The Wine-Dark Sea (7 page)

On the floor below, the women were lamenting. In their greeny-brown dresses, they clung together, shadowy and large-eyed, wailing and babbling in some tongue of which Grigg knew nothing, doubtless their own. Even in their mortification and misery, they were as beautiful as in their previous joy.

‘What has happened?’

The women stopped wailing when they saw him, and Lek spoke.

‘The rock is dead.’

Not at all understanding, Grigg could not but blurt out, ‘There was a man here last night. One man at least. I saw him.’

‘You
saw
him,’ said Vin. ‘And you did not kill him?’

‘Or let
us
kill him,’ said Tal.

There was a difficult pause. Grigg gazed into their
tear-stained
faces.

‘I saw him on top of the tower. I could not get to him in time across the ruins in the darkness. When I reached the tower, he was gone. I saw and heard his boat quite a long way off.’

‘Why did you not tell us?’ asked Lek. ‘Why did you not trust us?’

To such a question conventional answers abound, but Grigg could not bring one of them to his lips. Guilt in him was reinforced by fear. He felt that he might be made to suffer, and he felt that he deserved the suffering.

‘What does it mean,’ he asked, ‘when you say the rock is dead?’

A tremor passed through them and Vin began once more to weep.

‘The rock was a living rock,’ said Lek softly. ‘The rock gave us wine and water. The rock was the other god, the female god, so, while the rock was alive, you could not be told. Now they have killed the rock with a machine, so that it does not matter what is said.’ As Lek spoke, Tal burst into tears and moans.

‘Is there nothing I can do?’

‘There is nothing that anyone in the world can do.

‘This was the last living rock, and now the last living rock is dead. There is nothing but to mourn, to forgive, and to go.’

‘I do not expect to be forgiven,’ said Grigg. ‘I deserve to die.’ The words came out quite naturally; which was something he would never before have thought possible.

Lek stepped forward, took his hands, and kissed them. Then Vin and Tal did the same, leaving their tears on his mouth.

‘Let me at least mourn with you.’

Lek smiled sadly, and indeed he found that the power to mourn, the power to mourn anything, was not in him.

They walked in line down the causeway, among the flowers, the birds, and the lizards; with Grigg bringing up the rear. The green and grey of the sea had absorbed nearly all the red, though there was still a faint, shimmering glow beneath the surface, melting away as Grigg watched. They took nothing.

The women spread the big, blue sail, and expertly steered the ship out of the basin into the hot morning. Grigg stood at the stern, looking back along the spreading plume of her wake.

Then Lek was standing beside him.

‘How long can you swim?’

Grigg looked into her eyes.

‘Possibly for half an hour,’ he said. ‘At least, in smooth, warm water.’

So when they neared a spit of land, he went overside in the summer clothes he had worn when he had originally cast off in his borrowed motor-boat. It was his initiation into the last of the four elements. He went without touching any of the women, and in the event, he was immersed for not much more than ten minutes before fetching up, dripping and bearded, on a pebbly strand. Even so, it was enough for the ship to have sailed almost to the horizon, so skilfully was she navigated.

On the moors, as early as this, the air no longer clung about her, impeding her movements, absorbing her energies. Now a warm breeze seemed to lift her up and bear her on: the absorption process was reversed; her bloodstream drew impulsion from the zephyrs. Her thoughts raced from her in all directions, unproductive but joyful. She remembered the railway posters. Was this ozone?

Not that she had at all disliked the big industrial city they had just left; unlike Mimi, who had loathed it. Mimi had wanted their walking tour to be each day from one Youth Hostel to another; but that was the one proposal Margaret had successfully resisted. Their itinerary lay in the Pennines, and Margaret had urged the case for sleeping in farm-houses and, on occasion, in conventional hotels. Mimi had suggested that the former were undependable and the latter both dreary and expensive; but suddenly her advocacy of Youth Hostels had filled her with shame, and she had capitulated. ‘But hotels look down on hikers,’ she had added. Margaret had not until then regarded them as hikers.

