Touch (14 page)

Gustave began to run. Upstream, through shallow water and overhanging fronds of bracken. A heavy bird broke out from the trees above and panicked away through the branches. Below him a white tongue of light flickered across the meadow and the sounds of their betrayal began. Engines were approaching on the road. There were shouts. He climbed quickly where the stream fell, running, flinging himself over boulders in the river bed. The moss broke off under his hands and his feet slipped everywhere on the rocks. He had to clamber up onto the bank when he came to a waterfall, taking to the hillside. He knew that he had to get back to the village. Below him a voice was hailing them in hesitant French. Then a small volley of pistol shots. It was answered by rifles and the quick tapping of a machine gun. The bloody fools! Gustave took the pistol from his belt and flung it away into the river. He had to climb the valley, and fast.

To his right lay the vineyards and open land. To his left the forest grew thickly, extending to the meadows that spread below the village. He heard the heavy thrumming of an aero-plane approaching. Instead of following the signal from a torch they would see the searchlight, the muzzle-flashes of the ambush below. The plane banked over the trees and droned away. There was nothing anyone could do to help the men now. Nothing he could do. The twin headlights of a lorry were heading down to the bridge, twisting with the road. There was a shot from the meadow, then another. Then the machine gun, methodical as a seamstress tacking cloth.

 
Now Gustave ran by instinct. He ran through the forest of his childhood, dodging overhanging branches, finding the footpaths that were soft with fallen pine needles. He ran with a feral cunning. The thought of the men below being dragged into the truck or to the mill where the soldiers had been waiting jabbered in his head. He'd taken a girl there once, before Amelie. They'd picked bluebells in the meadow and seen an adder coiled on a stone in the sun. She'd let him touch her breasts in the disused upper room where they used to store the grain. Then she'd helped him to masturbate, his semen jetting onto her face, hot and quick. His only hope was that they would all be killed.

Gustave's feet were sodden from the stream. His shoes were rubbing at his heels. He limped on. Panting in harsh gasps. Taking a direct path to the village through the meadow, between cows that lay on the damp grass. Here and there were the white faces of mushrooms coming secretively in the night. Gustave leaned against a gate, wiping sweat from his forehead with his cap. He couldn't remember the girl's name.

At the outskirts of the village Gustave took off his shoes and went barefoot through the streets until he reached his house. He got in through the back door, lifting the catch and letting it fall quietly. The rooms still smelled of bottled fruit. It was the scent of briars and summer lanes. He hid his wet shoes behind a pile of logs in the hearth and took off his jacket, splashing water into his face at the sink. Then he fumbled for the cognac bottle in the dark, taking a swig straight from its neck. The liquid skinned his throat.

When he entered the bedroom his breathing was calmer. He knew from Amelie's voice that she was sitting up in bed. Gustave took off his clothes and folded them blindly onto a chair.

‘Gustave?'

He didn't answer.

‘Are you alright? You're not hurt?'

‘No. I'm alright.'

It was a faraway voice, not his.

‘I thought you'd be later.'

‘Later than this?'

It was all unreal, even now, just half an hour later. Nothing had happened. He had to remember that.

‘Yes, you said so.'

‘Well, it's alright then, I'm here.'

He reached under the bolster for his nightshirt but she tugged it from his hand and threw it across the bed.

‘Come on, you don't need that.'

In the bed Amelie was naked, softly enveloping him. Her tongue was hot inside his mouth, her breasts firm against his chest. Gustave arched himself above her, his hands curved around her shoulders. Then he sank slowly down between her outspread knees.

 
After they'd made love she asked for a glass of water and he brought it to her. She lit a candle, placing it low on the floor so that the light couldn't show. A lorry went past the house, rattling the shutters, travelling at speed towards the town. Then another. They kept going. Gustave's heart measured his pulse in steady beats. He stood listening intently. Amelie's hair was spread down behind her, against the pillows and the oak bed head, gleaming in the dull light. He saw that his cock was slick with her blood, something they'd always celebrated.

‘You've come on!'

‘Ah, so soon?'

Amelie reached for a square of cotton waste and pressed it between her legs before examining it.

‘Oh, yes.'

She looked up shyly.

