Every Living Thing (36 page)

“Oh yes?”

“Aye, red-’ot news. Nat’s become a dad!”

“Really? That’s great! Congratulations, Nat! What is it—boy or a girl?”

Fatherhood seemed to have mellowed the big man because a sheepish smile spread over his face. “Twins,” he said proudly. “Boy and a girl!”

“Well—terrific. You can’t do better than that!”

Phil broke in. “We’ve been tellin’ him, Mr. Herriot. He blamed you for stoppin’ the job with that first injection you gave ’im. Well, the second jab must have been the antidote!”

“S
OMETHING FOR YOU TO
think about, James,” Siegfried said as he closed the day-book and rose from the desk.

He was unusually serious and I looked at him in surprise. “What’s that?”

“Well, I know you’ve had a happy year at Rowan Garth, but you’ve always had an ambition to live right out in the country in a village.”

“That’s right—some time in the future, anyway.”

“Well, there’s a grand little place—High Field House—coming up for sale in Hannerly and I think it’s something special. I’m sure it will soon be snapped up. Maybe you’d care to have a look.”

It gave me a jolt. I had certainly nourished this idea for a long time, but as one who hated change of any kind I had never got further than regarding it as a distant dream. Now I was suddenly brought right up against it.

I rubbed my chin. “I don’t know—I wasn’t thinking about it yet for a while. Maybe some day…”

“James, it takes a lot to stir you into action.” My partner wagged a finger at me. “But I tell you this, that day will come some time and when it does you will start to thrash around and you’ll never find anything better than this place I’m talking about. There isn’t a prettier village than Hannerly and the house is ideal for you.”

I felt trapped at the suggestion. Siegfried knew me so well. But as the hours passed and my mind went through its usual gradual adjustment, I finally came round sufficiently to mention the proposition to Helen.

My wife was much less diffident than me. “Let’s have a look,” she said.

We did have a look, right away, spurred by Helen’s better-developed sense of urgency. I knew Hannerly well, sitting as it did right in the heart of our practice. It was tiny; a peaceful backwater of a dozen houses, several of them farms, tucked into the sheltering fell-side and strung along a quiet little road that led nowhere in particular—to a neighbouring village some miles away or branching up the hillside to the high country hundreds of feet above. It was beautiful, but not with the chocolate-box prettiness of the tourist villages. No shop, no pub, no streetlights. To me it was a secret corner of Yorkshire, a little tableau in stone of that stern and lovely county.

The doctor who was leaving showed us round. The house was modest but charming, resting on the face of its own field, a steeply sloping pasture where sheep grazed. An extensive lawn stretched down to a swiftly running beck that widened into a pond where a score of mallard ducks floated serenely and great willows bent their branches towards the water.

Afterwards, in the May sunshine, Helen and I climbed with our dog behind the house, up the grassy bank past trees heavy with blossom, then over a stile to a lofty green plateau that seemed to overlook the whole world.

We flopped onto the grass and from our eyrie we looked down past the sheep unhurriedly cropping the grass to the house lying below us, backed by a great crescent of tree-covered hillside with the rim of the high moorland peeping above the trees. This majestic sweep curved away to a headland where a tall cliff dominated the scene, a huge friendly slab of rock gleaming in the sunshine. Away in the other direction, over the roofs of the hamlet, there was a heart-lifting glimpse of the great wide plain of York and the distant hills beyond.

After the cold spring the whole countryside had softened and the air had a gentle warmth, rich with the scents of May blossom and the medley of wild flowers that speckled the grass. In a little wood to our right a scented lake of bluebells flooded the shady reaches of the trees.

As we sat there three squirrels hopped one after another from a tall sycamore and, pursued optimistically by fat Dinah, flitted, quick and light as air, over the green and disappeared behind a rise, leaving her effortlessly behind.

Helen voiced my thoughts. “Living here would be heaven.”

We almost ran down the hill to the house and closed the deal with the doctor. There were none of the traumas of our previous house-buying efforts; a shake of the hand and it was over.

