Master of the Moor (21 page)

The pavements of Tace Way were covered with a gleaming skin of rain and water dripped in heavier drops than the rain from neat little front garden trees. Outside Mrs Newman’s house was parked a van with Bale’s Pet Shop on its side. That reminded Stephen about having Peach destroyed, something which would now have to wait until tomorrow, but which would be a very natural act on the part of a deserted husband. Hadn’t he read somewhere, whether as fact or fiction he didn’t know, that Elizabeth Barrett’s father had destroyed, or wanted to have destroyed, her spaniel when she ran away with Robert Browning? Act normally. The normal thing would be to rid oneself of the runaway woman’s pet.

He went into the house and into the kitchen but he felt too exhausted to eat. Mrs Newman would come across the road soon, now she had seen he was back. He locked the back door and took off the phone receiver, took off his boots and jacket and went upstairs. Still wearing his jeans and shirt, he lay down on the bed and pulled the covers over him. For a moment or two he lay there, listening to the gentle patter of the rain, and then he slid into sleep.

A sound from downstairs awoke him, he didn’t know how long afterwards. It was still raining lightly. The sound had been one of the interior doors closing, and now he could hear footsteps. Had he, after all, forgotten to lock the back door?

Surely Mrs Newman wouldn’t come upstairs after him, but these footsteps were mounting the stairs. Stephen sat up as the bedroom door came open. He jumped off the bed and backed against the wall with a cry of terror.

Lyn had come into the room and was looking at him.

His nerves
must be very bad, she thought. He looked as if he had seen a ghost. She stood about a yard in from the door and spoke to him gently.

‘I’m sorry if I startled you, Stephen. I’ve come back for my things and for Peach.’

He didn’t speak. He stood against the wall, his hands flat against it as if he were only prevented from further retreat by that solid mass.

‘I saw the car, I knew you couldn’t be at work, but I thought you must be out on the moor. I wouldn’t have come in like that if I’d known you were here.’

Still he didn’t answer. She began to feel afraid of him again. For a while she had succeeded in conquering this new fear of Stephen. Because she couldn’t let herself feel afraid of
Stephen
, poor frightened Stephen, she had stopped Nick coming with her to Tace Way, but
now the fear was coming back. She forced herself to take a few steps forward and to speak steadily.

‘It wasn’t right of me to run away like that while you were out on Saturday. It was because I got in a panic.’ She didn’t mention his having hit her but her hand went up involuntarily to her bruised left eye. ‘Being away these two days,’ she said, ‘I think it’s made me understand — you’ll be glad to be rid of me, won’t you, Stephen? You don’t need a — a mother any more.’

He moved away from the wall and she flinched a little. But he wasn’t coming near her. He sat or half fell onto the bed and turned away his face. She was sure then that he wasn’t going to speak to her. The cupboard where her clothes were was on his side of the bed, but she went up to it and slid back the doors. She took out an armful of clothes almost haphazardly, the skin on her back tingling with apprehension. Again she drove herself. She turned and held out her hand to him, though she knew better than to touch him.

‘Won’t you speak to me? We may not see each other again. Stephen?’

He jumped up and climbed away from her over the bed. It would have been funny if it hadn’t been so horrible. He scrambled across the bed on all fours, dropped on to the floor, ran across the passage and into his study. She heard the key turn in the lock.

Nick had made her promise not to lift the suitcases herself. She had laughed at him but she had promised. She had survived Stephen’s violence and the baby had survived and she was going with Nick to London. Except that it would have upset Stephen she would have sung out loud as she carried the armfuls of clothes downstairs and packed them in the cases.

Her mother came across the road. ‘I knew something was up when he said you were going to his uncle Stanley’s.
I said to your dad, Stanley Naulls wouldn’t have folks round, he might have to give them something to eat and drink.’

Lyn smiled. ‘I kept phoning you but you don’t hear the phone when you’re out in the garden. I knew you’d start wondering, it was a relief when I got hold of you in the afternoon.’

