Free The Means of Escape by Penelope Fitzgerald

flew.
    ‘If you’d have lived over the other way I couldn’t have helped you,’ Parrish said.
    A Maori boy took the young birds out as soon as they were four months old and tossed them at three miles, ten miles, twenty miles, always in the same direction, north-north-west of Awanui.
    ‘As long as they can do fifteen miles,’ said Tanner.
    ‘They can do two hundred and fifty.’
    ‘How long will it take them to do fifteen miles?’
    ‘Twenty minutes in clear weather,’ said Parrish.
    The Maori boy chose out two birds and packed them into a wicker hamper, which Tanner wedged into the driver’s seat of the dray.
    ‘Have you got them numbered in some way?’ Tanner asked.
    ‘I don’t need to. I know them all,’ said Parrish.
    He added that they would need rock salt, so Tanner drove back into the town once more to buy the rock salt and a sack of millet. By the time he got to Hiruharama the dark clear night sky was pressing in on every side. I ought to have taken you with me, he told Kitty. She said she had been all right. He hadn’t, though, he’d been worried. You mean you’ve forgotten something at the stores, said Kitty. Tanner went out to the dray and fetched the pigeons, still shifting about and conferring quietly in their wicker basket.
    ‘Here’s one thing more than you asked for,’ he said. They found room for them in the loft above the vegetablestore. The Blue Chequers were the prettiest things about the place.
    The sister in England did send a book, although it didn’t arrive for almost a year. In any case, it only had one chapter of a practical nature. Otherwise, it was religious in tone. But meanwhile Kitty’s calculations couldn’t have been far out, because more or less when they expected it the pains came on strong enough for Tanner to send for the doctor.
    He had made the pigeons’ nests out of packing-cases. They ought to have flown out daily for exercise, but he hadn’t been able to manage that. Still, they looked fair enough, a bit dishevelled, but not so that you’d notice. It was four o’clock, breezy, but not windy. He took them out into the bright air which, even that far from the coast, was full of the salt of the ocean. How to toss a pigeon he had no idea. He opened the basket, and before he could think what to do next they were out and up into the blue. He watched in terror as after reaching a certain height they began turning round in tight circles as though puzzled or lost. Then, apparently sighting something on the horizon that they knew, they set off strongly towards Awanui. – Say twenty minutes for them to get to Parrish’s loft. Ten minutes for Parrish or the Maori boy to walk up the street to the doctor’s. Two and a half hours for the doctor to drive over, even allowing for his losing the way once. Thirty seconds for him to get down from his trap and open his bag. –
    At five o’clock Tanner went out to see to the pigs andhens. At six Kitty was no better and no worse. She lay there quietly, sweating from head to foot. ‘I can hear someone coming,’ she said, not from Awanui, though, it was along the top road. Tanner thought it must be Brinkman. ‘Why, yes, it must be six months since he came,’ said Kitty, as though she was making conversation. Who else, after all, could it have been on the top road? The track up there had a deep rounded gutter each side which made it awkward to drive along. They could hear the screeching and rattling of his old buggy, two wheels in the gutter, two out. ‘He’s stopped at the gully now to let his horse drink,’ said Kitty. ‘He’ll have to let it walk the rest of the way.’ – ‘He’ll have to turn round when he gets here and start right back,’ said Tanner.
    There used to be a photograph of Brinkman somewhere, but Mr Tanner didn’t know what had become of it, and he believed it hadn’t been a good likeness in any case. – Of course, in the circumstances, as he’d come eight miles over a rough road, he had to be