By the Lake (16 page)

“It’s all true,” the boy said. “There was a bigger crowd every day.”

“Be careful,” Monica warned. “I think I would have died if I had been in the lobby but all he did was wave to the people like a cardinal. He was so unbothered and so much himself that people began to take to him in the end. Before we left I saw him get all sorts of looks—people laughing and amused—but also attracted. People are funny. They look down from all sorts of heights and then if the looking down has no effect they get unsure.

“He may have ignored the crowd but he misses very little. After the children were in bed and Patrick here was in charge I used to go for a walk along the front on my own. On the way back I went into the hotel bar. I had to force myself the first evening. It was what Paddy Joe and myself used to do at the end of the day whenever we went on holiday and I wasn’t sure if I could bear to walk in without him. I wasn’t even sitting down when his lordship was there like my shadow. I was glad of his company. You’d never be bored with him. And it stopped those men coming up and offering drinks, which is the worst of being on your own. One night I had a second brandy. I saw him staring at the glass in an odd way and I asked if there was anything wrong.
‘You could get used to it, Monica,’ he said in that way of his that makes it sound like the end of the road. All that family hated drink. Only very late in her life did my mother take a drink. Lord bless him: he did his very best and he couldn’t have been nicer with the children and they are all fond of him except when he appeared as Funny Man.”

“Or throwing his money up in the air,” the boy added.

“They didn’t like that. I had to make them pick up the coins. When we were growing up we were glad to gather coins no matter from what quarter of heaven they fell.”

“Mother is always talking about how things were when she was growing up,” the boy screwed his face into an expression of distaste.

“In fairness, he’d have stayed the whole week in the hotel and never said a word, even though it was killing him, but you should have seen the look on his face when I said that maybe we were there long enough: it was deliverance.”

Outside the porch the Ruttledges witnessed the formal end of the holiday, the thanks, the praise, the promises, the handshakes, the final kiss. All the children were travelling with Monica and she was the first to drive away after inviting the Ruttledges to her house for an evening.

“We’ll come when you have time to get settled. We’ll come as soon as you are ready.”

The Shah let down the window as the big car rolled slowly past the porch. “I’ll be out on Sunday. Things should be more or less back to normal by then.”

On Sunday he took the metal box away.

“Are you sure you don’t want to count?” Ruttledge asked playfully when he handed over the box. “I could have helped myself to thousands.”

“That’ll do you now,” he said. “That’s enough out of you for one day. I don’t know how on earth you put up with him, Kate.”

Then the settled weather came, the morning breeze from the lake lifting and tossing the curtains on the open windows to scatter early light around the bedroom walls.

A sharp clawing sound came from behind the curtain where a window was open. The din of birds was already loud about the house but the low motor hum of the small insects had not yet begun. The traffic was barely moving on the distant road.

The clawing was followed by a loud falling into the room, and then stillness. There was a sound of something heavy being dragged along the floor towards the bed. Most mornings the black cat came through the window into the room. Usually she came soundlessly, except when she brought mice or small birds and woke the room with the racket of her play. The sound was heavier and more alarming than a cat coming in with her prey.

Kate slept through the noise. She even moved her face lower into the pillow as if in search of deeper sleep.

With a single leap, the cat was on the foot of the bed, claws digging into the white cover as she fought not to be dragged down by the weight she carried. Not until she had secured her grip on the edge of the bed did she advance to leave the animal beneath Kate’s raised shoulder. Then the cat sat straight up and began to purr. It was a young hare she brought, its brown fur stretched out on the white cover, the white of the belly glowing softly in the darkness. All her attention was fixed on the sleeping woman.

When she was wild and starving, Kate had brought her food. She would watch from behind a tree, not leaving the safety of
the tree for the food until the woman left. Eventually, she came, dragging her body low along the ground, provided Kate stood some distance away. Until one day she ate from the plate and sat and cleaned her face instead of running back for cover.

Though she was now tame and belonged more to the house than the fields, she never lost her wildness completely. She must have come on the leveret when it was sleeping in its form in the long grass or hunted it down when it tried to escape through the thick waves of the meadow.

Tired of sitting on the bed without any reaction from the sleeping woman, the cat seized the young hare again and advanced until she was able to drop the leveret across Kate’s throat.

Ruttledge was trapped in the fascination of watching. He could have reached across and lifted the young hare, but he felt powerless, as if he were part of a dream.

Before he could move, her own hands came from beneath the bedclothes and groped about her throat as if the hands had the separate life of small animals. Feeling the warm fur, they suddenly went still, and with a cry she sat up, flinging the small hare loose.

“What a thing to do!”

The cat retreated to the corner of the bed in the face of the outburst and stood her ground. Ruttledge switched on the bedside lamp.

“How did it get here?”

“Your cat brought it in. She brought it in through the window.”

“Why didn’t you stop her?”

“I didn’t know what she was going to do.”

Released from the tension of her fright, Kate suddenly reached for the cat. “Oh, you villain! What is the poor animal?”

“A young hare—half-grown.”

The flesh was still warm. A trickle of bright scarlet ran from
the nostrils. There was a thin red stain along the white cover of the bed, like a trail. He lifted and put the leveret out of sight on the floor.

“Why did you do that to me?” The cat reacted to the tone of the voice and purred louder than ever and came forward to be lifted and prized.

Outside there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. The ripe heavy grass in the meadow was stirring like water beneath the light breeze. Over breakfast they heard on the radio that ridges of high pressure were moving slowly in off the Atlantic. As they went about the tasks of the morning, from every quarter came the sounds of machinery starting up and the whine of rotary mowers, like low-flying aeroplanes in the meadows. There was a sense that the whole of this quiet place was becoming deranged.

