Flight of a Witch

CHAPTER I

^ »

Driving along the lane from Fairford, at four o’clock on that half-term Thursday in October, Tom Kenyon saw Annet Beck climb the Hallowmount and vanish over the crest.

A shaft of lurid light sheared suddenly through the rainclouds to westward, and lit upon the rolling, dun-coloured side of the hill, re-kindling the last brightness in the October grass. The rift widened, spilling angry radiance down the slope, and a moving sapphire blazed into life and climbed slowly upward through the bleached and faded green. The blue of her coat had seemed dark and unobtrusive when she had stood at the gate, holding him off with eyes impenetrable as stone; it burned now with the deep fire of the brightest of gentians.

And what was she doing there, in the cleft of brightness between rain and rain, like an apparition, like a portent?

He pulled in to the curve of rutted grass in front of the Wastfield gate, and stopped the car there. He watched her mount, and nursed the small spark of grievance against her jealously, because for some reason it seemed to him suddenly threatened by some vast and obliterating dark that rendered it precious and comforting by contrast.

Westward, the folded hills of Wales receded into leaden cloud, but on the near side of the border the Hallowmount flaunted its single ring of ancient, decrepit trees in an orange-red like the reflected glow of fire. The speck of gentian-blue climbed to the crest, stood erect against the sky for an instant, shrank, vanished. And at the same moment the rent in the clouds closed and sealed again, and the light went out.

The hill was dark, the circle of soft October rain unbroken. He turned the ignition key, and let the Mini roll back over the glistening, pale grass on to the road. Maybe three hours of daylight left, if this could be called daylight, and with luck he could be home in Hampstead soon after dark. His mother would have a special supper waiting for him, his father would probably go so far as to skip his usual Thursday evening bridge in his son’s honour, and more than likely Sybil would drop round with careful casualness about nine o’clock, armed with some borrowed magazines to return, or some knitting patterns for his mother; having, of course, a matter of weeks ago, taken care to inform herself as to when Comerbourne Grammar School kept its half-term, and whether he was coming down by car or by train. She would want to hear all about his new school, about his sixth form and their academic records, and his digs, and all the people he had met, and all the friends he had made, to the point of exhaustion. But if he told her any of the essentials she would be completely lost. How do you interpret a semi-feudal county on the Welsh borders to a daughter of suburbia? Especially when you are yourself a son of suburbia, a townie born and bred, quick but inaccurate of perception, brash, uncertain among these immovable families and seats of primeval habitation, distracted between the sophistication of these elegant border women, active and emancipated, and those dark racial memories of theirs, that mould so much of what they do and say? Sybil had no terms of reference. She would be as irrelevant and lost here as he had been, that first week of term.

Mathematics, thank God, is much the same everywhere, and he was a perfectly competent teacher, he had only to cling firmly to his work for a few weeks and the rest fell readily into place. He knew he could teach, headmasters didn’t have to tell him that. And all things considered, the first half of his first term hadn’t gone badly at all.

The school buildings were old but good, encrusted with new blocks behind, and a shade cramped for parking space, though with a Mini he didn’t have to worry overmuch about that. He hadn’t been prepared to find so many sons of wealthy commuting business-men from the Black Country at school here in the marches, and their lavish standard of living had somewhat daunted him, until he ran his nose unexpectedly into the headmaster’s characteristic notice on the hall board:

‘Will the Sixth Form please refrain from encroaching on the Staff parking ground, as their Jaguars and Bentleys are giving the resident 1955 Fords an inferiority complex.’

That had set him up again in his own esteem. And the long-legged seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds who emerged from the parental cars, in spite of their resplendent transport, were not otherwise hopelessly spoiled, and had a shrewd grasp of the amount of work that would keep them out of trouble, and an equable disposition to produce the requisite effort, with a little over for luck. They seemed to Tom Kenyon at once more mature and developed and more spontaneous and young than the southern product with which he was more familiar, and on occasions, when they were shaken out of their equilibrium by something totally unexpected, alarmingly candid and abrupt. But they were resilient, they recovered their balance with admirable aplomb. Usually they were pulling his leg before he’d realised they no longer needed nursing. They weren’t a bad lot.

Even the staff were easy enough. Even the three women for whom he hadn’t been prepared. Jane Darrill, the junior geographer, could be a bit offhand and you-be-damned when she liked, but of course she was very young, not above twenty-five. Tom was twenty-six himself.

It was Jane who had suggested he should move out to the village of Comerford for living quarters, and put him in touch with the Becks, who had a house too big for them, and an income, on the whole, rather too small.

‘If you’re going to be a countryman,’ said Jane, with her suspiciously private smile, that always made his hackles rise a little in the conviction that she was somehow making fun of him, ‘you might as well go the whole hog and be a proper one. Come and be a borderer, like me. Comerford is the real thing. This dump is rapidly becoming a suburb of Birmingham.’

That was an exaggeration, or perhaps a prophecy. Jane was blessed, or cursed, with an appearance of extreme competence and cheerfulness, round-faced, fair-complexioned, vigorous, pretty enough if she hadn’t filed her brusque manner to an aggressive edge in order to keep the Lower Sixth in healthy awe of her. Sometimes she liked to offset the impression by leaning perversely towards cynicism and gloom.

Tom looked out of the common-room window upon a Comerbourne which appeared to his urban eye small, limited, antique and charming. He could see the tops of the limes in the riverside gardens, a thin ribbon of silver, the balustrade of the nearer bridge over the Comer. A provincial capital of the minor persuasion, still clinging to its weekly country market, still drawing in, to buy and sell, half the housewives and farmwives of a quarter of Wales as well as Midshire itself. Back-streets straight out of the Middle Ages, a few superb Tudor pubs, a dwindling county society more blood-ridden and exclusive than he’d thought possible in the mid-twentieth century, still conscientiously freezing out intruders, and pathetically unaware that its island of privilege had long since become an island of stagnation in a backwater of impotence, and was crumbling away piecemeal from under its large, sensibly-shod feet; and round it and over it, oblivious of it, swarmed the busy, brisk, self-confident rush of the new people, the new powers, business and banking and industry and administration, advancing upon an expanding future, brushing with faint impatience and no ceremony past the petrified remnants of a feudal past.

