The Adventures of God in His Search for the Black Girl (11 page)

‘Hullo, Snuck. Haven’t seen you for ages.’

A week later, Charlie and Gerald went out together beyond the wire and brought in a wounded man who had been
groaning
. Both behaved with extreme courage and were wounded themselves.

The man they rescued turned out to be a German, and he died anyway.

Charlie recovered from his wound at base hospital, Gerald in an officers’ home. They were sent back to different sectors of the line. Gerald was awarded the Military Cross, Charlie (because he wasn’t an officer) the Military Medal.

Market Frumlington took several years to subscribe the cost of a war memorial, perhaps because many of its inhabitants were out of work.

It was not until a cold summer day in 1926 that old Mrs Grimple-Tones, recently widowed and herself veiled, unveiled a large, dark grey, grainy angel.

Beside her stood her surviving son, Hugh.

A bishop (whom Mrs Grimple-Tones had known when he was plain Mr Chaunt, the curate) read the ceremony of
dedication
, and a military bugler sounded the Last Post.

When the crowd had left, Effie led Charlie’s son towards the plinth.

Charlie’s wife Lucy had left their son with Effie when she went to work in a munitions factory. After Charlie’s death, Effie heard no more from her.

Charlie’s son read aloud the legend incised on the granite: ‘In Memory of the Officers and Men of Market Frumlington who Gave their Lives in the Great War, 1914–1918.’

Beneath the heading, three names were cut in large letters filled in with gold. Among them was Lieut. G. de B.
Grimple-Tones
, M.C.

Then a line was incised across the surface. Beneath that there were three columns of names in smaller letters and
without
gold.

From near the bottom of the second column Charlie’s son read aloud ‘C. Snuck,’ and commented ‘That’s my dad.’

‘Call him your daddy, darling,’ Effie said. But though she could not prevent herself from correcting him, she was proud of the child’s excellent elocution, which he had learnt from her.

She took his hand to lead him away. She was due to go out later in the afternoon to clean the municipal offices – casual work that came her way only when the offices had to be
prepared
for an evening ‘function’.

‘Wait a minute, granny,’ the child said.

She waited while he silently read the legend again.

‘Why does it say “Officers and Men”, granny?’

‘Because those are the two sorts of soldier, of course.’

‘
Aren’t
officers men, then?’

‘What a silly question,’ Effie said, feeling disappointed; she had hoped the child was going to be clever.

‘I expect you’d like to look round the place and get the feel of things again.’

Hugh Grimple-Tones made that suggestion because he, Hugh, always felt disorientated when his son Derek arrived home for the vacation.

Understanding this, Derek obligingly took a walk round ‘the place’ – the Porringers gardens and estate, which covered most of the hills overlooking Market Frumlington. Some of the more ‘composed’ or ‘picturesque’ panoramas on the Porringers land were in fact what presented themselves to Derek’s mind’s eye whenever people spoke of England.

At dinner Hugh asked his son:

‘Well, what do you and your contemporaries feel about the great question of the day?’

‘This Hitler business? O, I don’t think that’ll come to much. Some of my friends are doing some flying: with the University club, you know, at the weekends. They say you never know when it might be needed. I was thinking I might join them next term – but more for the fun of it.’

‘Well, be careful,’ Hugh said. ‘Of accidents, I mean – not Hitler. I think he’ll blow himself out. No, I meant: what did
your friends feel about the Abdication?’

‘O that,’ Derek said. ‘Sad business.’

‘Very sad,’ said Hugh. ‘I’ve always had a soft spot for him, actually. Actually, I’ve always thought he looks a bit like your uncle Gerald. Though Gerald was much bigger, of course. Still: it was inevitable. We couldn’t have the king married to a divorcée. Not given that the king is head of the church of England.’

‘Funny you should say that,’ Derek said. ‘When a friend of mine said that, another friend of mine said the church of England wouldn’t have existed but for the fact that Henry VIII was a divorcé.’

‘That was quite different,’ said Hugh. ‘Still: your friend must be quick-witted to have thought of it.’

Charlie Snuck’s son Gerald (he hated his name, which, his grandmother told him just before she died, had been expressly wished on him by the father he couldn’t remember) went directly, and at the earliest permissible age, from grammar school into the regular air force.

