by Ivy Ferrari
She walked home slowly, shaken by her discovery; now elated, now depressed. The rising storm, buffeting her at every step, reminded her of the day of tempest when they first met, suggested again all those elements of conflict they had known. Yet her love soared above and beyond despair. Neither reason nor past resentment could shake its strength and joy.
Carrie, being remote and absorbed on her own account, failed to notice the kindled restlessness of Tina. The next day was the last before Helen’s return, and it seemed to Tina that events were sweeping them all along towards inevitable change. This feeling was intensified when she walked into Carrie’s den after tea to find her grimly stripping her room of Air Force souvenirs. The Blenheims, the Spitfires, the Short Sunderlands, the Lancasters were wrapped up one by one and entombed in a cardboard carton, bound for the local Air Cadets’ Club. The polished wings had already disappeared from above the mantelpiece and the pictures of uniformed groups had been piled into one heap and tied with string.
‘Oh, Carrie!’ was all she said.
Carrie closed the carton, slung about it and made several fierce knots. ‘Oh, Carrie, is it?’ she said at last. ‘You know the Air Force motto—“Per atdua ad astra” ... “Through arduous ways to the stars.” Well, I’ve been through the arduous ways, but I didn’t find any stars. And my guess is that no one who lives in the past ever does. So don’t be sorry for me. Just learn a lesson by it, as I have. And if you ever find you’ve made a big mistake, do what I’m doing now, cut the threads of it right out of your life and start again. You’ve got to be ruthless about it, however much it hurts.’ She stood winding the rest of the string into a neat hank, her eyes fixed on the distance. ‘Don’t be too sorry for me, Tina.’ she said softly. ‘I didn’t just discover I’d been chasing an empty dream, I had my eyes opened in another way too. I’ve learned that a man may be rough and ready, tactless and sometimes infuriating, but still be one of the best men who ever breathed ... I’ve been blind, you know, blind and stupid all along. I’ve never even begun to get things into proportion.’
She walked to the window, stood watching the lashing trees, still storm-tossed. ‘Maybe I’ve been too absorbed in history too. But don’t worry that I’ll ever parcel up the Wall and kick it out of my life. That’s different I began by loving it for one reason but ended by loving it for itself alone, the sheer fascination of it Lofty hasn’t spoiled that for me. For how could he, when he didn’t care any more? That was the moment of truth, after all.’
‘I’m glad.’ said Tina. ‘I couldn’t imagine you giving up archaeology or Wall history. I’m glad about Sandy too.’ Her voice was so wistful that for a second Carrie eyed her curiously. But the moment passed.
‘We’re just good friends.’ Carrie said. ‘Well, maybe more than that. Sandy knows I’ve got to have time to find myself again, to shake free of the past. He’s a patient man at heart.’
At supper Carrie seemed quite composed, though with little to say. Adam, after a shrewd glance or two, directed the conversation towards Tina, but with little more success. Since her cataclysmic discovery that she loved him, she could no longer be natural, could not hold his gaze, or properly concentrate on what he was saying. His nearness, combined with her shattering secret, were too much for her.
Fortunately Isa made a diversion, arriving with the pudding plus dire news of fallen trees and blocked roads further north. ‘Aye, and we’ll get it worse here yet, they say. Hark at that wind in the chimney! It made me that nervous I wouldn’t like to say I’d got the coffee just right, for I was measuring it into the pot and lost count. Storms always get me gey bothered!’
Adam’s eyes were alight with laughter. ‘Ah, but Isa, remember that text about a house built upon a rock—that’s Hadrian’s Edge. You’re safe enough here, never fear.’
‘Aye, that’s right enough. But there’s another verse says: “A house divided against itself cannot stand!” ’ Isa seemed to look significantly from Tina to Adam.
When she had gone Tina looked at her plate, her heart hurrying in a painful beat. How true it was, and it mattered little how much Isa knew of the conflict between herself and Adam. In many ways it was a house divided and Helen’s return could only widen the rift.
