No Way Of Telling (7 page)

Certainly bales were more comfortable to sit on than bare tin, but Amy felt herself less able to control the toboggan when she was perched up on top of them, and so she brought it down the hill to the cottage very slowly and cautiously.

Mrs Bowen was clearing frozen snow off the front-kitchen windows. She heard the noise of shouting and barking and came round into the shed to watch their arrival.

“Why Amy,” she said, “that was a brainwave you had! What a help it’s going to be to us.”

Amy was pleased by her grandmother’s praise. “I mean to fetch all the bales on it—not all today, I don’t suppose. There’s about a dozen or so of them left. Maybe fourteen—fifteen.”

“And you can manage on your own, do you think—or shall I come with you?”

It was when Mrs Bowen said something like this that Amy was made aware, with a pang, of the great difference in their ages and also of what that difference meant: Ivor would have been longing to try out the new invention. But her grandmother had done the journey once today and once, for choice, was enough. She was old, and old people were obliged to portion out their strength, having only a limited daily supply of it. Amy felt she could go up and down, up and down, again and again, and still not be tired.

“I can manage all right,” she said.

Mrs Bowen inspected the toboggan thoroughly, and admired it.

“I’m glad you thought to put that sack on the front, Amy—it could be dangerous when you come to have a spill if there’d been tin sticking up.”

“Ivor showed me what to do. I ought by rights to bang the sides up as well, so as to stop the snow coming in over—that’s what Ivor did—but I shan’t bother for now. His was a real beauty, though. He’d got some old bicycle tyres and we cut them open—I helped him—and we made holes in the tyres and holes in the corrugated and bound them over the edges with string, all round. It took us a lot of time, but it was worth it. Mine’s not as good as that, not nearly.”

“I think you’ve done it very well,” said Mrs Bowen. “You can always add a few improvements later, if you feel inclined. Do you mean to stay out much longer? I believe it’s getting colder again, if that’s possible.”

“I’ll bring a few more bales down yet. You see, Granny, what I’m planning to do is to make a wall with them—here—between these posts, and that’ll give the ewes some shelter. Oh, Granny—she wasn’t by the stack, that other one. I don’t like to think of where she’s got to.”

“No more do I,” said Mrs Bowen.

It occurred to Amy while she was collecting the next load that possibly instead of being stuck in a drift the missing ewe had taken refuge in Tyler’s Place, and with this thought in her head she stood by the haystack gazing down towards the group of trees that concealed the ruined farmhouse. It was a good way off—half a mile at least. More than that. A mile?

Amy transported two more bales to the cottage, trudged up to the top again and tobogganed down to the stack. Again she stood calculating the distance between her and that group of trees. Her legs were beginning to ache; so were her arms.

Getting there would be easy enough—she could whizz down on her tin toboggan in next to no time at all; but coming back would be harder: a long walk, uphill and out of the sun, the path uncertain, afternoon nearly over. At that moment, for no apparent reason, there flashed into Amy’s mind a remembrance of the hacker as she had last seen it. Of course! She had driven it into the top of the chopping-block, and there it had stayed, upright, its blade firmly embedded.

Amy turned away from viewing Tyler’s Place and lugged another two bales to the top of the hill.

He must have wrenched it out when he decided to use the chopping-block for a seat. Did that mean it was now lying under the snow on the floor of the shed where he—not she—had flung it?

One of the bales had slipped backwards off the toboggan. She struggled to get it on board again. Every time she had to shove or drag a bale it was bigger and heavier, she could have sworn, than the time before. Her face flushed, her thoughts troubled, Amy raised her head and immediately was overcome by astonishment.

She was so accustomed to vast acres of emptiness that at first the two black dots were almost unbelievable. They appeared to come speeding directly out of the sinking sun, down from the uplands, swooping across the snow as birds swoop through the air, coming from the west by the same way the drovers had used long ago but at a pace no drover had ever dreamed of. Their approach was so rapid that it was like some kind of conjuring trick. Nearer and nearer they came, racing along the other side of the valley. Thrilled, amazed, motionless, everything else forgotten, Amy watched them. They were people! They were real!—alive!—two men! They were on skis!

