Unlike the cuckoo, which is shy, as if it were ashamed of its own ways and would prefer to pass itself off as a wood pigeon, Miss Feakes is outgoing and conspicuous, even though she lives without human company. She had a lodger for a while, who conducted a lurid affair with the ever-obliging postman, but now she contents herself with the companionship of rabbits, chickens, goats, cats, Labradors, West Highland terriers and a jackdaw that she rescued when it was a fledgling. She does not need an alarm clock any more because the jackdaw thinks that it can sing, and joins in with the morning chorus. She wears a brown peaked cap because the bird sometimes sits upon her head and was never house-trained.
Miss Feakes feeds them all. The small dogs yap, bouncing up and down like quaint Victorian toys, and the slavering Labradors put their front paws up on the wooden table whose surface about the edges has been scoured by claws for forty years. The cats adorn the centre of the table and the shelves where plates used to be, otherwise entwining themselves about her legs, which are wound permanently, not only with cats but also with flesh-coloured elasticated bandage, reminding the village’s old soldiers of the inexplicable puttees that they used to have to wear in the old days.
One of these old soldiers is the postman. He originally arrived as the batman to the General who used to own the house next door. He is thin, and very fit from cycling in all weathers. Even in winter the skin on his face and neck is golden brown, like old waxed pine, and he wears brightly polished army boots that he has maintained ever since the 1950s. He tells the children that his bicycle clips are for catching the change that falls through the holes in his pockets. He whistles when he arrives at the gate, and the dogs come to collect the biscuits with which he has befriended them, and which, for the purposes of his correspondence with the Inland Revenue, he considers to be a legitimate business expense. He leaves Miss Feakes’s house until last, because she expects to give him a cup of tea.
He hates having to drink it, but he is soft-hearted. ‘Do you think the weather’ll hold up?’ he asks her, as he surveys the grimy newspapers that serve in the place of carpets. Miss Feakes would not dream of taking a tabloid paper because the sheets are not big enough, and so she takes the Daily Telegraph, of whose editorial outlook she approves. In the evenings she reads about the cricket and falls asleep over the crossword.
‘The forecast’s always wrong,’ she says, as usual. ‘I know all about the weather from watching my animals.’
‘Animals can foretell earthquakes,’ says the postman, ‘so I hear tell.’
He looks at his cup of tea. There is a decade of tannin stain about the rim, and an oily film floating on the top. The tea tastes of cats. Some of them are not very domesticated and the whole house reeks of warm tom’s urine, of wet dogs, of decaying newspaper, of dust. The house exhales a stupefying halitosis. It is so nauseating that no one can stay in there for longer than twenty minutes, and accordingly the postman rises to leave, his cup of tea unfinished. Today he will buy Miss Feakes a present. It will be a potted hyacinth, whose powerful scent of aunts and grandmothers might improve the atmosphere of the house, and he will find Miss Feakes’s discarded body in the kitchen when he comes to give it to her in the morning. After the burial he will go to the graveyard on his own, and plant the hyacinth in her grave, so that even death might not defeat his good intentions. Nearby the yew tree that was originally planted to secure longbows for the King’s army, beneath a mother-of-pearl sky that is reeling and drunken with rooks, he will take off his cap and gaze down upon the new-turned earth, and then, like a true Briton, he will restrain his tears as he paces out his grief along the rutty track that leads to the hill. He will see the deep green of the dog’s mercury, and, above the busy noise of Mr Hamden’s tractor, he will be spooked by the cuckoo that sounds like Miss Agatha Feakes calling her dogs.
But Miss Feakes is not yet dead, and she conducts her day exactly as if she will live for ever. She sits in her armchair, and, one by one, she defleas her cats. They sit expectantly, according to the daily ritual, and they jump, purring, into her lap. She combs the fleas from their necks, stroking against the lie of the fur, and then she does their flanks and haunches. She fluffs up the fur of the long-haired ones, and gives them whimsical hairstyles which she then pats flat again, so as not to compromise their dignity. When she does their bellies, they go wild-eyed and silly, and sometimes they embrace her wrists with their front paws, biting at her fingers from sheer pleasure. Miss Feakes extracts the fleas from between the tines of the comb and drops them into a cereal bowl that is full of scalding water. They struggle a little, and die. She likes to poke at them with a forefinger, so that they sink to the bottom and drown more quickly. Miss Feakes keeps all the fur from her combings, and puts it in carrier bags, because one day she is intending to have it spun, and then she can knit herself the softest and most personal cardigan in the history of the world. Sometimes she thinks that it might make more sense simply to use it for stuffing cushions, but really it wouldn’t be the same.
When she has finished with the cats, Miss Feakes decides to go shopping. She has the same car that she has had since before the war. It is a grey 1927 Swift four-seat open tourer, with black mudguards and running boards, and a high steering wheel. The car is lovingly maintained for free by the two teetotal brothers at the garage, but at present the hood is falling apart and she has contrived to lose the wooden dashboard, exposing all the wiring. Therefore she takes it out only when her animals have not forecast rain. With long pins she secures a hat that, like her car, was flamboyant in her youth, and heaves at the starter handle. She has been feeling a little weak and woozy recently, and between each effort she pauses for breath and leans on the car, one hand on the top of the radiator for support. After so much time with the one car she has the knack of starting it, though, and it knocks into life and settles down into a steady tick. The car has a crash gearbox, but Miss Feakes is a maestro in the art of the double declutch, and the gears grate only when she surprises it into first. At the end of her drive she honks the rubber bulb of the horn several times, so that people will know that she is coming, and she will not have to lose precious momentum by using the brakes or changing down. In the village there are forty-two reckless drivers. Forty-one of them are nuns from the convent on the hill, who have altogether too much faith in the protective power of the Blessed Virgin, and the other is Miss Agatha Feakes, who today is going to Scats Farm Shop in Godalming in order to buy worming tablets, feed for her goats and chickens, a blade for her bowsaw and a new pair of wellington boots. Miss Feakes cannot easily reach her feet any more, but she has toenails like chisels, which destroy the toes of one pair of wellington boots every six months. She reminds herself daily to ask the doctor to cut them for her, but when it comes to the crunch she prefers to forswear the indignity. It is bad enough that he unwraps and rewraps her bandages, inspecting her varicose veins that are always in danger of ulceration. Twenty years ago he suggested an operation, but she said, ‘And who is going to look after my animals? I have responsibilities, you know,’ and so he never suggested it again. Miss Feakes takes her creatures very seriously; she has agreed with the vet that he can purchase her house in advance of her death in return for free treatment during her lifetime.