White doves fly up from the roof. I watch their wings flicker against the sky. Sudden vertigo. Something shifts in my head. Something huge. Then everything I see collapses into something else. I blink. It looks the same. But it isn’t. This is not my college. Nothing about it feels familiar. It doesn’t even feel like a college at all. Just a few acres of buildings, giant collector’s boxes of brick and stone crammed with the detritus of centuries. In the chapel are painted angels whose faces are all the same, uncanny angels with swords and bright pre-Raphaelite plumage. There’s a bronze Benin cockerel in the dining hall, and a skeleton in a cupboard in the Fellows’ cloakroom, a real, yellowed skeleton held together with pins and twisted wire. Beyond my office building are a host of yew trees clipped into absurd wind-blown boulders. A bronze horse on one lawn, and a hare on another, and a metal book held to the ground by a sculpted ball and chain. Everything here is built from things pulled from dreams. A few weeks earlier scores of bay trees in pots were set out all over the college for an Alice In Wonderland-themed Ball; I’d watched students wiring flowers into their branches: soft fabric roses of white and pillarbox red.
In two months, I think, my college job will end. In two months I will have no office, no college, no salary, no home. Everything will be different. But, I think, everything already is. When Alice dropped down the rabbit-hole into Wonderland she fell so slowly she could take things from the cupboards and bookshelves on the walls, look curiously at the maps and pictures that passed her by. In my three years as a Cambridge Fellow there’d been lectures and libraries and college meetings, supervisions, admissions interviews, late nights of paper-writing and essay-marking, and other things soaked in Cantabrian glamour: eating pheasant by candlelight at High Table while snow dashed itself in flurries against the leaded glass and carols were sung and the port was passed and the silver glittered upon dark-polished refectory tables. Now, standing on a cricket pitch with a hawk on my hand, I knew I had always been falling as I moved past these things. I could reach out and touch them, pick them off their shelves and replace them, but they were not mine. Not really ever mine. Alice, falling, looked down to see where she was headed, but everything below her was darkness.
Concentrate on why you’re here, I tell myself. You have a hawk to fly. Ever since my father died I’d had these bouts of derealisation, strange episodes where the world became unrecognisable. It will pass. But I am spooked by what’s just happened. My fingers shake as I thread the end of the creance through the swivel at the end of her jesses and tie it there with two miniature falconer’s knots. I pull on them and they hold. Knots and lines. Material reassurances. I play out fifteen feet more creance and stow the rest of it deep in a zipped-up pocket of my hawking waistcoat to keep it secure. Then I pull her leash free from the swivel and tuck it into another pocket. Hawking waistcoats, like those of fishermen or photographers, are hardly clothes at all, just pockets hung in rows. The one at my right hip is lined in vinyl, and inside it are three dead day-old chicks, each skinned and torn roughly in half.
‘Sit there – on you go.’ The hawk hops onto the rail of the wooden veranda and turns to face me in a low boxer’s crouch. I step back six feet, put half a chick in my glove, extend my arm and whistle. There is no hesitation. There is a scratch of talons on wood, a flowering of feathers, one deep downstroke, the brief, heavy swing of talons brought up and into play and the dull thud as she hits my glove. When she has finished eating we do it again, and this time I stand a little further away. Eight feet: three wingbeats, another reward. For a creature with the tactical intelligence of a goshawk this game is child’s play. The third time I put her on the railing she is already airborne as I turn my back: a skip of my heart, a hastily extended glove and she is at my side, wolfing down the rest of her food, crest raised, wings dropped, eyes blazing, a thing of perfect triumph. I thread her leash back through the swivel and untie the creance. That will do for today. She flew perfectly. And I’m so pleased with how the lesson has gone I start singing on the way home. I serenade my hawk with ‘My Favourite Things’, with whiskers and kittens and brown paper packages tied up with string. It strikes me that this must be happiness. That I have remembered what it is, and how it can be done. But watching television from the sofa later that evening I notice tears running from my eyes and dropping into my mug of tea. Odd, I think. I put it down to tiredness. Perhaps I am getting a cold. Perhaps I am allergic to something. I wipe the tears away and go to make more tea in the kitchen, where a dead white rabbit is defrosting like a soft toy in an evidence bag, and the striplight flickers ominously, undecided whether to illuminate the room or cease working entirely.
