The Night Following (32 page)

I simply forgot. It’s an honest error made in a moment of absentmindedness, brought on, no doubt, by the strain of events. In my past life, if such a thing was ever to happen, that’s what I would have been assumed to be: honest and absentminded. Now I look like a thief. They think I’m a thief, and suddenly I feel like one, so how can I do otherwise than act like one? I thrust the money over as if I were paying a fine. I don’t say anything; if I try to explain I just made a mistake I’ll sound like a liar, then they’ll think I’m a liar as well as a thief. But saying nothing makes me seem stealthy and even more guilty; it’s confusing me, being both exposed like this and wrongly accused, and my confusion, too, looks like guilt. I try an apologetic smile but that must look guilty, too, because the boy’s glare shifts from me only long enough to exchange a knowing look with his colleague. Arthur is shaking.

We make it out the door and back to the car. As we drive away it strikes me I’ve made another mistake. We’ll have to stop again. I should have bought food there. If I had, I wouldn’t have been able to forget about paying for the gas. Now we’ve got next to nothing to eat and I can’t let Arthur starve. I am more unnerved than I can say; the thought of braving such a place again fills me with absolute dread.

   We drive for many hours. At around three o’clock in the morning we leave the motorway, and immediately the rushing in my brain eases. Arthur’s head is lolling back, and as I turn up the exit ramp and steer around the roundabout, it tips and rolls and he wakes up. Just off the junction there’s a long lay-by with a couple of parked lorries and at the very end a food van, lit and open. I pull over and stop. Arthur staggers out and pees against a tree while I buy four of everything: burgers, sausages, bacon rolls, kebabs, chips—enough to keep us going for a while, appetizing or not, stone cold or not.

For the rest of the journey we are traveling into the light. Arthur is cheerful now. He fishes out various maps and points all over them with a pen from the glove compartment, though he isn’t saying much. Somehow he has three pairs of spectacles in his pockets and tries them all, finally using two pairs by wearing one and holding the other halfway between his eyes and the page on his lap.

Ruth, he says, making a face, the old B596 is no more. I’m rerouting us west of Bakewell, we can’t be doing with all this bypass nonsense.

His words are muffled, as if he is chewing on a mouthful of wet paper, but I obey his directions and he settles back and says, Isn’t this nice?

I agree it is. He beams and places a hand on my arm. Oh, isn’t it nice? Going back?

It’s lovely.

Going back together, he says with satisfaction, and we drive on until I have to start singing to keep myself awake. I wind the window down to let in some cold air. We’re climbing higher; the rushing wind has lost the oily tang of the main roads and has the magical pricking sweetness of cut fields and a heavy, early autumn dew. Arthur laughs and joins in with “Green Grow the Rushes-o”and when we finish that he starts up at once with “Jerusalem,”as if he knows a hundred songs and can pick one without thinking. The words come easily, and give him delight.

And did those feet in ancient time

Walk upon England’s mountain green?

Remember, Ruth?
Jerusalem
?

Just in time, I do.

Fourteenth of June, 1972, I say, and he smiles at me and squeezes my hand on the steering wheel.

But still I can’t stay awake, and although it’s very nearly light and it can’t be far now, I pull off the road into the opening of a rutted track. Across it just a few feet back from the road there’s a barrier of barbed wire and baler twine, stretched between fence posts set in old concrete-filled paint cans. An electrified livestock fence is drawn across a couple of yards behind that. Beyond it, at the horizon, the sky is solidifying to a pale solid gold, like cooling beeswax. I tip the seat back and close my eyes. Arthur sighs and settles beside me and takes my hand. Except for the occasional soft buffeting of air as a vehicle roars past us, it is quiet and still.

The sun on my face wakes me up. There’s a tight ache around my ribs. The day is already garish but when I get out of the car to stretch my body, I discover it’s also windy and cold. By the side of the track, sparse and stemmy weeds dusky with exhaust fumes wave back and forth, and here and there in the ditch the meager yellow stars of a wildflower dip among cigarette packets, bottles, and shreds of paper and buckled cans. Miles above us, a few birds fleck a giant, chaotic sky.

