Perfect Gallows (25 page)

By about the time Jean came down after the milking there was a cleared lane all round the field, with the hand-tied sheaves laid under the hedge. Now the tractor could start, and the feel of the morning changed. The drub of its motor and the clatter of the reaper-binder, ten times louder than the simple horse-drawn bar, became the main noises of the day. Dave drove the tractor. Jean sat on the pierced metal seat at the back of the binder, controlling the height of the cutter-bar and lifting it for the turns. She had a cord that led to Dave's elbow which she could tug for him to stop before things went disastrously wrong behind him. The binder was old, much-mended, and broke down every third circuit, but Dave understood its moods. He would climb down, mumbling slurred obscenities, tug some tangle out, adjust something with a spanner, oil something else and start again.

Meanwhile the stookers, working in teams of two, picked up a sheaf under each arm, faced their partners as if setting for square-dance and plonked the four sheaves on their bases with the seed-heads leaning together. If they got it right the sheaves stood and eight more could then be stacked against them to make a stook, in line from the last and the right distance from the next line so that in a week a wagon could drive between them and the now-dried sheaves (if the weather held) be pitched easily up to the loaders. Stooking was not difficult work, nothing like as heavy as mucking-out, but after a couple of hours you became very weary, weary of the monotony, of the glare of the noon sun off pale stubble, of the strange refusal of particular sheaves to stand. Your arms rubbed raw along the inside. Patches of most fields were infested with thistles, so that each sheaf tortured the tender skin. Seed heads (barley was even worse than oats, everyone said) worked their way into your clothing to scratch at each move. Harvest mites chose your softest places—under your belt, your arm-pits, crotch, the crook of knees and elbows—producing at first a pleasant mild itch which you soon learnt would be a furious irritation by midnight.

Worst of all, the work gave you time to think. There was nothing else to do with your mind while the slow hours passed and the island of uncut stalks dwindled and dwindled. Other times of the day you could read, or help Cousin Brown with the play (Andrew, in addition to being principal actor, had also the jobs of assistant stage manager, box-office clerk, messenger and wardrobe hand); nights, there was Jean, up in her room at the Lodge, or if it was warm enough wandering out under the stars and finding somewhere. But harvesting you couldn't help thinking, thinking and feeling, your days of hope closing and closing, your chances of escape becoming ever fainter.

Most fields were small enough to mow in one day. Dolly drove the tractor for the last few circuits while Dave and Mrs Althorp waited with shot-guns at opposite corners of the now cam-shaped island of stalks. The stookers stopped work and stood clear, some gripping staves. Out of the last unreaped yards the trapped rabbits bolted for the hedgerows. Guns banged. Stave-holders yelled, chased, thwacked. It was meat to add to the rations, a flare of fun after the dusty day. Everyone looked forward to it.

Three evenings after his medical Andrew was sitting on a fallen tree at the top of the Five-acre, watching the rabbit-drive. Jean had gone off for the evening milking. The late afternoon sun shining through the dust of harvest hazed the whole scene brown-gold. He made a rectangular frame with thumbs and forefingers and looked through it, choosing shots for an imaginary film. When he had the prestige he would insist on directing his own films. One day … If …

A twig cracked in the copse behind him. He twisted and saw Sergeant Stephens push his way out between a couple of elder bushes and raise a hand in greeting. Yes, of course; this was where he came to leave Cousin Blue's butter for Samuel to fetch, and later came down to collect his payment. He didn't seem at all put out to find himself observed, but climbed by the protruding roots up on to the bole of the tree and walked out along the trunk, stepping easily over the couple of strands of barbed wire which the men who'd fenced the camp had thought enough at this point. Owing to the tighter security since the invasion Andrew hadn't seen him for several weeks.

“Hello, sergeant,” he said.

“Hi. Thought I'd come take a couple of snapshots, send to the folks back home. You don't see this kinda farming around there these days. We cut a mile at a time, combines, four of 'em in a row. This looks like something out of a picture book.”

“Are you a farmer?”

