The Everywhere Man Page 17

  ‘I’m beginning to wonder if there’s really anything wrong with your leg, to be quite honest,’ Alix replied with a frown. ‘You didn’t ... you wouldn’t ...?’

  ‘Of course not! Don’t be silly as well as naive, child. I’m hardly senile enough to go wasting hospital beds just to enhance my little schemes,’ Mrs Babcock replied with astonishing candour. ‘But I’m glad to see I didn’t stay awake half the night for nothing. You are in love with him, aren’t you? Even to the point of thinking of leaving us soon.’

  Alix gasped at the accuracy of the remark. ‘You’re ... you’re a witch!’ she cried in surprise. ‘Or at least a mind- reader.’

  ‘Just a very wise old woman sometimes,’ Mrs Babcock laughed. ‘And sometimes just as silly as anybody else, but let’s hope this isn’t one of the times. Unless, of course, you don’t love him enough to put up a decent fight?’

  ‘It isn’t a matter of that,’ Alix replied sadly. ‘I could fight for him if I had him, and I would, make no mistake. But I don’t have him. And he’s given me no reason to believe I ever might.’

  ‘Piffle! He’s made love to you, hasn’t he?’

  ‘I ... I ... don’t quite know what you mean,’ Alix replied, hedging round the directness of the question.

  ‘Of course you do. And you’ve answered the question as well. Ah, don’t look so touchy, child,’ said Mrs Babcock. ‘There’s nothing the matter with being a bit ... old-fashioned, if you don’t mind the term. Sometimes it has values you wouldn’t expect, because a man can get all the sex he wants, these days; it’s finding a girl with values that suit him that’s difficult.’

  Their conversation diverged then into a general one about modern living and the changes from when Mrs Babcock had been young. And with the removal of herself from the focus of the discussion, Alix quite began to enjoy herself.

  They were enjoying a good laugh about one of Mrs B.’s youthful love affairs when Quinn returned, loaded to overflowing with plastic containers of Chinese food.

  ‘My goodness! There’s enough here to feed an army,’ Alix exclaimed when she had laid out the containers and brought bowls and chopsticks from the kitchen on Mrs Babcock’s direction.

  ‘What we don’t eat I’ll have warmed up for my breakfast,’ Quinn replied, and at Alix’s exclamation of revulsion at such a thought, ‘I’ve eaten worse in my day.’

  ‘Yes, but surely I can ...’

  ‘You can not expect to be making me breakfast, he interrupted quickly. ‘Both you and Mrs B. will lie in as late as you please, and spend the rest of the day being lazy as well. You’re playing nursemaid, not substitute housekeeper — and see that you remember it.’

  Alix didn’t argue, having decided it would be far better to simply organise their lives without consulting Quinn too much at all. Certainly somebody would have to do the housework, and if she herself didn’t do it, then Mrs Babcock would be trying to keep ahead of it, game leg and all.

  But not only did Quinn not accept her silence as acquiescence, he was also thinking one step ahead of her, as she found by his next remark. ‘And just so you don’t get any fancy ideas about the housework — either of you — there 11 be a casual cleaning lady here first thing in the morning. And she’ll be working under my orders, Mrs B., with specific instructions to ignore any attempts by you to get rid of her before she’s done the work.’

  ‘Now why would 1 want to do that?’ the housekeeper replied demurely, but Alix was more direct.

  ‘Well then you’d better send somebody over with some of my work, she replied. ‘I can’t just sit around all day twiddling my thumbs and watching somebody else work’

  Quinn merely laughed. ‘Just can’t stand to be idle, can you? You should try paying attention, Alix. I didn’t mention lunches, which must be prepared ... or dinners. And after your last performance, I’m rather looking forward to seeing what kind of cook you are in your own right. Maybe It you re good enough I’ll move you out of the drafting room and into the kitchen.’

  His mocking grin did little to soften the innuendo, but Alix could only glare silently at him for it. She didn’t dare say a word m reply.

  Indeed, she hardly had a chance in any event; his next remark was quite as astounding as the one before it — and even more provocative.

