Cushing's Crusade (15 page)

When he got back to the house Derek saw his car in the drive. Better find that bicycle. He began looking without putting much effort into it. Ten minutes later, having found no trace of the missing machine, he realized with a jarring shock that although subsequent events had stretched time unnaturally, his last
conversation
with Giles had actually taken place earlier that day. He went into the hall and was shocked to see that the clock showed eight o’clock. No trace of his earlier desparing detachment was left as he ran into the kitchen in search of Mrs Hocking. With an unpleasant falling sensation in his stomach, he learned that Giles had left just before ten and had not returned to lunch, nor had he taken any food with him.

The boy’s deliberate indifference came back to him with
painful
clarity. Giles had
seemed
stable enough, but it was quite possible that he had concealed his real feelings, that the whole act of not caring had been no more than a mask. Easy to forget that even trivial disasters are felt so keenly in childhood; and an unwanted and unnecessary confession of adultery was hardly trivial. Derek had a sudden vision of Giles riding his bicycle with deliberate carelessness; saw him drifting round a sharp bend on
the wrong side of the road into the path of an oncoming lorry. Or was he floating face downwards in the sea, or lying crumpled at the foot of a rocky cliff?

Derek was standing staring at the phone in the hall when Diana came up to him. All her cool detachment had gone; she looked pale and shaken.

‘You can’t find him either? It’s so unlike him going off.’

Derek took her arm gently. Then he gave her a comforting smile.

‘He’ll be back soon. Boys are like that. They get carried away and can’t imagine their parents might worry. When I was his age I went off to Brighton for the day and didn’t get back till after midnight. I was amazed when my father sent me to bed in
disgrace
.’

Diana was tugging at her hair distractedly.

‘Why the hell did we leave him? Why?’

‘If he’s not back by nine, we’ll ring the police.’

‘Is it our fault?’ she cried suddenly.

‘Perhaps,’ he replied, wondering how he could have let the boy go off on his own earlier in the day. Waves of shame flooded through him.

‘I never showed enough interest,’ she moaned. ‘You were so much better, Derek.’

If she knew about the morning, thought Derek; if she ever knew … Giles, aged four: freckled face, snub nose, hair a redder red, no glasses. An eager, inventive child with so many private words. Potato was tubby, oranges ornies, chutney chucketty. Diana saying: He’s far too old for that baby talk, and: It’s ridiculous a boy his age having to sleep with his baby blanket. Derek the one who understood. Good Daddy, bad Mummy. Diana saying angrily: You keep on undermining me. Always Mummy who has to say no to him. Derek felt tears forming. He put his arms round Diana and they held each other.

*

When Charles returned from the doctor’s, with four stitches in his chin, he seemed surprised to see his guests still in the house. At first he was angry but when he heard about Giles a temporary
truce was patched up. Mrs Hocking was told to provide a cold supper.

They ate in the kitchen, mostly in silence. Derek only picked at his food and Diana seemed equally lacking in appetite. Charles didn’t open any wine but fetched some brandy afterwards. When his thoughts became too disturbing, Derek studied the plates on the heavy mahogany dresser and vainly tried not to hear the hollow ticking of the large Victorian wall-clock. Charles poured out three glasses of brandy and then started to peal a peach with meticulous care. Diana suddenly pushed back her chair with a harsh scraping noise on the flags.

‘I’m sorry but I can’t just sit here. We ought to ring the police now.’

Charles put down his knife and said gently, ‘It might be worth trying the hospitals first. There aren’t many. If he hasn’t been admitted we’ll be able to discount the idea of a road accident.’

A quarter of an hour later Charles came back. It occurred to Derek that he was enjoying his rôle of capable man of action. Maligned by his ungrateful guests, he was still enough of a good samaritan to do all he could for them.

‘Well, no news at any of the hospitals. I’m on the phone to the police in Penzance. I’ve given them a description and they’ll circulate it.’ He turned to Diana. ‘What was he wearing this morning?’

Diana’s lips were trembling. She screwed up her eyes as though desperately trying to remember and then shook her head.

‘It’s awful. I’m not sure. Jeans, I think, and a yellow sweater.’

‘Navy jeans, a pale blue T-shirt and a fawn jersey,’ muttered Derek. ‘I think he was wearing sandals.’

‘Anything to identify him? Name-tags on his clothes?’

Diana let out a loud sob that seemed to surprise her. Her eyes were quite dry.

