Hindsight Page 11

  Well, he told himself again, he had done it now. He drew a long breath, let it out, and looked the forbidden territory over.

  The day had lost the winter-warning smell which had been in the air that morning. The sun had gone too, leaving a soft grey day full of autumn odours. He was standing at the edge of a cupped plateau ringed on its further edge, about half a mile away, by the ditch and wall, with a belt of trees beyond them. There were no trees inside this bit of park and their absence made the space seem wilder and more desolate than other areas he had explored. He could see two groups of deer.

  One lot was some three hundred yards away to his right, about a dozen grazing hinds, a few young stags, and a large male with branching antlers who stood on the skyline with its back to the others and from time to time stretched out its thick neck and bellowed. There was no cover in that direction, no hope of a stalk.

  The second group was grazing on the further rise of the cup, quite close to the wall. That was much more promising. If he struck off slantwise between the two groups Paul could reach the ditch without getting too near to either of them, and then work his way back behind the bank and worm over the top. He started at once, but had not gone fifty yards when a fresh chance came up. The group he was after also had a boss-stag, which had been doing the same trick of bellowing at nothing but now moved stiffly away from its wives and began to roar even louder and more frequently. It was clear that it was roaring at something now, and looking along the obvious line Paul saw a third large stag approaching from the right, parallel to the wall. This animal now began to roar as it advanced. There was going to be a fight, something much too interesting to miss. Paul stopped to watch.

  Now the boss-stag stood and waited, roaring its warning. The other stag came stiffly on, halting sometimes to roar back, until they faced each other a few feet apart. They lowered their antlers and waggled their heads from side to side, as if waiting for the right moment to charge. Beyond them the rest of the group grazed steadily, paying no attention at all. Paul realised that the two stags were too occupied with each other to notice him, and at the same time the commotion they were making provided him with a sort of cover from the rest of the herd. He gave up the idea of a flanking movement and walked directly forward.

  The stags, in fact, didn’t charge, but closed almost gingerly, adjusting their stance until their antlers locked. It was like a game with rules. ‘The fight cannot commence until both contestants are comfortable.’ Then they just shoved. There was a bit of sideways movement, but more as though they were searching for a better grip than trying to slip a horn-point past the other’s guard. It wasn’t nearly as exciting as Paul had hoped, but clumsy and a bit ridiculous.

  He was near enough to hear the click and clack of antlers when the intruding stag lost its footing on one foreleg. The other bore down at once, forcing it to its knees and trying to bucket it backwards across the grass while it could neither get up nor disengage. Its neck twisted, and then it wrenched its antlers free, half-rolled away, got up and backed off. The other stag made no effort to attack it while it was down, but bellowed a warning as it rose. It shook its antlers, wheeled to one side and trotted off, unflurried. The winner roared again and started back towards its hinds.

  At this point one of the hinds noticed Paul. He must have been about eighty yards from the main group, but only forty or so from the stag. The hind’s head came up, its ears twitched and fixed (they always heard you before they saw you) and then the whole group was staring. The stag’s head swung round too. Its antlers lowered. For a panic instant Paul thought it was going to charge. He stood still and raised his gun two-handed like a club. The stag stared at him a moment longer, then turned and followed its hinds, who were already racing away towards the skyline.

  Paul stood, letting the fright die out of him. The stag had not looked at all clumsy or ridiculous when the big head had lowered in warning and the prongs of the antlers had faced directly towards him. Stupid, he told himself. Bad luck, too. But somehow, inwardly, he felt that the moment had been sent, was a sort of warning, because he was here at all.

  As his shivers lessened he heard a change in the general sound of the afternoon, a distant steady murmur swelling up where before there had been silence. Of course, it was the school cheering. The silence had been half time, and now the match had begun again. Twenty-five minutes to go. He had better start back. The best way would be to circle to the left below the ridge, then down across the path to the gardens and up to the Temple, down again to East Drive and up through the trees to the latrines. (There were proper lavs in the school by now, but the latrines had been kept for boys who might want to ‘go round the corner’ during a game.) He’d have to leave his gun among the trees and come back for it later, so that it would look as if he was simply rejoining the spectators after a visit to the latrines.

  He started off at the pace he thought of as ‘the long, swinging stride of a man born to the hills’, leaning well forward and using his gun as a staff. He now felt a need to reach the match well before it ended. Somehow that brief threat from the stag had spoilt the afternoon, making him for the moment just a frightened child, and not the self-reliant lone adventurer. He realised he had not really enjoyed himself. He had not been free. The mixture of excitement and dread, which twenty minutes ago had promised so much, seemed to have reacted and become a new emotional compound, almost self-disgust. It was as though he had let The Man down by rule-breaking, and also let Molly down by not enjoying the process. To yell for the school from the touch-line might help him get the taste of all that out of his mouth.

