Master of the Moor (7 page)

The sky was the way he liked it best and thought best suited to the terrain it overcast, piled with cloud in pillars and columns and towers and ramparts, so that in places the vapour seemed not insubstantial but composed of solid masonry. The surface of the moor itself glowed with the flowerbuds on the grasses and the tiny recumbent plants and there was a feel in the air of new springing life. The orchids, fresh and perfect against the damp stone, growing between cushions of bright green moss, had creamy flowers, fragrant and triplelobed. Stephen had hardly been able to believe his eyes.

Tace, describing the orchid in his novel, had also told where it was to be found, and within a few years every tuber and plant of
leuchorchis albida
had been stripped from the moor. Here, by the Hilder, was far west of the site of the plants mentioned in Wrenwood. Stephen resolved to be wiser than his grandfather and, while telling his readers of his discovery, not to disclose its whereabouts.

He didn’t even tell Lyn. She liked flowers and planted flowers in their garden but he often felt she
didn’t really care about the moor. When she asked him if he would come with her to see Joanne he put forward the excuse of having his article to write, so Lyn went with Kevin.

‘I reckon you’re very wise not going in for this lark,’ Joanne said, shifting the mound of her body uncomfortably under the bedclothes. ‘If you get like weakening, just remember me. D’you know, they could keep me in here right up until the baby’s born.’

‘They won’t do that,’ Lyn said. ‘They haven’t got the beds.’

‘She’s brought it on herself with overeating,’ said Kevin.

For once Joanne didn’t round on him. She sighed. ‘It’s all fluid, they say. The baby isn’t even very big. I’m like one of those water beds, stick a needle in me and I’d go down to nothing. Pity they can’t.’

Lyn left the two of them together. St Ebba’s, the maternity hospital, was a good way farther down North River Street from Hilderbridge General, but there had been no room left in St Ebba’s car park and she had used the car park of the rambling, foinstone, turreted building that had once been the Three Towns work-house. It was nearly eight o’clock of a sunny evening, still light, as light as afternoon, but cool as early June often is. The trees in the grounds were in full, fresh leaf, and behind them the sun declined towards the moorland horizon, its rays making a brilliant silver-gold glare through the tracery. Lyn took one of the gravel paths into the grounds of the general hospital, walking towards the sun that dazzled her eyes so that she screwed them up against it. Her hair was loose today and she wore a blue and white striped cotton dress with her mother’s birthday gift cardigan. She had several
pairs of sunglasses, perks of Gillman’s, but she had forgotten to bring a pair with her.

She saw the man, not very tall, thin, wearing jeans and a tee-shirt, coming along the path towards her, towards the main gate into North River Street, but the sun blinded her and she didn’t know him. He saw her and stopped. She closed her eyes and passed her hand over them and looked again. When she saw it was Nick Frazer something very curious happened. She behaved as she had never thought it would be possible for her to behave. She didn’t think. It was a reflex, the result of those weeks of thinking and longing and wondering. She ran to him and into his arms. He put out his arms and caught her and held her, and they stood there on the gravel path in the grounds of Hilderbridge General Hospital, embraced as if they had long been lovers and had known each other with profound emotion and physical joy and had been parted only to meet again now, by chance, so felicitously.

‘I’ve thought about you every day, all the time,’ he said.

‘Oh, I know, I know,’ she said.

‘I knew exactly why you didn’t come and I thought you knew why I didn’t come to you. But it was a deadlock, no way of breaking out of it. I even hoped that damned cat would find his way back so that I’d have an excuse to ring you.’

‘I had a sort of fantasy he’d go to Mrs Africa’s and I’d go there after him and so would you and we’d meet.’

‘Did you? I had a feeling like that too. How mad we’ve been, Lyn. Lyn, Lyn, that’s the first time I’ve said your name. Except to myself, I’ve said it a hundred times to myself.’

She said in a level voice, though her hands were shaking, like puppets jerked on strings, ‘I’ve been visiting
my sister. My brother-in-law’s with her now but visiting ends at eight and I have to take him home. I brought him so I have to take him back.’

‘Let him take your car and you stay with me,’ Nick said.

