The Living and the Dead in Winsford

5

It was about three o’clock in the afternoon, before daylight had deteriorated too much, that we set out on our first longish walk over the moor.

By ‘longish’ I mean in this connection just under two hours. I had bought various maps and descriptions of walks at the antiquarian bookshop in Dulverton, but on this occasion I didn’t bother to plan a particular route. I just felt the need to start becoming acquainted with the moor before darkness fell — and Castor was evidently of the same opinion as he immediately took the lead, always a sign that he thinks a walk is going to be interesting and worth doing.

We set off from Darne Lodge, I climbed and he jumped over the stone wall, and then we followed one of the several well-worn paths heading westwards. It was extremely muddy in places, but I was wearing my splendid new walking shoes bought in Queensway, Bayswater, three days ago, and Castor is never put out if the ground is a bit on the sticky side. What he can’t cope with is when the going is hard and littered with sharp stones — just like me, in a figurative sense.

We had only walked a few hundred metres when we came to something marked on the maps as a sight worth seeing — the so-called Caratacus monument: a small shelter protecting a memorial stone from Roman times. The inscription is illegible to the uninitiated, but the stone is thought to have been raised to honour a local chieftain who led valiant resistance against the superior occupying forces.

We continued southwards, parallel with the Dulverton road even though we only had occasional glimpses of it. I thought somewhat casually about the concept of ‘resistance’, then and now. Superiority and inferiority, male and female: but I soon lost the thread — it seemed out of place in this landscape. I still don’t know what is appropriate and what is inappropriate here, but what I can say is that there is a marked sense of desolation and a peculiar kind of silence on the moor. Apart from when you disturb a pheasant, or a flock of them — there are hundreds of pheasants on Exmoor — and the colourful males at least seem incapable of flying without screeching loudly. After a while we also happened upon a little group of the famous wild Exmoor ponies. They looked both dishevelled and strong — and clearly needed treating with respect. I have read that they wander about up here all year round, and live their lives from birth to death in these spartan surroundings. They more or less ignored us. Castor restricted himself to observing them from a safe distance, and then we continued our leisurely stroll. To an untrained eye like mine, the moor is a sort of self-sufficient entity — that is the overwhelming impression it makes. It is barren and monotonous, perhaps somewhat secretive, and motionless as a petrified ocean. Nothing but low, bushy vegetation succeeds in forcing its way up from the infertile soil: heather, ferns and gorse, some of it constantly in bloom. Here and there the landscape is intersected by valleys carved out over the centuries by brooks and streams wending their way to the Exe or the Barle. But in these hollows the vegetation is abundant and dripping with moisture: we soon found ourselves in one of them, filled with beech and oak, alder and hazel — I’m not sure of the various species, and resolved to buy a comprehensive reference book as soon as possible. I recognize holly, moss and ivy, clinging stubbornly and methodically to trunks and branches. Water trickles under dense rhododendron thickets, and the smell of decay is everywhere.

I made all those observations during the first thirty or forty minutes of our walk, as we were making our way down a slope on a very muddy path, apparently used recently by both sheep and ponies: it seemed to be the very same slope we had contemplated from our bedroom window that morning. And sure enough, one of the very rare signposts indicated that the path went all the way to Winsford. However, when we came to somewhere apparently called Halse Farm, which must presumably have given its name to the road up to Darne Lodge, we decided to turn and go back home. It was four o’clock, and dusk was already beginning to fall: no doubt it would be best to walk all the way to the village the next morning or afternoon. Neither I nor Castor would want to be stranded in the dark in this magnificent, bewitching landscape. The word bewitching really does seem to be an accurate description.

When we got back to Darne Lodge we spent a few hours dealing with household chores. Yet again I feel linguistic uncertainty when I use the pronoun we. Obviously I was the one who lit the candles and the fire, and who chopped up greens and onions and slices of lamb for the stew I eventually ate myself. I was the one who did the washing up, wiped clean various drawers and cupboards, and packed away my clothes in the wardrobe and the chest of drawers in the bedroom. Castor’s only contribution was to eat his evening meal — Royal Canin Maxi for dogs over twenty-six kilos — and lap up rather noisily the water in his usual metal bowl. He spent the rest of the late afternoon and evening on the sheepskin rug in front of the fire.

Needless to say my urge to cling on to the plural form is not all that difficult to understand. I have lived under the same roof as my husband for over thirty years, and that has left traces deep down in the grammar of my language. Perhaps it is just that I’m scared. A we has so much more weight than a mere I, even if it is only a dog that justifies its use. And it is the elder twin sister of Independence — Loneliness, the one who carries herself awkwardly, has skin scarred by scurf and very bad breath, who I have to kill and bury. Over and over again; that’s life. She is the monstrous enemy, for both Castor and myself — I don’t know why I started going on about this. Bugger it all! To hell with all this nonsensical analysis! I believe in individual human beings. I must believe in individual human beings.

