“Well?” Pawsense said.
“The tail is beautiful, Mama.”
“No, Nimbletoes. I mean, what have you got to report?”
“He is to die for! So silent and composed, like our Father’s people. And he ambles most correctly yet casually one half body length behind Papa, so deferent and inured to Custom is he!”
“Immense!”
It was impossible to tell if cousin Frisk’s punctuations were genuine, perfunctory, or deeply ironic. Frisk sure was a puzzle. He was starting to like her.
“Where are they now? We have scarcely time to make Bel’s tail luxuriant.”
“They have come up from the road for Primate vehicles, and are processing in stately measure toward the pretty decorated roof set over the stream.”
“We shall proceed thence ourselves,” Pawsense said. “You, Nimbletoes, shall walk first as befits an emissary. Then Goodpaws – Goodpaws, where are you?”
“I am here, Mama.”
“You will walk next, as Senior Sister. Then I shall come behind you with Sensibella. Frisk and Bandit shall bring up the rear. Friskywits?”
“Yes.”
“Try not to say anything. If you must speak and you can’t think of anything appropriate to say, you may mention the weather.”
“I shall do just that, Mama.”
Pawsense sniffed the air. “I fear the weather is going to do something crude.”
The daughters trooped outdoors to take their places in the procession. Bandit stood behind Sensibella’s great tail. He wondered if he was supposed to walk upright and carry it above the fallen bulrushes so that it wouldn’t become soiled. He felt a suppressed fit of giggling starting up in Frisk. The whole affair was ridiculous. Sensibel wasn’t feigning indifference in order to provoke a more earnest courtship. She didn’t want to be courted at all.
“They have reached the stream-house without walls.”
This was where the courtier would set eyes and nose on the courted one. Then, after greetings and light talk, they would come around to the wilderness side of the pond, to a derelict doll’s house of a cottage by the water, where Pawsense’s family lived. Its large windows had fly screens instead of glass because it was built by the original owners for the nights when the main cottage on the ridge above it became too hot – there’s nothing hotter than a summer cottage during a heatwave – and they could sleep close to the breezes off the pond. Sometimes the parents told their children that they needed to be near the pond even on a cool night. The original cottage up on the ridge had been torn down and replaced by a modern weatherproofed building, half cottage, half suburban mansion. Its present family members must have kept the doll’s house to honour their progenitors.
“Festina lente. Make haste slowly,” Pawsense announced. “The better for Sensibel to be admired from afar.”
Bandit sensed a slow-motion disaster in progress. The Arrival of the Intended Bride. For the Intended Bride had no desire to assume the role that had been assigned to her at birth. Her heart was fixed on a romantic stranger whose virtues she had extolled to her sisters in the tree. But Bandit knew even this romantic infatuation was unreal. It had the quality of desperate whimsy. It served no other purpose than to help Sensibel imagine the idea of an existence beyond the control of her mother. In the meantime, whimsy gave her an excuse to dally with the Raccoonopolitan lord. She would dally with him so assiduously that his ardour would flame out and he would lose interest. Deep down, he knew, Sensibella’s feelings were not for aristocrats or tall dark strangers, whether sighted from afar or presented to her gift-wrapped. Her heart was set on him, Bandit, and was all the more romantic because her heart’s affections could never come true. The joining of cousins was forbidden.
***
Nimble hadn’t said that a whole retinue of dancers had come with the party, complete with bodyguards. They weren’t important to her imagination, so she left them out of her report which was already breathless. Yet the matter of appropriate theatre for the occasion was clearly a concern to Smartwhisker, husband of Aunt Pawsense, who conveyed the marriage proposal visibly in the form of a Raccoonopolis lord. Who could refuse this shyly grinning young man? Who could turn tail on this portrait of physical and social prowess?
Sensibel could.
Bandit noticed that her tail began to droop at the sight of her intended fiancé. Her gait became unsure. She looked desperately over her shoulder for him. Her eyes met his just long enough to transmit a message. Get me out of here. His eyes answered: Play the game. An opportunity will present itself. Frisk, walking beside him, licked his ear mischievously. She understood.
