by Thomas Hinde
At first as I listened I said ‘yes,’ but after a time I stopped because it made it harder to hear what they were saying. Also they didn’t pause for my answers and I began to guess that they might not be able to hear me. I was sure of this when they ended, ‘Acknowledge by field signal’.
I put down the receiver and came out of the office. Molly was in the kitchen. She must have come from the garden while I’d been phoning. If she’d been in the kitchen before, she would surely have answered it.
PART FOUR
Acknowledge by field signal. Suddenly one more thing made sense.
That bright red helicopter we saw every few days, making its rather aimless progress across the sky, as if as much interested in the ground as in getting anywhere. Or perhaps I was imagining things. There was no need for the whole machine to be ours. More likely a single member of the crew, who could do what was needed, without disclosing himself.
I was worried about the word ‘field’. It would have been easier to use the tennis court. There was no way for other people to look down on that. My orchards were entirely overlooked from the house and there was a chance that Molly – or more likely Peggy – might ask what it meant.
I could explain the crates but I wouldn’t know what to say about their pattern. She might then wonder why I was getting out the crates at all, on a Sunday, doing it myself without Grant, who helps me with the spraying and other jobs. There was a moment when such questions became self-increasing, like a fire which takes hold and begins to look for new things to burn, unlike the individual sticks which are always ready to smoulder out. They were the sort of questions I must never let start.
But the crates seemed the only possible way. Looking down from the front drive after breakfast, I picked a place which was partly hidden by trees from here but would probably be clear from above. It was fifty yards from the sheds.
Getting them out and carrying them that distance took me most of the morning. I was glad to have the work. I’d got them about half arranged. I was halfway between the shape I was making and the shed, carrying one under each arm, when I suddenly stopped. I’d had a picture of myself as if from above. Though I was hot and sweating it made me cold all over. My knees felt shaky. My arms felt weak and I thought I might drop the crates. There I was, small and busy. There was that curious half-formed hieroglyphic. What on earth was I doing?
I wanted to pause and think but I knew that I mustn’t. I turned and began to stumble with my crates back to the shed. I left them there and hurried back to that signal which I had imagined I was making. The sight of it horrified me. I began to run round it, pushing the crates right and left out of shape. I put them into other arbitrary groups here and there under the trees. Anything to destroy that awful mad sign. I stood still in the full sun, shivering violently like a man with a fever.
Near me two remained together. They had formed the base of the shape’s first upright stroke. I put a third next to them, then a fourth and a fifth. I lifted it and threw it ten yards into the trees. I threw them all violently away. When I missed my grip on one I kicked it and my foot splintered the wood and became caught inside. I beat it against a tree trunk, breaking it into pieces and taking a long graze of skin from my shin.
I stood looking round me at the confusion I had made. Crates and bits of broken wood lay everywhere. What did it mean?
Now I could start to put them away. Now I could go up the hillside back to my home I liked and my wife and children I loved. I was better now. And when that red helicopter came presently, buzzing and hovering, it would see no sign. I went on my knees in the dry grass and held my hair in my hands, pulling at its roots. If only I knew. If only I knew.
Presently I knew that it was a risk I couldn’t take. Slowly and painfully, limping from my hurt shin, I rearranged the crates. I fetched others from the shed and completed the shape.
I fetched nails and a hammer and began to repair the broken ones. I listened all the time and sometimes looked up into the blue sky with its puffs of fair weather cumulus.
I listened all afternoon.
Towards evening I became anxious. There was a limit to the time I could leave them there in that ‘message understood’ symbol. Even if I risked it for the night, Grant was coming in the morning and would start to move them as he worked on them. I would have no reason for stopping him.
We began supper. Outside it was still warm though less stifling than the afternoon. The morning clouds, instead of growing to thunder size, as I had expected, had gone away. The sunlight had turned yellow and the long shadows of the pines were on the lawn. Here in the kitchen I noticed a beam turning the black foot-plate of the hot-water boiler grey. I was watching this with surprise that it should have penetrated to this unexpected corner when I heard it.
