When I was small I’d loved falconry’s historical glamour. I treasured it in the same way children treasure the hope that they might be like the children in books: secretly magical, part of some deeper, mysterious world that makes them something out of the ordinary. But that was a long time ago. I did not feel like that any more. I was not training a hawk because I wished to feel special. I did not want the hawk to make me feel I was striding righteously across the lands of my long-lost ancestors. I had no use for history, no use for time at all. I was training the hawk to make it all disappear.
Tonight I take Mabel further afield. We get to Midsummer Common at about eight o’clock and we wander right across it, past the redpoll cattle grazing hock-deep in thistles, stop by the cycle path along the south side of the river and sit ourselves down on a wooden bench under an alder tree. My feet are wet, cold, stinging with thistle scratches. I clench my toes into my sandals and watch the river slide. This side of the bank is all narrowboats and cyclists but the far bank is fronted with concrete slipways and college boathouses. And on the slipway opposite a man in a tracksuit is cleaning the bottom of an upended racing boat. Walkers pass, cyclists pass fast, and he and I seem the only people here. The cyclists and shoppers don’t see me, they don’t see the hawk, and they don’t see the man with the boat. I watch him work with his rags and bottles and his yellow bucket. Both he and I are concentrating our attentions on something important; both of us have a job to do. He has to clean and wax the shell of his boat, and I have to tame the hawk. Nothing else signifies. He wipes and waxes and polishes, and when this has been done to his satisfaction, the boat is shouldered and put back into the boathouse. He packs up the stuff on the slipway and leaves. Mabel doesn’t care. She has something much more interesting to attend to: four mallards dabbling about in the grey water about twenty yards away. They float off in a little raft and we make our way home.
Now the light is thickening into real dusk and it starts to rain. And with the rain and the dusk comes the smell of autumn. It makes me shiver happily. But I have no idea what amazement is still to come. Because Mabel and I are about to witness an extraordinary phenomenon, an evening ritual I had no idea existed until today. Joggers! Like bats leaving their roost, their numbers build incrementally. First there are one or two, then a gap, then another one, and then three together. By the time Mabel and I are halfway home it feels as if we’re in a nature documentary about the Serengeti. They are everywhere. Herds of them. They keep to the paths, though, which is good, because I can position myself and the hawk in a triangle of rough grass and chickweed just after the path splits into two. We stand there in the gloom and watch runners come up, split, and then stream past us. Of course they don’t see us. We are motionless. ‘Perhaps runners are like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park,’ I tell her. ‘They can’t see things that aren’t moving.’
It is raining quite hard now, and the hawk’s flat head is beaded with tiny gems of water that glow in the light from the sodium lamps. She balances on the balls of her feet, as she does when she’s calm. Her pupils are wide and catlike in the dark. What the hell, I think. She’s jumped to the fist inside the house. I wonder if she’ll do it out here. Right next to us is a wooden barrier enclosing a young lime sapling. I plonk her down on the top of the post, and she jumps, blam, just like that, leash-length from the post to my fist for food. With the wind blowing the wrong way, with rain in her eyes, with joggers thundering past us, she jumps three times, and then rouses, sending raindrops in a spray of metallic orange around us both. Brilliant.
13
Alice, falling THE LIGHT IS laid evenly on the grass, the cows are back in the fields after milking, and the far sky towards Buckingham builds towards dusk in dinted pewter clouds. Gos is perched twenty yards away on the railings of the well, and White is pleased with himself. He has solved the great and simple mystery of falconry: he knows now that the hawk will fly to him if it is hungry. It will misbehave if it is not. And now he has fashioned a creance from a long length of tarred twine – doubled in two to make it stronger, because it has a tendency to snap – and he has tied it to Gos’s swivel. And now he is here, and the hawk is over there, and he is whistling the tune of the hymn that calls the hawk to him.
The Lord is My Shepherd.
I shall not want.
He . . .
He rubs his eyes. They have begun to ache. He has been whistling the tune for ten minutes now, the old Scottish melody to Psalm 23, and it is hard to keep to the right notes when your lips are dry and the mosquitoes are starting to bite.
The Lord is My Shepherd; I shall not want.
He does want. He wants very much.