Master of the Moor (4 page)

He closed the door of his study and went across the landing to the bathroom. Lyn had had her bath and was in bed, her new cat, his birthday present, in a basket on the floor by her side.

‘Just till he gets used to us.’

‘Good Lord, darling,
I
don’t mind.’ Stephen had his bath in the mornings. He washed his hands and face and cleaned his teeth with the water pick he had bought with Dadda’s Christmas money. The time was after eleven and he was tired but he could never sleep without reading for a few minutes at least. Currently he was rereading Tace’s autobiography of which the author had completed only Book One, dying in the
midst of describing his thirtieth year. He read for a quarter of an hour and Lyn read, and then Lyn put her book face downwards on the floor by the cat’s basket. Stephen put a leather marker with an engraving of Tower Foin on it in his book and switched out the bedlamp.

‘Good night, darling.’

‘Good night, Stephen,’ said Lyn. ‘Sleep well.’

A pathologist called Dr Paul Fleisch described how Marianne Price had died. He used a lot of abstruse terms like ‘cricoid’ but what it amounted to was that she had been strangled. The murderer had done it with his bare hands. Before this evidence Stephen had had to give his. He was the first witness at the inquest. Once he had begun he didn’t feel nervous, he spoke slowly and levelly, and once his part was over he began to enjoy the rest of the proceedings.

Ian Stringer, sitting with the dead girl’s parents, he recognized at once. At school he had been an ace rugby player and had become a big burly man. The inquest was adjourned and Stringer came up to Stephen outside the court.

‘I don’t know if you remember me. Byss Comprehensive. I think I was a year behind you.’

Stephen nodded and took Stringer’s outstretched hand.

‘It’s only — well, I thought I’d ask you — how she looked when — I mean they say some people who die like that, they look sort of, their faces …’

‘Good Lord, no, there was nothing like that. She looked as if she was asleep.’

Stringer didn’t believe him but he was grateful for the kindness. Together they walked along the High Street towards the Market Place where they parted,
Stephen for Whalbys’, Stringer to return to Cartwright-Cageby’s where he was a foreman fitter. Dadda was out, doing something to a very ancient, very special ceiling in Jackley Manor with Tudor roses carved on its beams. Stephen worked on the armchairs till lunchtime. After he had had a sandwich in the Market Burger House, he loaded the van with small stuff to be returned and went out delivering. There was an early nineteenth-century firescreen to go back to a house in Trinity Street. Next to Trinity Church where Dadda and Mother had been married was the old people’s home called Sunningdale. Stephen parked the van and delivered the screen. The matron of Sunningdale was an easy-going woman who let visitors come pretty well when they pleased, this entailing no great inconvenience as few did please.

Helena Naulls was in the day room with the dozen or so other old women and the two old men. In the Three Towns, as elsewhere, the men died and the women lived on and on. A big colour television set was on and one or two were looking at it, at a programme designed for seven-year-olds, but most were just sitting. One woman was knitting, an old man was reading the
Daily Mirror
. Mrs Naulls was among those who just sat.

Seeing her there, Stephen had to remind himself — for nothing in her bearing hinted at it and no vestige of handsome looks remained — that she had once been the mistress of Alfred Osborn Tace. She was a scrawny flabby woman who had once been stout. Her face had become big and vacant, the eyes sluggishly furtive, the mouth vague. Her hair, snow white and abundant, had been lopped off in a ragged uneven way by the home’s hairdresser. Today — such muddles often happened — she was wearing a cardigan of matted grey wool belonging to a much smaller and slighter inmate, a long
brown skirt, brown stockings that wrinkled round her still-narrow ankles, and blue check carpet slippers.

Once she had been pretty and lively with a twenty-three-inch waist. She had been second housemaid at Chesney Hall and Arthur Naulls had been under-gardener. They had had several children, of all of whom but the eldest Arthur was the father. Mrs Naulls was in Sunningdale because her son Stanley was a Hilderbridge councillor and had pulled strings. Otherwise there wouldn’t have been a chance for someone with such a large family, almost any of whom could have taken her in. The only one, in fact, who had offered had been Lyn. Stephen had vetoed that, though, before she had made her offer to anyone but him, and now he tended to tell people they couldn’t have his grandmother because it wouldn’t be fair on his wife. He had been brought up to call Mrs Naulls ‘Nanna’ but had had more luck with her than with Dadda when he wanted to change this mode of address.

