by Alex Miller
Trade secrets I suppose.
I need opinion supported by evidence. Facts! And that’s where my little stack of books comes in. They are a support to my thinking. And tonight I was going to read up on the larches. Find out something about those trees where the nott lives. But I’m not making much headway. And it’s not only the storm that’s preventing me.
The other big distraction is this: when I came into my room this evening, after our usual stewed steak and onions, potatoes, cauliflower and half a steamed pudding each, ready to set myself up for the night, I discovered that my resident rat had a companion. This gave me an unpleasant shock. It spoiled my mood. Botany for me is deciphering a code. I need all my wits for it if I’m not to miss the very point of significance that I’m searching for.
I had to kill the pair of them.
It’s still preoccupying me.
A resident rat might sound ridiculous. Without explanation that’s true of a lot of things.
When I first came here I couldn’t work out for a while why Morris and his wife had put me in this room rather than in the room they use themselves. This bed that I’m sitting on is something special. It’s not a bed you could go and buy in a shop. Someone has gone out of their way to build it. Not Morris. I’ve never asked him, but I feel sure Morris would not have constructed this bed. Her father maybe. As a dowry. Couldn’t afford anything else so made something. A work of skill and love. No holds barred. Really go to town and make a bed like nobody’s got. He would have had to bring the timber for it in here. There’s no way you’d get this bed out of the room without ripping out a wall. Solid walnut. A local tree. There’s walnut trees all over the place round here. Stolen, I imagine. No one’s going to give that timber away. The square end-posts are nine inches through and nearly as tall as me! It’s not a rich person’s bed. It’s a giant labourer’s dream bed. Square, heavy and solidly made. Cut, sawed and morticed. Nothing turned, dovetailed or inlaid. No ‘lines’. The headboard is one solid plank two inches thick and four feet deep. Finished with an adze. The whole thing rubbed with a hot mixture of boiled linseed oil and beeswax. As soon as I open the door in the evening, linseed. And no springs or wires. Cross joists and planks!
And her mother, I suppose, made the furnishings for it. The mattress is stuffed with half a ton of down. It’s deep and warm and it smells of comfort. Then there’s the bolster, the four pillows and this eiderdown. All huge and all filled with down.
My bed is a place of luxury.
There’s nothing else like it in this house.
They have an ordinary double bed with a wire spring. Something for two bodies to lie on. Side by side. But not this one. This bed is my home roost. When my time’s my own and I’m not out exploring the moor or checking on the nott, this is where I retreat. Everything on to the bed! Tip out my whole box of books. Spread my papers and rubbish around and wrap myself in the eiderdown. And if nothing out of the ordinary occurs I’m settled in for a good time.
Giggling and leaping around the other side of the wall used to go on nearly every night. Difficult to ignore. Lately it’s more likely to be Morris coughing. Then murmuring to each other in the middle of the night and creaking and moving around. Restless. Morris not able to sleep. Then lighting up a smoke and coughing some more. Her telling him to get back into the bed. He’s worked out, that’s the trouble.
They’re not having the fun they once had. Not as calm as he used to be. Irritable with the Tiger a couple of times this week. The truth is, he’s not well.
One thing I’ve never heard them do in there, however, is kill a rat. They never get rats in their room. For myself I reached an accommodation with the rats the day I decided extermination was not the only way to deal with them. That arrangement has only just broken down tonight.
It’s not just this bed that’s all right with me. It’s been the room too. I’ve always trusted what goes on in here. For example, I don’t use the savings bank in the village shop. That way I also avoid having to put up with the tribal reactions to me of the rosy old fogies who inhabit the place. I keep my money in this chest of drawers here. Fifty-seven pounds so far. Pressed under my clean breeches.
It’s a good feeling to have that hidden pile.
Another backstop.
