While one of the longest arguments straggled on, Nicky noticed a movement just beyond the group. Four or five deer, long accustomed to the idea that people mean picnickers, and picnickers mean scraps of food, had come nosing up. Uncle Chacha, who hadn’t spoken as much as the others so far, now broke into the argument in Punjabi, shifting a couple of feet back out of the circle as he did so. The deer shied away at his movement, then drifted slowly in again.
“Do not look at them, Miss Gore,” said one of the uncles. “A wild animal is made more nervous by the gaze of the hunter.”
“I do wish everyone would call me Nicky,” she said. “Miss Gore sounds like somebody’s aunt.”
Smiles glowed amid the beards.
“Okay,” said several voices; but they said it quietly, and when the discussion rambled on it did so without any sudden bursts of shouting which might disturb a wild animal.
She never saw Uncle Chacha strike because she was carefully not looking straight at the deer. But in the corner of her eye there was a flash of movement, a silent explosion followed by one sharp thud. Then the deer were bounding away and all the Sikhs were on their feet, crowding round and cheering. Nicky jostled through to see what had happened and found Uncle Chacha standing, stave in hand, by what looked like a pale brown sack. He hung his head with exactly Kaka’s shyness — he must be the fat boy’s father. Then Nicky saw that the sack had a spindly leg, and a round eye big as a halfpenny, dull and unwinking.
“He broke its neck with his lathi,” said Kewal proudly. “One blow, bim, like that. We will have roast venison for supper.”
The council was over. Nicky raced twigs on the stream with Gopal and his friends for a bit, then joined in a game of blindman’s buff. Then all the children sat in a circle round the cart to hear the old lady tell them a story. Nicky went off to play with a tiny brown baby, Neena’s niece, who kicked and gurgled on a pink towel. After that she curled up and slept amid the tickling grasses.
It was almost dark when they woke her, and the dewy dusk smelled beautifully of roasted meat. They all sat on the trampled grass in a ragged circle round the fires; even the smallest babies were awake again, staring from their mothers’ laps at the wavering flames. The Sikhs looked stranger still as the night deepened; the men’s beards became huge shadows — shadows with no shape to cast them — and in these shadows a row of teeth would gleam for a moment when a mouth opened to talk or smile or chew; the eyes too shone weird in the weird light. They looked like a ring of pirates, murderous invaders.
The venison was charred at the edges and tough to chew, but full of delicious juices even if you did have to spit out the pithy gobbets of fiber that were left unswallowable at the end of each mouthful. The Sikhs had made a curry sauce to dip the meat into, and passed it round in pots, but it was too hot for Nicky. The grown-ups ate a flattish sconelike bread called chapati, which they’d brought with them, but the children preferred to finish off the crisps from the pub. The drinking water was still tepid from its boiling, but delicious after a month of lemonade.
When they’d finished eating, the big man stood up by the old lady’s cart and read in a solemn voice from a book. Sometimes the Sikhs answered him, all together.
“Prayers,” whispered Gopal in Nicky’s ear.
Some of the babies were asleep again before he’d finished, and now they were settled into their prams. An awning had been built over the old lady’s cart, and the cut bracken piled into mounds under that and the other carts for the smaller children to sleep on. The older children and the grown-ups slept in the open, women and girls in one group, men and boys in the other. Somebody had a spare blanket to lend to Nicky. The bracken was surprisingly comfortable.
“You see?” said Neena as they were sorting themselves out. “It takes a long time to make a camp. It is a lot of work. We cannot hope to march more than ten miles a day, with the children to think about and the carts and prams to push.”
“Where are you going to?” said Nicky.
“We do not know. We will just go until we can find a place where we can live. Perhaps it is across the sea, but I hope not.”
III
GOOD LAND, CLEAN WATER
A PLACE where they could live.
They came to it eight days later, but did not recognize it at first. They thought it was just a sensible place to stop for a few days so that Rani, Neena’s sister-in-law, could have her baby. On the left of the lane stood a raw, ugly, square brick farmhouse with metal-frame windows; then, a little further up the hill, was a brick shed; then a tiny brand-new bungalow; and then, for them to camp in, an old brick farmyard built like a fort with a single gateway, an old barn down one side, and on the others single-story cattle sheds and grain stores. A hundred yards on, right on the ridge of the hill, loomed two vast new asbestos and concrete barns and a cluster of grain towers. On the other side of the lane there was only a single house, opposite the farmyard. Once it had been two old cottages for farm laborers, but someone had run them together and smartened them up for an artist to live in.
He’d gone, and so had all the other people. Every house was empty. No cattle lowed for milking, no cat miaowed on any doorstep. Hundreds of birds clattered in the hedges round the artist’s cottage, but the farmer had hauled out every other hedge on his land to make it easier to cultivate the flowing steppes of hay and wheat and barley that now stood rippling in the upland wind across six hundred acres.
A mile and a half down the hill you could see the tower of Felpham Church, warm brick, rising amid lindens, seeming to move nearer when the afternoon sun shone full on it, and then to drift away when a cloud shadow hit the sun. You could see only a few roofs of Felpham, although it was quite a big village. Beyond that was distance.
And the distance really was distance, although the farm stood barely a hundred and fifty feet above the plain which stretched to the northeast. For twenty miles there was nothing else as high. There were no real landmarks, except the now useless electric pylons. A double row of these swooped across the slope between the farm and the village, but Nicky tried not to see them. Instead she gazed out beyond them to the mottled leagues, blue and gray and green, that reached toward London. Though they had been settled here for weeks she felt that she still could count every footstep of the road they had come.
It was the people she remembered most. First the old tramp who had come, snuffling like a hedgehog, up to their camp on Esher Common and asked for food. The Sikhs had simply made room for him, dirty as he was, and fed him all he wanted. He must have been half crazy, for he seemed to notice no difference between them and other people, nor between these times and other times, but just mumbled and chewed, and at last lurched away into the dark without a word of thanks.
But the first real people they’d met — ordinary English people, wearing English clothes — had been at Ripley. And they’d been enemies. A dozen men and women had run out of a pub at the sound of the iron wheels on the road. For a while they’d simply stared as the march of Sikhs moved slowly past, but then one of the women had said something mocking to the men, then a man had shouted and all the men were throwing stones and bottles at the Sikhs while the women cursed and jeered. Kaka had been hit by a stone, but had managed not to cry. Nicky had rushed from the line, shouting to the men to stop it; their attitude changed, and for a moment she’d thought they’d heard her and understood, until the rear guard of the Sikhs rushed past her, staves whirling. The Englishmen had broken and run, while their women cowered against the wall. As the procession moved out of Ripley there were catcalls from behind walls, and clods of earth lobbed into the line, but no one had followed them. And the people working the fields paid no attention as they marched by, grim and silent.