Down Among the Gods (21 page)

‘Why don’t you?’ says Jessie. ‘We could all go. Would we be any use, Dafydd?’

‘Of course,’ he says. ‘The more the merrier.’

Patrick sits down and stares gloomily at the eggs. He puts a finger in one ear and shakes it furiously.

‘Phone them,’ says Jessie. ‘Go on. You can have a meeting any time but you won’t get another chance to do this for a while.’

Lydia looks at the clock on the mantelpiece and then back to Jessie again. Patrick picks up his fork with some determination, then sighs and puts it down again. ‘I don’t suppose I could have a doggy bag,’ he says.

‘You can live without breakfast,’ says Jessie. ‘I’ve packed you some sandwiches. You’ll survive.’

‘Hugh Roberts and his lads are doing the eastern side,’ says Dafydd, ‘so we’ll start right over at the village end. With any luck we should meet up with them somewhere around the middle and drive the whole lot down together.’ He looks at his watch. Patrick pours himself more coffee. Lydia looks at the clock again, then clicks her tongue. ‘No,’ she says. ‘It has to be business before pleasure. I’ll have to go back.’

‘That’s a shame,’ says Patrick.

‘Yes,’ says Dafydd, standing up and looking at his watch again. ‘What about you, Jessie?’

‘I’ll have to take Lydia to the station.’

‘Messed up everybody’s day, haven’t I?’ says Lydia.

‘Hardly,’ says Patrick, swallowing his coffee and heading for the door. ‘See you again some time?’

‘Yes,’ says Lydia. ‘I hope so.’

The mist is still clinging to the peaks as Dafydd and Patrick set off, but it is drifting away and the day promises to be fine. As they walk together across the bridge and on to the grassy path that leads up towards the scree, Dafydd says, ‘Phew! I thought for a minute there we were going to be stuck with the women.’

Patrick looks up and grins. Since they first met, he and Dafydd have been a little uncertain of each other. Now, after last night, they are friends.

The two dogs trot on ahead, all eagerness and lolling tongues. They are lean and strong, working dogs not pets. They are symbolic of Dafydd’s power. Patrick worships him a little. He is a modern farmer with a lot of sheep and a lot of machinery, yet he hasn’t lost sight of the basics of life. It is land and not acres that he farms. He is enjoying the rich and fragrant morning as much as Patrick is.

As they start into the more serious gradients of the mountain, the sun begins to burn away the light morning mist. It is going to be a scorcher.

‘Look at the day I’m going to miss,’ says Lydia as Jessie drives down the bumpy track and out on to the road.

‘Still not too late to change your mind,’ says Jessie.

‘Yes, it is. What will you do today?’

‘I don’t know.’ Jessie has thought no further than getting Lydia to the station. She has been holding off the sinister feelings that are demanding her attention, but they close in on her now. Despite their love-making of the previous night, Jessie is beginning to feel that Patrick has somehow betrayed her. His departure was like a rebellion, but against what she doesn’t know. She needs time and space to think about it.

‘Does he often do that?’ says Lydia.

‘Do what?’

‘Go off drinking like that.’

‘How do you know he went off drinking?’

‘I heard him come in, lurching all over the place.’

Jessie’s blood runs cold. Lydia’s face is turned away, gazing out at the hillside pastures running down towards the valley and Jessie has no desire to ask her whether she heard anything else. She can think of no way in which Lydia could possibly be responsible for the turmoil she has been thrown into, yet it seems that she is somehow gloating, as though the events of the previous night have proved her right, yet again.

‘Did you have a row or something?’

Jessie slows the car at the junction with the main road and turns left, towards Bangor. ‘We never have rows,’ she says.

‘That’s great,’ says Lydia, glancing at her watch. ‘Good for you.’

When Patrick comes home he is tired, dishevelled and smelling of sheep. Dafydd has gone with a trailer of lambs and has left the rest in with Hugh Roberts’s in the sheepfolds on the other side of the bridge until he can collect them in the morning. The ewes and ewe lambs have gone back to the mountain until winter.

‘How did you get on?’ says Jessie, as Patrick settles gingerly into a chair and begins to take off his boots.

‘I think, on the whole,’ he says, ‘the other two dogs were rather more use.’ He embarks on a brilliant imitation of Dafydd. ‘Round the back, Patrick. No, round the BACK! The other side!’

