Losing Nelson (44 page)

It was this fixity of regard that alerted me. I could feel their eyes on me all the time. Things began to fall into place. Badham emerging from the hotel, looking to right and left—that had been a signal. The man with the telephone, receiving instructions. The bus that drew up so opportunely, the driver who did not ask me to produce a ticket. And now these two, keeping me under observation.

They were cunning; every time I glanced at them, they were looking somewhere else. The girl sat hunched forward. She was continually wrinkling the loose skin on her nose and opening her mouth in a snarling expression. She had on a white T-shirt with
Louisiana Country Club
inscribed across the bosom. What did that mean? They could have been notified that I would be on this bus, but how could Badham have known I would get on it in the first place? Could he have watched me? I had not actually seen him walk away.

The girl was looking about her, still wrinkling her nose and snarling. She was looking at the other people on the bus. Suddenly I realized: it was an outing, she was enjoying herself, this was her best T-shirt. She was retarded, to say the least, and this woman was looking after her. Surreptitiously, I scanned the woman’s face. I was afraid, but I had to do it. Broad cheeks, small deep-set eyes, an expression of placid resignation. Not the mother—a nurse of some kind, the girl’s keeper … She had taken some trouble to change her appearance, but I knew her now, I recognized her, I had last seen her leading away poor Penhas on the occasion of my father’s funeral. Nothing to do with Badham. Her name was Mrs. White. I felt a great rush of relief. I caught her eye and nodded slightly to show that I had understood, and she blinked twice in reply.

We were on a level now, far above the sea, moving between large buildings with identical balconies. The roads were wider and there were pockets of greenery here and there, scattered groups of trees and clumps of brightly flowering bushes. There were not many people on the bus now, but a man was sitting opposite me on the other side of the aisle. I leaned forward and spoke to his averted face: “Posillipo?” He turned and looked at me for some moments in silence. Then he shook his head and pointed in the direction the bus had come from. He called forward to the driver, who merely shrugged. Some minutes afterwards the bus stopped. “
Capolinea
,” the man said. He again
pointed behind him, the way the bus had come. The bus driver got down from his seat and came towards us. “
Capolinea
,” he said.

Everyone was getting off; we had come to the end of the line. I understood now. They had wanted to keep me away from Villa Emma at all costs. Misled by the man with the telephone, I had boarded the bus on the wrong side of the road. Posillipo was in the other direction. The driver showed me his watch and made a little circle above it with his forefinger. One hour. I would have to wait an hour before I could get a bus back. The driver smiled; his moustache lifted. He made little chopping motions in the direction from which we had come. “Posillipo.” He was in it too, of course.

Everyone else was off the bus by now. I followed them. The driver got back into his seat and the bus drew away, gathered speed, disappeared in the distance. If this was the end of the line, where was he going? I thought I knew the answer to that. Mrs. White and her charge had got off with the others. They were someway off, walking along together by the side of the road. I had no idea where I was or what I should do. It was ten minutes to seven. The sun was setting in silver cloud over a sea invisible from here. I was not proposing to stay where I was, in that empty place, alone and exposed, without cover of any kind. I was not such a fool as that. While I was still hesitating, the signal came. Mrs. White glanced slightly over her shoulder. I immediately began to follow, taking care to keep a distance between us.

The road curved away; I lost them from view. When I came round the curve, there was no sign of them. But there was an unsurfaced road going off at right angles, with houses on one side and a stone wall on the other, bordering what looked like private grounds. After a while the road narrowed, the houses were less frequent. It was no more than a footpath. There was no sign of Mrs. White or the girl. I had made a mistake somehow, I had misread the signal. I stopped at the edge of the road and stood still. Immediately, with this ceasing of
movement, I became aware that I was being watched. I was in a trap. I could not simply go back the way I had come, it was too dangerous, it was what they expected. Then I saw that there was a gate in the wall on the other side, a little way farther along, a metal gate, painted green.

There was no padlock on the gate, just a simple bar. It opened quite easily. I was planning to make a detour, keeping within the shelter of the wall, until I could get back to the dirt road again at a point somewhere near where it joined the main road, find a hiding place where I could wait for the bus. But I was too much in fear of the open, I stayed in the shelter of the wall too long. When I finally hoisted myself over it and dropped down on the other side, bruising my elbows and jarring my legs in the process, there was no sign of the road. I was in what I took to be the grounds of some large house or perhaps hotel. A gravel path wound away through thick shrubbery. All I could do was follow this—I had lost all sense of direction now.

I came out onto an asphalt driveway and an empty car park with white lines marking the spaces. On the other side of this were some single-storey brick buildings that looked like offices and then a large white house with balconied windows. I crossed the car park, passed round the nearer of the brick buildings. Through a window I saw two men in long white coats talking together. They stared at me as I passed.

I began to walk more quickly. There was a pavement now, leading in the direction of the white house. A man appeared suddenly from a side turning and walked towards me. He was passing a hand over his face, down and up again, with rapid repeated movements. As we drew opposite he stopped doing this, but he kept his hand stretched over his nose and peeped at me over the top of it.

