‘My word!’ said the Major.
Matters were not improved by the fact that the third cowman seemed to have lost his head: apart from ringing his bell, he seemed proposing to do nothing to avoid a collision. At almost the last possible moment, however, he recovered himself and took action. True, this consisted of nothing more constructive than veering into the bank, hitting it with his front wheel, falling off his saddle and inflicting on himself some painful, disabling injury of the ankle; but it was just sufficient to bring the cows to a halt. Once relieved of their hurry, the creatures immediately began to disperse in various directions in search of food. Some attempted to wander back in the direction from which they had come; a second group decided to explore the offshoot opposite the gate of the Rector’s house, in which the Mini was parked; a third tackled the nearest verges and hedges; a fourth - three cows only, including the leader - remained standing more or less still, sniffing at the paintwork of the estate wagon. Tully’s youngest son, whose name was Alan, ran hither and thither, cursing, making cow noises like ‘Coop, coop’, and plying his switch in an effort to re-assemble the herd in a homogeneous mass in the lane, all facing the right way. Sometimes he shouted at the hunt saboteurs, ‘Get that bloody thing out of the way!’ Sometimes he shouted at the third cowman, who was sitting on the bank moaning and nursing his ankle.
‘Git yer arse up off o’ there, Enoch, an’ come an’ help!’
‘Can’t,’ Enoch shouted back. ‘I think I gone an’ broke me bloody leg!’
‘Pity you ‘asn’t broke yer bloody neck,’ said Alan unfeelingly, fluctuating between treble and bass. Panting, he continued to chase the errant cows single-handed.
‘I think, perhaps -’ said Mr Dodd.
‘Capitalist feudalists,’ said the hunt saboteuse.
The Major said, ‘I say, my dear fellow, do you think we ought to get down and help?’
‘As far as I can see,’ said Fen, ‘the only way we could really help would be by knocking the two younger saboteurs unconscious and moving their car.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t mind doing that.’
‘Good heavens, what’s happening now?’
What was happening now, and what inhibited them from moving for the moment, was that the leader of the herd had come to the conclusion that the grass was greener on the other side. Eyes rolling, she proceeded doggedly to scramble across the bonnet of the estate wagon, its rusted metal buckling under her weight, and to descend somehow on the other side. The hunt saboteurs got expeditiously out of her way. So did the two huntsmen and Miss Mimms, all of whom had been contemplating these goings-on in pessimistic silence. Only the bay belonging to the man in the caftan remained unperturbed, still stationed beneath the Major’s branch and apparently on the point of slumber.
Alan Tully was roused to a fresh access of rage.
‘Can’t ’ee bloody stop ’er, you useless lot?’ he shrieked. ‘Enoch, get after ’er, can’t ’ee?’
‘It’s me leg,’ said Enoch, not attempting to get up. Seemingly in an attempt to justify his existence, he grabbed at his fallen bicycle and began trying to straighten the handlebars. The leader of the cows, meanwhile, had set off briskly towards the field gate at the bend of the lane, had reached it, and was now doing her best to lift it off its hinges with her head. From their position on the other side of the estate wagon, such of the remaining cows as Alan bad managed to herd together stood regarding her admiringly.
‘Stop her! Git after her!’ Alan bellowed despairingly. But no one answered him and no one moved. Both huntsmen and hunt saboteurs, indeed, seemed to feel that the time had come for them to re-open hostilities, and with the exception of the bearded man were all talking simultaneously when a menacing wave of assorted internal-combustion resonances reached their ears from the direction of Glazebridge. Fen and the Major heard them too, and Fen rotated on his bough to see a large number of machines strung out and roaring up the hill towards the bend.
The motor-cycle scramble had arrived.
