Breaking Light (6 page)

‘But Cecilia …'

‘No: it's my final decision.'

*

It was well into the afternoon, the feeble sun barely reaching over the hedges, when Mr Askew set out for his allotment again. As he shuffled along the street, past Wilkinson's, which was now the deli, and a group of Gore-texed ramblers outside Rowden's, he wondered whether he needed to employ a woman to come and do a bit of cleaning for him; somebody who could come – and be gone – while he was out for a walk or at the allotments. The thought was unsettling but he had to keep at it, unflinchingly. However, his mind soon slipped towards more pleasant thoughts. He quickened his steps as he remembered the plan
he had worked out during his after-lunch doze. He was going to plant an herbaceous border on the side of the allotment that faced the silent woman's plot. He could already see it in his mind's eye: the taller achillea and delphiniums at the back and then anemones and sea holly at the front. Perhaps a few poppies. Lapis lazuli flanked by gold, white, purple and red – a rainbow of goodwill and neighbourly consideration.

As he turned on to the path to the higher ground, he could see a glimpse of colour in the dull field. ‘Ah, good,' he said to himself. ‘She's back.' Leaning into the wind, he stumbled towards her, waving his hand and shouting, a bit too eagerly, ‘Ah, I thought you might come back this afternoon – it's such a nice day for it, isn't it?' He had made his mind up and would not have it otherwise, although the wind did bite and the sky was darkening over the hills in the west. A few gulls, having detoured from the coast beyond the horizon, scattered reluctantly from the beds of fat worms as Mr Askew charged up the broken path, his coat catching briefly on last year's brambles. He was suddenly uncertain whether she had heard him – the wind was still against him – and threw his words at her with renewed force. ‘Lovely afternoon, wouldn't you say?' He faltered as he saw that she had stopped digging and was looking at him. In the flurry of the afternoon, she seemed remarkably still – the kind of stillness learnt in solitude. She was younger than he had thought at first, perhaps in her early fifties, and her dark gaze, as it finally settled on him, was more intense.

‘Not necessarily.' Her voice was clear, the pronunciation distinct but foreign.

He was taken aback for a moment, then murmured, ‘No, I suppose you're right. Weather is always a matter of opinion –
quite subjective, really. What is fair to one may be quite foul to another.' How stupid he sounded.

And yet her smile was without irony, or so it seemed. The headscarf had slid back to reveal her black hair, streaked with a few strands of silver. ‘Our nature makes it difficult to reach absolute certainty and consensus … but some things are indisputable –' her eyes were the colour of reeds in a river – ‘such as, a rectangle has four corners, or, if I sow, I will reap.'

The wind was fretting with his hair, lifting the fringe, which he kept long out of habit, and blowing it about. He tried to hold it down until he remembered the cap in his coat pocket. Putting it on gave him a moment to recompose himself. ‘I plant because I want my day to be a little bit more beautiful, if possible,' he admitted, and dared look her in the eye.

She looked at the snowdrops and scilla at his feet and nodded. ‘These flowers are new to me; they are very pretty. You're lucky to have such insouciance. I sow vegetables because they offer me a sense of belonging –' she pushed her spade harder into the earth with surprising strength – ‘and something to tend to,' she added.

He nodded. And then he remembered what he had come to tell her. ‘I intend to plant an herbaceous border.' His hand indicated gently where. ‘It will be very … colourful in a few months. You see, it was you who inspired me, this morning.'

It will become her beauty, he thought to himself, and the flawed day seemed suddenly perfect.

‘I do not drink, take drugs or get caught up in trafficking,' the strange woman on his doorstep said defiantly, and added, ‘I want to make it clear that I'm not like one of them Eastern Europeans.'

Mr Askew only stared.

‘I wouldn't normally answer an ad, you understand –' she tried to look under – and then over – his arm which held open the door – ‘but, as there's less to do up at the farm these days, I thought I might be charitable and help a neighbour who's new to the community.'

