In a Dry Season

by Peter Robinson

  I was immediately put in mind of Hardy’s novel A Pair of Blue Eyes, which I had read only a few weeks previously. Like Elfride Swancourt’s, this land-girl’s eyes were “a sublimation of her.” They were “a misty and shady blue, that had no beginning or surface . . . looked into rather than at.” Those eyes also had a way of making you feel you were the only person in the world when she talked to you.

  “Nasty out, isn’t it? I don’t suppose you’ve got five Woodbines for sale, have you?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “Sorry,” I said. “We don’t have any cigarettes at all.” It was one of the toughest times we’d had in the war thus far: the Luftwaffe was bombing our cities to ruins; the U-boats were sinking Atlantic convoys at an alarming rate; and the meat ration had just been dropped to only one and tenpence a week. But here she was, bold as brass, a stranger, walking into the shop and without a by-your-leave asking for cigarettes!

  I was lying, of course. We did have cigarettes, but what small supply we had we kept under the counter for our registered customers. We certainly didn’t go selling them to strange and beautiful land-girls with eyes out of Thomas Hardy novels.

  I was just on the point of telling her to try fluttering her eyelashes at one of the airmen knocking about the village—holding my tongue never having been my strongest point—when she totally disarmed me with a sequence of reactions.

  First she thumped the counter with her little fist and cursed. Then, a moment later, she bit the corner of her lower lip and broke into a bright smile. “I didn’t think you would have,” she said, “but it was worth asking. I ran out the day before yesterday and I’m absolutely gasping for a fag. Oh, well, can’t be helped.”

  “Are you the new land-girl at Top Hill Farm?” I asked, curious now, and beginning to feel more than a little guilty about my deceit.

  She smiled again. “Word gets around quickly, doesn’t it?” “It’s a small village.”

  “So I see. Anyway, that’s me. Gloria Stringer.” Then she held her hand out. I thought it rather an odd gesture for a woman, especially around these parts, but I took it. Her hand was soft and slightly moist like a summer leaf after rain. Mine felt coarse and heavy, wrapped around such a delicate thing. I always was an ungainly and awkward child, but never did I feel this so much as during that first meeting with Gloria. “Gwen Shackleton,” I muttered, more than a trifle embarrassed. “Pleased to meet you.”

  Gloria rested her hand palm down on the counter, cocked one hip forward and looked around. “Not a lot to do around here, is there?” she said.

  I smiled. “Not a lot.” I knew what she meant, of course, but it still struck me as an odd, even insensitive, thing to say. I got up at six o’clock every morning to run the shop, and on top of that I spent one night a week fire-watching—a bit of a joke around these parts until the Spinner’s Inn was burned down by a stray incendiary bomb in February and two people were killed. I also helped with the local Women’s Voluntary Service. Most days, after the nine o’clock news, I was exhausted and ready to fall asleep the minute my head hit the pillow.

  I had heard how hard a land-girl’s job was, of course, but to judge by her appearance, especially those soft hands, you would swear that Gloria Stringer had never done a day’s hard physical labour in her life. My first thought was an uncharitable one. Knowing farmer Kilnsey’s wandering eyes, I thought that, perhaps, when his wife wasn’t around, he was teaching Gloria a new way of ploughing the furrow. Though I wasn’t quite sure what that meant, being only sixteen at the time, I had heard more than one or two farmers use the phrase when they thought I was out of earshot.

  But in this, as in most of my first impressions about Gloria, I was quite wrong. This freshness in her appearance was simply one of her many remarkable qualities. She could spend the day hay-making, threshing, pea-pulling, milking, stooking or snagging turnips, yet always appear fresh and alive, with energy to spare, as if, unlike the rest of us mere mortals, she had some sort of invisible shield around her through which the hard diurnal toil couldn’t penetrate.

  On first impressions, I have to confess that I did not like Gloria Stringer; she struck me as being vain, common, shallow and selfish. Not to mention beautiful, of course. That hurt, especially.

  Then, wouldn’t you know it, but right in the middle of our conversation, Michael Stanhope had to walk in.