His reasons were that he couldn’t afford to stay on at school and that, unless he stayed on, he would have no hope of a decent job.

He was fully trained by the time the war began and Derek Grimple-Tones joined up.

By 1940 they were flying Hurricanes from the same base. Indeed, Gerry Snuck often flew as Derek’s wing man.

Gerry Snuck was occasionally bothered by a ghostly feeling of having met the name Grimple-Tones somewhere before. Derek Grimple-Tones thought nothing about Gerry Snuck except that he was a reliable and brave wing man. Because they messed separately, they never talked intimately enough to discover that they came from the same part of England.

In 1941 Gerry converted to night fighters. Derek did a tour as an instructor and then trained to become a controller.

Derek left the air force when the war ended, as Wing
Commander
Grimple-Tones, D.F.C. and bar. Gerry left it two years later, as Sergeant Pilot Snuck, D.F.M. and bar.

The name Snuck meant nothing to Hugh Grimple-Tones, either. He had no notion that the man whose case he was
considering
was a war-time comrade of his son’s and had in fact served under Derek’s command. Had he known, Hugh would have honourably opted out of the case. He set great value on his impartiality and often pointed out that one of the
justifications
for maintaining a monied class in a democratic age was that certain important duties to society could be performed only by people who were immune to financial temptation.

Looking at the extravagantly moustached and unfashionably short-haired man in front of him, Hugh reflected how much more neatly Derek had made the transition into middle age and the postwar world.

Derek was, indeed, doing very well as a merchant banker. It was he who had introduced his father to the firm which had negotiated to buy the Porringers estate for development.

The prosecution represented that the accused man was
cunning
and imitative, adept at aping the mannerisms and the very speech of what might be termed the officer class. It had been easy for Snuck to present himself, convincingly, as an
ex-officer
and thereby to prevail upon casual acquaintances to entrust to him, in the belief that he was an officer and a
gentleman
, sums of money on which he assured them of a profitable return. And in fact he did attempt to set up various business enterprises. However, he had no experience in the handling of capital. His schemes came to nothing. No money found its way back to the trusting people who had believed his plausible account of himself as an officer widely experienced in
administration
and the management of personnel.

The defence represented that Snuck had an excellent – and perfectly genuine – war record.

The magistrates withdrew to confer. While their coffee was served they could not discuss the case. Hugh reflected on his own strange tendency to apologise to Derek for selling the Porringers land, which he knew Derek loved – a tendency that was strange because the sale was really Derek’s doing. Derek had answered firmly if frivolously (Hugh still shared and
appreciated
his son’s sense of humour) that the sale was the family
contribution to modernising Britain. Hugh had more seriously rejoined that, in making sure it was office blocks that were built on the land, they were saving Market Frumlington from being distorted into something ugly with an ugly name like Market Frumlington New Town or Market Frumlington
Overspill
Area.

The magistrates drank their coffee, arrived at their decision and returned to the court room, where it was the task of Hugh Grimple-Tones, as the senior among them, to announce it.

The magistrates did, he said, take into account Snuck’s war record. However, by pretending to what amounted to a false war record, he had in a sense dishonoured his genuine one – and, indeed, that of all the young men who had
honorably
served their country in time of war. Snuck’s offence was the mean and nasty one of deceit practised for financial gain. The magistrates had decided to impose the maximum sentence open to them – not vindictively but because there was far too much these days of the spirit which despised honest work and wanted to get something for nothing.

After dinner that night, Hugh Grimple-Tones signed the deed of sale in the library at Porringers. The housekeeper was called in to witness his signature.

Standing beside the desk, Derek rolled the rocking-horse blotter over the two signatures as deftly as if he had been standing by at an international treaty-making.

When the housekeeper had been excused, Hugh said:

‘It’s the end of an era, Derek.’

‘Then look on it as the start of a new one,’ Derek said
cheerfully
. ‘I’ve got lots of ideas about what you should put the money into.’

‘I’m lucky to have an expert to advise me.’

‘In these inflationary days’, Derek told his father, ‘no one can afford to sneeze at a capital sum like that – and least of all when you can get it without lifting a finger.’

‘Three wishes?’ said the little girl. ‘Delightful, and just what I need. I’ve had an exceptionally trying afternoon.’

