The Chalk Giants (5 page)

He was shivering by the time the others rose; but his brain felt clear. They were sullen, unspeaking; he wondered if the prospect of his leaving had been discussed. He brewed himself coffee, heating a saucepan on the camping stove. He saw they were down to the last gas bottle. He drank, holding his hands round the cup for warmth, and heard the squeaking as the wood-truck passed the door. He waited a moment longer, and walked into the yard.

The fog was thick as ever, and the light strange; yellowish, and dull. A path wound up across the grass, rising to the cliffs that fringed the bay. He followed it, keeping well back, guided by the sound of creaking.

The ascent was less steep than he had expected. The path led through a gully in the rock, dank stone close to either side. At the crest, the light was brighter; and he glimpsed in the mist the moving shadow that was Jones.

His heart was thudding faster; but the calm remained. He took the gun from his pocket, seated the grip into his palm, clicked off the safety and laid his forefinger alongside the trigger guard. The path swung left, dipping again toward the sea. He hurried the last few yards, and saw the other had turned. Behind him stretched a ragged crest of ground; the light, breaking through the mist, showed the pale gleam of his hair. He was cocking his head, staring back the way he had come. He called, uncertainly; then as Stan closed with him he relaxed. ‘It’s Potty Potts,’ he said. ‘What are you doing, Potty Potts?’ Then his face altered.

His stance was good; and the action of a Luger is precise. He took up first pressure, squeezed. This time he was holding well; the weight of gun and clip absorbed the recoil. The muzzle rose, dropped back to the mark. Echoes ran, barking; but the second round missed. For Jones was no longer there.

He walked forward slowly, and stopped. The paradox was explained; the crest of ground, dim in the mist, was the edge of a seaward-facing cliff. He peered into the void at his feet and heard, mixed with the seething in his ears, the distant roar of the tide. A sea bird wheeled, complaining; there were no other sounds.

He sat on the grass, seeing the rag-doll figure flung out into space as if punched by a massive fist. Then he looked down at the gun. Strange how at the end it had been so easy. No range at all.

He pressed the magazine release, ejected the chambered round. Then he stood up, walked to the truck. A heave, and it too vanished. The faint noise of its falling reached back to him.

It took an hour to find a path to the beach. He moved slowly, climbing between piles of shattered rock. As he climbed, he sang. The tune he chose was his favourite: ‘O God our Help in Ages Past’. Light moved round him, wheeling; and the angels joined in with the descant

He found the truck lying smashed beside a great flat-topped rock. Near it a spur of stone showed a smear of sticky red, but there was no sign of the body. The sea sucked and lisped, surging round the outcrop; the narrow beach of dark fawn sand was empty and smooth.

He sat a while, letting his eyes drift closed. He felt very tired. He heard the sea roar, and the mewing of the gulls. Then the mewing stopped.

He opened his eyes. As he did so the mist above him glowed. Then the water. The brightness grew, till the sea was a mirror of silver, reflecting a hidden sun. Afterwards, the sound began; a sighing at first and rumbling, like the passage of great wheels across the sky. The rumbling deepened to a growl. The cliff vibrated; boulders and stone rained down, from somewhere came the boom of a heavier fall. He ran out into the sea, saw the mist fly ragged, as if driven by the passage of great masses of air. Distant headlands gleamed, alien in bright sunlight; then the noise died away. In its wake came another; but fainter and far-off, like an echo. When that was gone too he turned eastward, began to pick his way once more below the cliffs. An hour, and the bay opened out ahead; he saw the grey bulk of the farmhouse, the barn where the cars were parked.

He had been gripping the butt of the gun in his pocket. He made himself relax, climbed to the sloping turf. The place was silent; and at the door sat Richard Joyce.

He went past him into the building, knowing already what he would find. The rooms deserted, beds and sleeping bags sprawled anyhow. He walked back to the other. He said, ‘Where are they?’

The artist looked at him tiredly, resting his head against the stone. There were dark rings under his eyes. He said, ‘They’ve gone.’

What do you mean?’ said Stan. ‘Where?’

‘Gone,’ said Joyce. ‘Just gone.’ He heaved himself to his feet and walked away.

