A Division of the Light (25 page)

He could tell that Alice felt a satisfying pleasure in her own movements. Even the thick clothing that she wore could not fully mask her feline pride. When they returned to the hotel she could throw that clothing to one side. Would he be able to strip her with the slow, easy confidence of his many past seductions? Would she encourage him to linger over each part of her flesh as he laid it bare?

Already he imagined the texture of the nape of her neck, the curve of her hip beneath his hand, the taste of her lips, the sway
of her breasts, the feral heat of her vulva. As lovers, could they be as thorough and exploratory as it was possible to be? Would she relish his timing, his touch, his attention to detail?

They labored upward in silence. Neither spoke. The only sounds were of their footfalls on the gritty road, their breathing and the distant muffled noise of water.

After a few minutes they came to a point where they could stand on the road's grassy edge and look down. Trees with fanned-out roots clung to a precipitous and gloomy slope. Through the dark trunks, a few hundred feet below, the riverside path could be distinguished. Water glittered across its surface like a glaze.

“It looks as if the river has burst its banks,” Alice said.

“I see it.”

“Maybe that's why he was forced to take this road.”

“Maybe.”

“If he'd gone that way, down there, he'd have been able to fill his water bottle easily.”

“Alice, you can't spend your life thinking of things that never happened.”

“You think not? I think it makes sense to always wonder why.”

Ever since they had begun the journey Alice had been brooding once more on the workings of what others called chance. If Thomas had been able to take the lower path then he would have reached his destination and returned by the same route. He need never have seen, or crossed, or paused by the upper bridge. He need never have scrambled down what had been reported to her as a steep, dangerous slope. He would not have slipped and fallen into the torrent. He would still be alive.

And yet she did not wish to believe that Thomas's death was an unforeseen consequence of chance decisions and events; she
had to believe that it concealed a hidden purpose. People did not die without reason; individuals were never pointlessly destroyed. There was a kind of celestial mechanism that gave meaning to everything, even if that truth often remained hidden. Whether or not Thomas had committed suicide—and Alice was certain he had not—his death must be part of a design whose pattern she could not yet read. And perhaps, she thought, it was not intended that she should ever read it. Maybe the signs were designed to be understood by someone else. It was even possible, but unlikely, that it was Gregory who was the most important person on this pilgrimage.

They were considerably higher now, and the landscape opened out so that raw moorland could be seen in the gaps beyond the regimented plantations of spruce. The choked roadside ditches ran with thin streams.

“The air's so heavy,” Alice protested. “This jacket feels cumbersome.”

“I think it's going to rain. Better keep it on.”

Gregory studied the scenery to either side. He could make no interesting compositions from it; there was an exhausted monotony about everything. Bracket fungus jutted from the trunks of trees and spongy moss grew across mulch. Sometimes the edges of the road had been carved into raw banks by heavy machinery, and spindly black roots of bracken protruded from these like dead feelers. High above the moor two buzzards circled slowly against a sky that had become so low and bruised that all of the colors bent toward a jaundiced yellow. It felt as if the world itself was running down.

“I'm tired and my boots hurt,” Alice said.

“For God's sake, you knew this wouldn't be a stroll in the park.”

The vigor of Gregory's response was surprising even to him. Irritation bled from his words as if they had been cut.

She did not respond. Gregory felt the shape of the urn against his back. He considered apologizing, but did not. To one side were a dozen or so trees that must have been toppled years before. Their gray roots were dry and brittle and their bark was sheathed in moss.

Maybe Cassie had been correct, Gregory thought. After all, in the past she had often been proved right. And his daughter had never expressed an opinion, or given advice, that had been in bad faith. There was only one reason that he was toiling up this bleak slope with a dead man's ashes on his back. If he had not been so obsessed by Alice Fell, he would have refused.

A piece of stone cracked beneath his boot. He was thirsty. The air had grown heavier and beneath his waterproof clothing he was clammy.

“Let's drink,” he said, taking a bottle of water from a rucksack pocket and opening the top. “You first.”

Alice took it from him and tilted back her head to drink. The skin of her throat was an unblemished white. Gregory imagined her head thrown back in pleasure.

When she handed the bottle back he could see that she was thinking of Thomas.

“I know,” he said. “Never set off without a supply of water.”

“You could tell I was thinking him. There's no need to underline it.”

Alice was ahead by several steps before he could return the bottle to his pack. Her boots crunched softly on the grit.

Gregory had no idea what kind of person Thomas Laidlaw had been. He could not know if Alice had spoken the truth about
him. Probably, he thought, Cassie was right—Alice had encouraged Thomas to feel more for her than she had been able to feel for him. Maybe that was a pattern in her life. Alice courted the attention of men and encouraged their love. As soon as they were helpless, she lost interest. Maybe, Gregory brooded, she was more like him than he had ever been willing to admit.

And if Cassie were right about Alice, she was right that Gregory had been foolish in allowing himself to be captivated. The only hidden depth in Alice was one of ambition. The best thing to happen would be for them to share a bed for a night, maybe several nights, and then part. She would care nothing for him and he should care nothing for her. His fascination had been an error, an aberration. Cassie's insight was valid; as soon as he had slept with Alice the truth would become obvious. Satisfaction would generate clarity.

They stopped for a few moments while he consulted the map again. The only mark that Thomas had made on the land between the courses of the Calder and the Bleng was a thin box that he had drawn around his destination. Every other site that he had visited had a date and time noted beside it, but there was nothing beside Sampson's Bratfull.

“According to this we should come to a fork quite soon. When we do, we need to take the forestry road to the left. The other one eventually leads you out to the main road to Wasdale.”

“And Thomas's bridge?”

“Maybe another ten minutes after the fork. It's difficult to tell.”