That was what he saw in Comerbourne; and to tell the truth, the encroachments of the industrial Midlands into the fossilised life of this remote capital rather attracted than repelled him. But he’d never lived in a village, and the idea still had a (probably quite misleading) charm about it. He thought vaguely of country pursuits and country functions, and saw himself adopted into a village society which would surely not be averse to finding a place for a young and presentable male, whatever his origins. He could have the best of both worlds, with Comerbourne only a couple of miles away, near enough to be reached easily when he needed it, far enough away to be easily evaded when he had no need of it. And it’s always a good idea to put at least a couple of miles between yourself and your work in the evenings.

‘What are these Becks like?’ he asked, half in love with the idea but cautious still.

‘Oh, ordinary. Middle-aged, retired, a bit stodgy, maybe. Terribly conscientious, they’ll probably worry about whether they’re doing enough for you. Not amusing, but then you needn’t rely on them for your amusement, need you? Mr Beck used to teach at the Modern until a couple of years ago. He never made it to a headship. Not headmaster material,’ she said rather dryly. Tom Kenyon, confident, clever and ambitious, was obvious headmaster material, and, moreover, knew it very well.

‘He hasn’t got a son here, has he?’ asked Tom sharply, suddenly shaken by the thought of having his landlady’s darling under his feet, with a fond mamma pushing persuasively behind. He wished it back the moment it was out. A silly question. Jane wouldn’t be such a fool as to land him in any such situation, it would be against all her teacher’s instincts, and they were shrewd and effective enough. And blurting out the horrid thought had only exposed himself. But she merely gave him the edge of a deflationary smile, and rattled away half a dozen rock specimens into the back of her table drawer.

‘No sons at all, don’t worry. “He has but one daughter, an uncommon handsome gel”.’

‘Go on!’ He wasn’t particularly interested, but he produced the spark in the eye and the sharpening glow of attention that was demanded of him, and straightened his tie with exaggeratedly fatuous care. ‘How old?’

‘Eighteen, I think! She was seventeen last spring, anyhow, when the row—’ She frowned and swallowed the word, shoving away papers; but he hadn’t been listening closely enough to demand or even miss the rest of the sentence.

‘Eighteen, and uncommon handsome! That does it! They won’t look at me, they’ll be after some old gorgon of a maiden aunt for a lodger.’

Jane turned her fashionable shock-head of mangled brown hair and grinned at him derisively. ‘Come off it!’ she said. ‘You’re not that dangerous.’ It had been a joke, and all that, but she needn’t have sounded so crushingly sure of herself. Girls had never given him much trouble, except by clinging too long and tightly, and at the wrong times.

‘What’s her name?’ he asked.

‘Annet.’

‘Not Annette?’

‘Not Annette. Just Annet. Plain Annet.’

‘What’s plain about it? Annet Beck. That’s a witch’s name.’

‘Annet is a witch, I shouldn’t wonder,’ Jane looked thoughtfully back into the past again, and refrained from calling attention to what she saw. Witch or not, neither of them was greatly concerned with Annet; not then. ‘Go and take a look at the place, anyhow,’ said Jane, offhand as usual. ‘If you don’t like the look of the border solitude, you needn’t take it any further.’

And he had gone, and he had taken the recommended look at Comerford. Along the riverside road, through coppices scarlet and gold with autumn, and thinning to filigree; out of sight and memory of the town, between farms rising gently from water-meadows to stubble to heath pasture, over undulations of open ground purple with heather, and down to the river again.

The village closed in its ford from either bank, a compact huddle of old houses, considerably larger than he had expected, and comparatively sophisticated, with beautifully converted cottages and elegant gardens on its fringes that told plainly of pioneering commuters or wealthy retired business people in possession. The town had, in fact, reached Comerford, it was almost a small town itself. He looked at it, and was disappointed. But when he lifted his eyes to look over it, and saw the surging animal backs of the enfolding hills, time ran backwards over his head like silk unwinding from a dropped spool.

Ridge beyond ridge, receding into pallor and mist, filmed over with the oblique beams of light splayed from behind broken copper cloud, Wales withdrew into fine rain, while England lay in quivering, cool sunlight.

Meadows and dark, low hedges climbed the slopes. Away on the dwindling flank of the hog-back to northwestward the horizontal scoring of ancient mine levels showed plainly. Lead, probably, worked out long since, or at any rate long since abandoned. Round the crest of the same hill the unquestionable green earthworks of an Iron Age fort, crisp and new-looking as though it had been moulded only yesterday. The long green heavings of turf, the deep ditches, the few broken, black mine-chimneys and the gunmetal-coloured heaps of old spoil nestled together without conflict, and the village with its smart new façades and its congealing shopping streets settled comfortably in the lee of the scratched Roman workings, and thought no wrong. All time was relative here; or perhaps all time was contemporaneous. Nothing that was native was alien or uncanny here, though it came from the pre-dawn twilight before man stood upright and walked.