  Michael Stanhope was something of a character around the village, to put it mildly. A reasonably successful artist, somewhere in his early fifties, I’d guess, he affected a rakish appearance and seemed deliberately to go out of his way to offend people.

  That day, he was wearing a rumpled white linen suit over a grubby lavender shirt and a crooked yellow bow-tie. He also wore his ubiquitous broad-brimmed hat and carried a cane with a snake-head handle. As usual, he looked quite dissipated. His eyes were bloodshot, he had at least three days’ stubble on his face, and he emanated a sort of general fug of stale smoke and alcohol.

  A lot of people didn’t like Michael Stanhope because he wasn’t afraid to say what he thought and he spoke out against the war. I quite liked him, in a way, though I didn’t agree with his views. Half the time he only said what he did to annoy people, like complaining that he couldn’t get canvas for his paintings because the army was using it all. That wasn’t true.

  But he would have to walk in right then.

  “Good morning, my cherub,” he said, as he always did, though I felt far from cherubic. “I trust you have my usual?”

  “Er, sorry Mr Stanhope,” I stammered. “We’re all out.” “All out? Come, come now, girl, that can’t be.” He grinned and looked over at Gloria mischievously. Then he winked at her.

  “I’m sorry, Mr Stanhope.”

  “I’ll bet if you looked in the usual place,” he said, leaning forward and rapping on the counter with his cane, “you would find them.”

  I knew when I was beaten. Mortified, blushing to the roots of my being, I reached under the counter and brought out the two packets of Piccadilly I had put aside for him, the way I always did whenever we were lucky enough to get some in.

  “That’ll be one and eight, please,” I said.

  “Outrageous,” Mr Stanhope complained as he dug out the coins, “the way this government is taxing us to death to make war. Don’t you think so, my cherub?”

  I muttered something noncommittal.

  All the while Gloria had been watching our little display with growing fascination. When I glanced at her guiltily as I handed over the cigarettes to Mr Stanhope, she smiled at me and shrugged.

  Mr Stanhope must have caught the gesture. He was always quick to sense any new nuance or current in the atmosphere. He fed on that sort of thing.

  “Ah, I see,” he said, turning his gaze fully towards Gloria and admiring her figure quite openly. “Do I take it that you were enquiring after cigarettes yourself, my dear?”

  Gloria nodded. “As a matter of fact, I was.”

  “Well,” said Mr Stanhope, putting the brass snake-head of his cane to his chin as he reflected, “I’ll tell you what. As I very much approve of women smoking, perhaps we can come to some sort of arrangement. I have but one stipulation.”

  “Oh,” said Gloria, crossing her arms and narrowing her eyes. “And what might that be?”

  “That you smoke in the street every now and then.”

  Gloria stared at him for a moment, then she started to laugh. “That won’t be a problem,” she said. “I can assure you.” And he handed her one of the packets.

  I was flabbergasted. There were ten cigarettes in each packet and they weren’t cheap or easy to get.

  Instead of protesting that she couldn’t possibly accept them but thanking him for his generosity anyway, as I would have done, Gloria simply took the packet and said, “Why, thank you very much, Mr . . . ?”

  He beamed at her. “Stanhope. Michael Stanhope. At your service. And it’s my pleasure. Believe me, my dear, it’s a rare treat indeed to meet a woman as comely as thyself aro
und these parts.” Then he moved a step closer and scrutinized her, quite rudely, I thought, rather like a farmer looking over a horse he was about to buy.

  Gloria stood her ground.

  When Mr Stanhope had finished, he turned to go, but before the door shut behind him, he cast a quick glance over his shoulder at Gloria. “You know, you really must visit my studio, my dear. See my etchings, as it were.” And with that he was gone, chuckling as he went.

  In the silence that followed, Gloria and I stared at one another for a moment, then we both burst out giggling. When we had managed to control ourselves, I told her I was sorry for deceiving her over the cigarettes, but she waved the apology aside. “You have your regulars to attend to,” she said. “And these are difficult times.”

  “I must apologize for Mr Stanhope, too,” I said. “I’m afraid he can be quite rude.”

