"Thanks, Dominic. I'll go and see the police, at any rate. Maybe I'll be back this afternoon."
His grief began to reach him as he followed Ellen to the car. He'd felt relieved when his aunt had gone to stay with friends for Christmas and the New Year – relieved that the family was spared the usual two days of sustaining polite conversation and being determinedly convivial. She'd seen the Christmas cards the children had painted for her, he thought, but they wouldn't be making her any more birthday cards. He'd never thanked her for bringing him up, and now it was too late. He gulped and clenched his fists and managed not to weep until he was sitting in the car, where Ellen put her arm around him. Eventually he mumbled "Let's find out what there is to know."
He blew his stuffed nose as she eased the car into the traffic. "Did the police say how it happened?"
"I don't think she could have suffered much, Ben. Apparently she had hypothermia."
"How could she have? What did her friends think they were up to?"
"She wasn't with her friends. She was in the town where you were born."
"Stargrave? What would she have been doing there?"
"I never thought to ask."
His eyes were aching, his mouth tasted of grief, his incomprehension felt like a storm which wouldn't break. He hurried into the police station while Ellen parked the car. A policeman who looked incongruously like a doorman was at the enquiry desk. "Can I help you?"
"I'm Ben Sterling. You had a report that my aunt died up north. I wonder if you know what she was doing there."
If he found it strange that this was Ben's primary concern, he kept his opinion to himself. He tramped away into an office where typewriters were clacking. By the time he reappeared with a sheaf of papers in his hand, Ellen had joined Ben and was squeezing his arm.
"Your aunt is the lady who was found in a place called Star-grave?"
"She must be, but I don't understand why she was there."
"I believe the police there have established that she was visiting her house."
Ben felt dizzy, and grasped the edge of the counter. "What house?"
The policeman scrutinised the topmost paper. "The house she's apparently been letting for a good many years. If you'd like to follow me," he said.
THIRTEEN
The day after the funeral, Margaret asked "Dad, how many houses do we own now?"
They were walking along a path at the edge of a cliff, where their Sunday drive had ended up. The grey sky was broken only by the shining of a cloud like a sliver of mirror above the sea. Wide slow waves floated down from the horizon to part at the corroded breakwaters protruding from a beach overlooked by hotels which were closed for the winter. Margaret's question took Ben by surprise, interrupting a reverie which he was immediately unable to remember. "Just the one we live in, Margery," Ellen said.
"But Dad said his auntie Beryl wanted us to have everything of hers."
"Soon," Ben told her. "Unless my long-lost brother Shack-leton Sterling, who was sent abroad before he was out of his cradle and who's been exploring the unexplored regions of the world ever since he was a teenager, turns up."
"You haven't really got a brother," Johnny pleaded.
"I've just got Mummy and you two and whoever's taking shape inside my head."
"If there's all those people it's a good job we'll have lots of houses."
"Only three, Margery," Ellen said, "and I shouldn't think we'll be keeping all of them."
"Will we keep the one in the mountains where Daddy came from? Can we go and see that house?"
"Yes, Daddy, can we?" Margaret cried. "I'd love to see that house."
"I suppose we could."
A wind sharp as salt brought sand hissing through the grass at the edge of the cliff. "Get a move on or we'll be too cold to see anything," Ellen said.
Ben lagged behind on the way back to the car. So, he thought again, his aunt had overcome her dislike of the Sterlings enough not only to accept the legacy of their house but also to have an estate agent in Stargrave collect rents from tenants for her ever since. She must have kept her ownership a secret from him because she'd been afraid the knowledge would revive some aspect of his childhood which she had tried to suppress, but couldn't she have told him once he had grown up? Then he would have been able to visit Stargrave on her behalf, and she wouldn't have died alone up there, having apparently fallen and injured herself on her way back from the house to the hotel. Why couldn't she have followed the main road instead of wandering across the common alongside the forest, too far above the town for anyone to notice her in time? "Silly old woman," he muttered, and had to fight back tears before following the family away from the sea.
