Beck laboured behind him, panting heavily, but he couldn’t wait for him, the quivering of the grass drew him on, hypnotically alluring. They had left the lower outcrop of rocks behind on their right hand, jagged in black and white like broken teeth. Against the skyline, faded periwinkle blue and faintly luminous beyond that enormous moon, the tips of the rocks at the Altar just showed clear of the grass. At close quarters they stood thirty feet high, a horseshoe shape with a worn space of grass enclosed in their uneven arms, a picnickers’ delight. The ring of squat trees, stooping, mis-shapen pines half-peeled of their bark, still lay out of sight on the summit.
He turned his head, and saw the bowl between the border hills drowned, drained of all colour, a landscape solitary and strange as the craters of the moon. He withdrew his eyes from it with a wrench, and leaned into the slope as though his life, or a life incredibly becoming almost dearer than his own, depended on his reaching the top of the hill. Though there could be nothing here for them, nothing at all, no sign. If she had left her prints charmed into the grass, this acid whiteness of the moonlight would have bleached them all away.
There was a real wind up here, no longer a mysterious tremor that trod out the path for him, but a steady, light breeze that blew from behind him, from the hills of the west. So it was that he heard nothing as he breasted the last yards of the slope towards the Altar, panting, and saw suddenly before him the small, slender ankles moving in a rhythm of confidence and peace, the light feet furrowing the grasses. No colour in the shoes, the stockings, only gradations of grey, no colour in the narrow skirt gripping her thighs as she came. No colour in the coat now, no gentian blue, only a deeper, dimmer grey, soft-textured, melting into the night. And within the hoisted collar the abrupt darkness of blue-black hair, the more abrupt whiteness and clarity of an oval face.
His eyes reached the face, and he had to halt and stiffen his legs under him to sustain the weight of relief and gratitude. Everything else could wait, the incipient rage, the anxiety that would surely close in again within minutes to impede all contact between them. What did they matter? He was looking at Annet. Annet, alive, intact and alone.
She came dropping down the slope towards them with her soft, lithe stride, not hurrying, not delaying, one hand in her pocket, one holding up her collar to her chin. He saw her face pale and still, with great eyes enormously dilated. She was aware of him; she saw them both, converging upon her, and knew them very well, and yet it seemed to him that she was looking through them rather than at them, that her mind and her heart were somewhere infinitely distant and inaccessible. He could not put a name to the disquiet she roused in him, or the quality of the pale, charged brightness that vibrated about her moonlit movements. But he knew he was frightened, that he dreaded the unavoidable questions to which he didn’t want to know the answers. And all the time she was drawing nearer, her steps quickening a little; and there was no escaping the moment and the spark.
But when the spark flashed Beck was breathless, and Tom was dumb. It was Annet who looked wonderingly from face to face, and asked in a voice shaken between offence and uneasiness: ‘What are you doing here? is anything the matter?’
Was anything the matter! As though they had offended her by coming out to meet the last bus, as though they could not trust her to come home alone. The same erected head and faintly, gravely hostile face, unaware of having given more cause for anxiety than she did every day by being aloof and independent of them. Or was it quite the same? Her eyes were so wide and opaque and strange, as though she had only just awakened from sleep, and deep within the blankness a small, remote flame of disquiet kindled as he watched. But not fear; only disquiet, as though they were the unaccountable ones.
He said: ‘We came to look for you.’ What else could he say?
Still out of breath, her father said with feeble anger:
‘Where’ve you been? When you went out you said you’d be in to tea.’ Fantastic, the commonplaces that came most readily to the tongue; maybe wisely, for what could words do about it now?
‘I know,’ said Annet, her voice almost conciliatory, something like a smile playing over her face for the absurdity of all this. ‘I meant to. I know I’m horribly late, I went a long way, farther than I realised. I couldn’t believe it was so late, it seemed to drop dark all at once. But you didn’t have to send out a search party, surely? I thought you’d be home by now, Mr Kenyon. You didn’t stay because of me, did you?’
And then she did smile, vaguely and sweetly and penitently, softened and eased by the night and the silence and that something in herself that kept her lulled and still like a dreaming woman; and the smile died on her lips and left them parted on held breath as she saw their fixed and wondering faces. Their own wariness, incomprehension and quickening fear stared back at them from her dilated eyes.
‘What’s the matter? I’m sorry I’m late, but why should you be alarmed about a couple of hours? I really don’t see— I’m not even wet, it’s stopped raining. What is the matter?’
Carefully, in a breathy voice that hurt his throat, Beck asked: ‘And what about the five days in between?’
She looked from one face to the other, and the smile was as dead as the skeleton rocks bleaching in the moonlight below them. She moistened her lips and tightened her grip on the raised folds of her collar. In the great dark eyes the little flames of fear burned high and bright.
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Annet in a thin whisper. ‘What five days?’
CHAPTER III
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He got up as soon as it was light, and dressed and went out. What was the point of staying in bed? He hadn’t slept more than ten minutes at a stretch all night. He couldn’t stop hearing her voice, patiently, desperately, wearily going over the recital time after time, unshakable in obstinacy.
‘I went out to post the letters, and met Mr Kenyon at the gate. He offered to take them for me, but I wanted some fresh air, so I walked. What else can I tell you? That’s what I did. I went for a long walk, right over the Hallowmount and along the brook. I meant to come back round by the bog, but it got dark so quickly I changed my mind and climbed back over the top. And then I met them, and that’s all. It’s Thursday. Whatever you say, it must be Thursday, it was Thursday I went out with the letters. What’s happened to you all?’
And the two of them at her, one on either side, frightened and angry but afraid to be too angry, afraid to drive her further from them; anxious, bitter, piteous, throwing the same questions at her over and over.
‘Where did you go? Where did you spend the nights? Who went with you? What’s come over you? Do you expect us to believe a fairy-tale like that?’
He had driven them home, and then torn himself away as inconspicuously as he could, but he hadn’t been able to help hearing the beginning of it. What right had he in that scene? Annet didn’t want or need him, and he didn’t want to hear them call her a liar. He got out of the house, and took the car and drove into Comerford. All the way along the quarter of a mile of solitary, moonlit road, under the flank of that naked slope, he was repeating to himself that at least she was alive and well, and that was everything. Wherever she had been, whatever was the truth about her lost five days, she was alive and well, and home. But by the ragged, chaotic pain that frayed him he knew that that was not quite everything. And he knew that she would win, that in the end, true or not, they would all be committed to the same uneasy silence and acceptance.