“What! Total recall! I have always regarded it as an obscene myth. Still, I must take advantage of your faculties just as you must take advantage of mine — social contract, in effect. Rousseau would have been pleased.”
At Overton Farm the weatherman’s demeanor was completely different. He became soft and smooth, rubbing his hands together and cooing at the girl who opened the door, and then at the sturdy farmhouse wife who pushed her aside. He was a leech from Gloucester, he said, hasting north at the command of my Lord Salting, to attend the birth of an heir. Now they were late, having stayed by the way to succor a village oppressed with a running sickness. They were tired and hungry. Could they rest awhile and buy milk and bread? And if by chance there were any illness in the house he would be glad to do what he could in recompense for hospitality.
The farmwife led them indoors to a room where the pattern of embossed wallpaper still showed through whitewash. The fireplace had undergone an upheaval in order to install a great open range, unlit at this time of year, with hooks for curing hams in the chimney and a bread oven jutting across the hearth beside it. The furniture was hard oak, crudely made. Sally and the weatherman sat on a long bench and Geoffrey stood against the wall, pulling faces at random to sustain his reputation for idiocy, while the farmwife and her maid clattered in the scullery beyond.
His dizziness was gone, and he was beginning to have doubts about the weatherman. There was something too slick about him, and he really had been horrid to the poor old woman at the cottage. But he did know his way about. He was being very useful now, and rather cunning not mentioning horses at all.
The farmwife came back with a leg of cold mutton, and the maid brought ale, milk, butter and rough brown bread. They ate for a while in silence, but soon the farmwife started asking where they’d come from and why they hadn’t gone through Ross. She didn’t sound suspicious, just curious, and the weatherman satisfied her by saying that Geoffrey tended to have fits in towns. They all sighed and glanced at him, and to keep them happy he pulled another face. Then the weatherman asked about crossing the Wye, and was told to take the path down to the old railway bridge, keeping an eye open for thunderstorms in case the Necromancer chose to throw a bolt at it. It was only at this point that he mentioned horses, in the most casual way, as though he wasn’t really interested and honestly preferred walking. It was just that they were so late for this important birth, and his lordship was not a man to displease. The farmwife’s face turned hard and greedy and she called to the maid to go and fetch the master from the cow-byre.
He was a small, dark, beaten-looking man, and even when he was there his wife did most of the talking, speaking of the superexcellent quality of the farm’s horses, and how exceedingly lucky the travelers were that there should be, at this moment, not one but two to spare, which were a bargain at seven sovereigns. The weatherman nodded and smiled until the two horses were led into the yard. One was a lean, tall roan and the other a restless piebald. The weatherman grunted and strolled over to them, feeling their legs and sides, forcing their mouths open, slapping their shoulders. At last he stood up, shook his head and offered the farmwife three sovereigns for the pair, or four with harness thrown in. At once there was a cackle of dismay, as if a fox had got into a henhouse, and they settled down to hard bargaining, with the weatherman holding the upper ground, as he could claim both that they didn’t want horses and also that two horses were no good to them in any case — they really wanted three.
The haggling grumbled back and forth, like a slow-motion game of tennis, until the farmer broke into a pause.
“If you be wanting three horses,” he said, “we got a pony as might do for the young lady. He’s a liddle ’un, but he’s a good ’un.”
He shambled off round the corner of a barn and returned with the most extraordinary animal, a hairy, square thing with four short legs under it, dark brown, the texture of a doormat, with a black mane and a sulky eye. It snarled at the people, and when the weatherman was feeling its hocks it chose its moment and bit him hard in the fleshy part of the thigh. He jumped back, his face black with rage.
“Ah,” said the farmer, “you want to watch un. He’s strong, but he’s wilful. Tell you what, you take the other two for five-an-a-narf sov, an’ I’ll give un to you, saddle an’ all. Ach, shut up, Madge. He eats more than he’s worth every month, an’ we’ve no use for un.”
The weatherman rubbed his thigh, pulled his temper together and looked at Sally.
“What do you think, my dear,” he said. “Can you manage him? He gave me a vicious nip.”
“What’s his name?” said Sally.
“Maddox,” said the farmer. “I dunno why.”
Sally felt in a pocket of her blouse and brought out a small orange cube. Geoffrey recognized it at once by the smelclass="underline" it was a piece of the gypsy’s horse bait. She broke it in half and walked stolidly towards the pony, holding a fragment in the flat of her palm. The other two horses edged in towards the sweet, treacly smell.
“Keep them away,” said Sally. “This is for Maddox. Come on then, boy. Come on. That’s a nice Maddox. Come on. There. Now, if you’re a good pony and do what I tell you, you shall have the other half for your supper. You are a good pony. I know you are.”
She scratched as hard as she could through the doormat hair between his ears, and he nuzzled in to her side, nearly knocking her over, looking for the rest of the horse bait.
“Well,” said the farmer, “I never seed anything like it. I’ll just nip off an’ fetch his harness afore he changes his mind. Five-an-a-narf sov it is then, mister?”
“I suppose so,” said the weatherman, and counted the money out into the farmwife’s hand. She bit every coin.
The horses jibbed at the railway bridge, disturbed by the machine-forged metal, until Sally led Maddox up on to the causeway and the other two followed. It really was evening now, a world of soft, warm gold, with the hedge-trees black on their sunless side and casting field-wide shadows. They plugged on (Geoffrey very unhappy on the piebald) through Sellack, along the path by the river bank on to the road again near Kynaston, and up the slow westward hill. It was almost dark, with Sally yawning and swaying in her saddle, before the weatherman agreed to stop for the night.
The place he chose wasn’t bad, a disused huddle of farm buildings backing on to a field which was a wild tangle of weeds and self-sown wheat. There was a big Dutch barn of corrugated asbestos, half its roof blown off in some freak wind, but filled with rusting tractors, combines, balers, hoists and such. It didn’t look as though they’d been afflicted by any special visitations from over the horizon, no such holocaust as had destroyed the Rolls. Given time and petrol, Geoffrey felt that he could have got some of them to go. But the moment a cylinder stirred, the wrath of the Necromancer would be down on them.
They ate and slept in another barn, floored with musty straw. The weatherman had brought bread and a bagful of mutton at the farm, and they sat with their backs against decaying bales and munched and talked. Sally, curiously, did most of the talking — about life in Weymouth, and the respect Geoffrey was held in, and the inadequacy of other Dorset weathermen compared to him. When the weatherman spoke he did so in smooth, rolling clauses, full of long words such as schoolmasters use when they are teasing a favored pupil, but he told them very little about himself. His talk was like candyfloss, that huge sweet bauble that fills the eye but leaves little in your belly when you’ve eaten it. At last he gave them both a nip of liquor from a flask “to help them sleep,” and they wormed themselves into the powdery straw, disturbed by tickling fragments at first, then cozy with generated warmth, then miles deep in the chasms of sleep.