Kitabı oku: «The War Widow»
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HarperImpulse
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First published in Great Britain by HarperImpulse 2018
Copyright © Lorna Gray 2018
Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com
Cover design by Ellie Game © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018
Lorna Gray asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780008279578
Ebook Edition © January 2018 ISBN: 9780008279561
Version: 2018-06-27
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
A Letter From the Author to the Reader
Acknowledgements
Extract
About the Author
Keep Reading …
About HarperImpulse
About the Publisher
For Harry and Mason
Chapter 1
Thursday 20 November 1947
I might have done things differently had I had known today that I only had four more days of glorious solitude. That in four short days they would find me at last. That four short days would carry my race to the limit of this sea-ravaged coastline. That here I would feel the nauseating pull and draw of the waves and above it all, hear the darker overtone of footsteps as they strolled inescapably towards me.
I wouldn’t be thinking about myself at that moment. I would simply be waiting, defeated, quivering on the wooden harbour jetty and looking down into the murky water as it heaved beneath. Thinking about him and what he had done; and finally and absolutely admit that despite all my determined efforts to the contrary, I had lost control over both my mind and my freedom, with no hope left of ever regaining it.
But that would be four days from now. Today there were still four more days ahead of wonderful optimism. Today I was feeling the tug of the waves too, but in an altogether more peaceful way.
I had come to Aberystwyth in November two years after the war. I was climbing down from a rough little hilltop that overlooked the town a little after dawn and the view was glorious. The wide bay of terraces clung bravely to the curve where sweeping cliffs met dark granite seashores and today, as ever, it called to the artist in me.
I probably shouldn’t have been up there. The doctors had prescribed rest after my accident and I knew even the walk back to my hotel would have drawn their united disapproval. But at least it was quiet and calming in its way because very few people were about. Those that were cared little for a woman in a beige trench coat with the collar turned up who was walking briskly past shops declaring fresh stocks of corned beef and offal – a novelty in this time of rationing. Nobody noticed me walking past the shuttered tearooms either. These were papered with posters bearing the information that the cinema would be showing the full coverage of the Princess Elizabeth’s wedding just as soon as the newsreels got here. It was all wonderfully like being invisible. It was just unfortunate that the illusion abandoned me just as soon as I climbed the steps to my hotel.
“Good morning, Miss Word.”
The lady in the wood-panelled reception booth in the foyer was excessively genteel and her grey hair was done up in a neat bun. Her greeting was dignified and gracious but slightly marred by the fact that Word wasn’t actually my name. It was Ward but I didn’t tell her that. Just as I had been too embarrassed to correct her late last night when she’d said it after watching me sign my name on the registration form, and again after she’d taken custody of my ration book and handed me my key…
So this morning I repeated the peculiar habit of feeling guiltily responsible for having the wrong name and only stated warmly that it was indeed a good morning and moved bravely towards the dining room. It was the sort of room that belonged a largely imaginary bygone era that had never known the war. The requirement to be brave came from my reluctance to interact with the other guests. I didn’t want conversation today. And besides, the pages of the hotel’s guestbook bore the signatures of an intimidatingly large scattering of high society grandees, which I certainly wasn’t. It had prices to match. I never would have chosen to stay here at all if I hadn’t remembered it from a brief visit many years ago during my honeymoon and the fact that I couldn’t have faced any more decisions last night after such a day and such a long journey.
As it was, when I took my seat it was only to be reassuringly greeted and then ignored by two elderly ladies who were deep in an animated discussion. They were worrying about the danger of introducing unbridled enjoyment – embodied by the recently lifted embargo on foreign travel I think – to a generation that had been brought up knowing only wartime excursions to the respectable English seaside. I think they were unaware that they were, in fact, at present in Wales.
I hid my head in a book. I had borrowed it from the tiny library in the lounge next door and it was a battered copy of Jane Eyre. It was supposed to keep my mind from working while I finished my breakfast but it wasn’t doing very well since I had read the book more times than I could count. Then I discovered a more modern effort abandoned on the table next to me. It promised ‘A Sterling Mystery!!!’ – a weak pun on the name of the principle character I think – and bore the name A. E. Woolfe emblazoned across the cover like a banner. Sceptical purely on the grounds of too many exclamation marks, I picked it up and read the first few pages easily enough but when the first character died in a grisly fashion at the wheel of his car, I felt my head begin to swim and had to put it down.
“Not to your taste?” A male voice.
Looking up, I discovered that the surrounding tables were now packed with a different set of people and the comfortable Miss Bartlemans had miraculously transformed into a dark-haired gentleman who was now sitting in the chair opposite, with a newspaper spread over the table between us. His eyes were a mild pale blue and were watching me benignly and at least they had the relatively harmless excuse that I had been thoroughly absorbed in my book. Anonymity and similar ambitions aside, I tend to be like that when reading. It used to drive my husband wild, along with a great number of other things.
