Maire is lying on Gog, when he looks to his right and notices that the blind over the glass partition has rolled up. In the driving mirror, he sees the thin smile of Jules, who has adjusted the mirror to see the interior of the back compartment rather than the road. “The bastard,” Gog says and rolls half-over, depositing Maire suddenly on the floor, while he yanks down the blind. “I hate being spied on. You and your bloody chauffeur. You sack him. I insist.”
“You needn’t be such a brute to me. Men always are, after. What was poor Jules doing?” Maire rises, aggrieved, off the floor.
“Playing Peeping Tom. Or is it Peeping Tomasina?”
“Well, the poor dear, it’s so boring up front, all alone. I can’t sack Jules. There’s still a war on, don’t you know? She’s a treasure. I’ll never find another like her, even if I ransack the whole of the A.T.S.”
“Why does she have to dress like a man?”
“It makes her look more like a chauffeur, doesn’t it?” Maire wipes herself with a handkerchief and begins pulling down her chessboard skirt. “We’ve got to pretend there are more men around than there really are, to forget the war which took you all away. That’s what we call doing our little bit.”
“I suppose so,” Gog grumbles. He dresses himself and draws Maire beside him on the seat and kisses her. “That was very sudden, darling,” he says. “You could have waited till we were in an hotel.”
“Again, how like a man!” Maire says, smiling. “You only complain you’ve been seduced after it’s all over. Anyway, I had to seduce you, to remind you how nice it was with me, so you’d stay with me. Instead of wanting to go back to the moors and leave me again. And I should think it ought to have been sudden. I haven’t seen you in a year, with you dashing all the way to Berlin with the army.”
“You’ve been virtuous for a whole year while I’ve been saving the country?” Gog asks. And then he looks into the ripe pout of his wife. And they both burst out laughing simultaneously at the absurdity of the question.
“Of course I haven’t, darling,” Maire says. “But I only love you.”
She lets up the blinds of the car one by one, to show Gog more and more of the grimy brick terraces of a northern industrial town, with nothing but honest toil to make an excuse for itself. “You do get me to go to outlandish places,” Maire says. “When the hospital finally tracked me down, I raced up with Jules, only to find you’d left the night before without permission. I’ve used up half my petrol coupons, and I simply can’t flirt with yet another M.T.O. to fiddle more; every time they make a pass, you feel they’re changing gears. I’ve more than half a mind, you know, not to let go of you again. It’s the very devil finding you. You don’t even stick to the roads. In fact, I may have said I’d loose you on the moors again. But don’t you think, Gog angel, we should make it straight back to London? You do like sleeping with me, don’t you?”
So Gog remembers one of Maire’s tricks, tacking two questions together which have nothing to do with each other, yet demanding one answer. “Of course I love sleeping with you,” Gog says. “But I really would like to get out at the Yorkshire moors, when we reach them.” He yawns. “But perhaps not. We’ve got so much to talk about. If you talked for days, I’d still hardly know you. There are so many gaps in my mind. So perhaps I’ll stay. Or you could tramp the moors with me.”
“None of that, Gog Griffin,” Maire says. “I’ve tried tramping with you. And frankly, I’d rather be raped by the Red Army than keep up with you on a hike.” She plants firm kisses on each of Gog’s eyes. “You’re not to open them. You’re dropping. Sleep, my giant friend. And when you’ve woken up, I’ll chatter so much the holes in your mind will overflow.”
“The moors,” Gog insists. “Wake me at the moors. I want . . .” Yet he is so tired, the words become a mumble in his mouth and his head leans on the back of the seat and he falls into a dreamless sleep in the back of the black car.
He wakes to find Maire shaking him by the shoulder. It is night. Outside the car windows, Gog can dimly see the frozen breakers of the moors.
“Borrowby,” Maire says. “The moors, as promised. The Hambleton Hills are to your left. Just what Dr. Griffin ordered. Now, do you seriously expect me to leave the car with you and spend a night in that howling patch of nothing?”
Gog rubs his eyes with his fist. “We could sleep here,” he says, “and start tramping the moors in the morning.”
