Finally the Girt Pike was utterly spent, and Robert eased it towards him by raising the tip of the rod. Robert put his landing net into the water, and made the classic fisherman’s mistake. No one had ever told him that big fish seem to know what a landing net is for. This is why you draw a fish over the net, and then lift it. You cannot risk pulling it straight into a net that is plainly visible.
The Girt Pike saw the net and with shocking suddenness it burst back into frenzied life and hurled itself out towards the centre of the pond. Before Robert even knew what was happening, it had wrenched the rod out of his hand and towed it away across the water towards the lily pad.
Robert wanted to cry, and he sat down on the grass gazing numbly out at his rod floating on the water, and the heaving of the lily pad as the pike thrashed about in it. Finally he stood up, shaking but determined, and took off his shoes, socks and trousers. He dipped a toe into the water. It seemed unnaturally cold for a summer’s day. He worried that the water would be too deep, because he was not a good swimmer. He waded out, feeling the silty mud squelching between his toes, until he could grasp the butt of the rod. He raised it, and prepared to take up the strain of the fish. When he did so, it was the lily pad that responded, and he realised that the fish had wound the line round and round the massed stems. He pulled futilely on the line. The lilies moved but did not give, and his despair was renewed. The situation seemed irretrievable.
It was then that the speckled tail of the Girt Pike rose up vertically from the water in the middle of the lily pad, rather like Excalibur, and just hung there, pointing straight up and not moving. Robert beheld it in wonderment, realising that the fish had wound itself so tightly around the lilies that it could no longer move. It was drowning ignominiously in the middle of its kingdom. This was an ignoble and humiliating end for a creature of such power and myth.
Robert waded back to the bank, took up his landing net and found his fishing knife. He re-entered the freezing water and approached the lily pad. He was already a wiser and more cautious fisherman. He got the net ready in advance, and slipped it under the fish, which did not respond. When he raised it, the fish flapped feebly, its huge body overspilling the sides of the net. Desperately Robert tried to saw at the line where it entered the water and tangled with the lilies. Finally he succeeded, and the fish was released into his possession. Robert brought it out of the pond, unable to believe just how heavy it was, and equally incredulous that he really had caught it and conquered it. He laid it on the lawn, where it continued to flap, and then Robert waded back into the water to cut the line again, so that he could retrieve his rod, which was still floating on the water.
Robert was bending over it, contemplating hitting it on the head with his home-made priest, but actually too trepidatious to do so, when Mrs Rendall appeared bearing a fresh plate of peanut butter sandwiches in one hand and a fresh cup of tea in the other. ‘Oh my goodness gracious,’ she exclaimed when she saw the little boy, trouserless and his shirt tails dripping, crouched over the vast, gleaming fish. He stood up when she approached, and was deeply embarrassed about being bare-legged before her. ‘It got tangled in the lilies, missus, an’ I had to go in after it.’
‘You’re so brave,’ exclaimed Mrs Rendall. ‘You’ve caught it! I can hardly believe my eyes! How wonderful! How clever and brave you are!’
‘It wasn’t easy,’ said Robert, in a manly tone of voice.
They stood side by side, gazing down at the gulping and dying fish that was now drowning in air. Robert had just learned that a swift and sudden death is not always the best. Sometimes a noble creature should be allowed to drift away with dignity, in a long and slowly fading dream that has no precise point of terminus. In the mouth of the great fish, the tiny silver roach, snared on the snap tackle, and much mangled, also flapped out the last of its meagre life.
‘It’s so beautiful,’ said Mrs Rendall, looking wonderingly at the great olive stripes and the bright speckles of its flanks. ‘And look at those teeth! They’re fearsome! I had no idea it was so beautiful! I almost feel sorry.’
‘I feel sorry, missus,’ said Robert, his voice a little choked, and when Mrs Rendall looked down at him she could see that indeed his eyes were brimming with tears.
Mrs Rendall took Robert home, with his hazel pole tied to the roof rack, and his bicycle hanging out of the open boot of the Austin Cambridge. At his feet, wrapped in newspaper and a plastic fertiliser sack, lay the body of the Girt Pike.
It would be hard to calculate the importance of these events in Robert’s life. He was thereafter spoken of with awe by all the other boys in the village, and the little girls regarded him with something like fear mixed with desire. He became ‘the boy who’s got the pet rook, and caught the Girt Pike at the Glebe House pond’, and when he grew up, he became ‘you know, the man who caught the Girt Pike at the Glebe House when he was a boy, the one who had a rook’. In his house on Cherryhurst there would always be an overexposed photograph on the wall of the self-conscious and proud little fellow trying to hold up a pike that was too long and heavy for him. There would always be a photograph of the catch, laid out on the lawn beside a yardstick.
Robert’s mother hung the fish up in the larder with its mouth full of salt, and next day it was eaten with great ceremony by the extended family and some of the neighbours. Robert did not think that it tasted very good because to him it savoured of guilt, but everyone else seemed to think it very fine. He received many a toast, many a pat on the head and many a congratulatory slap between the shoulder blades, none of which quite succeeded in drawing off his perturbing feelings of shame. He was haunted by how beautiful the pike had been when it was freshly out of the water, and how its beauty had already diminished when it had been out for only an hour. He knew instinctively that beauty should last for ever, and that this world would never be perfected until beauty was perpetual. Whenever he dreamed of his battle with the Girt Pike, what he remembered more than anything was the terror and panic of it, so that in retrospect his triumph took on more the aspect of a nightmare.
There was no doubt about the effect of the episode on Robert’s self-confidence. He suddenly started to do unnaturally well at school, and passed the eleven-plus unexpectedly, so that his parents had to decide whether or not they could bear the expense and inconvenience of sending him to the grammar school in Guildford.
He had also been touched in another way. When the cancer took Mrs Rendall off a year later, he was heartbroken, and he wrote her a letter:
Dear Mrs Rendall,
I am so sorry that you have died, because you were so pretty and so nice, and you let me catch the Girt Pike, which was the best thing ever, and you made me tea and peanut butter sandwiches, and you bought me the Intrepid Prince Regent reel to thank me for catching the Girt Pike and saving the ducklings, and it’s the best reel ever and just what I always wanted.
With love from Robert.
Robert folded up the letter very small and put it into one of his grandfather’s discarded tobacco tins. He borrowed his mother’s trowel and cycled up to the churchyard, where he buried his message in the upturned clay of the new grave, before crawling into the abandoned lime kiln nearby, where he could crouch in the wet darkness and bury his eyes in his forearm without being seen.
Robert used the Intrepid Prince Regent reel for the rest of his life, even though he never went pike fishing again. Content with perch and roach, he used the reel long after its manufacturer was bought out by a predator and asset-stripped, and he used it when he was middle-aged and everyone else was using superbly engineered reels made of lightweight graphite, which ran on roller bearings. Whenever he got it out of its bag and mounted it on his rod, he remembered the Girt Pike, the Glebe House pond, and pretty, vivacious Mrs Rendall. Every time he went to the churchyard he would pause in front of her grave, where the headstone was tilting and covered with yellow lichen, and, wondering if his tobacco tin and message had rotted away, would feel all over again his long-standing sorrow.