Notwithstanding: Stories From an English Village

by Louis de Bernières

  Eventually they find the green-and-grey Rover, and the policeman strokes the wing appreciatively. ‘Lovely cars, these,’ he says. ‘I learned to drive in one. Built like a tank, never go wrong. Bit heavy on the old petrol, though.’ He notices that the keys have been left in the ignition.

  Bella wakes up and greets her master with all the joy that old age and stiffness might allow. She eyes the policeman suspiciously, but allows him to fondle her ears.

  The General loves it in his new home. Bellevue is simply vast, the biggest house he has ever had. It is even bigger than his childhood home in Gloucestershire, the great house that was demolished because of inheritance tax. He has an enormous staff of servants who are more conscientious than all the wallahs, orderlies and batmen he has ever known put together. He wonders why the regiment never thought of having women help out in the mess, but of course in his day it simply wasn’t done.

  Best and happiest, his wife has unaccountably returned, radiant with all the adorable golden prettiness that first besotted him, in the form of a twenty-two-year-old nurse who has become very fond of him and pays him special attention. She makes sure that he remembers his trousers and his tie, and speaks to him in the soft and musical voice that he has so acutely but unwittingly missed these last few months. He tells her frequently that he has washed all her jerseys, ready for when she comes back, and she strokes his cheek, thanks him and plants a chaste kiss on his forehead. He is as much in love with her as he ever was, and calls her ‘my darling’ as he reaches out to take her hand.

  In the daytime the General sits on a bench by the front door, with his walking stick at the ready and with Bella at his feet. She is brought in every day by the old lady who now cares for her, and is fed leftovers by the staff. The General walks her slowly round the grounds, which are full of magnificent rhododendrons, and gives advice and instruction to the two tolerant gardeners.

  Whenever anyone comes through the door, the General, when he is at his post, rises courteously to his feet and greets them. ‘Do come in! Delighted to see you. Let me call someone to take your coat. What can I get you? Scotch? Don’t touch the stuff myself. Sherry? Medium or dry?’

  The visitors and staff get used to the distinguished, sweet old man, they humour him affectionately and politely, and some of them listen with diminishingly reluctant interest as he regales them with highlights from his adventurous past. They can hardly believe that once upon a time in the Khyber Pass this ancient man, mounted on a bay horse, charged into battle with a sabre, and they will miss him for weeks when one day Bella is not at her place by his feet, and he is neither in the garden, nor at his bench by the door.

  RABBIT

  JOAN WALKS WITH the Major, and with Leafy, wife of the redoubtable Colonel Pericles Barkwell. It is an evening late in March, but the day has seemed more like one from the end of June. They have gone out warmly dressed, because it is only March, after all, and now they are huffing and sweltering as they circle the bounds of the fields behind Joan’s home. Joan doesn’t like to sweat so much because she doesn’t want people to know that she has been struck by the menopause, and it is beside the point that this particular sweat is brought about by a very English refusal to concede that any March day might be other than cold and blustery.

  The Major is clad in green wellingtons, corduroys, a grey woolly jumper and a khaki-coloured quilted body warmer that enhances his military mien. In his pocket is a supersonic whistle for the dog, which he never uses because he has trained the dog to respond to parade-ground orders. ‘Dogs will retire. Ab-o-u-t turn!’ he roars, and the black Labrador obediently comes to heel. The supersonic whistle is a present from his son in the City, who believes in high-tech solutions to problems which no one had previously recognised as problematical.

  Leafy Barkwell is dressed in wellies, and a tweed skirt that has seen smarter days. Its wool has been teased by bramble and thorn for a decade, and some people have taken to commenting unkindly that it looks like a sisal doormat. It is the only scruffy garment she has, because indoors she is elegant, and indoors is where she most likes to be. Today, however, she has succumbed to the warmth of the day and has come out at the same time as the primroses, with which she shares some of her delicate beauty, even though she is no longer young.

