The heat wave continued, week after week, June into July. William found it exhausting, but he feared any change, for regularity had come to obsess him. Regular weather, regular meals, regular exercises (press-ups and knee bends), regular tours of inspection, regular hours in bed, regular times in the lavatory (even if only straining). Regularity: it alone would make health possible, himself coherent, the world a presence again. There should be as many emblems or reminders of it as possible, therefore – the convalescent’s icons – such as the sundial he had found in the garden (how he missed a good watch, though, regularity itself), the old cracked barometer he had found in an outhouse, the chart of milking times he had come across in a steading.
But there were days when he was sure he had left it too late. He would not reclaim himself now. There would be moments of terrible weakness then, William lying on his jacket in a field, still unable to hear birdsong, able only occasionally to smell grass. But he didn’t allow himself to remain stricken for long (nothing more absurd than the selfconsciously prostrate figure). He would stand up and continue on his tour of inspection, spots before his eyes (silent flies? he once wondered), a ringing in his ears, his nostrils as good as useless, walking still with a trace of the drunkard’s teetering. Walking on eggs (his wife’s description); peripheral neuritis (the doctor’s): a condition, he knew, which could be fought with vitamin B. And so, tokens of his will to reclaim himself, to be a steady guardian of these fields and their machinery, bottles of pills he had taken from a cabinet in Mrs Mclehose’s bathroom stood on a small table he had carried to the kitchen from one of the outhouses. They were ranged according to his sense of their importance: vitamin B, vitamin C, iron, calcium. It encouraged him, not just to take the pills with his meals, but to touch the bottles gently between meals, whenever he passed them.
He became sunburned, and the sight of his sunburned face in the cracked mirror pleased him. All signs of agreeable change held him. He watched admiringly as flowers in the garden bloomed and were gone, as the grass which he was still too weak to scythe and mow grew longer. Sometimes he looked so intently, like a man actually entranced, that it was as if he was trying to catch nature in the very act of renewing herself – discern the hand of God, even, in the splendour of the light.
Aware that his walk betrayed his past, he set out to change it. He tried out several walks, determined that if he found one that suited him (because it spoke, somehow, of what he hoped to became) he would keep it. His experiments took place mainly in the garden and were like rehearsals for a play that consisted simply of a prologue – a very confused one at that. He tried a pensive stroll, pensive down to the arm movements, but it wasn’t right for an outdoor life like his and it embarrassed him deeply. He tried a forceful, rangy walk, but because it suggested a state more fiercely ambitious than any he could imagine himself ever reaching; it embarrassed him also. He tried a bright but modest walk, but, probably because it betrayed a sort of indiscriminate willingness, a sort of sweet servility, it caused his energy to go after about forty yards, and it sickened him anyway. The one he finally hit upon surprised him: brisk, semi-military, neat, the walk of one used to discipline and responsibility. Measured but alert, self-possessed but responsive. He practised it in the garden and around the house (up and down the stairs like some trainee adjutant) until it satisfied him almost entirely. He decided to try it out on a tour of inspection, one which would take in all four groups of outhouses and which would involve a check of all the machinery (over a period of three weeks he had made an inventory of the contents of each outhouse, right down to pails and stray spanners).
He thought of the groups of outhouses as hamlets, each with its own character. The first unsettled him, with its broken pump, its dead echoes and its unseasonal chill. The second he found welcoming – probably because of the cat which hung about there, the bright red and green woodwork and the generous spaces between the machines. The third troubled him – the harvesters so close together, the ploughs pointing outwards like weapons: it was like a stockade, and, in it, William kept turning round, coughing into the back of his hand when he saw that there was nothing there. The fourth he found welcoming also: its steady silence, the way it seemed to be visited by gentle breezes, its impression of having been abandoned with some dignity years before the others. His tours of inspection were painstaking, but there were days when he couldn’t bring himself to visit the first hamlet at all and when he could only bear the third for a moment or two. He was sure that if he were to hear the sound of engines in the middle of the night, the clank and clatter of machinery, it would be from one or the other of these.
