The Woodcutter

by Reginald Hill

  Not that I didn’t have the chance to learn on the job, so to speak. Despite me ignoring them as much as I could, most of the girls seemed more than willing to be friendly, but I couldn’t see any point in wasting time with them that I could have spent scrambling up a wet rock face!

  So what you’d likely call significant sexual experience didn’t come my way until . . . well, let me tell you about it.

  Or rather, let me tell myself. I’m not at all sure I shall ever let you see this, Elf, which means I can be completely frank as I’m reserving the right to tear it all to pieces, if that’s what I decide.

  So let’s go back to me taking off into the woods, leaving Imogen staring after me, Johnny Nutbrown bleeding from the nose, his parents puce with indignation, Sir Leon hugely disappointed and Lady Kira flaring her nostrils in her favourite what-did-you-expect expression.

  Of course I’m just guessing at most of that, apart from Johnny’s nose. What I’m certain I left behind was the jacket and tie I’d taken off at Sir Leon’s suggestion.

  He came round to Birkstane with them that evening.

  I was in my bedroom. Naturally I’d said nothing about the events of the day to either Dad or Aunt Carrie, just muttered something in reply to their question as to whether I’d had a good time.

  I heard the car pull up outside and when I looked out and recognized Sir Leon’s Range Rover, I thought of climbing out of the window and doing a bunk.

  Then I saw there was still someone in the car after Sir Leon had climbed out of the driver’s seat.

  It was Imogen, her pale face pressed against the window, staring up at me.

  For a moment our gazes locked. I don’t know what my face showed but hers showed nothing.

  Then Dad roared, ‘Wilf! Get yourself down here!’

  The time for flight was past. I went down and met my fate.

  It wasn’t as bad as I’d feared. Sir Leon was very laid back about things. He said boys always fight, it’s in their genes, and he was sure my blow had been more in sport than in earnest, and Johnny’s nose wasn’t broken, and he was sure a little note of apology would set all things well.

  Dad stood over me while I wrote it.

  Dear Johnny, I’m really sorry I made your nose bleed, I didn’t mean to, it was an accident. Yours sincerely Wilfred Hadda.

  Dad also wanted me to write to Lady Kira, but Sir Leon said that wouldn’t be necessary, he’d pass on my verbal apologies.

  As he left, he punched me lightly on the arm and said, ‘Us wolves need to pick our moments to growl, eh?’

  I expected Dad to really whale into me after Sir Leon had gone, but he just looked at me and said, ‘So that’s a lesson to us both, lad, one I thought I’d learned a long time back. My fault. Folks like us and folks like the Ulphingstones don’t mix.’

  ‘Because they’re better than us?’ I asked.

  ‘Nay!’ he said sharply. ‘The Haddas are as good as any bugger. But if you put banties in with turtle doves, you’re going to get ructions!’

  And that was it. He obviously felt in part responsible. Me, I suppose I should have been delighted to get off so lightly, but as I lay in bed that night, all I could think of was Imogen, and why she’d accompanied her father to Birkstane.

  I found out the next day. She wanted to be sure she knew how to get there by herself. I left the house as usual straight after breakfast, i.e. about seven a.m. Dad got up at six and so did Aunt Carrie. Breakfast was the one meal of the day she could be relied on for, so long as you were happy to have porridge followed by scrambled egg, sausage and black pudding all the year round. If I decided to have a lie-in, the penalty was I had to make my own, so usually I got up.

  It was a beautiful late July morning. The sun had been up for a good hour and a half and the morning mists were being sucked up the wooded fellside behind the house, clinging on to the tall pines like the last gauzy garments of a teasing stripper.

  I hadn’t any definite plan, it might well turn into a pleasant pottering-about, basking kind of day with a dip in the lake at the end of it, but in case I got the urge to do a bit of serious scrambling, I looped a shortish length of rope over my rucksack and clipped a couple of karabiners and slings to my belt.

  I hadn’t gone a hundred yards before Imogen stepped out from behind a tree and blocked my path.

