North Face (20 page)

“You’d better have it; she might call the luck off. I’m feeling a ready prey to superstition just now.” He gave it her, and they smiled at each other in an incautious happiness which neither was quite in time to disguise. It was with something of a shock that they found they had emerged meanwhile from the castle lane and were in a street. The local constable, who did not look busy, had stopped his bicycle with one foot on the kerb, and was eyeing them with kindly toleration.

“Excuse me, sir. That lace the lady has there—may I ask if you bought it up the lane?”

“Yes,” said Neil. “Not on coupons, is it?”

“That’s all right, sir, that is; you’ve not committed any offence. But if you’ve been subjected to any annoyance, or the lady, I’d be glad to hear of it. We’ve been getting complaints.” He fished in his pocket, where the corner of a notebook appeared.

“Annoyance?” said Neil reservedly. “No, I wouldn’t say that.”

“Nor the lady?” The constable thumbed his notebook, with diminishing hope.

“Not at all, thank you,” said Ellen firmly. She put the lace in her pocket, where her hand gently retained it. “I was glad to have it; you know, it’s hard to get.”

When law and order had cycled away they caught one another’s eyes, hung for a second on the edge of a laugh, and funked it at the last moment.

The Wheatsheaf Hotel had not received the benefits of modernization. The façade was Georgian, but inside one could stand in the Tudor hearth and, looking up, see a square of sky. The service was leisurely, the bread fresh; they were the first comers and had the placid low-ceilinged room to themselves. They talked books, the kind of pseudo-impersonal conversation into which scraps of personal detail filter easily, without the need for acknowledgment. After the meal, they pottered round the church, and found that by a pleasing oversight the door to the tower had been left unlocked. Climbing past the sleeping bells, they stood on the warm leads, looking at the little town spread like an illustrated map below them.

“I suppose,” said Ellen, “all over the world there are places like this, which one can’t believe will ever change. ‘And like this insubstantial pageant faded’ …”

“That was always true.” Neil looked at the stone of the balustrade roughened and pitted by weather so that it was no longer possible to trace on it the mark of human tools. “Once it was easy to forget it, that’s all.”

“Perhaps it’s wrong to accept it. Fatalism doesn’t help.”

“It depends what you mean by accepting it.” He felt no resistance against sharing his thought, but some trouble in finding words. Things had come to him while he was by himself in the woods, real, but as glimpses of light and colour are real, of which one can say little more than ‘bright’ and ‘blue.’ Their shapelessness in terms of speech had not occurred to him, at the time. “I mean, letting go of things need not be an act of despair, I suppose. Sometimes one feels freer, and even the things one lets go of are better than they were. Sorry to be so vague.”

“No, you’re not. But—” She had drawn a little away; he saw in her face a look of frightened resistance. “It’s inhuman,” she said at last, “There are some things one
must
hold on to.”

He had no answer to this: it was not a point of discussion, but as if she had said “I am cold” or “I can go no further.” Leaning over, he watched the tiny foreshortened figures crossing the market square. In its far corner was a shape like a long blackbeetle sleeping against a diminished tree. “Perhaps,” he said, “we ought to be getting down. That looks like the bus.”

“It can’t be that time yet! And we still haven’t seen the castle.”

“You can see it from here,” said Neil. “I was keeping quiet about it.”

She followed his eye, and laughed. “How funny they look from here. Just the hats weaving about. What
are
they doing—playing rounders? Never mind, the church was quite as good.”

“We’ll come again.”

When they got to the bus, they found themselves in sole possession. This inspired superiority at first, followed by a gradual misgiving.

“I suppose,” said Ellen, “it
is
the right one?”

“It’s the only one, so it can hardly not be. It’s probably well known in the district for starting late.” After another ten minutes, however, he walked round to the front of it, where the direction board, turned half way up into the frame, kept its secret still. “We’ll give it five more minutes, and if nothing happens I’ll go and find somebody who knows.”

They were fortified, however, before this by the arrival of a stout placid woman with several baskets and a hat trimmed with grapes, who settled herself in the front seat and began to knit a pink bed-sock with reassuring contentment.

