I braced the breast muscles not to flinch. It was too much. At two yards humanity became again the inherent coward, and cringed away to the right, averting face from the eyes of slaughter, humping shoulder, powerless to remain erect. But Gos bound to the shoulder with a decisive blow, stepped quickly down the arm, was feeding on two ounces of beef.5
He had tried so hard not to be a coward. It was why he had hunted with the Grafton and learned to fly, and why he had swum around the St Leonards pier when he was small, and dived off the highest diving board at the Hastings Baths at school. He feels that old, sick horror. Powerless to remain erect. He must be brave. When he was small his mother had pleaded with him that he should ‘grow up a big brave and honourable man’ and it had conditioned him to fear the reverse. ‘I felt myself incapable of being any of these noble things’,6 he’d written. This was a test of manhood. Screwing his courage tight he calls Gos once more, from fifty yards this time, and this time he does not duck, even with terror flowing in all the courses of his veins. He is proud of the hawk for flying fifty yards, proud of himself for standing his ground. It is a victory worthy of celebration, and that night he drinks himself senseless. ‘I cry prosit loudly and repeatedly,’7 he wrote, ‘quaff fiery liquids of triumph, drink damnation to my enemies, and smash the glasses on the floor.’
It is fifteen days since the hawk arrived. I’ve washed my hair, applied some make-up, found some presentable clothes – that is, ones not dusted with dried hawk-mutes – and walked with Mabel to my college for a summer lunch-party at the Master’s Lodge. At ten minutes past two I’m sitting at a long table on a secluded English lawn giving an impromptu lecture on falconry while Mabel tears at a rabbit leg in my hand. The Master of the college, a shrewd and genial man in an impeccably tailored suit, is listening intently to my speech. Next to him is his mother, looking distinctly amused. Her grandchildren sit by her. And next to them, the Master’s wife, an elegant dark-haired lawyer, holding a glass of wine. She catches my eye and grins. Two days ago on the way to the supermarket I’d heard her shout my name and turned to see her dismount from her bicycle with practised equestrian grace. We’d talked for a while under tattered leaf shadows, and soon I was in the kitchen of the Master’s Lodge drinking tea. ‘So, Helen,’ she said, ‘we’re having a lunch party on Saturday. Just family. In the garden, if the weather’s fine. What would be marvellous,’ she said, head tilted, ‘would be if you came along afterwards and brought your hawk. We’ve heard you’re flying her on the college grounds, and we’d love to meet her.’ She uncapped a black marker pen, wrote HELEN GOSHAWK on a whiteboard, then hesitated, turned to me. ‘Two p.m.?’
‘Two p.m.’
She wrote the time in her elegant hand and smiled.
So now the hawk eats, the conversation continues, the sun falls in pale planes on the ancient walls, the chirrups of house martins drift down from above like distant fingertips on glass, and I glory in it all. How beautiful it is here, I think, and how supremely unlikely it is that I ever got to be here at all, a state-school kid born to parents who’d never gone to university, to whom Cambridge was the mysterious haunt of toffs and spies.
‘You must be a spy,’ my father used to tell me. ‘Must be.’ He’d watched me as a child sneaking about with binoculars, hiding for hours in bushes and trees. I was the invisible girl; someone tailor-made for a secret life.
‘No, really I’m not,’ I’d say for the hundredth time. ‘I’m not!’
‘But of course you’d say that.’ And he’d laugh delightedly, because there was no way I could persuade him otherwise.
‘It’s a job, Dad,’ I’d say, rolling my eyes. ‘I teach people English and the History of Science. I sit in a library, read books, do my research. That’s all it is. I’m not something out of a John le Carré novel.’
‘But you could be,’ he’d say, stressing the could, and part of him not joking at all.