Mr Mac and Me (25 page)

That evening, I go to Mrs Horrod. She opens the door to me and starts back fearful, but when I don’t mention Ann, or Mother, and smile at her and nod, she takes a breath and lets me in. ‘Could you tell me how rabbit-skin glue is made?’ I ask, and it’s clear from her long pause that for once she isn’t sure. ‘With rabbit skin, I s’pose,’ she frowns. ‘Boil it up until the water’s thickened. Let it cool. And then boil it up again.’

Later I go over to Sogg’s Fen just as Father did the night that I was born. But there’s no storm now. It’s clear and bright and my pockets are full of flints. I lie on a mound that hangs over the hollow, and I wait, still as I can, until the rabbits creep back into the open. They are big rabbits, large as hares, a patch of white behind their tails, so that when they hop, they flash bright as a lamp. God’s trick on them, I tell myself, for when they are still, there is nothing but a shadow. All the same I pick one out. It is near. A big loping animal with fine long ears.

We had ferrets once. A pair of them in a pen out in the garden. And Father would take them when he went rabbiting and set them down the holes. But he lost one in a warren when the line got knotted on a stump, and when he sent the other after it, he lost that too. ‘You should have dug them out,’ Mother scolded him. And Father protested that he did try digging. Dug halfway to Australia. The ferrets were in too deep. Our ferret cage is empty now. And it’s some time since we ate rabbit. But I’m sure that if I lie here still enough I can aim a flint and strike one on the head.

The grass was dry when I lay down, but the chill of the night is turning it to damp. Slowly I lift my arm. The rabbits pause. I pause with them. And they’re nibbling again. I draw my arm back, and the stone, for all that I’ve been practising, flies from my hand. I’ve got one. Stunned, if it’s not dead. And while the others melt away, I take out my knife and I cut across its throat. Its eyes cloud over. White as Ann’s when they roll back. And with warm blood oozing through my fingers, I run home fast across the marsh.

Can your mother skin a rabbit?
It was a chant the village children sang when I was first at school with them, and I’d chant back:
Yes. Yes. Yes
. Because the chances were if you said no, you’d never taste its meat.

Mother is up, sitting by Ann’s bed. I stand beside her and look down. Ann’s eyes are closed. Her face pale, her hair brushed out. I’ve never seen her look so beautiful, and I’m reminded of the sleeping princess in Mac’s pamphlet, lying in its frame of beaten silver.
Love, if thy tresses be so dark, how dark those hidden eyes must be
. I don’t know how those words stayed in my head, and to shake them away, I bring the rabbit out from behind my back. ‘I’ll need the skin,’ I say. And Mother is so surprised she screams.

‘Not in here.’ She pushes me from the room. But she climbs down the ladder and hangs the rabbit by its feet, and with one long cut down its belly she pulls its coat off like a glove. I leave the skin to dry out in the wind. And then I have the task of peeling away the soft layer of its fur. Mother can sell it. There’s a lady at Blackshore who’ll give good money for a hide, although she’ll not be pleased to see that it’s so thin. When it’s done I stoke up the stove, and draw a pot of water from the well. I don’t wait for it to boil but squeeze in the skin and leave it there to cook.

The smell is terrible. It fills the room and, firmly as I shut the door, soon the house is thick with it. Men come in for a drink, covering their mouths, and Mother shouts at me to go into the garden and leave it there to cool.

But I can’t leave it. Instead I build a fire under the cover of our trees, and hoping that no wisps of smoke will float out and betray me, I set the pot above it. Slowly, very slowly, the hide softens and the water shrinks. I add a little more and keep at it. Stirring and prodding and waiting for the leather to dissolve. Boil and leave, and boil again, it is the same instructions Mrs Horrod gives for herbs. And when the fire has died, I hide my pot in the woods, and I come out the next day to start again. And there has been a change. The water is slick when I put in a finger. And I smear it against my shoe and watch while it dries. I light the fire again and leave my pot to simmer, running back and forth between my chores to stoke it up with twigs. ‘That wretched smell will never go,’ Mother shakes the tablecloth, and she throws open the windows and sprinkles vinegar over the floor to freshen up the room.

