Jimmy, with a heavy pack on his back, moved up the side of Hangingstone Hill until he came to a small outcrop of rock, its crest covered with whortleberry bushes. Underneath the overhang of the rock the ground had been scooped back and trod bare by generations of sheep that had used it for a refuge. There were three sheep in it now. They scattered as Jimmy appeared.
He went under the overhang and slipped off the pack. From inside it he took a sheet of thick polythene and wrapped the pack in it, binding the four corners into a tight twist at the top and cording them securely so that all dampness would be kept out. From his jacket pocket he took a small trowel. Squatting on the ground, he began to dig away at the hoof-packed earth. After an hour he had made a hole large enough to take the pack and deep enough so that when he scraped back the loose soil there was a good three-inch layer above it. The rest of the earth he scattered over the ground, stamping it down with his, feet. In a couple of days the sheltering sheep would have packed it down even harder and no one – if by any unlucky chance anyone should come that way at this time of the year – would know the ground had been disturbed. Then he took the trowel and rammed it hard into the earth wall a few inches below the underside of the overhanging boulder. He forced it in until only the small circle of the top of the brown, work-worn handle showed like the knob of a root.
This done Jimmy backed out of the recess and looked around him. The night was far from silent. There was the incessant sound of water noises, from the mires and small streams, the cough now and then of one of the sheep he had disturbed, the high call of a curlew and far away, from one of the lower valleys, the barking of a dog. But although Jimmy heard them it was without interest. There was only one concern in his mind at that moment, the demand of blood and kinship which in thought carried him eight miles farther south across the wild, unfriendly spread of the moor to the grim, grey jail at Princetown. He had done all he could. The clothes and provisions in the pack were there to be taken if the man for whom they were destined could ever reach them. Many men in their time had escaped from the prison working parties that laboured in the fields and quarries surrounding the jail, slipping off when the longed-for cover of heavy moorland mist suddenly descended. But to escape was one thing. A man then had to beat the moor, to find his way off it, avoiding all the roads because they were at once blocked with police patrols and barriers. The eight miles between Princetown and the spot where Jimmy now stood could for some men, particularly if they were city bred and the weather turned against them, just as well have been eight hundred.
Jimmy suddenly gave a little shiver of cold and apprehension and then turned away northwards and began to work his way back to the lower slopes where the Taw after a few miles would find its stripling strength and form and begin the long flow to the sea.
Mr Samkin, although he was nearing his seventies, was an active man, both physically and mentally. He was very short and broad-shouldered and the way he walked reminded Smiler very much of a bulldog. When he asked a question, too, he had a habit of shooting his head forward which increased the resemblance. His motto was work hard and play hard – but he insisted that work should be done before play. Smiler liked him, since Mr Samkin never treated him as a schoolboy, but as a young student with a brain and ideas of his own. Smiler soon took to speaking frankly about things and having decided opinions of his own, and Mr Samkin encouraged this.
Once, for instance, Smiler grumbled about the dullness of some of the books which he had been set to read in his study of English literature. This applied particularly to Sir Walter Scott. In talking one evening after their tuition period was over and Sandra had gone, Smiler said, ‘I can’t see, sir, why you should have to read something which doesn’t interest you – like Sir Walter Scott. What good does it do you?’
‘The good a thing does you, Samuel, isn’t always apparent immediately. Anyway, why don’t you like Sir Walter Scott?’
‘I don’t know, sir, but I don’t.’
With a humorous glint in his eye Mr Samkin said, ‘That’s not a good enough answer. All right, Samuel, this weekend you write me a five-hundred-word essay on your objections to reading Sir Walter Scott.’
‘Oh, sir …’
Mr Samkin chuckled. ‘It won’t kill you. And let me ask you this – have you ever read his Marmion?’
‘That’s a poem, isn’t it, sir?’
‘Yes.’
‘No, I haven’t, sir. His books are bad enough.’
‘Well, perhaps you’ve missed something. Listen to this.’
