Master of the Moor (6 page)

The moon went in. At one moment the Banks of Knamber were bathed in pale light, at the next a gush of cloud had obscured the spotty yellow orb of the moon. As it vanished, absorbed in the veils of blackness, Stephen stumbled over a twisted root and fell headlong.

He wasn’t hurt. But when he picked himself up he was shivering in the darkness. Where the man was, gone or waiting for him behind the next tree, he had no idea. It was now impossible to see more than a few yards. He knew roughly where he was, or he knew in theory, and he stumbled slowly along in a westerly direction, sometimes holding onto the trunk of a birch tree. Once he thought he heard a movement among the trees to the left of him, as of footfalls rustling the grass. He stood still and listened but the sound came no more. Then, it seemed hours later, when he sensed or smelt or somehow divined that he was almost at the road, there
came, as likely as not out of his own imagination, the delicate sound of an indrawn breath.

It was midnight when he came home to Tace Way. Lyn was in bed but not asleep. She came down to him and made him a hot drink and felt his forehead which was burning hot and covered in drops of sweat.

In the past Stephen had sometimes been like this after being out late on the moor, feverish next day and light-headed. Lyn left him in bed and took the car to work, promising to be back early to give him his lunch. It was to salve her conscience, she thought, and make up for her obsessional preoccupation with Nick Frazer.

Although she hadn’t seen him again, he was always in her thoughts. In her mind she talked to him, telling him about her life, day-to-day things, carrying on with him a long intimate dialogue. It was in vain that she told herself he was a stranger, a man who had probably by now forgotten her. This revolving of him in her mind led invariably to the same end, the same fear, that he would go away from Hilderbridge without her seeing him and then she would never see him again.

When her morning’s work was finished she thought, as she thought every day, that she would walk along the Mootwalk to Bale’s and at last set her mind at rest. But she didn’t do this. She drove home. She was afraid Nick might treat her with coldness and pretend he had forgotten who she was.

Stephen was still in bed but sitting up and there were books on Vangmoor all over the quilt. Lyn put a cloth on a tray and laid it and on an impulse picked a small blue iris and put it in a vase to go on the tray as well. Stephen’s dark blue eyes were very bright and there was a flush on his cheekbones. Otherwise he seemed
much better and he ate his lunch like a hungry schoolboy.

‘I say, Lyn, did I ever tell you how I actually got into one of the old mines when I was a kid?’

She shook her head. Vangmoor bored her. Sometimes she even found it oppressive, living in the middle of it. Their bedroom window, by a lucky chance for Stephen, had the best view of the moor of any house in Tace Way. The curtains were drawn back as far as they would go, and whenever she looked up the green-brown panorama confronted her and the pale bowl of sky. She made an effort. ‘Aren’t they very dangerous?’

‘Kids don’t care about that. We’d heard there was a way into the Goughdale Mine somewhere on the slopes of Big Allen. Actually it’s mentioned in one of the Bleakland books, though I hadn’t read them then. I was about twelve. I went looking for it with my cousin Peter.’

‘Peter Naulls?’

Stephen nodded. ‘Uncle Leonard’s son. We started looking for the hole in the long summer holidays. We were jolly methodical, I can tell you. Each day we covered a set area and we marked the bit we’d covered with sticks. But it took us weeks and weeks to find it.’ He hesitated. He had begun his account, intending to tell Lyn the whole of it, but now that he had reached the point of disclosing the site of the hole into the mine and of describing it and what happened there, he felt uneasy. Dadda he had told, though even to him he had given only a vague location, but he hadn’t said a word to his grandmother and he was sure Peter wouldn’t have told Uncle Leonard and Auntie Midge. Why divulge the secret now? ‘We found it,’ he said and lied, ‘but we didn’t go in or anything. Too scared for
that
.’

‘Oh, well,’ she said.

‘It was pretty enterprising of us to have found it, wasn’t it? Dadda thought so. He said what a waste of bloody time and then he gave me a five-pound note.’

‘How exactly like Dadda.’ She straightened his pillows. She took away the tray. There was no point in asking him if he would like the curtains drawn. He would come down soon anyway and say he was all right and going out on the moor again. Perhaps she could write to Nick and explain things. Explain what? Even if she were to write she knew she would never post the letter.

