by Ruth Rendell
‘Peter Naulls?’
Stephen nodded. ‘Uncle Leonard’s son. We started looking for the hole in the long summer holidays. We were jolly methodical, I can tell you. Each day we covered a set area and we marked the bit we’d covered with sticks. But it took us weeks and weeks to find it.’ He hesitated. He had begun his account, intending to tell Lyn the whole of it, but now that he had reached the point of disclosing the site of the hole into the mine and of describing it and what happened there, he felt uneasy. Dadda he had told, though even to him he had given only a vague location, but he hadn’t said a word to his grandmother and he was sure Peter wouldn’t have told Uncle Leonard and Auntie Midge. Why divulge the secret now? ‘We found it,’ he said and lied, ‘but we didn’t go in or anything. Too scared for that.’
‘Oh, well,’ she said.
‘It was pretty enterprising of us to have found it, wasn’t it? Dadda thought so. He said what a waste of bloody time and then he gave me a five-pound note.’
‘How exactly like Dadda.’ She straightened his pillows. She took away the tray. There was no point in asking him if he would like the curtains drawn. He would come down soon anyway and say he was all right and going out on the moor again. Perhaps she could write to Nick and explain things. Explain what? Even if she were to write she knew she would never post the letter.
‘You were wrong about another one being killed in a couple of weeks, Mum,’ Joanne said on a Sunday afternoon. ‘It’s been more like six.’
‘Listen to who’s counting,’ said Kevin. ‘Thank God there hasn’t is what you ought to say.’
‘Well, I do. I do say that. I only meant it doesn’t look like there’s going to be another.’
‘Early days,’ said Mrs Newman. ‘It could just be he hasn’t been able to catch anyone.’
Joanne shrieked. She was big now and the child vigorous. The women had been amused — though the men, especially Dadda, embarrassed — when its movements, or so Joanne averred, had bounced a plate off her lap. Stephen told them how that morning he had seen a girl out on the moor alone.
‘Some folks want their heads examined,’ said Mr Newman. ‘I just hope you two girls have got more sense than ever to set a foot out there.’
Dadda, voyaging day by day farther out on his black sea of depression, made his one contribution to the talk. ‘That’s right, keep your feet under your own table.’
Joanne got to her feet ponderously. Her belly swayed, her ankles were like those of a woman with dropsy. ‘I go climbing hills every day, of course. Like a mountain goat, aren’t I, Kev?’
There was laughter at that, shamefaced from Mr Newman. Joanne fetched more biscuits, her current craving. Stephen hadn’t much to say. The first thing he had thought of when he awoke that morning was that it was his mother’s birthday, 25 May, and he had been thinking about it ever since, as he always did on that day. Somewhere, on the other side of the world, she must be celebrating it. She and her husband and Barnabas and Barbara …
‘You never told me about that old Mr Bale, Lyn,’ said Mrs Newman. ‘You never told me he’d had a heart attack coming round from the anaesthetic. I had to hear it from Kevin’s mum.’
‘How could I tell you when I didn’t know?’
‘Well, I’d have thought you’d know that, working next door but four or five or whatever it is. And there’s no need to colour up like that, it isn’t as if it matters.’
‘Do you mean he’s dead?’ said Lyn.
‘No, of course he isn’t dead. I’d have said if he’d been dead but Kevin’s mum said he was on the danger list.’
The conversation, in which neither Stephen nor Dadda took part, then turned upon whether ‘danger list’ was merely a figurative term or if hospitals actually maintained such ominous catalogues. Stephen wondered if Dadda also remembered what day it was. Probably, for he forgot nothing, his memory was prodigious. But it was impossible to tell what went on behind that massive, tortured brow, perpetually corrugated as if in a continual wince and recoil from life.
It was a family gathering, though one very different from what was now taking place in Tace Way, that had first alerted Stephen to the true facts of his descent.
5
Arthur and Helena Naulls had had their Golden Wedding party in November about the time of Stephen’s own twenty-first birthday. Before that he hadn’t known Helena’s wedding date. Who but a genealogist knew his grandmother’s wedding date? But he had always known his mother’s birthday and at primary school he had been allowed to make her a birthday card. He could still remember it, a picture of a house and a tree and a sun with rays like a starfish. Three weeks later she had gone off with a long-distance lorry driver.
