I found another stone at last, a loose Cotswold stone with a fairly sharp edge along one side; it served its purpose, with a second stone as a chopping block beneath. The head came off. I tried to hack the legs off as well, but with less success. The gutting was even more difficult. Again, though I managed to open part of its stomach, I couldn’t get any of the woolly skin off. The knife wasn’t sharp enough. I hung the animal up with some baler twine on one of the beams and let it bleed for ten minutes or so while I sharpened Spinks’s knife.
In the end, even though I got the blade pretty sharp, I made a fearful mess of the butchering. When I’d finished the beast looked as if it had been mutilated, torn and stabbed about by a madman. All the same, I had managed to roughly skin and gut it and the blood was washing away now in the doorway as the rain fell less heavily and the storm passed on. I wrapped the entrails in the wool coat and stuck my hands out the door, letting the rain wash the blood away. The carcase lay in the mud behind me. I held that out to wash it in the rain as well. But my arms were so weak I had to let it drop after a moment.
I put the skin and guts to carry away in one of the old fertiliser sacks and tied the rest of the sloppy, still-warm animal round my waist with baler twine. The storm had cleared now. But the land was waterlogged outside. And down by the source of the brook, as I went back, the marshy ground smoked, risen in a small flood, so that I was up to my ankles in running water as I walked through it. I was soaked again. But halfway to the lake the sun returned suddenly and warmed my back, and the horror of the last half-hour faded. Indeed, by the time I got back to the lake, I had so successfully put it out of my mind that the violence appeared the act of someone else, not me.
It wasn’t until the next morning, when I inspected the carcase, hanging from another branch in my oak, that my feelings changed again: the fatty, bruised blue colour of a butcher’s-shop lamb was beginning to form on the inner skin as it dangled, as if from a meat rail, by its back legs. I had a sense of strange achievement then, of having unearthed some long-forgotten, essential gift in myself. Unpleasant the killing may have been — but necessary: yes, necessary, I reminded myself I had killed for food after all, for survival. I would eat the beast. And yet, at heart, I knew I was lying to myself, was secretly disgusted by the whole business. I would never kill another animal in such a way, I thought. And from then on I kept a continual eye open for the woman from the manor. Much as I had come to dislike the world outside, I was going to have to save myself and ensure my future through some other more civilised means.
The weather was cool and showery for the next few days, and the woman didn’t come down to swim, though I kept a sharp look-out for her each afternoon from the top of my oak tree. The bunch of roses had quite faded out on the island. She had not returned there. Perhaps, after the disagreement with her husband, she’d gone away herself.
I kept a watch on the house, too, twice a day, from my look-out post on top of the beech tree. But again there was no sign of the woman anywhere. Indeed, for such a big place, there was a strange lack of activity about the manor, even when I looked over it carefully with the binoculars. It seemed almost deserted. No one came and no one left in the hour or so, each morning and afternoon, that I kept an eye on it.
There was a gardener, I saw, quite an old man with a younger colleague, at work in the vegetable beds to one side of the kitchen garden. They seemed to work very slowly and conscientiously, with a rake and a hoe and an old-fashioned high-sided wooden wheelbarrow. They repaired the wire netting over a clump of blackcurrant bushes and laid out strawberry nets and refurbished the scarecrow, which I could see now wore what looked like a Victorian frock coat together with a stovepipe hat. Surely it had a slouch hat of some sort the other night? There seemed to be a lot of dressing up of one sort or another going on up in the Manor.
The younger gardener mowed all the front lawns and grass terraces one morning, including a croquet court at the bottom of the terraces with a little wooden summerhouse at the end of it. He fixed the hoops and sticks out on it afterwards. But no one played on it, then or the next day. There were no animals about the place that I could see. No one except the two gardeners appeared anywhere in the open, and the lights didn’t come on again at night in the conservatory. The whole place, both Manor and estate, had an air of life suspended now. The great Gothic pile brooded over the parkland, impervious, empty. And in the evening, when the light sank in the west and the troubled, showery skies let great washed beams of sun suddenly flow over the manor, the brick took on a fairytale aspect again, but this time more powerfully when, from the height of the tall tree, I could see the whole house now, its slim turrets and long chimneys dark pencil-strokes against the rain-bright sunsets. There was an air of sheer enchantment about it then. But the woman must have migrated, gone south for the summer, or to London, or perhaps back to America. I was disappointed.
I let the lamb hang for several days before I cooked it, living on the stale remains of the cricketers’ tea meanwhile. I’d decided in advance to roast the animal whole, if I could, in the old pumping-shed. And I managed to build this up with a collection of stones and a few bricks, making a kind of three-sided barbecue pit hidden at the back of the shed. I skewered the carcase right through, with a steel fencing-post that I’d found, and placed this across the top of the stones, bending one end into a vague handle so that I could turn the meat as it cooked. There was plenty of dry wood about; that was no problem.
I prepared this grill throughout the evening and waited until it was quite dark before lighting it, so that the smoke wouldn’t show. The flames would be invisible in any case, hidden by the shed. Some of the dry branches crackled to begin with, that was my only fear. But once the fire settled down there was hardly any sound. And soon the bigger logs began to glow, red at first, and then with an almost white heat, and the stones got very hot and the carcase sizzled, the fat spattering in the brilliant embers, the meat blistering, then darkening as I turned the spit.
It took almost three hours to cook properly. But in the meantime I cut little slivers off to test it and soon had a meal going out of the tit-bits, sharpening my hunger as the night wore on. These nutty little hors d’oeuvres were magnificent. And at the end, when I’d taken the whole carcase off the fire and let it cool, I rather gorged on it, demolishing nearly half a whole leg down to the bone. It was very good indeed, burnt on the outside, tender as a melon in the middle, juicy.
Afterwards I dismantled the brick walls and scattered all the ashes and slept nearby, along one side of the old engine, the meaty, woodsmoke smell all over my skin and my lips tasting long afterwards of cinders and burnt fat. I slept warm, content, replete, the sleep of the just. I slept well, except for the dream in the early morning, when I dozed in and out of sleep, turning on the fire-warmed earth.
I dreamt of a sardine barbecue, on top of one of Lisbon’s windy hills, in the graveyard outside the Anglican church of St George. I had experienced just such a barbecue nearly a year before when I’d first met Laura and Clare out there. But now, in my sleep, neither of them was present. It was a summer party of complete strangers. I could hear the ferry klaxons out in the bay, honking and moaning, but much louder than they would have done in fact. I asked someone why they were so loud, so continuous. ‘The King has died,’ the stranger said. ‘They are carrying him here. He will be buried here in a moment.’