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After Elizabeth ultimately died, it was inevitable that many people should come forward with counsel, and doubtless equally inevitable that the counsel be so totally diverse.

There were two broad and opposed schools.

The first considered that Stephen should ‘treasure the memory’ (though it was not always put like that) for an indefinite period, which, it was implied, might conveniently last him out to the end of his own life. These people attached great importance to Stephen ‘not rushing anything’. The second school urged that Stephen marry again as soon as he possibly could. They said that, above all, he must not just fall into apathy and let his life slide. They said he was a man made for marriage and all it meant.

Of course, both parties were absolutely right in every way. Stephen could see that perfectly well.

It made little difference. Planning, he considered, would be absurd in any case. Until further notice, the matter would have to be left to fate. The trouble was, of course, that fate’s possible options were narrowing and dissolving almost weekly, as they had already been doing throughout Elizabeth’s lengthy illness. For example (the obvious and most pressing example): how many women would want to marry Stephen now? A number, perhaps; but not a number that he would want to marry. Not after Elizabeth. That in particular.

They told him he should take a holiday, and he took one. They told him he should see his doctor, and he saw him. The man who had looked after Elizabeth had wanted to emigrate, had generously held back while Elizabeth had remained alive, and had then shot off at once. The new man was half-Sudanese, and Stephen found him difficult to communicate with, at least upon a first encounter, at least on immediate topics.

In the end, Stephen applied for and obtained a spell of compassionate leave, and went, as he usually did, to stay with his elder brother, Harewood, in the north. Harewood was in orders: the Reverend Harewood Hooper BD, MA. Their father and grandfather had been in orders too, and had been incumbents of that same small church in that same small parish for thirty-nine years and forty-two years respectively. So far, Harewood had served for only twenty-three years. The patron of the living, a private individual, conscientious and very long lived, was relieved to be able to rely upon a succession of such dedicated men. Unfortunately, Harewood’s own son, his one child, had dropped out, and was now believed to have disappeared into Nepal. Harewood himself cared more for rock growths than for controversies about South Africa or for other such fashionable church preoccupations. He had published two important books on lichens. People often came to see him on the subject. He was modestly famous.

He fostered lichens on the flagstones leading up to the rectory front door; on the splendidly living stone walls, here grey stone, there yellow; even in the seldom used larders and pantries; assuredly on the roof, which, happily, was of stone slabs also.

As always when he visited his brother, Stephen found that he was spending much of his time out of doors; mainly, being the man he was, in long, solitary walks across the heathered uplands. This had nothing to do with Harewood’s speciality. Harewood suffered badly from bronchitis and catarrh, and nowadays went out as little as possible. The domestic lichens, once introduced, required little attention – only observation.

Rather it was on account of Harewood’s wife, Harriet, that Stephen roamed; a lady in whose company Stephen had never been at ease. She had always seemed to him a restless woman; jumpy and puzzling; the very reverse of all that had seemed best about Elizabeth. A doubtful asset, Stephen would have thought, in a diminishing rural parish; but Stephen himself, in a quiet and unobtruding way, had long been something of a sceptic. Be that as it might, he always found that Harriet seemed to be baiting and fussing him, not least when her husband was present; even, unforgivably, when Elizabeth, down in London, had been battling through her last dreadful years. On every visit, therefore, Stephen wandered about for long hours in the open, even when ice was in the air and snow on the tenuous tracks.

But Stephen did not see it as a particular hardship. Elizabeth, who might have done – though, for his sake, she could have been depended upon to conceal the fact – had seldom come on these visits at any time. She had never been a country girl, though fond of the sea. Stephen positively liked wandering unaccompanied on the moors, though he had little detailed knowledge of their flora and fauna, or even of their archaeology, largely industrial and fragmentary. By now he was familiar with most of the moorland routes from the rectory and the village; and, as commonly happens, there was one that he preferred to all the others, and nowadays found himself taking almost without having to make a decision. Sometimes even, asleep in his London flat that until just now had been their London flat, he found himself actually dreaming of that particular soaring trail, though he would have found it difficult to define what properties of beauty or poetry or convenience it had of which the other tracks had less. According to the map, it led to a spot named Burton’s Clough.

There was a vague valley or extended hollow more or less in the place which the map indicated, but to Stephen it seemed every time too indefinite to be marked out for record. Every time he wondered whether this was indeed the place; whether there was not some more decisive declivity that he had never discovered. Or possibly the name derived from some event in local history. It was the upwards walk to the place that appealed to Stephen, and, to an only slightly lesser extent, the first part of the slow descent homewards, supposing that the rectory could in any sense be called home: never the easily attainable but inconclusive supposed goal, the Clough. Of course there was always R. L. Stevenson’s travelling hopefully to be inwardly quoted; and on most occasions hitherto Stephen had inwardly quoted it.

Never had there been any human being at, near, or visible from the terrain around Burton’s Clough, let alone in the presumptive clough itself. There was no apparent reason why there should be. Stephen seldom met anyone at all on the moors. Only organizations go any distance afoot nowadays, and this was not an approved didactic district. All the work of agriculture is for a period being done by machines. Most of the cottages are peopled by transients. Everyone is supposed to have a car.

But that morning, Stephen’s first in the field since his bereavement six weeks before, there was someone, and down at the bottom of the shallow clough itself. The person was dressed so as to be almost lost in the hues of autumn, plainly neither tripper nor trifler. The person was engaged in some task.

Stephen was in no state for company, but that very condition, and a certain particular reluctance that morning to return to the rectory before he had to, led him to advance further, not descending into the clough but skirting along the ridge to the west of it, where, indeed, his track continued.

If he had been in the Alps, his shadow might have fallen in the early autumn sun across the figure below, but in the circumstances that idea would have been fanciful, because, at the moment, the sun was no more than a misty bag of gleams in a confused sky. None the less, as Stephen’s figure passed, comparatively high above, the figure below glanced up at him.

Stephen could see that it was the figure of a girl. She was wearing a fawn shirt and pale green trousers, but the nature of her activity remained uncertain.

Stephen glanced away, then glanced back.

She seemed still to be looking up at him, and suddenly he waved to her, though it was not altogether the kind of thing he normally did. She waved back at him. Stephen even fancied she smiled at him. It seemed quite likely. She resumed her task.

He waited for an instant, but she looked up no more. He continued on his way more slowly, and feeling more alive, even if only for moments. For those moments, it had been as if he still belonged to the human race, to the mass of mankind.

