H Is for Hawk (18 page)

Towards the end of the book, limping and homeless, Prisonface meets a mysterious man on a country road. The man has saturnine, strangely carved features, and walks in darkness, a black dog by his side. He is a supernaturally suave figure: Prisonface is drawn to him, drawn to his power, recognising in it ‘the wisdom of certainty, the happiness of reality, the mastership of right’.
⁸
The stranger had once been a schoolmaster too, at a place called Golden Gates, but left because he could not bear the people teaching there. Now he is married, lives in a cottage in the woods and is content. The man is White’s vision of his future self: a White freed, a White triumphant, a man who lectures Prisonface, over several pages, on the failings of the school system: ‘To anybody who has spent two months training a goshawk, knowing that it will be fatal even to give the creature even a cross look,’
⁹
the man says, ‘it seems very extraordinary that the complex psychology of a human being can be taught with a stick.’

Sitting by the lamp, White finishes writing the speech that is perhaps the least cruel, the most humane in the whole book. He is speaking to his past self with pity and compassion.

‘You went back to school voluntarily from the University because you still needed to go to school, because there was something still to find. You went back under the hen’s wing for safety, because you were still too small a chicken, but also in search of something: you want the talisman that would make you fit to leave.’
¹⁰

‘What am I searching for?’

‘That you will only know when you find it.’

‘Is it wisdom or manhood?’

‘Perhaps it is love.’

Perhaps it is love. Perhaps it is. I imagine him writing those lines in his small kitchen, the light wet on the oilskin tablecloth, the night close against the window. He will stoke the fire in a little while. First he will write a little more. His hawk is sleeping. All the leaves on the trees of the Ridings are still tonight, all unmoving out across Three Parks Woods, across Stowe Woods and Sawpit Woods, over the Black Pits ponds, the carp slumbering deep in the waters. There is peace here. He is a wicked man. A free man. A man who is cast out, the man who fell.
Feral. Ferox. Fairy
. A man who is content with his lot. He puts the pen down to pour another drink, then picks up his pen and writes some more. He writes of Dr Prisonface asking the mysterious man his name, and of the man telling him it is Lucifer. Lucifer the light-bringer, the fallen angel, the devil incarnate.

14

The line

THE EXPRESSION ON
Christina’s face is unusual. It’s not a happy face, but it’s not unhappy either. Tense, certainly. It is fierce, ambivalent and brave. Today she’d come out to watch the hawk fly and in a burst of inspiration I decided to recruit her as my under-falconer. She’d borne my grief-spurred strangenesses with great good grace over the last few months but nothing could have prepared her for this. ‘The problem is, I can’t get away fast enough,’ I tell her. ‘She flies after me as soon as I start walking away. But she has to come longer distances before I can fly her loose. Can you hold her for me, out on the pitch, so I can call her from your fist?’

‘You’ll have to show me how,’ she says, paling.

‘It’s easy, really.’

I give her my spare glove, put the hawk on it and bend her fingers into the right shape to hold the jesses.

‘Turn your back to me – yes, like that. Perfect. Now she can’t see me. So I’m going to walk over there. When I shout OK, turn right, stick out your arm and open your hand, so she can fly.’

She bites her lip, nods.

‘Make sure you turn the right way; you don’t want to get the creance caught round your legs.’

She holds the hawk with cautious concentration, as if it were a pitcher full of some caustic agent. She stands straight-backed, still and composed, a small figure fifteen yards away in skinny black jeans, T-shirt and bright red sneakers.

‘OK!’

She turns, and Mabel bursts towards me, dragging the creance behind her, flying so low her wing-tips almost brush the turf. With each deep wingbeat her body flexes and swings but her eyes and head are perfectly, gyroscopically, still, fixed and focused on my glove. The silvered undersides of her wings flash as she spreads them wide, her tail flares, she brings her feet up to strike and she hits the glove feet-first like a kickboxer.

‘Was that OK?’ shouts Christina.

I give her a thumbs-up, and she responds the same way: for a moment we are two traffic controllers on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier.