I heard it long before the others. It was loud before they heard it. It seemed to come directly over the house, and lower than I remembered so that it stopped our talking.
When it was gone Molly said, ‘What are you smiling at?’
It was true, a foolish smile had come on my face. ‘The noise,’ I said. ‘The way we couldn’t hear ourselves think.’ I went on smiling and frowning.
That Monday I found the footprint.
I’d just come down from my attic to cross off the day on my calendar – there were eleven left. I’d come out of the office on to the sunny lawn to check Wilfred Draycott and Jim Brightworth leaving for the station. Wilfred’s mini approached with a hurried whine which faded quickly as soon as he reached the New Lane because his drive joined it below ours. Jim’s Jaguar went into the dip below our lawn with a plushy roar, less like an engine than a furnace breathing. And I’d gone from this sunny side of the house to the shade at the back. I saw it in a small flower-bed.
No part of this bed was fertile and the inner two feet which were always in shade and sheltered from the rain by the house eaves were completely bare. A thin crust had formed on them. At the centre of this bare inner margin, crushing the crust into the soft soil below, was a distinct footprint.
It was recent, that was the first thing I saw. The inch of discoloured undersoil round its edge looked fresh. Anyway I would have noticed it. At least once a day I made the circuit of the house by that back way which connected my two drives. And I kept my eyes open. True, I had been preoccupied the day before but I remembered coming here at tea-time while I was listening for the helicopter. That left the evening and the night.
Next, it was a left shoe, and I could tell which way they had been going. But there wasn’t a window or drain pipe for eight feet in either direction.
The apparent pointlessness of it disturbed me. Not only was there no way up or into the house which they could have been surveying but they couldn’t have been crossing from one place to another because the flower-bed occupied a triangular corner where the kitchen stuck out backwards from the rest of the house. I felt this should be the clue to the problem and worried over it. An added complication was that the footprint was set parallel to the house wall so that the fetching something theory – a ball or paper aeroplane – wouldn’t work. And there had been about equal weight on the toe and heel so that it wasn’t a halting mark.
I know as well as anyone that you don’t get a single footprint. Montbretia grew in a reedy mat close to the sheltered margin of arid soil and I bent and examined it for another, but it seemed everywhere equally crushed.
After that came the shoe size, a vital point. Here I had to be careful because the way it had sunk into the soil made it look bigger than it was. To get a better view I stepped from the drive on to the eighteen-inch stone wall which contained the bed and leant forward, peering closely. Too big for my children, I thought, but small for a man. Men’s size five and a half, I guessed. As I bent I half-toppled and had to stand quickly, circling my arms backwards to keep my balance on the wall. It was then that I saw Molly about twenty yards away, standing quite still, watching me. She was in the drive immediately outside our front door, and unli
ke me she was in the sun. I could see the sunlight in her fair hair.
‘What are you doing?’ she called.
‘Working things out,’ I said with quiet confidence.
I came down from the wall and moved towards her, but backwards, looking now at the house roof, now at the flower-bed.
‘The gutters,’ I said, preoccupied, still not turning to her.
‘What’s wrong with them?’
‘We’re going to make our fortune.’ After more pause I turned to her. ‘A mirror device to tell you if your gutters are full of leaves without hiring a fifty-foot ladder.’
She laughed and turned away. It had been a near thing.
All that sunny morning, as I worked with Grant on the crates, I thought about the footprint. At twelve I came up to the house, and soon afterwards, when I heard Molly take the car to go shopping, I went to look at it again. With me I took one of her left shoes from the lobby.
Treading carefully on the flattened montbretia so that I wouldn’t leave a mark or disturb any I still might find, I moved on to the flower-bed. I squatted and leant forward holding the shoe in both hands. I lowered it carefully, arms outstretched. I heard a high voice call ‘Daddee’.
I stood and began to move back fast. I’d only taken two steps when I heard it much louder and half the distance away. I was recovering my balance from jumping clear of the bed when I saw her in the drive, exactly where Molly had stood early that morning.
