The Painted Tent (20 page)

With Fria sitting steadily, the tiercel often left her for long periods after he had fed her. In time he knew the river valley and its surroundings for miles north and south of Eggesford. And quite a few people came to know him. The water bailiff, standing quietly and hidden under the overhang of some trees, saw him come down one day over a stretch of reed and iris-thick swamp and take a mallard drake as it was planing down to the marsh. The tiercel carried it to a gravel spit in the middle of a fast, shallow run of the river not twenty yards from him. He stood like a statue for half an hour watching the peregrine feed. A few visitors to the Fox and Hounds Hotel saw the tiercel flying high but a lot of them failed to recognize his breed. But some of them did and most of them kept quiet about what they had seen. But the presence of the peregrines inevitably became more remarked and the rumour of their whereabouts began to spread slowly … a little trickle of news and speculation amongst local people and visitors, a trickle which, blocked here, would seep along some new channel.

Away from Eggesford the tiercel was shot at twice. Once by a young man from Barnstaple – who had driven out for a day's poaching with an unlicensed shotgun – as the tiercel swooped round a corner of a wood chasing a pigeon; and another time by a farmer, walking gun in hand along the edge of a field of young corn. The tiercel who had been feeding at the foot of the hedge flew up as the man crested the rounded swell of the field and came into view. Instinctively he had brought up the gun and fired. A few pellets from the outer spread of the shot pattern rattled against the tiercel's left wing harmlessly. The farmer, who was not by nature an intolerant man, watched the tiercel fly away, recognized the bird late for what it was, and was thankful that he had missed it.

Luckily, so far, no one had discovered that there was a pair of peregrines in the district and that their eyrie was in the red brick tower at Highford House.

Laura arrived on the late afternoon train from Exeter at Eggesford Station. Smiler had been waiting for half an hour. Not because the train was late but because he had arrived early. With his own money he had hired a car from a local garage, and the garage proprietor sat in it now outside the station, grinning to himself at the excitement which Smiler – whom he knew – had been unable to suppress. Jerking up and down on his seat as though t'were full of pins, he thought. Must be a girl. Can't be nothin' else but a girl.

Inside the station Smiler walked up and down the platform restlessly. He wore a new pair of trousers, a freshly ironed blue shirt with a bold red tie, and a slightly over-sized green and blue-checked jacket which Bob – who did a little second-hand trading on the side – had sold him at a bargain price, pointing out, ‘Never mind the fit, lad, you'll grow to it in a month. Look at the material. Genuine West of England cloth and a bargain at a quid.' His fair hair was bound down close to his scalp with a liberal anointment of some violet-smelling hair lotion which had been left behind by Jimmy Jago. ‘From the days,' had said the Duchess, ‘when he found it in his fancy to do a little serious courting but soon thought better of it.'

The sparrows and starlings quarrelled on the station roof as Smiler paced up and down. Across the tracks below the bank a man was fly-fishing in the pool under the bridge. Smiler watched him, relishing the smooth parabolas of the line's movement, and remembered the one and only time that he had caught a salmon on a fly and how he would never have landed it but for Laura's advice
¹

He heard the rattle of the train when it was a quarter of a mile away and then the challenging, bugle-like notes as it hooted for the level crossing and the station. As the train rolled to a stop alongside the platform Smiler stood rooted to the spot with a sudden trembling in his legs and a hard dry lump in his throat, watching the few passengers descend.

Dismay swept over him as they all disembarked and moved towards the station exit. Laura was not with them. Loose brown hair, brown eyes and a sun-tanned skin … Gosh, he thought, perhaps after all this time I've forgotten what she looks like. Panic rose slowly in him.

A voice from behind him said, ‘ Well, you dafty, aren't you going to give me welcome?'

Smiler turned. Standing beside him, case in hand, was a tallish young woman, her long brown hair tied in a pony-tail, wearing a red trouser suit that fitted her slim body as though it were another skin, a flash of white silk scarf at her throat, white, wedge-heeled shoes on her feet, and a smile on her lips which were made up with dark red lipstick.

‘Laura! Gosh, I didn't recognize you!' He grabbed at her hand and began to work it like a pump handle.

