Mr Price had not finished. He shifted his weight onto the other foot and continued.
‘You hunt around here, don’t you, John? And probably poach a little too, but what’s that between friends? Nobody much cares about that around here – there’s not enough money in the shooting. And besides, most of the farmers would see it as payment for all the pests you clear off their crops. A pheasant here and there for culling twenty rabbits, eh? Nobody minds that. And you’re well known.’ He stopped, possibly waiting for a response. When none came he went on. ‘But you eat the pests, don’t you? It’s not just for sport with you. I’d probably discover that these children were fairly nifty at skinning animals. And plucking birds too, I’d say.’
‘We dindt catch your bird and eat it. I know difference between a wood pigeon and a racing pigeon. Your bird were got by a hawk and I’m sure you worked that out first thing this morning before deciding to drive up here to my house.’
It seemed as if Mr Price would disagree, but he did not. After a moment’s pause he said, ‘I know you’re right. I know it. I just wondered if you had seen anything. He was a beautiful bird, you know? I’ve been working on the line for a decade and he seemed like the best I’d ever come up with. But no matter. A hawk got him and so I’ll set some traps and make sure there are fewer around. Shoot any hawk you see, yes?’
‘I won’t.’
‘No, of course you won’t. Well, never mind. Let’s see how fast his brothers and sisters are, shall we? Let’s see if they can outfly the hawks.’
He was about to leave – he very nearly went – and then he didn’t. He saw my sister and I again and stopped. ‘Your children must be lonely away from school and anybody of their own age. It’s just the three of you. They must get lonely.’ And then, ‘I’ll bring my boys up one time so they can make some friends.’
Daddy said nothing. Mr Price grimaced at Cathy and climbed back into his Land Rover. The car curled towards us before taking the track back down to the main road. Its engine was quiet and it disappeared quickly.
Daddy remained fixed to his position for some time after the Land Rover rolled away but his breathing had changed, like a sail buoyed and loosened by an irregular wind.
‘Why did he really come here, Daddy?’ Cathy asked.
She had grown taller over the winter but it had made her weaker. Her bones had stretched and thinned and her muscles had spread to cover them. She could not control her movements as minutely as she had previously. Her knees did not know the length of her femurs and tibias, and her feet smacked the ground when she walked. When she stood up she had taken to resting her weight on one leg or the other with her free foot upended on its toes behind her, tucked behind the supporting ankle. It might have been her hips that had changed. She never would get those wide, birthing hip bones that she feared she would, the ones that conform a woman’s whole body around them, but she did get something. Her pelvis developed tilted. Her silhouette took a different line and the small of her back had to curve to meet it before rising sharply as it had done before.
‘Where do you know him from, Daddy?’ she asked when she got no reply.
Sometimes it was as if Daddy was torn apart by our questions. He wanted to be an honest man who shared what he knew with his children, imparting details of his current and former lives, knowing that if any of the details were too much for us that was the very reason for imparting them. Everything he did now was to toughen us up against something unseen. He wanted to strengthen us against the dark things in the world. The more we knew of it, the better we would be prepared. And yet there was nothing of the world in our lives, only stories of it. We had been taken out of our school and our hometown to live with Daddy in a small copse. We had no friends and hardly any neighbours. We obtained a form of education from a woman who dropped books lazily into our laps from a library she had developed to suit only her tastes and her own way of thinking. She probably resented our presence. She probably thought we were filthy and stupid but gave us her time out of some obligation to Daddy.
That was why anybody did anything for us, it seemed. Around here anyway. They feared him or they owed him favours. Other people did not seem to possess the kind of love he had nor the care he took of them from inside our hilltop watchtower. Others saw reciprocity and debts, imagined threats founded in nothing more than his physical presence, burdens passed onto their shoulders by his existence in their landscape, his insistence on integrity, the old-world morality over which he presided. The lurcher puppies that Peter had given us were tokens of fealty, and while Daddy saw them as complete payment for a service he had really done to satisfy his own frustrations, I knew that Peter still felt the debt, or feared the debt. And it was all because he remained unknown. Daddy could never draw a person in with his temperament. There was nothing generous or reassuring in his manner. The only thing that was known of Daddy was that he was the strongest man anyone had ever met, and that he was ruthless in a fight.
Daddy, of course, knew nothing of this. He could not see into other people’s minds any more than he could understand their bodies, so much smaller and weaker than his own. And he could not see any way in which Cathy and I might live our lives without him. We were not built like him and so how were we to stand against the world as he did? He had seen violence, and saw violence now, and he could not understand how a person was to defend themselves or form their place in the world but with their bare muscles and bare hands. And so he kept us here. And I see now that he tied us to everything he valued and feared.
He did not answer Cathy.
Daddy once told us that battles were only ever fought between two people at any one time. There might be armies and governments and ideologies, but in any given moment there was just one person and another person, one about to kill and one about to be killed. The other men and women who were with you or against you faded away. It was just you and another standing in a muddy field with your skin naked beneath your clothes. And Daddy told us that when we met people we had to remember that, to remember that you can only look directly into one person’s pair of eyes at any given time.
Cathy asked again how we knew Mr Price, and still Daddy did not answer.
‘We must be cautious of Mr Price,’ he said, at last. That was all he said.
Cathy stayed quiet. She had folded her arms about her body.
‘Will he come back?’ Cathy asked.
‘Yes.’
Chapter Seven