Only once or twice previously had he continued beyond the top of Burton’s Clough, and never for any great distance. On the map (it had been his father’s map), the track wavered on across a vast area of nothing very much, merely contour lines and occasional habitations with odd, possibly evocative, names: habitations which, as Stephen knew from experience, regularly proved, when approached, to be littered ruins or not to be detectable at all. He would not necessarily have been averse from the twelve or fourteen miles solitary walk involved, at least while Elizabeth had been secure and alive, and at home in London; but conditions at the rectory had never permitted so long an absence. Harriet often made clear that she expected her guests to be present punctually at all meals and punctually at such other particular turning points of a particular day as the day itself might define.

On the present occasion, and at the slow pace into which he had subsided, Stephen knew that he should turn back within the next ten to fifteen minutes; but he half-understood that what he was really doing was calculating the best time for a second possible communication with the girl he had seen in the clough. If he reappeared too soon, he might be thought, at such a spot, to be pestering, even menacing; if too late, the girl might be gone. In any case, there was an obvious limit to the time he could give to such approach as might be possible.

As the whole matter crystallized within him, he turned on the instant. There was a stone beside the track at the point where he did it; perhaps aforetime a milepost, at the least a waymark. Its location seemed to justify his action. He noticed that it too was patched with lichen. When staying with Harewood, he always noticed; and more and more at other times too.

One might almost have thought that the girl had been waiting for him. She was standing at much the same spot, and looking upwards abstractedly. Stephen saw that beside her on the ground was a grey receptacle. He had not noticed it before, because its vague colour sank into the landscape, as did the girl herself, costumed as she was. The receptacle seemed to be half-filled with grey contents of some kind.

As soon as he came into her line of sight, and sometime before he stood immediately above her, the girl spoke.

‘Are you lost? Are you looking for someone? ‘

She must have had a remarkably clear voice, because her words came floating up to Stephen like bubbles in water.

He continued along the ridge towards her while she watched him. Only when he was directly above her did he trust his own words to reach her.

‘No. I’m really just filling in time. Thank you very much.’

‘If you go on to the top, there’s a spring.’

‘I should think you have to have it pointed out to you. With all this heather.’

She looked down for a moment, then up again. ‘Do you live here?’

‘No. I’m staying with my brother. He’s the rector. Perhaps you go to his church?’

She shook her head. ‘No. We don’t go to any church.’

That could not be followed up, Stephen felt, at his present distance and altitude. ‘What are you doing?’ he asked. ‘Collecting stones for my father.’

‘What does he do with them?’

‘He wants the mosses and lichens.’

‘Then,’ cried Stephen, ‘you must know my brother. Or your father must know him. My brother is one of the great authorities on lichens.’ This unexpected link seemed to open a door; and, at least for a second, to open it surprisingly wide.

Stephen found himself bustling down the rough but not particularly steep slope towards her.

‘My father’s not an authority,’ said the girl, gazing seriously at the descending figure. ‘He’s not an authority on anything.’ ‘Oh, you misunderstand,’ said Stephen. ‘My brother is only an amateur too. I didn’t mean he was a professor or anything like that. Still, I think your father must have heard of him.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said the girl. ‘I’m almost sure not.’ Stephen had nearly reached the bottom of the shallow vale.

It was completely out of the wind down there, and surprisingly torrid.

‘Let me see,’ he said, looking into the girl’s basket, before he looked at the girl.

She lifted the basket off the ground. Her hand and forearm were brown.

‘Some of the specimens are very small,’ he said, smiling. It was essential to keep the conversation going, and it was initially more difficult now that he was alone with her in the valley, and close to her.

‘It’s been a bad year,’ she said. ‘Some days I’ve found almost nothing. Nothing that could be taken home.’

‘All the same, the basket must be heavy. Please put it down.’ He saw that it was reinforced with stout metal strips, mostly rusty.

‘Take a piece for yourself, if you like,’ said the girl. She spoke as if they were portions of iced cake, or home-made coconut fudge.

Stephen gazed full at the girl. She had a sensitive face with grey-green eyes and short reddish hair – no, auburn. The demode word came to Stephen on the instant. Both her shirt and her trousers were worn and faded: familiar, Stephen felt. She was wearing serious shoes, but little cared for. She was a part of nature.

‘I’ll take this piece,’ Stephen said. ‘It’s conglomerate.’

‘Is it?’ said the girl. Stephen was surprised that after so much ingathering, she did not know a fact so elementary.

‘I might take this piece too, and show the stuff on it to my brother.’

‘Help yourself,’ said the girl. ‘But don’t take them all.’

Feeling had been building up in Stephen while he had been walking solitarily on the ridge above. For so long he had been isolated, insulated, incarcerated. Elizabeth had been everything to him, and no one could ever be like her, but ‘attractive’ was not a word that he had used to himself about her, not for a long time; not attractive as this girl was attractive. Elizabeth had been a part of him, perhaps the greater part of him; but not mysterious, not fascinating.

‘Well, I don’t know,’ said Stephen. ‘How far do you have to carry that burden?’

‘The basket isn’t full yet. I must go on searching for a bit.’

‘I am sorry to say I can’t offer to help. I have to go back.’

All the same, Stephen had reached a decision.

The girl simply nodded. She had not yet picked up the basket again.

‘Where do you live?’

‘Quite near.’

That seemed to Stephen to be almost impossible, but it was not the main point.

Stephen felt like a schoolboy; though not like himself as a schoolboy. ‘If I were to be here after lunch tomorrow, say at half past two, would you show me the spring? The spring you were talking about.’

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘If you like.’

Stephen could not manage the response so obviously needed, gently confident; if possible, even gently witty. For a moment, in fact, he could say nothing. Then – ‘Look,’ he said. He brought an envelope out of his pocket and in pencil on the back of it he wrote: ‘Tomorrow. Here. 2.30 p.m. To visit the spring.’

He said, ‘It’s too big,’ and tore one end off the envelope, aware that the remaining section bore his name, and that the envelope had been addressed to him care of his brother. As a matter of fact, it had contained the final communication from the undertaking firm. He wished they had omitted his equivocal and rather ridiculous OBE.

He held the envelope out. She took it and inserted it, without a word, into a pocket of her shirt, buttoning down the flap. Stephen’s heart beat at the gesture.

He was not exactly sure what to make of the situation or whether the appointment was to be depended upon. But at such moments in life, one is often sure of neither thing, nor of anything much else.

He looked at her. ‘What’s your name?’ he asked, as casually as he could.

‘Nell,’ she answered.

He had not quite expected that, but then he had not particularly expected anything else either.

‘I look forward to our walk, Nell,’ he said. He could not help adding, ‘I look forward to it very much.’

She nodded and smiled.

He fancied that they had really looked at one another for a moment.

‘I must go on searching,’ she said.

She picked up the heavy basket, seemingly without particular effort, and walked away from him, up the valley.

Insanely, he wondered about her lunch. Surely she must have some? She seemed so exceptionally healthy and strong.