The sounds came again, in the night. After which he dozed. Toward dawn he was visited by a dream. First it was as if she called to him, her voice mixed with a soughing wind. Then it seemed he stood on some eminence, placed high above a rolling plain. He saw the heath and hills, then all the country; the blue-grey sea, fossil-haunted cliffs. He saw the castle and the village, small as children’s toys; and other villages and towns, and others and still more. Then white flame leaped, devouring; and when he could see again they were blotted out. Wiped clean, every one. And the sea creamed against empty beaches, the wind hissed through the grass. Her voice came again, high and mournful as a sea bird. The sound rushed out to lose itself in the vastness of the west; and the sun rose, over a low hill, bringing an empty dawn.

MAGGIE

Somebody wrote to me to say I’d killed my parents. If that’s true I suppose I did them a favour. It got them out of this. Did I kill them?

In fact, no. You don’t die of grief. You don’t die of anything except stoppage of the heart. But that’s the trouble with emotions. People don’t understand them. They miss what they can do, and make a lot of noise about what they can’t.

Certainly nobody understood me. After what I’d done I was supposed to be - oh Christ, distraught or something. That’s what they could never understand. I wasn’t distraught. I wasn’t anything. Not even sorry. Given the same chance I’d have done the same again.

I suppose I got off lightly. Never teach again of course, but who the hell wants to? If you’d seen that school...

Imagine a great, echoing, glass-and-concrete box. Or a stack of rabbit hutches, fifty or sixty feet high. And all round, reaching into distance, the roofs of the New Model Estate. Grass showing here and there, the grass they hadn’t destroyed. And little tamed trees. I felt I was suffocating. Like a goldfish in a bowl.

I can still hear the kids if I want to. All the hundreds of kids, footsteps and chattering filling the place like splashing water. I can see the Links, long glass corridors stifling-hot in summer, the geometric troughs of peonies and geraniums. It was a Model School. Model School and Model Estate. That was what was wrong with it.

They said I had no feeling for the children. That was the biggest laugh. I was the most popular staff member there, it used to get up the others’ noses. Then they said I had no morals. That stung. The only thing that did. Morals are of the mind, not the body. But that’s two thousand years of Christian ethos for you.

I wonder what’s happened to that school. Flattened, I should think. Those noises... What did I actually do to that girl?

At least that’s one thing I can still be precise about. The Estate was going to take her, like it took all the rest. She was going to marry, like all the rest. And beget children; decently, with the lights out, like all the rest. And shorten her husband’s life for a bigger fridge or a bigger car or new lounge curtains or a trailer cabin cruiser or a colour TV. Instead I opened her eyes, for a little while. I taught her, before the little houses took her, to swim in the wine-dark sea. She sat at the feet of Sappho; she heard the thunder from Olympus, knew Pan and all the fauns.

Only that, of course, isn’t what they called it.

I think there’s a time for everybody when feeling runs out, the tears just dry up. It’s another theory I had, something else that sent me wild; that emotion isn’t a bottomless well, that we’re all of us born with a measured amount and when we’ve run through that there’s no more to come. So if we squander it on unworthy things we’re squandering the only part of ourselves that has a meaning, that sets us apart from trees and the brute beasts. Holmes used to say the brain was like an attic, it could only hold so much lumber. So he never bothered to remember whether the earth went round the sun, or the sun went round the earth. Because it didn’t matter to him. I believe the same of the heart.

So when I came back down here I wouldn’t let myself be moved. To anger, or to joy. They said I was cold, what I’d done showed I had no feelings. But it wasn’t like that. It was nothing like that at all.

At least my mother gave, me a roof. I suppose I should be grateful. I suppose I was. She let me sit about, and stopped talking to the neighbours, and the whispering died away in its own good time.

I suppose that’s why I closed myself up. The things that hurt most people passed me by; and the things that wounded me, they couldn’t understand. Nobody will, in this epoch. Not anymore. Maybe when people start again, in a thousand years when the ash has blown away, there’ll be a new society; one that will care. And maybe in those times there’ll be no wars, or need of them. Sappho will come again.

Long thoughts for a scandal in a Comprehensive! I suppose if I told them to anybody they’d think how hard I was working to justify myself. One thing’s certain. They wouldn’t listen.

