A track led across the paddock to an orchard where a branch had been split off by the weight of large reddish apples, some pecked by the birds or bored into by wasps, but most ready for picking. The one he ate was a blend of tart and sweet, and he tossed the core up towards heavy clouds sending down the first drops, soon steady enough to enrich the smell of bent-over grass between the trees. The whole place wanted going over with a lawnmower.
Not visible from the ground floor of the house, he let the water flatten his hair and run down his face, saturate his jacket, get through to the skin, an icy clamminess connecting him to an area of the sky from which a real self looked down on the marionette specimen he felt himself to be. Such rain made tears invisible, unnoticed. He shivered with exhilaration — regarding the elements as nothing compared to the volcanic compound of misery and defiance inside the armour which no downpour could penetrate. The experience was perversely enjoyable, a dose of self-induced reality, and however long he stood in the rain he would stay no other than who he was, no matter how many spirits attached themselves to him.
‘Herbert!’ Maud’s cry splintered him back, and he saw her in oilskins and wellingtons, basket over arm and parting the brambles. ‘I need some apples for a pie. You must take some back with you, unless you catch pneumonia and have to go to bed for a month. I say, you’re soaked.’
‘Am I?’ He took the basket. ‘Let me do it.’ When it was filled she gripped his elbow and guided him to shelter in the house. What a peculiar idea, he thought, imagining someone like me getting pneumonia, recalling summer days in the factory when he had walked out into the breeze soaked in sweat.
A bath freshened, and cleansed away his uncertainties, till he felt as if he’d lived in the house all his life, hadn’t left it for a day. The Rayburn dried his clothes, and upstairs he took off his father’s heavy checked dressing gown before putting on a clean shirt for dinner.
When he walked into the lounge, Hugh came from behind his Daily Mail to offer him a sherry. The tall old man stood stiffly with the decanter and poured a tumbler three-quarters full, Herbert deciding that the best way to get through the evening was to soak in as much as was given him to drink. ‘It’s good,’ he said, after a slug of the golden liquid. ‘Dry.’
‘Can’t stand the sweet stuff.’ Hugh poked at the logs, though the room was warm. ‘Your mother tells me you’re writing a book.’
Another swig lightened the seriousness of the issue. ‘Well, you can say it’s in the planning stage.’
‘Not an easy thing to do.’
‘I’m going to do something that hasn’t been done before: which is write about people who work in factories. Do it properly, though, from the inside.’ The words rolled out, oiled by drink. ‘I know them so well by now, there’s nothing else I really can write about.’
Hugh refilled both glasses. ‘Are they worth it, do you think?’
‘Everybody is.’
‘I expect you’re the best judge of that.’
Maud looked at them as they linked arms and walked in for dinner. ‘How much sherry have you two had?’
‘A couple of little ones, but we’ll go easy on the wine.’
They did, though all three went back to the lounge afterwards and drank several Martell brandies, so that by ten Herbert could decently say he was tired, and would they excuse him if he went to bed?
The silence of the dark was unnerving. If he put on the light the ceiling would revolve. An owl struck the night with its note, and he felt apprehensive, as if the room had no walls. He put on the light and read a few poems from Other Men’s Rowers, but one that was anti-Semitic reminded him of Isaac, and he put the book away.
He would wait for the dawn, though it was only eleven o’clock. The floor was cold to his feet and, wearing the all-embracing dressing gown of his father’s, he opened the door so as to make no squeak at the hinges. Sliding a finger along the wainscot to keep a straight course, he navigated towards a splinter of light, at the other end of the corridor. No one could accuse him of sneaking about, because he was going downstairs to stand in the fresh cold air and get some of his drunkenness blown away.
He was not a prisoner, in any case, and put an ear to the door through which light showed. ‘Nor me,’ his mother said, ’but I’m sure he won’t turn out to be a bad egg.’
Poor things had no one else to talk about. His father’s study was just as he had seen it in the afternoon. In the attic he found a fort and fire engine broken and dusty, toys from his childhood. Finding his way in darkness to the kitchen, he hated the night. Night was inhuman, antipathetic, no good for him. After five minutes of fresh air he made back for bed, his only refuge. Night was a black cloth covering all romance, and he slept as if utterly worn out. When he woke up bits of dream were stamped on by the boots of daylight.
The morning was dry and blustery, and at breakfast Hugh said they would go out with the Purdys. ‘See if we can bag a rabbit or two down by the river.’
Energized, ready for anything, Herbert chose a pair of wellingtons from the hall by the kitchen and, with a bandolier of cartridges hanging from his shoulder, and the gun pointing down, followed his father to the lane. Like two soldiers on patrol, Herbert thought.
High stinging nettles bent over the track, a thick hawthorn hedge and a ditch on the other side. The carmine blue and gold of an overflying painted lady stopped Hugh for a moment in his stalking, and Herbert all but ran into him.
By a pink blaze of rosebay his father signalled for stealth, which put both at the crouch and immobile. He straightened, gun at the same time coming to his shoulder. Herbert went down with equal slowness on one knee to take aim, and the question came as to whether he should put a stop to his father now, in the back, at ten yards range. He pressed off the safety catch, stroking the cold trigger.
Two mature and confident rabbits came from under a laden bramble, furry snouts at the twitch, facing each other as if for a round of boxing before loosing themselves for breakfast in the rich pastures. A large white butterfly made a hypotenuse up from his sights, and he lined his gun on the left-hand rabbit, assuming his father would take the other.
For no reason he could think of Archie’s face printed itself on his mind, enough of a glimpse to make him wonder if such a powerful almost sexual urge to blow a hole in his own father should for a moment be morally contemplated. He decided that Archie was too primitive and too civilized even to think of such a murder, and in any case so was he.
The rabbit spun over, and he hit the other before it could run. A third report from a higher elevation brought a wounded pigeon flopping on to the Pliocene soil. He was astounded that his father had not all along intended to fire at either of the rabbits but had left both to him, confident of being understood.
The shots alerted wildlife for miles around, so that in spite of another hour’s tramping and a few wasted shots, they downed nothing more. ‘Two rabbits and a pigeon ain’t bad,’ Hugh said. ‘That was a good bit of shooting, by the way.’
‘So was yours.’
They stood under a half-shed chestnut, Hugh wielding his pipe for a well-earned smoke. ‘I have so much faith in this little lighting-up machine you made at your factory that I didn’t even carry matches this morning.’