His own meal was all scarlet runners, but he had lost his appetite in any case, something that had never previously happened since the funeral, as he had noticed with surprise on several occasions.

Luncheon was called lunch, but the evening meal was none the less called supper, perhaps from humility. At supper that evening, Harriet referred forcefully to Stephen’s earlier abstemiousness.

‘I trust you’re not sickening, Stephen. It would be a bad moment. Dr Gopalachari’s on holiday. Perhaps I ought to warn you.’

‘Dr Who?’

‘No, not Dr Who. Dr Gopalachari. He’s a West Bengali. We are lucky to have him.’

Stephen’s brother, Harewood, coughed forlornly.

*  *  *  *  *

For luncheon the next day, Stephen had even less appetite, even though it was mashed turnip, cooked, or at least served, with mixed peppers. Harriet loved all things oriental.

On an almost empty stomach, he hastened up the long but not steep ascent. He had not known he could still walk so fast uphill, but for some reason the knowledge did not make him particularly happy, as doubtless it should have done.

The girl, dressed as on the day before, was seated upon a low rock at the spot from which he had first spoken to her. It was not yet twenty past. He had discerned her seated shape from afar, but she had proved to be sitting with her back to the ascending track and to him. On the whole, he was glad that she had not been watching his exertions, inevitably comical, albeit triumphant.

She did not even look up until he actually stood before her. Of course this time she had no basket.

‘Oh, hullo,’ she said.

He stood looking at her. ‘We’re both punctual.’

She nodded. He was panting quite strenuously, and glad to gain a little time.

He spoke. ‘Did you find many more suitable stones?’

She shook her head, then rose to her feet.

He found it difficult not to stretch out his arms and draw her to him.

‘Why is this called Burton’s Clough, I wonder? It seems altogether too wide and shallow for a clough.’

‘I didn’t know it was,’ said the girl.

‘The map says it is. At least I think this is the place. Shall we go? Lead me to the magic spring.’

She smiled at him. ‘Why do you call it that?’ ‘I’m sure it is magic. It must be.’

‘It’s just clear water,’ said the girl, ‘and very, very deep.’ Happily, the track was still wide enough for them to walk side by side, though Stephen realized that, further on, where he had not been, this might cease to be the case.

‘How long are you staying here?’ asked the girl.

‘Perhaps for another fortnight. It depends.’

‘Are you married? ‘

‘I was married, Nell, but my wife unfortunately died.’ It seemed unnecessary to put any date to it, and calculated only to cause stress.

‘I’m sorry,’ said the girl.

‘She was a wonderful woman and a very good wife.’

To that the girl said nothing. What could she say?

‘I am taking a period of leave from the civil service,’ Stephen volunteered. ‘Nothing very glamorous.’

‘What’s the civil service? ‘ asked the girl.

‘You ought to know that,’ said Stephen in mock reproof: more or less mock. After all, she was not a child, or not exactly. All the same, he produced a childlike explanation. ‘The civil service is what looks after the country. The country would hardly carry on without us. Not nowadays. Nothing would run properly.’

‘Really not?’

‘No. Not run properly.’ With her it was practicable to be lightly profane.

‘Father says that all politicians are evil. I don’t know anything about it.’

‘Civil servants are not politicians, Nell. But perhaps this is not the best moment to go into it all.’ He said that partly because he suspected she had no wish to learn.

There was a pause.

‘Do you like walking?’ she asked.

‘Very much. I could easily walk all day. Would you come with me?’

‘I do walk all day, or most of it. Of course I have to sleep at night. I lie in front of the fire.’

‘But it’s too warm for a fire at this time of year.’ He said it to keep the conversation going, but, in fact, he was far from certain. He himself was not particularly warm at that very moment. He had no doubt cooled off after speeding up the ascent, but the two of them were, none the less, walking reasonably fast, and still he felt chilly, perhaps perilously so.

‘Father always likes a fire,’ said the girl. ‘He’s a cold mortal.’

They had reached the decayed milestone or waymark at which Stephen had turned on the previous day. The girl had stopped and was fingering the lichens with which it was spattered. She knelt against the stone with her left arm round the back of it.

‘Can you put a name to them? ‘ asked Stephen.

‘Yes, to some of them.’

‘I am sure your father has one of my brother’s books on his shelf.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said the girl. ‘We have no shelves. Father can’t read.’

She straightened up and glanced at Stephen.

‘Oh, but surely—’

For example, and among other things, the girl herself was perfectly well spoken. As a matter of fact, hers was a noticeably beautiful voice. Stephen had noticed it, and even thrilled to it, when first he had heard it, floating up from the bottom of the so-called clough. He had thrilled to it ever since, despite the curious things the girl sometimes said.

They resumed their way.

‘Father has no eyes,’ said the girl.

‘That is terrible,’ said Stephen. ‘I hadn’t realized.’

The girl said nothing.

Stephen felt his first real qualm, as distinct from mere habitual self-doubt. ‘Am I taking you away from him? Should you go back to him? ‘

‘I’m never with him by day,’ said the girl. ‘He finds his way about.’

‘I know that does happen,’ said Stephen guardedly. ‘All the same—’

‘Father doesn’t need a civil service to run him,’ said the girl. The way she spoke convinced Stephen that she had known all along what the civil service was and did. He had from the first supposed that to be so. Everyone knew.

‘You said your dead wife was a wonderful woman,’ said the girl.

‘Yes, she was.’

‘My father is a wonderful man.’

‘Yes,’ said Stephen. ‘I am only sorry about his affliction.’

‘It’s not an affliction,’ said the girl.

Stephen did not know what to say to that. The last thing to be desired was an argument of any kind whatever, other perhaps than a fun argument.

‘Father doesn’t need to get things out of books,’ said the girl.

‘There are certainly other ways of learning,’ said Stephen. ‘I expect that was one of the things you yourself learned at school.’

He suspected she would say she had never been to school. His had been a half-fishing remark.

But all she replied was, ‘Yes’:

Stephen looked around him for a moment. Already, he had gone considerably further along the track than ever before. ‘It really is beautiful up here.’ It seemed a complete wilderness. The track had wound among the wide folds of the hill, so that nothing but wilderness was visible in any direction.

‘I should like to live here,’ said Stephen. ‘I should like it now.’ He knew that he partly meant ‘now that Elizabeth was dead’.

‘There are empty houses everywhere,’ said the girl. ‘You can just move into one. It’s what Father and I did, and now it’s our home.’

Stephen supposed that that at least explained something. It possibly elucidated one of the earliest of her odd remarks.

‘I’ll help you to find one, if you like,’ said the girl. ‘Father says that none of them have been lived in for hundreds of years. I know where all the best ones are.’

