‘Mr Gillman’s ready for you now,’ she said to the older of the women, and helped her gently into the consulting room.
Of course it couldn’t be that Nick had been relieved. In calling at Gillman’s at all, he must have been coming to ask her to go out with him. The idea burst into her mind, a sudden radiant solution, that she could rush along to the pet shop at lunchtime and apologize, ask him to forgive her and make everything all right. Just as swiftly, she saw that this was absurd. How could she apologize to a man for being married to someone else? And even supposing she did, what then? Could she unmarry herself? Make Stephen vanish? And for what? To go to the cinema with Nick Frazer?
She could unmarry herself. She could have done that any time these past four years. It would only have taken a word and the simple, undeniable proof. She had often thought of it and each time she did Stephen’s face came before her eyes, as clear as some mystic’s vision, the most vulnerable face she had ever seen, the face of a brave child.
* * *
It was cloudy for most of the day of 30 April but the sky cleared in the late afternoon and by five the sun shone out boldly. At about half past six Stephen set out to take the crinkle-crankle path up the fell, the way he had brought the policemen three weeks before. Never, since he was a child, had he missed coming up to the Foinmen on Beltane.
There was little enough to see, of course. On 29 April and 1 May the setting sun’s rays were scarcely differently placed, but an ancient tradition attached to the eve of May Day. The rays, just as the red orb of the sun sank beneath the slope of Ringer’s Foin, touched the very centre of the Altar. Long ago, thousands of years ago perhaps, a rune had been carved in the centre of the broad flat stone, and the faint marks which still remained indicated that the rune had been in the shape the shadows of the Foinmen made at sunset. No doubt some very holy ceremony had once taken place there on Beltane. Stephen liked to stand and watch, to imagine the druidical forms as they must have been, going about their ritual, and to wait in silence and stillness for the sun to perform his precise function.
It had not always been possible for him to observe the phenomenon on his own. Others often came to watch too. Once there had even been a party of tourists, disturbing the peace with their groans and giggles as they struggled up the steep path from their coach. On sunless Beltanes he had invariably found himself alone there, but never on such a glorious evening as this. Nevertheless, he had met no one, could see no one on the whole spread of Foinmen’s Plain. In the past days people had begun cautiously to return to the moor, but not this evening and not here.
It was much warmer than on that last visit and warmer than last year. There was scarcely a breath of wind. The stones threw long, flaring shadows that suggested the shape of some ancient harp, only lengthening imperceptibly as the sun’s angle grew more oblique. Great towering clouds were massing behind Big Allen but to the west the sky was as clear as the inside of a mother-of-pearl-lined shell, of a pale, tender, pinstained azure. A flock of birds flew homewards very high over Ringer’s Foin. Thin streaks of cirrus lay parallel to the horizon, and between them the sun’s orb had become a well-defined sphere of a rich rose-crimson. It was five to eight.
Stephen had no feelings of aversion or horror because Marianne Price had lain dead over there. He felt as he always did on the moor, and especially on this spot and on Big Allen, peaceful, without care, without self almost, at one with nature and the past, and as if nothing that happened down there could hurt or vex him any more.
The rays crept across the slab with its skin of yellowish lichen. The granite was gradually being dyed carmine by the progress of the dying sun. And now, as Stephen looked at his watch, the tide of red colour crept to touch that central point where the rune was. For a moment the rune gleamed in a pool of red light. The shadows of the stones stretched to their maximum length, while the sun seemed to rest on the horizon. It was poised there, a rosy ball, and then it began to dip below the rim of the land. Down in Chesney St Michael-in-the-Moor tolled the hour — six, seven, eight, and on the last note, the red light glimmered and failed, the harp-like shadows fled and the Altar became once more a sheet of half-buried stone. For another year the sacred meeting of the rune and the sunset was over.
With the departure of the sun a breeze came, making ripples in the turf and bending the ling to the ground. Stephen made his way down and crossed the Hilderbridge road a little south of Chesney. The road bisected Vangmoor, and north of the village the Loomlade road crossed it, thus dividing the region roughly into four quarters. This south-eastern quarter was to Stephen’s mind the least beautiful, but it was some weeks since he had been there and he liked to keep the whole of the moor under surveillance. It consisted mainly of a large area of more or less flat heathland that was in places marshy and out of which rose the only hill to be found here, the broad, low Knamber Foin that looked from a distance no more than a heap of stones. Away in the distance, beyond the foin, the land became fertile and fields began, enclosed by dry stone walls.
Stephen went first to Knamber Hole where they had found Marianne Price’s bicycle. Not a trace of the search or the find remained — or not as far as he could see. Dusk was fast approaching. All colour had gone from the landscape, leaving the ground a kind of shimmering, bright grey on which every bush and stunted tree appeared as a black silhouette. The sky was pallid and clear between the encroaching tides of cloud. You could not have called it grey, it was of some colour that had never been given a name, and it glowed as if the moon and stars were behind the skin of it, waiting to break through. But whatever lit it was not the moon, for this Stephen now saw slowly rising out of clusters of cloud on the rim of the moor, a reddish, mottled orb like the ghost of that sun. It seemed bigger than the sun and it sailed with a peculiar swiftness up into the heavens, growing paler and brighter as it did so until it lit up the plain with a dull, yellow light. He was glad of the moon, for he had been walking away from the road and the quarry for a long time and had reached the rising, stony ground at the foot of the foin.
At this point he decided to turn back, for even now it would be eleven before he was home and it was seldom he stayed out as late as that. Lyn would worry. To the north and west, in the right angle the roads made, lay a tree-dotted plain called the Banks of Knamber. It was covered with birch trees, thousands of them, small and frail, none of them much taller than a man. There was gorse as well and of course the omnipresent bilberries. It took Stephen about half an hour to reach the banks and he began to head across them towards Chesney.
In the dull moonlight, which seemed to paint the landscape with phosphorescence rather than illuminate it, the region resembled a pale sky scattered all over with puffs of black cloud. And from time to time the moon dulled even further as thin wracks of cloud and then denser masses passed across its face. Once it disappeared altogether, and although a fair degree of brightness remained in the sky, the land became very dark and in this pathless place it was not easy for Stephen to find his way.