The Woodcutter (62 page)

She attacked the slope ferociously. After a moment or so she realized that Sneck had opted for the path taken by his master. For the first time she felt truly and frighteningly alone. At the top of the slope the path turned along a more gently inclined rock shelf that on her right side fell steeply into the valley. She fixed her gaze firmly ahead. A mountain rescue stretcher box came into view, more of a dreadful warning than a comfort. Now the track headed up another scree slope. The Rock loomed to her right, but she still wasn’t high enough to view its top.

Soon, she told herself. Soon!

But what was she going to see when she got high enough to look down at it?

She recalled the shining blade of the axe that Wolf had carried out of Birkstane with him.

But he wasn’t a killer, she told herself. It had been unnecessary killing that had made him fall out with JC.

Unnecessary.

There was the rub. The death of the innocent had filled him with rage.

But the death of the guilty . . .

She pushed herself still harder.

8

As Lady Kira told her story at the breakfast table, Imogen had noticed with a slight distaste how her voice grew mellow under the power of sensual recollection.

‘It wasn’t long after I came to the castle,’ said her mother. ‘Your father, well, let me put it this way, your father had a very English attitude to making love. He was the perfect gentleman, very concerned in case he hurt me, and anxious to make what he assumed might not be a very pleasing experience for me last as short a time as possible. I tried to let him know that I didn’t care about being hurt as long as I was overwhelmed, but . . . anyway, things weren’t going too well, and after a particularly unsatisfactory night, I wandered out in the morning, across the lawns and into the forest.

‘I heard him before I saw him. The perfectly regular, powerful crash of an axe into the trunk of a tree. A rhythm that seemed to vibrate through my whole body. I walked towards it. Then in the light of the early-morning sun slanting down through the trees, I saw him at the edge of a clearing, tall, fair, naked to the waist, already sweating through his effort though the morning air was still cool.

‘I sat down on an old stump and watched him, delighting in his strength, his vigour, his strong rhythmic movement. He paused to wipe his brow with a large red kerchief. And then, though I made no sound, he became aware of me.

‘He stood and looked at me for a moment, then he came towards me. He was still carrying his axe. I remember the blade seemed huge close to my head and he himself looked like a giant towering over me.

‘He said, “I shouldn’t sit there, my lady. Tree ’ull be coming down shortly.”

‘I didn’t say anything, but just drank in his closeness. His belt buckle was only a foot or so from my face. Almost without thinking, I reached up and began to undo it. For a moment he went tense and I thought he was going to pull back.

‘Then he relaxed.

‘And then I had the most ecstatic sex I had yet experienced.’

She’d fallen silent. Her features had softened, her body relaxed, and her eyes were focused elsewhere, elsewhen.

Imogen said coldly, ‘And how was it for him, Lady Chatterley?’

Kira straightened up and was herself again.

‘All right, I suppose. He didn’t say. All he could do when it was over was apologize, as if he’d been the one who set things in motion! Men can be very arrogant, can’t they? He stuttered a lot of stuff about his wife having a child a couple of months earlier, and things still not being right between them, and so on. What it added up to, I suppose, was he hadn’t been getting any sex for some time before the birth and it didn’t look as if he were likely to be getting any in the foreseeable future, and this state of frustration he offered as explanation for his unforgivable effrontery in screwing me. His main concern seemed to be that I might broadcast our encounter!

‘Well, as you can imagine, I soon grew tired of this babble. I tidied myself up and said to him that I certainly had no intention of letting anyone know I’d demeaned myself with a woodcutter. And I further added that if ever I got the slightest hint by so much as a word or a look or a nod or a wink that he had mentioned it to anybody else, that would be the day he found himself out of work and out of his tied cottage.’

Imogen had stopped listening. Her mind was making calculations.

‘You say this happened how many months after Wolf’s birth?’

‘Who said anything about Wolf?’

‘The Haddas only had one child. How long?’

‘Two, three months,’ said Kira.

‘And I’m almost exactly a year younger than Wolf . . . Christ, Mother, what are you trying to tell me? That you let me marry my half-brother?’

Interestingly the idea excited as much as it horrified her.

