Consequences (35 page)

He went on, “But what would you have wanted to do about it. Go there? Stay away?”

She considered. “It would depend on circumstances…on when it is.”

“Ah. Just so.”

“If I’m prehistoric, I think I’d want to make a raft or something and go and see if there’s anything useful there. Later on…maybe I’d wonder if there’s more work over there, better opportunities.”

“Actually,” he said, “in the nineteenth century it was the other way round. Welsh miners were coming over here to work in the iron ore mines up on the Brendons.”

“Then maybe I’d marry one of them.”

He laughed. “You undoubtedly did. Plenty of Welsh names around here. I say…you’ve quite latched onto this, haven’t you?”

They turned into a lane that plunged steeply down, walked through a hamlet—scattered cottages, farm building—and stopped by a little whitewashed church that sat above the hedge bank. Brian looked at his watch. “I suppose we have to be getting back. That chap should be phoning soon.”

They walked slowly. Ruth talked about Lorna and Matt, about what happened, about Lucas. He listened intently.

“I had no idea the cottage came with so much baggage. I feel a gatecrasher.”

“You shouldn’t. You found the paintings. And someone else might have junked the blocks, and the figure.”

“I shall be the custodian, then.” He shot her a glance. “And what about you? You mentioned you’d be on your way to Devon. Holiday?”

She explained Sam. She lightly sketched the children, the gallery, her work. No need to overload the man.

He spoke of his own work. A grown-up daughter was mentioned, studying in America. They were walking up the side of a field now, the roof of the cottage visible at the top of the rise.

Ruth went upstairs to the bathroom. When she came down, he was standing in the kitchen, the phone in his hand. “Message. There’s a nuisance I’m afraid.” His expression was not that of a man who is finding any great problem. “They can’t get the right screen until tomorrow. I don’t see any alternative but for you to stay here overnight.”

“Oh, heavens…” she said. “Look, I can’t do that. I’ve imposed on you quite enough as it is. There’ll be some local B and B…”

“No way. I’m already considering the dinner options. I’ve got some lamb chops in the fridge. Or there’s the Indian in Williton.”

“Oh dear…I feel awful about this. Well—thank you.”

She took her mobile outside to call Sam, and stood there in the late afternoon sunshine.

She found that she was not feeling particularly awful after all.

“Sam? I’ve had a bit of a hitch…”

She sat on the sofa in the sitting-room, looking through a local publication of old photographs of the area, at Brian’s suggestion. “Nostalgia industry. But there are some that give you an idea of how it was in your grandparents’ day.”

Farm workers in shirtsleeves and open waistcoats. Flat caps everywhere. Horse-drawn farm vehicles. Many bicycles. Women’s Institute members in flowery pinnies. Little boxy cars.

Ruth peered at this black and white world, which, of course, for them had not been black and white at all but rich color, and normal, expected, unexceptional—the world as it was, and how could it be otherwise? Very young Lorna wore a pinny, perhaps. Certainly they had bikes.

She could hear the creak of floorboards as Brian moved around overhead. He seemed to be doing a lot of moving. He had vanished upstairs a while ago on some unstated mission, leaving her with this booklet.

She looked around the room again. It was a comfortable room, and would be cosy in winter, with that big radiator under the window. On this summer evening, all the doors were open. In the kitchen, the table had been laid for supper, and there was wine in the fridge—Ruth had insisted on bringing some out from the box intended for Sam.

Molly had remembered little of this place—a few stored images that she would pull up and talk of occasionally. The hens that laid their eggs in the hedge, where they weren’t supposed to. Ice on puddles. Those homemade toys. Blood on her leg after she had gashed it on a gate. This gate, here? Ruth set aside the photograph book and considered the ducks, the willows, the water. Molly never spoke of those; perhaps they were furnishings so mundane, so accepted, that they vanished from her memory. What kind of duck is that, and that?

Brian was clattering down the stairs. He appeared in the doorway, looking rather smug. “Some rejigging of the resources. I am sleeping on the couch in the study, and you are having my bedroom. I’ve changed the sheets. I want you to wake up in the morning and see the frescos.”

“Oh—you shouldn’t have done that. But it’s a very kind thought—thank you.”