‘You were wrong about another one being killed in a couple of weeks, Mum,’ Joanne said on a Sunday afternoon. ‘It’s been more like six.’

‘Listen to who’s counting,’ said Kevin. ‘Thank God there hasn’t is what you ought to say.’

‘Well, I do. I do say that. I only meant it doesn’t look like there’s going to be another.’

‘Early days,’ said Mrs Newman. ‘It could just be he hasn’t been able to catch anyone.’

Joanne shrieked. She was big now and the child vigorous. The women had been amused — though the men, especially Dadda, embarrassed — when its movements, or so Joanne averred, had bounced a plate off her lap. Stephen told them how that morning he had seen a girl out on the moor alone.

‘Some folks want their heads examined,’ said Mr Newman. ‘I just hope you two girls have got more sense than ever to set a foot out there.’

Dadda, voyaging day by day farther out on his black sea of depression, made his one contribution to the talk. ‘That’s right, keep your feet under your own table.’

Joanne got to her feet ponderously. Her belly swayed, her ankles were like those of a woman with
dropsy. ‘I go climbing hills every day, of course. Like a mountain goat, aren’t I, Kev?’

There was laughter at that, shamefaced from Mr Newman. Joanne fetched more biscuits, her current craving. Stephen hadn’t much to say. The first thing he had thought of when he awoke that morning was that it was his mother’s birthday, 25 May, and he had been thinking about it ever since, as he always did on that day. Somewhere, on the other side of the world, she must be celebrating it. She and her husband and Barnabas and Barbara …

‘You never told me about that old Mr Bale, Lyn,’ said Mrs Newman. ‘You never told me he’d had a heart attack coming round from the anaesthetic. I had to hear it from Kevin’s mum.’

‘How could I tell you when I didn’t know?’

‘Well, I’d have thought you’d know that, working next door but four or five or whatever it is. And there’s no need to colour up like that, it isn’t as if it matters.’

‘Do you mean he’s dead?’ said Lyn.

‘No, of course he isn’t dead. I’d have said if he’d been dead but Kevin’s mum said he was on the danger list.’

The conversation, in which neither Stephen nor Dadda took part, then turned upon whether ‘danger list’ was merely a figurative term or if hospitals actually maintained such ominous catalogues. Stephen wondered if Dadda also remembered what day it was. Probably, for he forgot nothing, his memory was prodigious. But it was impossible to tell what went on behind that massive, tortured brow, perpetually corrugated as if in a continual wince and recoil from life.

It was a family gathering, though one very different from what was now taking place in Tace Way, that had first alerted Stephen to the true facts of his descent.

Arthur and
Helena Naulls had had their Golden Wedding party in November about the time of Stephen’s own twenty-first birthday. Before that he hadn’t known Helena’s wedding date. Who but a genealogist knew his grandmother’s wedding date? But he had always known his mother’s birthday and at primary school he had been allowed to make her a birthday card. He could still remember it, a picture of a house and a tree and a sun with rays like a starfish. Three weeks later she had gone off with a long-distance lorry driver.

Her birthday was 25 May and her parents had been married in November, though not perhaps the previous November. They had been married for fifty years, but was his mother forty-nine or only forty-eight? There was no one he could ask. The idea of asking Dadda!
What he did was to go to Holy Trinity Church and look at the parish records where he found that his parents’ wedding date was also May — the 27th. Birth dates are not given on marriage certificates, only ages, and his mother’s was there as twenty-five, which meant she must have been born in 1926 and have been twenty-seven when he was born. Stephen was almost sure this wasn’t so, that she had been twenty-eight when he was born and thirty-four when she ran away. Perhaps there had been a muddle because her birthday and her wedding date were so close together.

He puzzled over the dates on the backs of photographs, most of which seemed to have been taken in May, and he tried to get from his aunts the precise age gap between his parents and between his mother and Uncle Stanley. Their answers were always, ‘A couple of years’ or ‘Oh, three or four years.’

The true facts came out simply and when he wasn’t even looking for them. Looking for his own birth certificate for his own marriage, he found his mother’s too — in a desk in the house in King Street. The Holy Trinity marriage entry was wrong. Brenda had been born in May 1925 and therefore conceived during the previous August when Helena was still second housemaid at Chesney Hall.

