Strange Stories (2 page)

As always when he visited his brother, Stephen found that he was spending much of his time out of doors; mainly, being the man he was, in long, solitary walks across the heathered uplands. This had nothing to do with Harewood’s speciality. Harewood suffered badly from bronchitis and catarrh, and nowadays went out as little as possible. The domestic lichens, once introduced, required little attention - only observation.

Rather it was on account of Harewood’s wife, Harriet, that Stephen roamed; a lady in whose company Stephen had never been at ease. She had always seemed to him a restless woman; jumpy and puzzling; the very reverse of all that had seemed best about Elizabeth. A doubtful asset, Stephen would have thought, in a diminishing rural parish; but Stephen himself, in a quiet and unobtruding way, had long been something of a sceptic. Be that as it might, he always found that Harriet seemed to be baiting and fussing him, not least when her husband was present; even, unforgivably, when Elizabeth, down in London, had been battling through her last dreadful years. On every visit, therefore, Stephen wandered about for long hours in the open, even when ice was in the air and snow on the tenuous tracks.

But Stephen did not see it as a particular hardship. Elizabeth, who might have done - though, for his sake, she could have been depended upon to conceal the fact - had seldom come on these visits at any time. She had never been a country girl, though fond of the sea. Stephen positively liked wandering unaccompanied on the moors, though he had little detailed knowledge of their flora and fauna, or even of their archaeology, largely industrial and fragmentary. By now he was familiar with most of the moorland routes from the rectory and the village; and, as commonly happens, there was one that he preferred to all the others, and nowadays found himself taking almost without having to make a decision. Sometimes even, asleep in his London flat that until just now had been their London flat, he found himself actually dreaming of that particular soaring trail, though he would have found it difficult to define what properties of beauty or poetry or convenience it had of which the other tracks had less. According to the map, it led to a spot named Burton’s Clough.

There was a vague valley or extended hollow more or less in the place which the map indicated, but to Stephen it seemed every time too indefinite to be marked out for record. Every time he wondered whether this was indeed the place; whether there was not some more decisive declivity that he had never discovered. Or possibly the name derived from some event in local history. It was the upwards walk to the place that appealed to Stephen, and, to an only slightly lesser extent, the first part of the slow descent homewards, supposing that the rectory could in any sense be called home: never the easily attainable but inconclusive supposed goal, the Clough. Of course there was always R. L. Stevenson’s travelling hopefully to be inwardly quoted; and on most occasions hitherto Stephen had inwardly quoted it.

Never had there been any human being at, near, or visible from the terrain around Burton’s Clough, let alone in the presumptive clough itself. There was no apparent reason why there should be. Stephen seldom met anyone at all on the moors. Only organizations go any distance afoot nowadays, and this was not an approved didactic district. All the work of agriculture is for a period being done by machines. Most of the cottages are peopled by transients. Everyone is supposed to have a car.

But that morning, Stephen’s first in the field since his bereavement six weeks before, there was someone, and down at the bottom of the shallow clough itself. The person was dressed so as to be almost lost in the hues of autumn, plainly neither tripper nor trifler. The person was engaged in some task.

Stephen was in no state for company, but that very condition, and a certain particular reluctance that morning to return to the rectory before he had to, led him to advance further, not descending into the clough but skirting along the ridge to the west of it, where, indeed, his track continued.

If he had been in the Alps, his shadow might have fallen in the early autumn sun across the figure below, but in the circumstances that idea would have been fanciful, because, at the moment, the sun was no more than a misty bag of gleams in a confused sky. None the less, as Stephen’s figure passed, comparatively high above, the figure below glanced up at him.

Stephen could see that it was the figure of a girl. She was wearing a fawn shirt and pale green trousers, but the nature of her activity remained uncertain.

Stephen glanced away, then glanced back.

She seemed still to be looking up at him, and suddenly he waved to her, though it was not altogether the kind of thing he normally did. She waved back at him. Stephen even fancied she smiled at him. It seemed quite likely. She resumed her task.

