The Night Following

Chapter 14: A Month in the Country

“Hurry up, Grace!” Evelyn cried, patting her hands over the surface of the eiderdown, trying to locate her other glove. She had just heard the honk of a car horn from the street outside. “Are you ready, love? It’s here, the car’s here!”

She found the glove and pulled it on. Her new summer gloves, bought for this special day, were made of some new stretchy fabric, non-wrinkle, fully washable, and, or at least as they had promised her in the shop, gleaming white. Today, Uncle Les was sending a car right to the door that would convey them to the convalescent home where, as he had written in his postcard, he was settling in fine after just a week and already feeling the benefit.

It was so long since Evelyn had been out anywhere that she was as excited as a young girl. When had she last gone for a spin through the countryside? It was years, and that was by bus. The thought of being taken in a private car was almost more excitement than she could bear. She was vague about where exactly Uncle Les’s convalescent place was, but that didn’t matter. In fact she liked the mystery. It was an extra thrill to feel that only the driver had to know the route. She could just sit back and be taken to her destination, like a duchess! It didn’t do any harm to feel like a bit of a swell, once in a blue moon. It was only pretending, and life was ordinary enough the rest of the time for it not to turn her head.

Evelyn’s good spirits survived, even when Grace refused to describe the car to her. Was it big and black and shiny, she asked, but Grace would say only that yes it was a car, yes it was big and black, just about all cars were, and as to shiny she hadn’t noticed. Inside the car smelled leathery and expensive. When she leaned across and asked Grace in a whisper if the driver was in a uniform, Grace shooshed her impatiently.

They drove in silence. When the sounds of other traffic died away and she knew they were out of town, Evelyn wound down the window for some country air. But she enjoyed it for only a few minutes before Grace complained of the draught.

It was getting on for dinnertime when the car left the road and made its way slowly along gravel and finally came to a stop. The driver jumped out and crunched round to open the passenger door.

“Here you are, ladies, the Maud Braddock Memorial Home for Invalids,” he said, handing Evelyn out so gallantly that she felt certain he was in uniform, complete with cap.

The air was certainly bracing, just what you would want at a place of convalescence, Evelyn said to herself, breathing it in. It was cool and mossy, and somehow watery, and there seemed to be a lot of it, more than you got in an ordinary lungful of town air. She could hear a fast-flowing stream not far away, and birds high in the sky. But Grace was tramping ahead over the gravel now, and Evelyn followed.

The place seemed half hospital, half hotel, hushed and smelling of floor polish rather than disinfectant. They were greeted in the hall and told that Mr. Hibbert was expecting them, and then they were led into a room so warm Evelyn felt she had stepped into a greenhouse. Indeed she almost had, as Uncle Les, who was waiting there, explained. They had entered a marvellous, newly built glass sun lounge, the last word in luxury, that stretched across one side of the front of the old Edwardian building, originally used as a hunting lodge.

He went on to tell them that the Maud Braddock Memorial Home for Wounded Servicemen had been set up here during the War. Now there was no further use for it in that capacity, and it was now catering to a different clientele altogether, convalescents and invalids who would pay for the best and insist on getting it.

“Like your sun lounge, for instance,” Uncle Les said, waving his arm.“Deluxe. No expense spared.”

A proper sun trap it was, apparently, where most of the patients lay on reclining chairs surrounded by potted palms for much of the day, basking in the warmth.

“Blowing a gale outside and you could be on the Riviera, lying here,” Uncle Les said.

“Don’t you want to get out, though, into the fresh air?” Evelyn asked. Uncle Les explained that half an hour out of doors twice a day, morning and afternoon, was as much as he was allowed. Well wrapped up in blankets, he was wheeled along by a nurse and encouraged to walk for five minutes at the beginning and the end of each session. Next week he was going to walk for ten minutes each time, and he was also planning to try the steam bath in the Home’s brand-new hydro facilities.

Perhaps once they’d stayed for lunch (and the food was excellent, he assured them), and he’d had his afternoon nap, Grace would be so kind as to do the honours and push him along in his wicker chair for his afternoon constitutional? That’s if, Uncle Les said rather tightly, she would deign to honour them with her presence? He’d only glimpsed her at the door, and then she’d disappeared. Where had she got to?

Uncle Les called a nurse and asked if Grace had been seen wandering about anywhere, and might she be informed that her uncle was ready to be her host at luncheon. Evelyn said nothing. She hoped Grace might just have taken herself off outside to explore and go for a walk, since the opportunity to enjoy country air was a rare one for Grace as much as for herself, but still she felt uneasy. Once the nurse had been dispatched to find Mr. Hibbert’s mislaid visitor, Uncle Les began telling her, in a low whisper, about some of his fellow patients and Evelyn tried to concentrate, frowning.

Half an hour later, Grace still had not been found. The nurse reported back to them that she thought the lady must have gone for a longer walk, and she would ask the kitchen to keep aside something for her luncheon, which was now about to be served.

But when the meal, braised liver and onions with cabbage, with a glass of milk stout for Les, followed by ginger pudding, was over, there was still no sign of Grace. After coffee, Les was wheeled away for his hour’s rest, and Evelyn was invited to sit in the sun lounge.

It was while she was there, feeling the sun on her face through the glass, that the commotion began. The same nurse who had looked for Grace came running in.

“Oh, excuse me, madam!” she began. She seemed not to know what to say next. “Oh, madam, your daughter, she is your daughter, isn’t she? Oh, thank goodness you’re here. Oh, what a shock! We need to contact her husband at once! Matron doesn’t think it’s going to be very long!”

Evelyn was mystified. “Why, whatever is the matter? Where is she? She’s all right, isn’t she? What isn’t going to be very long?”

“Oh, madam! She’s doing fine, it’s all going to be fine, though Matron says it’s early. The gardener found her in the little summerhouse, we got her indoors at once, of course, lucky there was a room vacant. And Matron’s a qualified midwife, thank goodness! Though she’s rusty, she says. Of course we’ve rung for the doctor. But we need to contact her husband to let him know!”

Evelyn sat silent for a moment. “I understand. I see. Yes. Yes, now I understand,” she said quietly. “Let’s not get hysterical.” She paused, thinking. “Her husband can’t possibly get here in time. He isn’t available,” she said firmly, “but we’ll deal with that in due course. The main thing is that she’s all right. I’m very sorry for this inconvenience, but yes, it is lucky she’s here. Take me to her, please. It won’t be long, you say?”

They walked swiftly into the hall and the nurse began to lead her upstairs. She was nervous and seemed unable to stop talking.

“It’s the little room at the top. Quiet. You know, nice and private, right at the back. Well, Matron says that’s better, in case there’s to be any, you know, commotion…Well, what with the other patients, I mean they’re here to rest, aren’t they, when all’s said and done? There’s a nice little fire lit and it’s got a nice view of one side of the garden, and-”

Evelyn interrupted her. “Another thing. Please don’t wake Mr. Hibbert. There’s no need to disturb him. When he’s had his rest, would you take him for his walk as usual? I don’t want him upset. I’ll give him the news later. Afterwards.”

A little over two hours later, Evelyn sat by Grace’s bed holding the almost weightless bundle in her arms. The baby girl was tiny, but healthy. Although about four weeks too soon, it had been a quick and straightforward birth. Just as well, Matron had said tersely to Evelyn, since they weren’t equipped for childbirth. And it was a great pity, in her opinion, that the father was working down south and would have to be informed by telegram once the mother had returned to Aldbury, where she had left his address. Then, with a click of her tongue and a murmur that seemed to indicate she was softening, and was perhaps rather proud of having delivered a baby safely, she had left the mother, new daughter, and grandmother alone.

Tears flooded down Evelyn’s cheeks as she cradled the new arrival. It was no use, she was never going to know. Grace was too exhausted to be as hostile as usual, but she was refusing point-blank to name the baby’s father.

A baby out of the blue. A beautiful baby and no father to give her his name, it’s a scandal,” Evelyn said, feeling quite at the end of her tether. “Why didn’t you tell me you were in trouble? Wait till your Uncle Les hears. Or does he know and he didn’t tell me? Maybe everybody on the street knew you were expecting, everybody but me. Why did nobody say?”

“Nobody knew,” Grace said sullenly. “I made sure of that. I didn’t hardly show and I’m always behind the counter anyway. I thought I’d have it without folk knowing and get it adopted.”

“Without folk knowing? How were you going to manage that?”

Grace sighed. “I don’t rightly know,” she said. “I was trying not to think about it. Anyway, folk’ll have to know now, won’t they? Because I’m keeping her. I’m not having her adopted. I’m keeping her and nobody’s going to stop me.”

There was a silence. “Aye, and I won’t try and stop you, lass,” Evelyn said gently. “It’ll be hard going, mind. And I don’t know what your Uncle Les is going to say. I’m warning you he won’t like it. He’s a respected businessman. He’ll get it out of you, who the father is.”

“Oh, never you worry. I can handle him,” Grace said stoutly. “You leave him to me. Nobody is going to stop me keeping my baby.”

Just then there was a soft little mewl and a tiny splutter from the baby. Evelyn wiped her eyes and smiled. “All right, then. We’ll take one day at a time,” she sighed, handing the baby over.“One day at a time.”

Grace was right. She could and did handle Uncle Les. By the evening, after she had spoken to him alone, he was quite reconciled to the child’s existence and, to Evelyn’s further amazement, he accepted that Grace was never going to divulge the father’s name. They discussed the matter in the sun lounge over tea while Grace and the baby were asleep upstairs. Matron had spoken to the owners of the Maud Braddock Home and had softened even further. Grace would stay on for another few days before going back to Aldbury, but for now, she needed rest. It was unheard of, a newborn baby at the Maud Braddock, but now that they were getting used to it the staff were enjoying the novelty and word had gone round among the patients, too. It seemed to be giving everyone a lift.

“But, Uncle Les, the fellow’s got to face his responsibilities, whoever he is. He’s fathered a child,” Evelyn said. “Even if he won’t marry her he has to take responsibility. It’s only right he should provide.”

But Uncle Les was very uncomfortable about pursuing the matter any further. “The child will be provided for, never you mind that. Grace is twenty-three, she’s a grown woman and if she won’t say, she won’t say,” he said with finality. “So we let it drop. You hear me? Bad for the child otherwise. You need to bring her up so it’s natural to her she has her mother’s name and no father. Bring her up believing he’s dead. She won’t know any better. Then she won’t hanker after him.”

“But-” Evelyn had opened her mouth to protest, thinking how she had never stopped missing the father she barely remembered, but Uncle Les silenced her.

“Nay, there’s no more to be said. There’s an end to it. It’s not to be discussed again in my hearing, or in the child’s. Have another scone, they’re homemade.”

Evelyn drank some of her tea thoughtfully. “It’s not just the father’s name,”she said, trying to lighten her voice.“There’s the name of the place an’ all. Have we to put ‘the Maud Braddock Memorial Home for Invalids’ as place of birth on the little mite’s birth certificate? That’ll look peculiar. Whoever heard of a baby getting born in an invalids’ home?”

Uncle Les gave a short laugh. “We won’t need to. It’s not been the Maud Braddock that long. Round here it’s still known by the old name. We’ll put that. The locals call it Overdale.”

