H Is for Hawk (12 page)

I was turning into a hawk.

I didn’t shrink and grow plumes like the Wart in
The Sword in the Stone
, who was transformed by Merlyn into a merlin as part of his magical education. I had loved that scene as a child. I had read it over and over again, thrilling at the Wart’s toes turning to talons and scratching on the floor, his primary feathers bursting in soft blue quills from the end of his fingers. But I was turning into a hawk all the same.

The change came about through my grief, my watching, my not being myself. The first few days with a wild new hawk are a delicate, reflexive dance of manners. To judge when to scratch your nose without offence, when to walk and when to sit, when to retreat and when to come close, you must read your hawk’s state of mind. You do this by watching her posture and her feathers, the workings of which turn the bird’s shape into an exquisitely controlled barometer of mood. A hawk’s simpler emotions are easily perceived. Feathers held tight to the body mean
I am afraid.
Held loosely they mean
I am at ease.
But the longer you watch a hawk the more subtleties you see; and soon, in my hypervigilant state, I was responding to the tiniest of cues. A frowning contraction of the crines around her beak and an almost imperceptible narrowing of her eyes meant something like
happy
; a particular, fugitive expression on her face, oddly distant and reserved, meant
sleepy.

To train a hawk you must watch it like a hawk, and so you come to understand its moods. Then you gain the ability to predict what it will do next. This is the sixth sense of the practised animal trainer. Eventually you don’t see the hawk’s body language at all. You seem to feel what it feels. Notice what it notices. The hawk’s apprehension becomes your own. You are exercising what the poet Keats called your chameleon quality, the ability to ‘tolerate a loss of self and a loss of rationality by trusting in the capacity to recreate oneself in another character or another environment’.
¹
Such a feat of imaginative recreation has always come easily to me. Too easily. It’s part of being a watcher, forgetting who you are and putting yourself in the thing you are watching. That is why the girl who was me when I was small loved watching birds. She made herself disappear, and then in the birds she watched, took flight. It was happening now. I had put myself in the hawk’s wild mind to tame her, and as the days passed in the darkened room my humanity was burning away.

Three tentative raps on the front door. ‘Hang on,’ I call. A small voice inside me, resentful and savage, hisses,
Go away
. It is Christina with two takeaway coffees and the Sunday papers. ‘So,’ she says, settling herself in a chair by the fireplace. ‘How’s it going? Is the hawk OK?’ I nod. I raise my eyebrows. I am vaguely aware this isn’t enough to make a conversation. ‘Mmm,’ I say. The voice is not entirely mine. She hugs her knees and looks at me curiously.
I must try harder
, I think. So I talk about the hawk for a while, and then I can’t speak any more. I stare at my paper cup.

I’m pleased to see her.
She shouldn’t be here
. This coffee is good.
We should be alone.
These resentful thoughts surprise me. Manning the hawk is all about showing it new things. Christina is a new thing. ‘I’m going to try something,’ I tell her. ‘Ignore the hawk. Just keep reading the papers.’ I fetch a fresh piece of beef from the kitchen, sit with the hawk on the sofa, reach up and remove her hood. There’s a moment of fast-beating incomprehension and the air in the room turns to ice. Tight-feathered, in savage irresolution, eyes like porcelain saucers, the hawk stares. My heart sinks. She is going to bate. But the moment stretches, and she does not. After a deal of cautious observation she decides that a human turning newspaper pages is something entirely fascinating.

An hour later all is calm and companionable. We’re watching television. The hawk balances evenly on the balls of her feet, mesmerised by the flickering screen. Tiny white wisps of down still attached to the finials of her scapular feathers wave in the draught from the hall. Then, without warning, she bursts from my fist in a whirlwind of a bate. Papers fly. Christina flinches.
Shit
, I think.
I should hood her, let her rest. This is too much
. But I am wrong. Fear did not engender this bate. Frustration did. She picks at her jesses in displaced fury, then tears at the meat beneath her toes. She is hungry. The food is a wonderful discovery. She is a delicate, decisive gastronome. She picks, and bites, and swallows, and squeaks in happiness, and bites and swallows again. I am thrilled. But also indignant. This moment was to have been born of solitude and meditative darkness. Not this. Not daylight with another person in the room and
’Allo ’Allo!
on the television. Not in the presence of comedy Nazis and a soundtrack about giant sausages and the occupation of France. She narrows her eyes with pleasure, bristles around the nose, and her feathers soften into loose falls of ochre and cream. ‘Has she done that before?’ asks Christina. ‘No,’ I say. ‘This is the first time.’ Laughter from the television audience as an SS officer dressed as a woman hoves into view and the hawk finishes eating, lifts herself into a vast, frothy mop of feathers, holds them there for an instant and shakes them all back into place. A rouse. It is a sign of contentment. She has not roused before.