Arthur wakes in a bad mood. Of course, he says, peevish and flatulent, he will remember the turnoff out of Netherbarn Cross for Overdale, but we drive three miles too far before he admits in an injured voice that I have missed it. His stomach is upset; he wriggles and scratches and fidgets with the window. I turn the car around and we crawl back the way we came but still he can’t find the turnoff because, he says, he can’t be expected to recognize it approaching from the wrong direction. We persevere, but after more studying of the maps and the tattered hand-drawn directions from nearly forty years ago, twice he chooses the wrong track. One takes us into a farmyard; the other ends at a barred and padlocked brick building stuck with aerials and antennae, property of the electric company, sitting at the base of a pylon.

It’s not as if you, Arthur says sniffily, as I reverse the car and we start to bump our way back to the road, were ever a natural at map-reading.

I’m too exasperated to reply so we drive on saying nothing for a while, back in the direction of Netherbarn Cross. We pass the same small garage we’ve seen half a dozen times; the situation is getting so desperate that I am steeling myself, if we have to drive past it again, to go in and ask for directions.

Still, he says, I suppose you’d better take a look.

I park at a disused turning that looks as if it might once have led to a hopeless golf course that never prospered. It’s a derelict little place that we’ve passed and repassed in the last hour, but while I’m peering at the map Arthur is staring hard out the window.

Those trees are new, he says eventually.

It seems we’re here. We’ve found it by accident. It’s the trees that threw him, a line of conifers on each side behind low, curving brick walls that also, he says, never used to be here. The old Overdale track has been transformed into an entrance, and the entrance is now in disrepair; in front of each of the two trees nearest the road stands a pair of upright, rusting metal struts, buckled and stricken. One set is quite bare and from the other hang the stiff plywood shreds of a sign long ago ripped away.

And another thing, Arthur grumbles, waving a hand behind him: How could I be expected to find it when everything else is so different? The garage never used to be there, either. And they’ve widened the road and stuck those things in the middle.

There are barriers between the two traffic lanes and a long white-hatched space in the road where buses can wait before turning. His memory of the old hazardous junction is useless, and the old directions no longer make sense.

They’ve flattened out the bend, he says, aggrieved. No wonder I missed it. After all, you missed it, too, didn’t you?

I start the car again and we set off up the track. The posts of the brick entrance have fallen away and lie crumbled and biscuity on the ground, and across the walls zigzag fissures in the mortar skew the brickwork. There are gaps in the rows of white copestones. Where the conifers end, the way reverts to a country track through fields. A tall green line of weeds grows down the center of it and swishes the underside of the car. Every few yards we drive over ruts that have been filled with stones or patches of tar, but not recently; thistles and dock sprout through puddles and cracks. I have to stop and get out to move a coil of wire and a sheet of corrugated iron out of the way, and about half a mile on we come across a burned-out, rusted car, tipped halfway into a field. The front wheels and hood are missing and its trunk gapes open. Nettles stretch up through the engine.

Gradually we leave the tussocky fields behind. The hills on either side of the way begin to climb toward the sky. As they rise into slanting mounds and suave, tilting cones they assume new distinction and character; they acquire the presence, even sentience, of sculpture or of people standing peripherally and very still, alone or in deliberate clusters. Light brims over the shoulders of the eclipsed hills to the east and pours itself over the opposite side in cold, showy pinks and yellows. The track rises ahead and then dips, and in the distance disappears round a curve into the dark swell of a valley. I glance at Arthur. His eyes are running with tears and his mouth opens and closes wetly.

Nearly there, I whisper, and he nods.

After another mile or so the wide pebbly stream that is now running alongside the track veers away extravagantly. We round the next curve and Arthur cries out. I stop the car on the edge of an apron of pitted tarmac tatty with weeds and the mangled remains of benches and litter bins. The building before us is a small redbrick mansion with a miscellany of dark elaborate turrets and impractical chimneys and gabled windows, set into the hillside in front of a sparse plantation of twiggy shrubs and trees. Even derelict and vandalized, it looks pompous.

