The Fox in the Attic (2 page)

—R.H.

ONLY THE STEADY creaking of a flight of swans disturbed the silence, laboring low overhead with outstretched necks towards the sea.

It was a warm, wet, windless afternoon with a soft feathery feeling in the air: rain, yet so fine it could scarcely fall but rather floated. It clung to everything it touched; the rushes in the deep choked ditches of the sea-marsh were bowed down with it, the small black cattle looked cobwebbed with it, their horns were jeweled with it. Curiously stumpy too these cattle looked, the whole herd sunk nearly to the knees in a soft patch.

This sea-marsh stretched for miles. Seaward, a grayness merging into sky had altogether rubbed out the line of dunes which bounded it that way: inland, another and darker blurred grayness was all you could see of the solid Welsh hills. But near by loomed a solitary gate, where the path crossed a footbridge and humped over the big dyke; and here in a sodden tangle of brambles the scent of a fox hung, too heavy today to rise or dissipate.

The gate clicked sharply and shed its cascade as two men passed through. Both were heavily loaded in oilskins. The elder and more tattered one carried two shotguns, negligently, and a brace of golden plover were tied to the bit of old rope he wore knotted round his middle: glimpses of a sharp-featured weather-beaten face showed from within his bonneted sou'-wester, but mouth and even chin were hidden in a long weeping mustache. The younger man was springy and tall and well-built and carried over his shoulder the body of a dead child. Her thin muddy legs dangled against his chest, her head and arms hung down his back; and at his heels walked a black dog—disciplined, saturated, and eager.

Suddenly the older man blew through the curtain of his mustache as if to clear it of water before speaking, but he thought better of it after a quick glance round at his companion. There was no personal grief in the young man's face but it was awe-struck.

An hour later the two men had left the sea-marsh behind them: they had reached higher ground where a lofty but tangled and neglected wood traversed a steep hillside. So soft was this south-western Welsh climate, and so thick the shelter of all that towering timber round, that here a glade of very old azaleas planted in a clearing had themselves grown almost into gangling trees and dripping rhododendron-scrub had spread half across what had once been a broad graveled carriage-drive. Deep black ruts showed where in the war years the steel tires of heavy farm-wagons had broken through the crust of this long-derelict drive; but nowadays in places the roadway was blocked altogether with newly-fallen trunks and branches that nothing could pass.

Soon however the two men turned off by a short-cut, a steep footpath squeezed between a ferny rock the size of a cottage and a watery plantation of twenty-foot bamboos.

Beyond the bamboos their path tunneled under a seemingly endless ancient growth of rhododendrons and they had to duck, for though the huge congested limbs of this dark thicket had once been propped on crutches to give the path full headroom many of these were now rotten and had collapsed. At the very center of this grove the tunnel passed by a small stone temple; but here too the brute force of vegetation was at work, for the clearing had closed in, the weather-pocked marble faun lay face down in the tangle of ivy which had fallen with him, the little shrine itself now wore its cupola awry. Thus it was not till the two men had traveled the whole length of this dark and dripping tunnel and finally reached the further border of all this abandoned woodland that they really came right out again at last under the open whitish sky.

Here, a flight of vast garden terraces had been cut in the hillside like giant stairs. Downwards, these terraces led to a vista of winding waterlily lakes and distant park with a far silver curl of river: upwards, they mounted to a house. The walking figures of the two men and the dog, ascending, and presently turning right-handed along the topmost of these terraces, looked surprisingly small against that house—almost like toys, for this ancient pile was far larger than you had taken it for at first. Nevertheless there was no hum from this huge house, no sign of life even: not one open window, nor a single curl of smoke from any of its hundred chimneys. The men's sodden boots on the stone paving made little sound, but there was none other.

This topmost terrace ended at a tall hexagonal Victorian orangery projecting rather incongruously from the older building, the clear lights in its Gothic cast-iron traceries deep-damasked here and there with dark panes of red and blue Bristol. In the angle this projection made with the main structure a modest half-glazed door was set in the house's ancient stone-work, and here at last the two men halted: the young man with the small body over his shoulder took charge of the guns as well and sent the furtive, feral-looking older man away. Then the young man with the burden and the wet dog went in by themselves, and the door closed with a hollow sound.