Now my hawk is tame enough to sit bareheaded. From her perch by the window she watches the curtains move over a carpet furred with dust. She won’t yet be picked up without a bate. But I’m working on that. From the sofa I flick a thumbnail-sized scrap of steak towards her. It falls with a sticky
thwick
on the vinyl cloth beneath her perch. She looks down at it. Frowns. Turns her head to one side to inspect it more carefully. Then hops down with a scratch of talons and a rattle of feathers, picks the meat delicately from the floor and swallows it. Gone. For a while she stands there, as if trying to remember something she has forgotten, then bounces back onto the perch with brio, all shaggy trousers and waggy tail. I wait a while, then send another scrap of flesh her way.
Thwick
.
Hop
.
Swallow
.
Hop
. I lower myself to the floor and sit there for a while. Shuffling slowly sideways on my rump, I watch the hawk out of the corner of my eye. She tenses. I stop. She untenses. I move. She tenses. I stop again. I inch across the carpet until I reach that hair-fine juncture where any movement nearer will make her bate from the perch. Breathing as carefully as if I were about to take an extravagantly long rifle-shot, I slowly – so slowly – extend my garnished fist towards her. I can almost taste the hawk’s indecision; the air is thick with it. But – joy! – she is looking at the food in front of her. She leans forward as if to pick it from the glove, but then something inside her snaps. With an awful clang of the metal ring of the perch against its steel base, she bates away from me.
Damn
. I take her up onto the glove for a few mouthfuls of food.

When she is settled back on her perch, we play the game again.
Flick
.
Hop
.
Flick
. She’s solved the puzzle of where the food is coming from and some part of her is reconsidering my place in her world. She watches me intently as I inch towards her and again extend the garnished glove. She leans across and snaps up my gift of steak. My heart leaps. She takes another piece, and then another, smacking her glossy black chops.

As I sit there happily feeding titbits to the hawk, her name drops into my head.
Mabel
. From
amabilis
, meaning loveable, or dear. An old, slightly silly name, an unfashionable name. There is something of the grandmother about it: antimacassars and afternoon teas. There’s a superstition among falconers that a hawk’s ability is inversely proportional to the ferocity of its name. Call a hawk
Tiddles
and it will be a formidable hunter; call it
Spitfire
or
Slayer
and it will probably refuse to fly at all. White called his hawk Gos for short, but also awarded him a host of darkly grandiose other names that for years made me roll my eyes in exasperation. Hamlet. Macbeth. Strindberg. Van Gogh. Astur. Baal. Medici. Roderick Dhu. Lord George Gordon. Byron. Odin. Nero. Death. Tarquin. Edgar Allan Poe.
Imagine
, I used to think, amused and faintly contemptuous. Imagine calling your goshawk any of those things! But now that list just made me sad. My hawk needed a name as far from that awful litany, as far from Death as it could get. ‘Mabel.’ I say the word out loud to her and watch her watching me say it. My mouth shapes the word. ‘Mabel.’ And as I say it, it strikes me that all those people outside the window who shop and walk and cycle and go home and eat and love and sleep and dream – all of them have names. And so do I. ‘Helen,’ I say. How strange it sounds. How very strange. I put another piece of meat on my glove and the hawk leans down and eats.

10

Darkness

HE POURS ANOTHER
whisky into his emptied glass and broods over the day’s events. He is free, but he has shackled himself to a madman. A lunatic. At the very least, a sufferer of intermittent delusional insanity. He turns down the beam of the paraffin lamp and sinks back into the chair, gloomily rereading the report he has written on the progress of his goshawk’s education.

