‘Of course,’ said John, as he scratched the chin that was concealed beneath the forest growing from it, ‘we could always trap the foxes ourselves and release them somewhere else?’
‘No good,’ argued Fran. ‘The chances are they would make their way back here, or be killed by some other hunt or gamekeeper. The real problem as I see it, is that hunting must be banned once and for all.’
‘Fine chance while the ones in power are the ones who go in for that sort of carnage.’
‘Reasonable argument is the only way this problem can be tackled. If we resort to violence then we become the same as them.’
‘I still think shoving a few volts through the telescope tracks is a good idea.’ John grinned to himself beneath the privacy of his undergrowth. ‘Never thought I’d ever have anything in common with a scientist.’
Fran wasn’t so impressed. ‘They’re just as pernicious as the mistakes they make. They are the lackeys of the very people who should be removed from power.’
‘That small grey-haired woman wouldn’t go much on hearing you talk like that. From what I heard, she put a flea in the ear of one of the establishment the other night.’
‘Apparently most of the village heard her putting more than a flea in the woman’s ear,’ Fran commented with the distaste of an incurable pacifist. ‘They were only arguing over property.’
‘I think it was something to do with her trying to run all the foreigners out of the village as well. Everyone I’ve spoken to says Mrs Trotter and her family always have been anti-Semitic, anti-socialist, and racist. I don’t think they like those telescopes spoiling the local view either. They tried to block the project when the observatory first came. They preferred the museum which reminded them of the old days when the serfs were starving and they occasionally let them have a bushel of their own wheat to survive on.’
At any other time this could have led to a deadly serious philosophical discussion that would have lasted until the students reached the museum and probably after, but Fran suddenly stopped and stared at the meadow at the back of Diana’s cottage. In the rays of the early morning sunlight something was glimmering and dancing like a delicate curtain of dust.
‘What on earth is that?’ Fran asked.
John peered towards where his friend’s finger pointed, and commented off-handedly, ‘Just a light effect. Could be marsh gas.’
‘It doesn’t look like that to me.’
‘Look-’ John said earnestly, ‘-didn’t we swear off that stuff?’
‘I haven’t touched it. You’ve been with me all the time, so how could I? There seems to be something down there, I tell you. It’s moving about like a slowly revolving top, full of shapes and things.’
John took a longer, harder look just to satisfy his companion. Either because he thought Fran was hallucinating or because there was too much hair obscuring his view, he insisted, ‘It’s just a light effect. You’re getting like that crazy Russian.’
This immediately took Fran’s attention away from the meadow and raised more political sentiments.
‘Does he have to be crazy because he’s a Russian?’ Fran complained.
‘The way they had to live must have been enough to drive anyone crazy,’ John added against his better judgement.
‘How do you know he isn’t crazy because he spent half his life in a labour camp?’ came the instant response, it somehow not occurring to Fran that the Russian might not be crazy, just maligned by enough people to make it seem fact. ‘They said that student was crazy because he insisted he’d seen the Loch Ness monster. And look what happened there.’
‘So it rained frogs on him while he was walking across the campus. What’s that got to do with the Loch Ness monster?’
‘It proves that just because somebody claims something apparently impossible, it doesn’t mean they are lying,’ Fran pointed out.
‘But we all saw the frogs. We never saw the Loch Ness monster. Anyway, if whatever this Russian fellow keeps going on about is right, it must mean he’s sane.’
‘Didn’t I say that?’
‘No,’ and the argument went on as they passed by the meadow and into the grounds of the museum.