The weather continued to hold, and the surroundings were altogether restful. In the time which had elapsed since Fen and the Major had lost the Hunt, and its followers on foot or in cars, they had seen nothing and no one except for a Central Electricity Generating Board lorry, three men aboard it, hastening in the direction of Burraford.
The meet had been at The Stanbury Arms - not a very good choice, since there was scarcely room for all the huntsmen, the Hunt followers, the hunt saboteurs, the cars, the horses, the horse-boxes, and the notoriously ill-disciplined bitch pack, all of whom were obliged to spread themselves a considerable distance in both directions along the lane. Even so, possibly owing to the sunshine, a general good humour prevailed. Isobel Jones, assisted by a blowsy girl from the village, did a busy trade in the overcrowded bar; Jack Jones looked down with keen approval from his bed at the upstairs window; and even the hunt saboteurs, some of whom had burdened themselves with scrawled, strangely-spelt objurgations on placards, seemed more or less at a loss, managing only a meagre jeer when the horses and hounds eventually moved off. The chief of the saboteurs, a small, dark-suited, bespectacled man whom Fen recognized as a dispensing chemist from Glazebridge, stood in the car-park in earnest but apparently amicable conversation with the Master, who was taking intermittent swigs from a gleaming silver hip flask; he seemed for the moment subdued, perhaps because he had recently put an advertisement in the local paper offering a £5 reward to anyone who could give information about the smuggling in of foxes, in crates, by British Rail, and their subsequent release in the wilds to provide targets for the blood-lust of the huntsmen. This had provided a good deal of sour amusement to farmers who kept hens, and who were accustomed to waking up in the morning to find whole rows of the birds lying about the yard with their heads bitten off; the district was already infested with foxes, and Mr Dodd (which was the dispensing chemist’s name) had hurriedly withdrawn his advertisement after only one issue.
The Glazebridge and District Harriers were an inefficient lot, and although they often found, deaths among the Canidae they put to flight were few and far between. Nor were they a very distinguished Hunt: the men mostly turned up in ratcatcher (Fen had that morning noted one, with waist-length hair, who was wearing a hoicked-up caftan and prayer beads above his shining riding boots); the women, though lending a little colour to the proceedings by putting on pink, were preponderantly ill-favoured and dull; the horses, with only a few exceptions, looked as if their sires and dams had been mated by some primitive flawed computer-dating system; and of the hounds, several were so fat and old and lenient, with rheumatism and sore pads, that they could scarcely be trusted not to abandon the chase after a mile or less. Still, what the Hunt lacked in usefulness it more than made up for in enthusiasm and optimism, emotions with which it was infected less by the Master, a neurotic figurehead who held his position chiefly by virtue of his money, than by the cheerfulness of Clarence Tully and his huge sons, all of them splendidly mounted, who moved chatting among the crowd like yeasty catalysts in an inert chemical mixture.
The Hunt eventually got under way, heading along the lane in the Glazebridge direction and pursued by pro and anti fanatics walking or in cars. The cars soon disappeared, and at various stages the pedestrians dropped out. Owing to the Major’s arthritic hip, he and Fen made relatively slow progress, dropping further and further behind; and by the time they reached the apple tree, they had the lane to themselves. It was at this stage that the Major proposed that they cease walking and climb instead. And so here they were, reasonably comfortable in their point of vantage, and with a grandstand view of the cumulative havoc which was shortly to develop down below.
The Major finished his apple and threw the core into the field behind the tree. ‘Widger visited you yesterday afternoon, my dear fellow,’ he said. ‘Whatever did he want?’
‘He was telling me about progress in the investigation of the Botticelli murder,’ said Fen from above. ‘Or rather, about the lack of it.’
‘They’re not getting anywhere, then?’
‘Apparently not.’
‘Silly fellows, letting the wretched man’s head be stolen from them like that,’ said the Major severely. ‘No wonder they’re stuck. Were you able to help them at all?’
‘Not very much, I’m afraid.’
‘And do you think that harpy killed Routh?’