“They must have altered the time,” said Ellen in an undertone. “She looks all set for half an hour.” At the sound of her voice the woman looked back at them, with benevolent curiosity. Neil took advantage of this to ask her when the bus was supposed to start. This seemed to please her; she lowered the sock and sat round conversationally.

“Would you be wanting to see Mr Lambourne? He won’t be long now.” She added, as one who removes the last ambiguity, “I’m Mrs Lambourne.”

“How do you do,” said Neil with fogged politeness. “This is the Barlock bus, isn’t it?”

A look of deep satisfaction settled on Mrs Lambourne’s round face. She speared a needle into her wool. “There. That’s just what I thought. The moment I saw you I said to myself, Now I wonder if they’ve taken this for the Thursday bus to Barlock?”

“Where
does
it go, then?” Neil was still not quite in touch with developments.

“You mean
this
bus? Why, this one, it doesn’t what you might say go anywhere. Just back to the garage. My husband and I live up by there. He always picks me up on a Wednesday, when he drives the bus back. I thought as soon as I seen you there, ‘Now I wonder if they’ve got in by mistake.’”

“Oh,” said Neil. “Thanks very much.” He and Ellen got up. “Perhaps you could tell us where the right one starts from?”

“The Barlock buses, they start from here. But they don’t run after four-thirty, only on market day.” Simplifying this further, she added, “Thursday, market day is. Today’s a Wednesday.”

Having agreed that this was so, they thanked her again, and left.

“Good thing you asked her,” said Ellen quite cheerfully. “She must be wrong about there not being another. Summer time-table, I expect.”

“I’ll have another look,” said Neil, with spurious ease. In his experience, country dwellers were rather more accurate about the local bus service than about sunset and dawn. Before he got to the board, he had guessed what he would see there. He was right. Beside the figure 6.30 a small letter t, which he had overlooked, gave reference to a footnote: “Thursdays only.” A glance at his watch told him, further, that it was nearly seven. He walked back to Ellen, assimilating all this.

“I’m afraid we’ve had it. I’d apologise if there were anything to say.”

He braced himself for tact. She would say it was a mistake anyone might make, as she often did too; and he would see her looking alert, ready in future to rely on herself.

Instead she exclaimed triumphantly, “There! What did I tell you? I said it always went in threes.”

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars. I didn’t read the marginalia.”

“If it hadn’t been that it would have been something else. It’s a gremlin. It’ll be all right now we’ve worked it off.”

She often used, involuntarily as he knew, these scraps of Air Force slang. This was the first time it had been followed by a moment’s constraint between them. “It looks,” she went on quickly, “as if we’ll have to walk. Oh, well, we’ve had quite a lazy day.”

“Walk? It’s more than twenty miles, and the sun will be down in half an hour. No, it won’t come to that. There must be a car for hire somewhere. Come and have a drink, they’ll know in the pub.”

They went back to the Wheatsheaf. “No, you don’t,” he said, when she told him that hers was a beer. “I owe you a drink and you’re having one.” He gave her a large sherry; himself, he felt he could do with a double. The barman was encouraging: Mr George, in New Street, had a car. Neil settled Ellen in a corner with some
Tatlers
(it was the kind of place that has
Tatlers
in the lounge bar) and went off to see about it alone. He supposed it would be fairly expensive; she was the type who, given the chance, would worry about this.

Mr George, surprised at supper, came to the door wiping his mouth. He displayed interest in their predicament, and a sympathy that filled Neil with instant misgiving. Mr George was sorry. Late as it was, he’d have taken the car out again, seeing how things were; but he’d been out with a party all day, and hadn’t above a gallon of his petrol allowance left. No, there wasn’t another car for hire, not hereabouts. He returned, with a civil goodnight, to the kippers whose smell had followed him to the threshold.

Neil turned back into the street. Already the sun was on the horizon. The situation, reduced to its now inescapable essentials, accompanied him quietly on his way.

Just as he was telling himself that at least there was nothing worse left to happen, he heard his own name called, on a note of jocular disbelief. By the time he had traced the sound to its source, it was too late to do anything.

Templeton was an old colleague, a mathematician of (Neil had been assured) brilliant abilities. In less specialised matters, he displayed a mental age of about ten years. They had not met since 1940; Templeton, who had been doing something statistical in the Army, had declined reinstatement and gone impressively City. He now pumped Neil’s hand up and down (he was also a treat arm-gripper and shoulder-tapper, eking out a limited vocabulary by these means) and announced that this called for a drink.