What Adam thought she never knew, because at that moment a gust of violent force hurled itself against the house. Adam said resignedly: ‘Seventy mile an hour gusts, by the sound of it. We’ll be having the telephone lines down next, not to mention the electricity.’
As if to prove him wrong the telephone shrilled. He got up to take the call in the alcove off the hall. When he appeared again his face was so grim and concerned both women looked askance.
‘I’ve got to go out—at once,’ he announced. ‘Rosie Finch has been missing all day and they’re getting alarmed. We’ll have to organise a proper search party. She may be lying hurt somewhere, with so many tree branches coming down.’
The women both got up. ‘Can I help?’ Tina asked. ‘And is it because of going into hospital?’
He shrugged. That seems the obvious answer. I can’t think why they didn’t sound the alarm sooner. As it is it’ll be like looking for a needle in a haystack. It’s nearly dark and blowing the roof off the world. No, there’s nothing you can really do—unless one of you can run along to Sandy Armstrong and rope him in. We’ll need every man we can get.’
‘I’ll go,’ Carrie said. ‘I know the woods better than Tina.’ And she was gone on the instant, stopping only to unhook an old raincoat from the hall. Adam turned to follow her, then looked back uncertainly at Tina. ‘Sorry, but there’s nothing you can do. If you went out there we’d only have to get up another search party. You’d lose yourself or come to grief in five minutes.’
It was not unkindly said, and there was even humour in his expressive glance at her gold kid sandals and cobwebby tights. There might even have been something more, she wasn’t sure, an indulgent tenderness, perhaps. But the brief moment had come and gone. She heard him make a few rapped demands on the telephone, then the front door closed behind him and she heard the noise of the Land-Rover rounding the drive.
She stood undecided, quite wretched. Rosie ... poor little Rosie crouching afraid and helpless in one of her many hidey-holes. It was unthinkable not to do something to help. Yet Adam had clearly counted her help as worth less than nothing. And reason told her why. She was unused to country dark and storm, she knew very little of the surrounding terrain except the woods and fields near the house. On the moor she would be useless, near the quarries even a menace. All hands would be needed to find Rosie and she could imagine Adam’s wrath if she ran into difficulties needing rescue.
Yet she ached at her own helplessness. If only she could do something...
It was then the idea came.
The odd thing she remembered was Rosie’s precious china. She could hear the child saying: ‘I don’t keep it here. I’ve got another secret place.’
If so, surely it couldn’t be so very far from the tree house, where Rosie’s tea-parties usually took place? Could it actually be the old quarry, that overgrown chasm quartered and runnelled by fox and rabbit burrows? Would the searchers even think of combing a place so near to Quarry Farm?
The more she .thought of it, the more instinct told her this was Rosie’s lair. She had seen for herself muddy footmarks at the entrance of one of the ragged tunnels burrowing down into that dark tangle of undergrowth. It could just mean that the twins played there, but on the other hand it was convenient yet lonely, the very kind of secret place Rosie was likely to inhabit.
She could do one of two things, she decided—try to gain on the searchers and pass on her idea, or go herself to the quarry and try to find the child. The first she soon rejected. Why should the men listen to the hunch of a city-bred girl—for a hunch was all it was. And they could be well abroad on the moor by now.
The second also made her pause, hearing the fury of the storm outside and knowing the enveloping darkness that awaited her. Yet the longer
she hesitated the more likely was Carrie to return and nip her plan in the bud.
All at once she sprang into action, ran upstairs to change into warm pants and an anorak, zipping herself into her boots. She collected a torch from the office, a flask of brandy from the medicine chest, and considered herself ready.
When she opened the front door, however, she shrank back again, appalled by the violence of the elements, black lashing rain driven on the wings of a mighty wind. She hesitated only for a moment, however, then pulled the front door behind her, took a deep breath and plunged out into the eye of the storm.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Tina dashed for the shelter of the trees, away from the merciless battering of wind and rain in the open drive. But running was impossible. For every two steps she struggled she was driven back one, while the glowing eye of her torch seemed only to accentuate the roaring blackness about her.
