Night of the Animals(28)

“Heard any animals lately?” Winefride suddenly asked the two aunties, as if inquiring about the latest gossip.

The big aunties nodded jovially in agreement, with occasional fixed love-stares at the two children.

“Of course—yes, yes, yes,” said Auntie Bettina. “There’s a Welsh toyger in there now, they’re saying.”

“Suuuuuuuuure,” said Cuthbert’s father, smirking. He kicked his legs out from the sofa rather impertinently. “That’s what these ones need,” glaring at his sons.

With the proud trip out of Birmingham in his squatty new Hillman Imp, he was almost in as good a mood as he got, but he still seemed like he had, as his mother-in-law would put it, “a dog in his belly.”

“Now these boys could use some scaring-up—and discipline. Especially old Cuddy.” Cuthbert didn’t like this nickname. His father grinned, and added, “They could run into a polecat, mind you.”

The word discipline from his father’s lips didn’t normally play well in small gatherings. It was like a hangman singing the praises of well-toned necks. His mother once told him, “Your dear old dad wouldn’t give away the droppings of his nose on a frosty morning, and if he said he did, he’d be lying about it.”

“Discipline? Scaring?” said Gran. “Shhhh! You inna understand at all.” She spoke good-naturedly, but there was a flash of a swishing razor in her tolerance.

“That’s what I said,” said Henry. “These boys respect that—something they learnt from me. I don’t mind giving them a little podge on their bottoms from time to time. Or with my belt.”

“Stop it, Hank,” said their mother.

“Give the forest its due respect, but I dunna think there’s any toygers anymore,” said Winefride, which is what people on the Welsh Marches used to call polecats. She looked upward for a moment, as though reviewing a long-memorized taxonomy. “But there’s other things, just as special as polecats. You know, we used to have lions in England and plenty o’ wild cats. Tis’ true. Back in the days of the barrows and stone tombs, when ‘did those feet in ancient time,’ as they say. You ’ad lions then, by jings. You know what I’m on about. You know, Hank.”

“Never,” said their father. “I do not know. That’s all rubbish. Drink your tea, Mum.” His smile was gone.

“Show some respect,” said Cuthbert’s mother.

“Humph,” said Winefride. “It’s all right.”

Cuthbert’s mum said to her husband, sighing with fatigue, “Aren’t you capable of humoring them a bit, Hank? Can’t you be decent?”

Auntie Bettina, the sharper of the two aunts, tried to change the subject. She shared most women’s remarkably unswerving and politely furtive disdain for her nephew, and she felt sorry for Winefride, a Clee girl who had been dragged off to West Brom by a sore bore of a son-in-law. Winefride wasn’t blood, but she felt far more a kindred spirit than Henry.

“You said you brought that camera of yours, Henry?”

Henry frowned at the woman with a harsh, instinctual alarm, and he almost ducked down in his seat. He held a flinty-eyed posture of defensiveness for a moment, as if preparing for some vast wave of other people’s messy joys to wash him away.

“Yeah?” he said, with a porcine grunt so routine for him, he actually felt it as sociable noise.

“Henry!” his wife scolded. He sat up a bit, looking around with a simpering smile. His wife had a way of snapping him out of his lugubriousness.

“Sorry,” he said. “Yeah, you wouldn’t believe the cost of film these days. Mr. Wilson’s ‘pound in the pocket’ is a right laugh.”

“Henry, you’ll be happy to take some piccies, won’t you?”

“Oh, ar, of course. A’right.”

After a few minutes, and much lecturing about the virtues of American manufacturing, their father produced his old Kodak Brownie 127, a small camera made of Bakelite, which Henry Handley swore by. He could coax unforgettable images in full color from it. There were three subjects—Cuthbert and Drystan or almost anyone posed in front of his or a neighbor’s car; local construction projects; or mute swans at the park. The man loved white swans.

“Roight, yow scallywags—against the wall,” he ordered. Cuthbert and Drystan jumped up and stood shoulder to shoulder, refusing to smile, folding their little scapulas against the dark wall like stunted bone wings. Cuthbert was actually shaking with fear; all too often, any kind of boisterousness on his father’s part, especially with a lager or two, ended up with Drystan being hit, again and again, with a belt, and then him.

Drystan began spinning his hawthorn twig like a green propeller in his hand. He stuck it in his mouth, made a silly face, then a serious one.

“Smile!” their father commanded. Finally, Cuthbert started snickering, then Drystan laughed, and the magnesium flashbulb exploded.

In the white-hot actinic light, Drystan’s face glowed with a robust, dark merriment. He looked different. The usual childlike fragility braced by his high cheekbones had receded. His russet-brown eyes looked smaller, harder. There was that green-leaved twig jauntily in his teeth. One could just make out something new—the forceful gaze of a man, emerging from the boy—angry, bold, honorable, and all things his father wasn’t.