He came to an unsurfaced area that was used as a car park. A man and a woman wearing cagoules had just opened the boot of their car and were drying two dogs with towels. The woman smiled and said that it looked as if it were going to pour down. Thomas thought of just walking on, but paused to ask if they knew the best way to Sampson’s Bratfull. Neither had heard of it, but when he explained its location, the man recommended that he take the track to the left just after the lower roadbridge across the Bleng. That way was more sheltered. The river had burst its banks and taken a new course a couple of years ago, but there was an alternative path through the wood. Thomas could, if he wished, return by the upper bridge, along the road from Scalderskew Farm. That way was longer, not as sheltered and not as interesting. The two dogs jumped into the car boot, circled round each other several times, and then settled down.
For more than a week Thomas had chosen not to hold conversations, and now he found that he wanted to spend time talking to these people. He asked about the dogs. One was a Lakeland terrier, the other a cross that was often taken for a Lancashire Heeler. The man and woman took as much delight in them as if they had been children, and for several minutes they described the dogs’ characters and exploits.
Thomas was slightly bored, but as he walked away he was also envious. Maybe the man and woman had as pleasant a life as could be led—a home far away from a city, a couple of dogs to walk, the natural world all around. They had appeared so happy with each other’s company. There was a sense of family that was somehow extended and completed by their pets. Thomas did not have any close family connections. There was Richard, whose name he kept as an emergency contact, but they had not met for several years. Instead, they had merely kept each other informed of their latest addresses and contact numbers. Others, when they had broken up with the person they loved, would have sought refuge with a brother or sister. Not Thomas. He had not felt able to do that, and had not wanted to. Others might even have been able to ask a brother or sister if they could borrow money; Thomas could not do that either, even though his account was now dangerously low.
A light shower fell as he crossed the smooth metal bars of a cattle grid. The year’s new growth shone a vivid green on the conifers. Behind their trunks the pale boulders in the river had been tinted brown with peat. Ivy grew thick enough to choke a ditch on the left.
The road turned to cross the lower bridge and then divided. The way to the right led upward and soon vanished behind a wooded bank. Beside it a sign for Scalderskew Farm was hammered into the ground. As the dog owners had advised, Thomas turned to the left and took a broad track of packed earth that skirted the river on its southern edge. A flurry of small unidentifiable birds whirred between saplings that had sprouted from a bank of mossy earth.
A little further on he came to the spot where the Bleng had burst its banks and now flowed across the track. At some time in the past, asphalt had been laid, perhaps because that stretch had always been muddy; now the flood had lifted it in cracked plates so that the water coursed across the shattered path in a series of shallow rapids. Thomas considered the alternative path through the wood but decided to ignore it. He waited for a moment with the toes of his boots at the edge of the stream, and then he walked slowly forward. Water flowed around the soles of his boots, its noise rising to cover him in its intersecting patterns.
He thought of the time when he had shared a shower with Alice. The cubicle had filled with mist, and condensation formed on the glass so they could no longer see out. The noise of the falling spray changed as they turned their shoulders and flanks to the jet, and they both laughed when water ran from the end of his penis as if from a tap.
Thomas took another step forward and misjudged the depth of the rapids. Cold water surged above the top of his boot and poured inside. Instantly his foot became icily cold. There was nothing for it but to walk quickly ahead. He forded the rogue stream and stood on its far side with his boots squelching beneath him.
Maybe Alice and Pharaoh were sharing a shower now, he thought. Maybe she was laughing in the way she had always laughed with Thomas. Was laughter something that she would share with all her lovers? Would every man in that hazy unfocused line have been told the same things, taken to the same places, made love to in the same unforgettable ways?
Thomas had brooded many times on the mysteries of Alice’s past. All he could do was speculate, as all that he possessed were the flimsiest of clues. As he walked on up the valley, the trees crowding more thickly around him, he once again began to be tortured by imagined comparison. In Alice’s judgment, how had he compared with other men? In how many ways had he failed? And what was he, how unsatisfactory was he, when compared with Gregory Pharaoh?