Swiftly suppressing that sobering thought, I lifted my head properly and slipped the paperback back onto the table to sheepishly retrieve the tattered classic. A faint curve was showing at one corner of his mouth. It made me tell him with a foolish beam, “It seems very well written actually but I need something gentle that won’t tax my brain. At least with Jane Eyre, I know the book so well I can start at an easy bit. Even if it does feel a little like sacrilege to discard the childhood section without so much as a glance.”
I stopped. He was sitting with his forearms resting upon his paper and he was the sort of man who wore reasonably good clothes as if they didn’t matter at all. I think he belonged in this hotel rather more than I did. I also think my light reply made him feel he had just made an awkward social error. Those eyes blanked of all expression as he tried to hide it and I cringed inwardly. I cursed myself for breaking my silence so soon after all my good intentions and quickly buried my head in the book before the more alert part of my mind could find another explanation for the barely definable stiffness that had come over his posture as soon as I had begun to speak.
Some other people arrived, noisily. This was the truly fashionable contingent of the hotel’s residents. They were a Dr Alderton and wife and her younger sister followed by a capable-looking gentleman who settled with his paper at the table behind. He had arrived shortly after me the night before and he had, from what I had overheard, found something wrong with his original hotel, had almost cut short his business and made for home but then had decided to give Aberystwyth another try. I had a vague recollection of his name being Brighton. Or perhaps it was Brinnington, or something like that. I couldn’t quite remember.
“Adam Hitchen, by the way.” The man sitting at my table interrupted just as my heroine was exploring Thornfield for the first time. His manner of speaking seemed shorter now. “We’ve met before.”
“We have?” I looked up, startled all over again. Then I recalled the walker, complete with notebook and innocent binoculars, whose arrival earlier this morning on that hilltop had sent me scurrying away with my half-finished painting back down to the town. He’d seemed middle-aged in that blurry dawn light but this man wasn’t. But he certainly was the same man. When standing, he’d been reasonably tall and well-built but slim in the way men are when they have a natural enjoyment of the outdoors. Since this was consistent with the taking of lonely hilltop walks of the sort that I liked, I added easily enough, “Of course we have. You identified those little birds in the gorse for me. I’m Kate Ward; and pleased to meet you again, naturally.”
I smiled at him just long enough to imply that I meant it and then escaped into my book again. She was about to unhorse Mr Rochester, I was sure.
“On holiday?” Another interruption. It was delivered in that new oddly abrupt tone that made it seem as though he barely cared to hear the answer, but was going to ask the question anyway.
“Something like that,” I said, turning a page. There at last was the vital exchange of words between governess and master. But then manners roughly asserted themselves and I remembered that it would be better not to be rude to the same man too many times in one day. I closed my book and smiled at him, this time genuinely. “What about you?”
But the question was lost in the sudden interest of Mrs Alderton and her sister. They turned to us, or rather him, and claimed him with a flurry of excited talking. Their casual assumption that they had the right made it clear they were already on considerably better terms with this man than I.
They were both beautifully made-up. The younger sister was perhaps five years younger than my thirty-two and had lovely big doe eyes. I suspected that she knew full well the effect they had. She had also achieved the near-impossible in the form of perfect satin curls. This was something my hair would never do, which was why mine was now cropped short and left to its own devices in a woolly version of the style seen everywhere in recent years curling neatly around the base of a WREN’s cap.
The older sister, Mrs Alderton, was adhering to the new severely girdled style and she was so smart that even to a cynic it must have seemed a little odd that she had been united with a slightly moth-eaten if wealthy husband. Perhaps she thought the same because she paid the doctor about the same amount of attention as she did me; although in theory I was more relieved than otherwise to be permitted to retreat once more into the comparative sanctuary of my book.
It wasn’t a sanctuary for long. I heard the walker speak; a light response to the younger woman’s extraordinary brand of banter and I noticed that she was receiving even less than the bland sentences he had used on me. Now his replies were actually painfully flat. They made his whole person seem very dull indeed and, to be quite frank, I just couldn’t quite believe him. It made me suspect he was deliberately trying to seem insignificant here. Though it also occurred to me that perhaps he was just a little shy.
Or perhaps he simply liked to be awkward. The sister, Mary James, said something – she made an unashamed joke at her fellow guest’s expense I think; she certainly leaned in closer to deliver it – and I must have made the mistake of glancing up from my book because I suddenly found myself catching a brief and most definitely unexpected flash of wry intelligence in her victim’s eyes as he calmly countered this new attack with yet another very bland reply. They were actually grey and, disconcertingly, very alert indeed.
Mrs Alderton must have seen his glance. She certainly turned towards me with a very odd expression on her elegant face. I had already moved to gather together my things, but I felt her gaze as it took in my taste in clothes, my age and my figure before dismissing it all just as rapidly. Then it ran onto the table beside me.
“Oh. Here’s your book, Mary.”
From the distance of several feet, I felt Mary James turn like a puppet to her sister’s command. She immediately snatched up the modern paperback. She drew me helplessly away from my book again as she murmured silkily, “Thank heavens it isn’t lost after all; I’ve read it a thousand times, haven’t I, Alice? It has to be one of my all-time favourites.”
