Just about make it in time for the dawn. Even more than three months after midsummer, the view of the dawn from High Knoll was never a disappointment.
And then he heard voices.
What?
On the Knoll? Voices on the Knoll? At dawn? Marcus felt violated. He stiffened, snatched hold of Malcolm’s collar, clamped a hand over his muzzle.
Accepting he had no right to feel like this. Wasn’t Castle land any more, although it was Marcus’s ambition — if, for instance, there was a sudden upturn (ha!) in the fortunes of The Phenomenologist — to buy it back one day. However, the elderly, reclusive Jenkins brothers, whose father had acquired the Knoll as part of a land package in the late 1940s, seemed to accept the footpath as a right of way, for the owners of the Castle, at least. On this understanding, Marcus laboured up here at dawn twice a week, summer and winter. And in all that time he’d never met a soul, except for the intense American girl that one occasion, and at least she’d had the bloody decency to consult him first.
Because, at the Knoll, the dawn was his time. His and Annie’s and Sally’s.
There was a clump of rowan below the summit, and Marcus crept between the trees, marching Malcolm ahead of him, and waited and listened. A man’s voice was drawling in that rhythmic up and down way that told you he wasn’t really talking to anyone he could see.
‘Now, this is a fairly unexceptional chambered tomb, dating back over four thousand years. We can’t get into the chamber any more because, as you can see, it’s collapsed in the middle. Of course, what we’re looking at here are merely the bones of the structure. Originally, all this would have been concealed by tons of earth, and all you’d have been able to see was a huge mound, with an opening … just … here. Now I say it’s unexceptional … except … for one aspect. The location.’
There was silence for about half a minute. Marcus seethed.
‘How was that, Patrick? We could run some music under the bit where we open up to the dawn spectacle. Do you think? What’s that da da thing from 2001? Or is that a bit of a cliche?’
‘No, it might work. Roger … Just another thought. When I pull back, but before I open it out, if you were to stand fractionally to the left …’
‘How far? This?’
‘And back a bit. Hold it there. Spot on. What I was thinking, if we time this right, do it just as it’s breaking through, it’ll look as if the sun’s rising out of the top of your head. Nice effect. What do you think?’
‘Hmm. Yes, OK. Why not? Worth a try.’
‘Make a change,’ Marcus said loudly, coming out of the trees, ‘from it shining out of his fucking arse.’
He hauled himself up onto the small plateau of the Knoll. Where there was hardly bloody room for him. The molten orb in the east turning five faces florid as they all spun at him.
Young Fraser-Hale looked startled but otherwise unperturbed. The haughty Magda Ring said, ‘Oh for heaven’s sake,’ and slapped her clipboard like a tambourine. The cameraman swung round, aiming his lens at Marcus like an assassin with a rifle. The sound man resentfully snatched off his headphones. And Falconer …
Falconer just smiled.
‘Marcus,’ he said.
Falconer. In his fur-trimmed motorcycle jacket and his ridiculously tight jeans. Falconer who strode the hills with his ponytail swinging, followed by a string of adoring acolytes: the old ladies he charmed, the young ones who — by all accounts — he shagged senseless.
‘One realizes, old chap,’ he said, ‘how terribly fond you are of this place, but we are working and, as you see, space is somewhat limited.’
Falconer, with his weekly television audience of an estimated six million.
Marcus with his ailing private-subscription magazine, circulation just under eight hundred and slipping.
His aversion to the man couldn’t be as simple as that, surely?
‘If I could just point out …’ the cameraman said, looking agitated, ‘that we’re going to have about four minutes, maximum, to get this shot before the sun goes behind a frigging cloud or something.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Falconer said. ‘Our friend just wandered up for a teensy snoop, and now he’s leaving. Aren’t you, Marcus? Old chap.’
Old chap. Always a slight emphasis on the old.
‘As a matter of fact, no.’ Marcus flicked back his heavy, grey hair and straightened his glasses. ‘I don’t think I am.’
Big problem was: most of the villagers seemed to love the bastard. The star-struck idiots on his damned courses taking all the rooms at the local hotels and pubs, filling up the holiday caravans on the mobile-home park; Jarman, the postmaster, claiming Falconer was the biggest boost to the local economy since they closed the bloody railway.
But look at the bloody damage he’s doing, Marcus would protest, and they’d all stare at him, mystified. And Marcus would try to explain how the damned man was destroying the ancient sanctity. Because that was his thing: to demystify, unravel, explain, according to his own limited, prosaic criteria, the essentially inexplicable. Demolishing mythology, dispelling atmosphere, stealing the energy and giving nothing back.
Except money.
Marcus delivering his side of the argument in two successive issues of The Phenomenologist: why the ludicrous University of the Earth would ultimately be a bad thing for the area. Leaving copies lying around, pinning up the article on the village noticeboard. With the exception of Amy, at the Tup, the villagers didn’t understand. They all thought he was out of his bloody tree. And jealous.
Falconer’s perpetually tanned face flexed and he flashed his white crowns. A combative, buccaneering smile, often seen on his accursed TV programme: the informed sceptic challenging the gullible, hare-brained mystic.
Marcus released the dog and straightened up: six inches shorter than Falconer, two stones heavier, ten years older. Malcolm growled happily.
‘You get hold of that bloody thing.’ The soundman backed away, protecting his privates. He wouldn’t know Malcolm was all mouth, no bite.
‘Dog’s got as much right to be here as you,’ said Marcus. ‘Probably more.’
‘You couldn’t be more wrong about that,’ Falconer said smoothly.
‘That animal touches me,’ the soundman said, ‘I’ll have the police in. Have it picked up and put down and you up in court.’ Turned on the cameraman. ‘I hate the country. You never told me there’d be any of this shit. You said there was no need for personal injury insurance. I’ve got kids, Patrick.’
‘Marcus,’ Falconer said, ‘did anyone ever tell you what an offensive little man you were? You’ve been here approximately half a minute, you’ve disrupted my shoot, upset my crew …’
‘Falconer.’ Marcus stared him in the eyes. ‘You have lived here less than six bloody months. In that short time, you have offended every one of my most basic sensibilities.’
‘Sensibilities?’ Falconer shook his head pityingly. ‘God preserve us.’
Marcus advanced on him. ‘Turned the whole valley into a sodding film set. Everywhere I go, there you are doing one of your inane “pieces-to-camera” on the psychology of Neolithic person … as though the whole bloody Stone Age is your bloody backyard.’
‘Well,’ Falconer said. ‘At least my version of pre-history is based on knowledge, as distinct from wishful thinking. But I really don’t have the time to discuss the nonsense of ley lines with an old fart whose opinions are irrelevant anyway, so-’
‘Bollocks! You don’t really know any more than the rest of us. You’re just a bloody academic vampire. A leech. ‘