  ‘You’d also better spend some time on dog training unless you plan to look a total fool during the trials,’ he said soberly. That beast of yours is the most undisciplined creature I’ve ever run across, unless of course he works better for you than he would for me tonight’

  ‘Well, I should hope he does,’ Alix retorted. Then she mapped her mouth closed and quickly changed the subject, lest Quinn trick her into revealing more than she intended before he saw for himself how well Nick could work.

  It was difficult to keep avoiding the subject during the leisurely meal, during which it was somehow agreed that Quinn would exercise both dogs each evening, leaving Alix free in the kitchen. It was only after some deliberate manipulation that she managed to keep him from insisting that they train their dogs together each morning at dawn, but she finally won that round by falling back on the excuse that she couldn’t concentrate on training with Mrs Babcock alone, and Quinn couldn’t very well shake her from that assertion since it was her sole reason for being in the house m the first place.

  Nonetheless, Alix made a deliberate point of training the big dog long and hard during the morning hours of the few days remaining to her.

  As soon as the cleaning lady had arrived, Alix would be away with the dog for long sessions of retrieving practice in one of the many irrigation channels of the district, flinging her kapok-filled training dummy into water, weed and tumbled stream-side vegetation as she encouraged Nick to speed up his retrieving and ignore the temptations of waterfowl and other animals when he was supposed to be working.

  Then it was off to a large paddock where she had seen several hares and even the occasional quail. He was superb as a pointer, but she was less confident about his steadiness when the game was flushed, and grew increasingly apprehensive as the Saturday morning utility trial approached.

  She knew that Quinn was busy readying Anna for the trials as well, and wished futilely that she had been less adamant about not going with him. Each morning before dawn he would be away in the Range Rover, returning just in time for work, and each evening he spent at least an hour off with both dogs, working them as long as the daylight would hold.

  Most frustrating was his refusal, during the final days, to even discuss the dogs’ progress. ‘They’re coming along,’ he would say, and then change the subject. Alix could have hit him, on occasion, for the mocking grin that tended to accompany his laconic remark.

  Saturday came all too quickly, and with it an astonishing degree of recovery from dear Mrs Babcock, who had decided to attend the trials as an observer.

  The diminutive housekeeper brushed aside Quinn’s arguments at dinner Friday night as if they were the quibbles of a student, and Alix found it actually amusing the way she seemed able to keep him in line.

  ‘Of course I’m not planning to walk across the paddocks with you,’ Mrs B. snapped. ‘But I can certainly sit in the shade of the Rover and watch most of the action through binoculars, can’t I? And so I shall.’

  She wasn’t to be swayed by anybody’s argument, and dawn Saturday found her ensconced in the rear passenger seat of the Range Rover, complete with binoculars, a huge cooler filled with sundry cold foods and drinks and a selection of books. The two dogs, complete with all the paraphernalia required for their comfort, took up the rear section of the vehicle, and Alix found herself in the passenger seat in front.

  It was a motley collection of gun-dog owners that gathered for the pre-trial vetting of dogs, and Alix felt herself almost overdressed for the occasion in dean, close-fitting jeans, a light long-sleeved blouse, sneakers and a kerchief in case she needed something on her head.

  Quinn, too, might have been overdressed by comparison, in trim drill trouser
s, hiking boots and a light shirt. Only the addition of shotgun and broad-brimmed hat brought him within the ranks of his compatriots, most of whom wore ragged, tattered jeans or shorts, rubber boots or sneakers and well-worn dog club T-shirts.

  At least half of them looked as if they’d spent a hard night in their cups, and from some of the comments Alix gathered her assessment wasn’t far off.

  But it was the dogs who took her eye to the exclusion of all else. The utility trial that day was open only to those breeds considered suitable for pointing, flushing and retrieving game. In this case it meant only German Short- haired Pointers and Weimaraners, and GSPs dominated this field of fourteen dogs.

  The four Weimaraners, while excellent specimens of their breed, seemed only pale copies of the much more colourful GSPs, most of which were already straining at the leash in their eagerness to begin the day’s hunting. Most were solid liver dogs, but one small, muscular bitch was even more brightly marked than Nick, although to Alix’s eye she lacked something in overall conformation.

