‘Well, here we are!’ A tall man smiled and bowed when Florian opened the door. A woman, brightly dressed, was there also.
‘Here indeed!’ she exclaimed. ‘And poor Mr Kilderry doesn’t know us from Adam!’
They didn’t give a name but Florian remembered seeing their black shooting-brake drawn up a few weeks ago.
‘I think you came to see the house,’ he said.
‘Oh, better than that,’ the tall man corrected him. ‘We bought it.’
He extended a hand. The woman, whom Florian assumed to be his wife, pressed a wine merchant’s carrier bag on him, saying it contained something refreshing.
‘We wondered if we might snoop about a bit,’ she murmured in a tinkling voice.
‘Of course. I’m sorry I couldn’t place you. A lot of people came.’ Champagne he guessed their gift was. He thanked them, although he didn’t like champagne.
‘What a happy day!’ the woman exclaimed. She smiled at Florian, her manner playful. ‘Do please forgive us for being a bore!’
‘Those gorgeous scenes!’ the man contributed, referring to the unframed watercolours in the drawing-room while he unfolded a typewritten sheet. ‘Unforgettable!’
‘What a very happy day!’ his wife continued to enthuse, and Florian wondered if she was drunk.
He left them to look about as they wished and to take measurements. He didn’t return to the Fieldbook he’d found but went on throwing anything that would burn on to his fire and anything that wouldn’t into the skip. He came across his father’s binoculars, which had been lost also, and an umbrella someone had left behind and never come back for. He found the key that wound the clock in the hall but hadn’t done so for years. He found the beads of a necklace in a matchbox.
The afternoon he’d hidden the Fieldbook under the fish baskets he had come down the back stairs with it in his hand, not taking it to his bedroom because there wasn’t time, since Isabella would miss her train if everyone didn’t hurry. The door of the poky room that was then a pantry was open. All that came clearly back again, as if it had never not been there.
He had appropriated the Fieldbook in the first place when it fell out of a stack of National Geographic magazines in the garage. He hadn’t been interested in the wildlife details but the faintly lined pages attracted him as much as the leather cover did and in time he found a use for them. Isabella, who often poked about among his possessions, was surprised by what she found written there. ‘Bizzarro!’ her comment was.
The women passed by Miss Dunlop on their way to the kitchen, both of them smirking a little. The Wing Commander moved close to Miss Dunlop and whispered in her ear some words of love. Miss Dunlop blushed, for the Wing Commander had put his earthy desires regarding Mrs Meade into words. He imagined it was Mrs Meade’s ear he spoke into, and he imagined biting the lobe of the countrywoman’s ear and feeling her coarse hair on his cheek.
‘It’s all very well,’ Miss Dunlop protested, sensing at last that something was amiss. She found a cigarette in the pocket of her suit and lit it.
‘How much you are the world to me!’ the Wing Commander murmured, reaching for her again.
No one else except Isabella had ever known about the writing in the Fieldbook, or even that the Fieldbook still existed. Nor did Florian himself regard his fragments of composition as anything more than the fruits of idleness. Nothing was complete, bits of people, bits of occurrences, and he noticed now that the writing was in places uncertain, his adolescent creations often verging on the affected. Madame Rochas, an old schoolteacher, was ‘haunted by footsteps ceaseless in the night’. Yu Zhang was so delighted by Circus of Horrors that he could not pass a cinema where it was showing without seeing it yet again. The Sunday visitors of Anna Andreyev spoke of St Petersburg and Lermontov. Emmanuel Quin was no more than a name, as Johnny Adelaide was, and Vidler. The Reverend Unmack stole from counters and did not know himself.
‘Mr Kilderry!’
Florian went upstairs.
‘Your hot press,’ the tall man said.
‘The hot press?’
‘It seems a trifle damp.’
‘Well, yes, it is.’
‘A leak? We wondered.’
‘I’m afraid so. I’m sorry about it.’
‘My dear fellow!’
Florian smiled and nodded, and went away. ‘What’d he have to say for himself?’ he heard the woman ask when he was on his way downstairs. ‘Couldn’t care less,’ the man reported.
They stayed all afternoon, but did not again enquire about the defects they came across. Eventually they called out to say they’d finished and were effusive in their gratitude as they said goodbye. Then they drove off in their big black shooting-brake and Florian returned to the pages of the Fieldbook. Most of what he read he had forgotten writing.
On Madole’s wasteland Willie John and Nason didn’t notice the boy at first. Then Willie John did.
‘What’s the kid want?’ he asked.
‘Only to watch,’ Nason said.
The Sky Wasp spluttered and glided back to them, the engine dead because the lighter fuel had run out.
‘We could charge the kid for watching.’ Willie John laughed, his big jaw split, the freckles around
