He went out in the car, which was his mum’s old car, a red Fiesta, and he drove around for three hours. After some time, his car found itself on a main road; then on a smaller road; then a smaller still. The road to either side was dense with green moss in dark and light colours, like soft cushions, like a growing mess of colour. You wanted no flowers when you looked at such warm wet moss. It was so good, all the greens of the moss in the woods. The road came to a halt with parking for just three or four cars, an ash gate to the moor at its northern boundary. He got out and went through the gate, closing it carefully behind him. There was nobody else about. He saw the name of the place: Scorhill. He knew it. He wondered where he had heard the name before. The moor here was close-cropped grass, trimmed by sheep, by the rabbits whose black shit like clotted marbles was everywhere, by the three beefy ponies on the other side of a stone wall, one rubbing its arse on a bleak and bony tree. At school, boys had said that here, just beyond the wall, was a place where magical mushrooms grew, without his knowing exactly what magical mushrooms actually were or what they did. The hill was there to be climbed, rising up as if into the sky, the saturated earth yielding new puddles under every step, pouring out water, and at some points he jumped from granite rock to granite rock, placed like stepping stones in the sweet and wet earth. Below the summit of the gentle slope, a torrent of gorse, florid with yellow. At it, he remembered why he knew the name of Scorhill; there was nothing below him but a great mass of moorland, dappled yellow and brown and green. Below that, there was nothing in the way of civilization to see; no house, no village, no manor, nothing but a plantation of trees and a rude bridge over a narrow stream. Around him the whole landscape spread. The horizon went all the way round, as if he were at the centre of a gigantic bowl. Why the horizon did not always do that, he had no idea. Above, in the sky, the larks sang and plummeted and leapt into the blue air with its stacked flight of clouds, and other birds—who knew what? The druids had come here. Below him, at the centre of this mass of nature and unplanned perfection, a circle of stones stood or lay, the grass between the stones trimmed and neat as a bowling green. It had been here for ever; the old druids, the old folk, they had known what they were about when they said, ‘Here…’ It captured the horizons, the sunrise and the sunset, the smell and the light of this place in its twenty-foot circle. He had been here before. He was glad to have seen it again. It was really a beautiful day.
BOOK THREE
NOTHING TO FEAR
Die Andern lachten
Und gingen vorbei.
Wir aber dachten
Wie schön es sei:
So still zu gehen
Durch’s freie Land
Im Abendwehen
Und Hand in Hand.
John Henry Mackay
1.
At the first ting of the alarm clock, Hettie was upright in her bed like a meerkat, silencing it with a downward thrust. It was five in the morning. Outside, only the faintest trace of light, like a dim old film.
She was already dressed. She had gone to bed that way. All she had to do was to put on her shoes, which were neatly paired by the side of the bed. On the floor was a bag-for-life, and a round blue washing-up bowl she had removed from the kitchen just before going up to bed. From under the bed, Hettie took a bottle of white spirit, similarly stolen, from the cupboard-under-the-stairs. What was the dusty bottle meant for? She had no idea. She placed it neatly in the washing-up bowl. From the regular row of dolls, blank in the morning half-light, she took Child Pornography, the doll with the curliest hair, who played the role of the judge when the game needed it. Hettie was sorry, but she would say goodbye to her this morning. She was the perfect corpse for a Viking funeral. She, too, went into the washing-up bowl, and then a large box of kitchen matches.
Finally, from her bedside table, Hettie took her favourite possession ever, her hatpin. She would be sorry to say goodbye to that, sorrier than about Child Pornography. But she had bought it and carried it and placed it on her bedside table and taken it to school in her bag, all that for a whole year. Now she had Michael, and the hatpin had reached the end of its use. She put that, too, in the blue washing-up bowl. The objects were neatly lodged with each other. She placed it in the bag-for-life. All this Hettie had done in the half-light of early morning. She had not wanted to wake her parents by putting her light on.