He drove through Comerford, village or town, whatever it was, and the hills melted and reassembled constantly as he drove, drawn back like filmy green curtains to uncover further recessions of crest beyond crest. Arthur Beck’s house was beyond, shaken loose from the last hand-hold of the village itself, a quarter of a mile along a narrow but metalled road that served a succession of border farms. On his right the river narrowed to a trickle of trout-stream in its flat meadows along the valley floor, winding bewilderingly, the hills grown brown and fawn with bleached grass and sedge and coarse heather behind. On his left a long, bare ridge of hill crowded the road implacably nearer and nearer to Wales. A ring of gnarled, half-naked trees, by their common age and their regular arrangement clearly planted by man, showed like a top-knot on the crest. One outcrop of rock broke the blonde turf halfway up, another had shown for a few moments over the comb of the ridge, a little apart from the trees on the summit. Sheep-paths, trampled out daintily over centuries by ancestors of these handsome, fearless hill-sheep he was just learning to know for Cluns and Kerrys, traced necklets round the slopes, level above level like the courses of a step-pyramid.

For the first time he was driving by the Hallowmount. The mid-afternoon sun was on the entire barren, rustling, pale brown slope of it, and yet he felt something of shadow and age and silence like a coolness cutting him off from the sun, not unpleasantly, not threateningly, rather as if he was naturally excluded from what embraced all other creatures here. He was the alien, not resented, not menaced, simply not belonging. And suddenly he was aware of the quietness and the permanence of this utter solitude, which seemed unpopulated, and yet had surely been inhabited ever since men began to tame beasts, before the first experimental grass-seeds were ever deliberately sown, before the first stone scratched the earth, and the developing tools were smoothed to a rich polish in the manipulating hands of the first artisans.

A turn to the right, just before the track plunged into half-grown plantations of conifers, brought him down towards the river again, past the gate of Wastfield farm, through a small coppice to Arthur Beck’s gate at the end of the farm wall.

There it was: Fairford. An old house, or rather a new house made from two old stone cottages, mellow, amber-coloured stone from higher up the valley. A walled garden in the inevitable autumn chaos, a glimpse of rather ragged lawn, a tangle of trees too big for a garden, but beautiful. Why should he care that the leaves would be a nuisance, tread into a decaying mush all over the paths, and silt down into a rotten cement in the guttering? He wouldn’t have to maintain the place; all he would have to do would be live in it and enjoy it. He imagined the summer here, and he was enchanted. Even the name wasn’t an affectation, there was a fair ford only fifty yards on, where the river poured in a smooth silvery sheet above clear beds of amber and agate pebbles, bright as jewels in the sun. The masonry of the original cottages looked – how old? – three centuries at least. The place had probably been Fairford ever since the advance guard of the Danes clawed a toehold on the Welsh bank of the river here, only to be rolled back fifty miles into England, and never thrust so far again.

He was almost sure then that he would come and lodge here; but some instinct of caution and perversity turned him back from opening the gate then and advancing to the massy door. He parked the car by the open grass along the riverside instead, and went for a long walk up the flank of the hill until it was time to drive back into Comerbourne.

‘Not bad,’ he said to Jane, in the common-room during the next free period they shared, ‘but I don’t know. All right in the summer, but a bit back-of-beyond for a bad winter, I should say. You could get snowed-up there for weeks.’

‘They ought to charge you extra for that as an amenity,’ said Jane, bitterly contemplating some gem in the homework of Four B, who were not her brightest form. ‘Imagine having a cast-iron alibi for contracting out of this madhouse for weeks at a time! But don’t kid yourself, my boy. They kept that road open even in 1947. The Wastfield tractors see to that. Snow or no snow, nobody gets away with anything around here.’

She didn’t ask him what he thought of doing, or he might, even then, have gone off in the opposite direction, sure that everybody has an angle, and she couldn’t be totally disinterested. She lived in Comerford herself, he knew that, and hadn’t failed to allow for one obvious possibility. But she showed no personal interest in him; and even if she was biding her time she wouldn’t find him easy to keep tabs on, with her family’s cottage a quarter of a mile this side the village, and Fairford well out on the opposite side. He’d had plenty of practice in evading girls he didn’t want to see, as well as in cornering those he did. No, he needn’t worry about Jane.

So he went back to Fairford on the Saturday afternoon. The westering sun smiled on him all the way along that journey back into pre-history, confirming his will to stay. By the time he drove back the dusk had closed on the Hallowmount, and black clouds covered the hills of Wales; a chill wind drove up the valley, crying in the new plantation. And he might have changed his mind, even then, if he hadn’t been already lost from the moment when he rattled the knocker at Fairford, and listened to the rapid, light footsteps within as someone came to open the door to him.

He was lost, then and for ever; because it was Annet who opened the door.

There is a kind of beauty that produces wolf-whistles, and another kind of beauty that creates silence all about it, taking the voices out of men’s mouths and the breath out of their throats. Nobody but Annet had ever struck Tom Kenyon dumb. He lived in the same house with her, he’d been rubbing shoulders with her now almost daily for half a term, and still he went softly for awe of her, and the words that would have come to him so glibly with a girl who meant nothing to him ebbed away clean out of mind when he was face to face with this girl. And yet why? She was flesh and blood like anyone else. Wasn’t she?

(But why, why should she be climbing the Hallowmount in the rain and the murk in a dank October twilight? Distant and strange and elusive as she was, what could draw her up there at such an hour of such a day?)

She was not much above middle height for her eighteen years, but so slender that she looked tall, and taller still because of the lofty way she carried her small head, tilted a little back to let the great, soft masses of her hair fall back from her face. When she wanted to hide she sat with head bent, and the twin black curtains, blue-black, burnished, smooth and heavy, drew protective shadows over her face. She wore it cut in a long bob, not quite to her shoulders, uncurled, uncoloured, unfashionable, parted over her left temple, the ends curving under to touch her neck. He never saw her play with it; the most she ever did was lift a hand to thrust it back out of her way; and yet every gleaming hair clung to the sheaf as threads of silk cling, alive and vital, and even after streaming in the wind the heavy coils flowed back massively like water into their constant order and repose.

