by Paul Torday
“But he has a marvellous collection of wine,” I said with enthusiasm.
“Well, maybe. There’s quite a lot of it, I know, but it all seems to me to be bits and pieces and odds and ends. It’s become an obsession for Francis. In some ways, it’s tragic. He has no children to leave anything to, and he has nothing to leave—except, of course, his wine. So, you’re absolutely right: Francis has a reason to look sad. But we all look after him, you know. Everybody loves Francis, for some reason.”
Eck stood up and stretched himself.
“What happened to the girl?” I asked.
“What girl? Oh, Francis’s girl. She had the child and had to give it away for adoption. Poor mite.”
The thought of adoption made me uncomfortable, and to change the subject I said, “Annabel’s nice, isn’t she?”
“Yes,” said Eck. He took a last puff at his cigar and flung it over the balustrade in a trail of sparks. “She’s very nice. She and I had a fling, once.”
“Really?”
“It was very jolly. The leg-over part of it was very jolly indeed. But then there was so much talking beforehand and afterwards, I found it all rather tiring, and in the end we decided to give it up and just be friends.” Eck started to stroll back towards the lighted windows through which we had walked earlier. The sound of laughter could be heard from within as the card game reached its climax.
“Some people think I’m an incurable romantic,” said Eck. “But in all honesty I’ve found this love business is rather an effort, don’t you agree? A quick bonk and a large gin and tonic satisfy most of life’s wants, in my opinion.”
I could not think of an adequate comment.
“Why don’t you have a crack at Annabel?” suggested Eck, stopping and turning to face me.
“Me? I don’t think so,” I replied.
“I don’t know, Wilberforce. I think she quite fancied you at dinner. I can tell. I should ask her out if I were you. You might be just her cup of tea: brainy sort of chap that you are.”
“No, I don’t think I will, Eck.”
He didn’t move, but stared at me. It was full night now, but in the light from the windows, and in the moonlight from above, we could see each other’s face clearly enough.
“You’re sweet on Catherine, aren’t you,” said Eck. It was not a question.
“No,” I said in a hoarse voice. I was absolutely taken aback by the sudden change in Eck’s tone, and by the question. He was no longer bantering.
“There’s nothing to be ashamed of, if you are,” said Eck. “I was pretty gone about her at one time. It’s easy enough to understand, with a girl who looks like that. But it’s a lost cause.”
“I’ve no intention of interfering between her and Ed,” I said. “They’re my friends.”
“Yes, of course,” said Eck. “But friendship has a funny way of going up in smoke in these situations. Ed and Catherine are going to get married. It’s all been arranged. Old Simon Hartlepool and Robin Plender made plans for them both long ago, and Ed and Catherine have been brainwashed into the idea they will be married one day, almost since they could walk. So don’t waste too much time on that idea.”
I did not reply and Eck said, “Come on. It’s gone quiet inside. They must have finished playing that dreadful game. I think it’ll be safe to go back in.”
FOUR
In late August, Ed asked me to go and stay at Blubberwick Lodge. There was to be a shooting party there for a couple of days. Ed and his guests were going up the day before, to shoot on the Friday. They were staying that night at the lodge. Francis and I were asked to go and watch the shooting and then stay for dinner on the Saturday night. It was half understood that Ed would lend me a gun for the last drive, arrange for me to stand with a minder and have a go at shooting a grouse. Francis wanted a chance to work Campbell, and pick up grouse behind the line.
Eck had told me about Blubberwick Lodge. It had been built by the first Marquess of Gateshead in the i86os, when the moors around Blubberwick were no longer mined for the lead that had founded the fortunes of the Simmonds family in the last two centuries. Now the moors were harvested for grouse, not lead.
It was considered inconvenient to ride twenty miles from Hartlepool Hall to Blubberwick Moor, so a lodge or shooting box had been built closer to hand. “It is a very comfortable set-up,” Eck told me. “Enormous soft beds, huge old bathtubs, very comfortable armchairs you can fall asleep in without cricking your neck. The only concession to modern life has been the installation of an ice-making machine to speed up the production of cocktails after shooting.”