Trying out his new walk (believing that it was already giving him the measure of the alien hamlets), William approached the first hamlet, wisps of grass floating upwards on the thermal currents. He paused as he always did before entering the steading. And heard voices. To begin with he couldn’t locate them; they might have been distant but sounding close or close but not really sounding so. He couldn’t make out any words, but he had an impression of casualness. Then there was a clang of metal on metal and he knew that there were men in the yard. Stooping, he moved to a position from which he thought he could see without being seen.
They looked like farm labourers returned out of curiosity or nostalgia to their old place of work, but he knew that they were not. There were four of them, one standing, leaning against the pump, the others sitting. They had pulled a plough to the centre of the steading and were dismantling it. The one on his feet was smoking, and gave occasional advice. None of it was taken, but no one seemed to mind, neither the one standing nor those sitting. They made a practised foursome, their intent steady, their movements quiet and informed. So much so that William wondered if they might not have been sent out to service the machinery – a visit of which someone had failed to inform him. The placidity, the intentness: it wasn’t easy to hold to his initial sense that they were doing wrong.
Exaggerating his walk, he entered the steading, smiling. He hadn’t intended to smile and feared that it was the smile of one unused to command. He had also not intended to walk straight up to the young men but to address then – sharply, perhaps scathingly – from about fifteen yards. But, as though his new walk with its military overtones had given him the idea that they were soldiers lounging on duty, he found himself face to face with them. They didn’t appear threatened however, and, for some reason, he didn’t feel threatened either. He had expected defiance, abuse, but they were as practised at seeming innocent as they had been at dismantling the plough. He hadn’t spoken; he had forgotten what he had planned to say. Too bad. With movements which might have suggested capitulation but for their astonishing insouciance, the young men turned away, two shrugging their shoulders, one smiling, the fourth, the one who had been smoking, stubbing out his cigarette on the concrete yard with his foot. William followed, confounded. Who were they? They left the steading and started running. Twenty yards, fifty yards, a hundred yards, two hundred yards: black shapes in the heat, angular, mercurial, in and out of dance, vanishing, reappearing, finally vanishing. William was still shaking when he got back to the farmhouse, but he was pleased, for it was the healthy shaking of fear, not the ignominious trembling of debility. He made himself some tea, and then, briskly, like one who has been awaiting the opportunity for years, he rang George Weir to make his report.
George Weir took a dramatic view of the matter, arriving in the afternoon with his wife, Sheila, who was pregnant, and launching into an immediate search of the house and garden. Sheila, fanning herself with a paperback, looked on silently. William stood beside her, looking on also. After a few minutes, however, he realised that it wasn’t her husband she was regarding, but the landscape, the summer day (as if too used to these overreactions to pay any attention). So when George, unseen round a corner of the house, called out in his deep voice “Nothing!” or “Nothing here!” or “Not a trace!” it was impossible for William to respond. All he did was look to his left, at Sheila, as though for a cue. But – a musing and imperturbable profile – she gave him none.
“D’you mind if I sit down?” she asked.
“I’m sorry. Come inside. It must be particularly hot for you. How long to go?”
“Three weeks,” she replied, entering the house, still fanning herself. “Not that I’m impatient. I like being pregnant; I always feel very well.”
Sheila was small and dark, and moved easily in spite of her condition, wearing a white maternity dress and sandals, the sandals flapping on the bare floor of the kitchen. The kitchen seemed to amuse her; she stood in the middle of it, fanning herself, smiling. Respectfully almost, as for an opinion on which his sense of himself might depend, William waited behind her. She was wearing her hair up, but some strands of it, he noticed, had escaped from a comb at the back of her neck. As she fanned herself, regularly, rhythmically with the paperback – beads of sweat on her forehead, her nose and under her eyes – these strands or wisps moved lightly above the brown skin of her neck. A perfect brown. Admiring, William became aware of her scent, the first he had caught in months. It was a dry one, derived from musk, he supposed, and as he tried to convince himself that he was really smelling it, it filled the kitchen. Either you didn’t smell it at all or you were overwhelmed. Either you sensed nothing or too much. What did it mean – that he was damaged or erratically recovering? Set to sensationalise the world or receive it fairly? Sheila turned to him.