‘Quite so,’ said the djinnee. ‘Well, I’ll leave my lamp by your bedside, and when you’ve made up your mind what to request for your first wish you can summon me by—’

‘I’d like my first wish straight away.’

The djinnee bowed from his fluent waist. ‘Yours to command.’

‘I wish for a whole suitcase-full of chocolate peppermint creams.’

‘Wish no sooner expressed than fulfilled.’ Temporarily lengthening his insubstantial right arm, the djinnee pulled out from beneath the bed a large and handsome suitcase made of soft, shiny grey plastic.

‘Mmm,’ said the little girl. Squatting onto the floor beside the suitcase, she slipped the catches, pushed up the lid and began to eat. ‘Mmm’, she said again, munching. ‘Not too minty, yet not too sweet. A very good recipe, this.’

‘Naturally,’ said the djinnee.

‘Supernaturally,’ said the little girl. ‘I prefer these even to the very good ones I had this afternoon, most of which Nanny made me hand round to what she will call my little friends. I take it’ (putting another sweet in her mouth, the little girl looked up sideways at the djinnee) ‘
you
’re not substantial enough to be interested in sweets?’

‘Quite so.’

‘I also take it I can keep the suitcase to use as a suitcase afterwards? It’s rather a smart one, I think.’

‘The suitcase was named in your wish as expressed, so it’s yours.’

‘Good,’ said the little girl, munching away. ‘Well, leave your lamp on my bedside table. I’ll rub the handle when I’m ready to wish again.’

‘At your command,’ said the djinnee, and vanished.

He manifested himself again an hour later. ‘I obey your summons. Are you ready to express your second wish?’

The little girl didn’t look up. She was still sitting on the floor, her head now drooped and swaying above the empty suitcase. ‘I wish to feel better.’

‘No sooner expressed than fulfilled.’

‘That’s a relief,’ said the little girl, rising with spirit to her feet. ‘I was feeling so awful I could scarcely stretch out my hand to rub your lamp.’

‘Quite so,’ said the djinnee. ‘Well, now you are restored, you will no doubt want to consider very carefully what use to make of your last wish. My lamp is still there—’

‘I’ll have my third wish now.’

‘Are you sure? Shouldn’t you—’

‘I wish that from now on all the wishes I express may be fulfilled.’

‘You are an over-sophisticated little brat,’ said the djinnee.

‘Quite so,’ said the little girl.

‘So now I have to dance attendance on you indefinitely’, the djinnee said, his tall, thin non-substance drooping. ‘I can only hope you’ll die young and release me.’

‘You don’t get out of it as easily as that. I express a wish to be immortal.’

‘Eternity,’ said the djinnee, and groaned. ‘Eternity in thrall to a brat.’

‘I might improve as I grow up,’ said the little girl
consolingly
. ‘Nanny sometimes says I might.’

‘A person who is such an accomplished tease at the age of eight shews no prospects for improvement.’

‘It’s not I who am the tease,’ said the little girl coolly. ‘Has it never occurred to you it’s mental cruelty to offer someone just three wishes and no more?’

‘It’s traditional.’

‘What a poor argument. I shall go to bed now. I’ll summon you if I think of any wishes during the night. Before you vanish, refill my suitcase with chocolate peppermint creams made to the same excellent recipe but with a tasteless medicine against dyspepsia thrown in.’

The djinnee nodded dejectedly towards the suitcase. It was full again.

‘Good,’ said the little girl, taking a peppermint cream.

‘Why couldn’t you have let me know my doom straight away?’ asked the djinnee. ‘Why didn’t you express the wish to have all your wishes fulfilled as your first wish, you little tease?’

‘For a supernatural being you’re very silly,’ the little girl replied. ‘If I’d done that, I’d have wasted two perfectly good wishes.’

‘Brat.’

‘Vanish.’

Having grown up among them, the woodcutter's son was not sentimental about the deer. When accidents befell them in the forest, he rescued if he could, and if not, wasted no time in regret. He did not disguise from himself that they were, on the whole, sensitive animals rather than intelligent ones. But neither did he disguise from himself that each was an
individual
personality. The terms on which he mixed with them were those of personal acquaintance and, with a few, personal friendship.

