The Night Following (33 page)

Remember! he says. Remember? We thought it so old-fashioned, that old marbled ebony, the maroon tiles! Worth a fortune today, old painted tiles like that.

He gazes at the wall admiringly as if the fireplace, rather than the raw gap where it used to be, were actually here. He takes me into the stripped-out kitchen that still holds a brackish vegetal smell, and from here into what he calls the eating and recreation quarters, now blank and damp. On the linoleum floor there are black streaks and dented circles where rubber-tipped chair and table legs were set down and scraped back in the clamor of innumerable institutional meals. Arthur stoops forward as if to catch again the trooping of children’s feet from serving hatch to table, the crash of plates and dishes, the clang of dropped cutlery. A dartboard still hangs on the wall.

As we go on he grows spry, pointing out this feature and that: the deep cornicing and baseboards, and in the stairwell, where now hangs only a length of tied-off electrical cord, the original Edwardian brass electric candelabra with the little parchment shades. He leads me upstairs and first we inspect the teachers’accommodation on the floor between the girls’and boys’dormitories. He remembers the room I slept in but not the name of the red-haired phys. ed. teacher I had to share with. I don’t, either.

Then we look over the top floor and the first floor, each one with five or six featureless rooms where, he reminds me, the kids bunked up in sixes and eights. He shows me their bathrooms with lines of collapsed shower stalls and basins clogged with dead insects. His fatigue has lifted; he walks the whole house, openmouthed. I follow, answering his excitement with a quieter pleasure.

I’m assessing each room, thinking about practicalities. Most are completely empty but here and there I note the hulks of furniture that must have been too heavy or too worthless to move. On one landing stands a gray metal cupboard without doors that still has pillows and some cardboard boxes of cleaning fluid and toilet paper in it. Nearby, three or four narrow bed frames with broken slats are upended against the wall.

It’s broad daylight now. I drive the car round to the hole in the fence and we unload, Arthur fairly trotting up and down with the lighter things. I’ve settled on the darkest room to sleep in, a small one with a boarded window on the middle floor at the back that lies in the shadow of the hillside. It’s probably going to get very cold; there’s a little fireplace but I’m too tired to think now about whether or not the chimney might still work. I’m also too tired to drag in a bed frame. I fetch some of the pillows and put them on the floor and cover them with the thickest of our sweaters, and we arrange blankets over us. We lie close together.

Trees are being pushed to and fro outside, and light through the gaps in the window boards flows across the walls and ceiling in a shadow show of shifting irregular beads, the fuzzy little ghosts of moving leaves and branches. I watch, listening, and Arthur is watching, too; I glance at him and catch sight of his fixed open eyes glistening in the room’s pale darkness. His mouth gapes and his breathing is rising and fading with the sweep of shadows reaching in, keeping time with the swoosh of the wind.

Yet something in all this swaying and ebbing of his breath, and of the trees and the wind, seems sly and mocking; something in or maybe beyond the room protests, wants this pattern of heartbeats and pulses disturbed, their rhythms arrested and rearranged. It is as if a tight, mewling voice is struggling through a tiny mouth and a knotted throat to say something unfinished and tremendous and full of sadness, perhaps anguished and violent. Arthur turns to me.

Ruth?

What is it? We should try to sleep.

There’s something you have to tell me.

It’s a statement, not a question, so I don’t reply.

Now that we’re here, there’s something you should be telling me, isn’t there? Something about what happened.

About what happened? Where, when? To the baby, you mean? The baby in the story?

He grunts. That, yes. But something else as well. What happened to you.

To me? Oh! Oh, what happened to me, that’d take too long to tell, now.

Don’t say that. You have to tell me. What happened that day? You want to tell me.

Yes. Maybe. But I can’t.

You can. You want to. You know what happened. You know who killed you.

Yes.

You have to tell me. Why won’t you tell me? You’re afraid of what I’ll do.

No.

Then
why
won’t you tell me?

I can’t. Because knowing will be worse than not knowing.

Worse? That’s nonsense! How could it be worse?

His voice rises and he thumps a fist on the blanket. Worse, who for? He should pay the price. He deserves to suffer!