There were Hondas and Suzukis and Yamahas and even a few Norton Commandos, ranging in capacity from 400 to 750 c.c. They were being ridden by youths and young men, who, unaware of what was awaiting them, were all going at a tremendous pace - so much so that when they rounded the bend, and the man in the caftan (by now perceptibly losing his cool) dashed forward to flag them down, their helmeted leaders were only just able to stop short of Miss Mimms’s horse. With the exception of the cow at the field gate, who went on striving unabatingly at her furative task, the herd panicked, and the unfortunate Alan Tully was back to square one. Enoch continued to sit on the bank, grizzling and groaning and calling for medical aid and intermittently wrestling with his bicycle. The hunt saboteurs lined themselves defensively up against the side of their vehicle. The bay had apparently fallen asleep entirely. The bearded huntsman spat in the lane. The man in the caftan lifted its hem and wiped the sweat off his face with it. Miss Mimms again burst into tears. Fen and the Major stayed safely up in the apple tree, by this time so selfishly riveted by the scene as to be psychologically quite incapable of deserting their grand-stand view and climbing down to offer assistance.
Motor-cyclists went on pouring round the bend and stopping short until eventually the lane became crammed with them. Some remained astride with their engines idling; others switched off; yet others dismounted. All looked grim and resentful. To the stink of aniseed and horses and cows was now superadded the stink of petrol fumes. Back along the lane to Glazebridge, far away from the hurly-burly, a rearmost motorcyclist had got off and was pressing himself and his machine hard into the hedge, though nothing at all was approaching him from either direction. Fen took this distant, terrorized figure to be Scorer.
The nearest motor-cyclist, who appeared to be fugleman for the rest, propped his Honda against the bank and after a quick assessment of the situation advanced minatorily on Mr Dodd. He was a muscular but rather stunted youth, scarcely taller than the chemist but a good deal more single-minded. He jerked his head towards the estate wagon and said, ‘That thing yours, Dad?’
‘Yes,’ said Mr Dodd. ‘No. Well, in a way.’
‘Move it.’
‘I don’t drive,’ said Mr Dodd. ‘You’ll have to ask one of these other two.’
‘You ask them - Dad. It’s you I’m talking to, not them. You’re in charge here, aren’t you?’
‘Well, in a way. Up to a point, that is. In actual fact, we’re a democratically elected - ’
‘Stow all that, Dad, and get weaving. I know what you lot are,’ said the motor-cyclist. ‘You’re hunt saboteurs, that’s what you are.’
‘And proud of it,’ said Mr Dodd, drawing himself up to his full height.
‘Cissies, dykes, fags, Nosey parkers. Busybodies. Spoilsports.’
‘Polluters,’ said the hunt saboteuse. ‘Lumpenproletariat. Why don’t you rise up against the exploiters and be men instead of
serfs?’
‘Kindly leave this to me, Miss Davenant,’ said Mr Dodd, who was losing his temper fast.
‘I said, move it, Dad.’
‘And stop calling me “Dad”.’
‘I’ll call you what I bloody like, you crazy old crank.’ The motor-cyclist raised his eyes to heaven, as if imploring it to rescue him from this superannuated donkey. ‘Ninety if you’re a day, and can’t even drive a car yet. Don’t you argue with me, Dad, or I’ll knock your dentures down your throat. When I tell you to get that wreck out of the way, you don’t argue, see, you just do it.’
For Mr Dodd, this was the last straw. ‘Oh no, I don’t,’ he said, bearing down on the motor-cyclist. ‘Don’t you dare tell me what to do, you miserable young puppy. I’ll teach you to tell me what to do.’ He clenched his fist and swung wildly at the motorcyclist’s face, but was still too far off for the blow to connect. Taking several steps nearer, he tried again, and this time, if the swipe had ever got under way, it might have rocked the motorcyclist slightly. It did not, however, get under way; in fac
t, it had only just started when Mr Dodd, still moving forward, tripped over a tortoise and fell abruptly into the motor-cyclist’s arms, clutching him round the back for support. It was possible to judge from the motor-cyclist’s face when confronted with this assault that his aggro was strictly verbal, that he avoided physical fights and that he feared that even such a decrepit relic as Mr Dodd, once roused, had the capacity to do him an injury and cause him much unacceptable pain. Accordingly, he confined himself to putting his own arms round Mr Dodd, and for some moments, in a confined space, the pair of them gavotted unsteadily round in circles - in what would have looked like a fraternal embrace but for the feeble wrestling motions to which one or other of them occasionally resorted - watched with mild interest by everyone present. The motor-cyclists made no move to come to the aid of their leader, and the hunt saboteurs made no move to come to the aid of theirs. Mr Dodd’s spectacles were shaken from his nose and at once trodden on by Miss Mimms’s horse. Eventually both combatants lost their balance altogether, and fell down, still locked together, on to the dusty tarmac. Disentangling himself, the motor-cyclist got upright again; he stood glaring round and brushing himself off with the palms of his gloved hands. Mr Dodd remained on his knees, groping about him vainly for his spectacles, which presently the hunt saboteuse, striding forward contemptuously, picked up for him and thrust into his hand. He put them on, but on discovering that with their lenses cracked and their frames buckled he could see better without them, soon took them off again, heaved himself to his feet, and with arms extended in front of him like a somnambulist’s, began making his way towards the estate wagon.
