Master of the Moor (16 page)

He wanted to cry, ‘I don’t believe it!’ but a robot voice spoke for him: ‘Good Lord! Good Lord!’

There was a silence that seemed endlessly to endure. The curtains swayed in the faint hot breeze. Sweat broke out in little beads on Stephen’s forehead and upper lip and prickled his skin. Brenda Evans broke the silence.

‘Long time no see.’

From the sigh she gave it seemed Joan Pettitt had been holding her breath. ‘Now, then, would you have known him, Brenda?’

‘He’s grown a bit.’

Helena uttered a thin shriek of laughter. Having pulled herself as far forward on her chair as she could without sending it skittering from under her, she reared herself up on to her feet and stood there, swaying, chuckling softly. It was perhaps the first time she had stood unaided for a year. She looked radiantly happy, as if she had waited all her life for this, as if she had seen Naples and now had nothing left to see. She swayed, giggling, turning her head to look from one to the other of them. And then Stephen saw what he knew
he would remember all his own life, the fearsome spectacle of someone suffering an apoplectic stroke.

Her laughter ceased on a retching sound and her face contorted in a spasm. It was as if she had been struck from behind with a massive but invisible hammer. Her hands flew up and she pitched forward on to the floor with a slithering crash.

Mrs Pettitt jumped up and screamed. Brenda Evans shouted, ‘Oh, my! Oh, my!’ and put her hand up over her mouth. A patient shouted and a nurse came running.

Stephen walked out of the ward like a man in a dream.

That evening, within an hour of each other, Chantal Tanya Simpson was born and Helena Beatrice Naulls died. Lyn was invited across the road to drink champagne with Kevin and her parents, but she didn’t go. She had come home to find Stephen in a state of shock, scarcely able to speak, although Helena was still alive then. Joan Pettitt phoned with the news that she had died and Lyn broke it to him gently. It seemed neither to relieve him nor make him worse.

He sat beside her, holding her hand so tightly that the bones ached. She had never felt his need of her so strongly. It was as if he were drawing a current out of her, recharging himself from some source of comfort in herself. For a long while he didn’t speak. Then he began talking about his grandmother, about how hard her life had been and how terrible the latter part of it, how awful her death. Lyn had never heard him talk about anyone like that before. She hadn’t thought he cared much for old Mrs Naulls but had visited her out of duty and in the hope of finding out more about her relationship with his grandfather. This outpouring of
love and pity was strange from Stephen. And uneasily Lyn began to feel that he wasn’t really talking about his grandmother at all, but that it was someone else he meant when he talked about suffering and cruelty and neglect.

He knelt down on the floor and laid his head in her lap, clasping her body in his arms. He had hardly ever before touched her so closely and intimately. Lyn sighed. She put her hand on his head and stroked his hair. Nowadays, her body and perhaps her mind too in a constant process of change, she felt less able to be Stephen’s support. It ought to have been a mutual thing, for she needed his support as well. The temptation to tell him about the baby and her idea of their future was suddenly very strong, the words were waiting on her breath. She suppressed them. Stephen had gone very white and his eyes were closed. She seemed to see Nick’s face, eager and smiling, the antithesis of this life in death, and as she bent over Stephen, murmuring softly to him, the tears came into her eyes and ran down her face.

Great ceremonial attended Naulls funerals and expense was never spared. Naullses were so intent on being buried or burnt with dignity and display that some of them saved up all their lives for their own funerals. Arthur Naulls, from the age of fourteen when he became gardener’s boy at Chesney Hall, had put aside a penny a week into some insurance scheme to this end, though when the time came, as his son Stanley had remarked with a sneer, it hadn’t amounted to nearly enough.

For his widow there were to be four black Daimlers to follow the hearse. The clans would gather first at uncle Leonard’s and partake later of a doleful banquet at the Bracebridges’, and in between there would be the
old Prayer Book funeral service at Holy Trinity as well as a service in the chapel at Byss Crematorium. Mother couldn’t have died at a better time of the year for flowers, said Mrs Pettitt in classic Naulls style.

