Lucifer Before Sunrise (23 page)

“Black marketeers,” he said. “Poachers. I hear they go round in cars.”

“Yes, sir?”

“It must have been between the time of Matt shutting and fastening the door last night, and going there in the morning,” said Lucy. “He came to tell me about it soon after you had left to go to Fenton.”

At the mention of Fenton, P.C. Bunnied’s faintly grinning gaze returned to Phillip’s face, while he continued to wait, pencil and notebook on the table before him.

“You seem amused. Why?”

“Perhaps you can answer me that, sir, better than I can tell you?”

“What does that mean?”

“Well, I expect that you will be able to tell me more about it than I can tell you. I am here at Mrs. Maddison’s request to investigate the matter of her missing cockerels.”

“Yes, I get that much, but I don’t understand what all this circumlocution is leading to.”

“I say, that’s a good word!” exclaimed P.C. Bunnied, admiringly. “Would you mind saying it again? I haven’t seen it in any of your books, so far as I’ve read. You won’t forget to put it in the next one what I told you, will you, sir, about the cuckoo singing all night?”

“I won’t forget. Now, what about the cockerels?”

“I fancy you’d be glad to see the last of Mrs. Maddison’s poultry on your Home Hills, sir? What with all the maggots on the dead hens supposed to be lying out there in the summer?”

“How did you hear about that?”

“I heard it, sir. Josiah Harn seemed to be concerned about your sheep, sir. Perhaps he thinks he’d do better if he had some of your land.”

“So you think I stole—or removed—the cockerels this morning, as part of my private war against the green Spanish fly, and its fascist collaborator, the blue bottle?”

“Very well, sir, since you have asked me, I suggest that these missing birds—you as a writer of words will note that I say the
missing
birds—are the property of Mrs. Maddison? Now, Christmas is approaching, the season for gifts to be made, or should I say, exchanged.”

“What is it you’re trying to say?”

“Only that I am called in to make enquiries about the cockerels missing from your premises. I receive a certain telephone message at eight fifteen ack emma. On receipt of the aforementioned
telephone
message, I inform my sergeant at Crabbe. Certain action was taken. You follow me, sir?”

“Like a will-o’-the-wisp, Mr. Bunnied.”

“Would you like a cup of tea?” suggested Lucy.

“Thank you all the same, but not on duty, ma’am. I won’t keep you from yours more than a minute. Referring back to the matter of the missing cockerels—again, you will no doubt have noticed, the phrase I use is the
missing
cockerels—would you like me to arrest the guilty party, sir?”

“Do you know who the thief is?”

“The sergeant and I have an idea. You will notice that it is only an idea. And now I won’t waste any more of your time, sir,” said P.C. Bunnied, as he put notebook and pencil in a
breast-pocket
.

Phillip’s head was aching, the zigzagging snake was flashing outside his left eye. He felt suddenly exhausted, but forced himself to say lightly, “Do speak frankly. Off the record, if you like.”

“You would like to know, sir? If you ask me, I will tell you. But remember, only if you really want me to tell you.”

“I do. Do you know who pinched our poultry?”

“I have an idea, sir, as I said just now, who removed
Mrs.
Maddison’s
cockerels.”

“Then
who
is it?”

“You’ve been to Fenton to-day, haven’t you, sir?”

“So you think I’m in the black market! Headline:
Farmer
Calls
in
Police
to
Investigate
Theft
.
Constable
Bunnied
Names
Farmer
Thief
. Seriously, do you
really
think I pinched my own cockerels?”

“
Mrs
.
Maddison’s cockerels, I think they are, sir? And if you will excuse my mentioning it, I think you have some points of difference, shall we say, between you and certain habituees of a local public house? Gould it be over payment, or non-payment, for certain goods not previously delivered?’

“Then you think I deal with those blackguards at the ‘Schooner’?”

“It is outside the scope of my duty to remark on your suggestion, sir. And furthermore, I would remind you that neither have I given any opinion as to who stole the cockerels, if they were stolen. Well, I must be going. Good-day, madam, good-day, sir, I wish
you a merry Christmas,” and so saying, P.C. Bunnied got up, straightened his tunic, took up his helmet and went out.

When he had gone Phillip asked Lucy who could have taken the birds. She said, “Anyway, someone who knew the yards well must have taken them.”

*

Some time later, Poppy told Phillip that the gang from Lowestoft that had set on him when he left ‘The Schooner’, were ‘going about saying’ that he had let them have the birds to avoid further ‘trouble’.