  In the clump of elms at the end of the field noisy squadrons of rooks croak and squabble. It is nesting time, and the birds are raiding all the surrounding trees for twigs, which they bring back to the elms, where other birds try to snatch them away. There are quarrels and tugs of war, and the booty almost inevitably gets dropped, whereupon the birds fly off back to the willows and oaks in order to break off more twigs with elaborate exertion that involves much acrobatic risk. The fallen twigs they stupidly do not bother to collect, so that under the rookery the ground begins to look as though a small hurricane has just passed by. In the old days when the peasants had been poor, when, in fact, there actually had been peasants, they used to come and collect the fallen twigs, and bind them into faggots. Now there is only one peasant left, malodorous old Obadiah Oak, with his teeth like tombstones. Jack Oak is probably the only person left who can remember what it was like to collect rook faggots and to know that young rooks aren’t scared of guns. The adults flew away, but you just took your rook gun and shot the youngsters off the branches where they sidled about in confusion. Then you cut out their breasts and made rook pie.

  Leafy begins to compose verses in her head that one day she might send to The Lady, or Country Life magazine. She writes mainly about the beauties of nature, which normally she experiences from the other side of her drawing-room window. Her poetry is very like the stuff that used to be anthologised in the 1920s by people like J. C. Squire, and she represents an England that urban intellectuals and university lecturers assert to be dead, merely because they wish that it were so, and do not realise that it is not. Millions of country people are quite unaware that this version of pastoral England is supposed to have gone, and so they continue to live in it with perfect calm and acceptance. Leafy writes poetry that rhymes inexactly, and struggles to scan, about blackbirds singing on fence posts, and woodlarks up in the blue, and about clouds, and about hearts beating in unison. She is as unaware of being quaint as she is of the gnomic poetry of T. S. Eliot or the angry verse of Adrian Mitchell.

  On the village green the man with the ridiculous dog called Archie is throwing golf balls in the hope of training it to retrieve them. On the other side of the copse the crack of Polly Wantage’s twelve-bore announces that she is once more persecuting squirrels. Up the hill Miss Agatha Feakes sounds the horn of her vintage Swift as she careers past the convent with a goat on the back seat as usual. On the common the Rector, armed with a plastic sack and a yellow plastic beach spade, is patrolling the bridleways and collecting horse droppings for his roses. In the graveyard of St Peter’s Church, Mrs Mac converses with the ghost of her husband. She asks him if he remembers the time when they were little children and all thirty-two of the pupils in the village school managed to pile into the hollow centre of the gigantic yew. In her house on the green, Mrs Griffiths opens a gin bottle and pours herself a tiny tipple which she dilutes with Ribena. She has thought of a new plot for her latest bodice-ripper, in which a beautiful young orphan called Venetia discovers that she is really an heiress, and has to choose between a handsome lord who probably wants her for her money, and the boy who was her teenage sweetheart, but has no prospects. In the middle of the field, a small posse of Friesian cows stands motionless beneath the huge oak that has been there since the English revolution. In the wood the bluebells are up, but have not yet blossomed, and the snowdrops and winter aconites have flowered awhile and gone.

  Joan exclaims, ‘Ooh look, what’s Wellington up to?’

  The other two follow the line of her pointing finger and see Wellington the black Labrador bounding up and down on the spot, his ears flopping forward. He appears to be nudging something. He goes down on his forepaws, his backside in the air, and barks s
enselessly.

  ‘He must have found something,’ says Leafy.

  With one accord they change course, and fifty yards later they see that Wellington has indeed found something. Joan makes Wellington sit, and slips on the lead. Side by side they look down, without a word.

  ‘Poor little bugger,’ says the Major at last.

  ‘It’s so awful,’ says Leafy, her voice trembling with shock and sorrow.

  ‘It makes you sick,’ says Joan.

  ‘To think this was introduced on purpose … by man,’ says the Major. ‘It’s vile, it’s damned vile. What a bloody thing to do. Whoever invented this ought to be strung up and flogged.’

  At their feet, in the last extremity of its suffering, is a myxomatosis rabbit. Its flanks have caved in from thirst and starvation, its lustreless coat is loose, hanging in folds. Deaf and blind, it cowers in the long grass, dimly aware that something is happening, but too weak to move. It is attempting to eat the grass, but its mouth is too swollen. It chews on nothing, or perhaps on the ulcers of its own tongue. It chews mechanically and thoughtlessly, as if, by this token eating, it can assuage some of the hollow agony of its unassuageable hunger.

