Notwithstanding: Stories From an English Village Page 4

  When he was home, Robert managed to get the pole through the house and out into the back garden with the assistance of his mother, who held on to the thin end to make sure that it didn’t whip any ornaments off their shelves. When he had laid it out on the grass he fetched a tape measure, and, with mounting excitement, confirmed that his rod was indeed not just twelve foot long, but sixteen. What should he do? All the best rods were twelve foot, but why not innovate, why not go even further? He wedged the rod into a chink in the fence, and bent it at the tip. It was definitely too thin and weak, so he cut off two feet. He waved the rod about, feeling it flex, and it was just right. He knew instinctively that it had enough whip in it to resist and tire a big fish, bending without breaking. Robert realised that he was pioneering a new concept in extra-long rods, and he felt emboldened and excited.

  The little boy whipped the end of the thirty-pound line on to the tip, carefully emulating the technique taught him by his grandfather. He tied a loop in his line and tightened it about an inch from the point of the rod, and then very neatly he bound it along the final inch with button thread, under which he had laid a short loop of fine line, so that he could pass the thread through the loop, and then pull it through under the binding, to fix it. This always worked better than knots. Robert waited impatiently until his mother went out to the village shop to get bread, and then he sneaked upstairs and raided her make-up table for clear nail varnish. He painted it heavily on to the whipped thread, enjoying the clinging, intoxicating odour of it, so that it would shrink the whipping tight and set it hard and solid.

  Robert had enough experience to realise that the line couldn’t be much longer than the rod, because otherwise he wouldn’t be able to land the fish, and so he cut it off at fifteen feet, reasoning that this left some compensating margin for the line that in the future he was bound to lose while cutting knots away from hooks and traces. He rootled around in his treasure drawer and found the brightly painted pike bung that he had once rescued at great peril after spotting it abandoned, tangled up in reeds on the River Wey after the great flood. He pulled the stick out of the middle, laid his line in the slot, and replaced the stick. He resisted the temptation to tie on the trace and the treble hooks of the snap tackle. He had had a hook in his finger before, because of leaving his rod tackled up and ready to go. Uncle Dick had brought the hook through his flesh until it emerged, then he had cut off the barb and drawn it back out. The memory of the agony he had had to endure still made him clench his teeth.

  Lastly Robert made a priest, because he knew that he was going to have to bash the pike over the head if he caught it. He found an old hickory broom handle, cut off a foot at one end, and drilled a hole in it. He decided to sacrifice some airgun pellets, and melted a handful in the lid of the tin, using Uncle Dick’s blowtorch. With a pair of pliers he gingerly picked up the lid, swimming with molten silvery liquid, and poured the lead into the hole that he had drilled. He would need the extra weight to make a sufficiently convincing cosh. He left it to cool, and then found to his frustration and disappointment that the lead simply fell out of the hole, because it shrunk when it cooled off. After a half-hour’s despair, Robert had a brainwave, and rummaged in his treasure drawer again. He had a big rusty bolt that he had found on the verge side, and this he glued into the hole vacated by the wilful lead. He smacked his palm with it a few times, and reckoned that it would be heavy enough.

  So it was that two days later Robert called in on Mrs Rendall, ostensibly to let her know that he was there, but primarily to activate the flow of tea and peanut butter sandwiches. He had just had the most difficult bicycle ride of his life, because it wasn’t easy cycling up hills with a bag of fishing tackle and a fourteen-foot pole, and all the mad drivers like Miss Agatha Feakes and the nuns from the convent made it that much more nerve-racking and hazardous. He had been glad to catch his breath by stopping and talking to the hedging and ditching man, who, in the attitude of Hamlet cradling Yorick’s skull, had been examining the seized and rusted remains of an ancient gin trap that he had just found in the ditch. The hedging and ditching man had admired the hazel pole, and said that he would have been proud to have made something like that himself, and that if that didn’t catch the Girt Pike then nothing would. When he finally arrived at the Glebe House, Robert was quite exhausted, his legs were aching, and he definitely needed tea and peanut butter before he could begin to catch a fish.

