My Name is Eva(40)
37
Evelyn, 6 February 1986
The Fox Café
After two days she made herself go down to the copse to check. It was still there, looking just the same as when she had dragged his body between the close-grown saplings and brambles. He? It? It wasn’t him any more. More leaves had blown over the corpse but his shoulders and head were clearly visible, the thin hair sticking to the scalp, dark with blood, and the skin now grey, greyer than she remembered. Wearing thick gardening gloves, she scooped handfuls of leaves and twigs over him until he was completely covered.
The day it happened had been cold, but the last two days had been mild and wet. If it continued to be mild, they would catch the scent and would soon come, just as they had come before. They are not particular – food is food, though there was a time when a badger took a long time to disappear. ‘Oh, foxes don’t like ’em,’ Neil had said, when she had pointed out that the black and cream pelt was still visible under the hedge that ran alongside his sheep’s field. ‘None of ’em like a badger’s stink.’
So what about a man’s stink, thought Evelyn. What if I’m wrong and they don’t want him? I’ve assumed they’ll go for him just as they went for the hens, the ducks, the geese and the lambs, but what if I’m wrong? What will I do then?
She walked away from the copse as if it was just one of the checkpoints in her regular casual inspection of the grounds. Wouldn’t do to linger too long; better to look as if it was merely one element of her constitutional, her perusal of the boundaries, her survey of her domain. As she walked, hands pushed into the pockets of her old Barbour jacket, still filled with ends of straw and twists of twine from her sheep-keeping days, she tried to remember how long it had taken before.
There was the fallow deer that dropped dead outside the front door one Easter. Lying there, legs out straight, just as if it had been standing upright one second, then fainted and toppled over the next. If Charles had still been around, he’d have been all for gutting it there and then and lobbing the joints into the big chest freezer in the garage. But her brother was long gone and Evelyn had to wait till Jim the gardener arrived after the Bank Holiday was over, by which time she wasn’t sure it would be safe to butcher the carcass, so together they lifted it into a wheelbarrow and trundled it across the lawns, through the paddocks and into the nearest copse.
Three days, maybe four, and then there was hardly anything left. They went for the abdomen first, clearing out the cavity and exposing the ribs, then the limbs were torn from the torso and dragged a little way off so each animal or fox family could gorge. She’d heard them that night, shrieking at each other as they fought over the choicest cuts, like squabbling housewives at a cut-price butcher’s stall in a noisy street market.
Over the years, sheep and a pig had all gone the same way. Why pay the knacker man to take the bodies for dog food and glue when the foxes could do the job for nothing? Now and then, these scavengers brought their own dinner to Kingsley and Evelyn would discover a reeking corpse or a decomposing fragment of a hind leg in a corner of the grounds, where the grass was allowed to grow long and wild with buttercups and clover during the summer months.
Years ago, when she first returned to Kingsley Manor, after Mama’s death, after the fruitless wait for Hugh’s return, she had struggled to like the foxes, with their raids on the hens and ducks, killing so many in a frenzied night of slaughterous bloodlust, but taking and eating so little. But gradually she had come to see that they were Nature’s dustmen, seizing opportunities, scavenging if they were able, but clearing away every scrap of edible flesh, fur, skin and bone until what little was left was indistinguishable from the humus of mulch and decay beneath the trees. Such useful partners in crime.
And she depended on them now. It had been so long in the planning, so long in the waiting, it couldn’t fall apart now, just because the foxes were too well fed or some local farmer had killed a vixen and let her cubs starve to death. Evelyn was sure she had heard their cries recently, so it was surely only a matter of time.
She worried as she walked that she should have removed every shred of clothing, that the garments she’d left on his skinny body were delaying the start. She knew she couldn’t risk having anything of his, anything at all, in the house, so she’d burned his clothes immediately. But she was relieved he had followed her into the woods, so trustingly, so tamely. This way was cleaner, further away from her. No one knew he was here. No one else ever came to the house now.
It pained her at first to tell Neil to take the sheep elsewhere, but his girls, ‘Those black Welsh bastards,’ he called them, were great escape artists and he was always having to jump over fences, waving his crook and sending his two collies to chase them back to their allotted grazing areas. It pained her even more to finally give Jim notice, to know the formal areas of garden would gradually become knotted with mare’s tail and ground elder when her knees and elbows could no longer cope, but it was necessary. She would weed as much as she could and still prune the roses up as high as she could reach. It was not such a terrible price to pay for keeping a promise.
38
Kingsley Manor
6 February 1986
My dearest darling Hugh,