Notwithstanding (25 page)

The following spring Lizzie starts turning up with another rook, who remains at a sensible distance while she receives her grapes and cheese, or accompanies
Robert
home from school. Robert is glad that she has found a friend, but worries that he will take her away.

There is no sign of this, however, and she is her usual ebullient and affectionate self, until, suddenly, she has gone altogether.

There has been no slow detachment, no gradual growing apart, no chance to become reconciled or resigned, no chance of farewell. The little shelter in the lilac is deserted, the bucket is disused, there is no more need to buy a bunch of grapes every week. Now they won’t need so much Cheddar either.

Robert and Uncle Dick sit side by side on the doorstep at the weekend, and Uncle Dick says, ‘Well, I did warn you, son. They’re like women, they always bugger off sooner or later. Don’t matter how nice you are.’

Robert doesn’t believe him. He thinks that the bond between them was something special, that Lizzie wouldn’t just disappear all of a sudden. Even so, he can see that Uncle Dick is right. She probably went away with her friend to make eggs. That’s what Uncle Dick says. ‘It’s the call of the wild, son.’

Uncle Dick puts his hand on Robert’s shoulder as he stands up. ‘Sorry, son,’ he says, and as he walks away he adds, ‘Did I tell you, son? Couple of days ago I thought I heard her say “silly bugger”. I wasn’t sure, though.’

Robert goes up the lane and turns right into the
woods
behind the Institute of Oceanography. By the pink water tower he stands under the elms and looks up at the rooks. They are squabbling over nest sites, and repairing old ones. He sits on a stump amid the ferns of bracken until dark, convinced that Lizzie couldn’t be up there making eggs. He would recognise her voice if she was there, and in any case she would come down the moment she knew he was there. He sits there until dark. He thinks of what Uncle Dick says about women. ‘You can find a really special one, son, and then she goes and breaks your heart, and then one day you realise that you’re glad you had her, and all right, you’ll miss her for ever, but that’s that. You don’t have to grieve no more.’

Robert listens to the sleepy noises of the rooks above him in the dark, and because there is no one there except the birds, he allows himself to cry silently for a while. Eventually, when the cold sets in and the dew starts to settle, he stands up stiffly, rubs his eyes on his sleeve and starts for home. Once again, spring is about to hurl new life into the world, and soon there will be new birds to look after in his garden hospital. No doubt it will never be the same again, but, as Uncle Dick says, ‘You carry on, son. You got your memories, so that’s what you do. Life’s a bugger, but you look straight ahead, and you bleedin’ well carry on.’

SILLY BUGGER (2)

ROYSTON CHITTOCK WAS
bought out by his partners for quite a handsome sum. They had been saying flattering things to him, such as ‘You’ve put so much into the business, old boy, isn’t it time you had some life for yourself?’ and ‘You deserve a rest, old boy, all work and no play, and so forth.’ But really it was because they could not bear to work with him any more. He was the kind of colleague who gets bees in his bonnet. He would become obsessed by trivial matters, and it had become worse and worse as time went by. Finally they had decided to try and buy him out after he had spent six months worrying aloud about whether or not the banisters on the staircase up to the office were the right height. He was getting the secretaries to walk up-and downstairs several times a day, in order to compare their opinions. He was asking clients about it instead
of
discussing business, and he was taking up far too much time on the topic at meetings. His previous obsession had been to do with the properties of manila envelopes, and before that he had been worrying about the likelihood of an airliner falling on the office while on the way to Heathrow.

Blessed with a huge lump sum, and the relieved good wishes of his former colleagues, Royston Chittock sold his house in Dover House Road, Putney, and moved southwards down the A3 to Notwithstanding, a village where he knew nobody, and with which he had no prior connection. It was a short train journey from there to London, a fact which was of value to him because, like anyone who has been a Londoner for any length of time, he was profoundly attached to the delusion that London is the centre of the universe. He found a modest house near the sign which said ‘Best Kept Village 1953’ and planned to spend a long and comfortable retirement golfing, gardening, and collecting and dealing in stamps. There was very little that he didn’t know about the philately of Japan and the former colonies. It was an ill-omened time to move. The evening after his arrival, the Horse and Groom and the Seven Stars in Guildford were blown up, killing five youngsters and injuring sixty-five.

His new house was named Mole End Cottage, and with good reason. When the estate agent from Messenger May Baverstock had pointed out to him
that
because the house backed on to a large meadow, there was a problem with moles in the garden, he had not been particularly concerned. He had no plans to play croquet, and it occurred to him that soil from molehills might be ideal as a potting medium. He looked benevolently upon the three dozen heaps of upturned earth, and reflected that one could live with moles easily enough. ‘Live and let live, that’s what I say,’ he repeated to himself whenever the topic popped into his mind.

Out in the garden Royston Chittock trimmed the hedges neatly, installed edging to the beds, created a modest rockery, spread pea shingle on the paths and planted a miniature ornamental cherry. He put a small bird table in front of the kitchen window, and a bird bath in the middle of the flower bed. The lawn he left to the moles, until winter had passed, and the difficulty of mowing it began to irritate him.

The fact was that you couldn’t mow unless you flattened the molehills by spreading them around, in which case you ended up with squashed muddy discs, or you shovelled the spoil into a barrow and dumped it elsewhere. Royston Chittock chose the latter course, reasoning that he could use it all on the rose beds.

He had bought a second-hand Suffolk Punch cylinder mower in good condition, and with this trusty machine he created immaculate stripes up and down
the
lawn. On one weekend he would mow lateral stripes, and on the next he would mow longitudinal ones. It all looked very smart, until, on following mornings he would look out of his bedroom window and see new heaps of soil dotted evenly all over its surface. He could live with it, he decided. Yes, of course, he really could live with it. Live and let live.

