A Dream of Wessex (7 page)

‘He’s my customer. I brought him up here.’

‘Just a customer, is he? I don’t like the way he was looking at you.’

‘Greg, he’s a Commission man. I want this sale for myself.’

The young man looked critically again at Harkman, and Julia saw in his eyes the same possessive expression she saw when his jealousies were aroused. She hadn’t been aware that Harkman had been looking at her in any certain way, and the information pleased her.

‘Get the best price you can, then. If he’s from the Commission he can afford the same prices as the government shop.’

‘I run the stall, Greg. I know how to make a sale.’ The young man still showed no sign of returning to the workshop. She added: ‘I’ll talk to you later.’

Greg hesitated a few moments longer, then, with one more wary look at Harkman, he clambered up the slope of the nearest rampart, and shortly was out of sight

David Harkman leaned forward to take the balance, opened the skimmer’s throttle, and felt the surge of acceleration beneath his feet. He throttled back at once, alarmed at the instant response of the engine. He guided the craft towards the shallow end of the inlet, and executed a wide, gentle turn. Facing towards the sea, he accelerated again, this time allowing the engine to take the craft as fast as it would go. The inlet, sheltered on one side by the bulk of the Castle and by a forested hill on the other, was as smooth as glass. The only thing that would tip him off the skimmer was his own inexperience.

As he passed the little beach where he had launched the skimmer, he looked for Julia to wave to her, but there was no sign of her. He reached the neck of the inlet and turned again, this time trying the standard skimmer-turn: flipping the board with his weight, turning it through a hundred and eighty degrees in not much more than its own length.

He started back with renewed confidence, and then he saw Julia. She was swimming, and he saw her arm wave from the water.

He liked the way the craft handled, and so he took it up and down the narrow creek three more times, acquiring confidence and regaining old skills each time. At last he took the skimmer to where Julia was swimming, and he slowed it, letting the engine idle.

She swam over to him. Her hair swept wetly back from her face, clinging to her head like the coat of an animal. As she rested her hands on the edge of the skimmer, he saw she was naked.

‘You’re as pale as the tourists!’ she said, laughing, and splashed water up at his legs.

‘I’ve been working in offices all my life,’ he said, trying to keep his balance because she was deliberately wobbling him.

‘Come and have a swim.’

‘No, I want to try the other board.’

‘I’ll tip you in!’

He gunned the engine and swung away. When he was a short distance from her he turned and headed straight back, pulling up short a couple of metres away and sending a sheet of water spraying over her. Julia went under, and came up spitting water.

Laughing, Harkman accelerated away down the creek.

Julia was still swimming five minutes later, so he went back to the beach and dragged the second skimmer down to the water. It didn’t take him more than one ride down the inlet to discover that this one, compared to the first, seemed slower and heavier.

He saw Julia standing in the shallows, up to her waist in the water, so he took the craft over to her.

‘I’m going to take the first one,’ he said, standing on the board and looking down at her. ‘How much?’

She grinned sweetly at him, then tipped the skimmer with both hands. Harkman swung his arms wildly, and toppled backwards into the water. As soon as he had recovered his sense of direction he lunged at Julia, splashing water, trying to give her a second ducking... but she was wading out.

‘Don’t you want to swim?’ he said, standing up with his hands on his hips.

‘I’ve had enough. I was getting cold. I’ll wait here.’

She picked up her discarded smock and began dabbing the water from her body with it. Harkman turned round and dived, and swam out to the deeper, greener water of the inlet, thinking it would have been a more interesting swim to be splashing around with a naked girl. He floated on his back, and saw that Julia had put her smock on the sand, and was lying down beside it, waiting for him.

Five minutes later he walked up the beach, and Julia tossed him her smock. ‘Here ... you can dry yourself with this.’

He wiped his face and neck, and sat down beside her. ‘I think I’ll dry out in the sun.’

He lay back on the sand, aware of her nearness to him, aware of her nakedness.

‘They’re good skimmers,’ he said, trying to keep his mind on other matters. Nudity was a commonplace in this part of Wessex; there was no invitation implied in her casual behaviour.

‘I suppose so,’ Julia said.

‘Who designs them?’

‘A couple of the men in the workshop.’