Her birthday was 25 May and her parents had been married in November, though not perhaps the previous November. They had been married for fifty years, but was his mother forty-nine or only forty-eight? There was no one he could ask. The idea of asking Dadda! What he did was to go to Holy Trinity Church and look at the parish records where he found that his parents’ wedding date was also May — the 27th. Birth dates are not given on marriage certificates, only ages, and his mother’s was there as twenty-five, which meant she must have been born in 1926 and have been twenty-seven when he was born. Stephen was almost sure this wasn’t so, that she had been twenty-eight when he was born and thirty-four when she ran away. Perhaps there had been a muddle because her birthday and her wedding date were so close together.
He puzzled over the dates on the backs of photographs, most of which seemed to have been taken in May, and he tried to get from his aunts the precise age gap between his parents and between his mother and Uncle Stanley. Their answers were always, ‘A couple of years’ or ‘Oh, three or four years.’
The true facts came out simply and when he wasn’t even looking for them. Looking for his own birth certificate for his own marriage, he found his mother’s too — in a desk in the house in King Street. The Holy Trinity marriage entry was wrong. Brenda had been born in May 1925 and therefore conceived during the previous August when Helena was still second housemaid at Chesney Hall.
The other clarification followed swiftly from a photograph of Tace he saw in a newspaper review. It was a few weeks after his marriage and Stephen had been feeling unsure of himself, unsure of life itself. The discovery fortified him. When he looked at the picture of Tace he might have been looking into a mirror.
Of course it had to be! He had always felt he couldn’t be the descendant of Naullses. The Whalby connection was bearable, for they were good honest craftsmen, respected for their skills. But to be a Naulls, formed out of the same genes as Uncle Stanley, mouthing platitudes in the council chamber, or weedy, weak-eyed Uncle Leonard, that was intolerable. It was also false. His mother wasn’t the daughter of Arthur Naulls but born of a summertime passion between a pretty servant and one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century.
Tace was married, so there was naturally no question of his marrying Helena. But he hadn’t deserted her, he had arranged a suitable marriage with his under-gardener, had given the couple the lodge to live in and had had the child named after one of his sweetest heroines, Brenda Nevil of Wrenwood.
Stephen never much cared to think about sex. In the past, when his thoughts had turned to it as a young boy’s thoughts will, his body hadn’t followed his mind. All he had been able to envisage was his mother, so slight and fair, being mounted first by Dadda and then by the lorry driver. So it wasn’t the sexual aspect of Helena’s affair that interested him but its romantic side. He imagined Helena coming to some trysting place on a summer night, to the Banks of Knamber perhaps, or like Lady Irene and Alastair Thornhill, to the ghost of a road, the Reeve’s Way, as it threaded through the Vale of Allen, and Tace meeting her there in the twilight. Love children, he had read, were more beautiful, more charming and more favoured by destiny than those born in wedlock. His mother was and must still be such a one. For the loss of her he had compensated as best he could, first with the imagin
ary friend he called Rip, then with the moor itself, but in May he thought of her still and with a curious longing.
It wasn’t for many weeks after coming to Chesney that Peach ventured out. His favourite places to be were the chestnut leaf table and the top of the mahogany tallboy under the landing window on which he lay for hours, staring at the peaks and plateaux of the moor.
He grew large and plump and round-cheeked, but he was without kittenish ways as if his sad experience had robbed him prematurely of his youth, yet when he sat on Lyn’s lap in the evenings he gave himself up to a drowsy and contented purring. His first excursion from the house took him no farther than the garden. Next time he was off and away. When two hours had passed and he hadn’t returned, Lyn imagined him finding his way back to Bale’s and by this act leading her there in search of him. She imagined herself reunited with Nick through the cat’s agency, as lovers might be in some fairy story.