The valley sides grew steeper, the riverbed more littered with boulders, the trees darker. In a patch of brambles that looped and curled across a thicket of sedge he found an entangled sheep. The ram’s eyes were as shiny as new-blown glass, and it struggled to free itself in an eerie silence. All that could be heard was the squishing sound of its feet as it trampled the marsh without moving any further forward. Thomas watched it for a while. He knew there was no way in which it could be freed other than with clippers, heavy-duty gloves and enough power to lift it by the horns and haunches. Eventually he turned away. Behind him the trapped ram struggled helplessly.
The track skirted to the right of a disused ford, climbed higher, and began to fade amongst undergrowth and moss. Sodden fir cones, dark as owl pellets, were scattered across the ground. Thomas slowed and then halted until he detected an unclear path that forked to the left. A coating of fallen needles gave beneath his weight as he passed between the trunks of high dark trees.
When Alice had demanded that he leave, Thomas had refused. Only when she had threatened to have him served with a solicitor’s letter did he begin to accept that she was as determined as she was cruel. Even then he had not left the area, but booked into a nearby cheap hotel and hung around for days waiting for her to ring. The bill ate into his account; he had always been dependent on Alice for money.
Because Thomas loved Alice with an intensity he had not thought possible, he could not understand the change in her feelings even when she been signaling them for several weeks. Much later, when he began his northern journey, he still hoped that somehow she would change her mind. At any moment he was ready to return; all she had to do was ask.
He carried that thought in his mind like a tune that he knew would never be sung. In a dark corner of his heart Thomas knew that he would spend the rest of his life thinking about Alice, but that she would scarcely think of him at all. And even if she did, he would be an object of derision.
He clambered across roots and down a bank that was slippery with mud to reach a narrow wooden footbridge with wet planks. Halfway across he leaned on the rail to look down on a furious deafening cascade as the Bleng was forced between massive boulders and spilled in torrents across them. For several minutes Thomas watched the river bear everything away. After a while the constant roar triggered his thirst. Along with the food he had bought in a village he carried a bottle for water, but when he took it from his rucksack he discovered that he had forgotten to fill it. He replaced the empty bottle and walked on.
The path swung across a floodplain covered in low scrub, then took a hairpin to the right and began to climb steeply through a conifer plantation. On either side lopped branches were strewn like brushwood between the standing trunks.
As the path angled right and then left across the gradient it grew even steeper. Ascending its eroded surface made him breathe strenuously. Noise from the river rose up the valley sides. Drizzle began to fall, a little heavier than before. Thomas paused to collect his breath, turn up his collar and place a peaked cap on his head. The sound of machinery drifted from some far distant spot in the plantation. He could not recognize the noise, but after about a minute decided that a team must be chainsawing wood on the other side of the valley.
Eventually, after an ascent
that he guessed must have been about four hundred feet, he arrived once more on the unmetaled road that led to Scalderskew Farm. The high haematite content of the surface gravel made it a muddy red, and sheep droppings littered the surface like tiny black olives.
Thomas joined the road and walked to the left. The farm lay some distance away, in a hollow between the high moors, the heights behind it already dissolved in mist. He knew where he was going. The weather would not stop him now.
He crossed another cattle grid whose bars gleamed cold in the rain. A dozen sheep moved out of his way. A few paces further, on the far side of a stream, he struck off the road. In front of him the treeless moor rose, inhospitable and cold. Its turf and reeds were slippery beneath his feet and the rain pattered in flurries on his rucksack.
Quite suddenly Thomas was irrationally happy. A solitary expedition in such bleak conditions was proof of his individuality and determination. If ever anyone talked of his life, they would have cause to praise his unfashionable qualities—his quiet, unflashy knowledge, his modesty, the way in which he had championed the past. Surely he was due such recognition. The land sucked at his boots as he walked. Visibility shrank around him.
