Mr Royston Chittock set about acquiring the shotgun licence. He collected the form from Godalming Police Station, filled it in, obtained references from the Reverend Freemantle and his former solicitor in London, and awaited the arrival of the firearms officer. This gentleman gravely inspected the gun cabinet that had been bolted to the wall in the cupboard under the stairs, and equally gravely questioned Mr Chittock. He wanted to know what the gun would be for. It was for pest control, said Mr Chittock, truthfully, adding mendaciously that he also wanted to take up clay-pigeon shooting, and that a friend in Scotland had invited him up for the Glorious Twelfth.
‘Have you any experience of shooting?’ asked the officer, whose real mission was to find out over a cup of tea whether or not the applicant might be mad or dangerous or suicidal, and Mr Chittock said, ‘Oh yes. I’ve used one before when I was young, and I also learned to fire a.303.’ He did not explain that the shotgun in question had been a garden gun, used by little boys to scare finches away from fruit blossom, and that he had fired it once, unsuccessfully, at a hedge sparrow, nor that the.303 had been for firing blanks in the school cadet force. The firearms officer said, ‘Even so, if I were you, sir, I would have a couple of lessons.’
Mr Chittock read two books about shotguns and shooting, and when the licence came through, he drove to Guildford and bought a double-barrelled side-by-side boxlock twelve-bore in Jeffries. It was a St Etienne Robuste, a nice simple gun that would appeal to a farmer rather than a gentleman, had Mr Chittock known it. He told the assistant that he needed it for pigeon shooting, and came away with two boxes of pretty red Eley cartridges, loaded with the usual ounce of number six shot. The forms had been filled in, and Mr Chittock was fully equipped for killing moles.
Chittock never noticed that the number of new molehills depended upon the day of the week, or that there were none at all on Sundays. After he had cleared them up, he spent hours every day standing on his new green with his new shotgun, waiting for the earth to heave. He stood and waited ’til his legs ached and his mind was numb.
From time to time Uncle Dick or Mr Joshuah Entincknapp, or sometimes both of them together, would crawl into the ditch and watch him through the bottom of the laurel hedge. If they were together, it was always difficult to suppress their delight. They would nudge each other, saying, ‘Silly bugger, look at that silly bloody bugger, we really got him hobbled, didn’t we?’
Mr Chittock wondered if his lack of success was anything to do with being too noisy, or even smelling wrong. He took to wearing his unwashed gardening trousers, and bought an old tweed jacket and hat at the White Elephant shop, leaving them on the compost heap overnight. It didn’t work and Mr Chittock continued to spend hours every day, stock-still with his shotgun growing ever heavier on his arm, in a state that approached nearer and nearer to absolute despair, just waiting for the moles.
One day Uncle Dick was hiding in the ditch, watching Mr Chittock, when Lizzie turned up. She had spotted him somehow, even through the canopy of an oak tree, and she descended noisily on to his shoulder with a small cry of joy. Nowadays she often had a wild rook with her, who kept a safe distance, and this companion settled into the oak above to keep an eye on his betrothed. ‘Bugger off! Bugger off, Lizzie,’ whispered Uncle Dick, fearing discovery, and brushing her legs from beneath him to get her off his shoulder.
Lizzie protested, but took off into the hawthorn tree above the new green. There she sidled along the branch until she was a few feet away from Mr Chittock as he stood forlornly with his new shotgun, waiting for the moles. She examined him with interest, raising and lowering the feathers on the top of her head from the effort of concentration, and suddenly all those months of Uncle Dick’s assiduous elocution lessons paid off. In the latter’s unmistakable tones, she said, ‘Silly bugger.’
Royston Chittock looked up abruptly, and the bird repeated ‘Silly bugger’, fluttering her wings and bobbing her tail on account of the extreme intellectual effort.
Chittock, his heart so full of rage and frustration that he had to take it out on something, raised the new gun, and fired. Nothing happened because he had forgotten to slip the safety catch. No animal likes to have even a stick pointed at it, so Lizzie skipped to another branch and craned her head in agitation. Chittock slipped the safety catch, and fired again, almost at point-blank.
He had not expected the kick to be so great, and, because the gun had been badly seated in his shoulder, he bruised his cheekbone on the stock. Holding the gun in his left hand, and with his right to his cheek, he looked down at the dying bird, its beak opening and closing, its scarlet blood darkening on the fine grass, its body almost shredded because of the close range of the shot. He was quite unprepared for Uncle Dick’s bursting through the hedge like a berserker.
Mr Royston Chittock sold his new shotgun and his house with its immaculate green, and moved back to Putney, where he continued to play below his handicap at Wimbledon Park, and the Duke’s and Prince’s Course at Richmond. He tried to forget the humiliation and ridicule that he had incurred in Notwithstanding, as Uncle Dick had denounced him, called him every foul name he could think of, and informed him that there hadn’t been any moles and they’d just been paying him back for being a stuck-up stupid thieving bastard. The interview had ended with Chittock on his hands and knees, as Uncle Dick’s hand clamped the back of his neck and his face was rubbed back and forth in the blood on the green. Then Uncle Dick had picked up the shotgun and fired the second barrel into the beautiful turf, saying, ‘Repair it yourself, pillock.’
He wrapped Lizzie’s mangled body in a piece of sacking from the back of his Prefect, took it away and buried it sadly on the golf course. He wished he had been able to tell Robert the circumstances of her wonderful linguistic advance, but he judged it better to keep silence and let the youngster think that she had simply disappeared, because birds are like women, and that’s what birds inevitably do.
THE BROKEN HEART
‘THE THING IS, Mr Oak, that there’s so much new money splashing about these days.’
‘New money? What’s that then? What’s new about it?’ Obadiah ‘Jack’ Oak hawks up a good gobbet of phlegm, curls his tongue into a blowpipe and ejects it. The projectile describes a graceful arc into the fireplace, where it comes to lie, shining and frothy, on the bed of ash. The young man winces. ‘Well, there are lots of people who have money now who never had it before, and lots of people who did have money who now have so much that they’re just looking desperately for things to spend it on. To invest in. Fine wines, or classic cars for example. That Triumph Herald of yours is probably worth more than a thousand just now.’
‘Got it for fifty pound,’ says Jack. ‘It’s clapped out, that is. Not worth nothing.’
‘Believe me, there are people who’ll pay a thousand.’
‘They’re mad, then,’ replies Jack. Jack has the peasant’s natural reservations about young smart alecs. This one can’t be more than twenty-two years old, he has a new suit, shiny shoes, an elegant haircut, and his hands and nails are so clean that Jack suspects him of being ‘you know, like, one o’ them, like that’, which is his way of saying a homosexual. He also has the accent of someone trying to appear posher than he is. Jack is suspicious of anyone who aims above his station. He has been obdurately and solidly himself since he was young, and cannot conceive of either wanting or trying to become someone else. ‘So what are you then?’ Jack asks again.