A Division of the Light (20 page)

“Whatever the job is, it can wait,” Gregory said, but she took no notice.

For a few seconds he thought that Alice would not reach the phone in time and would be forced to ring back later, but then he heard her speak from the bathroom. At first he tried to ignore what was being said, and instead pretended to busy himself by dismantling the tripod and placing the camera back in its case, as if everything were happening as planned.

But as the conversation went on Gregory edged closer and closer to the open bathroom door.

Alice had not recognized the incoming number, but told herself that there was no reason why she should. She had approached almost twenty companies and organizations, and it could have been any one of them that was ringing. But the caller's voice, when it came, was neither neutral nor formal. Instead it was hesitant.

“I'm looking for Alice Fell.”

“Yes,” she said, “that's me.”

“I'm sorry to ring you like this. We've never spoken.”

Alice waited. She did not know the voice even though there was an unclear suggestion of familiarity about it.

“I'm Richard.”

Still thinking of how she and Gregory would resume in a few minutes, she said nothing.

“Richard Laidlaw,” the man said.

For the briefest of moments she made no connection with the surname, but then she immediately knew there was something wrong.

“What is it?” she asked.

As he stood at the door Gregory began to realize that everything was changing. Alice's voice and the way she held her body were indicators that could not be ignored. An instinct for self-protection made him pretend that this was of little consequence. What did it matter that he would not be having sex with her that afternoon? It was bound to happen soon.

The thought immediately vanished into a regretful melancholy. Gregory knew his own mind now. He truly needed to make love to Alice. He wanted her presence to be imprinted on his body and his memory. Emotions rose within him that he had not wished for, and wanted to suppress, but he was helpless before them.

Much later Alice came to believe that the call had been made at that particular moment because it was part of a hidden design. Richard could have rung ten minutes later. Or she need not have answered. And that would have altered everything. If she and Gregory had actually made love before the call, then Alice would have had to look on their intimacy as something she should have been wise enough to refuse.

But they had not made love, and when she looked at the photographs taken that day she was able to view them as indicative of a certain kind of cleansing ritual. Although unaware that she was exactly where she needed to be, Alice had been unconsciously preparing for Gregory's future.

Almost two hundred images are stored in the small Kodak that Thomas kept in a side pocket of his rucksack. The first dozen are studies of the interior of a city flat, including a view from a window and one of the inside of the front door. The living room and bedroom have each been photographed from several angles. There are no means of identifying the flat, and few would recognize that it belongs to Alice. A succeeding image could be either a deliberate abstract or a mistake, but is actually a photograph of a river taken by zoom at dusk. The yellowish smears on the formless gray are lights reflected in the moving water.

The remaining pictures are of remote archaeological sites. To a non-specialist the most recognizable location, and certainly the most dramatic, is the stone circle at Castlerigg, although this features in only three shots. Perhaps Thomas felt that the site was too well known. Covered in much greater detail are the circle at Swinside and the megaliths of Long Meg and Her Daughters. Other photographs show what remains of tumuli, cultivation terraces, settlements and hill forts. The untrained eye, however, will see only low mounds of earth, grass and broken stone, like
evidence that has become so degraded that it is no longer decipherable.

Other than when a brief moment of sunlight passed across these barren places, the colors are muted and the landscapes drab. Some shots have been taken during rain, with muddy puddles collected in every depression. Only twice does Thomas himself appear, posed self-consciously against a mound to give it scale. These pictures were taken early in his journey, at the Leven's Park Ring Cairn and the Bronze Age farmstead at Sealford. After that, he appears to have abandoned the idea of standing in front of the lens.

