The View from Mount Dog (19 page)

‘About an hour, I should think,’ said Colin, picking up the chainsaw. ‘That’s about as much as I can stand, what with the noise and the smell. Still, it’s sweet work.’

‘Of course it is. A lifetime aim.’

‘Exactly that.’

I was all ready for him when I heard his hail from across the river. I whisked him over in the skiff and was pleased and surprised he did not spot the sheet of glass let into the river-bank, although it is true that since it extends below the surface and is somewhat browed with grasses (plus the fact that I took elaborate pains to set it unobtrusively) a casual observer might easily miss it. But when I ushered him into the clump of whitethorn to the little entrance he understood at once.

‘Ratty!’ he exclaimed with pleasure. He went down. ‘Oh, it’s perfect.’

And, though I say it myself, it
is
perfect. One descends the steps and there beneath the river-bank is a snuggery with twin chintz-covered armchairs drawn up before the grate, shelves full of books and objects, the waxed table gleaming in the reflected light of the river. Nothing very valuable, you understand – at least, not in market-place terms – but comfortable and well worn. The slipping river held back by glass and forming the fourth wall would alone be enough to show that one was embedded in England, but even in winter with the curtains to and the firelight twinkling merrily on china and glasses of port one would scarcely be in doubt. Perhaps only in that single corner of the room devoted to Adrian may there be a sense of melancholy but definitely not of gloom. Beneath several pictures of him from babyhood almost to the month of his death are certain keepsakes most emphatically not laid out as if in a hallowed museum but merely left as if tidied away for his return at evening: a pair of scuffed Clark’s sandals with rose-window air-holes cut in the toes, an old Aertex shirt, a grey sun-bonnet, a cricket bat. Here, at least for as long as I myself survive, he will always be, galloping endlessly across the vivid meadows on Minefield while poor Frances wrings her hands with maternal impotence. ‘Tom, Tom,’ I hear her say, ‘it
cannot
be safe to let him out on that pony without a hat.’ Poor Fran, how her worries
echo vainly across all those years.

Meanwhile Colin was repeating how perfect it was. I poured him a glass of beer and we stood by the window watching the water boatmen scud in the dazzle.

‘I feel at home here,’ he said. ‘I’m glad I came.

‘You’re among friends now,’ I told him. ‘We’ve quite a community in these parts; we must get a little party up and introduce you. Durrant Anderson, did you say? I wonder if there’s anyone here you’d know already. Sir Arthur Cramphorn of Schwolb’s?’

‘Certainly I’ve met him, although I don’t know him at all well.’

‘He’s a bit staid but as loyal a friend as you could hope to meet. He’s Badger: owns Yesterham Hall but lives in what he calls his sett about a mile from here. Who else have we got? Oh, of course, there’s Little Grey Rabbit. That’s Caroline Parry-Savage.’

‘Not with HPD?’

‘Yes, do you know her?’

‘Absolutely. I was over at Harkness Pithers & Drew not six weeks ago for a meeting. She’s senior investment analyst there now, as I recall.’

‘The very same.’ We raised our glasses.

‘I’ll tell you what,’ said Colin, ‘if you can muster the people I’ll throw a house-warming for us all when I’ve finished my hidey-hole. How’s that?’

‘Won’t it be a bit cramped?’

‘Oh dear, I suppose it will. Funny, I never thought. One’s so used to seeing Wol in his parlour with dressers and grandfather clocks and what not it’s hard to remember that, well, one’s
scale
is a bit different now.’

‘Never mind. We’ll pay you a visit and then we can all come back here. My experience tells me we might need a bit of floor-space. Little Grey Rabbit’s apt to bounce a bit when she gets some cowslip wine down her. But you know how rabbits are.’

In point of fact it took almost a month to fix up the party, owing to Badger’s gout, by which time Wol had finished his nest. One day the sounds of hammering from the hanging woods across the river ceased and the next I skiffed across and made my way up towards his tree. I did it quietly in order that I might withdraw without being noticed, for that particular moment when at last one can return unhindered to a private
reality is very precious and cannot be shared. And so it was that, standing in the lee of the beech, I could see the front door of the oak was shut. How beautifully he had made it, I thought in admiration. Colin had clearly been to immense pains to cut it as true as possible, for the curved outer section he had removed and hinged now closed so snugly into its massive frame that one needed to look twice in order to see it. Searching for windows I found still more cause for admiration. Instead of merely hacking rectangles he had made apertures at points where there had been the involuted scars of long-vanished boughs, retaining their original irregular ovoid or circular outlines. They had been glazed, but one at least could be opened, for framed in the topmost window I caught a glimpse of Wol’s face, fixed in a silent broodingness, staring out of his eyrie into the light-patterned trunks and glades with which he had surrounded himself. It was not a moment for intrusion; I turned and crept away down the hill to my own river-bank.

