The Dun Cow Rib Read online

  It happened so fast, so dazzlingly lightning fast, that I had no time even to flinch. He sprang. He lashed out with both front paws, razor claws fully extended, slashing down my trousers and onto my boots. Then he was gone. Fire without smoke. In one blur of black-striped fury he had launched, slashed, turned and vanished under a clump of broom. The corduroy at my left knee was torn open and blood began to well up from a blade-thin slice in my kneecap. Long white streaks in the green rubber of my boots marked where the claws of both paws had ripped downwards, streaks eight inches long. But for the boots he would have slashed my left leg to the bone.

  I had felt nothing. It happened so fast and with such accuracy that the tomcat had not bodily hit me, not followed through with brute force, rather it was delivered at a perfectly calculated distance, the down-swiping claws at full stretch, pulling away the instant they hit home. That cat knew exactly how to use its claws as weapons of contempt, just as a thug with a knife might slash to disfigure you.

  I looked down at my knee as the blood roped and plied itself through the torn weave of my trousers. I cursed, a curse as much at my own disregard of the warnings and my crass appearance in the pen without food as at the tomcat himself. I limped out. Only twenty-four hours earlier I had told the Spanish biologists that even though our cats were captive bred they were still wild animals and totally unpredictable. Some of us only ever learn things the hard way.

  I walked back to the house feeling more than a little foolish. ‘Serves you right,’ my mother would have said – did say many times over – when through impatience or stubbornness, or just mindless folly, I had hurt myself. ‘What d’ you expect?’ she’d ask, gesturing frustration at my stupidity when yet again I had run to her tearful and bloodied after falling out of a tree or grazing my knees.

  Once, aged about five, rushing to catch a red admiral butterfly with my hands, I tripped and crashed into a stone wall. I broke a front tooth, splitting my top lip so that blood flowed freely down my chin and onto my shirt. She wiped away my tears. ‘Now every time you look in the mirror and see that tooth, it will remind you to be more careful.’ She hung on the word, hung on to me, love issuing from every pore. But it never did. If it ever existed, the caution gene had been strangled at birth, totally absent from my armoury. I now see that back then, without ever knowing it, I had led both my parents a merry song and dance. My mother, who was never equipped to cope with a rambunctious, hyperactive child always in trouble, must have struggled – must have wondered what she had done to deserve me.

  2

  Death of a dog

  It was a dog and it was dead, unquestionably dead. On its side with one ear and half its head missing. A dog blotched with its own dried blood lying dead in a ditch under a thorn hedge. A dog flat on its side as if it had been thrown there, or collapsed over sideways from a savage blow. Its mouth was slightly agape. A long canine fang curved down from a lip drawn in a last snarl, a snarl that should have been of rage or pain, or perhaps just disbelief, a snarl shattered by oblivion. Blood and saliva shone on a slightly protruding tongue hiding the lower teeth as though the dog had died with a heavy exhalation, thrusting the tongue outwards, never to be withdrawn. A glazed eye stared opaquely, unnervingly, a stare of shock and despair and emptiness. Something terrible had happened here and that eye had been its silent witness.

  To a seven-year-old boy who knew dogs and loved a dog, a dog not unlike this powerful, stocky, brown and white bull-terrier-ish mongrel, a boy who knew the bond of trust, the hot muzzle, the velvet ears, the barley-meal breath, who had romped and rolled and held dogs close, it was a catastrophe. The world had lost a dog in wild and terrifying circumstances I could not begin to imagine. My heart convulsed inside my chest and tried to break out through my mouth. I wanted to touch it, to stroke its smooth fur, but I held back. I wanted to cry out, to cry for comprehension of the brute forces that had done this thing, to cry for help and for someone to share with me the intolerable burden of this abruptly shattered life. But no tears came. So I ran.

  I ran the quarter mile across the damp Longbottom meadows and ditches above School Lane; I ran a frantic course, crashing through briars and marshy places, slicing the corners off fields, hurling myself over fences in the most direct route home I could take. I wanted home and to find a grown-up to whom I could pour out this breathless tale of dog destruction.

