Warlight(48)
He led her through the thick grass to the shoreline, the passing of time still being signalled by the growing depth of water. As light came up it was a foot deep, the landscape almost recognizable. Suddenly everything was awake, the birds were moving out from their nests, the gun dog, formal on the edge of the now two-foot-deep estuary, was moving backwards as the water rose, swirling fast. It would be dangerous to a stranger who was not a strong swimmer; he would be pulled away, even by this shallow tide, whereas earlier he could have walked waist-deep across the hundred-yard stretch of the Blyth estuary to that small temporary island.
Felon fired and the empty cartridge bucked free of the shotgun. The bird’s silent fall down into the water. The dog swam out, tussled with it a moment, circled and swam back with the fowl. She noticed how the dog had grabbed it by its feet so he could breathe as he swam. Birds flew over him in chaotic sixes and Felon fired again. Clearer light now. He picked up the other shotgun, explained how to break it open and double-load it. He didn’t show her, he explained it, speaking quietly, watching her face’s response for what she was actually taking in. He always liked and trusted how she listened, even when younger, her head lifted, watching his mouth. Dogs did that. She fired into the sky at nothing. He made her keep doing that to get used to the sound and recoil.
Sometimes they drove to the Blyth estuary, sometimes to the Alde. After that first night journey, whenever Felon took her wildfowling along the tidal coasts, she climbed into the front seat and stayed awake, even if they barely spoke. She’d peer into the last darkness, the grey trees rushing at them, passing alongside as if uncaught. She was already thinking ahead, rehearsing how heavy the gun would be in her hands, the cold grip of it, the sweep of it up to the accurate height and moment, the recoil and echo of noise along the silence of the estuary. So she could become accustomed to all that while the three of them journeyed towards it in the dark car. The dog leaned between the seats and placed his warm muzzle on her right shoulder, and she leaned over and pressed her own head against his.
Rose’s taut body and face barely changed over the years, kept a leanness. There was vigilance in her. Marsh Felon could never tell where it came from, for the landscape she grew up in was placid, a self-sufficient place without urgency. Her father, the Admiral, reflected that placidness. He appeared unconcerned with what took place around him, but this was not the complete portrait of him. Marsh was aware that the father, just as he did, had a busier, more official life in the city. The two men accompanied each other on Sunday walks, with Marsh, always the amateur naturalist, speaking of the mystery of chalk hills, where “whole faunas come and go, while the layers of the chalk are built from the efforts of infinitesimal creatures working in almost limitless time.” Suffolk, for Rose’s father, was such a slow, gradual universe, a plateau of rest. He knew the real and urgent world was the sea.
Between the father and Felon’s easy friendship was the girl. Neither of the men seemed tyrannical or dangerous to her. Her father might appear a stuffed shirt when asked about political parties, but he let the family dog, Petunia, clamber onto the sofa and then into his arms. His wife and daughter watched such responses well aware they did not exist for him at sea, where even a scuffed lanyard would be a punishable matter. And he was sentimental about music, would hush them when a specific melody came over the airwaves. When he was not there, his daughter missed that calm maleness that she could sidle next to for warmth when her mother’s rules were restrictive. Which perhaps was why Rose, in his absence, sought out Marsh Felon, listening to him openmouthed about the insistent habits of hedgehogs, about a cow eating the afterbirth of its calf in order to renew its strength. She wanted the complex rules of adults and nature. Even in her youth Felon would always talk to her as an adult.
When Marsh Felon returned to Suffolk after long periods of time abroad, she would come to know him again. But she was no longer the young girl he had taught to fish or go wildfowling. She was married, with a daughter, my sister Rachel.
—
Felon watches Rose with the daughter tucked under her arm. She places Rachel on the grass and picks up the fishing rod, his gift. He knows her first response will be to test its weight, balance it on her fingers, then smile. He has been away too long. All he wants is to again catch that smile. She rubs her open palm against the grain of the impregnated rod, then picks up the infant and walks over to embrace Felon, the child awkwardly between them.
But he watches her now in an alternative way; she is no longer a learning youth, and it disappoints him. Whereas she, having driven up to her parents’ home in Suffolk and seeing him again, does not imagine him as anything other than that ally from childhood. The sense of a difference between them is not in Rose, even if she is in the midst of constant breastfeeding, waking at three or four in the darkness. If she is thinking of anything somewhere in the back of her mind, it is not Felon her neighbour from the past, for whom she still has affection, but the career she had been moving towards that her marriage has now expelled from her life. She has a child, is already pregnant with another, so a career as linguist appears lost. She is to remain a young mother. She feels less gymnastic. She even thinks of mentioning this to Felon on their walk, when she is free of the child for an hour.
It turns out that Felon is mostly in London, where she also lives with her husband in nearby Tulse Hill, but they do not run into each other. In London they have separate lives. Felon works at the BBC, along with other projects he says little about. And although he is known as the loveable naturalist on his radio show, behind that portrait he is known by some as a ladies’ man—“the boulevardier,” her father keeps calling him.