So there we are: another one of us has found his way unerringly here to this enchanted place. Tonight is the night of the party, and if previous occasions are anything to go by it will be merry and bonhomous. For, necessary as our private isolations sometimes are among the rivers and fields and woods, we are very much at our best in each other’s company. Then those silent messages sent flashing across the fairyland of Cheapside, Poultry and Cannon Street find at last their proper expression in the only true reality which is companionship. And then what tales are told far into the night! What strange rites and goings-on there are among the night creatures of these distant shires! It is as if long-lost nurseries came alive again, and I know that even the solitary brooder in his oak-tree will tonight spread his wings underground with us. So happily, sadly, swiftly the time will pass until suddenly the stars are paler in the sky and the dawn wind springs up and it is time to say goodbye. As the river gurgles and the drowsy farewells of the parting guests die away along their separate paths through field and thicket, the strengthening light is enough to reveal the marks crushed into the dew by our feet, little animal prints which will remain in the dabbled grass until the sun rises to bake them away!

Not so long after dawn Jhonny and Siyo were sitting by the stream watching the preparations rather than overseeing them, Jhonny more intent on his feelings of quiet satisfaction and his friend slightly stupefied by the day’s getting under way, still loggy after the previous evening’s drinking. The stream at this point meandered uncertainly about in its bed as if without a downpour somewhere behind it in the forests of the interior it had no idea how best to flow in the overlarge space it found itself in. It gurgled around the boulders where the women came to spank the dirt out of the laundry and pooled beneath the eroded bank of the bend opposite. In this wallow under the low earth cliff threaded with exposed roots a buffalo lay with its chin resting on the water. Various insects skittered around its muzzle, their feet making swift dimples on the surface. For a long minute a small pink and black bird perched on the end of one of its horns.

‘My head aches,’ said Siyo.

‘You were drunk last night. Rum and beer. There weren’t really enough snacks, were there? It’s very bad for you, drinking without eating. Plenty of food today, though.’

‘
And
drink. That’s the best thing about birthdays. If they’re properly organised, you can forget it means one year nearer the grave.’

‘Hush,’ said Jhonny automatically. ‘I prefer to think of my eldest son as twenty-one rather than … well, he’s twenty-one.
He’s not really any
older
yet.’

‘Of course not. But Boyet’s certainly turned into a fine young man. And that’s taken time,’ he added somewhat to himself.

The heat was rising with the sun. Behind them Jhonny’s dog Tiger lay on a bench, wheezing. His feet were tied, likewise his muzzle. Blood from his expertly cut neck was being caught in a plastic basin. A circle of onlookers, mostly children, watched his waning arterial spurts with interest. A little way off between two closely growing palms a couple of young men had built an unlit fire of dried fronds. Jhonny half-turned, cast an appraising glance over the scene and, satisfied that matters were properly in hand, turned back to where a large and brilliant butterfly with transparent hind wings was drifting about the buffalo’s head.

‘I hope he comes after all this,’ said Jhonny presently.

‘Of course he will. Didn’t he send a telegram? Where else would he go on his twenty-first birthday?’

‘The launch might not sail.’

‘The sea’s flat calm; I looked from the hill this morning.’

‘It might have broken,’ persisted Jhonny. ‘It often does. I was talking to an engineer the other day who’d just made the trip and he’d looked into the engine-room. He says the motor’s over twenty years old.’ He picked up a couple of longish sticks from the ground, examined them, threw one into the stream, unsheathed his knife with which he peeled the remaining stick before whittling one end into a blunt taper.

‘You’re beginning to sound as if you don’t want Boyet to come,’ said Siyo.

‘And you?’

‘Oh, Jhonny, you know that’s untrue. Apart from anything else he’s my godson, isn’t he? How could you say such a thing?’

‘Joke only,’ Jhonny said. ‘Joke only.’ But already it seemed a ruffle had passed over the day which was so beautifully dawning. On this subject he managed to abolish most of his own thoughts while retaining a dully sensitive recognition that people were ambivalent about Boyet and always had been. He was not like his siblings – some bright, a couple frankly dumb, but all of them equable, biddable, sunny even. But from the outset Boyet had evinced a certain querulousness, a pettishness in addition to being so
argumentative.
No one denied him his brains – or much else, for that matter – but he had always acted as if people
were
constantly denying him things which were his as of right. The slight unease his father felt when thinking about
him was caused partly by a fear of the scenes Boyet had always been good at making and partly by a lingering doubt as to whether he really had perhaps denied the boy something even though he couldn’t imagine what it might reasonably be. Was Boyet not at this moment attending the country’s oldest and best university? And had not the entire family gone without in order that they might afford the tuition fees?