‘I’ll have to think about that,’ said Stephen. ‘I have my job, you must remember.’ He wanted her to be rude about his job.

But she only said, ‘We’ll look now, if you like.’

‘Tomorrow, perhaps. We’re looking for the spring now.’

‘Are you tired?’ asked the girl, with apparently genuine concern, and presumably forgetting altogether what he had told her about his longing to walk all day.

‘Not at all tired,’ said Stephen, smiling at her.

‘Then why were you looking at your watch?’

‘A bad habit picked up in the civil service. We all do it.’

He had observed long before that she had no watch on her lovely brown forearm, no bracelet; only the marks of thorn scratches and the incisions of sharp stones. The light golden bloom on her arms filled him with delight and with desire.

In fact, he had omitted to time their progression, though he timed most things, so that the habit had wrecked his natural faculty. Perhaps another twenty or thirty minutes passed, while they continued to walk side by side, the track having as yet shown no particular sign of narrowing, so that one might think it still led somewhere, and that people still went there. As they advanced, they said little more of consequence for the moment; or so it seemed to Stephen. He surmised that there was now what is termed an understanding between them, even though in a sense he himself understood very little. It was more a phase for pleasant nothings, he deemed, always supposing that he could evolve a sufficient supply of them, than for meaningful questions and reasonable responses.

Suddenly, the track seemed not to narrow, but to stop, even to vanish. Hereunto it had been surprisingly well trodden. Now he could see nothing but knee-high heather.

‘The spring’s over there,’ said the girl in a matter of fact way, and pointing. Such simple and natural gestures are often the most beautiful.

‘How right I was in saying that I could never find it alone!’ remarked Stephen.

He could not see why the main track should not lead to the spring – if there really was a spring. Why else should the track be beaten to this spot? The mystery was akin to the Burton’s Clough mystery. The uplands had been settled under other conditions than ours. Stephen, on his perambulations, had always felt that, everywhere.

But the girl was standing among the heather a few yards away, and Stephen saw that there was a curious serpentine rabbit run that he had failed to notice – except that rabbits do not run like serpents. There were several fair-sized birds flying overhead in silence. Stephen fancied they were kites.

He wriggled his way down the rabbit path, with little dignity.

There was the most beautiful small pool imaginable: clear, deep, lustrous, gently heaving at its centre, or near its centre. It stood in a small clearing.

All the rivers in Britain might be taken as rising here, and thus flowing until the first moment of their pollution.

Stephen became aware that now the sun really was shining. He had not noticed before. The girl stood on the far side of the pool in her faded shirt and trousers, smiling seraphically. The pool pleased her, so that suddenly everything pleased her.

‘Have you kept the note I gave you?’ asked Stephen.

She put her hand lightly on her breast pocket, and therefore on her breast.

‘I’m glad,’ said Stephen.

If the pool had not been between them, he would have seized her, whatever the consequences.

‘Just clear water,’ said the girl.

The sun brought out new colours in her hair. The shape of her head was absolutely perfect.

‘The track,’ said Stephen, ‘seems to be quite well used. Is this where the people come?’

‘No,’ said the girl. ‘They come to and from the places where they live.’

‘I thought you said all the houses were empty.’

‘What I said was there are many empty houses.’

‘That is what you said. I’m sorry. But the track seems to come to an end. What do the people do then?’

‘They find their way,’ said the girl. ‘Stop worrying about them.’

The water was still between them. Stephen was no longer in doubt that there was indeed something else between them. Really there was. The pool was intermittently throwing up tiny golden waves in the pure breeze, then losing them again.

‘We haven’t seen anybody,’ said Stephen. ‘I never do see anyone.’

The girl looked puzzled.

Stephen realized that the way he had put it, the statement that he never saw anyone, might have been tactless. ‘When I go for my long walks alone,’ he added.

‘Not only then,’ said the girl.

Stephen’s heart turned over slightly.

‘Possibly,’ he said. ‘I daresay you are very right.’

The kites were still flapping like torn pieces of charred pasteboard in the high air, though in the lower part of it.

‘You haven’t even looked to the bottom of the pool yet,’ said the girl.

‘I suppose not.’ Stephen fell on his knees, as the girl had done at the milestone or waymark, and gazed downwards through the pellucid near-nothingness beneath the shifting golden rods. There were a few polished stones round the sides, but little else that he could see, and nothing that seemed of significance. How should there be, of course? Unless the girl had put it there, as Stephen realized might have been possible.

Stephen looked up. ‘It’s a splendid pool,’ he said.

But now his eye caught something else; something other than the girl and the pool. On the edge of the rising ground behind the girl stood a small stone house. It was something else that Stephen had not previously noticed. Indeed, he had been reasonably sure that there had been nothing and no one, not so much as a hint of mankind, not for a quite long way, a quite long time.

‘Is that where one of the people lives?’ he asked, and in his turn pointed. ‘Or perhaps more than one? ‘

‘It’s empty,’ said the girl.

‘Should we go and look?’

‘If you like,’ said the girl. Stephen quite saw that his expressed response to the glorious little spring had been inadequate. He had lost the trick of feeling, years and years ago.

‘It’s a splendid pool,’ he said again, a little self-consciously.

Despite what the girl had said, Stephen had thought that to reach the house above them, they would have to scramble through the high heather. But he realized at once that there was a path, which was one further thing he had not previously noticed.

The girl went before, weaving backwards and forwards up the hillside. Following her, with his thoughts more free to wander, as the exertion made talking difficult, Stephen suddenly apprehended that the need to return for Harriet’s teatime had for a season passed completely from his mind.

Apprehending it now, he did not even look at his watch. Apart from anything else, the struggle upwards was too intense for even the smallest distraction or secondary effort. The best thing might be for his watch simply to stop.

They were at the summit, with a wider horizon, but still Stephen could see no other structure than the one before him, though this time he gazed around with a certain care. From here, the pool below them seemed to catch the full sun all over its surface. It gleamed among the heathered rocks like a vast luminous sea anemone among weeds.

Stephen could see at once that the house appeared basically habitable. He had expected jagged holes in the walls, broken panes in the windows, less than half a roof, ubiquitous litter.

The door simply stood open, but it was a door, not a mere gap; a door in faded green, like the girl’s trousers. Inside, the floorboards were present and there was even a certain amount of simple furniture, though, as an estate agent would at once have pointed out with apologies, no curtains and no carpets.

‘Nell. Somebody lives here already,’ Stephen said sharply, before they had even gone upstairs.

‘Already?’ queried the girl.

Stephen made the necessary correction. ‘Someone lives here.’

‘No,’ said the girl. ‘No one. Not for centuries.’

