Hindsight Page 12

  The foregoing does not mean that I was proposing to write a lot of formless guff for my own gratification. I was still intending to produce a detective story, and in the same mental breath as that in which I had decided to describe Wither’s death I had also decided that I would be able to use this as my crime in the novel. The moral repugnance of so doing seemed to vanish under the solvent of my own need as a writer. (I say ‘seemed to’ because this is not an argument to which I really subscribe. The artist is not let off anything for being an artist; he is under the same rules as the rest of us. But it is easy to persuade oneself otherwise while the fit is on one.)

  As happens at such moments, all sorts of details seemed to quiver and replace themselves in satisfactory patterns. Even by that afternoon I found it hard to attend to the committee-work (Dobbs had sent formal regrets of inability to attend, with no explanation) because I kept thinking of things that would work.

  For instance, Annette’s laughter at the idea that stags could be dangerous. I had met an official in Richmond Park who said that in his opinion the chief danger came from people attempting to feed the animals, when a suddenly raised antler might cause serious injury; and though all of the books I had procured mentioned the occasional fatality, one of them actually had a footnote saying that the only confirmed misadventure of this sort was a death in a private park in Devon during the war. I saw how I could actually use this, as well as a host of other things, many of which I had included by accident, simply because I remembered them as true.

  This process continued over several days, excitingly enough for me to be able to go back and work on the hitherto neglected plot-structure­. I knew from experience that it would do no harm to let the scenes that followed from the deer-cull simmer for a while, vivid though they had now become in my mind.

  While I was in the library getting the deer-books I had looked for a copy of Honey from the Rock, but all Steen’s books were out on loan except The Fanatics, so I took that. I am an intolerant reader of other people’s fiction, but I had what was for me a serious go at it, not giving up till page 100. The opening I thought truly impressive, despite my difficulty in preventing an image of Molly in childhood from inhabiting the shoes and clothes of the hero as he roamed the huge shuttered rooms with their blazing fires while the Atlantic gales threshed through the crenellations above. I was particularly struck by the one long paragraph about the billiard-room, the flames glinting off the teeth of the line of mounted lion-heads on the wall and the table sheeted as if for the autopsy of a giant. Of course Steen had put that in for the general symbolism of the book, but I wondered whether he had made it up or got it from something Molly had said. In a way it sounded more like Daisy’s line.

  If I were a more experienced novel-reader I might be able to say why the book then seemed to fall apart. There was something wrong, something I couldn’t put my finger on. Steen was primarily a writer of ideas, with the ability to find big concrete images to express them. But here something seemed continually to intrude between idea and image. The mind revolved its mighty cogs; the imaginative pistons thumped; but somehow they never meshed to produce an output of power. I was increasingly depressed by the huge creative energy being so misused, frustrated, dribbling away, wasting itself page by page, as a life can be frustrated and wasted day by day. From the feel of the pages, incidentally, many previous readers must have given up at about the same point I did.

  Dobbs’s letter took longer to come than usual and then alarmed me by being a package, but most of its contents, though manuscript, were in an only vaguely familiar hand. His covering letter was comparatively brief.

  Dear Rogers,

  My secretary has been doing a preliminary sort of the next Benison trunk and has come up with the enclosed. I have read them, I’m afraid, but don’t propose to make use of them. If I were writing a biography of MB (which God forbid) I would find them of definite value, but not irreplaceable. I tell you this to help you decide whether to keep or destroy them, or whatever. Naturally I would vote against destruction, but I have often felt that our cries of horror at the burning by relatives of a great man’s papers, though in one sense justified, show, a failure to grasp either the emotional values of a past period or the sense of shock which X may well feel on discovering that Y, so long lived with, loved, revered, was never really known.

  I take it that your conversation with Miss Penoyre comes into the class you call guess-memory; I suppose she might recall being in her pram, say aged four. Even that does not necessarily prove that she and MB were already members of the same household. She could well be the child of friends, taken on for some reason at a later date, perhaps as late as the war.