‘Daddy, when was William the First born?’
She went on coming towards me but more slowly. She was close to tears, though she kept them back better than she would have done the holidays before. I thought there’d been a fight.
‘Born?’ I said, making time. ‘You mean actually born?’
‘Dan says . . .’ she began. Then she’d seen it. ‘Daddy, what’s that?’
‘If you mean when did he become king . . .’ I said.
‘Daddy, why have you got one of Mummy’s shoes?’
‘Oh that,’ I said, bringing it casually from behind my back, still too preoccupied to attend properly. ‘You see, he must have become king of Normandy first, that’s a funny thought.’
‘What is?’ She glanced quickly behind her. ‘What’s funny?’ She stopped about two yards away, looking up at me. ‘Daddy, why have you got one of Mummy’s shoes?’
‘She lost it,’ I said, definitely annoyed this time. ‘You see, the date we all know is 1066. What was Dan asking?’
At that moment Molly came round the end of the house.
Usually I heard the car. She might have brought it up the back drive and put it straight into the garage. Or she might have parked it on the front drive. Whichever she’d done, I’d have expected to hear it. I must have been distracted.
It did flash through my mind that I couldn’t remember hearing it go out. I knew I must have heard it because otherwise I wouldn’t have known she was shopping, but I couldn’t actually bring back the sound as a recent memory.
‘Home already?’ I said.
‘Mummy, Daddy’s found the shoe you lost.’
‘Me?’ she said vaguely.
‘That didn’t take long,’ I said.
‘Mummy, Daddy’s found your shoe.’
There seemed no choice so I handed it to her. ‘Rescued from the dog,’ I said.
Dan came round the corner of the house singing, ‘Who didn’t know, ten sixty-six, who didn’t know, ten sixty-six.’
‘But we haven’t got a dog,’ Molly said. She seemed genuinely confused.
I just grinned enigmatically.
‘Where did you find it?’
Dan stopped singing. ‘Who?’ he said, sensing mystery. ‘What?’
‘Back there.’ I gestured with a thumb, and sauntered past them as if no longer interested.
Behind me I could hear Peggy explaining with impatient condescension to Dan, ‘Daddy says he rescued Mummy’s shoe from the dog, but Mummy says we haven’t got a dog.’ She had a way of clearing things to their essentials.
Molly didn’t say anything.
‘I think Daddy’s the dog,’ Peggy said. It gave me a shock, making me halt, then stroll on. I hoped they hadn’t noticed.
All the same I thought I’d acted quickly and well – till late that evening when I happened to pass up the back drive behind the house and glance at that triangular flower-bed in the angle. Its inner margin was perfectly smooth.
There wasn’t a mark. The only change was that its thin soil crust had gone. Completely gone. The whole inner two feet were smooth soft brown. I didn’t pause as I strolled casually past.
That week I sold the fruit crop on the trees. There wasn’t any choice.
It was something I hadn’t done in other years, though pickers had been a growing problem. In our part of the country, becoming more a commuters’ suburb all the time, they had been harder each year to find, even when you offered absurd wages. I’d gone on trying because, anxious as it made me, I’d enjoyed picking time.
I’d enjoyed the starts at dawn when the fruit was still cold and our fingers grew numb. And the numbness of mind when we’d been doing it for sixteen hours, almost without a break – that was a strange feeling, and one I didn’t know any other way of reaching. It had put me beyond the ordinary things I worried about. Suddenly, around supper-time, I’d find I no longer wanted it to be finished so that I could rest my aching arms and shoulders. I wasn’t anxious any more about how much we’d done that day and whether a gale would come before we’d finished. These problems were still there but they’d receded in importance. It was easy any day to make them recede by looking at them from a hundred years or another star. This was different. I wasn’t driving them away with a philosophical attack but genuinely felt they weren’t important, weren’t even real.
Once I remember, long after the pickers had gone, Molly and I had found that we were picking by moonlight. We’d gone on so long into the dusk that the light of the full moon had become more use than the daylight. We’d stopped then, but in spite of our exhaustion we hadn’t wanted to.