Every day brought more interference. I would come down when it got dark to find that more coloured foliage had dropped through the letter box: shiny, grinning advice about hearing aids, time-share apartments, stair lifts, handy “systems” for “maximizing priceless storage space.” The downstairs rooms became ragged and spoiled with torn envelopes, unfinished lists, unsigned forms. I would stumble across the paraphernalia of Arthur’s leg treatments: towels, open tubes of ointment, bandages and socks left where he had pulled them off. The kitchen filled up with the neighbour’s unrecognizable food in plastic containers, with notes attached: HEAT GENTLY, WILL SEPARATE IF BOILED. JUST POP UNDER GRILL TILL BROWNED. Some lumpy homemade biscuits turned up from somewhere along with a brochure about assisted living. Della left a potted plant and more poetry (just the slant of some people’s handwriting can arouse fury). One night, stuck on the fridge door under magnets, I found a drawing in crayon of a lady with a halo and wings riding a bicycle, surrounded by clouds and flowers. Underneath was written “from Amy and all the Watsons (at No. 48).”

In dealing with these and other invasions I was holding back, I now see, not merely a tide of encroachment but also the notion that any such staying action could be only that, and would prove, in the end, unavailing. By definition, after all, the besieged have nothing more to play for than survival, and quite possibly the demands of that particular game, all the plucky, ingenious, and inconclusive stratagems to hold off ultimate depletion, are what distract us from its futility. So our way of living did not seem to me so frail that its final breach was inevitable, and I turned over in my mind, with no particular urgency, only the wisdom or practicality of this or that small refinement for its protection. I wrote a note discouraging circulars and callers and stuck it on the door. I left the neighbour’s food out, untouched, on the front step. I did not consider that perhaps a play for time was all our arrangement was or ever could be; I failed to understand that no matter what I did, by little corrosive steps one person or another would be the first to bring it to an absolute end.

Ignoring every portent, I was attuned only to what seemed significant: the watchful and desirous duet between Arthur and me. After all, it was all we needed, and was surely its own fluent justification- though no justification was owed to anyone-for the simple necessity of two, the impossibility of more than two.

27 Cardigan Avenue

Dear Ruth

The baby, Ruth. The baby in the story. What happens to the baby girl?

It’s nice having you around again. I wouldn’t say I’m relaxed about it, it takes some getting used to. DOES NOT HELP, does it, these fools popping up. I can understand why you make yourself scarce in daytime. Why WE do. I can’t avoid them altogether because of legs. Keeping curtains closed sends out the general message though.

Apart from only being around at night, you haven’t come back in what one might call the standard ways, have you? You’re not what anyone could call your average haunter. You’re not scary or tragic, not even mildly SPOOKY, to use a Della word.

In fact, you don’t seem all that deceased. You’re pretty much as you were. Practical, comfortable, always got something to do. Not saying anything-that’s the only big difference, apart from the fact that I can’t see you, not in the old way.

Though on subject of seeing and not seeing, this story. I’m getting on well with it now. I keep thinking about that baby.

What I wonder is would you have shown it to me? I mean if circumstances were otherwise, in the ordinary way? Doesn’t really matter because you have shown it to me, now. You directed me to it. And I know you’re pleased that I’m reading it.

I like this new way. I like US this way, suits us better than the old way.

More soon. I even like writing to you, now. I like writing to you when I can hear you around the place and I know you’re nearby, downstairs or in the next room or along the landing.

Arthur

It came, inevitably. It came when we felt safest, on a calm, honey-warm early September night. The doorbell rang. As was our custom, Arthur was upstairs and I was in the kitchen, just starting to think about getting his dinner. Neither of us moved. The bell rang again and went on ringing. Then came a series of bangs on the door and a man’s voice. He sounded a bit drunk.

“Hey! Can you put a light on? Come on, Arthur, I need to talk!” He pressed on the bell again, and then we heard another voice.

“Tony, leave him alone, it doesn’t matter! Tony, leave him alone!” “I’m not leaving him alone, it’s for his own good! He got a fucking invitation! Hey, Arthur!” The voice dropped to a placatory, treacherous singsong. “Come on, mate, barbie time! You gonna come and enjoy yourself or what?”

“Tony! Stop it, please-”

“Tell you what, Arthur, I got a drink right here for you. Get you in the mood, mate. Come on, s’only us and a few friendly faces, what’s your problem?”

“Oh, Tony-have some consideration!”

“Wha’s the matter? Look, Mum, does he or doesn’t he need a firm hand? I’m only doing what you said!”

“I didn’t say bully him! Leave him alone!”

The ringing and banging subsided and eventually stopped. Then the bell sounded again, tentatively, and above it came the woman’s voice again.

“Arthur, it’s me, Rosemary. Mrs. M! It’s all right, Arthur, don’t worry. He doesn’t mean any harm. It’s only Tony. Arthur? Arthur!”

He was still upstairs. The voice became wheedling. I began to tremble.

“Arthur, would you open the door a minute, dear? I’m so sorry, he didn’t mean it. He wants to say sorry. Arthur, could you please come to the door?”

The man’s voice added, “Yeah, sorry, mate, didn’t mean no offence. OK?”

Arthur didn’t stir.

“Arthur, it’s Rosemary. I can’t go till I know you’re all right.”

The man called, “OK, so how about you put a light on, Arthur? Show us you’re okay, mate. OK?”

Only a few feet lay between us and the front door. Those people were just on the other side of it. If Arthur didn’t go down to them they could burst through it and be upon us in seconds, yelling and cajoling, pulling him around. Suddenly I saw that all my efforts to protect us had been pointless. In the end, doors and locks and walls stand for nothing and against nothing. They are only the weakest of defences against any purpose, including urgent and violent goodwill.

I stood with a tea towel in my hand, straining to hear above the shunk of the washing machine behind me and the hammering of my heart in my throat. Then I heard Arthur’s tread at the top of the stairs. Without thinking about it, I knew the best way to protect him. I ran out to the conservatory and through the sliding door into the dining room. The door from there out to the hall was closed; I opened it a fraction and pressed close against the wall. Through the gap I could see the outline of Arthur’s body, halted on the stairs. Shapes moved under the porch and shadows dappled the hall floor. The woman’s voice came at us again.

“Arthur, I have your spare key here, dear. I’m coming in, all right? Just to see you’re all right. It’s just me and Tony. Tony’s with me, we just want to see you’re all right.”

I heard Arthur whimper as the lock turned. Feet clumped across the threshold, lights flashed on. They were in the hall, just out of my sight line. Arthur had slumped down on the stairs.

“Arthur? Oh, Tony didn’t mean any harm. Did you, Tony? He just wondered why you didn’t answer our invitation.”

I pushed the tea towel against my mouth to stop myself from screaming. Arthur pulled himself up and came unsteadily downstairs.

“Here you go, mate. Lager OK for you?” I heard the snap and hiss of a can. “Oops! There you go then. Get that down you. Do you good.”

Arthur cleared his throat, giving up an attempt to protest. He had his back to me and I fancy I saw him retreat from them, inclining a little in my direction, to protect me, to explain to me perhaps that he was accepting the drink just to stall them there. He had to submit to their interest in him, not so far as to encourage them to think themselves welcome, but enough to get them to leave with both neighbourly impulses, prurience and conscience, satisfied.

“Thing is,” Tony said, “Mum’s just trying to help. She’s done this whole barbecue, see? And bugger me, there’s all of us in the garden over there just trying to be friendly and you don’t turn up. Not very polite, mate.”

“Barbecue?” Arthur’s voice sounded tight with confusion. “What do I want with a barbecue? I don’t know anything about any bloody barbecue!”

“I did tell you, Arthur,” the woman said. “We said it’d be good for you to see a few of the neighbours. You agreed. There were proper invitations, dear.”

“I’m busy. Sometimes things slip my mind.”

“But I wrote it all down. You said you’d come.”

A few days ago there had been a handwritten card with a drawing of a smoking hamburger and a glass of wine on it. I’d torn it up.

“Mum’s gone to a lot of trouble. It’s a lot of work, a barbecue. Hey, mate, you OK?”

Arthur had started to sway on his feet, probably because he’d just tipped his head back to swig some of his drink. I saw him grope for the banister and the can fell from his hand. Tony marched forward and grabbed him and Mrs. M let out a wail. “The carpet!”

“Whoa, there! OK, mate, let’s get you sat down,” Tony said.

“Leave me alone!” Arthur said, recoiling. “Don’t touch me! I just got light-headed for a second. Slight loss of balance. Comes and goes.”

“Need a decent meal, I’d say. You know you’re naughty.” Mrs. M swung past Arthur towards the kitchen. “Where’s there a bucket, dear-under the sink?” He stared after her, ignoring Tony’s arm going round his shoulder. She called out over the sound of the taps, “Shouldn’t stain if I get straight at it. I can pop over for my stain remover if you haven’t any.”

Of course we had stain remover. She returned, sank down on the carpet between Tony and Arthur, and began dabbing with a sponge.

“Went to your head, probably,” Tony said with forced cheerfulness. “Sure you’re OK?”

“Yes. Yes, thank you,” Arthur said, stepping out of Mrs. M’s path. “I’m all right now.”

“She’s got a point, though. You need a steak inside you,” Tony said. “Red meat, nothing like it. Sets you up. I’m the same.”

“He is,” Mrs. M grunted from the carpet. “Always has been. I mean, don’t ever give him chicken,” she said, “because he won’t thank you for it.” She got to her feet. “As for fish, practically a dirty word. Well! That won’t take long to dry. Fingers crossed. Sensible colour for a hall. Is it ‘Sahara’?”

I imagined Arthur staring at her and trying to puzzle out what on earth she was talking about. I realized I didn’t really know what his eyes looked like. There was a silence. Then Tony said, “There’s a few still over there, in the garden.”

“Yes, you want to be getting back to your guests,” Arthur said.

“Well…” Mrs. M sighed. “It doesn’t seem right. Wouldn’t you like someone to be with you?”

Tony took Arthur’s elbow and gave it a shake. “Tell you what, Arthur, why not come on over now? Get another beer. There’s plenty left. You could use a burger.”

She joined in. “Go on. There’s peach pavlova. Just for a while.”

“I’m in my slippers.”

“Don’t matter just to cross the road. Tell you the truth, mate, I don’t feel right leaving you,” Tony said. “Neither does Mum.”

“Thank you. Well, that is kind,” Arthur said. I could tell from his voice he wanted to refuse, but then they might not leave; they were wrangling, disruptive, insistent people, ready to trample wherever they liked. “Very kind indeed. Thank you.”

This pleased them. They led him away, one at each elbow, and he went quietly.

Dear Ruth

Where’s the rest of it? The story. What happens to the baby? I want to know what happens to the baby.

I like it now, thinking about the early days.

I should have put a bit more effort into getting the point of the poetry and I’m sorry for that. This seems like a second chance.

I’ve been thinking. More comes back about Overdale the more I think. That first night. We lay there looking up at the stars, didn’t we? It was so clear and so cold, and by then I had my arms tight around you trying to keep you warm.

I remember pointing out some of the constellations. You only knew the Plough. It was after I’d shown you how to spot the Great Bear and the Little Bear and was just moving on to Orion and Andromeda, and you suddenly told me to stop talking and close my eyes. Why, I said, I like looking at the stars, don’t you?