Of course that was particularly absurd and childish. Much of this furniture, Stephen thought, was of the kind offered by the furnishing department of a good Co-op. Stephen had sometimes come upon such articles on visits paid in the course of his work. He had to admit, however, that he had little idea when such houses as this actually were built at these odd spots on the moors. Possibly as long ago as in the seventeenth century? Possibly only sixty or eighty years ago?

Possibly—?

They went upstairs. There were two very low rooms, hardly as much as half lighted from one small and dirty window in each. One room was totally unfurnished. The sole content of the other was a double bed which absorbed much of the cubic capacity available. It was a quite handsome country object, with a carved head and foot. It even offered a seemingly intact mattress, badly in need of a wash.

‘Someone must be living here,’ said Stephen. ‘At least sometimes. Perhaps the owners come here for the weekend. Or perhaps they’re just moving in.’

As soon as he spoke, it occurred to him that the evidence was equally consistent with their moving out, but he did not continue.

‘Lots of the houses are like this,’ said the girl. ‘No one lives in them.’

Stephen wondered vaguely whether the clear air or some factor of that kind might preserve things as if they were still in use. It was a familiar enough notion, though, in his case, somewhat unspecific. It would be simpler to disbelieve the girl, who was young and without experience, though perfectly eager, at least when others were eager. They returned downstairs.

‘Shall we see some more houses?’ asked the girl.

‘I don’t think I have the time.’

‘You said you had a fortnight. I know what a fortnight is.’

‘Yes.’ He simply could not tell her that he had to report for Harriet’s astringent teatime; nor, even now, was that in the forefront of his mind. The truth was that whereas hitherto he had been trying to paddle in deep waters, he was now floundering in them.

The girl had a suggestion. ‘Why not live here for a fortnight?’

‘I am committed to staying with my brother. He’s not very fit. I should worry about him if I broke my word.’ He realized that he was speaking to her in a more adult way than before. It had really begun with her speaking similarly to him.

‘Does your worrying about him do him any good? ‘

‘Not much, I’m afraid.’

‘Does your worrying about everything do you any good? ‘ ‘None whatever, Nell. None at all.’

He turned aside and looked out of the window; the parlour window might not be too grand a term, for all its need of cleaning.

He addressed her firmly. ‘Would you give me a hand with all the things that need to be done? Even for a tenancy of a fortnight?’

‘If you like.’

‘We should have to do a lot of shopping.’

The girl, standing behind him, remained silent. It was an unusual non-response.

‘I should have to cook on a primus stove,’ said Stephen. ‘I wonder if we can buy one? I used to be quite good with them.’ Rapture was beginning.

The girl said nothing.

‘We might need new locks on the doors.’

The girl spoke. ‘There is only one door.’

‘So there is,’ said Stephen. ‘In towns, houses have two, a front door and a back door. When trouble comes in at one, you can do a bolt through the other.’

‘People don’t need a lock,’ said the girl. ‘Why should they?’ He turned away from the filthy window and gazed straight at her. ‘Suppose I was to fall in love with you? ‘ he said.

‘Then you would not have to go back after a fortnight.’

It could hardly have been a straighter reply.

He put one arm round her shoulders, one hand on her breast, so that the note he had written her lay between them. He remembered that the first letter written to a woman is always a love letter. ‘Would you promise to visit me every day?’

‘I might be unable to do that.’

‘I don’t want to seem unkind, but you did say that your father could manage.’

‘If he discovers, he will keep me at home and send my sister out instead. He has powers. He’s very frightening.’

Stephen relaxed his hold a little. He had been all along well aware how sadly impracticable was the entire idea.

For example: he could hardly even drive up to this place with supplies; even had his car not been in the course of an opportune overhaul in London, a very complete overhaul after all this anxious time. And that was only one thing; one among very many.

‘Well, what’s the answer?’ Stephen said, smiling at her in the wrong way, longing for her in a very different way.

‘I can’t come and go the whole time,’ said the girl.

‘I see,’ said Stephen.

He who had missed so many opportunities, always for excellent reasons, and for one excellent reason in particular, clearly saw that this might be his last opportunity, and almost certainly was.

‘How should we live?’ he asked. ‘I mean how should we eat and manage? ‘

‘As the birds do,’ said the girl.

Stephen did not inquire of her how she came to know Shakespeare, as people put it. He might ask her that later. In the meantime, he could see that the flat, floating birds he had taken to be kites, were indeed drifting past the dirty window, and round and round the house, as it seemed. Of course his questions had been mere routine in any case. He could well have killed himself if she had made a merely routine response.

‘Let’s see,’ he said. He gently took her hand. He kissed her softly on the lips. He returned with her upstairs.

It would perhaps have been more suitable if he had been leading the party, but that might be a trifle. Even the damp discolouration of the mattress might be a trifle. Harriet’s teatime could not, in truth, be forced from the mind, but it was provisionally overruled. One learned the trick in the course of one’s work, or one would break altogether.

*  *  *  *  *

There were of course only the bed and the mattress; no sheets or blankets; no Spanish or Kashmiri rugs; no entangling silkiness, no singing save that of the moor. Elizabeth had never wished to make love like that. She had liked to turn on the record player, almost always Brahms or Schumann (the Rhenish Symphony was her particular favourite), and to ascend slowly into a deep fully made bed. But the matter had not seriously arisen for years. Stephen had often wondered why not.

Nell was lying on her front. Seemingly expectant and resistant at the same time, she clung like a clam. Her body was as brown as a pale chestnut, but it was a strong and well-made body. Her short hair was wavy rather than curly. Stephen was ravished by the line of it on her strong neck. He was ravished by her relaxed shoulder blade. He was ravished by her perfect waist and thighs. He was ravished by her youth and youthful smell.

‘Please turn over,’ he said, after tugging at her intermittently, and not very effectively.

Fortunately, he was not too displeased by his own appearance. The hair on his body was bleaching and fading, but otherwise he could, quite sincerely, see little difference from when he had been twenty-four, and had married Elizabeth. He knew, however, that at these times sincerity is not enough; nor objectivity either. When are they?

‘Please,’ he said softly in Nell’s ear. Her ears were a slightly unusual shape, and the most beautiful he had ever beheld, or beheld so intently.

He put his hand lightly on her neck. ‘Please,’ he said.

She wriggled over in a single swift movement, like a light stab from an invisible knife. He saw that her eyes were neither closed nor open, neither looking at him, nor looking at anything but him.