Mrs Alderton only inclined her head. Then I saw her follow it with one of those swift, calculating glances beneath lowered lashes which only ever seem necessary for married women when there is a potentially available man around; particularly if she has an unmarried sister on hand and that man should happen to be passably attractive. In Adam Hitchen’s case, he was certainly passable and I suspected that the crinkle at the corner of his eyes when he smiled very possibly qualified him for the next tier above that. Not that he was smiling now though.
“Haven’t I?” Mary’s prompt was faintly urgent. Mrs Alderton took her cue, theatrically, saying, “You really should be more careful, dear. Who knows who might try to borrow it? Not everyone has read them all you know.”
There was quite some emphasis on the ‘all’.
My gaze touched the walker’s eyes again but there was no betraying flash of character this time. They seemed in fact, if it were possible, to now be devoid of any personality whatsoever.
It was the goad I needed to lever me out of my seat and across the foyer into the mild November day.
---
The town was busier now that its residents had emerged to undertake their morning scurry to offices and shops. The thick traffic was a bizarrely confused mixture of old carts and aged horses that should probably have been retired after the war, and lorries in the crisp painted liveries of the bigger firms who had the advantage now that the basic petrol ration was being withheld from the public. There were few cars on the road. It probably explained why the vast town centre train station was absolutely crowded with people again just as it had been last night.
My destination was the Vale of Rheidol railway, a narrow gauge line tucked in a modest corner away from its larger black cousins. It was a lifeline for the remote villages dotted picturesquely along the steeply rising mountains and it gave me an odd moment when the train gave a jolting shudder and began the slow ascent.
Many years of my life had been spent in paying dutiful visits to my husband’s family in this seaside town. Then a war had been declared and he had gone away, with the result that opportunities for sightseeing of any sort had ceased for the duration. So I ought to have been thrilled now that it was peacetime and a crowded seat in a tiny carriage was gifting me a fresh glimpse of that once much loved scenery. But I wasn’t. The past minutes had been occupied by an unceasing surveillance of the platform and now I was able to only stare blankly as the valley slopes closed steadily in.
It was a fiercely controlled air of calm. I wished that I’d managed to achieve something like this yesterday during the long journey south from Lancaster. Yesterday’s hours between waking and dinner had been consumed by an exhaustion of crowded stations and carriages until the deafening rattle shook me out of logical thought. Sometime after Crewe I had convinced myself that an elderly gentleman was making notes about me and his neighbour was excessively interested in the stops along my route. All of which had, of course, later been embarrassingly – and publicly – proved false.
Today though, I was rested and defiant in the face of yet another journey. No silliness was permitted to accompany me here, not even when my neighbour smiled at me and urged me to precede him into the jostling herd of disembarking passengers at the bare levelled ground that made up the station at Devil’s Bridge.
This was a tiny place. It was situated at the narrow head of a steeply wooded gorge and spanned only by the bridge that lent the hamlet its name. A few buildings straggled along the winding road and the sole hotel peeped out over the treetops, seeming incapable of supporting the sheer volume of tourists that were descending from the train. In summer this place was darkly leafy but now, when the autumn had already struck the dead leaves from the mossy boughs, the grazing land above was like a crown above the wild sweep downhill into bleak wooded valleys.
I’d expected it to be quiet here today. Instead it was as busy as summer and I could feel the excitement growing in the crowd around me long before we swept in a sort of united disorientation of hats, handbags and raincoats around a bend lined with high metal railings towards the low parapet that signalled our first glimpse of the natural spectacle that made this place famous.
I handed my shilling to the man at the turnstile. He took my money in a greasy hand and the mechanical clanking as the turnstile’s metal arms turned was stiff and unwelcoming. But then I was through and stepping down into the sudden wilderness of dormant woodland. It was no quieter inside; it seemed as though the crowd’s chatter was magnified in here and I stood for a moment, gathering my bearings before trailing after them down the steps towards the first viewpoint.
For a while there was no view at all. The trees grew sinuously, twisted old oaks clinging to any piece of ground they could. Even leafless, the damply rusting branches still strained vigorously to reclaim the scene. They acted like a ruthless blind; for a while I could see nothing and it seemed as though the cluster of tourists might never grow bored enough to move on and leave me to take in the view in peace. But then, finally, the last of them turned away and bustled past on their own private mission to tackle the waymarked path so I could step forwards and reach out a hand to take sole possession of the cold metal barrier. Here I was at last.
It felt like a lifetime had passed since I’d first begun this journey to this place where I would mark my husband’s death.
But this was no agonised pilgrimage of the sort undertaken by a bewildered war widow. The sort where a grief-stricken wife hopes to achieve some kind of comprehension of the cruelty that stole her beloved husband’s life. This was peacetime, he was my ex-husband after our divorce thirteen months ago and he had been a stranger to me for far longer than that. This was no respectful farewell to former happiness at all.
