The Painted Tent (10 page)

On one of these days Smiler spent a day with the local veterinary surgeon – an excursion which had been arranged by the Duchess. The vet picked him up in his car in the morning and he went round with him on his visits.

The vet was a cheerful man who liked company especially when it was the kind which was happy to sit and listen to him talk. And talk he did to Smiler as he made his visits to farm and cottage and the small country towns and hamlets. If Smiler had been in any way faint-hearted about his ambition to become a vet it was a day which would have probably made him change his mind. As it was, at the end of it, his mind was in a whirl but his ambition was still intact. He heard about and saw all sorts of animals and their diseases, about pigs and their enteric complaints and bacterial infections and was told that the pig is basically a very clean animal; he was shown how to handle birds, hens, geese, turkeys and budgerigars; his ears sang with talk about diet deficiencies of proteins and vitamins; he was given the life history of the warble fly that attacks bullocks; he stood by, his eyes missing nothing, while lambs were injected for dysentery, and his head was made to spin with a litany of the diseases of animals – foot-rot, foot-and-mouth, Johne's disease, Scrapie, liver fluke, mange mite, dog fleas, lice, keds and maggot flies – and then surgical details of neutering and spaying cats and the delivery of calves by Caesarean operation. With a twinkle in his eyes and his pipe seldom from his mouth, the vet inundated Smiler with theory and practical demonstrations all that day as though – rightly proud of his profession – he wanted to test Smiler, to make sure that he really knew what he wanted and knew exactly what it would entail. And Smiler stood up to it because hard work and often dirty work held no fears for him. He knew what he wanted. He wanted to be a vet and – he was going to become one.

At the end of the day the vet took him to the bar of the Fox and Hounds Hotel at Eggesford, not far from Bullaybrook Farm, and bought them both quarts of beer (though Smiler would have preferred cider). While they sat drinking it, the vet said, ‘Well, Samuel – that's just one day. And not ended yet. There'll be more waiting for me at the surgery. Think you can take it?'

‘Oh, I'm sure I can, sir.'

The vet eyed him over his tankard and said, ‘Ay, I think you can. You've got a good pair of hands and a strong stomach. You've a long way to go, but you've all the time in the world before you. If ever you want any help come and see me.'

That evening Smiler wrote in his diary:

Spent the whole day with Mr Rhodes. I think the Duchess must have told him to rub my nose in it – and didn't he by half! But it don't make no difference. Bother – any. I'm going to be a vet. The beer at the Fox and Hounds was good. I think I could get to like it as much as cider. Letter today from Laura. Only two mingy pages and most of that about somebody's funeral she went to. Fria just the same.

The mild weather hastened Spring to the Taw valley. While Smiler went on with his work at the farm and his studies with Mr Samkin – who now had Smiler groaning because he was insisting that he should learn some Latin and was hinting that very soon Smiler would have to take a proper series of correspondence courses with some educational institution so that he could prepare for his first examinations – things were happening in other places which would eventually shape Smiler's destiny.

In Bristol Albert and Ethel had received a letter from Smiler's father by airmail from Australia. The relevant part of the letter which concerned Smiler read:

I don't know what the police and the shipping company have been playing at in not letting me know what's been going on. They say they've sent me stuff but I never got it. Anyway, that's all water under the bridge and I can't get back yet to do anything about it. There's a dock strike out here and we're stuck till the lads decide to unload us – and could you see the company flying me home? Not B. likely.

But that don't worry me because I know my Samuel M. You just give him the letter what I'm enclosing and he'll know what he's got to do. But I don't want you or Ethel to do or say anything about this to anyone, mind, until Samuel M. gets the letter.

Ethel, who was sitting holding the sealed letter to Smiler while Albert read to her, made a sour face and said, ‘Just like him. Putting it all on to somebody else. Out of sight, out of mind.'

Albert gave an inward sigh and said mildly, ‘Well, dear, it isn't quite like that. What else could he do? And my bet is that he's given Smiler some sound advice.'