  I didn’t know what to say so said nothing.

  She was wearing a T-shirt, shorts and trainers. On her back was a small pack, on her head a huge sunhat that shaded her face so I could not see her expression.

  She said, ‘Johnny says you punched him ’cos he was rude about my dancing. He said if I saw you to tell you he’s OK and it was a jolly good punch.’

  I remember feeling surprise. In Nutbrown’s shoes I don’t think I’d have been anywhere near as gracious. In fact I know bloody well I wouldn’t!

  I said, ‘Is that what you’ve come to tell us? Grand. Then I’ll be off.’

  I pushed by her rudely and strode away. I thought I’d left her standing but after a moment I heard her voice behind me saying, ‘So where are we going?’

  I spun round to face her and snapped, ‘I’m going climbing. Don’t know where you’re going. Don’t care either.’

  In case you’re wondering, Elf, how come I was talking like this to the same girl I’d fallen for so utterly and irreversibly just the day before, you should recall I was a fifteen-year-old lad, uncouth as they came, with even fewer communication skills than most of the breed because there were so very few people I wanted to communicate with.

  Also, let’s be honest, standing still in shorts and trainers with her golden hair hidden beneath that stupid hat, it was hard to believe this was the visionary creature I’d seen dancing on the lawn.

  My mind was in a whirl so I set off again because that seemed the only alternative to standing there, looking at her.

  She fell into step beside me when the terrain permitted, a yard behind me when it didn’t. I set a cracking pace, a lot faster than I would have done if I’d been by myself, but it didn’t seem to trouble her. When I got to the lake, that’s Wastwater, I deliberately headed along the path on the south-east side, the one at the foot of what they call the Screes, a thousand feet or so of steep, unstable rock that only an idiot would mess with. Even the so-called path that tracks the lake’s edge is a penance, involving a tedious mile or so of scrambling across awkwardly placed boulders. I thought that would soon shake her off, but she was still there at the far end. So now I crossed the valley and went up by the inn at Wasdale Head into Mosedale, not stopping until I reached Black Sail Pass between Kirk Fell and Pillar.

  This was a good six miles over some pretty rough ground and she was still with me, no more out of breath than I was. Now I found I had a dilemma. The further I went, particularly if as usual I wandered off the main well-trodden paths, the more I’d be stuck with her. But she could easily retrace the path we’d come by back to the valley road, and on a day like this, there would be plenty of walkers tracking across Black Sail, so I felt I could dump her here without too much trouble to my conscience.

  I sat down and took a drink from the bottle of water I carried in my sack. She produced a can of cola and drank from that.

  I said, ‘That’s stupid.’

  ‘Why’s that?’ she said, not sounding offended but genuinely interested.

  ‘Because you can’t seal it up again like a bottle. You’ve got to drink the lot.’

  ‘So I’ll drink the lot.’

  ‘What happens when you get thirsty again?’

  ‘I’ll open another one,’ she said, grinning and shaking her rucksack till I could hear several cans rattling against each other. ‘Like a drink?’

  She offered me the can. I shook my head. I wouldn’t have minded, but drinking out of a can that had touched her mouth seemed a bit too intimate when I was planning to dump her.

  I said, ‘Won’t your mam and dad be worrying about you?’

  She said, ‘No. They think I’m out
walking up Greendale with Jules and Pippa.’

  These it emerged were two of the other girls I’d seen the previous day. Imogen had proposed they all went out walking today, but when she revealed her plan involved getting up really early, two of them had dropped out. It said much for her powers of persuasion that she’d persuaded the other two to go along with her. It said even more that she’d got them to agree to cover up for her when she announced she was taking off on her own the moment they were out of sight of the castle.

  ‘I’ve arranged to meet them at five,’ she said, ‘so that gives us plenty of time.’

  ‘To do what?’ I was foolish enough to ask.

  ‘Whatever you’re going to do,’ she said expectantly. ‘Sounds like it could be fun. A lot better than anything that was likely to happen with Jules and Pippa.’

