The Travellers and Other Stories (26 page)

How thin and sinewy her arms were! And how cold she looked—as if, while the pie-crust was baking beneath a layer of tin foil and kidney beans, she'd gone off to take a shower in some horrible plastic-curtained little cubicle and had never properly warmed up afterwards.

She seemed to Lenny to have appeared from nowhere—to have risen up from the shadows behind the pillar at the end of the crowded pew. A dark-haired, frail-looking thing dressed entirely in black, as if in mourning—a black short-sleeved dress with a worn turtle-neck collar, black stockings with snags in them, an old black broad-brimmed hat that was too big and came down almost to her chin.

If Lenny ducked slightly she could see the girl's small sharp-featured face beneath the floppy brim of the big borrowed-looking hat. Fierce pixie eyes and hollow cheeks, a brittle mouth. Everything about her made Lenny think of a string pulled tight and about to be plucked, a figure balanced on the crumbling lip of a cliff and ready to jump; a brief electric calm before a storm.

Who was she?

One of Don's ex-girlfriends? A stalker, a prostitute? A disgruntled employee from his office? A mental patient?

Lenny looked at the pie, in its ancient spring-form pan, resting on the open palm of the girl's small right hand. It had a blackened fluted crust and it was piled high with a custardy filling. Lenny could smell the vanilla, the fat in the cream. She watched as the girl, like a diminutive baseball pitcher, drew back her thin sinewy arm. Lenny held her breath. She waited for some kind of instinct to kick in but nothing happened, nothing happened that made her cry out in a loud and urgent way
LOOK OUT DON!!!! THERE
'
S A GIRL HERE WITH A PIE!!!!
Nothing at all that made her want to run out into the aisle and throw herself like a stampeding elephant across the chancel steps in front of her thirty-five-year-old son and save him from the pie. The only feeling Lenny had as he came striding towards them along the crimson carpet with his flaxen-haired bride on his arm, was that she didn't have any interest in him, or his bride, or the little girls they had with them who were dressed like tiny princesses, or the little boys who were wearing velvet knickerbockers as if they all still lived in the eighteenth century. The only feeling Lenny had as she watched the long slow parabola of the pie moving out into the aisle and travelling like a spinning planet towards his face, was that she preferred this dark-haired girl to any of them; the only feeling she had when the soft squashy sound came, and the muffled cream-filled shout, was that she wanted to reach for the girl's hand and run for the back of the church, fly out through the big doors into the wide and busy street and hail a cab; the only feeling she had when the driver turned and looked at the two of them thrown together in the back—Lenny breathless, her heart racing, the girl still holding onto her hand—was that she'd lived her whole life till now in a kind of dull enchantment, and when the driver asked them,
Where to, ladies?
the only feeling she had was that she was completely, fully awake.

CREED

SHE COULD SEE
Creed's place now, up ahead, not more than another three quarters of a mile.

On the big flat stone at the top of the path she stopped to rest, pushed back her sticky hair and wondered again what he would do when he saw her—what he would say and how he would be and what he would look like too, close-up, after all this time.

For years now, for most of her life, she'd seen him only from afar, mending his walls or checking on his sheep or coming down off the high fell with a bucket to the spring above the waterfall, a bulky hatted figure.

A few times over the years she'd thought about going up there and knocking on his door and saying to him,
Michael it's me. Ruth. From the valley. Come. Sit with me at least
.

Once not long after her thirtieth birthday she'd come up this far along the path with a box of her brother's old dominoes in her pocket. All the way along the river and up over the slick black rocks on the west side of the beck to the top, with the game's smooth pieces chinking against each other and her thumb fidgeting with the sliding wooden lid, she'd rehearsed what she'd say to Creed when she reached him: that it was crazy, idiotic, them living like this—the two of them in this vast forgotten garden of bracken and stone and pasture and bog, like the very last people on earth, but never speaking, never coming close to one another.

