Tivington Nott (6 page)

There he goes. Squirting grease again!

Alsop mopes along behind him, watching the stuff oozing out of the hot bearings and dropping in black sluggish blobs on to the stubble. He knows in his heart of hearts how badly the Tiger wants the horse and it’s nearly killing him that he can’t get any leverage on it. ‘They don’t look as though they really
need
greasing,’ he says in the end.

The Tiger’s hard at it, bum in the air and elbows going; ‘They need it!’ he growls, moving briskly to the next nipple and pumping.

So Alsop stands. Frustrated. Staring at the broad back of the Tiger ahead of him. No longer following.

He must feel me watching him because he looks across, directly at me. Shrugs and gives his head a shake, as much as to say, What can I do with a man like this?

I look away and drink some tea. It’s a little late for him to be asking questions like that. I could have told him long ago. If he were smart he wouldn’t be here. He’d be at home in Australia.

I’m enjoying watching the Tiger exulting. Digging himself confidently into this one! He should have got to know Kabara while he had the chance. But he let that slip and it’s not going to be as easy now as he thinks. When it’s too late it’s going to hit him that he was right about one thing anyway; the horse may have the blood to give him superior speed and stamina, but it would take an extra-special horseman to make an Exmoor deer-hunter out of Kabara.

It’s a dream that’s drawing him in now; seeing himself right up with the leaders, in at the death, going the distance in the winter with the hinds, when things get really tough, when only the fanatics, the silent obsessed hunters go out on the moor and pursue their crazy passions. Worse than gamblers! The old Tiger’s been seduced by a dream: the greatest hunting farmer Exmoor’s ever seen! And now here he is hooking himself firmly on getting a bargain out of Alsop’s weakness. Sidetracked. Too smart for himself. He’s going to have that stallion for a hunter! Well, let’s see if he can coax Kabara across the bogs and channels of the Chains without coming to grief! Let him wade in! We’ll see what happens. He’s going to wish he’d forgotten all about Kabara and stuck to his chestnut nags.

But I shall say nothing. He is supposed to be the master of his situation.

A day off tomorrow. Everyone is going to the Winsford meet. So Morris and his wife are out there in the kitchen with the stove hot and a midweek bottle of stout between them. Something special. Nattering. The place is being torn apart by an Atlantic storm that came roaring in over Dunkery an hour ago and it’s still pounding and ripping at this prefabricated junk heap. Blasting its way across the empty moor! My room’s the place to be! Sitting on my bed with my legs drawn up and the eiderdown round my shoulders. Trying to read Ewart’s
Elementary Botany
, and being distracted.

Boom! Crash! Smashing into the ridge! Inches away! It’s a blitzkrieg! We’re being pounded and deafened by the lightning explosions. Our ridge cops it. It’s an attraction. A natural conductor. Bearing the full brunt of the ocean-bred storm. There’s a piece of tin going smash, smash, smash on the roof but I can only just hear it for the wind.

But we haven’t blown away yet!

And here comes the cold air. Whoosh! Like a big door opening and driving through the cracks and joints. There goes the last of the warm air!

The Tiger’ll be over there all nicely tucked in with Roly-Poly, gloating on his good fortune. Every last scrap of his corn packed in under the tin. Safe and sweet. Acres of the stuff round here are being blasted into the mud tonight.

Well, too bad . . .

I keep looking at this same page without really taking it in:
GYMNOSPERMS
—Pines, Firs, Larches, Yews, & Cycads. Synopsis of Description & Classification. The more important natural orders indigenous to Britain.
That’s Ewart setting things up to be as exact as it is possible to be; scientific in other words. Leaving nothing to chance, hearsay or tradition. But checking it all out. Which is just what I want. I can do without guesses. Folklore, chit-chat, rumours, gossip. They’ve got all that stuff at their fingertips round here.

They know it, I don’t.

It’s imparted by word of mouth and sign language. You can never be quite sure what they mean. Nothing clear-cut and final about their answers. Everything’s got to be spiced and packed and knotted up with ambiguities before they’ll let you have it. And even then they grudge it. Ask them a straight question and they’ll spit and cough and look over their shoulder, then say something you can’t understand and move away. After he’d put the scythe into Solomon’s the other day and we were all sitting under the hedge having a cup of tea, I asked Sam Jones how he’d cured the ringworm on the calves last year without ever coming near them. He breathed and wheezed and stared around, then mumbled, ‘It’s in the book,’ before getting up and shifting himself.