‘I thought it'd be another week.'

‘You're a clever girl!'

Gustave handed her the glass of water, allowing his hand to linger on hers. Then he kissed her once under each nipple. When he climbed into the bed beside her the sheets smelled faintly of lavender.

The rocking stone was in Spooky Wood. It was accessible only by driving off the road that ran down from the head of the valley and onto a rutted track. The track curved sharply, climbing past the old railway cottages and onto the moor where there was room to park beside a ruined limekiln. That was next to James' house. Lucas drove onto the patch of rough ground, pulled up the handbrake and elbowed the car door open. The ground was soft underfoot. He leaned back into the car to drag the keys from the ignition. Not that anyone would steal it up here.

To the south, the bulk of the fells rose in a hatchwork of shadows and soft afternoon light, forming a flat-topped escarpment. Limestone was overlain with a layer of gritstone that had stopped it from eroding, from dissolving under centuries of rain. Lucas turned his head, hunching from the wind. He hadn't brought a scarf or hat. His hair that had once grown in dark curls was thinning at the temples now. He took his bearings, leaning both hands on the top stones of a dry-built wall. There it was, Spooky Wood, way down to his right where the sun would eventually set. A patch of larch trees sprawled on the moor, as if the wood had picked itself up to flee, then fallen.

The house looked deserted, except for a wisp of wood smoke. That evocative scent. After James had died, his younger brother had turned up to dispose of the house and studio. No one even knew he had a brother. Half-brother, someone had whispered, significantly, at the funeral. The house had been quickly sold and just as quickly gentrified. Instead of white plastered walls and stripped-wood floors and a filthy electric cooker, it had an Aga, floral wallpaper, discreet lamps, chintzy curtains, a Range Rover in the yard, a chestnut pony in the paddock. James would have hated all that. And Elena had moved away without leaving an address, without saying goodbye to anyone. Not even to Lucas. At the funeral she'd stood gaunt and silent, dabbing at her nose and wearing one of James' old coats.

Lucas zipped up his jacket against the chill and buttoned the neck-flap. What was he doing here? Each year a feeling grew in him, a kind of yearning, and he made his way back. Sentimental, maybe. Perhaps he would always return like this. The past was important. But it needed keeping in its place. It was good to come back, so that things didn't grow in your mind to overshadow the present. After all, that was how regret began. That was one thing he'd learned from James: regret nothing.

He climbed the stile, gripping the damp timber to haul himself up, the breeze nipping at his bald patch. Low fells sloped away to the north, so that he was walking gently downhill towards the dark smudge of the wood.
Spooky Wood
. Not its real name, but the name he and Elena had given it when James was alive. James who had seemed so bohemian, self-sufficient, ageless. When he fell ill towards the end and Lucas was visiting he'd send them out together:
Go for a walk, get
Elena into the fresh air. Go, go!

Lucas glanced back at the house. The first time he'd come here was to look at some of James' paintings. He'd just set up a small commercial gallery in Ilkley after curating for Leeds city art galleries. He'd cut his teeth there, made the necessary contacts. That was long after studying at Falmouth, long after he'd given up his own ambitions to be a painter, of course. He'd decided that his talent was in showing the work of others. Commissioning, procuring, talent spotting. And he'd been right. He'd done well, building a solid reputation throughout the north of England and even further afield. But then the art world was a small world. An unforgiving world if you got things wrong. These days art was an investment and his customers expected to buy something beautiful
and
watch it grow in value. They hadn't learnt the greatest pleasure of any art form – that one wants but does not need it, that beauty is useless but not meaningless.

That wasn't true of the artists of course. He'd been put on to James Essien by a dealer in Amsterdam. He'd been astonished to find a painter he hadn't heard of living close by in Yorkshire. And one whose reputation – whose value – was rising. But all that had come out later, when he knew James much better. There'd been a phone call first, some tentative remarks, then James sweeping all that ceremony aside, his fruity public-school voice urging Lucas to visit. A few days later he'd driven up through Airedale and Ribblesdale. He'd found the track and then the house – squatting on a ridge under grey clouds – with difficulty. He'd knocked hesitantly and James had answered, dressed in a torn blue sweater and khaki trousers, larger than life, a smudged glass in his hand. Lucas was taken into James' studio and plied with Bulgarian wine. Fluent in three or four European languages, he'd peppered his conversation with authentic pronunciations:
jouissance
,
chiaroscuro
,
pointillist
, the names of great artists flowing from his tongue as if he'd known them all personally. Lucas had been impressed, a little intimidated, a little repelled. Elena had been there in the background somewhere, listening to the radio in a distant room then appearing at the window as Lucas drove away. There was already something wistful about her pale hair and skin, the fine turn of her neck.

