Tana French - The Searcher - A Novel

“Well,” he says, “I haven’t rightly decided. I’ve got that piece of woodland, I’m gonna leave that the way it is; it’s about half hazel trees, and I’d eat hazelnuts all day long. I might add in a couple of apple trees, give me something sweet to go with the nuts in a few years’ time. And I was thinking of planting out another piece with vegetables.”

“Oh, God,” Lena says. “You’re not one of them off-the-grid types, are you?”

Cal grins. “Nah. Just been sitting at a desk for too long, feel like spending some time outdoors.”

“Thank God.”

“You get a lot of off-the-grid types round here?”

“Now and again. Notions about getting back to the land, and they think this is the place to do it. It looks the part, I suppose.” She nods to the mountains ahead, hunch-shouldered and tawny, shawled here and there with rags of mist. “Most of them don’t know one end of a spade from the other. They last about six months.”

“I’m OK with doing my hunting and gathering mainly out of your sister’s store,” Cal says. “I gotta admit Noreen scares me a little bit, but not enough to make me want to grow my own bacon.”

“Noreen’s all right,” Lena says. “I would say ignore her and in the end she’ll leave you alone, but she won’t. Noreen can’t see anything without wanting to put it to use. You just have to let it roll off you.”

“She’s backing the wrong horse here,” Cal says. “I’m not that useful to anyone, right now.”

“Nothing wrong with that. And don’t let Noreen convince you different.”

They walk in silence, but an easy silence. There are blackberry brambles mixed in with the gorse; a couple of thickset, tufty ponies in a field are nibbling at them, and every now and then Lena pulls a blackberry off a hedge and eats it. Cal follows her lead. The berries are dark and full, still with a tart edge to them. “I’ll get a rake of them, one of these days, and make jam,” Lena says. “If there’s a day when I can be arsed.”

She turns off the road, down a long dirt lane. The fields on either side are pasture, thick with long grass and the smells of cows. A man examining a cow’s leg lifts his head at Lena’s call and waves, shouting back something Cal doesn’t catch. “Ciaran Maloney,” Lena says. “Bought the land off me.” Cal can picture her out in those fields, in rubber boots and muddy pants, neatly outmaneuvering a frisky colt.

Her house is a long white bungalow, freshly painted, with boxes of geraniums on the windowsills. She doesn’t invite Cal in; instead she leads him round the side of the house, towards a low, rugged stone building. “I tried to get the dog to whelp inside,” she says, “but she was having none of it. It was the cattle byre she wanted. In the end I thought, what harm. The walls on it are thick enough to keep out the cold, and if she does get chilly, she knows where to come.”

“That what you and your husband farmed? Cattle?”

“We did, yeah. Dairy. They weren’t kept here, but. This is the old byre, from a century or two back. We used it mostly for storing feed.”

The byre is dim, lit only through small high windows, and Lena was right about the walls: it’s warmer in there than Cal expected. The dog is in the end stall. They squat on their haunches, while Nellie keeps a respectful distance, and peer in.

The mama dog is tan and white, curled up in a big wooden box around a squeaking mass of pups wriggling over each other to get in close. “That’s a fine-looking litter,” Cal says.

“This here’s the runt I was telling you about,” Lena says, reaching in and scooping up a fat pup mottled in black, tan and white. “Look at the size of him now.”

Cal reaches to take the pup, but the mama dog half-rises, a low growl starting in her chest. The other pups, disturbed, squeak furiously. “Give her a minute,” Lena says. “She’s not as well trained as Nellie. I’ve only had her a few weeks, haven’t had a chance to put manners on her. Once she sees her sister doesn’t mind you, she’ll be grand.”

Cal turns his shoulder to the litter and makes a big fuss of Nellie, who soaks it up joyfully, licking and wriggling. Sure enough, the mama dog sinks back down among her pups and, when Cal turns back, allows him to take the runt from Lena with only a lift of her lip.

The pup’s eyes are closed tight and his head wobbles on his neck. He gnaws at Cal’s fingertip with tiny toothless gums, looking for milk. He has a tan face and black ears, with a white blaze running up his nose; the black patch on his tan back is the shape of a ragged flag flying. Cal strokes his soft floppy ears.

“Been a while since I got a chance to do this,” he says.

“They’re nice to have about, all right,” Lena says. “I’d no wish for puppies—or for two dogs, come to that. I fancied having the one, so I got Nellie out of a shelter, after the pair of them were left on the side of a road. The people that took Daisy didn’t bother spaying her; when she came up pregnant, they dropped her back to the shelter. The shelter rang me. At first I said no, but in the end I thought, why not?” She reaches into the basket to tickle a pup’s forehead with one finger; the pup nuzzles blindly into her hand. “You take what comes your way, I suppose.”

“Mostly doesn’t seem like there’s much choice,” Cal agrees.

“And of course the pups are some mad mix. God knows who’ll want them.”

Cal likes the angle of her next to him: not tilted towards him like a woman who wants him or wants him to want her, off balance as if he might have to catch her any minute, but planted solid on her feet and shoulder-to-shoulder with him, like a partner. The byre smells of cattle feed, sweet and nutty, and the floor is scattered with strawy golden dust. The riverbank cold is starting to thaw out of his bones.

“Some retriever in there, I’d guess,” he says. “And that one at the end’s got a little terrier around the ears.”

“Pure mutt, I’d say. No way to know if they’d be any good for hunting. And beagles are no use as guard dogs. You’d get more savagery out of a hamster.”

“They any good as watchdogs?”

“They’ll let you know if someone’s on your land, all right. They notice everything, and they want to tell you about it. But the worst they’ll do to him is lick him to pieces.”

“I wouldn’t ask a dog to do my dirty work for me,” Cal says. “But I’d want one that’d let me know if something needs doing.”

“You’ve a good way with them,” Lena says. “If you want one, you can have one.”

Cal wasn’t aware, till that moment, that he was being evaluated. “I’ll take a week or two to think it over,” he says. “If that’s all right.”

Lena, her face turned to him, has that amused look again. “Did I give you a fright, with all that talk about the blow-ins packing it in after one winter?”

“It’s not that,” Cal says, a little taken aback.

“I told you, most of them last six months. You’re here, what now, four? Don’t worry, you won’t be setting any records if you cut and run.”

“I want to be sure I’ll do a dog justice,” Cal says. “It’s a responsibility.”

Lena nods. “True enough,” she says. There’s a slight lift to her eyebrow; he can’t tell whether she believes him. “Let me know whenever you make your mind up, so. Is there one that takes your fancy? You’re the first person I’ve offered; you can have your pick.”

“Well,” Cal says, running a finger down the runt’s back, “I like the looks of this one right here. He’s already proved he’s no quitter.”

“I’ll tell people he’s spoken for,” Lena says. “If anyone asks. If you want to come up and see how he’s growing, give me a ring first to make sure I’m about—I’ll give you my number. I work odd hours, some days.”