We do it again. And again. The next day brings heavy rain so we fly her loose between us in the front room of my house, back and forth from fist to fist, over the rug, past the mirror, under the light, wings sending up draughts that leave the lampshade swinging wildly. By the fourth day the hawk is flying twenty-five yards to me, will come without hesitation from the ground, from Christina’s fist, from tree branches, from the roof of the pavilion. ‘Thank you so much for your help,’ I tell her as we walk from the field. ‘You know, I think we’re nearly there. Once she flies a full fifty yards I’ll let her loose.’ The thought brings a squirmy, high-pitched joy.
I mustn’t rush. I cannot wait
.

I had called so many hawks before, but calling Mabel was different. I stood there, raised my arm, and whistled the whistle that meant,
Please come. This is where you want to be. Fly to me. Ignore the towering clouds, the wind that pushes the trees behind you. Fix yourself on me and fly between where you are and where I am
. And I’d hear my heart beating. And I’d see the hawk crouch and fly. I’d see her drop from the perch, speed towards me, and my heart would be in my mouth. Though she was still on the creance, I feared the faltering. I feared the veering off, the sudden fright, the hawk flying away. But the beating wings brought her straight to me, and the thump of her gripping talons on the glove was a miracle. It was always a miracle.
I choose to be here
, it meant.
I eschew the air, the woods, the fields
. There was nothing that was such a salve to my grieving heart as the hawk returning. But it was hard, now, to distinguish between my heart and the hawk at all. When she sat twenty yards across the pitch part of me sat there too, as if someone had taken my heart and moved it that little distance. It reminded me of Philip Pullman’s children’s fantasy series
His Dark Materials
, in which each person has a
daemon
, an animal that is a visible manifestation of their soul and accompanies them everywhere. When people are separated from their daemons they feel pain. This was a universe very close to mine. I felt incomplete unless the hawk was sitting on my hand: we were parts of each other. Grief and the hawk had conspired to this strangeness. I trusted she would fly to me as simply and completely as I trusted gravity would make things fall. And so entrenched was this sense that the hawk flying to me was part of the workings of the world that when things went wrong, the world went wrong with it.

She’d left Christina’s fist with all the joy and certainty in the world. I watched her approach and waited with happy anticipation for the solid
thwack
of her landing on my glove. But it did not come. Instead, she snatched at the food in my fist with one down-dropped taloned foot, and kept flying, fast, out and away from me. I could feel the failure in her, the sense that she hadn’t got what she wanted, and I could feel, too, that what had just happened had spooked her, and that now she was flying away from it, and me, as fast as possible. I grabbed hold of the creance and ran with her, putting resistance on the line until she was brought to earth, crest raised, wings spread wide, feet planted in the turf, beak open, panting in fury. I held out my fist and she flew straight up onto it as if nothing had happened at all.

‘She must have been scared by something,’ I said. ‘Let’s try it again.’

And again the hawk came, low and fast, and again she snatched at the glove and kept flying. Again I brought her to earth.

‘Why is she doing it?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’

This had never happened before. Over the years I’d had hawks that ignored me. Hawks that turned their back on me. Hawks that flew reluctantly, flew badly, or didn’t fly at all. It never worried me. These hawks weren’t at their flying weight, that was all, and this was easily fixed. But this was different. This was a hawk desperately eager to fly to me, but with a last-second terror of landing on my glove. It was incomprehensible. I telephoned Stuart. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong. Does she need more manning? Is she too high in weight?’

I was as bewildered as a child.

‘What should I do?’

There was a long pause, and then a longer sigh.

‘Are you feeding her chicks?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘Stop feeding her chicks! They’re too rich for her at this stage. She’ll be fine, she’s nearly there. Just feed her rabbit. It won’t hurt her, but it’ll stop this problem.’

All the trust I had left in the world rested in the fact that the hawk wanted to fly to me. Now she was scared to land on my fist –
she didn’t trust me
– and I could not explain to Stuart how awful this felt. I thanked him. I had asked for advice, and he had given it, simply and precisely.
This is the problem. This is how you fix it
. But I didn’t believe him.
It can’t just be the food. I have done something bad
, I thought miserably.
Something terrible
.

