Notwithstanding (17 page)

Anyone observing the General’s robustness as he deep-breathes in his garden in early summer, amid the blooms of his azaleas, would find it easier to do so on account of his nudity. He has emerged in a state of
nakedness
out of sheer innocence, and now he goes back indoors with the fixed intention of driving to Haslemere to buy something, although quite what he does not yet know. He scrutinises himself in the hall mirror, and beetles his brows in puzzlement. ‘Dear me, old boy,’ he says to himself at last, ‘you’ve forgotten your tie. Letting yourself go. Can’t have that. Have to give yourself a good dressing-down.’

He strides upstairs, reaches a regimental tie from the wardrobe, realises that he needs a collar around which to tie it and fetches a shirt from its hanger. He then understands that the ensemble is incomplete owing to the lack of a waistcoat and blazer. He calls his ancient dog. ‘Bella, Bella, old girl!’

Bella is deaf, but she is already waiting by the front door, her tail wagging on her portly rump. Her dugs are blotchy, dark and pendulous after three litters (one of them accidental), and her muzzle is silver. The wrists above her front paws are swollen with painful arthritis, and she waddles breathlessly when she walks. She is the last and the best of the General’s gun dogs, but, like him, she has given up shooting. Now, like him, she just likes to go out in the car.

The General opens the door of the Rover, and Bella puts her front paws up on the back seat. The General bends down, grasps her rear legs, and propels her into the interior. This is how they have managed it for the last two years, ever since Bella seized up.

The General starts up the car and guns the accelerator. It feels peculiar, and he realises that he has forgotten to put his shoes on. He goes back inside and wanders about until he looks down at his feet and remembers what he was after.

Bella and the General go the back way to Godalming, a town once famous for being the first to have street lighting, and for being the home of Mary Tofts, who was frightened by rabbits in the spring of 1726, and consequently gave birth to a litter of eighteen of them in November. Nearby, and less explicably, the ghost of Bonnie Prince Charlie strolls beneath the trees of Westbrook.

The General motors up Malthouse Lane, past the convent. He passes the hedging and ditching man, who, in the attitude of Hamlet cradling Yorick’s skull, is waist-deep in the verge-side ditch, inspecting the freshly excavated hubcap of a Riley 1.5. The General drives past the Glebe House, through Hascombe, and finally parks his car behind the new Waitrose. He sets out past the public conveniences, past the Christian cafe, and out into the high street, where he pauses in puzzlement. It all looks wrong. He scratches the top of his head in bemusement. He stops a middle-aged woman and asks, ‘I say, please do excuse me, but is this Haslemere?’

She looks at him in horror and alarm, says ‘Godalming’ and hurries away. ‘Damn and blast!’
exclaims
the General. Now he can’t buy whatever it was that he intended to get in Haslemere. Never mind, he will go to Lasseter’s instead, because a man can never have too many nails and screwdrivers and clothes pegs and whatnot. He might go and look in the window of William Douglas, too, because he has never lost his love for the things of boyhood, such as cricket balls, catapults and airguns.

He is but halfway there when he is accosted by a police officer. ‘Excuse me, sir,’ says the latter, in that portentous tone much favoured by the British police, ‘may I have a word?’

The General trusts and approves of anyone in uniform, and he smiles delightedly. He thinks that no doubt the policeman has some weighty issue to deal with, and feels the need to take advantage of his wider and deeper experience. The policeman ushers him gently into the alleyway beside the pub where Peter the Great once stayed, when Godalming was on the main wool route to London. ‘Do you realise, sir,’ asks the officer, ‘that you have gone shopping without your trousers on?’ Sensitively he refrains from mentioning the lack of underwear. Fortunately the tails of the shirt are long, and any indecency is sufficiently concealed in shadow.

The General looks down, but sees only the polished toes of his shoes. He raises a knee and beholds the nakedness of his leg. ‘Ah,’ he says. ‘Damned
embarrassing
. Can’t imagine … so sorry. Have to keep an eye on that, eh? Can’t be having that, can we? Definitely not cavalry. Damned embarrassing. No socks either. Whatever next! Have to give myself a rocket!’