The pale moon of dawn hung in the western sky as he closed his cottage door behind him, and set out to feed the farm horses. It was too dark to see the pine trees on the hill-crest, he was late, he was hurrying.

His footfalls in the rimed grasses were the only sounds in a spectral world. He knew the way by hearing rather than by sight. For many mornings on his way to the farm buildings he had followed the path through the paddock to the bridge below which the river moved so slowly that its star-reflections scarcely quivered.

He opened the north stable door and, having carefully closed it, felt his way over the cobbles, hands extended before him, to the oat-bin. There he groped for the match-box, and with eyes tightly closed against the stab and flare of the match-flame held it to the wick of the candle stump in a tin biscuit box lying on its side. Every morning he dreaded that the match-box, so hard to come by, would be stolen. Every morning a wild feeling of relief came to him that it was still in the tin box. Matches were now almost unobtainable. Lucy was allowed by the village grocer only one box, containing forty matches, every week.

The bottom of the tin box was coagulated with grease, scattered with dead matches. Through clenched eyes he winced away from the stabbing power of the candle flame mounting until the
cavernous
stable seemed flooded with light, and the shapes of three
carthorses
loomed hugely near. Each one, as he perceived it, appearing to be partly nebulous in the zigzagging pain of his left eyeball.

The stable roof was old, with uneven pantiles, some glass tiles among them. Hearing the burring drone of an aircraft approaching he ran back and blew out the candle. He listened, while the horses remained part of the ammoniacal darkness.

Was it a Heinkel, or a Hudson of Coastal Command? He judged that the beat of the engines lacked the coarse burring exhaust of Daimler-Benz engines, and relit the candle. Its light was now less
unkind. The sooner the work was done the sooner he might lie down in the straw and rest. First, to water the horses, lest they get colic.

He re-opened the south stable door and fastened it back against the brick wall outside. The rusty water-tank was down a short slope grooved in chalk and flint by horses’ feet. It was beside the concrete road built there four years before. Rain fed it from the gutters of the cowhouse.

First Sheba the black mare was untied. Before she was in foal to Palgrave Viking she had sometimes been lively. Occasionally she had snapped. Once she had bitten his hand, leaving blue marks in the flesh. At morning stables she had been liable to run away, after prancing and slipping on the concrete, while Luke had stood there, wondering how he could get another job. He was anxious, too, lest she fall down and break a leg, and he would be faulted.

But now, visibly larger, Sheba was no longer what David called tisky.

Left alone, she lumbered out. When she came in for her feed in the manger he untied Beatrice, an aged mare, and Toby an even older gelding. While the two animals were drinking he lifted the sieve off its nail, shook some chaff into it, sifted it to remove the dust, added fifteen pounds of crushed oats scooped in the old aluminium saucepan from the rat-proof bin, threw in three double handfuls of damp sugar-beet pulp from the pail, another of sliced swede, and some withered apples. He tipped the mixture into the wooden feeding bins.

It was nearly half-past six. All British clocks which hadn’t stopped were now an hour in advance of Greenwich time, to gain a further hour of light from darkness. In ninety minutes the men would be arriving to take horses and tumbrils to the sugar-beet field.

When Beatrice lumbered in again he fastened the leather halter around her neck and began to groom her. She munched on, enjoying the strokes of the brush on her chronic-itching legs. The candle had been puffed out for economy, and because darkness was more friendly than light. As he worked he was conscious of the strokes becoming slower, of his arms and body and legs seeming to thicken. He leaned against her barrel for momentary rest.

*

What was the time? Could he have been asleep leaning against Beatrice? Chinks of light in the tiles above were visible.

A cock crowed in the distant High Barn yard.

Fear thrust through his heaviness. Then with relief he
remembered
that the horses had been fed.

He recognized the cock crowing—it was Hawkeye. The gallant bird had not been killed and eaten because it was supposed to be Billy’s pet. The pet flew at nearly everyone from behind and struck them with its spurs. It lived wild in the High Barn with a score or more of white pigeons. The pigeons had come from a stray pair of homers. They had settled there a year or more before. Cats had taken some. They nested up by the wall plate. Perhaps the original pair had belonged to Coastal Command—deserters from the war.

Hawkeye crowed again. Cows in the yards were lowing softly to their calves in boxes. He knew that Matt had arrived. The calves responded with loud blares. Matt was the middleman, as it were, feeding them with milk from the pail.

Pigs in the stall beside Beatrice were beginning to squeal. They had been weaned from the sow only a week before. They knew by the calves blaring that Matt had arrived. They were clean little beasts. From birth onwards they went as far as possible from the communal bed and playground to do their little jobs. As Phillip looked over the wooden partition, one had just returned and was trying to push itself into the serried elongation of pink and happy warmth. Querulous cries of protest greeted the cold outsider trying to muscle-in.

