A Division of the Light (26 page)

He tried again. “Or maybe it would be right to scatter him from here,” he said.

“From the bridge?”

“Yes. Why not?”

“Because I promised to scatter them where he wanted to go, that's why.”

“It's your decision,” Gregory said, knowing that he would persist.

For a few moments Alice began to consider the possibility that Thomas had not been meant to reach his destination, that it had somehow been decreed that he should drown here, that the river might have always been his natural end. Perhaps after all it would be fitting to return his ashes to water. But not this water.

And she had made a promise. In her life she had broken many promises, but this was one that it was easy to keep. She had a duty that she was determined to discharge. Besides, if some vestige of Thomas's consciousness still flickered somewhere, then the Bratfull would be where it would want to be left. There was a sense of completion about that, a justice. Her lover's ashes would be disposed of in a way that would fit his life's ambition like a key.

“Do we carry on,” Gregory asked, “or do you think that the right thing would be to return him to the river and let him be carried along to the sea?”

“He would never reach the sea,” Alice said. “He'd be dispersed and laid down along the banks with all those tiny particles of silt and mud and peat. Thomas wouldn't want that. He would want his ashes concentrated in part of a mound that's been there for thousands of years, a mound that must have been used for reasons we can only guess at—burials, rituals, communion with the gods. It's the right place.”

To Gregory this made little sense. Alice had stopped loving Thomas months ago. She was under no obligation to his memory. It would have been simpler just to scatter the ashes now. Thomas could not be aware of what was happening to his remains. He was no longer part of the world. It did not even make sense to say that he was oblivious or insensate; he had simply been expunged.

“If I was going to throw his ashes into a river,” Alice went on, “I'd pick a different one to this.”

“I can see its appeal.”

“Really? Look at the color of that water. It's like liquid manure.”

They stood in silence for a few more seconds before she spoke again.

“We should move away from here.”

Gregory decided that maybe after all it was best to complete the journey. He did not want Alice to be harried by conscience and decide, perhaps when they were naked and about to make love, that she had somehow betrayed Thomas by not ascending the remaining gradients of this desolate and unvisited moor.

“You're right,” he said briskly, “it's too exposed. Look at that sky. We should get back to the car before it starts to rain.”

He was still pretending to be a leader, Alice thought.

They crossed the bridge and began to climb the long curve
of hill. In several places the road had decayed into patches of rubble that they stepped across or walked around. The way upward was a slow, tedious drag that held no pleasure at all. Along the plantation edge to their left were trees that appeared to have exhausted the soil. Several had been marked in spray paint by forestry officials, and these small incomprehensible signs stood out like bright badges on the dull bark. One tree, Alice noticed, had been sundered in a way she could not understand, as a scorched black line ran upward from the roots to encompass the top of the decapitated trunk.

After a while they came to an indistinct path that led across a patch of bright grass and then plunged down to their left between dark-green trees. Gregory spoke again.

“The other way back. We could have taken that if it hadn't been flooded.”

“Is it shorter?”

“According to the map. But I don't know if there's a way past the river.”

“We can try it. I don't mind getting my feet wet.”

Gregory nodded and pushed onward. He was happy to try the other route; the sooner they were back at the hotel, the better.

Alice remained a pace behind him. In her imagination the water still seethed and roared. She pictured Thomas inert and lifeless among rocks stained the color of excrement, thrown onto land by the same river that Gregory had suggested he be cast into for a second time. A man who could make such a comment must have an atrophied sense of right, a skewed view of justice and little grasp of harmony. The only thing he really knew about was the balance of tones within an image.

Alice reached a decision. As soon as she had, it seemed that
it had been quietly encroaching on her sensibility for days, perhaps weeks.