  He set up his normal rod, because first of all he had to catch a tiddler to put on the snap tackle. It was a perfect day, balmy, with a light breeze that was propelling wisps of cloud across the face of the sun. The animals and birds seemed especially active and cheerful. With the tea and sandwiches lying pleasantly on his stomach like the weight of a cat in the lap, Robert settled on his tiny folding fishing stool, and hauled in one tiddler after another. There was such pleasure in catching so many sparkling silver roach with their bright scarlet fins that it put the Girt Pike out of his mind. There was no sign of the great fish, and it receded into a distant possibility, a far potentiality, as if he suspected, or even knew, that he was not really old enough, or man enough, or ambitious enough, to catch it. He was also, in truth, reluctant to take one of those jewel-like fish, and impale it on treble hooks. Like all little boys, he had had his moments of gratuitous cruelty, but these beautiful little creatures were too perfect to violate.

  He was in that hypnagogic state common in bank-side fishermen, when he became aware quite suddenly that something was happening at his feet. There was a stirring and a swirling in the water. He looked down and saw that the Girt Pike was tugging at his keepnet in an attempt to get at the tiddlers within. The great dark fish, casual, brutal and impudent, was actually within a hand’s reach, and Robert felt his heart leap in his chest. He shouted and leapt backwards, knocking over his stool, and the pike flicked its tail and vanished. When Robert came back to the water, thankful that no one had been witness to his panic and foolishness, he could see the pike near the surface by the lily pad, fanning the water with its fins, and watching him. It must have been three feet long, and was the biggest fish that Robert had ever seen. It seemed impossible that such a creature could have lived in this small pond.

  With his hands shaking, Robert took a roach from his keepnet and hooked it on to his snap tackle, just as it said in the books, with one hook through the dorsal fin and another through the lip. He did not enjoy doing this, but he had been taken over by a deep and ineluctable instinct. He knew that it was necessity, and that was all.

  He swung the little victim out over the water, dropped it just past the lily pad, and drew it straight past the nose of the pike.

  To his amazement and surprise, and so fast that he could not react, the pike lunged forward and took the bait. Robert knew that when a pike took, you had to wait a second before you struck, otherwise you could just wrench the bait out of its mouth, but in this case he was so astonished that he nearly didn’t strike at all. When he did so, he felt the massive weight and strength of the fish at the other end, and began to experience an intoxicating terror that he would never in his life forget.

  He would always remember the effort of trying to control his fright, and the temptation to do stupid or counter-productive things. He forced himself not to haul on the fish, not to risk breaking the rod, to let it tire itself out naturally against the spring of the hazel wood. He was amazed and bewondered by the energy and fury of the pike, as it surged one way and then another, bending the rod so that it bucked and leapt in his hands. Robert realised that he did not have his landing net ready, and understood too late that the net was far too small in any case. It was a little folding thing that he had found in the White Elephant in Godalming, and it had been originally intended for trout. He tucked the hazel pole under one arm, and managed to flick the net open with one hand.

  He never knew how long it was that the mighty fish hurled itself about. Every time Robert thought that it had given up, the fish suddenly flamed back into furious resista
nce, rushing hither and thither, shaking its head, diving and leaping. Robert lost all sense of time and entered into another dimension that had something about it of eternity. He was holding on grimly, clutching his hazel pole more desperately than he really needed to, his knuckles white, his eyes popping in his head, and all the muscles of his arms and back aching with the strain. As the fish finally did begin to tire, as the intervals between its furies grew longer, he started to experience the terrible anxiety of not knowing how he was going to cope with such a monster once he had got it on to the bank.

  Finally the Girt Pike was utterly spent, and Robert eased it towards him by raising the tip of the rod. Robert put his landing net into the water, and made the classic fisherman’s mistake. No one had ever told him that big fish seem to know what a landing net is for. This is why you draw a fish over the net, and then lift it. You cannot risk pulling it straight into a net that is plainly visible.

  The Girt Pike saw the net and with shocking suddenness it burst back into frenzied life and hurled itself out towards the centre of the pond. Before Robert even knew what was happening, it had wrenched the rod out of his hand and towed it away across the water towards the lily pad.

