Tivington Nott (7 page)

But he’s lost that one already if he only knew it, and he might as well forget strategy. When the Tiger buys Kabara he’ll do it on his own terms. If I were Alsop I’d be planning an orderly retreat from England, and thinking of getting back to my own country.

This is just the way it goes when I’m alone in here reading. I start following up on whatever’s going on, if I’m not too tired, and I don’t notice what’s happening under my nose, right here in my room. Which is how I got taken totally off-guard by the rats the first time.

The book I was reading that evening was something special. It is lying here on the bed now in front of me. It is
The Master of Game
and was written by King Edward III’s grandson in 1406. My copy was printed in 1909 and what’s left of the cover is grey-green cloth with a gold medieval design. It is inscribed on the front endpaper: ‘Peter Staines, on his twenty-first birthday, With best wishes from Sir Guy & Lady Fentner; June 1923.’

It smells wonderful!

Its author was the leader of England’s vanguard at the Battle of Agincourt. He was killed there. Smashed aside by a great blow from an iron mace. So there he was, the leader in a fight that people have called England’s greatest victory! And the same man sat down and wrote this book, which is gentle and well mannered, thoughtful and filled with elegant phrases and descriptions. He calls it ‘My litel symple book.’ He was too modest. It’s not so simple, but is full of knowledge and feeling and understanding. He is writing about his passion, hunting. And he only writes what he knows, leaving conjecture to those who don’t know. It is a book that I can open at any page and begin reading with pleasure. This is not hearsay; it’s clear he has trodden through the high wet bracken on chill mornings and held in his hand the red earth where the fox has dug freshly. And his admiration for this animal, which others considered vermin, was keen. He says, ‘The fox does not complain when men slay him, but defendeth himself with all his power while he is alive.’ Some compliment from a warrior!

And there I was, right in there with the intimate thoughts of this Plantagenet, seeing him defending himself at his last battle without complaining of his wounds and without crying out, but doing his best and dying there. Settled deeply into my downy palace here, visions of Agincourt and the fox all mixed up and stewing around in my head, when I felt a slow, gentle pressure being exerted at the back of my shoulder, close up to my neck.

I looked at the door, moving only my eyes, thinking it just possible that my absorption in the book had been so great that I hadn’t noticed someone come in and go round behind me. Some kind of local joke maybe? I was naïve enough then even to consider the possibility that I might be initiated into the ways of the locality. I was in a mood for odd things to happen to me anyway. After all, what was I to expect from these people? But in the stillness, during that couple of seconds, I heard Morris and his wife making their little noises behind the wall. There was no one with me. And then the pressure eased, allowing me to hope that I might have imagined it, or maybe had one of those involuntary muscular contractions that feel just like a touch.

I was about to reach up and give my shoulder a rub when there it was again. Slow and easy but unmistakably something on the eiderdown. I leaped up and away from the bed, ready to keep going right through the door and all the way back to London. And a rat dropped off my shoulder and sat there, embedded in the warm folds of my eiderdown, from where it gazed at me.

I got such a fright that I panicked and grabbed one of my boots and pounded it where it crouched. It didn’t try to get away and it didn’t defend itself, but it seemed to resist the blows for ages. It took a long time to die. It hung on. Sight was in its gaze for so long that I almost despaired of killing it. I’d never killed anything before, not a decent-sized animal anyway, and hadn’t realised quite how committed and violent it is necessary to be.

That was number one. There were plenty more to follow. And it wasn’t long before I became a skilled and efficient rat killer.

Due to a continuous damp seepage there’s a rotten area of skirting board and flooring in the corner under the chest of drawers. I’ve blocked it fifty times. But they keep at it. Nibbling and gnawing and scratching away all through the night, night after night until one of them gets through.

And it’s just one. You’d think they’d come pouring in by the hundred. Rat waves squealing and shrieking after all that hard work. And I used to lie awake waiting for that grey avalanche. But it’s just one. Quietly. Sits there on the floor in the open. No attempt at being sneaky about it. They are big, slow and easy to kill. Waiting for it almost. Making no attempt to dodge the blow. Not retreating back through the hole. Not a flicker of fight in them. Nothing of the Plantagenet or the fox about these things. Almost as if they had been sentenced. Listed for this hole. So I killed them for a while, but there was no sport in it. It was repetitive, predictable, unpleasant.