Before me rose the bridge like a stark monument to past centuries. It held two older bridges cocooned beneath its arch. They lay one on top of the other, each bridge built at a slightly different angle to the older stonework that had gone before and each squatting over a wider gap. Somewhere far below, the fierce waters of the Mynach roared blind into the chasm; folklore claimed that the devil himself had built the first narrow crossing and today, for the first time, I could have almost believed it.
Because about eight days ago, my ex-husband had taken himself to that selfsame spot and looked down into the raging depths. And had then decided to follow the look with his body.
Whatever else had happened in the days since then and now, this part of my story at least was not a creation. The police had confirmed it. The river had been in spate; it had been swollen beyond all normal bounds by heavy rain in the hours before and there was no hope of anyone surviving that. No hope even of a decent funeral. His body had never been recovered. This river’s current was the sort that was strong enough to move rocks and trees, and a human body had been a mere speck of dirt in the stream. The only fragments the torrent had left us as proof of a man’s passing were a broken camera, a few traumatised passers-by and a ruined sock recovered from an eddy half a mile downstream.
It was insane. And worse, it was insufferably sad to have to hear polite judgements about his character, as if this could have ever had anything to do with his usual state of mind. I hadn’t received so much as a note from him in the year since our divorce but still it was incomprehensible; impossible to imagine Rhys, my stubbornly individual ex-husband, ever meaning to end it like this.
And yet he had. And somehow, now, whatever it was that had brought him to this desperate extreme had since turned its gaze upon my life and my mind. And I still didn’t have the faintest idea why.
Chapter 2
I wasn’t going to find my answers here. Abruptly my silent vigil was broken. Oblivious to the recent history of this place, the next group of tourists appeared noisily on the viewpoint beside me to exclaim in their turn, and my bitter enjoyment of my half-angry grief was destroyed in an instant. Casting a last glance at the bridge and its forbidding heights, I swallowed the wealth of unanswered questions and found myself leaving room for sorrow instead. It came with a bolt that rocked me. One doesn’t expect to feel grief in company and there is a certain shame inherent in feeling a flood of emotion that is at odds with the laughter of all your fellows. Somehow it felt a little like seeking attention despite the fact that attention was the very last thing that I could possibly want. And yet he was the man I had spent years of my life with – had loved once and probably still did – and this was where he had died.
And then in the next breath I had myself under control again and emotion of any sort was swept aside with about as much resolution as the sheer strength of will that had brought me here in the first place. It was the same willpower that had seen me leave him all those months ago and the same steel that had helped me build my new life in the north. Now it helped me set my feet to the empty path downhill. There was a distant whistle from a departing train.
It was echoed by a deep voice saying my name. My proper one I mean; Miss Ward. As a question. I span round. My solemn descent had led me far beyond the reach of the nearest tourist chatter and it was hard to contain the urge to curse at this resounding proof of my stupidity. How could I have imagined fear would give me room to breathe here?
My first line of defence rested on politeness. “Yes, it is. Hello, Mr …?”
“Bristol. Jim Bristol.”
Suspense transformed into an urge to laugh as he solved the little mystery of his name, but then mirth evaporated as the suave businessman from the hotel stepped lightly down the immensely steep stone staircase to join me. He was wearing a well-made suit in one of the customary shades of grey – because the variety afforded by clothing coupons limited men just as much as women – and he stopped on the step above and turned to lean his elbows easily on the barrier there before throwing an appreciative glance around him. He was perhaps six foot tall and broad shouldered to match and standing on that step he positively towered over me. The twisting fingers of bare branches cast lines across his jaw. He was one of those men whose muscular fitness made him very handsome. I thought he was also one of those men who knew it. His gaze settled on me.
“Beautiful spot, isn’t it?”
I tried not to feel crowded by him or by the white flood of water travelling down the black rock face, the stunted overhanging trees and the impossible sweep below of the near-vertical staircase descending into deeper darkness. My fingers knotted in the straps of my bag while I smiled. “Yes. Yes, it is.”
He was probably in his late thirties but it was difficult to be precise. His toned physique perhaps indicated that he had recently returned from his duties in foreign climes, although his hair wasn’t cropped short in the military style and his suit wasn’t the standard shapelessness of the Government Issue demob suit. Anywhere else he might have been impressive or even beautiful but here, far from any other voices, he definitely was not. I swear I saw something lodged within those friendly brown eyes that hinted at a harder mind behind.
Superficially, however, he was only warm and I was only useless at saying no. He said, “Do you mind if I keep you company for a while? I’m trying to find a nice spot to sit down with a sandwich. You won’t mind if I go first?”
I let him move past me. I concentrated on the tricky steps and not glaring fiercely at the back of his head. The woodland smelled of wet things down here and rot and moss. A wren snapped past with the speed of a rifle shot but oblivious to the dramatic comparisons my mind was making between small birds and weaponry, my companion only turned back once more and fixed me with a mischievous grin. “You know, you looked very picturesque back there framed by all those trees and rocks.”
“How very …” I searched for the word, “gratifying.”