  “Nonsense,” she said, with that little, pixieish grin of hers. “I rather liked him. And he did give me these.”

  She opened the packet and offered me a cigarette. I shook my head; I didn’t smoke then. She put one in the corner of her mouth and lit it with a small silver lighter she took from her uniform pocket. “Just as well,” she said. “I can see these will have to last me a while.”

  “I can put some aside for you in future,” I said. “I mean, I can try. Depending on how many we can get, of course.”

  “Would you? Oh, yes, please! That would be wonderful. Now if I might just have a look at that copy of Picture Goer over there, the one with Vivien Leigh on the cover. I do so admire Vivien Leigh, don’t you? She’s so beautiful. Have you seen Gone With the Wind? I saw it in the West End before I went on my month’s training. Absolutely—”

  But before I could get the magazine for her or tell her that Gone With the Wind hadn’t reached this far north yet, Matthew dashed in.

  Gloria turned at the sound of the bell, eyebrows raised in curiosity. When he saw her, my brother stopped in his tracks and fell into her eyes so deeply you could hear the splash.

  The first thing Banks did when he got back to the cottage that night was check the answering machine. Nothing. Damn it. He wanted to put things right after his miserable cock-up on the phone earlier that day, but he still had no access to Brian’s number in Wimbledon. He didn’t even know Andrew’s last name. He could find out—after all, he was supposed to be a detective—but it would take time, and he could only do it during office hours. Sandra might know, of course, but the last thing he wanted to do was talk to her.

  Banks poured himself a whisky, turned off the bright overhead light and switched on the reading lamp by his armchair. He picked up the book he had been reading over the past week, an anthology of twentieth-century poetry, but he couldn’t concentrate. The blue walls distracted him, and the smell of paint in the deep silence of the countryside made him feel lonely and restless. He turned on the radio. Someone was playing the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto.

  Banks glanced around the room. The walls did look good; they harmonized well with the ceiling, which he had painted the colour of ripe Brie. Maybe they were just a little too cold, he thought, though he needed all the air-conditioning he could get in this weather. He could always repaint them orange or red in winter, when the ice and snow came, and that would give the illusion of warmth.

  He lit the last cigarette of the day and took his drink outside. The cottage stood on a narrow, unpaved laneway about fifty yards west of Gratly. Opposite Banks’s front door was a sort of bulge in the low wall that ran between the lane and Gratly Beck. In the daytime, it was an ideal spot for ramblers to stop for a moment and admire the falls, but at night there was never anyone there. The lane wasn’t a through road, and there was plenty of room for Banks to park his car there. Just beyond the cottage, it dwindled to a public footpath, which ran between the woods and the side of Gratly Beck.

  Banks had come to see this area as his personal balcony, and he liked to stand out there or sit on the low wall dangling his legs over the edge late in the evening, when it was quiet. It helped him think, get things sorted.

  Tonight, the stone was still warm; the smoke on his tongue tasted sweet as fresh-mown hay. A sheep bleated high on the daleside, where the silhouetted fells were only a shade or two blacker than the night itself. Sharp starlight pricked the satin sky, along with the lights of a distant farmhouse; a gibbous moon hung over Helmthorpe, in the valley bottom, and the square church tower, with its ancient weather-vane, stood solid against the night. This must have been what the blackout was like, Banks thought, remembering his mother’s stories of getting around London during the Blitz.

  As Banks sat by the dried-up waterfalls, he thought again about the odd way he had come to live in this isolated limestone cottage. It was as a “dream cottage” in more than one way: though he had never told anyone this, he had actually bought it because of a dream.

  Over his last few months alone in the Eastvale semi, Banks had drifted so far from himself that he hadn’t even cleaned or tidied the place since Christmas. Why bother? He spent most of his evenings out in pubs or driving the countryside alone, anyway, and his nights falling asleep half-drunk on the sofa, listening to Mozart or Bob Dylan, fish-and-chip wrappers and take-away cartons piling up in an ever-widening circle around him.