  The trial manager was a tall young man with a massive, fiery red beard and a soft Scots accent, and he wasted no time in getting the show under way. The dogs were vetted, competitors given their numbers, and then they were on their way to a paddock selected earlier for the trial.

  It was about ten miles from the city, the last few involving a series of tracks and gates and cattle-guard grids until finally they arrived at the chosen location.

  Everyone but Mrs Babcock disembarked and gathered outside the final gate, scurrying through a host of last-minute preparations before being called to order.

  The first brace of dogs, each wearing a brightly coloured neckband so the judge and gallery could distinguish between them, were sent out ahead of their handlers, and at a suitable distance the rest of the gallery followed. They had not gone a hundred metres when a hare, somehow having escaped the eye of the first two dogs, flushed from squarely beneath Nick’s questing nose, and he almost pulled Alix off her feet in his eagerness to give chase.

  He pulled, giving a little yelp of excitement. Alix, hauled off balance by the dog, gave an even louder squeal of alarm and would have been flat on her face if Quinn hadn’t reached out to steady her.

  ‘Hardly an auspicious beginning,’ he remarked quietly, and she flushed with embarrassment.

  Hardly auspicious indeed. Suddenly she began to seriously wonder if she hadn’t bitten off far more than she could chew, and her every instinct was to withdraw, now, before she made a total fool of herself.

  But it was too late, and if Quinn realised that as well as she did, he was at least kind enough not to say so. So they moved on, following as the first brace of dogs worked, and then the second and the third. None of them struck game, or at least none that could be seen from the gallery trailing behind the competitors at a safe and non-distracting distance.

  Several of the dogs in the gallery, all of them GSPs, Alix noticed with dismay, carried on an almost constant whining of excitement, causing the manager to rebuke the handlers several times. It was small consolation to realise that neither Nick nor Anna was among the offenders.

  Quinn and Anna were in the fourth brace, and Alix’s soft ‘good luck’ was rewarded with a generous smile and a nod as he moved ahead to join the judge and trial manager. Anna had drawn the red neckband, and Alix strained her eyes, moving right to the vanguard of the gallery as her eyes followed that bright red neckband as it flashed from cover to cover, shifting back and forth in a continuous pattern as the dog searched for scent.

  Twice Anna paused as if to point, but each time she turned away then, working a good pattern but never finding either quail or hare. When the brace had completed that portion of the trial, still without pointing a single bird, Alix wasn’t sure who was more disappointed, herself or the dogs.

  ‘There’s a few birds out there,’ Quinn remarked upon his return, ‘but it’s getting pretty hot already, and the scent isn’t travelling well.’

  The fifth brace also turned up nothing, and then the sixth was called. Alix’s turn. Her apprehension couldn’t be disguised, and Quinn alluded to it when he handed her his shotgun and waved her off to take her turn.

  No ‘good luck’ from him. Instead he grinned wryly and muttered, ‘Try not to shoot your foot off.’

  AUx sneered at him, but as she turned away it was with the realisation that he had just done more for her spirits with the taunt than he could have more conventionally. Thrusting her chin up with determination, she slipped on Nick’s white neckband and sent him off with an enthusiastic wave.

  Nick worked his twenty-minute stint with a great deal of style, and although he found no game it wasn’t through lack of effort. More important, he worked well and close under control, coursing a deliberate pattern as he cast back and forth in front of the shooters and judges. Not so his partner in the trial. It was a young dog, handled by one of the survivors of the previous night’s carousing, and whether because of the man’s hangover or in spite of it, the dog played up atrociously. Four different times the dogs had to be called in because of the young dog ranging too far afield, happily ignoring his owner’s whistle and shouts.

  ‘Oh, you’re a good dog, you are,’ Alix cooed in praise when they had returned to the gallery as the final pair moved out.

  Quinn merely raised an eyebrow, then admitted, ‘He worked well, but with that kind of competition he couldn’t help but look good.’