Augustine was the young man's name (the dog's name I forget).

Augustine had the thick white skin which often goes with such sandy red hair as his, the snub lightly-freckled nose, the broad intelligent forehead. Normally this young face was serene; but now it was beginning to show the first effects of shock and for a full minute he stood stockstill in his dewy oilskins, staring round the familiar walls of this warm and cozy room with new and seemingly astonished eyes. Then Augustine's dilated pupils focused—fascinated, as if seeing it for the first time—on his great-grandfather's gun. This stood in the place of honor in the tall glass-fronted case which was the room's chief furnishing: a beautiful double-barreled hammer-gun damascened with silver, its blue-black barrels worn paper-thin with firing. Pinned to the wooden back of the case behind it there was an old photograph of someone short and bushy standing with this very gun over his arm; and with him two bowler-hatted keepers, equally bushy. The print was faded to a browny-yellow, but now as Augustine's abnormal gaze lit on it the faint figures seemed to him to clarify and grow—to take on for him an advisory look. At that his gaze widened to include the whole family of these beloved guns racked in that great glass gunroom case there: guns of all calibers from rook-rifles and a boy's 20-bore by Purdey to a huge 4-bore punt-gun: grouped round the veteran, they too now seemed veritable councillors.

Then his eyes shifted. In a corner of the room stood the collection of his fishing-rods. Their solid butts were set in a cracked Ming vase like arrows in a quiver; but he felt now as if their wispy twitching ends were tingling, like antennae—
his
antennae. Above them the mounted otters'-masks on the peeling walls grinned. The tiny wisp of steam from the ever-simmering kettle on the round coke-stove seemed to be actively inviting the brown teapot that stood on the shelf above —the loaf, and the knife, and the pot of jam. In short, these guns and rods of his, and even the furniture, the kettle and the loaf had suddenly become living tentacles of “him.” It was as if he and this long-loved gunroom were now one living continuous flesh. It was as if for the time being “he” was no longer cooped up entirely within his own skin: he had expanded, and these four walls had become now his final envelope. Only outside these walls did the hostile, alien “world” begin.

All this passed in a matter of seconds: then mentally Augustine shook himself, aware that his state was more than a little abnormal and reminded at the same time of that dead mite of alien world he had brought in here and carried on his shoulder still.

An old lancet window suggested this had been a domestic chapel once; all the same, not even for a moment could he put her down in
here
.

In the middle of the room a round oak table stood nowadays; but under the morning's crumbs, under the oilstains where for years guns had been cleaned on it and under the bloodstains where game had been rested on it there were still discernible faded inkstains and blurred inscriptions and knife-cuts from its earlier days in the schoolroom. As Augustine moved towards it to lay the guns down his own initials, “A.L.P.-H.,” suddenly leapt out at him from the dark wood, pricked there with his compass-points and colored (he recalled) one drowsy morning in the schoolroom long ago—in imitation of Henry, his godlike elder cousin. For though this house had not been actually his childhood home, much of Augustine's childhood had in fact been spent here: from his earliest age his two old great-uncles used to invite him on prolonged visits, as company for Henry chiefly ... ah, now Henry's “H.P.-H.” had leaped out of the smudges too (ten times more elegantly tattooed than his, of course).

That little Purdey 20-bore behind the glass (momentarily it stood out from the background of its fellows as the figure in a painted portrait does) had been Henry's first gun. When Henry quite grew out of it, it had descended to teach Augustine too to shoot. That of course was before 1914: in the halcyon days before the war when the two old men were still living and
Henry
was the heir.

Augustine, still humping the little body, moved towards the telephone bracketed to the wall behind the door. This was a peculiar apparatus, evidently built to order. It had two hinged ear-pieces, installed one on each side in case one ear or the other should be deaf; and it was ancient enough to have a handle to wind. Augustine wound the handle and asked for the police, addressing the instrument in the toneless but very articulate manner habitual to someone a solitary by his own act and choice who prefers to use his voice as seldom and as briefly as he can.

