Night of the Animals(25)
Cuthbert’s mother, Mary Handley, sat cramped beside Henry on a black-leather settee that looked big and misplaced in the cottage, fingering her teacup and leaning forward with a stiff, mannered face, unwilling to relax. Husband and wife each maintained, in their own miserable ways, an illusion that all was diamond-glinted good fortune in the city. Having moved themselves from the Marches to Birmingham years ago, they had barely broached the lower middle class; they kept their own ire at this state of affairs tamed with purchases of chocolate and lager and a few overworn sports jackets and perfumes, jingoism, and an abiding unctuousness toward the rich. Neither had any use for forests.
“I’d like to see it cleared, meself, except if there’s any, loik, swans in there,” said Henry. “There’s loads of woodlands in Wales, and no one makes a tuppence off Wyre these days, do they? It’s not like the old barking-peeling and tannin days, is it?”
Their gran, who was named Winefride after one of the local so-called miracle wells of the Marches, took a frank swallow of tea, trying to ignore the man’s foolishness. Hundreds of species of birds inhabited Wyre, but no swans. She was a white-haired woman with a strong, square face; for the day trip, she’d worn a long pretty nylon dirndl skirt with gold acanthus-leaf designs and a gray Orlon sweater, both bought by catalog order from Kays.
“Of course,” said Henry, sitting up a bit on the settee, and smirking. “The politics of chopping anything down is all mardy* these days. Even in Wales.”
Two plump rose-cheeked women of roughly the same vintage, the great-aunties, were scurrying in and out of the kitchen, bringing a pot of damson jam, triangles of toast, slices of Cox’s Orange Pippins, and a Spode teapot.
“Bist sure thee’st stay near the big oaks, along the edges, and don’t be too loud, and you’ll see or hear a thing or two,” their gran said to the boys, ignoring her son-in-law’s last comment. “But if errun of thee go loblolling in there, all tittery and tottery, no living thing will show itself. But the Boogles will!”
“Boogles,” gasped Cuthbert.
“I’ll outrun any Boogles,” said Drystan.
“No you won’t,” said Cuthbert. “You ’av to stay with me, Dryst. You’re not doing a runner, roight?”
The boys had heard about Boogles, the “owd sprites,” many times from their gran, but they had never been close to a place where the creatures supposedly lived.
Still restive from the car ride, they had been roving the tiny sitting room. A gold-framed photo on a wall cabinet caught Cuthbert’s eye, and he scrutinized it from inches away. It showed a young, burly soldier with a brisk, proud smile. He wore the same heavy wool tunic and puttees he saw in a photograph of his dead grandfather, but this soldier looked robustly healthy.
“That’s your great-uncle Tom,” one of their aunties said. “’E used to keep a pet hob-lamb e’d let run around our kitchen. E’yunt come back from Ypres.”
“That’s a man,” said Henry.
There was a brief silence, and Cuthbert’s father looked down stiffly, out of respect. He gave his whiskers a scratch.
Despite their age difference, in their blue-striped T-shirts and matching khaki camp shorts, the boys might nearly have been mistaken for twins that day. Cuthbert was very tall for his age. Unlike other Handleys, their hair was as dark brown as cloves. They both had high pale foreheads, long mahogany eyes, and small, delicate O mouths. The younger boy was only a little shorter than his brother, though he still possessed the round face and short jaw of a child.
“I’m not afraid of any Welsh forest,” said Drystan. Of the two, he exuded a particularly languid self-assurance and sweet inattention, with longer hair and a slightly more prominent chin. He’d been walking around since breakfast with untied shoes. His father’s quick violence toward him and lack of warmth had wrought something darker and angrier in Drystan, combined with an intense but underfed intelligence. “I promise that I’ll never go mad.”
Their mother, who had fairer hair but the same black-brown eyes, said, “If you don’t stop your mithering, we’ll all be mad! And it’s not Wales. It’s the Marches.”
Winefride put down her tea and sniffed at Mary. She said, whispering loudly enough for Cuthbert to hear, “Don’t be such a cruel munch. They’re just lambs.”
“Gran?” said Drystan. “I don’t want to be any lamb. I want to be something clever—and brutal.” He grabbed his little brother and scrobbled his hair, then started tickling him under his arms. Cuthbert squealed with laughter. “Someone needs to herd this little lamb.”
“Dryst!” barked their father, in a severe tone that embarrassed everyone present. No one said a word for a few moments. Cuthbert’s brother glared at their father with open contempt, shaking his head.
Since arriving from the city, the Handley parents had planted themselves in the murky sitting room of the great-aunties’ home, a room that smelled of burned oats and damp flagstone in an eighteenth-century cottage with tiny casement windows. Their old uncle George Milburn slept in a chair.
Winefride, on the other hand, who often wore a sad expression of declined pride, was as vivified by the trip to her “owd Wyre” as her daughter Mary seemed querulous. She looked nearly as anxious to get outside as her grandsons, and she kept tapping her foot and looking out the casement window. Her ongoing descriptions of the forest could not have been more potent to Cuthbert’s ears. They seemed like the breathtaking words of some grizzled space mercenary in his Dan Dare comics, not of a rheumy old woman living in her son-in-law and daughter’s cramped terrace house in West Brom.