Jessie laughs and ruffles his hair, then bends down to help him with his boots.

‘I think they’re rusted on,’ he says.

‘Do you want a bath, or do you want to eat first?’

‘Food. Lots of it. Dafydd says he’ll give us a couple of lambs for the freezer.’

‘What freezer?’ says Jessie.

‘Haven’t we got a freezer? What’s that thing in the feed shed?’

‘That’s ancient. They used to put the goose into it to hatch.’

‘Did they? How do you know?’

Jessie opens the oven and gets out stew and baked potatoes. ‘I don’t know how I know. Dafydd told me, I suppose.’

‘When were you talking to Dafydd?’

‘What do you mean, when was I talking to Dafydd? You’re not going to start getting precious about Dafydd, are you?’

‘No, of course not. I just wondered, that’s all.’ He swings his chair round to the table and makes an extravagant lunge at the stew. Jessie threatens him with the ladle and he swipes at it like a bear. She collapses into a chair, and drops her head on to the table, helpless with mirth.

Patrick is a little more restless than usual that evening, and can find nothing fruitful to do with his time. After his bath he wanders from room to room, wondering whether he was right to decline Dafydd’s second offer of shepherd’s pie in the pub, but in the end he decides that he’s just tired, and brings a book in to read beside the fire.

Jessie is mulling over her old notebooks again. She looks up as Patrick comes in. ‘Feeling better?’

‘Better than what?’

‘I don’t know. Better for the bath.’

‘Yes, I suppose I am. Can’t beat a good soak.’

Jessie puts down her notebook and goes out to the new kitchen to put on the kettle. ‘Tea or Horlicks?’ she calls.

‘Tea, if you’re making it.’

Jessie comes back in and sits on the edge of her seat while she waits for the kettle. ‘I’ve been doing a bit of thinking,’ she says.

‘Oh?’

‘Yes. It was something Lydia said. About my writing.’

‘What writing?’

‘Well, that’s the point, isn’t it? What writing?’

Patrick closes his book, a little wearily. ‘Go on.’

‘Well, Lydia has this theory that women get too dependent on relationships and that’s why they don’t make anything of their own lives.’

‘You’ve made more of your life than I have,’ says Patrick, dropping the book and looking around the room. ‘I mean, all this is your life, isn’t it? It’s not mine.’

There is a hint of bitterness in his voice as he says it, and it takes Jessie by surprise. ‘I wouldn’t see it like that,’ she says. ‘After all ...’

‘After all, what?’

‘I don’t know. At least you’re out there in the studio, getting things together. But I’m not doing anything apart from fuddling along through other people’s manuscripts. I’m not doing anything creative or original. And there’s no point in moaning and saying that I don’t have time. I have to make time, somehow. Otherwise I’ll be looking back at my life in ten years’ time and wondering what happened to it, you know?’

Patrick buries his face in his hands and sighs. He puts the sudden reappearance of depression down to tiredness, and begins to think about his bed.

‘I’ve just been looking through these,’ Jessie goes on, ‘and there’s quite a few good ideas in them that I never worked out. I’m sure that if I just get organised I can start putting some time into it. I’d be a lot happier with life if I did.’

Patrick looks up, and his face has a scornful expression which takes Jessie by surprise. ‘Are you not happy, then?’ he says.

‘It’s not that,’ she says. ‘I am happy. I mean, I’m happy here, with you. But that thing about the writing ...’ she looks across at him, but he is looking down at the hearthrug. ‘I thought you’d understand that, Patrick, with your drawing and everything. I thought we had that much in common.’

Patrick picks up the book and stands up. ‘I’m just tired,’ he says. ‘I can’t really see why it matters just now. Perhaps we can talk about it again.’ The kettle comes to the boil and snaps itself off. ‘I don’t think I’ll have that tea after all. It’ll only keep me awake.’

‘Horlicks, then.’

‘No, thanks.’

‘I could bring it up to you.’

For a moment he looks at her, suspicious of her generosity, unsure whether he wants it. Then he capitulates and nods. ‘That would be nice,’ he says.

That night Patrick dreams, and remembers the dream well enough to relate it to Jessie in the morning.

‘I was in the London Underground, on the Circle Line. I think I was part of some kind of expedition or something. I had one of those little barrels round my neck like the Saint Bernards’ wear.’