The whole place is surrounded by high chain-link fencing, bearing warning signs about trespass and the hazardous state of “these premises.”I leave Arthur weeping quietly in the car and walk the fence. I go as far as the ruin of a modern single-story extension, not visible from the car, that abuts on the far side of the lodge. Here is where two sections of fencing have been forced apart and where, against the walls of the extension, fires have been set. Smoke stains snake up the boards nailed over the front doors as far as the asphalt overhang of the flat roof. The blistered, prefabricated panels under one of the windows have sheered off and now curl outward. Like all the others, this window had been boarded up, but now it’s a jagged dark rectangle. Traces of another fire on the ground underneath it reach as high as the sill. The window board itself, prized off and split and partly burnt, lies nearby in a bed of broken glass.

I’m stepping through the gap in the fence, twisting my way through a web of cut and buckled wire, when I hear excited screams from Arthur.

Ruth, Ruth! Quick! They’re still here!

I run back round to the car, but it’s empty. He shouts again. He’s way over by the front porch of the lodge, waving at me. I follow his gestures and he guides me along the fence to where it curves up the other side and around to the back. It’s adjoined clumsily to a wind-stricken tree whose trunk lists toward the ground, leaving an easy gap. Arthur beckons me through and I hurry down to him. The original pillared porch juts out squarely from the double front doors. There may have been benches set into the sides of the porch once, but they’re long gone. Some of the colored diamond floor tiles are still in place under drifts of leaves and rubbish, and the walls are ornamented from top to bottom with panels of glazed brick set between carved pilasters and small empty niches. High on the walls a bas-relief frieze of acanthus and birds, bordered by a pair of deep ledges decorated like cake icing, runs along all three sides. Arthur is holding up a set of keys.

Knew
they’d still be here! He’s clanking them on their ring and he’s gabbling and spitting with pride.

You remember? The secret spares! The porch ledge! Bill what’s-his-name got them made in Matlock, remember? We’ll soon be in business, he says, thumbing through the keys and selecting one far bigger than the others. Aha, here’s the mortise. Proper locksmith’s key, that. Feel the weight of it.

He hasn’t noticed, or maybe he just doesn’t see, that the front doors are now secured top, bottom, and middle by three hinged metal bands whose hasps are chained and padlocked.

Come on, I say. I think there’s a way in round the back.

It’s difficult, though. The broken window of the extension is impossibly high for Arthur and it takes time and a lot of strength for me to haul the vandalized benches and litter bins round to the break in the fence, get them through, and fix them under the sill so that he can climb up and step over.

We find ourselves in a bare classroom. It must always have been warped and thin and damp, but it now looks as if water has flooded through it. Mold stains streak the walls and the ceiling is buckled and slack. White deposits of mineral salts encrust the crumbling cladding material. The floor is gritty with it, and also with bird droppings and cigarette ends and burnt rubbish. There’s a trapped, soaked stench of rain and ash and urine.

Through the door and across a corridor is another room, identical except that there’s a heap of rags and bottles in one corner and it’s darker because the window boards are still in place. The sun is bleeding through the gaps, casting wavering needles of light onto the far wall that’s covered by a painted, chipped relief map studded with arrows and circles and crosses. Arthur gazes at it, enraptured. He wanders across with a hand outstretched and stabs at a point between some brown ridges and an irregular dark blue oval.

He strokes a fingertip across it and then touches his finger to his lips.

Here. Just here, he says, replacing the finger with tender and tremulous precision back on the exact spot on the map. Here, Ruth.

Then he moves into a shaft of light that illuminates his face abruptly and dazzles him so that he has to squeeze his eyes shut, and he loses his balance and begins to stagger. His eyes fly open in fright. I rush to take hold of him before he falls, and our bodies fold together. He shakes in my arms. I watch the light tremble on the floor and across the walls. Then I take his hand and lead him out and along to the end of the corridor where there’s a solid old door connecting the extension to the main house. Arthur produces the keys again, and finally we find the one that fits. Beyond that is a kind of long scullery and another locked door, but it turns out we have the key to that, too.

He meanders through the house, raising dust. All the rooms are bare and dark and seem to me even more abjectly and irretrievably abandoned than the classrooms; their emptiness is sadder and deeper in a way I can’t explain. But for Arthur it is pure reunion, unalloyed by melancholy. Behind every heavy, squealing door is something, or someone, he is delighted to see. In a room with a wide bay window he tries to draw my attention to the fireplace.