Apart from the controversy about the city, all had so far gone fairly well, particularly with the weather, as their
progress
entered its second week. The city Margaret had found new, interesting, unexpectedly beautiful and romantic: its well-proportioned stone mills and uncountable volcanic
chimneys
appeared perfectly to consort with the high free
mountains
always in the background. To Mimi the place was all that she went on holiday to avoid. If you had to have towns, she would choose the blurred amalgam of the Midlands and South, where town does not contrast with country but merges into it, neither town nor country being at any time so distinct as in the North. To Margaret this, to her, new way of life (of which she saw only the very topmost surface), seemed considerably less dreadful than she had expected. Mimi, to whom also it was new, saw it as the existence from which very probably her great-grandfather had fought and climbed, a degradation she was appalled to find still in existence and able to devour her. If there had to be industry, let the facts be swaddled in suburbs. The Free Trade Hotel (RAC and AA) had found single rooms for them; and Mimi had missed someone to talk to in bed.

They had descended to the town quite suddenly from the wildest moors, as one does in the North. Now equally
suddenly
it was as if there were no towns, but only small,
long-toothed
Neanderthals crouched behind rocks waiting to tear the two of them to pieces. Air roared past in incalculable bulk under the lucent sky, deeply blue but traversed by well spaced masses of sharply edged white cloud, like the floats in a Mediterranean pageant. The misty, smoky, reeking air of the city had enchanted Margaret with its perpetually changing atmospheric effects, a meteorological drama unavailable in any other environment; but up here the air was certainly like itself. The path was hard to find across the heather, the only landmarks being contours and neither of them expert with a map; but they advanced in happy silence, all barriers between them blown down, even Margaret’s heavy rucksack far from her mind. (Mimi took her own even heavier rucksack for granted at all times.)

‘Surely that’s a train?’ said Margaret, when they had walked for two or three hours.

‘Oh God,’ said Mimi, the escapist.

‘The point is it’ll give us our bearing.’ The vague rumbling was now lost in the noisy wind. ‘Let’s look.’

Mimi unstrapped the back pocket on Margaret’s rucksack and took out the map. They stood holding it between them. Their orientation being governed by the wind, and beyond their power to correct mentally, they then laid the map on the ground, the top more or less to the north, and a grey stone on each corner.

‘There’s the line,’ said Margaret, following it across the map with her finger. ‘We must be somewhere about here.’

‘How do you know we’re not above the tunnel?’ inquired Mimi. ‘It’s about four miles long.’

‘I don’t think we’re high enough. ‘The tunnel’s further on.’

‘Couldn’t we strike this road?’

‘Which way do you suggest?’

‘Over the brow of the next hill, if you were right about that being a train. The road goes quite near the railway and the sound came from over there.’ Mimi pointed, the web of her rucksack, as she lay twisted on the ground, dragging uncomfortably in the shoulder strap of her shirt.

‘I wish we had a canvas map. The wind’s tearing this one to pieces.’

Mimi replied amiably. ‘It’s a bore, isn’t it?’ It was she who had been responsible for the map.

‘I’m almost sure you’re right,’ said Margaret, with all the confidence of the lost.

‘Let’s go,’ said Mimi. With difficulty they folded up the map, and Mimi returned it to Margaret’s rucksack. The four grey stones continued to mark the corners of a now
mysterious
rectangle.

As it chanced, Mimi was right. When they had descended to the valley before them, and toiled to the next ridge, a double line of railway and a stone-walled road climbed the valley beyond. While they watched, a train began slowly to chug upwards from far to the left.

‘The other one must have been going downhill,’ said Mimi.

They began the descent to the road. It was some time since there had been even a sheep path. The distance to the road was negligible as the crow flies, but it took them
thirty-five
minutes by Mimi’s wrist-watch, and the crawling train passed before them almost as soon as they started.

‘I wish we were crows,’ Mimi exclaimed.

Margaret said, ‘Yes,’ and smiled.

They noticed no traffic on the road, which, when reached, proved to be surfaced with hard, irregular granite chips,
somewhat
in need of re-laying and the attentions of a steamroller.

‘Pretty grim,’ said Mimi after a quarter of an hour. ‘But I’m through with that heather.’ Both sides of the valley were packed with it.

‘Hadn’t we better try to find out exactly where we are?’ suggested Margaret.

‘Does it really matter?’

‘There’s lunch.’

‘That doesn’t depend on where we are. So long as we’re in the country it’s all one, don’t you think?’

‘I think we’d better make sure.’