Lucas had found some of James' work bombastic and over-stated. But most of it had hit the mark with what he felt was a kind of searing veracity, an unmistakable authority. The kind that time would judge. The kind you had to take a hunch on. He'd bought two huge watercolours, landscapes that had been abstracted from their original forms into patches of colour that seemed almost motile, changing with each angle of view. He'd sold one but kept the other for himself. The painting surprised him every time he climbed the stairs at home to find its colours warping the lit space of the landing. Then he'd exhibited other work for commission, making frequent trips to visit James and look through the latest stuff. Or James would simply call him when he had something new to offer:
Time to visit, my dear
. They'd become friends. Of a sort. Friends who were useful to each other. Well, come to think of it, that wasn't entirely fair. Friends ought to be useful to each other, after all. There was a genuine fondness, too, a mutual admiration that went unremarked but was never-theless gratifying. Whenever Lucas drove away from the house after a visit he felt more generous, more talented, more fulfilled in his work. James had that knack.

 
Now there it was behind him: the house where James had lived on cheap wine, stewed tea, Dutch cheese, sardines, oranges and brown bread. He'd bought it for a song in the seventies when he'd given up lecturing. He'd set up a studio, thrown the key over a wall and never locked the door again. Except he'd never lectured anywhere. That was part of the myth. The rumour was that James had got caught up in a forgery scam when he was in his twenties. Lucas had heard that it was early French impressionists; but, more authoritatively, he'd also heard that it was Dutch work from an earlier century. The Delft school. Hals, Ruisdael, Cuyp, de Witte, van Goyen, Saenredam. One thing was for sure: you needed technique to get away with that kind of thing. Though he'd never known James work in oils or even acrylic. He was a water colourist through and through.

One dealer had told him that James had done time after being caught out. Another that he'd simply skipped across to the Continent and got by on the family money. He was a German-Belgian Jew by descent; his father had been an industrial chemist, eventually settling in Manchester. Long-standing Anglophiles, they had already sent James and his brother to school in England. The elder brother who'd been killed in Burma right at the end of the war. Lucas had never asked about any of that, of course. But it was a strange feeling to wonder if James was sometimes imitating himself, whether his work was some kind of double take. Fakery. Impressions of impressions. Pastiche. But then what else could it be? It was art, and like all art both inauthentic and true.

If you visited when James was away – which was often –there'd be a row of notes on the kitchen table, each weighted down with a knife or the pepper mill. Every message from a different friend, saying how sorry they were to have missed him. Lucas lived alone. Whenever he left the house, locking the door reminded him of James. The very action seemed pinched, ignoble, as mean-spirited as pension schemes, insurance policies or burglar alarms. James' generosity had always seemed so effortless.

 
It was November. Two o'clock. Already the light seemed faint against the limestone. It would be cold later. A thin moon. A horn of ice. Lucas set off along the sunken path. It descended the fell side in a glitter of mud. On each side, exposed peat showed the depth of the bog. To his left, the escarpment shouldered upwards. Ahead was the wood. It grew on a limestone pavement raised above the surrounding fell. Three acres of wind-blitzed trees. A hare broke from cover, ran a few yards then paused to watch him. It lowered its ears and he saw the wind parting the fur on its face. Once, only a couple of years ago, he'd come here in summer on a calm evening, the sun basking in the apex of the valley. He'd been half-expecting to find her there. Elena. Instead, a tawny owl had terrified him, gliding out of the wood's green-golden light. That was all: just the crackle of branches underfoot, the rasp of breath caught in his chest, the scent of larch trees.