On the skin between her right shoulder and her right breast was a curious, brownish, greyish, bluish, irregular mark or patch, which had been hidden by her shirt, though Stephen could not quite see how. It was more demanding of attention than it might have been, partly because of its position, and partly, where Stephen was concerned, because of something vaguely else. In any case, it would mean that the poor girl could not reposefully wear a low-cut dress, should the need arise. Though it was by no means a birthmark in the usual sense, Nell had probably been lying on her front through chagrin about it. Upon Stephen, however, the effect was to make him love her more deeply; perhaps love her for the first time. He did not want her or her body to be quite perfect. In a real person, it would be almost vulgar. At this point, Harriet and Harriet’s teatime came more prominently into view for a few seconds.

Nell might say something about the mark sooner or later. He would never take an initiative.

At the moment, she said nothing at all. He simply could not make out whether she was watching him or not. Her mouth was long and generous; but had not her whole proceeding been generous in a marvellous degree? He could not even make out whether she was taut or relaxed. No small mystery was Nell after years and years of a perfect, but always slow-moving, relationship with Elizabeth!

He kissed her intimately. When she made no particular response, not even a grunt, he began to caress her, more or less as he had caressed his wife. He took care not to touch the peculiar blemish, or even to enter its area. There was no need to do so. It occurred to Stephen that the mark might be the consequence of an injury; and so might in due course disappear, or largely so. In the end that happened even to many of the strangest human markings. One day, as the nannies used to say.

Suddenly she made a wild plunge at him that took away his breath. The surprise was directly physical, but moral also. He had found it a little difficult to assess Nell’s likely age, and inquiry was out of the question; but he had supposed it probable that she was a virgin, and had quite deliberately resolved to accept the implication. Or so he had believed of himself.

Now she was behaving as a maenad.

As an oread, rather; Stephen thought at a later hour. For surely these moors were mountains, often above the thousand-foot contour; boundless uplands peopled solely by unwedded nymphs and their monstrous progenitors? Stephen had received a proper education at a proper place: in Stephen’s first days, one had not made the grade, Stephen’s grade, otherwise. Stephen’s parents had undertaken sacrifices so immense that no one had fully recovered from them.

The last vestige of initiative had passed from Stephen like a limb. And yet, he fancied, it was not because Nell was what Elizabeth would have called unfeminine, but merely because she was young, and perhaps because she lived without contamination, merging into the aspect and mutability of remote places. So, at least, he could only suppose.

Soon he ceased to suppose anything. He knew bliss unequalled, unprecedented, assuredly unimagined. Moreover, the wonder lasted for longer than he would have conceived of as possible. That particularly struck him.

Nell’s flawed body was celestial. Nell herself was more wonderful than the dream of death. Nell could not possibly exist.

He was fondling her and feeling a trifle cold; much as Elizabeth would have felt. Not that it mattered in the very least. Nell was no maenad or oread. She was a half-frightened child, sweetly soft, responsive to his every thought, sometimes before he had fully given birth to it. She was a waif, a foundling. And it was he who had found her. And only yesterday.

‘Tell me about your sister,’ said Stephen. He realized that it was growing dark as well as chilly.

‘She’s not like me. You wouldn’t like her.’

Stephen knew that ordinary, normal girls always responded much like that.

He smiled at Nell. ‘But what is she like?’

‘She’s made quite differently. You wouldn’t care for her.’

‘Has she a name?’

‘Of a sort.’

‘What do you and your father call her?’

‘We call her different things at different times. You’re cold.’ So she was human, after all, Stephen thought.

She herself had very little to put on. Two fairly light garments, a pair of stout socks, her solid shoes.

They went downstairs.

‘Would you care to borrow my sweater?’ asked Stephen. ‘Until tomorrow?’

She made no reply, but simply stared at him through the dusk in the downstairs room, the living place, the parlour, the salon.

‘Take it,’ said Stephen. It was a heavy garment. Elizabeth had spent nearly four months knitting it continuously, while slowly recovering from her very first disintegration. It was in thick complex stitches and meant to last for ever. When staying with Harewood, Stephen wore it constantly.

Nell took the sweater but did not put it on. She was still staring at him. At such a moment her grey-green eyes were almost luminous.

‘We’ll meet again tomorrow,’ said Stephen firmly. ‘We’ll settle down here tomorrow. I must say something to my brother and sister-in-law, and I don’t care what happens after that. Not now. At least I do care. I care very much. As you well know.’

‘It’s risky,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he replied, because it was necessary to evade all discussion. ‘Yes, but it can’t be helped. You come as early as you can, and I’ll arrive with some provisions for us. We really need some blankets too, and some candles. I’ll see if I can borrow a Land-Rover from one of the farms.’ He trusted that his confidence and his firm, practical actions would override all doubts.

‘I may be stopped,’ she said. ‘My father can’t read books but he can read minds. He does it all the time.’

‘You must run away from him,’ said Stephen firmly. ‘We’ll stay here for a little, and then you can come back to London with me.’

She made no comment on that, but simply repeated, ‘My father can read my mind. I only have to be in the same room with him. He’s frightening.’

Her attitude to her father seemed to have changed considerably. It was the experience of love, Stephen supposed; first love.

‘Obviously, you must try to be in a different room as much as possible. It’s only for one more night. We’ve known each other now for two days.’

‘There’s only one room.’

Stephen had known that such would be her rejoinder.

He well knew also that his behaviour might seem unromantic and even cold-hearted. But the compulsion upon him could not be plainer: if he did not return to the rectory tonight, Harriet, weakly aided by Harewood, would have the police after him; dogs would be scurrying across the moors, as if after Hercules, and perhaps searchlights sweeping also. Nothing could more fatally upset any hope of a quiet and enduring compact with such a one as Nell. He was bound for a rough scene with Harriet and Harewood as it was. It being now long past teatime, he would be lucky if Harriet had not taken action before he could reappear. Speed was vital and, furthermore, little of the situation could be explained with any candour to Nell. First, she would simply not understand what he said (even though within her range she was shrewd enough, often shrewder than he). Second, in so far as she did understand, she would panic and vanish. And he had no means of tracking her down at all. She was as shy about her abode as about the mark on her body; though doubtless with as little reason, or so Stephen hoped. He recognized that parting from her at all might be as unwise as it would be painful, but it was the lesser peril. He could not take her to London tonight, or to anywhere, because there was no accessible transport. Not nowadays. He could not take her to the rectory, where Harriet might make Harewood lay an anathema upon her. They could not stay in the moorland house without food or warmth.

‘I’ll walk with you to the top of the clough,’ he said.

She shook her head. ‘It’s not there I live.’

‘Where then? ‘ he asked at once.

‘Not that way at all.’

‘Will you get there?’

She nodded: in exactly what spirit it was hard to say.

He refrained from inquiring how she would explain the absence of specimens for her father. Two or three stones dragged from the walls of the house they were in, might serve the purpose in any case, he thought: outside and inside were almost equally mossed, lichened, adorned, encumbered.