“My dad was, only he went bust in the depression and we moved to the city.”

He lifted his camera and looked through the viewfinder.

“Too far off,” he said. “OK if we move down a little? Where's your girl?”

“Milking. Please don't mention she's mine if you get talking. Mrs Althorp doesn't like it.”

“Sure, no problem.”

They walked down, the stubble crackling under the sergeant's enormous boots. He took several pictures, of the binder, the stooks, Mrs Althorp in the act of firing.

“That dame can handle a gun,” he said. “Better than a lot of our guys out in Normandy, way things are going.”

“It seems to be taking ages.”

“The Krauts can fight. Best army in the world. We're taking one in ten casualties already, and the closer we come to Germany the tougher it's gonna get. The Russkies won't have it any easier, even if they are going great guns right now. Once they're on German soil …”

“We've got to win in the end.”

“Sure.”

“When, do you think?”

“Winter of forty-five, maybe. That's the Krauts. After that it'll be the Japs. You ever think what it's going to be like taking the Jap mainland? One in ten casualties will be nothing.”

“I've had my medical for call-up.”

“You'll be in time, kid. You're not going to miss a thing.”

“I'm more interested in things missing me,” Andrew heard Adrian saying, while he shrivelled inside.

“Have those lawyers finished messing with the old man's will?” asked the sergeant.

“It doesn't look as if anything's going to get settled till the war's over and young Mr Oyler comes back.”

“Jesus!”

“Did Phil find any more out?”

“Phil? You didn't hear about Phil? He was the one in his ten.”

“The one … That's awful. When?”

“Week after D-Day. Say—I haven't told your nigger friend.”

“Why on earth …?”

The sergeant sighed.

“Well, first off I guess I felt bad about old Phil. I'd staked him, remember? It was my dough. So when I saw that clipping he sent I figured I was on a loser. I called Phil back. If I'd kept him on the job he'd be alive now.”

“Yes, but …”

“Your friend, he's kind of crazy, huh?”

“He's different.”

“Yeah. Obsessed, I'd call it. Look, suppose I tell him I'm calling Phil back, what's he gonna do?”

“Offer to pay the expenses himself? He's got a bit saved up. But you could always explain that you can't get Phil more than a few days' leave.”

“Sure, and then what's he do? Hire a private dick of his own, I'll bet. Now, you gotta understand, I do things my own way in this camp, but I can't afford to have guys nosing around asking questions. I can't afford some guy asking about Phil, saying he was in Hull early June when he shoulda been here, right? I could be in bad trouble. So I stalled. I thought if I give him time to think about it, your friend would come around. He asks me, any news from Phil and I tell him no. But he keeps on and on. Then he starts to think just because there ain't no news from Phil that means Mr Charles ain't telling the truth. Phil would've found something else by now, supposing it was there to find. Right?”

“So you started making things up?”

“Yeah, an old lady who was in the shelter … Jesus, all I want is to get the guy to lay off! Why can't he see reason? You ever seen that clipping? Ain't that enough?”

“The trouble is my uncle told him something the morning he died. I think he probably said that Charles wasn't his son and he was going to change his will to make sure he didn't get anything. Nobody'd believe Samuel if he just said so, so he's got to try and prove it somehow. I don't think he'll ever give up.”

“Jesus! What am I gonna do?”

“I suppose I could talk to him. I'd have to tell him the truth. I could explain about you not being able to afford having people asking about Phil's leave. He'd understand that. He's lived in England most of his life. He knows how things work.”

The sergeant shook his head gloomily and rewound the spool of his film. It seemed an absurd small mess for somebody so competent and wary to land himself in, but of course it wasn't only questions about Phil's leave he was worried about. Questions of any sort would be very unwelcome. It crossed Andrew's mind to wonder whether the episode Samuel had told him about, when it looked as if a couple of GIs were going to rough him up in the drive but the sergeant had turned up providentially and rescued him, hadn't perhaps been staged to try and warn him off. But then why had the sergeant not cut the link completely by refusing to supply Cousin Blue's butter?