‘He only has name-tapes on his school clothes. These were holiday things.’

When Charles had gone back to the phone she started crying uncontrollably. Long low sobs that came from the pit of her stomach and shook her with each spasm. Derek came and put his
arms round her. After a minute or two she dried her eyes with her sleeve, smearing mascara across her cheek.

Before Charles returned, Angela came in looking hot and angry. She glanced at Derek and then started to eat what was left of her brother’s helping of chicken.

‘I had to walk back,’ she complained with her mouth full. ‘Somebody might have waited for me.’

‘Giles is missing,’ said Derek quietly.

‘God, I’m sorry.’

For a moment Derek was frightened that she was going to say more, but, before she could, Charles came in again.

‘The police are going to contact the local coast guard. He may have been cut off by the tide or got himself stuck up a cliff. If there’s no sign by morning they’ll get a naval helicopter out to look for him.’

‘It isn’t happening,’ moaned Diana.

‘No need to get worried till midnight,’ said Charles soothingly. ‘To tell the truth the police thought we were a bit over-anxious getting them in this early. But better safe than sorry.’

A little later Charles and Diana went down to Tregeare to ask in the pub if anybody had seen Giles; Angela would stay in the house in case he phoned or turned up in person, and Derek had made up his mind to go down to the beach and search along the shore for a couple of miles.

When Charles and Diana had gone, Derek went upstairs for an extra sweater. On his way through the hall Angela stopped him and handed him a torch.

‘I’m sorry I said what I did this afternoon,’ she said quietly.

‘You weren’t to know.’

She kissed him lightly on the cheek as he walked out into the darkness.

*

Derek picked his way over the rockery towards the edge of the strip of woodland which separated the grounds of Charles’s house from the shore. The yellow beam of his torch stabbed out a narrow field of vision: too narrow, he thought. He switched off the torch to gauge how well he could see by the light of the
crescent moon and a sky filled with stars. For a while he stood still and waited for his eyes to acclimatize. Have to go carefully.

Ahead the trees reared up: an unreal black wall like a giant
cut-out
against the paler sky. To the right, where the trees were less dense, he could see the far side of the estuary floating indistinctly like a long dark cloud on the silvery water. As his eyes grew used to the darkness, he was able to pick out more detail. The wall of trees was soon no longer impenetrable, for now amid dark leaves he could glimpse the grey bark of trunk or branch. Just ahead of him to his left he could make out a tangle of brambles; a few moments before it might have been a large holly bush or a dense clump of bamboos. The path too had become clearer and he could see a faint white line where it twisted away until obscured by the dark shadows of the trees.

But as he walked deeper into the wood he could make out very little. The prevailing wind had bent the oak trees so that their branches formed a dense and flattened canopy above him. At times pools of moonlight were so rare that he had to use his torch, and then the utter hopelessness of his search became cruelly obvious. He shouted the boy’s name several times and waved the torch above his head but there was no answer, only the
whispering
of leaves stirred by the slight breeze. Derek trudged on across a small clearing overgrown with straggling elders. As though it was remotely likely that Giles should be sitting in a wood half a mile from the house, as though, if he could light the entire
coastline
with powerful arc-lights, he would find him. A long way away he thought he heard a fox bark. Occasionally twigs fell and branches creaked. Once, a small animal scuttled past with a
rustling
scratching sound. Weasel, stoat or rat—he didn’t know or care. Stories in the papers came back to him; children who had not been seen for years and parents not knowing all that time whether they were dead or alive. Pathetic yellowing photographs in shop windows: ‘If you have seen Christine, Sandra, Clare …’ Derek imagined himself coming to Cornwall at weekends, wandering through resorts, asking in hotels and beach shops whether Giles had been seen. Could he take a room, get work on a paper round, deliver milk or serve in a store? Would people ask
him where he came from or suspect that he’d run away? Wasn’t it obvious that they would? And yet children, boys and girls in their early teens did run away and stay away. Visions of Giles being kept by an ageing homosexual, or stealing from shops, or sleeping rough.

Derek was crying as he pressed on through tall ferns towards trees silhouetted against water: the sea. Minutes later he was crunching over shingle.

Moonlight shimmered on rock pools and on wet fronds of seaweed, which the tide had recently exposed. Below the rocks the water was a glassy black, the surface smooth as polished ice; and yet there was movement: a long flat swell moving the sea ever so little like water tilted slightly in a huge bowl.