‘Well, thanks, Sammy. That's aye a gay welcome to Devon. And did you think, you loon, that I'd come wearing my farm or boat clothes? And when you've finished with my hand I'll have it back and you can give me a kiss. It's all right – don't fret – the stuff's kiss-proof.' Her eyes shining, she leaned forward and Smiler kissed her, his head swimming so much that for a moment Laura put up a hand to stop him pushing her backwards.

‘Oh, Laura,' cried Smiler, ‘you look super! You're so grown up!'

‘It's a thing that happens – but you don't have to shout it to the whole world. And you've not done so bad yourself. You've filled out and you're taller. And, my goodness, laddie, have you become a smart dresser. Where did you get all this gear?' She fingered the loose sleeve of his jacket.

‘From one of the Ancients.'

Laura laughed, leaned forward and kissed his cheek, saying, ‘That doesn't surprise me. Never mind, things will seem different when we get into jeans.' Then, spontaneously, she hugged his arm and went on, ‘Oh, it's good to see you, Sammy!'

‘And me, you, too. Here, give me that.' He grabbed her case and, hurrying her along the platform, went on, ‘I've got a car waiting, hired it myself, and the driver's the garageman, and he says he grows the most marvellous dahlias and he's got a cat that keeps biting out its own fur and eating it so I said I'd look it up in one of my vet books and see what I could do about it, and – Crikeys! I forgot to ask. Are your mother and father well?'

‘Aye, they send their love. And my father's a few pounds poorer by way of my rail fare and so's my mother because of this.' Laura fingered her red suit.

And the car driver, seeing them coming, hopped out of the car quickly to take the case and stow it away, and said to himself that although he had known it must be a girl,
this
was a girl that could make both a man's eyes pop out on first meeting unless he blinked fast to keep them in.

Driving them back to the farm, the garageman eyed them in his mirror as they sat in the back holding hands and, because a silence had descended on them that he thought might freeze them up forever, grinned and said to Laura, ‘You're the best-looking number, miss, that I've ever picked up from Eggesford and there've been one or two movie stars among them.' Then with a wink, he went on, ‘Sammy here didn't tell me he had such a good-looking sister!' At that they all laughed and, somehow from that moment, the strangeness was gone from the two and they were Laura and Smiler and the months of separation dissolved like a river mist under the first warm rays of the sun.

From that moment began the happiest week that Smiler could remember for years and years – which was not strictly true, but understandable, for the memories of the young are short.

The Duchess took to Laura as though she were one of her own daughters, and a favourite one at that. And Laura took to the Duchess and knew at once that the red curls were no wig, and she helped with the cooking and in the kitchen as though she had lived in the house for years. The whole building was a babble of chatter and laughter and happiness which – when the two were away from the place – the Duchess would sit back and think about, sighing to herself with a mixture of quiet joy and nostalgia.

The Ancients, because they wanted to and also because they knew it teased Smiler, brought Laura a posy every morning when they came to work – not a posy between them, but one each. They mock-quarrelled with one another as to which was the best, making Laura give a decision which she did, meticulously keeping the score even but wondering what she would do on her last day which would be an odd one. She need not have worried because the Ancients – as it turned out – knew better than to embarrass a lady. On the last day they brought a double-sized one between them. And, from the depths of the stone barn, they hauled out a girl's bicycle which Jimmy was – or had been – hoping to refurbish and sell one day. They put it in order and Laura was free to roam the countryside with Smiler on his bicycle, both of them in working denims and shirts and Smiler's haversack loaded with a lunch provided by the Duchess.

One lunchtime Smiler took Laura into the bar of the Fox and Hounds and, while she drank cider, he had a glass of beer because he felt it was a more manly, grown-up thing to do when Laura was with him. But the gesture was spoiled when she said, ‘You don't have to make such a face drinking it and from what I remember of you, you had a giddy enough head from a drop of cider without taking to beer.' When Smiler protested and they quarrelled happily, the barman, Harry, came over. Winking at Laura, he said, ‘If he's giving you trouble, miss, just say the word and I'll throw him out.'