Later, when the children were in bed, Ellen said "As long as you're going to look at your old home, shall we all go?"
"It's quite a way to drive."
"We could make a weekend of it. Unless you'd rather we weren't there, of course."
At once he felt selfish. It might be their only chance to see Stargrave, and he could always go for a solitary walk while his memories surfaced. "Let's see if there's room at the inn."
The hotel receptionist sounded delighted to be asked and to reserve two rooms for Saturday. "We can have a bit of a dirty weekend when the children are asleep," Ellen said, and matched his grin. "We can practise now if you like."
Afterwards, as he pulled the duvet over them and rested his head on her breast, she whispered "Tell me a secret."
"I don't think I have any from you."
"Then tell me what you remember best about growing up in Stargrave."
"Waiting," he said at once. "Feeling as if I was always waiting for something»like Christmas, only it never quite came."
"Poor little boy."
"I don't mean I was disappointed. I mean those years of my childhood seemed like the start of an adventure. Everything around me felt like a preamble to some event I couldn't put a name to."
"That sounds like childhood right enough."
"I suppose that must have been all it was," Ben said, but he felt as if she'd reduced the reality to a cliche which prevented him from remembering. "Anyway, I lost it once I moved away from Stargrave. I still experience something like it now and then, sometimes when I'm writing."
"Not when you're with me?"
"Of course," Ben said, kissing away her wistfulness. "I'm having it now."
He was certainly experiencing a sense of imminence which put him in mind of the first hint of light above the horizon before dawn. When he awoke next morning it was still there, and it stayed with him during the week. By Friday evening he was as expectant as the children were. That night he dreamed of standing on a mountain where the ice grew beneath him and raised him towards the stars.
In the morning, however, the prospect of breakfast on the motorway was barely capable of rousing the children. Margaret had gone dutifully to bed but had then been unable to sleep, Johnny had had to be harangued up the stairs, and now they were having to rise before dawn. For the next half-hour the family stumbled in and out of the bathroom, bumping sleepily into one another as they vied for space. They straggled out to the car, into a heavy darkness which seemed to cling like grime to Ben, making him feel unable to waken fully. He trudged back to the kitchen and splashed his eyes with handfuls of cold water until he felt alert enough to drive.
Their route led them away from the dawn. An hour later, as he drove through darkness which felt as if it had accumulated the weight of the long night, the children began to stir. Margaret played with her mother at relishing place-names aloud
"Swineshead, Stragglethorpe, Coddington, Clumber Park" while the sight of villages awakening as milk floats groaned through the streets was enough of a treat for Johnny. As the road swung northwest towards the motorway, Ben saw the leafless tips of trees at the edge of a wood turn golden with the dawn. The sight seemed so like a promise that he felt enlivened at once.
Before the car reached the westbound motorway, peaks appeared in the di
stance, gleaming with snow. By now the children were insisting they were famished. Ben stopped at the first motorway service area, though if he had been alone he would have driven to Stargrave without a break. "Finish your drinks in the car," he said as soon as they'd done eating, and waited for them outside the toilets like a stereotype of a father-to-be outside a delivery room.
Half an hour later he came off the motorway through Leeds too soon. What appeared to be the most direct route to Star-grave led him through streets teeming with Saturday shoppers so contemptuous of vehicles that he had to restrain himself from leaning on the horn. At last the crowds were left behind, and the road found a river to follow. As he trod on the accelerator, he felt the heat of the city fall behind as if he was emerging from a suffocating room into the open air.
The terraces of houses which flanked the road out of Leeds gathered themselves into a few small towns, and then they petered out. The moorland road sloped upwards between dry-stone walls, frozen explosions of stone miles long, bordering fields and tracts of gorse and heather from which protruded squarish lichened rocks like ruined houses being swallowed by the moor. The road climbed gradually for half an hour towards limestone ridges bare except for a crust of snow gleaming beneath the glassy sun. The smoke of lonely farmhouses vanished into a thin sky which held neither clouds nor birds. Winds cold as frozen snow set the gorse and heather shivering. Every time the car sped over a ridge, Ben expected to see Star-grave ahead. He must be assuming that it wasn't as far across the moors as it had seemed to him as a child, and his expectancy was making him nervous, until he started talking to distract himself. "When I wasn't much more than your age, Johnny, I came all this way by myself."