He wondered if she was aware of the tension he was feeling. They were talking in an off-hand, disinterested way, as if unwilling to confront each other with more direct statements. Or was it only he who felt it? She was lying back, supporting her weight on her elbows, and staring out across the inlet. Trying not to be too obvious about it, Harkman appraised her body, admired the neatness of her figure. Her skin was tanned all over to a mellow brown.

In an effort to persuade himself that he was not alone, Harkman wondered why Julia delayed here at the beach with him. If it was just a question of selling him the skimmer, the deal would be concluded now.

His clothes were piled near by, and he fumbled through the pockets of his jacket and found his cigarettes.

‘Do you smoke?’ he said.

‘No thanks.’

He leaned back and inhaled smoke. The Castle heaped behind them, seeming to glow in the heat of the sun, radiating an ancient heat, an inner life. Was it just this that was affecting him? He had responded at last to the compulsion that had afflicted him in London, and he had visited the Castle. Yet it had been nothing, just as now, as he lay under the slope of its ramparts, it was nothing.

Julia was restless, and stared back up the rampart several times.

‘Was that your boyfriend?’ Harkman said in the end, breaking a silence that had endured for several minutes. ‘The one in the paint-shop?’

‘Greg? He’s no one special.’

‘I thought you were waiting for him to come back.’

‘No ... it’s just...’ She sat up, and turned round to face him. ‘I shouldn’t be here with you.’

‘Do you want to put on your dress again?’

‘It’s not that. If Greg ... or anybody came back, they’d wonder why I was still sitting here.’

‘Well? Why are you?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Shall we close the deal?’ Harkman said. ‘I’ve brought the money with me.’

‘No.’ She put a hand on his. ‘Please don’t. Stay and talk to me.’

And there it was: for Harkman, a confirmation of his own feeling. Nothing specific, nothing he could put into words. No reasons, but a need to stay with her, a need to talk and make some kind of contact.

He said: ‘When I arrived in Dorchester two days ago, I felt I recognized you. Do you know what I mean?’

She nodded. ‘I knew your name. David Harkman ... it was as if it was written in large letters all over you.’

‘Was it?’ he said, smiling.

‘No - but I knew it. Have we met before?’

‘I don’t think so. I’ve never been to Wessex in my life.’

‘I’ve only been here for about three years.’ She spoke then of her past, as if to set out a sequence of events where their lives might have intersected. Harkman listened, but he knew that there was nowhere they could have seen each other: she had been brought up on a cooperative farm near Hereford, and lived there until three years ago. She’d never been to London, never even travelled further east than Malvern, where she had been to school.

Harkman thought of his own life, but didn’t speak of it. He felt his age, realizing that he must be nearly fifteen years older than her ... and that those fifteen years would take longer to tell than the story of her own whole life. And yet, in terms of events nothing much had happened: education, career, marriage, career, divorce, career ... offices, government departments, reports written and published. Not much for more than forty years of life, but more than he wanted to describe to her.

‘Then what is it?’ she said. ‘Why do I know you?’

‘You really do feel it.’

She was looking at him directly, almost earnestly, and he remembered the evasiveness of those same eyes when they had been talking outside the shop.

‘I’m glad you said something,’ Julia said. ‘I thought it was only me.’

‘I’ll say it plainly: I’m attracted to you.’

A large fly buzzed around Julia’s face, and she flicked a hand at it. Undeterred, it landed on her leg and walked up her thigh in quick, staccato movements. She knocked it away.

She said: ‘I thought for a time that I ... It’s difficult to say. Yesterday at the shop. Well, I thought it was one of those sexual things. You know, when you can’t control it.’

‘You’re very attractive, Julia.’

‘But it’s not that, is it? Not just that.’

‘I’m tempted to say yes,’ he said. ‘I wish it was only that, because it would be simpler. It’s there for me ... but that’s not all.’

‘I’d like my dress, please.’

He passed it to her without a word, and watched as she pulled it over her head. She stood up to shake it down over her legs, then sat beside him again.

‘Did you get dressed because we were talking about sex?’ he said.