Yes, you said, but you also liked closing your eyes and not seeing them but knowing they were still there. And when we were lying like that, eyes closed, you said, can’t you just feel where we are? Can’t you just feel the size of the mountain around you and the sky above and just feel the millions of millions of gallons of water flowing through the reservoir down below? Technically speaking Kinder Scout isn’t a mountain and the water in a reservoir doesn’t flow, it’s stagnant, I said, and you punched me in the chest and told me to shut up. Playfully.

I want to live here, you said. I want to live on a hillside somewhere, surrounded by higher hills and mountains and with water at the bottom. I want to hear the wind on the mountaintops and the water lapping down below every minute of every day and all night long.

Of course I went along with all that. I said I’d like to live on a hillside, too, and just then I meant it. But I wasn’t thinking only about living. I was so happy at that moment that the thought of death suddenly came to me. That’s to say I allowed it to come, because I felt so free and strong that I didn’t need to keep it away-I knew it could not pin me down and make me feel ordinary and discouraged, just then. I thought-I could die at this moment. If I died on this hillside right now, I’d die with my life well spent (though I was glad I didn’t).

But if I had, I’d have died knowing all I needed to know-that I loved you completely, and that I was holding in my arms, wrapped up against the cold, all that was, or ever could be necessary to me now.

Arthur

Ihadn’t seen before that he can barely walk. In the house it doesn’t show so much. I was watching from the bedroom window and I saw them come back across the road and up the drive, Arthur’s feet edging along in little shuffles, his back bent. Tony, with professional tenderness for the slow and sick, was supporting him by the elbow, taking it slow and letting him rest every few steps. When they paused Arthur would look up and gaze ahead as if the house and I were miles distant and he would reach us only by the greatest exertion.

As they came through the door Tony snapped on the switches. In the burst of light Arthur vomited, suddenly and lavishly, on the floor. The sour, curdy stench rose instantly through the hall and up into the darkness of the stairs. I had come out to stand on the top step, and I craned forwards just far enough to see him being steered, groaning and stumbling, towards the kitchen. I wanted to dash straight down but I didn’t; I would be needed later, and only then would I be of real use.

Tony returned and cleaned up the mess, his scrubbing brisk and ill-tempered. When he went back into the kitchen I crept a little further down the stairs, and listened. I could hear snatches of Tony’s voice saying something to do with “doctor” and “urgent attention” and “tomorrow,” but I couldn’t make out Arthur’s replies. Then Tony spoke sharply. Arthur, he said, wasn’t being very cooperative.

“You’re not doing yourself any favours, mate,” he said. “Maybe it’s time you accepted some help.” He paused. “Look, I know what you’re going through. Loss of spouse, it’s bloody awful. I see it all the time. And it’s worse for you. Everybody knows…”

Arthur began to shout. “You know nothing! You have no idea, you hear me? Nobody knows what this is like!”

“Hey, hey there! OK, OK-I’m sorry, I put that the wrong way. Look, steady on now,” Tony said. “It’s OK. It’s understandable…”

Again Arthur interrupted. “Why don’t any of you listen? I don’t care if it’s understandable! I’m going to kill the bastard! You hear? Some fucking bastard took her away and none of you do anything about that, do you? You’re useless, the police are useless. You’re all fucking useless!”

“Look, hold on a minute. I can see why you feel that way, honest I can. But the police are doing their best. They might still get him. We’re all doing our best, mate.”

“So bloody what? That bastard’s going to get what’s coming to him. I’m going to get him myself and strangle him with my own bare hands, it’s the only way to get justice in this bloody country! Now leave me alone, will you? Fuck off and leave me alone!”

As the kitchen door opened I darted back upstairs into the darkness. Tony came out and paused in the hall, blowing out his cheeks. He rubbed at the carpet with his foot, turned back for a moment as if he had one last thing to say, but thought better of it and left.

A few minutes later Arthur appeared. He raised his head in my direction but I don’t know what he saw. He fumbled along the wall and switched out the lights in the hall. He seemed to have aged. I ventured down far enough to see his outline against the street lamps’ aura from the door but I remained in the shadow of the turn of the stairs and did not move. Then, in the dark, he called for me in a breaking, plangent voice-Ruth!

That was all. We both listened to the sound of it dying on the air. He called again. I didn’t go to him. He was sending out the name like a flare. He was experimenting, testing the house Ruth had arranged and kept for half her life to see if it would withstand the speaking of her name, if the sound of its one syllable wafting through the darkness to the edges of the walls and curving back would lapse and cease eventually, or would prove restless, an unruly echo roused easily from the corners. The quiescent, returning silence was like watching a white curtain fall back to stillness after the air has been disturbed.

He had called out for me at last.

Still I didn’t go to him. I stayed in the dark of the stairwell, unable to move. Arthur swayed across the hall below me and disappeared into the kitchen. I guessed he had gone out to sit in the conservatory. I slumped down on the stairs, leaned my head against the wall, and waited.

After a while he returned, clutching the letter. He dropped it on the floor, looked up, called my name again, and shuffled away. The borrowed light in the hall was somehow absorbent; he seemed to be sinking and losing form in a way that might be irretrievable. I hurried down and read what he’d written in the glow from the street lamp.

12:30 am

Dear Ruth

I’ve called for you and you won’t come, but I know you’re still here. I know you’re still here.

I have to talk to you. TALK.

PLEASE ANSWER.

It’s all up. Done with.

Still you’re not answering-you’re here, aren’t you?

We’ve got to do something.

Ruth, they’ll be back in the morning.

The Tony fellow. I hadn’t got my bandages on, that was the start of it. I was minding my own business, getting through a burnt sausage in a bun. Was perched on their swinging garden seat thing so ankles on display,and T leans forward, grabs my trouser bottom, pulls it back, and says AHA! As if finding a leg inside a pair of trousers required some special brilliance.

Thought so! Chronic ulceration!

Very officious.

There’s your National Health Service for you!

You know the way people get offended when they find out something they think you should have told them? Especially when it’s none of their business?

I tried to stand up for myself but it was no good.

Chronic ulceration! he says again, meaning “I’m the medical expert round here and don’t you forget it.” Here’s a condition directly related to personal care and nutrition and what’s the Primary Care Trust’s answer to that!

He was the only one not embarrassed. Even Mrs. M (she of elephant hide) said, Now Tony, Arthur’s here for a nice quiet time, you leave him alone.

Which didn’t shut him up.

Bloody PCT hasn’t bloody got one, that’s my point! Look at the poor bugger!

Then even HE knew he’d said enough. Mrs. M starts flapping around offering people more of everything. The women start making stupid remarks in big surprised voices, mainly about the food-you’d think Mrs. M invented potato salad. Tony leans in and says, Sorry about that, mate, but I’m not letting this go, we’re gonna get you taken care of, right?

Other people still milling around, laughing too much. I just ate my pudding and took no notice. You were the one for the small talk and the laughing. Mrs. M gave me a second helping of peach pavlova and when I’d finished everybody had gone. The Great Tony insisted on walking me back over.

You saw.

Ruth, where are you?

And then I was sick in the hall. Too much excitement, I suppose, not used to rich puddings. Tony cleaned up.

But I WOULD NOT LET HIM help me upstairs and I LEFT HIM IN NO DOUBT that I could get into pyjamas unaided-did not reveal that I have no need of pyjamas as am generally up and about while others are snoring their heads off.

But Tony says he’ll be back over again first thing and he’s going to phone the doctor and get something done. He says he’ll be making a strong case for hospitalization because I’m deteriorating, and if the doctor doesn’t visit and arrange it ASAP he’ll call an ambulance personally. Or he’ll get me into an A & E himself even if it means picking me up bodily and shoving me in the back of his car.

We’ve got to do something. Nobody listens to me and they’ll take me away again.

I can’t leave you again. We’ve got to stay together.

You’d have liked that pavlova. Wish you were around more.

We have got to do something.

With love

A.

So I went to him at last. He was rocking to and fro in an armchair. I kneeled down and pulled his hands away from his face, and closed his arms around me. He wept, and clasped my head against his neck. I could taste his tears and feel the loose, mulchy lips and his cheeks, so flimsy against the faintly rotten flaps of his mouth and the chipped bones of teeth. I embraced him as was my due and my right. I kissed his face and head, I pressed my mouth against the salty hide of his neck and chin, the skin flaking and wrinkling like cloth over gristly bones, over transparent veins and blood vessels like pulled threads. I breathed him in as if I were swallowing all the minute ebbings of fluids, the smells of wax and little trapped signs of age and illness, the thinning muscle that would one day slough and fail.

We said nothing. After a while his weeping subsided, and in one movement I drew away, took his hand, and led him upstairs. In the bedroom we arranged ourselves as if resuming a lifelong pattern after a period of abstinence or absence. I took him to his side of the bed and settled him on the pillows with a single kiss and a stroke of his hair. He smoothed the sheet for me and turned and smiled as I got in. I watched him fall asleep and then I lay awake thinking, trying to still my breathing.

I let them form, the thoughts that are born of the middle hours of the night, I let them grow firm and real in my mind and become the plan for what I realized was now the only possible course of action against our circumstances. Everything had been leading to this, though nothing had prepared us for it, but no matter; it was as if we were making our way into an obscuring white mist that would disperse before us and show the way ahead. I could see that our path had been there all the time, merely hidden.

Before it was light I got up. First I climbed the ladder to the attic. Apart from the nest of dusty curtains where I had been sleeping, there was hardly a space not strewn with rubbish: papers, books, journals baled and tied with hemp string, plastic binders of Reader’s Digest and National Geographic, but mainly notebooks and photographs and loose typed sheets, covered with crossings-out and annotations. I was pleased that Arthur, in all his rummaging and ransacking up here, had not had the strength to dislodge the heavy things. There was furniture: a kidney-shaped coffee table set upside down, its spindly gold legs splayed like antennae, a chair half re-caned, two dismantled beds whose slats, poles, and headboards lay sloping in against the roof beams. Everything was threaded together by wispy brown loops of cobwebs. I also found, stashed behind a bundle of tied tent poles, more than I had hoped for: a mattress with rusty-edged stains, and shaded with what looked like charcoal or soot. I cleared the books and papers off the floor with the edge of my foot and shoved them into heaps against the walls, then I hauled the mattress onto the floor. It fell with a whump, raising a cloud of its own sticky dust that smelled of dead grass and feathers and dried blood.

I went back to the spare room and collected bedding, which I pushed up the ladder ahead of me. I returned to the kitchen and made sandwiches and two flasks of tea. I found a jar for milk, and filled a large plastic jug with water. All these I carried up the ladder and set neatly next to the mattress. I got cups and plates and paper napkins, biscuits and fruit to go up, too. We could have nothing hot to eat, I had decided, in case the smell carried. I liked to give Arthur a hot meal every night, but he would miss it only this once. As soon as it was dark again we’d be on our way.

There was one other practical consideration that could not be ignored. I brought out the largest bucket from under the sink, emptied half a bottle of disinfectant into it, and added some water. I got the bucket up the ladder and set it in a corner behind as discreet a screen as I could devise from stacked boxes and an upended decorating table.