  Robert wanted to cry, and he sat down on the grass gazing numbly out at his rod floating on the water, and the heaving of the lily pad as the pike thrashed about in it. Finally he stood up, shaking but determined, and took off his shoes, socks and trousers. He dipped a toe into the water. It seemed unnaturally cold for a summer’s day. He worried that the water would be too deep, because he was not a good swimmer. He waded out, feeling the silty mud squelching between his toes, until he could grasp the butt of the rod. He raised it, and prepared to take up the strain of the fish. When he did so, it was the lily pad that responded, and he realised that the fish had wound the line round and round the massed stems. He pulled futilely on the line. The lilies moved but did not give, and his despair was renewed. The situation seemed irretrievable.

  It was then that the speckled tail of the Girt Pike rose up vertically from the water in the middle of the lily pad, rather like Excalibur, and just hung there, pointing straight up and not moving. Robert beheld it in wonderment, realising that the fish had wound itself so tightly around the lilies that it could no longer move. It was drowning ignominiously in the middle of its kingdom. This was an ignoble and humiliating end for a creature of such power and myth.

  Robert waded back to the bank, took up his landing net and found his fishing knife. He re-entered the freezing water and approached the lily pad. He was already a wiser and more cautious fisherman. He got the net ready in advance, and slipped it under the fish, which did not respond. When he raised it, the fish flapped feebly, its huge body overspilling the sides of the net. Desperately Robert tried to saw at the line where it entered the water and tangled with the lilies. Finally he succeeded, and the fish was released into his possession. Robert brought it out of the pond, unable to believe just how heavy it was, and equally incredulous that he really had caught it and conquered it. He laid it on the lawn, where it continued to flap, and then Robert waded back into the water to cut the line again, so that he could retrieve his rod, which was still floating on the water.

  Robert was bending over it, contemplating hitting it on the head with his home-made priest, but actually too trepidatious to do so, when Mrs Rendall appeared bearing a fresh plate of peanut butter sandwiches in one hand and a fresh cup of tea in the other. ‘Oh my goodness gracious,’ she exclaimed when she saw the little boy, trouserless and his shirt tails dripping, crouched over the vast, gleaming fish. He stood up when she approached, and was deeply embarrassed about being bare-legged before her. ‘It got tangled in the lilies, missus, an’ I had to go in after it.’

  ‘You’re so brave,’ exclaimed Mrs Rendall. ‘You’ve caught it! I can hardly believe my eyes! How wonderful! How clever and brave you are!’

  ‘It wasn’t easy,’ said Robert, in a manly tone of voice.

  They stood side by side, gazing down at the gulping and dying fish that was now drowning in air. Robert had just learned that a swift and sudden death is not always the best. Sometimes a noble creature should be allowed to drift away with dignity, in a long and slowly fading dream that has no precise point of terminus. In the mouth of the great fish, the tiny silver roach, snared on the snap tackle, and much mangled, also flapped out the last of its meagre life.

  ‘It’s so beautiful,’ said Mrs Rendall, looking wonderingly at the great olive stripes and the bright speckles of its flanks. ‘And look at those teeth! They’re fearsome! I had no idea it was so beautiful! I almost feel sorry.’

  ‘I feel sorry, missus,’ said Robert, his voice a little choked, and when Mrs Rendall looked down at him she could see that indeed his eyes were brimming with tears.

  Mrs Rendall took Robert home, with his hazel pole tied to the roof rack, and his bicycle hanging out of the open boot of the Austin Cambridge. At his feet, wrapped in newspaper and a plastic fertiliser sack, lay the body of the Girt Pike.

  It would be hard to calculate the importance of these events in Robert’s life. He was thereafter spoken of with awe by all the other boys in the village, and the little girls regarded him with something like fear mixed with desire. He became ‘the boy who’s got the pet rook, and caught the Girt Pike at the Glebe House pond’, and when he grew up, he became ‘you know, the man who caught the Girt Pike at the Glebe House when he was a boy, the one who had a rook’. In his house on Cherryhurst there would always be an overexposed photograph on the wall of the self-conscious and proud little fellow trying to hold up a pike that was too long and heavy for him. There would always be a photograph of the catch, laid out on the lawn beside a yardstick.