Between the wings of this resplendent helmet her face was oval, delicate and still, with fine bones that impressed their pure, taut shapes through the creamy flesh. Passionate, eloquent bones, if the envelope that enclosed them had not imposed its own ivory silence upon them. There was little red in her face, and yet she was not pale; when he saw her first she had the gloss of the summer still upon her, and was tinted like honey. Her mouth was grave and full, often sullen, often sad, quick to smile, but never at any joke he could share, or any pleasure he could afford her. And her eyes were the deep, brilliant, burning blue the sun had just found in her coat on the crest of the Hallowmount, the blue of the darkest gentians, between blue-black lashes as dark as her hair.

She had showed him the room, and he had taken the room, hardly aware of its pleasant furnishings, seeing only the movement of her hand as she opened the door, and the long, courteous, unsmiling blue stare that had never wavered as she waited for him to speak. Her own voice was deep and quiet, and only now did he realise how few words he had ever heard it speak, to him or to anyone. She moved like a true eighteen-year-old, with a rapid, coltish grace. What she did about the house was done well and ungrudgingly, but with a certain impatience and a certain resignation, as though she were making ritual gestures which she knew to be indispensable, but in the efficacy of which she did not believe.

And her attendance on him was of the same kind; it hurt and bewildered him to know it, but he could not choose but know.

For him life in Fairford had only gradually taken shape as a frame for Annet, and all the kaleidoscope of other faces that peopled his new world was only a galaxy in attendance upon her. Arthur Beck, handsome in a feeble, pedantic way, wisps of thin hair carefully arranged over his high crown, glasses askew on his precipitous nose, bore about with him always an air of vague and puzzled disappointment, and a precarious and occasionally pompous dignity. Ageing people shouldn’t have children, when they were doomed to be always so hopelessly far from them. Even the mother must have been nearly forty at the time. Who can jump clean over forty years?

Mrs Beck, solider and more decisive than her husband, was one of the plainest women Tom had ever seen, and yet revealed a startling echo of Annet’s beauty sometimes in a look or a movement. Dark hair without lustre, waved crisply and immovably, dark blue eyes faded into a dull greyish colour, like blue denim after a lifetime of washing, an anxious face, kind but troubled, a flat, practical voice.

Dull, impenetrable people, at least to a newcomer with more self-assurance than patience. And that incredible bud of their age flowered with face turned away from them, as though her sun had always risen elsewhere.

The children of ageing marriages, so he had heard, are often difficult and strange, like deprived children; in a sense they are deprived, a lost generation cuts them off from their roots, they have grandparents for parents. These were not even young grandparents at heart, but dim, discouraged and old. Sometimes gleams of wistful scholarship showed in Beck, and brought a momentary eagerness back to his face. Mrs Beck kept up with village society, and dressed like a county gentlewoman, but for God’s sake, what good was that when county gentlewomen were themselves a generation out of date, living anachronisms, museum pieces even here, where the past, the genuine past, was as real and valid as tomorrow?

At first he had thought, with his usual healthy confidence in his own charms, that he would bring a breath of fresh air into Annet’s enclosed life, and provide her with the young company she needed. But in a week or two he had found that she was, in fact, almost never in, and appeared to have gallingly little need of him. She had a job that took her away during the day; she acted as secretary to Mrs Blacklock at Cwm Hall, a privilege which gave great satisfaction to her mother, if she herself accepted it without noticeable emotion. The lady needed a secretary, for she ran, it seemed to Tom, everything in sight, every local society, every committee, every charity, every social event. Nothing could take place in and around Comerford without Regina’s blessing. Her patronage of Annet, therefore, was balm to Mrs Beck’s heart. Annet, as Tom heard from various sources – but never from Annet! – would have liked to uproot herself from this backwater and go and get a job in London, but the Becks were terrified to let her, and stubbornly refused to consent. Maybe because they knew they were hopelessly out of touch with her, and were afraid to let her out of their sight; maybe because she was their ewe Iamb, and they couldn’t bear to part with her. She was safe with Mrs Blacklock. Regina was inordinately careful and kind. Regina never let her come home alone if she was at all late, but sent her in the car. Regina wouldn’t let her strike up any undesirable acquaintances, Regina saw to it that she knew everyone who was presentable and of good repute.

For God’s sake, thought Tom impotently, she was eighteen, wasn’t she? And intelligent and capable, or the Blacklocks wouldn’t have kept her. And did she behave as if she needed a chaperone?

She lived a busy enough life. Choir practice on Friday nights, dances in Comerbourne on Saturdays, or cinemas, and Myra Gibbons from Wastfield usually went with her. Their escorts to dances were vetted carefully; Mrs Beck had old-fashioned notions. But the sorry fact remained that Annet had no need of Tom Kenyon. There wasn’t a young man in Comerford who hadn’t at some time paid tentative court to her. There wasn’t a young man in Comerford who had got further with her than he found himself getting.

Remote, alien and beautiful, Annet floated upon the tide of events, submitted to parental control without comment or protest, and kept her own secrets. He didn’t know her at all; he never would.

The rest revolved about her. They had made him welcome, adopted him readily into their activities, found him a part to play; more than she ever had. Yet he saw them only by her light, at least those nearest to her: the Blacklocks, the vicar with his hearty voice and his uncertain, deprecating eyes, the Gibbons family, all the population of Fairford. Lucky for him that some of the denizens of his Sixth lived in Comerford, and their parents opened their doors to him readily: Miles Mallindine’s young, modern parents, Dominic Felse’s policeman father and pretty, shrewd, amusing mother. Policeman was the wrong term, strictly speaking; George Felse was a Detective-Inspector in the Midshire CID, recently promoted from Detective-Sergeant. The progeny of these pleasant couples tolerated him and kept their lordly distance, behaving with princely punctilio if they were left to entertain him; the parents welcomed him and never worried him. Privately they laughed a little, affectionately, at their own sons. Tom found them a pleasure and a relief. And they delivered him, at least, from feeling himself dependent upon Annet’s charity, when he had dreamed of extending to her the largesse of his own.