He climbed another stile, clambering over slabs of stone set into the wall. The stile was new, the stone curiously familiar. When he bent to look under the steps he could see inscriptions etched in cursive script. They were recycled headstones. The National Park had restored the pathway and the stiles years after James died. But how on earth had they got permission for this? Perhaps the dead were so distant that no living relative had complained. They'd been taken from one of the chapels converted to a dwelling now because the farmers and villagers no longer needed God to fill their empty time. Once they would have thought nothing of walking ten miles to attend services twice on a Sunday. Now even the stones commemorating them had a new utility. Lucas paused with his hand against the slate. Here they were: the names of the dead put to new use, cold under his hand.

The wood was closer now. He could see the edge of the limestone pavement, the trunks of larches splintered where westerlies had harried and broken them and bent them over. 
Spooky
, Elena had said. Because it looked like a crouching animal. A wolf or a bear. She'd touched his arm. Blonde hair and pale skin, her eyes almost grey they were so pale.
Truly, it's
a wolf
, she'd said,
it's alive! Look!

They'd found the rocking stone together, set into the pavement, shaped like a flattened torpedo. James had told them where to look. It had become too far for him to walk after the heart bypass that had left his skin grey and baggy, his legs wasted. Sometimes, on warm days, he'd sit with his shirt open, showing the livid scar on his breastbone where they'd opened him up.
Like a tin of fish
. And he had another scar the length of one leg where they'd taken a vein for grafting. So he'd slouch around the house and wave Lucas and Elena away as if they were a couple of children. The stone was there, just as he'd promised. They'd straddled it and swayed their hips until it began to move, knocking against the rock on either side until it was booming along the length of the wood. Once it was moving, it was possible to control it by flexing the ankles, working in harmony with your partner to create a shared rhythm.
It's a sacred stone, a shrine!
Elena had said, her accent thick and husky. Hoops of gold gleamed in her ears. Her small teeth glistened as she moved in rapture to the swaying weight of the stone.

Afterwards they'd gone back to the house and sat with James in front of the fire, sipping whisky and cracking walnuts with the poker. That was soon after he'd fallen ill. After the operation and the long stay in hospital. He never complained about pain or breathlessness, treating the whole business as just another adventure. There he was, waiting for them when they got back, smiling, congratulating them. On what? Elena's face had been abstracted, almost elated, as if she was still on the rocking stone, sending out its primeval boom. She'd whispered to him as they clambered down from the wood,
Nothing has changed here
. She'd said it fiercely, plucking at his sleeve.
Nothing has changed!
He hadn't really known what she'd meant. But he'd often thought about it, re-running the words in his mind until his memory of Elena triggered them always.

The approach to the wood was tricky. You had to veer off from the path then clamber down from the edge of the moor, which petered out in a low cliff. Then you had to clamber up eight feet of limestone that reared into the wood. Lucas slipped and half fell, banging the heel of his hand. There was a dead sheep lying on the grass below him. Its head was bent to one side, the reddle mark fresh on its rump where the tup had been at it. In the hawthorns at the edge of the wood, a flock of long-tailed tits were stripping the berries. Lucas stepped up onto a ledge, stamped down some strands of wire from a rusted fence and stepped over. He gripped the edge of the rock and then pressed down with the flat of his hands, wincing, mantling upwards.

He was in. The light was filtered by wintering larches. Hart's tongue glistened everywhere. Ferns had died back, a rich russet. There were deep grykes in the pavement and you had to be careful because the stones were covered in moss. A few rowan trees had been planted in protective sheaths to keep away rabbits or deer. The damp rocks were treacherous underfoot. He remembered how he'd taken Elena's hand, how she'd fallen against him and he'd felt her breath hot on his neck. She'd flushed and laughed it off. But he'd felt his chest go tight. And he hadn't really known anything about her. She was Hungarian. She'd come to live with James.
My painter
, she called him affectionately, touching his arm. She was thirty years younger than her painter, four years younger than Lucas. But then James had always been good at cultivating young friends. That was what he'd called Elena, his friend. But there'd been gossip down in the village. And when they sat together his hand covered hers and lingered there. Then he'd glance up at Lucas with that little smile, half-surprised, half-amused at his good luck. But always sure of his own worth and generosity, his unmistakable largesse.