But Peach didn’t go to Bale’s or to his former home in Hilderbridge. He came back in the evening, bringing Lyn a fieldmouse. Her mother had come over to tell her Joanne had been kept in hospital with high blood pressure and threatened eclampsia. She had gone to St Ebba’s antenatal clinic and they had kept her there. When Mrs Newman saw the mouse, though it was dead, she jumped on a kitchen chair and squealed. Peach took back his gift, which he had laid at Lyn’s feet, and sat with it in his mouth, making cross twittering growls.
Stephen wrote for ‘Voice of Vangmoor’: ‘Those who declare our moorland puts up a poor showing when it comes to wildlife, should contemplate some of the offerings of my ginger tomcat: fieldmice, a shrew and even a water vole.’ Author’s licence, he told himself, though he had hesitated over the water vole. ‘Wild flowers too are to be found in abundance. Not only is the bilberry putting forth its globular pinkish-green blooms and the uva-ursi prolific with blossom this spring, but a few orchids may be spotted. I myself was lucky enough last week to see a fine sample of the Lesser Twayblade and another of the Small White Orchid, rare occurrences as far south as this and in these times. Readers of our great Vangmoor novelist, Alfred Osborn Tace (or viewers, as one must say these days!) will be familiar with the scene in Wrenwood in which Brenda Nevil hunts for specimens of this orchid for her bridal bouquet.’
It was true that he had found the orchid. A little cluster of it was growing among the damp rock ledges between Big Allen and Mottle Foin near where the Hilder ran down. Stephen came upon the flowers by chance after he had left the path and struck out across the rough marshy ground.
The sky was the way he liked it best and thought best suited to the terrain it overcast, piled with cloud in pillars and columns and towers and ramparts, so that in places the vapour seemed not insubstantial but composed of solid masonry. The surface of the moor itself glowed with the flowerbuds on the grasses and the tiny recumbent plants and there was a feel in the air of new springing life. The orchids, fresh and perfect against the damp stone, growing between cushions of bright green moss, had creamy flowers, fragrant and triplelobed. Stephen had hardly been able to believe his eyes.
Tace, describing the orchid in his novel, had also told where it was to be found, and within a few years every tuber and plant of leuchorchis albida had been stripped from the moor. Here, by the Hilder, was far west of the site of the plants mentioned in Wrenwood. Stephen resolved to be wiser than his grandfather and, while telling his readers of his discovery, not to disclose its whereabouts.
He didn’t even tell Lyn. She liked flowers and planted flowers in their garden but he often felt she didn’t really care about the moor. When she asked him if he would come with her to see Joanne he put forward the excuse of having his article to write, so Lyn went with Kevin.
‘I reckon you’re very wise not going in for this lark,’ Joanne said, shifting the mound of her body uncomfortably under the bedclothes. ‘If you get like weakening, just remember me. D’you know, they could keep me in here right up until the baby’s born.’
‘They won’t do that,’ Lyn said. ‘They haven’t got the beds.’
‘She’s brought it on herself with overeating,’ said Kevin.
For once Joanne didn’t round on him. She sighed. ‘It’s all fluid, they say. The baby isn’t even very big. I’m like one of those water beds, stick a needle in me and I’d go down to nothing. Pity they can’t.’
Lyn left the two of them together. St Ebba’s, the maternity hospital, was a good way farther down North River Street from Hilderbridge General, but there had been no room left in St Ebba’s car park and she had used the car park of the rambling, foinstone, turreted building that had once been the Three Towns work-house. It was nearly eight o’clock of a sunny evening, still light, as light as afternoon, but cool as early June often is. The trees in the grounds were in full, fresh leaf, and behind them the sun declined towards the moorland horizon, its rays making a brilliant silver-gold glare through the tracery. Lyn took one of the gravel paths into the grounds of the general hospital, walking towards the sun that dazzled her eyes so that she screwed them up against it. Her hair was loose today and she wore a blue and white striped cotton dress with her mother’s birthday gift cardigan. She had several pairs of sunglasses, perks of Gillman’s, but she had forgotten to bring a pair with her.
