‘Karen?’ I thought he said. Then he whistled. But only a bird answered in the distance. The sun was rising higher now, beginning to cast long shafts of gold through the cathedral of beech trees round the clearing. The mist had gone. Ross turned apprehensively, as though he felt suddenly exposed in all this brilliant light, and looked up the steep bank towards where I was hidden. I thought — if he comes up I’ll shoot him too. But he didn’t. He moved straight on, following the path he thought the dog had taken, up towards the head of the lake. And so it was the more careless of me to allow myself to be trapped by him ten minutes later behind the ruined pumping shed. For the shed was in the same direction that he had taken, by the northern end of the lake: if I’d stayed put by the dead beast for a little longer, Ross would probably have left the wood altogether.
Instead, after some while crouching uncomfortably on the slope, I became impatient. I was anxious to get rid of the dog and get back to my crow’s nest. So I picked it up again after settling the dead leaves so that no blood was visible, and set off along almost the same path that Ross had taken.
It was when I’d got behind the shed, leaving myself without an exit, and had started to prise up one of the metal shutters with a stick, that I heard something move on the other side of the old brickwork, the faintest sound — but a footfall, I thought, for it was followed almost immediately by another noise, a twig cracking. Peering round the back corner of the building, I saw Ross coming towards me, moving through some saplings, this time with a look of certainty in his eyes, his gun raised.
There was no way out then. The dog was lying in the open, next the well. If Ross came round the corner and saw it, and especially if it had been his dog, I knew he’d shoot me straight away if he got the chance. It was then that I notched the second arrow, drew the bow and waited for him.
One
‘All gone again!’ Laura sang out in a tone of weary optimism, intent as always on putting a good face on things. We’d become used to the child’s intermittent chaos in the cottage long before. But Clare had got so much better lately that this new mayhem, the explosion of moist soil all over the crisp linen Sunday tablecloth, surprised even us. Judy, the postmistress’s elder daughter, was nearly in tears. She’d been looking after Clare while all of us had been out to the Easter Sunday service at the church just beyond my cottage.
‘I was out in the kitchen, just for a minute — putting the roast in …’
‘It doesn’t matter.’ Laura comforted her, while Minty, our big, over-loving, wire-haired terrier, pranced around in a frenzy of foolish welcome, as though we’d been away for days and this disaster in the dining-room was a carefully contrived homecoming gift which he and Clare had been working on all morning for us.
George — George Benson, a Professor of Anthropology now at Oxford and out with his wife Annabelle from the town for the weekend — moved round the circular table, making odd archaeological surveys into the dirt, scraping it up with his hands, but only making it worse. The clayey soil was moist. Laura had watered the half dozen flowering hyacinths that same morning. And now the table was like a desecrated altar: the dark smudges of this grave soil from the end of our garden, just next the churchyard wall, set against the brilliant white linen cloth, with the conical blue and pink flowers, like little fir trees, smashed all over the place and Clare, still crouching on the table deep about her business, seemingly unaware of us, sorting the soil through, discovering the bulbs, inspecting them carefully, smelling them as a gourmet might ponder some exotic dish.
‘Well? What happened?’ Laura asked her daughter, not looking at her directly, no hint of annoyance in her voice. Clare didn’t reply, though of course she could speak now, very reasonably when she wished. She was nearly eleven after all.
‘I expect she wanted to be taken to church,’ I said.
I was no great churchgoer. But Laura liked to go, and Clare too, if for different reasons. That was how I’d first met both of them the summer before, high up on one of Lisbon’s windy hills, in the Anglican church of St George. We’d all become so much happier people since then, that perhaps Clare had come to identify churches with her new-found contentment, where all three of us were in such buildings together, and had felt excluded this morning — threatened — and had thus taken her revenge.
‘But she said she didn’t want to come,’ Laura turned, admitting some of her anguish to me, at least. ‘She’d sooner stay at home with Judy and help with the lunch, she said.’
‘She wanted to be made to come then.’
I disliked hinting, even, at the dry world of psychology, the awful jargon of the child specialists, their arid theories of cause and effect that I knew had done so little for Clare over the years. But even so, we all of us had a need sometimes to be forcibly confirmed in our happiness, to be taken to bed by a woman, or rooted away from the fire by friends for a frosty winter walk.
‘Perhaps,’ Laura said. And then, more abruptly, ‘Though God knows, she’s growing up, isn’t she? She has to learn what she wants, herself.’
‘She wants that as well,’ I said shortly. ‘She wants it both ways. She wants everything.’ I was more upset than Laura, perhaps.
Clare hadn’t heard us. She was still totally absorbed in her gardening. Her fringe of blond hair moved into a shaft of sun just then which touched it like a halo. It was midday with the light at its height over the church roof, angled down straight onto the table by the window, and Clare’s face beamed as she squelched the soil through her fingers. The room was filled with the smell of fresh earth and hyacinths and bathed with an intense spring light, the child a radiant harbinger of this muddy easier apocalypse. We stood there, the four of us round the table, unable to speak.
At last a log fell off the fire in the next room and I remembered the wine I had to open and set by the warmth before lunch. It wasn’t the first time this sort of horticultural explosion had occurred, these wild scents all over the cottage. Clare had a recurrent obsession with nature, with growing things, a thirst for flowers: to touch, to crush, to eat them, a need which died out completely in her at times, like bulbs in winter, only to blaze up again without reason — or none we knew of. She was happy then, so totally involved and happy, all her vacancy gone, that one felt that, lacking appropriate human development, she had instead a perfect bond with nature, alert to all its secret smells and signs, like an animal.
Apart from the hyacinths, Laura always liked to keep a big bowl of lavender on the deep windowsill of the small drawing-room: just the dried stalks in winter, when one could crush their ears at odd moments, gazing at nothing in particular out of the window, kneading them with warm fingers, so that the deep summer smell would live again even on the greyest days. In summer itself the perfume needed no encouragement, the flowers picked fresh from the big clump by the front garden gate.
Clare, on the days when she stayed at home for some reason from the special school near Oxford, found these fresh or dry stalks an almost irresistible source of fascination. This quintessence of English floral life was something new to her, I suppose, something she had not known in London nor, before that, in the desert wadis of East Africa where she had spent the first years of her life.
Sometimes she would take just a single stalk from the bowl and sit with it on the sofa, gazing at it intently for an hour, picking its minute buds out one by one, sniffing it before pushing it up her nose the better to grasp its smell, or turning it round and using the end as a toothpick. Or else she would take the whole bunch out and place the stalks meticulously, lined up in regiments all over the drawing-room floor throughout a morning, before re-arranging them or suddenly stamping on them vigorously, so that even up in the attic study where I worked the odour would rise up the two floors to me, while the drawing-room itself, when I came down to lunch, smelt like an accident in a perfume factory.