These calling-off lessons teach the hawk to fly immediately to an upraised glove and a whistle. Rapid response is the key to success. If the hawk doesn’t come straight away there’s no point in waiting minutes on end, whistling and calling; it’s better to end the training session and try again later. White did not know this, and it is one of the reasons why his first attempt to call Gos is so painful to read. But what upset me most about that sorry episode wasn’t the wait that taught the hawk nothing, nor the sadistic tug on the creance that pitched poor Gos to the ground. It wasn’t even that he’d taken so long to reward the hawk that it had no understanding that the food it was given was a reward at all. It was this: that once the hawk decided to walk towards him, White had run away.
But he returns and tries again. Two days later Gos is back on the railings and White is forty yards away, whistling and waving two ounces of butcher’s steak in his hand. He pleads. He calls. He tries every voice he knows: his tone is commanding, pandering, urgent, mad, soft, desperate, cross. ‘Now, now,’3 he remonstrates. ‘Don’t be silly, come-along, be-a-good-Gos, Gossy-gossy-gos.’ After ten minutes, Gos decides to fly. But the falconer’s joy turns fast to horror, for what is approaching him is hardly a hawk at all. It is a ‘hump-backed aviating Richard III’,4 a ghastly aerial toad, and its glowing headlamp eyes are not focused on his outstretched fist, my God, but on his exposed and unprotected face. He begins to panic. Gos had hurt him a few minutes before, had jumped up to his shoulder and buried a foot in his neck. There was blood. There was a great deal of pain. He remembers the force of that blow, the agony of it, the reserves of patience it required for him not to dash the hawk to the ground and kill it, to wait, just to wait for the hawk to let go. Closer. Now it is five paces. It is almost upon him. Those great eyes are fixed on his. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. He cannot bear it. His nerve breaks. He shuts his eyes and ducks. Gos, vastly confused, veers off into the branches of a tree, misses his footing, drops awkwardly into a hedge.
White collects himself, retrieves the hawk, walks back to the railings and tries the whole lesson again. This time he will be brave. This time. As the hawk flies to him he holds his breath and tries to stand his ground:
I braced the breast muscles not to flinch. It was too much. At two yards humanity became again the inherent coward, and cringed away to the right, averting face from the eyes of slaughter, humping shoulder, powerless to remain erect. But Gos bound to the shoulder with a decisive blow, stepped quickly down the arm, was feeding on two ounces of beef.5
He had tried so hard not to be a coward. It was why he had hunted with the Grafton and learned to fly, and why he had swum around the St Leonards pier when he was small, and dived off the highest diving board at the Hastings Baths at school. He feels that old, sick horror. Powerless to remain erect. He must be brave. When he was small his mother had pleaded with him that he should ‘grow up a big brave and honourable man’ and it had conditioned him to fear the reverse. ‘I felt myself incapable of being any of these noble things’,6 he’d written. This was a test of manhood. Screwing his courage tight he calls Gos once more, from fifty yards this time, and this time he does not duck, even with terror flowing in all the courses of his veins. He is proud of the hawk for flying fifty yards, proud of himself for standing his ground. It is a victory
worthy of celebration, and that night he drinks himself senseless. ‘I cry prosit loudly and repeatedly,’7 he wrote, ‘quaff fiery liquids of triumph, drink damnation to my enemies, and smash the glasses on the floor.’