Leonard Naulls, the only really prosperous one, lived in west Hilderbridge in a district called Callowford. All the other Naullses lived round about, but Leonard’s house was the biggest and in the smartest street. Stephen got there early. He brought a sheaf of red dahlias and carnations with him and put them with the other flowers in the hall. His aunt Midge kissed him and told him how good it was of him to come, he had always been good to his grandma, and then she went back upstairs to finish adjusting her black crimplene turban. He had already seen his uncle Leonard walking slowly round the garden with his sister Joan and his brother-in-law Sidney Pettitt, showing them the flowerbeds. Showing visitors the garden, even though they were one’s own siblings, even though they could see it daily from their own windows, was a Naulls habit, indulged in on solemn occasions. Stephen noticed that the photograph of his cousin Peter, which last time he had been in this house had stood on the hall table, was gone. He pushed open the door into the living room.

This room had french windows overlooking the lawn and the meagre herbaceous borders. Standing in front of them, her back to Stephen, looking out at the gloomy strolling figures, was Brenda Evans. She was alone. Her round plump form was swathed in clinging pleated black and she had high-heeled black patent leather shoes on, stockings with black seams, one of which was very crooked. She hadn’t yet put her hat on. A shiny small black straw, probably bought specially for the occasion, lay on the arm of the settee beside her. Her yellow
hair was newly done, yellow, incurved, glossy, like a chrysanthemum.

She hadn’t heard him come in. Stephen stood in the doorway, looking at a woman’s back, a woman standing at a window. A great many things seemed to happen to him as he stood there. Impressions passed in clear bright pictures across the screen of his mind, a pile of coins at eye level on a table, his hands round an old woman’s stringy throat, thin blue air mail letters dropping into the post box on Chesney Green, letters that would never be answered.

A hot dazzling blur fell over Stephen’s sight, he was blinded to everything except that curvy shape, its outlines fuzzy now, the window behind it, and because of the bright light, the green of the lawn transposed to its opposite in the spectrum, blood-red. His hands went up, the fingers bent as if to claw. He was poised for the leap at her. She heard his breath drawn in and she turned round.

‘Why, Stephen! How nice.’

He put up his hand to his forehead, felt on his fingertips the drops of sweat. There was a fierce drumming in his head. To explain the gesture, his robot voice said, ‘Lord, isn’t it
hot
?’

‘Lovely,’ said Brenda Evans. ‘It just suits me. On our way back from Europe you and me must have a real cosy get-together. I’m dying to meet your wife. Linda, isn’t it? But Stephen, believe me, there just hasn’t been a minute what with Ma taking a notion to die like that. Though in one way it couldn’t have been more convenient, with me on the spot and not having to be fetched over.’ Whatever she had become, she was clearly still a Naulls. ‘They didn’t want to have the funeral till Monday but your uncle Stanley insisted. It has to be before
my sister leaves for Paris, France, he said, so of course they gave way.’

The robot said, ‘Well, have a jolly good holiday.’

‘We deserve it. It’s twenty-two years since Fred or me set foot outside of Canada. Now, dear, tell me how’s your father?’

‘He’s fine. Fit as a fiddle. Still at the same old trade, you know.’

‘And you’re his right-hand man. I bet you’ve made yourself indispensable, eh?’

‘I don’t know about that.’ Stephen began to laugh. He couldn’t stop once he had begun and he rocked about on the sofa, sobbing with laughter, his chest aching with it, water running out of his eyes. He could see she was staring at him but he couldn’t stop. At last he got up and ran out of the room, colliding with auntie Midge and the Bracebridges coming in. Both his hands and his handkerchief were over his face and they thought he was crying.

‘Stephen was always very good to his nanna,’ said Mrs Bracebridge.

Afterwards they understood he was too upset to stay for the lunch. Stephen had meant to go to work in the afternoon, and when he left the crematorium he drove back by way of the market square, he even slowed briefly as he passed Whalbys’, but he didn’t stop. While his mother was in the town he didn’t want to face Dadda in case he too had heard of her arrival. Dadda’s reaction was beyond his imaginings, he didn’t want to try to think about it.

He changed his clothes and went out on to the moor, keeping as best he could to the shady places, the Vale of Allen and the eastern side of the hill. The air was heavy and humid, there had been no rain for twenty-four days, but although the sky was still a pale, dazzling
blue, it was hung all round the horizon with white clouds mottled with indigo.