I arranged to meet Francis at Caerlyon at eight o’clock in the morning on the Saturday on which we had been invited.
Francis, Campbell and I drove to Blubberwick together in Francis’s old Land Rover. I wasn’t allowed to take my Range Rover.
“Too smart,” said Francis, shaking his head. “White leather seats. Campbell will get mud everywhere.”
So we drove, early one morning in late August, deep into the Pennine uplands at about twenty miles an hour. The air had a sharp feeling to it and was so clear that one had the impression of seeing the wide horizons through a telescope. Everything seemed nearer than it really was. The heather was still in flower: its purple bloom covered every hill.
“Will I know anyone there?” I asked Francis, as we drove along the narrow roads across the moorland.
“Eck will be there, of course. No party ever takes place that Eck isn’t invited to. There’s someone called Heini Carinthia, who comes every year. He’s an old friend of mine. He started my interest in wine. I’d like you to meet him. Ask him about Château Trebuchet: that’s his property, in Pomerol, in Bordeaux. He says it produces the best Pomerol after Petrus. I myself think it is a moderate wine. Then there’s Philippe de Bargemen, a very charming Frenchman, who spends his life shooting: grouse in the Pennines, doves in Argentina, quail in Texas, pheasants in Hungary. He’s never without a gun in his hand. Nice man. The others are mainly locals. You’ll know some of them, I expect.”
We drove on and then Francis said, “You’re very privileged, you know. Getting an invitation to Blubberwick isn’t something that happens every day. It’s one of the best grouse moors in the North of England.”
“I don’t know how I feel about shooting those poor grouse.”
Francis smiled. “Well, of course you have to hit one first. But if they are not shot, they get diseased. Once the number of grouse on the moor gets beyond a certain density, they start passing a parasite to one another. I believe they pick it up from sheep. That kills them off faster than anything. The only way to preserve grouse is to shoot them.”
I did not follow the logic of this, but Francis spoke as if he knew what he was talking about, so I said nothing more.
“There is no sport like it,” said Francis. “You go and stand on the roof of the world, and the grouse come at you from all directions, faster than you would believe possible. All other forms of shooting come a distant second. Few people ever get the chance to do it. You don’t know how lucky you are.”
We were now driving along a narrow single-track road that wound through the heather. Then I saw my first grouse. A brown bird with a red comb on its head whirred out of a clump of heather close to the side of the road calling, “Go back, G’back, g’back.” We came over the crest of a hill and saw Blubberwick Lodge below us. It was a large rambling building, covered in a fading cream-coloured rendering to protect it from the constant drizzle and wind of the dales. As we drove down the bank towards it, I could see activity: beaters climbing into two big ex-army lorries, guns coming out of the house and straggling towards a line of four-wheel-drive vehicles drawn up on the gravel. We drove through the lodge gates.
Ed was waiting for us on the gravel. When he saw us he tapped his watch with his finger and said, “Francis, if I’d known you were coming in that old banger I’d have told you to set out yesterday. What was wrong with Wilberforce’s Range Rover?”
Ed said to me, “Wilberforce, I don’t think you know Heinrich Carinthia? Or Philippe de Bargemon?” I shook hands with a large, smiling elderly man and then a younger, dark-haired Frenchman. The other guns I knew. Eck greeted me with a wave of his hand. One of the party, to my surprise, was Annabel Gazebee.
“Hello, Annabel,” I said. “I didn’t know you would be shooting.”
“We rely on her to get our bag,” said Ed. “She’s a top gun.”
Then Ed introduced me to my minder, Bob. “Go and stand with Francis this morning. You’ll get a better idea of what goes on from behind the line. Then, if you feel like it, you can have a go yourself this afternoon, and Bob will show you what to do. He’ll stand with you and make sure you’re safe.” Bob had the gun that Ed was lending me slung in a sleeve over his shoulder.