‘Ortrud? Yes, probably. She seems to like hitting people on the head.’
‘Killing Routh is practically the only good thing you can say about her, don’t you know. Question is, can they prove it?’
‘If she keeps her mouth shut, I dare say they can’t.’
‘Ortrud can no more keep her mouth shut than she can get along without sex.’
‘Anyway, they can charge her with trying to kill her husband. What with one thing and another, it’ll be an insanity plea, I imagine. That’s if they can keep her quiet, and stop her boasting about it all.’
‘In any case,’ said the Major, reaching for a second apple, ‘it seems as if Youings has seen through her at last. Whatever happens, he’ll be able to get a divorce, won’t he?’
‘Certainly he will.’
‘So all’s well that ends well. What about the other two -Mavis and the man in the Botticelli tent? Did Ortrud murder them as well as Routh?’
‘I don’t think so.’
The Major was shocked. ‘You don’t think so? Are you telling me that there’s still a murderer on the loose?’
‘Ortrud’s half mad,’ said Fen. ‘She wouldn’t go to a lot of trouble to cover up her tracks, as the Botticelli murderer has. Their mentalities are completely different.’
‘Well, my dear fellow, if you say so. But who is the Botticelli murderer?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘But you must know by now, my dear fellow,’ said the Major plaintively. ‘We’re practically at the end of the book.’ All at once he straightened up on his bough. ‘I say, look, there’s the Hunt coming this way. Or part of it. Drop-outs, I think. They’ve given up and are going home. Lost the hounds, perhaps, not that that’s easy, with the lazy brutes averaging about five miles an hour on the straight. But they may have over-ridden them, however hard they reined in, and lost them that way.’
Following his gaze towards the field gate up the lane at the bend, Fen saw that in the pasture beyond it three huntsmen were riding slowly over the sky-line. Circumspectly this party descended towards the gate, and passing through it gained the lane, where two of them waited while the third conscientiously dismounted to close the gate and latch it. He then got astride his horse again, and still at a funereal pace the three of them, riding abreast, came on towards the apple tree where Fen and the Major were watching them. And by this time it was possible to make them out properly: they were two men flanking a girl with Bible-black hair peeking out from under her cap, and with the strained, wan face of one to whom the preliminaries of Armageddon have just been announced by some notorious practical joker. She, and the man riding on her left, wore pink; their companion was the man in the caftan and prayer beads whom Fen had noted at the meet. The near-side rider sported a long, thick, wiry, square-cut black beard - what Urquhart, in his translation of Rabelais, describes as a ‘great buggerly beard’; he seemed taciturn and straight-laced; the caftan man, who kept leaning from his saddle to pat the girl’s arm consolingly, and to murmur to her, was patently less rigid and more humane. Both, however, looked as if they were in the act of honourably rescuing the girl from peril, and neither of them noticed Fen and the Major who in addition to being above eye-level, were in any case partially concealed by leaves.
‘My word!’ said the Major. ‘They all look a bit glum, don’t they?’
The horses’ hooves kicked up little puffs of dust in the lane, like spurts of powder from an aerosol container. A vehicular noise was heard approaching, from somewhere along the lane beyond the Rector’s house, and the huntsmen got themselves into single file to let whoever it was get past. Co
ming into sight at a good pace, and making a considerable racket about it, the noise revealed itself as an enormous estate wagon of indefinite make. It was ancient and damaged and painted all over in psychedelic swirls of hideous pastel colours. Sitting in the back of it, horn-rimmed-spectacled and dark-suited and revealed by his expression as being far from in comity with his much younger companions, was Mr Dodd the dispensing chemist, leader of the hunt saboteurs; next to him sprawled a girl with long, tangled hair; in front, and driving, was a completely bald youth (alopecia? Buddhism?) in a stained roll-neck sweater. Even above the engine’s stuttering din, Fen and the Major were able to hear the girl’s shriek of glee when she saw the three huntsmen, and to glimpse her leaning forward urgently to speak to the driver. He nodded; the estate wagon slowed, swerved in to the verge, and by a series of rapid manoeuvres managed to get itself sideways on across the lane just to the right of the apple tree. It was now blocking the way entirely, and the riders, after spreading out again, perforce came to a halt.