Trade secrets I suppose.

I need opinion supported by evidence. Facts! And that’s where my little stack of books comes in. They are a support to my thinking. And tonight I was going to read up on the larches. Find out something about those trees where the nott lives. But I’m not making much headway. And it’s not only the storm that’s preventing me.

The other big distraction is this: when I came into my room this evening, after our usual stewed steak and onions, potatoes, cauliflower and half a steamed pudding each, ready to set myself up for the night, I discovered that my resident rat had a companion. This gave me an unpleasant shock. It spoiled my mood. Botany for me is deciphering a code. I need all my wits for it if I’m not to miss the very point of significance that I’m searching for.

I had to kill the pair of them.

It’s still preoccupying me.

A resident rat might sound ridiculous. Without explanation that’s true of a lot of things.

When I first came here I couldn’t work out for a while why Morris and his wife had put me in this room rather than in the room they use themselves. This bed that I’m sitting on is something special. It’s not a bed you could go and buy in a shop. Someone has gone out of their way to build it. Not Morris. I’ve never asked him, but I feel sure Morris would not have constructed this bed. Her father maybe. As a dowry. Couldn’t afford anything else so made something. A work of skill and love. No holds barred. Really go to town and make a bed like nobody’s got. He would have had to bring the timber for it in here. There’s no way you’d get this bed out of the room without ripping out a wall. Solid walnut. A local tree. There’s walnut trees all over the place round here. Stolen, I imagine. No one’s going to give that timber away. The square end-posts are nine inches through and nearly as tall as me! It’s not a rich person’s bed. It’s a giant labourer’s dream bed. Square, heavy and solidly made. Cut, sawed and morticed. Nothing turned, dovetailed or inlaid. No ‘lines’. The headboard is one solid plank two inches thick and four feet deep. Finished with an adze. The whole thing rubbed with a hot mixture of boiled linseed oil and beeswax. As soon as I open the door in the evening, linseed. And no springs or wires. Cross joists and planks!

And her mother, I suppose, made the furnishings for it. The mattress is stuffed with half a ton of down. It’s deep and warm and it smells of comfort. Then there’s the bolster, the four pillows and this eiderdown. All huge and all filled with down.

My bed is a place of luxury.

There’s nothing else like it in this house.

They have an ordinary double bed with a wire spring. Something for two bodies to lie on. Side by side. But not this one. This bed is my home roost. When my time’s my own and I’m not out exploring the moor or checking on the nott, this is where I retreat. Everything on to the bed! Tip out my whole box of books. Spread my papers and rubbish around and wrap myself in the eiderdown. And if nothing out of the ordinary occurs I’m settled in for a good time.

Giggling and leaping around the other side of the wall used to go on nearly every night. Difficult to ignore. Lately it’s more likely to be Morris coughing. Then murmuring to each other in the middle of the night and creaking and moving around. Restless. Morris not able to sleep. Then lighting up a smoke and coughing some more. Her telling him to get back into the bed. He’s worked out, that’s the trouble.

They’re not having the fun they once had. Not as calm as he used to be. Irritable with the Tiger a couple of times this week. The truth is, he’s not well.

One thing I’ve never heard them do in there, however, is kill a rat. They never get rats in their room. For myself I reached an accommodation with the rats the day I decided extermination was not the only way to deal with them. That arrangement has only just broken down tonight.

It’s not just this bed that’s all right with me. It’s been the room too. I’ve always trusted what goes on in here. For example, I don’t use the savings bank in the village shop. That way I also avoid having to put up with the tribal reactions to me of the rosy old fogies who inhabit the place. I keep my money in this chest of drawers here. Fifty-seven pounds so far. Pressed under my clean breeches.

It’s a good feeling to have that hidden pile.

Another backstop.