  Robert’s mother hung the fish up in the larder with its mouth full of salt, and next day it was eaten with great ceremony by the extended family and some of the neighbours. Robert did not think that it tasted very good because to him it savoured of guilt, but everyone else seemed to think it very fine. He received many a toast, many a pat on the head and many a congratulatory slap between the shoulder blades, none of which quite succeeded in drawing off his perturbing feelings of shame. He was haunted by how beautiful the pike had been when it was freshly out of the water, and how its beauty had already diminished when it had been out for only an hour. He knew instinctively that beauty should last for ever, and that this world would never be perfected until beauty was perpetual. Whenever he dreamed of his battle with the Girt Pike, what he remembered more than anything was the terror and panic of it, so that in retrospect his triumph took on more the aspect of a nightmare.

  There was no doubt about the effect of the episode on Robert’s self-confidence. He suddenly started to do unnaturally well at school, and passed the eleven-plus unexpectedly, so that his parents had to decide whether or not they could bear the expense and inconvenience of sending him to the grammar school in Guildford.

  He had also been touched in another way. When the cancer took Mrs Rendall off a year later, he was heartbroken, and he wrote her a letter:

  Dear Mrs Rendall,

  I am so sorry that you have died, because you were so pretty and so nice, and you let me catch the Girt Pike, which was the best thing ever, and you made me tea and peanut butter sandwiches, and you bought me the Intrepid Prince Regent reel to thank me for catching the Girt Pike and saving the ducklings, and it’s the best reel ever and just what I always wanted.

  With love from Robert.

  Robert folded up the letter very small and put it into one of his grandfather’s discarded tobacco tins. He borrowed his mother’s trowel and cycled up to the churchyard, where he buried his message in the upturned clay of the new grave, before crawling into the abandoned lime kiln nearby, where he could crouch in the wet darkness and bury his eyes in his forearm without being seen.

  Robert used the Intrepid Prince Regent reel for the rest of his life, even though he never went pike fishing again. Content with perch and roach, he used the reel long after
its manufacturer was bought out by a predator and asset-stripped, and he used it when he was middle-aged and everyone else was using superbly engineered reels made of lightweight graphite, which ran on roller bearings. Whenever he got it out of its bag and mounted it on his rod, he remembered the Girt Pike, the Glebe House pond, and pretty, vivacious Mrs Rendall. Every time he went to the churchyard he would pause in front of her grave, where the headstone was tilting and covered with yellow lichen, and, wondering if his tobacco tin and message had rotted away, would feel all over again his long-standing sorrow.

  THE AUSPICIOUS MEETING OF THE FIRST TWO MEMBERS OF THE FAMOUS NOTWITHSTANDING WIND QUARTET

  IT WAS A day in middle March, of the kind that for early risers begins sunny and uplifting, but which for late risers has already degenerated into the nondescript gloom that causes England to be deprecated by foreigners. The rooks were breaking off the ends of willow twigs and building their nests with raucous incompetence, most of the twigs ending up on the ground below, whence the birds could never be bothered to retrieve them. The box hedges were in blossom, causing some people to ring the gas board, and others to wonder what feline had pissed so copiously as to make the whole village smell of cat piss. Out on the roads, squashed baby rabbits were being dismantled by magpies, and frogs migrating to their breeding ponds were being flattened into very large and thin batrachian medallions that would, once dried out, have made excellent beer mats.

  It was a Saturday, and the young man was driving along Notwithstanding Road, which leads twistingly and straitly from Notwithstanding to Godalming. Over time the lanes had sunk some fifteen feet below the surface of the ground, steep banks rose up on either side and trees so overarched the carriageway that the ensemble formed a kind of natural tunnel that gave people exhilarating intimations of being in fairyland. It was on this road that one was most in danger from the nuns who lived in the convent on the hill. Their bizarre disregard for safety on the roads was a source of constant wonderment to the locals.