‘My, that’s a beauty!’ said Mrs Jones. ‘Three good meals on there – at this rate we could stay here all summer, and I wouldn’t mind hanging around till my lilies have seeded.’
Lung settled on to the grass and watched her manipulating her flower-press. For a while Theodore went on drawing, but gradually became aware of a change in the atmosphere, a sense of stifled energies beginning to fill the glade. He looked carefully up and saw that Lung was watching Mrs Jones out of the corner of his eyes while his hand stroked the sleek side of his fish, and she was merely twiddling and then untwiddling the brass butterfly-nut at the corner of her press. It had happened sometimes before, but they had always been extremely strict with themselves; perhaps, without telling him, they had agreed rules, but if so it had been for his sake. He had seldom seen them even touch, and when talking to each other in his presence they maintained a slightly teasing relationship, as though their love was not really serious and he needn’t worry about it. But he was often aware of it, a deep, intense, unspoken shared emotion, more like hunger than anything he could understand as love. Being with them in this mood was like living too near some source of power – a furnace, perhaps, the by-product of whose energies is enough to make one want to move to somewhere cooler.
‘Shall I go and look at the old traps,’ he said. ‘If that one’s going to last three meals we don’t want to catch anything we can’t eat.’
‘I think that would be a very good idea,’ said Mrs Jones in her drawing-room voice.
Theodore folded his picture and tucked it into the breast-pocket of his jacket. He rose and walked away without looking back.
Normally it took about ten minutes to walk to the coomb where they had first camped, but Mrs Jones had made a rule that for regular journeys like this they must always try to use a different path, so Theodore decided this time he would stay right down by the lake shore, which would delay him because the undergrowth was thicker here. He slowed himself still further by walking with a hunter’s silence. There was no real difference between deliberately going a slow way and going a quick way and then hanging around for a while, but there seemed to be. He was angry about the interruption of his drawing when it was going well, and the stealing of his share of the day, and he was ashamed of himself for being angry.
About a hundred yards short of the coomb he ducked below a branch that hung right out over the lake and saw that something was disturbing the water near where the little stream ran out – close by Lung’s fish-traps, he thought. He couldn’t actually see the shore at that point, but after watching for a moment he became almost certain that something was actually meddling with one of the traps. The bear, perhaps. He wasn’t at all anxious to meet the creature at close quarters, but he would be glad to see it at a distance, so now he struck up away from the shore, aiming for a point about half way up the coomb; the lakeside undergrowth thinned, and he was able to move quite quickly between the trees until he came out behind one of the ranked drifts of lilies and could gaze down from tree-shadow into the bright-lit arena beyond.
Down by the stream, a few yards up from the shore, a man was making urgent gestures. Near the head of the coomb another man was kneeling by a rectangle of paler grass where Mrs Jones’s tent had been pitched. This second man looked up, saw the gestures and came hurrying down to meet his comrade. Together they went to the lakeside and pulled out one of the fish-traps. Even from where he watched Theodore could see the sudden agonized writhings of a fish brought into the air. The men looked at it for a moment, then slid the trap back into the water and backed away, stooping as they did so to erase their foot-prints in the water-logged earth.
They came slowly up the coomb, pointing at things that caught their attention – the interlocking rings of shorter grass where the tethered horses had grazed, a pile of old horse-droppings, the patch by the stream where Lung had usually washed the dishes. They darted eagerly up the far slope and stared at a point among the lilies, inexplicably as far as Theodore could see, until one of them fell to his knees and began to dig with his bare hands; then he remembered that Mrs Jones had dug one of her precious lily-bulbs from there. What were they after? Treasure?
The standing man began to argue. He snatched at his companion’s shoulder, dragging him to his feet. They came back down to the stream, still arguing in low voices. They were small men, wearing what looked like rags which were held in place by a tracery of criss-crossing thongs; plaits of coarse black hair stuck out all round their heads under small grey fur caps with tight-rolled brims. They were Lolo, that was certain. Then one of the men in the frenzy of argument pushed his face to within an inch of the other man’s nose. He held his head poking forward on his neck and cocked a little to one side – an extraordinary posture which made it look as though his spine were double jointed. Theodore had seen a man do that only once before, in an argument over who should carry which burden when the porters were loading up in the Lolo village before the ambush. This was that man.
Theodore stayed perfectly still, his muscles locked by the ancient instinct of the hunted, while the men finished their argument and peered hither and thither, eager but scared, into the lily-glowing darkness beneath the trees. He began to feel that at any moment the wide, snub noses would pick up his scent, but at last the men started back up the coomb and disappeared under the trees. He felt certain that they were going to find their comrades and report what they had seen.
It seemed important to him to know whether the enemy were behind or in front, so, using known tracks, he followed the men up through the wood, keeping them right at the limit of his vision. They never looked round but the moment they reached the track they started eastwards up it at a quick, effortless jog. He held his breath until they disappeared and then, still careful to leave no traces, made his way down to the camp.
Normally when he came unexpectedly into the glade he would have coughed, or hummed a few lines of one of Mrs Jones’s songs. It was like knocking at a door. But this time he didn’t dare make even that amount of human noise, so he caught the lovers unprepared. Lung was lying on his back with his head in Mrs Jones’s lap. She had let her hair down and was bending over him, gently stroking his head with one hand. He held the other clasped against his chest.
Theodore paused in his approach. Despite the urgency and fear he found it hard to break the weightless bubble of their happiness. He saw for the first time how streaked with grey was Mrs Jones’s hair.
‘Pardon me,’ he whispered.
They looked up. Mrs Jones stared for a moment through the curtain of her hair, then tossed it back.
‘What’s up, Theo?’ she said in a low voice.
He crouched in front of her and in a straining whisper told what he had seen. She nodded, accepting without question that he was sure that he recognized one of the men.
‘That’s rough,’ she said. ‘The others can’t be far off, neither, or they’d have spent more time scouting. First thing, we got to get out into the open – up by this bridge of yours might be favourite, then if things go sour we can try and cross it and cut the rope behind us. Before it comes to that we’ll try and parley with them, buy them off for a blood-price. But we haven’t a hope if they catch us down among the trees . . . oh, it’s all my fault for saying we could hang on here for ever! Lung, my love, you better get up. I’m afraid our prettytimes are over.’