Necessity. A pair of new boots once a year and a book every now and then, when I get to the market in Taunton with Tiger. That’s all I spend money on. I don’t take extended holidays, just the one-day kind. No one else round here takes extended holidays either. But I am expected to. ‘So I suppose you’ll be going off, then? For a week or so?’ The Tiger starts enquiring hopefully as soon as Christmas gets close. Trying to coax me into it. And Morris and his wife, though they don’t say anything, would be glad if I did. They don’t like having me hanging around at Christmas time. It makes them uneasy. They think I haven’t noticed, but the truth is they would like to get rid of me. Have a break from me for once. Forget I exist.
Once the general work comes to a stop things change for me. I don’t fit and it’s obvious. There’s no covering it up by keeping busy. I’m a stranger in the middle of what’s going on. An irritation. Irksome. Spoiling everybody’s fun.
Morris may be from Wiltshire but he’s still the son of Tiger’s sister. He is related. And he married a local. All this doesn’t make him a local, but it gets him a place in the goings-on. Intimacies and celebrations. Ritual!
And that’s what I don’t have and can’t fake.
Christmas leaves me sticking up on my own in the middle of nowhere. They’re surprised when they come across me. You can almost hear them saying it: ‘What’s he doing here?’ People I’ve never seen before milling around in the kitchen wearing their Sunday best. Pushing. Yelling. Touching each other. Embracing and swaying, all talking at once. Keyed up and excited. Ready for something out of the ordinary. Snatching the first drink and downing it. In the mood for fun. They’re not sure what they might get around to doing before it’s over and this half scares them. Especially the men. The smoke and the beer and the noise!
A chance to go crazy.
I can’t hide in here all the time. I have to eat and that’s when I get stuck with them. I put up with it till one of them starts showing aggression: ‘What’s the matter with this one? Frightened his face’ll crack if he smiles?’ What can I say to that stuff? It embarrasses Morris. He’s wishing I wasn’t there. Hoping I’m not going to answer back and let one thing lead to another. Hoping things will go off well. No trouble. No hitches.
So I head off.
Out on to the moor. Down the combes and into the woods. Roaming or sitting still somewhere. In the frost with the naked trees against the moon. Smelling the cold clean earth. Giving my brain a chance to clear.
They feel better when they know I’m not here. Relieved. After all, who wants a stone-face sitting in the circle of good-timers? They want to zip along in their lingo without having me or the boss or anyone else checking on them. It’s as simple as that. I hold them up. Keep the brakes on their excitement. They want to blast ahead and dribble and yell and do whatever comes into their heads. A waste of good beer otherwise!
Out in the wilderness with the Australians! That’s where I am at Christmas time. Where Alsop and his missus are all the year round. Foreigners! The three of us! Except he’s forever trying to find ways of winkling himself into the goings-on. She doesn’t seem to care one way or the other. We never see her. Or maybe she’s more like me. But he’d love to be a part of it. Before the accident he’d stand around praising things when there was nothing to be said. Pretending to be impressed with everything he saw. Too loud. Being met with silence. But really just like me at party time. In the way!
And he still hasn’t totally learned his lesson. I was watching him from the window here only this evening, before the storm broke. He came poking up along the road from Gaudon Manor. Lanky, alone as always, and bent by his pain. No hat. He stopped outside the gate here and stood jabbing the ground with his stick. Turning stones an
d whatever. The way he’s seen Tiger do it. Except when the Tiger jabs this soil he’s jabbing his own bones. Hardly knows he’s doing it. Listening for the sounds of winter coming or something. You wouldn’t know. Talking to his ancestors maybe. Nothing he’d admit to anyway.
It’s no good Alsop trying stunts like that.
He’s out there by the gate, hanging around for a minute or two, hoping Morris is going to see him and yell out a greeting. I could see he almost decided at one stage to come in and knock on the door. Hungry for a bit of company. But there’s no place for him here. He heads off eventually, towards the pub at Handycross. Going that way. Probably nagged at home. Rather different from all the leaping and prancing he used to go on with. He’s getting a lift to the meet with Morris in the morning. That should raise a few eyebrows among the locals. And might even cause some tension here too. Morris’s wife’s not going to feel like taking a back seat to the major. But he must reckon he’s got to be there in person to see the Tiger in action on Kabara. Not ready to trust any second-hand accounts of the run. Wanting ammunition in favour of the horse so he can argue his case.
