Sarah Hall - The Beautiful Indifference - Stories

November passed by, leaving sleet on the ground and a brown rot to the moors. By the second Sunday of December I had five good pelts. Jonah and William, reading a personal keenness in my presence at the water’s edge, agreed to hunt further on downstream, into the next valley. We were an odd threesome, with our coats and our sacks, treading both sides of the river like a Viking party, and lighting damp bonfires between thistles to smoke the devils out. Jonah, who never spoke, would signal for us to pause, signal for us to walk on. The truth of death is a peculiar thing. For there was a fascination to these evenings that went past utility or sport. We were in the hinterlands, a wilding place, where the reign was ours entirely. We were the wolves. We were the lions.

All day I looked forward to treading the banks, with the dogs sooling about in the undergrowth. And the night welcomed me, gave me senses. I was struck by the ability of the river to ferry odours on its back. It seemed to enhance everything it touched: the mineral stones of its bed, the wet shag of the dogs when they went swimming, the bark of sour thorn trees whose roots sipped at the shallows. Sometimes I imagined I could, like the dogs, detect the waft of mink through the ferns. I knew that binary scent of blood’s soft iron and glandy secretion. And when an animal blurted from its hole and the dogs took off, or there were pants and whines at the head of a rabbit warren, my heart banged up towards my throat, and my eye focused. As we passed through the twilight territory there were shrills and screeches in the trees — the nocturnal world engaged in its sharp procedures, just as we were.

The lads got used to not looking back every so often to make sure I was keeping up. I managed fine and never complained of the chill against my forehead. I could set the dogs and call them to heel as well as my brothers. I carried our father’s leather harrier gloves to hoist up any bodies from between the tails. Twice I shot at mink as they fled, the blunt crack echoing up the fells. In the distance the guns of the Dickinsons and the Harrisons and the Farrows replied. And it was me who eventually shot Tan, the second eldest of our dogs, when she was bitten through her leg and the wound turned septic and she was dying, pity-eyed, unable to stand or take water. Jonah sat inside the house and wept, and his eyes pled, Dolly, I can’t. Will you?

We hunted clear down to the Eamont, until the current slowed and great sandstone bluffs rose and there was nowhere for the animals to hide or burrow. Of the ones we caught we raised the slack bodies up on forked sticks, dangled them from their necks, like the terrible flags of returning mercenaries. The boys stripped to their waists in the frosty night air and wore mink round their shoulders and paraded home.

It was a strange Advent for Magda, this beastly collection. She knew nothing of my plans and probably supposed me to be working extra hours at the estate, saving for a lavender cushion for her gift, or the coral brooch she’d admired in town. While others tied up mistletoe and stirred charms into suet pudding, I set half a dozen mink on the trestle in the woodshed and lopped off their legs and measured out a pattern. They were handsome creatures, but for those evilly slanting bottom fangs. I could see why graceful ladies the country over wanted the full-length affair.

Skin them like a squirrel, my father instructed, and I did so, peeling the fur stiffly backwards as if husking unripe fruit, then scraping away the fat with a Bowie knife. The stripped pink bodies and the heads I left in a heap by the woodshed, where they looked grisly and withered, and I began to feel guilty, as if my mess was equal to that of the dreadful vermin. Eventually I passed them along in a bucket as fodder for the pigs up at High Hullock Howe.

It would have been better to let the pelts air and dry before stitching them together; there were correct treatments I knew this cape would not enjoy in its making, but time was short. The weather was worsening, with two snowfalls in a week and a late Helm Wind off the Pennines, which had left the eastern villages cut off. Magda was confined to her bedroom, cramped and pale. The light in our cottage was poor. I worked early, from seven until nine, as soon as the sun supported any industry, before turning my hand to my other chores. It was a raw effort for the fingers, pulling the hide straight and piercing it with line. As soon as it began to take shape the garment became heavy to hold and stitch. My hands ached by the end of each sitting.

If my family thought it a curious or silly occupation, they did not reveal it. They knew Magda was dear to me and ailing, so they paid me the courtesy of space to sew and hang the item. Sometimes Jonah watched me working through the window, with the look on his face of a man wistful for some previous vision beheld. One morning he knocked on the glass and I opened the window. He held a piece of polished horn up between his fingers, then passed it to me. He tapped his chest, pointed at the cape, and left to join our father in the paddock. I looked at the pretty little object he had made. There was a figure carved into the white tusk button, but I could not descry it. A sitting dog, perhaps. Or a woman’s face in cameo.

The winter took hold. There were record snowfalls. The villages were blocked and paraffin ran low. Sugar was rationed at the store. And there was worse to come, the sky-watchers said. The cottage was bitter in the mornings before the range was up, and I put on extra woollens and stamped my feet as I sewed. I felt neither truly myself nor like any other person during this time, I was simply given to the occupation. If I ran a crooked hem and had to unpick a line then I imagined Magda’s brant collarbones. I remembered the lavish berries in the autumn hedgerows and thought of those telltale stains on her petties. With every prick I made I wished Magda well again. I wished it and I traded for it. And when the cotton snapped I grasped the bobbin and quickly tied the thread tight again. Each day I put my face against the soft fur and whispered into its darkness, God keep her.

By Christmas Eve I was finished. I came late to mass from brushing the coat down and inspecting it a final time, with every lamp lit to illuminate the parlour, and I received a disapproving look from the seated congregation. But I did not care. I felt triumphant. And I sang the last carol as merrily as it was meant.

Magda was delighted with the cape. She got glistery-eyed when she saw it the next morning and got up from her bed like a miracle-walker.

She said, You hang the moon, Dolly Carter, you hang the moon!

And she kissed my cheek and hugged me to her until I blushed scarlet. She had me put the garment over her shoulders and fasten the horn button, and then she curtsied like a proper dame. She looked like a silky portion of night before me, and I did wonder if I hadn’t reached down into some charmed well of pitch, contracting with a rabble of spirits to create the thing. The stole remained a little gamey, and it never looked entirely neat, but Magda wore it all through January and February and commented each time she did so how fine it felt.

As warm as sotter loaf, she said.

We buried her in May. She knew exactly what she wanted to be buried in, and though her father protested, the cape was put around her shoulders, over the white communion dress, which still fitted perfectly after all the years. I attended to her laces and brushed her hair. I gave her spring flowers and a stem of vervain. By then the bones had come so far through her she seemed carved from ivory, like the birds the mason set into her stone.

I thought I would miss her and I did miss her prettiness and her mirth. I did miss her gentle candour. But my dreams were not of Magda. The truth of death is a peculiar thing. For when they leave us the beloved are as if they never were. They vanish from this earth and vanish from the air. What remains are moors and mountains, the solid world upon which we find ourselves, and in which we reign. We are the wolves. We are the lions. After so many nights treading the banks with the dogs and my brothers, intent on some mettlesome purpose I did not truly understand, night after night I dreamed of the river. I dream it now: a river of stolen perfumes, winding its way through our inverse Eden.