Eventually, she never quite knew how, she reached the woodland path leading to the quarry. And immediately her hope of shelter was dashed. The rough ride, tunnelling through the thrashing trees, was a wild funnel of wind. She found the tormented groaning of the trees so terrifying she switched off her torch and crouched against the undergrowth until her eyes became accustomed to the darkness. Better to see, as she could now dimly, the tossing movement of the high boughs against the paler sky, than be trapped within her circle of light, with all kinds of imagined horrors ready to crash down upon her.
It seemed an endless battle to the quarry edge. Though the force of the rain had lessened she was already soaking, her smart boots seeping damp. She was also fighting for breath, almost crying in her frustration and helplessness. Of only one thing could she be certain. Here at the quarry were no lights, no signs of a search party. As she had guessed, they were combing the moor further afield.
At the quarry brink she flashed her torch on the huge matted mass of undergrowth shelving steeply to the quarry floor. She began to call Rosie’s name, but realised the futility of it. The wind flung her words back at her, drowned by its roaring any possible thread of answering sound.
Now her heart sank indeed. Rosie could be there, but the only way to find out was to tunnel into that black sodden mass of bushes, to chance all the horrors of a sudden fall to the quarry floor. To a girl of these moors and woods an inborn instinct would have come to her aid; she would have known every warning sensation of sinking ground or the sudden sharp ring of limestone, would have known where best to follow the burrows and animal tracks into that black maze. But Tina, child of the sunlit Roman streets, of nights made dazzling by artificial lighting, was hampered by fear and ignorance.
It was at this moment, teetering on the edge of a nameless experience, that she thought of Adam, of his disparaging, almost amused glance at her silly sandals, his total acceptance of her uselessness. Why wasn’t he here now, to take this weight of terrible responsibility and doubt from her shoulders? He would have been so calm, so capable, so utterly unflappable...
Yet scarcely perhaps as wise as herself. He had viewed Rosie’s disappearance as flight, while she with her woman’s intuition knew it was much more likely to be a panic cowering in some familiar lair.
She realised that the wind had dropped a little. It was a strange moment’s hush as if the storm gathered its forces for a mightier onslaught, but time enough to call Rosie’s name again, and to fancy, as the eldritch shriek of the wind rose again, that there had been a faint answering pipe from the depths of the quarry.
It could have been anything, the shriek of some wild creature trapped by another, the cry of a bird even, but Tina knew she could not leave the matter in doubt now. There was a slender chance that it was Rosie. Somehow she must get down there and find out.
She flashed her torch to more purpose, saw the large burrow which seemed the only point of access into the undergrowth, a foot-high tunnel with a muddy floor, dropping steeply through a tangle of brambles. Sure enough there were small footprints in the mud at the entrance, but how new or old she had no way of telling.
The entrance looked sinister. What if some fox or badger lurked down there in the blackness, turning perhaps to clawing savagery if cornered? What if she found, half way down, that the tunnel ended in a precipice and she was plunging to death or injury on the welter of hewn stone below? She knew from daylight walks that the rioting weeds and growth of many summers had successfully screened the real dangers of the quarry. Only Rosie and her twin could know its secrets.
‘If Rosie went down there so can I!’ she said aloud, and gave herself no more time to hesitate. She forced herself into the slimy-floored tunnel face downwards, inching her body along, her torch held before her. Down, down, more steeply now, the bramble tendrils ripping her face, clawing her hands. She came to what was almost a clearing in the bushes, where she could feel the rain on her face again and had room to raise her head, seeing by her torch-light other smaller burrows leading off left and right. There was a strong animal stink, a scuttling somewhere ahead. She was sick with panic.