It was butchery.

And it soon began to depress me, but I kept doing it. It got harder and harder to deliver the death blow. I developed a muscular reluctance, a stiffness and uncertainty, which caused me to miss my aim altogether sometimes, or what was even worse, to botch the job and smash one of the doomed creatures across the back. I tried to stir them up, to put some fight into them, to give the dismal business an element of variety at least. But no matter what I did, jabbing and poking and yelling at them, they remained unmoved. Puddings. At most I could detect resentment, but never any actual resistance.

After a few months of this it got to the point where I’d come in and do various things around the room before killing the rat. ‘I can see you,’ I’d say, and then I’d get on with whatever it was I had in hand. Putting off the disgusting business. But sooner or later I’d have to make up my mind to do it. Go and get the stick and stand there looking at the one whose turn it was that night. It wasn’t easy. In fact it gave me the creeps.

And it only got worse when I started discussing the business with them. Little black beady eyes looking up at me. Not so ugly really. Grey feet and that rodent tail. I’ve seen worse looking things. ‘All right, you’ve got another fifteen seconds,’ and I’d start counting slowly. Seeing the rat, intact, healthy, a reasonable rat life ahead probably, except for this situation. ‘Okay, another half minute. But then I’ll really have to do it.’ Time running out. Then slam with the stick. One vicious smash on the head and they’d be dead, give a couple of kicks and I’d pick the limp carcass off the floor and carry it out by the tail. Chuck it on Morris’s neatly maintained heap of pig shit up at the end of the garden. When Morris and I went past on the way to milking in the morning the bodies were always gone. Food for nocturnal owls and foxes . . . And if Morris and his wife were still up, sitting in the kitchen when I went past, dangling my dead rat, we’d nod an acknowledgement at it and say nothing. It put a blight on my evenings, however, wondering every night when the scratching and gnawing and squealing was going to result in a breach in my blockade. Coming in here after washing my feet, all set for an evening’s reading, and finding this nasty job to be done.

I got sick of it. So one evening I pretended there wasn’t a rat there, squatting silently under the chest of drawers, watching me. I got on the bed and started reading. ‘The execution takes place at dawn,’ I said, when it was time to snuff the candle out. And I lay down and had an undisturbed night. But of course when the morning came I was in my usual hurry. Woken by Morris’s careful, knock, knock, knock on the wall. A cup of tea and a piece of bread and butter waiting for me. Just time to gulp it down while I laced my boots before we were off, out into the icy wind and the darkness, hurrying up the garden and across Old Ley to the farm.

I was well into the milking before I remembered the rat. But there was no chance to kill it when we got home for breakfast. It would have meant taking my boots off and disrupting the routine. By the time Morris and I get back for breakfast his wife has got control of the place. We’re only in for a quarter hour; down our food and grab our lunch packs and we’re out again.

So the rat was still in here when I got back that evening.
Still
in here, or in here again? I didn’t know. It was more or less in the same position, keeping low and still, down there next to the hole. Looking sleepy, but watching.

I didn’t say anything to it that night. I wasn’t voicing any decisions, I mean, about what was going to happen. But I left it there. I did nothing and said nothing.

It would have been a week or so before I started coming up with things like, And what sort of a day have
you
had? when I got in at night.

My nights were peaceful. No gnawing and squealing going on behind the skirting board! No need to wonder if tonight was the night for rat killing! It was a relief. A new era. And I was beginning to feel grateful to the resident for sitting there quietly guarding that hole. I made one or two concessions. I called this one the Resident, and I gladly ceased to be the exterminating angel.

I believed in our unwritten agreement. He got the floor under the chest of drawers, I got my peace of mind. It was fair. And I like things to be fair. So I stopped worrying about the whole business.

Until tonight.

A situation foreseen by Morris.

Crouching in the straw, trying to keep our feet out of contact with the black ice on the frozen cobbles for a spell, down there in the disused threshing barn last winter, eating our lunch, I explained about the Resident. Morris listened till I’d finished. Nodding along with what I had to say. It was about week three of my new peace of mind and I was feeling very pleased with myself. Telling Morris was, in a way, a boast as much as anything. Like indicating that if he and his wife had been on to this, they wouldn’t have had to move out, but could have gone on enjoying the luxury of their bridal bed. If that’s what it is.