He drove through the dim rain, and he saw all the procession of new faces, one by one, passing before him. But always Annet, always Annet. And always with gentian eyes fixed ahead, and face turned away from him.

Eve Mallindine had given him a lift once, when the Mini was in the garage for servicing, and run him into town from the Comerford bus-stop. It was pure chance that he had mentioned Annet to her; if anything connected with Annet could be called chance. More probably he was so full of her that he couldn’t keep her name out of his mouth. Had he even betrayed that he was jealous of the young men who danced with her at the Saturday hops in town, and resented her mother’s prim care of her? He was horribly afraid he might have done. Well for him it was Mrs Malltndine. Everything a sixth-former’s mother should be, young and sophisticated and pretty, with a twinkle in her artfully-blue-shadowed eyes, and legs like flappers used to have before the fad for impossible shoes spoiled their gait and made them the same thickness from ankle to knee. Incidentally, she wore stiletto heels herself. How did she manage to walk like a proud filly in them? And how on earth did she drive so well?

She looked along her shoulder at him briefly, and returned her golden-brown eyes to the road ahead. She pondered for a moment, and then she said: ‘I’d better tell you, Tom. Do you mind if I call you Tom? After all, you’re almost in loco parentis to my brat.’

He hadn’t minded. He couldn’t remember when he’d minded anything less. Just sitting beside her was enough to make him feel a few inches taller, and he needed every lift he could get, when he remembered Annet.

‘Barbara Beck isn’t so mad as she looks to you,’ said Eve Mallindine, with a wry little smile. ‘Annet nearly made a run for it, early last spring. With my blessed hopeful. And don’t you dare let him know I told you, or I’ll wring your neck. But you wouldn’t, you’re not the kind. Excuse a mother’s partiality. I wouldn’t like him hurt. And if I’d been seventeen and male, I’d have jumped at the chance, too. They didn’t get any farther than Comerbourne station. Bill got wind of it, somehow – I never asked him how, I was far too busy pretending everything was normal and I hadn’t noticed the row going on. Bill took Annet home, and then brought the pup back and shut himself in the bedroom with him. I’m sure they both behaved with the greatest dignity – not even a raised voice between ’em! Miles was past seventeen, and nearly six feet high, and so damned grown-up – Well, you know him! Poor Bill must have felt at a hopeless disadvantage – if he hadn’t been in a flaming temper. I don’t know which of them I was sorriest for. I kept out of it, and made a cheese souffle. It seemed the most sensible thing to do, they were both crazy about my cheese souffles, and even a brokenhearted lover has to eat.’ She cast a glance at him again, even more briefly, and grinned. ‘They argued for an hour, and neither would give an inch. Poor darlings, they’re so alike. Don’t you think so?’

He didn’t. He saw Miles Mallindine every time he looked at her. Miles wasn’t the most unattractive member of the Upper Sixth, not by a long way. But all he said was, somewhat constrainedly: ‘Where were they heading?’

‘They had one-way tickets for London. Poor lambs, they were twenty minutes early for the train. A mistake! The trouble I had, getting Miles thawed out after that catastrophe. It’s awfully difficult, you know, Tom, for a seventeen-year-old to believe one doesn’t blame him. But I didn’t. Would you? You’ve seen Annet.’

‘No,’ he said; with difficulty, but it sounded all right. ‘No, I wouldn’t blame him.’

‘Good for you, Tom, I knew you were human. But poor Bill has a social conscience, you see. I only have a human one. They made each other pretty sore. Bill felt Miles ought to come right out and confide in him. And Miles wouldn’t. They ate the souffle, though,’ she added comfortably, rightly recollecting this as reassurance that her menfolk were not seriously disabled, physically or emotionally. ‘And to tell the truth, I laced the coffee. It seemed a good thing to do.’

Was he allowed to ask questions? And if so, how far could he go? There must be a limit, and the most interesting questions probably stepped well over it. Such as: why? Why should Miles find it necessary to plan a runaway affair with Annet? Many escorts a good deal less presentable were allowed to take the girl about, provided they called for her respectably at the house, and were vetted and found reliable. The Becks wouldn’t have frozen out a good-looking boy with wealthy parents, excellent prospects, and charm enough, when he pleased, to call the bird from the tree. If he’d wanted Annet, he had only to convince the girl, her parents would certainly have smiled upon him from the beginning. So why? Why run? Apparently there was no question of previous misbehaviour, no girl-in-trouble complications that made a getaway and a quick marriage desirable.

‘It’s all blown over now, of course,’ said Eve, slowing at the first traffic lights on the edge of Comerbourne. ‘Nobody else ever treated it as more than a romantic escapade. But Mrs Beck still thinks Miles planned her poor girl’s ruin. I thought I’d better tell you how the land lay, you might feel a bit baffled if it came up out of the blue.’

Somehow it was too late by then for the ‘why’ question. All he could say was: ‘And is he still – I mean, has he got over her by now?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t ask him. What he wants to tell he’ll tell, what he doesn’t nobody can make him. Me, I don’t try. But getting over Annet might be quite an arduous convalescence, don’t you think so?’

‘It well might,’ said Tom, with brittle care. She was a dangerous woman, she might see all too readily that Miles wasn’t the only chronic case.

‘Ah, well,’ she said cheerfully, putting her foot down as the orange changed to green, ‘he’ll be going up to Queens’ next year, and he’ll have more than enough to keep him busy. I hear he’s coming camping with you next weekend. Thirty juniors to ride herd on, he says. Heaven help you all!’

