Something in his chest gave a hot jump, for she was there too. She wore a shirt checked in amber and sage green and a short canvas-coloured skirt and sandals that left her feet bare, just a sexy little strap between the toes. Her hair and eyes were dark, her skin brown-gold in the lamplight and her hands like butterflies, as deft and slight. She was perfect, head to feet. He wondered sometimes how anything could be that perfect, somehow it seemed nearly wrong. He swallowed and wondered what to say, but there was no need because Ray called from the bar as he always did, ‘Same place,’ and grinned and jerked his head at the ceiling. So he hefted his stuff upstairs and unpacked, he knew the furniture in the room now and the bed with its immaculate, tight-stretched sheets. The window stood ajar on its big old-fashioned stay and beyond was the castle, the great shell of ruin blue in the dusk. He would unpack quickly and put the camera and light-meter in the one drawer that locked and go and eat his meal because afterwards he could sit in the bar. And once she talked to him a whole ten minutes, asked what he did for a living and whether he’d had a good trip and how long it had taken getting down. After that he had a good time, although she didn’t speak to him again; instead he heard how John’s boss planted the wrong strain of wheat and the wind had flattened it, and how the caravan had taken first prize in a carnival and how the coastguards log a boat all round the shores of Britain. Driving back, it seemed the hours flew; it was as if she was with him, he’d brought her back like a wonderful catch from a wonderful shifting sea. He smiled, in the dark; and the Champ took a roundabout gently so as not to wake Martine, asleep a hundred miles away.
He got the Champ from Chalky for a straight ton, God knew where he had picked it up; but when he got tired of her and said she was using too much bloody juice and went for an old Magnette Stan took her over and cleaned her up and had new side-screens made and a hood at Trade and got himself a garage again. After that she was good for him because he could sit inside her and dream, though when he got her down to Purbeck the first time Ray Seddon took the pleasure out, right out, saying he thought the bloody coal had come.
They all laughed, the people he knew, and he had to laugh with them, but afterwards it wasn’t too bad because she came out to see. She was wearing a white shirt and the canvassy skirt and her hair had been cut, though he preferred it that shade longer. The Champ was standing on the skyline, angled on the rough car park behind the pub; the sun was glinting on her dark green paint, she looked big and tough and smart. Martine had her arms folded and a cardigan over her shoulders. She said in her brittle little voice, ‘What are all those knobs?’ and he said, ‘Four-wheel drive,’ and then his voice stuck in his throat because the chance was there, anybody else in the world would have said, ‘Nip in, I’ll give you a run,’ but he couldn’t speak. So time stopped for a bit; then she was walking back saying, ‘I have to get on now,’ so he went round to the back of the car and fiddled with the jerrican lock as if it didn’t matter, and the afternoon was still and warm and he felt like death. After which Northerton was hard to take; his mother’s house and the doctor coming and the workshop and the fish-and-chip place on the corner and the birds on the telly and in the Sunday papers, all reminding him of her. Winter was coming on; and Chalky was hard to take, the Sunday walks down past the garden fields and the new Grammar School to Drawback where they ran the dogs. The grey sky and the rough brown fields, the silence and leafless trees, all were hard to take, though what he had inside him locked away he couldn’t speak of, least of all to Chalky. Though he owed the castle to him and the valley and Martine; to a week’s holiday, years back now, Chalky between women, with time on his hands for once. What had haunted Stan had left him unimpressed. The beer was good, he had pronounced; the castle all right, if you liked that sort of thing; and Martine all right, though she didn’t look like a very good fuck. Stan pondered, frowning; while Chalky swore and cursed and the greyhound put up hares it never caught, and cut itself on hedgerow wire. And sometimes it was good to get back in the Champ and drive down past the gasworks to his place and shut the curtains and put the Box on and get his mother’s tea.
The traffic was halted again; and lights were flashing, amber and blue. There were cars drawn up and lorries; it looked like a road-block and he couldn’t think any more what he meant to do.
All the tech lights were on, so the side of the building looked like a shining yellow cliff. The canteen was cold and nearly empty, stinking of lunchtime’s bacon rolls. They’d pulled two tables together, though the fat woman had yelled through the serving hatch not to, and Tasker was there from the Boot and Shoe, the only leather bloke they got on with, and Quatermain and Briant and Tony Sidgwick and half a dozen more. Mist was closing in and the odd bangs were starting already and they were all making a row, and it was Guy Fawkes Night.