  The first round ended without a shot being fired, and after a ten-minute break in which the dogs happily swam and cooled off in a handy dam, it was off again on the second round.

  If Alix had been apprehensive before, it was irrelevant to the trauma of being drawn in the same brace as Quinn and Anna, ‘But what shall I do for a gun?’ she asked, mentally kicking herself immediately for asking such a stupid question. There was always a spare gun brought during a trial, and in any event, as Quinn mockingly informed her, any of the lads would gladly lend one to such a pretty competitor.

  She could hardly argue, despite the private thought that she looked anything but her best after several hours of tramping through the stubble. Nonetheless, there had been no shortage of volunteers to help her through fences and the like, especially since she was the only female present.

  The man whose dog had played up so horrendously during the first session made quite a point of apologising to Alix personally, and would have stayed in close contact with even the slightest encouragement.

  In the second run they were the third brace away, working through heavy scrub above a huge dam where black swans and other waterfowl swam in ignorance of the dogs and men and guns. It was as if they knew there was nothing to fear on this day, and as Alix and Quinn stepped forward to take their turn, Alix wished she could go and join the birds in their security.

  The two dogs worked well and fairly close, which wasn’t all that surprising since they had been trained together every night for a week. What was surprising was how quickly they found birds. After only five minutes, Nick suddenly stiffened into a rigid, definite point, one forepaw upraised and his nose low and outstretched. Anna swung around immediately to back him up, and once both dogs were steady the judge sent Quinn and Alix forward.

  Suddenly Alix was absolutely terrified. The unfamiliar shotgun felt like lead in her hands, and she knew it wasn’t fitted right for her. She couldn’t possibly shoot properly with it.

  She glanced across to Quinn, but he was concentrating on his approach as they slipped in quietly behind the dogs. The birds would flush any moment now, and Alix forgot everything but her own concentration. Would Nick hold when they flushed, or bolt after them, thus disgracing both himself and Alix as a handler? Steady ... steady, she thought, moving each foot forward in a slow, deliberate maintenance of her balance and position.

  Then the birds were up, soaring in a flurry of feathers that, even expected, caught Alix momentarily by surprise. And everything came to her as it should. She swung up the gun, sliding away the safety a
s she lifted it, followed the first of the three birds, fired, swung to the next, fired, and had the breathtaking satisfaction of seeing her dog standing steady as a rock when it was all over.

  The rest was anticlimax. When the judge ordered it, she sent Nick first after the farthest bird, and when he returned with it, after the nearest.

  And when they moved away again, with still more than ten minutes of competition to go, Alix knew — she just knew — that Quinn Tennant would damned well think twice before he dared ever again criticise her dog. Or her shooting, she thought triumphantly.

  She was striding along, head high and shoulders thrust back in an exhibition of superb, comfortable confidence, when Quinn’s hiss brought her suddenly back to reality.’

  The dogs — no, her dog — had struck game again.

  It was truly too much! Alix halted in her tracks, eyes fixed on the scene as Nick locked himself in the point and Anna, far off to his left, swung up her head and realised what was happening.

  Unable to move until ordered to do so by the judge, she stayed silent beside Quinn, her eyes searching through the low cover as Anna threw her head high and pivoted in a huge circle to catch the wind as the bitch came into position.

  Nick was a statue, but Anna moved like a dancer, feet lifting high as she skimmed over the scrub in a high-stepping trot that was so beautiful as to be poetic.

  She came into proper position to back the point — honouring, in the language of gun-dog fanciers — and then to Alix’s amazement she danced forward still further.

  Beside Alix, Quinn hissed his alarm too softly for the dog or the judge to hear, but Alix heard, and felt him stiffen with the awful certainty of what was about to happen.

  Anna paused, but not long enough for Quinn to even think of relaxing. Alix could feel his tension as if they had been touching. Two more steps, she paused again, but then she moved quickly and stolidly forward, the determination obvious in her every movement.

  Slowly now, like a mincing ghost of a dog, she stepped , closer and closer, passing Nick’s rigid figure as she stole the point.