Exactly opposite to her, at the place where the turning she took every day from school dropped down from the high track to cross the stream, they stopped. She thought that to them she must seem like a flag on the skyline in her scarlet trousers and scarlet scarf, and she waved. They were certainly looking towards her. Neither waved back. One of them pointed, but that was at the cottage. Perhaps they were going to come across? She waited hopefully. But instead, after a few more moments of what might have been consultation or argument, they shuffled their skis round, thrust their sticks into the ground, glided on, and were gone.

Amy was curiously disappointed that neither of them had answered her wave. They must have seen her. She had waved and they had not—as though they had disapproved of her waving. Probably they were just too busy talking, that was all. But her pleasure at an apparition, otherwise so marvellous and strange, was a little damaged.

She decided that this was going to be her last load of hay for today. It was hard work and she was tired. By the time she had ridden down to the cottage, though, her tiredness had lessened and her spirits revived. After all, what news it was! Conscious that she did have something quite out of the ordinary to tell, Amy burst into the front-kitchen.

“Granny—did you see those people? They were on skis—that’s what they do in Switzerland. Imagine—in our valley!”

Mrs Bowen had seen nothing, and so Amy described the spectacle for her.

“They must have come from right over the other side, from Pengarth. How far would that be—five miles?”

“More like eight,” said Mrs Bowen, marvelling with her. “So it’s visitors in winter now, is it?—we’ve only had picnickers before, summer folk. That’s what the millionaires do, Amy—winter sports they call it, don’t they? Fancy though—
here!
”

“I wish they’d come across the stream for a cup of tea,” said Amy. “I waved at them and they were in two minds about it—I could tell, the way they stood there.”

“I daresay they were wanting to know how much further they had to go before they came on a road. That’s a longish way to have travelled with no sign of human habitation. Still, it won’t take them many minutes to get down to Melin-y-Groes on those contraptions, I don’t suppose. Most likely they’re there by now. Maybe we ought to learn to use those things, Amy. They’d be handy for us in winter time.”

Mrs Bowen was cheerful but Amy felt an unexpected twinge of envy that strangers should be able to reach the village so easily when they themselves were cut off from its lights and faces and voices.

“Oh, I do wish they’d called in,” she said, with a deep sigh. “We could have told them about last night, Granny, and asked them to keep a look-out for that man. We could have sent a message to Mr Pugh and then he’d have caught him, and then I’d have got my blankets back.”

“Why Amy,” said Mrs Bowen, “it was only chance you glimpsed them at all. We’re no worse off than we were before. I think you’d better stop in now, and I’ll make the tea. You’ve been out on that hill for long enough. The sun’s gone—and there’s not a speck of snow melted for all the shining it’s done today. That just shows how cold it is. I’ve fed the chickens, Amy, but I left it for you to shut them in, by and by.”

“I’ll do it now, while I’ve still got my coat on,” said Amy. “That’s six bales I fetched down this afternoon, and tomorrow I mean to fetch down the rest of them. Mick—you stay in with Granny. I shan’t be long gone.”

The chickens were already inside their hut; Amy had merely to push the slide across and turn the catch. Then she began to build a wall with the bales of hay between two of the shed-posts. There were not enough bales yet to make a proper wall, but if the storm were to get up again in the night it would give the ewes at least a certain amount of shelter, Amy felt.

She only wished she could have done as much for the ewe that was missing. All day at the back of her head she had been worrying about it, unable to forget that it must be
somewhere,
and on its own, possibly hurt, certainly hungry, needing her help. People and sheep were not the same; they had different thoughts and different feelings, she knew. And yet she kept imagining it might have been her that was missing; and if it had been and nobody bothered to come to her aid—what then?

She had promised Mr Protheroe to care for his five ewes—five, not four—and the promise made her responsible, bound her to do her best. Amy was ashamed because she felt that her best was what she had avoided doing. Suppose the missing ewe was down at Tyler’s Place? It could be. She had considered exploring the ruins and had turned away: it was far, and it was late, and she was tired—but chiefly she had not gone because she had been afraid to go. She would go, she
would
! Tomorrow, early, before breakfast, she would toboggan down to Tyler’s Place.