  It turned out she’d made enquiries about me, of Sir Leon and also of some of the locals who worked at the castle.

  From them she’d learned that I spent most of my spare time roaming the countryside, ‘getting up to God knows what kind of mischief’. She heard the story of my accident, my miraculous survival, and my subsequent exploits with some of the mountain rescue team. She’d also learned that I was usually up with the lark, so when she resolved to tag along with me, she knew she had to contrive an early start.

  The trouble was, in letting her explain all this to me, I had taken a significant step towards the role of fellow conspirator. If I tried to dump her, I could now see that she was quite capable of following at a distance. I could have tried to take her back to the castle, but I had no way to compel her. And one thing I knew for certain, if ever it became known that she hadn’t spent the day with her friends, no way would my pleas of complete innocence cut any ice with Lady Kira.

  So I was stuck with her. The best plan looked to be to keep her occupied a couple of hours and above all make sure that she kept her rendezvous with the other two girls.

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘Time to move.’

  We stood up. I noticed she just left her Coke can lying on the ground. I gave it a kick. She looked down at it, looked up at me, thought for a moment, then grinned and picked it up and stuffed it into her sack.

  Daft, but somehow that acknowledgement that I was the boss gave me a thrill, so rather than simply lead her up the main track on to Pillar, I decided to take her round by the High Level route that winds above Ennerdale and eventually leads to the summit by a steep scramble at the back of Pillar Rock.

  It was a bad mistake. It turned out she’d heard of Pillar Rock because a friend’s brother had had a fall there in the spring and broken both his legs.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I remember. I know a couple of the guys who brought him down. They said him and his mates were real wankers, didn’t know what they were doing.’

  ‘My friend said her brother had been climbing in the Alps,’ she protested.

  ‘Oh yeah? Can’t have been all that good if he managed to come off the Slab and Notch,’ I declared, annoyed that my mountain rescue friends’ verdict should be called in doubt. ‘It’s nowt but a scramble. Don’t even need a rope.’

  This was laying it on a bit thick. OK, in terms of climbing difficulty, this most popular route up the Rock really is classed as a Grade-3 scramble. But it’s got tremendous exposure. If you come off, you fall a long way. Only real climbers, or real idiots, go up there without a rope. The guy they brought down in the spring was lucky to get away with nothing worse than a couple of smashed legs.

  She said, ‘You’ve been up it then?’

  ‘Couple of times.’

  ‘By yourself?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  It was true. The first time I’d been ten and back then I suppose I was a real idiot. I was like a spider, scuttling up rock faces that give me vertigo now just thinking about them. How the hell I never got cragfast, I don’t know.

  I’d got a bit more sense since my close encounter with the mountain rescue, but I still liked climbing by myself. The second time I went up Pillar Rock had been the previous spring. After I heard my mountain rescue friends talking about the accident, some ghoulish subconscious impulse took me back there. I remember pausing in the Notch and looking down and picturing the guy tumbling through the air. I wondered what it must feel like. All I had to do to find out was let go.

  Don’t worry, it wasn’t a serious thought. If I was going to fall, it would be off something that would impress my rescue mates! But dismissing the Slab and Notch as a ‘mere’ scramble now got me into more bother.

  ‘Let’s go up there then,’ she said.

  ‘With you? No way!’

  ‘Why not? You just said it was dead easy.’

  ‘Yeah, but not for someone like you.’

  ‘What do you mean, like me? We do climbing at my school. I’ve been on the wall at the sports centre.’

  This was true, though, as I learned later, Imogen’s desire to take up rock climbing seriously had provoked a loud and unified negative from her parents, and the school had been instructed to make sure she didn’t get near the wall again.

  Well, her parents might have got their way, but with me it was no contest.

  In my defence, she did make it clear that she was going to have a go with or without me, and by going along with her at least I could make sure she was on the end of my rope.

  And to tell the truth, this readiness of hers to go spidering up a rock face the way I’d been doing for years had an effect on me like the sight of her dancing on the lawn.