By late afternoon there is no water left but the skin is slimy with a mush of paste. I cut a page from my sketchbook and I fold it together and pointing the ends like an envelope I glue it closed. ‘Yes,’ I dance around the fire, and I don’t allow myself to think how easily Ann sealed Old Mac’s letters with a paste of flour.

I scrape my glue into a jar, squeezing every last drop of it from the skin, and leaving Mother’s blackened, stinking pot to catch the rain when it should come, I carry it to Mac’s.

I knock, I wait. But there is no one there. And so I run back through the garden, and skirt around the harbour until I reach their shed. Mac is alone with his lamb’s-tails. They are thick as a flock, soft as pillows, and I must stare at them for a long while before I see the faces, smiling at each other, caterpillar folk they are, the lady in a hat.

‘Where will I find Mrs Mackintosh?’ I ask him, quiet, so as not to disturb, and I’m right, because he carries on, his head bent, filling each stem with grey and turquoise, black and green. ‘London,’ he says when I think he can’t have heard.

‘London! Is that not dangerous?’

‘Less dangerous, they say, than staying here.’ He turns then and hands me a letter. Mrs Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh.

‘I’ll post it for you,’ I promise him, ‘soon as I can get across the river.’ And I slip the letter into the pocket of my shirt.

My dear Margaret.

I have steamed open the envelope myself, and taken it upstairs to Ann.

It has been beautifully warm and soft all morning, just as you like it, with a silver rain falling for a minute or two, and no Zeppelins daring to cross over and follow you to London.

I’m hoping you’ll have seen the doctor by now and that he has good news for you. Whatever he says, he’ll have to admit this sea air suits your heart, I haven’t seen you weakened since you’ve been here, only with distress on your return from Glasgow after seeing your sister so reduced, and I hope, after this journey, you’ll be back here at least as well as when you left. And soon.

You can offer the doctor
Larkspur
as payment if he’ll have it. Or
Petunia. Or if needs be, both. And while you are there if you could show the flower pictures to B at Bramerton Street, and tell him if he’ll take some you’ll have them framed. You’ll do that twice as well as me, of course. But ask him first what he’ll pay. I’m sorry to treat you as my London agent. But it would help, with the situation with Muthesius impossible, if I could sell something. Anything. We’re getting very low. Dear Margaret, nothing is the same without you here. Do write and let me know when you’ll return. There are only two things that are important to me. You first, and then my work
.

MMYT

‘You first,’ I whisper the words to Ann. ‘And then my work.’ She would have liked that. I tug her arm. ‘Wake up, why don’t you.’ But her breath remains even, her face closed. ‘All right,’ I tell her, ‘have it your way.’ And I kick the door as I go through.

Chapter 47

The Royal Sussex Cyclists have laid barbed wire along the beach. Roll after roll of it, the spikes already rusting in the spray. I scan the shoreline and think how if a man was washed in now, he’d be caught and tangled in the wire. There was an advertisement in yesterday’s
Gazette
. Cyclists needed. Bicycles provided. Must have keen eyesight and be above the height of 5ft 2in. Training will be given. Comfortable billets in Colchester. Uniforms and rations. For men between the ages of 19 and 38.

How old do you have to be to pass for nineteen? I wonder, and I drag my foot along the canal path towards Southwold.

It’s not so long since I was last here, but in the days after the bombs soldiers have fortified the town. There are pillboxes and gun emplacements, and between the oak trees and the water tower a new double row of wire. As I walk along the promenade I see the old colonel Danky once told me fought in the Crimea – and I wave at him and try out a salute. I want him to know we’ll carry on where he left off. But he doesn’t seem to see.

There’s a funeral procession winding past the Grand Hotel. It’s the fisherman Winner Harris, whose trawl boat was caught in the warp of a minesweeper and sunk. His family are there, clinging together, weeping, and behind them a sad cluster of fishermen, Danky among them, and Thorogood too. I take my hat off and stand and let them pass, and I think of Winner who carved boats from blocks of wood and sailed them on the yacht pond over at Paul’s Fen. I see his careful hands, sure never to damage the bowsprit, nosing them round before they hit the bank, lifting them from the water to set their rudders straight. The procession moves on, and I make my way towards the post office, passing as I go whole divisions of soldiers, newly arrived to protect the town. Their horses are housed on the common, stall after stall of them, under canvas, and I imagine what George Allard will be saying to his wind-powered sail:
Any day now. Any hour. The enemy will be here to burn and murder and destroy.
And although I attempt a smile at the thought of it, the breath catches in my throat, and I promise myself I’ll walk back along the beach, however hard the going, to cast an eye along our coast.

