The creature was caught in the headlights, amid shooting white flecks of rain. Munday slowed the car. The pinched black and white head faced them, the bright eyes flashed, and then it was off, bounding away from the car. Munday picked up speed but stayed well behind the animal, and as if being chased, it leaped onto the bank, sniffing for refuge. Then it blundered down and scrambled to the opposite bank, keeping ahead of the car. Munday continued on, fascinated by the sleek dark thing darting from bank to bank, nosing for a burrow and finally shooting straight along the roadside for some distance, pursued by the moving lights, running in a low glide, its head down, its damp tail switching.
“He’s scared, poor thing,” said Caroline. “Your lights are blinding him.”
Munday flicked off the headlights and stopped the car. They were in complete darkness: the rain was loud, drumming on the roof. Munday said, “We’ll give him a chance,” and pulled off one glove and reached for Caroline’s thigh. He fumbled under her coat and felt her dress, warmed by her leg, and then a pouch of softness he pushed with his excited hand. She parted her legs and helped with her hips, and his hand found the satin-covered jowls of her cunt At once he was aroused; and the dark, the rain, the road, the badger in flight only provoked a greater fury in him. But she said gentiy, “No,” and she stretched out her arm, reached forward, not so much directing him as seeming to grasp for something that remained invisible to him.
Munday turned on the headlights and the badger’s lighted eyes appeared up the road, beyond her hand. The badger had stopped when they had, and for the moment after the lights were switched on it held its look of curiosity on its striped face. It began again to run, and after twenty feet frisked wildly at the bank. Caroline said, “They kill them.”
As she spoke the badger flung itself up the wet gleaming bank and slid into an opening at the top, disappearing through a tangle of brambles.
She said, “They eat their haunches.”
Concentrating on the badger’s flight and distracted by his touching Caroline (it seemed a swift and crazy memory already—had he done it?—he wore only his left glove), Munday had not noticed that the car was climbing. He crossed a stone bridge; he changed gears and the car labored up a grade. They made their way upward now, along a curving lane, the rain falling in bright beaded screens, slanting against their headlights, passed into the road.
“Don’t tell me you walked all this way.”
“I’m not taking you to my house,” she said.
The sentence captivated him and made that circuitous passage through the wet lanes of the valley an extraordinary event: he was lost, she was showing him the way, directing him through a landscape she knew. The route was hers, a surprise, the suspense her doing; he was in her hands.
The road widened and led to another, even wider; there was a cottage, its front door flush with the roadside, and further on a new turning, The Yew Tree’s hanging sign with its motto on a painted pennant, Be Bold—Be Wyse, the lighted telephone booth, the pillar box, the long row of massive oaks, the bend in the road where he had once panicked— now he drove slowly—the telephone pole, and at last a thick rose-bush beating against a fence. Munday parked. He said, “No—not here.”
“Yes,” she said.
“We can’t,” he said. “Emma, she’s—”
“She’s asleep,” said Caroline. “It’s late.” She spoke with a persuasive kindness; but Munday was pleading.
“No, she never sleeps. She’s wakeful.” Munday leaned towards Caroline. “She’s not well. You don’t know.”
Beyond the rain-marked window of the car he saw the side wall of the Black House, the irregular contours of the broken dripping stone. It was as if he were facing his own guilt. He heard the wind blowing at the wall, and sounds he knew well, that tearing of wind on the dead grass, its purr on the swaying overhead wires, the tree limbs knocking, the grinding gate Emma had left open when he had dropped her earlier. But it was the familiarity of the sounds, not their strangeness that frightened him.
“Please,” he said.
“Go in and see,” she said, not budging. The calmness in her voice overcame him.
“Wait here,” he said. He got out of the car and hurried into the house, crossed through the kitchen and went upstairs, testing the carpet as he climbed. He listened briefly at the head of the stairs and then he proceeded along the hall to the bedroom. The door was ajar; he eased it open a few more inches and heard the wind-blown rain sifting against the window glass. He saw a heap of bedclothes and Emma’s hair spread on the pillow—sleeping, she always looked like a casualty. For seconds he mistook his own breathing for hers, then he closed his eyes and concentrated and heard her breathing with heavy slowness, like someone inflating a balloon. He whispered, “Emma,” but the rhythm of her breathing went on uninterrupted. Again he whispered her name, louder, almost as if he wanted her to wake up and in waking prevent him from going any further with Caroline in the house: “Emma ”
But she did not wake; the sounds grew snorelike, resigned, and her deep sleep was like desertion. He was trapped between two women conspiring in the dark for him to take all the blame. He felt for the latch and took the key from inside. He shut the bedroom door and locked it.
He found Caroline in the living room. There were tall green candles burning in the wall holders over the mantelpiece. Caroline was kneeling in front of the fireplace, blowing at the remains of a fire, a few embers on which she had placed a mound of wood-shavings.
“Where did those candles come from?” asked Munday.
She continued to blow softly at the sparks. Then she said, “I found them in the back hall cupboard.”
“I had no idea there were candles in it.”
“Pass me some of that wood,” she said.
Munday took some small split branches from the keg and placed them on the hearthstone. He stepped away and watched her coax the fire with her breath; her face was set against a small circle of sparks. She knelt and peered as if at a reflection she was attempting to kiss, for her lips, as she blew, were that shape.
“I didn’t see the light go on,” said Munday. “I would have seen that back hall light from the upstairs bedroom.”
“I didn’t need the light,” she said. “Ah, it’s caught.” The shavings burst into flames and lighted her face. She piled on more shavings and bits of stringy bark
and then wood-chips and the split branches Munday had set before her.
“We have firelighters,” Munday said. “They’d have it going in seconds.”
“I prefer to do it this way,” she said, and pushed a dry stick, white as flesh, into the flames.
Munday said, “It’s wrong—us here.”
Caroline fed the fire. It crackled, louder than her voice as she whispered, “Don’t you see? This is the only place it’s right.”
“She's sleeping,” said Munday, after a moment.
“Ah,” said Caroline, and smiled, but Munday was not sure whether she was smiling at what he had just said or at the fire, which she stacked with larger pieces of split wood. It was roaring in the chimney now, and the air moved in the room, larger and much brighter with the tall candles and the sticks alight.