. As long as you behave like a child you must be treated as a child.'