A Drake at the Door (12 page)

When she appeared again she came up to the gentleman with a low bow and handed him his cup. There was a glint in her eye.

‘Thank you very much,’ said the man.

‘I
hope
you’ll enjoy it,’ said Jane.

She had, in her fanciful fashion, allocated him his compost and, equally fancifully, had contrived a method of getting him there. It consisted of a potion, now emptied into the cup, of stewed stinging nettles, chickweed and heliotrope. She had planned the potion as soon as I told her, a few days before, that this particular gentleman was coming to visit me. He was very polite. He drank his tea without complaint. And, of course, he does not know to this day that in theory he is part of a compost.

After this episode we called Jane a witch. ‘Cast a spell, Jane,’ we would say whenever there was something we particularly desired.

But here was a Dutchman asking me the whereabouts of Pentewan Nurseries; and obviously I could not betray Jane by describing it as a meadow thirty feet square poised on an inaccessible cliff. It was my duty to support her. The matter had to be treated seriously. So I said:

‘The proprietor of Pentewan Nurseries
helps
here. I’ll introduce you.’

My introduction was enough to speed Jane’s idea of fun to such an extent that the Dutchman, innocent, was talking in terms of tons of bulbs for Pentewan Nurseries. I felt, as I listened, that he was aware that something might be wrong, but the prospect of his commission confused him. This was an opportunity. A new customer. And the girl was obviously knowledgeable.

It is an art to know at what moment to end a joke, and Jane never persevered too long. She disengaged quietly. She did not close the session of joking with a guffaw, forcing her victim into blustering embarrassment. She slid out of the joke. She left a question mark in the victim’s mind. And the Dutchman departed, a suspicion of a smile on his face, wondering whether she would indeed write to him about the order she promised to consider.

So was she joking about going to Turkey? Was it a whim or a jest to say that she was leaving us? Perhaps the mood we were in had deprived Jeannie and me of a sense of humour. We had no laughter to spare. We had been drained by the weary struggle for survival, our senses had been deadened by the pitiless monotony of pretence; the pretence to be prosperous, the pretence to be gay, the pretence to have hope when none seemed to exist. Far from the cities, esconced in the home of our dreams, we could not escape the twentieth-century malady. The sordid routine pursued us. And now on the day that we had momentarily rejoiced in a reprieve, here was Jane telling us she was going.

‘It’s no use worrying about it any more,’ said Jeannie, ‘it’s just a pity she didn’t choose another day to tell us.’

Weeks passed and nothing happened. The winter came and still the trek to Turkey was never mentioned. Then one windy, rainy November afternoon, Jeannie broached the question again at a moment when Jane had lugged a couple of baskets of wallflowers into the packing shed.

‘Oh, Jane,’ she said casually, ‘what’s happened to your Turkey trip?’

Jane heaped a pile of the wallflowers on to the table and started to strip off the leaves. She still wore her oilskin. It was huge, black, and three times too big for her; and her sou’wester, also black, buried her head so that all you could see was a nose and a few strands of fair hair.

‘We’ve decided not to go just yet,’ she said. A firm little voice, a note of slight irritation in it that comes when one is asked about a plan which has miscarried.

‘Not
yet
, at any rate,’ she added.

The answer was all that Jeannie required. She knew her Jane.

The Turkey visit had been permanently postponed.

The spring came early the following year. In February there were gentle west winds, balmy days which sent the larks into the sky to sing a month before their time. The green woodpecker in the elms below the cottage clung to the bark tapping his note of joy, unperturbed that the splendour of his crimson crown among the bare branches was there for all to see. The sunshine was his safety.

There was a rush of wings in Minack woods. Exultant songs from the willows, blackbirds courting, and thrushes rivalling them with glorious notes. Harsh warbles from the chaffinches, and the trills of the wrens, fluffing their tiny bodies, then bellowing their happiness. Magpies coarsely cried. The two ravens from the cliff flew overhead coughing their comments on what they could see below. Robins were careless in hiding their nests, no time for danger, for spring was here. Owls hooted in the daylight. The wintering flocks of starlings gathered in the sky like black confetti, wondering whether to leave. Too soon for the chiffchaffs or the warblers or the whitethroats. They did not know we had an early spring. Minack woods still belonged to those who lived there.

