Brian put both hands to his mouth and made a Tarzan call, the mere shadow of an incompetent warbling scream flitting through the trees, to a swift and against the unbridgeable obstacle of distance. He listened to it dying, waited for silence, then shouted what many swear-words he knew, using all the air his lungs could muster to send them far away. He paused between each word until its echo was about to fade, then he let go with another explosive monosyllable, hands cupped in a message to which no answer was expected. When he grew tired of the game he leapt down and set out for midday dinner at the Nook.
In the quiet afternoon he leaned over the pigsty gate, tapping the pink-white pigs with a piece of stick as they gathered at the trough on feeling a human being near. When they grew tired and wandered away he shook the gate latch to see how quickly they would converge again on the trough, and was astonished at the squeals sent forth in protest at his taps. His grandmother called that he was to stop tormenting them, talked for ten minutes about cruelty to dumb animals, saying that God would put him in a big fire when he died, if he wasn’t carefuclass="underline" and as he walked into the garden behind the house, ashamed at having been caught, he imagined a mighty hand catching him up and flinging him into an enormous heap of burning embers. But then he doubled back from this scene of horror, and pictured a skilful escape before events led so far.
Cats made less noise. He sat on a bench under a wooden awning when one came stalking tail up between potatoes, grey-black and mustard and yellow, round face turning left and right to box a white butterfly, then coming for Brian’s held-out hand. It had grown fat and trusting on a surfeit of cornfield and copperhouse rats, rubbed its flank against him and allowed itself to be lifted to his knees.
When it purred and rattled at its new-found nest, Brian’s knees opened and let it fall. Before it could amble away, he laid it again in the groove between his closed thighs. The cat liked it but, having lost self-confidence and being afraid to purr, preferred to leap down and find a warm patch of soil in the sun. Brian’s hands caught it in mid-air and brought it back.
A few minutes’ stroking of smooth fur raised the rattles of its purring again; then his knees moved a fraction, and the purring stopped abruptly. He knew when an escape was coming because the cat’s back legs stiffened, whereat his arms grew ready to snap out and bring it back.
It took longer to soothe it this time, but Sunday afternoon was endless. His hands played slowly, rhythmically along the length of its soft flanks, backwards and forwards, from the top of its leonine head to the base of its tail, up and down, from the side of its mouth to behind its neck and above the hardly felt ridge of its comfortable backbone, until it purred as loud as if its throat were clogged with marbles.
He prodded it from behind. The indications of its pleasure ceased, but returned after a few seconds in which it sensed that the prod had been nothing more than an accident of nature which had gone away quickly and would probably not return. It did. Annoyed, it leapt from Brian’s knees, but his hand shot out and set it firmly and with some roughness where it had been.
The tail, upright with righteous wrath, waved before his eyes. He took the end and held it still, feeling the force of it trying to free itself and continue its angry swaying. Letting it go, it swung completely to one side. When the back legs stiffened, his hands hovered above the cat’s neck, and as it sprang, a hard grip descended.
It realized eventually that there was no real need to escape, that if it stayed still on the warm knees no harm would come. But the controlling demon of Brian — felt dimly by the cat between escapes — grew tired of waiting for a next attempt, and prodded with such force that it was almost clear before being snatched by hovering hands. Each time it thought to abandon its prison there was an unmistakable warning, but the interval between the jerk in its back legs and the sight of its body in mid-air grew shorter, until the warning jerk became so faint that Brian’s heart almost stopped in an effort to stay aware of it.
Bored, he decided to let it free on the next sally, but the sight of the cat leaping to freedom was too much, and before it could scatter its four legs among holes and furrows, he had set it firmly down again on his knees.
He made a low fence around it with his arms, a tempting barrier that was hardly noticed; it stayed where it was, belly stiffened with rage, eyes staring, tail waving back and forth like the electrical-contact mast of a dodgem-car. Instead of bounding forward, it swung away to the side, under his hand, to the nearest bush. Brian threw himself down, held nothing but its tail end. The cat howled a slow threat, urged its strong body away from what millstone had caught it, from the vice closing tighter and tighter the more it heaved. Brian looked at the straining back, at fur-marks of black and grey and mustard yellow mixed in, at the ears trying to twitch, at the head bent forward like a bull’s.
The long tail relaxed. A mass of sharp needles ran along the soft fleshy inside of his arm, leaving pale white indentations the size of small fishbones magically turning red.
But he didn’t let go. He picked up the cat with both hands so that he was helpless, cuffed it twice about the head, and threw it to the middle of the garden. With a scuffle of orientation it hit the soil, skidded towards the hedge, and was free.
He dabbed at his bleeding arm with a black handkerchief, walking slowly to the house. His grandmother turned from the fire: “What have you gone and done now, you silly lad?”
“I fell into a bush,” he told her.
She busied herself in a drawer for clean linen to bind it. “I don’t know, getting scratched like that. I’ll bet you was after bird nests. You’ll get sent on board ship if a policeman catches you at it, you will and all.”
Lydia promised him a trip to the Empire. She was a stout, good-looking thirty-five and still unmarried, and was making sure, so Brian had heard his mother say, of a good time before settling down. The man courting her, though, was grey-haired and thin-faced, and sent Brian running errands to a dozen different places every time he came to the Nook for an afternoon. He had consumption, Lydia said. (“She’ll never get it, and that’s a fact,” Vera remarked, when discussing the case with Seaton.) “What’s consumption?” Brian asked, when Lydia was getting ready.
“Mek sure an’ wash yer tabs out. It’s a disease,” she informed him, taking the flannel and rubbing his ears violently, which he resented and struggled to evade. “When yer badly an’ wain’t get better.”
“Do they tek everybody away then when they’ve got consumption?”
“Ay,” she said, “they do. If you don’t make haste, we’ll be late and then Tom’ll be mad.”
It was raining, and the muddy lane was darkened by wet hedges like rows of steaming camels on either bank. Lydia clutched his hand as they walked with heads bent: it was his first time to the Empire, and everyone spoke of it as a marvel, something more grandiose than the Great War, as legendary and surprising as the wooden horse of Troy. Well scrubbed, and dressed in a new coat, he was aware of being taken to somewhere posh and rare. “What’s going to be on?”