The bald youth switched off his engine and jumped out, facing the horses; he was revealed as wearing sneakers and old trousers as well as the roll-neck sweater, and appeared to be just as grim and laconic as the bearded huntsman. He was followed by Mr Dodd, who confronted the man in the caftan with a mien of intelligent reasonableness. Disentangling herself from a placard which said (in faded lettering) Free The Shrewsbury Pickets, the girl emerged last. She looked by far the most overtly bellicose of the party, in a T-shirt across whose bosom, and redolent with the charms of a long-lost Golden Age, were shakily stencilled the words I Love Che (‘Don’t suppose she’d love him much if he turned up in his present condition,’ observed the Major. ‘Remember The Monkeys Paw?’); she wore also shapeless slacks apparently tailored from jute, and highheeled black patent-leather shoes whose chrome buckles were studded with paste to simulate diamonds. In this ill-considered get-up she stood glaring for a moment at the demoralized girl on the horse, who lost the first round by incontinently bursting into tears. While she dried her eyes with a lacy handkerchief about the size of a chequer-board square, the man in the caftan again patted her on the arm, consolingly. Then he addressed himself to Mr Dodd.
‘Would you mind,’ he said mildly, ‘getting that thing out of our way?’
2
‘A little talk first,’ said Mr Dodd with equal civility. ‘All we’re asking is to have a little talk with you. A reasonable talk.’
‘Fascist pigs,’ snarled the hunt saboteuse, brushing hair out of her eyes.
‘We just want you to think a little about what you’re doing,’ said Mr Dodd, ‘when you go out hunting innocent, helpless animals.’
‘Blood-lust.’
‘Consider how uneven the contest is,’ said Mr Dodd. ‘All those horses, all those dogs. And just one terrified little fox, running for its life.’
‘Go and live in South Africa,’ said the hunt saboteuse. ‘Those tyrants there will give you something better to hunt than foxes. They’ll give you blacks. That’s it, go and live in South Africa, you bourgeois scabs.’
‘And then, think how it all ends,’ said Mr Dodd, still endeavouring doughtily to keep to the point. ‘The fox is cornered. Trembling, he has no hope left. The hounds surround him. Then they pounce. Their great teeth tear gobbets from him. In his intense agony, his blood gushes like a fountain. He dies slowly. He is literally rent in pieces. And all around him, the huntsmen sit astride their horses, laughing.’
‘Sado-masochistic élitists.’
‘Miss Davenant’ - here Mr Dodd addressed the hunt saboteuse in mild reproof - ‘I don’t think your approach is getting us anywhere. Peaceful persuasion, that’s the line to take. It - ‘
‘Power-crazed murderers.’
‘Well, I scarcely - Peter, what are you doing?’
What Peter - the bald youth - was doing soon became obvious. He had reached into the estate wagon for a large glass jar full of colourless liquid, had unstoppered it, and was now splashing its contents freely on to the surface of the lane. The odour of aniseed rose up and engulfed them all. Miss Mimms started crying again.
The second huntsman’s teeth gleamed in the forests of his beard. He made his first and only contribution to the discussion. Glowering at the bald youth, he hissed ‘Scybalum!’ twice - an arcane obscenity which, whatever its appropriateness, failed to have much effect, since only Fen understood what it meant.
Mr Dodd, who had his choleric side, said testily, ‘What on earth is the use of that, Peter? You’re just wasting the stuff. The hounds are nowhere near.’
The hunt saboteuse gave Mr Dodd a withering look. ‘You just go ahead, Peter,’ she shrilled. ‘You just show the pigs.’
