“When we came here, this place was perfect. Now look at it.” There was a pause, as he scratched irritably about for the light switch. He failed to find it. “It’s a slum, and I’m doing it. What difference can a job make?”
“Look,” I said, “I don’t quite understand.” I couldn’t bear the confines of the sleeping bag any more, but out there in the dark I was as lost as Lyall. I perched on what I hoped was the arm of a chair. “You’d better tell me about it,” I invited, since there seemed to be no alternative; and added, feeling disgusted with myself even as I did it, “Old chap.” I needn’t have worried. He hardly noticed.
“Everything I touch falls to pieces,” he said. “It’s been happening since I was a kid.” Then, with a dull attempt at dignity—“It’s held me back, of course: I’d have had a First if it hadn’t been for that bloody bicycle; the last job went down the chute with the office duplicator; I can’t even get on a bus without it smashing into something.”
“Everybody feels like that at some time or another,” I said. “In the Alps—”
“Bugger the Alps, Egerton!” he hissed. “Listen to me for once!”
His mind was a back drain, it was an attic with a trap full of dry, eviscerated mice. In it he’d store up every incident of his childhood—a nursery faux pas, a blocked lavatory bowl, a favorite animal run down in the street—making no distinction between the act and the accident, between the cup and the lip. With a kind of quiet hysteria in his voice, he detailed every anticlimax of his maturity—each imagined slight carefully catalogued, each spillage, each coin lost among the rubbish beneath a basement grid; every single inkblot gathered and sorted into a relentless, unselective system of culpability.
It was nonsensical and terrifying. Typists, tutors and maiden ladies, his victims and pursuers, haunted him through that attic. I haunted him, it seemed, for he ended with: “It was me that cut your hand in London, Egerton, not the bottle. I couldn’t help it. Something flows out of me, and I can’t control it any more—”
“Look at this place. Look at it!” And he began to sob.
A dim, cobwebby light was filtering through the remaining panes of glass, greying his face, his scrawny, hopeless body. I have a horror of confession; I was angry with him for burdening me, and at the same time full of an awful pity; what could I have said to him?—That I thought he was mad? Self-concern makes us all mad. All I could do then was pat his shoulder reassuringly.
“Look,” I said, “it’s getting light, Lyall. Let’s both have a bit of sleep. We can work it out later. You’ve obviously got a bit depressed, that’s all. You’ll feel better now.”
He stiffened. One moment he was blubbering helplessly, the next he had said quite clearly, “I might have known. You’ve had it easy all your life, you bloody pompous bastard—”
I got to my feet. I thought of Chamonix, and the razor of wind that shaves the Aiguilles. I should have kept nay temper; instead, I simply felt relieved to have a reason for losing it. I waited for a moment before saying, “Nobody paid my way through Cambridge, Lyall.” Then, deliberately, “For God’s sake pull yourself together. You’re not a child any more. And you never were a Jonah—just a bloody great bag of self-pity.”
He was hitting me the moment I turned away. I fell over the chair, upset more by the things he was screaming than by his clumsy attempts to re-enact some schoolyard fight of twenty years before. “Christ, Lyall, don’t be silly!” I shouted. I got the chair between us, but he roared and knocked it away. I made a grab for his windmilling arms; found myself backed into a corner. I got a knock on my cheek which stung my pride. “You little fucker,” I said, and hit him in the stomach. He fell down, belching and coughing.
I pulled him back into the room and stood over him. His wife discovered us there in our underpants—too old to be scrabbling about on a greasy carpet, too white and ugly to be anything but foolish. “What’s the matter?” she pleaded, befuddled with sleep and staring at my mutilated foot. Lyall said something filthy. “You’d better look after the baby,” I told her viciously. And then that old terrible boyhood cry of triumph. “He shouldn’t start things he can’t finish.”
I got dressed and packed my rucksack, Lyall sniffing and moaning throughout. As I left, the woman was kneeling over him, wiping his runny nose—but she was gazing up at me. “No!” I said. “No more. Not from me. He needs a bloody doctor—” Turning in the doorway: “Why did you have to lie to him about your age? Couldn’t you get anybody, either?” I felt a little sick.