The hazel is finished and Mac has started on a spray of speedwell. Veronica, he says it is, although I’ve heard Mrs Horrod call it gypsyweed or bird’s-eye. I sit beside him and count the leaves, watching to see where he might smuggle a bird in, knowing I’ll not see it until the thing is done.

‘Have you any news of Mrs Mackintosh?’ I ask. I’m concerned for her weak heart, all the way in London. And the rabbit-skin glue is hardening to pellets, so that if she doesn’t make use of it soon I’ll have to start again.

Mac nods, but he keeps drawing. ‘You’ll not start something?’ he asks, and so to please him I take a sheet of paper from the shed, and with a pencil I sketch as closely as I can the face of the woman in my miniature. Her oval eyes and tilted mouth, the softness of her neck. I work on a circular outline, unsure how to re-create the curve of the miniature itself, subtle as an eyeball inside its double-width surround.

It doesn’t work, and I scrunch the paper up in anger. And then, ashamed, I smooth it out, and turning it over, I try again. This time I draw Ann. I sketch her asleep. Her lashes fine and pale, resting on her cheeks, her hair loose about her shoulders. I give a smile to the corners of her mouth and I enclose her in a circle. Not too bad, I tell myself. Although there’s not a soul that would know it was her, and so I sprinkle her nose and cheeks with freckles and turn her into Betty.

It’s easier the second time to steam open the letter, and whether or not she wants to hear it I take it up to Ann.

It’s eight o’clock and I have had no letter from my Margaret and no news of her, so now I will have to wait till tomorrow morning anxiously because you said you would write.

But I must tell you the most surprising thing. I was sitting outside the ‘studio’ at five thirty eating my heart out with depression when our old friend T arrived. He’s staying near Rendlesham and heard I was here. There’s no teaching for him now, all his students are off at the front, and while they are assigning him some war work he said he was down in the dumps. He looked at my
Hazel
and said that’s going to be a very fine thing, I assured him I was trying to make it a fine thing. After a while he said, by Jove, Mackintosh, you are a marvel, you never seem depressed. You’re always cheerful and happy – I told him it was health – but I didn’t tell him that I was much more depressed than he was when he arrived – nor that his deepest depression was something equivalent to my not being very well – I keep my deepest depressions to myself. He shows them all the time like a young child – and that in a way makes him an object of sympathy and attraction – he came in his car, a fine black Crossley, we had a drink and he departed. But he thinks he will come again because I am a cheerful soul. Nothing more to tell tonight. No letter from Margaret.

MMYT

I’m not sure what to think, so I think nothing. Instead I stand quite still with the letter in my hand. Is there nothing that will cheer him? Nothing I can do? And I back out of the sickroom, my own heart heavy in my chest.

The next day there is another letter. I watch Mac while he is writing it.

I’ve been working hard, although you’ll laugh when you see what I’m painting now. And you’ll see too that the desire to eliminate green from my work has failed. You will understand, knowing as you do my insane aptitude for seeing green and putting it down here there and everywhere the very first thing – it complicates every colour scheme that I am aiming at so I must get over this vicious habit. It is one of my minor curses. Green, green, green. If I leave it off my palette I find my hands – when my mind is searching for some shape or form – squeezing green out of a tube – and so it begins again. But my
Veronica,
although tinted with silver and a hint of yellowish grey, is underlined with green. No flowers for her. Although I’ve noticed that another variation, growing conveniently by the back wall and untouched so far by our ravenous rabbit friends, is bursting with a purple flower, and I shall try that next. No other visitors. Just our boy. Mysterious as ever. So another lonely night without you. Did you find the words I sent? There are three of them. And you will see them anywhere you choose to look.