  So up we went, me first, then Imogen after I’d got her belayed. There were no problems, and she clearly wasn’t in the slightest fazed by having several hundred feet of air beneath her at the most exposed points.

  It was worth it just to see her face as she stood on the top of the rock.

  It’s a marvellous place to be, beautifully airy in three directions with the huge bulk of Pillar Fell itself looming behind.

  She drank it all in then she turned towards me, a wide smile on her face.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, pulling her hat off so that her golden hair once more floated in the gentle breeze.

  Then in one fluid movement she pulled her T-shirt over her head, kicked off her trainers, pushed down her shorts and stepped out of them.

  ‘Would you like to fuck me?’ she said.

  I stood staring at her, dumbfounded.

  Part of me was thinking that anyone on their way up the path to the summit of Pillar has a perfect view of the top of the rock.

  Another part was thinking there was next to nothing of her! She was so skinny her ribs showed, her breasts looked like they’d just begun to form, she looked more like ten than fourteen. She was as far as you could get from those pneumatic images in the porn mags that got passed around at school.

  But despite the danger of being overlooked, despite her lack of any obvious feminine attractiveness, my heart and my soul and, yes, my body was crying out in answer to her question: Oh yes, I’d like to fuck you very much!

  And I did.

  What was it like? It was a first for me, and for her too. I knew that because I ended up with blood on my cock. So, a pair of raw virgins, but we meshed like we’d been doing it for years, and unless they ran lessons in faking it at that expensive boarding school of hers, she enjoyed it every bit as much as I did. I can’t take any credit for that. While it was happening I was totally absorbed in my own feelings. But afterwards as we lay wrapped in each other’s arms, I knew I wanted this to be for ever.

  In the end it was her who pushed me away and stood up.

  ‘Mustn’t be late,’ she said, ‘or those two will run scared and give the game away.’

  She got dressed as quickly as she’d stripped, but not through any modest need to cover up. I’ve never met anyone as unself-conscious as Imogen.

  I lay there and watched her, then followed suit. She would have done the descent unroped, but I wouldn’t let her.

  On the long walk back I don’t think we exchanged more tha
n half a dozen words. There was lots I wanted to say but, like I told you, communication wasn’t my thing.

  With about a quarter mile to go she halted and put her hand on my chest.

  ‘I’m OK from now on,’ she said.

  I said, ‘Yeah. When . . . how . . .?’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’ll find you when I want you.’

  And she was gone.

  So there you have it, Elf. Sex, rites of passage, teenage trauma, all the steamy stuff you people like to paddle your inquisitive little fingers in.

  Watch out that you don’t find yourself touching something nasty!

  But that’s what turns you on, isn’t it?

  That’s what turns you on!

  Elf

  i

  When she was thirteen Alva Ozigbo’s English teacher had asked her class to write about what they wanted to be when they grew up.

  That night Alva sat so long over the assignment that both her parents asked if there was something they could help with.

  She regarded them long and assessingly before shaking her head.

  Her father, Ike, big, black and ebullient, was a consultant cardiologist at the Greater Manchester Teaching Hospital. Her mother, Elvira, slender, blonde and self-contained, had been an actress. She’d left her native Sweden in her teens to study in London in the belief that the English-speaking world would offer far greater opportunities. For a while her Scandinavian looks had got her parts that required Scandinavian looks, but it soon became clear that her best future lay on the stage. The nearest she got to a film career was being screentested for a Bergman movie. She still talked of it as a missed opportunity but the truth was the camera didn’t love her. On screen she became almost transparent, and by her mid-twenties she was resigned to a career of secondary roles in the theatre. She was Dina in The Pillars of the Community at the Royal Exchange when she met Ike Ozigbo. When they married six months later, she made a rare joke as they walked down the aisle together after the ceremony.

  ‘I always knew I’d get a starring role one day.’

  To which he’d romantically replied, ‘And it’s going to be a record-breaking run!’