But for the moment at least, in actual fact, I had an almost flat space — about seven by five feet wide, where I could lay the sleeping bag out, where I could cook and eat and listen to the transistor in some comfort. The only trouble was that by the time I’d finished the house I’d nothing left to cook. The packet soup was all gone and I couldn’t face another mouthful of watercress. I thought of mushrooms, but there weren’t any: and nettle soup, but that appealed less than the cress. There were fat pigeons flying in and out of the trees. But how to catch them? I’d heard of setting out lime for the smaller birds. But where was the lime and how did you set it? There were the wild mallard, too, on the lake which I fancied. But I could never get to within fifty yards of them before they clattered away. I’d made some snares and put them along some of the rabbit paths. But the wire that I’d taken from an old fence by the quarry must have been too stiff or rusty. I’d tried to fish as well from the big branch: tying long single strands of baler twine to Spinks’s Woolworth leaders and hooks, with a piece of oak bark as a float, letting the line sink into the dark pool from my perch far above in the great tree. But I had no success. Perhaps the fish didn’t fancy worms. The old cheddar would have been more to their taste, but that was long gone.
On the morning of my fifth day in the open I was literally starving. I’d sharpened the steel tips of the six arrows on the stone jetty meanwhile, and practised long hours with them against a rough target, the end of a fallen beech branch near the old pumping-shed. So I suppose I’d already taken the decision subconsciously, without admitting it yet. But I did then: there were all those lambs just beyond the rim of the quarry, so many that one, surely, would never be missed. I thought about it for a while. It was a risk and I was no butcher, though the various blades of Spinks’s knife were sharp enough, I thought … All the same, how did you gut a sheep? Would you let the carcase hang for a bit, like a pheasant? And what about the blood? I didn’t think about it any more then. But by late afternoon I was thinking about nothing else.
I’d never understood before how hunger could cause actual pain, an ache in the belly that spread everywhere else like a wasting disease. But I understood then. I took two of the sharpened arrows with the bow, as well as the knife, and climbed down the tree.
Passing the ruined footbridge and old boathouse, I moved up the western edge of the lake, back from the water, along the hidden paths I’d found there. There was only one danger spot — almost at the end of the lake, where some days before I’d found another path that led away from the lake at right angles, up a much gentler slope here, through the trees towards what must have been the back of the great house.
There was a big clump of flowering hawthorn here just before you reached this path, and I always stopped behind it, hiding in its cover for a minute, before crossing over the open space and going on up the valley. But there were no sounds that afternoon in the sunlight, no sign of any movement among the sloping trees to my left or on the path that ran through them. I moved from cover and I was several yards out into the clearing before I froze: there was a woman coming straight down the hill towards me now, only about a hundred yards away.
I don’t know how she failed to see me. The hawthorn immediately behind me must have served as camouflage — or else she was just preoccupied, with a big bath-towel wrapped round her folded arms, held in front of her like a muff. I got back behind the bush again in an instant. But I could still see her through the flowering branches as she came nearer: not tall, but with a lot of wavy black hair that made her seem tall, rising well forward on her brow and combed straight back so that it looked like a helmet, glistening in the distance: a bouncing helmet, for she had a strange jaunty walk, putting little skips and steps into her pace, as though merry over something, wearing smartly cut cords and a blouse wide-open at the front for it was muggy hot down here by the water in the late afternoon heat.
Crouching down, I crawled into the hawthorn bush and, working my way gently round inside the cavern of branches, I got almost to the front of the tree where I could just see out the far side through the snowstorm of white twigs.
I saw the boat then, a little blunt-nosed fibreglass dinghy, which must have been hidden in the bank. Leading back from the lake at this point a rough clearing had been made in the long grass. And the woman was there, too, her back towards me now, less than fifty yards away, getting undressed. She must have been in her late thirties, not muscular, but compactly built, with a great neatness about her, the neatness of a young girclass="underline" not an inch spare or wasted in the body. I couldn’t see her face, just her naked back, and this was unusuaclass="underline" a long slim back, very long, out of proportion with the rest, which splayed out dramatically just below her waist. She was deeply bronzed everywhere, without any strap marks. She was so sunburnt indeed, so dark-haired that I thought for a moment, irrationally, that she might be a Red Indian. She swam then, calmly, easily, yet with a kind of powerful athleticism — out into the equally bronzed water.
She swam for ten minutes or more, vigorously, up and down the lake, ducking her head right under now and then, kicking her legs back high in the air, diving deeply, only to emerge in a fountain of spray a few yards further on, vertically like a missile, shaking the water out of her eyes, the skein of dark hair twirling round her face now like a whip.
She swam like someone who had just discovered the trick, finding water a marvellous pleasure for the first time. Yet there was something spiteful, wilful in her pleasure, too — an unnecessary determination, as if she were challenging the liquid, wanting to fight it, punish it. She was bullying the water, that’s what it was — as if taking out some great frustration on it.
I noticed, though, that she never went further than the island halfway down the lake, never swam on through the small channels on either side of it, down to my end of the water. This lower half of the lake, where I had my tree, she never visited, it was, indeed, invisible from the northern end where I was then hidden.
When she got out she lay flat on the great bath-towel for five minutes in the sun, letting the heat dry her, for she couldn’t have wanted any more tan. She stood up at last and looked out over the lake into the trees on the other side, arms akimbo. I thought she was going to get dressed. But instead she did a curious thing: putting her hand to her mouth she let out a series of loud war whoops — yes, war whoops — letting her fingers fall rapidly on her lips like a drum. The surprising sounds spread over the water, echoing round the small valley. She stopped and listened intently, as if waiting for a reply — and I was petrified, fully expecting one. Then she did it again, in a slightly higher register, but more a question than a threat in the tone now.
I looked around wildly, peering through the branches of the bush to my left, first over to the far side of the lake, then right, looking up the steep side of the valley. And it was then that I saw the other woman — hidden, as I was, behind another clump of hawthorn, near the old pathway here that led up from the lake towards the house. She was a big woman, middle-aged, dressed in what looked like a white housekeeper’s coat. Or was it a nurse’s uniform? There was the sense of an overseer — a wardress almost — something powerful and malign in this huge Woman as she stood dead still, a threat in the warm valley, observing the antics of the other younger girlish figure, standing by the water now, naked, bellowing and whooping like some lovely savage.