M I C HAEL S M AL L, W RITER MONDAY, 7 FEBRUARY 2011
THE ODD FLUTTER Snout to the ground, snuffling for the unexpected, Lupi lolloped along the corridors of wheat. The lime stems were turning to watery yellow and the tacky ears rustled against Moira’s bare arms. Beyond the farmhouse of snapped cobbles, the stand of beeches on Beacon Hill beckoned. Tortoiseshell butterflies alighting three or four paces in front threaded her path. Once across the two-step style that released her from the bungalow estate, Moira abandoned herself to the leaf and bole of dappled arcades; quite unlike her native fens, where open, flat distances lent penetration to a farmer’s stare. Mornings she worked at the newsagency, or at least was a nodding accomplice to a clutch of pensioners, whose dithery confidences left her feeling more sprightly than thirty-three; or sometimes during heavier heart-to-hearts rather doddery on varicose veins. Like having a bull in a china shop, that particular morning, she had to chuckle. Not just the quarterly stock take being tallied by pen-pointing accountants, but there were ice-cream deliveries galore to rush into refrigeration, the dotty old till kept ringing up pennies and shillings, and toffee-nosed gents in dog-haired tweed got military about missing supplements. But derailments, she dismissed with bluesmocked indignation, were not her pigeon. On and up the slope romped Lupi, zigzag, following his nose. Only to disappear, waggling into the thickets of the chalk pit. ‘Oh, he does love them rabbits.’ Moira planted her thick-set legs on the outer rampart, from which she drank in lungfuls of air less heady for the chickweed burning off. Behind the veils of haze and plumes of smoke, the pallid dome of sky dimmed as sea. The townships of the coastal plain, from these heights so tidily arranged, like cardboard pyramids between bunches of broccoli, pressed towards a dazzle of glasshouses. In pick-your-own strawberry fields, trippers were hard at it, bottoms up, groveling like gold-diggers. And darkened