Morris didn’t say anything. I suppose he’d noticed that I hadn’t been carrying out any rats for a few weeks. And when I’d finished he lovingly sliced a segment from his portion of back fat, white, almost luminous stuff, turning it between his greasy thumb and forefinger, examining it with the eye of a specialist, before putting it in his mouth and chewing. His pocket knife poised over the remaining chunk.

When he’d swallowed the fat and washed it down with a mouthful of cold tea, Morris said, casual and interested, ‘What will you do if the Resident gets a companion?’

It took a while. But there they were tonight. And squatting outside the limits of the chest of drawers! I was shocked. I felt betrayed.

‘So this is the thanks I get is it?’ Crazy! Fancy expecting gratitude from a rat! I’m out of practice and they dodged around. It was messy. But there was nothing else for it. I couldn’t have them setting up a new colony right here in my room!

Anyway, they’re both out there on the dung-heap in the rain now.

Maybe Morris will help me to find a permanent solution. Then again, maybe there’s really no such thing as a rat-proof house. Things aren’t going to be the same in here . . . And there he goes now, laughing with her in there, then cough-cough-cough! The storm’s letting up. Blowing itself out at last. It’s late and my candle’s burnt down almost to the tin, the flame wobbling madly, rearing up wide and yellow then almost snuffing itself, filling the air with the smell of candle grease and reminding me of the shelter and the air raids. All that old stuff coming up.

The hole’s still there. I haven’t tried to block it. It’s silent too. I wonder what’ll happen now? Just keep up the war I suppose. The rats won’t stop. They’re congenital colonists. That’s biology.

I’d better get some sleep. I have to be up and out of here before Morris in the morning. I put a set of new shoes on Kabara and Finisher, the gelding, in preparation for today. The Tiger’ll want them saddled and waiting by daylight at the latest. It’s a long ride to Winsford from here.

The scent will be deadly after this storm!

Morris and his wife aren’t awake when I slip the latch on the back door and step out into the darkness. The moon is still bright enough over the oaks in Will’s wood to cast their shadows across the close-cropped turf of Old Ley. Everything’s sodden from the storm and the air is cold and still. I stand on the crest of the ridge and look down into the valley without a name that locals call the Black Valley, and I can see across a vast sweep of sleeping countryside all the way to the silvered waters of Bridgwater Bay and the outlet of the Doniford Stream. Everything is cool and clean! I can taste the air on my palate! There’s the sound of water trickling out of a pipe under the hedge next to me. I have to go. As I turn I startle a blackbird from its roost and it flies out, flat and fast across the field.

From fifty yards away the farm could be abandoned. Dead. Deserted. A settlement left over from another era. The big dark shadows of the cattle shed, the barn, the stable and the house all joined together, their windows and doors facing inward to the yard. Blank walls to the world. Compact against storms and trouble, and against anything else that might come along. Expecting the worst. Their weathered grey featureless stone walls and their grey slate roofs not interested in anything outside. They don’t want to know about it. Keep out! Silent in the autumn moonlight. Been standing there since who knows when? The odd bulge of the disused bread-oven poking out in to the road like the bum of a giant squatting in the end wall of the house.

I’ve got a good two hours of work to get through before daylight. Finisher and his mate Ashway hear me opening the road gate and they whinny softly. This is enough to start the cows moaning, even though they know it’s too early for them yet. I light the kerosene lamp in the stable and close the door behind me. The soft light reveals the cobbled floor and the ashen stall-trees, their wood polished to a deep honey gloss by the rubbing of generations of hunters and plough horses. It’s warm in here. The air rich with the acid smells of horse dander, piss, dung and meadow hay. Kabara is stationary in the shadows. Watching me. Making no welcome. The two geldings lean out and stretch for my hands, glad to see me. Ashway’s not coming with us. I’ll be riding Kabara, and Tiger will begin the day on Finisher. I get on with feeding them before I do anything else. Kabara and Finisher will need time to eat their fill.