It is fifteen days since the hawk arrived. I’ve washed my hair, applied some make-up, found some presentable clothes – that is, ones not dusted with dried hawk-mutes – and walked with Mabel to my college for a summer lunch-party at the Master’s Lodge. At ten minutes past two I’m sitting at a long table on a secluded English lawn giving an impromptu lecture on falconry while Mabel tears at a rabbit leg in my hand. The Master of the college, a shrewd and genial man in an impeccably tailored suit, is listening intently to my speech. Next to him is his mother, looking distinctly amused. Her grandchildren sit by her. And next to them, the Master’s wife, an elegant dark-haired lawyer, holding a glass of wine. She catches my eye and grins. Two days ago on the way to the supermarket I’d heard her shout my name and turned to see her dismount from her bicycle with practised equestrian grace. We’d talked for a while under tattered leaf shadows, and soon I was in the kitchen of the Master’s Lodge drinking tea. ‘So, Helen,’ she said, ‘we’re having a lunch party on Saturday. Just family. In the garden, if the weather’s fine. What would be marvellous,’ she said, head tilted, ‘would be if you came along afterwards and brought your hawk. We’ve heard you’re flying her on the college grounds, and we’d love to meet her.’ She uncapped a black marker pen, wrote HELEN GOSHAWK on a whiteboard, then hesitated, turned to me. ‘Two p.m.?’
‘Two p.m.’
She wrote the time in her elegant hand and smiled.
So now the hawk eats, the conversation continues, the sun falls in pale planes on the ancient walls, the chirrups of house martins drift down from above like distant fingertips on glass, and I glory in it all. How beautiful it is here, I think, and how supremely unlikely it is that I ever got to be here at all, a state-school kid born to parents who’d never gone to university, to whom Cambridge was the mysterious haunt of toffs and spies.
‘You must be a spy,’ my father used to tell me. ‘Must be.’ He’d watched me as a child sneaking about with binoculars, hiding for hours in bushes and trees. I was the invisible girl; someone tailor-made for a secret life.
‘No, really I’m not,’ I’d say for the hundredth time. ‘I’m not!’
‘But of course you’d say that.’ And he’d laugh delightedly, because there was no way I could persuade him otherwise.
‘It’s a job, Dad,’ I’d say, rolling my eyes. ‘I teach people English and the History of Science. I sit in a library, read books, do my research. That’s all it is. I’m not something out of a John le Carré novel.’
‘But you could be,’ he’d say, stressing the could, and part of him not joking at all.
My father had revelled in the thought that I might be a spy, for it was a life he understood, being only a hair’s breadth from his own. One day he’d handed me a miniature silver camera. ‘It takes special film,’ he said gleefully, flipping open the back and showing me where the miniature spool fitted in its matchbox-sized casing. Over the years he’d rigged up infra-red light-beams to photograph nocturnal wildlife, staked out the love-nests of cabinet ministers, tracked and photographed the movements of nuclear waste on secret midnight trains, climbed over fences, sneaked cameras into places he, and they, should not have been. Patience, detection, subterfuge and record. What historians did for a living was far more mysterious to him than the work of spies.
My vision blurs. We carry the lives we’ve imagined as we carry the lives we have, and sometimes a reckoning comes of all of the lives we have lost. The summer lunch recedes. I cannot pull it back. Fog seeps in from the rugby pitch where Prideaux strode. Slow, white breaths. There’s a hush in my head; it grows louder. ‘I am not a spy,’ I’d told my father. ‘I’m a historian.’ But watching everyone around the table, their faces entranced by my hawk, it seems I’m not even that any more. I am the Fool, I think, dully. I used to be a Research Fellow, a proper academic. Now I am in motley. I am not Helen any more. I am the hawk woman. The hawk pulls on the rabbit leg. Wasps circle her like electrons. They land on her feet, on her nose, seeking shreds of rabbit flesh to take back to their paper nest in some nearby Cambridge loft. She flicks them away with her beak and I watch their yellow-and-black striped abdomens spinning through the air before they right themselves and fly back to the hawk. This summer lunch feels deeply unreal. Shadows of damask and silver, a photogravure in an album, something from Agatha Christie, from Evelyn Waugh, from another time. But the wasps are real. They are here, and they are present. So is the hawk, the sun at their centre. And me? I do not know. I feel hollow and unhoused, an airy, empty wasps’ nest, a thing made of chewed paper after the frosts have murdered the life within.