He turned back to the activity behind him, freshly peeled stick gleaming in his hand like a wand. Tiger’s bonds had been cut and the dog now lay limply on the bench, eyes half-closed and with one of his thigh muscles twitching. He looked as he often had asleep and dreaming in the sun. The young men took a back leg apiece and carried the drained carcase to where the fire was laid. They tied a leg to each tree so that the dog’s head hung to within a foot of the brushwood. A red and pink drool of blood, mucus and serum descended slowly from the tip of his black nose. One of his legs was still twitching, and the drool swung a little as it lengthened. A match was put to the fire and flames leaped up, engulfing Tiger’s head. There was a violent spasm of the hind legs.

‘Dead now,’ said one of the young men. Tiger’s fur flared to a crisp. As soon as it had all been burned off they cut the dog down and carried it to the river. The brief flames had seared the flesh enough to stiffen the limbs, which now stuck out aggressively in black prongs. They dumped the body in the water at the feet of Jhonny and Siyo and began scraping away at the frizzle with their knives. With surprising ease a bright white and bald Tiger began to emerge from the case of char which crumbled away and was whirled off downstream, taking with it a pungent fume of smithies.

‘Quite fat,’ observed Siyo. ‘That’s a decent young dog you’ve got there. He’ll be juicy, all right.’

‘He certainly ate enough rice over the last month,’ said Jhonny. ‘You should have heard the wife complaining; said it ought to go to the pigs instead. But it’s not every day your eldest son has his twenty-first, is it? And, besides, the animal was greedy. He was always stealing food.’

When Tiger’s body was clean his head was cut off and skinned and placed on a rock in the stream. His eyes bulged out at what was being done to the rest of him, grey tongue protruding through a snarl. It delighted the children who with twigs investigated the gristly holes leading into the skull and
through which, not half an hour earlier, he had heard the summons to attend his own demise. Had they been so inclined, everybody present could have formed an accurate mental picture of Tiger trotting round the corner of Jhonny’s house after beginning this day, like any other, with a brisk chase through the undergrowth of the dozier chickens, the tips of his ears flapping. Until that moment he had been incorrigible, and quite a lot of trussing had gone on before he realised this was not a game.

Meanwhile his paunch had been opened and his entrails were being sorted in the stream. There was practically nothing other than the gall-bladder (carefully separated in its greenish pouch from its nest in the liver) which could not be eaten by someone or something. Even the pigs would eat the contents of his bowel given the chance, but Jhonny had moved to squat ankle-deep in the water and was gathering up the yellow and white mass. He took a length of it, expressed Tiger’s last supper into the stream and inserted the tapered stick he had been whittling into one end. When it lodged he went on pushing gently so that the end of the intestine began turning inwards. Easing it with his other hand, he rolled the length inside out, washed it carefully and deftly peeled off the now outermost membrane which he discarded. On the bank the large aluminium washing-bowl of Tiger’s constituent parts began filling up.

By the time the rinsed and jointed carcase had joined them Jhonny was again apprehensive about Boyet’s non-appearance.

‘Stop worrying,’ Siyo told him. ‘Have a glass of beer or something. The damned dog isn’t even cooked yet.’

‘So what? Since when did all the food have to be prepared before one’s own son returns home? This isn’t a wedding.’

‘All right,’ said Siyo pacifically and then, hoping for distraction, asked: ‘Have you done the chickens?’

‘
No
.’ It was so gruff as to be a kind of expletive, then ‘No,’ he said again in a different tone as thought overtook mood, ‘no, that’s a point, I haven’t. We’d better do those. Two’ll be enough, don’t you think? Or three. Better make it three, be on the safe side.’

The chickens proved difficult to catch. Normally there were at least a couple scratching round the earth floor of the kitchen which could be cornered between the firewood and the low bamboo palisade beneath the fire-pots. Today there was not a hen in the house, probably the result of that damned dog
chivvying them around; another good reason for eating the beast, Jhonny thought crossly as he set about looking for some light cord. He searched a shelf up under the roof which held among other things two defunct batteries, a carton of ‘Beatles Hair Pomade’ containing fish-hooks, a green plastic bottle of rubbing alcohol and some nylon thread for repairing nets. He found the cord tucked into the roof between bamboo and thatch and made a running knot in one end. He laid this noose, about half a yard in diameter, on the ground outside the house and lightly disguised its outline with a few pebbles and bits of stick. Then he scattered some rice around it but mainly inside it, took up the end of the rope and retreated into the house, squinting through a chink in the thatched wall. The house was full of women cutting up vegetables. Above the general hubbub he called to Siyo: ‘Could you just check on the water? There’s probably enough but it may need hotting up again.’