I think Richard understood. But men are odd. Most of them can’t stand their own sort of homosexuality but ours turns them on. I talked about it to him once. He reckoned the aesthetic counted for a lot, that it was male practice that offended him, not the morals. But I don’t know. I think there’s more to it than that.

He was good for me. He’d been through the mill himself, he didn’t expect ... oh, standards, anything. There were some afternoons I just couldn’t cope. I’d lie on the bed with the blinds pulled, see the sunburst on the linen, shadows moving on the floor, hear the summer noises of the Island...

He never tried for me. I think he understood. Sometimes he’d paint, or just potter. Sit and read, make tea. And knowing if I called him he was there...

They wouldn’t have understood a relationship like that either. Just presumed I’d turned Normal.

The pub saved me too. I often wondered whether Ray knew. If he did he never showed it. He didn’t pay me, for the singing. Not that I wanted him to. But I could always eat there. It all helped out

I suppose I wasn’t badly off. I’d got Richard when I needed him, and enough money to scrape by on. Even managed to keep the Cambridge going. I think I was settling down to an uneventful spinsterhood. Sounds queer. It’s all a state of mind. Like the other. I’ve known spinsters who’d been married for years. Raised families.

Only one thing scared me. Right deep down. I was afraid my feelings were dead, despite the penny-pinching I’d still got through the stack. It was enough for me just having a living. And going to the Barn, watching the people come and go. I wondered sometimes if I should have killed myself, a long while back when it all blew up. Talked about that to Richard too. He said no, he reckoned nobody sane ever really wants to die. He said there’d been a time when he didn’t care about living, but that was a different thing.

Pity about Vicky coming down. Don’t know how he felt about that. He went into his shell a bit. Pity it had to happen. Nearly makes you believe in personalized Fate.

I told him I thought I might be dead emotionally. That was queer too. Like tempting providence. I don’t know what I feel now. What I want. Maybe the bombs shook me more than I realized.

I knew what I wanted then. When Marty came. But I wouldn’t admit it. Not at the start. That was silly. When you stop being frank with yourself that’s when you really do start getting old.

Never known about her folk. She’s got an auntie in Bournemouth somewhere but she hardly ever sees her. She’s more withdrawn than most girls of her age. Twenty-three now, coming twenty-four. She was nineteen when I met her.

I wonder if she knew? From the start? So much rubbish talked about female intuition. Excuses for empty heads. Some have it, though. The pretty ones. Or maybe they’ve all got it. I never tried to find out about the others.

She was fond of me, I know that. I’ve got a certain quality, I can project. And age has made it easier. That’s why I would have made a good teacher.

That’s why I
did make
a good teacher . . .

I used to sit up with her some nights. In her room. Drink coffee. Slept there once. That was a strain. She surely knew, then . . .

She’s lovely. I used to think she had Spanish blood, but I changed my mind. Now I think she’s pure long-headed Celt. She fits here. Belongs. A Goddess, in a mini and an amber shirt.

Something moving in the notion. But this is a moving country. The past isn’t dead. Least, not till today. Till today, they remembered the Bloody Assize. Now, we’ve all been tried.

Trying to find a place for sorrow. But it’s all too much to take in. Maybe I’m still in shock.

Wonder if that bloody fog’s still there? I’d give a lot to see the sun. The wind’s been rising anyway. That should clear it. Wonder if he was right, about the fall-out. Trying not to think . . .

He was the worst thing that could have happened. From my point of view at least. Heard he’d got a wife in Poole anyway. Teacher. I kept my mouth shut. It would have looked like preaching morals. And I’m hardly the one to start that. Too many cheap answers available.

Wouldn’t have liked him anyway. Walking, talking Image, new-style bourgeois. All the fine emotions of a rattlesnake. But that’s done with now. That and a lot more things.

Wonder if the pub’s still there . . .

Silly thought. Of course it’s there. It’s all there, in the mist. Those ... epicentres were miles away. Up in the Midlands maybe.

Wonder if it’s all over . . .

I remember those trips down to the beach. The Ledges. Thought they were a mistake, at the time. Silly, but I just didn’t think she’d show so much. Must be getting old-fashioned. This is - this was - the seventies.