Maybe they are suffering, I say dreamily. They are. Not in the way you do, but in their way. So much has happened. Go to sleep.

I turn over on my side and nestle down, but Arthur yanks me around furiously.

How can you be so calm about it! I want to know! I have a right to know! What about me?

He is leaning over me and his eyes are fierce. His mouth is clenched and lopsided, and his breath hisses from it and dots my face with spittle.

What about
me
?

Shhh…now, dear. It’s all right. I’m here now. I’m here. Aren’t I? And we’re back here. At Overdale, together. Everything’s all right. You’re tired. Lie down and try to rest.

I have to speak in this way for several minutes, and eventually he grunts and sighs and settles back.

I won’t be able to sleep, he says, and starts to shiver and pick at the blankets with the fingers of one hand. Just as I think he’s falling asleep he starts up and bursts into tears and rocks from side to side, wailing and coughing.

I can’t sleep. I’m cold. I’ll never sleep. Not till I know, not till you tell me. You’ve got to tell me.

I talk to him some more, and then tuck the blankets close around him and snuggle in to still his body and warm him. I run my hand over and over his forehead and shush him like a baby.

I’m cold. You’ve got to tell me, he says. Promise you’ll tell me.

All right, I say. All right, I promise. I’ll tell you, but not now. This isn’t the time. Or the place.

Promise? When? When, Ruth?

Soon. I’ll tell you very soon if you promise to rest now. Go to sleep.

After a while he stops shivering and sleeps. I am almost warm enough. Inside the room the darkness grows dreamy; from outside comes again the sleek rustle of the trees around the house and the rattle of the metal fence, and from time to time the wind carries the faint creaking calls of water birds flocking somewhere not very far away.

   There’s a grainy frost on the tarmac. Our footsteps grate as we walk across it in the dark toward the trickling and oozing of the stream. Behind us the lodge is a uniform black, before us the hills seem pulled upward by the moon. The moon pulls us along, too, casting our scissoring shadows ahead of us on the path and over the wet pebbles and shingle at the edge of the streambed, lighting the wavelets plashing over them with winking dots and ridges. A tree has fallen and blocks our way. I help Arthur clamber over it, then I return and break a length from a black, dead branch for him to use as a stick. We walk, and we walk. Some of the stones sit heavy and smooth and dun under their sheeting of water and some look bleached and jagged, like bits of tooth. We find lying half-submerged a white blade of animal bone, Arthur says most likely from a sheep. He cuts the air with it, sprinkling an arc of water drops into the moonlight. He has a notion to keep it but it turns ashy in his hands.

As we go higher the stream breaks into channels around bigger stones and small lodged boulders that split the runneling water into angled, restless swords of silver and dark and silver and dark. We rest often, in places as far out of the wind as we can find. Here and there the bank of the stream bellies out where the water turns in a slow spin and collects in deep level pools, and falls almost silent, and turns viscous and as impenetrable as mercury, so that when we pause we might hear only a ghostly plocking and gulping from under the surface. Though we stare down trying to see something move on the bottom, even just reeds in the current, the black membrane of water gives back nothing but shivering fragments of reflected sky.

We tire. As we go farther the stream breaks into smaller and smaller streamlets until it is a web of tangled strands across a field of stones and reeds stretching outward under the moon. We stop again and I pull Arthur’s hands from his pockets and rub them between mine, and draw them inside my jacket to warm them. They are freezing, his face is freezing, his mouth is locked with cold, and his mind is quite elsewhere. When I speak to him about gloves and tell him I’ve got blankets in the rucksack, he gives me a kindly look, but he is puzzled, as if I am butting foolishly into another conversation and steering it in some new direction that he finds eccentric and tangential.

Though he is cold and weary, he is the leader. We move on when he is ready, we pause when he chooses. Sometimes he stops and raises his walking stick, listening for a faint sound he thought he heard to be repeated, some cry from a bird or an animal, and I have to wait until he decides it wasn’t a living creature at all, just some indistinct whistle borne along on the sifting, chilly breath of the night itself.

