Strange Stories (3 page)

On an almost empty stomach, he hastened up the long but not steep ascent. He had not known he could still walk so fast uphill, but for some reason the knowledge did not make him particularly happy, as doubtless it should have done.

The girl, dressed as on the day before, was seated upon a low rock at the spot from which he had first spoken to her. It was not yet twenty past. He had discerned her seated shape from afar, but she had proved to be sitting with her back to the ascending track and to him. On the whole, he was glad that she had not been watching his exertions, inevitably comical, albeit triumphant.

She did not even look up until he actually stood before her. Of course this time she had no basket.

‘Oh, hullo,’ she said.

He stood looking at her. ‘We’re both punctual.’

She nodded. He was panting quite strenuously, and glad to gain a little time.

He spoke. ‘Did you find many more suitable stones?’

She shook her head, then rose to her feet.

He found it difficult not to stretch out his arms and draw her to him.

‘Why is this called Burton’s Clough, I wonder? It seems altogether too wide and shallow for a clough.’

‘I didn’t know it was,’ said the girl.

‘The map says it is. At least I think this is the place. Shall we go? Lead me to the magic spring.’

She smiled at him. ‘Why do you call it thatV ‘I’m sure it is magic. It must be.’

‘It’s just clear water,’ said the girl, ‘and very, very deep.’ Happily, the track was still wide enough for them to walk side by side, though Stephen realized that, further on, where he had not been, this might cease to be the case.

‘How long are you staying here?’ asked the girl.

‘Perhaps for another fortnight. It depends.’

‘Are you married? ’

‘I
was
married, Nell, but my wife unfortunately died.’ It seemed unnecessary to put any date to it, and calculated only to cause stress.

‘I’m sorry,’ said the girl.

‘She was a wonderful woman and a very good wife.’

To that the girl said nothing. What could she say?

‘I am taking a period of leave from the civil service,’ Stephen volunteered. ‘Nothing very glamorous.’

‘What’s the civil service? ’ asked the girl.

‘You ought to know
that
,’ said Stephen in mock reproof: more or less mock. After all, she was not a child, or not exactly. All the same, he produced a childlike explanation. ‘The civil service is what looks after the country. The country would hardly carry on without us. Not nowadays. Nothing would run properly.’

‘Really not?’

‘No. Not run
properly
.’ With her it was practicable to be lightly profane.

‘Father says that all politicians are evil. I don’t know anything about it.’

‘Civil servants are not politicians, Nell. But perhaps this is not the best moment to go into it all.’ He said that partly because he suspected she had no wish to learn.

There was a pause.

‘Do you like walking?’ she asked.

‘Very much. I could easily walk all day. Would you come with me?’

‘I do walk all day, or most of it. Of course I have to sleep at night. I lie in front of the fire.’

‘But it’s too warm for a fire at this time of year.’ He said it to keep the conversation going, but, in fact, he was far from certain. He himself was not particularly warm at that very moment. He had no doubt cooled off after speeding up the ascent, but the two of them were, none the less, walking reasonably fast, and still he felt chilly, perhaps perilously so.

‘Father always likes a fire,’ said the girl. ‘He’s a cold mortal.’

They had reached the decayed milestone or waymark at which Stephen had turned on the previous day. The girl had stopped and was fingering the lichens with which it was spattered. She knelt against the stone with her left arm round the back of it.

‘Can you put a name to them? ’ asked Stephen.

‘Yes, to some of them.’

‘I am sure your father has one of my brother’s books on his shelf.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said the girl. ‘We have no shelves. Father can’t read.’

She straightened up and glanced at Stephen.

‘Oh, but surely—’

For example, and among other things, the girl herself was perfectly well spoken. As a matter of fact, hers was a noticeably beautiful voice. Stephen had noticed it, and even thrilled to it, when first he had heard it, floating up from the bottom of the so-called clough. He had thrilled to it ever since, despite the curious things the girl sometimes said.

They resumed their way.

‘Father has no eyes,’ said the girl.

‘That is terrible,’ said Stephen. ‘I hadn’t realized.’