  The little creature is so abject, so miserable, so pitiful, that it is heartbreaking just to stand and look. The worst thing, the most horrifying, is that its eyelids are stuck together, and what were its eyes behind them have inflated to the size of table-tennis balls. The effect of this swelling is entirely grotesque, the horrifying globes transforming the rabbit into something that seems other than a rabbit. It has become a monster imagined by the cartoonist of a horror comic.

  ‘I can’t bear it,’ says Leafy Barkwell.

  ‘The poor little mite,’ says Joan.

  The rabbit does not try to get away. It remains still and quiet, trying to eat, hoping that if it remains still for long enough, everything might begin to get better. It is so harrowed by misery that it has lost all sense of self-preservation. For days now it has stayed out in the same place in the grass, unable to find its burrow, freezing and shivering by night in the March frosts, drenched by the March rain, buffeted by the March gales, enduring the slow cruciation of this casually inflicted death, its own insignificant, tiny, world-destroying Calvary. It stays perfectly quiet, and never loses hope, but it is a most unfortunate miracle that it has not yet been found by a fox.

  The Major is an old soldier, and he knows his duty. He takes no pleasure in saying, ‘I am going to have to kill it.’

  Leafy puts her hands to her face and exclaims, ‘Oh please, not with me here.’

  ‘Wait till we’ve gone,’ pleads Joan.

  The Major is relieved not to have to do it immediately. He says, ‘I’ll come back with the airgun.’

  At the house the Major takes the airgun out of the cupboard. It is a Webley Mk III, very heavy, with a tapered barrel. It is a powerful .22 and is ideal for hunting small game over open sights. At one time it represented the best in British engineering, except that some idiot designed the rails so badly that they lifted off when you tried to mount telescopic sights. Years ago the Major had bought it as a present for his young son, feeling that it was his duty to teach him the manly arts, thinking that perhaps he might grow up to be a soldier, or that one day, if there was yet another war, it would be useful for the sons of England to know how to handle themselves in a fire-fight. The Major had taught his boy how to do rapid fire, how to allow for movement and windage, how to follow through, but now the boy works in the City, pale and sleepless, conjuring money out of thin air, his mouth spewing out American business jargon, driving around in a Porsche instead of a proper car, displaying a kind of energy and merriment that seem entirely artificial and out of character with the teenager that he used to know. The Major strokes the walnut stock of the Webley and thinks of the fantasies he used to entertain on his son’s behalf, before the world turned into something that he hadn’t realised he had been fighting for. He handles the walnut stock of the Webley and remembers the .303 Lee-Enfield that stayed with him undamaged from the start of the war to its end. He wonders what happened to it.

  He takes the airgun out into the field behind the house and is sorry to find that the piteous, oblivious little creature is still there. He realises that he really will have to do his duty. He bends down and strokes the rabbit down the length of its nose. It barely reacts. It occurs to the Major that the animal is so nearly dead that he might just as well leave it to die at its own pace, let it make its own quietus. He remembers Glub Pasha telling him years ago that his Arab troops believed that animals should be given time to think about life while they die, which is why they used to cut their throats with three strokes of a knife. ‘Whatever happened to Glub Pasha?’ he asks himself.

  The Major strokes the rabbit’s nose again, and says, ‘Little fellow, I want to say how sorry I am for what’s … for what’s been done to you. Poor little bugger. I’m so sorry.’ He strokes the animal’s flank and feels the hard starkness of the ribs.

  He straightens up and cocks the underlever of the Webley. He takes a lead pellet from the tin in his pocket, opens the tap of the gun and drops the pellet in. He checks it has gone home properly, and closes the tap. Against his will, but in accordance with his duty, he places the barrel of the gun between and just forward of the rabbit’s ears. He steels himself, squeezes the trigger and feels the gun leap in his hands.

