Duncton Found (75 page)

A blissful smile spread across Tubney’s cheerful face.

“Yes, when interesting visitors, especially ones who have been
very
interesting, finally leave, dear me, it makes me almost glow to think of it! The sheer joy of seeing their rears disappear down that path, the unadulterated pleasure of knowing they are going to be interesting somewhere else for ever more and
not
here. Mayweed, have you any idea how pleasant that is and what joy it gives me to think of it?”

“Sir is sufficiently eloquent to have given me a very good idea indeed. But one last question: what about moles in love? Are they good moles to have in Bablock?”

“On occasion we have had those. Charming, delightful, brings tears to my eyes. They tend to like the river bank at night, and that sort of thing. They look at the moon and occasionally race about. More mysteriously they stance for hours on end staring at each other, which seems strange when you consider that everything else around here is so much more interesting than mole. But I am thinking of young love, I suppose. Mature love, the kind of love that a mole such as you might indulge in is altogether different. Oh yes. That’s me, you know. A mature love.”

“She is...?” began Mayweed hesitantly.

“... dead? No. Absent with leave, as mature loves should often be. Visiting upslope. Doing what she enjoys doing while I do what I enjoy doing which, as you now know, is nothing much.”

“May humbleness ask the name of your love?”

“Crocus. I’ll tell you the story one day.”

“Pups?”

“Dozens. Hundreds. All gone now, all gone...” A tear slowly coursed down Tubney’s face.

“Why mole, Mayweed, me, he’s sorry, he....”

“Sorry, mole? What for? My tears are tears of joy. I shall never forget the day the last of our pups declared in an earnest voice and not for the first time that he was off and then, to my unabated joy, he left! Now that was a day worth waiting for.” The smile returned.

“Marvellous mole, Mayweed has the feeling that Bablock has all that he is looking for.”

For the first time a look of genuine concern came to Tubney’s face.

“You’re not planning to come and stay as a resident are you?”

“No, no, a mere visitor. With Sleekit my consort, and Beechen my, er, well, just a mole I know.”

“But just visiting?”

“Yes, we shall eventually have to leave.”

Tubney relaxed.

“Then, dear Sir, you and your friends shall be very, very welcome here in Bablock Hythe.”

Mayweed could not at that point have known about Beechen’s visit to Cumnor – since the Stone Mole himself had not yet decided to go there – but he might well have guessed the intention and direction of Beechen’s final gathering for his First Ministry.

So Mayweed scurried about and plotted an escape route out of those parts which would avoid all the complications of Cumnor. Rollright, north of Duncton, had been their original objective and soon, Mayweed sensed, it would be wise to go there.

Meanwhile, and despite Tubney’s affectation of not doing much, Mayweed wasted no time in enlisting the aid of the Bablock moles to the Stone Mole’s cause.

“Imagine, new-found chubby chum, how much greater your feelings of relief and delight will be if you leave your system for a time, help others, show your sense of responsibility towards endangered moles of the Stone, and feel you and the moles of Bablock have done something useful.”

“‘Useful’! ‘Responsibility’! ‘Leave’! ‘Help others’!” moaned Tubney. “Why
should
we? Isn’t it enough that we provide a welcome refuge for those who find us?”

Mayweed stared at him and said nothing.

“I mean to say,” continued Tubney uneasily, “these moles you want us to help you rescue – ‘rescue’, a word redolent of danger and disturbance which makes me shudder – can’t they rescue themselves?”

“Supposing the grike guardmoles descended on you here, selfish Sir, would you not want to be rescued?”

“Ah, yes well... I should have explained.
I am a.
guardmole, second generation, third order, reserve, retired. You see my father was sent here and, well, he took one look at the place and decided to stay and sort of let it be known that he had died in the course of his duties. Drowned, in fact. Toppled over into the river and drifted off. Enquiries were made, questions asked, guardmoles snouted about a bit, and then they gave up and he emerged from hiding.”

“Does nothing bother Bablock, then?” said Mayweed.

“The eldrene Wort at Cumnor tries. We had been left well alone for
years
and then she sent a couple of very odd moles down here, ranting and raving about the Word, saying blasphemers should be snouted et cetera and so forth. We gave them plenty of worms and a very enjoyable time and said we completely agreed with them and it
was
shocking. They went back satisfied but feeling guilty, as sincere moles who overindulge themselves are inclined to. Bablock was put out of bounds to them after that but we get one sneaking down here occasionally and we have a thoroughly enjoyable time pretending to be austere for a few days and agreeing how shockingly lax moledom is becoming.”

“Incorrigible Sir, you impress me. But now I understand that my friends are about to go to Cumnor and may need help....”

“Oh yes, no doubt of it, they will. They are coming tomorrow, or perhaps the next day... in fact some followers have already arrived and the Chawley End moles are most flummoxed about it.”

“You
know
?” exclaimed Mayweed.

“Of course. One cannot be indolent all the time, just most of it. As for your friends, is it true that one of them is the S —— M ——?”

Tubney mouthed “Stone Mole” but did not speak it aloud.

Mayweed laughed.

“Yes, staggering Sir, yes!”

“That’s what Crocus said. She’s thrilled, of course. Delighted. If only for her I shall bestir myself, just as soon as we have found out what Wort and her henchmoles are doing.”

“But won’t they immediately come down here?”