‘We’ll survive,’ said Tom. If you were the youngest male member of staff, and owned an anorak and a pair of clinkered boots, you were a sitter for all the outdoor assignments, and it was your bounden duty to look martyred and moan about it. No matter how much you actually enjoyed skippering a party of boys up a mountain or under canvas, you could never admit it. ‘Drop me along here by Cooks’, would you? I’ve got to see about some maps I ordered.’

And as he got out of the car and leaned to offer thanks for his ride, glad to be seen with her, complemented by the greetings he shared with her, the amazing woman smiled up at him confidently and calmly, and said: ‘You won’t take them on the Hallowmount, will you?’

She wasn’t even going to wait for an answer, so completely did she trust him to accept and understand what she had said. She gave him a little wave of her hand, and expected him to withdraw head and hand and close the door; and when he didn’t, she sat looking up at him with a quizzical, slightly surprised smile, no doubt thinking him as endearingly male and stupid as her own pig-headed pair.

‘Not take them on the Hallowmount?’ said Tom cautiously, to be sure he had not mistaken her.

‘No – but naturally you wouldn’t. Silly of me!’

‘Why not, though? Or is that a stupid question? And why naturally not?’ He had been feeling so close to her, so comfortable with her, and suddenly he felt alien and out of his depth. There she sat, in her amber-and-bracken autumn suit that wouldn’t have looked abashed in Bond Street, with her smooth brown beehive of hair and her long, elegant legs and incredibly fragile and impractical shoes, as modern as tomorrow, as secure and confident as money and education and travel and native temperament could make her; and without mystery or constraint, as though she were reminding her husband to lock the garage door, she warned him off from taking his week-end camp on the Hallowmount.

‘Oh, we just wouldn’t,’ she said, vaguely smiling, eyes wondering at him a little, but making allowances for him, too, as the incomer, the novice in these parts. ‘We just don’t. I wouldn’t worry too much myself, but some of their mothers might. You weren’t thinking of going there, were you?’

‘Well, no, I wasn’t. Too exposed, anyhow, for October. I was thinking of taking them up between the Westlyns.’

‘Good! Fine!’ said Eve Mallindine, satisfied, and slammed the door shut. She looked up and smiled at him through the open window. ‘No need to go yelling for trouble, is there?’ she said serenely, and shot away up Castle Wylde before the lights at the Cross could change colour again.

And he had not taken them on the Hallowmount. Once, he suspected – and the glance back at himself when younger was revealing – he would have gone there on principle, having been warned to keep away. Not now. Besides, she hadn’t pressed him, hadn’t exactly warned him off. She’d merely indicated to him that the plate was hot, so that he shouldn’t burn his fingers. She’d taken it for granted that no more was necessary where a sane and sensible adult was concerned. And whether it could be considered a sign of good sense and maturity or not, he hadn’t taken them on the Hallowmount.

But in the gathering dark over the remnants of the fire, up there in the shelter between the ridges of the Westlyns, with one ear cocked for sounds of forbidden horseplay from the Three B tents, he had turned his head to stare thoughtfully at the distant ridge of the Hallowmount, with its top-knot of trees and rocks black against the milky spaces between the stars. And he had asked the son what he had never had time to ask the mother.

‘How did it get its name – the Hallowmount? And why is it taken for granted one doesn’t take boys camping there?’

‘Is it?’ said Miles vaguely, flat on his back on a spread ground-sheet, with the faint glow of the fire falling aslant across his smooth, high-boned cheek and broad forehead. Mild wonder stirred in his tone and recalled Eve’s look and voice, but he wasn’t paying very much attention. ‘I suppose it would be, come to think of it. They wouldn’t mind by daylight, but at night they’d probably think it wasn’t the thing to do. On the principle that you never know, you know.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Tom. ‘You tell me. What about the name, for instance?’

‘I don’t think anybody knows much about the name, to be honest, but a lot of them will tell you they do. It goes back into pre-history—’

‘Or thereabouts,’ said Dominic Felse dubiously, demurring at such imprecision in his friend.

‘Let’s not argue about a few hundred years. Anyhow, whenever it was, we don’t know how it arose. Something not quite canny. But all this region and its inhabitants are a bit uncanny, I suppose.’ He opened his eyes wide at the sky and sat up, feeling it, perhaps, hardly dignified to conduct a discussion from the supine position. ‘Take the old lead mines,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘There couldn’t be anything more practical, but there couldn’t be anything more haunted, either. We have knockers – like in the Cornish tin mines. And Wild Edric’s down there, too, with his fairy wife Godda. And half a dozen others, for all we know. It’s the same with the Hallowmount. Some say it’s “hallow” because it was holy, a place of sacrificial mysteries in the pre-Christian cults. And some say it’s really “hollow,” and not for nothing. They say people have stumbled on the way inside sometimes, and vanished.’

‘Or come back years later,’ said Dominic helpfully, ‘like Kilmeny, with no memory of the time between, and as young as when they disappeared.’

‘Oh, that’s common to every country in Europe,’ said Tom, disappointed. ‘Nearly every hill that has a striking shape or has been the site of occupation from very early times gets that tale attached to it. Are you sure King Arthur isn’t down there, waiting for somebody to blow a horn and wake him up?’

‘No, sir, we use Wild Edric instead round these parts, we don’t need any other saviours.’ That was Milvers, the third of his only-slightly-dragooned sixth-form volunteers for this week-end chore. A clever one, Milvers, stuffed with the history and legends of the borders, all the more because he was not himself a borderer. He might be able to tell more than Miles Mallindine about the documentation of the Hallowmount; but nothing he could say would be as revealing, as perfectly direct and simple as Miles’s mild: ‘All this region and its inhabitants are a bit uncanny, I suppose.’ Without pretensions and without reluctance he had included himself in that verdict, in just the same way as his mother dealt herself in. They found nothing incongruous in having one foot in the twentieth century and one in the roots of time.