It was now after five o’clock and the sky was yellow. Birds were already screeching. The new day was burning the condensation off the skylight and soon would be reaching in and pasting the mattress with a rectangle of buttery sunshine. I pulled one of the old curtains from the pile of carpet scraps and burlap and underlays, and rigged it up against the glass, wedging it in tight. It was patterned in red and yellow and green; light shone through and cast glowing jewels across our bed. Suddenly I feared that Arthur might wake and find me gone, so I hurried back down.

He was asleep on his back. My entering the room roused him. At once his eyes were upon me, searching and finding, and they closed again.

Ruth? he said, though he seemed still asleep. Ruth, Ruth. I whispered to him that it was time to wake up. His eyes opened, and closed again. His mouth wriggled and settled into a thin pout.

Come on, I said. Wake up. It’s time. I pushed the bedclothes back. He turned over, gathering what was left of sleep tight into himself. I stroked his arm and gave his earlobe a little pinch.

Wake up, Arthur, I said. It’s time.

I pulled his feet to the floor and drew him upright but he kept his eyes closed, and when I let go he sank back into the pillows. To the east on the other side of the house the sun was almost risen; through this eclipsed window the light had begun to gleam sullenly.

Arthur, wake up! Come on, it’s time to go.

He didn’t say anything or even open his eyes, but he allowed me to help him up again until he was sitting on the bed. I found his slippers and fitted them over his feet, as stiff and grey as dead flounders. There was a delta of purple veins reaching across both of his ankles. I pulled him up by the hands and he stood swaying and unquestioning as if he’d given up all resistance and all sensation in his desire to stay asleep. When I led him along the landing and indicated the attic ladder, he went on ahead of me without haste or curiosity. By the time I had drawn the ladder up after us and dropped the trapdoor in place he had crawled onto the mattress and was lying curled and still.

I expected Tony to be a man of eager habits and that we would not have long to wait. It was still early when I heard the doorbell. I waited for some other sound, fearing something rushing and cataclysmic, some rapacious incursion, but at first there was nothing, not even the key in the lock. Then came the sounds of Tony and his mother talking and moving, it seemed casually and at random, through the house: feet on the stairs, opening doors, calling from one room to another. By degrees, voices were raised and grew urgent.

Have you checked the bathroom? See if he’s got stuck.

Wait. Look in there.

Arthur! Oh, God, where’s he got to?

I’ll try the garden.

Maybe he’s had a fall.

Go and check the bedrooms again. Check the sides, in case he’s fallen out.

The sounds receded for a while but I knew the two of them were still there. They would be thorough. Even after they had finished searching, they would not leave. They might check the hospitals to see if somehow Arthur had been transported away in the night. They would probably call the police. We had hours still to wait.

I did not dare move for fear of the floor creaking. I watched Arthur, praying he would go on sleeping, but he shifted and turned, groaned and woke up. For a wild second or two after his eyes focused, he didn’t know where he was. I leaned across, smoothed the side of his face with my hand and quieted him with a finger to my lips. I pointed downward and pressed the finger to my lips again, and then placed it gently on his lips.

He nodded. Nosey parkers, he whispered.

They can’t stay forever, I said. They’ll go soon.

Then it’ll be just us, he said, smiling.

I reached for his hand. It felt dry and loose as if his finger bones were afloat in a paper glove.

Around us the attic air grew grey and silky, and the sounds of voices and movement resumed in a dreamy way and swam like warm dust in the ether. Later, there were new voices and more footsteps, and the searching began again. All this was progressing at a time when we were used to sleeping and so we listened only half awake, half dreaming, to these warnings we didn’t need, that below us, another day had got people in its crass and ruthless grip and was propelling them through the hours, using them up with things that didn’t matter. We listened, and waited, and rested together untouchable, answerable only to each other.

All is quiet. Arthur is turned away from me, on his side. Now and again his hand flutters on his hip and a soft whistle or scraping noise emerges from his throat. I lie awake in the stained glow through the curtained glass and think of the shimmering sky and the surface of life beyond the strange warm altar of our mattress. Around me the air ripens with heat, and atoms of dust spin and glitter in it, and I sense a thousand secret quickenings in our attic universe of abandoned things and all their gummy folds and crannies and crumbling fibres, all the microscopic barbs of disintegrating matter on which the tiniest living things will catch and cling. Below me the house sighs with solitary, daylong weariness.

So we sleep, or wake and lie looking at the slopes of the roof, and turn to each other sometimes, and twice we stir ourselves as if by agreement and sit up and eat together, shyly at first and then with the silent, slight formality of people accustomed to sharing food but a little reticent and tongue-tied about the sharing of pleasure.

Arthur and Ruth conduct themselves over their meals with the same good manners that would attend all their mutual habits, with a decorum that, whether governed by constraint or by orchestration, is certainly consensual. She unpacks everything and arranges it on the mattress. He looks to her to preside. He waits while she chooses what he is to have and passes it to him. He starts to eat before she has arranged food for herself, this being a picnic after all, but he waits until she has finished before he judges it not inconvenient for her to provide him with what he wants next. He points to this and that- another sandwich, a tomato, a biscuit with cheese-and eats them in that order. At the right moment he leans across and takes charge of the flask and cups. His fingers cannot grip properly. He brushes his hands across his chest several times and shakes them and blows on them to get rid of the pins and needles, and tries again to unscrew the top. He can’t see to pour properly, either, and a considerable amount of tea falls on the mattress and wets his clothes, which he dabs with a napkin. I am watching anxiously but I don’t interfere, any more than Ruth would step forward and relieve a tremulous priest of the Communion cup and bless the wine herself.

We sleep again, and later I wake to a darkness that presses on my eyes. Even though I think Arthur is still asleep I whisper to him to lie still until I come back. I clamber over the floor, lift the trapdoor, and send the ladder down on its squealing metal slope to the landing. I hear the thud as the feet hit the carpet but I can’t see anything clearly. I wait for a moment before launching myself down, each tread heaving a creaky sigh. From the bedroom window I see that lights are on in most of the houses in the road. It’s not nearly as late as it seemed to be in the attic. The sky is a milky violet and the trees along the avenue are restless in a breeze. A few doors down a woman comes out with a watering can for the hanging basket on her porch. A young man walks past under a lamppost, hands pushed hard into the pockets of his short jacket. Mrs. M has not drawn her curtains.

By now I can work well enough in the dark. I start to search out heavy warm things. Ruth of course keeps a methodical eye on the storage of clothing and when I reach deep into the shelves in the spare bedroom wardrobe I find paired thick socks, woollen sweaters put away for the summer, and winter blankets folded in plastic bags. I pack as if we were about to depart for another time and season which, in truth, we are; perhaps something different, something tenuous and icy and autumnal, has entered the wind tonight.

Arthur doesn’t wait for me. I hear him lurching down the ladder and meet him on the landing. Down here, he looks worse. His hair is swirled and matted as if he’s been half drowned. When I approach and press my lips to his cheek, he trembles, and his skin is sweaty and sharp with salt and a trace of vomit. His mouth harbours a sour, flyblown smell and would be dark and sticky inside. One of his eyes wants to close. He wants to speak, I think, but he has trouble controlling his tongue and so lifts a hand into the air instead. He is listing a little to one side and stays on his feet as if standing up were a painfully achieved trick of balance.

But he nods at me and turns away to the spare room and soon I hear him paddling around among books and papers. He comes out with an untidy bundle and holds it out to me, mumbling. A string of saliva wets his bottom lip and descends in a slow cascade to his chest. He wipes at it with the papers in his hands and that’s when I see that he’s holding pages of maps, and when I take them from him I discover there’s also a battered paper folder.

He manages to say, Just to be on the safe side.

The folder is labelled Group Leaders Information Pack: Overdale Outdoor Education Centre. I open it and find a mass of photocopied drawings of birds waiting to be coloured in, some homemade booklets, loose pages, and stapled sheets. Arthur starts sifting through it all. He lifts out a sheet headed Directions to Overdale and waves it at me. I close the folder and hand it back to him.

Arthur moves off down the stairs. He hasn’t finished; I hear his feet sifting through the papers littering the hall and sitting room. When I’ve finished packing I follow, bumping the luggage down the stairs. There is a note for us in the kitchen. I find it on the floor; it must have been swept off the table in a draft from the door.

ARTHER

PHONE ME WHEN YOU GET THIS (07834 793922) OR BETTER COME AND KNOCK ON MY DOOR, I’LL BE IN.

V worried to know you are alright. Couldn’t find you and doctor wasn’t notified so Tony called police. They sent someone but as no sign of forced entry they can’t do anything. Told them you NEVER go out but they say adults entitled to leave own home without notice and to wait another 24 hours. Tried to make doctor talk to them re yr mobility, legs etc. but no go. Well later on nurse turned up for yr legs, she said not to worry as it’s not Alzhimers, you’re a bit confused but still independent, also they’ve been encouraging you to get out so you probably have.

ARTHUR WE WANT TO KNOW YOU’RE ALRIGHT, IT WILL WASTE POLICE TIME IF YOU DON’T LET US KNOW, I’M SUPPOSED TO LET THEM KNOW IF YOUR STILL AWAY BY TOMORROW. WILL KEEP EYE OUT FOR YOU.

HOPING YOUR ALRIGHT Rosemary (Mrs. M)

Arthur has nodded off, waiting for me in the conservatory. While I was packing he has been round the house collecting up more papers, and now he sits with them clutched against his chest; clearly he won’t be parted from them. Even asleep he looks fierce, like a little boy ready to put up a fight if the adults try to say it isn’t sensible to bring his stamp album to the seaside.

I’ve never touched the car keys but I know they’re hanging on the line of hooks just inside the kitchen door. We leave by the conservatory and enter the garage from the back garden. There’s an old-fashioned mechanical smell of oil and linseed and rags and grass. When I’ve loaded the boot Arthur lets me help him into the passenger seat. There isn’t enough room to open the door properly and several parts of his body encumber him. His left leg is uncooperative; once he is seated half in, sideways, he drags it after himself as if it were made of wood. The shin scrapes slow and hard against the door edge and his foot flaps about uselessly, but he doesn’t flinch.

I’m trying to think methodically. The car hasn’t been driven for months. What if it won’t start? I climb in and turn the ignition, and it does. With the engine running, I get out again and open each of the garage doors as quietly as I can. But the bottom of the first one screeches in its worn semicircle in the tar of the drive, loud enough, possibly, for people to hear. Now there is no time to waste. I don’t bother fiddling with the hooks and brackets in the ground that hold the doors open, so I shove them back as far as they’ll go and throw myself back into the driver’s seat. Before I can move forward they are already shuddering and swinging back on us but there’s nothing I can do about that now. Our departure is announced by two loud thwacks as the garage doors glance off the sides of the car. All I can do is keep going. I drag the gear lever into second, then third, and we roar off the drive, straight towards the dustbin that’s standing at the far end, slap bang in the middle under the trees. Those bastards. I forgot today was bin day. It’s too late to stop and move it, and it’s also far too late to miss it. My hands turn numb and over it goes with a bang. The car veers into the wall with a horrible rasping noise but I grip the wheel and swing us past the splintered dustbin and pell-mell into the avenue. My left-hand turn is more of a swerve and isn’t tight enough, so we clip the side of a car parked invisibly on the far side of the road; the other thing I’ve forgotten is to put headlights on. I can’t slow down to find where the switch is, so we have to lurch along for now, avoiding obstacles if possible. The trick is to keep going. Arthur tips back his head and lets out a whoop that scratches his throat and turns into a fit of coughing. He stamps his feet on the floor and turns to me with a mad spark in his eyes. Then he starts to clap one hand down against the other that lies dead in his lap.