“Francis, why aren’t you shooting?” I asked.
“I gave up shooting years ago,” he said. “It’s an expensive sport, and anyway I much prefer working my dog nowadays.”
“It’s a pity,” said Ed to me, “because Francis was one of the best shots in the county in his day.”
“I was about average,” said Francis modestly. “Now, my father was what you would call a good shot. And my grandfather was one of the great shots.”
Ed laughed and said, “It runs in the family, I expect.”
Then we climbed into our vehicles and set off towards the moor. We drove in a convoy up a moorland track towards the first line of butts. An undulating landscape of heather and peat hags and small pools opened before us and we stopped and parked the vehicles on a dry bit of ground in the lee of a small hill. Then the guns and the followers, including Catherine and Francis and myself, walked slowly along the line of the wooden butts, Ed indicating to each gun in turn which butt to occupy.
Francis turned away from the line and strode across the heather with Campbell dancing at his heels. I followed him, and when we were about three hundred yards back from the line, we stopped and hunkered down in the heather.
The silence was, for a time, absolute. Francis did not speak, and Campbell sat quivering beside him, once letting out a small moan of excitement. A great white sky arched over us. In every direction the moors rolled away, like a huge sea. Not a house or a road could be seen, nor any human figure. Then I saw a line of moving dots on the distant horizon. They did not appear to get any closer for a while, but then I realised it must be the beating line, and I began to hear, in the stillness, the snap of the flags they carried to drive forward the grouse. Occasionally shouts would arise from the line of “Flag up! Flag up!”
“They’re trying to stop the grouse flying back over the beaters, and turn them back towards the guns,” Francis explained. “Things should start to happen soon.”
Now I saw a cloud of birds in the sky wheel and turn over the beating line, and then drop low again so that I could not pick them out against the heather. Then a shot rang out from one end of the row of butts; then shots were being fired up and down the line. I saw a pack of grouse coming straight towards us and, as it flew over the butts, I saw two or three birds tumble and then those that were not hit went past us in a rush of wings almost before I had realised they were coming.
At the end of the drive Francis stood up and Campbell sat up, a paw raised, waiting for orders. Francis gestured with his arm. “Go on, Campbell,” he said. “Hi lost. Hi lost!”
The little dog surged through the heather, his head appearing from time to time with its ears flapping as he searched for fallen birds. In a few minutes he came back with one in his mouth.
“There, Wilberforce,” said Francis, handing me the soft, still-warm creature with its brown plumage and downy white leggings: “your first grouse.”
I held the bird gingerly for a moment and then gave it back to Francis. He smiled, and went back to working his dog.
After everything had been picked up, we walked on to the next drive, and then a third. Each was as exciting to watch as the first one and, by the time the last drive was over, it was afternoon. A pale sun was trying to burn its way through the overcast and not succeeding. It was warm and still. Francis and I walked back to the line of butts and joined up with the guns, and then we all walked together for a few hundred yards down the hill to where a small burn trickled between soft, grassy banks where the sheep had grazed off the heather. There we had a picnic beside the stream, and the keepers and the beaters took themselves off into a huddle with their Thermoses and sandwiches fifty yards away. The rest of us sat or lay on the grass surrounded by wicker hampers and wine coolers from which Horace, clad in a tweed jacket and twill trousers instead of his customary dark suit, dispensed all manner of good things.
Catherine came and sat down beside Ed and Eck and me and said, “What did you think of it all, Wilberforce?”
“Very exciting, but I don’t see how anyone ever hits anything. The birds fly so fast.”
She laughed. “You’ll soon find out for yourself. I expect you’ll hit something. You are going to shoot after lunch, aren’t you? Try to remember not to shoot more than Ed. He won’t like it if you do.”
Ed, who was reclining in the heather munching on a chicken leg said, with some asperity, “On the contrary, Catherine, I would be absolutely thrilled if he did.”