Neil meditated escape; but it would look odd, and an anxiety not to be commented on was too firmly rooted in him, nowadays, to be shaken off quickly. He could do with a drink, besides. Vividly aware that the only decent hotel in the place was the Wheatsheaf in which Ellen was waiting, he looked about, saw, across the street, the lights of a fly-blown little pub, and with desperate bonhomie steered Templeton in it.

The story of Templeton’s war took some time; but, though fond of talking about himself, he did not push it to fanaticism. He was quite out of touch, he said; how was the old place? Anything sensational happened lately? Templeton supposed not, it never did, though by God, when you were in that rut, if the Head lost his spectacles in chapel it seemed melodramatic. Never again, said Templeton, who was looking prosperous and had put on a significant amount of weight. And what was Neil (dark old horse) doing here on the loose? Shaken off the old harness too? That was the stuff. (His gaze filmed tactfully from Neil’s jacket which was very pre-war.) When, by the way, had he acquired that
mèche blanche?
It must go over big with the women, Templeton surmised. “Distinguished,” he added, after a profound choice of words.

This seemed to Neil a good moment to go and fetch another round. Returning with it, he urged Templeton back into autobiography. It worked so well that he repeated it several times, after which the worst seemed to be over; it was now only a question of getting away. He relaxed, leaning back in the recess where they had found a rickety bench to sit on. The little bar was thick with a rich Somerset burr, as soothing as the roucoulement of wood-pigeons. Templeton, who had reached the phase of nostalgia, was telling an interminable story of how he had once got the better of the Modern Languages master about time-tables for the Senior School. Listening to one word in six, Neil reflected that another drink would have been one too many, but that he needn’t have another now; Templeton was well away. As for himself, he was just at the optimum, a peak of beautiful, untroubled lucidity and peace.

It was at this moment that someone at the bar said, solemnly and sententiously, “No denying it. It’s a happy release.”

“Who wants to deny it?” said Neil. He smiled up at the electric light shade, which had the insignia of a brewing firm painted on it in three colours. There was, he thought, something apocalyptic about it.

“Eh?” said Templeton. “Didn’t get that.”

“I didn’t say anything. I was listening to you.” A happy release. He knew where he was, and could not imagine why he had been denying it so long. A happy, very happy release.

“Yes,” he said, when Templeton wound up. “That was the term when by some queer coincidence all the boys sang the same variant of the school anthem, and all the parents heard the words.” After which he made his excuses briskly, relying on the strategy of surprise, and found himself suddenly alone in the little street, his hand still retaining a tactile impression of Templeton’s hearty but curiously inadequate hand-grip, which felt as if the bony structure had decomposed into brawn. Above him was a red and green sunset, whose perfect composition looked most improbable; and the certainty which remained clear and apart from it all, like the single star which came out as he looked.

Ellen put down her third
Tatler
as he came in. It felt odd to be seeing her among all the little accidents of reality: a strand of hair loose from her slide, which he hadn’t noticed before, a splash of mud across one sandal. A long-haired tabby kitten, which had picked her up in his absence, lay sleeping along her lap, its nose with a lopsided white patch (distinguished, thought Neil) dangling between two white-gloved paws over the point of her knee. A mediocre sporting print hung slightly askew on the wall above her head.

Seeing him standing before her silent, she said, “Never mind. It can’t be helped, anyway.”

Neil pulled himself together with a quick jerk. This, of course, was what he ought to have been thinking of all the way here. The difficulty now was that it was so hard to realise he hadn’t communicated it all to her already: Mr George’s regrets, Templeton’s smugness, the technicolour sunset and the star. To begin now seemed no more than a perfunctory form of words.

“I’m sorry I’ve been so long,” he said sitting down beside her. “I met a fool I used to know and couldn’t lose him.” He broke off, discovering with a sudden shock that the forthcoming conversation wasn’t in the least perfunctory, and the sooner he convinced himself of it the better. “I’m even sorrier to tell you there seems to be no transport at all. I don’t know where to begin apologising for all this.”