Miles had been right, fear was inappropriate and irrelevant. Awe remained with him, and grew, but not fear. And if Miles had been right about that, too, then belonging was all. It could happen to you without any motion on your part. Suddenly it was, and you were in it. You belonged, you respected, you partook, you contributed, this earth and all its layers of ancestral bones accepted you; a better and safer, a more impregnable security than belonging to a tribe or conforming to a society could give you.
How strange that you should have to clamber alone into some remote, wild place like this, into this articulate silence and this teeming solitude, to discover where you came from and where you were going, and in what company. I belong, therefore I am.
The ground-wind had dropped, the grasses were motionless. The cold, clear air hung still. He heard, with some detached sense that did not suffer his deeper silence to be broken, light, distant sounds from the edges of Comerford, the faint, far hum of cars on country roads, a motor-cycle climbing steadily, small synthetic echoes from other worlds.
And all this time, side by side with this unbelievable serenity of mind, the horror possessed him that had fallen upon him when George Felse had said: ‘Annet described him as her father.’
There was nothing new to be thought or felt about it now, but he could not let it rest, his mind trod round and round the same path endlessly, agonised and finding no reassurance.
George had taken it to mean merely that she was preparing the way for some man respectable enough and old enough to pass for her father, in case they should be seen together. But supposing she had been using the term more precisely than that? Supposing she really meant the man everyone thought of as her father?
He had tried to get the idea out of his mind, but it would not leave him. All the details that might have presented discrepancies, and delivered him from the nightmare, came treacherously and fell into place. Beck had been home all the week-end? Oh, no, by his own account and his wife’s, he hadn’t. He’d tramped the lanes and the streets of Comerford most of Thursday night, but after that he’d gone off by bus to his sister’s place at Ledbury and his cousin’s small-holding in the Teme valley, in case Annet had turned up there. He’d come home only on Monday night. Nobody had checked his statements, why should they? Not even his wife. Nobody knew that he wasn’t really Annet’s father, nobody except Mrs Beck and Tom Kenyon.
Unless Annet knew. That was the whole point. Did Annet know? And if so, how long had she known? He pondered that painfully, and he could not avoid the fear that she did know it, and had known it for a long time. It accounted all too reasonably for her inaccessibility, her estrangement from them both. From Beck as father, that is. But Beck as a man?
Was it too far-fetched? It would be an appalling tragedy, but it could happen. There was an even worse thought peering at him relentlessly from the back of his mind: that Beck had told her the truth himself, because he could not feel towards her as his daughter, knowing she was not, and his sick conscience would not let him rest until he had made confession. He was a stickler for truth and duty in his ineffective way, he might even have meant it for the best.
And she – how could you ever be sure about Annet? She might have reacted with warmth and indignation and tenderness, from which the slippery path to love is not so far. And granted that as a possibility, into what a desperate and piteous situation they had trapped each other. Flight, robbery, murder might well come to look like legitimate ways out of it, if no other offered.
He wished now that he had told George, he even made strenuous resolutions to tell him as soon as he came; but in his heart he knew that he never would. He could not repeat what he had heard from an overwrought and drunken man; he had no right to break that lamentable confidence.
As often as he reached the end of this reappraisal, and turned to look at the whole idea with a more critical eye, he was convinced that he was mad, that it was impossible, that he had a warped mind; but as soon as he began a feverish examination of the details, in the hope of throwing it out altogether, he knew that it could happen, that such things had happened, that there was no immunity from the abnormal even in a world of careful normality, and no place to hide from love if it came for you. Look at his own case! Had he ever wanted to love her? Does anybody ever want to walk into the fire?
Half past six by his watch. The small, luminous pinpoints of the figures were the only brightness in this calm, immemorial, secret dark. He stirred, finding his limbs cramped by the gathering chill, and slid down from his perch into the grass. George would surely be here soon. And almost inevitably the two boys, though told to go home after their tea, would use their own obstinate judgement, and come back to share what was left of his vigil. More than likely even Jane, having packed her coach-load off to Comerbourne in charge of a couple of prefects, would return to see how he had fared. It couldn’t be long now.
He would be sorry, almost, to have his solitude shared by the living. For all the innumerable generations of the dead, dwindling far into time past, before the Romans came mining for lead, before the Iron Age fort on Cleave was dug, before the chipped flints of Middlehope were made, he had no need of speech in order to communicate, no need to exert himself in explanations or response. He was at one with them without effort of any kind, without rites, without ritual.
Regina was surely right. There were not, there never had been, any witches on the Hallowmount. They would have been inappropriate, derisory, redundant, alien, false. Incantations were for outsiders.
He thought, I’m going queer from being alone, getting fanciful; there’s a twentieth century somewhere around, and we’re in trouble in the middle of it, and no way out that I can see.
And it was then that the small sound that had been hammering for some minutes at his senses, unnoticed, achieved actual presence, and made itself known to him.
Time came back with it, and stress, and the inescapable memory of Annet, mute in the heart of her pathetic dream of happiness, with wreckage all round her. He moved out of the enclosing ring of the rocks, to hear more clearly.
Busy, regular, persistent, the hum of an engine climbing steadily, not on the Fairford side of the hill, but down there in the highest reaches of Middlehope. From the western flanks of the Hallowmount the sound would be cut off completely; here on the crest he heard it plainly. And when he moved out to the edge of the slope, looking down over the shallow bowl of the valley head, he saw the small glow-worm of a headlight weaving its way up by the sheep-path from Abbot’s Bale. Light and sound drew steadily nearer, crossing the boggy patches with assurance, mounting into the dry pasture where the path vanished like a smoke-trail on a pale sky. Close beneath the Altar, in the throat of Middlehope, the motor-cycle halted, and in a moment the engine stopped.