R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield (26 page)

Venn's lorry-driver, emerging from the quarry two-thirds of the way up Quarry Hill, was aware that something was amiss the moment he levelled out on the gradient, about one in six here but steeper beyond the ash coppices that grew on each side lower down the road. He braked as hard as he dared but the speed of the heavily-laden lorry increased so that he made a wild grab at the handbrake, throwing all his weight on it as the vehicle weaved the full width of the road, its speed increasing with every yard it covered. As he approached the bend he realised he could never make it and acted on impulse, swinging the wheel hard right, mounting the low bank and crashing into the little forest of saplings to cut the corner or, if he was lucky, snarl up on the tangled undergrowth there. His left hand still gripped the brake lever but his right was pressed on the horn, so that his blaring progress could have been heard a mile away.

Old Chuff Greenaway, Farmer Grover's part-time man, was the only witness to the lorry's crashing entry into the wood. He was hedging fifty yards lower down the hill, heard the horn and glanced up just in time to see the vehicle tear into the copse and plough on down the slope, its progress marked by the travelling tumult among the trees that tossed and whirled as though struck by a cyclone. The undergrowth slowed the lorry's progress somewhat but the weight of stone behind it was too much for the ten-year-old growth in the coppice. It shot out on to the road again at about thirty miles an hour, the driver still wrestling with the gears, the horn still trumpeting his terror.

Beth, changing gear to tackle the second stage of the hill, saw it as a looming shadow, bursting out of the woods like a mastodon on the rampage, but she had no real awareness of the impact when the lorry tore into the nearside of the Morgan, crushed it, caught it up upon its front fender, carried it fifty yards or more down the hill and then discarded it before striking the far hedge and overturning on its side. Nothing could have been more sudden, more unexpected or more final. One moment she was addressing a remark to the children about the blaring horn, the next this great thing was looming over her, blotting everything out. She felt no fear or even dismay, only an intense curiosity concerning its sudden eruption from the little green wood on her left.

Chuff Greenaway, panting hard, was on the scene in less than a minute, and what he saw caused him to stand wheezing yards short of the two piles of
debris, one big, one small, his mouth agape, his eyes starting from their sockets. Then, with a groan, he turned and tottered back to the farm lane beyond the bend, sobbing out his story to Martha Grover, who was hanging out washing in the cobbled yard.

With a small part of his mind David heard the young policeman's intermittent rumble, something about a terrible accident on Quarry Hill involving Venn's lorry, Beth and the children, but the full portent of what he was saying was too obscene, too monstrous to be absorbed. The man went on mumbling, his big hands fidgeting with his helmet on his knees, but soon David could make no kind of sense at all out of what he was saying and gestured so that he stopped, sitting immobile on the chair David had occupied that first spring day he came here and took tea with the Herries. Then, but dimly, he was aware of several other things, the presence of Ellie Herries who, for some inexplicable reason, was pressing his head to her chest, and a sustained roaring sound in his ears like the sound of the pre-zero-hour Somme bombardment, and behind it a complex of inconsequential sounds, a distant roll of thunder, the five-minute bell signifying the end of a period, the familiar clatter of boots on the quad flagstones outside, and the shrill voice of Rawlins – it was odd how easily he identified the voice-shouting, 'No! Find your own ruddy atlas! You're always scrounging…!' as he scuttled past under the window.

He got up, very stiffly, and moved out into the passage, through the arched door to Big School and into the forecourt, instinctively turning half-left and moving up towards the stump of the riven beech, Algy's thinking post. The roller was here again, parked where it should not have been by one of the chain-gangs, very active at this time of year, and he sat on it, grappling with the enormity of the news that the pink-cheeked young policeman had brought. Beth and one of the kids dead. The lorry driver dead. The other twin, he did not know whether it was Joan or Grace, badly injured and rushed by ambulance to Challacombe hospital.

The roaring in his ears increased in volume, blotting out other sounds although he could see, as through the wrong end of a telescope, some of the First Eleven at the nets below the pavilion, and even wondered why they played so soundlessly. One of the groundsmen was poking about the cricket pitch, searching for evidence of his implacable enemy, the mole. It
astounded him that life, distorted into an unimaginable nightmare for him, continued to flow so smoothly and unremarkably elsewhere.

