In the Time of Greenbloom

by Gabriel Fielding

  Trembling, John got up.

  “But that’s ridiculous,” he said. “It’s a waste of time, isn’t it Mr Harkess? She would never have stayed out all night, she would have walked miles, she would have run like,” he choked, “like the wind, to get here to us. She’s very fond of us Sergeant, she loves us, she would have hated us all to be worried like this. She would rather have died than—”

  In the enormity of their silence, he stopped. The Sergeant stooped over him and patted his forehead; his hand was cold and he smelt of blue-suits.

  “I’m sorry, son,” he said, “but we need your help you see.

  Over the wastes between them John looked up at him.

  “We thought for a start we ought to have just a little look round that cave of yours; criminals are queer fish, if they’ve taken a fancy to a place they often like to visit it again. You needn’t come in yourself of course; but you could take us up there and give us an idea of where you actually had your picnic; we thought it would be a good idea to get that done before we went any farther afield. If she’s on her way back, if he dropped her in the dales between here and York and she put up somewhere for the night—and she might have done you know—then of course she won’t have spent the night in the cave; but we can’t just stand about waiting for her to arrive or telephone, can we?”

  “No,” said John.

  “You’ll come then?”

  “Yes. I’ll come.”

  “Good lad.”

  George Harkess opened the door. “You’d better put on your mackintosh,” he said, “it’s raining.”

  He was tempted to wait in the hall a moment and hear what they said to each other; he knew they were going to talk about him but he was afraid that they might say something about Victoria too and so he ran straight through to the cloakroom and waited for them there.

  They left George Harkess’s car and the Police van by the Stump Cross and then walked back along the road to the place where the hiker had left the Sunbeam the day before. Without stepping off the road Sergeant Sanders examined the tyre-tracks in the grass and told the two constables from the van to put ropes and posts round them. The other man, in ordinary clothes, the man with the dogs, remained sitting in the back of the van with the dogs lying at his feet. He was smoking a cigarette. Sergeant Sanders told him they would let him know later if there was ‘anything for him’ after they had had a look at the cave. Then, with John and the Sergeant in the lead, the five of them followed the path to the dingle with George Harkess lagging behind and carrying on his shoulder the scaffolding of the Sergeant’s big camera which the two constables shared.

  When they had reached the entrance of the cave the Sergeant told his men to put all his apparatus inside and use their torches; then he turned to John.

  “Now,” he said. “Just you lead on and show us where you went yesterday. Here’s my torch, it’s a fine big one, and you should find it easy to follow in your own path.”

  “Thank you Sergeant.”

  “And listen! We know you’re not enjoying this and that you may be a little frightened when you get farther in. If that should happen and you decide you’ve had enough, just sing out and we’ll hand you back to the entrance.”

  “All right, Sergeant.”

  John stooped into the entrance and made his way quickly towards the pile of stones which mounted to the throat of the first gallery. Behind him, he heard the grunts of George Harkess as he moved and slithered over the uneven floor, and he thought of Mrs Blount and Annie Moses waiting together at the farm wondering where they had all gone and why they themselves had been told so little. He wished desperately that he too might have stayed with them, that he too had been born a woman, so that he might only wait for news instead of having always, for all the rest of his life, to go out to meet it.

  Although there were so many of them, the increasing darkness within the body of the cave separated them all from one another. Outside, it had been possible for them to consider themselves as a friendly, talkative, almost noisy group. George Harkess had blustered through the rain and made jokes about the Police Force. One of the policemen had whistled a little tune over and over again and the other had talked about grouse-shooting; but now they were strung out like beads in the darkness; each one thinking his own thoughts as they grunted and swore and struggled between the surfaces of the rock.

  After a few minutes the two policemen began to talk quietly. A long way behind him from the tail of the procession, he heard the muddle of their conversation: brief words of one or two syllables, elongated and multiplied by the echoes which they roused: a strange language in which the cave participated; as yesterday it had taken part in the words he and Victoria had shouted out into its emptiness.

  He tried to make out what they were saying as he crawled along on his hands and knees to the true cavern. They were joking, he decided; there was a flat and chilling joviality in their tones as they called to one another through their discomfort:

  “Yo’rl right?”

  “Steady!”

  “Gie ’t me then.”

  “Mud?”

  “Naw, ’ts cläe—yaller cläe.”

  “Yaller fer jalousy!”

  “Go on! oo’s jalous?”

  “Oop an’ over!”

  “’Ang on!”

  “Bloody wet!”

  “Brought y’r g’loshes?”

  These words were interspersed with the groans of George Harkess, with an occasional snort of laughter from one or other of the speakers, and the loud noises of their boots against water and boulders.

  John had never heard a human conversation that was so discomforting, or one that had so great a capacity for making even the most deadly silence seem warm and cheerful by comparison. Above all he wished that they would not laugh; their forced cheerfulness filled him with surprising anger making him long to turn round and tell them to ‘shut up!’ Every foolish, meaningless ejaculation of laughter was a confession of the fear they would not acknowledge and seemed to stir up and make more actively venomous the personal fear which lay coiled within him like a serpent. If he had been Sergeant Sanders, he decided, he would have turned round and told them that if they were frightened they could give up and return to the open air; but Sergeant Sanders was the most silent of them all. He made no sound as he followed John and George Harkess through the gallery.