  At his feet the rabbit has flung itself on to its side, and from its mouth there spurts a small cascade of inconceivably brilliant scarlet blood. Its back legs kick feebly, and, most heart-rendingly of all, so great is the pain of its starvation compared to the pain of its death wound that it continues trying to eat, its jaws moving ceaselessly.

  It kicks again, and then the Major makes a mistake. He knows that really it is dead already, that it died instantly, but he wants it to stop kicking and chewing. He reloads the gun and places the gun barrel against the side of the rabbit’s head, right against the hideous globe of its left eye socket. He pulls the trigger and then leaps back in horror, because a thick shower of bright white pus has exploded out of its head and spattered his trousers, his jacket, his hands, the barrel of his gun. It had never occurred to him that the swelling had been anything other than a swelling. He walks backwards a few paces, sees that the animal is completely dead, wishes it, perhaps ridiculously, a safe homegoing to wherever it has gone, and walks swiftly back to the house, too upset for thought.

  Joan has waited in the kitchen, and she sees him come in, his face white with distress. She puts her hand to his face, and he says in tones of quiet disbelief, ‘Its head was full of pus, and it exploded.’

  She looks at him as he takes a paper towel and wipes down his clothes and the gun. ‘Go and change,’ she says. ‘I’ll put your things in the machine.’

  The Major sits at the desk in his study, hands on his knees, looking out of the window at the laurels. A squirrel spirals up the oak tree, and a green woodpecker inspects its crevices for bugs. His clean clothes feel stiff and unyielding. His wife comes in with a cup of tea. It is her own blend, half Tetley tea bag and half Earl Grey. She puts it down carefully on his blotter and asks, ‘Are you all right, darling?’

  He says, ‘It was very upsetting.’ He pauses, and then asks her, ‘Did I ever tell you about the German soldier?’

  ‘Which one, darling?’

  ‘When we were sent out to collect the papers from the dead.’

  ‘No, you didn’t tell me.’

  He continues to look straight out of the window. ‘We’d been fighting for three days,’ he said. ‘We were all exhausted. No sleep. It was bloody hot. It had been hot for weeks. Appalling … very tough. Bloody hell, actually. Then the Germans withdrew, and my platoon was detailed to gather the papers from the dead. For the Red Cross. Send them back through Switzerland.’

  He pauses in order to collect himself. ‘I found this body. In a foxhole. He was damned bloody fat, this German. I remember thinking he was too fat to fight, that the Germans
must have been damned desperate to go round recruiting anyone as fat as that.

  ‘He had a nice belt, a black leather one, and it so happened that mine was buggered. Broken at the buckle. I was holding my trousers up with a string. Not very soldierly.

  ‘I tried to undo the German’s belt, but it was too tight, so I put my foot on his stomach to get some purchase. That was when I found out that he wasn’t fat, he was swollen.’

  The Major continues to look out at the laurels. ‘I vomited. I’ve seen lots of corpses. They don’t seem like people, not even the corpses of your friends. But that was the first one that actually exploded.

  ‘Afterwards we looked through the papers. They were all love letters and pictures of girls. Piles and piles of them. We sat and looked at them and said nothing. He was called Manfred Schneider, the one with the belt. Up until that day I loved killing Germans. It was all I wanted to do. Nothing I’d rather. I had a passion for it. But after that I stopped hating them. After that I only killed for duty.’

  Joan places her hand on his shoulder. He looks up at her and she can see that his eyes are glistening with choked-back tears. She strokes his thin grey hair, and kisses him lightly on the top of the head. Discreetly she turns and leaves the room. With his hands on his knees, his cup of tea cooling on the blotter, and his eyes brimming with a lifetime’s unsheddable tears, he looks out over the laurels, and remembers. He will never tell anyone, not even Joan, about the mercy killing that is sometimes all one can do for a hideously wounded friend.

  THIS BEAUTIFUL HOUSE

  I LOVE IT at Christmas. I just sit here at the end of the garden on top of the rockery, like a garden gnome. I don’t find the stones uncomfortable. I sit here and look at the house. It’s very beautiful, I always did think so. I grew up here, and I am still here now, although I spend much of my time out in the garden just looking.