Lady Kira shrugged.

‘Why not? In the old days, unions closer than that were winked at to keep the bloodline pure. Hardly applicable here, of course. To start with, while having no objection to you pleasuring yourself with a woodcutter as I had done, the idea of your actually marrying him struck me as positively obscene. Then you told me you were pregnant, but it wasn’t his. And I thought, why not? It did mean the little bastard would have a name. And Hadda had come back to us with his manners mended and money in his pocket, and he looked to have the kind of ingratiating manner that could lead him to make a lot more. He might do reasonably well for a few years till you grew tired of him and someone better suited came along.’

Imogen said, ‘But he was my brother!’

‘Half-brother. And as you’d made it clear you weren’t going to have any more children, I couldn’t see how your possible relationship might be a problem.’

Imogen said, ‘I bet it was a problem for poor old Fred though. I bet he put three and nine together and took a good look at me and saw my blonde hair and blue eyes and nothing whatsoever of Ulphingstone in me. No wonder he was so absolutely dead set against the marriage!’

‘Perhaps,’ said Kira indifferently. ‘Or perhaps he just had the good sense to see it was an ill match. Anyway, he never said anything.’

‘What could he say?
Excuse me, Sir Leon, I rogered your wife twenty years ago and it occurs to me that perhaps your beloved daughter is really mine?
And I was pregnant!’

‘Oh, come on, dear. I think you’re crediting the man with far too delicate a sensibility. He was a woodcutter, for God’s sake!’

Not since her teens had Imogen felt frustrated enough to want to strike her mother, but the urge welled up in her now.

She’d controlled it, stood up and made for the door.

‘Where are you going, dear?’ called her mother.

‘For a drive. Somewhere the air’s a bit fresher.’

And she’d closed the door behind her with a gentleness more powerful than a slam.

All this Imogen recounted to Wolf plainly and simply, leaving nothing out, putting nothing in.

He listened, standing still as a statue, his features set in marble.

When she finished, he let silence fall like a barrier between them.

Finally he said quietly, ‘So you and your family destroyed my father just as completely as you destroyed me.’

With an effort at lightness she said, ‘You don’t look too destroyed to me, Wolf. Look, why don’t we just walk away from this? I’ve got money. My share of the Woodcutter loot that Toby and Johnny squirrelled away. It’s safely stored in a Taiwanese bank. We can live any way you like. Brother and sister. Husband and wife.’

‘Wipe the slate clean, you mean?’ he said.

‘As clean as you like,’ she said. ‘If you want to spend the rest of your life punishing me, that’s all right too. Or perhaps not the rest. Seven years would seem about right.’

‘And is this what you came here to tell me?’ he said incredulously.

She shook her head vigorously.

‘No. Far from it. I had some silly notion of trying to clear things up between us, then I’d walk away, leaving you to the tender mercies of your black beauty. But now, after seeing you, talking to you, I can see how wrong that would be. You don’t want to tie yourself to a psychiatrist, Wolf! She’d be in your mind all the time, ferreting around, trying to set things straight. Me, I’m in your blood, I’m in your genes, I’m in your soul. And you’re in mine. I think I’ve always known it. But I never wanted to admit it. Betraying you like I did, I made excuses to myself, put it all down to reason and necessity. But all I was really doing was trying to prove I was stronger than this dependency I felt. I wanted to prove I was myself. Now I know that I can’t be that self without acknowledging you are part of it too. So what do you say?’

‘You let me go to jail for a disgusting crime I was innocent of,’ he cried. ‘You let me take the blame for frauds I knew nothing about. You divorced me and married the bastard who framed me. You helped drive our daughter to distraction and my father to despair. And now you want me to run away with you?’

‘Look at yourself, Wolf,’ she commanded with a matching force. ‘Think of the things you’ve done, or left undone. There’s only one hard truth to hold on to in that fantasy world you built. You want me, I want you. We both knew that the first time we came here. We both know it still. Do I have to strip off like that first time and offer myself? I will if you want. Just say the word, Wolf. Just say the word!’

She looked up at him, imploringly, defiantly.