“Oh definitely.” He was negotiating another narrow step and pointing out a broken section. “Makes me wish I could paint – you know the sort of thing, all blobs of paint and drama entitled ‘Girl in Raincoat by Waterfall’ or something equally unimaginative. But I shouldn’t be telling you this. You actually are an artist I gather?”
“How on earth did you discover that?”
Jim Bristol cast a captivatingly handsome smile over his shoulder that made a mockery of my tone. He also didn’t seem to notice that I had stopped dead with one hand gripping the metal rail. “Among other things, you put it on your registration form last night when you were collecting your key. I’m unashamedly nosey, you see – an occupational hazard you might say – so I noticed. What sort of things do you paint?”
“People mainly. What’s your occupation? If it makes you curious, I mean?”
“Have you got your sketchbook here? You do carry one, I presume? All artists do.”
He turned his head briefly to note that I had resumed walking – where else could I go, really, when the alternative was to run back up these lethal stone steps – and I shook my head in a lie. “Not today.”
“That’s a shame. I should have liked to see it – I’m sure you must be very gifted. Perhaps you can show me when we get back later. You’ll be having dinner at the hotel of course?”
I only gave a deliberately ambiguous, “I imagine so.”
He returned my smile with a more generous one of his own and stepped down off the last flight onto the narrow platform that marked the base of the gorge. It was surprisingly sunlit after the dank brown shade of our descent through autumnal trees. A narrow bridge was the only exit on the far side, spanning the surprisingly tame outflow from the final plunge pool. A yellow wagtail flew in to land bobbing on an outcrop on the towering cliff only to notice us and dart away again. It was the perfect place for a trap. He only said harmlessly, “I’d like that.”
Doubt rekindled, and this time with a vengeance.
I think he might have been intending to help me down off the last step but I kept my fingers firmly entwined in the straps on my bag. And even if his gesture wasn’t the sinister action I was watching for, the look he gave me as I stepped past him was almost certainly that of one who was checking whether his much-exercised charm was having its customary effect. It meant that, now, there was no need to wonder why I should be feeling so untrusting. Since attempting to travel quietly, it was, I suppose, inevitable that I would instantly find myself attracting attention from all sorts of quarters who would have normally let me pass unnoticed. But no one can pretend that ordinary men deal out this sort of unsolicited flirtation to perfect strangers. And certainly not when the setting is beyond isolated and the woman in question frequently feels that the stain of her failed marriage is written all over her like a marker to steer well clear. This might all seem like a plea to be contradicted, but the facts were there all the same.
The wagtail sauntered by, letting out a sharp tic tic of annoyance as it flashed away again. I put a pathetically unsteady hand on the rail of the footbridge but his voice called me back. “What do you plan to do with your day now?”
I made myself tear my gaze away from the both forbidding and inviting prospect of the towering ascent. Somewhere far, far above, a buzzard was calling. I turned to face him. He was crouching over his pack and focussed on attempting to draw out the tin that bore his sandwiches. He spared only one brief glance for me as he added, “Now that you’ve seen the sights here, I mean?”
“I don’t know. What exactly is it that you do, Mr Bristol? You said your job requires you to be inquisitive.”
If he noticed the brusqueness in my question he didn’t show it. He paused in his task, elbow resting easily on one grey-clad knee. “It’s not as exciting as I made it sound, I’m afraid. I’m just a civil servant; local government dogsbody – you know the sort, endlessly running around following up other people’s loose ends. Quite tedious really.”
I stared at him sideways beneath lowered lashes while pretending to examine the flowing water, trying to decide whether I could fit this person wearing the standard camouflage of the businessman-at-large with a vision of the same man, starched, collared and ensconced in any kind of bland office tedium. Somehow I really could not.
I watched as he lifted out the first neat triangle of his lunch, declining the tilt of a hand that offered another to me. The close walls of the gorge towered above us. Even now, eight days on, there were signs of the recent heavy rain. Truly sizeable branches and bits of rubbish had jammed themselves on this the lowest of the various steps of the waterfall’s descent and just beyond the little bridge I could see where a green furred boulder had been crudely thrust aside to reveal fresh stone underneath. For a moment something red flickered beneath the current and my heart turned over. It wasn’t his body. It was a fragment of different coloured stone and that was all.
That was all. It made me wonder how far down the treacherous course of this river the rescue team had dared to climb. And how much danger they must have encountered working hastily beside a river in spate purely because some hope still remained. This rough terrain would continue for some miles before the river widened into the easier floodplains that led to the sea. It seemed clear to me now that perhaps the buzzards might find him, but no one else would.
“Are you catching the train back later?” Jim Bristol’s voice was jarringly cheerful. I must have been hiding the desolation in my heart very well because he was oblivious. He had moved his bag to one side and was now leaning comfortably against the flat plane of the towering rock. He was about five yards away.
“The train?” I had to moisten my lips.
“I saw you on it this morning. I was wondering which one you would be taking back.”
“The last one,” I said smoothly, stepping onto the bridge. “I want to explore a little first.”
“Ah. I might see you on it.” He moved to take a bite from his last sandwich, seeming pleased with the information, and then paused with it inches from his mouth. “I’d like to talk more, if you don’t mind?”