She was waving a piece of paper in front of him, a piece of paper, he realised, with his own handwriting on it. It was the note he had put up on the board at the post office, advertising for a cleaning lady. How he regretted it now. But it was too late for that, quite clearly. He looked beyond her, towards the canopy of green leaves that fringed his property. At least I still have the trees to myself, he thought, and lowered his eyes to her. She was a short and compact kind of woman and, if it hadn't been for her bum, which presented itself in too-tight denim, she would have been altogether unremarkable.

‘It's only for a couple of hours a week, you do realise?'

‘Most respectable homes around here are normally cleaned
for at least four hours a week.' She was beginning to sound impatient.

‘Oh. All right; let's agree on three hours, then,' because he would always compromise.

‘Fine. I'll start on Friday,' she said, thinking it was her own triumph.

He sighed and began to close the door.

‘Ah-ah-ah!' She might just as well have put her foot in the gap.

He looked at her again.

‘I insist that you supply me with rubber gloves and cleaning products. Mr Muscle do the best ones.'

‘Oh, yes, yes, if you say so …' He sounded nervous and hoped she didn't notice.

‘See you on Friday, then.'

‘Yes, yes.' Closing the door at last, he tried to offer her a smile with his mended mouth.

As he leant his forehead against the closed door, he could hear her footsteps departing on the gravel outside. He realised that she had been wearing a pair of very white trainers that looked as if they had just been taken out of their box. The whole thing unsettled him. Why had he thought it would be a good idea to have somebody come into his home to move around his things – bounce her large bum against his furniture? He imagined the soles of the white trainers squeaking on his parquet and winced. You stupid fool! Well, it was done now. He hadn't even asked her name. He felt damp and his shirt was sticking to his back. He waited a little longer before walking into the drawing room, where he could watch the gravel drive and the lawns from behind the curtains. Grabbing at the worn folds of green velvet, he squinted at the light, which seemed suddenly to have turned
against him. She was nowhere to be seen – but still he imagined her spying on him from the bushes by the road. What had she made of his face he wondered. Had she noticed that it was badly sewn? At once, he felt the urge to go for a walk.

He stepped through to the kitchen and opened the back door on to the porch. His walking stick was leaning against the glass and his leather boots were caked in mud from their last outing. I wish I had a dog, he thought as he put on his boots, if only to feel the softness of its ears.

As he walked through the fields and paddocks, the sun came out from behind the clouds and warmed his face. A few young lambs idled amongst daffodils while their mothers grazed matronly nearby. Somewhere above – too high to cast a shadow – a couple of ravens were soaring and carousing in a courting game, their wedge-tails stencilling cuneiform on to the spring skies. As soon as he left the enclosed land behind, a breeze rose from the high moor, eager to greet him with coils and twists. Further away, on the horizon towards the coast, its freshness had already been trapped by a flotilla of wind farms: giant scarecrows in a field of barley. Mr Askew hunched his shoulders against the challenge as he started climbing towards the summit of the tor. As he trudged on, the clitter scraped at the sheep's dung which had stuck in the pattern of his rubber soles. He tugged at his cap in an effort to keep the wind out of his head but it would not let him alone. ‘It will ease once I reach the valley,' he said to himself in order to clear his mind. From this high position, his eyes swam out across the expanse of land that was still untamed by plough and unbound by road or dyke. Man had come here for centuries but, although groups of settlers had tried to manifest themselves in the landscape, what remained were signs of
struggle and submission rather than of conquest and triumph. Cairns and standing stones, chapels and stone crosses and other monuments to the living and their dead were deftly mirrored in grafts of peat digging and mining and small patches of ridge and furrow where somebody once tried to grow a crop.