For more than a week he had been visiting forlorn, out-of-the-way sites known only to a few. The Ordnance Survey map had become dog-eared, the compass face was smeared, and the laces of his scuffed boots were stiffened and discolored by mud. Thomas had no transport of his own, but relied on infrequent bus services and, twice, offers from strangers in cars who had taken pity on him. At night he stayed at B & Bs in villages or farmhouses and in the morning ate full English breakfasts whenever he could. For the rest of the day he survived on either bought sandwiches or Indian restaurant takeaways that he ate at bus stops with a plastic fork. Much of the time he was searching wet fellsides or moors for modest archaeological remains that were so difficult to spot that many walkers would have marched straight past. He habitually lingered at these locations for longer than was necessary.

Always sensitive about bodily functions, Thomas had developed a protocol for urinating in the open air, making use of tree plantations or dry stone walls as screens. Once, in an act that had subsequently seemed to him the most absurd of follies, he had stood at the center of a collapsed and deserted earthwork
and masturbated with a kind of clinical frenzy, as if he were somehow taking an obscure form of revenge. Only afterward did he feel ashamed, and hurry on as quickly as he could to his next destination.

Whenever he visited a site he circled or boxed its location in ink on his map and graded its interest with his own symbols. He did this so systematically that the map's red contour lines were now patterned with what looked like runic markings. By doing it Thomas could pretend, at least for some of the time, that his journey had a serious academic purpose.

On the day of his journey to Stockdale Moor he began by photographing a Celtic cross in a village churchyard. The weathered sandstone held both Norse and Christian symbols; a crucifixion was fading back into the stone. The cross was a thousand years old: by Thomas's standards relatively recent, but he had been required to teach several historical periods and the cross was important, so it seemed sensible to visit it before he began his climb to the settlements. It would join his other photographs of Norman castles, Georgian houses and sites from the Industrial Revolution. At this moment, and for most of his walk, Thomas believed he was certain to return to something like the life he had once led.

He stood among the mottled gravestones and checked his map. The thin blue squiggle of the Bleng rose below Caw Fell and Gowder Crag and flowed along the southern edge of the moor. Sampson's Bratfull was indicated in Gothic lettering, while symbols for cairns were pocked across the gradients and plateaux. All around were moors, farms and fells with names belonging to a grimly functional past during which matters of the intellect or of the heart must have been indulgences—Stone Pike, Raven Crag, Hawkbarrow, Scargreen.

Thomas folded his map and walked to the end of the village. At a signpost he struck off the main Wasdale road and set off into this bleak heartland along a narrow road that was marked as private. After a few last bungalows and a farm he could see nothing ahead but hedges, trees, fields and the sides of a shallow valley. A large bird wheeled in the sky for a long time before it was lost to sight behind the edge of the forest. Once again he found himself thinking of Alice. He could not help it. She was with him always.

Last night he had stayed at a B & B used by long-distance walkers. On a shelf there had been a scruffy collection of local guidebooks. As he leafed through one in a desultory fashion the name of Alice Fell had leapt out at him like an alarm: Wordsworth had written a poem of that name. The discovery seemed not so much of a coincidence as a goad.

For some distance the road resembled a lane and passed between wooden posts strung with wire and grassy banks topped by hawthorn. After five minutes he had to step off the metaled surface and stand close to a wooden gate when a muddy Land Rover drove toward him. Thomas moved back onto the road as soon as it had passed. He could hear the sound of water from beyond the trees on his right, and in the field to his left a few incurious sheep with ragged coats methodically cropped the grass. There seemed to be no one else around. When he reached the first conifers he looked to their uppermost branches and saw their tips sway in a breeze he could not feel at ground level. Above them the sky was cold and gray. He began to think about Alice again.

Often Thomas revisited his lost love affair like a detective searching for motivation, but this time he tortured himself by
wondering what Alice was doing at this particular moment. Safe and warm in the flat that he had once called home, he imagined, and perhaps with Gregory Pharaoh, a man who was far too old for her, a man whose promises must have been exciting, confusing and misleading. Perhaps even now she was naked and straddling him. Thomas tried to imagine the scene because he knew it would cause him pain, but each time the details were about to resolve themselves they slipped out of focus. The most hurtful thought of all was that Alice could be whispering in Pharaoh's ear the endearments and invitations that she had once whispered to Thomas, and which he had always wanted to be for him and him alone.