That sense of alarm intensified sharply. He seemed innocently intent on enjoying his lunch but the quick glance I saw him cast before taking that next bite seemed to my heightened senses to contain far more than purely casual interest. And I was sure he couldn’t possibly have missed the fact that I couldn’t wait to get away from him. It suddenly occurred to me that if I didn’t hurry up and take my leave, he’d have finished his lunch and I’d find myself accepting his company for the ascent.
“I’ll look forward to it,” I lied.
He let me go. “Excellent. Enjoy the rest of your day.” The smile he gave was simply one of open friendliness but I must have climbed about two hundred steps before I allowed myself to slow down.
---
At least that’s what it felt like. The ascent rose in short aggressive bursts from pool to pool with the black cliffs of the narrow gorge towering above. My heart was pounding and my leg muscles were complaining to the point of nausea, but I almost enjoyed the sensation as a relief from the panic I was experiencing because a man from the hotel had drawn me into conversation. Because that, after all, was all it had been.
Now I was free of him, I even had time to feel the irony; I knew full well that I wouldn’t have felt the need to break into a run just as soon as I had climbed out of his sight, had my companion been a woman from the hotel instead.
It was all very predictable, of course, that the divorcee should have developed an aversion to men, but that didn’t diminish the inner debate that was roaring away in my head. The one that didn’t care about my romantic history and was simply waiting to find proof, either in this man’s favour or against it; and all the while knowing with a grim sort of certainty that with the usual pattern of this thing I never would.
I finally faltered at the viewpoint that jutted out over the largest of the swirling steps in the waterfall. I was very hot. I knew I should feel tired too, I knew I must, but adrenalin held it at a determined distance. It held foresight at a stubborn distance too. I removed my coat simply for the sake of doing something that might bring some relief and laid it over the cool metal barrier that was designed to protect the unwary from the drop. And unfortunately that, perfectly predictably, led me to look down at the rushing water crashing into the pool below. The sight did me no good at all.
That chattering herd of holidaymakers finally laboured into view; the pack that had driven me on from my lonely examination of the head of the waterfall but lagged too far behind to save me from the distress of a private interview with Jim Bristol. Their breathless voices were filled with the excitement of the view. A family with a teenage girl and a younger brother in short trousers leaned over the barrier beside me, exclaiming and pointing as the whirlpool sucked and dragged at a few small branches caught in the flow. The girl was teasing the boy and threatening to throw him in, or worse still, leave him there as a test for whether the devil really did stalk the bridge at night. His half-laughing half-fearful pleas for help as she tugged on his arm made my mind flinch. They crashed carelessly past me, wrestling and completely ignoring the routine complaint from their mother and the boy, laughing giddily, pretended to fall.
I found that I had turned quickly away to the comparative safety of the path and then had to turn back again when I remembered my coat. I was flustered now and angry with myself and with Jim Bristol, and other people were coming so I pushed myself onwards. I was determined to keep ahead of them, I don’t know why. The steps were crude and very steep, and I had to concentrate hard on simply keeping my footing. And all the while I was focussing on the vision of the hotel at the top, the refreshing tea I would take, and the time I would find there to adjust to the realisation that now I almost craved the company of a crowd more than I dreaded it.
“Careful!”
A hand flashed out. I stumbled clumsily against it. I flinched as it steadied me. No jacket at all on this one; only the practical woollen jumper of a hiker and my eyes travelled from the hand to his face as I was thinking I shouldn’t have come here. I really shouldn’t have come.
I had the horrible impression I might have said that out loud.
Adam Hitchen released me and I made to hurry on only to discover that he had changed his mind and put out his hand again. His grip was warm through my clothing. My frock was a handmade belted affair in red that wrapped around with a tie above my left hip – my treasured coupons always went on fabric – and the thick winter sleeves were no barrier to the sense of his touch. I was suddenly very conscious indeed of how close we were to the lip of the drop; how easy it would be to have a little slip, an unfortunate accident. To go tumbling over the edge to the same inevitable end that had met my husband…
I found myself falling again into the trap of that first line of defence by apologising hastily: “So sorry, I wasn’t looking where I was going.” Then, brittle, “I must get on. Goodbye.”
If only I didn’t keep thinking politeness would save me. He didn’t let me go. He didn’t acknowledge my distress either. But at least the first words that interrupted the pounding of my heart were not unnaturally admiring. When he spoke, it was not pitched to match the visions that stalked my dreams, but in his distinctive tone that was perfectly level. “I’ve found something you might find interesting, do you want to see?”
I stopped trying to work out how I would force my way past for a moment and blinked up at him. If anything he seemed to be fighting a private battle with his own embarrassment. “That came out sounding a little strange, didn’t it? It really is nothing untoward, I promise you. Are you prepared to take a chance?”
Quite frankly, no I thought fiercely but didn’t say it. Instead I waited for his odd manner to run to an explanation. It didn’t come and he simply fixed his attention upon a tree standing a short distance away from the path. I would have judged his behaviour truly disturbing, except for the faintest disarming impression, given by the way a muscle in his jaw tightened, that he was in fact cringing from his own oddness and hoping very profoundly that I hadn’t noticed.