6.15–6.45 walked round + round Gos, holding out a leg, while he bated whenever I came too close. Came away without feeding him. This is not in the book. I have done the same thing, with the same results, for fifteen minutes in every hour since (until 6 o’clock at night).
¹

He despised that rabbit leg. He despised the fur on it, the claws, the crown of pale flesh that grew dry and waxen as the hours passed. He despised it because the hawk did not want it. The hawk did not want him either. He had whistled to the hawk all day and his lips had grown dry as the whistle gave out and his solicitude had thinned to frustration and finally despair. Last night the frustration had reached such a pitch that he’d prevented Gos from regaining the fist after a bate – worse, gloried in the hawk hanging there, revolving slowly on his jesses. It was a terrible sin. He is full of shame. And worry. Gos’s mutes are green. Does that mean his hawk is sick? Maybe that is why he did not want the rabbit. What should he do?
Starvation
, he thinks. That will cure the stomach upset, if it is one. Perhaps he shall give the hawk some egg tomorrow? But the most important thing of all is this:
he shall eat when he jumps for it, not before
.

White’s plan would have worked, had he stuck to it. But he did not. By dawn Gos had been given the greater part of a rabbit to eat, and he had not jumped to the fist. Another resolution was broken. They all were. Even White’s plan to keep the hawk awake for three days and nights had failed: he’d felt so sorry for Gos he kept returning him to his perch for short bouts of sleep. Freed from White’s presence, Gos remembered how much better life was when not tied to a human who kept stroking it and talking to it and bothering it with slippery rabbit livers, and singing and whistling and moving glasses of liquid up and down. When he came to pick it up again the hawk was always as wild as ever.

Poor Gos. Poor, ragged, fearful, broken-feathered Gos. I thought of him often as I sat with my hawk. I saw him in black and white and a long way off, as if viewed through the wrong end of a telescope: a miniature, miserable hawk bating and twittering in distress on the grey lawns of a distant house. Gos was very real to me. But White was not. It was hard to imagine him with his hawk. Sitting with my own it was hard to imagine him at all. I looked at photographs, but they were all of different people: one was a pale-eyed man with a Shakespearian beard who’d written books under the pen-name James Aston, and another a thin young man with nervous eyes and a spare, haunted face who was Mr White the schoolmaster. There were photographs of White the countryman in an open-necked shirt and a tweed jacket, looking louche and amused. And photographs of White much later in his life: a corpulent, white-bearded English Hemingway, a woolly-sweatered Falstaff. I couldn’t reconcile these faces. I read
The Goshawk
again as I sat with Mabel, read it many times, and every time it seemed a different book; sometimes a caustically funny romance, sometimes the journal of a man laughing at failure, sometimes a heartbreaking tract of another man’s despair.

But one White was clear to me as I manned my hawk. It was not White the falconer. It was the man who had, for the first time in his life, discovered the joys of domesticity. A man who painted woodwork the brightest of blues and reds, who arranged feathers in jars on his mantelpiece and made curries from prawns and eggs and spoons of thin-cut marmalade. I saw him boiling his laundry in the copper on the kitchen stove, and sitting in an armchair reading Masefield’s
Midnight Folk
with his setter Brownie sleeping at his feet.

And I saw him drinking. There was always a bottle at White’s side, and his battle with Gos made him drink all the more. ‘It was not that one drank enough to become incapable or stupid,’
²
he wrote, ‘but alcohol now seemed the only way of continuing to live.’ As I sat with my hawk and puzzled over White I wondered if it was alcohol that obscured him, blurred him from view. I knew the notion was fanciful, but even so there seemed some deep connection between White’s drinking and his evasiveness. And I was sure that it was the drink that irrigated White’s constant self-sabotage, for it is a common trait of alcoholics to make plans and promises, to oneself, to others, fervently, sincerely, and in hope of redemption. Promises that are broken, again and again, through fear, through loss of nerve, through any number of things that hide that deep desire, at heart, to obliterate one’s broken self.