— Listen to her! he would say to me merrily. She’s mad, mad!
And she too would laugh, and mime exasperation, shaking a playful fist in his face.
Felix was always busy, in a vague, haphazard way. He never seemed to finish anything, or to have started anywhere, but was always just doing. The keys he had been sorting the first time I came to the house lay for weeks on the kitchen table. He would walk up and stand looking at them, his hands in his pockets and his chin sunk on his breast, and heave a histrionic, weary sigh before wandering off to tackle some other obscure task. He spent hours prowling about upstairs, rummaging in closets and under beds, or going through the wardrobes that stood, like broad sarcophagi, in dank dressing rooms and faded boudoirs, still thronged with clothes, the moth-eaten relics of generations of Ashburns. He would salvage odds and ends of antique outfits — a pair of check plus-fours, a mildewed dinner jacket, a cricket umpire’s floppy hat — and wear them around the house with bland aplomb. I came upon him one day in the grounds, strolling through the trees in baggy tweeds and a norfolk jacket and carrying a rusty shotgun.
— Thought I’d take a bang at the birds, don’t you know, he said. Care to be my loader?
It had been raining, and now a sharp sun was shining. The drenched woods glittered. We walked along a winding path. There were rustlings and slitherings all about us in the grass, under the leaves. I had not rid myself of a faint unease in his presence. I always answered his remarks too eagerly, smiled too quickly at his jokes, as if to hold him at arm’s length. He made fun of everything. He pulled faces at Mr Kasperl behind his back, imitating his matronly walk. He would throw back his head and feign loud laughter, as if someone had said something wonderfully funny, until Sophie, with the inept cunning of the deaf, began to laugh along with him, then he would put up a hand and hide his face from her and chuckle, winking at Mr Kasperl and me. Yet it was not his mockery I feared. We came to a viridian field. The verdure shimmered. A little band of grazing deer saw us and fled silently into a copse. We paused, and Felix looked about him, beaming.
— What a paradise it seems, all the same, he said. I sometimes wonder if we deserve this world. What do you think, bird-boy?
He laughed and sauntered on, hefting the shotgun in the crook of his arm. We walked along the margin of the field until we came to the high hedge and the drive. The house was handsome with the sun on it, the windows ablaze. Birds swooped through the rinsed air, the great trees stood as if listening. For a moment I experienced a pure, piercing happiness, unaccountable, fleeting, like a fall of light. A delivery boy was coming up the drive behind us on his bike, pedalling leisurely, with one hand on the handlebar and his knees splayed. I knew him. His name was Clancy, a short, muscular fellow with a swatch of coarse black hair and a crooked jaw, and a bad cast in one eye. He wore big boots with cleats, and a long, striped apron. He had been in my class at school years ago. He was a dunce, and sat at a desk by himself in a corner. The teachers made fun of him, holding up his copybooks for us to see his slovenly work, while he crouched in his seat and looked around at us murderously out of his crooked eye. Sometimes on these occasions he would break down and weep, shockingly, like an adult, in pain and rage, coughing up jagged sobs and clenching his inky fists helplessly in his lap. Now, spying me ahead of him, he stopped whistling abruptly, and the front wheel of his bicycle wobbled. Felix halted, and waited, watching him. He dismounted and crossed to the other side of the drive, and plodded along slowly, bent low and pushing the bike, frowning to himself as if a very important thought had just occurred to him. The bicycle was a sturdy black machine with small thick wheels, and at the front an enormous wicker basket filled with parcels.
— You there, Felix called imperiously. Who are you?
Clancy stopped, and peered about him with an elaborate air of startlement. He used to wait for me on the way home from school and knock me down and pummel me, sitting on my chest and breathing his feral breath in my face. His fury always seemed a sort of grief. In time a hot, awful intimacy had grown up between us. Now, stricken with embarrassment, we avoided each other’s eye, as if we had once committed sin together. He opened his mouth, shut it, then coughed and tried again. He was eyeing the gun cradled in Felix’s arm.
— From Walker’s, sir, he said thickly. With the messages.
— Messages? Felix said. What messages?
Clancy began to sweat. He licked his lips, and pointed to the parcels in the basket.
— Them, sir. The messages that was ordered.
Felix turned to me.
— What is the fellow talking about? he said. Have you any idea?
— The grocery messages, Clancy said, raising his voice. The ones that was …
— Oh, groceries, Felix said, with a little laugh. I see, yes. Well, have you the list, then?
— What, sir?
Felix looked to heaven and sighed.
— The list, sor! The list that was given to the shop. Have you it with you?
Clancy blinked slowly and wiped his nose on a knuckle.
— I’d say I have, all right, he said guardedly.
He leaned his bicycle on its stand and produced a fistful of grubby papers from the pocket of his apron, and began to leaf through them unhappily with a thick thumb.
— Well, read it out, man, Felix cried, read it out!
A dark flush appeared on Clancy’s pitted brow. He licked his lips again and bent over his bits of paper, scrutinizing them with a stolid, hopeless stare. Felix groaned in annoyance.
— Come on, man! he said. What’s wrong with you?
Clancy, his face on fire, looked at me at last, like a wounded animal, in fury and a sort of supplication. He was not able to read. A moment passed. I looked away from those beseeching eyes. Felix chuckled.
— Oh, go on then, he said to Clancy, take your stuff around to the back door.
Clancy thrust the papers into his pocket, and mounted his bike and pushed off towards the house, crouched over the handlebars as if battling against a gale. Felix grinned, shaking his head. Suddenly he tossed the shotgun to me. The weight of it was a surprise.
— Go ahead, Barabbas, he said. Blaze away.
7
WORKMEN BEGAN arriving at the house, singly, with a fist in a pocket and one arm tightly swinging, or shouldering along in silent groups of two or three. Sophie and I watched them from the upstairs windows. They grew steadily foreshortened as they approached, as if they were wading into the ground. They would knock once at the front door and step back, holding their caps in their hands, quite patient, waiting. They wore shapeless jackets and white shirts open at the neck, and trousers larded with grime. Their faces and the backs of their necks glowed, I pictured them bent over sinks in cramped sculleries at first light, scrubbing themselves raw. One had a bald patch, pink and neat as a tonsure. They were roadmen and casual labourers, and a few factory hands laid off from the brick works or the foundry. Mr Kasperl interviewed them in one of the big empty rooms downstairs. He sat at a battered, leather-topped desk before the window, fiddling with a stub of pencil, while Felix walked up and down and did the talking. The men, standing in a knot in the middle of the floor, avoided looking at each other, as if out of a sort of shame. They pretended unconcern, hitching up their belts and glancing around them at the damp-stained walls and the crumbling cornices. Felix harangued them jovially, like a fairground barker.
— All right, now, all right, he said, show us your muscles there. We only want good strong types, willing to work. That right, boss?