The latest cluster of holidaymakers – one that might have been my salvation – puffed past but still that hand kept a firm grip upon my arm, both shielding me from their breathless jostling and preventing me from getting away. Jim Bristol was following them and he eyed us curiously as he climbed the path but then he too rounded the turn and it was just me and the walker alone in the woodland. Allowing him to keep me here, I realised sharply as the silence closed in around us, could well prove to have been a very, very stupid mistake.
My companion seemed oblivious to the shivers running under my skin and simply ducked his head towards my ear. “Look there; above that broken branch.”
His hand dropped from my arm. The release of his grip seemed to unleash surprise so that it washed over my overburdened brain like the floodwaters in the pools below. With it came a surge of relief that made me want to both laugh and cry at the same time.
There was an owl. Just an owl, resplendent in his mottled plumage, pretending to be part of the bark of a tree. It was a repeat of the momentary connection that this man had instigated very early this morning on top of the isolated hilltop behind Aberystwyth. Then it had been a jolly little bird that I had been both seeing and not seeing as I took in the view, oblivious to the man’s approach. This bird was perched in the curve where the heavy limb of a gnarled and twisted oak joined the main trunk and he was perfectly confident that he had succeeded in assuming the identity of a rather stunted branch growing from the larger bough beneath his feet.
“You see?” said my companion softly. He was laughing a little. “Well worth taking a chance.”
It was then that I discovered that the sudden release into something unexpectedly like happiness had made me pass my hand across my body to meet the warm wool of his sleeve instead. It had been an instinctive gesture. It meant appreciation, gratitude. I don’t believe he had noticed; or at least he didn’t until the sound of approaching voices made me snatch my hand away and turn swiftly towards the path. My heart was pounding in a different way, high and nervous, and I felt a fool. I felt a fool because my touch to his sleeve was nothing, and yet, it was also a marker of a deeper emotion that I had no right to share; not now; not when every sign of weakness was a forerunner to making a mistake again and I was finding it so hard these days to temper my reactions to within normal bounds. Whether dealing with fear, friendliness or some other sudden expression, in the end I always made a mistake and embarrassment crept close enough to wreak its own damage.
Now I was wrestling with a giddy sense of exhilaration in that way one does when, in a moment of severe distress, someone does something that reminds you that humanity is sometimes beautiful after all. Adam didn’t seem particularly keen to capitalise on the feeling though. He left me in peace to regain my composure and he even let me feel like I was managing to behave quite normally when he followed me up the last flight of steps towards the exit. And in return, I suppose for the first time, my usual gnawing readiness to find him suspicious slunk to the back of my mind.
The turnstile was there and then we were stepping out onto the sweeping curve of the road barely yards from the hotel. I waited, calm once more, while he slipped through the gate behind me. He stooped under the low archway. The air was fresher up here away from the dense gloom of the gorge, and the breeze was cool through the sleeves of my frock. I slung my coat around my shoulders and as I did so I spotted Jim Bristol through a small swarm of people moving towards the bridge. The rest were all wearing excitement on their cheery faces and all pointing delightedly over the edge. But not Jim Bristol. I had the very strong suspicion that only lately had he bent forward to peer over someone’s shoulder. I turned my head aside and found Adam Hitchen meeting my gaze instead.
He said, “Do you think our luck will hold long enough to get us a table in the tearooms?” His voice held that unsmiling reserve again.
It ought to have made me decline but somehow, before I knew it, I was walking with him towards the grandly overbearing frontage of the hotel. Then I was allowing myself to be ushered towards the comfort of a plush upholstered seat in the crowded room almost before the previous occupant had left it. If this was a fresh assault on my nerves, so be it. At least I would be fed at the same time.
Dining out was a restricted affair when nearly every morsel of food was regulated by rationing. Patrons irrespective of wealth could enjoy two courses, either a starter and a main, or a main and sweet, with tea or coffee to follow. I think I must have been rather too quick to state a preference for the latter. It made his eyebrows lift but he didn’t disagree.
The reason for my decisiveness was that the main was only a standard offering of some kind of stew but the dessert was a neat little plate of Welsh cakes, freshly made and warm still. I think they were the dish that first made me realise that I too had been entirely unsmiling for the duration of our meal.
“Thank you, Mr Hitchen.” He was handing me the plate bearing my share of our second course. Taking it was like awakening after an unsettled sleep and finding daylight more cheerful than you had thought.
“Adam, please.” He poured the tea that had accompanied the dessert. “Assuming you don’t mind my calling you Kate?”
The first of my pair of Welsh cakes was simply heavenly. I will forever remember that moment as a brief peaceful island in the sea of all that fear, and in all honesty I don’t think my companion can take all the credit. That gentle scone-like delicacy was a little touch of much needed comfort and it acted like a restorative upon my entire mind.
My companion was being reassuringly harmless too as he prompted, “It is Kate, isn’t it? Not Katherine?”