It was far too early for Rip to come. Surely he would never come in all this heat and light. Why had he called him that? It had been quite involuntary, calling the man, the girls’ killer, the denizen of the cavern, by the name of his imaginary friend. Yet it was a good name, it had the right daredevil, ruthless, fearsome sound. Rip. When he had killed Ann Morgan it had been broad daylight, though, but the moor no doubt as deserted as it now was.

Stephen took shelter from the sun inside the George Crane Coe and lay down on the dry brittle grass. The peaty soil had turned to dust and ran away through his fingers like salt. A throb of thunder made itself felt, vibrating through his body like a tiny earthquake tremor. He lay on the ground inside the broken tower, waiting for Rip to come.

Someone had bought the grey parrot and the rabbits. Apart from themselves, there was no living thing left in the shop but the snake. They were closed, the blind on the door was down. Nick sat on the edge of the counter, Lyn on the drum of corn. He was looking at her intently and she wondered if he could possibly guess or tell. But no, he was a vet, not a doctor, and she a woman, not a dog. The thought made her smile a little.

‘I love you, Lyn,’ he said. ‘I shall come back for you. I’ll come every weekend until I can make you say you’ll leave him and go with me.’

So he would, she thought, for a week or two or three. But two hundred miles away and with new things around him, he wouldn’t go on coming. He would forget.

‘I’m not leaving until Monday. When you change your mind I’ll be waiting by the phone.’

‘I shan’t change my mind,’ she said. ‘Shall we go out for a last walk or a drink or something?’

‘It won’t be a last walk, we’re not going to talk in terms of last things. Lyn, we’ve only just begun to know each other.’

She got up. Though she was as thin as ever, her body felt heavy with the child. They walked out of the shop into the sultry heat. As they passed the glass cases in the window an unpleasant thing happened. The snake, which scarcely ever moved, which had always when Lyn had seen it lain stretched out or coiled, suddenly reared up the forepart of its body, hissed and lashed its head at the glass. Its tongue flickered and Lyn drew back against Nick’s arm with a shudder.

The heavy
atmosphere, charged with the threat of the coming storm, was inside the house as well as outside. Lyn felt it as soon as she woke up. She looked at the white sky of low cloud and felt the weight of the air and remembered that the evening before she had parted for the last time from Nick. Stephen was still asleep beside her. He looked very young as he slept and there was a droop to the corners of his mouth.

It was already very hot, though the sun was only a white puddle of light in a mass of cloud. She got up and had a bath, made tea and took a cup to Stephen. He sat up and took it from her with a hearty ‘Thanks awfully, darling,’ but he was absent and preoccupied. He seemed miles away from her on some distant thought plane. She longed to throw herself on someone’s compassion, tell them everything and ask for comfort. She
had never been able to confide in her mother, Joanne was in hospital, only Stephen remained. Stephen was drinking his tea and looking out on to the moor, the scorched and shrivelled grass, the dull pale sky.

She left him and went downstairs. Peach came up to her and rubbed his head and soft golden shoulder against her leg. She picked him up and walked about with him in her arms. In six months she would have the baby, at least she would have that. Loneliness would pass when she had the baby. It was just that it was impossible to imagine the week ahead, all the weeks, without Nick. Peach purred in her arms. She set him down on the window sill, stared at the still, pale, brooding sky.

How many times, she wondered, had Stephen come to her for comfort? She thought of the last time, when his grandmother had died. Would he comfort her in the same way? Somehow she didn’t think so, she had never asked him or tried. The idea of the plan she had made came back to her, that she had been going to present to Stephen in cold practical terms. She was afraid she would cry as soon as she began to speak. Yet she had to tell him. Suddenly she realized she had no idea at all how he would take it.

She heard him get up and move about upstairs. She put the kettle on and set things on the table for breakfast. A small wave of nausea came gently up through her chest when she looked at the butter, the cream curds on the milk. These days she never ate breakfast. The nausea passed and when Stephen came in she was sitting at the table, drinking tea.

It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him then, but still she held back. She had realized something, that for weeks, months perhaps, Stephen hadn’t spoken to her at breakfast, hadn’t had a real conversation with her at
any time. Unhappiness or anxiety was making her acutely sensitive. The voice in which he announced to her that he would go into his study now to write his piece for the
Echo
sounded to her like the noises made by a talking machine.