Mr Samkin, with a sly twinkle in his eyes, recited:
We hold our greyhound in our hand,
Our falcon on our glove;
But where should we find leash or band
For dame that loves to rove?
Let the wild falcon soar her swing,
She’ll stoop when she has tired her wing.
Smiler, eyes wide, said impulsively, ‘Oh, I like that.’
Mr Samkin chuckled. ‘Of course you do. Because he’s caught
your special interest. So, I suggest you give Sir Walter Scott another
chance – but you also do the essay. Good night, Samuel.’
At the door Smiler turned and said, ‘You deliberately chose that bit, sir. About the falcon. Why?’
Mr Samkin, beginning to pack tobacco into his pipe, said casually, ‘Oh, I keep my eyes open, Samuel. And – when my eyes aren’t good enough – I use those.’
He nodded to a side table where lay a pair of Zeiss binoculars of which Smiler had been aware almost from the first day he had started his tuition. He would have given anything for a pair like it.
Mr Samkin went on, ‘Do me a good essay – and any day you want to borrow those you can have them.’
‘Oh, thanks ever so much, sir.’
‘I prefer “ Thank you very much”. And don’t worry: I’m not a gossip.’
Smiler went down the hill to the farm with Scott’s words singing in his mind. But where should we find leash or band for dame that loves to rove? Let the wild falcon soar her swing … If only she would, thought Smiler. If only she would and, while she was about it, learn to hunt and look after herself. He had already seen Fria fly down to bathe now and then. But that wasn’t enough. Still … it was something.
But Fria, as February wore towards March and in the lee of sheltered banks a stub-stemmed primrose or two began to blossom, showed no inclination to soar. Nevertheless she was changing.
Most days now she flew confidently down to the shallows and bathed. Now and then, instead of pitching by the water, she would change her mind and beat round with a quicker rhythm in her wings, circle, and go back to her beam perch. Her wing muscles were stronger and a slow confidence in her flight powers was building in her. Once, too, as she stood in the cotton grass by the water, the movement of a beetle over the ground a foot from her caught her eye. With a reflex that had nothing almost to do with her, she jumped and snapped up the beetle in her beak. But once there, she held it for a moment or two and then let it fall. She was well fed, the beetle meant nothing to her in terms of hunger, so she dropped it.
Now, too, when she took her short flights she was noticed, but not by many humans. Mr Samkin had seen her, it was true. So had the river bailiff as he came up the Bullay brook one day checking the spawning redds and keeping an eye open for dead salmon kelts. But the bailiff was like Smiler – he loved all animals and he kept his own counsel.
The birds and animals knew her now and they kept clear of her, crouching, hiding or going to cover if they were anywhere near her. Not even the rooks were tempted to interfere and mob her. They were busy with their nest-building and full of an exclusive excitement of their, own as they robbed sticks from one another and began their mating flights and battles.
Only once did the rooks come near to approaching Fria. One mid-morning she launched herself from her beam and began to glide down to the water meadow. But the wind that morning was uncertain. Boisterous gusts would suddenly sweep down f
rom the head of the valley towards the wood and, meeting it, would swirl in turbulence and rise in a great roar over the tops of the trees. Then, with a suddenness unheralded, the wind would drop altogether. As Fria was half-way down to the meadow one of these sudden squalls came racing down the valley. It caught Fria unawares. Thrusting up from beneath her, it tipped her into a double wing-over before she knew what was happening. For a second or two she was a panic-struck plaything of the wind which swept her across to the edge of the wood where for a few seconds, wings flicking hard against this new power that assaulted her. Fria was swung and tumbled out of control in the turbulence. The next moment the up-funnelling wind took her under her spread wings in a firm, steady cushion of power that lifted her up to the level of the rookery trees and then above them.
