Louis de Bernieres - Notwithstanding - Stories from an English Village

On the morning that concerns us, however, one small boy was fishing on his own, his keepnet flashing at his feet with golden tiddlers. His name was Robert, and he lived in the small row of council houses on Cherryhurst, the road to the Institute of Oceanography, just past the house of Mr Hadgecock the spy, and the lane that led up to the house where Mrs Mac lived with her sister and the ghost of her husband. Many of the boys who fished were much posher than he was, but fortunately the brotherhood of the line counted for far more than deeply inculcated divisions of class and education, and he and they regarded each other with the kind of mutual awe tinged with fear which only a class-conscious Briton would appreciate. Robert used a small rod made of two sections of an ancient Avon rod that his grandfather had adapted for him. It had chrome-plated rings whipped carefully on to it in red button thread, and it had been craftsmanly rubbed down and varnished so that it gleamed. Many of the posher boys were envious of it, and once he had even refused an offer for it of as much as thirty shillings and a Goliath catapult, and a Milbro catapult that needed new rubber. Robert used a small brass centre-pin reel that his grandfather had also passed on, and which was the very same reel with which he had fished in the pond when he had been a little boy. Robert longed for a spinning reel, the kind where you could just open the bail arm and cast as far as you liked, but he was nonetheless adept at pulling out loops of line from the centre pin and placing his bait exactly where he wanted to. One day collectors would be paying implausible money for old brass centre pins such as his, but just now Robert wanted, more than anything, an Intrepid Prince Regent, which was even better than an Intrepid Black Prince, because it had a proper roller on the bail arm. Robert wanted an Intrepid Prince Regent just as much as other people wanted a Colston dishwasher or an E-Type Jaguar. The Prince Regent cost exactly thirty shillings, and so he was in the paradoxical and self-defeating position of being able to buy one only if he sold his rod to one of the rich boys.

Robert was reeling in another small rudd, hoping it would be bigger than it was, when a voice behind him said, ‘Oh, you are clever. Do tell me what it is.’

‘It’s a rudd, missus,’ said Robert, turning round and dangling the unfortunate creature in front of the lady’s face.

The lady concerned was Mrs Rendall, blonde and pretty and vivacious, who, one day soon, would be carried away by cancer before she was forty. All the boys experienced a sensation of longing in the throat when they saw her or thought of her, and none of them could ever imagine growing up to be loved by someone as lovely as she. They thought of her husband as especially blessed, as if he were like God, his status much enhanced by the devotion of angels.

‘How do you know it’s a rudd?’ she asked, with genuine interest.

‘The mouth turns up, missus, ’cause it feeds on the top, and it’s all golden. If it were a roach its mouth would turn down, and if it were a bream it’d be silver, and anyway, I just know it’s a rudd.’

‘You are clever,’ repeated Mrs Rendall, genuinely impressed. She watched as the little boy unhooked it and put it into his keepnet. ‘What do you do with them?’ she asked.

‘At the end of the day I count them up, and then I put them back.’

‘Can’t you eat them?’

‘Don’t know, missus. Haven’t tried.’

‘What’s the most you’ve ever caught? In one day?’

‘Twenty, missus,’ Robert told her, exaggerating by five.

‘Twenty! That’s an awful lot!’ She watched him as, very self-consciously, he cast his line back out. He was determined to do it beautifully, because Mrs Rendall was very nice and very pretty, and her niceness and prettiness made him want to do everything perfectly when she was near him.

‘Have you ever caught a pike?’

‘No, missus. I never even seen one.’

‘Do you think that you could? Would you like to?’

Robert’s eyes gleamed. There was nothing in the whole world more marvellous than the prospect of catching a pike. It was probably more marvellous even than catching a shark. Robert knew someone who had been dangling his toes in the water when they had been savaged by a pike. He had heard of an Alsatian dog that had been bitten on the paw by one.

‘I don’t know if I could,’ admitted Robert. ‘I may not yet be old enough. If I was older, I reckon I could.’

‘How old are you, then?’

‘I’m eleven, missus.’

‘I think that’s old enough. In fact, I’m sure it is. Would you come and catch my pike?’

‘What? The Girt Pike?’ asked Robert incredulously.

Mrs Rendall lived in the Glebe House, opposite the cattle pound, and it had behind it a rectangular pond that must originally, perhaps a century before, have been a swimming pool. It was quite large, overhung with branches and it was absolutely full of starving tiddlers, as Robert had found out when poaching there from the shelter of a laurel. Robert had always kept an eye out for the Girt Pike, but he had never seen it. Everyone said it was there, and lots of people had claimed to have spotted it, or thought that maybe they might have done, but Robert never had, and he had become sceptical.

‘The Girt Pike? Is that what you call it? Why “Girt”?’

‘Don’t know, missus. That’s what it’s called, dunno why. It’s there, then, is it? I heard about it, but I wasn’t so sure.’

‘It’s there all right. Every year the ducks and the moorhens and the coots hatch out all these gorgeous little fluffy chicks, and that pike just gobbles them up one after the other.’

Robert’s eyes widened. ‘You seen it, missus?’

‘Yes. One after the other! It’s awful! He just opens his mouth and his head comes out of the water, and that’s one more chick, just gone! Every year! He eats all the chicks and there’s never one left to grow up. I do wish you’d come and catch it.’

‘You’d let me, then?’ asked Robert, in disbelief.

‘Let you? I’d be so grateful that you’d have to run away to stop me kissing you!’

‘Gosh,’ said Robert, thinking that he would probably have to run away as a matter of form, even if he did not actually want to. ‘You’d let me, then?’ he asked again.

‘Please do come up and catch it. I’ll bring you cups of tea and as many sandwiches as you can eat, I promise.’

‘Peanut butter?’ asked Robert, aware that posh people sometimes put truly revolting pastes made of rotten anchovies into their sandwiches.

‘Peanut butter or jam, or anything,’ said Mrs Rendall, much amused.

‘I’ll come up next week,’ said Robert.

‘Just knock at the door, and I’ll make you tea and sandwiches, I promise.’

‘Crunchy peanut butter,’ Robert specified, with an intonation of warning in his voice.

‘I’ll go and get it now,’ she said, and turned to go back to the Cricket Green Stores. When she drove past him a few minutes later, smiling at the wheel of her green-and-cream Austin Cambridge, she tooted the horn and waved a pot of crunchy peanut butter at him, with its red lid and label. Robert reeled in his line and began to pack up his tackle. His air had become deeply serious and determined. He was about to undertake the greatest task of his life hitherto, and he was gallantly doing it for a beautiful lady. This was what it might be like to be Sir Lancelot.

Robert had almost none of the equipment that one needs for pike, and he had very little money with which to acquire it. Nonetheless he went to Godalming on the bus, to C. F. Horne’s tackle shop in Bridge Street. Mr C. F. Horne was a very kindly man with a bald top and a brown shop coat. He would mend any little boy’s fishing rod very cheaply and beautifully, and nobody was ever aware, until he was one day found dead on the railway line, that his wife had been mentally ill for years, and that he had been suffering more stress and difficulty than most people could endure.