The Peacock Cloak

Poppyfields’ secret, and yet it was an open secret. If anyone had looked through the fence at midday and seen Poppyfields there, shimmering like Armageddon in the atomic heat of the sun, they would surely have seen it. But hardly anyone did look through. Cars went past all day without anyone looking in.

    Things might have been clearer to Angus Wendering if he had been able to overhear a conversation between his wife Judy and her best friend Anne, in the week after he and she had first met.
    “I know Angus is nothing special,” said Judy, setting down two glasses of chilled white wine on the table between them and returning to the conversation which they had broken off when she went to the bar, “but what I’ve decided is that there is no sense in waiting for Mr Right to come along. The thing to do is to find Mr Average and turn him into Mr Right.”
    This would have helped to explain why Angus sometimes felt like the caged rat in some behavioural experiment. He moved this way, he received an electric shock. He moved that way, he received another. He touched a lever and – aha! – no shock came but instead a pellet of food for him in the little tray. He touched the lever again and… Oh. No food. Only an extra-painful shock. So the answer wasn’t just pushing the lever. Perhaps it was pushing the lever in a certain way, or at a certain time? Or perhaps it wasn’t pushing the lever at all? Perhaps it was something else he happened coincidentally to have been doing the first time he pushed it?
    When Judy arranged to spend the weekend with her mother, leaving on Friday directly after work, he had a heady feeling of freedom and release. An evening and two whole days to do as he liked! As soon as he got back from work he took a knapsack and packed into it a pork pie, an apple, a Kit Kat bar and a bottle of ginger beer, along with a notebook, the Book of British Birds and a pair of binoculars. When the cat was away the mouse went birdwatching.
    And he went, of all places, to Poppyfields. Angus worked for the insurance company used by the building contractors at Poppyfields and he had once had occasion to visit the site in connection with the dispute over the underground marsh. During this visit he noticed how larks and linnets had taken advantage of the legal impasse and had colonised the disputed territory.
    “Nature grabs every opportunity,” he had enthused to Judy on his return. “It’s just a mouldy old brown-field site but already the wildlife is taking over. I’d love to go down there one afternoon and see how many kinds of plants and animals I can find.”
    Judy administered a small electric shock.
    “Whatever turns you on,” she coolly remarked.
    She wished to wean Angus off his interest in nature (a) because it wasted time which could be better spend on home improvements (b) because it did not strike Judy as very manly: geeky was the word that came to mind (c) because she was working on Angus to go on a management course to increase their earning power and make possible a move to a larger home than the two-bedroom box which they currently inhabited, and she wished to discourage any activity that diverted him from this goal.
    He hadn’t liked to raise the subject since and yet, when he heard that she would be going away, the first thing he had done was phone the contractors and arrange to pick up the key.

    Poppyfields lay waiting. It was six o’clock and the air was still warm, though the mirages no longer shimmered over the concrete floors of the old industrial units. Pulling his car up on the grassy verge of the road that ran past Poppyfields’ western perimeter, Angus walked to the gate and turned the key in the heavy padlock. The sound of the bolt drawing back sent up two quails that had been hiding in the grass nearby and Angus smiled. He was Mr Average in many ways. He would never be famous for his achievements. He would never be a leader. He had no ambition, no direction. Knowing this about himself, he had concluded that he must need Judy to supply what he was missing. That was why he put up with all those electric shocks. He was the floppy glove puppet, she was the firm hand. But he did have a certain capacity to see things, to become absorbed in the moment. The sudden bluster of the two quails rising went right through him, like a wave through still water. Perhaps the hand of the world itself can enter more easily into an empty puppet than into a glove that is stretched tightly