I smiled then. It was so unlikely: an American woman, living abroad, perhaps quite alone in the great empty house now, surrounded by priceless paintings. She’d be terrified out of her wits in any confrontation with me, a bearded wife-killer, as she would probably have heard, from the manor woods. Besides, how would I meet her? The house would have servants, alarms, perhaps a permanent security staff. But then I realised that meeting her might be simple enough. I had only to wait behind the hawthorn bush when next she came down to swim, or better still, surprise her when she came out to the island again, where she could not so easily escape, when she next brought her grave gifts. The roses would have faded by now. She might come soon.
I had some hope then, and more still when, later that evening, just before real dark, I caught a fish: a perch, I thought, nearly a foot long, as I looked at it squirming in my hand after I’d pulled it up, its scales still reflecting a little silver in the last of the light. It had run and tugged excitingly in the water beneath me, but the strands of baler twine had held. And having got it up in the branches successfully I felt for a moment that I could now live in these woods for ever.
But cooking it next morning for breakfast wasn’t so easy. In the end I had to chop the fish up with Spinks’s knife and poach the bits in the billy can, where in the end they disintegrated on the surface without being properly cooked inside. But it still tasted of fish, and I had the floury scones to go with it. All I needed was some lemon. I was living again, I thought. Yet I needed a proper cooking-pan, I realised — and I needed to lay in more food now that I was fit and eager enough to try and get it. I thought of the sheep again, or rather the lambs, though I avoided that precise description of them in my mind.
I’d swum then, in the hidden pool at the bottom of the lake, cleaning myself as best I could. The wind had gone entirely now. The day looked like being sultry and oppressive. There was thunder in the air, I thought. I practised with the bow and six arrows afterwards, taking them over to the undergrowth on the slopes above the old pumping-shed. I didn’t shoot for long. I had neither a bracer nor finger-tabs, so that the loosed string hurt the inside of my bow-arm after a dozen shots. But it was long enough for me to see that my aim had deteriorated in the past few days, when I hadn’t practised and hadn’t eaten. The arrows were nearly all short, dropping low beneath the target. I wasn’t strong enough to make a full draw and maintain it, quite still, for those few vital moments. I was still too weak. I’d had plenty of carbohydrates with the sandwiches and cakes. But I needed protein now. I needed some meat.
A squirrel appeared as I was shooting, a quizzical little animal, flat out against the trunk of a beech behind me, about thirty feet up. I was about to test a shot at it when I noticed, above it, two other baby squirrels, running up and down like toys along another branch. I didn’t fancy shooting the animal then, possibly the mother, so I left it, frustrated. And then I thought: if I wasn’t prepared to shoot a squirrel, how was I ever going to kill a lamb? And, given this squeamishness, what did I really think I was going to do with David Marcus? Kill him too? It seemed an unlikely idea, in truth, even if I ever got the chance. I saw then that I was entirely unfitted for killing, unless, I suppose, my own life was at stake. But wasn’t it now? Without food, one died.
I set out, up to the top of the lake and then on to the old quarry beyond, considering my inabilities. There was a strong smell of cow-parsley or elderflower, both come to rampant bloom now in the hedgerows along the cattle-path that led out of the valley a strong yet delicate, slightly tangy smell somehow, hanging everywhere in the silent, heavy air. The thunder rumbled in the distance, but a closer distance now.
I supposed one could stew up cow-parsley, make a sort of soup out of it? Though possibly, through boiling, it became poisonous? It was bound to be pretty unpalatable in any case, worse than the cress. There was the elderflower, of course: I knew you could make elderflower wine. Laura, in fact, had been planning to make some later that spring, from the crowd of old elder bushes that ran along one side of our garden …
And then, quite suddenly, as if touched by some violent hand out of the air, the sense of being able to kill came back to me, came like a physical thing, so that I could feel the muscles contracting all about my body. And I could have killed anything, man or beast, there and then, had it appeared at that moment.
I hadn’t thought about Laura recently. I’d kept her out of my mind on purpose; it was too painful. And my hunger in any case had made me think about nothing else but food. But then, thinking of the elderflower wine she might have made, thoughts of her broke through me like water smashing a dam, and the bitterness and enmity filled me again, as it had at the beginning, a frightful, uncontrollable violence which made me shake almost as I stood in the path, the thunder above me now, the first raindrops falling.
By the time I got to the top of the old quarry by the barbed wire fence the rain was pouring down in long straight rods, the drops so close together it was like a solid grey curtain, the clouds massing low down in huge folds of dark velvet all over the long pasture running away to the north. And I was in luck: it was almost too easy. Half a dozen of the lambs had somehow pushed their way through the fence from the pasture and were flocked together in one corner of the field, near the old stone barn. I drove them through the open doorway, where once inside and trapped they began to panic, terrified, bleating above the thunder which crashed about us immediately overhead, the rain falling like pebbles on the broken slates. I herded the lambs into a corner of the old barn, where they pushed and shoved madly to and fro, a great mass of wool, their coats smoking in the damp air. I could have killed as many as I wanted, I thought at first.
I chose the fattest of the lambs and, raising the bow, aimed for its neck. The arrow struck home all right: in fact it transfixed the beast, going right through its neck, without apparently doing it any other harm. It charged up and down in the corner of the barn, shaking its head wildly, rising up on its hind legs and dancing for moments, trying to rid itself of the arrow, pawing the air in a frenzy. And it was difficult to get in a second shot as the other beasts stampeded round me, escaping back out into the storm. I was left alone with the single wounded lamb.
Now the panic spread to me, as I didn’t know what to do to stop the animal’s pain. I loosed another arrow but it missed entirely. Finally I rushed the lamb, caught it, straddled it and tried to cut its throat with Spinks’s knife. But this didn’t have any effect either: the blade wasn’t sharp enough or the fur was too thick. Or both.
The lamb started to career around the barn with me on its back like a rodeo rider. Finally it threw me and made for the door. If it escaped away into the pasture or back towards the Manor with an arrow through its neck I was done for. So I dived after it, just catching it as it ran outside by a back leg.
In the end I stoned it to death, hitting its skull again and again, smashing the life out of it, without looking at it, as the rain drenched us both in the doorway of the barn. After five minutes I had a dead lamb in front of me, bleeding, cut about, which I never wanted to see or think of again, let alone eat. Yet I couldn’t leave it there, and there was no point now in throwing it away and hiding it. So, with even more distaste, I had to consider how to chop its head off, bleed it, gut it …