  I ran round the bottom of the old pond, stagnant with duckweed, past the moorhen’s nest of soggy rushes on a fallen tree. I hurdled over elm branches wind-ripped from high above, on through the orchard’s long grass as high as my waist. I burst through the tangy veil of scent from tall balsam poplars and poured myself over the oak-railed fence into the paddock, hands and trousers smeared and stippled with grey-green algae. Hens scattered in front of me as I dodged through the nettle clumps to the big-boarded gates with the rusty latch. I heaved it wide. Leaping the open drain, I raced through the cobbled stable yard, past the servants’ lavatories and on to the back door of the house.

  Scratched and muddied I burst into the flagstoned scullery, where low stoneware sinks and scrubbed draining boards stood efficiently bare and empty. Nobody there. On into the big kitchen, with its cream Aga range and huge table of bleached pine topped with flaking American cloth. Nobody there either. I yelled for Nellie. No answer. I ran through to the hall, heaving open the heavy green baize door on its stiff spring, down the single stone step and out into the cool, respectful silence of the black and white chequered floor and the deep, ponderous ticking of the hall clock called the Bowler in imitation of its booming chime, which echoed all round the house. Empty. I called out for my sister, my father, for anyone, pealing my seven-year-old voice up the elegantly curving stairs to the landing above and echoing sideways down the corridor to the schoolroom library with its shelves of fusty books. No reply.

  The furled iron ring of the front door latch was heavy and took both hands and gritted teeth to turn. It clanked up and the huge iron-studded oak door swung inward with a startling burst of sun. I ran out onto the crunching yellow gravel, leaving the door wide. Across the paved terrace and past the French windows to the drawing room and on to the ancient yew tree ringed round with its white painted seat, the tree in whose dark and scaly caverns a tawny owl always roosted, the tree that seemed to brood and cast its long shadow across the smoking-room lawn.

  I leapt down the stone steps and over the neatly mown square, past the bronze sundial on its age-lichened stone pedestal and on towards our grandfather’s outer sanctum, his holy of horticultural holies, where we children were strictly forbidden to go – the long, ordered glasshouses, four of them in parallel rows, with their dirty panes and worm-drive roof vents that squealed and juddered open and shut when the handles were cranked. I raced past the green corrugated rain butts in which mosquito larvae wiggled and mice mysteriously drowned, and on into the first long glasshouse with a vine espaliered against the once whitewashed brick wall and the slatted benches running full length under the glass, benches crowded with dozens of terracotta flowerpots of many different sizes. And there, at the very far end, hazy through the giddy intoxication of geraniums, he stood.

  There he was about his passionate horticultural summer affairs in a collarless pin-stripe shirt and a tweed hound’s-tooth check waistcoat with its gold watch chain, his horn-rimmed half-moon spectacles on his nose above a bristly little silver-grey moustache, and his bald head shining. There were his slender six feet six and a half inches, slightly stooped, long sleeves rolled up and his huge hands holding a pair of parrot-beaked secateurs and a woven trug bulging with dead heads and clippings. There he was with his pipe in his teeth, staring down at me over his glasses with eyebrows raised in pretended astonishment. ‘It’s dead,’ I blurted out. ‘And there’s blood everywhere.’ And then I cried.

  My grandfather tossed the secateurs into the trug, placed it carefully on the bench and bent to pick me up. He swept me effortlessly up, up, up and away from the swirling images of blood and death,
away from the clutching ache of panic, up and still further up until I too was six feet six and a half inches above the frightening world my exploration had led me into. He held me firmly in his arms and carried me out of the long, airless, stultifying geranium house so unspeakably burdened with sweet and heady scent, out into the sunshine freshness and the birdsong, and back toward the heavy carved oak bench on the edge of the smoking-room lawn.

  He sat down and held me on his knees. ‘Now you must dry your eyes and tell me what is dead.’ His voice was gentle and all-embracing and as deep as a wine cask and as old and wise as Solomon. He drew an acre of silk handkerchief from his trouser pocket and dabbed my tear-salted cheeks. It was soft and springy and smelled of pipe tobacco and bay rum, at that moment the most reassuring incense I could possibly have wished to inhale.