‘I’m getting out of this,’ said Mr Dodd.
‘Male chauvinist mouse,’ the hunt saboteuse hissed at him. It occurred to Fen that although she could only be about sixteen or seventeen, her package of progressive idées reçues was already a bit out of date, not to say rather blurrily cross-referenced. What would it be next, he wondered? Namibia? The perennial C.I.A.? Chile again? The Black Papers on Education?
‘Oh, shut up,’ said Mr Dodd to the hunt saboteuse.
‘I suppose you think I’m just a sexual object,’ said the hunt saboteuse.
Mr Dodd was normally a polite man, but now the last vestiges of chivalry left him. ‘You’re not even capable of being that, I’m afraid,’ he said; and got into the estate wagon and scrambled into the back, where he huddled down morosely, dissociating himself from all further part in the circumjacent turmoil. As to the hunt saboteuse, she was uncharacteristically for the moment bereft of speech.
The leader of the herd of Clarence Tully’s South Devons had meanwhile succeeded in getting the field gate at the bend off its hinges, had pushed it open and was now browsing in solitary splendour in the field beyond.
Two cars came round the bend from Glazebridge. They braked hurriedly on seeing what confronted them, and began playing protracted, angry fanfarades on their horns. To cries of rage and despair from Alan Tully, the cows on the far side of the estate wagon, unnerved by this fresh souce of noise, again scattered.
The second of the two cars was a Panda, containing a brace of uniformed constables. The first, a grey Cortina, had Widger driving, with Ling sitting at his side, puffing miasmally at a pipe. In the back sat Detective-Constable Rankine, lovingly nursing a pair of handcuffs. Rankine’s mouth was moving, so it was to be presumed that he was beguiling his superiors’ journey with a commentary on the landscape, or the weather, or the Botticelli murder, or the blockage in the lane, or some other topic which had struck his fancy. Both cars were forced to a halt, and a constable leaped from the Panda to clear a way for them, efficiently herding, by virtue of his uniform, all of the horses, the huntsmen, the motor-cyclists, the motor-cycles, and even the bald youth and the hunt saboteuse, on to the southern side, the apple-tree side, of the lane, where they joined the man in the caftan’s bay, which was still drowsing peaceably almost immediately beneath the Major. The constable then stood on guard while the police cortège nosed cautiously forward along the narrow route thus provided until once again checked, this time by the estate wagon.
‘My God, it’s the pigs,’ said the hunt saboteuse disgustedly. That was all we needed. Well, come on, arrest us for something,’ she shouted at the Cortina.
‘Ah, belt up, Elaine, can’t you?’ The bald youth might share the hunt saboteuse’s views on the evils of venery, but it was far from certain that he shared them on any other issue, and in his taciturn way he had become almost as irritated with her as had Mr Dodd: only rapidly fraying generation ties were still binding the two of them together. ‘I’m going to move your junk dooly, that’s what I’m going to do. I don’t want no trouble with the fuzz.’
‘Coward. Conformist,’ the hunt saboteuse spat at him. She turned her attention again to Widger. ‘Come on, then, arrest us,’ she bellowed. ‘It oughtn’t to be difficult for brutal fascist pigs like you to find some excuse for arresting and beating up innocent people.’
Widger stuck his head out of the window of the Cortina. ‘Does this … this motor-car belong to you, Miss?’ he asked.
‘For the love of the Lamb, let’s get going, Charles,’ said Ling fretfully. ‘We’re in a hurry.’