‘And some say a witch-coven used to meet there,’ said Milvers, warming to the assignment. ‘Did you know that outcrop of rock is known locally as the Altar?’

He hadn’t known, but it didn’t surprise him. Just a place of acquired ill-omen, after all, an accumulation of ordinary superstitions.

‘So that’s it,’ he said. ‘Just bad medicine.’

‘Oh, no, not really. Not bad. Any more than lightning’s good or bad. Or fire. Or the dead.’ Miles straightened and quivered to the sudden energy of his own thoughts, the thick brown lashes rolling back widely from bright, intent eyes. ‘Did somebody tell you it was bad luck, or something?’

Tom told him, in a strictly edited version, about that lift into town. ‘Your mother evidently thought it was a place to fight shy of. I suppose that’s the legacy of the witches.’

‘I don’t believe there ever were any witches. Just that chain of lives going back so unbelievably far, and a kind of impress left from them all—’ He couldn’t find the words he wanted, and wouldn’t descend to substitutes; he shut his arms helplessly round his knees, and rocked and scowled, still mining within his mind for the means of fluency. When not stirred, he could be a little lazy; it was an effort getting into gear.

‘Then why should everyone be afraid of it?’

Dominic looked at Miles, and Miles looked at Dominic. Tom had seen just such exchanges pass before, and the two mute faces relax in absolute agreement, as now. After that it was always a toss-up which of them would do the talking, but it was a certainty he would be talking for both.

‘We’re not afraid,’ said Miles, carefully and kindly keeping his smile in check. ‘Why should we be? We were born here. We’re in the chain, we don’t have to be afraid of it. We belong to it.’

‘In awe of it, then.’

They considered that with one more bright and rapid glance, and as one man accepted it.

‘Oh, in awe, yes, but that’s quite another thing, isn’t it?’

‘Is it so far from being afraid?’ said Tom, unconvinced.

Miles scrambled to his knees, leaning over the faint glow of the fire; in a little while now they would have to smother it for the night. ‘When my mother drove you into town, did she get caught at the lights by the technical college?’

‘Yes, I remember they were at red.’ He saw no connection yet, but here again was the twentieth century taking hands simply and naturally with the primeval darkness, and he felt the continuity tightening, and his palms pricked with the foreknowledge of a revelation that would leave him mute.

‘And was my mother afraid?’

Patiently, willing to learn – and wasn’t that something new for him, too? – Tom said: ‘Of course not.’

‘No, sir, of course not. You’re not afraid of traffic lights at red, it would be silly, wouldn’t it? But you don’t drive through them, either – do you?’

And he hadn’t been able to pin any of them down more precisely than that, until Jane Darrill handed him over to the mercies of the Archaeological Society. Basely and deliberately, as it turned out, for she must have known very well that once they had received him as an enquirer they wouldn’t let him escape until he had imbibed every word that existed in manuscript or print about the Hallowmount. They wrangled among themselves, but they spared him nothing.

Well, he’d asked for it! The vicar primed him with the parish records, and dragged him along to Miss Winslow, who kept the local archives, and Miss Winslow in turn hustled them both into the damp, dark but lovely splendours of Cwm Hall, which was middle Elizabethan black-and-white, and excellent of its period.

Regina Blacklock was president of the Archaeological Society as of most such bodies, and Peter Blacklock functioned as usual, good-humouredly and resignedly, as secretary and her dutiful echo. The weight of birth and position and money was all on her side, it was rather overdoing things that she should also have so strong and decisive a character. Who could stand against her? She was an authority on everything to do with Comerford and district; where the folklore of the borders was concerned, what she said went. She poured details over Tom’s head in a merciless stream, buried him under evidence of the Druidic goings-on which had once enlivened the Hallowmount on midsummer night and at the solstices. The vicar, pink with enthusiasm, acted as chorus whenever she drew breath. Devotees both, and no need to suspect that their passion was anything but genuine. But somehow Miles had been more convincing in his vagueness, and acceptance, and serenity.

‘You must go to the Borough Library, Mr Kenyon,’ said Regina, radiant with helpfulness and ardour, ‘you really must. I’ll telephone Mr Carling in the morning and tell him to expect you, and he’ll have the Welsh chronicles ready for you whenever you like to call him and arrange a visit. And he has the aerial photographs of the Iron Age Fort – Maeldun’s Ring, you know, the one on Cleave. You should look at those, they’re a revelation. Peter has a few here, but not all. Peter, darling, where are those enlargements now?’

And Peter darling brought them. Blessedly he brought a large whisky and soda in the other hand, and a small, mild, rueful smile that warmed his long, rather tired face into a very acceptable sympathy. A tall, slender, quiet man, of spare, gentle movements and thoughtful face. Goodlooking, too, in a somewhat disconsolate way, and even his mournfulness enlivened now and then by fleeting gleams of humour, affectionate when his eye dwelt upon his formidable wife, but satirical, too. They appeared to understand each other very well, but it was inevitable that she should be the one on top, since she was the last of the Wayne-Morgans, and proprietress of half this valley and one flank of the Hallowmount. Peter Blacklock had been a local solicitor by profession, though he didn’t practise now, being fully employed in running his wife’s estates, and making, as everyone agreed, a conscientious job of it.

How old would they be? Forty-five maybe. Not more than a year or two between them, and it could be either way. She was a very striking woman, if only she wouldn’t work so hard at it; but that tremendous energy had to go somewhere, and if there were only small channels at hand to receive it they were bound to get overcharged. She expounded the history of the border as if it was the future of man. Eve Mallindine wouldn’t have thought her forebears anything particular to shout about.