He noticed when mowing that if the ground was the slightest bit damp, his feet would quite often sink into the surface. He would fetch soil from the rose bed to pack into the little declivity. Once or twice he nearly sprained an ankle. ‘Bloody moles,’ he began to say to himself, but of course he could live with them really.

Within a year Royston Chittock had succeeded in becoming a member of the West Surrey Golf Club, because an unusually large number of elderly members had recently been translated to the Great Nineteenth Hole in the Sky, and he had managed to get himself proposed by a member from whom he had bought a collection of stamps from British Guiana for a deliberately overgenerous sum.

The problem with golf, of course, is that it very quickly becomes an obsession. One is inevitably hooked from the first moment that one does a beautiful drive straight up the middle of the fairway, or sinks a twenty-five-foot putt on a roller-coaster green. Mr Chittock was not exactly a beginner, since he had
trifled
with the game for years, as a necessary part of his business life, but this course was very different from the overcrowded ones in the orbit of London. It was old, the holes were long and well thought out, it was heavily wooded, there were not too many people on it, and above all it was a course that required some intelligence and subtlety from the player. It was the ideal course for someone such as himself, thought Royston Chittock.

The first hole sloped gently upward, and had an interesting ridge across the middle. The second was a par three with an elevated green surrounded by bunkers. It was on this hole, on his first round of golf as a full member, that Mr Chittock lofted a beautiful shot into the air, saw it describe an aesthetically perfect arc, saw it descend elegantly and discreetly, saw it run as if with intent, saw it strike the flagpole, skip into the air, hover a moment and descend into the hole.

A hole-in-one; Chittock was almost too thrilled to play on. Even so, he managed five pars and two birdies thereafter, and his head began to buzz with the notion of entering and winning tournaments. He was sure he could do it, even though he had scored ten on the sixth hole because of slicing into trees, heavy rough and a bunker, and then doing three putts.

When he got home Chittock wrapped his ace golf ball in a duster and placed it reverently in his sock drawer. He took it out several times a day to
caress
it and sniff its lovely aroma of gutta-percha. Because he now could not stop thinking about golf, he mitigated the resultant insomnia by taking the sacred ball to bed with him. He would never actually use it again, because of its totemic power. From its nest in the sock drawer it would emanate concentric success-waves that Chittock felt he could pick up on his internal antennae as he played.

He had to all intents and purposes discovered the meaning of life, or at least the meaning of his own. He played all day, every day, even using a red ball in the snow, once scoring an eagle on a par five because the ball skidded for miles on a patch of ice, and ended up two feet from the hole on a temporary green.

It inevitably occurs to golfers that it might be a good idea to practise their putting at home. They begin on the carpet in the drawing room or the hallway, but of course the ball goes too fast, so that when they get to the course they find that their putts stop short. Then they try the lawn, and realise that the grass is too coarse, so that when they get to a real green, they hit the ball a long way past the cup.

The old professional at Wentworth, Tom Haliburton, used to say that one drives for pleasure and putts for money. Royston Chittock knew very well that matches are won on the green and not on the tee, and he was interested in winning every club competition that he could, so he kept his handicap
artificially
high, and decided to dedicate himself to the study of putting. Like so many golfers before him, Royston Chittock decided that the only solution was to make a proper green on his own lawn, one that could be kept closely mown, and weeded and rolled. Fortunately one of the greenkeepers who worked at the West Surrey lived in Cherryhurst, the row of council houses near the Institute of Oceanography. His name was Dick, he talked like a Londoner, and he lived with young Robert’s mother. Robert referred to him as ‘Uncle Dick’, but most people were fairly certain that he wasn’t that kind of uncle.

For a very substantial sum Mr Chittock engaged Uncle Dick to make him a putting green in his spare time, and so it was that one afternoon he came round to Mole End Cottage in his black Ford Prefect in order to survey the garden and work out the best plan for a green.

‘You’ll have to get rid of these moles, squire,’ said Dick, as they walked the grass. ‘They’ll make a right mess of everything if you don’t. Wouldn’t even be worth starting.’

‘Is that difficult?’ asked Mr Chittock.

‘It can take bleedin’ years,’ said Uncle Dick. ‘The buggers keep coming back. You kill one batch of them, and that just makes accommodation for some more little buggers to move in. Drives you barmy. Best bet would be to get the moleman.’

‘Is it difficult? I mean to get rid of them oneself?’

‘You can get the traps in Scats,’ said Uncle Dick. ‘You get three of them, and I’ll show you how to do it.’

Accordingly, Royston Chittock went to Scats, a great barn of a place on the outskirts of Godalming, where one could wonder at and acquire all sorts of implements and contraptions whose uses were known only to farmers and those who kept horses. Unable to identify a mole trap, Mr Chittock enlisted the help of a comely seventeen-year-old assistant with the kind of thighs that could make a shire horse wince.

He came away with three gadgets that worked like doubled scissors on springs, with a sort of a tongue on a chain that would release the jaws of the trap if a mole moved it. In his kitchen at home, Royston Chittock discovered quite soon that the tongue also caused the trap to snap sharply and painfully shut if one poked it with an enquiring finger.

When Uncle Dick returned two days later, with young Robert’s pet rook perched on his shoulder, he found Mr Chittock standing in the middle of the lawn gazing forlornly around at his molehills. He looked up and said, ‘Well, I’ve put the traps in the molehills, but I haven’t caught any.’

Uncle Dick took off his cap and scratched his head. He sighed and said, ‘You don’t put them in the molehills, sir.’