Someone called out, perhaps in greeting, someone hidden by an angle of the building. From an upper room I heard the sound of a
woman’s laughter, strangely sustained, as if she were laughing also on the intakes of breath. A uniformed nurse came round a corner of the building with a very old man in a wheelchair. His face was tilted back and his eyes were closed, his sharp nose pointed up towards the sky. From the frame of his wheelchair there dangled a teddy bear and a black monkey with glass eyes. The bear and the monkey jerked and danced—they were on strings of elastic. The old man’s eyes were not closed, they were white slits, he was watching me. The nurse said some words I did not understand. She left the wheelchair and came round towards me.

I understood everything now. Mrs. White and the girl were in it too, they had led me here. The men with white coats, the hand signals, the laughter … They had anticipated everything. There was no time to lose. I jumped over the low hedge that bordered the pavement, ran back across the car park and into the shrubbery. There was great power and freedom in this running at first. I ran in a wide circle, crashed through another low hedge, climbed a wooden fence, and found myself behind the house on ground that led upwards through a straggle of bushes and bare earth and patches of burned-out grass.

That sense of freedom did not last. I was breathing hoarsely, open-mouthed, lungs straining as I climbed higher. A thin screen of trees, cluttered with ivy. I pushed through them and half scrambled, half fell down a bank on the other side into a deep-sided cutting, broad and flat enough at the bottom to walk along—it looked as if there might once have been a single rail track here. There were grassed-over mounds of stones at intervals along the way.

Down here the night had begun to take over, there was an advance of darkness between the banks. After a while I stopped and listened, but there was no sound of pursuit. When I judged the distance to be safe, I climbed up the bank on the farther side. I had to get up on hands and knees and I was torn by brambles and thorny scrub. But
when I reached the top of the bank, I forgot my hurts. I was looking down over the distant lights of streets and houses and the vanishing gleams of traffic, looking beyond this to the glimmering radiance of the bay. The sun had gone, but the sea still held the last of the light in a luminous solution of silver.

This was what you climbed up to as a boy, climbing from the sheltered glebeland, from the riverside meadows where the parsonage lay, mounting the bridle path towards the high ground above the village, high above, between the shoulders of the downs, from where we could look down over sand and saltmarsh, strands of gold and strips of shallow pool and at the verge the real sea, the mass of it, seamed white or silvered over. Behind us great rafts of bright cloud and the soft gleam of the sun on wet sand ripples and mudflats and the glitter of dried pebbles and shingle up the beach. Curlews whistling above the marshes, the terns with their wild cries and plunging flight.

How often we had seen it together. But now I was alone and the light was fading and I knew I had been brought here only for this, brought here alone to see the line of the sea as you saw it that evening in March when you were twelve years old, the evening before you left. It was the only point in all the countryside around from which to get a view of the sea. You came here in the fading light and looked at the sea and you walked away to spend your life with the sea and when you did that you took my life with you.

What I would have done, how long I would have stayed there, I don’t know. I thought everything was at an end. But then the miracle happened, the boy appeared. For some moments I could not believe it. Only a dark shape at first, surmounted by the pale glimmer of the face. There below me, in the last of the light he came walking. Between the crest of the cutting where I crouched and the lights of the houses below, neither fast nor slow—it was a path well known to him. On his back a sort of bump, which I made out to be a small rucksack.
Of course, his provisions would be there, his provisions for the journey. He was not going home to the parsonage, he was leaving, he was going away to spend his life with the sea, he was taking my life with him.

Down the slope again, through the thorns and scrub. I found a stone big enough, not too big. Panting now with the fear of being too late, I kept along the cutting out of hearing, out of sight. When I clawed myself up again, he was still there below me, a diminutive figure, walking at the same pace, looking ahead of him. And now, when I had to get behind him, he started singing!

Incomprehensible words in a child’s treble—your voice had not broken yet. A blunder of the first order, preventing you from hearing me as I drew closer behind you, my step uncertain in this difficult light. Perhaps at the last moment you heard or sensed something. But then it was too late, too late to turn on me the terror of your eyes. I struck downward at the small head, once, twice. The figure sank to its knees, half turning towards me, raising an arm. A sound came from it, not very loud, like sobbing but more liquid—as though there were some liquid in the throat. I struck again and he fell forward. I heard the crash of his fall.

Then I walked away, continuing the boy’s path, keeping the lights below me. There was no need to hurry now. I had nothing to fear. I had done it, I had broken the line. Dark and bright angels meet at twilight, it is the only time. And when they meet they join. We can never lose each other now.

“Unsworth is one of the best historical novelists on either side of the Atlantic…his vast knowledge of 18th-century social and material conditions creates a rich and strange rendering of daily life that’s utterly persuasive.” —
The New York Times Book Review

“Told with bite and freshness…Unsworth gives his figures glittering definition, and then leaves them open and undefined.” —
The Boston Globe

“[Unsworth’s] sentences recall the sharp detail, moral sensitivity and ready wit of Charles Dickens. But his sense of the lumbering, uneven gait of social progress is more sophisticated, more tempered, one might say, by history.” —
The Washington Post