‘They had one-way tickets for London. Poor lambs, they were twenty minutes early for the train. A mistake! The trouble I had, getting Miles thawed out after that catastrophe. It’s awfully difficult, you know, Tom, for a seventeen-year-old to believe one doesn’t blame him. But I didn’t. Would you? You’ve seen Annet.’
‘No,’ he said; with difficulty, but it sounded all right. ‘No, I wouldn’t blame him.’
‘Good for you, Tom, I knew you were human. But poor Bill has a social conscience, you see. I only have a human one. They made each other pretty sore. Bill felt Miles ought to come right out and confide in him. And Miles wouldn’t. They ate the souffle, though,’ she added comfortably, rightly recollecting this as reassurance that her menfolk were not seriously disabled, physically or emotionally. ‘And to tell the truth, I laced the coffee. It seemed a good thing to do.’
Was he allowed to ask questions? And if so, how far could he go? There must be a limit, and the most interesting questions probably stepped well over it. Such as: why? Why should Miles find it necessary to plan a runaway affair with Annet? Many escorts a good deal less presentable were allowed to take the girl about, provided they called for her respectably at the house, and were vetted and found reliable. The Becks wouldn’t have frozen out a good-looking boy with wealthy parents, excellent prospects, and charm enough, when he pleased, to call the bird from the tree. If he’d wanted Annet, he had only to convince the girl, her parents would certainly have smiled upon him from the beginning. So why? Why run? Apparently there was no question of previous misbehaviour, no girl-in-trouble complications that made a getaway and a quick marriage desirable.
‘It’s all blown over now, of course,’ said Eve, slowing at the first traffic lights on the edge of Comerbourne. ‘Nobody else ever treated it as more than a romantic escapade. But Mrs Beck still thinks Miles planned her poor girl’s ruin. I thought I’d better tell you how the land lay, you might feel a bit baffled if it came up out of the blue.’
Somehow it was too late by then for the ‘why’ question. All he could say was: ‘And is he still – I mean, has he got over her by now?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t ask him. What he wants to tell he’ll tell, what he doesn’t nobody can make him. Me, I don’t try. But getting over Annet might be quite an arduous convalescence, don’t you think so?’
‘It well might,’ said Tom, with brittle care. She was a dangerous woman, she might see all too readily that Miles wasn’t the only chronic case.
‘Ah, well,’ she said cheerfully, putting her foot down as the orange changed to green, ‘he’ll be going up to Queens’ next year, and he’ll have more than enough to keep him busy. I hear he’s coming camping with you next weekend. Thirty juniors to ride herd on, he says. Heaven help you all!’
‘We’ll survive,’ said Tom. If you were the youngest male member of staff, and owned an anorak and a pair of clinkered boots, you were a sitter for all the outdoor assignments, and it was your bounden duty to look martyred and moan about it. No matter how much you actually enjoyed skippering a party of boys up a mountain or under canvas, you could never admit it. ‘Drop me along here by Cooks’, would you? I’ve got to see about some maps I ordered.’
And as he got out of the car and leaned to offer thanks for his ride, glad to be seen with her, complemented by the greetings he shared with her, the amazing woman smiled up at him confidently and calmly, and said: ‘You won’t take them on the Hallowmount, will you?’
She wasn’t even going to wait for an answer, so completely did she trust him to accept and understand what she had said. She gave him a little wave of her hand, and expected him to withdraw head and hand and close the door; and when he didn’t, she sat looking up at him with a quizzical, slightly surprised smile, no doubt thinking him as endearingly male and stupid as her own pig-headed pair.
‘Not take them on the Hallowmount?’ said Tom cautiously, to be sure he had not mistaken her.
‘No – but naturally you wouldn’t. Silly of me!’
‘Why not, though? Or is that a stupid question? And why naturally not?’ He had been feeling so close to her, so comfortable with her, and suddenly he felt alien and out of his depth. There she sat, in her amber-and-bracken autumn suit that wouldn’t have looked abashed in Bond Street, with her smooth brown beehive of hair and her long, elegant legs and incredibly fragile and impractical shoes, as modern as tomorrow, as secure and confident as money and education and travel and native temperament could make her; and without mystery or constraint, as though she were reminding her husband to lock the garage door, she warned him off from taking his week-end camp on the Hallowmount.
‘Oh, we just wouldn’t,’ she said, vaguely smiling, eyes wondering at him a little, but making allowances for him, too, as the incomer, the novice in these parts. ‘We just don’t. I wouldn’t worry too much myself, but some of their mothers might. You weren’t thinking of going there, were you?’
‘Well, no, I wasn’t. Too exposed, anyhow, for October. I was thinking of taking them up between the Westlyns.’
‘Good! Fine!’ said Eve Mallindine, satisfied, and slammed the door shut. She looked up and smiled at him through the open window. ‘No need to go yelling for trouble, is there?’ she said serenely, and shot away up Castle Wylde before the lights at the Cross could change colour again.
And he had not taken them on the Hallowmount. Once, he suspected – and the glance back at himself when younger was revealing – he would have gone there on principle, having been warned to keep away. Not now. Besides, she hadn’t pressed him, hadn’t exactly warned him off. She’d merely indicated to him that the plate was hot, so that he shouldn’t burn his fingers. She’d taken it for granted that no more was necessary where a sane and sensible adult was concerned. And whether it could be considered a sign of good sense and maturity or not, he hadn’t taken them on the Hallowmount.
But in the gathering dark over the remnants of the fire, up there in the shelter between the ridges of the Westlyns, with one ear cocked for sounds of forbidden horseplay from the Three B tents, he had turned his head to stare thoughtfully at the distant ridge of the Hallowmount, with its top-knot of trees and rocks black against the milky spaces between the stars. And he had asked the son what he had never had time to ask the mother.
‘How did it get its name – the Hallowmount? And why is it taken for granted one doesn’t take boys camping there?’
‘Is it?’ said Miles vaguely, flat on his back on a spread ground-sheet, with the faint glow of the fire falling aslant across his smooth, high-boned cheek and broad forehead. Mild wonder stirred in his tone and recalled Eve’s look and voice, but he wasn’t paying very much attention. ‘I suppose it would be, come to think of it. They wouldn’t mind by daylight, but at night they’d probably think it wasn’t the thing to do. On the principle that you never know, you know.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Tom. ‘You tell me. What about the name, for instance?’
‘I don’t think anybody knows much about the name, to be honest, but a lot of them will tell you they do. It goes back into pre-history—’
‘Or thereabouts,’ said Dominic Felse dubiously, demurring at such imprecision in his friend.
‘Let’s not argue about a few hundred years. Anyhow, whenever it was, we don’t know how it arose. Something not quite canny. But all this region and its inhabitants are a bit uncanny, I suppose.’ He opened his eyes wide at the sky and sat up, feeling it, perhaps, hardly dignified to conduct a discussion from the supine position. ‘Take the old lead mines,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘There couldn’t be anything more practical, but there couldn’t be anything more haunted, either. We have knockers – like in the Cornish tin mines. And Wild Edric’s down there, too, with his fairy wife Godda. And half a dozen others, for all we know. It’s the same with the Hallowmount. Some say it’s “hallow” because it was holy, a place of sacrificial mysteries in the pre-Christian cults. And some say it’s really “hollow,” and not for nothing. They say people have stumbled on the way inside sometimes, and vanished.’