How far had she come? Twenty feet, perhaps? Was she still on the quarry lip, or lucky enough to be on a shallow slope that might take her down all the way? Impossible to tell. She began to fight and tear her way along the tunnel to the left, feeling buried, suffocated for ever in endless undergrowth, clawing aside spearing branches with bleeding hands, gasping and sobbing for breath. There came that scuttling again, a sudden yelp nearby. The quarry must be alive with wild life gone to ground for shelter from the storm.
Only let her escape from this suffocating horror! She knew she was teetering on the verge of hysteria, for she had always been subject to claustrophobia in confined spaces.
And then her thrashing light fell on dark limestone, the bushes gave way and she found herself on a broad lip or terrace, falling away into more undergrowth and below again what looked like the quarry floor.
She subsided on the wet stone, her breath almost gone, still crouching on all fours like a beaten animal. And it was then she heard it, between two gusts of wind, a tiny lost voice from below.
She gathered her strength, called: ‘Rosie, is that you? Where are you?’
The faint answering cry sounded like: ‘In the hut.’
‘Where is it, Rosie?’
‘Down here...’
The voice sounded from the mass of undergrowth below. Then she seemed to hear Rosie shouting something about a hurt foot. Her blood tingled. How long had the child been lying hurt, perhaps in some noisome burrow?
But her torch revealed that the limestone descended in huge jagged steps to the bushes, that with an effort she might get down that way, though she was certain now Rosie’s own path must have been much easier. Possibly she should have taken the right hand tunnel instead of the left...
She rested a moment, then let herself over the top. She had to use one hand for her torch, and the descent was a heart-stopping scramble of near falls, of scraped limbs and bleeding hands now cut even more on the sharp edges of shale. The last step of all was five feet deep and here she just had to jump it, turning one ankle painfully as she landed.
Even now she was faced again with another tangle of bushes.
Rosie’s voice called again, very near now. ‘I’m in the hut, Tina—right in the bushes!’
There was another burrow, a little larger this time. She crawled into it, expecting further horrors, but this time it was no suffocating passage of thorns, but widened out almost at once above her head. She was on a rough path, standing upright. Blocking the way ahead was a ruined door. Flashing her torch high, Tina saw the shape of the old hut, so buried in countless years of undergrowth that it must be totally invisible by daylight.
She wrenched open the door. The rough interior was dimly lit by a failing torch, and Rosie herself crouched on what looked like an old eiderdown in the corner.
‘Rosie darling! Are you all right?’ Forgetting her own hurts she propped her torch against the wall, sank down beside her and took the child in her arms.
>
Rosie sobbed against her shoulder, her thin arms encircling Tina in a frantic grip. ‘Oh, Tina, I’m so glad it’s you.’ She cried in earnest then, tears of relief and hysteria mingled. Tina wisely let her sob it out while some minutes went by. Her eyes became accustomed to the gloom and she saw worm-eaten .rafters, walls of sagging planks and a weedy concrete floor. She guessed that only the huge envelope of tangled bushes was keeping out the rain and wind. Apart from the eiderdown and Rosie’s precious cups on a rough shelf, the hut was totally bare and held a clenching chill.
Gradually Rosie was quiet. ‘It’s my foot, Tina. I slipped coming down the quarry. I think it’s sprained. I meant to go home when it got dark, after all. I don’t care what she does to me—I was scared. But I couldn’t walk.’
Tina did not really take in the incoherent words, but turned her attention to Rosie’s foot. She had shed her muddy wellingtons and the left foot was certainly swollen. Rosie winced as she gently prodded it.
‘I don’t think it’s broken, Rosie. You can waggle it a bit, can’t you?’
‘Aye, I can. But it hurts. And I’m gey cold.’
‘Here, drink some of this.’ Tina remembered the brandy.
Rosie drank and grimaced. ‘It’s like fire.’ she whimpered.
‘Yes, but it’ll make you feel warmer.’ Tina decided to take a mouthful herself. A moment ago she had seen Rosie’s torch flicker and die. This meant, unless anyone found them, a night in the hut. She couldn’t leave Rosie in the dark while she went for help and the child couldn’t possibly get up the quarry with that foot.