The next day a plague of moorhens had come out of the messy copse behind the pavilion and were running all over the pitch like a flock of feathered black mice. Moorhens! Birds that can neither fly well nor run fast, they are such easy prey for goshawks that falconers avoid flying them out of a sense of sporting fair play. Mabel had never seen them before, but she looked upon them now as if they had been designed by a kindly deity for her personal delectation. I wasn’t surprised; I’d already discovered that all sorts of predatory taxonomies are buried in a baby goshawk’s brain. A few days earlier I’d seen her looking at a small drawing of partridges in a book I’d left open on the floor. Intrigued, I picked up the book and held it in front of her. She kept her eyes fixed on the picture, even when I moved the book about in the air.
No way!
I thought. The drawing was in ink; it was stylised and sparse: it caught the feel and form of partridges, but there was no colour or detail to it. I flipped through the book, showed her other drawings: finches, seabirds, thrushes. She ignored them all. Then I showed her a drawing of a pheasant. Her black pupils dilated; she leaned forward and stared down her beak at it, as fascinated as she had been with the partridges. I was amazed. Amazed that she could understand two-dimensional images, and even more amazed that something deep in her brain saw these sparse inked curves as fitting the category
gamebirds
and had pronounced them worthy of interest.

Right on cue I hear a soft clucking noise, and a thin peeping, and Mabel’s head swings round, and mine too, and we see – just there, just ten feet away – a hen pheasant and a line of cheeping, half-feathered poults squeezing themselves under a railing on their way towards the grass. The pheasant sees Mabel and stops dead. She has never seen a goshawk before, but instantly perceives the danger she is in. She crouches to fly, realises this would leave her chicks behind, then considers sitting down and pretending to be a rock, and when she realises the futility of this manouevre – her lacy beige back does not match the sunlit grass, and the hawk has already seen her – all hell breaks loose. She stretches her neck high, puffs out her cheek feathers, beak open in panic, and runs pell-mell out across the pitch. Her chicks follow her desperately, six ungainly clockwork dinosaurs. I am bewildered – there is no safety out there, nowhere to hide, unless the pheasant thinks that putting her chicks amongst the distant moorhens would give them a faint, statistical chance of escape.

Mabel. Oh God, Mabel. Mabel is bating at them, bating so hard, wings beating so furiously, that she hangs horizontally in the air. The breeze is cold in my face, my fist pulled towards the fleeing pheasants. She bounces back onto my hand, beak open with exertion, fixes me with a white-hot, angry eye, then bates towards them again.
Not here, not now! Mabel! I can’t. I can’t let you catch one. It is against the laws of God and Man and . . . College.

I try to keep her on my fist – which is like trying to balance a very tall and unstable pile of precious china plates – execute a smart volte-face to block the pheasants from view, and in the excessively polite voice that only ever falls on me at times of enormous stress I ask Christina if she ‘might possibly chase the pheasants back into the bushes? And perhaps the moorhens too?’ She grins, and shepherds the pheasants back into the garden behind the railings. Then she sprints off across the pitch towards the moorhens. Meanwhile Mabel is standing on tiptoe, jumping up and down, craning her neck over my shoulder to see where they have gone, and I’m trying to stop her from seeing, and largely failing, and I turn my head and see Christina running across the field, arms windmilling, and before her, scores of moorhens rushing back into the woods, wings open as they run, like small boys playing aeroplanes, and I start giggling uncontrollably. This is
ludicrous
. I’m holding tight onto Britain’s deadliest hawk while someone chases all the gamebirds away.
My God
, I’m thinking.
If any of my falconer friends find out about this, they’ll never speak to me again
.

Once the pitch is clear of temptation I call Mabel as usual. She flies to my fist perfectly, a whole thirty yards. But on the second and third flights she clouts the glove hard with both feet, skies up, tries to turn in mid-air, wobbles, stalls, then ends up on the ground a few feet away, panting, wings dropped, looking as if she is going to explode. All my laughter is gone. Now I know why austringers have, for centuries, been famed for cursing. I curse. It is my fault this is happening. I know it is. I hate myself. I try to keep calm. I fail.
Damn, damn, damn
. I’m hot, incredibly bothered, pushing hair from my eyes with rabbit-flesh-specked fingers, cursing to high heaven, and to top it all I see a man in white shirtsleeves and a black waistcoat striding towards Christina, his shadow dark before him. It is one of the college porters, and he is not happy. The set of his shoulders is unmistakable. They start talking. From this distance I can’t hear what’s being said, but she is waving one hand towards me, and I suppose she is explaining to him that I’m not a random trespasser, but a bona fide College Fellow, and what I am doing is not against the rules.