He came to an unsurfaced area that was used as a car park. A man and a woman wearing cagoules had just opened the boot of their car and were drying two dogs with towels. The woman smiled and said that it looked as if it were going to pour down. Thomas thought of just walking on, but paused to ask if they knew the best way to Sampson's Bratfull. Neither had heard of it, but when he explained its location, the man recommended that he take the track to the left just after the lower roadbridge across the Bleng. That way was more sheltered. The river had burst its banks and taken a new course a couple of years ago, but there was an alternative path through the wood. Thomas could, if he wished, return by the upper bridge, along the road from Scalderskew Farm. That way was longer, not as sheltered and not as interesting. The two dogs jumped into the car boot, circled round each other several times, and then settled down.

For more than a week Thomas had chosen not to hold conversations, and now he found that he wanted to spend time talking to these people. He asked about the dogs. One was a Lakeland
terrier, the other a cross that was often taken for a Lancashire Heeler. The man and woman took as much delight in them as if they had been children, and for several minutes they described the dogs' characters and exploits.

Thomas was slightly bored, but as he walked away he was also envious. Maybe the man and woman had as pleasant a life as could be led—a home far away from a city, a couple of dogs to walk, the natural world all around. They had appeared so happy with each other's company. There was a sense of family that was somehow extended and completed by their pets. Thomas did not have any close family connections. There was Richard, whose name he kept as an emergency contact, but they had not met for several years. Instead, they had merely kept each other informed of their latest addresses and contact numbers. Others, when they had broken up with the person they loved, would have sought refuge with a brother or sister. Not Thomas. He had not felt able to do that, and had not wanted to. Others might even have been able to ask a brother or sister if they could borrow money; Thomas could not do that either, even though his account was now dangerously low.

A light shower fell as he crossed the smooth metal bars of a cattle grid. The year's new growth shone a vivid green on the conifers. Behind their trunks the pale boulders in the river had been tinted brown with peat. Ivy grew thick enough to choke a ditch on the left.

The road turned to cross the lower bridge and then divided. The way to the right led upward and soon vanished behind a wooded bank. Beside it a sign for Scalderskew Farm was hammered into the ground. As the dog owners had advised, Thomas turned to the left and took a broad track of packed earth that skirted
the river on its southern edge. A flurry of small unidentifiable birds whirred between saplings that had sprouted from a bank of mossy earth.

A little further on he came to the spot where the Bleng had burst its banks and now flowed across the track. At some time in the past, asphalt had been laid, perhaps because that stretch had always been muddy; now the flood had lifted it in cracked plates so that the water coursed across the shattered path in a series of shallow rapids. Thomas considered the alternative path through the wood but decided to ignore it. He waited for a moment with the toes of his boots at the edge of the stream, and then he walked slowly forward. Water flowed around the soles of his boots, its noise rising to cover him in its intersecting patterns.

He thought of the time when he had shared a shower with Alice. The cubicle had filled with mist, and condensation formed on the glass so they could no longer see out. The noise of the falling spray changed as they turned their shoulders and flanks to the jet, and they both laughed when water ran from the end of his penis as if from a tap.

Thomas took another step forward and misjudged the depth of the rapids. Cold water surged above the top of his boot and poured inside. Instantly his foot became icily cold. There was nothing for it but to walk quickly ahead. He forded the rogue stream and stood on its far side with his boots squelching beneath him.

Maybe Alice and Pharaoh were sharing a shower now, he thought. Maybe she was laughing in the way she had always laughed with Thomas. Was laughter something that she would share with all her lovers? Would every man in that hazy unfocused line have been told the same things, taken to the same places, made love to in the same unforgettable ways?