  It was the scent of unassailable authority; of great age and timelessness and security and the source of all well-being and the fount of all knowledge and all hope and all sanctity. It was the aroma that lingered in the long upstairs corridors that led to his bedroom – more forbidden territory we would not have dared encroach – and in the smoking-room lavatory we were not allowed to use but where we had peeped in and seen his silver-backed hairbrushes and a tortoiseshell comb laid out on a marble washstand beneath the gilt mirror. It was the lofty perfume of the olden days, of knights and kings and archbishops, the paternalistic aroma of history and Empire, and, in a peculiar way I could not have begun to describe or explain, it was the scent of love.

  ‘It’s a dog.’ The words choked themselves out. ‘And it’s dead.’ And the tears erupted again, welling into the crumpled silk; the image too stark and the trauma too vivid to be contained in so young a head.

  ‘I think you’d better show me this dog.’

  I held his huge hand as we strode up the mossy slabs of the laurel-lined Broadwalk, shady beneath the cloistered intimacy of huge elms and beeches, slabs that had been heaved into tectonic undulations by the ramifications of roots beneath. I had to take three steps to his one long pace, so I jogged along beside him, still jabbering out the awfulness of my find. We climbed the post and rail fences and out into the fields.

  White-faced Hereford bullocks frisked away from us as we cut across their moist pasture of buttercups and clover and lanky thistles. We strode up the field hedges of dense hawthorn and may, where blackbirds and thrushes burst out with a shimmer of sun-silvered wings and clucking alarms, undulated away from us and dived back in again far up ahead. A magpie jetted out beside us and flew off cackling like a witch. We drew close and my heart began to pound. I ran forward. We jumped a ditch: a mighty leap for me and one stride for him as he muttered, ‘Where on earth are you taking me, boy?’

  And there it was. There it was dead and snarling with a buzz of bluebottles about its nose and crawling over the bloody void where the ear and a slice of skull should have been.

  ‘Hmmphhh,’ my grandfather grunted from somewhere deep inside his waistcoated chest as he took the pipe from his teeth and pulled his lips forward and together in a pursed grimace of knowing disapproval. Then he nodded solemnly, ‘I know that dog. It’s been shot at very close range.’ And we turned away and began the long walk back to the house, the silence punctuated only by the regular sharp intake of breath from the side of his mouth.

  * * *

  It was mid-afternoon. My mother was away in hospital. My father, I learned, had driven my sister in the old black Rover the narrow twenty miles of the Roman Fosse Way – as straight as a blade – and a few winding Warwickshire-Oxfordshire back lanes into the quiet Cotswold market town of Banbury on some domestic errand. By the age of seven I had achieved a reputation for never being an asset on any shopping trip.

  So that day I had been abandoned to my own devices; even by then I had established blissful contentment at being left to explore on my own, under the vague and undefined supervision of Nellie – ‘Now don’t you go getting lost, young Jack, or I’ll be for it’ – to catch red admiral butterflies on rotting plums or search for birds’ nests, things of which adults vaguely approved but had little desire to supervise. As usual I had wandered off that day into the woods and fields of the Manor Farm.

  ‘They’ll all be back for tea,’ my grandfather told me, pulling out his gold pocket watch and tapping its glass as if it needed waking up before telling him the time. ‘In another hour or so. You mark my words.’

  He smiled down at me as he lit his pipe with a Swan Vestas, smoke pluming dragon-like from his nostrils, and then he was gone, leaving me earnestly marking his words, striding away from me, the high priest returning to his altar, back to his beloved geraniums and delphiniums and pyrotechnically bursting camellias that almost no one ever saw. He was gone again, gone for the moment, gone in measurable distances of yards and feet and inches, gone in physical presence with his tobacco trail wisping out behind him like an echo, gone in thought and preoccupation as his passion for flowers hauled him away, but to me he had not gone at all. Like the dog’s blood, the events of that day had congealed immutably within my seven-year-old head. My grandfather had become as present and live and tangible and knowable and, yes, as mine, as God to a lonely spinster.