“Not bloody likely,” Maire says. “Whatever folly I may be prepared to commit, Jules likes her creature comforts. She’d give in her notice, if she didn’t have a swansdown mattress and lavender sheets every night.”
“Yours, I suppose,” Gog insinuates.
“Are you trying to insult me?” Maire says. “I don’t happen to sleep with my chauffeur.”
“I’ve seen you,” Gog states.
“How too Proustian! Are you sure you didn’t call up some literary lesbian memories? Your mind is, after all, choc-a-bloc with fantasy.”
“Which allows you to start again with a clean sheet, Maire. If only I knew what you’d really done.”
“Nothing,” Maire says. “I’m as innocent as a new-born lamb. I wasn’t born yesterday, I was born today. And since you can’t remember for sure, who’s to judge me? I’m totally absolved.”
“You could judge yourself.”
“Then I’m bound to get off, aren’t I, Gog? I’ve never felt guilty in all my life. I’ve always done just what I wanted to do. So I couldn’t feel guilty, could I? We only feel real guilt – not that false religious kind – if we think we’ve missed a chance.”
Gog laughs. “Perhaps . . . Let’s discuss it in the morning on the moors.”
“I’m not coming,” Maire says coldly. “Don’t be a fool. Drive back to London with me now and start up your normal life.”
“I’d rather tramp right now,” Gog says.
“Why? It’s pure self-indulgence.”
“Hardly. It’s a form of personal treatment. I do remember I always used to go off and hike, when I got into a bit of a brainstorm. And it cured me. This time, I reckon I need a good long hike.”
“In London, my psychiatrist . . .”
“Nature’s the best one.”
“Don’t be a fool, Gog.”
“Come with me, Maire. But I have to tramp.”
“I certainly won’t. I’m not going to catch my death, even if you are. Be reasonable. Come to London. Do you really love the Brontës more than me?”
“No. I must cure myself.”
“I’m trying to be patient. I know you’re ill, Gog. But you really would try the patience of a saint, and I’ve never pretended to be anything but a devil. Will you or will you not come with me?”
“I must walk,” Gog says.
“You’re forcing me to persecute you, Gog.” Maire’s eyes close and her white face hardens to wax. “God, martyrs bring it on themselves. Who wouldn’t crucify Paul upside down, after what he said about women? I’ve tried kindness on you and I’ve tried cruelty. And, dammit, you force me to be cruel. When I’m kind, you’re stubborn and intolerable and plain stupid. It’s only when you make me vicious that I can get any sense into your thick skull.”
“Thanks for the ride,” Gog says coldly. He puts his hand on the nearside door of the car. “I’ll see you in London.”
“If I’m waiting patiently, which I doubt,” Maire says. She takes the pearl pin from her turban and jabs its steel point into the leather seat.
Gog half-opens the car door. He shivers at the cold wind blowing in off the moors.
“If you take that step out of the car,” Maire says, “I’m not responsible for what I do in the future. I won’t be left flat. Not by anyone. You just think you can screw me and get out. You’ll see.”
“I must be by myself,” Gog says. “To cure myself. Or I’d stay.”
“Just step out,” Maire says, “and you’ll regret it.” She almost smiles. “Why not stay? It’s warm here. And there’
s me.”
“I can take care of myself,” Gog says. “You can’t always sit above me in judgement, Maire. Even making love, you have to dominate, don’t you?”
Maire laughs. “Better be ruled by a clever woman than by a stubborn fool, even if the fool happens to be yourself.”
“Good-bye for the moment,” Gog says and steps out. Just as he loses his balance, he hears a miaow of triumph and catches a glimpse of the face of the porcupine cat rising in the front compartment beside the grinning chauffeur. And then Gog’s feet slip and he is slithering down a cliff of shale and stone, on the edge of which the car has been deliberately parked. A minor avalanche hammers about Gog’s ears. And then, above the miaow and the lying Maire’s harsh laughter, the bitter chuckle of water. And Gog is plunged into a shallow pool, his ankles cut open by the rocks at its bottom. He slips, falling full length into the icy pitch of the water and he hears Maire’s voice calling, “Pride. Fall.” Then the noise of the car moving away.