The other clarification followed swiftly from a photograph of Tace he saw in a newspaper review. It was a few weeks after his marriage and Stephen had been feeling unsure of himself, unsure of life itself. The discovery fortified him. When he looked at the picture of Tace he might have been looking into a mirror.

Of course it had to be! He had always felt he couldn’t be the descendant of Naullses. The Whalby connection was bearable, for they were good honest craftsmen, respected for their skills. But to be a Naulls, formed out of
the same genes as Uncle Stanley, mouthing platitudes in the council chamber, or weedy, weak-eyed Uncle Leonard, that was intolerable. It was also false. His mother wasn’t the daughter of Arthur Naulls but born of a summertime passion between a pretty servant and one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century.

Tace was married, so there was naturally no question of his marrying Helena. But he hadn’t deserted her, he had arranged a suitable marriage with his under-gardener, had given the couple the lodge to live in and had had the child named after one of his sweetest heroines, Brenda Nevil of
Wrenwood
.

Stephen never much cared to think about sex. In the past, when his thoughts had turned to it as a young boy’s thoughts will, his body hadn’t followed his mind. All he had been able to envisage was his mother, so slight and fair, being mounted first by Dadda and then by the lorry driver. So it wasn’t the sexual aspect of Helena’s affair that interested him but its romantic side. He imagined Helena coming to some trysting place on a summer night, to the Banks of Knamber perhaps, or like Lady Irene and Alastair Thornhill, to the ghost of a road, the Reeve’s Way, as it threaded through the Vale of Allen, and Tace meeting her there in the twilight. Love children, he had read, were more beautiful, more charming and more favoured by destiny than those born in wedlock. His mother was and must still be such a one. For the loss of her he had compensated as best he could, first with the imaginary friend he called Rip, then with the moor itself, but in May he thought of her still and with a curious longing.

It wasn’t for many weeks after coming to Chesney that Peach ventured out. His favourite places to be were the chestnut leaf table and the top of the mahogany tallboy
under the landing window on which he lay for hours, staring at the peaks and plateaux of the moor.

He grew large and plump and round-cheeked, but he was without kittenish ways as if his sad experience had robbed him prematurely of his youth, yet when he sat on Lyn’s lap in the evenings he gave himself up to a drowsy and contented purring. His first excursion from the house took him no farther than the garden. Next time he was off and away. When two hours had passed and he hadn’t returned, Lyn imagined him finding his way back to Bale’s and by this act leading her there in search of him. She imagined herself reunited with Nick through the cat’s agency, as lovers might be in some fairy story.

But Peach didn’t go to Bale’s or to his former home in Hilderbridge. He came back in the evening, bringing Lyn a fieldmouse. Her mother had come over to tell her Joanne had been kept in hospital with high blood pressure and threatened eclampsia. She had gone to St Ebba’s antenatal clinic and they had kept her there. When Mrs Newman saw the mouse, though it was dead, she jumped on a kitchen chair and squealed. Peach took back his gift, which he had laid at Lyn’s feet, and sat with it in his mouth, making cross twittering growls.

Stephen wrote for ‘Voice of Vangmoor’: ‘Those who declare our moorland puts up a poor showing when it comes to wildlife, should contemplate some of the offerings of my ginger tomcat: fieldmice, a shrew and even a water vole.’ Author’s licence, he told himself, though he had hesitated over the water vole. ‘Wild flowers too are to be found in abundance. Not only is the bilberry putting forth its globular pinkish-green blooms and the uva-ursi prolific with blossom this spring, but a few orchids may be spotted. I myself was
lucky enough last week to see a fine sample of the Lesser Twayblade and another of the Small White Orchid, rare occurrences as far south as this and in these times. Readers of our great Vangmoor novelist, Alfred Osborn Tace (or viewers, as one must say these days!) will be familiar with the scene in
Wrenwood
in which Brenda Nevil hunts for specimens of this orchid for her bridal bouquet.’

It was true that he had found the orchid. A little cluster of it was growing among the damp rock ledges between Big Allen and Mottle Foin near where the Hilder ran down. Stephen came upon the flowers by chance after he had left the path and struck out across the rough marshy ground.