But there were to be serious moments between the two during that week. The first came when Smiler took Laura up to show her his room and tell her all about his studies and about the peregrines up at Highford House, and a dozen other things. As he was talking Laura touched the little clay model of Johnny Pickering and said, ‘What's this, Sammy?'

Smiler told her, and her face grew serious.

She said, ‘Coming from where I do, I won't say that kind of magic doesn't work, but there's times when a body has no call to depend too much on it.'

‘What can you mean?'

Laura smiled. ‘I'll tell you when I have the mind. Right now you can walk me down this Bullay brook, of yours. There's daylight for an hour yet.'

They walked down the brook for a mile, and sat on the edge of a deep pool where, as the dusk thickened, a sea trout jumped and the small brook trout dimpled the water film as they fed from a drifting hatch of stone flies. The pipistrelle bats cut the darkening sky above them with fast and erratic wing-beats. Because their ears were young, they could catch the thin high notes of the bats talking to one another. After a while the talk between them ceased. Smiler held Laura's hand and, a little later, Laura laid her head against his shoulder. They rested there in the slow vibrant bliss of their reunion while the world darkened softly around them. Suddenly from the thickets on the other side of the brook a nightingale began to sing – which was no surprise because for the right people nightingales have a wonderful sense of timing.

That night Smiler wrote in his diary:

Laura's here, and gosh I don't know whether I'm on my head or my heels. She's more lovely than what I remembered her like – and just as cheeky and bossy which is super. Super. Super Laura. The peregrines tomorrow. (I am going to get a box with a key and lock this diary up from now on.)

The next morning as the first light touched the high wood crest behind Highford House, Maxie who had been stretching his legs with a walk came back to the house. He was reluctant to go down to his chamber and stood for a moment in the shadowed angle of a buttress by his water tank. The dawn chorus was in full song and the thickets and shrubberies were alive with bird movement. He watched a kestrel come across the field from the big chestnut and hover over the old garden below the tower. Maxie smiled to himself as the tiercel – who had passed the night on the tower-top – suddenly launched himself downwards and chased the kestrel away, racing and swerving after it with rapid wing-beats. The kestrel dived into the top branches of an old crab-apple tree by the wood and screamed at the tiercel as it went by.

Keep off my patch, thought Maxie. As the tiercel came back and settled on the tower Maxie nodded upwards to the bird. Good for you old man, he thought. You look after what's yours. A missus and soon you'll have kids. You're lucky. Oh, yes, lucky.

He turned away and climbed through an empty window into the house and made his way to his vaulted chamber, memory plaguing him, and impatience growing in him because he had waited long now and had had no word from Jimmy Jago.

Two hours later Smiler and Laura arrived at Highford. Smiler helped Laura to climb to the roof and they sat on the parapet together watching the tower. The tiercel was nowhere to be seen. Through the glasses they could just see the top of Fria's head as she brooded her eggs in the recess. After about fifteen minutes, from high overhead, came a long drawn call of
wickoo-wickoo.
A thousand feet up the tiercel circled.

‘He's brought her food. You just watch,' said Smiler. As he spoke Fria shuffled out to the lip of the ledge, raised her head, shook her loose feathers into trim and flew off, rising with a slow flapping movement until she was well above the old oak. From high above her the tiercel dropped the jackdaw which he had taken as it flighted between two clumps of fir plantations. The bird fell slowly and Fria with quickening wing-beats flew up and under it, rolled over as it passed her, and came down in a short stoop and seized it.

She dropped down and flew under the green canopy of the old oak and settled on her feeding-branch. The tiercel circled for a while and then, half closing his wings, came down fast to the tower. He pulled out of his dive, wings open, hanging for a moment above the recess ledge and then settled on the lip. He shook his plumage firm and sat on guard until Fria should have finished her meal.

Laura watched him through the field-glasses. He sat full in the light of the morning sun which caught the bright yellow cere at the base of his strong blue-black beak, a bold glare in his eyes. His dark-crowned head and the darker streaks of his cheek and moustache stripes and the steely shine of his back and wings were like the armoured accoutrements of some arrogant, feudal knight.