‘OK.’

Mimi again got out the map. As they were anchoring it by the roadside, a train roared into being and swept down the gradient.

‘What are you doing?’ asked Margaret, struggling with a rather unsuitable stone.

‘Waving, of course.’

‘Did anyone wave back?’

‘Haven’t you ever waved to the driver?’

‘No. I don’t think I have. I didn’t know it was the driver you waved to. I thought it was the passengers.’ The map now seemed secure.

‘Them too sometimes. But drivers always wave to girls.’

‘Only to girls?’

‘Only to girls.’ Mimi couldn’t remember when she hadn’t known that. ‘Where are we?’ They stared at the map, trying to drag out its mystery. Even now that they were on the road, with the railway plain before them crossing contour after contour, the problem seemed little simpler.

‘I wish there was an instrument which said how high we were,’ remarked Mimi.

‘Something else to carry.’

Soon they were reduced to staring about them.

‘Isn’t that a house?’ Mimi was again pointing the initiative.

‘If it is, I think it must be “Inn”.’ Margaret indicated it. ‘There’s no other building on the map this side of the railway tunnel, unless we’re much lower down the valley than we think.’

‘Maps don’t show every small building.’

‘They seem to in country districts. I’ve been noticing. Each farm has a little dot. Even the cottage by the reservoir yesterday had its dot.’

‘Oh well, if it’s a pub, we can eat in the bar. OK by me.’

Again they left behind them four grey stones at the
corners
of nothing.

‘Incidentally, the map only shows one house between the other end of the tunnel and Pudsley. A good eight miles, I should say.’

‘Let’s hope it’s one of your farms. I won’t face a night in Pudsley. We’re supposed to be on holiday. Remember?’

‘I expect they’ll put us up.’

The building ahead of them proved long deserted. Or possibly not so long; it is difficult to tell with simple stone buildings in a wet climate. The windows were planked up; slates from the roof littered the weedy garden; the front door had been stove in.

‘Trust the Army,’ said Mimi. ‘Hope tonight’s quarters are more weatherproof. We’d better eat. It’s a quarter past two.’

‘I don’t think it’s the Army. More like the agricultural depression.’ Margaret had learnt on her father’s estate the significance of deserted farmhouses and neglected holdings.

‘Look! There’s the tunnel.’

Margaret advanced a few steps up the road to join her. From the black portal the tunnel bored straight into the rock, with the road winding steeply above it.

‘There’s another building,’ said Margaret, following the discouraging ascent with her eyes. ‘What’s more, I can see a sign outside it. I believe the map’s wrong. Come on.’

‘Oh well,’ said Mimi.

Just as they were over the tunnel entrance another train sped downwards. They looked from above at the blind black roofs of the coaches, like the caterpillar at the fair with the cover down.

It was hard to say whether the map was wrong or not. The house above the tunnel, though apparently not shown, was certainly not an inn. It was almost the exact opposite: an unlicensed Guest House.

‘Good for a cup of tea,’ said Mimi. ‘But we’d better eat outside.’

A little further up the road was a small hillock. They ascended it, cast off their heavy rucksacks, loosened their belts a hole or two, and began to eat corned beef sandwiches. The Guest House lay below them, occupied to all appearances, but with no one visible.

‘Not much traffic,’ said Margaret, dangling a squashed tomato.

‘They all go by train.’

The distant crowing of an engine whistle seemed to confirm her words.

The sharp-edged clouds, now slightly larger, were still being pushed across the sky; but by now the breeze seemed to have dropped and it was exceedingly hot. The two women were covered with sweat, and Mimi undid another button of her shirt.’

Aren’t you glad I made you wear shorts?”

Margaret had to admit to herself she was glad. There had been some dissension between the two of them upon this point; Margaret, who had never worn shorts in her life before, feeling intensely embarrassed by Mimi’s proposal, and Mimi unexpectedly announcing that she wouldn’t come at all unless Margaret ‘dressed like everybody else’. Margaret now realised that for once ‘everybody’ was right. The freedom was
delightful
; and without it the weight of the rucksack would have been unendurable. Moreover, her entire present outfit had cost less than a guinea; and it mattered little what happened to it. That, she perceived, was the real freedom. Still she was pleased that none of her family could see her.