A few rooks saw her. They went up into the wind, rolled and dived untidily towards her, calling angrily to drive her away, knowing there was safety in their numbers, for if she attacked one there were others to confuse her with a blustery attack from an unseen quarter. But Fria was unconcerned with the rooks. Three or four unintentional flicks of her wings took her a hundred feet above the rooks and their wood. Then, as suddenly as it had come, the wind was gone. For a few seconds Fria hung high in the air, hovering on outstretched pinions, kestrel-fashion. In those few seconds a new world came into the scope of her wide-ranging eyes. She could see the Bullay brook running all the way down the valley and disappearing under a road bridge. Beyond that she caught a glimpse of the curving Taw and the hills, oak-and-pine-covered on its far side. She saw houses, farms, hamlets, a train sliding up the valley line and the passage of cars and lorries along the Exeter-Barnstaple road. High above them all, she saw for the first time two broad-winged buzzards circling in the air, turning and wheeling with a slow mastery of the wind. The kestrels she knew and the sparrow-hawks, but these were the first buzzards she had seen. It could have been that she did it from panic, or from a half-understood sense of distant kinship with the hawks, but – for whatever reason – she suddenly uttered in her free state a harsh plaint of kek-kek-kek. Then she slid sideways, half-closed her wings and planed down towards her bathing-place. Before she realized it she was going at a speed she had never known before. She overshot the edge of the brook shallows and, instinctively, threw herself up and came out of her dive with wings braking hard against the momentum that still lived in her body. She hovered like a kestrel and then settled clumsily on the brook bank twelve yards from her usual place. It had been her first real experience of the powers of her flight. She sat on the bank for fifteen minutes before she took off in a lull in the wind and flew back to her beam. Nobody at the farm had seen her manoeuvre.
Mr Samkin approved of Smiler’s essay on Sir Walter Scott, though he did not agree with his findings. However, Smiler was given permission to borrow the Zeiss binoculars whenever he wished. His need for them was soon to come.
The next evening after Smiler had finished his supper and was rising to go up to his room to study, the Duchess said, ‘Sit where you are, lad. I want to talk to you for a moment.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’ Smiler ran quickly over in his mind all the things he had done at work that day but could think of nothing wrong. The Duchess had shown that she had a sharp eye for slovenly work, and on the few occasions when Smiler had day-dreamed and done a bad job she had told him about it.
The Duchess, guessing what was going through his mind, smiled and shook her head, setting her red curls bouncing, (Smiler, prompted by a suggestion Sandra had once made, wondered whether the curls were only a wig) and said, ‘ It’s nothing you’ve done, Samuel. It’s what other people have done and, for the sake of peace and quiet here, I want you to know something about it.’
‘Yes, of course, ma’am.’
‘You know, lad, that Jimmy hasn’t been here for more than a week. That’s because I’ve told him to keep away from this place –’
‘What, for good, ma’am?’
‘No – until he comes to his senses. We’ve had a family quarrel, Samuel. I can see his point of view. There’s a fire in his blood and anger in his heart. Heeding them could cause him trouble. But that’s nothing to saddle you with. All you have to know and say – if anyone asks for him – is that he’s got a job travelling with a fair and you don’t know which one or where and you don’t know when he will be back.’
‘Yes, ma’am. But he will be back sometime, won’t he?’
‘I hope so.’
Smiler frowned, and then, brightening, said, ‘Couldn’t you look in your crystal ball and find out?’
The Duchess fondled the ears of the Siamese cat Scampi who was sitting in her lap. ‘One thing I’ve never done, Samuel, is to ask the crystal ball anything about the future of my kith and kin. It’s bad luck.’
Up in his room, although it was none of his business, Smiler wondered what the quarrel between the Duchess and Jimmy had been about. He had at the back of his mind a feeling that Jimmy’s night excursions to Highford House could have something to do with it. He was pretty sure, however, that Jimmy no longer went there. The little switch broom of hazel twigs had disappeared and, for the last four times when Smiler had been there at night, he had seen no sign of Jimmy and the other man. However, the night before he noticed that the broom was gone, Smiler had discovered something new. No one else but a regular visitor like himself, and then someone with sharp eyes, would have seen it. Some old lengths of roof water piping, which normally lay half-hidden in the long grass, had been collected together and put back in place up the side of the house and fitted to a length of guttering which still remained on one of the lower roof projections. At the bottom of the pipe a disused iron container from some long ruined wash-house had been dragged into place under the spout. On Smiler’s next visit after this discovery the iron container was half full of water that had run down the pipe from the broad, stone roof parapet. Smiler was sure that the farmer who grazed his cattle on the surrounding paddocks and pastures had not fixed up the water supply because in the far comer of the pasture was a modem drinking-trough which was fed from a standpipe linked to the main water supply.
