One thing he could do, and he did it. He parked the Mini in the drive of Bill Mallindine’s modern house by the riverside, and made returning a borrowed book the excuse for his unexpected call. Eve was out at some improbable feminine meeting, but Bill gave him a drink and a chair by the fire, and welcomed him gladly. And he hadn’t even had to ask any questions. At a table in one remote corner of the multiple living-room – heaven knew how they heated it so successfully, the crazy shape it was – Miles Mallindine and Dominic Felse were devotedly disentangling finished cassettes from cameras, and securing them in their little yellow bags ready for the post. Their heads together over the work, they gave him the polite minimum of attention. It was Bill who teased Miles to display some of his best pictures, and volunteered the information that the two had spent the half-term camping and climbing near Tryfan. The two pairs of boots, bristling with tripe hobs and clinkers, carelessly off-loaded in the hall, should have spoken for themselves.
So that, as far as it went, was that. Miles was home, with enough paraphernalia to provide him with an alibi, and with a reliable ally to bear witness for him into the bargain. And if they’d really planned anything together, Annet and he, wouldn’t they have taken care to cover her tracks as well as his?
And besides, there was the incredible conviction with which she had carried off her return, the dozen details that couldn’t be shrugged away. The mention of her surprise at seeing him, when he should have been well on his way home, the reassurance that she wasn’t even in danger of getting wet, because it had stopped raining, when it hadn’t rained for five days. And her charmed, distant face, and the suddenly engendered fear and wonder as the ground shook under her feet. Could she, could anyone, act like that? It was hard to believe.
Almost as hard as that the earth had opened and admitted her into secret, terrible places, and given her back at the end of five days with no memory of the time between, not a minute older than she went away. Late, late in a gloaming Kilmeny had come home, all right, but whether from some fairy underworld or a cheap hotel God-knew-where, that was more than he dared guess. Bonny Kilmeny! She was that, whatever else she might be. And Kilmeny, you’ll remember, he said to himself bitterly, driving home, was pure as pure could be. Who are you, to say Annet isn’t?
It wasn’t over when he got home. He had prayed that she’d be in bed, and her parents too exhausted to harrow the barren ground over again for him. But she was still there, and all that was changed was that the passion was clean gone out of her repeated affirmations, nothing left but the simple repetition of facts, or what she claimed were facts. She was indifferent now, she spoke without vehemence; if they believed her, well, if they did not, she couldn’t help that. She was tired, but eased; and there was something still left in her face and body of a strange, rapt, content. The strongest argument for her, if she had but known it. They might plead, and argue, and lament; she had only to withdraw into her own heart, and she was secure from all troubling. He could feel the truth of that, at least. The source of warmth and joy and security was within her, some perfection remembered. Not remembered, perhaps, only experienced still. My God, but it couldn’t be true! Could it?
And when they all said good-night, like relatively civilised people, suddenly it was clear that they would speak no more of this. She could not be shaken. She could only be convinced by the production of a letter received in answer to one she had posted on Thursday, by the torn-off leaves of the calendar, and their collective certainty. Confronted with these, she shrank in bewilderment and fright, and from accusing they had to reassure her. Did any of them believe? Was it even possible to believe? Elsewhere he would not have credited it, but here on the borders the frontiers of experience grew generously wide and imaginative. They winced from pressing her too hard, probably they were grateful that they had not been able to catch her out in any particular. Wasn’t it better to let well alone, and pray a little? Dreading, nevertheless, what revelation might yet erupt to confound them all.
Nobody knew! That was sanctuary, that nobody knew but the four of them, and please God, nobody ever would. He was so tangled into their household now that he would never get clear. Maybe he had drawn too close to Annet, in everything but blood, ever again to be considered as more distant than a brother.
Perhaps that was why he couldn’t sleep, why he arose before dawn, and went like a sensible modern man to look over the ground by daylight. Painfully new daylight, but clear enough to show details the moon had silvered over. Because she must be lying. (Musn’t she?) And if she was lying, where had she been? Farther away than the other side of the Hallowmount. And what had she been doing? (And with whom? But that was the question he would not entertain, he pushed it out of sight as soon as it reared its head.) Even granted the simple possibility of amnesia, she must have been somewhere. And from that somewhere she had returned precisely to the Hallowmount, as if only through the medium of that incalculable place could she reach her home again. That made this as surely a translation back from fairyland as if the earth had truly opened and let her go.
Again he climbed the hill, this time in the grey first light of a dull morning. Once over the crest he looked down upon the shallower undulations of another moorland valley, open heath grazing on both sides of the narrow brook that threaded it. An unpopulated, bare, beautiful desolation in changing tints of heather and bracken and furze. Not a single house in sight. No one here but sheep to stare at him and wonder as he dropped in long strides down the hill. On a wet Thursday afternoon there’d be no picnickers, no hill-walkers, no one to watch Annet Beck disappear into the underworld. Not like venturing on to Comerbourne station with a suitcase in broad daylight, among hundreds of people who knew her. But if this was to be considered as an escape route to somewhere else instead of fairyland, then there had to be a means of leaving this bowl of waste land, and faster than on foot. Footpaths were here by the dozen, trailing haphazard across the country from nowhere to nowhere, apparently, skirting the patches of bog where the cotton grass fluttered ragged and frayed. With a pony you could cover the ground here at a good speed, but Annet wasn’t one of the local jodhpurs and ’ard ’at sorority, and with a pony she would in any case have been courting notice when she did encounter human beings. Could a car be got up here? He had been long enough in these parts now to realise that there were comparatively few places round these border uplands where the local people couldn’t get cars to go. They had to; they lived in every corner of the back of beyond.
The long, oval, tilted bowl of pasture rose to northward, towards Comerford, and dipped to southward, in the direction of Abbot’s Bale. Both were out of sight. In a tract of land without cover you could still be private here; all you needed was neutral colours and stillness, and you were invisible.
The easiest run out of the bowl would surely be towards Abbot’s Bale. And beyond the brook, in the broad bottom of the valley, there sprang to life irresolutely a tiny, trodden path, that broadened and paled as it followed the ambling brook downwards, until it showed bared stones through here and there, and had grown to the dimensions of a farm cart, with two deep wheel-ruts, and the well-trodden dip where the horse walked in the middle. Where it tunnelled through the long grass it dwindled again, but always to reappear. Where it passed close to the marshy hollows the bright emerald green of fine, lush turf invaded it. In the distance there was a gate across it, and beyond probably others. But gates can be opened. Most gates, anyhow. A motor-bike could be brought up here with ease, even a small car, if you didn’t mind a rough ride. And whoever had met Annet here and taken her away wouldn’t be noticing a few bumps, or even a few scratches threatening his paint.