“Now I need to pay some attention to our supper, or you’ll regret the decision to eat here rather than have a jaunt to Williton.”

He returned presently with glasses of wine. “All under control.” He pointed at the book of photographs. “Yesteryear is big business. You’ll have noted the brown signs on all sides—the place is made to earn its living, and a good slice of the living is what’s over and done with.”

“The steam train.”

“That—and a good deal else. But transport is of much interest, here as anywhere. Vintage car rallies. Gatherings of old tractors.”

“I wonder why. Vintage leaves me cold, I’m afraid.”

“It’s a man thing, on the whole. Not this man, either. Though transport as such is certainly grist to my mill. How people got where they did, and why. Perceptions of time and space. Early travelers. The movements of armies. Oh dear, I’m off again.”

“Please keep going.”

“You’re being very tolerant. I get quite bottled up, on my own here, and become the Ancient Mariner when a visitor appears. Have you ever heard of the Harepath?” He described the west country track, still visible at points up on Exmoor, along which Saxon farmers moved when summoned to war—the army path. “Ninth-century motorway. Now
they
certainly saw space differently.”

“So do children. The world shrinking as they grow. Maybe they experience the whole process—from crawling to staggering to running. And they
always
want to get to the other place—the elsewhere.”

He laughed. “I’d not thought of that. I like it.”

“Alice,” said Ruth, “drinking from that bottle, and getting larger and larger. Her arm sticking out of the window. That’s all about confusions over size and space.”

“Of course. Thank you. I see a promising digression here.”

“And what about fairy story? The seven-league boots. That’s about somehow defeating space.”

“Jack and the beanstalk. Quite so.
The Arabian Nights
—magic carpets. This is a rich seam.”

“And time comes into it too. The Sleeping Beauty. Rip van Winkle. What’s all that about?”

“Hmmn…Escaping time? Stepping aside. Resisting the dictation of.”

From the kitchen there came an imperative ping. They both laughed.

Brian got up. “That is telling me the potatoes are nearly done. And I must put the chops on.”

“What shall I do?”

“The salad, perhaps.”

They ate with the door open onto the evening. Ruth thought: This was not supposed to happen. I am supposed to be in Devon now, not sitting here having a meal with someone I never met until a few hours ago. About to sleep in the room in which my mother was born. This is a kink in time—my personal time. Contingency moving in—twitching you off course. That passing car, the stone on the road, and me—all meeting up at that moment.

Brian pointed out that bats were flying past—a black flicker against the midnight blue sky. “Now the bat perception of space is something else, by all accounts. I think we won’t go there. Shall we have coffee outside? Dark—but not particularly cold.”

He guided her across the grass with a torch, to the seat he had put under one of the old apple trees. From there, the cottage was a shadowy outline; the lit window glowed, private and inviting. Crisp stars above. The bats.

“An owl has to hoot,” said Ruth. “To make it pure film set.”

“I’m afraid they do, occasionally.”

“Lucas—Heron Press Lucas—remembered it being very primitive back then. A standpipe outside. And he never mentioned the frescos. I suppose he forgot them.”

“Do you think I should have public open days?”

“And a brown sign?” She laughed. “I think not. Sacrilege. They’ll be for a select few only.”

“A Matt Faraday Society, perhaps? Annual conference on Blue Anchor beach.”

“He does have his admirers. It’s connoisseur stuff.” She paused; behind this talk there lay the reality of the young man and woman who had been here, once. Beached, now, decades past, while the place strode on.

“I went to Crete once, a few years ago,” she said. And told him about that time. Well, not quite all. And Brian, too, it seemed, knew it, had visited when in pursuit of ancient Mediterranean trade routes. For a while, that sunsoaked landscape hung against the Somerset night.

“Are you getting cold?” He stood up. “And we didn’t finish that wine.”

Back inside, she said, “What time is the windscreen man coming tomorrow?”

He looked vague. “Oh—I’m not too sure. I’ll call them first thing. Do you have a deadline for getting to Devon?”

“Well, I told my stepfather I’d probably be there about lunchtime.”

