The big fox looked down at Zed with its cold pale eyes, which were sombre and ruthless and sad, awful eyes which knew not of the human world. The fox’s face, with its heavy black marking, looked macabre and wild, a face that devoured other faces. Zed knew that he must stand. If he turned and ran the fox would pursue him and in a few steps those jaws would crack his back. Zed could see the fox’s teeth, wrinkling a little the soft black lip of the muzzle. And still they stared, the fox’s black paw still raised in the attitude in which Zed had surprised him. They were so close that Zed could feel the warm current of his enemy’s breath. He stared up. There was no movement he could make to assert his doghood. At any movement the fox might think he was about to flee, and leap. Zed measured the terrible strength and the more terrible will that confronted him. He stared, calling up his own will and the strange authority which his species derived, alone among other animals, from the society of the human race.
Then a strange thing happened. The fox turned his head a little and lowered it right down until his muzzle almost touched the grass, still keeping his blue pale wild eyes fixed upon Zed. Then he dropped his black paw and sidled a little, as in a slow dance, moving round the dog. Zed moved slightly keeping his face resolutely toward the fox and staring with his blue-black eyes in which there was reflected so much of the expression of man. The fox continued to move round Zed with his head lowered and his eyes gazing, moving as in a very slow rhythmic dance, and Zed continued, upon the same spot, to turn. Then, quite suddenly, there was a noise nearby, human voices. The fox turned and in a second vanished. Zed sat down where he was. He felt so strange, as if he pitied the fox, or almost envied him, and did not want to return to the world of happiness. After a moment or two, avoiding Brian and Gabriel (for it was they), he ran back toward the garage, where the door was still shut. Outside on the gravel he began playing with the stones, tapping them with his little white paw as if they were his ball, and he forgot about the fox.
‘He’s sweet,’ said Hattie, holding Zed in her arms.
On entering the garden from the back gate, Adam and Zed had run straight on toward the garage, passing the Slipper House toward which the grown-ups wended their slower way. Adam had sat in the Rolls, turning the wheel this way and that, stood up to observe George, sat again, then emerged to find Zed waiting and had inspected the colony of martins underneath the eaves who were busy renovating last year’s nests. Later in the summer the baby birds would be closely visible, propped up in the nests like little dolls with white faces. Then Brian and Gabriel had come to find him, and he had run back with Zed to find Hattie and Pearl standing outside on the grass with Father Bernard. Zed had run straight to Hattie, who had picked him up and was pressing her nose into his furry shoulder while he licked her forehead. The combination of the dry coolish tickly fur and the warm round small body agitated with slightly struggling but trustful doggy affection and the smooth wet tongue caressing her brow quite overcame poor Hattie. She could feel Zed’s heart beating fast and her own heart beat fast too. She wanted to hug the dog and cry. She put him down hastily. ‘What’s his name?’
‘Zed,’ said Adam. He touched the skirt of Hattie’s dress. Hattie had put on a flowery summer dress earlier in the morning, but had changed into a straight many-buttoned navy blue shift over a blue-and-white striped shirt blouse when she decided to put her hair up.
‘They are alpha and omega,’ said Father Bernard smiling.
The cool April sun was shining out of a cool blue sky, making the green tiles of the Slipper House glisten as if they were wet. Dew upon the grass, newly come into the moving sunlight, flashed like diamonds; and a trail of dewy footprints across the lawn from the little copse which occupied the bottom of the garden presaged the footpath dreaded by Alex.
Pearl, who had persuaded Hattie to emerge, now stood behind her in the doorway of the house. She was wearing over her brown dress an apron which she had deliberately failed to remove when she saw from the window the advancing ‘company’. She had folded her arms in front of her and stood at attention, wearing her calm dour Mexican look, brown as her dress. She was aware of the priest casting curious glances at her and trying in vain to catch her eye with his nervous girlish smile.
The Brian McCaffreys returning from a shopping expedition (it was Saturday) had met Father Bernard who had proudly announced his destination. Gabriel was at once anxious, with this excuse, to ‘drop in’ and catch a glimpse of the famous girl. The news that John Robert Rozanov’s grand-daughter was installed at the Slipper House was the talk of the Institute. Her appearance there was eagerly awaited. In a sudden gust of possessive emotion, about which she felt secretive and almost guilty, Gabriel felt that she must see the waif and establish a special relation with her before she became the property of everybody. She tried to conceal the quality of her interest from Brian and Adam. She also wanted to find out whether John Robert had committed Hattie to Alex’s care. She had suggested a subsequent visit to Alex, but Brian was in no mood to see his mother. Although he complained he was, however, not unwilling to demonstrate his independence of her by visiting the Slipper House, and he too wanted to look at the girl.
Gabriel had impulsively handed over a cake (purchased for Leafy Ridge tea-time) which Hattie had handed to Pearl who had put it inside the front door on the floor. Gabriel’s earnest wet eyes were fixed with diffident sympathy upon Hattie. Gabriel had today had the infelicitous idea of tying her floppy hair back with a ribbon. Her face looked strained and shiny, her nose red in the April wind. Arrived, she felt embarrassed and apologetic, having awkwardly refused Hattie’s suggestion that they should come in. She now regretted this refusal, but could think of no way of retrieving the blunder which kept Hattie out on the grass shivering slightly in the cold wind. Gabriel was also upset because she had seen for a moment, just as she arrived at the Slipper House, the figure of George standing near the back door of Belmont and looking down the garden.
Hattie’s simple pinafore dress made her look schoolgirlish, although her white-blond hair had been assembled, without Pearl’s aid, into a large woven bun which climbed up the back of her head. She looked thin, almost ill (which she was not), untouched by sun, her pallid unmarked complexion damp like the stem of a winter plant. Her face, timid again, now after she had set Zed down, so lacked emphasis and colour that she seemed like a study in white by a painter whose whim it was to make a girl’s face scarcely appear from the faint hues of a uniformly milky canvas. Only her lips, poised and pouting a little with some persisting question, showed a faint natural pink. And her eyes, marbled with whiteness, were a faint but very clear pale blue.
Brian, standing behind Gabriel and smiling, showing his wolf teeth, thought, what a funny little drowned rat of a thing. And yet in two or three years that could be a beautiful woman.
Gabriel was saying, ‘If you need anything, please just let us know. Our telephone number, I’ll write it down, sorry I haven’t got a - Brian, could you write down our telephone number for — ’
‘It’s in the book,’ said Brian.
‘Oh, of course, anyway I expect Mrs McCaffrey is looking after you?’ Even after years of marriage it did not really occur to Gabriel that there was any Mrs McCaffrey except Alex. She cast a glance toward Belmont. The figure of George had disappeared.
‘Oh no,’ said Hattie, ‘we’re on our own. I haven’t even met Mrs McCaffrey. I suppose I ought to have done?’ She turned for a moment to Pearl, who remained rigid with folded arms.
‘I expect your grandfather drops in to see you have everything — ’