Necessity. A pair of new boots once a year and a book every now and then, when I get to the market in Taunton with Tiger. That’s all I spend money on. I don’t take extended holidays, just the one-day kind. No one else round here takes extended holidays either. But I am expected to. ‘So I suppose you’ll be going off, then? For a week or so?’ The Tiger starts enquiring hopefully as soon as Christmas gets close. Trying to coax me into it. And Morris and his wife, though they don’t say anything, would be glad if I did. They don’t like having me hanging around at Christmas time. It makes them uneasy. They think I haven’t noticed, but the truth is they would like to get rid of me. Have a break from me for once. Forget I exist.

Once the general work comes to a stop things change for me. I don’t fit and it’s obvious. There’s no covering it up by keeping busy. I’m a stranger in the middle of what’s going on. An irritation. Irksome. Spoiling everybody’s fun.

Morris may be from Wiltshire but he’s still the son of Tiger’s sister. He is related. And he married a local. All this doesn’t make
him
a local, but it gets him a place in the goings-on. Intimacies and celebrations. Ritual!

And that’s what I don’t have and can’t fake.

Christmas leaves me sticking up on my own in the middle of nowhere. They’re surprised when they come across me. You can almost hear them saying it: ‘What’s
he
doing here?’ People I’ve never seen before milling around in the kitchen wearing their Sunday best. Pushing. Yelling. Touching each other. Embracing and swaying, all talking at once. Keyed up and excited. Ready for something out of the ordinary. Snatching the first drink and downing it. In the mood for fun. They’re not sure what they might get around to doing before it’s over and this half scares them. Especially the men. The smoke and the beer and the noise!

A chance to go crazy.

I can’t hide in here all the time. I have to eat and that’s when I get stuck with them. I put up with it till one of them starts showing aggression: ‘What’s the matter with this one? Frightened his face’ll crack if he smiles?’ What can I say to that stuff? It embarrasses Morris. He’s wishing I wasn’t there. Hoping I’m not going to answer back and let one thing lead to another. Hoping things will go off well. No trouble. No hitches.

So I head off.

Out on to the moor. Down the combes and into the woods. Roaming or sitting still somewhere. In the frost with the naked trees against the moon. Smelling the cold clean earth. Giving my brain a chance to clear.

They feel better when they know I’m not here. Relieved. After all, who wants a stone-face sitting in the circle of good-timers? They want to zip along in their lingo without having me or the boss or anyone else checking on them. It’s as simple as that. I hold them up. Keep the brakes on their excitement. They want to blast ahead and dribble and yell and do whatever comes into their heads. A waste of good beer otherwise!

Out in the wilderness with the Australians! That’s where I am at Christmas time. Where Alsop and his missus are all the year round. Foreigners! The three of us! Except
he’s
forever trying to find ways of winkling himself into the goings-on. She doesn’t seem to care one way or the other. We never see her. Or maybe she’s more like me. But he’d love to be a part of it. Before the accident he’d stand around praising things when there was nothing to be said. Pretending to be impressed with everything he saw. Too loud. Being met with silence. But really just like me at party time. In the way!

And he still hasn’t totally learned his lesson. I was watching him from the window here only this evening, before the storm broke. He came poking up along the road from Gaudon Manor. Lanky, alone as always, and bent by his pain. No hat. He stopped outside the gate here and stood jabbing the ground with his stick. Turning stones and whatever. The way he’s seen Tiger do it. Except when the Tiger jabs this soil he’s jabbing his own bones. Hardly knows he’s doing it. Listening for the sounds of winter coming or something. You wouldn’t know. Talking to his ancestors maybe. Nothing he’d admit to anyway.

It’s no good Alsop trying stunts like that.

He’s out there by the gate, hanging around for a minute or two, hoping Morris is going to see him and yell out a greeting. I could see he almost decided at one stage to come in and knock on the door. Hungry for a bit of company. But there’s no place for him here. He heads off eventually, towards the pub at Handycross. Going that way. Probably nagged at home. Rather different from all the leaping and prancing he used to go on with. He’s getting a lift to the meet with Morris in the morning. That should raise a few eyebrows among the locals. And might even cause some tension here too. Morris’s wife’s not going to feel like taking a back seat to the major. But he must reckon he’s got to be there in person to see the Tiger in action on Kabara. Not ready to trust any second-hand accounts of the run. Wanting ammunition in favour of the horse so he can argue his case.