When God Was a Rabbit (11 page)

A new decade dawned, and my parents would eventually have guests who returned to them year after year, and who would all be a bit like us – a collage of the useful and impractical, the heady and the mundane.

It often occurred to me that normal people
never
stayed with us, or if they did it was certainly for no longer than the one eyeopening night. My mother loved this seasonal swell to our family, the ebb and flow of familiar faces that brought new stories and new delights to our door, just as the stagnancy of the everyday settled there like stubborn mould. Our lives had become tidal; friendships, money, business, love; nothing ever stayed the same.

It was a fine summer’s day, the day I first saw Mr Arthur Henry striding through the village leaving a trail of open mouths and Cornish gossip in his colourful wake. He was wearing linen plus fours, a yellow and blue striped shirt and a pink and white polka-dot bow tie that was so large it almost obscured his neck. He carried a cane in one hand and a newspaper in the other, and now and then he would waft away wasps attracted to the sweet floral scent that exuded from his pale skin. I followed him only as far as the amusement arcade, where the sudden need to play pinball overtook me and where I reluctantly entrusted him to the day ahead. I watched him saunter along the quay next to the crabbers and the ferrymen. I watched him weave in and out of parents holding cigarettes and lager instead of their children’s hands. He belonged to another time, a more genteel one; and yet he graced the modern with a simple inquisitiveness and charm that kept me spellbound for days.

The next time I saw him was in the forest. He was talking loudly to himself (Shakespeare, I later learnt) and danced like an aged elf in this unabashed green solitude. It was the type of dance not intended for an audience, for its form was wild and juvenile, and sprung from an uncritical source. He wore the same outfit but had walking shoes instead of polished brogues, and held a twig of leaves instead of his cane.

I felt shy watching his moment of privacy, and when my conscience could bear no more, I came out from behind a tree and said, ‘Good morning, sir,’ and held out my hand with an assurance beyond my years.

He stopped in the middle of a pirouette and smiled, and breathing hard said, ‘Good morning, young lady,’ and he shook my hand. He looked older up close but not that old; sixty probably, for his skin had the sheen of care and the trace of a long-forgotten vanity that once would have shone from mirrors with the radiance of sunrise.

‘I like your outfit,’ I said.

‘That’s very kind of you to say,’ he said.

‘This is my forest,’ I said.

‘Is it now? Then I am a trespasser and I am indeed at your mercy,’ and he bowed in front of me.

I giggled. I’d never met anyone who spoke as eloquently as that and I thought he was probably a poet; my first.

‘Where are you staying?’ I asked as I sat down on the bench.

‘I’m staying in a quaint bed and breakfast just behind the river on the east side,’ he said as he sat next to me, still trying to catch his tired, exhilarated breath.

‘Ah,’ I said nodding, pretending to know which one he was talking about.

He took out his pipe and placed it comfortably between his teeth. He lit a match and held it above the bowl and puffed hard as gusts of nutty sweet smoke wafted from his mouth and made me feel hungry. I thought about the biscuits my mother and I had made earlier that morning – chocolate-covered shortbread fingers – and I could smell the scent of baking on my cardigan. My mouth started to water and I felt suddenly drawn to home.

‘I live in the big white house just the other side of here,’ I said, pointing in the general direction, hoping he’d be impressed, because I so wanted him to be impressed.

‘I’m impressed,’ he said, and I blushed.

‘My house is a bed and breakfast too,’ I said.

‘Is it now?’ he said.

‘You can come and have a look at it if you want. We have some vacancies,’ I said.

‘Do you now?’ he said.

‘So if you stayed with us you could use this forest any time you wanted.
Legally
,’ I said.

‘Could I now?’ he said, and he looked at me and smiled, and I knew immediately that his smile meant, Yes.

My mother loved Arthur from the start. She took great pleasure in welcoming him under her orphaned wing, allowing him to mend the brittleness that had settled in over the years. She missed living her life with somebody older advancing ahead; somebody to shield her from the mortal wall that drew closer every season; someone simply to tell her that she would be all right. And he did that, all of that, from the moment he came to stay; and when he raised his cap and shouted his ‘hellos’, none of us had any clue that it would be the start of a rich and enduring relationship that would become as dependable as the quiet close of day; for Arthur simply paid a month in advance and installed himself in the outside cottage my father had completed just two days before. The smell of paint hung in the air, the vapours verging on nauseating, but it signalled newness to Mr Henry, not discomfort, and as he entered his new home, he opened his arms out wide and shouted ‘Bliss!’ (a word I soon adopted as my own; a word that endeared me to no one).

‘What do you think of the shepherd’s pie?’ said Brenda, the dinner lady at school.

‘Bliss,’ I said, instead of my normal ‘OK’.

‘No need to be sarcastic,’ she said, and put back the extra spoonful of peas that had hovered so enticingly above my plate.

By the time Arthur came to live with us, he had already retired from a life that had him yo-yoing between academia and the diplomatic service like an alternating current. He was disciplined, but hid it behind a camp frivolity that made people think he wandered unconcerned throughout the day. But he
was
concerned, about so much. He awoke unfailingly at six every morning and wandered down to the jetty to note the constantly changing aspect of nature. He noticed small things, particular things; the additional markings of a young deer that shyly appeared over the other side of the river, the last star to disappear at sunrise, (it was always the faint one to the right of the large oak), the minuscule erosion of the opposite bank as a new root became visible amidst the mud and sand. He opened my eyes to this subtle scene of change, and whenever I declared I was bored, he would march me down to the water’s edge and make me describe all I could see in tones of enthusiasm and wonder, until my body again reverberated with the excitement of life.