The resolve lightened her heart. Some sort of wild I-dare-you-to urge drove her to run out of the shed and flounder uphill along the north-easterly track, treading in the very footsteps that had lain there since morning untouched except by snow-flakes. She defied the footsteps, destroyed them, kicked them to bits, as she went. Long before she reached the top she lost her breath and threw herself spread-eagled flat on the frozen snow. She heard Mick barking, barking.

“I’m
here,
Mick,” she whispered, waiting for him to find her.

But he must have gone in again; there was silence. Night was approaching. The snow glimmered almost blue—blue-white, coldest of all cold colours. Amy felt the icy touch of it against her flushed cheek, and sat up.

Two men, their skis balanced in long dark lines across their shoulders, were just about to reach the front door of the cottage.

Amy came down the side of the hill in a series of flying leaps and arrived breathless at the very moment Mrs Bowen, her shawl round her shoulders, stepped out into the porch and closed the door deliberately behind her. One of the men stood a yard or two off, supporting the skis and the ski-sticks. The other was in the porch entrance. He turned as Amy came up and looked at her and she halted by the step and put her hand against the nearest post to steady herself and looked back at him. His eyes, even in the failing light, were brilliant and piercing. Her heart thumped, but that was from hurrying: she was not frightened, she was excited. After a few moments he turned again to Mrs Bowen who had been standing waiting without a word.

“Good evening. Is your husband about, I wonder?”

“No, he’s not,” said Mrs Bowen, explaining nothing more.

“Ah!” said he, knocking his boots gently against a post of the porch, so as to make the snow fall off them. “Then we’ll wait until he comes.”

“You’d have a long wait,” said Mrs Bowen shortly. “He’s been dead for thirty-five years.”

Amy was puzzled by her grandmother’s dry manner and surprised that she, who was usually so hospitable, had failed to invite her callers inside. It was not as though they were anything like that wild creature who had broken in on them the night before. The tall man talking to Mrs Bowen was polite and smiling. Everything about him seemed to Amy wonderful—his voice, his clothes, his eyes, her first sight of him swerving down the valley out of the setting sun as though he had been some sort of angel or hero, too good to be true. Yet he had been true after all. She had longed for them to cross the stream and her wish, like a wish in a fairy-story, had been granted: they were here. They were actually
here,
and Amy had an overwhelming desire to be allowed to keep them, to make friends with them—with this one anyway, the one with the soft pleasant voice and the dazzling eyes who was saying to Mrs Bowen:

“Is there somebody else we can speak to—your son, perhaps?”

“Well, no—so far as speaking goes I’m the one for that,” said Mrs Bowen, not troubling to add that her son was in Australia.

Amy heard her with dismay. Why was she being so rude, so unlike herself? He would be bound to take offence and go. She watched his face anxiously. But no!—he was still smiling, his voice remained agreeable. Indeed, he almost sounded as though he were amused by what Mrs Bowen had said.

“You mean to tell me you live here alone?”

“There’s the two of us,” said Mrs Bowen.

Again Amy felt those extraordinary eyes turned on her like lamps, and said eagerly, wanting to speak to him herself:

“She’s my granny.”

“I see! Do you hear that?” he called out, laughing. “Nobody here but an old woman and a child. We thought it must be a shepherd’s cottage,” he said to Mrs Bowen, “right up here in the hills like this, on its own.”

Amy could tell from the way her grandmother pulled the shawl tighter round her arms that she was angered by his words. But it was true, after all—she
was
an old woman. He had not meant to annoy her.

“You must find it very isolated—no neighbours. Don’t you get lonely?” he went on.

Mrs Bowen made no reply.

“You won’t mind, I suppose, if we take a look round?” he said, and to Amy it seemed that his voice had become a degree colder: it was hardly surprising.

“Oh?—and what for?” said Mrs Bowen.

A look round! Amy knew what for at once, and knew that her grandmother knew—had known it all the time. So they were not just holiday-makers, out on their skis for the fun of it. They were the police, and they were looking for that man. How dull she had been not to have realised it straight away when she first saw them. But it was their clothes that had misled her. In Amy’s experience policemen could be seen to be policemen by the uniform they wore, as in the case of Mr Pugh down in Melin-y-Groes.