The wind slices through Gog’s sodden clothes, seeming to cut between his ribs into his innards. He shivers uncontrollably, then stops shivering, too frozen even to shudder. He knows that he will freeze to death if he does not find some warmth. So he begins to stumble and climb back up the shale towards the road, to signal a passing car.
Gog stands for ten minutes beside the road, yet no vehicle comes. He feels himself chilling and losing feeling in his limbs. He must move. Dimly he can see the walls of a farmhouse set back some hundreds of yards from the road. So he begins to trudge towards the black blocks of human habitation, shuttered up against the night. Two stone walls block his way; but he clambers over their scraping edges.
When Gog reaches the farmhouse, he bangs on shutters and door, shouting, “Let me in, I’m freezing.” He hears movement within, voices, a mutter of argument. But however loudly he shouts, no one will unbolt the door.
Cursing and sodden cold, he makes for a large barn, where he hopes to find some hay as a covering. The barn door is shut, but only with a spike. He removes the spike and enters the dark interior. It is warm within, meaty warm with the stench of dung and animal heat and hay. He walks a few paces forward, then meets with his knee the lying flank of a beast. He puts out his hand and feels the hot hide of a cow, which does not stir at his touch. Thankfully, Gog lies by the rump of the sleeping cow and gathers in warmth from the body of the animal. And eventually he sleeps on the trodden hay, his body curved round the beast that is drying him back to life.
At crow of rooster dawn, Gog wakes. The grey light dusts the rafters, the hanging leather harness, the cubes of baled hay, the pitchforks, the teeth of the rusting machinery for ploughing and reaping. Gog sees the dark flank couched above his body, and he lies grateful in the shadow of its warmth. Then he rises, stiffly, as the cow begins to shift and turn its face towards him. Only it is not a cow, but a heavy dew-lapped bull, looking at him with eyes blurry with rheumy lashes over the iron ring through its nose.
The bull that has spared Gog regards the man, whom it has not crushed nor gored in the night. Creases of puzzlement at its action ridge the white patch on its forehead, while slobbers of gratification at its own generosity run from its nose and the soggy corners of its mouth. It stares at Gog, then yawns cavernously, while Gog slowly backs away in fear. At the door of the barn, Gog has the grace to bow. “Thank you, good bull,” he says, “for your patience.” And so Gog quits the farmyard, leaving the barn door open in revenge, so that the bull may get out and perhaps gore the farmer, whose light in his bedroom now mocks Gog with its ray of comradeship denied.
Once out onto the moors, Gog takes a course towards the south-east, where the Hambleton Hills rise, their limestone and grit scarps as spume on the top of the choppy swell of the foothills, which run their breakers up the slopes, the wind making ripples in the bracken and heather, a little movement that cannot affect the still waves of the earthy sea. Above the moors, a buzzard is soaring; but, as Gog watches, it becomes a meteorite and plummets down, only breaking out its wings a thousand foot below to sweep again upwards. The buzzard plays its freefalling game thrice, and then, in an upsweep, it is attacked by a horde of ravens, angry at its presence above their nests in the limestone peaks. The ravens pierce in at the buzzard as if to skewer their large enemy on their beaks. The buzzard flaps its wide wings lazily ahead of its black pursuers. But when one of its foes dares to come too close, it turns on its back in mid-air, holding its talons towards the presumptuous raven, which sheers away in alarm.
Gog keeps his body moving up the hills, the hot blood in his veins drying out his moist clothes, until the sweat pricking through his skin makes his shirt moist again. He feels hunger nag at his belly, until the nagging becomes a gnawing obsession. Thoughts of tinned peaches fill his mind all the way to a saddle between the hills where the limestone crags give way to a swell of bracken and furze and gorse. So Gog crosses Boltby Moor and looks down past Old Byland to Ryedale, a green and unlikely trough in the high moor before Brontëland, with far copses of oak and ash breaking in occasional permanent spray.