It stood there, fore-trotters between two pink backs, the image of sensitivity, until the mass-breathing was deep again; then gradually, warily, it pushed itself into a warm place. A smaller pig on the outside was squeezed out, and feeling the cold, gave a shriek of unhappiness. Grunts from the drowsy and comfortable ‘haves’ told the ‘have-not’ to keep quiet.

Beatrice munched on. The lowing of cattle ceased. The pigs lay quiet. Phillip’s desire to sleep returned irresistibly, and with eyes tightly closed and arms outstretched to find the way he moved to the heap of clean barley straw in the empty stall beside Toby, the chestnut gelding. Pushing himself backwards into the heap he turned over, pulled straw over legs against the frost and hid face in arms. He was supposed to be master, yet to oversleep, to be late at stables, was ever a dread accompanying what should have been the night’s rest. Lucy’s old alarm clock’s method of recording the passage of time while standing under his bed was such that his alarm or anxiety was chronic and the clock a mere clacking mechanism so independable that he had to make frequent
comparisons of its face by torch-light with the luminous hands of his wristlet watch. Thus in the dark flow of the winter night he would find that the clock had lost ten minutes, or gained half an hour: that having corrected the position of the hands he could sleep for another forty minutes, or four hours, before the need to go down to the stables. But thereafter he would awaken perhaps half a dozen times to reassure himself that he had not over-slept, for the hands of the clock might, or might not, be telling the truth. The cogs were badly worn.

The clock had been a present from Lucy’s Girl Guides when she married Phillip seventeen years before.

Phillip was pulling more straw on top of his legs when a roar was upon the stable building and he saw in the top of the half-open stable door a glowing orange light curving through the air, then another, another, another—rising over the dark fringe of pines on the hill-crest. The chatter of the guns was absorbed by the vaster roar of black wings, three pairs of black wings—one behind another —banking steeply to dive over Pewitts where the Searchlight Camp was sited. Red streaks like a Morse message came from the sky.

The German tracers seemed to have a flatter trajectory than those from the Lewis gun of the camp. Then the aircraft were gone, skimming the meadows and the marshes eastwards to the sea.

He went back to his hole in the straw. Soon near his head was a rustling and a faint
mee-ow
sounding near his ear. One of the stable cats had a litter of kittens under the manger, and when he lay down she crept to him for warmth and companionship. Purr-
purr-purr
against his heart. He loved her, loved her——

*

“Are you all right, Dad?” enquired a voice. “Cor, they were what you call tisky, weren’t they?”

“Hullo, Peter.”

Blessed moment—to hear that voice!

Collars, bridles, breechings to be lifted off creosoted pegs and put on; horses led out and down the slippery concrete slab, round the Corn Barn, and to the hovel rimed white under the pines and beeches rilling half the sky above the chalk quarry.

“Back, Toby my dear, back—back!”

Toby stood between the shafts of his tumbril, shafts so heavy to lift, higher, higher—“Oh, be quick, Peter! Hook the chain!”

After a rest, Beatrice was hooked into her shafts, and the horses were stumping past the gateway, heads down for the hard pull up the gulley.

They must have looked to be a couple of spectral vagabonds passing the sentry by the searchlight camp, farmer-carter wearing old bandless felt hat, buttonless tweed coat held together with binder twine, strips of hessian-sacking spiral’d on lower trouser’d legs against the mud of a midday thaw. Behind, leading second tumbril, followed carter’s lad, old flying helmet on head, greatcoat over thin, hand-me-down overalls covering war-time utility suit.

Arriving at the Nightcraft field, they stood still in the field grey with hoar-frost, awaiting the men.

There they waited, stamping feet, patting horses’ necks; waiting. The topping of the sugar-beet was ‘taken’ work, so Jack the
Jackdaw
,
Steve, and Powerful Dick were more or less their own masters.

When after half an hour no one had appeared, Phillip sent Peter down the hill to his breakfast, and tried to sleep standing between two unmoving horses.

The world was silent, the only movement that of frosty vapour arising from the horses, and a flight of gulls in formation passing darkly across the south-eastern sky. His watch said it was five minutes after eight o’clock.

After years of lifting, hauling, pitching, pulling, straining—hay, straw, roots, cornsacks, mortar, bricks, timber, plough, harrow, roll—the habit of immobility when resting came natural to both labouring animal and man. They shared the warmth of movement up the gulley, each breath adding to the fume hanging over the field.