The Painted Tent (6 page)

At that moment Smiler was glad of Mr Samkin who was making him read Kipling and remembered some lines from the last poem they had done –

If you wake at midnight, and hear a horse's feet,
Don't go drawing back the blind, or looking in the

street,
Them that asks no questions isn't told a lie,
Watch the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go

by!

So, Smiler sat where he was, a shadow in the angle of a ruined parapet ledge. And below, Jimmy Jago waited like another shadow. Then, from outside, there suddenly came the double note of a wintering curlew, or so Smiler thought it was until he saw Jimmy move, drop something among the rubble to the left of the window, and then slide out into the night. He knew that it had been an all-clear signal from the other man, who, he felt, might easily from his appearance have been either Bob or Bill.

To be on the safe side, Smiler sat where he was for fifteen minutes by his birthday watch – hands luminous – the present of Jimmy. He wondered, though he knew it was none of his business, what Jimmy was doing up here when only that morning he had supposedly driven off in his shabby old car on a dealing trip for two or three days. One thing was clear: neither of the men were poaching for there was nothing in the house to poach.

When he thought the coast was clear Smiler climbed down and went into the house. He picked his way across the broken rubble and stones of the floor to the window. Lying on the ground to one side of it was the object Jimmy had dropped.

Smiler picked it up. He stared at it puzzled. It was a very small broom or besom made of bunched hazel twigs bound together with a couple of twists of binder twine. Although it had no long wooden hazel pole for a handle it was a miniature of the hazel besoms that he used sometimes to sweep the floor of the barns.

Smiler studied it, shook his head in bafflement, and then told himself, ‘Samuel M., Jimmy's business is Jimmy's business and he's your friend.'

He put the besom back where he had found it. But all the way home – although he knew it was none of his business – he just kept wondering what on earth anyone should want a besom for in a ruined old mansion that it would have taken an army of men and builders to bring back to its former glory.

It was three days before Jimmy Jago showed up at the farm again. He returned after supper and while Smiler was studying in his room he could hear him and the Duchess talking in the kitchen. It was not possible to hear what they said, but he had the impression that now and again some sort of argument was going on between them. However, Smiler, who knew what it was to be in trouble of his own, wisely decided that other people's affairs were nothing to do with him unless he were invited to share them. He sagely decided to say nothing and keep his own counsel – but this could not keep him from the use of his eyes.

Three times before Christmas arrived he sat on his parapet ledge at Highford House and saw the two men leave, always around the same time. Now, when he went up there – which was less often as winter gripped the valley – he always looked to see if the hazel besom lay by the window. If it did he was content to stay. But if the besom was not in its place, then he quietly made off.

He wrote to Laura regularly now and took a great deal of trouble over his letters so that they should be grammatically correct. It annoyed him sometimes that Laura did not write as often as he did, but when he taxed her with it she wrote back and told him ‘… not to be a daft loon. Do you think I've got nothing else to do all day but sit and write letters? And anyway you only write to me so much because you want to show off your grammatics.'

Smiler also wrote to Albert a couple of times without giving his address. He got Jimmy Jago to post the letters well away from Devon while he was on his travels.

Through all this, Smiler went twice a week to Mr Samkin who lived in the village at the head of the brook valley. But, although Smiler studied hard, he was not as happy at Mr Samkin's as he had been. Mr Samkin had taken on another student for extra coaching. This was a sixteen-year-old girl from the village called Sandra Parsons whose father was the local postman. Sandra had fair hair, blue eyes, a nice but slightly hooky nose, and a funny sort of giggle of a laugh which Smiler found irritating. But the chief thing that annoyed him was that Sandra was too friendly towards him. She so often found excuses to cycle down to Bullaybrook Farm and talk to him, when he should have been working, that he took to hiding when he saw her coming. On a Sunday, with two or three other girls, she would walk down and they would hang about the small stone bridge over the brook and, when he went off for a walk, follow him, giggling and laughing. But he had to admit that while they were at Mr Samkin's Sandra was entirely serious and attentive to the instruction being given. Once in a fit of pique when Sandra spoilt one of his walks by joining up with him he called her nose ‘a hooky beak'. Instead of being put out she laughed and said, ‘Oh, Sammy – that just shows how uneducated you are. It's an aristocratic nose. All the Parsons are descended from the King of the Barnstaple Treacle Mines. I suppose you'll tell me next that you didn't know treacle comes from a mine?'