She'd pictured them both at his table, her brother's dominoes spread out between them in various arrangements, not speaking perhaps (neither of them had much practice at that) but at least sitting together in a not-uncomfortable silence. Then up here at the big flat stone at the top of the path she'd lost her nerve. In the distance, his thick-walled bothy with its arrow-slit windows had looked so closed-in and stubborn and hunched against the weather and the world, so like a fortress for his feelings, that she'd lacked the courage to go on and had turned around and gone back down.

Today she was wearing her brown work boots and her black coat and her blue dress and she hoped she looked respectable. She didn't want Michael Creed to open his door and look at her and think she was a fright.

She'd been a child when his wife died, ten or eleven years old.

She remembered the two of them coming to her father's church. The wife's dark hair. Creed a young man, broad-shouldered and strong, with a neat beard.

Her father had gone up there a dozen times afterwards and tried to comfort him but Creed wouldn't let him in the house. She remembered how tired and discouraged her father had looked the last time he came home.

‘What happened, William? What did he say to you?' her mother had asked, rather fearfully, and they'd all watched him hang up his coat and press his lips together and set down his Bible on their kitchen table and tap it lightly with his fingers. He'd looked as if he was debating with himself whether to repeat in front of his family what Creed had said.

‘He said, Janice, that God had greatly disappointed him. He said that he had begged Him for His pity and His mercy and had been refused. He said there was nothing now I had to tell him that he wanted to listen to and if I ever came trespassing on his land again and tried to talk to him about God's love, he would come out into his yard and stick his shotgun in my crap-filled mouth and shoot me.'

Creed stayed away from the church after that, and if he ever came face to face with her father down in the valley he turned around and walked the other way. He began to avoid anyone who attended the Sunday service, which in those days had been nearly everyone. At some point he moved out of the farmhouse he'd shared with his wife and into the bothy further up the fell. Eventually he stopped coming down into the valley for anything. It was as if, not being able to look God in the eye and spit in His face, or inform Him personally that he was sending Him to Coventry forever, Creed had settled on the next best thing. Or perhaps he'd decided that there was no face to spit in and he was living in a world of fools; that from now on, he was on his own.

He mended his walls and birthed his ewes and when autumn came he drove the new season's lambs up along the high straight track that had once been the Romans' way north to the border, sold them to be slaughtered, picked up his supplies and walked back the way he'd come. Anywhere he had to go, he took the old Roman way, never the path down into the valley, the track along the river that took him past their house and the church.

What would he look like?

Like the other men she remembered in their fifties and sixties who used to live here? Bull-necked men with brick-red faces and bow legs and giant hands?

When he was young his hair had been brown, chestnut-coloured, she remembered that.

Not as dark as his wife's but still brown. His beard had been brown also.

And hadn't he had one brown eye and one grey? She thought so. She thought she remembered her sister Pam remarking on it once when they were girls.

Her sister Pam and her brother Frank always asked after him when they came. ‘And what about Michael Creed?' they said. ‘Do you ever see him, Ruth? Is he still up there?'

‘Yes,' she told them. ‘He's still up there.'

But what if he wasn't?

What if since the last time she'd glimpsed his bulky shape in the distance, he'd died or given up at last and gone away, like everyone else?

What if she got there and knocked on his door and there was no answer and when she pushed it open the place was empty and cleared out and there was nothing up there but his sheep and a couple of starving dogs?

In winter, months went by sometimes without a sign of him. Then there'd be a storm, a heavy fall of snow, and he'd be up there with his dogs, digging out his buried sheep. The dogs trickling over the white hillside, showing him where to put his shovel so he could bring them out alive. In spring, around lambing time, she woke sometimes in the dark and saw the pin-prick beam of his torch moving over the sloping fields as he went about checking on things.

Over the years her father's scattered parish had dwindled away.