Peter followed up action with speech. ‘We did ought to have laid a false trail,’ he said, frowning at the bearded scybalummerchant: ‘And we did ought to have unstopped the earths, and sprayed the dogs with Anti-Mate, and used firecrackers and thunderflashes and horns and whistles. That’s what we did ought to have done.’ He transferred his displeasure to Mr Dodd. ‘And why haven’t we, that’s what I want to know? Why haven’t we?’
Mr Dodd groped for the vanishing tatters of his leadership. ‘As regards this particular meet,’ he stammered feebly, ‘I made an arrangement with the Master that we shouldn’t - that we shouldn’t - In short, that we should confine ourselves to banners and to verbal protest. You see, the police - trespass -’
‘Revisionist!’ the hunt saboteuse said. ‘You’re nothing but a dirty bourgeois revisionist. Trespass, hell! I tell you, these bloody aristo land-owners have got it coming to them anyway. And as to being scared of the fuzz, all I can say is -’
‘You’re a bourgeois yourself, come to that,’ said Mr Dodd stoutly.
‘Still, you didn’t ought to have done it,’ said the bald youth in more moderate tones. Thoughtfully, he poured more aniseed on to the ground.
During this interchange, the man in the caftan had wearily dismounted. He let go of his horse’s reins - it was a sixteenhands bay, apparently of a very equable disposition - and on being released it wandered to the grassy bank above which the hedge grew, coming to rest immediately beneath the branch on which the Major was sitting. Here it stood grazing as voraciously as its bridle allowed; and here it remained unperturbed throughout all the subsequent disturbances, until its fate finally caught up with it.
The man in the caftan approached Mr Dodd on foot, watched suspiciously by the hunt saboteuse and the bald youth. The bearded man imitated him in dismounting, to stand in the lane in silence, glaring at the scene. Miss Mimms stayed up, quietly weeping, with no one now to pat her on the arm.
‘Look,’ said the man in the caftan, ‘I don’t in the least mind talking about the pros and cons of hunting, but this isn’t the time for it, or the place. Miss Mimms has been thrown. She’s hurt herself. We’re taking her to see Dr Mason, and you’re in the way. So will you please get out of the way?’
The hunt saboteuse laughed harshly and performed a little dance of triumph. Mr Dodd said, ‘Oh dear, I am sorry. Perhaps in the circumstances we’d better - ’
‘She don’t look hurt bad to me,’ said the bald youth.
‘Miss Mimms is suffering from extensive bruises and from shock.’
‘Serve her right,’ said the hunt saboteuse.
‘Come, now,’ said the man in the caftan.
‘Yes, I think in the circumstances perhaps we’d better -’
‘She can still ride her horse, can’t she?’ said the hunt saboteuse. ‘If she wants to see a doctor, tell her to go jump a hedge.’
Miss Mimms dissolved into a niagara of tears. ‘Shock can be very dangerous,’ said the man in the caftan sternly.
‘Yes, I think perhaps –’
But what the issue of this conflict would have been, neither Fen nor anyone else would ever know, for at this point a new element was added to the situation. From down the lane beyond the Rector’s house a locally familiar aggregation of sounds came within earshot, approachi
ng rapidly: shouts, a bicycle bell, a drumming of hooves.
One of Clarence Tully’s herds was on the move.
Fen, the Major, the huntsmen and the hunt saboteurs were alike struck dumb, peering into the east to catch a first sight of this fresh complication. And they had little time to wait. In the van of the procession, as usual, came Tully’s third cowman on his bicycle, pedalling away frenziedly. Then the South Devons -luckily only about twenty of them, but all moving precipitately, at their utmost speed. Finally, to draw up the rear, trotted Clarence Tully’s youngest son, a brawny eleven-year-old whose penetrating voice was on the change, and who carried a long hazel switch with which to lash out at the bony rumps of the hindermost cows if they showed signs of straggling or of losing momentum. This rowdy, intimidating muster came belting up the lane at full tilt, and it seemed impossible that it would be able to stop in time to avoid breaking against, and deluging, the obstacle of the hunt saboteurs’ estate wagon, as an Atlantic roller drenches a shingle bank.
The Glimpses of the Moon Page 24