Mrs Newman carried the cases out and put them in the back of the van. ‘I can’t help feeling a bit weepy, Lyn. We’ve never had a divorce in our family. It’s a shame you ever married him, he was never a real husband to you. When you three were little there was a man like him lived in one of those pair of cottages on the Thirlton road …’

‘Mum,’ Lyn said, ‘don’t send Stephen to Coventry, will you? Don’t not speak to him or anything.’

Joanne was in the garden, standing by the baby’s pram. Lyn went up to her and they embraced clumsily because it was the first time for years that they had kissed each other.

‘I’ll miss you. I’ll be so dead bored I’ll die.’

‘I’m not going to Australia,’ said Lyn. ‘I’m not going to the other end of the world.’

‘Might as well be. Oh, I do envy you, you are lucky.’

‘I know,’ said Lyn, ‘I know I am.’

She picked Peach out of the yellow maple tree and gathered him into her arms and put him on the passenger seat of the van. He sat erect, staring out. Lyn turned the van round, waved to her mother and her sister. She saw her mother wave, burst into tears and rush into the house, but she hesitated, slowing only for a moment before driving on and out of Tace Way. And soon the moor unfolded on either side of her, Chesney Fell and Foinmen’s Plain to the right, to the left the quivering copses on the Banks of Knamber. She would
never need to see it again except as an occasional visitor. Once when she was first married, walking along the Reeve’s Way with Stephen, she had found lying on the turf a skin shed by an adder. Now it seemed to her that the silvery-grey moor was her own snakeskin that she was sloughing off, peeling it off behind her, as she went on to new ways and new things.

The skin that was the moor wrinkled and shrivelled and rolled away and Lyn drove down into north Hilderbridge, down North River Street, over the bridge to the Moot walk and Nick and the southbound train.

The shock of it prostrated Stephen. He lay face downwards on the floor in his study. He listened to Lyn’s footsteps moving about the house, to her voice and her mother’s, a distant wordless sound like the twittering of birds, to the front door closing. By that time he knew it had been Lyn, was Lyn, not a ghost or some frightful emanation from his own fear or guilt. He knew by then that it was Lyn who had walked into the bedroom and therefore that he hadn’t killed Lyn on Saturday afternoon.

He got up and went across the passage and into his bedroom and looked out of the window. Bale’s van had gone. The baby’s pram stood on the Simpsons’ lawn but both women had gone in. It had stopped raining and a pale sun was shining through the layers of cloud. He could remember so clearly the events of Saturday afternoon. He had come home and seen Lyn standing at the window, standing there in her blue jeans and white tee-shirt, her hair cloaking her shoulders, and without motive, without even particularly wanting to do it, with nothing but a desire too urgent to resist, he had sprung at her and killed her. Yet just now he had seen her and heard her speak.

Was he going mad? Was it that his mind hadn’t been able to stand the battering it had lately received? The death of Helena, the defection of Lyn, the reappearance of — his mother. Had it all driven him mad so that he believed he had done things he hadn’t done? Perhaps the events were no longer so clearly memorable. He could recall his fingers digging so hard into Lyn’s neck that it seemed he must behead her, but quite lost were the details of his drive to the pony level and the times and sequences of the steps he had taken after the killing. Half an hour ago he would have sworn he had hidden her body but now the remembrance had grown vague, confused, like a dream at morning. He could remember nothing clearly of that killing but the feel of her neck in his hands. Yet even that must be a false memory, a dream …

Hook had told him he had fantasies and therefore must be a psychopath. At any rate now there would be no fresh confrontation with Hook. He hadn’t killed Lyn. He hadn’t cut off her hair, folded it into a sack, buried the sack in the mine. He hadn’t put the hair with that of Marianne Price and Ann Morgan into the box in Rip’s Cavern. Part of the shock of seeing Lyn had been the sight of her veil of pale bright hair.

He didn’t know whether to be relieved or sorry. For a while he had been Rip’s equal. The whole thing, he supposed, had been no more than a sort of wish-fulfilment. He had wanted to be on a level with Rip, so fooled himself he could do, had done, what he did. Stephen gave a dry mirthless laugh. He must recover from it now, take up the reins of life again, never never let his emotions get such a hold over him again.

