Notwithstanding (6 page)

It was then that the speckled tail of the Girt
Pike
rose up vertically from the water in the middle of the lily pad, rather like Excalibur, and just hung there, pointing straight up and not moving. Robert beheld it in wonderment, realising that the fish had wound itself so tightly around the lilies that it could no longer move. It was drowning ignominiously in the middle of its kingdom. This was an ignoble and humiliating end for a creature of such power and myth.

Robert waded back to the bank, took up his landing net and found his fishing knife. He re-entered the freezing water and approached the lily pad. He was already a wiser and more cautious fisherman. He got the net ready in advance, and slipped it under the fish, which did not respond. When he raised it, the fish flapped feebly, its huge body overspilling the sides of the net. Desperately Robert tried to saw at the line where it entered the water and tangled with the lilies. Finally he succeeded, and the fish was released into his possession. Robert brought it out of the pond, unable to believe just how heavy it was, and equally incredulous that he really had caught it and conquered it. He laid it on the lawn, where it continued to flap, and then Robert waded back into the water to cut the line again, so that he could retrieve his rod, which was still floating on the water.

Robert was bending over it, contemplating hitting
it
on the head with his home-made priest, but actually too trepidatious to do so, when Mrs Rendall appeared bearing a fresh plate of peanut butter sandwiches in one hand and a fresh cup of tea in the other. ‘Oh my goodness gracious,’ she exclaimed when she saw the little boy, trouserless and his shirt tails dripping, crouched over the vast, gleaming fish. He stood up when she approached, and was deeply embarrassed about being bare-legged before her. ‘It got tangled in the lilies, missus, an’ I had to go in after it.’

‘You’re so brave,’ exclaimed Mrs Rendall. ‘You’ve caught it! I can hardly believe my eyes! How wonderful! How clever and brave you are!’

‘It wasn’t easy,’ said Robert, in a manly tone of voice.

They stood side by side, gazing down at the gulping and dying fish that was now drowning in air. Robert had just learned that a swift and sudden death is not always the best. Sometimes a noble creature should be allowed to drift away with dignity, in a long and slowly fading dream that has no precise point of terminus. In the mouth of the great fish, the tiny silver roach, snared on the snap tackle, and much mangled, also flapped out the last of its meagre life.

‘It’s so beautiful,’ said Mrs Rendall, looking wonderingly at the great olive stripes and the bright speckles of its flanks. ‘And look at those teeth!
They’re
fearsome! I had no idea it was so beautiful! I almost feel sorry.’

‘I feel sorry, missus,’ said Robert, his voice a little choked, and when Mrs Rendall looked down at him she could see that indeed his eyes were brimming with tears.

Mrs Rendall took Robert home, with his hazel pole tied to the roof rack, and his bicycle hanging out of the open boot of the Austin Cambridge. At his feet, wrapped in newspaper and a plastic fertiliser sack, lay the body of the Girt Pike.

It would be hard to calculate the importance of these events in Robert’s life. He was thereafter spoken of with awe by all the other boys in the village, and the little girls regarded him with something like fear mixed with desire. He became ‘the boy who’s got the pet rook, and caught the Girt Pike at the Glebe House pond’, and when he grew up, he became ‘you know, the man who caught the Girt Pike at the Glebe House when he was a boy, the one who had a rook’. In his house on Cherryhurst there would always be an overexposed photograph on the wall of the self-conscious and proud little fellow trying to hold up a pike that was too long and heavy for him. There would always be a photograph of the catch, laid out on the lawn beside a yardstick.

Robert’s mother hung the fish up in the larder with its mouth full of salt, and next day it was eaten
with
great ceremony by the extended family and some of the neighbours. Robert did not think that it tasted very good because to him it savoured of guilt, but everyone else seemed to think it very fine. He received many a toast, many a pat on the head and many a congratulatory slap between the shoulder blades, none of which quite succeeded in drawing off his perturbing feelings of shame. He was haunted by how beautiful the pike had been when it was freshly out of the water, and how its beauty had already diminished when it had been out for only an hour. He knew instinctively that beauty should last for ever, and that this world would never be perfected until beauty was perpetual. Whenever he dreamed of his battle with the Girt Pike, what he remembered more than anything was the terror and panic of it, so that in retrospect his triumph took on more the aspect of a nightmare.

There was no doubt about the effect of the episode on Robert’s self-confidence. He suddenly started to do unnaturally well at school, and passed the eleven-plus unexpectedly, so that his parents had to decide whether or not they could bear the expense and inconvenience of sending him to the grammar school in Guildford.

He had also been touched in another way. When the cancer took Mrs Rendall off a year later, he was heartbroken, and he wrote her a letter:

Dear Mrs Rendall,

I am so sorry that you have died, because you were so pretty and so nice, and you let me catch the Girt Pike, which was the best thing ever, and you made me tea and peanut butter sandwiches, and you bought me the Intrepid Prince Regent reel to thank me for catching the Girt Pike and saving the ducklings, and it’s the best reel ever and just what I always wanted.

With love from Robert.

Robert folded up the letter very small and put it into one of his grandfather’s discarded tobacco tins. He borrowed his mother’s trowel and cycled up to the churchyard, where he buried his message in the upturned clay of the new grave, before crawling into the abandoned lime kiln nearby, where he could crouch in the wet darkness and bury his eyes in his forearm without being seen.

Robert used the Intrepid Prince Regent reel for the rest of his life, even though he never went pike fishing again. Content with perch and roach, he used the reel long after its manufacturer was bought out by a predator and asset-stripped, and he used it when he was middle-aged and everyone else was using superbly engineered reels made of lightweight graphite, which ran on roller bearings. Whenever he got it out of its
bag
and mounted it on his rod, he remembered the Girt Pike, the Glebe House pond, and pretty, vivacious Mrs Rendall. Every time he went to the churchyard he would pause in front of her grave, where the headstone was tilting and covered with yellow lichen, and, wondering if his tobacco tin and message had rotted away, would feel all over again his long-standing sorrow.