‘May I ask your name, sir?’ enquires the policeman. ‘Then we might be able to help you.’

The General puts his hand to his eyes, and thinks hard. ‘Remember my number,’ he says at last. ‘Always remember my number. In case of capture, you know. Second Lieutenant, um … 734 …’ he begins, but then stops. ‘Damn it! Damned if I haven’t forgotten. Won’t do at all.’

‘I think you’d better go home and put some trousers on,’ says the policeman. ‘Do you think you can find your way? Perhaps you can tell me your address?’

The General reflects futilely, and offers, ‘Used to have a place in Simla. Little bungalow. Hot season, you know. Unbearable anywhere else. Wives and children always sent to Simla.’

The policeman sighs, and then asks, ‘And where did you leave your car, sir?’

‘Is this Haslemere?’ asks the old soldier.

‘Godalming, sir,’ says the policeman.

‘Blast it,’ says the General.

The policeman takes the General by the arm and they walk around the car park looking for his car. The
policeman
has radioed into the station and they have advised him of the probable identity of the old warrior and his vehicle. This has happened several times recently, but the General usually recovers in between. Social services have been informed, the children are making arrangements and wheels are in motion.

Eventually they find the green-and-grey Rover, and the policeman strokes the wing appreciatively. ‘Lovely cars, these,’ he says. ‘I learned to drive in one. Built like a tank, never go wrong. Bit heavy on the old petrol, though.’ He notices that the keys have been left in the ignition.

Bella wakes up and greets her master with all the joy that old age and stiffness might allow. She eyes the policeman suspiciously, but allows him to fondle her ears.

The General loves it in his new home. Bellevue is simply vast, the biggest house he has ever had. It is even bigger than his childhood home in Gloucestershire, the great house that was demolished because of inheritance tax. He has an enormous staff of servants who are more conscientious than all the wallahs, orderlies and batmen he has ever known put together. He wonders why the regiment never thought of having women help out in the mess, but of course in his day it simply wasn’t done.

Best and happiest, his wife has unaccountably returned, radiant with all the adorable golden prettiness
that
first besotted him, in the form of a twenty-two-year-old nurse who has become very fond of him and pays him special attention. She makes sure that he remembers his trousers and his tie, and speaks to him in the soft and musical voice that he has so acutely but unwittingly missed these last few months. He tells her frequently that he has washed all her jerseys, ready for when she comes back, and she strokes his cheek, thanks him and plants a chaste kiss on his forehead. He is as much in love with her as he ever was, and calls her ‘my darling’ as he reaches out to take her hand.

In the daytime the General sits on a bench by the front door, with his walking stick at the ready and with Bella at his feet. She is brought in every day by the old lady who now cares for her, and is fed leftovers by the staff. The General walks her slowly round the grounds, which are full of magnificent rhododendrons, and gives advice and instruction to the two tolerant gardeners.

Whenever anyone comes through the door, the General, when he is at his post, rises courteously to his feet and greets them. ‘Do come in! Delighted to see you. Let me call someone to take your coat. What can I get you? Scotch? Don’t touch the stuff myself. Sherry? Medium or dry?’

The visitors and staff get used to the distinguished, sweet old man, they humour him affectionately and
politely
, and some of them listen with diminishingly reluctant interest as he regales them with highlights from his adventurous past. They can hardly believe that once upon a time in the Khyber Pass this ancient man, mounted on a bay horse, charged into battle with a sabre, and they will miss him for weeks when one day Bella is not at her place by his feet, and he is neither in the garden, nor at his bench by the door.

RABBIT

JOAN WALKS WITH
the Major, and with Leafy, wife of the redoubtable Colonel Pericles Barkwell. It is an evening late in March, but the day has seemed more like one from the end of June. They have gone out warmly dressed, because it is only March, after all, and now they are huffing and sweltering as they circle the bounds of the fields behind Joan’s home. Joan doesn’t like to sweat so much because she doesn’t want people to know that she has been struck by the menopause, and it is beside the point that this particular sweat is brought about by a very English refusal to concede that any March day might be other than cold and blustery.

