‘You could’ve got word to me through someone in village.’
Mr Price shrugged.
‘Maybe you knew I’d turn you away,’ said Daddy.
‘I’m sure you wouldn’t have turned me away, John. We go back a long way, you and I. I thought you’d greet me like an old friend.’ Mr Price smiled. ‘And besides, we certainly had something very real in common once.’ He now laughed. He had cut glass teeth and scarlet gums.
‘What do you want?’ said Daddy.
‘Nothing much. Or nothing much for you. To me it’s important as I’m sure you’ll understand.’ He looked round at me, then Cathy, then back to me. ‘Do you still fly pigeons, John? Do you still keep a loft?’
‘No,’ said Daddy. ‘I handt for years.’ Daddy was standing at his full, majestic height. When he pulled the air around into his cavernous lungs he looked lighter than he was, like a circus tent caught in an updraft.
Mr Price pressed him, ‘Only I’ve lost a bird, you see. One of my best racers. Or I thought he was going to be. He’s young and I was testing him. He came from the best stock and I had – I have – high hopes. But he should have been back by now. He should have been back in my loft yesterday.’
‘Perhaps he’s not as good as you thought he were.’
‘No, no. I released him not too far away. Over the distance I set him, if he were slow he would have been hours, minutes late. Not a day.’
‘Then he’s lost.’
Mr Price chewed his lower lip from the inside. ‘That is clear to me. I would like to find out why. Has he been distracted? Has he been shot?’
‘And this is all you want to talk to me about?’
‘Yes, of course. What else?’
‘Well I’ll tell you plainly that I don’t know where your pigeon is. You’ll have to ask elsewhere.’
Mr Price had not finished. He shifted his weight onto the other foot and continued.
‘You hunt around here, don’t you, John? And probably poach a little too, but what’s that between friends? Nobody much cares about that around here – there’s not enough money in the shooting. And besides, most of the farmers would see it as payment for all the pests you clear off their crops. A pheasant here and there for culling twenty rabbits, eh? Nobody minds that. And you’re well known.’ He stopped, possibly waiting for a response. When none came he went on. ‘But you eat the pests, don’t you? It’s not just for sport with you. I’d probably discover that these children were fairly nifty at skinning animals. And plucking birds too, I’d say.’
‘We dindt catch your bird and eat it. I know difference between a wood pigeon and a racing pigeon. Your bird were got by a hawk and I’m sure you worked that out first thing this morning before deciding to drive up here to my house.’
It seemed as if Mr Price would disagree, but he did not. After a moment’s pause he said, ‘I know you’re right. I know it. I just wondered if you had seen anything. He was a beautiful bird, you know? I’ve been working on the line for a decade and he seemed like the best I’d ever come up with. But no matter. A hawk got him and so I’ll set some traps and make sure there are fewer around. Shoot any hawk you see, yes?’
‘I won’t.’
‘No, of course you won’t. Well, never mind. Let’s see how fast his brothers and sisters are, shall we? Let’s see if they can outfly the hawks.’
He was about to leave – he very nearly went – and then he didn’t. He saw my sister and I again and stopped. ‘Your children must be lonely away from school and anybody of their own age. It’s just the three of you. They must get lonely.’ And then, ‘I’ll bring my boys up one time so they can make some friends.’
Daddy said nothing. Mr Price grimaced at Cathy and climbed back into his Land Rover. The car curled towards us before taking the track back down to the main road. Its engine was quiet and it disappeared quickly.
Daddy remained fixed to his position for some time after the Land Rover rolled away but his breathing had changed, like a sail buoyed and loosened by an irregular wind.
‘Why did he really come here, Daddy?’ Cathy asked.
She had grown taller over the winter but it had made her weaker. Her bones had stretched and thinned and her muscles had spread to cover them. She could not control her movements as minutely as she had previously. Her knees did not know the length of her femurs and tibias, and her feet smacked the ground when she walked. When she stood up she had taken to resting her weight on one leg or the other with her free foot upended on its toes behind her, tucked behind the supporting ankle. It might have been her hips that had changed. She never would get those wide, birthing hip bones that she feared she would, the ones that conform a woman’s whole body around them, but she did get something. Her pelvis developed tilted. Her silhouette took a different line and the small of her back had to curve to meet it before rising sharply as it had done before.
‘Where do you know him from, Daddy?’ she asked when she got no reply.
Sometimes it was as if Daddy was torn apart by our questions. He wanted to be an honest man who shared what he knew with his children, imparting details of his current and former lives, knowing that if any of the details were too much for us that was the very reason for imparting them. Everything he did now was to toughen us up against something unseen. He wanted to strengthen us against the dark things in the world. The more we knew of it, the better we would be prepared. And yet there was nothing of the world in our lives, only stories of it. We had been taken out of our school and our hometown to live with Daddy in a small copse. We had no friends and hardly any neighbours. We obtained a form of education from a woman who dropped books lazily into our laps from a library she had developed to suit only her tastes and her own way of thinking. She probably resented our presence. She probably thought we were filthy and stupid but gave us her time out of some obligation to Daddy.
