FOUR

Too Too Solid Flesh

Inside his trap Magnus was in quite a state. During the night he had fallen once more into the watering-can, washing off most of the lime but becoming as a result extremely muddy as he rampaged around the earthen floor looking for a way of escape. His tousled coat clogged with soil, he now looked more like a half-grown sewer-rat than a baby mouse. He was also very angry.

In the middle of the morning the woman came down the garden path to open the sliding door a little, for the November weather was unusually mild, and the humidity in the greenhouse, she knew, would do her plants no good. No sooner had she put a carpet-slippered foot inside than, to her horror, it was pounced upon by a fierce animal, the like of which she had never seen before, which gave a high-pitched growl and sank its teeth into her ankle.

‘Nasty! Nasty!’ cried Magnus indistinctly through clenched jaws, ‘Bite you!’ before a frantic kick sent him flying, and his chatters of rage mingled with the frightened cries of his victim as she hastily limped back up the path to fetch her husband. But when they returned a few moments later, each armed with a stout stick, there was no sign of her attacker. Only the pile of half-eaten dahlia bulbs told its own tale.

‘Must have been a rat,’ said the man.

‘Not like any rat I ever saw.’

‘Fetch the cat. He might follow it.’

But like all its kind the cat had no desire to do what humans wished it to, and only stalked away again, tail twitching.

Magnus meantime had found his way back to the pigsty. His anger had been replaced by his other chief emotion, greed. He had also acquired a new word to supplement his meagre vocabulary.

‘Nice,’ murmured Magnus, as he laid into a Porker Pill with a noise like splintering bones. ‘Nice. Nice.’

Inside the cottage Madeleine and Marcus Aurelius were breakfasting, with distinct lack of appetite.

‘To think,’ said Madeleine in a broken voice, ‘yesterday he was here with us. And now . . .’

‘There, there, Maddie my dear,’ said Marcus. ‘There will be others.’

‘But not like him.’

‘True,’ said Marcus. ‘Very true.’ He paused reflectively. ‘Very true indeed,’ he said.

‘Oh, my poor baby . . .’

‘Magnus,’ put in Marcus absently.

‘My poor Magnus. There’ll never be another like him, never!’

‘Highly improbable.’

‘Oh, Markie!’ cried Madeleine. ‘A mouse’s life is not a happy one!’ Marcus Aurelius looked about to dispute this sweeping statement but before he could begin, Madeleine went on, ‘Maybe it’s a good thing, him going from this vale of tears so young. Who knows what he might have been spared. If ’twasn’t the cat, it mighta bin poison. Or traps. And that reminds me, Markie, the trapping season’s started, they put ’em out last night, did you notice?’

‘To be honest, my dear, no. I came across a most interesting cutting from the Bristol Evening Post, on the manufacture of Cheddar cheese, and –’

‘Marcus Aurelius!’ said Madeleine. ‘You mean you sat there calmly reading? After what happened last night? How could you?’

‘The traps, Maddie dear,’ said Marcus hastily. ‘Where are they?’

‘Usual places,’ said Madeleine. ‘Under the sink. Larder floor. Airing cupboard. And usual bait – bacon rind. Got no imagination, they haven’t.’

‘Fortunately, my dear,’ said Marcus, ‘only unusually foolish mice become involved with such contraptions.’

‘Or unusually short-sighted ones,’ said Madeleine, and flounced out of the nest.

What with grief for her lost son and irritation with her insensitive husband she was halfway down the garden path, opposite the greenhouse, before she came to her senses. A shiver of fear ran through her as she forced herself to peer hastily through the glass but no mouthing ghost stood imploringly within. Then the cat-flap in the back door squeaked on its hinges and Madeleine fled for the pigsty and the happiest moment of her little life so far. For there, beneath the staging, stood a very substantial, very dirty, very beloved figure.

‘Mummy! Nice Mummy!’ cried Magnus loudly. ‘More! More!’

Madeleine spent the rest of the day there, dividing her time between fetching down stocks of Porker Pills, cleaning up her muddied child, and simply lying and feasting her eyes upon him in a daze of happiness. She was quite unable to understand how he had escaped what had seemed certain death, since Magnus’s replies to all her questioning consisted only of ‘Nasty!’ ‘Nice,’ or ‘Bite you!’ with an occasional ‘More!’ thrown in, but she did not care. All that mattered was that he was there, twice as large as life.

Four weeks passed, during which time Magnus doubled not only his age but his size. What a limitless diet of Pennyfeather’s Patent Porker Pills would have done to a pig Heaven only knows, but there was no doubt what it was doing to a mouse. Magnus was by now almost the size of a rat and still going strong. Indeed one day an old yellow-toothed bare-tailed buck-rat had come upon Magnus unexpectedly under the pigsty flooring and had fled from the strange young giant with a squeal of terror.

As for Madeleine, she needed to look lively whenever she heard the warning cry of ‘Nice Mummy!’ For Magnus was an affectionate and demonstrative child, and nimble footwork was needed if she were not to be crushed beneath the weight of his nuzzling love.

Fortunately it was a mild winter, as she had firmly decided to stay down at the summer home until he should be fully grown. ‘Whatever that may mean,’ she said to herself with a worried shake of the head. The night cold did not trouble her, since sleeping beside Magnus kept her warm as toast. She slept very lightly, however, fearing to be overlaid.

Only once had Marcus Aurelius come back down to the pigsty, on the evening of that first day after the episode with the cat. Madeleine had come rushing in to his fireside nest with the news that the supposed ghost was in fact solid flesh. ‘Too too solid!’ Marcus had cried plaintively, recoiling hastily before his son’s caresses.