And when it was over, the boxes being piled on to the lorry and driven away, I’d enjoyed that too, though in a different way.
I think I was most worried that for marketing reasons the contractors might in the end find it uneconomic to pick our crop. Ours might be the marginal one they didn’t want. They’d have made their profit elsewhere and ours would be a small contribution to the debit side already allowed for. They’d be under no obligation to increase their loss. Molly wouldn’t see it that way. The fruit rotting on our trees would upset her. She’d want to pick it herself. No one would persuade her that because it had been paid for it had done its job, wasn’t even hers to pick.
I made the first phone call on Monday and the deal was fixed on Wednesday. That was the day we gave our tennis party. All my instincts were against it. I wasn’t sure if I could be polite.
Without consulting me Molly had asked the Draycotts over for a game. She said she’d done it when she heard he’d begun his holiday. Everything followed from that. The first thing that followed was that Wilfred fell through a cucumber frame. He’d literally been dragged off his feet, Rene said, when exercising Boodles on a lead.
He had to be exercised on a lead because about a mile and a half away there was a bitch in heat and this was making him sex mad. Wilfred had taken him out at dusk and a faint breath of wind must have come from the southeast because the next thing he’d known he was right inside the frame with deep cuts on both hands. The odd thing was, Boodles had been so shocked by what he’d done, he’d stood and gaped.
She hoped we’d excuse Wilfred for not ringing himself, but his hands . . . They’d so looked forward to it. Ever since they’d been asked. Of course we wouldn’t want her alone. She hardly bothered to say it. Perhaps it was this that made me insist they should come, when it was exactly the excuse I’d hoped for. ‘Of course you must,’ I said. ‘And bring Wilfred to watch.’
‘We�
��ll ask Jim and Janie,’ Molly said. ‘Jim’s just started his holiday.’
It was my shocked surprise at this coincidence which stopped me objecting at once. Then it was too late.
When I rang Jim he said he’d unfortunately arranged something with Charlie Quorum. Golf? I was about to ask. I checked myself, remembering that I didn’t know. ‘Bring him too,’ I said cheerily.
‘That’s an idea,’ Jim said.
I held on to the receiver for several seconds while Jim calculated.
‘That’s quite an idea,’ he said. ‘We’ll do that.’
‘And bring Hubert,’ I said.
‘Hubert!’ Jim said. ‘Tennis! You’re mad.’
Though I was surprising myself by the way I was extending this casual game with the Draycotts to a party, I’d already begun to realize that it wasn’t a mistake. I needed more evidence, needed it badly.
Half an hour before they were due I discovered that Molly had asked Mrs. Willis to drop in for tea.
‘May as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb,’ she said.
I was startled that she should use this particular cliché. Looking at her, I wondered if she’d startled herself. I had the strange feeling that there was a second when we might have had a wry laugh together.
‘I had to ring her about the Michaelmas daisies,’ Molly said.
I’d never imagined that Mrs. Willis gardened, and said so.
‘I know,’ Molly said and paused as if it worried her too. ‘Perhaps she wants them for a present.’
‘Can they be transplanted at this time of year?’
‘That’s the trouble,’ Molly said, as if she was thinking about something else.
‘When it’s so dry,’ we said simultaneously, stared at each other and broke out laughing. I didn’t understand why.
‘She must be lonely,’ Molly said.
‘Mrs. Willis?’ I said. ‘I thought she was the centre of a gang of septuagenarian bridge-fiends.’
‘That’s true,’ Molly said, but not as if she thought so.
From the start I found that afternoon upsetting. There was a strange atmosphere which, watch and listen as I would, I couldn’t attach to anything. One difficulty was that I didn’t seem able to listen well. It was an old fear I’d had, that I was going deaf. When I was playing I could see that the others who were standing together watching were saying things, but I couldn’t catch them. I could only hear the faintest murmuring, as if from far away. When I was watching I could see the various partners speaking to each other between points or in quick asides during rallies, but the words didn’t reach me.