That was why anybody did anything for us, it seemed. Around here anyway. They feared him or they owed him favours. Other people did not seem to possess the kind of love he had nor the care he took of them from inside our hilltop watchtower. Others saw reciprocity and debts, imagined threats founded in nothing more than his physical presence, burdens passed onto their shoulders by his existence in their landscape, his insistence on integrity, the old-world morality over which he presided. The lurcher puppies that Peter had given us were tokens of fealty, and while Daddy saw them as complete payment for a service he had really done to satisfy his own frustrations, I knew that Peter still felt the debt, or feared the debt. And it was all because he remained unknown. Daddy could never draw a person in with his temperament. There was nothing generous or reassuring in his manner. The only thing that was known of Daddy was that he was the strongest man anyone had ever met, and that he was ruthless in a fight.
Daddy, of course, knew nothing of this. He could not see into other people’s minds any more than he could understand their bodies, so much smaller and weaker than his own. And he could not see any way in which Cathy and I might live our lives without him. We were not built like him and so how were we to stand against the world as he did? He had seen violence, and saw violence now, and he could not understand how a person was to defend themselves or form their place in the world but with their bare muscles and bare hands. And so he kept us here. And I see now that he tied us to everything he valued and feared.
He did not answer Cathy.
Daddy once told us that battles were only ever fought between two people at any one time. There might be armies and governments and ideologies, but in any given moment there was just one person and another person, one about to kill and one about to be killed. The other men and women who were with you or against you faded away. It was just you and another standing in a muddy field with your skin naked beneath your clothes. And Daddy told us that when we met people we had to remember that, to remember that you can only look directly into one person’s pair of eyes at any given time.
Cathy asked again how we knew Mr Price, and still Daddy did not answer.
> ‘We must be cautious of Mr Price,’ he said, at last. That was all he said.
Cathy stayed quiet. She had folded her arms about her body.
‘Will he come back?’ Cathy asked.
‘Yes.’
Chapter Seven
Cathy and I went to Vivien’s house on weekdays. Daddy walked us down and drank hot tea with Vivien, then left us until lunchtime. She gave us lessons like we would have had at school only without the routine that would have been expected there. The lessons were centred on Vivien’s interests at that time or the thoughts she was having on that particular day.
Cathy did not keep her promise for long, though she tried. She sat down with the books and papers and made a go of it and joined in when Vivien and I discussed what we had read. But after a while she became restless. She looked out of the living room window into the garden and the fields beyond and even when she was not looking outside I knew that was where her thoughts lay. I tried to speak to her but the words bounced and echoed as if they were leaving the house and disappearing through her into the world beyond. I had an inside sort of head. She had an outside sort of head.
Following her initial efforts, in all but the coldest and wettest weather, Cathy went outside into Vivien’s garden. Sometimes she took the book Vivien had given her. Usually she did not. She slipped into the garden then ran into the fields and only came back at the end of the morning in time for Daddy’s return and we would all have lunch together as if we had been sitting side by side for the last four hours. Vivien did not stop Cathy nor did she mention her absence to Daddy. And Daddy did not ask us questions about what we had learnt. These were separate worlds.
I preferred to stay in the house. With Daddy and Cathy I spent so much of my time in the outdoors that it was a welcome change. Vivien kept her fire well stoked. When it rained the water ran slowly in thick drops down her double-glazed windows and after a time left a small trail of their minuscule residue. She kept soft blankets folded neatly by her armchairs and cushions that her grandmother and great aunts had embroidered with harvest scenes. Those mornings at Vivien’s were comfortable and safe. It was a different life.
Cathy had talked about Vivien’s awkward body but when this woman moved about her house it did not seem awkward at all. Not to me. She seemed unconcerned by the features upon which Cathy fixated. She walked with disinterest. She situated herself effortlessly within her surroundings. Violence did not define Vivien, like it did Daddy. I think this is what alarmed Cathy. I too found it remarkable. I loved my father and my sister but Vivien was not like them. She talked to me about history and poetry and her travels around France and Italy and about art. I began to see a world that suited me in a different way. I came to prefer the inside to the outside, the armchair, the blankets and cushions, the tea and the teacakes, the curtains and the polished brass, and Vivien’s books, and the comfort of it all. And while I sat and read and drank tea, Cathy walked or ran through the fields and woods and, in her own way, she read the world too.
On a Monday morning in January, we walked to Vivien’s as usual and, as usual, Cathy picked up the work she was given and took it outside. I chose an armchair by the fireplace and wrapped myself in one of the soft quilts. I rested my feet on a small leather pouf the colour of leaf litter. Vivien crouched by the hearth. The fire was unlit. She took old newspapers from the pile and scrunched them into tight balls then packed them into the grate. I watched her place coals on the newspapers then lay strips of wood around the top like the spokes of a wheel. She lit four matches and placed them by corners of the paper such that the body of the structure was slowly overtaken by rippling flames: bright in parts like ice, dull in others like scorched tarmac.
Back at school, I had learnt to read and write and count and add up but when I remembered the lessons it was not the development of these skills but the series of profound revelations that held their clarity. People used to live in caves with woolly mammoths. There were tiny forgotten creatures buried deep inside rocks. There was once a precious little baby named Jesus. Salt and sugar dissolved in water, and this meant they were soluble. Pipistrelles were the smallest bats and they could see with their ears. Rivers cut deep paths through mountains. The moon had no light of its own. Joseph wore a technicoloured dream-coat.