Gog does not take the road to the village, preferring the hard slog through tuft and thorn, breaking bracken and edging past gorse. His eyes scan the sheep-tracks for manna from heaven to allay his hunger. Heaven remains indifferent, but man comes to his aid. There is a rustling and whimpering. Gog comes upon a rabbit, choking and plunging in the wire noose of a snare. His hunger makes the saliva of a beast of prey spurt in his mouth at the carnivorous desire for raw flesh, which Crook made him taste. But as he feels the warm life pulse beneath the brown fur of the rabbit and sees its small head twist up with rolling white eyeballs and its legs scrabble against his thighs, Gog pauses. He remembers the past night and the clemency of the bull. If an animal can show mercy, why not a human? So he changes his grip, slipping the wire noose off the rabbit’s neck and letting it free, so that it can hop and burrow into a clump of gorse. A life for a life, but still no breakfast.
It is Gog’s fortunate morning. As he reaches the road just beyond Old Byland, he finds the litter of a day-old picnic, crusts of bread thoughtfully wrapped in greaseproof paper for tidiness’ sake, chicken bones not properly gnawed, even salt in a twist of blue paper. Gog scavenges for the starving belly that has become all of him. He bolts down everything, even to the last scrap of sinew adhering to a drumstick. His hunger is not satisfied, but allayed. He now crosses the little Rye river and walks through the cornfields on its far bank, breaking off the stalks and rubbing the ears between his rough palms and blowing the chaff away with his breath and chewing the raw corn grains into a mash between his teeth. So, filled with a surfeit of litter and fresh grain, Gog comes with a swollen belly to the ruins of the great abbey of Rievaulx.
The broken stones of the abbey skirt the valley’s edge as it plunges into the Rye. Through the fallen arches of the cloister, Gog sees a throng of boys in straw boaters sitting on the grass, while rows of bright-coated ladies and cassocked priests sit in folding chairs behind them. They face a narrow stage, set up beneath a brown tent on the site of the old chapter house. The gutted west transept of the abbey church flanks the left side of the stage; three tall perpendicular windows without glass stare blankly down from the bald flat face of wrecked religion. The right side of the stage is bordered by the ruins of the monks’ lavatory; the scrubbed stones crumble and totter above the rounded arch into the old washplace as they try to keep their square stance on the rain-scoured walls. Beyond the tent, the woody hills to the south roll upwards to the grey fells of cloud in the sky, indifferent to the roofless abbey, fallen, fallen, fallen, fallen from its high estate and sombre in its stone.
As Gog approaches, a pimply youth in grey flannels and a black blazer, his boater more of a soiled straw rim than a hat, presses a leaflet into Gog’s hand. It announces that the Down-forth Public School Players are presenting the medieval miracle play, Everyman in Albion, to the greater glory of God; the profits from the sale of the five shilling tickets wil
l go to buy the rear turret of a bomber. Gog reaches his hand into his pocket to find a coin; but his pocket is naturally empty. So he withdraws his hand and shrugs, waving his arms. The boy cowers back, bowing Gog into the cloisters. Gog cannot understand the boy’s reaction until he squints down and sees that he has forgotten to unclench his fist. He walks over to the back of the folding seats, and he looks past the flowered hats firmly pinned onto the permanent waves of the guardian mothers and past the greased strands of hair failing to cover the bald patches on the crania of the priests, too old or too holy to go to war, until he sees the boaters of the sitting boys above the fluffy down fluttering on their necks with all the soft promise of catkins in the breeze.
On the stage a youth appears, dressed in pieces of sacking that fail to suggest a doublet and hose. He stoops as if overcome by the woes of the world, or perhaps he has merely outgrown his strength. In the high-pitched boom that passes for clear enunciation, he declaims:
“A wretched wight, I, Everyman,
Am here to tell ye all I can.
All harken to me now . . .”
With a stage effect worthy of the Book of Genesis, the sides of the tent shake mightily and a golden sun and a silver moon fall from the roof of the tent on strings, bouncing like yoyos, while a turreted canvas wall is wheeled onstage from the left with a screeching of wheels, its painted bricks infinitely more cheerful and credible than the rotting ruins of Rievaulx. Everyman shouts valiantly above the din:
“A strife I shall tell to you
Of Magus and of Grim –
Scratch, dog at cat and cat at him!
Satan’s dam she was their mother,
And horrid hate between both brothers.
Bloody born in woeful sin,
Crouchit and scratchit twin at twin.
They sorrows suffered many on,
Gog Page 18