His brain was still three-parts numb. It was impossible to absorb a shock of this magnitude. And yet, below the area of numbness, was a terrible rawness that quivered and winced when partial consciousness invaded it. He sat there like a stone carving, hands on thighs, chin thrust forward, seeing without actually seeing, hearing nothing but that dull roaring and then, as unaccountably as Ellie had appeared, Howarth was there, feet planted astride, hands locked behind his back as he sometimes stood in class. He said, 'Come up to my rooms, P.J. Come and have a stiff drink, man,' and when David did not answer, 'The police say someone will have to go to Challacombe. I'll come with you, as soon as the head gets back with transport.' And then he did a strange thing, strange that is for Howarth, who had never, in the seven years he had known him, betrayed any emotion other than irritation. His tight little mouth twisted, the eyes behind the prim, pince-nez glasses glittered, and he reached out and placed his arm about David's shoulders, letting it rest there, lightly but firmly.

Away across the field the bell jangled for lunch and a muted clamour reached them. The sounds roused him somewhat. He said, hoarsely, 'Do you suppose it's
true
, Howarth? I mean… couldn't it be some… some frightful mix-up?' and Howarth said, hoarsely, 'We'll call in on Doc Willoughby's on the way to Challacombe, David. He'll give you something to help ride out the shock.'

It was strange. His brain recorded the fact that Howarth had never before addressed him by his Christian name and this, improbably, touched some hidden spring behind his eyes, so that he began to weep, tears brimming over and coursing the length of his jawline. He even noted that one of them splashed down on the smooth shining surface of the roller, bursting like a starshell over the lines at night, so that it recalled violent deaths in the past, the very distant past, it seemed, although the wounds those deaths inflicted on him were not healed, as he had always assumed them to be. He said, brokenly, 'Out there it was different. Everybody was going to die. It was only a matter of how and when.'

'You got through that,' Howarth said.

'Not this.
Not this!'

'
Yes!
Here you've got something to hold on to, make something of. Out there it was just… just bloody waste!' Suddenly he became extraordinarily animated, putting both hands to David's shoulders swinging him round and
shaking him. 'The people round you aren't numbered for death, the way everyone was out there. You've got thirty to forty years of hard grind ahead of you, doing a job you're uniquely equipped to do and in a way no one else could do it! It won't make much difference for a month, a year maybe, but it will in the end, I promise. A clear purpose always does, and I'm qualified to tell you that.'

Something of Howarth's urgency got through to him. Not much, but enough to bring him partially out of his stupor of grief and despair. He said, carefully, 'I couldn't go to Challacombe, Howarth. I couldn't identify her. Someone else will have to do that. Killed outright, that policeman said. Crushed by a bloody great lorry, running wild…' He stood up. 'I'm going across the moor. Alone. I can't fight it… can't accept it… here. Not where
she
was, not where that kid waved goodbye three hours ago. Tell Ellie. Tell Herries when he gets back.'

'Let me come with you.'

'No! I can only cope with it alone, but it must be away from here.' He glanced down at the great sprawl of buildings, silent again for the lunch break. 'This place was a part of her. She's too close here. So are the twins. Can you understand that?'

'Yes,' Howarth said, 'but for God's sake remember what I said, about using it to hold on to. The place itself,
all of us here
. For there isn't one soul down there who isn't grieving with you, or won't be the moment he knows. That's worth thinking on, David. It's the only thing worth a thought just now.'

He stood and watched him go, up past the pavilion, along the fringe of the plantation, then left into the undergrowth. Sullenly he groped for his cigarettes and after three fumbled attempts lit a Gold Flake, inhaling the smoke deep into his lungs. He stood there watching until he saw the tall, spare figure emerge from the far side of the plantation and head for the Coombe. Then, with a grunt, he turned back towards the school buildings, walking swiftly and purposefully, but wondering just how he could explain his sanction of P.J.'s lunge off into the open country, with a more than even chance that he would never find his way back again.