Four hours later we drive into the canopied artificial daylight of a service station on the M6. As I fill up the tank I study the docile shuffling of people inside, queuing at the registers and swaying among the shelves and cabinets. I wonder that they seem unembarrassed to be so lumpy and dark and heavy in a place so garish and streamlined. They appear quite undisturbed by the lights, and I want to learn how they do it so that I will look, when the time comes for me to go in, not as though I belong there (because none of them manages that) but just enough like one of them to pass without notice.

But before I’m ready, Arthur is wheezing his way out of the car. He needs a bathroom, he says, and sets off across the forecourt in a bizarrely careful way as if he thinks he is elsewhere, perhaps walking sideways down a flight of stairs. He’s lost one of his slippers. I retrieve it from the foot-well of the car and catch up with him at the entrance and we go in together. He halts, flinching, overawed by the piped music and excruciating light. He seems about to collapse under the glare. The toilets are at the back. Once I’ve got his slipper back on I steer him across the floor, concentrating on finding the shortest route between the stands of magazines and banks of candy and bins of DVDs and thermos flasks on special offer. Through the music and the plopping of the cash registers I sense people in mid-transaction going quiet and turning their eyes on us, but maybe I am only imagining it.

I push Arthur in the direction of his place and take myself to the ladies’ room. There’s a long mirror at the entrance that I can’t avoid, and that’s when I realize I probably wasn’t imagining that people were staring. I haven’t seen my own reflection in a while. I’ve changed. My face has puckered and turned a bready white, and my eyes are different, too, both faded and darkened. Rings have appeared around the irises, which are now a filmy watercolour blue. The pupils are sunk and tiny, like punctured holes. My mouth has the clamped, institutional look of someone whose incarceration, wherever it is, is chronic but no longer open to question, like a sanatorium patient or a life prisoner. Most dramatic though, is my hair. It’s grown, of course, and looks like grey, drought-stricken grass, but I hadn’t realized how flatly it sticks to my skull or how it sprouts up at the ends for being left unbrushed. The clothes could be better, too. They are plain enough and should not attract attention in themselves, but I am now aware my proportions have changed. The trousers flap at half-mast and the sweater seems empty in front and the sleeves hang over my hands to my fingertips. I see that I am wearing earrings, and the very idea of a surface such as mine being decorated in any way is preposterous. And being indoors so much has made me careless about footwear; the sandals don’t fit and never would have fitted, and the brown socks practical enough for an evening in the house seem here both to demand and to defy explanation.

Arthur’s getup, as I notice when I come out and find him leaning for support on the plastic dome of a pay phone bolted to the wall, is filthy. In this light I see that his purple sweatshirt with Let’s Cruise emblazoned on the chest is crisscrossed with stains from our picnic in the attic, and his trousers are spotted with the dribbles and spills of innumerable little accidents of one kind or another.

His free hand is fumbling with his trouser front and he’s oblivious to all else. I grab his other hand and pull him away, and he sets his eyes firmly on his feet and concentrates on getting them to move. We’re conspicuously slow. The attention we’re attracting is unmistakable now, and all I want is to get us through the door and back into darkness where the car is waiting. I’m trying unsuccessfully not to drag Arthur faster than he can go. We very nearly make it.

Hey!

I look up and see that the boy in the red T-shirt behind the register is talking to us. He has cinnamon skin and lustrous eyes. He can’t mean any harm.

Yes, what? I say pleasantly.

’Scuse me a minute!

Now the whole queue is turning to look at us-why? We’re not doing anything wrong, I know that, so the best thing we can do is ignore them. I grip Arthur’s arm and tug at him so hard he nearly falls over, but I have to get us out of this place.

The boy glances over his shoulder and calls into a little office behind the counter. Another man in a red T-shirt appears and swiftly crosses the floor in front of us. When he’s in position between us and the door, the boy speaks again. His eyes gleam like wet plums.

’Scuse me, madam, these premises are protected by surveillance cameras. I have to inform you that you and your car-

What? What’s the matter?

He pats a few computer keys and his machine makes some pucking and scratching noises.

I have to inform you that you have been recorded on the company’s CCTV security equipment getting fuel. Pump number 8, right? That’s twenty-six pounds eighty-seven, please. The company operates a strict zero tolerance policy with regard to non-payment. Cash or card, madam?

I simply forgot. It’s an honest error made in a moment of absentmindedness, brought on, no doubt, by the strain of events. In my past life, if such a thing was ever to happen, that’s what I would have been assumed to be: honest and absentminded. Now I look like a thief. They think I’m a thief, and suddenly I feel like one, so how can I do otherwise than act like one? I thrust the money over as if I were paying a fine. I don’t say anything; if I try to explain I just made a mistake I’ll sound like a liar, then they’ll think I’m a liar as well as a thief. But saying nothing makes me seem stealthy and even more guilty; it’s confusing me, being both exposed like this and wrongly accused, and my confusion, too, looks like guilt. I try an apologetic smile but that must look guilty, too, because the boy’s glare shifts from me only long enough to exchange a knowing look with his colleague. Arthur is shaking.

We make it out the door and back to the car. As we drive away it strikes me I’ve made another mistake. We’ll have to stop again. I should have bought food there. If I had, I wouldn’t have been able to forget about paying for the fuel. Now we’ve got next to nothing to eat and I can’t let Arthur starve. I am more unnerved than I can say; the thought of braving such a place again fills me with absolute dread.

We drive for many hours. At around three o’clock in the morning we leave the motorway, and immediately the rushing in my brain eases. Arthur’s head is lolling back, and as I turn up the slip road and steer around the roundabout, it tips and rolls and he wakes up. Just off the junction there’s a long lay-by with a couple of parked lorries and at the very end a food van, lit and open. I pull over and stop. Arthur staggers out and pees against a tree while I buy four of everything: burgers, sausages, bacon rolls, kebabs, chips-enough to keep us going for a while, appetizing or not, stone cold or not.

For the rest of the journey we are travelling into the light. Arthur is cheerful now. He fishes out various maps and points all over them with a pen from the glove compartment, though he isn’t saying much. Somehow he has three pairs of spectacles in his pockets and tries them all, finally using two pairs by wearing one and holding the other halfway between his eyes and the page on his lap.

Ruth, he says, making a face, the old B596 is no more. I’m rerouting us west of Bakewell, we can’t be doing with all this bypass nonsense.

His words are muffled, as if he is chewing on a mouthful of wet paper, but I obey his directions and he settles back and says, Isn’t this nice?

I agree it is. He beams and places a hand on my arm. Oh, isn’t it nice? Going back?

It’s lovely.

Going back together, he says with satisfaction, and we drive on until I have to start singing to keep myself awake. I wind the window down to let in some cold air. We’re climbing higher; the rushing wind has lost the oily tang of the main roads and has the magical pricking sweetness of cut fields and a heavy, early autumn dew. Arthur laughs and joins in with “Green Grow the Rushes-o” and when we finish that he starts up at once with “Jerusalem,” as if he knows a hundred songs and can pick one without thinking. The words come easily, and give him delight.

And did those feet in ancient time

Walk upon England’s mountain green?

Remember, Ruth? Jerusalem?

Just in time, I do.

Fourteenth of June, 1972, I say, and he smiles at me and squeezes my hand on the steering wheel.

But still I can’t stay awake, and although it’s very nearly light and it can’t be far now, I pull off the road into the opening of a rutted track. Across it just a few feet back from the road there’s a barrier of barbed wire and baler twine, stretched between fence posts set in old concrete-filled paint cans. An electrified livestock fence is drawn across a couple of yards behind that. Beyond it, at the horizon, the sky is solidifying to a pale solid gold, like cooling beeswax. I tip the seat back and close my eyes. Arthur sighs and settles beside me and takes my hand. Except for the occasional soft buffeting of air as a vehicle roars past us, it is quiet and still.

The sun on my face wakes me up. There’s a tight ache around my ribs. The day is already garish but when I get out of the car to stretch my body, I discover it’s also windy and cold. By the side of the track, sparse and stemmy weeds dusky with exhaust fumes wave back and forth, and here and there in the ditch the meagre yellow stars of a wildflower dip among cigarette packets, bottles, and shreds of paper and buckled cans. Miles above us, a few birds fleck a giant, chaotic sky.

Arthur wakes in a bad mood. Of course, he says, peevish and flatulent, he will remember the turnoff out of Netherbarn Cross for Overdale, but we drive three miles too far before he admits in an injured voice that I have missed it. His stomach is upset; he wriggles and scratches and fidgets with the window. I turn the car around and we crawl back the way we came but still he can’t find the turnoff because, he says, he can’t be expected to recognize it approaching from the wrong direction. We persevere, but after more studying of the maps and the tattered hand-drawn directions from nearly forty years ago, twice he chooses the wrong track. One takes us into a farmyard; the other ends at a barred and padlocked brick building stuck with aerials and antennae, property of the electricity company, sitting at the base of a pylon.

It’s not as if you, Arthur says sniffily, as I reverse the car and we start to bump our way back to the road, were ever a natural at map-reading.

I’m too exasperated to reply so we drive on saying nothing for a while, back in the direction of Netherbarn Cross. We pass the same small garage we’ve seen half a dozen times; the situation is getting so desperate that I am steeling myself, if we have to drive past it again, to go in and ask for directions.

Still, he says, I suppose you’d better take a look.

I park at a disused turning that looks as if it might once have led to a hopeless golf course that never prospered. It’s a derelict little place that we’ve passed and repassed in the last hour, but while I’m peering at the map Arthur is staring hard out the window.

Those trees are new, he says eventually.

It seems we’re here. We’ve found it by accident. It’s the trees that threw him, a line of conifers on each side behind low, curving brick walls that also, he says, never used to be here. The old Overdale track has been transformed into an entrance, and the entrance is now in disrepair; in front of each of the two trees nearest the road stands a pair of upright, rusting metal struts, buckled and stricken. One set is quite bare and from the other hang the stiff plywood shreds of a sign long ago ripped away.

And another thing, Arthur grumbles, waving a hand behind him: How could I be expected to find it when everything else is so different? The garage never used to be there, either. And they’ve widened the road and stuck those things in the middle.

There are barriers between the two traffic lanes and a long white-hatched space in the road where coaches can wait before turning. His memory of the old hazardous junction is useless, and the old directions no longer make sense.

They’ve flattened out the bend, he says, aggrieved. No wonder I missed it. After all, you missed it, too, didn’t you?

I start the car again and we set off up the track. The posts of the brick entrance have fallen away and lie crumbled and biscuity on the ground, and across the walls zigzag fissures in the mortar skew the brickwork. There are gaps in the rows of white copestones. Where the conifers end, the way reverts to a country track through fields. A tall green line of weeds grows down the centre of it and swishes the underside of the car. Every few yards we drive over ruts that have been filled with stones or patches of tar, but not recently; thistles and dock sprout through puddles and cracks. I have to stop and get out to move a coil of wire and a sheet of corrugated iron out of the way, and about half a mile on we come across a burned-out, rusted car, tipped halfway into a field. The front wheels and bonnet are missing and its boot gapes open. Nettles stretch up through the engine.