  At the ritual of five o’clock afternoon tea at the kitchen table, Nellie sliced the large white loaf in her own alarming style. She would hold the loaf on end, cut face uppermost, and saw horizontally across the top with the blade flashing back and forth toward her own ample bosom. The result was thick, ragged slices for making toast on the ancient Aga hotplate in a folding wire mesh frame. (There was a bread slicer for what she called ‘proper dining-room bread’.) This hot toast, with its imprint of mesh-singed check, she smeared with salty butter the colour of daffodils from the farm dairy, heaped dripping onto a platter and placed strategically in the middle of the table where two large jars, one of honey and the other of her own strawberry jam, lay invitingly open.

  It was an invariable routine and a near-compulsory gathering of such family as were about, possibly for the first time since breakfast. ‘I’ve baked a cake,’ Nellie would announce, delivering to the table a warmly volcanic fruit cake rising to a sultana-fissured crater at its summit. Her toast and cake drew us in like moths to a candle. Only on Sundays was the tea ritual extended to the hushed formality of the Jacobean panelled dining room, and that was an adult affair where from the sideboard they poured their tea into Dresden bone-china cups from a silver teapot and the bread was neatly sliced on the slicer. Children stayed in the kitchen with Nellie, and that suited me fine.

  Kitchen tea came from a large china pot, glossy brown, dressed in a knitted and fitted blue and yellow cosy, and was poured through a strainer into big blue-ringed teacups of simple household ware. With a long-drawn sigh my grandfather always collapsed his great length into a big, high-backed oak carver at the far end of the table; my father and my uncle sat on either side, while my sister and I perched nearest the Aga under Nellie’s watchful eye. ‘Now, no tipping back!’ she would hiss at me in an audible whisper, flipping her tea towel against my shoulder in mock anger. ‘Or you’ll be in right trouble and no honey for a week.’ And when my sister and I giggled feebly at this rebuke she would add, ‘And just you remember your manners at table.’

  I can remember dozens of such sleepy summer afternoons and kitchen teas, dozens of days of toast and honey and jam and crumbling fruit cake, of Nellie’s teasing and the grown-ups locked in yawningly leaden conversation about the abhorrent politics of the day, but only one when, together like old buddies, my grandfather and I held the family in thrall, when the saga of the dead dog gripped them so; only one when I was at the centre of his world and my world and the whole wide world and everything revolved around him and me and my awful discovery.

  ‘The boy’s found a dead dog in a ditch at Longbottom,’ he announced as soon as he had lowered himself into the chair. ‘He took me out there. It’s that wretch Howson’s dog – Tramp, I think he called it – a big terrier of a kind. Shot at point-blank range. H
alf its head is missing.’ He loaded strawberry jam onto his toast.

  Nellie looked pale and turned away to the Aga to busy herself with more toast. ‘Whatever were you doing out at Longbottom?’ my father enquired directly.

  My grandfather rescued me. ‘He was just birds’ nesting. It’s a good spot. There are magpies in those thorn hedges.’

  ‘Why d’ y’ think he shot his dog?’ my father quizzed, changing tack.

  ‘That man has a terrible temper on him. He’d shoot anything. It disobeyed him, I shouldn’t wonder, and he blasted it. Damned shame. It was a decent looking dog and good at the rabbits.’

  * * *

  I now see that it was inevitable that those explorations, those dreamy solo sorties into the woods and fields where a child’s unfettered imagination could run riot, meeting and treating every encounter with the surging excitement of real discovery, would become an addiction from which I would never fully recover. Every day I longed to escape. I would rush through breakfast, gobbling down Nellie’s thick porridge as fast as I could. ‘Please may I get down?’

  ‘Yes, you may. Now don’t you go getting into trouble, young Jack, or you’ll be . . .’ But I would be out of the door and away before she could finish the sentence. Usually I didn’t know where I was going. There was never a defined purpose, it was just out and away and come what may.