  He had just re-crossed the ridge when he saw two figures coming out of the chestnut grove on the path towards the gardens. Luckily there was a small hollow close by, where a hole had once been dug or a tree torn up by its roots. He dropped into this and peered over the rim. It was Annette and the Captain, walking slowly along the path. Annette seemed upset. Indeed, though he was too far off to be sure, Paul thought she was crying. At one point she left the path in a staggering, clumsy run, halted and made a wide movement with her arms, a bit like one of Daisy’s wilder gestures, hopeless and bewildered. The Captain followed her and put his arm round her shoulder before leading her back to the path. He seemed to be doing most of the talking. They went slowly, taking ages to reach the iron gate into the wood.

  Though part of Paul’s mind still buzzed with the fret of hurry, another part tried to make sense of what he saw. Suppose the school joke was true that Mr Wither was in love with Miss Penoyre, it would explain why Molly teased him in the particular way she did, and why Annette minded so much. Suppose that morning, while Paul had been ringing the bell, the Captain had taken her to one side and told her that he would help … she’d looked surprised and pleased … and now something must have gone wrong …

  The moment it was safe Paul rose and free-wheeled down the slope, then fell back into his hillman’s stride for the narrow, twisting track up to the Temple. He was still thinking about Annette and Clumper. He didn’t particularly want to, but he couldn’t help it. He felt he’d had enough of people being in love, at home, Mummy and Duncan, still whenever they thought no one was looking touching and stroking each other. You’d have thought, now that they’d had their baby … And now it was starting up here, at Paddery, with two other people he’d have liked to be ordinary friends with. And Annette was so young and plain, and Clumper was a cripple. How could they …

  Paul had not been consciously trying to move stealthily, but the turf of the track was springy and soft, and a light breeze had got up to rustle the bracken, and the cheering from the match was nearer now; whatever the reason, just this once the deer did not hear him coming.

  The last few yards up to the rim of the area below the Temple were steep, with step-like ridges in the turf. Paul came striding up these, eyes down to pick his footholds, and was out on the level before he was aware of the animals or they of him. The first he knew was a violen
t scatter of movement, that bellowing roar, and the inrush of the big stag.

  He sprang back, caught a heel and sprawled. Somehow his gun was still in his hand and he slashed feebly sideways with it, so that it clattered against the oncoming antlers. The stag halted. Paul wriggled his knees under him and rose, still prodding forward with the gun, but the moment he began to back away the stag made another rush. He swung wildly and the gun banged against a prong, making his palms sting and almost loosing his hold, but stopping the stag again. He had to fend off two more such rushes as he backed across the arena before he felt beneath his heel the mound on which the Temple stood. He turned and scrambled up it, dodged behind a pillar and stood gasping. The stag had not followed him. It bellowed once more, shook its antlers from side to side and loped away after its hinds. Paul leaned shuddering against the bird-streaked statue. He felt sick with fright. His mind kept recreating for him the image of prongs, of black snarling lips, froth-streaked fur, a brown eye wide and crazy with rage. Though he was completely unhurt he felt as though he had been appallingly punished. It took him some while to pull himself together enough to run down the crunching gravel of the path to East Drive and up through the trees beyond. He reached the match just as it was ending, but nobody noticed his flush and panting because they were all so excited. It had, apparently, been a terrific match and St Aidan’s had won 3-2.

  Three or four days later Scammell came up to Paul while he was queuing in the kitchen passage for evening cocoa.

  ‘Change of rules, praes’ privs,’ he said, snipping the words off in imitation of the officer who’d come and talked to the school a fortnight before about Dunkirk. ‘Till end of term that temple thing out of bounds. Mustn’t go within a hundred yards of any deer. They’re out of bounds too.’

  ‘Bound to be,’ said Paul. ‘Get anywhere near one and out it bounds.’

  ‘Serious,’ said Scammell. ‘The Man says any nonsense and he’ll keep praes inside Painted Trees. Told us at Praes’ Moot just now. Said I was to see you knew.’

  ‘What does?’ said Dent ma.

  ‘It’s because of the rut. It makes them dangerous.’

  ‘What’s rut?’ said Dent, because it amused him to watch Scammell blush.

  ‘One of them had a go at Mr Floyd,’ said Scammell. ‘He was lucky to come out of it alive.’

  Of course over the next two weeks when you met Mr Floyd you asked him to tell you about his adventure with the stag. Before he got tired of it he evolved a graphic story, full of scything antlers and snorting nostrils. It must have been the same animal that had attacked Paul, because Mr Floyd had gone to the Temple to take some measurements; he was planning to do scenes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the arena next summer. The place had been empty when he started but the stag had turned up and charged at him. He told his tale slowly, with pauses for meditative puffs on his pipe. Details accumulated as the days went by, until it all became a bit of a joke and Paul was glad that he had been forced to keep his own adventure secret. But waking in the morning and hearing the distant roaring of the stags (which most of the boys had previously assumed to be only the way in which Devonshire cattle mooed) one still could experience a mild thrill at the idea of sharing the landscape with dangerous animals.

  Curiously, the only person who from the first had not been impressed by Mr Floyd’s story was Annette Penoyre. That very first Sunday, only a couple of days after the attack, she walked back to the school with Paul after tea in the conservatory. It would soon be dusk. They came out into the park and saw a group of hinds and a big stag close to the path. Paul hesitated.

