IT BEING autumn, I, with bulbs to bury, not only dug, but whistled as I dug. I had barely got to Questa o quella, when a voice said: “If you wanted to hear Rigoletto murdered, you could not have come to a better place.”
I dropped the spade. A robin, no less startled, coughed out a haunch of worm and shot off, like a feathered bullet. The voice had come from above my head. I glanced up but there was nothing in the apple tree save two squirrels, one grey, the other, remarkably, red. I was about to put the voice down to something borne on a freak gust, when the red squirrel cocked its little head towards the grey and said: “Not, mind, that I am a fan of early Verdi. Ripeness did not touch him until Otello.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” said the grey. “Personally, I stop at Eminem.”
My sweat froze. “You speak English,” I heard myself say.
“Either that,” sneered the red, “or you have a grasp of basic squirrel.”
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“Forgive me,” I said, “I have never heard a squirrel talk before.”
“That,” said the red, sharply, “is because you have only come across greys, with whom you have nothing in common.”
“Our only wossname, interest,” said the grey, “is nuts. Cob, hazel, acorn, you name it. I could tell you stories about nuts that’d make your hair stand on end, only what’s the point?”
“They are a simple folk,” said his colleague. “But,” he added quickly, as the grey bared a glinting fang, “fundamentally decent. By the by, have you been to the Hopper exhibition yet? Primitive psycho-drama it may be, but there is no denying that for sheer luminescent colour, he . . .” “Forgive my interrupting,” I said, “but I had always understood that grey and red squirrels did not get on. I had heard that it was the, er, savage grey that was responsible for decimating the gentler red.”
“The happiest nations have no history,” murmured the red. “I have always been partial to George Eliot’s resonant ironies.”
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“I could listen to him talk all day,” said the grey. “Yes, in a nutshell, we have put the past behind us. Conflict does not solve nothing. Look at Iraq. Look at Tony and Gordon. So, since this is National Red Squirrel Week, I am looking after him. He would be the first to admit he couldn’t look after hisself. His brother copped it from a very slow Volvo, didn’t he?” “He stopped in the middle of Finchley Road,” said the red, glumly, “in order to work out a geotropic crux.”
“They prised him out of the tyre treads just this side of Runcorn,” said the grey. “Reds may be a dab hand at Latin physics, but traffic is a closed book to ‘em. Without me, he’d be gravy on a gypsy’s lip, wouldn’t you, Quentin?” “Chacun a son métier,” said the red, and ran up the tree to groom, very delicately. The grey watched him, clenching his paws till the claws flashed.
“I don’t know if I can keep this up for a whole bloody week,” he said.