Gradually we leave the tussocky fields behind. The hills on either side of the way begin to climb towards the sky. As they rise into slanting mounds and suave, tilting cones they assume new distinction and character; they acquire the presence, even sentience, of sculpture or of people standing peripherally and very still, alone or in deliberate clusters. Light brims over the shoulders of the eclipsed hills to the east and pours itself over the opposite side in cold, showy pinks and yellows. The track rises ahead and then dips, and in the distance disappears round a curve into the dark swell of a valley. I glance at Arthur. His eyes are running with tears and his mouth opens and closes wetly.

Nearly there, I whisper, and he nods.

After another mile or so the wide pebbly stream that is now running alongside the track veers away extravagantly. We round the next curve and Arthur cries out. I stop the car on the edge of an apron of pitted tarmac tatty with weeds and the mangled remains of benches and litter bins. The building before us is a small redbrick mansion with a miscellany of dark elaborate turrets and impractical chimneys and gabled windows, set into the hillside in front of a sparse plantation of twiggy shrubs and trees. Even derelict and vandalized, it looks pompous.

The whole place is surrounded by high chain-link fencing, bearing warning signs about trespass and the hazardous state of “these premises.” I leave Arthur weeping quietly in the car and walk the fence. I go as far as the ruin of a modern single-storey extension, not visible from the car, that abuts on the far side of the lodge. Here is where two sections of fencing have been forced apart and where, against the walls of the extension, fires have been set. Smoke stains snake up the boards nailed over the front doors as far as the asphalt overhang of the flat roof. The blistered, prefabricated panels under one of the windows have sheered off and now curl outward. Like all the others, this window had been boarded up, but now it’s a jagged dark rectangle. Traces of another fire on the ground underneath it reach as high as the sill. The window board itself, prised off and split and partly burnt, lies nearby in a bed of broken glass.

I’m stepping through the gap in the fence, twisting my way through a web of cut and buckled wire, when I hear excited screams from Arthur.

Ruth, Ruth! Quick! They’re still here!

I run back round to the car, but it’s empty. He shouts again. He’s way over by the front porch of the lodge, waving at me. I follow his gestures and he guides me along the fence to where it curves up the other side and around to the back. It’s adjoined clumsily to a wind-stricken tree whose trunk lists towards the ground, leaving an easy gap. Arthur beckons me through and I hurry down to him. The original pillared porch juts out squarely from the double front doors. There may have been benches set into the sides of the porch once, but they’re long gone. Some of the coloured diamond floor tiles are still in place under drifts of leaves and rubbish, and the walls are ornamented from top to bottom with panels of glazed brick set between carved pilasters and small empty niches. High on the walls a bas-relief frieze of acanthus and birds, bordered by a pair of deep ledges decorated like cake icing, runs along all three sides. Arthur is holding up a set of keys.

Knew they’d still be here! He’s clanking them on their ring and he’s gabbling and spitting with pride.

You remember? The secret spares! The porch ledge! Bill what’s his-name got them made in Matlock, remember? We’ll soon be in business, he says, thumbing through the keys and selecting one far bigger than the others. Aha, here’s the mortise. Proper locksmith’s key, that. Feel the weight of it.

He hasn’t noticed, or maybe he just doesn’t see, that the front doors are now secured top, bottom, and middle by three hinged metal bands whose hasps are chained and padlocked.

Come on, I say. I think there’s a way in round the back.

It’s difficult, though. The broken window of the extension is impossibly high for Arthur and it takes time and a lot of strength for me to haul the vandalized benches and litter bins round to the break in the fence, get them through, and fix them under the sill so that he can climb up and step over.

We find ourselves in a bare classroom. It must always have been warped and thin and damp, but it now looks as if water has flooded through it. Mould stains streak the walls and the ceiling is buckled and slack. White deposits of mineral salts encrust the crumbling cladding material. The floor is gritty with it, and also with bird droppings and cigarette ends and burnt rubbish. There’s a trapped, soaked stench of rain and ash and urine.

Through the door and across a corridor is another room, identical except that there’s a heap of rags and bottles in one corner and it’s darker because the window boards are still in place. The sun is bleeding through the gaps, casting wavering needles of light onto the far wall that’s covered by a painted, chipped relief map studded with arrows and circles and crosses. Arthur gazes at it, enraptured. He wanders across with a hand outstretched and stabs at a point between some brown ridges and an irregular dark blue oval.

He strokes a fingertip across it and then touches his finger to his lips.

Here. Just here, he says, replacing the finger with tender and tremulous precision back on the exact spot on the map. Here, Ruth.

Then he moves into a shaft of light that illuminates his face abruptly and dazzles him so that he has to squeeze his eyes shut, and he loses his balance and begins to stagger. His eyes fly open in fright. I rush to take hold of him before he falls, and our bodies fold together. He shakes in my arms. I watch the light tremble on the floor and across the walls. Then I take his hand and lead him out and along to the end of the corridor where there’s a solid old door connecting the extension to the main house. Arthur produces the keys again, and finally we find the one that fits. Beyond that is a kind of long scullery and another locked door, but it turns out we have the key to that, too.

He meanders through the house, raising dust. All the rooms are bare and dark and seem to me even more abjectly and irretrievably abandoned than the classrooms; their emptiness is sadder and deeper in a way I can’t explain. But for Arthur it is pure reunion, unalloyed by melancholy. Behind every heavy, squealing door is something, or someone, he is delighted to see. In a room with a wide bay window he tries to draw my attention to the fireplace.

Remember! he says. Remember? We thought it so old-fashioned, that old marbled ebony, the maroon tiles! Worth a fortune today, old painted tiles like that.

He gazes at the wall admiringly as if the fireplace, rather than the raw gap where it used to be, were actually here. He takes me into the stripped-out kitchen that still holds a brackish vegetal smell, and from here into what he calls the eating and recreation quarters, now blank and damp. On the linoleum floor there are black streaks and dented circles where rubber-tipped chair and table legs were set down and scraped back in the clamour of innumerable institutional meals. Arthur stoops forward as if to catch again the trooping of children’s feet from serving hatch to table, the crash of plates and dishes, the clang of dropped cutlery. A dartboard still hangs on the wall.

As we go on he grows spry, pointing out this feature and that: the deep cornicing and skirting boards, and in the stairwell, where now hangs only a length of tied-off electrical cord, the original Edwardian brass electric candelabra with the little parchment shades. He leads me upstairs and first we inspect the teachers’ accommodation on the floor between the girls’ and boys’ dormitories. He remembers the room I slept in but not the name of the red-haired phys. ed. teacher I had to share with. I don’t, either.

Then we look over the top floor and the first floor, each one with five or six featureless rooms where, he reminds me, the kids bunked up in sixes and eights. He shows me their bathrooms with lines of collapsed shower stalls and basins clogged with dead insects. His fatigue has lifted; he walks the whole house, open-mouthed. I follow, answering his excitement with a quieter pleasure.

I’m assessing each room, thinking about practicalities. Most are completely empty but here and there I note the hulks of furniture that must have been too heavy or too worthless to move. On one landing stands a grey metal cupboard without doors that still has pillows and some cardboard boxes of cleaning fluid and toilet paper in it. Nearby, three or four narrow bed frames with broken slats are upended against the wall.

It’s broad daylight now. I drive the car round to the hole in the fence and we unload, Arthur fairly trotting up and down with the lighter things. I’ve settled on the darkest room to sleep in, a small one with a boarded window on the middle floor at the back that lies in the shadow of the hillside. It’s probably going to get very cold; there’s a little fireplace but I’m too tired to think now about whether or not the chimney might still work. I’m also too tired to drag in a bed frame. I fetch some of the pillows and put them on the floor and cover them with the thickest of our sweaters, and we arrange blankets over us. We lie close together.

Trees are being pushed to and fro outside, and light through the gaps in the window boards flows across the walls and ceiling in a shadow show of shifting irregular beads, the fuzzy little ghosts of moving leaves and branches. I watch, listening, and Arthur is watching, too; I glance at him and catch sight of his fixed open eyes glistening in the room’s pale darkness. His mouth gapes and his breathing is rising and fading with the sweep of shadows reaching in, keeping time with the swoosh of the wind.

Yet something in all this swaying and ebbing of his breath, and of the trees and the wind, seems sly and mocking; something in or maybe beyond the room protests, wants this pattern of heartbeats and pulses disturbed, their rhythms arrested and rearranged. It is as if a tight, mewling voice is struggling through a tiny mouth and a knotted throat to say something unfinished and tremendous and full of sadness, perhaps anguished and violent. Arthur turns to me.

Ruth?

What is it? We should try to sleep.

There’s something you have to tell me.

It’s a statement, not a question, so I don’t reply.

Now that we’re here, there’s something you should be telling me, isn’t there? Something about what happened.

About what happened? Where, when? To the baby, you mean? The baby in the story?

He grunts. That, yes. But something else as well. What happened to you.

To me? Oh! Oh, what happened to me, that’d take too long to tell, now.

Don’t say that. You have to tell me. What happened that day? You want to tell me.

Yes. Maybe. But I can’t.

You can. You want to. You know what happened. You know who killed you.

Yes.

You have to tell me. Why won’t you tell me? You’re afraid of what I’ll do.

No.

Then why won’t you tell me?

I can’t. Because knowing will be worse than not knowing.

Worse? That’s nonsense! How could it be worse?

His voice rises and he thumps a fist on the blanket. Worse, who for? He should pay the price. He deserves to suffer!

Maybe they are suffering, I say dreamily. They are. Not in the way you do, but in their way. So much has happened. Go to sleep.

I turn over on my side and nestle down, but Arthur yanks me around furiously.

How can you be so calm about it! I want to know! I have a right to know! What about me?

He is leaning over me and his eyes are fierce. His mouth is clenched and lopsided, and his breath hisses from it and dots my face with spittle.

What about me?

Shhh… now, dear. It’s all right. I’m here now. I’m here. Aren’t I? And we’re back here. At Overdale, together. Everything’s all right. You’re tired. Lie down and try to rest.

I have to speak in this way for several minutes, and eventually he grunts and sighs and settles back.

I won’t be able to sleep, he says, and starts to shiver and pick at the blankets with the fingers of one hand. Just as I think he’s falling asleep he starts up and bursts into tears and rocks from side to side, wailing and coughing.

I can’t sleep. I’m cold. I’ll never sleep. Not till I know, not till you tell me. You’ve got to tell me.

I talk to him some more, and then tuck the blankets close around him and snuggle in to still his body and warm him. I run my hand over and over his forehead and shush him like a baby.

I’m cold. You’ve got to tell me, he says. Promise you’ll tell me.

All right, I say. All right, I promise. I’ll tell you, but not now. This isn’t the time. Or the place.

Promise? When? When, Ruth?

Soon. I’ll tell you very soon if you promise to rest now. Go to sleep.

After a while he stops shivering and sleeps. I am almost warm enough. Inside the room the darkness grows dreamy; from outside comes again the sleek rustle of the trees around the house and the rattle of the metal fence, and from time to time the wind carries the faint creaking calls of water birds flocking somewhere not very far away.