  ‘Come on,’ she said.

  ‘But Mr Floyd …’

  She laughed.

  ‘Just wave your arms at them and they’ll run away,’ she said.

  She did, and they did.

  10

  How smells ambush one! The fact is notorious, but each time it happens it is a fresh shock. It must be the smell itself, not merely the thought of it, or reading or writing or talking about it. Will age ever undo the spell? Suppose on my death-bed I were presented with one of my personal trigger-odours …

  I went to Richmond Park to look at red deer. I had no expectation of being able to smell them.

  Though I had done what I intended, writing for Dobbs about the Captain and for myself about my encounter with the stag at the Temple, the stuff had not ‘come’ in the way I had hoped. As may be apparent to the careful reader (supposing I have one) I had had to fetch the material just presented with some labour. And yet it was all, I believed, true, even to the forgotten connection between the episodes. As evidence of this I may say that after writing it I had looked up the poem about Philip’s defeat, and though the Greek meant even less to me now than it had when I was twelve, it was there. I don’t believe I had ever thought about it in the interim. Its existence gave me confidence in the factuality of the Captain having set it to me that particular afternoon, and my then having gone on to talk to him about Molly and Daisy. But though I had got the stuff down, I was not happy about the feel of it. I thought it rang hollow. And worse, no fresh streams of memory were released.

  No doubt my subconscious reason for going to Richmond was the hope that a more direct stimulus, a stronger dose of the deer-drug, would do the trick; at a rational level it was a simple piece of research; I had to go to London anyway, to attend another of those writers’ committees, and passed the gates of Richmond Park. I had recently got three books about deer out of the library, but as well as reading them it seemed sense to fix an image of the animals clear in my eye and mind.

  It was a lovely clear morning in mid-October and thus in mid-rut, and there the stags were, roaring; they were smaller of course than in my mind’s eye, but still formidable to a grown man. Richmond is far tamer and the deer far more used to humans than was the case with Paddery, especially in wartime. It seemed unreal to be able to walk along a path within ten yards of a browsing stag and watch it raise its head to decide about me before going back to feeding, unalarmed. If after an hour of stalking at Paddery I had been able to get within that distance I would have been thrilled; and the animal the moment it had spotted me would have raced away with that peculiar gallop that seems to flow into great bounds over non-existent obstacles. I only saw this delightful spectacle once at Richmond, when some idiots let their dog yelp around after a group of deer.

  The smell leapt at me when there wasn’t a deer in sight. I was wandering under a stand of oaks when I caught the whiff, faint, and gone in a couple of seconds, though I walked around under the trees for a while, sniffing like a maniac. I cannot now describe it. Less musty than fox-smell, perhaps. Sweetish?

  But I know it was the odour of a stag in rut because of what it did to me.

  Re-reading, as I eventually had to do, all that I had written of my novel it became clear to me that I had really been writing it—had felt the initial excitement I had, the need—because subconsciously I had decided that the time had come on my inward calendar when I must face up to all that had happened to me on the night I had found Mr Wither’s body. Perhaps the reader has perceived the odd reference to, and then shying away from, this event. As I’ve said, I had always known it had happened and had believed myself indifferent to it; indeed, the coroner at the inquest congratulated me on my cool-headedness. It never struck me until that morning in Richmond Park that perhaps the incident had been lying there, shut away in an attic of my mind, quietly infecting my whole life.

  Why, for instance, had I forgotten to mention the smell of the animal that had attacked me below the Temple? It was more than a detail—it was central to the experience. Mr Floyd had noticed it too, and always put in a phrase about ‘the bestial reek of the creature’. I was still apparently able to make the association between my adventure and my childhood distrust and bewilderment about adult sexuality, but this link seems to have been routed—as with brain-damaged patients—through unlike
ly channels in my mind. The natural channel, the one using my physical awareness of the stag’s own potent sexuality, I had blanked right out. (I wonder whether my dislike of the kind of writer and man exemplified by Steen is another aspect of this. Also whether my own kind of writing—a mannered style employed in the invention of fantastical deaths—may not be my way of sublimating the object in the attic. I don’t know. I don’t think I wish to know.)

  Until that morning I had told myself it would be obscene, or at least a kind of posthumous bad manners, for me to use the real details of Mr Wither’s death in a novel. I was going to blow him up in his MG during an air raid on Exeter, the murderer faking one of those random bombs that were a feature of the war. A land-girl on one of my uncle’s farms had been killed in just this manner while walking across an empty field. I had, I believed, been looking forward to the big scene of the raid, with Paul fire-watching on the roof at Paddery. But by the time I reached my committee that morning I discovered that for the past ten weeks my subconscious had been working with surprising persistence towards a different end.

  And that discovery, together with the visit to Richmond, was going to do the trick. Not one, but three linked episodes had wavered up to the surface of the pool of memory. First the deer-cull, then Daisy going mad, then finding Mr Wither. They belonged to each other, not only in time-sequence and cause, but with a potent emotional linkage, so that I knew I could not write about finding the body without having cleared the other two out of the way.