I try to keep her on my fist – which is like trying to balance a very tall and unstable pile of precious china plates – execute a smart volte-face to block the pheasants from view, and in the excessively polite voice that only ever falls on me at times of enormous stress I ask Christina if she ‘might possibly chase the pheasants back into the bushes? And perhaps the moorhens too?’ She grins, and shepherds the pheasants back into the garden behind the railings. Then she sprints off across the pitch towards the moorhens. Meanwhile Mabel is standing on tiptoe, jumping up and down, craning her neck over my shoulder to see where they have gone, and I’m trying to stop her from seeing, and largely failing, and I turn my head and see Christina running across the field, arms windmilling, and before her, scores of moorhens rushing back into the woods, wings open as they run, like small boys playing aeroplanes, and I start giggling uncontrollably. This is ludicrous. I’m holding tight onto Britain’s deadliest hawk while someone chases all the gamebirds away. My God, I’m thinking. If any of my falconer friends find out about this, they’ll never speak to me again.
Once the pitch is clear of temptation I call Mabel as usual. She flies to my fist perfectly, a whole thirty yards. But on the second and third flights she clouts the glove hard with both feet, skies up, tries to turn in mid-air, wobbles, stalls, then ends up on the ground a few feet away, panting, wings dropped, looking as if she is going to explode. All my laughter is gone. Now I know why austringers have, for centuries, been famed for cursing. I curse. It is my fault this is happening. I know it is. I hate myself. I try to keep calm. I fail. Damn, damn, damn. I’m hot, incredibly bothered, pushing hair from my eyes with rabbit-flesh-specked fingers, cursing to high heaven, and to top it all I see a man in white shirtsleeves and a black waistcoat striding towards Christina, his shadow dark before him. It is one of the college porters, and he is not happy. The set of his shoulders is unmistakable. They start talking. From this distance I can’t hear what’s being said, but she is waving one hand towards me, and I suppose she is explaining to him that I’m not a random trespasser, but a bona fide College Fellow, and what I am doing is not against the rules.
From his demeanour I don’t think he believes her.
They stop talking as I approach. He recognises me. I recognise him. ‘Hello!’ I say brightly, and explain what I am doing with a hawk on this hallowed ground.
‘Hmm,’ he says, eyeing Mabel with suspicion. ‘Are you going to catch students with it?’
‘Only if they’re causing trouble.’ Then I whisper conspiratorially, ‘Let me have the names.’
It is the right answer. A shout of laughter. He is fascinated by the hawk, and wants to know more about it, but he is working and duty calls. ‘Excuse me,’ he says, and he sets his shoulders once again, narrows his eyes into the sun, and stalks off towards some poor tourists who’ve decided to have a picnic on the corner of the college rugby pitch.
I flew her later in the day. I flew her earlier. I fed her rabbit with fur and rabbit without. I fed her chicks that I’d gutted and skinned and rinsed in water. I reduced her weight. I raised it. I reduced it again. I wore different clothes. I tried everything to fix the problem, certain that the problem couldn’t be fixed because the problem was me. Sometimes she flew straight to my fist, sometimes straight over it, and there was no way of knowing which it would be. Every flight was a monstrous game of chance, a coin-toss, and what was at stake felt something very like my soul. I began to think that what made the hawk flinch from me was the same thing that had driven away the man I’d fallen for after my father’s death. Think that there was something deeply wrong about me, something vile that only he and the hawk could see. And every evening I wrote in the journal I’d kept since the hawk arrived. I made notes in terse, impersonal shorthand, detailing the weather, Mabel’s behaviour, measurements of weight and wind and food. They read like aviation reports, things to be broadcast in clipped tones from the Air Ministry roof:
2lb 1?oz light winds, sunny, 4 p.m. 35 yards four flights quick response, overshot last two. Washed chicks.
But they were changing.
2lb 1?oz clear, slight breeze, 4.30 p.m. three flights 35 yards overshot every time. Awful. Rabbit.???!!
They were no longer entirely about the hawk.
Dull. Headache. Hard to get out today. Am I ill? 2lb 1?oz rabbit three flights 25 yards overshot on last why? Have to fix this what am I doing wrong?
Sun, stiff breeze. 4 p.m. Rabbit, but same as yesterday 20 yards OK – at 25 overshot twice: 2lb 1?oz rest of day horrible because I had to see people, have to pretend everything fine. On and on. Wish they would FUCK OFF AND LEAVE ME ALONE.