To go out on the moor would have been the best remedy for this. He had his rope and his powerful torch and a packet of candles, and he had planned to attempt Apsley Sough at the weekend. But the long spell of dry weather broke and on Saturday it rained all day, the driving torrential rain of midsummer. Next day the foins were shrouded in a drizzle that was more than mist and less than rain.
Stephen wrote for ‘Voice of Vangmoor’: ‘Now that the summer is well and truly with us, several places of interest in the “Foinland” area have been opened to the public. The historic gardens of Jackley Manor may be viewed any Sunday from now until 30 September between 2 and 5 p.m., and in response to popular demand, Mr David Southworth is for the first time opening the gardens and some of the rooms at Chesney Hall on Saturdays, also from 2 till 5. Visitors will be able to see the study in which Tace wrote the famed Chronicles of Bleakland and also, I understand, one of the actual pens used …’
‘And why isn’t Cinderella hastening back to her hearth this evening?’ said Nick.
‘Stephen’s gone to see his grandmother. He’ll be late home.’
‘I wish you’d said. We could have gone out somewhere. The way things are, we never do anything but this.’
Lyn sat up in bed. She started to laugh. ‘I don’t claim to know much about these things but I understood that was something men never never said.’
His face was serious. He took one of her hands and held it in both his. ‘I dwell in the suburbs of your good pleasure, don’t I?’
She looked at him inquiringly. ‘It comes in Julius Caesar,’ he said. ‘Portia says it to her husband, I think, to Brutus. “Dwell I but in the suburbs of your good pleasure?” That’s how you make me feel. I thought I was going to be more than that to you, Lyn, I thought we could be more to each other. Here’s something else you probably thought men never never said. I don’t see much point in casual affairs.’
Her heart was beating hard with fear and wonder. She was a lifetime away from laughter now. ‘But when your uncle gets better you’ll go away. You’ll go away anyway in August.’
‘And that’s all there is to it? I’ll court more women and you’ll couch with more men?’
It wasn’t at all the answer she had expected. She didn’t know what she had expected. ‘I won’t do that,’ she said. ‘I didn’t before. I don’t see much point in casual affairs either.’
He got up. He pulled on jeans and a shirt and went out into the kitchen where she heard him starting to make coffee. When he came back he sat on the bed beside her and lifted her up in his arms and held her against him. His words surprised her.
‘You’d never go out on the moor alone, would you, Lyn? Promise me you never will.’
‘I promise,’ she said.
Without the knitter and the old man to be stimulus and audience, Stephen didn’t know how to talk to his grandmother. She was in bed for the evening visitors to the Lady Clara Stillwood Ward, and she seemed more limp and structurally collapsed than at Sunningdale. The apoplexy had pulled her face down on one side, giving a quirk to the mouth. Her skin had blanched to the matt, rubbery whiteness of a fungus. She moved one of her hands and made an inarticulate sound when she saw him.
Stephen put the box of jellies down on the white coverlet beside her. One of Mrs Naull’s hands was paralysed. Though he had never loved or even liked her, though he had come to hate and fear her, then feel a deep guilt towards her, it went to Stephen’s heart to see that one sound hand fumbling ineffectually with the cellophane wrapping while the other lay useless, while his grandmother’s face, or the mobile part of it, contorted with piteous frustration. He unwrapped the box, fed her an orange jelly and then a green one, wiped away the coloured trickle that came out of the corner of her mouth.
‘How’s Midge, Leonard?’ said Mrs Naulls in a new, slurred voice.
‘I’m Stephen.’
There seemed to be no more to say. He gave her a red jelly and she managed to eat it without dribbling. He thought of how he had held her throat and shaken her like an animal shakes its victim animal, desiring to break its neck. She had struggled and clawed at his hands to prise off the fingers and gasped out an address to him. His hands slackened and he gave a sort of sob and she said it again, choked it out, an address in Vancouver.
He was ready with his apologies, to go on his knees to her if necessary. Dadda’s temper, Dadda’s violence, that had raged in him, had burned itself out with a fizzle. She had got up with surly resentment, rubbing her neck, straightening her dress and her apron. The back door opened. Arthur Naulls was coming back from what he called his ‘constitutional’. She began getting their tea without a word, she never mentioned it again, never told anyone.
More than half his life ago. He felt that he disliked her no less intensely now than he had done then, yet he came regularly to see her, more regularly than her own children, so that he had a reputation in the family of being ‘good’ to her. Why did he come? Why would he go on coming, to sit by her and feed her with sweets, until she died? Because she was his only link with his mother and that illustrious ancestry? Did he, even now, hope for revelations or some gratuitous gift? A long-passed-over message from Canada? A tale of Tace?
‘Arthur’s not been in once,’ said Mrs Naulls.
Stephen didn’t feel he could say her husband had been dead eight years. ‘He’s not been too well.’ That in a way was true. But she had forgotten, it seemed, the man and the grievance, and was gazing vaguely at him, clouded blue eyes, mushroom-white cheeks. He kissed her, put another jelly in her mouth, patted her shoulder. As he went she lifted her hand in the way she had done when he came. Going down the stairs, he met his aunt Joan and his aunt Kay coming up, carrying lupins from the Pettitt garden and a bottle of Lucozade.
‘Stephen’s always been good to his grandma,’ said Mrs Pettitt.
‘There was a lot about you in the paper, Stephen,’ said Mrs Bracebridge. ‘It was nice you putting that in about Dad working for Mr Tace.’
She must have thought ‘descendant’ meant ‘ancestor employed by’ or some such thing. The elder Naullses were all more or less illiterate. Conversely, that reminded him. ‘Does anyone ever hear from Peter?’
‘Peter?’
‘My cousin, Peter Naulls.’
‘You’ll have to ask your uncle Leonard about that,’ said Mrs Pettitt. She spoke in the tone of one cautioning a former associate of the Prodigal Son. ‘Nobody condescends to tell us, do they, Kay?’
They went on up, whispering together, tip-toeing. They were the kind of women who behaved in hospital as if they were in church. Stephen got into his car and drove home the long way round via Byss and Loomlade. The rain had stopped and it was warm and humid, the sky feathered all over with tiny golden clouds. The evening sunlight lay like a gilding over the distant reaches of the moor. Stephen, thinking of his grandmother, remembered those letters he had written while in his teens to Mrs Brenda Evans at Tobermory Park Road, Vancouver, and to which he had received no reply. His grandmother, probably, had given him a false address. What did it matter now? He was sure he no longer cared. He had put away childish things.