The boy gasped in admiration. "Why?"
"You know Daddy's parents died when he was young," Ellen said. "His Auntie Beryl took him to live with her before he'd had a chance to say goodbye properly, and so he came back."
Ben opened his mouth and closed it again. He felt as if she'd stolen his memory and rendered it banal. He was trying to recall what had really been in his mind the last time he'd returned to Stargrave when Margaret rebuked him. "You shouldn't tell Johnny things like that or you'll have him wanting to do it too."
"You wouldn't run away and leave us, would you, Johnny?" Ellen said.
Just shut up for a moment, Ben was close to shouting, let me think – and then the road swung around a curve enclosed by spiky walls and climbed into the open, and he saw the railway bridge ahead. The line had been disused for years; a mass of sullenly green weeds led away from both ends of the parapet and vanished among standing shapes of limestone which the years since his departure seemed to have rendered even more grotesque, more nearly meaningful. His foot wavered on the accelerator, because he felt suddenly cold. He gripped the wheel and sent the car racing under the low dark arch.
The road curved upwards beside the overgrown railway, and the moors above Stargrave came into view, dominated by limestone crags which made Ben think of icebergs. Ellen gave a sigh of pleasure at the view, but he found he was holding his breath. The car reached the crest of the slope, and Sterling Forest and the Sterling house both rose to meet him.
The shared movement made them seem part of a single entity, as if the tall grey steep-roofed house was posted as a sentry for the forest wider than the town. The forest was a darkness hovering above Stargrave, its tens of thousands of trees rooted in shadow under their canopy of sombre green. Before he could grasp these impressions, they were driven out of his mind by the sight of a For Sale board outside the Sterling house.
At the junction of the main road and the rough track which led to the house, he stopped the car beside a bungalow he didn't recognise and stared bewildered at the sign outside his childhood home. "Can't we go in?" Margaret said.
He was unexpectedly daunted by the idea of visiting the house while it was occupied by people he didn't know. Realising that they were his tenants, or would be once his aunt's will had gone through probate, aggravated his nervousness. At least one of the tenants was at home; someone had just appeared at the window of a room on the middle floor – Ben's old room. The vague pale face at his window made him feel ousted. "I haven't got the key," he said, and drove into the town.
At first it looked as he remembered it, the chunky buildings huddled beneath the moor, Church Road leading up from the main road to the church above the station and down again to the market square, The Crescent describing a smaller curve below Church Road, the narrow crooked side streets climbing across them from Market Street. The view infected him with nostalgia, even when he passed a torn poster for a concert in
Leeds by a band called Piss In The Sink, until he was confronted by the names of several of the shops: Country Taste Pizza Parlour, Video Universe, Brats Boutique, The Food Trough… Presumably some of these were meant to appeal to tourists; the railway station had been turned into an information centre for climbers and ramblers, flanked by a record store called The Bop Shop and a furniture-maker's by the name of Suites and Sawer. "Half a wit is even worse than none," he growled, and headed for the Station Hotel.
It was a thickset three-storey building which occupied one side of the square. In the darkly panelled lobby, beneath the stalactites of a chandelier, a woman was poring over a ledger, ticking off amounts with a stub of pencil as chewed as a dog's rubber bone. "Mr and Mrs Sterling and the kiddies," she said in a Yorkshire accent as broad as she was. "Write yourselves down and I'll show you up."
Since the vintage lift was out of order she led them up the wide staircase, emitting a wheeze as each stair gave a creak. "Keep your hand in your pocket, lad," she said as Ben made to tip her. The children switched on their television and bounced on their beds while he lay down for a few minutes to relax. "How does it feel to be home?" Ellen said from the bathroom.