It might have ended there, I might have taken away the simplest and most comforting solution to the enigma of Lyall, if I hadn’t decided that while (for the second, or, now I could admit it, the third time in my life) I never wanted to see him again, I didn’t intend to let him ruin the week or so of holiday I had left to me. It was unthinkable to return to Wandsworth with only that sordid squabble to remember through the winter.
So instead of catching the bus back to Ambleside I moved up the valley to the National Trust site, put up my little Ultimate tent, and for a week at least had some recompense for my stay beneath Raw Pike; pottering about in silent, stone-choked ghylls of Oxendale, where nobody ever seems to go; drowsing among the glacial moraines of Stake Pass, where dragonflies clatter mournfully through the brittle reed-stems and the path tumbles down its spur into the Langstrath like an invitation; watching the evening climbers on Gimmer, colored motes against the archaic face of the rock, infinitely slow-moving and precarious.
It was a peculiar time. The heat wave, rather than abating, merely consolidated its grip and moved into its third week, during which temperatures of a hundred degrees were recorded in Keswick. Dead sheep dotted the fells like roches moutonees, and in dry gullies gaped silently over bleached pebbles. A middle-aged couple on a coach outing for the blind wandered somehow onto the screes at Wastwater, to be discovered on the 1,700-foot line by an astonished rescue team and brought down suffering from heat prostation and amnesia. Mickleden Beck diminished to a trickle—at the dam beneath Stickle Breast, exhausted birds littered the old waterline, staring passively up at the quivering peaks.
The camp site was empty, and curiously lethargic. A handful of climbers from Durham University had set up in one field, some boys as an Outward Bound exercise in the other: but there were none of the great blue-and-orange canvas palaces which normally spread their wings beneath Side Pike all summer long, none of the children who in a moment of boredom trip over your guylines on their way to pee secretly in ‘the brook. After dark each night, a few of us clustered round the warden’s caravan to hear the ten o’clock national news, while heat-lightning played round Pike o’ Stickle then danced gleefully away across Martcrag Moor. Under a fat moon, the valley was greenish and ingenuous, like an ill-lit diorama.
Despite my anger—or perhaps because of it—I couldn’t exorcise the Lyalls, and their dreamlike embrace of inadvertency and pain continued to fascinate me. I even broke an excursion to Blea Rigg and Codale to sit on the fellside for half an hour and muse over the cottage, small and precise in the valley; but from up there it was uncommunicative. One of the barn roofs had sagged; there was fresh rubble in the road; the whole place had an air of abandonment and stupefaction in the heat. Where was Lyall?—Prowling hungrily through the Ambleside bookshops, haggling sourly over the price of a papercover thriller now that he couldn’t get the Times?
And the woman—what elusive thoughts, what trancelike afternoons, staring out into the sunlight and the netties? Her calm was mysterious. Lyall was destroying her, but she stayed; she was a liar—but there was something dreadfully apt in her vision, her metaphor of entropy. If this seems a detached, academic attitude to her essential misery, it was not one I was able to hold for long. The heat wave mounted past bearings; the valley lay smashed and submissive beneath it; and eight days after my brawl with Lyall, on a night when events human and geological seemed to reach almost consciously toward union, I was forced from the speculative view.
Slee
p was impossible. Later than usual, we gathered round the warden’s radio. But for the vibrant greenish haze in the sky, it might have been day. Sweat poured off us. Confused by the evil half-light and the heat rolling out of Mickleden, a pair of wrens were piping miserably and intermittently from the undergrowth by the brook, where a thousand insects hung in the air over an inch of slow water.
With oil-tariff revelations compromising the minority government, public anger mounting over the French agricultural betrayal, and the constant spector of the Patriotic Front demanding proportional representation from the wings of an already shaky parliament, the political organism had begun to look like some fossil survivor of another age. That night, it seemed to wake up suddenly to its situation; it thrashed and bled in the malarial air of the twentieth century, and over the transistor we followed its final throes; the government fell, and something became extinct in Britain while we slapped our necks to kill midges.
