The Willows and Beyond (15 page)

“Mole, old fellow, you have dared raise a subject I have often thought of raising with you. It is perfectly true that but for your intervention I would have followed the Sea Rat south all those long years ago, and our lives might have been very different. I make no complaint about that, for nobody knows better than you how content and fulfilled my life along the River Bank has been — and all the happier and satisfying for your constant companionship.

“Yet, I do not deny that there have been times when I have been regretful — more than regretful perhaps — of that opportunity never taken, a feeling that has grown more rather than less troubling in recent years, especially since Young Rat appeared on the scene. He means no harm with his tales of Araby and the Orient, and gives me pleasure with his songs and his food — even if the after effects are sometimes more than disagreeable! — and he cannot know how wide was that door upon a new and exciting world opened by his father so many years ago, and how I have never quite been able to close it.” The Mole’s head slumped lower still.

“Indeed, Mole’ cried the Rat passionately, sitting up, brightness returning to his eyes, “do you remember —Then he realized that others were in the room and perhaps this was not a topic upon which his friend desired a public airing.

“I say, Badger, would you be so kind as to ask Young Rat or Nephew to brew us a nice cup of tea?”

The Badger understood at once and retreated, saying as he closed the door behind him that he would bring in the tea himself.

“Do I remember what?” said the Mole quietly.

“You’ve probably quite forgotten, but many years ago, when we first met, we were sauntering near Mole End, after you had abandoned it to spend the summer months in my house, and you caught the scent of it, the feeling of it.”

“I remember,” said the Mole, peering out of the bedroom window across to his own side of the River. “And do you remember how you had to insist that I listen to you, and that you followed your heart back home?”

“I do, Ratty.”

“I was insensitive, was I not?”

“A little, but you quickly made amends.”

“Well, Mole, my yearning for foreign climes, my dreams of travel and my desire to journey to those places the Sea Rat and his son once knew so well run very deep — as deep in their own way as that desire for home you felt those long years ago, and still feel. The desire for travel is in the nature of those who lead a nautical life.”

“And I denied it you!” cried the Mole brokenly. “It is I who have been insensitive all these years!”

“Why do you think I have kept myself so busy at my River work if not to forget the wanderlust within me? Why do I grow irritable sometimes, especially when autumn comes and I see all those birds migrating, heading off on journeys I myself will now never make?”

“But Ratty, if you really wanted to, then surely you could?”

“No, Mole, not any more. I am too old to follow my youthful dreams, too lacking in energy and enterprise, and I shall never be able to now. And she who has sustained me so long is dying day by day and soon I shall have nothing left, and no hope!”

The Rat could not continue, but only stared out through the window as the Mole had done, at the grey River and the dull wintry scene beyond, as tears of grief for his lost youth coursed unhindered down his face.

“O Ratty, please don’t!”

The door quietly opened and the Badger came in with two steaming mugs of tea. He saw at once how things lay and when the Rat said, “Leave me alone now, please let me be alone!” he understood that it was for the best. There are times when an animal needs solitude.

“Come on, Mole old chap, I expect Ratty could do with some rest once he’s drunk his tea — and when he has then I’m sure he’d be glad if you would prepare something for him to eat, something bland and gentle, which will not unsettle him once more.

“Yes, yes, I need to sleep’ said the Rat, not looking at either of them but staring out of the window.

So there they left him, the door quietly closed once more, with the Mole very much subdued and overcome by the revelations his friend had made.

“I’m sorry —“ began Young Rat, who felt the crisis must be all his fault.

“There is nothing to be sorry for,” said the Mole comfortingly, “indeed rather the opposite, for Ratty and I have been made to talk of things too long unsaid and if a friendship is true it should not balk at doing so. Is that not so, Badger?”

The Badger nodded sagely Then he said, “We have all had enough excitement for one day and I shall go home, and you should do so as well, Nephew, for your uncle and Young Rat here are quite capable of seeing to his needs. I am sure that Ratty will thank Otter and Portly for their help when he is better, but for now.

“I shall stay here tonight,” said the Mole as Nephew and the others dispersed and Young Rat went out with them to help them on their way Then he stoked the fire, listened for a moment at the Rat’s door and, after examining the books upon the Rat’s dresser, took down his atlas of the world.

How well thumbed it was, how readily it opened at those central pages that showed the Mediterranean lands. How the Mole sighed as he cast his eyes over all the many names Ratty had underlined over the years: Tangier, Tunis and Syracuse; Crete and Cyprus, Egypt and the Lebanon.