3

David had no awareness of familiar landmarks, or not after crossing the plank bridge over the Coombe, where he had seen Blades and that woman
Darbyshire last summer. He walked swiftly but blindly, vaulting stiles, scrambling up and down briar-sown banks, so that often he stumbled and sometimes fell. But he picked himself up with a kind of ferocity and pushed on over miles and miles of upland and across a dozen or more timbered gullies. As long as he could keep walking at this speed he was able to keep at bay the full impact of the blow, to stop it flattening him and leaving him as crushed and broken as Beth and the twins, wherever they were at this moment. His sole awareness of the landscape was the curious yellowish light he had noticed earlier that day and persisted even here, fifteen hundred feet above sea level. Every now and again thunder rolled but it was not until he paused gasping, on the crest of the long, heathery slope leading down to Chetsford Water, that the storm began to gather overhead and one or two heavy spots of rain fell on his sweating face. The soft, yellow glow in the sky dispersed then, replaced by a grey curtain of rain moving swiftly in from the east, a swaying, gently undulating curtain, immensely tall and hissing, coming to meet him like a vast, all-enveloping sheet of old canvas, the sail of some giant galleon torn loose by a cyclone and running free across the middle moor. He had never seen its like before. Perhaps nobody had. Perhaps it was the forerunner of the Apocalypse.

He stood there watching it until it reached him, drenching him through in a matter of seconds. He was standing in a particularly open place, two hundred feet or more above the floor of the valley, where a great belt of brushwood grew both sides of the stream. There was something vaguely familiar about the landscape, as though he had seen it in a recent dream. He recognised the lie of the land, the long straggle of crouching timber down there, the strangely even ridges of the hills, like a choppy sea studded with flotsam represented by boulders and gorse patches. Great arteries of forked lightning lit it up in great detail, tearing jagged rents in the rain curtain and over all, in a succession of ear-splitting discharges, the thunder rolled.

It was only then that he became aware of the dog and its presence amazed him almost as much as the spectacle. It was Ferguson's Airedale, Towser, that must have attached itself to him the moment he left the plantation and followed at his heels over God knew how many miles of moorland. The dog was whining, terrified by the uproar, and at every fresh clap of thunder he gave a series of sharp, high-pitched yelps. Finally, getting no response from the man, he ran, still yelping, the full length of the slope to the cover of the brushwood. David did not follow. The cataclysm was a solace, the teeming rain beating
over every square inch of his body, a balm. It was the end of the world. He saw it as a kind of climax to the horrors of the day, and, at a farther distance, to days of almost identical uproar in the Salient and the Somme.

And then, just as the dog reached the floor of the valley, he became aware of a figure blundering up the slope, head invisible, shoulders hunched under a yellow oilskin, and with a small part of his brain he wondered who the devil it could be, and what he was doing down there in such chaos. At that moment the whole sky blazed up and, a second or two later, an explosion of enormous weight burst over him, stunning his senses so that he was only vaguely aware of the arrival of the figure in the oilskin, who seized his hand and began dragging him down, down to the valley until, in the space of a lightning flash it seemed, they were threading a tunnel of dripping foliage leading to a shallow cave in the rock face beside the rushing stream. Inside it was quite dry and the place was clearly inhabited. An array of kit lay about, including blankets and a knapsack. A small fire smouldered under the overhang, obstinate tongues of flame holding out against the hissing downpour.

He sat down then, limp and exhausted, and as in a dream he saw the figure of a boy, tousled and laughing, emerge from beneath the folds of the oilskin and recognised Spats Winterbourne who seemed, for some obtuse reason, to be enjoying himself, for he said, shouting above the uproar, 'It's a corker, isn't it, sir? Never seen one like this before!' and then, with concern, 'I say, you're drenched through, sir! Peel off and rub yourself down. There's a towel here somewhere. It's a bit grubby, I'm afraid…' and David, hypnotised by the boy, obediently shed jacket and shirt, and began towelling himself.

It was extraordinarily cosy in here, a refuge not only from the storm but from the pitiless world outside, where women and children were crushed under lorries overloaded with building stone. Mutely he watched Winterbourne busy himself about the fire, putting a kettle on a grid and ladling cocoa from a tin into a thick earthenware mug. What astonished him far more than the coincidence of meeting Winterbourne here, of having directed his heedless steps to the very spot where the boy was hiding, was Winterbourne's identity with the moor, and the impression he gave of being an integral part of its wildness and remoteness. He had always thought of Winterbourne as a town-bred boy, dapper and clothes-conscious, even elegant in a slightly comical way, but here, in a cave beside a rushing stream, he was a gipsy, moving and doing for himself, as though this was his natural habitat. A sense of curiosity close to wonder invaded him, holding
his own tragedy at bay, so that he grabbed at it, as though Winterbourne and Winterbourne's identification with the moor was a raft in an ocean of misery. He said, 'You've been here all the time, haven't you?' and Winterbourne, with a self-effacing grin, replied, 'Yes, sir. I suppose you were out looking for me.'