‘How are you, Grandmother?’ he said. He had brought her a box of fruit jellies, the only passion she still had. She took them in unsteady hands stained with grave marks, and peered with suspicion at the manufacturer’s name. ‘How have you been getting on?’

‘Just the same.’

‘Anybody been to see you?’

Mrs Naulls shook her head. ‘Nobody ever comes to see me.’ She took the cellophane wrapping off the box. ‘Not a soul.’

‘Oh, Mrs Naulls, what an untruth!’ said the old woman in the next chair. She was the one who had been knitting. ‘Your son Leslie was here only yesterday.’

‘Haven’t got a son called Leslie, have I, Stanley?’ said Mrs Naulls, dropping cellophane on the floor.

‘Leonard. And I’m Stephen.’

‘Nurse’ll be after you,’ said the knitter. ‘You’re what they call a litter bug.’

Mrs Naulls ate a crimson jelly and then a green one. She didn’t offer the box. A bovine contentment came into her face as she chewed. Stephen had never been able to talk to her about her relationship with the great novelist. He had been over twenty before he had even found out about it but he hadn’t been old enough to dare ask his grandmother how it had been and how she had felt and what they had talked about. Now when he might dare it was too late. But still he searched for ways to bring the conversation round to Tace.

‘I expect you’ve been watching those “Bleakland” programmes, haven’t you, Grandmother?’

‘Pardon?’ she said, her mouth full.

‘On the television, Saturday nights.’

A woman who had been looking at the screen turned to him and said, ‘I saw one, round at my daughter’s. It was lovely. Lovely dresses.’

‘Why can’t you see it here?’

‘They get us to bed,’ said the knitter. ‘Eight they start getting us to bed.’

‘That’s a pity,’ Stephen persisted. ‘You’d have liked to watch that, Grandmother.’

‘How’s Rosemary, Keith?’ said Mrs Naulls.

‘If you mean Lyn, she’s fine. And I’m Stephen.’

He looked at her hopelessly. She had come to this, to a limp white heap who had forgotten the names of her nearest and dearest. Once he had tried to extract so much from her, and not just details of the Tace affair. She was the key to a past he needed to understand. Dadda’s temper, that he had inherited along with Dadda’s darkness and Dadda’s height, had got the better of
him and he had attacked her, physically attacked her. But that was more than half his lifetime ago. He got up.

‘Time I was on my way.’

Mrs Naulls said lucidly, as if veils had suddenly, when it was too late, fallen from her mind and her speech, ‘It was good of you to come, dear. Thank you for the jellies.’

The knitter waved. Stephen was sure his grandmother had fallen asleep before he was even out of the room. It had begun to rain. Soon it was raining hard enough, Stephen noted dismally, to keep him off the moor for the evening. He felt as he had done when a small boy and rain or some other calamity of nature had kept him from a picnic, resentful and somewhat indignant.

It was the end of the week before Lyn took the cat basket back. There were ten birthday cards on the mantelpiece, but they had been there two days and she took them down. Two of them made her feel, not old exactly, but as if life was passing her by. They were the one from Joanne that said, ‘You’ve reached a quarter century’ and the one from Stephen, ‘My dearest wife’. She was uneasy about going to the pet shop. In her imagination she saw Nick Frazer as a young version of his uncle, a young wolf instead of an old one. But if she didn’t take it back he would only come along and ask for it. She was surprised he hadn’t already. Peach was sitting on the window sill, watching the raindrops run down the outside of the glass and trying to catch them with his paw. He behaved as if they were insects. Lyn stroked him and reminded him she would be back at lunchtime.

Nick Frazer was locking up the shop when she came along at one. She had remembered him quite differently
from what he really was. He looked at her with a preoccupied air before he recognized her, perhaps because she had put up her hair rather severely — deliberately — into a tight knot on the back of her head. The pleasant, serious face, the steady brown eyes, disconcerted her. Was this the wolf who was going to make double-edged remarks, even a pass, at her? He took the basket, thanked her quietly, locked the shop door again. She was so surprised by the warmth of his smile, by his being able to smile so frankly, so like a friend, that when he said he was going to lunch at the Blue Lagoon and would she come too, she said yes, all right, without thinking.