The Major is clad in green wellingtons, corduroys, a grey woolly jumper and a khaki-coloured quilted body warmer that enhances his military mien. In his
pocket
is a supersonic whistle for the dog, which he never uses because he has trained the dog to respond to parade-ground orders. ‘Dogs will retire. Ab-o-u-t turn!’ he roars, and the black Labrador obediently comes to heel. The supersonic whistle is a present from his son in the City, who believes in high-tech solutions to problems which no one had previously recognised as problematical.

Leafy Barkwell is dressed in wellies, and a tweed skirt that has seen smarter days. Its wool has been teased by bramble and thorn for a decade, and some people have taken to commenting unkindly that it looks like a sisal doormat. It is the only scruffy garment she has, because indoors she is elegant, and indoors is where she most likes to be. Today, however, she has succumbed to the warmth of the day and has come out at the same time as the primroses, with which she shares some of her delicate beauty, even though she is no longer young.

In the clump of elms at the end of the field noisy squadrons of rooks croak and squabble. It is nesting time, and the birds are raiding all the surrounding trees for twigs, which they bring back to the elms, where other birds try to snatch them away. There are quarrels and tugs of war, and the booty almost inevitably gets dropped, whereupon the birds fly off back to the willows and oaks in order to break off more twigs with elaborate exertion that
involves
much acrobatic risk. The fallen twigs they stupidly do not bother to collect, so that under the rookery the ground begins to look as though a small hurricane has just passed by. In the old days when the peasants had been poor, when, in fact, there actually had been peasants, they used to come and collect the fallen twigs, and bind them into faggots. Now there is only one peasant left, malodorous old Obadiah Oak, with his teeth like tombstones. Jack Oak is probably the only person left who can remember what it was like to collect rook faggots and to know that young rooks aren’t scared of guns. The adults flew away, but you just took your rook gun and shot the youngsters off the branches where they sidled about in confusion. Then you cut out their breasts and made rook pie.

Leafy begins to compose verses in her head that one day she might send to
The Lady
, or
Country Life
magazine. She writes mainly about the beauties of nature, which normally she experiences from the other side of her drawing-room window. Her poetry is very like the stuff that used to be anthologised in the 1920s by people like J. C. Squire, and she represents an England that urban intellectuals and university lecturers assert to be dead, merely because they wish that it were so, and do not realise that it is not. Millions of country people are quite unaware that this version of pastoral England is supposed to have gone, and so they continue to live
in
it with perfect calm and acceptance. Leafy writes poetry that rhymes inexactly, and struggles to scan, about blackbirds singing on fence posts, and woodlarks up in the blue, and about clouds, and about hearts beating in unison. She is as unaware of being quaint as she is of the gnomic poetry of T. S. Eliot or the angry verse of Adrian Mitchell.

On the village green the man with the ridiculous dog called Archie is throwing golf balls in the hope of training it to retrieve them. On the other side of the copse the crack of Polly Wantage’s twelve-bore announces that she is once more persecuting squirrels. Up the hill Miss Agatha Feakes sounds the horn of her vintage Swift as she careers past the convent with a goat on the back seat as usual. On the common the Rector, armed with a plastic sack and a yellow plastic beach spade, is patrolling the bridleways and collecting horse droppings for his roses. In the graveyard of St Peter’s Church, Mrs Mac converses with the ghost of her husband. She asks him if he remembers the time when they were little children and all thirty-two of the pupils in the village school managed to pile into the hollow centre of the gigantic yew. In her house on the green, Mrs Griffiths opens a gin bottle and pours herself a tiny tipple which she dilutes with Ribena. She has thought of a new plot for her latest bodice-ripper, in which a beautiful young orphan called Venetia discovers that she is really an heiress,
and
has to choose between a handsome lord who probably wants her for her money, and the boy who was her teenage sweetheart, but has no prospects. In the middle of the field, a small posse of Friesian cows stands motionless beneath the huge oak that has been there since the English revolution. In the wood the bluebells are up, but have not yet blossomed, and the snowdrops and winter aconites have flowered awhile and gone.