He practised yoga on the grass just outside his cottage and could contort his limbs in the most extreme way, whilst his face remained a palette of calm and concentration. He said he’d taken up yoga at Mahatma Gandhi’s ashram in Ahmedabad and had focused his mind by walking over hot coals for fun. Because there was always a twinkle in his eye, no one ever really knew if he stretched the truth as easily as he stretched his body, but I knew. I always knew the difference between truth and fiction. It was the subtle alteration of his tone, a resonance only I could detect as he traversed the borders between those two states. But ultimately who cared? Truth, as he always said, was overrated; nobody ever won prizes for telling the truth.

A yogi had once told him the exact time and circumstances of his death and with such information at his fingertips he had been able to calculate to the day, when both his money and breath would expire (although he told me he’d allowed a fiveday leeway on the money).

‘How are you going to die, Arthur? Tell me – how are you going to die?’

I asked him that every week for a year until he finally said, ‘With a smile on my face.’ An answer that seemed to silence my gory enthusiasm with an anticlimactic jeer.

During the years he had left, he planned to write his memoirs and relive them in what he referred to as ‘impotent serenity’. They were stories of travels: racy, explicit accounts of a gentleman’s tour of toilet cubicles and underground bars throughout the world, but in his hands they became a fantastic historical account of the changing template of society. And what soon became clear was that Arthur Henry had always been in the right place at the right time. He had just got off the bus when Rosa Parks decided not to,
and
he was in Dallas when JFK was shot. He was holed up in a moderately priced motel with an FBI agent he adored and knew only as Sly. When reports of the fatal shooting traversed those thin walls, Sly abandoned him like a discarded nightgown, and left him to his own spent company and the sweet rubbing of handcuffs toying at his wrists. He was found by a cleaner the next morning, a woman who seemed so inured to his naked predicament that she simply sat next to him on the bed and wept for the man who was once her American Dream. Arthur apparently did the same.

At weekends and holidays, I ran my boat taxi service to and from the village as a way to secure my pocket money. I loved ferrying Arthur about, and recently I’d been allowed to head out of the harbour into open water with him and hug the ragged coastline to Talland and back. I learnt to read the patterns the seagulls made and the encroaching smell of sea air, and could sense a heavy swell ahead of time. Arthur had never fished before, so this was the first time in my life that I could teach him something and I felt full of pride. I started to unravel the feathered, orange trailing lines that I promised my mother would catch our supper of mackerel that evening.

‘Just let the rope run through your fingers, Arthur,’ I said, ‘and when you feel a tug, yell and start to pull in the line.’

‘Elly,’ he said, ‘I shall scream!’

I scanned the waters ahead; pleasure boats were aplenty in this holiday season and I looked for a route that would lead us safely away from the dangerous holiday spirit that steered most of those erratic craft. I looked down into the waters and saw the shadows of rugged rocks beneath, waiting like crocodiles to emerge in the shallows. I’d caught a bass here the previous week. Five pounds of struggle and fear, but I’d landed it alone and sold it on the quay to a restaurant. But we were not fishing for bass today, we were fishing for mackerel, and what we needed was deeper water. I started the engine and soon we were heading out past the island towards a clear horizon, Arthur holding the orange line, never taking his eyes away from the task.

‘Why don’t you go to school?’ Arthur asked as he attempted to light his pipe.

‘I do,’ I said.

‘Oh, come on,’ he said, ‘not often.’

‘No need,’ I said. ‘I can learn all I need to know here; by the sea, in the forest; building things. I can make jam
and
I can find edible fungi in the forest. I can do everything that would ensure my survival, should disaster unexpectedly strike.’

‘And are you
expecting
disaster to
unexpectedly
strike?’

‘I’m just saying I’m
ready
, Arthur.’

Arthur thought for a while and sucked deeply on his pipe. The sweet nutty plumes wafted towards me on the breeze and I opened my mouth, timed it well and swallowed mouthfuls of the thick edible smoke.

‘Nature
is
a great educator; but not the sole educator. You do yourself a great disservice by not attending,’ he said as he leant down and placed the fishing line securely under his foot. ‘Don’t leave it too late, Elly. Don’t let the window of education pass you by. Even youth can have regret.’

‘But I like learning,’ I said. ‘I just don’t like
school
. I used to. But it’s different here. I still want to play, Arthur. But everyone in my class wants to be grown up. I’m different. They tell me I’m different and I know I am, but only with them does it feel wrong.’

‘I’m different,’ said Arthur.

‘I know, but you feel right,’ and I leant over the side and let my hand trail in the coolness of the water. ‘I’m unpopular and that hurts,’ I said.

‘Popularity, my dear, is as overrated as a large member,’ he said, looking into the distance, lost in one of his other clandestine worlds.

‘What member?’ I asked, momentarily confused.

‘How old are you?’ he asked.

‘Nearly twelve.’

‘Don’t ever stop playing, Elly,’ he said, as he wiped his hands on a starched, white handkerchief that he’d ironed the night before. ‘Never stop playing.’

I changed direction and took us further away from the pull of the island. Our drift had been deceptively strong, and the soft drone of the engine sounded strained against the tide.

‘Arthur?’ I said, shielding my brow with my free hand. ‘No one needs to worry about me. I’ll turn out all right in the end. You know I will.’

He slapped his knee and said, ‘I said exactly the same thing at your age, Elly. And look at me now!’

‘Well, there you go,’ I said, beaming.

‘There you go,’ he said, falling back into the depths of thought. ‘Actually, your mother wanted me to ask you something.’

‘Oh?’ I said, securing the tiller in a locked position and unravelling another fishing line.

‘How would you like to be schooled at home?’ he said.