  In April he seemed to reach his lowest ebb. Tracy, who had been to visit her mother in London that Easter weekend, let it slip over the telephone that there was a new man in Sandra’s life, a photo-journalist called Sean, and that they seemed serious. He looked young, Tracy said. Which was a hell of a compliment coming from a nineteen-year-old. Banks immediately began to wonder just how long this affair had been going on before he and Sandra separated last November. He asked Tracy, but she said she didn’t know. She also seemed upset that Banks would even suggest it, so he backed off.

  As a result, Banks was more full of anger and self-pity than usual that night. Whenever he thought of Sean, which was far more often than he would have liked, he wanted to kill him. He even considered phoning an old mate on the Met and asking if they couldn’t put the bastard away for something. There were plenty of coppers on the Met who would jump at the chance to put someone called Sean away. But while he had certainly bent the rules occasionally, Banks had never yet abused his position for his own ends, and even at his lowest ebb he wasn’t going to start.

  His hatred was unreasonable, he knew, but when was hatred ever reasonable? He had never even met Sean. Besides, if Sandra wanted to pick up some toy boy and take him home to her bed, it was hardly the toy boy’s fault, was it? More likely hers. But reason didn’t stop Banks from wanting to kill the bastard.

  That night, after several whiskies too many, he had fallen asleep on the sofa as usual, with Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks playing on the CD. Long after the music had finished, he woke from a dream peculiar only for its emotional intensity.

  He was sitting alone at a pine table in a kitchen, and sunlight flooded through the open curtains, bathing everything in its warm and honeyed glow. The walls were off-white, with a strip of red tiles over the sink and counter area; matching red canisters for coffee, tea and sugar stood on the white Formica counter-tops, and copper-bottomed pots and pans hung from a wooden rack beside the set of kitchen knives. The clarity of detail was extraordinary; every grain and knothole in the wood, every nuance of light on steel or copper shone with a preternatural brightness. He could even smell the warm pine from the table and the fitted cupboards, the oil on the hinges.

  That was it. Nothing happened. Just a dream of light.

  But the intense feeling of well-being it gave him, as warm and bright as the sunlight itself, still suffused him when he awoke, disappointed to find himself alone and hung-over on the sofa in the Eastvale semi.

  When Sandra decided a few weeks later that their separation was to be permanent—or at least that reconciliation wasn’t imminent—they sold the semi. Sandra got the television and VCR; Banks got the stereo and the lion’s share of the CD collect
ion. That was fair; he had collected them in the first place. They split the kitchenware, and for some obscure reason, Sandra also took the tin-opener. Books and clothes were easily divided, and they sold most of the furniture. All in all, there hadn’t been a hell of a lot to show for more than twenty years of marriage. Even after the sale, Banks didn’t care much where or how he lived, until a few weeks in a bed-and-breakfast place straight out of Bill Bryson changed his mind.

  He began to seek isolation. When he first saw the cottage from the outside, he didn’t think much of it. The view of the dale was terrific, as was the seclusion afforded by the woods, the beck, and the ash grove between the cottage and Gratly itself, but it was a squat, ugly little place that needed a lot of work.

  A typical Dales mix of limestone, grit and flag, it had originally been a farm labourer’s cottage. Carved into the gritstone doorhead was the date 1768 and the initials JH, probably the time it was built and the initials of the first owner. Banks wondered who JH was and what had become of him. Mrs Perkins, the present owner, had lost both her two sons and her husband, and she was finally leaving to move in with her sister in Tadcaster.

  Inside, the place didn’t make much more of an impression at first, either; it smelled of camphor and mould, and all the furniture and decor seemed dark and dingy. Downstairs was a living-room with a stone fireplace at one end, and upstairs, only two small bedrooms. The bathroom and toilet had been tacked onto the kitchen at the back, as they often were in such old houses. Plumbing was pretty primitive back in 1768.

  Banks was not a believer in visions and prescience, but he would have been a fool to deny that when he walked into the kitchen that day he experienced the same feeling of well-being and peace he had experienced in the dream. It looked different, of course, but he knew it was the same place, the one in his dream.