The sea rippled in innocence, and when the
Scillonian
sailed by to and from the Islands we could hear in the cottage the pounding of her engines; for the wind and the surf were silent. Fishermen were tempted to drop their lobster pots, and one of them every day had a string across our tiny bay. There were others feathering for mackerel. Cockleshell white boats with men in yellow oilskins, engines chattering until the moment came to switch off and to drift with the tide. Gulls aimlessly dotted the water, like lazy holidaymakers. Cormorants on the edge of rocks held out their wings to dry like huge, motionless bats. The first primroses clustered on the cliff’s edge and the white blooms of the blackthorn spattered the wasteland above. A beautiful spring, if only the task was to be part of it; but to us it held a threat. There was danger in the lovely days. There was menace in the soft breezes and warm nights. For our livelihood depended on cold. We required brisk weather and frosts up-a-long. How could we sell our flowers if flowers from everywhere were flooding the markets?

This was our first spring at Minack without Monty. He had died the previous May and lay buried beside the little stream that crossed the lane at the entrance to Minack, and which was for ever to be known as Monty’s Leap. His shadow seemed always to be with us. And although when one loses a loved one it is necessary to be practical and not to mope or to be indulgently sentimental, we yearned for the soft fur curled at the bottom of our bed at night, the sudden purrs, the wonderful comfort of his greetings on our returns, the splendour of his person – the colour of autumn bracken – poised ready to pounce on a mouse rustling in the grass.

He had been part of our lives for so long. He had been a friend in the sense that he had always been there to cope with our disappointments, ready to be picked up and hugged or to bring calm with a game or to soothe by sitting on my lap and being gently stroked. He had been an anchor in our life. He was only a cat, but he had shared the years; and thus he would always be part of us.

I said to him on his last day that I would never have another cat. I felt, in saying this, that I was in some strange way repaying his love. I was giving him his identity. I was proving to him that he was not to me just one of a breed who could be replaced, like replacing a broken cup with one of the same pattern. He was Monty, and there would never be another. It would be no use some well-meaning person arriving at the door with a kitten, curbing grief by offering a substitute. I was telling him that I would always be loyal to him. The only cat I had ever known.

And then I made a remark that in retrospect was to prove so extraordinary. I found myself saying that I would make one exception . . . if a black cat whose previous home could never be discovered came crying to the door of the cottage in a storm. I was so astonished by my own words that I went and told Jeannie. I was ashamed by what I had said. At the very moment I was trying to prove my devotion, I had hedged. I had not meant what I had been saying to Monty. My emotion had deceived me and my subconscious had come out with the truth. I would, in fact, accept a successor. True, I was able to console myself by realising I had made an apparently impossible condition.

And now it was February, a wonderful summer-like February, nine months after he died, and there had been no sign of a black cat crying at the door. There had been no sign of any stray cat coming to Minack; and cats, except for Monty’s memory, had been dismissed from my mind. We had other companions.

Old Hubert, the gull on the roof, continued to waddle along the ridge, staring down at us as we went about our business, sitting sometimes with feathers fluffed out at the top of the massive stone chimney, strutting in the garden, alighting on the cedarwood covering of the coal shed waiting for Jeannie to feed him.

He had been with us for six years, since that day we came up from the cliff aware that we had lost the rewards of our potato harvest to the weather, all our hopes gone, Tommy – who then worked for us – told to leave because we had no money for his wages, a moment of despair; and then we came up the path to the cottage and saw the gull on the roof.

He was to us the symbol we needed. The sight of him reassured us in the sense that at this moment of material defeat, the wild had suddenly accepted us as it had accepted the generations who had toiled at Minack before us. The gull had watched and now was prepared to trust. We had never attempted to lure him. We had never noticed him before. He was one of hundreds who flew every day in the sky above Minack, and he had chosen this moment of distress to adopt us. It was from that time that we felt we belonged to Minack, that we were no longer interlopers from the city imposing ourselves on the countryside, pretending in fact to be country people. We had passed the test. We were no longer looking on from the outside, armchair escapists who believe that dreams are real. We had been defeated, and there would be no soft way out for victory. We had joined the ghosts of Minack in the endless struggle against the seasons and, in doing so, we had embraced all the things they had seen and heard and done. We had become part of the ageless continuity of Minack; and the gull on the roof was its symbol.