Then, a good many pages on, he found a torn slip of paper marking the pages entitled “The Middle East:

Asia, South”. Upon that sheet, written not only in the Rat’s hand but in Young Rat’s too, were those places to which the two had undertaken a culinary journey the night before with such dire consequences: Suez, the Gulf of Aden, and Al Basrah in the Persian Gulf; Bombay, and further off yet, Penang and Kuala Lumpur.

It seemed that the Rat had as yet marked off only one of these destinations on the map itself, this time in red and recently so, for the crayon he had used lay still upon the dresser: Al Basrah, in the kitchen of whose Caliph the Sea Rat once worked, and whose superlative Shaljamiya Chicken had given the Rat so much pleasure — and discomfort.

Yet not a discomfort so great as the Mole felt as he saw what the Rat had written on the paper below this list of names:
“Places I would have liked to visit but now never shall.”

“O my, how wrong I was to make Ratty stay at home, how wrong!” cried the Mole disconsolately, throwing himself down into the Rat’s chair and staring at the fire, the atlas open in his hands.

Which is how Young Rat found him when he returned a short time later.

“Mr Mole, are you all right?” asked the youngster. “No, I am not and nor is Ratty. I am hungry, for I have barely eaten all day, and as for Ratty, I venture to suggest that his appetite will return when he wakes up. Therefore, I would be much obliged if you would set to in the galley and prepare something, for I am too tired and upset to do it myself”

“I could make you the stickleback pie you both like.”

“No, I think something a little more — interesting.”

“Well then, I suppose I could do coddled eggs — that’s a favourite of Mr Ratty’s, or used to be before — before —“

“Quite so’ said the Mole, “quite so. But I was thinking that perhaps my cooking has been a little unadventurous of late and that if you could find some exotic yet mild dish, one fit for stomachs used to River Bank food yet in need of appetizing excitement —“My Pa used to make
rendangdaging
for those who have been ill and indisposed, and I think I have the ingredients.”

“A raging den gang?” repeated the Mole doubtfully.

“No,
rendangdaging
— it’s Malayan and means —“

“Pray, do not tell me what it means, or what it contains. Does it perchance come from the environs of Penang?”

“More or less, give or take a few days up a jungle creek in a boat.”

“Then please make it for us.

“Of course,” said Young Rat. Then he set to with a will, only later adding that it might be wise to have some sweetmeats to follow.

“Sweetmeats,” murmured the Mole dreamily, having resumed his perusal of Ratty’s atlas and paused awhile in the Persian Gulf. “What is it you have in mind?”

“There’s
hais,
of which I have a stock in the larder, for they keep well. Then there’s honeyed dates, of which the Caliph himself was especially fond, and of which my Pa became a master when he took over the job of Chief Taster to the Court —“

The Mole waved his hand airily and said, “They sound just the ticket, and I am sure they will help the Rat feel a lot better. But
do
avoid turnips, aubergines and banana-bean sauce, for at least a day or two, if you
don’t
mind!”

VII

The Uninvited Guest

In the days and weeks following the Rat’s sudden indisposition grey mists hung almost continually over the fields and dikes about the River, and the days grew dull and tedious. It was not yet as cold as that sudden snap of ice and snow at the start of November, but the feeling persisted that winter would show its harsher face again before too long.

That the Rat’s sudden and alarming “illness” had proved to be nothing more than a severe bout of indigestion brought on by Young Rat’s exotic cuisine was naturally a source of some amusement up and down the River Bank.

The Mole was not so easily fooled, however, nor sanguine about those matters which in his hours of greatest discomfort the Rat had so frankly raised.

In any case, the Rat did not recover quite so well as might have been hoped, as if his gastric trials and tribulations had brought out into the open a deeper lassitude and despondency He tried to seem cheerful and to keep busy, but he did so without much will, and many a time the Mole caught him staring at the River sadly, wistful for past dreams he felt he could not recover, and filled with foreboding for the future of the River he loved so much.

Feeling somewhat responsible for the Rat’s malaise and disappointment in his life, the Mole took to spending two or three nights each week at Ratty’s home, hoping in that way to raise his spirits, or at least make sure that he did not plunge to yet gloomier depths. In this endeavour he was encouraged by the Rat himself, who asked that he stay close, and who always perked up when, after an absence necessitated by his chores at Mole End, his friend appeared on the far side of the River once more.