He waited for an instant, but she looked up no more. He continued on his way more slowly, and feeling more alive, even if only for moments. For those moments, it had been as if he still belonged to the human race, to the mass of mankind.

Only once or twice previously had he continued beyond the top of Burton’s Clough, and never for any great distance. On the map (it had been his father’s map), the track wavered on across a vast area of nothing very much, merely contour lines and occasional habitations with odd, possibly evocative, names: habitations which, as Stephen knew from experience, regularly proved, when approached, to be littered ruins or not to be detectable at all. He would not necessarily have been averse from the twelve or fourteen miles solitary walk involved, at least while Elizabeth had been secure and alive, and at home in London; but conditions at the rectory had never permitted so long an absence. Harriet often made clear that she expected her guests to be present punctually at all meals and punctually at such other particular turning points of a particular day as the day itself might define.

On the present occasion, and at the slow pace into which he had subsided, Stephen knew that he should turn back within the next ten to fifteen minutes; but he half-understood that what he was really doing was calculating the best time for a second possible communication with the girl he had seen in the clough. If he reappeared too soon, he might be thought, at such a spot, to be pestering, even menacing; if too late, the girl might be gone. In any case, there was an obvious limit to the time he could give to such approach as might be possible.

As the whole matter crystallized within him, he turned on the instant. There was a stone beside the track at the point where he did it; perhaps aforetime a milepost, at the least a waymark. Its location seemed to justify his action. He noticed that it too was patched with lichen. When staying with Harewood, he always noticed; and more and more at other times too.

One might almost have thought that the girl had been waiting for him. She was standing at much the same spot, and looking upwards abstractedly. Stephen saw that beside her on the ground was a grey receptacle. He had not noticed it before, because its vague colour sank into the landscape, as did the girl herself, costumed as she was. The receptacle seemed to be half-filled with grey contents of some kind.

As soon as he came into her line of sight, and sometime before he stood immediately above her, the girl spoke.

‘Are you lost? Are you looking for someone? ’

She must have had a remarkably clear voice, because her words came floating up to Stephen like bubbles in water.

He continued along the ridge towards her while she watched him. Only when he was directly above her did he trust his own words to reach her.

‘No. I’m really just filling in time. Thank you very much.’

‘If you go on to the top, there’s a spring.’

‘I should think you have to have it pointed out to you. With all this heather.’

She looked down for a moment, then up again. ‘Do you live here?’

‘No. I’m staying with my brother. He’s the rector. Perhaps you go to his church?’

She shook her head. ‘No. We don’t go to any church.’

That could not be followed up, Stephen felt, at his present distance and altitude. ‘What are you doing?’ he asked. ‘Collecting stones for my father.’

‘What does he do with them?’

‘He wants the mosses and lichens.’

‘Then,’ cried Stephen, ‘you
must
know my brother. Or your father must know him. My brother is one of the great authorities on lichens.’ This unexpected link seemed to open a door; and, at least for a second, to open it surprisingly wide.

Stephen found himself bustling down the rough but not particularly steep slope towards her.

‘My father’s not an
authority
,’ said the girl, gazing seriously at the descending figure. ‘He’s not an authority on anything.’ ‘Oh, you misunderstand,’ said Stephen. ‘My brother is only an amateur too. I didn’t mean he was a professor or anything like that. Still, I think your father must have heard of him.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said the girl. ‘I’m almost sure not.’ Stephen had nearly reached the bottom of the shallow vale.

It was completely out of the wind down there, and surprisingly torrid.

‘Let me see,’ he said, looking into the girl’s basket, before he looked at the girl.

She lifted the basket off the ground. Her hand and forearm were brown.

‘Some of the specimens are very small,’ he said, smiling. It was essential to keep the conversation going, and it was initially more difficult now that he was alone with her in the valley, and close to her.

‘It’s been a bad year,’ she said. ‘Some days I’ve found almost nothing. Nothing that could be taken home.’

‘All the same, the basket must be heavy. Please put it down.’ He saw that it was reinforced with stout metal strips, mostly rusty.