‘Ms.’ The hunt saboteuse wobbled her breasts under the T-shirt to show that they were un-brassiered, a token of liberation which had little effect, since her torso was almost entirely concealed by long shanks of tangled, parti-coloured hair. ‘Ms, if you don’t mind.’
‘I do mind,’ said Widger, who had no time for such inanities. He got out of the Cortina and advanced on the hunt saboteuse with an air of menace. ‘I said, is this your car?’
‘Yes, it is, and I’m not going to move it. You can -’
‘Do let’s get going, Charles,’ Ling shouted. ‘Our man -’
‘I really will arrest you, you know,’ said Widger. ‘For obstructing the police in the execution of their duties. Now if you’ll kindly - ’
‘Scybalum!’ hissed the bearded huntsman, while Miss Mimms wept, the motor-cyclists’ leader judiciously picked his nose, and the man in the caftan contemplated the scene in despair. Enoch could still be heard grieving, and Alan Tully swearing monotonously as he tried to organize his cows. The Major reached for yet a third apple and Fen lit a fresh cigarette.
‘The police seem to be putting on a show of strength,’ said the Major. ‘Do you think they’ve found out who the murderer is, and are on their way to arrest him?’
‘Either that or detain him for questioning. They certainly seem to expect resistance.’
‘Let’s hope it isn’t one of us, then,’ said the Major. ‘Because we’re well hidden and they haven’t spotted us yet.’
‘Very well, if you refuse to move it,’ Widger was saying to the hunt saboteuse, ‘I shall have no alternative but to move it myself.’ He turned away from her and began clambering into the estate wagon, where for the first time he perceived Mr Dodd hunched in the back. ‘Mr Dodd!’ he exclaimed. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’
‘Oh, hello, Inspector,’ said Mr Dodd uneasily, having managed to identify Widger at the cost of some optical strain. ‘I -I’ve got myself into rather bad company, I’m afraid. These young people - I’m sure they mean well, but such language … And they just won’t see that reason is the only weapon, calmness and reason.’ He shook his head sadly, doing his best to look an injured innocent. ‘We shall never get reform in any other way.’
‘Oh, so it’s hunt sabotage, is it?’ said Widger, enlightened. ‘Calmness and reason, eh? And just what’s this aniseed I smell?’
‘Aniseed,’ said Mr Dodd rather more stiffly, ‘has its place.’
‘I see. Well, you just stay where you are while I try to get this ruin of an automobile into the side of the road.’
Widger edged himself into the driver’s seat, switched on, started the engine with a roar, let the clutch in, put the gear lever into reverse, twisted the wheel, and let the clutch out again. The estate wagon twitched once, but otherwi
se made no move, and the engine died. Widger restarted it and tried again, with the same negative result. Nor did any of the forward gears make any difference: the vehicle remained immobile where it was.
‘We really must get on,’ Ling bawled through his pipe.
Disembarking, Widger addressed himself to the bald youth, who happened to be nearest. ‘What’s the matter with this thing?’ he demanded irritably.
‘You tell me, cock,’ said the bald youth. ‘She was okay when I was driving her. It’s something you’ve done.’
‘Oh, rubbish … Rankine!’
In his anxiety to be of help, Detective-Constable Rankine almost fell out of the back of the Cortina. He was still dangling the handcuffs from one fist. ‘Sir?’ he said.
‘You’re supposed to know something about cars, aren’t you?’
‘I think I may assert without immodesty, sir,’ said Rankine, ‘that I have some practical experience of the internal combustion engine.’ He lifted a forefinger, presumably in order to engage Widger’s closest attention. ‘Its basic principle is simple. Petroleum vapour under pressure is ignited by a -’
‘Yes, thank you very much, Rankine, but we don’t want a lecture on mechanics just at the immediate moment. The point is, can you do anything about this bloody estate wagon? I think the brakes must be jammed. Can you unjam them?’
‘Certainly, sir.’
‘Well, don’t just stand there, Rankine. Get on with it.’
‘Sir.’
‘Quickly.’
‘Sir.’
Ling could be heard groaning aloud. ‘I said, quickly, Rankine,’ Widger repeated.
The Glimpses of the Moon Page 25