The sentence was: ‘She reverted to a feral state.’30 A longing came to my mind, then, that I should be able to do this also. The word ‘feral’ had a kind of magical potency which allied itself with two other words, ‘ferocious’ and ‘free’. ‘Fairy’ ‘Fey’, ‘aeriel’ and other discreditable alliances ranged themselves behind the great chord of ‘ferox’. To revert to a feral state! I took a farm-labourer’s cottage at five shillings a week, and wrote to Germany for a goshawk.
Feral. He wanted to be free. He wanted to be ferocious. He wanted to be fey, a fairy, ferox. All those elements of himself he’d pushed away, his sexuality, his desire for cruelty, for mastery: all these were suddenly there in the figure of the hawk. White had found himself in the hawk that Blaine had lost. He clutched it tightly. It might hurt him, but he wouldn’t let go. He would train it. Yes. He would teach the hawk, and he would teach himself, and he would write a book about it and teach his readers this doomed and ancient art. It was as if he were holding aloft the flag of some long-defeated country to which he staked his allegiance. He’d train his hawk in the ruins of his former life. And then when the war came, as it surely would, and everything around him crumbled into ruin and anarchy, White would fly his goshawk, eat the pheasants it caught, a survivor, a yeoman living off the land, far from the bitter, sexual confusion of the metropolis or the small wars of the schoolroom.
5
Holding tight
WHEN YOU ARE broken, you run. But you don’t always run away. Sometimes, helplessly, you run towards. My reasons weren’t White’s, but I was running just the same. It was a morning in early August, and I was four hundred miles from home. What I was doing felt like a drugs deal. It certainly looked like one. For minutes on end I’d paced up and down a Scottish quayside with a can of caffeinated soda in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and an envelope stuffed with ￡800 in twenty-pound notes in my back pocket. Over there in the car sat Christina, spectacularly impassive in a pair of aviator shades. She’d come along to keep me company, and I hoped she wasn’t bored. She was probably bored. Perhaps she was asleep. I walked back to the car. It was my father’s. I was driving it now, but the boot was full of things I couldn’t bring myself to remove: 35mm film canisters; a crushed packet of aspirin; a newspaper with a half-finished crossword in my father’s hand; a pair of winter gloves. I leaned against the bonnet, rubbed my eyes and looked out at the harbour, willing the ferry into view. A clear pool of turquoise was spreading out there over the Irish Sea; small crosses that were gulls traversed it. It seemed strange that it was day at all; both of us were wiped out from yesterday’s long drive, and faintly freaked out by the hotel we’d stayed at the night before. 21st Century Hotel! it said on a laminated paper sign by the door. When we opened it the first thing we saw was a plastic bulldog sitting on a desk, grimacing at us with the malevolent, merry belligerence of a thing from a nightmare.