Sarah Hall - The Beautiful Indifference - Stories

Poor Magda had not been well all year. She’d been ragging too much, as if a week were a month in her Eve’s calendar. She had two strange knots under her arms. They felt pliant and downy like wasps' nests when she put my fingers there, saying, Now, Dolly, don’t get into a tiz.

And she was weary, weary well past her age. I’d been washing her cloths for her, when she hadn’t the strength to soak the cotton herself. She’d no mother or sister to help. Better me than one of the men in the family, I said to her, it was no bother. Her father had taken her to the doctor that summer and nothing came of it for the doctor was unsure of what might cause the condition. A woman’s cycle was a mystery at best, he said.

On the second visit he went to his books and an idea came to him that one of the glands in her brain was mis-cooperating. It was working too hard, or something was growing aside it. There were surgeries now to get behind the skull, the doctor informed Magda and her father, for the Great War had sent plenty of the broken-headed to theatre. But the business was full of risk and seldom did the patient intellectually restore. She reported this to me with a smile, sitting against the haystack at the back of Lanty Farrow’s barn, where we often met. Her wheaty hair was pinned and tucked away. She had on her old blue bonnet and she knocked against its rim as if on a front door.

Let us in! she said.

To me it seemed so terribly unfair. She was beautiful through her bones, Magda, with her frame as delicately pinched and whittled as a swift’s, and barely a swelling on the little wen of her chest. The thought of moving those bones around nigh on broke my heart.

On the third visit it was decided no surgery would be done. The doctor said he hoped things would settle down of their own accord. He talked of primrose oil and vervain, which was strange for a man known to publicly scorn the apothecaries and arsenic peddlers who traded at the sports days with blue bottles and jars. We knew from this the diagnosis was ill. Magda went with his suggestion though, and cut strands of Simpler’s Joy from the lonning by her father’s cottage.

Hallowed by thou, if thou growest on the ground, she said, as she gathered it up, as if ours was a century older and witches were abroad.

Do you have to be so sinister? I asked.

May as well, she said.

She hung the stinking weeds in the chimney to dry. Her hands became scented with the oil, and the scent set me on edge, for it was a murky perfume, said to attract pigeons and rats as a corpse would, and eels to the resting place of the drowned if it was scattered on water. I took it in mind perhaps her body wanted a husband and was asking too hard, but I didn’t say that to her. We’d both avoided it so far. She was my friend and I loved her and there was nothing to be gained by being a turncoat or a hypocrite. Whatever was wrong, it left her with those downy pods and producing as redly as the November hedgerows. I feared for her in a hard winter. All I wanted was to keep her warm.

With the bad news of Magda, the mink had come back to the valley in summer too. We’d been free of them for several years, and were glad of it, and the councils were glad we’d stopped pressing them to admit their presence in the north like a virulent disease, always saying our complaints were for nowt but sooty ghosts. Some village children came back from crawfishing at the river and said they’d seen a black otter, a little one, not paddling the current but riddling up alongside the banks. How did it move, one of the men asked.

Like this, and they undulated their hands up and down. Like a stoaty.

The valley farmers took note, reinforced coops and sheds and cleaned gun barrels, and they waited. August. September.

It wasn’t long before we were finding carcasses: first rabbits and moorhens and dippers, then geese, then cats, throats missing, entrails left in piles like evil little votives. There was no thrift to the killing, nothing necessary. A marten or a wildcat will dismantle wire and twine like a patient clockmaker, then steal from the pens and take prey back to the woods. They’ll eat all but the bitter gall bladder, so the damage is almost forgivable. But mink, mink are brazen and gluttonous, they’re villainous wee devils. They began breaking into the keeps with saw teeth and claws, desecrating everything, tearing up livestock as if it was nothing more than a savage raid. They went through flocks, strew feathers all about. They slaughtered for the slenderest taste of blood seemingly, and the waste was sickening.

When it became clear they would not roam on, and after the bulk of the harvesting was done, the village met up in the church hall. Magda and I sat at the back and listened to them blether and gripe. There would be a hunting party each evening, it was finally decided, for whichever men were available. The pests would be abolished once and for all. However well they’d bred into the territory, every last one would be culled from its riverside lair. Therefore if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink: for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head , the inscription read above the church hall door. Romans 12.20. But sometimes it’s better not to look up. So we began starving the hounds.

I didn’t know how many mink it would take to make a cape, but when the idea came to me it didn’t recede. A little fur wrap. What better way to keep Magda warm? Magda was as slight as when she’d been a girl, barely filling her own small dresses and her Sunday coat. She’d never grown tall like I had during our school years, and I’d grown used to feeling like a dool tree towering above her. I’d seen mink before. The animals were not much bigger than the span of a griddle plate — the males one rim wider. I estimated it would take no more than eight altogether, using as much of the pelage as could be salvaged, and probably less for the dot of the lass. Two to the elbow, three across the shoulder. Proper insulation for the thin spindle of her body. As I did the morning wash up at the manor, I imagined the dark panels quilting her back and how fine she’d look. The stole would be rough at the joins and the hems, for I was no practised seamstress; my fingers were not the nimblest at such a task. I’d mended my brothers’ moleskin breeches when my mother had asked, with her thickest needle and strongest thread, and I’d darned and fixed buttons like any other daughter. It would be a roughish garment like a tinker or poacher’s, but I would do my best for Magda this white-hearted winter. I set my mind to the assemblage of vermin.

I rarely hunted. In truth I did not much enjoy it like my brothers, William and Jonah, who went out with the chase every Lady Day and Michaelmas. On occasion I’d been there when they’d baited badgers, but had never felt that gust of excitement when the dogs closed their pack and the jack of their jaws increased. The boys were surprised when I said I’d be coming. Our dogs were unused to smaller quarry, but the bitches were young and I knew they would dig at the banks in a fury when they caught the scent or the sound of a creature down in the earth. The other farmers would not be interested in selling pelts; even together there wouldn’t be enough of a quality to bundle up and send to Saville’s by way of Carlisle. These were not original Norfolk-bred mink, shiny and sleek and farmed above their natural size. The coasts and moors had worn the wild mink down, dulled its jet fur to caramel. All the parish wanted was to rid the dale of the nuisance and collect up good batches of eggs again.

Doubtless they would have kept the heads for panel trophies. But I made an arrangement with the hunting families. I bartered buttermilk and preserves, the last of our honey, and I lied to old Lanty Farrow, with his beautiful otter hound and his Winchester, that I’d court his son, Calum. I told them all to shout the dogs off early for the purpose of saving the hides. In the weeks to come I went out in the evening with my brothers and a rifle, the reek of the kennels drifting behind us. Our lanterns hung soft moons over the river and their flames lit the gore of the berries in the briar.