In contrast, Nimble at the front of the procession seemed ready to fling herself on the Intended. Even the stolid and ungainly Goodpaws, caught up in the spirit of the joining, appeared to float along the path through the bulrushes. And Aunt Pawsense had acquired a further rotundity, as if inflated by the pear-shaped utterances she was about to deliver.
Bandit watched with the bemusement of one placed on the sidelines. As first cousin, he ought to have been accorded the role of close family relative, but even this status was denied him. He had fleas and his family wasn’t respectable. He lacked good breeding and property. Bandit considered that his want of a background that would propel him into a secure future might actually be the reason Sensibel was attracted to him. He was the romantic opposite of the perfect hereafter that was now being staged for her.
Staged? Absolutely. The delegation had formed into a half circle on the path at the pagoda. The dancing girls shifted their weight from one side to the other and exchanged knowing glances. Across from them stood the bodyguard – a line of sleek-coated family sons, presumably brothers and cousins of the Intended. There was no way this urban family – no, this clan, was going to be forced off its new hunting ground. At the middle of the semi-circle, the young lord acted his role according to the script. He was one of those ideal people who always know the right thing to do, not because they are especially moral but because they can’t imagine an alternative to the obvious and proper. Yet his importance was overshadowed by the personality of Smartwhisker. Hearty and expansive, the tribal father filled the space with benevolence. The sight of his four daughters made him even more benevolent. And the sight of his wife brought his benevolence to a boil. She was the most sensible of Raccoons, with her unquestionable pedigree: Pawsense of the River Clan Family at the Pond Marsh, said to be related in some obscure way to the Raccoon with No Name who was lord of Creek Town and the Lower River. That was why her pedigree was irreproachable.
What would become of Sensibella in this hypocrisy? Would her husband grow up to be a version of Smartwhisker, possessing the social ease of a Raccoon of Property? Would she turn into a portly matriarch like her mother, arranging opportune marriages for her multiple children? Sensibel, who had tussled with him all afternoon in the new Spring bulrushes, free as a girl can be in the daylight, completely without inhibition. He affectionately touched the place where she had playfully bitten him on the flank.
The daughters of Pawsense formed a line. Bandit stood at one end, where it met the teenage dancers. They automatically began throwing poses at him. He looked away. Sensibel had been like them once. Now, she had the frozen mask of a sacrificial victim. What was she thinking? This marriage arrangement marked the end of her girlhood, unless she found a way out of it. But what if for some reason she found the Twit attractive? What if she decided to lose one freedom, the freedom to be young and undecided, for another, the freedom to be secure? Bandit was beginning to understand that freedom is relative to the situation you are in.
The Greeting of the Bridal Party. Goodpaws, as first-born daughter, was presented first to her father.
“Goody. I hear you have your bonnet set for Squire Hairball. Decent man. Nothing wrong with him ’cept his name. Marry him at once, I say.”
Goodpaws blushed and finished her curtsey.
“Ah, dear Sensibella. You’re not just beautiful, you’re a work of art. Marry you myself, if I could. I’d marry you just for your tail. Heh! Heh! And here’s Friskywits. What have you got to say for yourself?”
“I fear the weather is going to do something crude.”
“Why, so it is! So it is! Weather is always changing. Yes, that’s what weather does. Now you – please forgive me. I have quite forgot your name.” Smartwhisker tapped his skull to dislodge the missing name from where it had become stuck.
“I am Nimbletoes, Papa.”
“Nimbletoes. Never heard of you! No matter. The more the merrier. Everybody, I introduce Lord Padmind, first in line to succeed to the headship of the families on the Heights.”
Four curtseys exactly synchronized.
Bandit watched the colours of the sunset passing over the fur of his cousins. The hazy yellow evening had produced a memorable sunset, and the sisters reflected its changing hues of orange, and pink, and purple. The same hues provided a dramatic backdrop to the personage of Smartwhisker. It seemed he had brought the sunset with him. A blue dragonfly alighted on Sensibel’s tail. The high-toned voice of Aunt Pawsense penetrated his reverie:
“I would rather have young people settle down on a small property at once, and have to struggle with a few difficulties together, than be involved in a long engagement …”
