“How’s Marc?” Em was back from London. We were eating cake in The Polly. She’d cut her hair short and it suited her, made her look simultaneously older and more elfin. The waitress asked her where she got her earrings and seemed put out when Em told her a friend had made them.
“All right, I guess.” Distant and barely speaking to me would have been more accurate. It had been worse since she left. Sometimes when he looked at me, it was like I was something he had spent a fortune on, and now wished he could take back to the shop. Em was quiet. I had the feeling she was measuring her words.
“You have to do something, Andy, get help. This is not fair. It’s just not fair on … anyone.”
I stared down at the crumbs on my plate.
“It’s not healthy, not for either of you.”
“I know I’m not much fun.” It was difficult getting the words out.
“I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry, Andy.” Like it was her fault.
When we said goodbye, Em hugged me hard. Drawing apart, she held on tight to my wrists.
“Come to London. Stay with me. You can get a job up there easy. Get away from here.”
And I would, of course, only not with Em.
* * *
When I turned, Marcus was in the doorway, his mouth a tight line. How long had he been there?
“We need another beater to come on the shoot tomorrow. Out on the Collingwood Estate. Darren says he doesn’t need you in the office.”
“I don’t think—” It had snowed in the night. I tried to picture myself flushing a load of pheasants from their hiding places toward a row of shotguns. That morning, I’d only made it as far as the kitchen and a cup of tea, and from there looked out into the white day and the mist. The contours of the hills were fading in and out of sight as though struggling into being. I waited there, at first thinking and then not-thinking, with the sensation of being emptied, as though through the corridors of my vision something was passing out of me, expending itself in the snow. Now it was dark. Where had the day gone? The week, the month, the last three years? “Marcus, I’m not sure I’m up to it.”
“You’re coming,” he said.
* * *
The alarm went off at six in the dark. Marcus had stayed at his mum’s again. I pulled my clothes from off the chair next to the bed and struggled into them still under the bedclothes. When I heard the van, I got up and half fell down the stairs and out the front door into the snow. I took a handful and rubbed it across my face.
“You better have made tea.” And he had, a thermos of it, and as we took the road to the shoot I poured myself a cup, spilling scalding drops on my thighs. The Collingwood Estate lay out past Hungerford and the road wound there through villages and hamlets and over hills where the tarmac was frosted, and then down among darkly wooded dells.
In the car park near the big house, we met the other beaters and then walked down to the river. The black water flowed clear and fast, and a lick of vapor was curling from it. The water was warmer than the air, and although the sky was clear there would be more snow. The guns were parked up by the house while the beaters, mostly old boys, had congregated round the game cart, a pickup with rails in the back to string up the birds. They were exchanging gossip while the dogs nosed about their feet. A pair of Labradors, sisters with fox-red coats and black-tipped ears, cried with excitement. It was their first season and as they danced and fretted, I felt a little of their joy seep into me, like a tiny drop of dye—yolk yellow—falling into a pool of white paint. Col, an old friend of Darren’s who’d taken Marcus fishing and to shoots when he was a boy, offered me his hip flask.
“That’s the one, one Marcus is talking to.” A young man in tweeds was going round shaking hands with the guns, all of whom had paid upward of five hundred quid for the day’s shoot.
“The one what?”
“Zack Allerton. His family owns the estate. He’s got an older brother, Lawrence, but he’s in banking. Not interested. So Zack’s having a go at running the shooting and fishing. He’s a DJ. Plays records in those London clubs, the ones the kids thrash about in like de-knackered bullocks while clutching bottles of water.”
“How do you know about them, Col?”
“I saw it on Panorama.”
By nine, I was standing on the perimeter of a field, holding my flag, a white triangle of fertilizer bag nailed to a stick. Marcus was a hundred meters to my left, Col further up on my right. The other beaters were on the other side of a small copse. The drive began and we advanced toward them over the sheep grazing and then through a small field of rotting maize stalks, waving our flags and driving the pheasants into the waiting guns. Dark birds with long tail feathers burst upward and sailed frantically in the direction of the river. The guns sounded, and I watched as a pheasant dropped out of the air mid-flight, like a switch had been flipped. They fell among the brush that bordered the river where it split into channels. The dogs hurtled in and out of the freezing water bringing back the bodies.
At lunch, the beaters perched on the veranda of the club hut. Most were retired country folk like Col, or dog breeders, but there were a few hobbyists like us, doing it for the fresh air and a couple of crisp twenties. The guns sat at picnic tables by the river. There was wine, beer, and whiskey for everyone, and Zack took around bowls of crisps and made sure people’s glasses were topped up. He was just a few years older than us, but so polished he seemed ageless. I sat with my eyes closed, facing the sun. Mike, the gamekeeper, was conspiring with someone.
“We’ll give him a brace,” I heard him say in a low voice. “He kept quiet about the business with the mower, he deserves some birds.”
Two women had arrived. They were talking some feet away by the picnic tables about the drive down from London and I amused myself by trying to picture their faces. They would be blond, of course, but whereas one—Priss, what kind of name was Priss?—was bursting with words, juicy with enthusiasm for the shoot, the day, the drive across the snowy country, the other sounded dry, had a voice that twitched with a permanent-sounding dissatisfaction. She would be dark, I decided, wasp-waisted, perhaps a bit wolfy around the face.
I opened my eyes. I’d been right the first time. Both blond, Priss taller and sandier, full-lipped and big-chested with narrow hips. The second woman I recognized as Alice Calcraft, the girl whose family owned the manor and who didn’t rate iceberg lettuce. She was as slender as a weasel with small, even, white teeth and fine, fair hair, the kind of woman who would always be girlish. She caught my glance and then turned her back, like even a glance was common.
But then, I was never going to warm to Alice Calcraft. Because of ponies and skiing and posh school, and because for Alice to be nice to you, you had to disarm first. But mainly because, after she turned her back on me, she bent down to say something to the man sitting next to her brother at the picnic table—hair tickling his cheek, one hand on his shoulder—and this man, when he stood up, turned into David.
We did another drive, this one through the thickets by the river. I climbed over mossy fallen trees and through reed beds and brambles and patches of marsh, thrashing my flag about and banging it on the trunks of cricket willows, nose streaming. It was good to feel something as simple as fury. The guns fired overhead, and shot fell from the sky, pattering down through the trees. It sounded like summer rain on the roof of a tin shed. A small piece hit me on the forehead. I swore and rubbed the spot. The metal had been hot.