‘Goodnight, Nell. We’ll meet tomorrow morning. Here.’ He really had to go. Harriet was made anxious by the slightest irregularity, and when she became anxious, she became frenzied. His present irregularity was by no means slight already; assuredly not slight by Harriet’s standards.

To his great relief, Nell nodded again. She had still not put on his sweater.

‘In a few days’ time, we’ll go to London. We’ll be together always.’ He could hardly believe his own ears listening to his own voice saying such things. After all this time! After Elizabeth! After so much inner peace and convinced adoration and asking for nothing more! After the fearful illness!

They parted with kisses but with little drama. Nell sped off into what the map depicted as virtual void.

‘All the same,’ Stephen reflected, ‘I must look at the map again. I’ll try to borrow Harewood’s dividers.’

He pushed back through the heather, rejoicing in his sense of direction, among so many other things to rejoice about, and began lumbering down the track homewards. The light was now so poor that he walked faster and faster; faster even than he had ascended. In the end, he was running uncontrollably.

*  *  *  *  *

Therefore, his heart was already pounding when he discovered that the rectory was in confusion; though, at the rectory, even confusion had a slightly wan quality.

During the afternoon, Harriet had had a seizure of some kind, and during the evening had been taken off in a public ambulance.

‘What time did it happen? ‘ asked Stephen. He knew from all too much experience that it was the kind of thing that people did ask.

‘I don’t really know, Stephen,’ replied Harewood. ‘I was in my specimens room reading the Journal, and I fear that a considerable time may have passed before I came upon her. I was too distressed to look at my watch even then. Besides, between ourselves, my watch loses rather badly.’

Though Stephen tried to help in some way, the improvised evening meal was upsetting. Harriet had planned rissoles sauted in ghee, but neither of the men really knew how to cook with ghee. The home-made Congress Pudding was nothing less than nauseous. Very probably, some decisive final touches had been omitted.

‘You see how it is, young Stephen,’ said Harewood, after they had munched miserably but briefly. ‘The prognosis cannot be described as hopeful. I may have to give up the living.’

‘You can’t possibly do that, Harewood, whatever happens. There is Father’s memory to think about. I’m sure I should think about him more often myself.’ Stephen’s thoughts were, in fact, upon quite specially different topics.

‘I don’t wish to go, I assure you, Stephen. I’ve been very happy here.’

The statement surprised Stephen, but was of course thoroughly welcome and appropriate.

‘There is always prayer, Harewood.’

‘Yes, Stephen, indeed. I may well have been remiss. That might explain much.’

They had been unable to discover where Harriet hid the coffee, so sat for moments in reverent and reflective silence, one on either side of the bleak table: a gift from the nearest branch of the Free India League.

Stephen embarked upon a tentative demarche. ‘I need hardly say that I don’t want to leave you in the lurch.’

‘It speaks for itself that there can be no question of that.’

Stephen drew in a quantity of air. ‘To put it absolutely plainly. I feel that for a spell you would be better off at this time without me around to clutter up the place and make endless demands.’

For a second time within hours, Stephen recognized quite clearly that his line of procedure could well be seen as coldblooded; but, for a second time, he was acting under extreme compulsion – compulsion more extreme than he had expected ever again to encounter, at least on the hither side of the Styx.

‘I should never deem you to be doing that, young Stephen. Blood is at all times, even the most embarrassing times, thicker than water. It was Cardinal Newman, by the way, who first said that; a prelate of a different soteriology.’

Stephen simply did not believe it, but he said nothing. Harewood often came forward with such assertions, but they were almost invariably erroneous. Stephen sometimes doubted whether Harewood could be completely relied upon even in the context of his private speciality, the lichens.

‘I think I had better leave tomorrow morning and so reduce the load for a span. I am sure Doreen will appreciate it.’ Doreen was the intermittent help; a little brash, where in former days no doubt she would have been a little simple. Stephen had always supposed that brashness might make it more possible to serve Harriet. Doreen had been deserted, childless, by her young husband; but there had been a proper divorce. Harewood was supposed to be taking a keen interest in Doreen, who was no longer in her absolutely first youth.

‘You will be rather more dependent upon Doreen for a time,’ added Stephen.

‘I suppose that may well be,’ said Harewood. Stephen fancied that his brother almost smiled. He quite saw that he might have thought so because of the ideas in his own mind, at which he himself was smiling continuously.

‘You must do whatever you think best for all concerned, Stephen,’ said Harewood. ‘Including, of course, your sister-in-law, dear Harriet.’

‘I think I should go now and perhaps come back a little later.’

‘As you will, Stephen. I have always recognized that you have a mind trained both academically and by your work. I am a much less coordinated spirit. Oh yes, I know it well. I should rely very much upon your judgement in almost any serious matter.’

Circumstanced as at the moment he was, Stephen almost blushed.

But Harewood made things all right by adding, ‘Except perhaps in certain matters of the spirit which, in the nature of things, lie quite particularly between my Maker and myself alone.’

‘Oh, naturally,’ said Stephen.

‘Otherwise,’ continued Harewood, ‘and now that Harriet is unavailable – for a very short time only, we must hope – it is upon you, Stephen, that I propose to rely foremost, in many pressing concerns of this world.’

Beyond doubt, Harewood now was not all but smiling. He was smiling nearly at full strength. He explained this immediately.

‘My catarrh seems very much better,’ he said. ‘I might consider setting forth in splendour one of these days. Seeking specimens, I mean.’

Stephen plunged upon impulse.

‘It may seem a bit odd in the circumstances, but I should be glad to have the use of a Land-Rover. There’s a building up on the moors I should like to look at again before I go, and it’s too far to walk in the time. There’s a perfectly good track to quite near it. Is there anyone you know of in the parish who would lend me such a thing? Just for an hour or two, of course.’ Harewood responded at once. ‘You might try Tom Jarrold. I regret to say that he’s usually too drunk to drive. Indeed, one could never guarantee that his vehicle will even leave the ground.’

Possibly it was not exactly the right reference, but what an excellent and informed parish priest Harewood was suddenly proving to be!

Harewood had reopened the latest number of the Journal, which he had been sitting on in the chair all the time. His perusal had of course been interrupted by the afternoon’s events.

‘Don’t feel called upon to stop talking,’ said Harewood. ‘I can read and listen at the same time perfectly well.’

Stephen reflected that the attempt had not often been made when Harriet had been in the room.

‘I don’t think there’s anything more to say at the moment. We seem to have settled everything that can be settled.’

‘I shall be depending upon you in many different matters, remember,’ said Harewood, but without looking up from the speckled diagrams.