“But you’ve nothing here,” she laughed.
“To be frank,” he said quietly, “I’ve nothing much anywhere.”
“If you say so,” she said, with a studied absence of sympathy which yet struck him as a kind of sympathy. “What is George doing? Do you suppose he thinks they’ve planted bombs?”
“I’m afraid I’ve no idea what he’s doing.”
“Nor have I. Is there somewhere we can sit down?”
He had found two deckchairs in the garage and these he set up for George and Sheila opposite the broken leather armchair he sat in each evening. Legs apart, appearing (now that she was sitting) as though stranded by her huge belly, islanded, Sheila lay back, watching William. It was clear that she regarded him as a curiosity; she couldn’t conceal it. Not even by fanning herself. She lifted the paperback to do this, but, as if suddenly irritated by the artificiality of the movement, she dropped it again, her hand and the book trailing on the floor.
It was a book on breastfeeding, William saw, on the cover a breast and a feeding infant submerged together in a sea of pink. He couldn’t make out whether the breast was dominating the infant or the infant the breast, and cocked his head to see more clearly. Sheila lifted the book and flourished it.
“What do you do here? Read?”
“Not yet,” William said, aware that he wanted to be as scrupulous in his account of himself as he was in his tours of inspection. “I find concentration difficult still. But it’ll come back, I hope. I did read once though – quite a lot. So you can ask me about that, if you want, but whether I’ll remember much is a different matter.”
“So you have a condition too?” Sheila asked, laying a hand on her stomach.
“Yes; but as far from yours as I can imagine. Would you like some water?”
“It’s all right. I look more uncomfortable than I feel.”
George’s footsteps were heard outside – quick footsteps for so large a man.
He passed the lounge window, head bowed, and, calling out to them, came in by the side door. Not speaking, flustered and perspiring, he lowered himself into the deckchair beside his wife, who, not speaking either, turned to him casually, and regarded him as from some remote but peaceable plain of pregnancy. He too a curiosity to her, with an unnamed condition? He made an impatient gesture, fretful almost, as in defence of himself (evidently, not for the first time) against his wife’s calmness, the dead-ends and irrelevancies it apparently enabled her to see. She was smiling, fanning herself again, using the artificiality of the movement not just to expose her husband’s distraction but to try and subdue it.
“Well,” Sheila asked at last, “what have you got to report?”
“One can never be too sure,” George said heatedly. “When they’re around, they’re everywhere. They’re more cunning now than ever. You think they’re gone and they’re behind you. William says they didn’t say a word. Not a word! Gone are the days when they shouted, came at you with spanners. You’d hardly know it was them.”
“That’s right,” William agreed. “They could have been trainee mechanics, or unemployed mechanics.”
“It wouldn’t surprise me,” Sheila said. “It might be the latest youth opportunity scheme. Summer therapy for our lost young.”
“Good God!” George said.
There was a silence. Slowly, George’s urgent manner subsided; but he didn’t relax. Bleached browns and yellows as far as the eye could see; the dykes diminished by the haze, mere lines now; the hedges ragged and skeletal; no birds in the sky: for a moment he appeared weary before all this. But then, a different kind of excitement to that with which he had searched the garden, he became heated again. This time, he was like someone searching for a point of reference but failing to find it. Finding nothing instead; nothing at all.
“It’s not warfare, George,” Sheila said, taking his hand.
“Their appearances are still very intermittent. Take it easy. Come on.”
“You’re right, of course,” George answered. “It’s the heat: it always gets me.”
“It’s cool in here,” Sheila said.
William was struck by how easily she was able to calm George. She had calmed him, too. The scene in the steading of the first hamlet, at the time so ambiguous and unsettling, seemed merely odd now. Another curiosity.
“Have you any family, William?” Sheila asked.
Again he was aware of wanting to be as scrupulous in his reply as possible.
“I have two children, a son and a daughter. But my wife and I are divorced. I don’t see any of the family. Haven’t done for years. I’ve not been in a state to see them, really, so it’s not as bitter as you might think. “
“Parents still alive?” George asked.
“No. Both dead, father for years.”
