Duncan and Clive made consenting sounds. The guest could have been a magnate standing in the heather, annihilating grouse. A clever man who did things to insects when he was a boy.
After a loaded moment he seemed to look, not past Lawrence, more through him, at the large crack up the wall. He put his hand to it. “A new development,” he said, caressing a line of subsidence so dark that it could have been made of obsidian. Whatever age this man was, Lawrence wouldn’t have been surprised to hear it. Nor that he had gone up the Litten Path himself a few times, somehow managing to claw his way back.
“Clive?” the man said.
“It’s just shown up.” Clive chortled. He was well into a large glass of wine by this point.
“Subsidence,” Lawrence offered. “From the pit.”
The words had just popped out. The man straightened and regarded Lawrence. “And isn’t that neat,” he said slowly.
Clive Swarsby cleared his throat. “This is Lawrence. Local boy, Evelyn’s guest. Done some sterling campaigning for me.”
Lawrence held his hand out to greet the man. He could smell cooked meat, and out of the window thought he could see the outline of someone watching everything, a tall, malingering shape standing a few yards away in the snow.
“Lawrence,” said Duncan, doing a great job of expressing a lot while saying very little. “This is Bramwell Guiseley.”
You couldn’t really have that good an idea of someone you knew by deed alone. From what he’d been told about Guiseley, Lawrence had been expecting someone a lot younger, more disdainful. He supposed the man had presence. A powerful chewer, Guiseley pushed great clods of nubile lamb into his mouth. He ate in sequence. First the carrots and then the greens, then the potatoes, eventually graduating to the roast beef. He hadn’t said much all night, and now in the final plump stages of his meal, he continued to hold his tongue.
A few other guests had arrived to break things up, to none of whom Lawrence was introduced. An alderman and his jowly wife from Hoy-on-wold, another two Conservative councillors from the borough and their spouses. Lawrence sat next to Evie, who seemed to have lost the will to speak and barely touched her food. He asked her if everything was all right. She said it was fine. From time to time, glancing up the table, he noticed her and Guiseley catch each other’s eye. He wasn’t sure if it was a smile he saw, or if he’d imagined it.
After everyone completed their main course, Clive tinkled his plate with his fork and stood with his glass raised, the claret glowing in the light, his lips bruised a dim purple as if he’d been drinking something totally different to everyone else.
“These have been a few strange months, and not just in this fold, but all over the country, generally, and though it hasn’t been easy, not for any of us.” He glanced at Lawrence. “I know that as a party and a people we have the right amount of grist for the mill. It’s certainly been a difficult time for many of us, but now that the ward for the borough has been selected… by its able populace.” Clive flashed that plummy smile. “So my family and I shall be retreating to whence we came.” He raised his chin in triumph and faced Guiseley directly. “And with my return to London and active party service imminent, I am reminded of some of the bard’s lines, that seem fitting, indeed, for the occasion:
‘The west yet glimmers with some streaks of day. Now spurs the lated traveller apace, to gain the timely inn.’”
“Macbeth,” whispered Evie, pushing away her plate.
“So as I, the lated traveller,” her father continued, “safely return to the timely inn, my friends, I would like to thank you all for coming. You are all so very dear, and more than welcome to visit us in the south. Hear, hear.”
“Hear, hear,” repeated everyone, even Guiseley.
As the guests resumed their seats Evie left the table without excusing herself. Noticing her brimming eyes, Lawrence untucked his napkin from his collar, set it on the table and went after her.
He had never been this far into Threndle House. It was exactly the disappointment he had been led to believe it was. The parched weft of the carpet and the faded walls said everything. It would be mad to live in, though, this place, to live a dream of something, just as his father had once said to him. That was true enough. This was Threndle House, not so much a bad dream as an old dream, one where you were stuck and couldn’t control what was going on around you. All you could do was fail to run.
Lawrence searched for Evie, trying every room until he found her packing a bag on a double bed. A suitcase was open and clothes of all kinds were littered over the floor. Outside, through the window, were shapes. A gothic outline of this weather-beaten land.
“Is it seeing him again?”
“It’s everything. If I have to listen to their… sophistry anymore, I’ll scream.”
“And that Guiseley. Bloody hell.”
“They didn’t say he was going to be here. He was once so… God, Lawrence…” She sat on the bed. “I can’t even describe it.”
“Duncan just said he were your boyfriend. I didn’t expect him to be a fucking pensioner.”
“Oh grow up.”
“You never said you were leaving either! Were you just going to go without saying anything? I thought…”
“That’s why I invited you, to apologise. I honestly didn’t realise what you were going through.”
Look at her, so unused to penitence. It still grated on Lawrence, Evie’s presumptions. She had lived her whole life with no idea, all because she came from a different neck of the woods to him. All because somewhere along the way one of Evie’s ancestors had stumbled upon a better opportunity than one of his.
It was no use going over it all again. “What’s that tosser even doing here anyway?” said Lawrence. “If Duncan knows what happened, doesn’t your dad as well?”
“They invited him,” Evie said tearfully. “They’ve made some deal. Duncan said a man like that is better to keep in your pocket than set against you.”
Lawrence was too shy to comfort her now. He could picture her big affair, the excitement in all its heaving moments and leatherette permutations. For all her spike and meanness, Evie was as vulnerable as any other young person. She had been joyridden.
“But why?” he said.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Well where will you go?”
“As long as it’s away from them, I don’t care.”
Lawrence glanced at her shyly. “How about the moon?”
Evie dried her eyes. “I’ll buy a caravan.”
“The moon in a caravan.” Lawrence liked the sound of that. “I’ll come with you,” he said.
“We’ll go up the Litten Path.”
“That’s it.”
“I’ve ordered a taxi,” said Evie, shutting her luggage.
“I wish I’d had one of them when I ran away.”
The two of them hugged, about as close as Lawrence would ever get.
“What will you do?” asked Evie.
“Get a job, I reckon.”
“You don’t… Oh, Lawrence, why don’t you come with me?” She showed off Clive’s Mastercard. Her mascara was blotchy and the wind was really racing outside. It was to be a cavernous winter in this land of theirs.
Lawrence hadn’t the words. Thoughts of his mother intruded, the cage she’d built for herself that for years she’d been too frightened to leave. He understood not just the cage now, but Shell. Litten too. What would he do if he wasn’t here? Who would he be? When you weighed it up, surely you were better off where you belonged, rather than aimless with someone who didn’t care for you other than as a friend?