“Yeah, I guess that's the best plan,” said the sergeant. “Provided he lays off—that's all I want.”

The last swathes went down. The last sheaves tumbled from the binder. One little rabbit, barely a month old, lolloped a few paces and sat cowering until an Italian POW picked it up and stood teasing the back of its neck and gentling its flattened ears beside the line of corpses.

“There's always one who gets lucky,” said the sergeant. Make it me, thought Andrew. Oh, make it me.

THREE

“It was really very effective,” said Cousin Brown. “It stuck at the dress rehearsal and I dreaded it would do so at an actual performance, but in the end it behaved perfectly and the audience applauded the effect every time.”

“Provided I don't touch it,” said Andrew. “Props tend to go wonky for me.”

There was no harvesting that morning because it had been raining off and on since dawn, so between showers Cousin Brown had taken Andrew down to the Amphitheatre to help her fetch out the banquet-table for Act Three from the shed behind the larger Green Room hut where the props from past productions were stored. One at each end they carried it on to the stage. Andrew stood back to look. From the front it appeared to be a table draped with a gorgeous cloth, but though eight foot long it was barely a foot wide, and the cloth was cleverly painted board, hinged halfway up. From beneath it Cousin Brown fetched out a number of L-sectioned objects, made of plywood, and started to set them up, clicking them into place and attaching to each a spring which stretched down into the surface of the table. On the forward-facing surfaces were painted the items of the feast, a boar's head, a luminescent jelly, a grotesquely turreted pastry and so on.

“Rex Whistler designed it, you know,” said Cousin Brown. “He did all our magical effects for the production. Stoddart, who used to be our general handyman until he volunteered, was marvellous at building things like this. Now both Rex and Stoddart are dead. How strange and sad war can be.”

Andrew's distrust of the object as a gadget liable to stick deepened into horror. The lives, the performances, gone. This
thing
left. The fact that audiences had applauded it deepened his loathing.

“Now, you see,” said Cousin Brown, “Ariel, dressed as a harpy sweeps into the banquet just as the nobles are reaching for the food. He claps his wings over the table and ‘with a quaint device' the banquet vanishes. I have him standing here, behind the table, wings spread wide. The nobles start back—he really does look rather horrendous, you know, in Rex's jokey manner—Ariel brings his wings together. There is a thunder-clap to drown the clicks, and …”

She had been going through the movements as she spoke and must at this point have touched a lever below the table with her foot. The painted dishes rattled down, pulled by their springs, and the shorter feet of the L-sections shot into view, with boulders painted on their undersides. At the same time the top half of the cloth flopped down and the front of the table became part of the same barren outcrop. A dismal seagull perched at one end.

“Isn't it fun!” cried Cousin Blue's voice. Andrew turned and saw her standing with Charles at the top of the tiers of seats.

“Wasn't Rex too clever!” she said. “I adore that sort of trick—
much
the best part of the play, don't you agree?”

She fluttered her eyelids at Charles and then held out her arm for him to help her down the flight of steps between the seats. He did so a little perfunctorily. It wasn't that their relationship had changed, quite, but their performance of it had, a bit like that of actors in a play which has run too long but shows no sign of closing. Nothing could happen until Uncle Vole's will was sorted out, and nobody knew when that would be. Cousin Blue was holding a buff government envelope in her other hand.

“Something's come for Andrew,” she said. “It looked important, so we thought we'd bring it down.”

Andrew's heart thumped. He took the envelope and stared at the address. No possible mistake. The handwriting, niggling but characterless, spoke of the ordinariness of the event. That clerk might have written a couple of hundred envelopes that day before he reached this one, almost at the end of the alphabet. Each one vital to the addressee, all indifferent to the clerk, another day of John Smiths, Number x, Some Road, Blankton. Death would be like that clerk, choosing you not because your name was Stoddard or Whistler but because you were next on his list. He opened the envelope and read the instructions.

“It's my call-up,” he said. “The thirty-first.”

“But there is no … of
this
month, do you mean? You said it was not till September!”