The Likes of Us (63 page)

‘No, you haven't. I apologise again.'

‘If we all looked at life the way you look at it, there'd be even more of us divorced.'

‘Perhaps so.'

Melanie had rapidly undressed. Heather was taking things from the wardrobe that she wouldn't need in the morning and folding them neatly into her case. Packing the night before, Melanie thought, was one of the little ways by which Heather made you feel idle and sloppy.

‘What did you find to talk about out there in the dark, anyway?'

‘Oh, this and that. He's a pharmacist. He has a shop.'

‘I thought you already knew that.'

‘He was telling me about the Russian prisoners' chapel.'

‘You know, I really do think you owed it to yourself to see that. Just because I didn't want to walk all that way
…
'

‘Well, it's too late now. But Gavin told me this story about it. Do listen, Melanie. It's so beautifully sad.'

‘Go on, then. I'm listening.'

‘Well, the Austrians fought the Russians in the First World War and put some of the prisoners they took to building a road over those mountains. One day, in atrocious weather on the summit, a local girl got lost in a blizzard while looking for some goats that had strayed. One of the Russians found her and took her down to safety. She'd surety have perished if
it hadn't been for him and her grateful family gave him shelter in return and a good fire to sleep by. No
w
, he was a trusted prisoner or he'd have been shackled like his comrades, and it was thought he'd made an attempt to escape. They wouldn't believe his story about the girl and the goats. They gave him fifty lashes and transferred him to an even worse place in another province. When the thaw came and the girl could climb up the pass to see him he'd gone. She never saw him again, but she spent the rest of her life grieving for him, because in that brief time she'd fallen eternally in love with him. Eventually the war ended, the prisoners were repatriated and the road was completed. In the meantime the goat-girl had come into an unexpected legacy and with the money she built a small chapel at the summit of the pass in memory of her lost love. One day she set out there alone and was never seen again. But people swear that at certain times, when all the conditions are right, she can be heard weeping by those engaged in their silent devotions.'

‘Isn't it haunting?'

‘I thought things couldn't haunt you till long after.'

‘Well, don't you think it's the kind of thing you'll never forget?'

‘I suppose it is. If you're as interested as you were to start with.'

Melanie was rubbing lotion into her brow and cheeks with both hands at once.

‘Look, Heather,' she said, ‘I'm glad you don't sulk, because there's one thing you should know about me. I say what I have to say, then forget it. Life's too short for bearing grudges.'

She opened her pyjamas in front of the long mirror on the door and looked at herself. She was beginning to show a tan and was afraid that her breasts would already look repellently white against it when she took off her bikini top on the coast.

 

On the coach Heather struck up a conversation with the stocky grey-haired woman sitting across the gangway. It was the first time they had exchanged more than a couple of words. She was one of those who had gone out every day in walking-gear and she had not lingered in the dining-room.

Now she told Heather, while Melanie listened also, that it was her first time in the country since her husband's death, five years ago. Before that they had come every year, sometimes more than once. He had, she said, been one of those parachuted in during the war, to make contact with the partisans, whatever that meant.

‘You must know it intimately and have lots of friends,' Heather said.

‘Well
…
' the woman waved a square, capable-looking hand, ‘some parts better than others. And old friends grow old and fall away
…
'

The coach was climbing.

‘I didn't know we'd be going over the mountains,' Heather said.

‘It saves thirty miles if the pass is open.'

‘This is the road the Russian prisoners built, surely.'

‘Yes, it is. Near the summit is their chapel.'

That damned chapel!

‘I heard a story about that,' Heather said.

‘Oh?'

‘You must know it already.'

‘Perhaps not.'

‘Well, it's about a girl who lost some goats in a snowstorm
…
'

Something made Melanie glance across at the woman as Heather finished. A little smile played on her lips.

‘You hadn't heard it, then?'

‘No. Who do you say told it to you?'

‘A man at the hotel.'

‘A local man?'

‘No, a Scotsman on holiday.'

The woman's smile had broadened.

‘Why are you smiling?'

‘It doesn't matter. There's no harm in it.'

‘You mean it isn't true?'

‘What a pity if it isn't.'

‘But you'd surely have known it if it were.'

Heather's colour was rising. The woman noticed it too.

‘But it doesn't matter,' she said again. ‘There's no harm done, is there?'

‘No, but
…
'

But you don't know Heather, lady, Melanie was thinking. As Heather fell silent and looked distractedly away, the woman kept stealing little glances at her flushed face.

‘I've upset you. I've made you feel foolish.'

‘No, really
…
'

But she was upset. In a moment she began to mutter under her breath. Melanie felt impelled to break in on it.

‘Heather
…
what on earth's the matter?'

‘We couldn't stop, could we?'

‘I shouldn't think so. We've hardly got started. Don't you feel well?'

‘I'll be all right.'

Sweat had broken out on her top lip. Melanie found a scented freshener tissue and put it into her hand.

‘Use this.'

The stocky woman had been to the front of the bus to speak to the courier. She smiled at Heather and Melanie as she returned to her seat and the speakers crackled. The courier cleared her throat.

‘Your attention, please. I have been asked if we can stop at the chapel of the Russian prisoners on the summit of the pass. Such a stop is not on our schedule, but we can allow ten minutes. Ten minutes only, please, as we have a long way to go. First of all I will tell you a little about the place
…
'

It sounded to Melanie as if the courier had not heard the story about the goat-girl either.