“No, they won’t, not in force. A mole does not, as Crocus’s cousin rather crudely puts it, poop in his own back burrow. Anyway, you have, I believe, worked out an escape route?”

“You constantly dumbfound me, Tubney,” said Mayweed.

“By Pinkhill?”

“No, Swinford. It’s quicker and less likely.”

“Dear me. Swinford. That’s most daring, most energetic, very vigorous.”

“It may be, Tubney, but just think how you will feel when we finally leave.”

“I do, all the time. Now relax, for your fretting talons and busy leer quite put me in a sweat. All is in paw, when we’ve been told what’s happening we’ll set off towards Hen Wood and be ready to collect your friends. Have a worm or something, tell me a tale,
relax,
you’re in Bablock now. Things will work out as they should.”

Which, apart from Beechen’s unexpected desire to be alone and leave them on the very threshold of Bablock after their rescue from Hen Wood, they did.

“Relax!” Mayweed said more than once to troubled Buckram as, having looked upslope and seen Beechen gone, the great mole lumbered miserably along feeling that he had failed in his duty.

“No good
telling
him to relax, Mayweed,” observed Tubney as they continued on. “Nomole relaxes if they’re told to. No, you leave it to Bablock to sort him out. It’ll take a day or two – perhaps three in his particular case – but believe me there’s something about the air in Bablock, and the way the river flows, and, and....”

But he had no need to say more for the moles had turned the corner and crossed the mysterious boundary that took them into the world that was Bablock.

The frosty ground stretched ahead of them, and the pale sunlight slanted down across the tree-lined river banks, and all over the great meander of flowing water whose sound and scents dominate the gravelly terrace on which the Bablock system sits. The last of the autumn colours were dotted here and there, and as Sleekit came to Mayweed’s flank the two paused to stare as Tubney, kind and thoughtful that he was, led Buckram on, talking to him non-stop to take his mind off Beechen.

“Sensuous love, this is the place I found for us,” said Mayweed.

“Mayweed, you always surprise me, from the first time I saw you until this moment.”

“Humbleness thought hard and decided his beloved needed a place to rest and enjoy his company to the full. Bablock and the moles in it will provide it. Indolence and pleasure ooze out of every tunnel, and lie like sweet-scented nesting material on every surface stance. Madam will have noticed that the air here makes her Mayweed wax poetic.”

Sleekit sighed with pleasure, touched him close, stared about, pulled him nearer to the river and closer to herself, peered down into its waters, sighed again, stanced down, stanced up, snouted here and there, sighed a third time, and said, “Will Beechen really be safe?”

“Mayweed does not know, though he fears for him very much. But he thinks the Stone is with Beechen as it is with us. Let the mole be, he needs time alone and thinks he is in love. Let him wander a bit. It does a mole no harm. The Bablock moles are not as idle as they like others to think, and no doubt Tubney will see that moles are watching out for him. When he’s ready he’ll come here and we can show him the pleasures we have found in the place.”

“How long can we stay?”

Mayweed settled down, extended his snout along his paws, stared at the water and then northwards upstream.

“I would like to get you both to Rollright by Longest Night. I....”

“It’s enough, my dear, it’s all I wish to know. When you say we must leave, we shall leave. Until then I’ll pretend we have forever here.”

Which, with much pleasure, she did, as the clear skies that brought frost across moledom continued, and moles enjoyed days of pale sunlight, and shining nights when the bright stars seemed to conspire with every dream that lovers, young and old, might have.

While in the secret places along the heaths above Bablock, and down to the icy meadows where Whitley lies, two moles began to know their providential love.

Beechen and Mistle, the nervousness of their first meeting soon gone, discovered the joy that complete acceptance by another, both in body and in spirit, brings. Blind such love may sometimes be, irrational as well, yet to those lost in its continuing discoveries time, place and circumstance seem all moulded to suit the lovers’ ends.

Some have said that Beechen, being what he was, should not have fallen so in love. Others that surely Mistle, faced by such a mole as him, could not but feel her love thwarted by the awe she felt, so that it was not love but adoration. And there are those who would pretend that those two young moles had a love so pure, so ideal, that driven snow would have seemed mucky by comparison.

Not so. All untrue. Forget their antecedents and their destiny; think only of two moles driven by that ordinary need young adults always have for a union that gives strength through sharing to the struggle to make sense of the great conflicts and dilemmas that moles and moledom always present. Stone Mole he may have been but, as Tryfan never tired of reminding those in Duncton Wood, he was
first
but ordinary mole, with an ordinary need to love; and in that sense Mistle was but ordinary as well.

Yet for all that, one thing was extraordinary about their love, which was that from the very first its nature, its context, its very life, was of the Stone. If ever the love of two moles shone with the light of the Stone it was that of Beechen of Duncton Wood and Mistle of Avebury. The meaning and context pairs so often search for in vain, wondering why once passion is spent or why when conversation is done there is a void, those two had discovered from the very first.

Their love was not just of the Stone but was its celebration too, and so once their nervousness was done, wherever they went in those special November days, the Stone was with them, and shone about them.

Like Mayweed and Sleekit, they watched the bright night skies, and they wandered the still and frosty mornings when mists made the Thames mysterious; they heard nature’s sounds and knew its austere winter scents and felt at one with themselves and with their world. Reverence was in their every movement; but quietness, too, and fun.