  I am of course wary of the way you ‘remember’ things when I ask you about them, and not till then. You may say that my question evoked the memory. The question arises from some fact in the real past, so a true memory must answer it. And I accept that there are several points where you have in effect answered questions which I had not yet asked.

  I hope you will forgive my saying that I still find your portrait of Richard Smith disappointing for my purposes. This is not criticism of your handling of him for your purposes. You produce a picture of a man whose physical appearance is clear enough, but of whose inward landscape I can get no glimpse. I take it that this was his creation, not merely yours, i.e., a man in armour, his visor down against the world. There is no reason why, supposing I were well enough, I should not get on and deal with Steen’s final years, the two last books, etc., leaving a few notional gaps in case anything new emerges about Richard Smith, but I find this very difficult to contemplate. It is ironic that I nearly decided not to trouble you in the first place about recollections of MB, and now I find you my life-line.

  Did you see another piece in the ST Arts pages about the Steen film last Sunday? I’d better warn you that you may be approached about this. I had one of the scriptwriters here last week and told him about your memories of MB; he became a little excited. They have the problem of having hired a major star to play the part, and then not being able to give her enough to do. Now there is talk of making the whole thing her memories, a flashback from later in life, and as one major thread of the book is Steen’s role as a disregarded prophet they might choose to set this during the Second World War. The idea of MB living in Orne’s conservatory has obvious cinematic possibilities. If they do approach you, make sure you get some money out of them.

  Returning to the idea of Smith as a man in armour. Do you think it possible that the rift with Steen hurt him as much as it hurt Steen? Can he still have been nursing some inward wound? Let me know.

  My own intestinal campaign appears to be still at the phoney-war stage.

  Yours ever,

  Simon Dobbs

  I was cheered by this letter—mainly of course by the possibility of getting a few pennies from heaven by way of film money—but also because it seemed to me to be written in a firmer hand than the previous one, and to have been composed at a sitting, though of course it was much shorter. I didn’t know what to say about the Captain’s ‘inward wound’; the thought had not struck me, though I agreed with Dobbs’s image of him as a man in armour; those deep-sunk eyes might well have been peering out at the world through a slit in some protective layer.

  I turned reluctantly to the letters from my father. There were nineteen of them, starting in 1917 and finishing in 1932. The first was a proposal of marriage and so were two of the later ones, the third proposal coming only a few months before my parents were married, indeed after I had imagined them to have become engaged. The general tone started extremely cheerful, witty and attractive. Even the declarations of love (the first two) were couched in a voice of amiable self-mockery. A darkening of tone, a note of time slipping away, abrading youth and ease, could be detected in the sequence before the first batch ended with the final proposal. There was a three-year gap, and then a stiff note of thanks for a glass spoon
sent as a christening present for me, which I don’t remember ever having seen; then another gap before the last two letters—one brief, dated late in 1931 and rather grimly apologising for a misunderstanding that seemed to have taken place in Paris a few days earlier. The nature of the incident was not deducible, but in the light of what Dobbs had told me about Molly perhaps guessable. Last of all came a long letter from South America, telling Molly how much she had meant to the writer and how often he thought of her. Though he had made a deliberate effort to recapture the champagne tone of earlier years—he wrote at length about remembered meetings and escapades—this seemed to me a very sad letter indeed. He told her of the plan to run an airline with my godfather (whom he simply called Ian, implying that Molly knew him too) but added something which my mother had never mentioned to me, and which I am not sure that she herself ever knew—that if the venture was a success she and I would go out and start a new life in South America. He made a joke about my becoming a little Spaniard. He died three days after the date on the letter.

  I suppose I had really been waiting for Dobbs, using the excuse of getting my neglected plot-work sorted out, before I tackled the scenes which my visit to Richmond had startled me into recollecting. Or perhaps I had relapsed a bit into my old reluctance to confront them. Now, with my father’s last letter to Molly echoing in my mind, I settled down to try and bring them out into daylight.