The chapel, which stood on a level patch of cleared ground above a sheer drop of a hundred feet or more, was a small building of roughly dressed stone with a steeply pitched roof and a bell-tower. The walls had the same rough, unplastered finish inside. There were no seats. The single oblong room was bare except for a rectangular stone altar table on which stood a wooden crucifix and twin stone jars holding fresh wild flowers.

The cold in the place struck Melanie at once. ‘God, they must have frozen.'

When she looked round Heather had gone. Melanie went out also. The sky had darkened. It felt less like early morning than approaching night. She wandered along the side of the building and was in time to see the stocky woman beckon to Heather as though she had been waiting for her. Heather stood beside her on the edge of the precipice. The woman took her finger from her lips and Melanie respected her request for silence as she herself approached them.

‘Can you hear it?' the woman asked.

Heather nodded. The two of them faced the void and listened.

‘Well,' the woman said eventually, ‘any number of people would tell us that that is no more than a trick of the wind.'

‘They would.'

‘But I'd like to think I'm one of those who knows better.'

‘So would I.'

And if that was what they wanted, Melanie thought, where was the harm? She would have turned away then, except that the sudden tears in the stocky woman's eyes held her where she stood.

‘Are you all right?' Heather reached to take the woman's arm.

‘It's all at risk, you know.' The woman gestured with her free hand above the void. ‘All in great peril. If we could hear the crying of the dead, the thousands upon thousands who spilt their blood for it, it would appal us.'

‘It's too complicated for me to grasp,' Heather said.

‘Perhaps for any of us,' the woman said. ‘Perhaps it always was.'

The courier, impatient to get away, was calling them to the coach. As Melanie set off she heard the woman ask, behind her ‘Will you be seeing your Scottish friend again?'

‘I've no idea where he lives. I don't even know his surname.'

‘A pity. He sounds like an understanding man.'

Almost immediately they began to descend. The road on this side was cut into the mountain in a zig-zag line, sometimes plunging into cuttings before emerging again to heart-stopping views of the plain below. Once, as they seemed to turn back on themselves, they could see for several moments the chapel on the summit against a livid sky.

‘It's going to snow again up there,' the stocky woman said.

The words themselves seemed to chill Melanie to the bone. ‘God, I'll be glad when we get to the sea.' Although she was wearing a windcheater she rummaged in her drawstring bag for her rolled cardigan. There was something under it which she offered Heather. A fat paperback book.

‘This is yours.'

‘Where did I leave it? I think I had it in the bar last night.'

‘It was handed to me at reception this morning.'

‘By the way,” Heather asked, “did you get Andrew's address?'

‘Whatever for?' She'd been tempted to ask ‘Who's Andrew?'

‘Oh, I just wondered.'

‘All over Europe,' Andrew had said at one point, ‘there'll be people like us, strangers getting to know one another.' And moving on in the morning, Melanie had thought.

‘Is your book any good?' she asked.

‘Quite gripping, if a bit long-winded.'

‘I wouldn't mind having a go when you've finished.'

‘Not much further now.' Heather riffled the pages, then asked, ‘What's this doing here?'

‘What is it?'

Heather held up the small piece of card and looked at both sides. She trembled suddenly, as if the same cold that Melanie had felt now touched her. Without asking again Melanie took the card from Heather's fingers. It was a business card with Gavin's name and the address of his shop printed on one side. On the other was a scribbled note which it took Melanie a moment to decipher:

 

‘Dear Heather,

Should ever serendipity – or a lost goat – bring you to Perth I'd like you to look me up. G.'

 

The stocky woman was speaking to Heather across the aisle. ‘Last view.' In the instant they looked up at the summit of the pass again the road swung, taking the coach behind a wall of rock and the chapel was finally lost to their sight.

Melanie was glad to see the back of it, and the mountain too. For as they emerged into the open again she saw on the horizon a rim of blue that common sense told her couldn't possibly be what she was so looking forward to, but which her eager imagination only too readily transformed into the sea.

Author Bio

 

 

 

Stan Barstow was born in Horbury in the West Riding of Yorkshire in 1928, the only child of a miner. He attended Ossett Grammar School until he was sixteen, then went to work as a draughtsman at a local engineering firm. He married Constance Kershaw in 1951 and they had two children.

 

He was a novelist and scriptwriter; he won awards, including Baftas, for his TV and radio dramatisations. He is best known for his novel,
A Kind of Loving
(1960), which was subsequently made into a ground-breaking film. But his first sortie into writing was the short story. He started writing for money – ‘certainly there was no question
…
of my thinking I had anything serious to say' – but he soon realised that ‘writing insincerely rarely works'. ‘The Search for Tommy Flynn', initially aired on BBC radio, was his first published work. In all, he produced three volumes of short stories, most set in his fictional town of Cressley. It was a form which fascinated him all his life.

 

In 2000, Stan Barstow left his native Yorkshire with his partner, the radio playwright Diana Griffiths, and went to live in south Wales. He died on 1st August 2011 at Neath. His work has been translated into many languages and is taught in schools and colleges all over the world. He was an honorary MA of the Open University, a Fellow of the RSL and a Fellow of the Welsh Academy.