I leaned back in my seat with the teacup cradled in my hands. I was ready at last to attempt the part of civilised luncheon partner. “No,” I said, “definitely Kate. It’s short for Katarina, which I hate.”
“You’re from Russia? Your English is very good, if you don’t mind my saying.”
I couldn’t tell whether he was teasing or not. I really couldn’t tell. It made me say drily, “Yes. I mean; no I don’t mind your saying. And yes, as if you haven’t already guessed: my accent is boring and English through and through. My mother just has an active imagination and an unhealthy obsession with the Ballets Russes, that’s all. My older sister is called Ludmilla, so I count myself lucky.”
An eyebrow lifted. “And does she abbreviate her name too?”
“Millie,” I said with a faint smile. “Much more pronounceable.”
“You’re an artist, aren’t you?”
Again that abrupt delivery that made his question seem somehow like an accusation. With a little sickening swoop from confidence into restraint, I wondered if this was working up to being a parody of my recent conversation in the gorge after all. He must have noticed the sudden tightening of my mouth because by way of explanation he added more gently, “You were painting when I stumbled across you this morning.”
I swallowed the sour taste of suspicion and admitted the truth. “Lovely up there, isn’t it? I might have gone further if I had thought to bring a more useful wardrobe of clothes.”
“No slacks or gumboots?”
He was teasing me. I nodded. “Precisely. I reached the point where the path turns into a very dirty sheep track and then stalled. Painting was my excuse – or camouflage if you will – and at least honour was saved by the fact that the view up there ranks as beyond inspirational.”
“Yes. It does. There’s quite some atmosphere around that hilltop.”
There was a deeper ring of sincerity in his tone. Then I saw him blink at me across the brim of his teacup. I saw his mouth dip as he set the teacup down. There was something in the action that was a familiar kind of self-reproach; like a guilty realisation he’d said too much. I recognised the feeling because I was constantly doing it myself. My attention sharpened abruptly. I said quickly, “You were making notes – are you a writer?”
Then a sudden thought struck me as he looked at me – that sort where you get a rare glimpse of the real person for the first time and it comes with a kind of kick that feels like shock but might just as easily be care. I found myself staring. “You go by the name of A. E. Woolfe …”
“Quick, aren’t you?” He spoke a shade curtly. Then he conceded with a rueful smile, “This is meant to be a research trip but unfortunately I haven’t been able to travel quite as incognito as I would have liked.”
I laughed and saw his eyelashes flicker.
He asked “What’s funny?”
“I was just thinking that it’s a good job I’d said that book was well written, otherwise I’d be feeling very embarrassed at this precise moment.”
Suddenly he grinned. He sat back in his chair. It was like a sudden shelving of reserve. Then he leaned in to rest his forearms upon the table with an eagerness that matched Jim Bristol’s, but with an entirely different energy. An entirely different style of warmth I mean. In his person he was as physically fit as Jim Bristol, as befitted a tall man who clearly liked walking, but without Jim’s excess of muscle so that the whole effect was of restrained strength rather than formidable bulk. As he leaned in his whole posture changed as if his nervousness had suddenly eased, and in a rare moment of not thinking everything was about me and my little drama, I wondered if my earlier theory had been correct and he truly was a little shy.
As if to prove the point, his attention dropped to the salt cellar, toying with it and moving it in a circle around the pepper pot. Then his hand stilled and he said carefully with his gaze resting upon the tabletop, “What about you – you’re travelling incognito too, aren’t you?”
“What do you mean? What makes you say that?” I demanded, thrust abruptly back into unhappy suspicion. I wondered what I would do if it turned out that this man sitting opposite in a pleasant hotel tearoom was actually a different kind of person entirely.
“No reason,” he said, “just an impression I got, that’s all.” He was still playing with the salt cellar and he carefully set it back into its place beside its peppery companion before lifting his head again. His mouth gifted me a quick glimpse of a reassuring smile. “Natural assumption based on nothing more than solidarity between artists. If I’m in hiding then so must you be.”
I gave a short laugh then and turned my head aside under the guise of being distracted by the earnest discussion between the waitress and the patrons at the next table so that he needn’t see the workings of my mind. Then I dared to glance at him again and the expression on his face drew my mouth into a sheepish smile. “Comparing me with the great A. E. Woolfe? That’s setting me a little high I should think – no need for incognito when you’re an unknown.” And then, lulled by the answering crease that touched the corners of his eyes, I foolishly added, “And this isn’t really a painting trip anyway.”
“No?” he asked. “What is it then?”
I hesitated. I actually wavered for a moment between sense and further stupidity. But then I heard myself only say, “I’m sorry to sound mysterious but I’d rather not speak about it, if you don’t mind.”
To many this would have been the perfect encouragement to pry but I was astounded to find that with this man at least, this was not the case. He simply sat back in his chair and said calmly, “Fair enough. You needn’t tell me anything you don’t want to. After all, why should you when—”
“—I don’t know you from Adam?”
“Quite,” he said. And then he smiled at me.
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