A cluster of scented candles was still burning on the window ledge. It was half past one. The door was ajar, and had been all the time. Castor was presumably still curled up in front of the fire in the kitchen downstairs. I assumed that Jeremy was asleep in his room on the next floor up. I thought it felt remarkable, and said as much to Mark.
‘You ought to know that this is among the most unexpected things that have happened to me for a very long time.’
‘For me too,’ said Mark, stroking my cheek with the back of his hand. ‘I stopped thinking about this kind of thing ages ago. If you live in a village like Winsford that is the only sensible attitude to take. The number of available women has been rather less than zero for the last sixty years.’
‘I thought lots of tourists come to Exmoor every summer?’
He snorted. ‘If you’re looking for a man you don’t put on Wellington boots and a waterproof jacket and go out on a moor.’
‘But I would like to go walking over the moor with you.’
‘You are different. Presumably you’re not quite right in the head, but that suits me down to the ground. Where would you like to go?’
I thought for a moment. ‘Simonsbath and on towards Brendon, I think. Isn’t that what you recommended? Where you went walking as a child?’
‘Whenever you like,’ said Mark, yawning. ‘Yes, that’s where the moor is at its most beautiful. . And its most desolate. It’ll be as windy and rainy as hell at this time of year, but that’s a risk you have to take. As long as you have the right clothes it’s not a problem.’
I explained that I even had a waterproof jacket for my dog, and he promised that we would go there as soon as an opportunity arose.
‘But not before Christmas,’ he said.
‘Why not?’ I asked, more as a joke than anything else. ‘There’s a whole week left yet.’
‘I’m going to be busy at the beginning of the week,’ he said. ‘A chap I work quite a lot with is coming here. And then Jeremy and I are off to my sister’s over Christmas — the main holidays, that is.’
‘I see. Where does she live?’
‘Scarborough, if you know where that is. It takes half a day to drive there, and I don’t know how it will go. How Jeremy will react. He doesn’t really want to leave this house at all, as you’ve probably gathered. I suppose you could say it’s an experiment, but I’ve set my mind on going through with it. In any case, we’ll be back before New Year, and then I promise to go walking over the moor with you until you drop.’
I said I was looking forward to that. Then added that what I wanted more than anything else just at the moment was to sleep for a few hours.
‘I thought you were never going to stop talking,’ said Mark, and so we rolled over on our sides and fell asleep.
It was eleven o’clock the next morning before Castor and I left Heathercombe Cottage. Jeremy joined us for breakfast — for twenty minutes, at least: that was the time he needed to eat his meal which comprised two eggs fried on both sides, a cup of tea, and two slices of toast with apricot jam. Mark said he had eaten exactly the same breakfast every single morning for the last two years, and the only place you could get the right sort of apricot jam was a little health food shop in Tiverton. If ever it closed down there would be a major problem.
Three spoonfuls of sugar in the tea, and lots of milk. Jeremy measured the dosage himself, concentrating as if he were placing the final card in a house of cards. He was wearing the same Harlequins jersey as yesterday, but his jeans were blue rather than black; and just as the previous day he shook hands with me once again. As I sat at the table, watching him more or less counting the grains of sugar in each spoon, I felt overcome by a feeling of tenderness towards him that I found difficult to explain.
‘What does he do up there in his room with his computer?’
Mark hesitated. Jeremy had just left us, and I found it difficult to talk about him when he was present. Castor had been given a portion of scrambled egg and bacon that he gobbled in less than five seconds.
‘You don’t really want to know that.’
‘Yes I do,’ I said. ‘I really do.’
He sighed. ‘Okay. Only two things, in fact. Recently, at least. He watches violent films and solves sudokus.’
‘Violent films and sudokus?’
‘Yes, I’m afraid so.’
‘And he. . I mean, why violent films?’
‘I don’t know. But he doesn’t seem to be adversely affected by them. And he gets into a much worse humour if he’s not allowed to look at them. I’ve tried restricting him, believe you me.’
I thought about that gesture he had made in the window, but yet again decided not to mention it.
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to. .’
Mark shrugged. ‘That’s okay. He sits watching those films. . He does watch other films as well, not only ones in which people kill one another, but I just don’t know what he gets out of them. Either sort. He sometimes watches the same film three times without a pause — maybe he needs to do that for it to sink in. He’s not exactly a star at solving sudokus either.’
There was a trace of bitterness in his voice, and I wished I hadn’t asked in the first place. ‘I suspect sudokus aren’t the easiest of puzzles to solve,’ I said, ‘but I’ve never tried so I don’t know.’
Mark laughed. ‘He understands the rules. I tried telling myself that he’s better with numbers than with letters, so I spent a few weeks teaching him. . Well, he understands what you have to do, but the problem is that he has no idea how to distinguish between right and wrong. I’ve checked up on him, and instead of working something out he tries pot luck, and it’s wrong more or less all the time. When he realizes it’s wrong, he goes back and tries pot luck again. I think it takes him about half a day to solve a sudoku of the easiest sort.’
‘Hmm,’ I said. ‘But it keeps him occupied, I suppose.’
‘Yes, it does,’ said Mark with a sigh. ‘And who’s to say what the rest of us do to occupy ourselves is so much more sensible? Manufacturing weapons? Selling shares? Advertising rubbish that nobody wants?’
He was certainly starting to sound gloomy, and I thought it would be best to let the matter drop. Once again I’m not at all sure what I mean by ‘let the matter drop’.
‘I dreamt about it again last night,’ he said after a few seconds of silence.
‘About what?’
‘About what I said when we first met. That absent husband and the house in the south. Perhaps it was because you were lying beside me. .’
I was totally unprepared for this, and it came as a bit of a shock. I had almost succeeded in repressing his clairvoyant abilities, or whatever they were. In any case, I hadn’t spent much time thinking about it, and that business about reading other people’s minds felt more like an in-joke by this time.
But perhaps that was an over-hasty conclusion?
‘Really?’ I said, sounding more doubtful than I would have liked.
‘It was the same thing, really. A group of men around a table dressed in white, wondering where somebody had disappeared to. A white house as well. . somewhere a long way south, as I said before.’
‘And what about me? Was I there in a corner somewhere?’
‘That might be what was new about it,’ said Mark, looking thoughtful. ‘You were walking along a beach — it must have been quite close by, because I saw you at the same time as I saw the house. Yes, you were walking along a beach with your dog. . There was no more to it than that.’
‘That’s quite enough,’ I said, trying to laugh. ‘I don’t want you to be limitlessly supernatural.’
Mark cleared his throat and apologized.
‘But I’m really pleased that Castor and I could come here,’ I said after a short pause while I got a grip on myself. ‘I’d like to invite you up to Darne Lodge, but that somehow feels like a move in the wrong direction. . And I assume it would be hard to persuade Jeremy to come there. It really is a rat-hole.’