Chapter Ten

It was a dark and stormy afternoon. Howling like a demented banshee, shaking the bony, leafless trees on either side of the drive so violently you’d swear it was their skeletons you heard rattling, an icy wind surged around the four walls of ffolkes Manor. The temperature must have been close to zero.

Stepping out of the house with Tobermory plodding ponderously in his wake, the dog’s leash trailing the snow-blanketed gravel path behind him, the Colonel stopped dead on the doorstep even before he closed the front door. The sheer force of the wind had visibly taken him by surprise and he glanced up at the heavens as though wondering apprehensively whether this was such a good idea after all. Then, manfully, he buttoned his overcoat’s top button and pushed its collar up till it shielded his neck both front and back.

For the moment at least, the snow had stopped falling and now lay deep and even as far as the eye could see, in so far as, under the lowering firmament, the eye could see very much of anything at all. But what lay ahead couldn’t have been further from the quaint and powdery snow of Christmas cards – the snow as nature’s tinsel. There was a desert of snow stretching away in every direction, without the oasis, either near or far, of a smattering of house-lights, which would have intimated the existence of some living community, a village at the very least, to reassure you that you weren’t the sole survivor of a dead world.

How often, though, had the Colonel insisted that he preferred his seasons to be properly seasonal. ‘The four seasons,’ he never tired of saying, ‘are like the four courses of a meal. A diet of perpetual sunshine is like being served a meal of four puddings.’ And even now, on a day so god-forsaken he might have been forgiven for having had second thoughts about the wisdom of his walk, you could still make out on his face the masochistic satisfaction a real Englishman takes in a real English winter, the sort of winter which feels like it truly is winter, the sort of winter Dickens wrote about.

His coat buttoned right to the neck, his hairy woollen scarf wound tight around its collar, he slammed the front door of ffolkes Manor. That was another of the Colonel’s idiosyncrasies. You could always tell when it was he who had come in or gone out, since he was incapable of closing a door, any door, without slamming it. He even, nobody quite knew how, contrived to slam doors open. No matter how regularly Mary ffolkes would remind him that there wasn’t a single door in the house that couldn’t be pulled-to quietly, he never did remember not to slam it.

As he strode away down the drive, the Colonel turned a judgmental eye on his wife’s monkey-puzzle tree, which stood directly in front of the big bay kitchen window. It was a frippery which he gruffly pretended not to approve of but which he nevertheless couldn’t help interfering with and advising on and generally sticking his nose into as he would into everything else that happened in and around his own house. But the engulfing gloom was such that it must have been impossible for him to see how well it was holding its own against the ferocity of a West Country winter. So, with an almost audible sigh, he grasped his gnarled wooden stick, a genuine shepherd’s crook which he’d brought back with him from his American sojourn, whistled to Tobermory, who ambled up out of nowhere to join him, and set out on his constitutional across the moor.

Walking briskly to keep himself as warm as was humanly possible, if not so briskly as to risk leaving Tobermory behind – walking, so one imagined, his own memories along with the dog and maybe even using the dog as an excuse to permit him to walk those memories undetected – he cut an oddly vulnerable figure silhouetted against the white shadows of the desolate lunar landscape.

Every so often, coming to a brief standstill, he’d test the ground ahead of him with his stick to make sure he wasn’t unwittingly about to insert his foot into one of the tiny but treacherous gullies, now deceptively ironed out by the snow, with which, as he knew, the moors were pock-marked, for he was as familiar with them as with the back of his own hand. And every step he took was accompanied, mechanically, almost automatically, almost as though he himself were unaware of what he was doing, like a labourer whistling while he worked, by an affectionate halloo to Tobermory.

‘Come on, Tober!’ he’d cry out, without even troubling to turn his head, and ‘Here, boy!’ and ‘That’s it, try to keep up with me!’ and ‘Yes, yes, you’re a plucky old mutt, that you are!’ And because, apparently, not another denizen of Dartmoor, neither human nor animal, had ventured outdoors on such a forbidding Boxing Day, the distinctively squiggly pattern of his footprints stood out so vividly on the otherwise pristine terrain you could, in an absolutely literal sense, follow in his footsteps.

It was, after fifteen minutes or thereabouts at a steady pace, when he had left ffolkes Manor pretty far behind – the house-lights were still visible but they had become far too small, anonymous and untwinkly to be any longer describable as ‘warm’ – it was then that Tobermory started to appear vaguely restless.

Not that he failed to continue trudging along after the nice man who, he seemed to comprehend, was understudying his real master. From time to time, though, painfully cranking up his fossilised neck muscles, he would turn his head to sneak a look back over the terrain which they’d already covered. Yet he never once barked or even growled, and the Colonel, his breath as visible as cigar smoke, never once took notice of the creature’s growing unease.

Then, as unexpected as it was brief, a sickly mist-enhaloed sun appeared from behind a low-lying bank of clouds and the entire landscape momentarily softened. Just at that moment Tober turned again – and this time he did bark. His barking sounded, from a distance, like nothing so much as the phlegmy wheezing of an asthmatic old codger, but it was enough to stop the Colonel in his tracks.

Shielding his features from the wind, he looked back at the dog, whose vocal exertions were causing not only his tail but his whole ramshackle frame to wag.

‘What is it, Tober? You smell something, boy? A rabbit? A goat? Surely not?’