Whatever happened, she no longer wanted to sleep with Gregory. She did not even want to kiss him; no doubt she would find it unpleasant just to touch him. He was selfish and an irritant. Oh, he was superficially kind, and he had aroused her interest because he was so obviously fascinated by her. But Gregory Pharaoh was an arrogant, conceited man who would never be touched by grace. Alice believed that he must fuck women in the way that he took photographs—with detachment, and as if he were doing them a favor. And all the time he would flatter, lie, tell his subjects what he thought they wanted to hear, and which for much of the time they actually
did
want to hear. Wherever he claimed his heart to be, it was always in his work. He looked at the world through a lens. Every man that Alice had ever loved had also had his heart in his work, but her own heart was always eager to be grasped. It was not her fault that no man had yet been able to hold onto it.

Gregory unfolded the map to study Stockdale Moor again.

“How much further do we have to go?” she asked.

“Not far.”

Alice decided that there was nothing to distinguish Gregory from any of her other lovers. Even his profession was parasitic. It pretended to be an art form, but it was not. It exploited uncertainty and vanity. If it was creative then it was creation at a base level, and scarcely comparable with painting or literature or even theater. The skills it required were either technical or to do with the optimal selection of already extant visual information. Anyone could easily be trained to be such a judge. The pursuit of the image attracted people of a certain kind; failures
willing to reinvent themselves in an unregulated trade. For this they obtained rewards out of all proportion to the effort they were required to put in. Alice was as worthy of better things as she was worthy of a better lover.

And now she saw clearly that she had never been destined to sleep with Gregory. At first she had thought that the phone call to tell her of Thomas's death had meant only that the moment had been postponed. Now she realized that everything had stopped at that instant. It had been not a delay but a termination, not chance but providence. She had been saved.

They crossed a cattle grid with weeds choking the space beneath its bars. Immediately afterward a stream ran down the hill and vanished into a pipe beneath the road. The land dipped toward where smoke rose from a farm and then rose again in a bleak hill. There was a momentary disturbance of the light beyond the hill, a kind of suffused whiteness that immediately vanished. Alice did not know if this had been an illusion. She waited for it to happen again, but all was unchanged.

Gregory looked at her and then nodded toward the bank of grass and reeds that rose to their right. “It must be up here,” he said. “If we keep to the far side of the stream we'll find it easily.”

The boggy turf was scattered with the shiny black droppings of sheep. The flock had trampled areas of exposed mud bordering the stream. For several minutes there was no sign of any tumulus.

Gregory bent forward into the uneven slippery ascent. Sometimes his boots squelched in sodden grass, sometimes they clicked against pieces of rock. At one point he thoughtlessly grasped a handful of reeds and found them to be sharp and unbreakable. When he examined his hand he was relieved to see that it had
not been cut. Gregory had a low tolerance of physical pain, and could not understand those who endured or even liked it. Once, one of his lovers had wanted him to hurt her and he had refused.

Quite suddenly he had a fantasy of making love to Alice here, now, in the middle of this barren, inhospitable place. He visualized the two of them, desperate with longing, grasping at each other's clothing to find zips or buttons to yank apart, their hands plunging to the base of each other's bellies, the noise of their agitated breathing pulsing like a beacon across the deserted moor.

It was all down to chance, Gregory believed. Life was random numbers and thrown dice. If the call had not come when he was photographing Alice nude, if she had ignored her phone and if they had been able to consummate their passion among the shrouds of that hushed cell of a room, then an urgent partial coupling on the moor might have been possible. Oblivious to the outside world, clothes only slightly disarranged, they could have masturbated each other into a shuddering frenzy. Perhaps, if she had been willing to kneel on the drenched turf, Alice could even have brought him off with her mouth.

Such wild imaginings excited him and he strode quickly ahead as she followed a few steps behind. As his fantasies deepened and took tighter hold, Gregory found that he was smiling at their energetic variety. Why, he wondered, had he sometimes considered the advantages of relationships with women that were rooted in comradeship rather than sex? Any benefits would be spurious. He was getting old, he no longer possessed the energy he had once had, and in another few years he would no longer be able to seduce his models with confidence and ease. He should make the most of whatever opportunities might remain. There would
not be many. There was no time for hesitation or conscience. His personal winter was moving ever closer.