And then, just as suddenly and even more powerfully, he was overtaken by a sensation that was the polar opposite of the one he had just experienced.
There was no point in tramping this moor in search of an unimportant mound of stones. No one had ever thought it worthy of serious excavation. The appeal of Sampson’s Bratfull lay in its quirky, rather grandiose name, and that was all. Thomas brooded about what could have been his real motivation for coming here. Perhaps it had nothing to do with archaeology. Perhaps it was because the very ordinariness of the mound, its position at the unexplored edge of things, corresponded to his own lack of achievement, his own life. Despite its name, Sampson’s Bratfull was insignificant. Who had ever visited it deliberately? A glance at the map would tell you all you needed to know. No one would even notice if this accumulation of stones somehow ceased to exist.
At the very moment that he was thinking this, he found what he was searching for.
The mist that had retreated before his progress now closed behind him. Thomas stood on the sodden ground in front of a long barrow of countless gray stones pocked with lichen. A viscous sheen of water lay across the rocks as if they had been coated in colorless oil. Rain trickled down his face and the breath rattled in his throat.
The tumulus seemed to be part of the moor itself; whether rising from it or sinking back into it Thomas was unable to decide. He walked along one of the longer sides and then stopped, looking directly at the bank of rock. The circle of mist enclosed the spot as if it were an arena. All was quiet but for the sound of his own movements.
He began to unsling his rucksack so that he could get his camera, and then he stopped and shucked it back on his shoulders again. What did photography matter? What was the point of all those pictures that were steadily filling the Kodak’s memory? Photographers, Thomas thought, were people who accumulated images like others accumulated objects. There must be a kind of desperation in their lives, a drive to record everything that passed in front of them, an obsession with permanence. They were mired in the present. All that they did was record surfaces. Anything deeper was beyond their interests or their capabilities. They watched; that was all.
And this was why Gregory Pharaoh would never understand heartbreak. A photographer could never know despair. In that way, Gregory was a perfect match for Alice. They both moved like insects across the surface of life. Neither had been injured by it.
It seemed to Thomas the bitterest of ironies that the world belonged to people who had never been scarred. He had been a fool to get involved, and an even bigger fool to allow himself to be wounded so deeply. Alice was not even sorry for him; instead she was scornful. Perhaps even now she was discussing him with Gregory Pharaoh and they were laughing.
Thomas picked a stone from the mound, weighed it in his hand, put it down again, and picked up another. They made tiny indentations in his palm. Thousands of years ago people had collected these stones and carried them to this spot to mark something, no one was certain exactly what—a burial, probably; several burials, perhaps. Maybe a few feet below the surface there were still bones to be found. Maybe the bodies had been burned on a pyre before being interred. And perhaps the site had been sacred, placed on the heights so that the dead would be closer to the gods.
Thomas pictured himself being memorialized by such a mound. It would be much more dramatic than a gravestone or a bronze plaque on a crematorium wall. If he died here, now, this instant, then maybe his true worth would begin to be recognized. People he hardly knew would claim that he had been their friend. Alice would be struck to the heart with guilt, made dumb by her part in his death, and ashamed that she should even think of taking Gregory Pharaoh into her bed.
He grimaced and put the stone back on the mound. A squall drove in from the west, the rain hitting his face and the back of his hands as sharply as hailstones. The turf beneath his feet seemed to be a damp crust of earth suspended on mud. The temperature gradients slid around him.
That was enough. Thomas walked away from Sampson’s Bratfull intending never to return.
The road was filling with opaque red puddles. Thomas walked through them with the rain driving against his back. His cap became so soaked that it tightened around his head. He wondered about returning the way he had come rather than taking the long road back, but he knew that he must be close to the upper bridge. Perhaps he could find shelter there.