And then there were Charlie the chaffinch and Tim the robin. Monty had treated these two with indifference, as indeed he did all birds. Yet both Charlie and Tim often gave him reasons to be justifiably irritated. Charlie, who was so gaily beautiful in the spring and summer and so drab in winter, used to hop around him as he lay somnolent in the garden as if he were playing a game of dare. And Tim used to tempt him by coming into the cottage and perching on the back of the chair upon which he was lying; then start to warble, softly, almost a gurgle.

We had not sought the friendship of Charlie or Tim. They each pushed their personalities into our lives. We had not set out to bribe them by the customary method of crumbs. It was just that we became gradually aware day after day, week after week, that a particular chaffinch and a particular robin took far more notice of us than any of the other birds in the neighbourhood.

Indeed their behaviour exactly suited our personal attitude to wildlife. It should come to man and not man to it. Some people like to try to conquer the natural instincts of a wild bird or animal, and then boast they have an unusual pet. True, it has required great patience on their part to score the victory but it always seems to me to be a hollow one. It makes me feel that vanity is the motive of the conquest, for it certainly cannot be of any benefit to the wild creature concerned. Its instincts will strive to be free again and, if it escapes, it will probably go to its doom by trusting other animals and men who are normally its enemy.

Jeannie was brought a fox cub once by a trapper who had found it in one of his snares. It was surprising that he had not killed it, for it was trapped in sheep country and foxes had been worrying the sheep in the neighbourhood; but it was so pitifully young, not a month old and perhaps caught on its first venture out from the earth, that he had not the heart to do so. He had made a special trip to Minack, for the snare had badly cut its right foot and it needed attention; and the trapper felt that Jeannie was the one to help.

He took it out of a basket and handed it to her and it immediately snuggled into her arms like a puppy. It looked so safe and harmless that I put out a finger to stroke it. I just touched it, and was nipped; but it never nipped Jeannie for the whole six weeks she looked after it. It was a male cub, and she called him Sammy.

For the first few days she kept him in a wire-covered box near the stove in the sitting room, teaching him to lap bread and milk from a saucer. Three or four times a day she bathed the foot and although it must have hurt him, he showed no resentment towards her. He obviously had complete trust.

We were about to plant tomatoes in our small greenhouse, a hundred and twenty plants direct into the soil. The ground was ready. The plants were waiting. A small number in proportion to those we grew in the other greenhouses, but still a useful one. It was, therefore, financially unfortunate that Sammy had arrived at this particular moment, for Sammy could not stay for long in the sitting room and what better place could he go than to the greenhouse?

So we surrendered the tomato plants, filled a chicken coop with hay, half covering it with a rug to give the darkness of an earth, and introduced Sammy to his new home. He was very timid, and as soon as Jeannie released him he scurried to the coop and hid himself in the hay. I do not know what else I expected him to do. He had every reason to be frightened and yet, as he hid that first time, I had a fleeting understanding of what it is that makes the unwise try to tame the wild.

I was irked by the instinct that Sammy would never be my friend. It was an affront to my goodwill. My vanity was hurt. I had a sudden anger making me wish to impel him to like me; and this, I thought, was the same unsavoury compulsion I despised in others. I should like to force Sammy to be so dependent on me that I could pretend he was fond of me. I had to surrender little. He had to surrender his life.

Jeannie patiently nursed his foot until it was well again; and when darkness fell, and there was a moon, we used to watch him running about through the panes of the greenhouse. She still fed him by hand, pushing a saucer up to him as he lay in his coop; and slowly she began to wean him from bread and milk to dog biscuits, and then to slugs. We spent a great deal of time collecting succulent slugs, but in order at first to persuade him to eat them we had to be harsh. Jeannie withheld the dog biscuits for a day so that he became so hungry that he had to taste the dish which would be one of his stand-bys when he was out on his own.