The lessons with Vivien were different. Today I was supposed to be reading a book about aeroplane mechanics. It contained illustrations of the components and diagrams of how they fitted together. It set out American planes alongside their Soviet counterparts and made comparisons between them. A few weeks ago Vivien had told me that she was concerned that she was not teaching us enough about science. Science and technology, she had said. And the natural world. So she had started giving us the books she had about vintage cars, the flora and fauna of the Brecon Beacons, mushrooms and fungi of the British Isles, geology of the Grand Canyon, and the manuals from cameras that had been taken to junk shops years before, with instructions about shutter speeds and aperture settings. And with all these she supplied a dictionary. She wanted to teach us the words in the books, the definitions of the objects and organisms and how to identify them by name. I did not learn much about how anything worked, or why, or how all the birds and beetles stayed alive. I just learnt their taxonomy.
Vivien remained by the fire to watch it take hold. She stretched out her hands to warm them. Her palms turned a light tawny, slowly, from the heat and glow they reflected. I wondered about her taxonomy. I wondered how Vivien could be described.
‘What do you do, Vivien?’
‘Nothing,’ she said.
She stopped speaking and I did not want to prompt her further, but she soon started again. ‘Nothing at the moment, but I’ve done various things over the years. I’m older than you might think.’
I really had no idea how old she might be. My only real comparison for adult age was Daddy, who was so worn yet so vital that it was impossible for strangers to discern his years.
‘I’ve been a painter,’ she went on, ‘and a poet. And I’ve worked in offices for money. And I spent four months becoming a lawyer but gave it up. And I even nearly became a naval officer, once, but that was actually completely ridiculous because I’m not very active and I don’t know anything about boats and I’ve never spent much time near the sea. I mean, I rented a cottage overlooking the Norfolk coast once, but I found I hardly ever looked out of the window, and when I went out for walks I went inland. Strange that, isn’t it?’
‘When Cathy and I lived with our Granny Morley, we walked by sea all time.’
Vivien smiled without teeth. ‘Most people would. But I don’t have any real interest in anything, you know. I don’t really care about anything. Not about the sea or the outdoors or nature or anything. I don’t really have any hobbies. My mother and grandmother used to sew things.’ She picked up one of the embroidered cushions. ‘But it doesn’t interest me. I do things for a bit and then get bored. Like painting or writing. It interested me for a while but I gave up.’
Some sparks flew from the fire and she swept them up and moved away from the hearth. Her knees cracked as they were flexed.
‘I think about swimming but I don’t swim,’ she said. ‘I imagine what it would be like to be in the water, especially the sea. I imagine what it would be like to dip my body into the freezing salt water and how it would feel to be fully submerged and then come up for air but I never do it. I don’t go to the beach and I don’t get into the water. Sometimes I think I could have been an actor. It’s the one profession I’ve never tried. In one way or another, I have spent my whole life impersonating other people. Acting out fantasies with personalities that I’ve made up in my head. Brave people that go about the world and do things. But it’s not like it’s the achievements that matter to me, it’s the interest. The interest the people I play take in the world around them. I suppose they love it in a way that I don’t. They’re fanatics.’
She sat down on the sofa but remained erect rather than sinking back into its cur
ves. ‘What are you, Daniel?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What are your father and sister?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well if you don’t, then how can I? But I do know they’re fanatics. When they care about something, whatever it is, they care about it to the full. They care about it as much as anyone can. They don’t pretend, like an actor would. They’re not concerned with being seen to be doing something. They just do it.’
‘Daddy likes to fight,’ I said.
‘Yes, I know,’ said Vivien. ‘I know all about that.’ She looked as if she did. She looked as if she knew more than I did. I wondered again how she and Daddy knew each other. Daddy the brute and this well-dressed, mild-mannered lady who liked to sit inside her stylish house with her stylish possessions.
‘It’s his job,’ I said. ‘He says it’s just something he does to get paid.’
‘Do you believe it’s just a job?’
I looked up at Vivien for a moment. Then into the fire.
‘A lot of men feel like they should be violent,’ said Vivien. ‘They grow up seeing a violent life as something to aspire to. They don’t have any real sense of what it means and they hate every minute of it. Your father is not like that. There is a tension about him when he approaches a violent act and a calm about him when it is finished. The times at which he is on edge are those just before he strikes. He is most frustrated when a fight is a couple of months behind him and a couple of months ahead of him. That’s when you’ll see him shake. Your Daddy needs it. The violence. I wouldn’t say he enjoys it, even, but he needs it. It quenches him.’ She sat and looked at me. Minutes passed, possibly, but I did not respond and she did not speak again until she asked, ‘Have you ever seen a whale, Daniel?’
I told her that I had not in real life, only on the television.
‘On the television have you seen a whale breach?’ she asked. ‘That’s when it jumps clean out of the water only to smack down onto the surface of the sea. Have you seen that? The almighty splash it makes?’
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