‘Take a piece for yourself, if you like,’ said the girl. She spoke as if they were portions of iced cake, or home-made coconut fudge.

Stephen gazed full at the girl. She had a sensitive face with grey-green eyes and short reddish hair - no, auburn. The
demode
word came to Stephen on the instant. Both her shirt and her trousers were worn and faded: familiar, Stephen felt. She was wearing serious shoes, but little cared for. She was a part of nature.

‘I’ll take this piece,’ Stephen said. ‘It’s conglomerate.’

‘Is it?’ said the girl. Stephen was surprised that after so much ingathering, she did not know a fact so elementary.

‘I might take this piece too, and show the stuff on it to my brother.’

‘Help yourself,’ said the girl. ‘But don’t take them all.’

Feeling had been building up in Stephen while he had been walking solitarily on the ridge above. For so long he had been isolated, insulated, incarcerated. Elizabeth had been everything to him, and no one could ever be like her, but ‘attractive’ was not a word that he had used to himself about her, not for a long time; not attractive as this girl was attractive. Elizabeth had been a part of him, perhaps the greater part of him; but not mysterious, not fascinating.

‘Well, I don’t know,’ said Stephen. ‘How far do you have to carry that burden?’

‘The basket isn’t full yet. I must go on searching for a bit.’

‘I am sorry to say I can’t offer to help. I have to go back.’

All the same, Stephen had reached a decision.

The girl simply nodded. She had not yet picked up the basket again.

‘Where do you live?’

‘Quite near.’

That seemed to Stephen to be almost impossible, but it was not the main point.

Stephen felt like a schoolboy; though not like himself as a schoolboy. ‘If I were to be here after lunch tomorrow, say at half past two, would you show me the spring? The spring you were talking about.’

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘If you like.’

Stephen could not manage the response so obviously needed, gently confident; if possible, even gently witty. For a moment, in fact, he could say nothing. Then - ‘Look,’ he said. He brought an envelope out of his pocket and in pencil on the back of it he wrote: ‘Tomorrow. Here. 2.30 p.m. To visit the spring.’

He said, ‘It’s too big,’ and tore one end off the envelope, aware that the remaining section bore his name, and that the envelope had been addressed to him care of his brother. As a matter of fact, it had contained the final communication from the undertaking firm. He wished they had omitted his equivocal and rather ridiculous OBE.

He held the envelope out. She took it and inserted it, without a word, into a pocket of her shirt, buttoning down the flap. Stephen’s heart beat at the gesture.

He was not exactly sure what to make of the situation or whether the appointment was to be depended upon. But at such moments in life, one is often sure of neither thing, nor of anything much else.

He looked at her. ‘What’s your name?’ he asked, as casually as he could.

‘Nell,’ she answered.

He had not quite expected that, but then he had not particularly expected anything else either.

‘I look forward to our walk, Nell,’ he said. He could not help adding, ‘I look forward to it very much.’

She nodded and smiled.

He fancied that they had really looked at one another for a moment.

‘I must go on searching,’ she said.

She picked up the heavy basket, seemingly without particular effort, and walked away from him, up the valley.

Insanely, he wondered about her lunch. Surely she must have some? She seemed so exceptionally healthy and strong.

His own meal was all scarlet runners, but he had lost his appetite in any case, something that had never previously happened since the funeral, as he had noticed with surprise on several occasions.

Luncheon was called lunch, but the evening meal was none the less called supper, perhaps from humility. At supper that evening, Harriet referred forcefully to Stephen’s earlier abstemiousness.

‘I trust you’re not sickening, Stephen. It would be a bad moment. Dr Gopalachari’s on holiday. Perhaps I ought to warn you.’

‘Dr Who?’

‘No, not Dr Who. Dr Gopalachari. He’s a West Bengali. We are lucky to have him.’

Stephen’s brother, Harewood, coughed forlornly.

***

For luncheon the next day, Stephen had even less appetite, even though it was mashed turnip, cooked, or at least served, with mixed peppers. Harriet loved all things oriental.