His only attempt to be hypocritical with himself was made in his early childhood, and even so it was not the deer but humans he was attempting to prettify. For at first he declined to believe that the hunters who once a year came in hosts to the forest actually killed the deer. He watched his father, the taciturn old woodcutter, help the hunters drag the corpses into their shooting brakes. But until he was about eight the
woodcutter
's son managed to believe that the arrival of the hunters and the high casualty rate among the deer were merely
coincidental
facts, and that the townsmen who temporarily invaded the forest came merely to collect accidental corpses in the same way that he himself, ever since he could remember, had collected sets of antlers and sometimes even skulls which he came upon in the forest.

When he was eight, however, he was already handy enough and sturdy enough to be bidden help his father during the hunting season. At dawn he had to stand in the clearing around the woodcutter's cabin, greet the drivers of the first vans to arrive, and beckon them into parking places. At sunset he had to help his father haul the heavy bodies along the forest paths and hump them up into the appropriate van. The boy could no longer avoid noticing that the wounds were
gunshot
wounds and admitting to himself that shot does not fly in forests by accident.

As he grew stronger and his father feebler, he had to
undertake
more and more of the work. When he was 13 he found himself dragging the corpse of a deer which had been his
particular
friend. Bright red, watery blood stood like raindrops in the nostrils of a nose which had often nuzzled his hand.

About the same time the boy realised that his father took – though the son never witnessed the act of taking – large tips from the hunters in return for his son's labour and the use of the cabin as a hunting lodge. Without being told, he
understood
that his father's earnings from cutting wood were tiny and that the hunting season was his only big chance.

The boy came to spend quite half the year in acute but unexpressed dread of the approaching season. When the season was over, he would run for relief and bitter solace into the deepest thickets, where he would find such deer as survived huddled in terror. He would try to comfort himself by
resolutely
considering only the fortunate fact that this or that individual had been spared. The deer, having always known him, let him move among them like one of themselves. They even seemed to take a certain calm from his sad caresses. He supposed that they must smell the blood of their species on his hands. Yet as a result of their stupidity or innocence they never, for all their timid startings at every noise on the breeze, flinched from him, even when he had to kill deer whom the hunters had left mortally wounded.

He grew up, becoming twice as tall and heavy as his father. Even so, he never discussed the hunting season with his father. The old man's grumpiness held a forbidding authority, which, his son noticed, even the hunters respected. They hated the old man but paid him largely. They found the son, with his more willing manners and more educated, fluent speech, charming – and gave him nothing but orders.

Sometimes the son wondered if the old man had retreated into grumpiness because he was fleeing a bad conscience.

Suddenly the old man was seized with a pain around the heart and died. It happened just after the close of the hunting season, which made the son wonder whether his father's heart had in fact been finally broken by the massacre. He found
himself
mourning more deeply than he had expected.

When he came back from the funeral in the town, he
changed out of his smart suit and made at once for the depths of the forest, unthinkingly wanting to be among the deer. They seemed to respond in the same unthinking way to his grief, rubbing up against him like snowdrifts or, in brushing past, delivering him a velour slap from their sides. Taking comfort from them, he remembered an accident he had read about in a newspaper years earlier and perhaps stored in his head for this moment. Weaving thoughts around it, he began to
elaborate
his plans, which he would have a whole year to bring to perfection, for the next hunting season.

The season opened to an exhilarating frosty morning. While the sky was still the colour of a duck's egg, the woodcutter's son was up and out, stamping his feet and blowing vaporously into his hands in the clearing, his head as alert as a deer's to the first sound of a car engine.

When it came, he ran out along the path, papery ice on thin puddles crackling beneath his boots, to accost the first hunter.

The driving-seat window was rolled down and puffs of
congealed
breath exchanged as the woodcutter's son delivered uncharacteristically hearty greetings and gave the news of his father's death with inappropriate cheerfulness, explaining that he had taken over the business. After last year's record bag, he told the hunter, there would be a run of hunters on the forest and competition for the quarry would be strong.
Moreover
, he said, the deer, warned by experience, had grown
cunning
. They would not be shot without the help of a ruse, which he would disclose exclusively to a favoured hunter. Then he waited winningly beside the car door. A bank note was passed to him through the window. Hastily, he bade the hunter drive his car into the undergrowth and conceal it, while he himself fetched the necessary apparatus from the cabin.