THE AUSPICIOUS MEETING OF THE FIRST TWO MEMBERS OF THE FAMOUS NOTWITHSTANDING WIND QUARTET

IT WAS A
day in middle March, of the kind that for early risers begins sunny and uplifting, but which for late risers has already degenerated into the nondescript gloom that causes England to be deprecated by foreigners. The rooks were breaking off the ends of willow twigs and building their nests with raucous incompetence, most of the twigs ending up on the ground below, whence the birds could never be bothered to retrieve them. The box hedges were in blossom, causing some people to ring the gas board, and others to wonder what feline had pissed so copiously as to make the whole village smell of cat piss. Out on the roads, squashed baby rabbits were being dismantled by magpies, and frogs migrating to their breeding ponds were being flattened into very large and thin batrachian
medallions
that would, once dried out, have made excellent beer mats.

It was a Saturday, and the young man was driving along Notwithstanding Road, which leads twistingly and straitly from Notwithstanding to Godalming. Over time the lanes had sunk some fifteen feet below the surface of the ground, steep banks rose up on either side and trees so overarched the carriageway that the ensemble formed a kind of natural tunnel that gave people exhilarating intimations of being in fairyland. It was on this road that one was most in danger from the nuns who lived in the convent on the hill. Their bizarre disregard for safety on the roads was a source of constant wonderment to the locals.

The young man was taking a long cut into town in the spirit of exploration, since he was relatively new to the area, having recently taken up a post as assistant music teacher in a local public school. It was the kind of public school that one might have described as being in the top rank of the second-raters. He was not on duty this day, having been spared the embarrassment of refereeing any football games or supervising any detentions. Thus far he was not relishing his job particularly. The boys’ attitude to music was more robust and jocular than musical, confining itself mainly to bawling out filthy rugby songs in the communal showers. Moreover, since he was accommodated in a spartan bachelor flat provided
by
the school, he had not experienced the customary welcome of newcomers to the village, which consisted in solidly constructed, inquisitive middle-aged women turning up with pots of home-made marmalade and general offers of assistance and advice. His flat was in a large house in a remote corner of the school grounds, and the other flats were occupied by the school chaplain, a sports teacher who thought that classical music was for ‘queers’ and a fey and unhappy young English teacher who almost certainly was one.

The music teacher was quite poor, and had no prospect of ever being otherwise. He drove a Morris Minor saloon which he had bought for fifty pounds at the age of seventeen. He and his father had dismantled and rebuilt it in the garden. The car was admittedly and visibly hand-painted, but it had already proved a faithful servant, and it worked well even when technically ill. He was fully reconciled to a long future with this car, even though his rowdier friends in better-paid jobs were roaring about in souped-up white Ford Escorts with red stripes down the sides and huge holes cut out of the bonnet in order to accommodate oversized Weber carburettors.

He had passed the hedging and ditching man, who was contemplating an old whisky bottle that he had just excavated from the mud. He was somewhere in the vicinity of the Glebe House when he came across a car that was stopped on the verge, unwisely
near
to a bend in the road. He felt reluctant to overtake it, in case a car should be coming round the bend the other way. Most of all, though, he stopped because the stationary car was also a Morris Minor.

Going round to the front, he met with a woman, standing and facing him with an expression that had something about it of embarrassment and shame. Her hands were behind her back, as if she were concealing something. She was about thirty years old, a little plump, pleasant in the face without being pretty, dressed practically rather than for elegance or for effect.

‘Ummm, hello,’ said the music teacher diffidently. ‘I’m so sorry to bother you, but I wondered if … if you were in need of assistance. I mean, I thought you might have broken down, and, as it were, I drive a Morris Minor myself, and I always stop for Morris Minors if they’re broken down. Usually I can get them going, you see. I’ve got a toolbox and some spares in the car. Solidarity and all that.’ He looked at her, feeling foolish.

‘Actually, I haven’t broken down, so I’m not a damsel in distress, but thank you all the same. It was very kind of you to stop.’ She smiled at him. It was the smile of someone who wishes that you would go away.

‘The thing is, you’re parked near a bend, so I thought …’

‘Yes,’ she agreed, ‘it’s a silly place to stop, but …’

‘Yes?’ It was then that he saw, behind her head, a pheasant. ‘Gracious,’ he said, ‘poor little bugger.’

It had clearly been struck by a car while flying across the road and had hurtled into the side of the thorn hedge, near the top, where it had become stuck upside down, and died. The brown rump of the pheasant, as it protruded from the hedge, looked both comical and pathetic.

‘Yes, poor little bugger,’ she agreed. ‘So many of them get splatted at this time of the year. God knows why.’

‘It’s the mating season perhaps? That’s when all the animals get silly.’ A thought occurred to the young man. ‘You weren’t … are you, er, if you don’t mind me asking, planning to eat it? I mean, did you stop to get it out?’

She looked horrified, but also guilty. ‘Gosh, no. They’re so bruised when they’re hit that the flesh goes all black and has a horrible texture. My dad ran one over once, and it wasn’t at all nice when we tried to eat it. It’s the kind of thing that everyone tries once. Not recommended.’

The young man scrutinised the bird. He was always fascinated by the intricate and beautiful patterns on pheasants’ feathers. ‘I wonder what happened to the tail,’ he said. ‘This pheasant doesn’t seem to have one. The feathers can’t have been knocked out by the car, surely?’

‘Well, actually, I’ve got them,’ she admitted, taking her hands from behind her back, and holding out the long, barred feathers. ‘In fact, that’s why I stopped.’