‘I can’t do that.’ They stood under a cedar tree. Nick took her in his arms and kissed her but, when his lips parted and she could taste his mouth, she drew back. There were movements in her body that frightened her. She said, and her voice wasn’t steady any more, ‘I have to take Kevin home now. Should we — should we see each other tomorrow?’

‘Lunch at the Blue Lagoon?’

She nodded.

‘I don’t want to let you go, but d’you know, I feel so ridiculously happy. I am awake, aren’t I? I haven’t succumbed to weariness at Uncle Jim’s bedside and fallen asleep? Of course I haven’t, I don’t dream, never have. It’s early closing tomorrow — we can have all the afternoon together.’

She smiled at him. Then she walked away quickly along the path to the car park. Kevin was waiting by the car, leaning his arms on its roof, bored, smoking a cigarette.

‘What d’you think of her, then?’

Lyn blinked at him. He seemed curiously unreal. ‘I’m sorry?’ she said.

‘Jo. I said what d’you think of her?’

‘She seems okay. How would
I
know?’

He got into the car beside her, gangling, long-legged, with big hands and feet. She realized for the first time fully consciously that she was ill at ease with, even afraid of, very tall men. Nick and she, they were proportioned to each other, they seemed to belong to the same tribe.

‘Okay if we pick up Trev?’

Kevin’s twin worked in some factory or mill in North Hilderbridge where he did the maximum overtime. He was waiting on the Jackley Road outside a pub called the Ostrich, Kevin’s double in every particular until he had grown a moustache.

‘Where’s old Steve got to, Lyn?’

‘Where d’you think?’ said Kevin. ‘I tell her she’s a moor widow.’

‘Yeah, but what’s he escaping from, Lyn? What’s with him he can’t adjust to reality?’

‘The moor’s real enough, I should think.’ She didn’t want to discuss Stephen.

‘It’s either an acute case of claustrophobia or his super ego could be compelling him to confront agoraphobia.’

‘Why don’t you apply for a grant and go and do a psychology degree at the tech?’ said Lyn.

Trevor began to explain why not, about the pointlessness of formal education in an area where knowledge depended so much upon intuition, and also about how much he earned with his overtime at Batsby Ball Bearings. She didn’t listen. She thought of Nick and then of Stephen. But what difference could this make to Stephen? She was depriving him of nothing, taking from him nothing he wanted or could possess.

A flock of sheep were in Goughdale, cropping the turf, dark-wooled, long-horned sheep of the breed called Big Allen Black. The outward signs of the disused mine workings beneath, the old windlass, the boundary stones, the ruined coes, rose out of the plain and showed black against the setting sun.

Would he, seventeen years afterwards, be able to rediscover the mouth of the hole that led down into the
Goughdale Mine? He thought he could remember roughly where it was: on the side of Big Allen facing him, the northern face, almost at the foot and a little to the right of centre. Somewhere among the crags of limestone that made a broad shelf along part of the foin’s lowest slopes.

The hole was referred to by Tace as ‘Apsley Sough’, though ‘sough’, in these parts meant a drain or channel. He had sited it far from where it really was, half a mile down from where it was; he had obviously never seen it. And it couldn’t have been a sough or drain, for there could have been no reason to drain water
into
a mine. Joseph Usher, Tace’s hero, had hidden himself in a chamber of the mine but had been driven out by hunger and thirst and, having given himself up, been taken away to trial and execution. Stephen made his way across the dale towards the mountain by a path that ran to the west of the ruined engine house. It was growing cool, even cold, with the departure of the sun. The sheep lifted their heads and looked at him as he passed by but they made no sound.

The weather had been hot that August when he was twelve. Peter Naulls and he, searching for the hole into the mine, had got as suntanned as if they had been on the kind of holiday they never had, on the beaches of Spain or Italy. Peter had, literally, stumbled on the mouth of the hole. Running in some ritual or phase of a game — for they didn’t spend every minute of each day crawling and peering and prodding the ground — he had caught his foot in a root and fallen headlong. He had found himself looking into the infinitely complex growth of stem and grass and leaf and tendril and fine twig that covered the moor in a thick springy upholstery, but also beyond this, through and beside this, into clear darkness. Under his face, half overlaid by a
crag shaped like a mushroom growth on a tree trunk, entirely obscured until his eyes were close up to it by the thick vegetation, was the open fissure which for thirty days they had searched for in vain. He had sprung to his feet and thrown out his arms and cried, for he had just been doing Archimedes’ Principle at school, ‘Eureka!’