‘That Smiler – the trouble he's caused.'

‘Not to us, dear. To the police, maybe – but then they're paid for it.'

Ethel held up the letter gingerly by one corner as though it might contain poison and said, ‘Well – and what about this? We get letters from him – but no address and postmarked all over the place. How we gain' to get this to him?'

Albert sighed again, audibly this time, and said, ‘I don't know. But I'll find a way.' He rose and took the letter from his wife. Looking round the prim front parlour where he was not allowed to smoke and always had to wear carpet slippers, he went on, ‘I'll just go out to me workshop and think it over for an hour. Something'll come to me.'

After half an hour contentedly smoking in his workshop, nothing had come to Albert. But he was not downhearted because Albert was a philosopher and he knew that most problems had a way – if you waited long enough – of solving themselves. He only hoped that this one would not be so long in coming that it would be too late for Smiler to take whatever advice his father was giving. He locked the letter away in his little workshop desk for safety. Ethel, he knew, had the curiosity of a jackdaw. She was well capable of steaming the letter open and reading it.

In Bristol, too, Johnny Pickering was becoming a little frightened and puzzled. He was getting letters recently from all over the place – Southampton, London, Manchester, Glasgow, Durham – and seldom a week passed without one dropping on to the front door-mat.

They were all printed in ink in the same hand without address or signature and there was never more than one sentence in them. The first five had read:

confession is good for the soul you did it
and the innocent suffered
own up and avoid bad luck
nothing will go right until you are right
with yourself.
the black hand is over you and the green
eyes are watching
only three more warnings before fate strikes

At first Johnny Pickering had tried to take no notice of the letters. But he could not keep it up. Things suddenly
did
seem to have started to go wrong with him. He slipped on the pavement and badly twisted his ankle. His girl friend told him she wanted no more to do with him and found herself another boy. He began to get in trouble at work breaking things in the china shop where he was employed as a counter assistant. He knew perfectly well what all the letters were about and he thought they came from Smiler. But he couldn't work out how Smiler could be dodging about all over England posting them. He said nothing to his parents, but his slowly changing manner, making him irritable and rude, often brought him a smart backhander from his father. There were times when he heartily wished he had never stolen the old lady's handbag and put the blame on Smiler.

And while Albert pondered what to do about Smiler's letter and Johnny Pickering swore, less and less convincingly, that he was never going to be daft enough to go and make a clean breast of things to the police, Smiler was facing his own problems; some minor – like the way Sandra still hung around and foisted her company on him whenever she could; and one major – his disquiet over Fria who still sat on her beam and did little more than fly down to the shallows most days to bathe and was quite content to take food from the loft ledge.

He talked his major problem over one day with Mr Samkin who had become, in a way, more of a confidant for him than the Duchess who seemed to go about the farm now preoccupied and – Smiler guessed – clearly worried about her rift with Jimmy.

Mr Samkin said, ‘There's nothing you can do but have patience, Samuel. In the wild state Fria would have been taught everything by her parents. Animals have to be taught. But she was taken before all that could happen. Now, if she wants to live free, she's got to learn everything herself. Imagine if you woke up one day on a Pacific island beach – ten years old, and you couldn't speak, knew no language, had never climbed a tree or peeled a banana, couldn't swim. How would you feel?'

‘Pretty lost.'

‘Well, that's Fria. She's pretty lost. But she's got food and water and shelter of a kind. No matter what kind of spirit she's got she's sensible enough to stay where she is. Would you take it on yourself to drive her away deliberately? To cut off her food supply?'

‘I couldn't, sir.'

Mr Samkin smiled gently. ‘ Of course not. But something might. Some accident. If on your desert island you slipped and fell into the sea you'd make an instinctive effort to swim. If it came off – you'd have survived. If you were hungry you'd find yourself picking some fruit or other and trying it. If you didn't like its taste you'd spit it out. If you liked it you'd eat it. Self-education forced on man or beast has only two ends – survival or death. Fria isn't going to move from the safety of her beam until something too powerful for her to resist makes her.'