We are deep in the hills now and although we are still able to make our way by its light, the moon has disappeared over a ridge. We are walking into a wretched wind and I start to feel afraid. I don’t know where we are going, or maybe I don’t want to know. I want to stop or turn back, but Arthur goes on doggedly, just ahead of me. Soon the path divides and he pauses, then points the way toward the lower fork that does not go to the top of the hill but cuts a gently downward slope around the curve of it, through a stand of scrubby trees. He tramps on and I follow close behind.

Within ten minutes we have rounded the side of the hill, and everything changes. We’re in the shelter of the summit now. We have to call above the roar of the wind but we do not feel it so much; it sweeps over the top of the hill above us. The moon has reappeared and shines directly on the reservoir a long way below. Arthur plants himself on the ground to gaze and I realize we’re not going any farther.

I unpack the rucksack and try to get him warm; I hunker down next to him and wrap a blanket around us. But he doesn’t seem to feel the cold anymore. He’s got his arms pressed tight into his sides and he is staring down onto the surface of the water, crimped and silvered by the wind and moon. He starts to point out the old landmarks.

There’s the path through to Boar Clough, and if you go on over the top it levels out and another six miles takes you back to Hayfield. And this must be where the old sheep gate was, he suggests, gesturing vaguely down to a path far below us, and then he yawns and looks and considers again, shakes his head, and with a wide swing of his arm murmurs that it could have been anywhere. It doesn’t matter. He turns to me and pats my face and smiles.

I reach into the rucksack for the pack of food and a picnic knife. We ought to be drinking something hot and sweet, like cocoa, but all we’ve got is fatty cold meat and onions in chewy bread, and some water. I cut off pieces small enough for him to manage and hand them over, and I eat the lumps that are left. When we’ve finished I say, I wish we had a tent, but Arthur gets to his feet and pulls out all the bedding, fixes the rucksack expertly as a windbreak at our heads, unrolls the blankets, and spreads one out on the ground.

Lie down, Ruth, get comfortable.

I do as I’m told. The ground is bumpy and damp but at least we are lying on a mattressy layer of heather. He arranges himself beside me and wraps us up.

We’ll soon get warm, he says, and he takes me in his arms. He brings our last blanket over our heads like a giant hood, enclosing us in a stuffy sack that smells of the food we’ve been eating. It’s also prickly, but once my eyes are closed I’m able to feel only his arms and his neck, and then his hand inside my jacket and on my waist, moving over my skin and pushing up my clothes until my breasts are bare under his fingers. He is so thin now, his mouth is loose and bristly, but he curls in and presses against me and kisses and nuzzles and rests his lips on my nipples, and I stroke his head. I feel his hand reach for mine and he draws it down inside his clothes. He has the beginning of an erection. With no urgency and with no words, we find our way through the layers of blankets and clothing to each other’s bodies, and we make love. My body receives him, and that is enough.

Later when I whisper his name there is no reply, but then I feel his mouth forming words against my skin and his hand tightens in the dip of my waist. He is asking me something.

Ruth, what happened? Tell me what happened.

I don’t know what to answer.

I say, Tell me something. Did you mean it? What you said you’d do to the person who did it, if you got your hands on them?

I said I’d kill him, he says. He sounds slightly embarrassed. I told everybody, I said I’d strangle him with my bare hands.

Surely that was just the heat of the moment, I say. You wouldn’t do a thing like that. Not you, Arthur. You couldn’t.

Arthur considers this. No, he says almost regretfully, you’re wrong. I meant it. I could do it. I would. I’d have to.

No matter who it was? Even supposing it was somebody very young, only a kid? Or suppose it was a woman, or just somebody who’ll never recover, somebody who’d do anything to put it right if they could?

I can hear fear enter my voice but Arthur doesn’t seem to.

Put it right? What the hell does that mean?

I just mean…maybe it’s someone who’ll never, who won’t be able to rest until—

He turns and presses himself down hard on my body, pinning me to the earth as if he’s afraid I’ll escape. His breath comes in hot, salty gusts.

I don’t care! Put it
right
? So they feel better? Why
should
they be able to rest? Think what they did to you! They shouldn’t even go on living, not after that!