as familiars . . .’
‘What – in East-Enders?’ asked Timothy, with mock-serious interest.
‘No – in a book called Matthew Hopkins, Witchfinder-general – clever!’
‘Oh, Matthew Hopkins – he’s in Dallas. I forgot.’
‘Why do you always try to make out I’m stupid when you go on and on making stupid remarks yourself that you think are funny and nobody else does only they’re too polite to say so . . .’
‘It’s getting cold,’ said Rose. ‘Let’s get back indoors.’
She was just saying it to be tactful.
So why did she shiver?
They were bedded down for the night, in the low dim bedrooms with their sloping ceilings. The exchange of insults from bedroom to bedroom had finally ceased. Jane at least had put out her oil-lamp, for her bedroom showed dark through the half-opened doors. She wondered if Tim had fallen asleep over his book with the light still on; then she heard him turn a page, the night was so silent.
She turned her own page. She wished she had a more suitable book, like Lark Rise to Candleford or Kilvert’s diary, but all she had was one of Philip’s violent thrillers, brought home from a transatlantic flight. Though it was as much about suspender-belts as guns . . . she thought sadly that after all, he was a Cambridge graduate, even if it was in science. What did men see in such books, where the women were as cold and hard as the tiny blue-barrelled automatics they produced from their stocking-tops?
The noise was a tearing of the night, a murder of the silence. It rose and cracked, as if the throat that made it could no longer sustain it. Inhuman, unearthly. Rose’s legs gave a convulsive twitch under the bedclothes. Then the noise rose again . . .
Outside. In the dark. In the garden.
A third time it rose. And then Jane came flying into the room and hurled herself on to the bed and into Rose’s arms.
‘Mummy, what is it? I thought I was having a nightmare but . . .’
The noise rose a fourth time. Savage. Yet mournful, as if there were no hope, no life left in the world. Cold and dreary as death itself, Rose thought.
A movement in the doorway made Rose’s skin leap all over. But it was only Timothy. He looked quite calm; almost as if he was enjoying himself. There was something long and black in his hands. His hands tensed, as he bent it in half . . .
‘Tim, what have you got?’
He gave a small grin. ‘Only my air-pistol. The one Dad gave me last Christmas. I thought it might come in useful in outlandish parts . . .’
‘Tim, for heaven’s sake, what good is an air-pistol?’
‘It’s a .22. It can go through a plank of wood at fifty yards. Dad and I tried it, down Bunty’s pit. It’s Yugoslav – ’
‘Tim, you wouldn’t shoot . . .’
‘Bloody would,’ he said, taking a small shiny pellet from the box that was bulging his pyjama pocket and putting it carefully into the barrel. He closed the air-pistol with a reassuring click.
The awful cry rose again, as Tim parted the curtains and opened the small window. ‘Black as the hobs of hell out here,’ said his suddenly muffled voice.
Rose leapt out of bed. If her offspring was going to shoot something on her behalf, she really ought to be there as a witness. She pushed in alongside him, in the narrow dormer window. Peered out. There was a dim blue light to the south; the one solitary neon streetlamp in the centre of Wallney, by the sub-post office. And the moon was somewhere up there, behind clouds . . . As her eyes grew accustomed to the dimness, she began to see the line of the laid hedge.
‘There it is,’ said Tim. ‘On the rockery.’
There was a small black shape, on the faint paleness of the concrete lumps.
Her breath went out of her in a great whoosh. ‘It’s only cats . . . tomcats fighting.’
‘I can only see one of them.’
‘The other one must be in the hedge.’
‘But there’s only one making a noise. And it’s not hunched up like it’s going to fight. It’s just sitting.’
Another wail went up. In spite of knowing it was a cat, Rose couldn’t help shuddering. ‘I hope it goes away soon.’
‘Shall I have a pot at it?’ Tim raised the pistol.
‘Tim, how could you?’ This was a crueller Tim than she’d known before; she felt distress, that she didn’t know