They set off again. The ground had flattened now, and above the geometry of the conifer plantations they could see the high bare moor that separated the two rivers. Beneath their feet the road was still broken stone and gritty mud. A spine of bright
green turf ran along its center, untouched by the wheels of timber lorries and Land Rovers.

Alice resented Gregory taking control of the map. She could read city plans easily but was less confident with contours and bridleways; nevertheless she had come to the conclusion that she should have insisted on carrying and studying Thomas's map. She would have been happier if Gregory did not act as if they were on an expedition. And although Alice had initially been pleased that he had volunteered to carry the urn, she had begun to feel that that, in ways that she could not fully rationalize, it was she who should take it to the tumulus where the ashes would be scattered.

Perhaps Gregory had adopted the role of guide to ingratiate himself, or perhaps it was an extension of his need to control. He had never regarded her as a true equal. Instead he had been driven by his need; Alice had always found that obvious. And yet Gregory's desire had always been expressed through his professional activities. His compulsion to photograph lay like a grid across everything. She had asked him not to bring his camera now, and he had agreed; but would he have consented to leave it aside for a longer period? Gregory had always kept a distance from the world by studying it through a lens; was he even capable of living without a camera?

It was not so long ago that she had thought of warning him. Remembering the distress that she had caused past lovers, Alice had wanted to look hard into Gregory's eyes and tell him not to fall in love with her too deeply. If he had asked why, she would have been honest. Because, she would have said, I cause pain that no one ever expects to suffer.

But now Alice believed that she must have misjudged Gregory.
He would never suffer pain; it was not in his nature. His only reactions would be of inconvenience, irritation, and perhaps embarrassment. He was incapable of the anguish that Alice was secretly proud of causing. Gregory could shrug off his love for her, just as he must have shrugged off his affairs with countless other women who had been mercenary and vain enough to sleep with him.

They came to the fork. The road ahead continued across fields of recently planted trees, their tips only about six feet from the ground, toward a wall of mature woods several hundred yards away. From within it came the sounds of a motor, rising and falling in tone. It reminded Alice of how, sprawled on the pavement, she had heard the robbers' motorbike roar away from her.

“What's that?”

“Forestry workers must be logging up there, but that's not the way that we're going. This looks like the road we want.”

They stood in a turning circle of packed soil and shale, its far edge indented with the broken chevrons of tractor tires. Another road led down from the circle, bending round the side of a turf bank and then dipping out of sight as it followed the valley contours back in the direction of the river.

Gregory adjusted the straps on his rucksack. “The upper bridge can't be far now,” he said, setting off again.

The road became steeper. Streams draining from the moorland ran along narrow man-made channels on their right. To their left a broad area of logged-out plantation opened up. Hundreds of ragged stumps, bleached as if they had been submerged, stuck out of a slope strewn with decaying pine needles and lopped brushwood.

“Listen,” Alice said.

Gregory looked at her. He could still hear the chainsaw whine in the far distance.

“It's the river,” she told him.

It was true; the Bleng could be heard again as it rushed through its channel beyond the harvested trees.

“I felt we were getting near,” she said.

When the upper bridge came into view it was disappointingly bare and functional. Both Alice and Gregory had imagined that in some undefined way it must be distinctive. Instead the bridge was nothing more than a broad unadorned concrete slab laid down across abutments to link one drab section of road with the next.

“Are you sure this is it?”

“No doubt about it,” Gregory said. “Look how the land rises on the far side. Sampson's Bratfull must be beyond the next plantation.”

They walked down the slope, its angle making them unconsciously gather pace. Alice's boots had begun to chafe and she was increasingly uncomfortable. The noise of the river grew ever louder.

When Gregory stepped onto the bridge it made a hard unyielding sound. He took a few paces forward and then stopped just short of the lip at the edge of the slab. Dry mud had thrown its shallow depressions and furrows into relief, so that he appeared to be standing on the dispersing outlines of a carpet. Beneath him the Bleng tumbled between steep banks and boulders before flowing out of sight behind the trees.

Now Gregory decided that if they could empty the urn within the next few minutes, without further thought or ceremony, the ashes would vanish immediately. He and Alice could stand together
as if in prayer for a short while longer and then they could go back, never again to set foot in this bleak, forsaken place.

“He must have climbed down here,” he said, and pointed down the rake of earth and shale to his right. “Look how narrow they cut that channel. You can imagine what this would have been like after all that rain. Any increase in volume would force water high up those sides.”

Alice walked uneasily toward the edge, but then stood back from it. The air was heavy and relentless.

She had expected to be emotional at the site of Thomas's death. She was ready to be stricken by feelings of sadness and waste, and had even thought that she might feel disabled by guilt. Instead there was a blankness inside her imagination, as if she had completed a journey to an oracle and now found that she no longer needed to hear it speak. When she looked down into the river it seemed to have little to do with Thomas. It had been deserted by the past. The water that had carried him away was long gone and part of an ocean by now.

“There's a kind of shelf there, toward the bottom of that slope,” Gregory went on. “It's narrow but we could stand on it. Do you want to go down?”

Alice shook her head.

“It would be difficult, but we could do it. Probably that's where he fell.”

After she did not answer, Gregory took his chance.

“You once told me that Thomas was fascinated by rivers. We could even empty the urn down there. If you wanted to.”

“No,” she said quickly, “I don't want to do that.”

The peaty water rushed and drummed and swirled beneath them. As if readying himself to wait for several minutes, Gregory
folded his arms and stood with his legs further apart.

He was growing weary of the journey, and had no desire to trudge even further along such a featureless track. Sampson's Bratfull held no attraction for him. Wherever Alice chose to throw the ashes, he would be content for the act to be done as quickly as possible. Afterward, they would be able to return to the safety of the car and then to the warmth and privacy of the hotel. That was the real reason why he was here.