Derek shouted again but his words died at once without echo and the rhythmic sighing of the sea on the shingle went on. Occasionally pebbles clattered hollowly pulled back gently by the water. The black shape of a tanker lit with pin-points of light slid imperceptibly across the bay. Please, Giles, if you’re near or far, please answer, please, if you never answer again, answer now. Memories of hide-and-seek. I’ll count fifty, only fifty, mind, so hurry … forty-eight, nine,
fifty
… Coming to get you. My fault, he moaned aloud. I didn’t mean it, Giles; I didn’t know how you would feel. From the beginning I never considered you, from the day Charles came to the flat.
My
fears,
my
hopes,
my
marriage. Oh Giles.

The shore was ribbed with ridges of rock running from the land down into the sea; clambering over one such obstacle, Derek slipped and grazed his hands on rough barnacles. Later, looking down from the top of another ledge, he saw a black shape in the water, too far away to see distinctly. He half-ran, half-fell down onto the beach and lunged forward, gasping, until he saw not a body but a large piece of wave-worn driftwood. He sank down onto the wet stones and couldn’t go on for several minutes. Each breath came like a small sob, and in his chest the same sickening ache of shock which a motorist feels after narrowly avoiding head-on collision. A little later the same horror when he mistook some heaped seaweed for a pile of clothes. Another quarter of an
hour and he had reached Tregeare, but, since Charles and Diana would have searched there, he pressed on along the shore.

Beyond the village a steep cliff prevented him sticking to the sea. The only way was to cut across fields for a while. After a long walk he climbed over a low wall and saw the sea again. This time there was no beach but a desolate scree, littered with boulders tumbled together chaotically: the remains of the cliff worn away to its constituent parts by waves and wind. As he descended nearer these large boulders the ground became boggy and sucked at his shoes, making it hard going. By straining his eyes he could make out a small cow-path that avoided the worst of the mud. The whole area seemed a mass of little streams which cut shallow gullies in the soft ground. When he reached the rocks he could hear the water making strange plopping noises under them. Again he shouted and again there was no answering call.
Weariness
and fear made him feel very weak. He hadn’t done anything so energetic since his early twenties and now his calves and thighs felt so strained and numb that they shook uncontrollably when he braced the muscles. A sudden vision of Giles telling him about the geological history of this wilderness of stones and rocks made him weep. At first he tried to hold back but then allowed deep sobs to shake him.

As he stumbled from rock to rock, jarring each joint with every sudden drop, and scraping the skin on shins and hands with each small ascent, he realized that soon he wouldn’t have the strength to go back. He sat down for a while and then, leaving the shore, started back across the boggy ground and began climbing up towards the fields. He reached a small grassy plateau and sat down to rest again. His legs were shaking and when he tried to stand they folded under him. Have to wait longer. He lay back on the grass and looked up at the stars. One side of the sky seemed very slightly lighter than the other now. He didn’t know when he started to doze but it must have been soon after he lay down because he seemed to be back at the house and Giles had come back and was eating cold meat in the kitchen. He was explaining how he had spent the day in Birmingham and had then gone on to see the Scouts in the Peak District. Then Charles came
in and started kissing Diana which made Derek laugh and a little later Giles joined in. Somehow they had all moved to the
Afro-Asian
Institute and Derek was showing Giles the archives. They started tossing letters about like confetti. The dream stopped.

When Derek opened his eyes the stars were pale and indistinct. The crescent moon had become a small insignificant half-disc. From the east, light was flowing as if from a screen lit from behind. From the fields around him he could hear birds
singing
. The land was no longer grey, silver and black, for now the earth was beginning to glow with dark browns and umber. He sat up and rubbed his eyes. The sky was still a pale misty grey but just above the horizon a pink haze was beginning to flush gold. The colour reflected in the sea but still no sun. For a moment Derek forgot why he was sitting where he was, for, as he looked eastwards, a light no bigger than a flaring match had appeared where the sea and sky met. In seconds this tiny area of molten fire was brighter than all the fires he had ever seen. A channel of gold reached from the horizon almost to the shore. A minute it seemed and the top of the sun was distinct and growing all the time, a half-circle and then an orb. He looked away and pulled himself to his feet; light seemed to be flowing past him like something he could touch. When he looked at the sun again it should have been bright but, strangely, although light was growing all around him, the sun itself seemed paler, its fire diminished by its own
reflected
light.