He spoke then like one making a belated confession; challenging himself to see what his words really meant (wondering if he was succeeding); feeling his way into an abyss he had previously just skirted; taking more advantage of the forbearance of his audience than he thought he should (surprised that he had an audience at all); discovering himself to be on a kind of pilgrimage.
“My mother … murdered earlier this year. The spring. Yes, I’m afraid so. They didn’t find who did it. Or why. No clues at all. There are more of these cases than one thinks. Utterly … The files are closed. Rarely reopened. Naturally we don’t hear about it – bad for police reputation! But why look for the invisible? Coming and going like that. Astonishing! Took nothing. Did nothing – except that. I was suspected, of course. Why not? She wasn’t a victim kind of person, though. Wouldn’t have set herself up for the chop. I’m sure of it. Sure too she didn’t know him. Or her. Are most killers male? I suppose so. Good God! Sorry! Enough said. Anyway, she’s dead. Mother and father dead.”
He looked out of the window. No birds, no wind: one species of fact. His mother murdered: another. Had he grasped it? Taken it seriously enough? Instructed himself adequately in the meaning of such an end? On all counts he doubted himself. The line gave out where it should not have done – at the point of the knife. There he had denied her. Awed, he turned to the Weirs, whose kindly presence had enabled him to speak. They were staring at him.
“How terrible, William,” Sheila said. “You mustn’t know what to think.”
“Exactly so,” he replied with pain, sucking in his cheeks. “Exactly so. I’m sorry, in your condition …”
“Not at all,” Sheila said. “Don’t think of it.”
Still telling himself that he was holding back from drink, that when he got the half-bottle of whisky he would be as scrupulous with it as he was in his tours of inspection, he went that evening to the general store. It was a stifling evening and he walked slowly. He didn’t have a drink on the way back, holding the bottle as if it was for another, waiting until he was inside the farmhouse. In the kitchen, then, he poured himself a generous measure and drank it quickly. He poured himself another and went outside. Dogs barked in the distance (may even have been playing in the distance, for he was sure he could see quick dark shapes, coming and going, coming and going.) Purple clouds were banked in the west. He raised his glass to the flat land. But he could go no further. There had been too many savage mock toasts. Altogether too many. (Sandra Mclehose had drunk to the Pope, the Queen, Lord Byron, Henry VIII, those with too much money and those with no money at all.) He spilled the whisky on the ground and, coughing, embarrassed, went indoors. The rest of the half-bottle – as if it was a sick animal that had to be helped to relieve itself – he allowed to tip over in the sink.
April 9th, 1973
A man must have his hobbies. Without hobbies you shrink yearly. At least that is my opinion. Those who are claimed by their jobs or professions believe that they are rising when actually they are falling. Only their positions conceal the fact that, humanly, they are nonentities. For look at them in retirement: various kinds of nullity, of distemper. They are as powerless then as they were powerful when they worked. The captain of industry, left to himself at last, invariably falls to pieces. God save me from this. Walter Fairley, chairman of our firm, was dead after a year of retirement. Visiting him in hospital, I couldn’t believe he’d ever done anything. Such a spiritless death – not to mention such a premature one – it made me reconsider the life. Between the interstices of his achievements in educational publishing (several of them major, it has to be admitted) what did I glimpse – or believe I’d suspected at the time but not credited? (You don’t attend to the pupils contracting when the cigar is buoyant, the hands applauding.) A poorly fuelled soul hoping it wouldn’t be found out.
My main hobby is birdwatching. Here I extend myself to the utmost. When the light is perfect, allowing me to do justice to the character of the bird, its movements, plumage (how the wind on this can disclose colours not seen otherwise!), I am inspired. The natural world can seen to me contained in this one small part of it. (Sentimental to believe so? Perhaps.
Perhaps.) To appreciate one bird is to appreciate them all. To appreciate birds is, ironically, to appreciate their prey. And so on. I won’t say that I ever feel (this would be truly sentimental) that I end up by appreciating mankind – we are a special case – but at times I think I have glimpsed the possibility. On the shores of our afflicted world the waves of my sensibility have, perhaps, lapped tentatively.