But he’s lost that one already if he only knew it, and he might as well forget strategy. When the Tiger buys Kabara he’ll do it on his own terms. If I were Alsop I’d be planning an orderly retreat from England, and thinking of getting back to my own country.
This is just the way it goes when I’m alone in here reading. I start following up on whatever’s going on, if I’m not too tired, and I don’t notice what’s happening under my nose, right here in my room. Which is how I got taken totally off-guard by the rats the first time.
The book I was reading that evening was something special. It is lying here on the bed now in front of me. It is The Master of Game and was written by King Edward III’s grandson in 1406. My copy was printed in 1909 and what’s left of the cover is grey-green cloth with a gold medieval design. It is inscribed on the front endpaper: ‘Peter Staines, on his twenty-first birthday, With best wishes from Sir Guy & Lady Fentner; June 1923.’
It smells wonderful!
Its author was the leader of England’s vanguard at the Battle of Agincourt. He was killed there. Smashed aside by a great blow from an iron mace. So there he was, the leader in a fight that people have called England’s greatest victory! And the same man sat down and wrote this book, which is gentle and well mannered, thoughtful and filled with elegant phrases and descriptions. He calls it ‘My litel symple book.’ He was too modest. It’s not so simple, but is full of knowledge and feeling and understanding. He is writing about his passion, hunting. And he only writes what he knows, leaving conjecture to those who don’t know. It is a book that I can open at any page and begin reading with pleasure. This is not hearsay; it’s clear he has trodden through the high wet bracken on chill mornings and held in his hand the red earth where the fox has dug freshly. And his admiration for this animal, which others considered vermin, was keen. He says, ‘The fox does not complain when men slay him, but defendeth himself with all his power while he is alive.’ Some compliment from a warrior!
And there I was, right in there with the intimate thoughts of this Plantagenet, seeing him defending himself at his last battle without complaining of his wounds and without crying out, but doing his best and dying there. Settled deeply into my downy palace here, visions of Agincourt and the fox all mixed up and stewing around in my head, when I felt a slow, gentle pressure being exerted at the back of my shoulder, close up to my neck.
I looked at the door, moving only my eyes, thinking it just possible that my absorption in the book had been so great that I hadn’t noticed someone come in and go round behind me. Some kind of local joke maybe? I was naïve enough then even to consider the possibility that I might be initiated into the ways of the locality. I was in a mood for odd things to happen to me anyway. After all, what was I to expect from these people? But in the stillness, during that couple of seconds, I heard Morris and his wife making their little noises behind the wall. There was no one with me. And then the pressure eased, allowing me to hope that I might have imagined it, or maybe had one of those involuntary muscular contractions that feel just like a touch.
I was about to reach up and give my shoulder a rub when there it was again. Slow and easy but unmistakably something on the eiderdown. I leaped up and away from the bed, ready to keep going right through the door and all the way back to London. And a rat dropped off my shoulder and sat there, embedded in the warm folds of my eiderdown, from where it gazed at me.
I got such a fright that I panicked and grabbed one of my boots and pounded it where it crouched. It didn’t try to get away and it didn’t defend itself, but it seemed to resist the blows for ages. It took a long time to die. It hung on. Sight was in its gaze for so long that I almost despaired of killing it. I’d never killed anything before, not a decent-sized animal anyway, and hadn’t realised quite how committed and violent it is necessary to be.
That was number one. There were plenty more to follow. And it wasn’t long before I became a skilled and efficient rat killer.
Due to a continuous damp seepage there’s a rotten area of skirting board and flooring in the corner under the chest of drawers. I’ve blocked it fifty times. But they keep at it. Nibbling and gnawing and scratching away all through the night, night after night until one of them gets through.