“I know you would, darling,” said Catherine. She went and sat down nearer to him and stroked his hair. “You’re so good.”
Before we finished lunch Ed pulled a camera out from his pocket and took photographs of everybody sitting on the grass, eating their lunch. Then Catherine asked me to take a photograph of herself with Francis and Ed. The three of them got to their feet for the picture. Francis stood in the middle with an arm around Ed and an arm around Catherine. The heather stretched behind them to the milky sky, and the air was so clear that whenever I looked at that photograph afterwards—for Ed gave me a copy—it seemed to me as if the three of them might at any instant step out of the picture, or that I might step into it and return to the innocent happiness of that moment.
§
The shooting began again after lunch. Bob the minder followed behind me, carrying my gun in its sleeve and a bag of cartridges slung over his shoulder. We followed Ed towards another line of butts, about half a mile from where we had sat and eaten our picnic. As we came to the butts Ed directed the guns where to stand. Halfway along the line he stopped and said, “This’ll do for you, Wilberforce. You should get some shooting here. There are plenty of grouse about on this bit of the moor this year.”
I could hear them all around us, their liquid bubbling music occasionally broken as a cock bird would flutter up for a moment to see what was going on, uttering its cackling admonition: “Go back! G’back!”
Bob and I entered the butt, and Bob took the gun out of its sleeve and began to instruct me. “Now then, sir,” he said, “I’ll put these two canes on either side of the front of the butt. Never swing your gun past them, otherwise you’ll shoot one of the other gentlemen in the line, and they never enjoy being shot, sir. And when you hear horns blowing, that will mean the beating line will be within range, and then you must only shoot grouse that have gone past us and are behind the butt, otherwise you’ll shoot one of the keepers, and they definitely dislike being shot, sir.”
Then he showed me how to break the gun and present it to him so that he could reload for me after I had fired it, and we settled down to wait. Various other pickers up and flankers walked past, and the flankers settled themselves in the heather at each end of the line of butts, with sticks on to which were stapled sheets of white plastic from old bags of fertiliser.
“What are those men going to do?” I asked Bob.
“When the grouse start coming through, they’ll get up and flag them to make sure they go over the line of guns and don’t get out the side. There’ll be a bit of a wait now, sir. The beating line starts the drive quite a long way away.”
I stood in my butt, a wooden hurdle with heather al
ong the top to give the illusion of camouflage, with my gun resting on the lip, waiting for the grouse to appear. My heart was beating faster than usual. I half-hoped I wouldn’t hit anything; but a deeper urge made itself felt: I knew I would want to shoot the grouse when at last they came.
The silence was absolute. The limitless horizons of the Pennines opened up before me. A huge grey bird wheeled in the sky above us.
“Look at that, sir,” said Bob: “that’s a hen harrier. They eat the grouse chicks in the breeding season and pick off any wounded birds we don’t find. They know what’s going on today, sir.”
The great raptor soared and wheeled against the pale sky, waiting for its chance. Strange-looking flies drifted past in front of the butt, locked in amorous embraces. A solitary bumblebee droned past in search of heather honey. The milky sky and the horizon seemed indivisible, as if the land rose up to meet the white light of heaven, as if it went on for ever. Somewhere far to the east were the urban sprawls of Tyne-side and Wearside: now it seemed as if those places, and everything in them—my work, my life so far—were an unguessable distance away.
I saw a line of dots appear on the horizon.
“That’s the beating line,” said Bob. “In a few minutes we should start to get busy. Remember, when you see the grouse, pick your bird and stay on it. Shoot it in front as far out as you dare. They travel that fast, if you wait, it’ll be on you and past you before you can shoot.”
A moment or two ticked by. I could hear the occasional flap of a flag, as the beating line snapped them to and fro, to move the packs of grouse forward. Once or twice I heard again the screams of “Flag up! Flag up!”