Ruttledge was ready for cutting. As he swung the mower round to connect to the drive shaft, he felt some apprehension but no excitement. He had not grown up with machines and got none of the pleasure he saw young men take in their power; neither would he ever be as skilful and confident in their use. He knew the basic mechanics and the danger of the blurring speed of those small blades. The morning wind from the lake that lifted the curtains had died. The water was like glass, reflecting the clear sky on either side of a sparkling river of light from a climbing sun. Not a breath of wind moved on the meadows. The only movement was the tossing of the butterflies above the restful grass. The idling tractor stilled the insect hum but not the clamour of the crows or the shrieks of the lake gulls. Once the mower was in gear and turned up to full throttle it drowned every sound. In a cocoon of noise and dust and diesel fumes and the dull, reflected heat from metal, he sat at the wheel while the tractor and mower circled and circled the meadow, the grass falling in front of the blurring whine of the blades. Out of a corner of an eye he saw hares escaping and a hen-pheasant leading her small band of young across the swards towards the dubious
safety of a deep drain. When all the meadows were cut they looked wonderfully empty and clean, the big oak and ash trees in the hedges towering over the rows of cut grass, with the crows and the gulls descending in a shrieking rabble to hunt frogs and snails and worms. In corners of the meadows, pairs of plump pigeons were pecking busily at grass seed. No pheasant or hare had been killed or maimed. With the sea of grass gone, the space between the house and the lake suddenly seemed a different land.

“I’m hurrying,” Ruttledge said as he had tea and a sandwich in the house. “I know Jamesie will be on edge once he hears the mower.”

“What time do you think you’ll be finished?”

“His meadows are small: by teatime.”

“I’ll be over around six.”

He travelled round the shore. All the gates from the road to the house were open. The pair of dogs met the tractor at the last gate, escorting it down to the house. The brown hens lay sprawled in the dust and shade behind the netting wire. A pair of boots was drying in front of the open door. The green gate to the meadows had been pushed wide from the whitewashed wall of the outhouse. Ruttledge left the tractor running on the street, the mower raised.

“Are yous ready?”

A sound of laughter came from within.

“Good soldiers never die,” Jamesie shouted out but did not appear.

It was dark and cool within the cave of the house after the hot sunlight. Jamesie sat at the table by the window in his stocking feet with a copy of the
Observer
. Mary and Margaret sat quietly together at the unlit stove. After the greetings and welcomes, Jamesie said, “Why don’t you turn the bloody thing off out on the street and we’ll have tea or a drink or something?”

“No. We’ll start. How much do you want cut?”

Jamesie and Mary looked to one another quickly before turning to Ruttledge. “What do you think?”

Ruttledge refused to be drawn. “It’s up to you. I can mow it all if you want.”

“Mary?” Jamesie turned.

“There’s no use asking me. You know yourself what you want.”

He was in crisis, having always had the meadows cut in three parts: it was against his instinct to risk it all in the one throw. In bad summers he would spend weeks struggling with hay, but cut in three portions all of it would never be lost. While he knew that the machines had taken most of the hardship from haymaking, he couldn’t quite believe that they had taken most of the risk and excitement and drama as well.

“What did you do?” he asked anxiously.

“I knocked all mine.”

“Cut it all to hell,” Mary said suddenly. “Otherwise we’ll be sick looking at it for the whole summer.”

“What if it pours?” Jamesie demanded.

“The forecast is good,” Ruttledge said gently.

“Fuck it,” Jamesie said suddenly. “Cut it to hell. We’ll live or die.”

“Good!” Mary said vigorously. “I wouldn’t like to count the summers I was sick of the colour of hay.”

The meadows must have once been tiny, not much more than gardens. Hedges or ditches had been removed and now ran as shallow drains through the small meadows. Wherever they dipped sharply Jamesie had marked them with old nylons tied to the top of poles like flags. In places the meadows ran along the river and the edges of the bog. On these stretches he kept watch. Ruttledge was uneasy to have him so close because he knew the danger of a blade flying loose or catching a small stone to whirl it from the thick grass like a bullet, but Jamesie could not be persuaded away.

“Here you can’t see the river from the grass. Lord bless us, if the tractor went in we’d be the talk of the country for weeks.”

No stone or blade flew and by evening all the small meadows were mowed. A huge flock of crows descended on the swards, and some pigeons but no gulls. The meadows were hidden from the lake. Away to the west the sky was turning red.

Ruttledge was surprised not to find Kate in the house. “She said she was coming over.”

“Something must have held her up,” Mary said.

“I couldn’t look at whiskey. I’ll have water or a beer,” Ruttledge protested when Jamesie pounded a bottle of Powers down on the table like a challenge and unscrewed the cap, the three swallows on the gold label poised for flight.

“You’re no good. Useless,” he said as he poured a large whiskey and raised his glass with a challenging flourish.

The cold beer was delicious in the tiredness. The tiredness itself was deeply pleasurable after the jolting and heat and dust and concentration on the disappearing ground. Mary put a large platter heaped with sandwiches on a chair.

“These are wonderful, Mary. Did any word come from Italy?”

“Yesterday,” she smiled the sweet smile that was all her own and took a postcard from the windowsill. “There’s nothing in it. Read away.”

Ruttledge was expecting to see a crowded beach or a café with tables under awnings or an old church on the card, but it was a reproduction of Giotto’s
Flight into Egypt
. Joseph with a bundle on his shoulder was leading the donkey carrying Mary and the Child. Against the deep blue of the sky and the pale hills hovered two angels with outspread wings and haloes of pale gold. The blue of Mary’s robe was lighter than the lightest blue of the sky. The robes of Joseph, the child and the angels were as brown as earth. The trees on the pale hills were flowers. The whole had an extraordinary and deeply affecting serenity: it was
as if they had complete trust in the blessed light as they travelled to a place or state where nothing cast a shadow.