He went down to the kitchen, made himself scrambled eggs, a mug of coffee, cut off two hunks of bread. Perhaps it was because he had been starving himself
that he had had these delusions. When he had eaten he felt so much better, clearer-headed, calmer, that he could look back on his imaginings and laugh at himself. He actually did laugh aloud. There, alone in the house, he laughed so uproariously as he went back up the stairs that he got a stitch in his side.

In the study he tore up the sheet of paper on which he had attempted those first puny sentences of an article the night before. A fresh sheet went into the typewriter. Now Helena was dead he need never see a Naulls again. This would show them, this would be something more pungent than the ending of the drought, than an account of a thunderstorm. It was a chance for him that Tace’s birthday happened to fall this week, a peg to hang his article on.

‘The present writer’s maternal grandfather, Alfred Osborn Tace, would have been ninety-eight years old this week had he lived. His sole descendant will be honouring the great man’s birth date as he always does, as he always did himself, by private celebrations of the beauty of his beloved Vangmoor, in short, by going out on the moor for a picnic on one of our fine August days …’

Stephen said a good deal more about his relationship with Tace and invented two Tace anecdotes as told him by his grandmother when he was a child. He didn’t quite dare say he remembered Tace or even that he had been told of being dandled on his knee, since Tace had died three years before he was born. When the article was finished he thought it the best thing he had ever done. He put it in an envelope, addressed it to the
Echo
, and went off down to the post box on the green to post it.

From St Michael’s churchyard one obtained the best view in the village of Knamber Foin. Stephen leaned
over the lychgate and gazed across the intervening land. Had he truly suffered so much agony and fear sitting in the car at Thirlton, driving down the long bleak road to the ‘bridge’ over the portal, lying sleepless and tortured in his bed, or had that too been a dream? He stared, perplexed, across the moor. The wind was getting up. A breeze blew out of the west, ruffling, then smoothing, the birch foliage in the Banks of Knamber as if an invisible hairbrush had passed over it. Why shouldn’t he take the car and drive to the pony level now? It might be that Saturday wasn’t a dream while this morning was. The dead Lyn might lie over there, the dream Lyn have appeared to him …

He told himself not to be a fool and he chuckled out loud at the very thought of having such ideas. Back at home again, he walked about the house, thinking of changes he would make now Lyn was gone and the place all his. Tomorrow he would have to shop for food, replenish the fridge, cancel half the milk, remember to buy bread. For a while he amused himself tidying the kitchen, rearranging things, putting Peach’s food dish and all the tins of cat food into the dustbin.

The repeat showing of Saturday’s episode of
Elizabeth Nevil
began at 7.30. Stephen switched on the television as they were playing the by now familiar, even famous, introductory music. The first episode started with Joseph Usher’s finding Apsley Sough while walking his Irish wolfhounds in Goughdale. The joke was that the scriptwriter and the director had no more known where the mineshaft was than Tace had. Stephen laughed aloud at the sight of the actor playing Usher peering down a hole a few feet away from the George Crane Coe. A rabbit warren, that’s all that was. And when they showed the inside of the mine it was obviously something rigged up in the studio and
not at all like the real thing. Stephen wondered if Rip was also watching and laughing. After that they didn’t show any more of the moor, but only interiors and the ‘lovely dresses’ Helena’s fellow-inmates of Sunningdale had talked about.

He lost interest because the scriptwriter hadn’t stuck very closely to Tace’s text. He kept thinking of the body in the pony level, the body that wasn’t there, that had never been there. Yet he had only to close his eyes to see it lying there, face downwards and with its shorn head, the light of his small torch playing faintly on it. He had knelt down and cut off the hair and coiled it into a skein and rolled it up in the sack. Then, on the following morning, he had taken it out of the sack and put it in the pocket of his zipper jacket, only to think immediately that this was an unwise move in case any hairs adhered to the lining of the pocket. Surely he had done those things, surely he had done them yesterday morning, had wrapped the skein of hair in clinging film, put it into his rucksack with the rope and the torch while he waited for Kevin to depart and the coast to be clear.

He turned off the television and went to the hall cupboard. His zipper jacket was hanging there. He brought it to the living room window but the daylight wasn’t strong enough to see much by. Under the central light he turned the pocket inside out. A single blonde hair clung to the slightly magnetic nylon lining.