It was nearly midnight before Ruth got into bed. They had talked on. Generalities; particularities. Lying there, before she fell deeply asleep, she was aware of a continuous flow, rare with a stranger, in which one theme segued into another, without a break, in which his views on contemporary farming practices had somehow become Ruth’s account of selling artworks. She had glimpsed a life: a marriage long expired, a flat in that northern city, students, colleagues, commitments. She knew that she too must be supplying clues, hints. They cleared up the kitchen together; later, there was a polite skirmish about who should use the bathroom first. As she washed, Ruth looked at the shaving stuff, his bits and pieces, and realized that it was years since she had shared a bathroom with a man. This is all very odd, she had thought. But odd is all it is. That’s all.

When she woke, it was full morning. Eight o’clock, and the bird life in full cry. She got up, drew the curtains, and lay there looking. She counted the figures. Were they meant to be a sequence, a troop, or the same couple repeated all around. They had no features, they were just flying figures—arms, legs, breasts, buttocks. The woman was fuller, softer; he was more taut, more muscular. Were they Lorna and Matt?

She heard Brian go downstairs. Then he came up again, and there was a knock.

“Come in.”

Gingerly, he stuck his head around the door. “Thought you might care for a cup of tea.” He put it on the chest of drawers and was gone.

When she came down he was getting breakfast. “I’ve spoken to the man, and it seems he can’t make it until after lunch. Is that going to be a problem for you?”

“Not for me. I can tell Sam. But I’m not going to take up any more of your time. I’ll just sit around—or go for a walk—and you must get on with what you’re doing.”

He grinned. He seemed to be in high spirits, like someone about to go on holiday, about to break out. “I have a plan. Sit. Toast coming up. Marmalade or honey? Tea or coffee?”

She watched him as he reached for this and that, talked. A little clumsy—the bread knife got dropped; short-sighted—he had to peer at a label before tutting and throwing a jar into the bin. “No, no—use before
January.
” She was wanting to smile. Why? His mood was contagious. Outside, the morning sang on.

The plan involved a drive, a walk. “My mystery tour. Your introduction to these parts. Up over the moor for a bit, then down to the alabaster beach in honor of Matt’s little figure.”

Introduction? She thought. Am I coming back?

It was a day of flying sun and cloud, the light changing from moment to moment. The stubble field alongside the cottage was yellow as sunshine. Beyond, the hillside was brilliant—a complexity of fields, a copse, one single patch of rich red earth—all of it set against dark gray cloud, against which stood a rainbow.

They got into his car. He was cavalier with the lanes, whipping confidently ahead, bolting into gateways when something came. They climbed, they rose up into space, amid the great slack contours of the moor, that reached away, that folded down into green combes. They stopped, got out, and walked for a bit along a heathery path, sat for a while on a great stone by a gate. He waved a hand: “Dunkery Beacon. Highest point. We haven’t got time to go up. Perhaps another…” He bit off the end of the sentence, looked away.

She concentrated on the view: the purple hillside, a flare of yellow gorse, a little knot of sheep in a gully. What did he…? Is this what I think?

They got back into the car. He was talking fervently of some conservation issue, his eyes screwed up against the sun.

She found that she had said, “You need dark glasses.” It was meant to be a thought. She told herself: don’t be a fool. This is not happening. Calm down.

He said, “You’re right. I think there are some in that pocket. Could you…”

She found the glasses. He fumbled in her hand for them, took a bend rather too fast, narrowly missed the rear end of a sheep grazing on the verge. “Sorry. Nearly got it. The local roadkill.”

They came down from the moor, drove across a vale, skirted Minehead. He waved at sparkling white canopies in the distance: “Butlins. Temple of holidays. You get used to the architecture. I quite like it.” They arrived at the coast, the sea. He pitched the car through a caravan site. “We park here. Bit of a scramble down the cliff.” They got out, left the caravans behind and the playing children, lolloping dogs, and walked over short turf pocked with rabbit holes. Someone’s kite had escaped, a ribbon of blue that undulated overhead. Gulls floated, banked, fell beyond the clifftop in front of them. They climbed up, and were on the edge: a gray pebbled beach below, rocks, an expanse of shining muddy sand. Far off, a frill of waves, the tide right out. Ruth stood, taking all this in. He was beside her, and when she turned to speak he was not looking ahead but at her, had been for moments, she sensed—an intent look, an intimate look, that hung on after she turned to him.