‘Yes.’ ‘Then I think we understand one another.’ He had a sudden urge to touch her, and he reached out to take her hand, but she moved it away from him. He went on: ‘I feel that we somehow possess each other, Julia. That we are linked in some way, and that it was inevitable we would meet. Do you know what I mean?’

‘I think so.’

‘I’d like a direct answer.’

She said: ‘I’m not sure I can give you one.’

Harkman flicked away the end of his cigarette, and it cartwheeled into the water and hissed. He lit another immediately. ‘Am I offending you by talking about this?’

‘No, but it’s very difficult. I know what you mean, because I feel it too. As soon as I saw you I felt it.’

Harkman said: ‘Julia, two years ago I was working at my office in London, when I suddenly felt a tremendous necessity to live and work here in Wessex. It obsessed me; I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Eventually I applied for a transfer to Dorchester ... and although it took two years for the permit to come through, I got here in the end. Now I’m here, and I still don’t know why. It feels to me now, as I talk to you, that it was to meet you, or someone like you. But I know rationally that that’s nonsense.’

He paused, remembering how he had fretted in London, waiting for the appointment to be confirmed.

‘Go on.’

‘That’s about it. Except that now I’ve met you, it feels as if my reason for coming here was just a pretext.’

Julia said, unexpectedly: ‘I think I understand. When I came to Maiden Castle for the first time, everything that had happened before seemed unreal.’

Harkman looked at her in surprise. ‘Are you making that up?’

‘No. I can remember my father and mother, and I can remember the farm, and schooldays ... and all that. But at the same time I can hardly remember what it was really like.’

‘Do you ever see your parents?’

‘Sometimes. I think I saw them ... recently. I’m not sure.’

‘And you’d never go back to the farm?’

She shook her head. ‘It would be impossible.’

‘Do you know why?’

‘Because I’m committed to the Castle.’ She was looking away from him. ‘No, it isn’t just that. My place is here. I can’t say why.’

‘My place is with you,’ Harkman said. ‘I don’t know why, either. I’ll never leave Wessex.’

‘What do you want, David?’

‘I want you, Julia ... and I want to know why’

Looking directly at him, she said: ‘If you had to settle for one, which would it be?’

And she looked away, just as she had done outside the skimmer-shop.

There was a noise above them, and Harkman turned. Greg had appeared at the top of the nearest rampart, and was walking down towards them. Julia had seen him too.

Harkman said: ‘Will you come to my room tonight? In Dorchester.’

‘No, I can’t. It’s impossible.’

‘Tomorrow, then.’

She shook her head, watching Greg come towards them, but said: ‘I don’t know where it is.’

She stood up, straightening her smock with guilty movements of her hands.

‘The Commission hostel. Room 14.’

Greg scrambled down on to the sand, and walked towards them. Harkman turned to face him.

‘I’d like this one,’ he said.

Greg said: ‘Two thousand dollars. Seven thousand extra for the engine.’

‘Greg, that’s not the usual price,’ Julia said.

Harkman looked at her, and, conscious of the double meaning, said: ‘Well?’

Julia brushed the sand from her smock, keeping her face averted. ‘We normally charge six thousand for the whole unit.’ Greg showed no response.

‘That seems a fair price.’ Harkman bent down and picked up his jacket.

‘I’ll deliver it myself,’ Julia said. ‘Tomorrow evening.’

As Harkman counted the money into Greg’s hand, Julia was standing by the edge of the waves, staring out across the narrow inlet.

By mid-afternoon, Tom Benedict was plainly very ill, and Julia’s intrigued day-dreams about David Harkman were interrupted as she arranged for Tom to be taken to the infirmary in the Castle village. Hannah and Mark, who ran the stall in Dorchester with her, were expecting her there for the evening trade, and she had to take time to send someone down with a message.

When she returned to the infirmary, Allen had already visited Tom, and the old man was laid out as comfortably as possible in the cool, white-painted ward. He recognized Julia when she arrived, but soon afterwards fell asleep.

The Castle infirmary was run on an entirely voluntary basis, and had no proper medical facilities. It was simply a long, low hut, which was kept clean and ventilated, and contained sixteen beds where people suffering from minor ailments could be looked after. A few medical supplies were kept in a small room at one end, but any serious disease had to be treated in the Dorchester hospital.