A cloud, which had rested over a small lake for some time, decided to move on, silently detaching itself and bringing with it its own shadow that was the exact shape of the lake. Mr Askew followed its drift with his eyes until his gaze could no longer avoid the small cottage in the valley below. Even from this distance he could see that the thatch was tidy and the stonework in the barn was new. The yard was paved with slate and, where Uncle Gerry's henhouse had once stood, somebody had parked a four-wheel drive. The cottage looked very pretty where it nestled in the green valley – some would have called it picturesque and expected roses and honeysuckle to climb up to the eaves in summer. But Mr Askew, as if this had nothing to do with him, blinked and looked away, averting his mind from the hospitable smoke that once escaped from the chimney and from the proud rooster and his harem that used to fritter in the yard. He felt a bit tired and sat down with his back against a rock. In front of him were the remains of a cairn, which marked the summit of the tor. Every summer, ramblers would add to the pile, each one carrying a stone to the stack for luck, and every winter the storms would tear at the stones, scattering hope and fortune. And then he laughed, remembering Michael on the moor on a day of strong winds: ‘It can blow the flesh off your bones, if you let it. Honest, Gabe! So what you need to do is either open your mouth and let it blow right through you or, if it's really bad, you must lie down and hold on to the grass with your hands
and teeth – like this,' and Michael had thrown himself on to his stomach, biting into the moor. Mr Askew laughed again and opened his mouth wide to let the wind blow through him and fill his lungs.

*

All through that first summer, their friendship stretched and tightened like a cat sunning itself on a stone wall. The end of the school year saw many of the other children returning to work on the farms and smallholdings, so that Gabriel, who had no such duties, was suddenly out of harm's way. They no longer met at Oakstone but, every morning, whilst the tracks of snails spelled their silvery messages across the path, Gabriel would run under the trees, through lozenged sunlight, towards the moor gate – the last port before the open wash of grass and bracken. Red kites watched him with their yellow eyes and swifts raced like arrowheads through the high skies. A hare would stop in her tracks and listen to the threat of the thump, thump of his plimsolls on last year's heather. Michael would meet him, breathless, at Hart Cross, one of the stone crosses that had marked the trails across the moor since the monks first walked into the wilderness. Each such morning brought new excitement as their uncurtailed curiosity widened their world – there was nothing and nowhere they would not explore. They would twirl like shamans across the heath and dance with the petrified maidens in a stone circle, rest for a while on grass beds in the remains of an ancient settlement, or take aim at each other across the muddy trenches left behind by tin miners.

They followed a tin mining leat for hours until they reached its source. Here, they took their clothes off and jumped into the
water. Holding on to a rock or digging their hands into the silt at the bottom of the stream, they would let the current hold them still as trout as they opened their eyes to the unparalleled beauty of an underwater world – a world that would inevitably disappear at the end of each breath. These tiny deaths would make them thoughtful and edgy for a while, irritated by each other and themselves because, by now, there was little to distinguish one from the other. Once, they watched a cow drown in a mine pit. Powerless and grief-stricken, they clung to each other as the terrible head roared in panic and the once-kind eyes dimmed and rolled back into the blood dark. At such times, Gabriel was comforted only by the warm-sand smell of Michael's temples or the tanned skin at the back of his neck and the familiar crests of dirt under his fingernails. Sometimes, when they were tired and lay down to rest together, keeping each other warm, out of the wind, Gabriel could no longer tell to which body his head belonged or whose heartbeat was pulsing in his ears.

Only hunger would drive the boys off the moor and into the valley where Uncle Gerry's cottage sat, irreversibly, in the hillside. They would come tumbling down the slope behind the house or trudging wearily like crusaders along the road, their broken swords beating at hedgerows. On one occasion, they returned to see Uncle Gerry speaking to a tall man in the yard. Uncle Gerry was leaning on his shovel, so that it seemed as if the other man was looking down on him. The tweeds, too, made the stranger look important against the muck of the yard, although he did take off his hat in an effort to lower himself a little.

‘It's my dad!' Michael shouted and quickened his step.

But Gabriel held back and pulled at his dirty fringe.

‘C'mon, Gabe,' he called. ‘Let's go and meet him.'

Still he hesitated and stepped into the shadow under the hedge; the light out there was the warm gold of midsummer.

‘Don't be such a drag.' Michael, too, had stopped.

Gabriel wanted to shout and stamp his foot in frustration, but only pulled at a twig of bramble. This was what he'd dreaded. ‘He won't like it if he sees us playing together. You know we are not supposed to.'