He is only a man. Success is a pressure. He cannot quite bear it. It boils and bubbles. And without knowing it, quietly and cruelly, he begins to sabotage his success, because success cannot be borne. It is so very easily done.
Stuart pulls off the road onto a farm track to the west of the city. The evening is warm, but there’s a torn-paper whiteness behind the sun that speaks of frost to come. I unhood the hawk. Her pale eyes stare out across a hillside of stubble and chalky till, at slopes cut with hedgerows crisped at their edges into shot-silk taffeta. She sees skeletal teasels and fencewires. Larks calling overhead. A discarded twelve-gauge shotgun cartridge by my feet. Red. She glances down at it, then up, fixing her gaze on something three fields away, delighted at this enlargement of her world. When Stuart takes her upon his fist she leans back and stares up at him with almost comical dread, head sunk deep into her shoulders. But soon she relaxes; for all his strangeness there is a kindness to him, an ease and proficiency in his dealings with her that quickly reassures. We unwind the creance and call her across the bare field. She flies badly, of course. I see that flinch as she approaches, that moment where all conviction and trust slides away and I am revealed to her as a monster. Once again I grab the creance and bring her to earth. Her feet sink into the friable loam; she looks down in wonderment at her half-obscured toes.
Stuart is firm with me. Tells me she needs to be keener. I cannot bear it. I get him to swear that my hawk won’t die in the night.
‘Of course she won’t,’ he says, blue eyes crinkling into something between a smile and a frown.
‘Are you sure?’ I say pathetically. I am horribly worried that I am starving her to death.
He extends a hand and feels Mabel’s breastbone, her ribcage, the muscles under her wings.
‘She’s fine, Helen.’
‘Honestly?’
‘Yes.’
I trudge back to the car, staring down at my feet.
Then Stuart stops dead.
‘Stuart?’
‘Look!’ he says. ‘Look at that!’
‘What?’ I say, turning and shading my eyes. ‘I can’t see anything.’
‘Look towards the sun.’
‘I am!’
‘Look down!’