He loomed over her, holding the axe over her head as if to ward off her gaze. The polished blade mirrored her face beneath. She ripped the zip on her fleece jacket open, pulled on the buttons of her shirt till it too parted, revealing the soft white swell of her breasts.

A hundred feet away on the summit path, seeing the movement of the axe, Alva Ozigbo screamed, ‘No!’ but the gusting north-west wind blew the word back down her throat. She dived her hand into her pocket and pulled out her mobile phone. Somehow she had to let them know she was here. And then beyond the two figures who seemed bound together in a kind of all-excluding ecstasy, she saw the man she’d been following. He was on his hands and knees, having just pulled himself up the final few feet of the climb.

She opened her phone, sought and found Imogen’s number that she’d put in there last month, prayed that its state-of-the-art technology would find a signal up here and that Imogen would have her phone switched on.

She pressed the speed-dial key.

Pudovkin pushed himself upright. It had been harder than he’d imagined. It wasn’t at all like the climbing wall. All that space beneath his feet, and somewhere far below he kept imagining he could hear a dog barking angrily, like some hound of hell waiting to seize him if he fell. A couple of times he’d nearly lost his grip and even the coke he’d snorted couldn’t stop him trembling. He’d need to get close to make sure of his shot.

And then he realized there were two of them. The lawyer’s wife was here too. What the hell was that all about? He didn’t want to kill her, but it was hard to see an alternative. At least her presence seemed to be such a distraction that Hadda was totally unaware of his arrival.

He took a step forward, gun raised.

Two things happened as he pressed the trigger.

A telephone rang.

And Hadda raised his axe.

The bullet glanced off the blade, making it ring like a bell, then rattled away among the fellside crags.

Hadda turned his one-eyed gaze on the Russian. Even safely distanced from any possible swing of the axe, and with a loaded pistol in his hand, Pudovkin felt himself paralysed. Only for a moment.

But in that moment Imogen had raised her phone to her ear and pushed herself upright so that she stood between Hadda and his assassin.

A shaft of sunshine broke through the lowering cloud as if to highlight a climactic scene.

She called, ‘Pudo, it’s Pasha. He’d like to speak to you.’

She advanced unhurriedly, a smile on her face, the phone outstretched.

Some part of his mind was yelling at him that Nikitin couldn’t possibly know that he was up here on top of this fucking great rock with his fancy woman and her ex-husband.

Another part was registering that her jacket and shirt were open and she had really great tits.

And perhaps because of the normalcy of this reaction, yet another part assured him that the guy with the gun was always the guy in control, and he reached out his hand to take the phone.

He grasped it.

The woman kept on coming.

She wrapped herself around him in an embrace as fierce as a lover’s and with an irresistible force drove him backwards.

Hadda and Alva screamed together in unconscious unison, ‘No!’

Then they were gone.

Somewhere in mid air, they lost contact with each other and Imogen was falling alone, first through the bright air, then through the unreverberate blackness, as she had always dreamed.

Only Sneck was positioned to see the whole of the fall, and he, alone on the slab below, threw back his head and filled the valley with a mournful howl.

High above, Hadda turned and looked across to Alva in despair. Then he began to spin round, axe held out at arm’s length, faster and faster, finally letting go and sinking to his knees as the axe hurtled so far through the air that it fell a thousand feet before landing in the valley below.

Epilogue
Wait and Hope

‘
Il n’y a ni bonheur ni malheur en ce monde, il y a la comparaison d’un état à un autre, voilà tout. Celui-là seul qui a éprouvé l’extrême infortune est apte à ressentir l’extrême félicité. Il faut avoir voulu mourir pour savoir combien il est bon de vivre.

‘
Vivez donc et soyez heureux, enfants chéris de mon coeur, et n’oubliez jamais que, jusqu’au jour où Dieu daignera dévoiler l’avenir à l’homme, toute la sagesse humaine sera dans ces deux mots:

‘
Attendre et espérer!
’
*

Alexandre Dumas:
Le Comte de Monte-Cristo

*
‘There is neither happiness nor misery in the world, only the comparison of one state with another. Only the man who has plumbed the depths of misfortune is capable of scaling the heights of joy. To grasp how good it is to live you must have been driven to long for death.