The girl said nothing.

Stephen felt his first real qualm, as distinct from mere habitual self-doubt. ‘Am I taking you away from him? Should you go back to him? ’

‘I’m never with him by day,’ said the girl. ‘He finds his way about.’

‘I know that does happen,’ said Stephen guardedly. ‘All the same—’

‘Father doesn’t need a civil service to run him,’ said the girl. The way she spoke convinced Stephen that she had known all along what the civil service was and did. He had from the first supposed that to be so. Everyone knew.

‘You said your dead wife was a wonderful woman,’ said the girl.

‘Yes, she was.’

‘My father is a wonderful man.’

‘Yes,’ said Stephen. ‘I am only sorry about his affliction.’

‘It’s not an affliction,’ said the girl.

Stephen did not know what to say to that. The last thing to be desired was an argument of any kind whatever, other perhaps than a fun argument.

‘Father doesn’t need to get things out of books,’ said the girl.

‘There are certainly other ways of learning,’ said Stephen. ‘I expect that was one of the things you yourself learned at school.’

He suspected she would say she had never been to school. His had been a half-fishing remark.

But all she replied was, ‘Yes’:

Stephen looked around him for a moment. Already, he had gone considerably further along the track than ever before. ‘It really is beautiful up here.’ It seemed a complete wilderness. The track had wound among the wide folds of the hill, so that nothing but wilderness was visible in any direction.

‘I should like to live here,’ said Stephen. ‘I should like it now.’ He knew that he partly meant ‘now that Elizabeth was dead’.

‘There are empty houses everywhere,’ said the girl. ‘You can just move into one. It’s what Father and I did, and now it’s our home.’

Stephen supposed that that at least explained something. It possibly elucidated one of the earliest of her odd remarks.

‘I’ll help you to find one, if you like,’ said the girl. ‘Father says that none of them have been lived in for hundreds of years. I know where all the best ones are.’

‘I’ll have to think about that,’ said Stephen. ‘I have my job, you must remember.’ He wanted her to be rude about his job.

But she only said, ‘We’ll look now, if you like.’

‘Tomorrow, perhaps. We’re looking for the spring now.’

‘Are you tired?’ asked the girl, with apparently genuine concern, and presumably forgetting altogether what he had told her about his longing to walk all day.

‘Not at all tired,’ said Stephen, smiling at her.

‘Then why were you looking at your watch?’

‘A bad habit picked up in the civil service. We all do it.’

He had observed long before that she had no watch on her lovely brown forearm, no bracelet; only the marks of thorn scratches and the incisions of sharp stones. The light golden bloom on her arms filled him with delight and with desire.

In fact, he had omitted to time their progression, though he timed most things, so that the habit had wrecked his natural faculty. Perhaps another twenty or thirty minutes passed, while they continued to walk side by side, the track having as yet shown no particular sign of narrowing, so that one might think it still led somewhere, and that people still went there. As they advanced, they said little more of consequence for the moment; or so it seemed to Stephen. He surmised that there was now what is termed an understanding between them, even though in a sense he himself understood very little. It was more a phase for pleasant nothings, he deemed, always supposing that he could evolve a sufficient supply of them, than for meaningful questions and reasonable responses.

Suddenly, the track seemed not to narrow, but to stop, even to vanish. Hereunto it had been surprisingly well trodden. Now he could see nothing but knee-high heather.

‘The spring’s over there,’ said the girl in a matter of fact way, and pointing. Such simple and natural gestures are often the most beautiful.

‘How right I was in saying that I could never find it alone!’ remarked Stephen.

He could not see why the main track should not lead to the spring - if there really was a spring. Why else should the track be beaten to this spot? The mystery was akin to the Burton’s Clough mystery. The uplands had been settled under other conditions than ours. Stephen, on his perambulations, had always felt that, everywhere.

But the girl was standing among the heather a few yards away, and Stephen saw that there was a curious serpentine rabbit run that he had failed to notice - except that rabbits do not run like serpents. There were several fair-sized birds flying overhead in silence. Stephen fancied they were kites.