  At last they reached the wider entrance to the cave itself, and John stopped and waited for the others to gather together beneath its dripping roof. Sergeant Sanders straightened himself and stepped up beside him.

  “All right?” he asked.

  “Yes thank you Sergeant.”

  He waved the beam of his torch into the darkness ahead, watching it taper off into a grey ghost of light as it reached out into the vastness of the cavern.

  “We were in there,” he said. “Not very far, about fifty yards I think. You’ll see the remains of our fire.”

  “Which side was that?”

  “That side,” he pointed, “the right-hand side; but if you don’t mind, Sergeant, I’d rather not go any farther just now. I’ll just wait here and let you see if you can find—any clues.”

  “What’s he stopping for?” George Harkess and the constables had at last joined them. “For God’s sake get a move on boy! We don’t want to spend the whole morning down here.”

  “He’s doing very well, Mr Harkess,” said the Sergeant, “and I don’t think he’s wasted any time.”

  “No no. He’s done very well, but you must admit this isn’t the most comfortable way of spending a morning.”

  “It’s got to be done sir.”

  George Harkess rubbed his hands. “Of course,” he said. “Well, what do we do now? Get busy on the search? It looks a pretty large area from what one can see of it.”

  “I think it would be better if I went on alone, Mr Harkess, and searched the floor. It’s quite possible that something might have been dropped, a cigarette packet or a matchbox or a bus ticket.”

/>   “I’ll come with you if you like Sar’n’t?”

  “Better not. We don’t want it to be a case of too many cooks. My inspector has a rule about not fouling the ground; he’s a great one for following up when a case goes badly.”

  “Very well Sergeant! We’ll wait here and show you a light.”

  “Thank you sir.”

  He stepped down on to the floor of the cave and shining his torch a little way ahead of him started to move slowly away from them over towards the right-hand wall. The two policemen moved up and stood behind John, one on either side of him, directing their torches on to the Sergeant’s back. He turned round angrily screwing up his eyes in the double glare of the beams. Under the peak of his hat his face looked curiously white and dead like a mask in Madame Tussaud’s.

  “Not on my back! You damn’ fools,” he shouted. “How do you expect me to see anything but my own shadow if you’re going to direct your lights on me rather than on the floor? Have some sense, Haykin!”

  They changed the direction of the beams and he moved a few paces forward. Then he stopped again. The beam of his own torch crept ahead of him inch by inch over the clear pools and the smoothed corruscations of the limestone, against its brightness his shoulders and back were silhouetted clearly. At the distance of some sixty yards he looked quite small and very still, like the toy soldier who had fallen down the drain in Hans Andersen’s story. Suddenly he began to run, he came to life like the soldier in face of the beautiful doll he loved, he ran about five paces and then stopped again. They heard his exclamation; a sharp indrawn cry, ugly and short, which echoed about them for a moment before it was drawn in to the silence.

  John winced as the heavy hand of George Harkess came down upon his bruised shoulder. The great body of the man leaned over him and he could see and smell his condensed, unsweet, breath as he peered out ahead towards the Sergeant. Nobody moved, they were as still and absorbed as Victoria and John had been the afternoon before when they had stood in this same place and called out into the cave; and as their own candles had done, the torches of the two constables began to shake, making the shadows created by their beams rock and sway against the uneven surfaces. In the silence they all four heard clearly for the first time the falling of the water from the high places beyond them; and then, with the Sergeant still far ahead of them, still immobile and quiet, George Harkess suddenly leaned farther over John and bellowed out into the darkness.

  “What is it Sergeant? What have you found?”

  The Sergeant turned round deliberately, the white face of his torch winking back at them as though it were conveying a message in Morse.

  “We’ll want the camera,” he called. “Tell Haykin to get the camera!”

  “I will Sergeant! But tell us, what have you found? Have you found—”

  “Yes,” shouted the Sergeant. “Yes, she’s here.”

  “Is she—”

  Above John, weighing over him more heavily than all the weight of the rock between the darkness and the daylight, the body of George Harkess shuddered in its heavy tweed. He cleared his throat.

  “Is she all right?” he asked quickly.

  The Sergeant turned round once again.

  “No,” he called. “No,” and capriciously the cave echoed his terrible negative. He raised his voice.

  “I told you! Send Haykin for my camera and take the boy out. It is murder!”

  4

  In The Time of Greenbloom

  No Angel knows

  No fire-hung Seraph knows or could

  What I, the fallen son of fallen fathers

  Now and then within the cirrus understood.

  In The Time of Greenbloom

  He had stolen the asparagus after Chapel on Friday evening and sent it via the ‘Skip’ to be boiled for supper five minutes later. He had enjoyed it too, even despite the glances and nudges which ensued throughout the meal at the upper end of the table. Fortunately the label had come off the tin in the process of the boiling in the school kitchen, with the result that on its return it had been, if not unrecognisable, at any rate unidentifiable. He had no idea to whom it belonged, though in his mind he had narrowed down the possible owners to three: Hopper, whose father kept an hotel in Worthing, Liverman who had asthma and used green ink, or Coke who said his prayers and was promising wing three quarter in the 2nd fifteen.