"I don't know yet," he said, and swung his legs off the plump slightly shabby counterpane as soon as she managed to turn off the rickety taps. "I'd better head for the estate agent's. They may not be open this afternoon."
"Come on, you two, we're going out again."
"Can we have lunch at the pizza restaurant?" Johnny begged.
"If we can't find somewhere even more like paradise," Ben said.
Tovey's estate agency was on the northward stretch of Market Street. A photograph of the Sterling house gleamed and dulled on a rotating pillar in the window. A portly young man with a scrubbed smile and eyebrows like an inverted Mexican moustache came to meet him and shook hands with him. "Henry Tovey. How can I help you?"
"I'm Beryl Tate's nephew. I see you're selling her house."
"We do have that for sale. Please allow me to express my condolences, by the way. I only met the lady once, but she was always a pleasure to do business with."
"Have you had any offers for the house?" Ellen said.
"Not yet, but business is always slack at this time of year. Normally we might not have put the property on the market so soon after your tragedy, but Miss Tate had been most insistent that it should be advertised as soon as possible."
So Ben's aunt had come to Stargrave in order to get rid of the house. "What do her tenants think about the sale, do you know?" Ellen said.
"Most of them had already moved away. We assumed that was why Miss Tate decided to sell."
"I was wondering if we could have a look around the house," Ben said.
"By all means. Would you happen to have some identification so that I can keep our records up to date?" Tovey glanced at the photocopy of the will Ben had brought with him. "Ordinarily we'd show people over the property, but I'm sure that isn't necessary in your case. You may as well hold onto the key."
"You don't think whoever's in the house will mind if we just go in?"
"Put your mind at rest, Mr Sterling." Tovey held the door open for them and said "Your aunt's last tenant moved out once he got wind of your aunt's intention to sell. There's nobody at all in the house now."
FOURTEEN
To keep Johnny happy they lunch
ed at the pizza parlour. A large-boned woman, whose plastic apron swarmed with pigs in bibs, stood over the display of slabs of dough, slapping the top of the counter in time with a pop song so tinny that the relentless percussion sounded like an uncontrollable sneeze. Once she'd brought a trayful of generous helpings of pizza to the table, an unsteady disc draped in gingham, she pretended not to notice the Sterlings. So did the other diners – a birthday party of several children and a man with a paper hat balanced on his head, an old couple taking turns to order their Alsatian to lie down, a woman who kept underlining phrases in a newspaper and who stirred her tea vigorously every time she was about to sip it – but Ben was sure they were wondering what had brought the newcomers to town, which made him realise that he didn't quite know himself. He dawdled over his pizza until Margaret said "Shall we go and see the house now?"
"No hurry. I'd like to walk off all that driving first." When she made a face he said "And you'd better walk off that pizza before you start looking like the wrong kind of doe."
In the space of a couple of seconds her face crumpled, grew furious at having done so in public, warned Johnny not to laugh. "Daddy said you might, not that you do," Ellen comforted her. "I'd like to see some of the moors, wouldn't you? It may not be a walking day tomorrow."
Ben's instinct had been for a stroll in the forest, but he didn't want to cause any more conflict. In the street he apologised to Margaret, but she snatched her hind away. Once they were past the increasingly scattered houses where the northward stretch of Market Street became Richmond Road, however, she let him help her over the stile in the gritstone wall onto the nearest moorland path.
As soon as he set foot on the path he felt as if he could walk for days. The frozen grass was springy as wire; here and there the path crackled underfoot. A sprinkling of frost highlighted the traceries of heather, and tiny crystal globes on the gorse beside the path sparkled where the failing sunlight touched them. A mile above him on the slope, against vegetation luminous as an afterglow, every grotesque outline of the limestone crags stood out lucidly. Overhead the deep blue sky looked frozen solid by the night which was massing beneath the horizon; it made him think of blue ice spreading across the sky and forcing the sun down. A solitary bird hovered above the western ridge, emitting a high thin cry, and the whole of the landscape seemed to share the piercing clarity of the sound.
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