One by one the farms had emptied out. The old had died, the young and the middle-aged had moved away. Where there'd been two shops and a pub, a school and a recreation room there were only the carcasses of buildings. When her father died, no one was sent to replace him. Where there'd been people and families and children there was only her left now, and Michael Creed.

Who would have thought a place could fall in on itself so quickly? That so monumental a ruin could be achieved like that? Almost, it seemed to her sometimes, it had happened in the blink of an eye, or in the course of one brief night while she slept.

Hikers who came up this far poked their faces in at her window. They seemed amazed to see curtains, chimney smoke, her boots at the door. Once, coming back from the church, she'd found a young couple in woollen hats and waterproof jackets on the step at the back of her house, picnicking on crisps and sandwiches and hot tea from a thermos. They'd hardly seemed to believe her when she said she lived here, and when they'd gone she thought of them telling their friends about the woman they'd found living way up at the far end of the valley by herself, using the words she'd overheard her sister Pam and her brother Frank whispering to each other when they came and thought she was outside, words like squalid, primitive, unhygienic.

For a time, she'd let her brother and sister drive her back with them for a few days. But in town she discovered, as the years went by, that her clothing attracted attention, that her appearance shocked people. One cold Christmas when Pam came to collect her she'd got in the car wearing both her dresses, her blue one and her knitted fawn one, one on top of the other. Pam had been ashamed. All that week Ruth saw her making silent signals with her eyes to her friends. She discovered also that she'd aged more quickly than these people. Carting water off the fell to her house in a bucket, hauling fodder from the pasture on a sledge for her cow Charlotte, chopping wood and breaking sticks and stuffing them into the stove and picking up scraps of slate off the hills to mend her roof—it had all made her age more rapidly than Pam and these other women who came to Pam's house and tried not to gawp when Pam said, ‘This is my younger sister, Ruth.' Like Pam, all the women still had dark hair and neat unbroken fingernails and attractive teeth. She couldn't imagine how they managed it. She cared a little about it, this difference between the way they looked and the way she did, but not much. She told Pam she'd not be going back with her again. She was happy where she was, she'd no urge now to leave.

She'd stayed on to look after the church. When no one came to replace her father, it had been impossible for her to think of leaving it untended and unused. In winter she put holly in the alcoves. In spring, hawthorn and valerian. On Sundays she stood in the cold in front of the empty pews and read aloud the lesson. She patched the roof and polished the coloured window in the nave and the blackened script engraved on the brass plaque her father had screwed into the lintel over the door when he first arrived here from the coast. It was still her favourite Psalm:
I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the Lord.

In the back behind her house she grew swede and onions and potatoes and spinach. She had apples and blackcurrants and gooseberries from the trees and bushes her mother had planted. In winter an arsenal of things preserved in jars. A taxi came nine miles up the valley track once every three months and drove her to Penrith for her shopping. Her sister and her brother visited twice a year from Carlisle. She had no phone and no television but she had chickens and her cow and a sewing machine and her father's books. She knew that there was another kind of world and she could see that it had its attractions but she did not want to live in it. She wanted to be here. She liked it here. She was forty-two and she had not been lonely, not really. She had never lived her life expecting it to change.

Around her neck she wore the small wooden cross that had belonged to her father and as she walked she touched it every now and again to make sure it was still hidden beneath her dress.

She'd tried to leave it behind but in the end she'd not been able to.

She'd unhooked the clasp and dropped the chain into the palm of her hand and tipped it onto a plate and stepped out of the door but when she got to the path she'd felt so naked and afraid without it that she'd gone back and put it back on and slipped it inside her dress, telling herself that Creed wouldn't necessarily see it. However things went, she would do everything she could to hide it from him.

As she walked her legs shook.

Her damp face boiled with heat, her blue dress clung to her like another skin, her heart thumped like a big beating wheel. She took off her black coat, folded it over her arm, and carried it. She wished she could turn back here and go back down to the beck and splash her face and cool her throat with the icy water.