  John had snatched it from the cloisters in the dark when the rest of the House were fumbling about trying to find the sardines, baked beans, and tuck-shop eggs which they had placed there before Chapel started. It had been a fairly easy theft, scarcely deserving of the pleasure its contents had later given him. No one was to know that he had ‘blued-in’ the whole of his weekly two shillings on dough-nuts and coffee in the shop within half an hour of Rudmose doling it out to him; no one was to know that he felt quite clearly that he was owed considerably more than the odd tin of asparagus by the whole school for his unpopularity, his increasing solitude, and ‘the Moors’.

  No one else had had the Moors; no one else could ever have the Moors; it or they had been reserved for him alone and now that it was half-term for the rest of them, now that they could see their parents at ‘Foundaggers’ and talk to them or go out with them or even go up to London with them for the night, they owed something to him: a minute interlude of greed, of cosiness such as he had experienced while eating the asparagus, or the odd sixpence or shilling he was able to filch from the hanging trousers in the changing-room during afternoon games, they owed him more, they owed him the passing or forgiveness of any suspicion or certainty they might have that he was the thief.

  Last term he had been in the papers for weeks: his name, his photograph, all the details of his past, of his last days with Victoria in the Moors. He had been and still was ‘The Boy in the Danbey Dale Tragedy’, ‘Young John Blaydon, the sweetheart of Victoria Blount so hideously murdered by Person or Persons Unknown’ nearly five months ago. Everything, his evidence at the Inquest, the Coroner’s sympathy, the background stories of his home, flashlight photographs of the Stump Cross caverns, even extracts from the letters he had written to Victoria had been printed in the newspapers for weeks which had mounted into months before Father’s Bishop had at last persuaded the editors to leave him out of it.

  But by then of course it had been too late; the whole or his relationship with Victoria had become a lurid and vulgar advertisement splashed on every hoarding and concealed behind everyone’s gaze. The end of that Winter term and whole of the Christmas Holidays which followed it had been lived through the daily and recurring horror of the black and white publicity. Each night he had gone to bed attempting to absorb whatever fresh pain the day’s print had inflicted, each morning he had awakened pale and taut to the threat of whatever might await him at the breakfast-table.

  One paper, he remembered, a Sunday one, had likened Victoria to Juliet and himself to Romeo, an excruciating piece of intuition on the part of some reporter who had known nothing of the secret part of that dead, and to him, most dear conversation. It had compared the cave to the Tomb of the Capulets and gone on to suggest that the two of them had hidden themselves there in order to do their ‘innocent courting’ and so ‘outwit strong parental opposition to their friendship.’ Another had implied that he himself had clues which might help to identify the ‘Commercial Hiker’ of the evidence and was withholding them from the Police out of shyness or because he had been threatened with blackmail; a third when the publicity had been at its height had put in a strong plea for an end to that part of it which was focused on the ‘Blaydon Boy’, and on the next day had given an account of a long and entirely fictitious interview in which he was supposed to have opened his heart to ‘our Lady Correspondent’.

  All of them of course had been sympathetic in so far as his own evidence was concerned though they had hinted that it had been unwise of the parents to allow two young people ‘such freedom of opportunity’, whatever that might imply; and poor old Father in view of his priesthood
had come in for particularly odious reproof in the editorials.

  At Beowulf’s during the latter part of that first term there had been some attempt on the part of his housemaster, The Rev. Robert Rudmose, to organise an ineffectual censorship of the dayroom papers; and initially everyone had been kinder to him during that term than during the present one. They had even allowed him to be beaten as usual for such minor offences as ‘cutting detention’ or crossing the playing fields on a Saturday afternoon, and wryly, he had appreciated the tact of the staff and prefects in reporting him on these occasions and carrying out the brisk punishment as thoroughly as they would have done if no unusual event had ever involved him.

  But no amount of kindness, of unaccustomed grins from shining prefects, of gentleness from the blues and half-blues who taught Greek and Latin, could conceal the fact that by the others, his contemporaries, he had gradually become less liked and more suspected than ever. For he did not fool himself; he knew with certainty that he was not the sort of person who would ever have been popular even in the absence of the publicity which had attended his late arrival during that snowy first term. Even with no murder no public precocious and unEnglish love-affair to his name, he would still have been a singular and awkward epitome of the heroes of modern school stories by writers like Beverley Nichols and Godfrey Winn. Unknown, ingenuous, given to hopeless sentimentality with no athletic prowess with which to sugar the pill he would, with the long line of contemporary and unheroic school heroes, have been out of step; and the other fellows would not for long have liked him.

  As it was, on the house runs, on the long walk by the canal to the boathouse he now travelled increasingly alone. Even square kindly old Bass whose father owned a coal mine in Sheffield and who had initially been dumbly pleasant, preferred not to be seen with him; and consequently he had come to rely more and more upon himself and upon his own imaginings for an escape from Beowulf’s and the all too real world of the School.