Smiler groaned inwardly. There was nothing he could do but tolerate her, avoid her as much as possible, and feel more determined than ever to stick to his vow not to go to her Christmas party which she began to talk about well in advance.

By the time Christmas arrived there were a few horses in the stable, a couple of rosin backs and a small black pony which, given encouragement by Bill and Bob when it was in the yard, would go up on to its back legs and waltz and pirouette across the cobbles.

Christmas came with the first light fall of snow and a frost that made the ground bone-hard and lapped the fringes of the Bullay brook with a rim of ice. Jimmy Jago was at home for Christmas and Bill and Bob came down to have Christmas dinner with them all. Afterwards they all sat around the fireplace and exchanged presents. Smiler one weekend had gone on the train to Barnstaple to buy his presents for people – and had been considerably hampered in the expedition because Sandra had got wind of it and turned up on the train with two other girls. It had seemed to him that every time he turned a street corner or went into a shop there they would be. The best Christmas present Smiler had was a quiet word from Jimmy Jago before Bill and Bob arrived.

Jimmy said, ‘ Never mind how, but I got a mate of mine to ask at the shipping company about your Dad. Seems he missed his boat at Montevideo because he went up in the hills for a two-day trip and got fever at the hotel where he was staying. He was in hospital up there for a couple of days before they realized he was from a ship.'

‘But he's all right now, isn't he?'

‘Of course he is. But that isn't the half of it. Montevideo wasn't his lucky place. Just as he was getting over the fever, he slips on the tiles of the hospital corridor and breaks his leg.' Jimmy grinned. ‘Would you say your old man is accident-prone?'

‘It's news to me,' said Smiler.

‘Well, not to worry. Everything's all right. The company have taken care of him. He's on another of their ships now. It picked him up on its way to Australia. My mate couldn't find out when it's due back in this country. He didn't like to be any nosier in case the company began to wonder what he was so interested for.'

‘Oh, gosh, Mr Jimmy – I'm glad he's all right. I mean, I knew he had to be, but it's nice to know. Thank you very much.'

And the worst present of a kind was a Christmas card from Sandra Parsons. Inside it was a formal invitation to Smiler to attend her party on the night after Boxing Day. When he groaned about it the Duchess, with a warm glint in her eyes, said, ‘You're growing up, Sammy. You've got to learn that there are a lot of things you have to do in life out of politeness which you don't want to do. But I'll let you into a secret. Most of them usually turn out to be very pleasant. You write a nice
thank you
and say you'll go.' She winked. ‘But there's no need to tell Laura about it if you don't want to.'

The Duchess was right, of course. When Smiler went to the party it took less than half an hour for his initial reticence and shyness to wear off. Then he began to enjoy himself. Mr and Mrs Parsons were warm-hearted, friendly people and soon made him welcome. And Sandra and her friends, now that he was amongst them and part of their accepted company, seemed less giggly and stupid than he had thought. They played games and danced to a record player and Smiler – who had not done much dancing in his life, but had a natural sense of rhythm – soon picked up the steps required of him. Although it was not part of his choosing, Smiler found that he danced with Sandra more than with the other girls and, in some mysterious way, when games were played he found himself partnered by her or on her side. This, without his knowing it, made Smiler an enemy – a big, well-built farmer's son of eighteen called Trevor Green who regarded Sandra as his girl friend. He was far from pleased at the way Sandra and a few of the other girls had taken to the fair-haired, freckle-faced Smiler. Trevor Green was not the kind who brought his grievances out into the open. Also, he had enough intelligence to realize that if he showed his jealousy of Smiler openly then it would do him no good with Sandra and might – in the way of many females – merely provoke her to a more galling display of her liking for Smiler.