As an antidote I drank two glasses of the excellent port I had bought in Dulverton, and took out my computer. Martin’s can stay inside his black briefcase for now, the one with that irritating sticker from Barcelona. I suppose I’ll get round to opening both of them eventually, the briefcase and the computer: but this evening didn’t seem to be the right time. I established that there was indeed no internet connection here, as I had already been told. If at some future point I feel the need to link up with the outside world — for reasons that I can’t really imagine at the moment — I can either drive to Minehead on the coast, where there are several internet cafes, or to the library in Dulverton. Or at least, I assume that’s what I would need to do: perhaps there are possibilities closer at hand. Attempts to use both my mobile and Martin’s in various parts of the house were also in vain: I decided that tomorrow I would try the location Mr Tawking had mentioned — that grave on the other side of the road. In no circumstances am I going to try to phone anybody — or to send an e-mail or a text message: but it could be interesting to know if anybody has been trying to contact us.

There again, perhaps it would be risky to activate my mobile. I don’t really know how they work. But if somebody should try to contact us — I mean really try — somebody like Interpol or a detective or somebody like that, then they will find us sooner or later, of course. But the point is that it should never occur to anybody that they should start searching. Because there is no reason to do so.

After the second glass of port wine and when the fire began to die down, I let Castor out to do his business. He disappeared into the pitch darkness, and as it was getting on for five minutes before he reappeared, I had time to imagine all kinds of things that might have happened to him, and worry unnecessarily. The whole plot is certainly no more than a thousand square metres, but it would have been easy for him to clamber over the old stone wall, if he had wanted to.

Then we went to bed. It was no later than a quarter past ten, but the darkness and the house itself — and the rain which soon began pattering on the slate roof and on the evergreen bushes outside the window, rhododendrons there as well if I’m not much mistaken — somehow reduced the concept of time to a. . to a totally insignificant theoretical construction. Before falling asleep I also began thinking about the house for the first time — about its history: how old it was, what function it used to have, who had lived there over the years and indeed the centuries, and why it was located just here in splendid isolation on the moor. There is a real farmhouse not all that far away, in the direction of Winsford, just above Halse Farm, and it’s possible that Darne Lodge was originally a part of that smallholding. Outside the lodge is a boarded-up stable block that I haven’t yet bothered to explore, and I suppose I can find out more details from Mr Tawking if I feel that I really want to know. Or down at The Royal Oak, which I have not yet visited.

In any case, the house is old, probably several hundred years old. The stone walls are thick, the roof low and the windows on the small side. Even if the rooms are large, the house is constructed in accordance with austere practical considerations, and when I had settled down in bed I realized that if a fire had been burning steadily all day one could benefit from the residual heat in the walls, even in the bedroom. After a while I got up and disconnected both the electric radiators. It’s better to rely on the fire, I thought: the simple firewood bunker built onto the gable wall of the stable block is well filled — but perhaps my landlord will expect me to leave it in the same state as it was in when I arrived. If so, I have no idea where I would get the necessary firewood from: but that is not something I need to worry about in the near future, and when I snuggled back down under the duvet I recalled once again the bitter-sweet fact that nobody in the whole world knows where we are. Castor and his master.

Or his missus, for that matter.

And those who know that there is somebody living in Darne Lodge just outside the village of Winsford in the county of Somerset near the border with Devon — possibly nobody at the moment apart from Mr Tawking — have no idea about their identity.

A woman and her dog, that’s all.

An autumn night like any other.

About an hour later I suddenly woke up. I found it impossible to decide if I had been woken by something external or something internal, but I was possessed by a highly unpleasant throbbing feeling and sat up, leaning against the bedhead. The rain had stopped, the darkness was dense. A faint musty smell. The only sound to be heard was Castor’s regular breathing from underneath the bottom of the duvet, but nevertheless I sensed a new sort of presence in the room. As if somebody were standing pressed up against the wall next to the wardrobe, watching us. Or perhaps the front door had just closed with a bang, and that was the sound that had woken me up — but that was of course a sheer impossibility. Castor would have reacted to the noise. His sense of hearing is many times more sensitive than mine, and even if he is not all that efficient as a guard dog, he always notices if some unknown creature turns up in our immediate vicinity.

But my heart was racing, and it was some time before I managed to calm down. It occurred to me that perhaps I ought to buy a little CD-player. A reassuring voice or a saxophone that could soften up the darkness and the silence would no doubt be welcome. Dexter Gordon, perhaps? Or Chet Baker? Would it be possible to find something by Chet Baker in a music shop in Minehead or Dulverton? Or would I need to go to Exeter? That is the only town of any size in this neck of the woods, and if I have read the map correctly it should be possible to drive there in an hour and a half or two hours at the most.

I eventually fell asleep again, and began immediately to dream about the grey-white beach at Miȩdzyzdroje. Walking eastwards into the wind, and then that strange walk back again.

That strange walk back again.