After the announcement a group of the Durham students hung uneasily about in the wedge of yellow light issuing from the warden’s door, speechless and shrugging. Later, they probed the bleeding gum cautiously, in undertones, while the warden’s wife made tea and the radio mumbled unconvincingly into the night. They seemed reluctant to separate and cross the empty site to empty tents, alone.
It was one of them who, turning eventually to go, drew our attention to a curious noise in the night—a low, spasmodic bubbling, like some thick liquid simmering up out of a hole in the ground. We cocked our heads, laughed at him, and he deferred shyly to our judgement that it was only the brook on the stones beneath the little bridge. But shortly afterwards it came again, closer; and then a third time, not twenty yards away across the car-park.
“There’s someone out there,” he said wonderingly. He was a tall, wispy lad within a thin yellow beard and large feet, his face young and concerned and decent even in that peculiar beryline gloom. When we laughed at him again, he said gently, “I think I’ll go and have a look, though.” The gate creaked open, we heard his boots on the gravel. With an edgy grin, one of his friends explained to us, “Too much ale tonight.” Silence.
Then, “Oh my God,” he said in a surprised voice. “You’d better come and do something,” he called, and gave himself up suddenly to a fit of choking and coughing. We found him sitting on the gravel with his head between his knees. He had vomited extensively. On the ground in front of him lay Lyall’s wife.
“How did she walk?” he whispered, “Oh, how did she walk?” He wrapped his arms around his knees and rocked himself to and fro.
She was hideously burnt. Her clothes were inseparable from the charred flesh in which they had become embedded; one ruined eye glared sightlessly out of a massive swelling of the facial tissue; plasma leaked from the less damaged areas, and she stank of the oven. Whatever fear or determination had driven her from under the shadow of Raw Pike now kept her conscious, staring passively upwards from her good eye, her body quivering gently with shock.
“Egerton,” she said, “Egerton, Egerton, Egerton—”
I knelt over her.
“—Egerton, Egerton—”
“Someone get that bloody Land Rover across here,” said the warden thickly.
“What happened?” I said. She lay like a blackened log, staring up at the sky. She shuddered convulsively. “Where’s Lyall?”
“—Egerton, Egerton, Egerton, Egerton—”
“I’m here.”
But she was dead.
I staggered away to squirt up a thin, painful stream of bile. The warden followed me. “Did she know you?” he said. “Where did she come from? What’s happened?” I wiped my mouth. How could I tell? She had come to get help from me, but not for herself. I hang on to that thought, even now. With some idea of protecting Lyall, at least until I could get to him, I said, “I’ve never seen her before in my life. Look, I’ve got to go. Excuse me.”
I felt him staring after me. The Land Rover was maneuvering nervously round the car-park, but now they had nowhere to take her. The boy from Durham was asking himself, over and over again, “How did she get here?” He appealed to his friends, but they were shaken and grey-faced, and they didn’t know what to say.
It was past midnight when I left the camp site. An almost constant flicker of heat-lightning lent a macabre formality to the lane, the hills and the drystone walls—like subjects in some steel engraving or high-contrast photograph, they were perfectly defined but quite unreal. At Middlefell Farm the lights were all out. Some sheep stared at me from a paddock, their sides heaving and their eyes unearthly.
I lurched along under that hot green sky for forty minutes, but it seemed longer. Like a fool, I kept looking for signs of the woman’s blind, agonized flight; had she fallen here, and dragged herself a little way?—And there, had it seemed impossible to drive the quivering insensate hulk a yard further? I was brought up short, stupid and horrified, by every smear of melted tar on the road; yet I ignored the only real event of the journey.
I had stopped for a moment to put my back against a drystone and massage the cramped calf of my left leg. A curlew was fluting tentatively from the deep Gothic cleft of Dungeon Ghyll. I had been gazing vacantly down the valley for perhaps half a minute, trying to control my erratic breathing, when the sky over Ambleside seemed to pulse suddenly, as if some curious shift of energy states had taken place. Simultaneously, the road lurched beneath me.