Jessie turns towards him sleepily and kisses his chest. ‘Getting ambitious, eh? Plain old sheepdog isn’t good enough for you?’

He laughs, relieved. In the dream, the collar had made him feel slightly humiliated. ‘That must be it,’ he says. ‘Anyway, everyone on the train, the whole expedition, was heading for King’s Cross. But there was one of those weird things that you get in dreams. The others were all facing me. I was the only one who had my back to the engine.’

Jessie gets up and puts on her dressing-gown. She is usually interested in dreams, but for some reason she doesn’t want to hear this one. ‘Bacon and egg?’ she says.

A fine drizzle is falling. Patrick puts on a raincoat after breakfast and crosses the yard towards the garden. The hens are still locked in the hen-house, crooning mournfully like recaptured slaves, and from the other side of the bridge he can hear the wether lambs bawling for their mothers and sisters. The mountains are lost in mist again, but Patrick can just see the top of Dafydd’s trailer down beside Hugh Roberts’s sheep-fold. He is about to walk on down the track and give Dafydd a hand to load when he hears laughter from several voices down there. For a moment he stands undecided, suddenly isolated, then turns his attention to the fence. The new posts that Jessie picked up when she took Lydia to her train are leaning against the bank, waiting to be used. Patrick sighs and bounces on his bended knees a few times to ease the stiffness in his legs. Then he goes back to the house.

Jessie is sitting in the armchair in her study. It is too wet to walk and there is no urgency about the two manuscripts which are sitting on her desk beside the computer. She has decided to take the day off and see if she can do some writing.

It gives her a wonderful feeling. Everything is right with the world, and at last, she feels, she has come to that point of perfect equilibrium which presides over each new beginning. She has taken off her shoes and folded one leg underneath her in her favourite attitude. All her old notebooks and diaries are lying in a pile on the floor beside her, and she has nearly finished going through the first of them. She has noted down a few ideas, but at the moment she has forgotten them and is reading through an old litany of complaints against the world and smiling at the naivety of her former self.

‘Jessie!’

He always does that. Always calls from the front door as if he were just passing by and wondering if there is anybody home. She doesn’t answer.

‘Could you give me a hand?’ he says, leaning round the door. She sighs and unfolds herself. ‘Doing what?’

‘Holding the posts. Or you can hammer if you like. It won’t take long.’

Jessie doesn’t fancy either of the jobs, or the rain. But she puts on her anorak and boots and comes out with him. The first few posts go in easily. Unlike Lydia, Jessie has no interest in hammering, so she holds and looks out at the landscapes around her. It is all, still, a little unreal. The grass in the meadow is long, ready for cutting. They have promised it to Dafydd for hay, but he was too busy with his own to cut it while the weather was fine, and he is waiting for another good spell. At the bottom of the meadow, low trees cling to the edge of the gorge and hide it from view. The craft-workers’ car passes along the road. Jessie reckons that already she recognises about a third of the cars that pass. The area still hasn’t been invaded by tourists.

A light wind blows the drizzle sideways for a minute. Now that she is out in it, Jessie doesn’t mind it at all. It is the same water that flows down the crag at the back and that they use for drinking, so clean and soft that it almost has flavour.

They have already set posts to the edge of the ground that Patrick has cleared, but he wants to go further. His plan is to enclose about double that area, to give him work for the autumn and winter. At the highest end of the opened earth, a rock is visible, jutting out from the grass. Patrick has met its lower edge and has been excavating it carefully, trying to find out how big it is. Jessie holds a post between the rock and the bank, and Patrick hammers with the flat stone he is using. The post sinks down about six inches then stops, with a jar that hurts their hands and arms.

‘Whoops!’ he says. ‘No go. Move it along a bit, will you?’

Jessie does. The rain is dripping into her eyes and down her neck. Patrick wallops the post again, and again it meets resistance. A third time they try, a third time they meet rock.

‘Damn.’ He pulls the post, a little roughly, from Jessie’s hands and flings it to the ground. Then he fetches the crowbar from the bank and begins to probe the ground.

The rock he has encountered is more than a rock. It is a little toe belonging to the foot of the crag which stretches underneath the house and down into the meadow. For a long time, he spears the ground with the crowbar, his movements becoming more urgent and angry as he goes on.

Jessie watches, aware that the news isn’t good. But she hasn’t yet realised what Patrick is coming to understand.