‘And are you living over the shop?’
‘I think Uncle rather hoped I’d live in the two rooms at the back but they smell a bit too powerfully of monkey and parrot so I’ve moved up into his flat. It’s nice, you must come and see it.’
This was a remark that three days before she would have thought of as wolfish. Now it seemed merely friendly. But she didn’t answer it. She was afraid he would ask her about herself and to forestall this she asked him to tell her about his training and what he hoped for in the future. He talked. They ate their bread and cheese. Lyn’s hands had stopped shaking.
‘That’s enough about me,’ he said. ‘Tell me about you.’
I am twenty-five, I am married, I was married in church and have lived with my husband four years, so I must be married, I have no children and never shall have, but I am waiting, waiting, for what I don’t know … ‘Nothing to tell,’ she said. And there was nothing, nothing she could tell. Mr Bale would come back in two or three weeks and she need never see Nick Frazer again. ‘I really must go now.’
While they were in the pub, in a corner far from a window, the rain had come on heavily, the kind of rain that will soak you to the skin in two minutes. Nick stopped her inside the door.
‘Will you wait for me? I’ll be very quick.’
He came back, and he had been very quick, with an umbrella from which, as he plunged in through the swing door, he was tearing the plastic wrapping.
‘You bought it specially!’
‘I had to have an umbrella to walk you home.’
‘But I live in Chesney,’ she said. ‘I’m going on the bus.’
‘To walk you to your bus stop then.’
It was something she hadn’t looked for and she was almost dismayed. Under the umbrella they had to walk very close together and after a while he took her hand and hooked it through his arm. It was precisely the action of Joseph Usher in The Mountainside, and Isabella Thornhill had slapped his face for it before rushing off, unprotected, into the downpour. Lyn felt the blood come up into her face. She held Nick’s arm and felt him warm and somehow tough against her side. He talked about the town, how he had never before been to this part of the country, how one day soon he must try to get out on the moor. There was an opening for her here. My husband, who is in fact the grandson of Alfred Osborn Tace, is really quite an authority on Vangmoor … She didn’t take it. She would have found it hard to speak, anyway. It was taking all her concentration to breathe normally, not to begin shaking again, with their arms linked and their bodies so close.
The bus saved her. As they turned up River Street it was coming down the hill and there wouldn’t be another for an hour.
‘There won’t be another for an hour!’ she cried.
‘Would that be so terrible?’
‘Oh, yes, yes, it would. Thank you for lunch, thank you very much. Goodbye!’
He stood on the pavement, smiling in perplexity, making swirls in the air with the umbrella. Her cheeks burned and she turned away from the window. The bus pulled away, through the rain, up towards the moor.
A full week had gone by and it was Saturday again before Stephen went out on the moor. There was not a soul to be seen, though it was a weekend and the sun was shining after many days of rain. The week before last, when it had been colder, he had seen parties of hikers, a fisherman coming from the Hilder, cyclists on the Loomlade road, campers with tent and calor gas stove and blankets on their backs. This morning Vangmoor was deserted. It was impossible to avoid the conclusion that the murder had emptied it.
At first he disliked this thought. It meant that the moor had in the past few days become known not as somewhere unique and beautiful but as the place where a young girl had been killed. Then, as he crossed the Loomlade road and entered the Vale of Allen, his feelings underwent a change. The moor seemed more his own when it was unpeopled, so that his childhood fantasy might have become real and he be the lord of this wild country.
Big Allen, the highest peak of the foinland, which was so often veiled in mist or appeared as a blurred blue shape, this morning showed every crevice and crag on its slopes, every wind-bent bilberry, every clump of ling. The air was as clear as the air only is after prolonged rain. The crinkle-crankle path that traversed the hillside was a bright brown hairpin, woven between the green and purplish and silvery heather. Now, in the dales beyond he could see the remains of the old mine workings. No lead had been mined on Vangmoor for a hundred years, but the engine houses and the housing for water wheels, once deemed so hideous, now in ruin had a beauty of their own. He climbed the lower slopes of Big Allen and stood, looking westwards. From here the Foinmen were hidden by the bulk of Ringer’s Foin with the rock on its top like a bell. In order to see them he would have had to climb a couple of hundred feet more. But the Hilder revealed itself, running down like a tinsel thread, crossed at one point by stepping stones, at another by the massive stone pillars that once had supported an aqueduct bringing water to the buildings of the Goughdale Mine. The waters of the river were broken and scintillating, splashing in bright sparks where it bounded over rocks on its way to the town. And Hilderbridge lay in the sunshine, its slate roofs all turned to planes of silver, its spires sharp needles, as if a silversmith had made it and dropped it in the valley between the meadows and the moor.
Beneath where he stood, under the western slopes of the foin and the wastes of Goughdale, was a network of subterranean chambers and passages and galleries. The last of the mines had been closed around the time of Tace’s birth and the entrances to the shafts had been closed or blocked by rockfalls. Stephen walked down and back to Loomlade. An hour later he was in Chesney, having seen no animate thing but two bumble bees and a rook. The gatehouse lodge to Chesney Hall that the police had taken over also looked deserted today. David Southworth, who owned the hall and who was the nephew of Tace’s widow, had done up the lodge as a home for his wife’s mother but since her death it had stood empty. Stephen went up the path and looked in the window. He hadn’t been in the lodge since Helena Naulls had left it on the death of her husband. The old wallpapers, nasturtiums in the living room, stripes and posies and true lovers’ knots in the hall, were gone and the walls painted white. There seemed to be no dark corners left, no little cupboards and half-hidden shelves through which a boy could hunt for evidence of his lost mother.
A man was sitting at a desk, typing, another stood by a filing cabinet. Both had their backs to him. Stephen moved away before they could become aware of his head blocking out some of their light. He walked home through the quiet and at this hour deserted village.
4
The fanbelt on the car broke, making Lyn late for work. Stephen tied it up but the string broke and he had to drive the car into Hilderbridge very slowly and carefully so as not to overheat the engine. Mr Gillman had had to attend to his own patients. He said to Lyn, ‘The young chap from Bale’s was in here asking for you. Asking for “Miss” Whalby actually, but I put him right on that one.’
Lyn took off her coat and came back to where her desk and typewriter and appointments book were. Two women had come in and she asked them to wait, giving them magazines to look at. She felt disproportionately upset. It was ridiculous to be upset at all, since she had herself intended to tell Nick she was married as soon as she saw him, or to make sure he saw her left hand on which today she had taken care to wear her wedding ring. She was imagining him shocked by what Mr Gillman said, leaving without a word, returning to the pet shop and alone there ever since, brooding on his disappointment and her treachery. But why should he have reacted like that? How did she know it had been like that? She could hardly ask Mr Gillman. Nick might have laughed when Mr Gillman told him — ‘I didn’t know she was married’ or even, ‘Married, is she? Just my luck.’ Come to that, he might have been relieved. He might have thought he had said too much on Friday, buying the umbrella specially and walking arm in arm with her, and be afraid she would think he had meant more than he had. Why couldn’t she believe that and stop thinking about it?