‘And then she might die, sir.'

Mr Samkin nodded gravely. ‘The odds are she will, Samuel. There's no sentiment in Mother Nature.'

Two days later the mild weather broke. The westerly breezes died and the wind moved round to the north-east. There was a night of bitter, sharp frost and the next day the wind freshened and with it came a hard, cold rain which swept down into the Taw valley in rolling, biting clouds and came racing up the Bullay brook in veil after veil of stinging, blinding squalls. In no time at all the woods and fields ran with water and the brook rose a foot before mid-day, swirling riverwards now in a brown flood carrying winter debris and litter with it. Birds and beasts hugged their shelters. The rooks clung to their wood and were tossed and drenched on their nests, sitting close to the first eggs which had been laid. In the fields the bullocks and sheep moved to sheltered corners and turned their backs on the icy downpour. In the farm-yard the only animals who enjoyed themselves were the few ducks the Duchess kept. They puddled about over the flooded cobbles and shovelled and dabbled their bills in the mud around the banks of the swollen shallows where Fria bathed.

Fria had no temptation that day to bathe. She sat on her beam, well back under the little pent roof and faced the cold onslaught of rain. Had she been an entirely wild peregrine she would have crept into the shelter of some small cliff crevice or tree hole and hidden from the weather. She sat there all day until just before the light began to go. There was a lull in the cold rainstorms and she flew down to the loft ledge and ate, tearing at a small rabbit which Smiler had left for her. Over the months she had learned slowly and awkwardly now how to pluck and find the breasts of the pigeons she was given and how to tear at the skin of rabbits and find her way to the succulent flesh of flanks and hindquarters.

Her meal done, she flew back to her beam and watched the evening darkness flood the valley while the renewed rain, heavier than before, slashed down as though it meant to drown the world. The brook was so swollen with the run-offs from the valley that it had come up four feet in a fast storm spate, a coffee-coloured foam and scud-topped torrent that beat high against the arch of the small stone road-bridge and was already spreading over the lower parts of the pasture and, within an hour, was to be over the road by the bridge.

When Smiler went out late that night to visit the barn, the rain battered against his storm jacket and the yard water swilled around his gumboots. He flicked his torch up to Fria and saw her huddled tight back against the barn wall into which the beam was set. For a moment or two he was tempted to creep up quietly into the loft and make a grab for her and put her back into the shelter of her cage, but it was a thought that died almost before it was born. In the darkness and rain he was sure to make a muff of it and, anyway, he knew that Fria would not be sleeping. She would be alert to any noise or movement from the loft. He did his round of the barn, came back across the flooded yard to check the stable doors and then went off to bed.

He lay in bed, reading and listening to the rain beat at his window, and finally he slept.

Outside Fria knew no sleep. She knew only the darkness peopled by darker shapes and the noise of the rain and the higher, steadier noise of the spate-filled brook racing away towards the Taw.

An hour before first morning-light the weather changed. The steady downpour eased off, sometimes stopped for a few minutes, and then abruptly what wind there was backed to the north-west and began to strengthen. Within half an hour it was roaring straight in from the sea and the long reaches of the Atlantic, thundering over miles of countryside and howling down into the valley from the far slope in a full gale that stripped dead branches from trees, seized anything that was loose and tossed it into the air, plucked slates from roofs and tore great patches in the old thatch of cottages. It came now not in one long steady pulse of moving, turbulent air, but in great gusty spasms that would follow a lull, and sometimes – because of the vagaries of the land over which it poured – it would change direction suddenly.

Her body plumage tightened down against its force, her eyes half closed as she faced the wind. Fria clung to her beam and there was a strength now in her legs and talons that held her firm against the sudden vortices and vigorous updraughts that swirled against the little pent roof above her. Now from this side, now from that, now from above and now from below, the violent, invisible tide assaulted Fria, and she held her place and would have gone on holding her place had it not been for the unexpected.