Something told Madeleine that her husband’s principal emotion, should he now set eyes upon the two-month-old Magnus, would not be, as hers was, pride, but horror. She left him to his reading.

Meanwhile she busied herself with Magnus’s education. The day’s supply of Porker Pills prepared, the little mother would sit before her mighty child and teach him the rules that govern the lives of mice, the rules of survival. She had been taught them in the nest by her mother and so back through hundreds of generations, so that they were couched in old-fashioned language.

Some were in the form of proverbs. ‘Look thou before thou leapest,’ ‘A squeak in time saveth nine,’ or ‘Through whatsoever hole thy whiskers pass, there will thy body also.’ Magnus made little response to such maxims, merely staring stolidly at Madeleine, his jaws champing ceaselessly. He much preferred a series of commandments which his mother would repeat to him each morning, all beginning with the words ‘Beware thou the . . .’

The list was a long one: ‘Beware thou the trap . . . the poison bait . . . the man . . . the dog . . . the owl . . . the weasel,’ and so on. During this recitation Magnus would become increasingly excited, ears pricked, eyes snapping, until at the last commandment, ‘Beware thou the cat,’ he would give a great shout of ‘Nasty!’

Madeleine tried hard to teach him to repeat these lessons after her, but, though his vocabulary was certainly increasing, he could still only put two words together at any one time. The commonest two were ‘Pill, Mummy!’ and the day came when Madeleine, rootling at the hole in the bottom of the packet, realized that there were very few of Mr Pennyfeather’s products left.

That night she made the dangerous trip back to the cottage to consult her learned husband on the matter.

‘What shall us do, Markie?’ she cried agitatedly. ‘I shall never manage to find enough food for our Magnus once they pills is gone. You’ll have to come down and help.’

Marcus Aurelius controlled his immediate reaction, which was to refuse point blank to do any such thing. He had no desire to leave the safety and comfort of his den and face danger and hardship in order to fill the huge belly of this demanding cuckoo-child. Nearly three months old, he thought angrily, and still relying on his mother for everything. Why, at that age I was completely self-sufficient, knew my way about the entire college from buttery to refectory. On the other hand, he did not wish his wife to be exposed to further risk, for he knew she would continue to try to find food whether he helped or no. He combed his whiskers thoughtfully.

‘Well, Maddie my dear,’ he said at last, ‘it appears to me that there is only one answer.’

‘What’s that then?’

‘Emigration.’

‘Emi-what?’

‘Emigration, my dear. The boy, er, Magnus, must leave home, seek his fortune, go out into the wide world – possibly to the farm across the road, there should be plenty to eat there.’

‘Marcus . . . Aurelius!’

‘Yes, dear?’

‘Are you serious?’

‘Serious, dear?’

‘Are you seriously telling me that we should kick out our only child –’

‘Hardly our only child, dear,’ interrupted Marcus.

‘– to be eaten by farm cats, chewed up by farm dogs, hit on the head by farm workers, squashed flat by farm tractors?’

‘It is to be hoped that none of these fates will befall him.’

‘Marcus . . . Aurelius!’

‘Yes, dear?’

‘Are you saying he’s got to go?’

‘Yes, dear.’

‘Over my dead body!’

‘That’s what it will be over, Maddie,’ said Marcus earnestly, ‘if he stays. And mine too, if you insist. The boy is obviously too big to get back into the house, the pills are almost finished, just think of the constant dangers to which you . . . to which we shall be exposed while attempting to satisfy his appetite. The only possible way in which he might stay with us, within the confines of the garden, that is, would depend upon the discovery of an alternative source of supply of suitable food near at hand.’

Madeleine let out a sudden squeak. ‘The rabbit!’ she cried excitedly.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘The rabbit! That lives in that big hutch. In the opposite corner from the pigsty. Beyond the plum trees.’

‘Oh come, Maddie my dear,’ said Marcus in a patient tone of voice. ‘Granted that mice are omnivorous, I take leave to doubt that Magnus could kill and eat a full-grown rabbit.’

‘No, not eat the rabbit, Markie,’ cried Madeleine impatiently. ‘Eat the rabbit’s food! They buys it for him, lovely stuff it is, oats and bran and flaked maize and little special pellets. Of course, of course, that’s the answer.’

Marcus Aurelius heaved an inward sigh of relief. The problem seemed to be solved, and he was anxious to return to his reading. Madeleine had interrupted him in the middle of an absorbing scrap torn from the Farmer & Stockbreeder.

‘Come on then, Markie!’

‘Come on?’

‘Down to the rabbit hutch. We must see about getting Magnus’s breakfast, there’s no time to waste.’

‘But –’

‘Marcus Aurelius!’

So out into the night they went.

As dawn broke they were crouched side by side underneath an old table on which stood the rabbit hutch. They had passed the rest of the night in the pigsty, and Marcus Aurelius was nursing his bruises, for his son had stepped on him. ‘Nice Daddy!’ Magnus had roared at the sight of him and, rushing affectionately forward, had crushed his short-sighted little sire beneath his huge feet.

In addition both were shivering, with cold, and with fear, for this was a comparatively unknown part of the garden, and the grey light showed strange shapes all about.

At that moment the dawn wind brought clearly to their ears a plaintive cry from the pigsty, for the last of Pennyfeather’s Patent Porker Pills was eaten.

‘More, Mummy!’ yelled Magnus. ‘More! More!’

‘Come on then, Markie,’ said Madeleine grimly, and she ran up the table leg to the rabbit hutch.