Gauzy skin and dying pillows, old smell of chloroform and hot baby powder, stiff webbed hands in his hair, that bad mouth drinking up his tears.
"For you can never leave me, Giles, can you?"
The tears eddied down his cheeks. "No, mother. I can never leave you."
"Baby Giles," she whispered. "Baby Giles."
31: picking up speed
He gave the fat-necked cab driver an unspecified number of five-pound notes and began to apologize, firstly for seeming to have no idea at all where Appleseed Rectory was, and secondly for having repeatedly addressed him as Luigi. The chauffeur counted the money, allowed his face to fall into an uncontrollable gloat, and accelerated stridently away. "Oh, and — keep the change, actually," Giles told the spinning dust. Giles milled round to face the house, slowly finding his footing on the ripped gravel. He drank from his liter hipflask and looked meltingly up at Appleseed Rectory. He looked up at its bleached walls, the flaking sills and drainpipes, the wasted concrete and dark windows, with a familiar jarred relief. He had no feeling for the house, nothing whatever beyond provisional recognition, but he was fairly sure of there
being good things in it — drink, friends, a known room. Perhaps the most attractive feature of the house, Giles moreover mused, was that he wouldn't have to leave it until his mother called again. Through the air came the sound of distant wings. Sudden foreboding discovered him. He was all teeth once more. Giles swayed before the neutral building, the clouds picking up speed above his head.
Which, of course, is precisely what everything else has started to do—pick up speed. Friday was slow: it sailed gaily by in commodious chunks, like a procession of battered river-boats heading for the jeweled estuary of night. See? But Saturday is fast and rough; adrift, it rushes along in snatches, sideways, at an angle, never head on, and is finished, really, before any of them know it.
32: THE COOL DOVES
Twice a day, at midmorning and just before dusk, the brood of doves which nested in the roof of the nearby church sailed down the rise of the village, treading air in the thick thermals above Appleseed Rectory, and swam across the garden to land in the friendly branches of the oak in the neighboring field, where they would ululate and moan at the changing light, compose themselves once again and lift off, swerving in line over the roadside stream to regain their mossy tiles. They came with ritual calm and regularity to Appleseed Rectory, as if in decorous salute to a former home. Time always seemed to pause and take a breath when the cool doves approached, and their lessening wings never failed to hold the eye.
"I swear, Quentin," said Andy yearningly, "unless some normal birds start coming here again, I'm going to get going on those fuckin' doves."
"Ah, but Andy — they're doves," said Quentin.
"They're still fuckin' birds, aren't they? What difference does that make?"
"But they're holy birds."
"Yeah, and I bet they read the Bible and do quid-a-jobs and never say 'fuck.' "
"Now, now, Andrew. Now, now."
For Quentin and Andy were out killing birds in the
garden. This recreation had recently come to carry a sense
of strain, particularly as regards Adorno. In the golden age of their first few weeks at the house, Andy would rise before six, gulp down some Irish coffee, and prowl into the garden: with the Webley rifle for stealthy two-hour sessions, often claiming to have dispatched between twenty and thirty of the pests in a single morning. Two months of this and aerial word got round that birds were non grata at Appleseed Rectory, and soon the little visitors ceased to wake Adorno with their song. Spiritedly, Andy got into the habit of emptying large bags of Swoop, Airies, and Wingmix on the lawn last thing at night, a wheeze initially so successful that he would sometimes find it unnecessary even to leave his room, picking the massed creatures off from his window. (If reproached by an Appleseed female about this policy Andy would counter, depending on his mood, that birds weren't cosmic and were therefore expendable, or alternatively that such crusades restored the precious bond of blood reciprocity between animal and man, or alternatively that it taught the greedy little fuckers a lesson.) Later still, of course, the most famished robins in England would give the Rectory lawn a mile-wide berth — despite the cream, dripping, pate, and freshly exhumed worms that Andy would array to tempt them to his green preserve. More recently still, in the early mornings, Andy could be glimpsed, a solitary and enigmatic figure, pacing the garden with his gun, forever gazing up in mute appeal at the indifferent skies.
"Well, they do live in the church," pursued Quentin gently, "and they are virtually the property of the village. Best to leave the doves alone, Andy."
"Yeah, well. And I suppose if I did get to work on them the fuckin' locals would only start to bitch about it. I just don't like the way they come down here every day so flash. As if they owned the fuckin' place. Well, I'll leave them alone for now but they'd just better not push their luck, is all."
"That's a sagacious Andy. Must maintain good relations with the pez. Have Lucy last night?"
"Nah— Just let her mouth-fuck me."
"I see. Was Diana pleased."
"She didn't get to know about it. I outsmarted her again."
"And tell me," Quentin asked him, "did you have Roxe-anne too?"
"Course."
"How do you mean, 'course'?"
"Well — anyone could tell she was going to make a play for me. For a start she was eye-fucking me all night — at that booze bar and stuff." Andy gestured across the garden. "A field-fuck," he said.
"Really, Andy. You and your fucks. What was it like— tolerably enjoyable?"
"Nah. Nothing special. Okay. Nothing special. You've fucked her, surely?" asked Andy, slightly taken aback.
"No; now you come to mention it, I don't believe I have. You see, Andy, when I ran into these people I was, shall we say, the houseguest of a certain screen actress, and so Roxeanne seemed, well, a tiny bit superfluous."
"Which one?"
Quentin shrugged and turned away. "Margot Make-piece…"
Andy's lemur eyes bulged. "Bullshit," he said. "No!"
"Oh yes."
"The one that— Can she? Right up the—?"
"Oh yes."
"Jesus."
"Anyway, we digress. With Roxeanne— I trust you acquitted yourself well?"
"I hit colossal form," said Andy.
"And Marvell and Skip? Did they try to get in on what I'm sure was a splendid act?"
"What, those fags? You're kidding. They're smarter than that."
"Don't underestimate them. They're peculiarly persistent. And persistently peculiar."
"Mm?"
"In a way, I'm beginning to regret having asked them. It doesn't seem to be going markedly well up to now. They've changed since I knew them. And they're generally so… so different, don't you feel?"
"The fuck, they're just American, that's all. Look, there's one!"
Andy was referring to an airborne speck well into the middle distance. Even as he spoke he lifted the gun and fired. They watched the little slug of metal die in a slow, plaintive arc; three hundred yards beyond, the dot winged its way
purposefully on. Lear-like imprecations fled from Andy's
mouth.
On Quentin's suggestion, Andy sought solace in peppering the Tuckle drainpipes and windowpanes for a quarter of an hour. But he soon grew bored and pitched the gun bitterly onto the grass. There was a dejected silence.