He wriggled his way down the rabbit path, with little dignity.

There was the most beautiful small pool imaginable: clear, deep, lustrous, gently heaving at its centre, or near its centre. It stood in a small clearing.

All the rivers in Britain might be taken as rising here, and thus flowing until the first moment of their pollution.

Stephen became aware that now the sun really was shining. He had not noticed before. The girl stood on the far side of the pool in her faded shirt and trousers, smiling seraphically. The pool pleased her, so that suddenly everything pleased her.

‘Have you kept the note I gave you?’ asked Stephen.

She put her hand lightly on her breast pocket, and therefore on her breast.

‘I’m glad,’ said Stephen.

If the pool had not been between them, he would have seized her, whatever the consequences.

‘Just clear water,’ said the girl.

The sun brought out new colours in her hair. The shape of her head was absolutely perfect.

‘The track,’ said Stephen, ‘seems to be quite well used. Is this where the people come?’

‘No,’ said the girl. ‘They come to and from the places where they live.’

‘I thought you said all the houses were empty.’

‘What I said was there are many empty houses.’

‘That is what you said. I’m sorry. But the track seems to come to an end. What do the people do then?’

‘They find their way,’ said the girl. ‘Stop worrying about them.’

The water was still between them. Stephen was no longer in doubt that there was indeed something else between them. Really there was. The pool was intermittently throwing up tiny golden waves in the pure breeze, then losing them again.

‘We haven’t seen anybody,’ said Stephen. ‘I never do see anyone.’

The girl looked puzzled.

Stephen realized that the way he had put it, the statement that he never saw anyone, might have been tactless. ‘When I go for my long walks alone,’ he added.

‘Not only then,’ said the girl.

Stephen’s heart turned over slightly.

‘Possibly,’ he said. ‘I daresay you are very right.’

The kites were still flapping like torn pieces of charred pasteboard in the high air, though in the lower part of it.

‘You haven’t even looked to the bottom of the pool yet,’ said the girl.

‘I suppose not.’ Stephen fell on his knees, as the girl had done at the milestone or waymark, and gazed downwards through the pellucid near-nothingness beneath the shifting golden rods. There were a few polished stones round the sides, but little else that he could see, and nothing that seemed of significance. How should there be, of course? Unless the girl had put it there, as Stephen realized might have been possible.

Stephen looked up. ‘It’s a splendid pool,’ he said.

But now his eye caught something else; something other than the girl and the pool. On the edge of the rising ground behind the girl stood a small stone house. It was something else that Stephen had not previously noticed. Indeed, he had been reasonably sure that there had been nothing and no one, not so much as a hint of mankind, not for a quite long way, a quite long time.

‘Is that where one of the people lives?’ he asked, and in his turn pointed. ‘Or perhaps more than one? ’

‘It’s empty,’ said the girl.

‘Should we go and look?’

‘If you like,’ said the girl. Stephen quite saw that his expressed response to the glorious little spring had been inadequate. He had lost the trick of feeling, years and years ago.

‘It’s a splendid pool,’ he said again, a little self-consciously.

Despite what the girl had said, Stephen had thought that to reach the house above them, they would have to scramble through the high heather. But he realized at once that there was a path, which was one further thing he had not previously noticed.

The girl went before, weaving backwards and forwards up the hillside. Following her, with his thoughts more free to wander, as the exertion made talking difficult, Stephen suddenly apprehended that the need to return for Harriet’s teatime had for a season passed completely from his mind.

Apprehending it now, he did not even look at his watch. Apart from anything else, the struggle upwards was too intense for even the smallest distraction or secondary effort. The best thing might be for his watch simply to stop.

They were at the summit, with a wider horizon, but still Stephen could see no other structure than the one before him, though this time he gazed around with a certain care. From here, the pool below them seemed to catch the full sun all over its surface. It gleamed among the heathered rocks like a vast luminous sea anemone among weeds.

Stephen could see at once that the house appeared basically habitable. He had expected jagged holes in the walls, broken panes in the windows, less than half a roof, ubiquitous litter.