It was a good blue eye, and he waited until he saw the worry ebb from it and confidence return.
‘You are right. What shall we do, then? Will you talk to him?’
‘No. Not yet, anyhow.’ He turned back to the pieces of paper. From the group of unreadable fragments he pointed at one. ‘What do you make of this?’
She shook her head. A rip had gone horizontally right through the middle of the word, slicing top from bottom.
‘I think this says, Bampton.’
‘Bampton? Why, that’s only four miles away!’
Armstrong consulted his watch. ‘It’s too late to go now. There is cleaning-up to do and these carcasses to be dealt with. If I don’t press on it will be too dark to see what I’m doing by the time I feed the pigs. I shall get up early, and go to Bampton first thing.’
‘All right, Robert.’
She turned to go.
‘Watch your hem!’
In the house, Bess Armstrong went to her bureau. The key turned in the lock only awkwardly. It had been so ever since it was mended. She remembered a day when Robin was eight. She’d come home and found the bureau forced open. Papers were everywhere, money and documents missing, and Robin had taken her by the hand to say, ‘I disturbed the thief, a rough-looking fellow, and look, Mother, here is the open window where I saw him make his escape.’ Her husband had immediately gone out looking for the man, but she had not followed him. Instead she had put her hands to her eye patch, and slid it round so that it covered her good eye and revealed the one that looked sideways and Saw things an ordinary eye didn’t. She took her son by the shoulders, and trained her Seeing eye on him. When Armstrong had come home, having found no trace of the rough-looking thief, she said, ‘No, I don’t suppose you did, for there was no such man. The thief was Robin.’
‘No!’ Armstrong protested.
‘It was Robin. He was too pleased with the story he told. It was Robin.’
‘I don’t believe it.’
They had not been able to reach an agreement, and it was one of the things that had been buried under the weight of the days since. But every time she turned the key of the lock, she remembered.
She folded a piece of paper into the shape of an envelope. She slid all the unreadable bits of the letter into it, then gathered the set of phrases and put them in too. With the final three pieces of paper between her fingers, she hesitated, uncertain, reluctant to let them go. At last she dropped them into the envelope, with a murmur for each one, like a spell:
‘Alice’
‘Alice’
‘Alice’
She pulled open the bureau drawer, but before she could put the pleat of paper away, an instinct halted her. Not the letter. Not the old story of the bureau and the forced lock. Something else. The sensation of a current rippling transparently through the air.
She tried to catch the tail end of the feeling and name it. Almost too late, yet she did catch it, fleetingly, for she heard the words her tongue pronounced in the empty room:
‘Something is going to happen.’
Outside, Robert Armstrong finished sharpening his knife. He called his second and third sons, and together they hoisted the carcasses on to hooks to bleed them over the gulleys. They rinsed their hands in a pail of rainwater and emptied the water over the floor to wash the worst of the blood away from the slaughter area. When he had set the boys to mopping, he went out to feed the pigs. They usually worked together, but on days when he had something on his mind he preferred to feed the pigs alone.
Effortlessly, Armstrong heaved sacks and spilt the grain into the troughs. He scratched one sow behind her ear, rubbed another on her flank, according to their individual liking. Pigs are remarkable creatures and, though most men are too blind to see it, have intelligence that shows in their eyes. Armstrong was persuaded that every pig had its own character, its own talents, and when he selected a female piglet for breeding he looked not only for physical qualities but for intelligence, foresight, good sense: the qualities that make a good mother. He was in the habit of talking to his pigs as he fed them and today, as usual, he had something to say to each and every one. ‘What have you got to be so