Helen’s words were prophetic. It was a sad moment when we had to leave the happy memories of Rowan Garth behind, but once we were installed in High Field we realised that living in Hannerly was heaven indeed. At times I could hardly believe our luck. To be able to sit at our front door drinking tea in the sunshine and watching the mallards splashing and diving in our pond with the hillside before us aflame with gorse and, way above, that changeless cliff face smiling down. And to live always in a quiet world where the silence at night was almost palpable.

Picking my torch-lit way on Dinah’s nocturnal strolls, I could hear nothing except the faintest whisper of the beck murmuring its eternal way under the stone bridge. Sometimes on these nightly walks a badger would scuttle across my path, and under the stars I might see a fox carrying out a stealthy exploration of our lawn.

One morning on an early call just after dawn, I surprised two roe deer in the open and watched enthralled as they galloped at incredible speed across the fields and, clearing the fences like steeplechasers, plunged into the woods.

Here in Hannerly, just a few miles from Darrowby, there was the ever-present thrill for Helen and me that we were living on the edge of the wild.

“B
Y
G
OD, AH’S SWEATIN’!”
Albert Budd gasped as he collapsed his sixteen stones onto a chair and wiped his face. Then he gave me an anguished look. “And ah know ah’m goin’ to start fartin’ in a minute.”

“What!” I stared at him in alarm. We had just finished a set of quadrilles at Calum’s newly formed Highland dancing club in Kayton village hall, and I was puffing, too, as I sat down next to the young farmer. “Really? Are you sure?”

“Aye, nothin’ surer. When Calum roped me in for this dancin’ I didn’t know there’d be all this jumpin’ and jogglin’, and I’ve just had a bloody good feed with three Yorkshire puddin’s. This is murder!”

I didn’t know what to say but I tried to be reassuring. “Just sit quietly for a bit—I expect you’ll be all right.”

Albert shook his head. “No chance! I can feel it comin’ on. He’s a bugger, is Calum. He came in and grabbed me as soon as I’d finished me dinner. Me mother allus gives me a special do on a Wednesday night after I get back from Houlton market—a few good slices o’ beef, sprouts and taties and, like I said, three Yorkshire puddin’s and a smashin’ spotted Dick and custard. I’d had a few pints at the Golden Lion, too, and I was just goin’ to put me feet up for half an hour when he walked into the house. Said I had to come with him and I thought the dancin’ would be like Victor Sylvester on the television.”

The stab of pity I felt for the poor chap’s predicament was sharpened by the fact that everybody else in the hall was having a wonderful time. Calum’s persuasive energies had obviously been successful and there was a good turnout of the local people forming up for an eightsome reel as the gramophone poured out Jimmy Shand’s foot-twitching beat.

Helen and I had gladly fallen in with the dancing idea and this was our third visit. With my Glasgow upbringing I had done it all before at school and parties, but I was rusty and had forgotten some of the steps. However, to the majority of the company—farmers, schoolteachers, doctors, and a good cross-section of the local people—the whole business was strange and new. But definitely fun to learn, and at times the loud laughter almost drowned the music.

I could understand that Albert didn’t find it funny at all. He was about twenty-five, living with a doting mother who looked after him far too well, and he was one of the many young farmers who had formed a friendship with the ebullient new vet and were eager to join him in his activities, but this was definitely not his scene.

I had often noted that there weren’t many fat chaps among the farmers but Albert was a striking exception. Six feet three, beacon-faced and with an enormous belly that he somehow managed to carry round his milking, hay-making and other farming chores. His appetite was legendary in the district and he was a constant menace to those carvery restaurants where you could put down a set amount and eat as much as you liked.

He looked acutely uncomfortable at this moment, resting his hands on his stomach and gazing at me with worried eyes.

I could sympathise with him. I had seen his streaming face bouncing aimlessly above the crowd in the quadrilles and there was no doubt he must be suffering.

“Ah tell ye this, Jim,” he went on. “If I have to do any more jumpin’ around I’ve had it. I’m goin’ to start fartin’, and when ah do ah can’t stop!”

“Oh dear, I’m sorry, Albert. It’s a bit awkward for you with all these ladies around.”

I hadn’t meant to be cruel but he stared at me in horror.