He came running back carrying a set of antlers, one of those it had been his childhood's work to collect. Explaining rapidly that the deer were now so suspicious that the only way to come within shooting range of them was to pass oneself off as one of them, he bound the antlers to the hunter's head with strings it had been his last year's work to devise and construct.
Warning
the hunter that he could not expect to get a full view of the now alerted deer but must shoot – low, of course – the instant
he saw a pair of antlers moving among the bushes, and
promising
him, as the only possessor of this subterfuge, a splendid day's sport, the woodcutter's son bundled the first comer off into the depths of the forest and hurried up the path to meet the next comer, to whom he gave exactly the same explanation and promise and a further set of antlers.

The morning rose high. Hunters poured into the forest. The woodcutter's son, waylaying each into secret colloquy, issued his entire collection of antlers. Each of the hunters tipped him. Yet he suspected they did not give him such large amounts as they had been in the habit of giving his father.

The forest began to be noisy with shots. Soon the bangs were joined by cries of pain, shouts of anger, altercations, and groans. A walking casualty limped furiously up to the cabin door and began to abuse the woodcutter's son.
Compassionately
helping him up the steps and into a rocking chair, the woodcutter's son explained that the hunter had misunderstood his instructions and had better, unless he wanted to be laughed at for his stupidity and ignorance of forestcraft, make no
mention
of them. He unstrapped the antlers which the hunter was still wearing and hooked them back into their place on his cabin's wall. Then, after doing his best for the man's wound, he walked the three miles to the nearest phone and summoned an ambulance.

Parties of wounded hunters were already, when he got back to the cabin, carrying in the bodies of dead hunters. Four or five corpses were stretched, under what blankets the
woodcutter
's cabin could provide, in the clearing. The clanging of relays of ambulances was added to the groaning that filled the forest.

The woodcutter's son worked untiringly all day. Not only did he help the ambulance parties at loading and comforting. He made forays alone in search of the dead and wounded, hurrying along the tracks only he thoroughly knew and usually contriving to arrive first at the place of a fatality, where he would unstrap the antlers from the hunter's head and discard them in the undergrowth, so as to make the corpse lighter for the stretcher-bearers to bring in.

By sunset the size of the disaster was patent. Even of the wounded, many had died in the cabin or in the ambulances.
And great numbers of the hunters had been killed outright where they stood. Their fellow marksmen, calculating
downward
from the glimpsed tip of an antler, had often put a bullet accurately through the centre of the forehead.

The woodcutter's son wore his smart suit again to go into the town for the inquest. He comported himself modestly and winningly in the witness-box and was commended for the help he had given the casualties.

In the lobby of the court, and again at the inn where he stopped on his way home, he made sure of the result. The
carnage
had already given the forest a superstitiously ill repute. No hunter would set foot in it again. The innkeeper regretted the takings he would lose.

Returned to the cabin, the woodcutter's son changed his clothes and hurried out, in the dusk, to the deer. From a
distance
he could discern the shadowed forms; there were no gaps; no deer had been killed.

As he approached, a sentinel deer at the edge of the group threw up its nose, sniffed, and wheeled away. The whole group took nervous alarm. Breaking into a silly trot, they all hurried deep into the forest, where they were hidden by the night.

The next day the woodcutter's son went into the town again. He bought himself an entirely new set of clothing – which used up nearly all the money he had taken in tips on the day of the carnage – and then bought large quantities of soap,
disinfectant
, deodorant, and aerosol sprays of every type and scent.

He went home and thoroughly cleansed both himself and the cabin.

Yet when he approached the deer again, they ran away. He tried all year. He tried three years later, when he expected a new generation to have forgotten the smell of human blood on him. But the signal of caution had been transmitted
throughout
the group.

He missed his friendship with the deer, but unsentimentally. He stayed on in the forest, living on the small wages of
woodcutting
. For sheer lack of anyone to talk to, he grew as taciturn, but not as grumpy, as his father had been. He never for a moment repented. On summer evenings it gave him deep
content
to watch the deer from the distance and rejoice in their safety.