How well he remembered that evening. Regina talked with passion, leaning towards him across the deep, blonde sheepskin rug; a big woman, red-haired but greying a little, interesting bands of silver in the short, russet hair; a broad, rather highly-coloured, energetic face, smooth and blonde, ripe blue eyes, arched brows plucked rather too thinly; a plump, full, firm body in good country tweeds. And Peter Blacklock in his elderly, leathery-elbowed sports jacket and Bedford cords, comfortable and distinguished, as though he had been born to the game. And the vicar, a contemporary, hard and athletic in body, eager and juvenile in mind, genuine echo to Mrs Blacklock’s full song. There were no pretences here, these were the real people. Tom had never known such, and bludgeoned as he was, he could not fail to be fascinated by them.

And in the background, of course, distant, indifferent and aware, but as though her soul remained absent, Annet. Working a little late that night, as she sometimes did, bored, probably, with them all, waiting to go home. Large-eyed, motionless of face, thinking of God knew what, she watched them all and was herself so withdrawn that she might have been in another world. The heavy, soft curve of her hair shadowing her face was like the undulation of one of the cords that held the world in balance. The whisky had been so sympathetically large that it affected his vision, and endowed her with, or perhaps only uncovered in her, cosmic significances.

‘In the seventeenth century,’ said the vicar, glowing with ardour, ‘we’re told there was a witch-coven in these parts that used to meet on the hill-top.’ His voice sounded somehow light-weight and breathless, emerging from that big, lean, shapely body. I’ll bet he was a Rugby blue, thought Tom inconsequently, and felt a small shock again at the uncertainty and shallowness of the face. For all his regular features, he looked more like a sixth-form schoolboy than sixth-form schoolboys themselves do nowadays. And why should he be so anxious to get in his Black Mass and his coven and his devil? But of course, he had, in a way, a vested interest in these blasphemies. Where would his profession be without them?

‘Coven, nonsense!’ said Regina roundly. “There isn’t a particle of evidence for that tale, and I don’t believe a word of it.’

‘But how can you dismiss Hayley’s diary so lightly? One of my predecessors in office, Mr Kenyon, the incumbent in the mid-seventeenth century, left a very circumstantial journal—’

‘Your predecessor was a demented witch-hunter,’ objected Regina firmly. ‘He left a reputation, as well as a journal, and personally I think I’d rather be called a witch than the things some of his contemporaries called him. By all accounts he’d have had half the village searched and hanged if he’d had his way, but luckily the local justices knew him too well, and were pretty easygoing country fellows themselves, so he didn’t do much damage. But don’t quote him as evidence! No, Mr Kenyon,’ she said, fixing Tom with a smiling but authoritative blue eye, ‘the occasional people who strayed into fairyland, or limbo, or whatever is inside magic mountains, I’ll stand for. I don’t mean they necessarily happened, these Rip-Van-Winkle vanishings, but I do accept that people here believed they happened. But witches, no! There never have been and there never will be any witches on the Hallowmount!’

And that was the sum of what he had got out of the evening, that and the fifteen minutes of unbelievable anguish and bliss on the way home, with Annet silent beside him in the passenger seat. That was the night he began to realise fully that this was different, that he couldn’t make use of it and wasn’t capable of disentangling himself from it; that he would never get over her, and never again be as he had been before he had known her. What he had thought to be a mild infatuation, only a little more serious than half a dozen others he had lived through and exploited, had grown and deepened out of knowledge, until it filled all his world with its new sensitivity, inordinately painful and disturbing. Annet was like that. He should have known at sight of her. But at sight of her it had already been too late to back away.

And then this afternoon, half-term Thursday. He had had a free last period, and got away early to pick up his case and set out on the drive home; and as he slid out of the car at the gate Annet had come out in her dark-blue coat, a nylon rain-scarf over her hair, three letters in her hand. At sight of him she had checked and recoiled very slightly, and the kind, careful, palpable veil of withdrawal had closed over her face. She knew his wants, and was sorry; she did not want him, and was a little sorry for that, too, or so it seemed to him. If she had not liked him she would not have troubled to evade him, she would not have shrunk from so small an encounter; but she liked him, and preferred not to have to remind him at every touch that she had nothing to give him that could ever satisfy him.

‘You’ll get wet,’ he said fatuously, ‘it’s coming on to rain. Let me take them for you.’

‘I don’t mind,’ she said. ‘I want a breath of air, I don’t mind the rain.’

‘I’ll run you down, then, at least let me do that.’

‘Thank you, but no, please don’t. I just want to walk.’ She saw the next plea already quivering on his lips, and staved it off rapidly and gently. ‘Alone,’ she said, the deep voice making it an apology and an entreaty, while her eyes stood him off with the blue brilliance of lapis lazuli in an inlaid Egyptian head.

‘I’m sorry!’ she said. ‘Don’t be hurt. I should only be horribly unsociable if you did come, and I’d rather not.’

She had even gone to the trouble to find several small, kind things to say to him, she who had no small-talk, softening her enforced rejection of him – and why had he forced it? – with reminders of his family waiting at home, of the long journey before him, and the advisability of making an early start and taking advantage of the remaining daylight to get as far as the Ml. And he had followed her lead gratefully, glad to return to firmer ground.

‘Your people must be looking forward so much to having you home again.’

He said he supposed they probably were. What could he say?

‘Have a pleasant journey! And a nice week-end!’

‘Thank you! And you, too. See you on Tuesday evening, then. Good-bye, Annet!’

‘Good-bye!’

She went up the lane towards the postbox outside the Wastfield gate. He went into the house, drank a hasty cup of tea, finished the packing of his single case, and set off again in the Mini towards Comerford.

And chancing to lift his eyes to the long, rain-dimmed hog-back of the Hallowmount as he drove, just as the clouds parted and the quivering spear of light transfixed it, he saw the moving sapphire that was Annet climb the hillside and vanish over the crest.