Sitting in his chair and staring at the little clay model of Johnny Pickering on the mantleshelf – the pebble still firmly on its back – Smiler puzzled over all this for a while. Then, with a shrug of his shoulders, he decided that it was no business of his. The Duchess and Jimmy had been good to him. It was not for him to go poking his nose into their quarrels or affairs.
When he went over later that night to make his rounds of the animals in the bam, he paused at the door and shone his torch beam up towards Fria. She was sitting huddled on her perch, well back under the little pent roof.
With an exasperated shake of his head Smiler called up to her. ‘You stupid old bird – you can’t sit up there for the rest of your life.’
No movement came from Fria.
March came in that year with an unexpected warmth and mild breezes from the west. Suddenly the hedgerows were starred with primrose clumps, there was a fresh, metallic greenness to the uncurling fronds of the hart’s-tongue ferns, and fragile violets showed their blooms. The fat buds of ash began to swell and there was the smallest drift of green from the hawthorns. There was no rain for two weeks. The Bullay brook dropped to a trickle and the Taw ran low and crystal clear while the estuary at Barnstaple filled with returning salmon waiting for the first spate to let them run the river when even now the kelts from the previous year’s spawning season drifted about the pools in which many of them would die before the spate could help take them down to the sea.
On one of these days Smiler spent a day with the local veterinary surgeon – an excursion which had been arranged by the Duchess. The vet picked him up in his car in the morning and he went round with him on his visits.
The vet was a cheerful man who liked company especially when it was the kind which was happy to sit and listen to him talk. And talk he did to Smiler as he made his visits to farm and cottage and the small country t
owns and hamlets. If Smiler had been in any way faint-hearted about his ambition to become a vet it was a day which would have probably made him change his mind. As it was, at the end of it, his mind was in a whirl but his ambition was still intact. He heard about and saw all sorts of animals and their diseases, about pigs and their enteric complaints and bacterial infections and was told that the pig is basically a very clean animal; he was shown how to handle birds, hens, geese, turkeys and budgerigars; his ears sang with talk about diet deficiencies of proteins and vitamins; he was given the life history of the warble fly that attacks bullocks; he stood by, his eyes missing nothing, while lambs were injected for dysentery, and his head was made to spin with a litany of the diseases of animals – foot-rot, foot-and-mouth, Johne’s disease, Scrapie, liver fluke, mange mite, dog fleas, lice, keds and maggot flies – and then surgical details of neutering and spaying cats and the delivery of calves by Caesarean operation. With a twinkle in his eyes and his pipe seldom from his mouth, the vet inundated Smiler with theory and practical demonstrations all that day as though – rightly proud of his profession – he wanted to test Smiler, to make sure that he really knew what he wanted and knew exactly what it would entail. And Smiler stood up to it because hard work and often dirty work held no fears for him. He knew what he wanted. He wanted to be a vet and – he was going to become one.
At the end of the day the vet took him to the bar of the Fox and Hounds Hotel at Eggesford, not far from Bullaybrook Farm, and bought them both quarts of beer (though Smiler would have preferred cider). While they sat drinking it, the vet said, ‘Well, Samuel – that’s just one day. And not ended yet. There’ll be more waiting for me at the surgery. Think you can take it?’
‘Oh, I’m sure I can, sir.’
The vet eyed him over his tankard and said, ‘Ay, I think you can. You’ve got a good pair of hands and a strong stomach. You’ve a long way to go, but you’ve all the time in the world before you. If ever you want any help come and see me.’
The Painted Tent Page 7