He answered her in the machine voice, the robot voice. ‘You’re having me on.’
‘You know I wouldn’t. It’s all true. I’m sorry if it’s been a shock.’
‘A shock …’ he repeated. He got up and went to the window and turned his back on her. ‘You really said those things? I’m not dreaming?’
‘Stephen …’ She laid her hand on his arm, though so lightly that it just brushed the sleeve of his shirt.
He flung it off violently. He turned round. What she heard then was so frightening she could have screamed. She clenched her hands. He spoke in a tone she had never heard from him before. And another voice came to her out of the past, the voice of her brother, then six, shouting at their mother when she told her son and daughter that Joanne was about to be born. Stephen used the same words, precisely the same, and he uttered them with the child’s shrill rage.
‘If you bring a baby into this house I’ll kill it!’
She didn’t scream. She controlled herself, strangling her voice, ‘Stephen, listen to me …’
‘I’ll kill it, d’you hear me?’ His face was nearly black with blood and the high voice shook. ‘I’ll kill it, I’ll cut it into pieces, I’ll drown it, I’ll trample it to death.’
She gave a gasp of pain. He raised his right hand and caught her a ringing blow with all his force across the side of her face and head. Lyn staggered backwards and fell. She crashed on to the floor, knocking over in her fall the round polished table on which the bust of Tace stood.
She cried out at the shaft of pain in her back and side but her first thought was for the child. With a moan she pulled herself into the crouching position and clasped her arms round her body.
Stephen, kneeling on the floor, holding the head of Tace, examining the crack which had appeared in the papier-mâché cranium, made a low murmur of distress. Lyn shuddered. She got carefully to her feet, tensed to await the result of her fall, the feel of warm blood flowing down between her legs. But there was nothing, or there was nothing yet. Her heart pounded on a racing stumbling beat.
He was still on his knees, trying to bring the sides of the crack together, throwing back his head in despair when the brittle stuff parted farther and a piece split away. For a moment it seemed as if he had forgotten her. But now his eyes turned on her again and he cried in that same shrill and childish voice, ‘You broke my statue!’
She looked at him in horror, her hands up to her face. Then she ran out and shut herself in her bedroom, locking the door.
The first flash of lightning of that day showed itself in the house in Tace Way as no more than the flicker a match makes when it is lighted and immediately blown out. And the sound of it, the thunder, came many seconds afterwards, thudding distantly. The storm was still a long way off. But it discoloured the sky as a dye discolours soapsuds, an inky flow seeping into the clouds.
For a long while Stephen stayed in his room, trying to mend the head of Tace. He thought about nothing but how he had to mend the crack and insert the broken piece before the breakage became worse and perhaps beyond repair. Ideally, Dadda was the man to call on here. Stephen did the best he could with the two kinds of glue he kept in his room, a simple gum and cement for use on various kinds of non-wood surfaces. Some of the papier-mâché at the edges of the crack had already crumpled and fallen away into a pulpy dust. When he had glued the pieces together, though not at all to his satisfaction, he placed the bust on a sheet of paper on his desk to dry in a shaft of weak, sultry sunshine.
He went out of the house and up onto the moor. It was too hot and too dry to bother with walking boots and he kept on his sandals. The air felt full of electricity. It was as if nature awaited the lighting of a fuse in order to explode. The Foinmen stood up pale and gleaming, silver monoliths, against a sky that now had a dark clotted aspect. Its pallor had darkened to a purplish-grey.
With his head bowed, Stephen walked up the avenue and laid himself down on the Altar. He lay with his face, his mouth, against the dry scented turf. The thunder rolled and he heard it as if it were from boulders trundled under the earth.
There was a continuous thunder in his head also, and he thought it was because he had struck Lyn, yet done no more than strike her. Remembering the child that was inside her, the child which he saw as already six years old, strong and happy, waiting in there until the time came to escape and triumph, made him beat with his fists on the limestone slab.
Presently he sank down on his face again with the calmness of despair, his mouth pressed against the warm hairy skin of the moor. There was some comfort in that, some solace in the scent that came off the grass, the warm earth. He would have liked to lie there for ever in the warm closeness, never to go back. An urge to be always alone now overcame him, to be a recluse as Dadda was, cut off by a purposeful act of will from the torturers of the world. He longed to find the house empty when he got back, his life cleansed of her as it now was of Helena and Brenda. Never to see her again was a hope he felt physically hungry for.
The ponderous, electric-charged air seemed to grow steadily more weighty. The moor was holding its breath for the rain to come. And all around now the thunder made an irregular drumbeat on the perimeter of the moor. But Stephen continued to lie there, listening to that other, lighter but steadier, drumming inside the confines of his head. The moor was like a vast warm bed, the atmosphere a blanket. He was aware of the first drop of rain as a splash on his extended left hand.
But no downpour followed. A few more splashes fell, haphazard silver ampoules, and then it was dry again. Stephen laid his head on his folded arms and longed for sleep, but sleep wouldn’t come, though he lay there for a long time, hearing the double throbbing, his own and nature’s, until a crash of thunder, as loud and sharp as a series of rifle shots, burst over his head. Almost immediately it was followed by a tree of forked lightning bursting into branches against the black clouds behind Big Allen, then by another crash of thunder. It had grown dark while he lay there, as dark as twilight. He looked at his watch and saw that he had been out on the moor for three hours but it was still only 2.30 in the afternoon.
He was reluctant to go home, more reluctant than he had ever been. Suppose she were still there, to come and cling to him … Like those druids of old or whoever they were that had placed the Foinmen here, he found himself murmuring a prayer to the Giant that she would be gone. A splash of rain struck the great monolith and trickled down the stone. Even then he would have stayed, but for the lightning. Five years before in a storm on the moor a shepherd had been struck by lightning out in the broad expanse of Bow Dale.
The lightning was springing in flares now over the Vale of Allen. Stephen began to walk away with slow dragging steps towards the crinkle-crankle path. He was halfway down Chesney Fell when the rain began in earnest. It was as if the thunder had finally shot open the sky and released a deluge. There was nothing he could do but walk on down, hurrying now, and let the million bright rods of rain soak through his shirt and his jeans and pour down his skin. His hair streamed forward over his face and he combed it back with dripping fingers. He saw the lightning strike a rearing boulder ahead of him, strike it with a vivid flash and a crack like a bullet, and the stone seemed to shiver under the onslaught. The storm was directly over his head, a battle raging in the sky.
Down on the road he felt safer. He knew better than to take shelter under a tree, it was too late anyway to take shelter now. There was no one about, the village was deserted. The rain came down in a steady crashing cascade and in Tace Way people had put lights on inside their houses as if it were evening. The gutters streamed with gurgling rivers. There were no lights on in his own house and he took heart and hurried this last lap, past his car, down the sideway to the back door.