Where was Peter now? The uncles and aunts presumably knew but Stephen himself hadn’t heard a word of him since he went away to college in London when he was eighteen. That departure to university of a man far less intelligent than himself had been a blow to Stephen. And Dadda’s comment — he occasionally deigned to recognize the existence of the Naulls clan — had done nothing to mitigate his sad resentment. ‘Bloody degree won’t get the lad a living in Naulls’s shop.’ Peter hadn’t been expected to work in the men’s outfitters, never had and never would.

But even in their search, strictly speaking, it had been Peter who had succeeded and not he. Peter, though fortuitously, had found Apsley Sough. It had been he who, with truth, had cried out, ‘I have found it!’

Next day they had gone back with ropes and a book on rock-climbing from the library to teach themselves about knots. Dadda would have locked Stephen up if he had known what was going on. Uncle Leonard and Auntie Midge, more appropriately to their characters, would have had nervous breakdowns.

The hole was not a vertical shaft. If it had been they might not have dared penetrate it very far. It had been bored or dug or had occurred naturally at an incline of about thirty degrees, so that all the way down into the mine, holding onto the rope, they had had purchase for their feet, had almost been able to
walk down
, though
describing it thus made a dull and orthodox act of what had been the great adventure of their boyhood.

After a long descent the shaft widened a little, and the light of their torches showed them the interior of the mine, the southern end of the tunnellings. They dropped down into a chamber, the roof of which must have been seven or eight feet high, and where the air seemed quite fresh. It was cold, though, by contrast with the heat outside, and there was a cold, damp, metallic smell. They lit the candles they had brought and made their way along a passage which led out of the chamber, gazing wordlessly — he couldn’t remember that they had spoken at all while in there — at the arched limestone walls, at the tunnels that from time to time branched from this central artery, once into a wide gallery whose egress had been blocked by a fall of stone. And then the flames of their candles had gone out. They had noticed no difference in the quality of the atmosphere but the flames of their candles had gone out.

They had said nothing. They had stood in the dark until Peter had put his torch on, and then they had turned back, glad though, relieved, when they could light a match again. Stephen had gone out first, scrambling up the shaft, putting all his weight this time on the rope and wondering what would happen, whether they would ever be found alive, if the rope came unfastened from the spur of rock to which they had tied it. But not really frightened, buoyed up always by a child’s invincible courage, the courage that comes from a sense of immortality.

When he came out into the bright white daylight he had a shock. There was another boy there, standing by the mouth of the hole, looking down, looking at the twitching rope. Adults in those circumstances would
have spoken to each other, but not children. Stephen didn’t know who the boy was or what he was doing on Big Allen and he didn’t speak to him. Nor did the boy address him or Peter. He stood a little apart from them, kicking at the scree, and then he walked off across Goughdale between the crumbling towers. Stephen could remember how hot it had been, the sky a dazzling white-blue, the heat making the air wave and shiver above the dry yellowed turf.

Dusk now brought a stillness and its own grey translucent light. He walked along the ridge of rock, trying to picture once more the place where Peter had run and fallen. At one point he knelt down and parted the heather with his hands, so sure was he that he had found it, but there was nothing but the scree and the tiny plants which grew amongst it. It had become too dark to search any more and it was cold. He shivered a little as he set off for home.

They had
meant to go out to lunch, or Nick had. He said to come upstairs to the flat only to fetch his jacket, and then they would go and eat and talk and maybe sit by the river. It was the first really warm day of summer. Lyn went first up the stairs and into the set of big, shabby rooms with arched windows that seemed full of sky.

She turned to Nick as he came in. He looked like a thin, young boy, much younger than he really was, his brown hair like a monk’s without the tonsure. His skin was brown and his eyes a light clear hazel. One of his hands was on the door, the other extended to her. She looked at his fine, thin hands, the turned wrists where there were fair hairs on the brown skin, and put her face up to his.