On his right the plantation edge was lined with conifers that had taken the full force of winter storms. Several had fallen so that the wheels of their root systems were set on edge like gigantic toppled candlesticks, and some had been snapped apart at about two-thirds of their height. A number had been sawed down so that the stubs of trunks resembled giant studs that had been punched into the earth. One tree had been struck by lightning and was nothing but a headless trunk, its upper section split as if by a gigantic cleaver. A thick streak of charred wood ran like a trail of dried black oil from its top to the ground.
The road dipped before him and then the upper bridge came into view. Thomas saw it first through a drifting curtain of rain. Wide enough to take a lorry stacked with timber, it spanned the valley in a broad functional slab. So that the forestry vehicles would not be unnecessarily restricted, there were no railings along its sides. After crossing it, the road ascended across the moor in a curve of murky red. The next tree boundary ran in a barrier along the skyline.
Thomas hoped that once he reached the bridge he would be able to creep beneath its shelter and remain there until the squall had passed. There would be something satisfyingly boyish in that; it would make all this into a kind of adventure. Eagerly he increased his pace down the slope, but then he stumbled on a loose stone. For a few seconds he lost his equilibrium and was forced to take awkward, jolting steps to regain balance. As soon as he had done this he stretched out his arms and made a few fake movements with them, as if wishing to convince an imaginary observer that he was rehearsing a theatrical act. Even as he did so he recognized this as absurd.
Only a thin concrete lip ran along the length of each side of the bridge. It would be easy to fall from it into the torrent below. The Bleng rushed and foamed, spray lifting from its surface and rising as if forced upward by the pressure of noise. A fallen tree, stripped of all greenery, thrust its branches from the water like the arms of the dead.
Within seconds Thomas realized that it would be impossible to take shelter. The bank angled steeply down to the river, but below the bridge the rake was precipitous. He took off his rucksack and placed it on a stone at the point where the concrete slabs abutted the road. Then he opened it and took out the empty water bottle. He needed a drink.
Thomas stood at the edge of the drop and stared down. There was something hypnotic about the rush of the peat-stained water, the severity of its flickering gle
am, the energy of its collapse into blinding white foam. He could not help but imagine being carried away within it.
If someone were to see him now, Thomas thought, poised with his boots on the edge of the downward slope and the water bottle in one hand; if some person were capable of looking into his mind, what would they see? What would they whisper in his ear? Would his whole life have been as absurd as the little dance he had done when he tripped? If he were honest with himself, if Thomas were as observant and as rational as the very best archaeologist, what conclusion would he draw?
There was only one.
He was a man who had failed and who would continue to fail. Defeat had locked around him like a trap. He had no worthwhile prospects. His savings had disappeared. He had never succeeded in getting employment to match his talents. The only woman he had truly loved had rejected him. For all of his life, in his family, his relationships, in the jobs he had taken, Thomas had been an obstacle for others to get round. He had always been in the way. And for Alice Fell, too, he had eventually become the person who had prevented her from moving on to another love and a different kind of life.
The slope down to the Bleng was slick with mud and shale. In order not to lose his balance Thomas had to stuff the bottle into a wide pocket on his jacket and descend the bank facing inwards. He did not want to slide and then toboggan into the flood without stopping. On the way down he kicked the toes of his boots into the incline and grasped clumps of turf or the occasional sapling until he could reach the water’s edge.
Once there he could scarcely think because the noise was so deafening. He squatted and rinsed his hands clean. The water stung his fingers and numbed them. He took the bottle from his jacket and propped it above a flat stone that lay flush with the angle of the slope. He watched it for a few seconds to make sure it would not slip. Perhaps he would fill it in a minute or so, he was not sure.
Thomas moved gingerly along the foot of the bank, angling his boots against the gradient so that he did not lose his balance. It was still raining heavily. When he looked back at the top of the slope he saw the underside of the bridge as a dark bar against the grayness of the sky, and his rucksack beside it as a bright spot of color.
A Division of the Light Page 16
