‘That’ll be young Christopher Organ in there, aged one and a half. He’s a lovely child, Gordon.’
I could just make out the small dot of a baby sitting high up in the pram, which had its hood folded down.
‘There’s sixty or seventy pheasants at least under that little nipper,’ Claud said happily. ‘You just imagine that.’
‘You can’t put sixty or seventy pheasants in a pram.’
‘You can if it’s got a good deep well underneath it, and if you take out the mattress and pack them in tight, right up to the top. All you need then is a sheet. You’ll be surprised how little room a pheasant takes up when it’s limp.’
We stood beside the pumps waiting for Bessie Organ to arrive. It was one of those warm windless September mornings with a darkening sky and a smell of thunder in the air.
‘Right through the village bold as brass,’ Claud said. ‘Good old Bessie.’
‘She seems in rather a hurry to me.’
Claud lit a new cigarette from the stub of the old one ‘Bessie is never in a hurry,’ he said.
‘She certainly isn’t walking normal,’ I told him. ‘You look.’
He squinted at her through the smoke of his cigarette. Then he took the cigarette out of his mouth and looked again.
‘Well?’ I said.
‘She does seem to be going a tiny bit quick, doesn’t she?’ he said carefully.
‘She’s going damn quick.’
There was a pause. Claud was beginning to stare very hard at the approaching woman.
‘Perhaps she doesn’t want to be caught in the rain, Gordon. I’ll bet that’s exactly what it is, she thinks it’s going to rain and she don’t want the baby to get wet.’
‘Why doesn’t she put the hood up?’
He didn’t answer this.
‘She’s running!’ I cried. ‘Look!’ Bessie had suddenly broken into a full sprint.
Claud stood very still, watching the woman; and in the silence that followed I fancied I could hear a baby screaming.
‘What’s up?’
He didn’t answer.
‘There’s something wrong with that baby,’ I said. ‘Listen.’
At this point, Bessie was about two hundred yards away from us but closing fast.
‘Can you hear him now?’ I said.
‘Yes.’
‘He’s yelling his head off.’
The small shrill voice in the distance was growing louder every second, frantic, piercing, nonstop, almost hysterical.
‘He’s having a fit,’ Claud announced.
‘I think he must be.’