Once the session is over and people are helping themselves to lunch, I check out the grid on the flip chart to see if Helen is booked in for the afternoon. She is not. She has reserved a slot on Thursday.
Instead of getting lunch, I leave Lumb Bank, taking the path that leads up the valley. I pass through deciduous woodland, the path gradually drawing closer to the river on my left. All I can hear is the tumble of the river and the occasional snippet of birdsong. A packhorse bridge takes me across the river and I start walking downstream on the other side. The path climbs away from the river and soon splits. I stand at the Y-junction and consider my options. They are few. Either left or right. Down or up. Or back. I take the right fork that leads diagonally up the hillside through the forest. After ten or fifteen minutes I realise the path is petering out. I face another choice. Either I go on or I go back. I check my watch: there should be enough time. I decide to go on. Straight ahead, the way looks difficult: outcrops of rock and increasingly dense tree cover with tangles of sharp dead growth low down on the pine trunks that would impede my progress as effectively as barbed wire. If I take a more direct approach to reaching the ridge, it will mean tackling a very steep slope, probably having to go on all fours at certain points. This is what I decide to do. Soon I am hauling myself up the steepest section by grabbing handfuls of tussocky grass and clambering the best I can. Eventually I exit the treeline and the gradient falls away. I am at the ridge. I walk for a further five minutes and I reach the sandstone bluff. I climb on to the top of this and look down across the valley to Lumb Bank on the far side. I shield my eyes; I can see a couple of people in the garden. It’s a long way, but one is almost certainly a woman, with long hair in a ponytail. Is Helen the only female student who wears her hair in a ponytail? I don’t know. The other person I’m less sure about. The size suggests it’s a woman, but there’s a mannish quality to the stance. I watch the two figures from this considerable distance, obviously without any idea what’s going on between them, but they are standing on the little rectangle of lawn, close enough to each other that they must be talking.
The afternoon’s tutorials pass off without incident and then everyone is waiting for the guest reader, who normally arrives some time between 4 and 6 p.m. Three students are in the kitchen on cooking duty; most of the others are scattered around the house and grounds writing or reading. I sit in the garden staring across the valley at the sandstone bluff, remembering standing on top of it only hours before. Out of the corner of my eye I see Grace enter the garden and immediately I slip my phone out of my pocket and hold it up to my ear.
I walk further down the garden pretending to be engaged on a call. At the end of the garden is a cottage, where the administrators are provided with accommodation, and beyond that a path leads off the property, through the woods and down the valley. As I step into the shade of the broadleaf wood, a large dark-brown bird takes off from nearby and flies away from me in a straight line between the trees going downhill. I have heard owls here at night.
When I return to the garden, Grace has disappeared but a few of the students have started drinking. Geeta asks me what time the guest reader will be arriving and I check my watch, see that it’s not far off 5 p.m. and say I’m surprised he’s not already here. By six he still hasn’t turned up and I walk up the lane to the main road with a couple of the more restless students, to see if we can see some sign of him. When we get back to the house, Nikki asks me if I have tried to call or text him. I tell her I don’t have his number. Dinner is served a little bit late, the expectation being that he will show up while we are eating. He doesn’t. By 8 p.m., everyone is gathered in the snug. It’s clear Lewis is not coming. One or two people voice their dissatisfaction. Helen asks if any of Lewis’ books are in the Lumb Bank library, in the adjoining room, and Stephen, who is writing a novel about vampires on Income Support in south Manchester, goes off to check. He comes back empty-handed and says there’s no one between Joanne Harris and M. John Harrison.
‘Shame,’ says Helen, turning to me, ‘you could have read to us from his work.’
There is some kind of inflection in her delivery, but it’s hard to say what it is. A short collective discussion ensues about Lewis Harris and the possible reasons why he has failed to turn up. Soon small groups form and numerous conversations are held at the same time. While chatting to Stephen about his vampire novel I overhear Helen telling someone else she’d tried to check out Harris and get hold of one of his books but had been unable not only to locate any of his titles, but to find any evidence that a writer of that name existed at all.
Later that night I finish The Blindfold. I immediately go back and reread the first page and only then do I realise how clever and sly the author has been.
Thursday morning. I set the group an exercise that requires them to go off and find an object somewhere in the house or garden, or a view that they can photograph, that should inspire a scene in their novel-in-progress. We are to reconvene in half an hour, after they have written as much as they can.
I walk up the lane to the road. By the time I reach the top, my heart is pumping fast and there is a light sheen of sweat clinging to my forehead and the back of my neck. I look one way — the road winds off towards the moors — and then the other. If I started walking to the right I would be in the village in five minutes, and half an hour later I could be down in the town waiting for a train to Manchester. I look at my watch. There are twenty minutes remaining. My scalp prickles. I look down the road. A car approaches slowly. It slows down even further as it reaches the crest of the hill. The driver peers through the windscreen at me. He has a shaved head, a goatee. I swivel and hold the man’s gaze while his car comes alongside and then passes me as he drives on towards the moors. I watch the car become smaller and smaller. It turns a corner and is gone.
I walk slowly back down the lane.
In any case, my car is parked by the house.
Once everyone is reassembled in the dining room, I ask who would like to go first. I look around the group. Helen is playing with her ponytail and sitting back from the table. Stephen is bent over his notebook. Grace has her elbows on the table and is either biting her fingernails or removing dirt from under them with her teeth. Her eyes flick up and lock with mine and she removes her fingers from her mouth. She is about to speak, to volunteer to go first. I look away quickly and see Geeta doing some last-minute editing to the page in front of her.
‘Geeta?’ I say, aware that Grace has raised her hand. ‘Geeta, would you like to go first?’
Geeta hesitates as she looks at Grace, who is saying she wants to read.
‘Geeta, you go first,’ I say.
She collects herself, offers a conciliatory glance in Grace’s direction.
‘It’s very short,’ she says. ‘And a bit rushed.’
‘Please,’ I say. ‘Everyone’s in the same boat.’
Geeta begins to read.
‘The clock had stopped just after 9.15 a.m., just after my mother made a funny little croak. She lay back with her mouth slightly open. I had felt then as if a transparent butterfly or dragonfly had emerged from her throat, hovered for a second, then flew to a place where I could not follow. I felt betrayed that she would die just two months after I had come back. That she would not wait. I was just easing into things, trying to ask her about that time when I was sixteen, when I was abruptly changed into a woman, a woman who immediately sustained a terrible loss. I wanted to ask her why she didn’t say something, why she would let her own flesh go to strangers. I wanted to ask her about the nature of shame and why was it so important to glue our faces together so the cracks won’t show. I wanted to tell her that in Japan, they deliberately made beautiful porcelain with crackled surfaces. I took the clock in my hands and stared into its round face, the long hand just after a quarter past. I wondered at time being stopped for her. For me too.’