There’s a grainy frost on the tarmac. Our footsteps grate as we walk across it in the dark towards the trickling and oozing of the stream. Behind us the lodge is a uniform black, before us the hills seem pulled upward by the moon. The moon pulls us along, too, casting our scissoring shadows ahead of us on the path and over the wet pebbles and shingle at the edge of the streambed, lighting the wavelets plashing over them with winking dots and ridges. A tree has fallen and blocks our way. I help Arthur clamber over it, then I return and break a length from a black, dead branch for him to use as a stick. We walk, and we walk. Some of the stones sit heavy and smooth and dun under their sheeting of water and some look bleached and jagged, like bits of tooth. We find lying half-submerged a white blade of animal bone, Arthur says most likely from a sheep. He cuts the air with it, sprinkling an arc of water drops into the moonlight. He has a notion to keep it but it turns ashy in his hands.

As we go higher the stream breaks into channels around bigger stones and small lodged boulders that split the runnelling water into angled, restless swords of silver and dark and silver and dark. We rest often, in places as far out of the wind as we can find. Here and there the bank of the stream bellies out where the water turns in a slow spin and collects in deep level pools, and falls almost silent, and turns viscous and as impenetrable as mercury, so that when we pause we might hear only a ghostly plocking and gulping from under the surface. Though we stare down trying to see something move on the bottom, even just reeds in the current, the black membrane of water gives back nothing but shivering fragments of reflected sky.

We tire. As we go further the stream breaks into smaller and smaller streamlets until it is a web of tangled strands across a field of stones and reeds stretching outward under the moon. We stop again and I pull Arthur’s hands from his pockets and rub them between mine, and draw them inside my jacket to warm them. They are freezing, his face is freezing, his mouth is locked with cold, and his mind is quite elsewhere. When I speak to him about gloves and tell him I’ve got blankets in the rucksack, he gives me a kindly look, but he is puzzled, as if I am butting foolishly into another conversation and steering it in some new direction that he finds eccentric and tangential.

Though he is cold and weary, he is the leader. We move on when he is ready, we pause when he chooses. Sometimes he stops and raises his walking stick, listening for a faint sound he thought he heard to be repeated, some cry from a bird or an animal, and I have to wait until he decides it wasn’t a living creature at all, just some indistinct whistle borne along on the sifting, chilly breath of the night itself.

We are deep in the hills now and although we are still able to make our way by its light, the moon has disappeared over a ridge. We are walking into a wretched wind and I start to feel afraid. I don’t know where we are going, or maybe I don’t want to know. I want to stop or turn back, but Arthur goes on doggedly, just ahead of me. Soon the path divides and he pauses, then points the way towards the lower fork that does not go to the top of the hill but cuts a gently downward slope around the curve of it, through a stand of scrubby trees. He tramps on and I follow close behind.

Within ten minutes we have rounded the side of the hill, and everything changes. We’re in the shelter of the summit now. We have to call above the roar of the wind but we do not feel it so much; it sweeps over the top of the hill above us. The moon has reappeared and shines directly on the reservoir a long way below. Arthur plants himself on the ground to gaze and I realize we’re not going any further.

I unpack the rucksack and try to get him warm; I hunker down next to him and wrap a blanket around us. But he doesn’t seem to feel the cold anymore. He’s got his arms pressed tight into his sides and he is staring down onto the surface of the water, crimped and silvered by the wind and moon. He starts to point out the old landmarks.

There’s the path through to Boar Clough, and if you go on over the top it levels out and another six miles takes you back to Hayfield. And this must be where the old sheep gate was, he suggests, gesturing vaguely down to a path far below us, and then he yawns and looks and considers again, shakes his head, and with a wide swing of his arm murmurs that it could have been anywhere. It doesn’t matter. He turns to me and pats my face and smiles.

I reach into the rucksack for the pack of food and a picnic knife. We ought to be drinking something hot and sweet, like cocoa, but all we’ve got is fatty cold meat and onions in chewy bread, and some water. I cut off pieces small enough for him to manage and hand them over, and I eat the lumps that are left. When we’ve finished I say, I wish we had a tent, but Arthur gets to his feet and pulls out all the bedding, fixes the rucksack expertly as a windbreak at our heads, unrolls the blankets, and spreads one out on the ground.

Lie down, Ruth, get comfortable.

I do as I’m told. The ground is bumpy and damp but at least we are lying on a mattressy layer of heather. He arranges himself beside me and wraps us up.

We’ll soon get warm, he says, and he takes me in his arms. He brings our last blanket over our heads like a giant hood, enclosing us in a stuffy sack that smells of the food we’ve been eating. It’s also prickly, but once my eyes are closed I’m able to feel only his arms and his neck, and then his hand inside my jacket and on my waist, moving over my skin and pushing up my clothes until my breasts are bare under his fingers. He is so thin now, his mouth is loose and bristly, but he curls in and presses against me and kisses and nuzzles and rests his lips on my nipples, and I stroke his head. I feel his hand reach for mine and he draws it down inside his clothes. He has the beginning of an erection. With no urgency and with no words, we find our way through the layers of blankets and clothing to each other’s bodies, and we make love. My body receives him, and that is enough.

Later when I whisper his name there is no reply, but then I feel his mouth forming words against my skin and his hand tightens in the dip of my waist. He is asking me something.

Ruth, what happened? Tell me what happened.

I don’t know what to answer.

I say, Tell me something. Did you mean it? What you said you’d do to the person who did it, if you got your hands on them?

I said I’d kill him, he says. He sounds slightly embarrassed. I told everybody, I said I’d strangle him with my bare hands.

Surely that was just the heat of the moment, I say. You wouldn’t do a thing like that. Not you, Arthur. You couldn’t.

Arthur considers this. No, he says almost regretfully, you’re wrong. I meant it. I could do it. I would. I’d have to.

No matter who it was? Even supposing it was somebody very young, only a kid? Or suppose it was a woman, or just somebody who’ll never recover, somebody who’d do anything to put it right if they could?

I can hear fear enter my voice but Arthur doesn’t seem to.

Put it right? What the hell does that mean?

I just mean… maybe it’s someone who’ll never, who won’t be able to rest until-

He turns and presses himself down hard on my body, pinning me to the earth as if he’s afraid I’ll escape. His breath comes in hot, salty gusts.

I don’t care! Put it right? So they feel better? Why should they be able to rest? Think what they did to you! They shouldn’t even go on living, not after that!

All right-no, they shouldn’t, I say. It’s just I hate seeing you so upset. Please don’t be upset. But I know, some things are too wicked to be forgiven.

He is silent. He releases me and eases himself back. Then he says, That’s what I’m saying. And you do know. You put it in that story. Uncle Les, the bad fella. He was asking for it, a bad end.

It was only a story, I say. But I expect he got it.

Now Arthur is lying on his back. His eyes are closed and his face is rumpling with the effort of holding back tears.

And the child. Tell me what happens to the child. The baby girl in the story, Ruth. What happened to her?

I kiss his mouth softly and I say, Don’t worry about it now. You’ll find out tomorrow. As soon as it’s light again. I’ll tell you everything.

You promise, he murmurs.

Soon I hear his breathing slacken into an unsteady, rasping sleep. I lie in his arms, knowing that I will tell him everything. As soon as it’s light. There will be no peace until I do. I feel, I think, a kind of welcome sadness at the idea that then at last his rage will rain down and spend itself on me, but I fear pain as much as anyone. I wish he were stronger or that he had a proper weapon. I hope oblivion will come quickly.

He wakes one more time and whispers, Ruth, I don’t care what happens now. We’re safe here, aren’t we?

I don’t know what to answer. Safe from what? In the morning I shall make sure the knife I brought is within his reach. I lie awake, afraid. For who knows what stalks us at a distance, circling in the dark? Who knows how inquisitive they will prove, how close they will come to see if we are lost children, if we are living or dead? What would they say to us? Suppose there are people still shambling along the path in the moonlight, and one strays from the others, and watches the distance grow between herself and her companions, and say that all in a rush she understands she will not see them again but no matter, for she has always known herself quite able to leave them? So she lingers at the gate and does not call out, nor even wave at their swaying backs, but turns her attention instead to the dark indecipherable shape on the hill. Suppose she has enacted this estrangement every night, in anticipation of us. Would we move to greet her? What would we tell her?

I don’t know what to answer. But Ruth knows, somehow, and my grandmother knows, and all the others, the counted and the numberless, the remembered and the unremembered dead. They are around us now in their habitual, dreaming way, murmuring reassurances in the voices we know so well, and since we would not feel them if they touched us they stroke through the darkness with fond hands and stir the air into little vortices, sending flurries through the orderly night that shift the folds of our blankets by a fraction, or shake loose two or three leaves from the stunted trees on the ridge and cast them down the hillside into a wind that’s no longer cold but soothes us in dull waves, and carries the scent of old vines and honey. By such tricks and currents they draw us on with kindliness, and though invisible they are not wholly unseen, they are not vanished.

I don’t know what to answer. I lie awake shivering. I don’t know how much strength there is in his hands. But I’ll no more resist his vengeance, whatever form it takes, than I turned away when he reached for me and burrowed lovingly into my body.

Arthur’s face was damp and yellow, I thought first of all with dew and the first light, but when I touched him his skin slid a little under my finger and it shone with a layer of some cool sweated oil, like putty. The wind had blown the blanket from the side of his head and a few leaves of hawthorn were fluttering against his hair. His mouth lay open towards me as if he had turned to speak. His eyes were half-shut and without meaning. The eyelids had become simply that, lids: a pair of formal, diminutive covers of skin interrupted in the act of blinking, but whether they had halted when his eyes were closing in sleep or opening under the glare of morning sky it was neither possible nor important to know. His arms were locked around me. I didn’t move at once. I lay watching the little rags of birds in the sky over the reservoir, listening to their cries, and then listening to the silence beside me, wondering if it meant something more than not breathing, something more than absence, whether it could mean that a parting, perhaps this one, might be absolute.

I sat up and pulled myself clear of his arms but kept hold of his hand. How long could I stay; how could it ever be time for me to leave him? I pushed back his sleeve and watched the sparse hairs on his forearm rising and falling. His finger ends were turning blue and clawing at nothing. The lips of his moist monkey mouth were fluttering as if he had strange dead words to speak to the wind. Soon his face would sink in upon itself. All there was left to wait for now was the flecking and wrinkling of his skin, darkening into hide.

I closed his eyes. I rearranged his clothing and straightened his body. From the rucksack I drew out the pages of Ruth’s unfinished story and placed them securely on his chest under his folded hands; I set his walking stick and maps close against his side. I kissed his lips and his forehead, and I settled myself close to him and placed a hand over his. I had promised to tell him everything and so I began to talk, and I did not stop until I had told him all I knew.

I began with what he also had known, that on that brittle spring day some force within her had marched Ruth right up to where the last moment of her life was waiting, a few minutes before noon on a country lane canopied by blossoming trees. There had been nothing she could do to prevent it, any more than I had been able to disarm whatever force in me had gone about its work that morning in delivering me to the time and place I would kill her.

The horror of what happened may mask, a little, its utter simplicity, or perhaps its very simplicity is part of the horror. Of course, if only we had known: if only I had been delayed by another minute, if only it had rained and Ruth had decided not to cycle. But all the if onlys in the world are grapeshot fired too late against the fact that on that day not one second’s pause, not one extra breath nor the merest passing thought, had pushed themselves between our attention to some obscured notion of what life required of us from moment to moment, and the brutal second that death occurred. Ruth’s life and the instant of my ending it were not separated by so much as a single additional beat of either of our two hearts.

