A solitary taxi was at rest outside the station. Once Ellen made for it he succeeded in reaching the driver's window. 'Excuse me, do you know where we can buy a, gardening equipment, sort of thing?'
The large tattooed man inclined his shaven pate in a lazy sidelong nod. 'Should be some in the next road.'
'Can you take us?'
'It's not that far,' the driver protested, then glanced askance at Ellen. 'Are you going on anywhere?'
She felt referred to rather than addressed, and left Hugh to say 'You could wait and take us to Thurstaston.'
'Helping the rangers, are you?'
'I expect so,' Hugh was sufficiently thrown to tell him. 'I'll sit in front, shall I, Ellen? You can have the back.'
At least this let her sit as far from the driver as she could. Nevertheless he lowered his window all the way as he started the engine, and didn't ask whether she minded the breeze that fluttered her old nightdress, peeling it away from her moist flesh only to paste it more uncomfortably still. He turned left off the main road and immediately left again, which brought them in less than a minute to a hardware store next to a wine bar. 'Do we both need to go in?' Hugh said.
'I take it you're asking me to.'
'I'll give you the money if you can.'
She wondered if the driver thought this sounded like a bribe; it felt absurdly like one. 'Don't go digging in your pocket,' she said. 'We're both out of work.'
As she struggled out of the taxi she was confronted by spades, four of them hovering in the gloom beyond the shop window. They were hanging from hooks on the wall, and the shop was darkened by an advancing mass of cloud. There was a spade for her and for each of her cousins, but what was that supposed to mean? She ought to bury her imagination for a while, and did her best to fancy that the bell above the door was indicating she could.
The comfortably plump woman in trousers and an overall behind the small counter might have been dressed for gardening. 'Brought the dark with you,' she said and sniffed. 'Needing help?'
Ellen gathered that the woman was eager to see the last of her, and why. 'Just a spade,' she said and was nervous enough to add 'For the garden.'
At once she was intensely aware why she was buying the item. Perhaps the banality of the transaction made its purpose real for her. A smell of earth that no amount of perfume could disguise clogged her nostrils, challenging her to breathe. If she fled the shop she would be letting her cousins down, and Hugh would feel compelled to find his way in. She plodded to the wall, shaking the resonant floorboards, to clutch at the biggest spade – the one, she couldn't help thinking, that might be most use as a weapon. She almost wrenched the hook loose in her haste to lift the spade off. She laid a twenty-pound note on the counter when the woman failed to take it, and that was where the woman placed her change. 'Would you like a bag?' she said.
As Ellen wondered if it might be advisable to hide the implement until she and Hugh were on the beach, the woman produced a plastic bag that would barely cover its head. 'Never mind,' Ellen said and bore the spade out of the shop.
The bell drew attention to it, and so did the taxi driver. 'Here's the digger,' he said. Hugh glanced so unsteadily at her that she thought he too might be fully aware at last of their undertaking. 'May as well keep it with you,' the driver said as she headed for the boot.
When the car swung away from the kerb the thin object lurched towards Ellen, tapping her on the shoulder with its handle. She grasped it by the shaft to keep it off, though this entailed too much awareness of the deformed hand at the end of her misshapen arm. Meanwhile the taxi found a different route to the main road and then set about climbing a hill. Soon the last houses were left behind, and the car was dwarfed by sandstone banks whose colour anticipated the thick brown of the cliff. Although the taxi was speeding uphill it was so enclosed that Ellen felt as if it were plunging into the earth.
It gained the summit of the road at last and swerved right at a crossroads towards the underside of the sky. 'Is this the way?' Hugh blurted.
For a moment this made Ellen as nervously distrustful as he sounded. 'This is it all right,' she said, hoping this reassured him more than it managed for her.
The road did indeed end on the brink of the cliff. To the left a solitary triangular kite was drooping its tail against the charred sky above the common beyond a centre for visitors to the nature trail; to the right a path led down to the beach. Hugh fumbled out money and paid the driver while Ellen supported her weight on the spade, having clambered forth. As the taxi performed an impatient three-point turn and sped inland, Hugh said 'Who's that? What's he want?'
The spade scraped across the tarmac as Ellen twisted around to see a figure turning its back in a gap in the hedge where a path led to the visitor centre. She'd failed to notice him when she left the taxi. He wore a grey anorak with the hood up and greenish rubber boots over equally muddy trousers, and was carrying a spade. 'Up here if you're helping with the path,' he said.
His voice was so muffled by the hood that Ellen had to strain to be anything like certain she was hearing him. The anorak was fatter than the humid afternoon warranted, and a good deal bulkier than him, to judge by the bony outlines of his legs. 'That's all right. We'll follow,' she called to send him on his way.
'No we won't,' Hugh whispered, and even lower 'Don't speak to him.'
Ellen peered after the figure as it shuffled along the path. The anorak was stained so variously grey that patches reminded her of lichen, not least by their texture. 'Why not?' she murmured.
'He's –' Hugh relinquished whispering and said at the top of his voice 'He's not there.'
The man was out of sight beyond the hedge now. His spade rose above it at some distance, long enough to beckon, scattering lumps of earth. 'Don't be silly, Hugh,' Ellen said, but when his eyes began to dodge from side to side she tramped to the gap in the hedge. The common was deserted under the blackening sky; even the kite had vanished. Were there traces of footprints on the path until the hedge around the visitor centre concealed it? They didn't look shod; indeed, they struck her as somehow even barer. 'Just come on,' she told Hugh and made for the path to the beach. She oughtn't to have spoken so sharply, but her nerves were to blame. She was beginning to wonder what else might intervene to prevent her and Hugh from reaching their goal.
TWENTY-NINE
When Hugh dug the spade into the base of the cliff, a handful of clay trickled down at him. Ellen glanced nervously upwards, but nobody was visible against the sky, although it was almost black enough to hide a watcher. 'Go on,' she urged, sounding muffled by the gloom. He planted one foot on the metal blade and leaned all his weight on it, heaving out a lump of earth as big as a man's head, which came so readily that someone might have been pushing it. Hugh stumbled backwards and, having flung away the spadeful, thrust the blade into the gaping cavity. Before he could exert his weight the mass of earth above him quivered as if it or its tenant were shaking off slumber. The next moment a bulk taller and broader than a house collapsed towards him.
'Watch out,' Ellen wasted time in crying as she made to drag him back. The sound of her approach only distracted him. He swung around to shove her out of danger – swung around the wrong way. His gaze and his frantic movements failed to coincide in search of her as the wall of earth slid towards them so lethargically it might have been relishing its deliberateness. Charlotte couldn't cry out, she could only dash to grab him and Ellen, to haul them clear if there was time. She had nothing to say that would help, and in any case she needed to devote her breath to sprinting faster. But her mouth was open, and it filled with mud as she and her cousins were buried deep in earth.