by J M Gregson
Cullis said speculatively, ‘There still aren’t many women scientists of quality available, are there? We couldn’t find a single one worth shortlisting, when we appointed Ben.’
He sounded as if he was apologizing for the fact. Perhaps it was his concession to feminism. In truth, Priscilla liked the fact that she had little female company in here. It made her feel a little special, as if she had won through against the odds, as if she were slightly more remarkable than the bright young men who sometimes seemed a threat to her. She said, ‘It all goes back to the schools. Generally speaking, maths and science isn’t well taught in girls’ schools. And in co-educational establishments, girls seem to think the arts subjects are more feminine.’
She wished immediately that she hadn’t spoken. Richard Cullis wasn’t a fool. He would know all this: probably he would think her banal and uninteresting. She realized with a little, rather pleasant, shock that she did not want him to think that.
But he nodded slowly and thoughtfully, as if she had offered him a more original thought. He walked over and looked out of the window at the almost empty car park and the equally deserted school playing fields beyond it. Then he walked to the door at the end of the lab and stood for a moment looking into the big, hangar-like room where they kept the rabbits and the other animals on which they tested new drugs.
It was almost as if he was checking that they were the only ones left in the building, Priscilla thought. She concluded the sentence she had been writing when he came in and pushed her completed record to one side, wondering if he thought her stupid because she had not yet learned enough mastery of syntax to put her stuff directly on to the computer.
Richard Cullis turned and came back towards her, stopping by her desk when she thought he was on his way out of the lab. ‘I don’t get much chance to chat with people individually. In my job, you’re always meaning to do it, but something more pressing invariably intervenes. Do you fancy going for a drink?’
‘Now?’
‘Why not? Seize the moment!’
She glanced at her watch, snatching a second to think, telling herself that a thirty-year-old mature woman should not be thrown by such a simple proposition. ‘I can’t. I have to go round to my mother’s house. She’s not been well.’
It was true. But of course he wouldn’t believe it. She could see he didn’t as he said, ‘You’re sure? Not just a quick one?’
‘I haven’t time, I’m afraid. I should be on my way already, really. Mum will be wondering where I’ve got to.’
‘Lucky old Mum, I say!’ He gave her a broad smile which said that he understood everything. ‘Well, some other time, perhaps.’
‘Yes. I’d like that.’
Priscilla Godwin tried to put conviction into the bland, routine phrase. She was surprised as she gathered her things together how much she hoped that he would ask her again.
May Hill is only about a thousand feet in height, but it commands a view of seven counties and is a well-known local Gloucestershire landmark, a centre of ancient folklore and much affection.
Jason Dimmock and his wife Lucy were making the easy climb, an ideal stroll for fit people with a dog on a summer evening. The first section was steep but short, and Lucy found herself panting a little, resenting her husband’s easy stride, which seemed only marginally shortened by the steepest incline. She paused for a moment to get her breath, gazing west at the clouds over the Welsh hills. ‘There’ll be rain before nightfall.’
‘We’ll be off the hill and back home by then. And approaching rain means we’ll be able to see more from the top. Visibility is always best in the hour before rain falls.’ Jason stretched a hand back towards her, offering help over the steepest part of the incline, but she shook her head, preferring the balance and rhythm of her own efforts.
Lucy Dimmock was slim and healthy, with black hair which swung attractively in the breeze, a long neck and large, widely set dark eyes. The effort had brought an attractive colour into her usually pale cheeks. She said, ‘I’ll be all right, if you let me move at my own pace. I’m just a little out of condition, that’s all. It’s a while since I had much exercise. I’m not able to spend as much time on the golf course as you do.’
‘No. You have other ways of finding exercise.’
It was out before he knew it was coming and Jason regretted it immediately. He had not meant to offer the barb; they had been getting on well together in the last few days. He had hoped that the fresh air and freedom of the hill and the long views of different kinds of country around them would remove tensions, bring them closer together. Now he had thrown in this senseless blow when each of them had least expected it: the jibe had come from somewhere deep within him before he could prevent it. It had been unthinking and instinctive, but that made it worse, not better.
He did not know what to do about it. There was no way he could rescue himself; it wasn’t the sort of remark which could be wiped away by a simple apology. He walked on quickly, out of conversational distance, needing the release of hard physical movement, banishing the images of tangled naked limbs which his words had brought with them. He called needlessly to the dog, pretending it needed his attention. The nearest sheep were half a mile away and the golden retriever was docile and obedient.
Jason stayed nearer to the dog than his wife, even when the ground levelled out and they began the long, gentle ascent to the circle of fir trees at the summit of May Hill. They passed a family of children running happily on their way down. The parents spoke to Jason and Lucy in turn, looking back a little curiously at this couple who walked thirty yards apart.
They sat together in silence on the bench by the summit, a careful two feet between them, gazing out over the wide reaches of the Severn as it ran towards the Bristol Channel. After two minutes, Jason said, ‘The tide’s in. Those last big bends of the river always look better when the water’s high and they catch the setting sun.’
