With pain. She twisted her face away and kept herself from crying out. Her body went as taut as a bowstring, and when she opened her eyes and looked into his face she saw there awestricken astonishment. He lay still inside her. And then, for his sake, she did what she had read should be done: raised her legs and arched her back and held him embraced and reached her mouth to his, and began to enjoy what she did. To enjoy as much as she was going to for this time, she knew that, and she smiled and held him and kissed him when she felt the convulsion and heard his breath released. The quivering net of light from the river seemed now to have set the whole room trembling. Down in the Mootwalk a woman laughed and from the water a swan gave its harsh, grating cry.
Nick, holding her, said quietly, ‘That was the first time for you.’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘I’ve never understood,’ she said, ‘but there it is. Doctors are only of use if a — a person wants to be cured.’ She was very near to crying. She sat up and wrapped her arms round her knees, her hair falling round her like a cloak. He said nothing. She thought that if he said the wrong thing now everything would be over for her and him. And she was so used to the wrong things being said, to her tactless family, a mother and sister who shouted where angels feared to whisper, to Stephen and his inept words. If Nick made the mildest joke about virginity, about his luck, about impotence, about needing to eat after their exertions, she would dress and run away and it would all be over. She turned to him in despair and the tears were running down her face.
He took no notice of them. His eyes were half-closed and he was smiling a little.
‘Go to sleep with me for a while,’ he said, and he took her gently into his arms. He didn’t say he loved her but, ‘I think we’re going to love each other, Lyn.’
From the pulled and sagging pockets of his jacket, his Sunday-go-to-meetings suit, his only suit, Dadda produced a cairngorm and silver ring for Lyn and a pearl-handled Stilton knife for Stephen. Though they might have forgotten that the following day would be the sixth anniversary of their engagement, he with his prodigious memory had not.
‘It was me brought you together,’ he said as they thanked him. ‘But for me I don’t reckon you’d ever have set eyes on each other.’
It was true. He had more or less arranged their marriage, Lyn sometimes thought. Her first job on leaving school had been at Whalbys’. She had been a clerk-receptionist-phone-answerer-tea-maker and she had got the job through her uncle Bob who was as near to being a friend of Thomas Whalby’s as it was possible to be. He had never employed a girl before or since and now it seemed to Lyn that Dadda had hand-picked her for Stephen without the knowledge of either of them. Young, innocent, they had been malleable in those hands which were so practised in making something valuable out of raw or damaged material.
Dadda, having scrutinized his previous gift, the chestnut leaf table, for white rings, cigarette burns or dust in the carving, shambled about the room examining the legs of furniture. Although he didn’t say so, Lyn knew he was looking for the marks of Peach’s claws. Peach, who often sat on the chestnut leaf table, marking it no more than if he had been a fluffy cushion or a nightdress-case cat, watched gravely from the basket in which he was wise enough to sit when at home on Sundays. Lyn put the ring on and said it was a perfect fit.
‘Ah, I had the size of your pretty fingers by heart,’ said Dadda who was adept at making one feel a heel.
Trevor Simpson came in later and Lyn’s uncle Bob as well as the rest of them. There were hardly enough chairs to go round. Dadda withdrew into a corner, drawing up his spider legs. Uncle Bob said he could remember, from when they were boys, Tom had never been keen on cats.
‘A mild form of ailurophobia,’ said Trevor.
‘Look, lad,’ said Dadda, ‘I don’t have nothing mild. I don’t have nothing bloody mild.’
Joanne, vast, out of hospital the day before, sat eating chocolate biscuits.
‘If you go on like that,’ said Kevin, ‘you’ll be back in there before the week’s out.’
‘It’s not food, it’s fluid. If I’ve told you once I’ve told you five thousand times, it’s all fluid.’
‘Chocolate’s poison to horses, did you know that? It’s got some substance in it, theo-something. Racehorses have been known to die of eating chocolate.’
‘You mean me and racehorses have got something in common?’
‘There was a woman lived in Hall cottages when you girls were little,’ said Mrs Newman, ‘used to feed her family on cat food. Out of tins, I mean. She used to give them Pedigree Chum too, but it was mostly cat food. She liked the fishiness.’
‘No thanks, Lyn,’ said her father, ‘I won’t have another sandwich.’
‘And she had this baby and it had a birthmark like a cat’s face on its stomach.’
‘Ours’ll have a Mars bar.’
‘I’ve no doubt it’s true,’ said Trevor. ‘Could be a rare form of imprinting, could even be stigmata.’
Peach jumped up onto Lyn’s lap. He lay there, purring. His pale golden, ringed tail hung down and sometimes the tip of it twitched. Dadda was the first to leave. He hadn’t come in the van. Bob Newman offered him a lift but he wouldn’t accept it, he said he would get the bus. Joanne and her mother lingered, gossiping, by their adjoining gates as if they wouldn’t see each other again for half a year. Lyn washed the dishes. She got out the mower to cut the back lawn.
‘I say, darling,’ Stephen said, ‘I think I’ll go out for a bit, blow the cobwebs away.’
‘Would you like me to come with you?’
His eyes became opaque. She could see he didn’t want her. ‘That wouldn’t be much fun for you. You have a rest, put your feet up.’
Was she still trying to retrieve something? Still hoping for something from him? ‘I’m twenty-five,’ she said, with the edge to her voice that was the nearest she got to temper.
‘Sorry. Shouldn’t have said that. I only meant you look tired. Why don’t you go out somewhere? Take the car.’
‘Perhaps I will.’ She seemed to hear Nick’s voice saying, We are going to love each other.
‘All right if I’m not back till late, then?’ Stephen said, eager for her approval.
‘Of course it’s all right, of course.’
He set off jauntily, whistling. Golden eyes looked at him from among the leaves of the yellow maple tree where Peach sat cleverly camouflaged. Stephen walked along the Jackley road, past the crossroads and up to the Vale of Allen. It had been a white day, white blank sky, white thin sun, warmish and dull. The sky was white and still, unmarked by cloud or blue.
A car was parked by the roadside, on the left hand side and facing north. Stephen thought it a curious place to leave one’s car, blocking, or partly blocking, the northbound roadway, while taking it a farther ten yards on would have enabled its driver to pull in onto the bridlepath that traversed the Vale as far as the Reeve’s Way. The car was a small yellow Volkswagen. Stephen couldn’t see a sign of its owner. The land here was dotted about with gorse bushes and he half-expected a dog to come bounding out from among them. But apart from the gentle, almost mesmeric, hum of the bees, all was silent and still.
He climbed up on to the Reeve’s Way and followed it northwards into Goughdale. The owner of the car was nowhere to be seen, nowhere in all these wide plains that lay about him, though the car was still there, a bright yellow dot on the distant road. The causeway commanded a view of all this region of the moor, but once he had jumped down and was in the shallow bowl of Goughdale, he could see nothing except the remains of surface workings and the louring slopes of Big Allen.