Then I told Arthur it was not Ruth but I, the less beloved, who should have died. It would have mattered less. But although I was left still breathing, my life, too-that is to say any deserving I might have of my life-ended with the taking of hers. Her death brought to a close my daily enactment of a series of scenes, contained and infinitely repeatable, that for years I had been trying to string together into a semblance of a history that would bear the telling. My life’s course had seemed always a delicate, waning story about which it was natural I should be sad and other people absentminded; in conversation my name was always the one they tended to forget. Now my story was finished. I had killed the person telling it.

Hereafter I would have no story, only a dishonoured past. And what else could I do then, but begin to learn what it is to be dead before I actually was? I ended my own life in the taking of Ruth’s, and in search of expiation I took her life again. What could I do but enter her story, and with the stealth and self-effacement of a ghost take it to its rightful ending here, with him, on a shining hillside she could not herself get back to?

Not that I quite understand endings, or beginnings. How a story begins is not why it begins, and how or why it ends is no more fathomable. Reasons buried in the accumulated past may be forever hidden from those whose reasons they are, or perhaps there are none, after all. Perhaps there are no reasons but only things that happen, attached to nothing, events that loom out of the dark and leave sometimes a series of blurry afterimages of what we thought vital at the time-what it will please us later to call our stories-imprinted on our blindness.

I paused, stroking Arthur’s hand. The bitterness of his death was that it seemed a kind of absconding, a defection from one last neglected task. He would give me no shriving now; all the peace would be his.

The wind was sweeping shards of reflected sun across the reservoir like pieces of broken mirror, so sharp and blinding I could not see the water itself. And so it is that light passes back and forth over what I can’t see as well as over this world of dark and changing surfaces, cloud shadows go on scudding across the wavering and inexact shapes of all the unended stories, casting angles and colours and all interpretations out of true. The sky will be always crowded and the earth forever alight with them, these unmediated details, the incongruent blunders as well as the mystic, the epic conjunctions, with the drifting and inconclusive atoms of the sparsest, no less than the mightiest, human events. I may lament all I like the lack of it, but there is no natural law in this world that can take such fragmentary and capricious refractions and make of them anything explicable and whole.

I swaddled his head with tender and particular care, wrapping a scarf round and round his face and eyes like a bandage. I covered him with the blankets and folded them in tight under his limbs.

That’s how I left him, on the hillside with his face to the sky. I made my way back slowly along the path. On the curve of the hill I turned for one final look, and then I went on towards the rushing of the stream, shielding my eyes against the sunlight sparkling on the water.

All this happened some time ago. I drove away from the lodge. The roads were deserted and the garage near the Overdale turning was closed. I left a letter there saying I thought he’d had a stroke. I said they’d find him out on the hill and I hadn’t wanted to leave him but I’d wrapped him up safe against the wind and the birds. I didn’t say that the last thing he gazed on was the dark water with the moon shining on it and the last touch he knew was the warm body of his Ruth.

I drove until the fuel gauge was nearing empty, and abandoned the car at a railway station. I caught a train, where to isn’t important. It was only a matter of hours before I understood that a person out of place is sentenced to be out of place everywhere, yet she has no choice but to keep going. And that is how it is.

Going from place to place at least punctuates a day with the dots and dashes of making a journey: the hurrying, the arriving, the synchronized languor of the intervals between connections. Waiting in cafés, I stack packets of sugar and trace patterns with a finger on the tabletop and look out the window; towards the close of afternoons I will find myself in another obscure provincial town, and thinking about nightfall, I’ll start tapping on the doors of the kind of abject boardinghouse that is never very far from the stations of such places. Sometimes I look for a caravan, off-season, or a room above a pub where I might stay for a week or so if I wash dishes. But sooner or later I’ll begin again to study timetables, for precisely that purpose, to study time; and maybe also to assert, from my state of dispossession, a small degree of something akin to possession though it be of nothing more than the coming day, the passing of which I will determine and execute in measures of the routes between places I don’t need to go.

Of course it’s fruitless, the crossing and recrossing of these distances. How spacious the landscape between resting points, how unnaturally lengthy the days. And every twilight seen from the window of another temporary room confirms that the preceding hours have drawn me a little further from my mislaid life, for I never was going to find its vestiges here, nor there, nor anywhere visible.

When it’s properly dark, I go out. I don’t want to, quite, but it’s become a habit after all this time not to resist how the night draws me to itself. And I am drawn sometimes miles away, to the edges of towns and the mistakenly built and put-aside streets of houses where people seldom flourish, where lives seem always precarious and marginal and lived against tides of more robust and purposeful forces.

There’s a constant flow of vans and lorries to and from the garages and roadside mini-marts that thrum all night long on the borders of such places; the soft roar and sodium mist from bypasses and motorway interchanges muffle and cloud the darkness right over their roofs and pavements. There are a few people about on foot, some walking dogs but mostly they’re foragers in the all-night shops, out for cigarettes or cans of drink or junk food, including, I’ve noticed, surprising quantities of ice cream for the small hours. Occasionally they’re couples, more usually they’re alone. But the lone ones aren’t solitary in the entrenched way I am; something about them seems to say they’ve come lately from the company of another or are hurrying back to it. I watch them cautiously. It’s a matter of some pride to me that I do not look destitute, quite. But I think my loneliness can be breathed in, like an odour, and so that people won’t pass by me close enough to detect it, I will cross the road or find a wall or doorway and wait. Then, without necessarily meaning to, I follow.

No, I don’t really follow, not to begin with. I let my thoughts walk alongside them, that’s all. I concern myself. I wonder if, say, the man striding by on legs that seem shortened from lack of use has cause to feel as pinched and aggrieved as he looks, and why he may be dismayed in his heart. I worry that the slow, sentimental-looking pregnant girl carrying bags of sweets has nobody to listen to her cravings and go to the shop for her, and hurry back to run her a bath and feed her liquorice sticks or spearmint toffee, stroking her belly, as she lies in the deep warm water. I don’t follow them; I just need to know they are safe, the lost ones, the wanderers. I like to see them enter rooms that will shut out the night that’s lapping at the door. I’m anxious and hungry for their well-being, so I give in and let myself be pulled along behind them.

Not that I try to see into houses. I do not go searching for uncurtained rooms. But there are so many, and it is impossible not to look in through lit windows, for since I now truly know the dark, I want equal knowledge of its absence. I have to observe the places where darkness has been disallowed, where its opposite reigns apparent. Such brightness! I admit the brightness does enthral me, though I gaze in dread because I can’t separate it from what it illuminates: people in houses moored like toy lightships on the surface of the night, people tending futile little eternal domestic fires the way I used to and the way Ruth and Arthur did. I can hardly bear to see them so lit up, so impossibly vulnerable yet oblivious, as if they thought their puny flares of artificial daylight could prevail, as if any tiny guttering yellow flame could ever withstand the encroaching black.

For hours at a time I watch them dappled by the light of television screens, heavy and unmoving in their chairs. I watch them at tables and mirrors, filling plates and eating with their hands, flipping through papers, brushing their hair. They stand at sinks, lift telephones, open and close cupboards. Children are put to bed and babies bundled on shoulders are carried from room to room. I watch as they leave off talking and little by little grow dreamy and inattentive, and fond and slow. How I envy them. Lights go out.

I want more. Now when a house goes dark I draw closer, right up to the windows. I want to hear breathing. I like to picture people in their beds and unaware that the day has run out on them, that sleep is suspending every crisis, every flawed, unfinished striving, every word said and not yet said in their particular small lives. I want to hear their steady breathing because then I would know that until they wake their stories are collapsed and upturned, dragged along in the depthless currents of dreams. I’d know that for a while at least their stories are as lost to them as mine is to me.

So what harm would it do if at such a time, for such a short time, I came closer still? I wouldn’t invade anyone’s dreams just by coming within the walls. Nor would I try to steal anyone’s story and take it for my own, but may I not borrow it, during a few hours of darkness, in order to affect it for the better? I see enough in all these lit-up houses to know I could do some good; there are always dozens of practical ways of making a difference. I long to help, as I did before. And I wouldn’t take more than I give. I’d attach to another life to improve it, not to end it or suck it dry. I’m not parasitic. It’s symbiosis I seek, that poise and purity and balance. I’m starving for it. I whimper at people’s windows.

Yet I shy away. I haven’t yet tried an unlocked door or unlatched a low window and stepped in, though I think I’m bound to; it’s only a matter of time. I don’t know what inhibits me, but I turn away long before it’s light.

Tonight I wander back the way I came along the quiet roads but I’m not ready for sleep in the rented room that smells of bar dregs and disinfectant. I’ll stay out even though there’s a prickle of frost in the air and I should be in warmer clothes. Beyond the houses, the pavement widens and leads into a park with a few swings and a roundabout. I set the swings going as I stroll past and then walk on quickly so I won’t hear their empty creaking. I slip through a line of trees on the edge of a recreation ground and strike out across playing fields. Ahead and around me in the dark I can make out the leaning white ribs of goalposts. When I’ve crossed to the far side I stop and stare back at the park and the houses under their yellowy bloom of cloud, looking for a sign that I ever set foot there. There is none, not so much as a dent in the grass. In front of me now is a fence and a scrub of bramble bushes and beyond that, over a metal gate, a stretch of ploughed earth curving upward into faraway woods.

Once I’m through the woods I roam further, across a patch of thin pasture and more fields. Then it gets steeper; paths end at stiles or slide over the horizon through gaps in hedges, land drops away behind scraggy stands of bushes and falls into hoof-rutted gullies. The wind rises. Darkness lies trapped in the trees like black veils snagged on the branches, it ripples ahead of me and spreads over the swell of the hills. I follow it, climbing an old sheep path almost to the top of a hill high above the glow of the town, where moonlight strikes through the clouds and silvers the grass.

I shiver and settle myself down, hugging my knees. Suddenly I’m too weary to move any further. My eyes close for a moment, though it’s so cold I won’t fall asleep. I wish I could. I need a place to lie, somewhere to stay. Is it to be here, another hillside under the moon? I look back in the direction of the town.

Something feels near at hand. I force myself awake and try to make sense of the contours of the hill, but I’m drowsy and shapes loom and shift and nudge against me, benignly perhaps; the wind now has me wrapped in its cool rocking arms and I don’t wish to be let go. I can’t trust my eyes, but I strive to make out a gate half-open, half-closed, in the moonlight. I’m searching through the dark for signs of a throng of lost ones idling along the path, the wind ruffling dry leaves into a familiar tangle of hair, bearing the echoes of myriad remembered stories and the scents of old vines and honey. Will they wait for me?

Something is ending, or beginning. How long will they linger, my lost ones, my wanderers? They wonder, I think, why I stay away. Do they hear me when I murmur that I think it may be coming soon, the night when I venture close enough to see if the moving shadows on the hillside really are theirs, do they know how I yearn to catch a glimpse of patient, moon-white hands outstretched to take me with them? But again I make myself turn away and look down towards the town. Then it’s as if I also see, motionless under the roofs of all the houses, the slumbering keepers of stories, the tender, infinite stories, so clamorous and so many and all of them unfinished, surrendered, waiting.