Though her low voice wasn’t in itself threatening, I sensed he was disconcerted that someone he clearly couldn’t put a name to had recognized him. All he said, however, was ‘You know Beatrix.’
‘Us all know one another.’
She hadn’t once glanced at me, but I was unable to look away from her. A few coarse hairs sprouted from her reddish face; I had the unpleasant notion that her cheeks were raw from being shaved. ‘Do you know where she is?’ Crawley said.
‘Her’ll be with the young ones.’
His head sank as his face turned up further. ‘How many?’
‘All that’s awake. Can’t you hear them? I should reckon even he could.’
As that apparently meant me I dutifully strained my ears, although I wasn’t anxious to heighten another sense: our entry into Warrendown seemed to have intensified the vegetable stench. After a few moments I made out a series of high regular sounds — childish voices chanting some formula — and experienced almost as much relief as my passenger audibly did. ‘She’s at the school,’ he said.
‘That’s her. Back where her was always meant for.’ The woman glanced over her shoulder into the cottage, and part of a disconcertingly large ear twitched out of her headscarf. ‘Feeding time,’ she said, and began unbuttoning the front of her dress as she stepped back through the doorway, beyond which I seemed to glimpse something hopping about a bare earth floor. ‘See you down there later,’ she told Crawley, and shut the door.
I threw the car into gear and drove as fast through the village as I reasonably could. Faces peered through the thick fringes over the low windows of the stunted cottages, and I told myself it was the dimness within that made those faces seem so fat and so blurred in their outlines, and the nervousness with which Crawley had infected me that caused their eyes to appear so large. At the centre of Warrendown the cottages, some of which I took to be shops without signs, crowded towards the road as if forced forward by the mounds behind them, mounds as broad as the cottages but lower, covered with thatch or grass. Past the centre the buildings were more sunken; more than one had collapsed, while others were so overgrown that only glimpses through the half-obscured unglazed windows of movements, ill-defined and sluggish, suggested that they were inhabited. I felt as though the rotten vegetable sweetness in the air was somehow dragging them all down as it was threatening to do to me, and had to restrain my foot from tramping on the accelerator. Now the car was almost out of Warrendown, which was scarcely half a mile long, and the high voices had fallen silent before I was able to distinguish what they had been chanting — a hymn, my instincts told me, even though the language had seemed wholly unfamiliar. I was wondering whether I’d passed the school, and preparing to tell Crawley I hadn’t time to retrace the route, when Crawley mumbled ‘This is it.’
‘If you say so.’ I now saw that the last fifty or so yards of the left-hand side of Warrendown were occupied by one long mound fattened by a pelt of thatch and grass and moss. I stopped the car but poised my foot on the accelerator. ‘What do you want to do?’
His blank eyes turned to me. Perhaps it was the strain on them which made them appear to be almost starting out of his head. ‘Why do you have to ask?’
I’d had enough. I reached across him to let him out, and the door of the school wobbled open as though I’d given it a cue. Beyond it stood a young woman of whom I could distinguish little except a long-sleeved ankle-length brown dress, my attention having been caught by the spectacle behind her — at least half a dozen small bodies in a restless heap on the bare floor of the dark corridor. As some of them raised their heads lethargically to blink big-eyed at me before subsiding again, Crawley clambered out of the vehicle, blocking my view. ‘Thanks for, you know,’ he muttered. ‘You’ll be coming back this way, will you?’
‘Does that mean you’ll be ready to leave?’
‘I’ll know better when you come.’
‘I’ll be back before dark and you’d better be out here on the road,’ I told him, and sped off.
I kept him in view in the mirror until the hedges hid Warrendown. The mirror shook with the unevenness of the road, but I saw him wave his free hand after me, stretching his torso towards the car as though he was about to drop to all fours and give chase. Behind him a figure leapt out of the doorway, and as he swung round she caught him. I could distinguish no more about her than I already had, except that the outline of her large face looked furry, no doubt framed by hair. She and Crawley embraced — all her limbs clasped him, at any rate — and as I looked away from this intimacy I noticed that the building of which the school was an extension had once possessed a tower, the overgrown stones of which were scattered beyond the edge of the village. It was none of my business whether they took care of their church, nor why anyone who’d attended university should have allowed herself to be reduced to teaching in a village school, nor what hold the place seemed to have over Crawley as well. They deserved each other, I told myself, and not only because they looked so similar. Once they were out of sight I lowered the windows and drove fast to rid the car of the stagnant mindless smell of Warrendown.
Before long the track brought me to an unmarked junction with the main road. I wound the windows tight and sped through the remains of Clotton, which felt drowned by the murky sky and the insidious chill of the dark river, and didn’t slow until I saw Brichester ahead, raising its hospital and graveyard above its multiplying streets. In those streets I felt more at ease; nothing untoward had ever befallen me in a city such as Brichester, and nothing seemed likely to do so, especially in a bookshop. I parked my car in a multi-storey at the edge of Lower Brichester and walked through the crowds to the first of my appointments.
My Christmas titles went down well — in the last shop of the day, perhaps too well. Not only did the new manager, previously second in command, order more copies than any of her competitors, but in a prematurely festive mood insisted on my helping her celebrate her promotion. One drink led to several, not least because I must have been trying to douse the nervousness with which Crawley and Warrendown had left me. Too late I realized my need for plenty of coffee and something to eat, and by the time I felt fit to drive the afternoon was well over.
Twilight had gathered like soot in cobwebs as wide as the sky. From the car park I saw lights fleeing upwards all over Brichester, vanishing home. The hospital was a glimmering misshapen skull beside which lay acres of bones. Even the fluorescent glare of the car park appeared unnatural, and I sat in my car wondering how much worse the places I had to drive back through would seem. I’d told Crawley I would collect him before dark, but wasn’t it already dark? Might he not have decided I wasn’t coming for him, and have made his own arrangements? This was almost enough to persuade me I needn’t return to Warrendown, but a stirring of guilt at my cowardice shamed me into heading for that morning’s route.