Munday had not realized how cold it was until he had seen those ragged boys in shorts. Now he noticed it was near freezing. He said, “They should be in school.”
“Where do you suppose they’re going?”
“Obviously to The Yew Tree, to return those bottles. Get a few pence.”
“They must live down there in those cottages,” said Emma, starting down the hill.
They walked around the bend in the road, squelching through the mud, to the row of cottages. What had looked so charming from behind their house, the sweep of the valley coming up to meet the thatched cottages with the smoking chimneys, the quilt of fields, the browsing sheep, now lost all its simplicity. The thatch was torn and partially mended, bristling brooms of new straw stuck out from the eaves, sheets of chicken wire held it together on the roof peak. The wall of the end cottage bulged, seams of cement had burst, and the foundation at one comer had cracked and come loose. The. fields were sodden and crisscrossed by deep ruts, the sheep was spattered with mud, and their yellow wool, the texture of elderly hair, was painted with crude red symbols. A dog bounded past the sheep, scattering them, and then ran to the Mundays and barked fiercely, holding itself low on the ground, crouching and inching closer as he snarled.
“There, there.” Emma spoke softly to the dog and reached over to stroke its head. It lifted its jaws and snapped at her hand and continued to bark. Emma stepped away, but still murmured her gentle disappointment, hoping to calm the dog.
“No friendlier than anyone else around here,” said Munday. He held his walking stick tightly and he noted a spot at the back of the dog’s head where he would land the blow.
“Aw, he won’t hurt you.”
The voice, Hosmer’s—they looked up and saw him in the yard, peering at them from under his hat brim—was flat, without encouragement or welcome. He was just above them, leaning on a shovel, in a green jacket with the pockets tom and flapping, wearing high gumboots.
“Likes to play, he does,” said Hosmer.
The dog had mounted Emma’s leg and left streaked paw prints on the light mac she had bought especially for these walks. She took the dog by its forelegs and pushed at its slavering mouth. She said, “Naughty— stop it!”
“Off ’er!” said Hosmer sharply to the dog. It pulled out of Emma’s grasp and bounded a few feet away and yelped and shook itself, turning in circles.
“So this is where you live,” said Munday, starting up the bank towards Hosmer. It was the bluff, genial tone he used with Africans in their bush compounds. “Very nice indeed. Your garden?”
“Yes, sir,” said Hosmer, straightening on his shovel and speaking with a guarded respect Munday felt might be impossible to penetrate with any friendliness.
“It’s a perfect site,” said Emma. She brushed at the paw prints with the heel of her hand.
“Mr. Awdry’s,” said Hosmer. “He owns the lot. We rent her, this end of the cottage. One of Duddle’s tenants has the other half.”
“But you get the sun,” said Emma.
“When she’s out,” said Hosmer.
“It’s a beautiful view.”
“That’s Shave’s Cross,” said Hosmer, choosing to indicate a smudge of squares on the landscape, a small cluster of distant gray cottages in the miles and miles of green farmland and trees. It occurred to Munday that a Bwamba might have done the same. Hosmer said, “Over there’s Lyme Regis.” It was a purpling hill, a promonotory at the horizon.
Munday was looking at the cottages. “I see,” he said. “Each of these three buildings is divided in half. That would make five more families living here. Almost a hamlet.”
“Four others,” said Hosmer. “Last one’s standing empty.”
“You’re a lucky man,” said Munday. “There are people in London who’d give anything to have a place like this.”
“Would they?” said Hosmer gruffly. “Well, they can stop where they are.”
“They’re not so bad,” Munday joked. “Once you get used to them.”
“I don’t get used to them,” said Hosmer. “Twenty guineas a week they pay—for a cottage! All that whisky, and the things they do. They want us in the council houses. Bloody nuisance, I say. They can bloody stop where they are.”
“They put the prices up, that it?” said Munday. He smiled; it was an African remark, made of foreign visitors.
Hosmer said, “And my back.”
“Is this all your garden?” asked Emma.
“Yes, ma’m.”
“May we look around?”
“Mind the mud,” said Hosmer. “Been raining. The cows come through here and chums it up.”
“You still have sprouts!” Emma showed Munday the tall plants with the pale green bulbs on their stalks.
“No bloody good to me,” said Hosmer. “Growing into flowers and rotting.” He turned on his shovel and watched the Mundays stroll to the bottom of the garden, Emma looking at the view, Munday lifting a tangle of vines with his walking stick for a better look at the marrows.
“It’s magnificent,” said Emma. She faced the sea where the low sun, wreathed in a gray shallow cloud, still shimmered on the water.
Munday headed for the back of the cottages. He heard Hosmer say, “Sorry I can’t offer you anything,” and Emma reply, “Oh, we were just out for a walk—” In the straw-clumps behind the cottages Munday saw rusting tools, an unused generator black with oil, a gutted motor, and tractor parts, a crankshaft, bolts and wheel-rims and a pile of lumber. He poked at them with his stick. A line of washing, faded overalls, yellow underwear, and blue shirts 'whitened with bleach stains blew noisily, the arms and legs filling with wind, and the line itself lifted. Munday crossed the humpy ground to the fence at the edge of Hosmer’s property to get a better look at the valley, and he was standing trying to memorize the rhythm of the hills, the play of light and shadow, when his thoughts were interrupted by a ribbon of decay leaking past his nose. He sniffed and lost it and then smelled it powerfully, the ribbon growing to a whole rag of stink.
A few feet away, just by a wire fence, was a little platform covered by an old brown piece of canvas. He saw that Hosmer and Emma were out of sight; he stepped over to it and lifted one comer with his stick. He saw white flesh, narrow sinews and the tight bundles of muscle. His first thought was that it was a human corpse, and that fear of discovering a dead man lessened the shock of seeing the hairy rug, the paws, and—lifting the stiff canvas higher—the two dead dogs, lying side by side on the wooden platform. They had been killed, and Munday thought flayed (the word came to him before he actually saw the slashes), and they lay there on the shelf, speckled by decay, beside their own folded pelts.
Munday dropped the canvas and hurried to the side of the cottage, where Hosmer and Emma were still standing and talking.
“I was just telling your missus,” said Hosmer, squinting. “That end cottage—she’s rented.”
Walking home Emma said, “Those were his boys. I asked him. I wish there were something we could do.”
“Bring them to the attention of Oxfam,” he said. “Alfred.”
“There’s nothing,” he said. “He doesn’t even want us around.”
“They look so beaten.”
“Not beaten,” he said. “Detribalized.”
“It’s so ironic,” Emma said, “living in such squalor with that magnificent view.”
Munday said, “Let’s keep to the road this time, shall we?”
And he knew as they talked about the early twilight, the dusk falling on the hills around them, that he would say nothing about the dead dogs. That baffling scene he understood only as an enactment of violence, but something no usual motive could properly explain or make less beastly was another secret he would have to keep from her and beat alone. It was like a hidden infidelity, a habit of faithlessness he was starting to learn, suppressing what frightened him so that Emma would not be alarmed.