She saw the man, not very tall, thin, wearing jeans and a tee-shirt, coming along the path towards her, towards the main gate into North River Street, but the sun blinded her and she didn’t know him. He saw her and stopped. She closed her eyes and passed her hand over them and looked again. When she saw it was Nick Frazer something very curious happened. She behaved as she had never thought it would be possible for her to behave. She didn’t think. It was a reflex, the result of those weeks of thinking and longing and wondering. She ran to him and into his arms. He put out his arms and caught her and held her, and they stood there on the gravel path in the grounds of Hilderbridge General Hospital, embraced as if they had long been lovers and had known each other with profound emotion and physical joy and had been parted only to meet again now, by chance, so felicitously.
‘I’ve thought about you every day, all the time,’ he said.
‘Oh, I know, I know,’ she said.
‘I knew exactly why you didn’t come and I thought you knew why I didn’t come to you. But it was a deadlock, no way of breaking out of it. I even hoped that damned cat would find his way back so that I’d have an excuse to ring you.’
‘I had a sort of fantasy he’d go to Mrs Africa’s and I’d go there after him and so would you and we’d meet.’
‘Did you? I had a feeling like that too. How mad we’ve been, Lyn. Lyn, Lyn, that’s the first time I’ve said your name. Except to myself, I’ve said it a hundred times to myself.’
She said in a level voice, though her hands were shaking, like puppets jerked on strings, ‘I’ve been visiting my sister. My brother-in-law’s with her now but visiting ends at eight and I have to take him home. I brought him so I have to take him back.’
‘Let him take your car and you stay with me,’ Nick said.
‘I can’t do that.’ They stood under a cedar tree. Nick took her in his arms and kissed her but, when his lips parted and she could taste his mouth, she drew back. There were movements in her body that frightened her. She said, and her voice wasn’t steady any more, ‘I have to take Kevin home now. Should we — should we see each other tomorrow?’
‘Lunch at the Blue Lagoon?’
She nodded.
‘I don’t want to let you go, but d’you know, I feel so ridiculously happy. I am awake, aren’t I? I haven’t succumbed to weariness at Uncle Jim’s bedside and fallen asleep? Of course I haven’t, I don’t dream, never have. It’s early closing tomorrow — we can have all the afternoon together.’
She smiled at him. Then she walked away quickly along the path to the car park. Kevin was waiting by the car, leaning his arms on its roof, bored, smoking a cigarette.
‘What d’you think of her, then?’
Lyn blinked at hi
m. He seemed curiously unreal. ‘I’m sorry?’ she said.
‘Jo. I said what d’you think of her?’
‘She seems okay. How would I know?’
He got into the car beside her, gangling, long-legged, with big hands and feet. She realized for the first time fully consciously that she was ill at ease with, even afraid of, very tall men. Nick and she, they were proportioned to each other, they seemed to belong to the same tribe.
‘Okay if we pick up Trev?’
Kevin’s twin worked in some factory or mill in North Hilderbridge where he did the maximum overtime. He was waiting on the Jackley Road outside a pub called the Ostrich, Kevin’s double in every particular until he had grown a moustache.
‘Where’s old Steve got to, Lyn?’
‘Where d’you think?’ said Kevin. ‘I tell her she’s a moor widow.’
‘Yeah, but what’s he escaping from, Lyn? What’s with him he can’t adjust to reality?’
‘The moor’s real enough, I should think.’ She didn’t want to discuss Stephen.
‘It’s either an acute case of claustrophobia or his super ego could be compelling him to confront agoraphobia.’
‘Why don’t you apply for a grant and go and do a psychology degree at the tech?’ said Lyn.
Trevor began to explain why not, about the pointlessness of formal education in an area where knowledge depended so much upon intuition, and also about how much he earned with his overtime at Batsby Ball Bearings. She didn’t listen. She thought of Nick and then of Stephen. But what difference could this make to Stephen? She was depriving him of nothing, taking from him nothing he wanted or could possess.
A flock of sheep were in Goughdale, cropping the turf, dark-wooled, long-horned sheep of the breed called Big Allen Black. The outward signs of the disused mine workings beneath, the old windlass, the boundary stones, the ruined coes, rose out of the plain and showed black against the setting sun.