But as she was going down the stairs, she must have made a noise.
‘What are you doing, Hettie?’ her father’s voice asked from their bedroom.
‘Nothing,’ Hettie said. Behind her father’s sleep-vague question, there was the familiar and yet annoying noise of her mother’s snoring. In-out, in-out, it went, like a punctured vacuum cleaner.
‘Where are you going…?’ her father said, in his horizontal voice, already drifting back to sleep, hardly needing an answer.
‘Nowhere,’ Hettie answered, carrying on down the stairs. She would have said ‘bird-watching’; she had her excuse ready for her return, some time before breakfast. But now, as she headed out towards the Viking funeral that Child Pornography was about to be rewarded with, no answer was necessary. She had told her father nowhere, and walked out of the house with her bag-for-life and its tragic contents.
At this time on a Sunday morning, no one was up. Even the motorway bridge over the estuary was silent. A remote high song of a bird, a blackbird perhaps, that was all. The sky was thinning far away, like water dropped into ink. It was strange how at the other end of the day, as night was falling, it made you nervous to walk the streets. (That was why Hettie had bought the hatpin in the first place, because of all the rapists and paedophiles and abductors hanging about Hanmouth’s streets.) At the other end of the day—i.e., like NOW—no one would be scared of anything, although there was probably only about the same amount of light in the sky. She walked briskly towards the quay, past the antiques shop and a dead, abandoned dark bus, waiting for a Sunday-morning driver to reclaim it for the first trip of the day. She went down Ferry Road, by the thicket-like boatyard with its thin legs in the air, not stopping to read the adverts for speedboats and tugboats in the blue-framed glass case. Soon she came to the stone jetty. On it were dozens of ducks, their heads under their wings, like mushrooms.
Miranda and Kenyon religiously bought a small yellow booklet from the newsagent, one every month, entitled Tide Tables. They probably felt they ought to know when the estuary was high and when low, if they lived by its banks. It lived on the hallway bookcase, replaced every month. Hettie thought she was the first member of the family ever to have picked it up and read it for a purpose. Within half an hour, she had worked out that the tide would be high at five thirty in the morning on this particular Sunday. She had waited weeks for a good time to roll round. Here it was, the perfect time for her undisturbed Viking funeral. The estuary was full. The jetty sat in the water like a tongue.
On the jetty, she unpacked the components, and placed them in a row. She squatted on her haunches. First, she folded the bag-for-life in four, fastening it with the hatpin. It went at the bottom of the washing-up bowl. Then Hettie opened the child-proof top of the white spirit. She had always been good at opening the child-proof tops of things. She had had the push-twist-click knack since she was little. Miranda was always saying to her, ‘Child, come and open this child-proof bottle,’ of aspirins, or Valium, or whatever it was. That was supposed to be funny.
Hettie poured the white spirit all over the woven jute bag until it was sopping and an inch of liquid was at the bottom of the bowl. She took the doll— ‘Goodbye, Child Pornography,’ she said, and thought of kissing her. ‘You had a noble life—’ She stopped, because the funeral oration came later. Child Pornography was good at sitting upright. That was why she played the judge. Now she went torso upright in the bowl, her legs stretched out, and Hettie decided to put her arms straight outwards, in supplication and despair.
She took the bowl down to the water’s edge, disturbing the ducks as she went. The little mushro
oms produced surprising sleepy heads and legs, walked, barking, a few paces, disturbing other mushrooms, settled again. She carried the bowl solemnly, the liquid slopping from side to side, soaking Child Pornography’s blue and white floral dress. She placed the bowl on the stones, half in the water, and had to go back to fetch the matches.
‘Farewell, O child,’ she said. ‘Go in peace, and remember your great deeds as you go. Every one of them. Farewell, farewell.’