And it’s just one. You’d think they’d come pouring in by the hundred. Rat waves squealing and shrieking after all that hard work. And I used to lie awake waiting for that grey avalanche. But it’s just one. Quietly. Sits there on the floor in the open. No attempt at being sneaky about it. They are big, slow and easy to kill. Waiting for it almost. Making no attempt to dodge the blow. Not retreating back through the hole. Not a flicker of fight in them. Nothing of the Plantagenet or the fox about these things. Almost as if they had been sentenced. Listed for this hole. So I killed them for a while, but there was no sport in it. It was repetitive, predictable, unpleasant.
It was butchery.
And it soon began to depress me, but I kept doing it. It got harder and harder to deliver the death blow. I developed a muscular reluctance, a stiffness and uncertainty, which caused me to miss my aim altogether sometimes, or what was even worse, to botch the job and smash one of the doomed creatures across the back. I tried to stir them up, to put some fight into them, to give the dismal business an element of variety at least. But no matter what I did, jabbing and poking and yelling at them, they remained unmoved. Puddings. At most I could detect resentment, but never any actual resistance.
After a few months of this it got to the point where I’d come in and do various things around the room before killing the rat. ‘I can see you,’ I’d say, and then I’d get on with whatever it was I had in hand. Putting off the disgusting business. But sooner or later I’d have to make up my mind to do it. Go and get the stick and stand there looking at the one whose turn it was that night. It wasn’t easy. In fact it gave me the creeps.
And it only got worse when I started discussing the business with them. Little black beady eyes looking up at me. Not so ugly really. Grey feet and that rodent tail. I’ve seen worse looking things. ‘All right, you’ve got another fifteen seconds,’ and I’d start counting slowly. Seeing the rat, intact, healthy, a reasonable rat life ahead probably, except for this situation. ‘Okay, another half minute. But then I’ll really have to do it.’ Time running out. Then slam with the stick. One vicious smash on the head and they’d be dead, give a couple of kicks and I’d pick the limp carcass off the floor and carry it out by the tail. Chuck it on Morris’s neatly maintained heap of pig shit up at the end of the garden. When Morris and I went past on the way to milking in the morning the bodies were always gone. Food for nocturnal owls and foxes . . . And if Morris and his wife were still up, sitting in the kitchen when I went past, dangling my dead rat, we’d nod an acknowledgement at it and say nothing. It put a blight on my evenings, however, wondering every night when the scratching and gnawi
ng and squealing was going to result in a breach in my blockade. Coming in here after washing my feet, all set for an evening’s reading, and finding this nasty job to be done.
I got sick of it. So one evening I pretended there wasn’t a rat there, squatting silently under the chest of drawers, watching me. I got on the bed and started reading. ‘The execution takes place at dawn,’ I said, when it was time to snuff the candle out. And I lay down and had an undisturbed night. But of course when the morning came I was in my usual hurry. Woken by Morris’s careful, knock, knock, knock on the wall. A cup of tea and a piece of bread and butter waiting for me. Just time to gulp it down while I laced my boots before we were off, out into the icy wind and the darkness, hurrying up the garden and across Old Ley to the farm.
I was well into the milking before I remembered the rat. But there was no chance to kill it when we got home for breakfast. It would have meant taking my boots off and disrupting the routine. By the time Morris and I get back for breakfast his wife has got control of the place. We’re only in for a quarter hour; down our food and grab our lunch packs and we’re out again.
So the rat was still in here when I got back that evening. Still in here, or in here again? I didn’t know. It was more or less in the same position, keeping low and still, down there next to the hole. Looking sleepy, but watching.
I didn’t say anything to it that night. I wasn’t voicing any decisions, I mean, about what was going to happen. But I left it there. I did nothing and said nothing.
It would have been a week or so before I started coming up with things like, And what sort of a day have you had? when I got in at night.
My nights were peaceful. No gnawing and squealing going on behind the skirting board! No need to wonder if tonight was the night for rat killing! It was a relief. A new era. And I was beginning to feel grateful to the resident for sitting there quietly guarding that hole. I made one or two concessions. I called this one the Resident, and I gladly ceased to be the exterminating angel.