She did not respond to his deliberately neutral remark, not because she did not want to, but because words would not come. Simple, innocent, harmless words should be the easiest, yet anger and an absurd sort of pride stilled them in her throat. After a moment, she said, like one picking at a scab she knew she should not touch, ‘You can’t let it go, can you? I’ve told you it’s over; I’ve done what I can to make things right with you. But you can’t let it go. You have to take every opportunity to rub my nose in it.’
‘I’m sorry.’ The words had come at last. But they were as useless as he had known they would be, a mere automatic response to her prompting. He turned his face away from her, called, ‘Oscar, come and lie down, please.’ He pointed at a spot by their feet and the dog came and lay down there with a huge sigh, as if he was conscious that he was merely a diversion for these unnecessarily complex humans. Jason fondled the ears and the warm brown head affectionately. Then he reached sideways and took his wife’s hand awkwardly. She did not reject his touch, but she did not respond to it either.
He held her hand for a little when they rose and moved round the clump of firs to look in the other direction, towards the sharp line of the Malvern Hills. ‘You’re right about the rain coming,’ he said. ‘You can see more detail on the side on the Malvems than I can ever remember seeing before.’
‘Yes.’ The lame, useless monosyllable was all she could manage. The wild piebald ponies which roamed May Hill were visible on this side of it. Lucy Dimmock watched them and found herself envying their freedom.
Six miles from May Hill, Detective Sergeant Bert Hook was searching for his lost youth and failing to discover it.
A mixture of persuasion and taunts from his fourteen-year-old son had drawn him out to bowl in the nets at the village cricket club. His presence there excited considerable interest, for until he was thirty-six Bert had been a stalwart of Herefordshire cricket in the Minor Counties competitions, a fearsome seam bowler who had made even the most talented batsmen hurry their strokes.
He had enjoyed the benefits of a powerful,
stocky build and a springy action, which had ensured that his bowling was always a little quicker than it looked from the edge of the field. Now he found that muscle had run to fat, that he was panting hard after three deliveries from a shortened run. Nevertheless, the young batsman in the net was regarding him with a new respect after losing his off stump to a good one.
Now came the real test, the reason why he had been brought here. Time was called on the man at the other end of the pitch and, with a challenging grin, Jack marched briskly into the net. Bert’s wife Eleanor had said that he was to go easy on the lad, to remember that he was still only a boy really. Eleanor didn’t understand much about sport and only a little more about father-son rivalries. Bert grinned at young Jack and breathed in deeply, pawing the ground like an ageing bull.
He pitched his first ball on a perfect length, but not too fast; he didn’t want to embarrass the lad in front of his friends. Jack took a quick stride forward and drove it hard and smoothly through where mid-off would have been, then replayed an imaginary shot, as if concerned only with his timing. Bert muttered a grudging, incredulous, ‘Good shot!’ but his son was preoccupied with his technique. Then, when Bert pitched his next ball on leg stump, Jack drove it like an arrow through mid-on and nodded to himself, apparently satisfied on this occasion with his execution.
Bert studied him with hands on hips, in a pose which the Bedfordshire Gazette had likened to Fiery Fred Trueman’s in an earlier era. It was rather wasted, as his son was looking down at his hands and making minor adjustments to his gloves. Bert went back to the end of his full run with single thought: bugger bloody Eleanor and her mistaken view that this was still a child.
He gripped the ball across the seam, sought hard for the old rhythm as he approached the crease, dug it in just short of a length so that it would rise quickly. There was a lot of grass on this practice wicket and the ball did just that. Jack aimed a hook at the ball, but it was too quick and it rose too steeply for him. It hit him on the chest, just over the heart; he winced away and clasped his hand briefly to the spot as his body jackknifed.
Bert was transformed in an instant from opponent to father. He went down the pitch and said anxiously, ‘OK, son?’
‘No prob, Dad.’ Jack was instantly the fit young man, ashamed of the momentary weakness he had shown. ‘Quite a good one, for an old man, that!’ He rehearsed the shot he had meant to play, dispatching the imaginary ball high over square leg for six, refusing to rub again the spot where he had been hit. Bert Hook made the long journey back to the end of his full run deep in thought.
The old ploy should be good enough for this young and inexperienced whippersnapper. He would show Jack that he had still much to learn and then depart with dignity into the sporting retirement he should not have forsaken. The fast yorker, pitching in the block-hole and taking out leg or middle stump, was the delivery for a batsman caught on the back foot after the short ball. It had been one of Bert Hook’s specialities in his day, accounting for better batsmen than this young sprog. Bert took a deep breath and gradually accelerated up his long run to the wicket.
He almost got it just right - for a man who hadn’t bowled it for years, it was a very good effort. He was just a fraction short, a mere couple of feet. That was enough to turn his intended yorker into a half-volley. Jack stood tall, scarcely needing to move his feet, and met the ball with a gloriously straight flowing bat.
The ball hit the very middle of it and flew back like a bullet at the bowler.
Bert, still off balance in his follow-through, instinctively stuck out an ill-advised foot towards the missile. It hit him just above the ankle and flew away to his left. He found himself before he knew what had happened lying on his back and clutching his leg tight against his chest. Probably he had uttered a cry of pain before the steady groaning which now filled the air, but he could not be sure of that.