Then Hettie struck a match, and dropped it into the bowl. She had imagined a faint blue flicker like a Christmas pudding. But it went up with a satisfying woof. All around, a great eruption of quack and flight, as the waterbirds took to the air, ran flapping for their lives. Never had they been woken up like this, with the smell of plastic burning and feathers singeing. Hettie could see that it would have been more sensible to bring a stick to poke the burning bowl into the stream. But in a second the flames died down somewhat and, with a deft shove of the foot, the bowl went into the water, still burning. By the jetty, the water was still, and the funeral boat twirled in the flood ineffectually. ‘Go on, you stupid thing,’ Hettie said. Then some kind of current took it, and it began to move purposefully. Child Pornography’s hair was beginning to catch. It burnt beautifully, and each strand was a little line of flame, hissing and winking up into the air, detaching and rising into the morning like a prayer. Her dress was ablaze; her face might be melting.
Into the middle of the estuary stream the Viking boat went, its cargo of flames and the stoic forward doll in its middle. It was working well, this floating blaze in the dim dawn light. Hettie, as she had planned, began to sing what she could remember of Siegfried’s funeral march. ‘Bash-bash! Baa—bash-bash! BAA—bash-bash—baa—bash! Da-daa—dit daa—didi DAA—’ she sang, running breathlessly back to the road. She had planned a funerary oration, but now she could see that running alongside the waterborne pyre would be more fun. It floated, the flames shooting high, the doll sitting impassively, all the way down Ferry Road, across the quay and, Hettie running alongside, to the beginning of the Strand. Its smoke was high and black and evil. Hettie had hoped that it would carry on, down the estuary and out to sea. But just there, the blaze seemed to be too much for it. The floating bowl suddenly collapsed into the water, drunkenly pitching the now black-faced and bald Child Pornography into the flood. The heat must have burnt through the bottom of the washing-up bowl.
‘Child,’ Hettie declaimed, standing in the herbaceous bed of the garden opposite number seventeen, the naked Lovells’. ‘Child, your life was brave, and your end was noble. We give you a hero’s end, as a hero merits. You passed judgment on many, and now you go to meet your judgment.’ Hettie wondered whether she could, after all, wade out and rescue the sacrificed hatpin when the tide was low. She dismissed the thought as not very dignified. ‘Farewell! We mourn for you, and for that man who died—’ she couldn’t remember that man’s name— ‘and for the general, and for that girl who died a death of heroes! Farewell! Farewell!’ Out in the stream, an object, twisted, blackened, melted, turned in the flood. It seemed to be caught on something. Hettie looked at her watch. It was six, and the sun was rising. From beginning to end of her Viking funeral, not one person had witnessed any part of it. They had slept through the whole thing.
2.
The four rooms at the corners of the university building were much fought over. They were the largest, and they had a double aspect. Some of the occupants managed to introduce a sofa and a coffee-table into their offices as marks of their superiority. The rooms to the front of the building looked out over the university’s immaculate gardens, acres of woodland, miniature lakes with mock-Renaissance sculptures spouting water, and glossy ericaceous shrubbery, just now coming into pink, purple and white flowers. The gardens were looking their best. They had become significantly sprucer in the last couple of years, and prospective parents often commented on their groomed beauty with approval. The appointment of twelve more gardeners with funds made available after the closing down of the chemistry department had had its desired effect. From the window of the head of the English department’s office, on the left-hand side and on the second floor of the building, the head of department looked at the university’s gardens. He found it restful; a change from budgets and research grants and learning outcomes; a change from books and literature, things that over the years he had come to detest; a change from Miranda Kenyon.