‘Do you remember Dong’s son coming back after his graduation?’ one of the women was saying. ‘Now, that was a party.’

Somehow this depressed Jhonny. He did indeed remember: the boy had done it in style, arriving in a crimson jeep full of rowdy friends and hospitality girls with stereo cassette music and two whole cases of whisky. That was how it should be done, apparently; fattish young men with chunky fraternity rings throwing up over the banana seedlings. Everybody in the village had said what a memorable occasion that had been, not least because there had been enough whisky for everyone to get drunk, the children included. That had been quite funny, it was true, with a great boiling-pan full of Coca-Cola and whisky into which they had gone on dipping their glasses. As the day wore on the house and yard had become littered with the bodies of sleeping kids who simply lay where they fell until various raucous mothers dragged them together and laid them all out in a long line, their heads resting on a mushy banana-bole. How people had laughed! And how deathly quiet the village had been next day, except for the cursing whenever a dog barked or a cock crew…. He jerked the rope and snared a flapping chicken by one leg, sending its companions running off in alarm. Well, this wasn’t going to be like that party. It was just a twenty-first, anyway, not a graduation. But he couldn’t deny that on the strength of his son’s rare visits over the last three years it was difficult to see him in a crimson jeep with hospitality girls. Jhonny shook his head as he bound the squawking bird’s
feet with a stray piece of sisal. There was something wrong, but he couldn’t figure out what.

It took twenty minutes and more rice than he cared to think about to get all three chickens lying side by side on the kitchen table. Jhonny looked them over critically: not fat, maybe, but by no means scrawny. In the market they’d fetch…. He suppressed this line of speculation. What did it matter what they were worth? This was family; one did not begrudge family. Still, a farmer was permitted to look at such things neutrally, a
tenant
farmer even more so. Having looked at these things neutrally he left them there to be dealt with and went back outside. He found that Siyo had brought over his own big wok and had lit a fire. The water in the wok seethed lightly and feathers of steam blew off it into the morning sunshine.

‘It never stops, though, does it?’ said Jhonny with sudden force. ‘Raising and killing, raising and killing. We work our hands sore and then blow it all in one great stuffing session. It doesn’t make sense.’

Siyo was quite accustomed to his friend’s sudden gusts of philosophising. ‘I agree,’ he said.

‘It certainly makes no sense raising and killing even before you know for certain that your damned guest’s going to arrive.’

‘He’ll come. Anyway, Jhonny, he’s not your damned guest: he’s your own son.’

‘One of them.’

‘The one you’ve done everything for.’

‘Perhaps that’s it,’ said Jhonny darkly. ‘You can always be sure, can’t you? Nothing’s ever going to be as you expect it, nothing ever turns out predictably. Now, I never gave Boyet the chance to go to college thinking he was somehow at the end of it going to come back here and take over from me when I get too stiff and tired to plough paddies and make copra and go to the forest for bamboo and plant rice and make beer and look after buffaloes and pigs and goats and chickens
and
keep our bastard shark landowner happy. In any case he was always useless at the ordinary sort of things like that, wasn’t he? Not like his brothers. I don’t believe he ever learned to climb a palm-tree. I can never remember seeing him up one.’

‘But he was brilliant at school.’

‘Oh, yes, he was
brilliant
; at any rate all his teachers said so. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it wasn’t unreasonable to expect that he would go off and get his degree or diploma or whatever
it is and start a business so that he could make lots of money for the family so we could all live a little more comfortably as we get older. That’s what sons do when they get on. The ones without diplomas go and work abroad doing the sort of things you and I do every day but paid fifty times more; the ones with diplomas make money with their brains and pay back their families that way. Simple, huh? So why isn’t Boyet like that?’

‘Give him a chance, Jhonny; the kid’s not even
got
his degree thing yet. I thought you said he had another year to go.’

‘Yes. But I’ve got a brain; there’s something telling me that when he does get it that’s the last we shall ever see of him.’

‘Jhonny!’ Siyo was genuinely shocked at his friend’s blackness, which seemed suddenly to have risen up from the bodies of the slain and engulfed him.