He scrambled to his feet as soon as he could, waving aside assistance, setting the injured limb gingerly on the ground with a grimace of agony which he turned into a rueful grin. ‘Not quite as quick as I used to be!’ he told the concerned faces around him. ‘I’d have had that in both hands, twenty years ago!’
That wasn’t true, of course, and probably no one believed him. But no one among the crowd around the old warhorse could deny it, could they? Distance lends enchantment to the sporting view; we are all supreme athletes in the golden glow of recollection.
Eleanor Hook noted that both her returning men seemed a little subdued. Being a wife and a mother and thus blunt to sporting perceptions, she said brightly, ‘How did it go, then?’
From Jack, she elicited a grunt and the impenetrable phrases she now realized marked the beginnings of adolescence. From Bert, she had some routine musings about the effects of Anno Domini upon the human frame and the tragic inability to muster the speed and grace which had once been his. Then, with a can of beer inside him, he said with a strange combination of reluctance and pride, ‘Your son has the makings of a batsman, if he keeps his feet on the ground.’
Jack Hook shut the door of the bathroom and removed his T-shirt with elaborate care. The bruise at the top of his chest was black and swelling: he winced as he touched it. It would be an impressive wound to show at school, to demonstrate just how fearsome a bowler his dad must have been. He studied it in the mirror, judging that it would be at about its best in either two or three days, when the blackness would still be vivid at its centre, but set off by green and yellow hues around it. He wouldn’t show it to his mother until then, would wait through her long wails of tender concern before revealing with apparent reluctance that his dad had done it.
Jack took a last look at it before taking himself to bed. He had to lie on his right side, finding the left too painful. The old boy must have been quite a fearsome proposition, in his day.
A couple of hours later, Eleanor Hook noted the bottle of witch hazel on the shelf of the bathroom cabinet. She had listened to Bert doctoring his ankle inexpertly and trying to suppress little whines of pain behind the locked door. Men weren’t good at pain.
She pretended to read her book as he hobbled into the room, holding himself erect and making an absurd pretence of moving normally. He sat for a moment reflectively on the edge of the bed, then levered himself into it with elaborate care. He said good night to Eleanor, held her briefly and tenderly for a moment, then turned away from her and stretched his legs cautiously and experimentally into the coolness of the cotton sheets.
Jack was going to be a cricketer, and a damned good one. Making his way easily over the green fields of England as a batsman, not a toiling, sweating bowler. Bert saw a graceful, commanding figure, with bat held high in the elegant follow-through of a perfect cover drive. His leg throbbed steadily, reassuringly. He was very quickly asleep.
Beside him, Eleanor Hook listened to the first gentle snore and set down her book. Boys will be boys, whatever their age and infirmity. She fell asleep contentedly on that thought.
Three
Alison Cullis was not a scientist. For a great deal of the time, she was glad of that. When she and her husband fought their battles, it was good that she had studied history and philosophy, not science.
It gave her a wider perspective, a knowledge of other civilizations and other ways of thinking. It gave her the knowledge that many of the things she and Richard wrestled over had been discussed many times before, by other and greater minds than theirs. It gave her access to the limitless world of great ideas and great thinkers, when Richard thought that mere facts were the key to everything.
These thoughts intruded upon Alison Cullis now as she knelt in the Church of the Sacred Heart and tried to pray. An onlooker would have seen a composed figure, a dark-haired woman with an oval face of quiet beauty, which might have come from a Flemish painting. The onlooker would have been greatly deceived.
Alison had come here to look for composure, but she had not found it. The more she tried to cool her emotions and direct her thoughts towards spir
itual things, the more her mind raced out of her control. You could not pray with your mind in turmoil: more than anything else in life, prayer needed concentration. She gave up the unequal effort and eased herself back on to the pew behind her, staring up at the roof of the church, soaring impossibly high above her in its Victorian neo-Gothic.
Alison’s eyes were drawn against her will to the statue of the blue-clad virgin with arms outstretched on the side altar. Away to her left, the image of the Sacred Heart, the cheap sensationalism of a Christ with heart exposed and burning for the sins of the world, stared down the long nave of the church. Images sanctioned by the most intellectual Church in the world to awe its peasant worshippers, she thought. A grand old Church, even with all its shortcomings, her mother had always said. She shut her eyes and bowed her head and tried again to shut out her own petty concerns and address herself to her God.
Instead of Christ, she saw Richard, his lips curled in amused contempt, mocking this tattered, outdated brocade of religion. He maintained that Alison would have discarded the whole elaborate sham years ago if she had been a scientist instead of an out-of-date romantic. When she thrust his face desperately aside, she found her mind filled with an image it had not entertained for years. A nun, her age indeterminate because of her wimple and her habit and most of all because of her serene certainty, talking to a group of sixteen-year-old girls impatient to take on the world. A quiet, confident figure, assuring them that Faith was the greatest of all the virtues, that Faith would conquer all doubts.