He sat with the rest, feeling a hot breeze blow on the back of his neck from the table at the far end where the art school girls were sitting. The tall blonde was there, Annette Clitheroe, thirty-five, twenty-three, thirty-six, and the little Irish one they reckoned did turns with the Pakis, and the other one, Helena, the one they nearly had the jumper off in the corridor that night and she didn’t have a stitch on underneath.; Tony Sidgwick kept cheeking them, saying to come down on the tech table and they’d show them how, then he started on Annette Clitheroe, her people had this big furnishing shop in town centre. She was wearing her hair up round one of those felt former things and Tony kept shouting what was it on her head; and she said finally, ‘That’s my business,’ and Sidgwick said, ‘That’s a bloody funny place to put it,’ and they all started shrieking, Stan included, because he couldn’t help himself. Then Sidgwick lit a jumping jack under the table, they didn’t seem him do it till it was fizzing and went off; and Stan Potts’s brain worked with lightning speed so that he grabbed it and threw it over his head and ducked. The fat woman was yelling over the counter about the Principal, and Sidgwick was choking himself he was laughing that much.
Her heels on the concrete floor were very distinct and sharp. She walked the length of the canteen, carrying the plate and set it down in front of him. He had to look up, though he couldn’t stop the laughing; and her eyes were snapping and glinting behind her glasses, there were red spots of anger on her cheeks. In the centre of the spoiled cakes, embedded in a meringue, were the remains of the cracker; and there were little white splashes of cream on her sweater, and one on her jaw.
She said, ‘My cousin lost his eye through one of these, you big fat bloody thug.
You must be mad. . .’
He’d passed the road-block but he’d had to lie, he’d said he was going to Dorchester. The traffic was lighter now, the cars spaced out and moving at forty, sometimes forty-five. But nearly nothing was coming up from the west.
His mind was empty; so to fill it, and keep away the things he didn’t want to see, he set himself to remember the road ahead. Wimborne, and the left turn by the Dorset Farmers, the little bridge, the long straight in the trees with the notice saying Welcome to Poole although you never really touched it; and the new roundabout at the bottom with the filling station, he could remember it being built. Then there was the other roundabout by the Bakers’ Arms and the research place, Admiralty they said it was, with the miles of high steel fence. Then the turn into Wareham, the siding where the oil tankers stood; and beyond, over the bridge . . . but his heart was thumping again, hammering, it seemed, painfully against his ribs, and he checked the thought half-formed.
After that first chance trip he went back to Purbeck time and again; though the journey from the Midlands was a long one, five hours and more on a bad day. It left little from a weekend; just one night, and the following morning. The nights he spent in the bar; he would rise early on the Sunday, drive down to the castle or out on to the heath. The castle drew him, the vast shell of ruin topping its hill, the village straggling and crouching at the foot of the mound. Foursquare it stood in a great pass, flanked to either side by bulging heights of chalk. Once he climbed the nearer of the hills, sat an hour or more staring down at the ruined walls and baileys, the gatehouse with its leaning towers of stone. A chalk stream ran beside the mound. Tall trees arched over it, bushes clothed its banks; and here in autumn the glow-worms came, like cold green stars in the grass. He longed to take them back to her, jewel her fingers with them and her dark, rich hair.
Other times he drove across the hills themselves, over the range road that was so often closed. There were hidden bays there, and empty, forgotten villages; and once he saw a horseman ride the forbidden cliffs, a mile or more distant, outlined against the pearly haze of sea. He discovered Kimmeridge with its blackened beach, the great house that overlooked the bay; Worth, its gnomish cottages hidden in sea mist, and Dancing Ledge with its lovely rock-carved pool. He was learning, too, the people who used the pub; John, as much a mystery to his friends, who knew, it seemed, every country you cared to mention and yet drove a tractor for a living; Martin Jones the hippie, with his floral shirts and wispy shoulder-length hair; Maggie who played guitar for the tourists sometimes in the Barn Bar, who lived in a white bungalow down the road with a birdbath on the lawn and a stone rabbit with broken-off ears, and Richard Joyce who painted for a living and who must have Private Means. He knew them, though he couldn’t talk to them; and for their part it seemed they looked askance at the fat man in the corner, with his pained half-smile and always-furtive eyes.