  11

  Two of the boys had already lost fathers during the fighting, both at Dunkirk. Three years later Greatrex was to be killed when his house on the Kent coast received a direct hit from a flying bomb. But the nearest St Aidan’s as a corporate entity came to the physical disgustingness of war was the deer-cull that took place on the last Saturday of October 1940.

  Breakfast began, as always, with the duty master saying grace. Then there was silence apart from the clicking of spoons on porridge bowls. You could get a drill-mark for even muttering to a neighbour to pass the milk. After five minutes The Man came in to read the fortnightly marks. Paul was still top of Schol, but by less than usual because he’d missed several batches of marks doing extra maths and classics. Higley was miles bottom of Schol and would be going back down to Midway. So on, through the school.

  Then came notices. Fish got his soccer cap, which allowed everyone to cheer for ten seconds. There was the team against St Dominic’s, but as it was an away match there was nothing about the drill for school support. Summertime was ending and the clocks would go back an hour at midnight. Sunday drills—Loader—second time this term. The Man looked up from his papers but did not leave.

  ‘Break will be in Big Space this morning,’ he said. ‘Nobody will go out before boys’ dinner, for any reason. The deer are being culled today. This means that men are coming to shoot some of them. It has to be done. There are sick and weakling animals which must be removed if the health of the herd is to be maintained, and perhaps some healthy ones so that numbers do not get out of hand. They will also try to deal with the stag which attacked Mr Floyd by the Temple. I have arranged that as far as possible they will clear the area around the school this morning, but they are governed to some extent by the movements of the deer and we may have to stay indoors this afternoon as well. In any case all you will probably hear is a few shots. The shooting will be done as humanely as possible. It is necessary for the sake of the deer themselves, and the meat will be a useful addition to the food resources of the country.

  ‘You may talk now.’

  The usual metallic clamour of voices crashed out. The Schol table was never as noisy as, say 2a, but this morning everyone was calling congratulations to Fish, possibly overdoing it out of an urge to ignore poor Higley, scarlet-faced still and just not weeping.

  ‘Look at Higger,’ muttered Dent.

  ‘A sick and weakling animal which must be removed if the health of Schol is to be maintained,’ said Paul. He wished he hadn’t, though Higley couldn’t have heard. His tongue was always saying things like that, because they felt as if they were going to sound amusing, and they didn’t. Dent frowned.

  ‘I say,’ said Twogood, ‘we might get venison for boys’ dinner tomorrow.’

  ‘Not for a week, glue-head,’ said Chinnock. ‘Don’t you know it’s got to hang.’

  ‘I think it’s horrible,’ said Higley suddenly. ‘Don’t you, Rogue?’

  ‘I suppose they’ve got to do it,’ said Paul. ‘I mean, all the meat we eat has been killed by someone.’

  ‘My aunt’s a vegetarian,’ said Twogood. ‘She lets her corgi eat meat but my poor old uncle is stuck with cheese. They get extra cheese on the ration, though.’

  Paul knew that Higley had only been making a fuss about the deer to hide the way he was almost weeping about going back down to Midway. There was a joke about the school cook having invented the vegetarian sausage; somebody made it again. Paul wondered why he wasn’t shocked by the idea of men coming to shoot the deer, and decided that it was all right because of their wildness. It was the price of wildness. They lived their own lives, and being hunted was part of that. It would have been different if they were tame, coming up to you to feed out of your hand. But they were better wild. They could use that lovely racing run to try and escape from the guns—that belonged. Death among the bracken belonged too.

  Nothing happened in the first half of the morning. Break in Big Space felt odd with the sun shining outside, not a cloud in the sky, the lake as still as a mirror; but it wasn’t boring because the comics came on Saturday. Captain Zoom was back, and old Vultz; stupid, but you couldn’t help reading them. Paul was doing so, perched sideways on one of the broad windowsills, when a van drove on to the gravel outside. ‘R. & R. Boyce,’ it said. ‘Corn Chandlers. Exeter.’ A fat man in green plus fours got out and opened the rear doors. Three more men emerged, carrying shot-guns. At this point Stocky came down the front steps and spoke to the man in green, who shouted at the driver and pointed. The van drove off towards the garage yard. As it went several more men with guns came in sight from that direction. They stood around on the gravel, pointing and arguing. One or two raised their guns to their shoulders and took imaginary aim down the slope. They looked a bit different from the shooting parties Paul had seen at Uncle Charles’s, most of them fairly old and some not wearing proper shooting clothes, but grey flannel bags with the trouser-ends tucked into their socks. Some wore gumboots, a few breeches and leather gaiters. One of the men in gaiters also wore a bowler hat. Some of the tweeds were pretty loud.