They walked along by the river. The rain had almost stopped. The Blue Lagoon was the old Red Lion renamed, no one knew why, on the corner of Bankside and Trinity Street. She had already had second thoughts.

‘I ought to get back to Peach.’ She had told him what the cat was called.

He smiled again. ‘The great beauty of keeping cats is they don’t tie you.’

She sat at a table while he went to get their lager and ploughman’s lunches. Lyn took off her gloves. She saw that her left hand was bare. In washing her hands after breakfast she had taken off her wedding ring and must have left it on the side of the basin. It was the kind of ring you had to take off to wash, a kind of chased inlay of platinum and gold that Stephen had had specially made on Dadda’s advice. She was always taking it off and forgetting it. Kevin’s brother, who fancied himself as an amateur psychologist, said you didn’t really forget things like that and it meant Lyn must unconsciously want not to wear it —
ergo
, not to be married.

Nick brought their drinks and food on a tray.

‘And how is Peach?’

‘Quite happy, I think. He’s not shaking any more.’

‘But you are,’ Nick said.

It was true. Her hands were trembling, she could hardly hold the glass. She managed to laugh, held her hands for a minute in her lap. ‘It’s a nervous thing I have.’

He made no comment on that. It was then that she noticed how gravely and interestedly he was looking at her, had looked at her ever since they met outside the shop. It was as if he was very concerned with her as a person. But when he spoke it was not of her but of Peach, how to feed him, what sort of supplements he should have, that although he had had his routine immunizations, he must have a booster at a year old and also an injection against a new sort of feline virus.

‘How is it you know so much when you only took the shop over last week?’

‘Well —’ Again that warm, frank smile. ‘I’m a vet.’

‘Are you really?’ A hangover from Lyn’s childhood — a mother who cleaned at Chesney Hall, a father at Cartwright-Cageby’s — was to feel respect that had once amounted to awe for the professional man. But good sense asserted itself. ‘Why aren’t you being one then?’

‘I’ve only just qualified.’ He added almost apologetically, ‘It takes a long time. I’ve got a job waiting for me in London, but I can’t start till August when the man retires. Hence Hilderbridge and Uncle Jim.’

‘And are you living over the shop?’

‘I think Uncle rather hoped I’d live in the two rooms at the back but they smell a bit too powerfully of monkey and parrot so I’ve moved up into his flat. It’s nice, you must come and see it.’

This was a remark that three days before she would
have thought of as wolfish. Now it seemed merely friendly. But she didn’t answer it. She was afraid he would ask her about herself and to forestall this she asked him to tell her about his training and what he hoped for in the future. He talked. They ate their bread and cheese. Lyn’s hands had stopped shaking.

‘That’s enough about me,’ he said. ‘Tell me about you.’

I am twenty-five, I am married, I was married in church and have lived with my husband four years, so I must be married, I have no children and never shall have, but I am waiting, waiting, for what I don’t know … ‘Nothing to tell,’ she said. And there was nothing, nothing she
could
tell. Mr Bale would come back in two or three weeks and she need never see Nick Frazer again. ‘I really must go now.’

While they were in the pub, in a corner far from a window, the rain had come on heavily, the kind of rain that will soak you to the skin in two minutes. Nick stopped her inside the door.

‘Will you wait for me? I’ll be very quick.’

He came back, and he had been very quick, with an umbrella from which, as he plunged in through the swing door, he was tearing the plastic wrapping.

‘You bought it specially!’

‘I had to have an umbrella to walk you home.’

‘But I live in Chesney,’ she said. ‘I’m going on the bus.’

‘To walk you to your bus stop then.’

It was something she hadn’t looked for and she was almost dismayed. Under the umbrella they had to walk very close together and after a while he took her hand and hooked it through his arm. It was precisely the action of Joseph Usher in
The Mountainside
, and Isabella Thornhill had slapped his face for it before rushing off,
unprotected, into the downpour. Lyn felt the blood come up into her face. She held Nick’s arm and felt him warm and somehow tough against her side. He talked about the town, how he had never before been to this part of the country, how one day soon he must try to get out on the moor. There was an opening for her here. My husband, who is in fact the grandson of Alfred Osborn Tace, is really quite an authority on Vangmoor … She didn’t take it. She would have found it hard to speak, anyway. It was taking all her concentration to breathe normally, not to begin shaking again, with their arms linked and their bodies so close.