These folk formed, as it were, an inner circle of acquaintanceship. But there were many others; Andy who worked with John, Andy with his tanned good-looking farmer’s face who went with Penny who helped out sometimes in the bar; Ted and Arthur and the locals and Vicky who was tall and blonde and wore an Army uniform, they said she was a nurse; she knew Richard, he’d seen her with him a couple of times. And the tourists, the leggy warm brown summer girls who sat in the hayloft in the Barn with their men and laughed and drank cider and lager and sometimes wine. He liked the Barn Bar best, with its high cool walls hung with implements and harness and the thatched roof over the counter and the door standing open to the dusk and the moths circling in the pools of yellow light. He saw the place in dreams; and always Martine was there, Martine with her great dark eyes. Sometimes too he saw her in the hills, in the hidden villages and by the great rock pool. Then he would wake and realize that once more he was home, that he had been alone, that he would always be alone; he would stare into the mirror, at the balding head, the faded, heavy-lidded eyes, and know he would never go to that golden place again, that Northerton was where he belonged and where he must stay. But the simplest truths are the hardest to accept; so he would pack his things, just one more time, and hear his mother’s complaints, and the images would swirl hour on hour till he saw the hills again, the sea-mist striping their flanks. He would drive into the remembered yard; and always he would know as he pushed through the hotel door that this time she was gone, gone for ever. Yet always she was there.
In the intervals between his trips he studied. He read the geology of the region; and its history, prehistory and architecture. Every fact that touched upon the place touched, it seemed, on her, made him feel fractionally less alone. So, increasingly, she towered in his consciousness; her face glowed above the hills, her slender hands cupped bays and sea. He discovered the Hardy novels, and in time the painter Nash; the hills and trees and standing stones, flowers that broke from their moorings to sail the sky, fossils that reared in ghostly anger from the rocks. Suns rolled their millstones of golden grain; and it seemed he heard, far off and far too late, the shock of distant armies. He became at times transfigured; then he would remember, and Northerton would claim him and the garage, the oil changes and grease-ups and job cards and M.O.T.’s; Chalky and the dogs, the telly and the dreary Sunday nights. His mind, circling, would balk once more at the inevitable yet wholly unacceptable fact: that he was fat, and bald, and forty, and that life was ended.
This inner pain was such that greater issues tended to pass him by; so that it was with some surprise that he entered the Barn Bar one summer night to find the place unusually quiet, a handful of regulars and visitors clustered round a tranny that stood on the counter-top. The words he heard seemed no less and no more than the many uttered before; but the silence that followed them was intense.
Martin Jones broke it. He sat hugging his knees, head back against the wall of the place, fair hair brushing the stone. ‘Well,’ he said in his quiet, carefully modulated voice, ‘it’s all happening. This is what we’ve been waiting for.’
Ray stood frowning behind the bar, one hand laid, it seemed protectively, on the shoulder of Martine. ‘Charming,’ he said. ‘Come on, Martin, we’ve heard it all before.’
The hippie shook his head. He said, ‘Not quite like this.’ He glanced round lazily. He said, ‘I’m looking forward to it. So’s Vicky. It’s what she joined up for.’
The blonde woman turned to stare at Joyce, but did not speak.
Jones always seemed exceptionally well informed. ‘This will be a primary retaliation zone,’ he said. ‘They’ll want to be sure of Winfrith. I expect we’ll be shipped out before too long. They’ve cleared one of the caravan parks at Sandbanks as an embarkation area. They’re keeping quiet about it, of course. That won’t be a sight of good, unfortunately. Far too flat.’
Somebody said, ‘Tell us where would be any good.’
‘Quite a lot of places,’ said Martin. ‘One thing’s certain; I shan’t be waiting it out in Poole.’ He yawned. ‘I’d tend to look for somewhere between the hills and the sea,’ he said. ‘You’d get good blast protection from the Purbecks; and I can’t see anybody lobbing anything into the Channel. They’re much too accurate these days.’