I felt it distinctly: a brief, queasy swaying motion. And when I touched the wall behind me, a faint tremor was in it, a fading vibration. I was dazed through lack of proper sleep; I was obsessed—and knew it—by the grim odyssey of Lyall’s wife: I put the tremor down to dizziness, and attributed that strange transitional flicker of the air to a flare of lightning somewhere over Troutbeck, a flash partially occluded by the mass of the fells between. But when I moved on, the peculiar hue of the sky was brighter; and although the event seemed to have no meaning at the time, it was to prove of central significance in the culminating nightmare.
The smoke was visible from quite a long way off, drifting filmy and exhausted up the fellside, clinging to the spongy ash and shrivelled bracken stems of that previous fire, to be trapped by an inversion about a hundred feet below Raw Pike and spread out in a thin cloudbank the color of watered milk.
Lyall’s cottage was ruined. Both barns were down in a heap of lamp-blacked stone, here and there an unconsumed rafter or beam sticking up out of the mess; the roof of the main building had caved in, taking the upper floor with it, so that there remained only a shell full of smoking slates and white soft ash. It radiated an intense heat, and the odd glowing cinder raced erratically up from it on the updraughts, but the fire per se had burnt itself out long before.
The wreckage was curiously uncompact. An explosion, probably of the kitchen gas-cylinders, had flung rubble into the nettle patch; and for some reason most of the face of the building lay in the road.
There among a tangle of smashed window frames and furniture, motionless in contemplation of the wreck and looking infinitely lonely, stood the long, ungainly figure of Lyall. His tweed jacket had gone through at the elbows, his trousers were charred and filthy, and his shoes were falling to pieces, as if he’d been trampling about in the embers looking for something. I began to shout his name long before I reached him. He studied my limping, hasty progress down the road for a moment; then, as I got close, seemed to lose interest.
“Lyall!” I called. “Are you all right?”
I kicked my way through the rubbish and shook his shoulder. He watched a swirl of ash dance over the deep embers. Something popped and cracked comfortably down in that hot pit. When he faced me, his eyes, red and sore, glowed out of his stubbled, smoke-blackened face with another kind of heat. But his voice was quite inoffensive when he said, “Hello, Egerton. I didn’t get much stuff out, you see.” Stacked neatly in the road a few yards off were twenty or thirty charred paperbacks. “She came to fetch you, then?”
He stared absently at t
he ruin. I had expected to find something more than a drowsy child, parching its skin in some reverie over the remains of a garden bonfire. I was sickened. “Lyall, you bloody moron!” I shouted: “She’s dead!” He moved his shoulders slightly, stared on. I caught hold of his arm and shook him. He was relaxed, unresistant. “Did you send her away in that condition? Are you mad? She was burnt to pieces!” I might have been talking to myself. “What’s been happening here?”
When he finally pulled up out of the dry trap of ashes, it was to shake his head slowly and say, “What? I don’t know.” He gaped, he blinked, he whispered, “She was getting so old. It was my fault—” He seemed about to explain something, but never did. That open-mouthed pain, that terrible passive acceptance of guilt, was probably the last glimpse I had of Lyall the human being. Had he, at some point during the dreadful events of that night, actually faced and recognized the corroding power of his self-concern? At the time I thought I understood it all—and standing uselessly amid all that rubble I needed to believe he had.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
At this the most inhuman paroxysm of misery and loathing took hold of his swollen, grimy features. “Fuck you, Egerton!” he cried. He threw off my hand. For a second, I was physically afraid, and backed quickly away from him. He followed me, with, “What’s it got to do with you? What’s any of it got to do with you?” Then, quieter, “I can’t seem to—”
The spasm passed. He looked down at his blistered hands as if seeing them for the first time. He laughed. His eyes flickered over me, cruel as heat-lightning. “Bugger off back home then, Egerton, if you feel like that,” he said. He put his hands in his trouser pockets and stirred the rubble with his toe. “I didn’t break the bloody piano, and I’ll tell the old bitch I didn’t—” He whirled away and strode off rapidly across the scorched fellside, stopping only to pick up an armful of books and call: “I’m sick of all this filthy rubbish anyway.”
Strangeness Page 21