“This must be it,” Alice said.

Gregory looked up. Ahead was a heap of dirty white stone. It resembled a tall broad wall that was slowly collapsing into a low mound. He had almost walked onto it without realizing. He stopped and surveyed the area.

“Sampson's Bratfull,” he announced.

“It's not much to look at,” Alice said, and glanced away for a few seconds as if she did not want to study the tumulus too closely.

She must be disappointed, Gregory thought. No doubt she had imagined something imposing, and not this almost formless heap of rubble. He would understand if Alice felt cheated and became angry.

The bleak, dull moor stretched away around them, its only points of light infrequent gleams from water droplets clinging to moss and reeds. The bruised sky seemed low enough to touch.

“We should walk round it,” Alice said.

“It's going to look the same wherever we stand.”

“A circular walk is better. I don't know why, but it seems the right thing to do.”

Together they paced the edge of the tumulus, threading their way through dark spears of grass that rose in clumps at the edges of the mound. At its far side they paused and fell silent.

Alice put her fingers to her mouth and pulled her bottom lip fractionally downward before releasing it. She did this without thinking, and then remembered it was a habit she had formed as a child, lost in her adolescence and had not repeated for years.

“Is this what you expected?” Gregory asked.

He wondered if his voice carried any of the amused cynicism
that he felt. They had come this far to find an object that was uninspiring and unremarkable. Even the singularity of the name was inaccurate; Sampson's Bratfull was nothing more than a ragged plurality of rocks.

But something puzzled Alice. “It's odd,” she said, “but it seems that there's something not quite right.”

“Considering what we had to do to get here, I wouldn't call it odd. Misguided, maybe. Or foolish. We've treated this hike as if it were a pilgrimage.”

“Duty isn't an emotion that you know much about, is it?”

The remark did not sting and Gregory did not respond.

“All the way round,” Alice insisted.

They continued to circle the mound until they reached the point where they had first stopped in front of it.

Gregory shucked the rucksack from his back and set it on the jumble of stones at the edge of the Bratfull. He pushed it down slightly so that it lodged more securely.

“Time for you to do that duty,” he told her.

Alice took a step back from the edge. The earth gave a damp sigh beneath her weight. She clasped her arms around herself apprehensively. The sickly light made her face bloodless. Gregory unfastened the rucksack.

“I mean it,” she insisted.

“Mean what?”

“I just feel that there's something wrong. I don't know why. If I knew I would tell you.”

Gregory was dismissive. “Nerves,” he said. “It's understandable. After all, you shared your life with this man and now you have to get rid of him in the most basic of ways. I wouldn't worry. It'll only take a few seconds.”

He drew the urn from the rucksack. It, too, was unprepossessing, a plastic flask with a molded handle, looking almost as if it had been picked from a supermarket shelf. The brown plastic body was as dark as loam, the screw top the color of cinders.

For all the baroque ritual of a funeral service, Gregory thought, the end point of every ceremony was remarkably trivial. Pouring ashes from a container like this would be an action that was almost domestic in its lack of resonance. The final disposal of Thomas Laidlaw would lack any overwhelming sense of meaning. It would be as easy and as thoughtless as pouring powder into a washing machine.

“Is it all right?” Alice asked.

As an answer, Gregory raised the flask in the air as though weighing it.

“Are you ready?” he asked.

Alice glanced round as if she expected another figure to suddenly join them. She could feel a tingling on the exposed parts of her skin, and when she touched the zip on her jacket it gave a tiny little snap, as if discharging static. Just as she had become determined never to sleep with Gregory, she now saw the impossibility of handling Thomas's ashes. In bringing them this far she had discharged her promise. She did not care what happened to them now.