I sit down on a hilltop to a lunch of beer and ham sandwiches. (I have discovered that if you wrap cans of beer in newspapers they stay cold.) Usually I make my own lunch, but today Margo did it. During our courtship she sometimes accompanied me on these trips, but it was clear that she was bored. It was like listening to music with someone who is indifferent to it. She would get me to make love to her in the wildest spots. All right in romantic theory, I suppose, but these spots are good for birds. Once I missed an eagle because of her. I’m sure I did. I’m sure it was an eagle. I seemed to glimpse it over my left shoulder, soaring from a crag, angrily majestic, disturbed, who knows, by Margo’s cries. It cast an enormous shadow on us and I can’t think what else could have done that.
So now I go birdwatching alone, no more required to explain to Margo what I hope to see, to give her the binoculars, to train them for her on the place where a kestrel or a dove or a raven briefly has its being, to hear her – oh God! – say that all she can see is a rock or a post or a piece of old clothing. The number of things she was able to see instead of birds was remarkable. In glades, for instance, she spotted refuse, on moorland the twisted remains of vehicles, in fields dead rabbits and dead sheep. And dead birds: these she was especially quick to see. She would not have the natural world pure for a moment. Her wish, it seemed, was to unsettle my reverence, to persuade me that the world soiled itself indiscriminately.
There are larks above me. I eat my lunch. The peace I long for is assured for today. It is harder to find however than it used to be, I cannot understand why. The possibility that one day it will fail me, and then fail me again, and then clearly be gone forever, horrifies me. Wordsworth it was who lost the art of knowing it and became sterile. What will I do if that happens to me?
A falcon hovers over the valley. I watch it through my binoculars, forgetting my lunch, forgetting everything, held entirely by this tawny idling in the mid air. Now it appears to be beginning its drop, now its rise, as if its plan is to persuade those below that it has no intentions, that its movements are all to do with wind currents. A capacity to deceive a part of its nature? I rather think so, having studied these birds for years. I read their minds well now. And so I can follow them with my binoculars, anticipating most of their feints and delays, switching suddenly to another part of the sky, there invariably to find the falcon arrived before me. There was a time when, mesmerised by their command of the air, by their monumental solitariness, I would lose them altogether. They would have dropped and I would be scanning an empty sky. Now I can sometimes follow them all the way down (we plunge together), exclaiming aloud in wonder, “Look at that!” or “There he goes!” To whom am I calling? Myself? Some ideal other? Is it not strange to cry out in the open spaces like this?
Now and then, of course, I am disturbed, It is often at about this time, three-thirty, and often by a couple such as this that I see approaching: merry, garrulous, about fifty, holding hands. They are not bird lovers and nor, from the awkwardness of their movements, do they appear to be walkers. I can never make out whether they are exceptional in having been as intimate as this all their lives or whether it is the intimacy of those recently married for the second or even the third time. I know what they are going to say; they never surprise me. (I know what hawks are going to do, more or less, but they always surprise me.) They address me with what I can only describe as a kind of ostentatious peacefulness. This doesn’t seem to have been inspired by the countryside, but to have arisen elsewhere: it is as though they have brought it to the countryside for the finishing touches. It is the other way round with me. Comparatively speaking, I am a mess at home and in the city. Why? Because I have built my life too much on my wit, my capacity to be the life and soul of even the most soulless parties. The clown dependable because of his thirst for clowning. But what I really want is to lose my wit, or, if not to lose it (for what else might go also?), to address it to other ends. What ends? It alarms me that I cannot say. I still – when listing the virtues – have no impression of what I am naming. It is like an anachronistic role call: the past may shift a little, saints and martyrs stepping forward to take their bow, but the present is stuck fast, redeemers tripped before they can go anywhere.
I stand with my binoculars half raised, but it doesn’t deter them: they chatter on about the heather and the fresh air. Eventually I excuse myself and move on. I find I am walking back to the car, tired suddenly, though not concerned to go home. I drive to an inn and sit at a table outside, drinking beer. I like the whiteness of this courtyard. It is strong, dominating even a party of cyclists. I will have a few beers and then go home. Margo has asked me not to be late because we are dining at the Macraes.