“Oh, ’ell!” he groaned, then, “by God, I’m startin’! I’m gettin’ out—I’m off ’ome!”

He was about to rise when the curate’s young wife came over.

“Really, Mr. Budd,” she said with mock disapproval, “we can’t have you sitting against the wall when we need a man for this reel.”

Albert gave her a ghastly smile. “Nay…nay…thank ye. I was just…”

“Oh, come now, you mustn’t be shy. Most of us are still learning.” She put out her hand and Albert gave me a last despairing glance before he was led onto the floor.

His eyes registered acute anxiety as he was stationed between the curate’s wife and a pretty young teacher from Darrowby Infants’ School, but there was no escape. The gramophone sounded the opening chord, they bowed, then they were off, skipping round hand in hand one way and then the other. I watched in morbid fascination as he halted and faced his partner. Oh my God, they were starting the
pas de bas
! That was fatal! For a few moments I watched the tortured face bob-bob-bobbing up and down, the great belly quivering like a blancmange as the music thundered, then I just couldn’t look.

I tore my eyes away and searched for some distraction among the dancing throng, and it struck me that all this was another example of something new Calum had brought to Darrowby. These people were just a few of the many on whom he had laid his hand. I looked at him now, the tall, black-moustached figure, magnificent as any Highland chieftain in his kilt, leaping high, kicking out his feet, toes pointed in the classical manner while Dierdre, tartan-sashed and graceful, glided expertly among the stumbling rookies.

The thought recurred that Calum had an irresistible attraction for a large number of people and he had brought fresh, meaningful things into their lives, yet there seemed always to be a faint spice of danger for those who followed closely in his beguiling wake; for myself on that barebacked cart-horse, Siegfried with the Dobermanns and now the hapless Albert in agony out on that floor.

“L
OOK AT THAT,
J
IM
! Surely that’s a stray cat. I’ve never seen it before.” Helen was at the kitchen sink, washing dishes, and she pointed through the window.

Our new house in Hannerly had been built into a sloping field. There was a low retaining wall, chest high, just outside the window and behind, the grassy bank led from the wall top up to some bushes and an open log shed standing high about twenty yards away. A lean little cat was peering warily from the bushes. Two tiny kittens crouched by her side.

“I think you’re right,” I said. “That’s a stray with her family and she’s looking for food.”

Helen put out a bowl of meat scraps and some milk on the flat top of the wall and retired to the kitchen. The mother cat did not move for a few minutes, then she advanced with the utmost caution, took up some of the food in her mouth and carried it back to her kittens.

Several times she crept down the bank, but when the kittens tried to follow her she gave them a quick “get-back” tap with her paw.

We watched, fascinated, as the scraggy, half-starved creature made sure that her family had eaten before she herself took anything from the bowl, then when the food was finished we quietly opened the kitchen door. But as soon as they saw us, cat and kittens flitted away into the field.

“I wonder where they came from,” Helen said.

I shrugged. “Heaven knows. There’s a lot of open country round here. They could have come from miles away. And that mother cat doesn’t look like an ordinary stray. There’s a real wild look about her.”

Helen nodded. “Yes, she looks as though she’s never been in a house, never had anything to do with people. I’ve heard of wild cats like that who live outside. Maybe she only came looking for food because of her kittens.”

“I think you’re right,” I said as we returned to the kitchen. “Anyway, the poor little things have had a good feed. I don’t suppose we’ll see them again.”

But I was wrong. Two days later, the trio reappeared. In the same place, peeping from the bushes, looking hungrily at the kitchen window. Helen fed them again, the mother cat still fiercely forbidding her kittens to leave the bushes, and once more they darted away when we tried to approach them. When they came again next morning, Helen turned to me and smiled.

“I think we’ve been adopted,” she said.

She was right. The three of them took up residence in the log shed and after a few days the mother allowed the kittens to come down to the food bowls, shepherding them carefully all the way. They were still quite tiny, only a few weeks old. One was black and white, the other tortoiseshell.

Helen fed them for a fortnight, but they remained unapproachable creatures, then one morning as I was about to go on my rounds, she called me into the kitchen.

She pointed through the window. “What do you make of that?”