Trevor Green, from the day of the party, worked secretly against Smiler. Sometimes in the darkness of early evening he would walk through the brook fields and leave gates open so that the cattle strayed. Another night he crept into the barnyard and punctured both tyres on Smiler's bicycle with a fine bradawl so that Smiler would not suspect sabotage. He worked in the dark and in the way the country folk used to think the bad-tempered pixies worked when they wanted to make trouble and more work for those they disliked. He opened the hatch-gate of the disused leat which had once served the old Bullay-brook Mill. The brook was in spate and the water raced down the old leat, poured through a broken bank above the barns, and flooded the yards and the stables one night. Quietly and stealthily as the New Year came in and January wore away through wintry, roaring days of wind and rain, Trevor Green spaced his mischief and caused Smiler a great deal of extra work. But in the way of life, and without knowing it, he at last did something which, though it caused Smiler trouble and worry to begin with, in the end gave Smiler great pleasure and joy.

One night after Smiler had made his last inspection of the animals in the barn and had returned to his bedroom, Trevor Green crept up to the barn, took the key from under the water-butt, and let himself in. He closed the door and switched on the light. The only windows in the barn were at the far end and could not be seen from the house.

He went down the row of cages and pens and opened the doors of the Barbary ram's pen and that of Freddie the chimpanzee. On the other side of the barn he opened the cages of the griffon, the mynah birds and of Fria. None of the animals paid much attention to him. An eye was opened from sleep and then closed. Fria stared graven-faced at him, eyes unblinking. Within a few minutes he was gone, chuckling to himself, picturing the trouble Smiler would have in the morning when he arrived and found birds and animals loose in the barn.

It was a stupid trick, the product of a small, jealous mind – and it would have been a complete failure had it not been for Freddie. Most of the animals were so used to their captivity that they were content to stay where they were and go on sleeping. So was Freddie for a long time. He was warm and comfortable in his straw bed. He had cocked an uncurious eye at Trevor as he passed, yawned, and drifted away into sleep again.

But at four o'clock in the morning Freddie woke and sat up blinking. That the barn lights should be on was unusual, and the unusual now stirred Freddie's curiosity. He saw that the door of his cage was open and shambled over to it, long arms swinging, his knuckles brushing the ground, his large, old man's mouth working soundlessly as though in silent irritation at the break in barn routine. One of the mynah birds cocked an eye at him and, giving a sleepy whistle, said, ‘Look, look at the time! Look at the time!' Freddie gave a pout of his thick lips at the bird, scratched his head and then dropped to the floor. Grunting to himself, he made a little tour up his side of the barn, absent-mindedly picked up a piece of wood from the floor and rattled it along the bars of the tapir's cage. At the far end of the building was a flight of wooden steps that led to a loft. Freddie went up the steps and sat on the top rung. The trap-door leading into the loft was closed. He banged on it as though it were a drum for a while and then dropped from the top steps to the ground in an easy movement. He enjoyed the exercise so much that he went up the steps and repeated the performance. He walked down the length of the bird-cages to the open door of the griffon's cage.

The griffon, head sunk between its shoulders, eyes half open, followed his movements, its great beak swinging slowly. Freddie raised his head to it, wrinkled his face, and chattered gently through clenched teeth. He banged his piece of wood to and fro across the open doorway. The griffon shook out its shabby plumage and sidled along its perch a few inches.

Freddie climbed up the bars of the cage and sat on top of it. Experimentally he reached down through the bars with his piece of wood and tried to touch the griffon.

Reluctantly the griffon flopped down from its perch to the cage floor like a disgruntled old woman and shuffled into a far corner. Freddie carried on a little chattering conversation to himself and then crossed over to the top of the mynah birds' cage. They turned their long beaks up to him defensively and half opened their wings to a threatening posture. One of the birds took off from its perch, swooped through the open door and flew up to the window ledge at the far end of the barn where it settled, whistled, and called, ‘Say it again! Say it again … Oh, clever bird!'