Sometimes a reckoning comes of all the lives we have lost, and sometimes we take it upon ourselves to burn them to ashes. In the evenings, by the light of the Aladdin lamp, in the soft white glow of its fluorescing mantle, White is doing his old life to death. He is committing the murder in a novel he’d started writing at Stowe, and now it is nearly finished. The book is called You Can’t Keep a Good Man Down, and it is the story of the decline and fall of a public-school headmaster called Dr Prisonface. Prisonface is terrified of life; he is a chameleon, a mirror, existing only through his reflection in the eyes of others. He loses his job at the school. He woos and is rejected by a boyish dark-haired barmaid, flees in terror from the advances of her mother. He flies with drunken aviators descended from Romantic poets. He tries to teach Hollywood moguls how to be Gentlemen and is humiliated when they mow down grouse with tommy guns. The book is a vicious satire on the educational system and the cult of the English Gentleman, but it is also a psychological exorcism, a caustic narrative written to burn away his former life. White called Prisonface to life in order that he should suffer, be punished, mocked, reduced to rags and die. From headmaster to private tutor, from farmworker to beggar, he fails at everything he attempts. Everyone he meets on the way lectures him on why he is useless and unreal, and the book’s narrator, too, puts the boot in at every opportunity.
Towards the end of the book, limping and homeless, Prisonface meets a mysterious man on a country road. The man has saturnine, strangely carved features, and walks in darkness, a black dog by his side. He is a supernaturally suave figure: Prisonface is drawn to him, drawn to his power, recognising in it ‘the wisdom of certainty, the happiness of reality, the mastership of right’.8 The stranger had once been a schoolmaster too, at a place called Golden Gates, but left because he could not bear the people teaching there. Now he is married, lives in a cottage in the woods and is content. The man is White’s vision of his future self: a White freed, a White triumphant, a man who lectures Prisonface, over several pages, on the failings of the school system: ‘To anybody who has spent two months training a goshawk, knowing that it will be fatal even to give the creature even a cross look,’9 the man says, ‘it seems very extraordinary that the complex psychology of a human being can be taught with a stick.’
Sitting by the lamp, White finishes writing the speech that is perhaps the least cruel, the most humane in the whole book. He is speaking to his past self with pity and compassion.
‘You went back to school voluntarily from the University because you still needed to go to school, because there was something still to find. You went back under the hen’s wing for safety, because you were still too small a chicken, but also in search of something: you want the talisman that would make you fit to leave.’10
‘What am I searching for?’
‘That you will only know when you find it.’
‘Is it wisdom or manhood?’
‘Perhaps it is love.’
Perhaps it is love. Perhaps it is. I imagine him writing those lines in his small kitchen, the light wet on the oilskin tablecloth, the night close against the window. He will stoke the fire in a little while. First he will write a little more. His hawk is
sleeping. All the leaves on the trees of the Ridings are still tonight, all unmoving out across Three Parks Woods, across Stowe Woods and Sawpit Woods, over the Black Pits ponds, the carp slumbering deep in the waters. There is peace here. He is a wicked man. A free man. A man who is cast out, the man who fell. Feral. Ferox. Fairy. A man who is content with his lot. He puts the pen down to pour another drink, then picks up his pen and writes some more. He writes of Dr Prisonface asking the mysterious man his name, and of the man telling him it is Lucifer. Lucifer the light-bringer, the fallen angel, the devil incarnate.
14
The line
THE EXPRESSION ON Christina’s face is unusual. It’s not a happy face, but it’s not unhappy either. Tense, certainly. It is fierce, ambivalent and brave. Today she’d come out to watch the hawk fly and in a burst of inspiration I decided to recruit her as my under-falconer. She’d borne my grief-spurred strangenesses with great good grace over the last few months but nothing could have prepared her for this. ‘The problem is, I can’t get away fast enough,’ I tell her. ‘She flies after me as soon as I start walking away. But she has to come longer distances before I can fly her loose. Can you hold her for me, out on the pitch, so I can call her from your fist?’
‘You’ll have to show me how,’ she says, paling.
‘It’s easy, really.’
I give her my spare glove, put the hawk on it and bend her fingers into the right shape to hold the jesses.
‘Turn your back to me – yes, like that. Perfect. Now she can’t see me. So I’m going to walk over there. When I shout OK, turn right, stick out your arm and open your hand, so she can fly.’
H Is for Hawk Page 13