Then the machine answered him. The upshot was that the sergeant would come out this evening on his bicycle to view, but doubted he could get an ambulance to fetch it till the morning. For tonight it must just stay where it was.

When at last (in a remote and half-darkened formal place of elegance, a room he never used) Augustine did lift the morsel off his shoulder, he found that it had stiffened. This had ceased to be “child” at all: it was total cadaver now. It had taken into its soft contours the exact mold of the shoulder over which it had been doubled and it had set like that—into a matrix of
him
. If (which God forbid) he had put it on again it would have fitted.

Augustine was absolutely alone with it in all this huge, empty house. He left it dumped there on the big dust-sheeted drawing-room sofa and hurried across the silent stone hall to wash his creeping hands.

For a while, cleaning the two guns and toweling the dog took all Augustine's attention; but then he was at a loss till the sergeant should come. He craved for and gulped a spoonful of sugar but otherwise could not eat because he had become aware of his hands again: they felt large, and as if he had not washed them
enough.
Indeed he was loth to taint with them even the pages of a book.

In this dilemma he wandered from the gunroom almost without knowing it into the billiardroom. This smelt of old carpeting and perished leather; it was a place he seldom went these days, but unlike most of the rest of the house it was unshuttered and now there was still enough of the failing daylight in here to see by.

Billiardrooms are never small. In childhood this one used to seem to Augustine as interminable as the vaults of heaven: it had always been a room of wonder, moreover, for what might not happen in a room where a rhinoceros—lurking in an Africa that must have been just behind the plaster—had thrust head and horn clean through the wall? (Often as a small thing he had peeped in fearfully before breakfast to find if during the night that rhinoceros in his wooden collar had inched any further through.)

This had been a man's room, which no woman except housemaids ever entered. So, traditionally, it had given asylum to everything in the house no woman of taste or delicacy could stand; and Augustine himself had altered nothing. The paint was a sour chocolate brown. The chairs and settees were uniformly covered in leather. This faded purple leather covered even the top of a kind of stool made from a huge elephant's-trotter (Great-uncle William had ridden the beast in battle or shot it in the chase, Augustine could never remember which).

In a tall china-cabinet here there were some lovely pieces of porcelain—Sèvres, Wedgwood, Dresden, Worcester—and other exquisite objects too: a large conch in silver-gilt, engraved with the royal arms of the Wittelsbachs and held out invitingly by a nymph: again, a delicate tureen-like receptacle in Pacific tortoiseshell which had stood (so the printed card stated) in the cabin of Captain Cook. You wondered, perhaps, to see such beauties banished here—till you realized that this was Uncle William's unique collection of rare spittoons.

But there was even worse here than leather and brown paint and china of equivocal uses. The engravings on the walls for instance: if you looked at them closely and with not too innocent an eye you found they tended to be coarse—or even French.

Those two good old Tory bachelors, those noble Victorian figures—Great-uncle Arthur! Great-uncle William! Indeed what a powder-magazine of schoolboy naughtiness it had pleased them to sit on, in here! Hardly anything in this room was quite what it seemed at first sight. That ribbed-glass picture looked at first just an innocent rustic scene, but as you walked past you saw from the tail of your eye the billy-goat going incessantly in and out, in and out. Again, the top of that elephant-foot stool was hinged, and lifted. Absently, Augustine lifted it now: it housed a commode of course, and there was a dead spider in it; but until this very moment he had never noticed that under the spider and the dust you could just descry, printed in green under the glaze on the bottom of the china pot, the famous—the execrated face of Gladstone.

That had been typical of the fanatical way those two Tory old children felt about
Liberals.
Their treatment of Augustine's own father was a case in point. Though a Conservative himself he had married the daughter of a house traditionally Whig and for this he had never been forgiven, never asked here again. Thus Augustine's own childhood visits here had always been paid either alone or with a nurse. As if the taint was one clinging to the female line, even his elder sister Mary had never once been asked here to Newton Llantony (in fairness for this deprivation, Mary had been sent alone to spend one whole summer holidays in Germany, where they had cousins. That must have been 1913: she was to have gone again, only next year the Kaiser invaded Belgium and the war came).