Miranda Kenyon was sitting on the head of department’s sofa. He had asked her to come and see him on a matter of some delicacy, and she was currently reading the matter of some delicacy. There was no doubt in the head of department’s mind that she was a difficult colleague, a problem colleague, whose demeanour could never have been described as collegiate. She was older than he was, but there was no reason for her to refer to him as ‘Benjamin’, ‘Benjie’, ‘Darling little Benny’, or, he had been told, ‘Cliff’. It was true that, as other people had remarked, his appeal was boyish—the word had recurred in verbal testimonies to his charm, as he himself thought of it. There was no reason for her to have remarked, however, in a faculty meeting in front of twenty colleagues that she would be obliged if he would leave off laughing reflexively after every sentence, as it seemed to be threatening to bring on her migraine. He regarded that as actively hostile. In any case, he prided himself on chairing professional meetings with good humour and some warmth. To talk of migraines being brought on by his good humour and warmth—that was definitely hostile. He looked at Miranda, sitting reading a letter, slightly flushed with the effort of climbing the stairs, smiling somewhat, with frank dislike.
‘Miranda,’ he said.
‘Yes, Benjamin,’ she said, looking up with affected pleasure and surprise. She might have been a researcher, dutifully hard at work, accepting with delight the diversion offered by a chance acquaintance.
‘I’ll let you finish,’ he said.
‘It’s true that I haven’t quite finished reading,’ she said, and returned her attention to the sheet of paper. He could have sworn that she had finished reading; that now she was just gazing at the sheet of paper, waiting until she could declare herself finished. To keep him waiting.
‘And now I have finished reading,’ she said, taking off her glasses, looking with kindly warmth towards Ben—what a fuss this young man seemed to be making, her expression said. ‘I can entirely see why you thought you would like to speak to me, Benjamin.’
‘Well, I think I should ask you whether you recognize Mr and Mrs Warren’s account of your letter to them, I suppose,’ Ben said. ‘Did you write a letter like that?’
‘Like…’ Miranda looked again at the letter, putting her glasses back on. ‘Oh dear. I think I may well have done. But should we take this from the very start, Benjamin?’
‘Perhaps we should,’ Ben said, defeated.
‘I was told that Sophie Warren’s poor attendance at my seminars and very poor work were due to some family problems. She told me this herself. I pressed her, and she told me that her parents were undergoing some serious marital problems, and that this was affecting her work. I was naturally very concerned.’
‘Naturally. So you wrote her parents a letter.’
‘As you see, I wrote a letter to her parents.’
‘And they have written back—well, you can see what they have written back. They wrote to me, as you see, not to you.’
‘Yes, I can’t understand that. I really can’t tell you why they should do that. It seems almost rude.’
‘They say that they don’t know why you think they were divorcing. They’re very happy, they love their daughter, they can’t see what it has to do with, blah, blah. They seem pretty angry, in fact. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.’
‘Well, I can understand that. I would be awfully angry if my daughter went round claiming that we were divorcing when there was no truth in it. I’d be furious with her.’
‘No,’ Ben said. ‘They’re angry with us.’ Ben laughed lightly again; then he remembered w
hat Miranda had said about finishing statements with laughter, and stopped short.
‘I see,’ Miranda said, and smiled like a pupil taking a lesson.
‘I can’t help feeling,’ Ben said, ‘I can’t help feeling that your behaviour may be construed as somewhat disingenuous.’
‘Well, you are entirely entitled to your own feelings,’ Miranda said. ‘You must own your feelings. I would never seek to deny anyone a right to hold and express their feelings.’
‘Miranda,’ Ben said. He took a deep breath. He looked at the horticulture. Three lacrosse players were helping a fourth, his arm evidently broken, up the hill; they looked like the helpless seasons in Poussin’s Dance to the Music of Time. ‘Miranda. When a student with poor attendance claims that a grandmother has died, or that they have had glandular fever, or that, or that their parents are undergoing a traumatic divorce—do you generally believe them?’
‘Ben,’ Miranda said. ‘Are you saying that we ought to call our students liars when they tell us these things? I don’t think I can quite square that with my conscience.’
‘No,’ Ben said. ‘I’m not saying that. But I wonder whether it was quite necessary to write a detailed letter of condolence, on behalf of the faculty, to the parents of a delinquent student, saying how sorry we are that they are getting divorced.’
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