  ‘Hi, Dent,’ said Paul. ‘Come and look.’

  Dent strolled over and gazed out of the window.

  ‘Just a lot of tradesmen,’ he said. ‘Look at the way they’re fooling around with their guns.’

  ‘I suppose they’ll be using buckshot.’

  ‘Better had.’

  ‘They’re going to have to get jolly close.’

  (Paul hadn’t told anyone about his attempts to stalk the deer. Even Dent might be a prae next term, and then if Paul let on he’d pretty well have to tell The Man.)

  ‘I expect they’ll try and drive them,’ said Dent. ‘Like Dad does with the pheasants.’

  Next class was maths with Clumper Wither. Paul had completely forgotten that the deer-cull was happening when he heard the first shots, one bang followed by another. The squeak of Clumper’s chalk on the blackboard faltered and he looked towards the back window. Schol was at the southwest corner of Paddery on the second floor (there was really no first floor at this point because of the height of the ceiling in Big Space). The back window looked south over the lake and the side window out along West Drive. Clumper had started to write again when a whole volley of shots clattered out.

  ‘Oh cripes!’ said Chinnock. ‘Come and see.’

  You could, with Clumper. Chinnock had already twisted to kneel on the seat of his desk, his face close to the glass. His voice had expressed something more than ordinary lesson-interruptin
g interest. The other eight boys rushed to the back of the room. Paul, coming last, stood on the scat of what had been Higley’s desk to look out over their heads.

  More shots clattered as about fifty deer came streaming across the slope between the house and the lake, right to left, going faster than Paul had ever seen them move, the ones in front stretching into huge leaps as they went. Most of the others came on at the same marvellous pace, but there were knots and turbulences in the flow of movement, ugly disturbances in the beauty of wild speed, because …

  The groups separated, and Paul understood. What he had seen was a wave of deer overtaking the stragglers from the previous wave, the ones that had set off the first volley of shots. Flat out they could cross the open grass in a few seconds, and they could overtake the stragglers because these had been hit, and now, as the unwounded animals swept clear of them, were left in the open, labouring painfully on. A hind only twenty yards from the gravel had her back leg broken, trailing and bloody. The blood came from a wound the size of a saucer, low on her rump. She fell, tried to rise, got her fore-quarters up, heaved, but could not force her hind leg to stand and so fell again. At once she started heaving forward and up, not understanding that it was no use. She did it again and again, heave and collapse, heave and collapse, getting a few inches further from the guns after each ghastly effort. It was too painful to watch. Paul climbed forward and stood on the writing-surface of Chinnock’s desk to try and see where the men with guns were.

  They had stationed themselves along the edge of the open space, using the trunks of the trees to conceal themselves until the deer had been driven in range. They must have decided this was a good place, because the beaters could then funnel the deer between the lake and the garage block which stretched out west from the main building, but it meant that they couldn’t really fire until the deer were already past them, which is why so many animals were messily wounded in their hind legs. They went on shooting like this, though after the first two waves the driven deer must have known they were there and tried to swerve out from the funnel or break back between the beaters. Some of the shots seemed to be coming from along West Drive, which meant that there were guns out there to widen the mouth of the funnel. Two or three deer were in the lake, swimming for the far shore. A whole troop of them fled across the slope beyond. But small groups, or sometimes single animals, still came hurtling out from under the trees, pursued by shots; almost always the rhythm of limbs would falter and at least one of the group would drop behind, moving now at a stumble, but usually strong enough to reach the left-hand trees.