*  *  *  *  *

As soon as Stephen turned on the hanging light in his bedroom, he noticed the new patch on the wallpaper; if only because it was immediately above his bed. The wallpaper had always been lowering anyway. He was the more certain that the particular patch was new because, naturally, he made his own bed each morning, which involved daily confrontation with that particular surface. Of course there had always been the other such patches among the marks on the walls.

Still, the new arrival was undoubtedly among the reasons why Stephen slept very little that night, even though, in his own estimation, he needed sleep so badly. There again, however, few do sleep in the first phase of what is felt to be a reciprocated relationship: equally fulfilling and perilous, always deceptive, and always somewhere known to be. The mixed ingredients of the last two days churned within Stephen, as in Harriet’s battered cook-pot; one rising as another fell. He was treating Harewood as he himself would not wish to be treated; and who could tell what had really led to Harriet’s collapse?

In the end, bliss drove out bewilderment, and seemed the one thing sure, as perhaps it was.

Later still, when daylight was all too visible through the frail curtains, Stephen half dreamed that he was lying inert on some surface he could not define and that Nell was administering water to him from a chalice. But the chalice, doubtless a consecrated object to begin with, and certainly of fairest silver from the Spanish mines, was blotched and blemished. Stephen wanted to turn away, to close his eyes properly, to expostulate, but could do none of these things. As Nell gently kissed his brow, he awoke fully with a compelling thirst. He had heard of people waking thirsty in the night, but to himself he could not remember it ever before happening. He had never lived like that.

There was no water in the room, because the house was just sufficiently advanced to make visitors go to the bathroom. Stephen walked quietly down the passage, then hesitated. He recollected that nowadays the bathroom door opened with an appalling wrench and scream.

It would be very wrong indeed to take the risk of waking poor Harewood, in his new isolation. Stephen crept on down the stairs towards the scullery, and there was Harewood, sleeping like the dead, not in the least sprawling, but, on the contrary, touchingly compressed and compact in the worn chair. For a moment, he looked like a schoolboy, though of course in that curtained light.

Harewood was murmuring contentedly. ‘Turn over. No, right over. You can trust me’; then, almost ecstatically, almost like a juvenile, ‘It’s beautiful. Oh, it’s beautiful.’

Stephen stole away to the back quarters, where both the luncheon and the supper washing-up, even the washing-up after tea, all awaited the touch of a vanished hand.

The cold tap jerked and jarred as it always did, but when Stephen went back, Harewood was slumbering still. His self-converse was now so ideal that it had fallen into incoherence. The cheap figure on the mantel of Shiva or somebody, which Stephen had always detested, sneered animatedly.

*  *  *  *  *

But there Nell really was; really, really was.

In his soul, Stephen was astonished. Things do not go like that in real life, least of all in the dreaded demesne of the heart.

However, they unloaded the Land-Rover together, as if everything were perfectly real; toiling up the heather paths with heavy loads, Nell always ahead, always as strong as he: which was really rather necessary.

‘I must take the Rover back. Come with me.’

He had not for a moment supposed that she would, but she did, and with no demur.

‘It’s rough going,’ he said. But she merely put her brown hand on his thigh, as she sat and bumped beside him.

They were a pair now.

‘It won’t take a moment while I settle with the man.’

He was determined that it should not. It must be undesirable that the two of them be seen together in the village. Probably it was undesirable that he himself, even alone, be seen there before a long time had passed. He might perhaps steal back one distant day like Enoch Arden, and take Harewood completely by surprise, both of them now bearded, shaggily or skimpily. What by then would have become of Nell?

They walked upwards hand in hand. Every now and then he said something amorous or amusing to her, but not very often because, as he had foreseen, the words did not come to him readily. He was bound to become more fluent as his heart reopened. She was now speaking more often than he was: not merely more shrewd, but more explicit.

‘I’m as close to you as that,’ she said, pointing with her free hand to a patch of rocky ground with something growing on it – growing quite profusely, almost exuberantly. She had spoken in reply to one of his questions.

He returned the squeeze of the hand he was holding.

‘We’ll be like the holly and the ivy,’ she volunteered later, ‘and then we’ll be like the pebble and the shard.’

He thought that both comparisons were, like Harewood’s comparisons, somewhat inexact, but, in her case, all the more adorable by reason of it. He kissed her.

At first he could not see their house, though, as they neared it, his eyes seemed to wander round the entire horizon: limited in range, however, by the fact that they were mounting quite steeply. But Nell led the way through the rabbit and snake paths, first to the spring, then upwards once more; and there, needless to say, the house was. Earlier that afternoon, they had already toiled up and down several times with the baggage. The earlier occupants had been sturdy folk; men and women alike; aboriginals.

It was somewhere near the spring that Nell, this time, made her possibly crucial declaration.

‘I’ve run away,’ she said, as if previously she had been afraid to speak the words. ‘Take care of me.’

They entered.

When they had been lugging in the food and the blankets and the cressets and the pans, he had of policy refrained from even glancing at the walls of the house; but what could it matter now? For the glorious and overwhelming moment at least? And, judging by recent experience, the moment might even prove a noticeably long moment. Time might again stand still. Time sometimes did if one had not expected it.

Therefore, from as soon as they entered, he stared round at intervals quite brazenly, though not when Nell was looking at him, as for so much of the time she was now doing.

The upshot was anti-climax: here was not the stark, familiar bedroom in the rectory, and Stephen realized that he had not yet acquired points, or areas, of reference and comparison. He was at liberty to deem that they might never be needed.

Nell was ordering things, arranging things, even beginning to prepare things: all as if she had been a diplomee of a domestic college; as if she had been blessed with a dedicated mamma or aunt. After all, thought Stephen, as he watched her and intercepted her, her appearance is largely that of an ordinary modern girl.

He loved her.

He turned his back upon her earlier curious intimations. She had run away from it all; and had even stated as much, unasked and unprompted. Henceforth, an ordinary modern girl was what for him she should firmly be; though loyaller, tenderer, stronger than any other.

When, in the end, languishingly they went upstairs, this time they wrapt themselves in lovely new blankets, but Stephen was in no doubt at all that still there was only the one mark on her.

Conceivably, even, it was a slightly smaller mark.

He would no longer detect, no longer speculate, no longer be anxious, no longer imagine. No more mortal marks and corruptions. For example, he would quite possibly never sleep in that room at the rectory again.

*  *  *  *  *

Thus, for a week, he counted the good things only, as does a sundial. They were many and the silken sequence of them seemed to extend over a lifetime. He recollected the Christian Science teaching that evil is a mere illusion. He clung to the thesis that time is no absolute.

Nell had the knack of supplementing the food he had purchased with fauna and flora that she brought back from the moor. While, at a vague hour of the morning, he lay long among the blankets, simultaneously awake and asleep, she went forth, and never did she return empty-handed, seldom, indeed, other than laden. He was at last learning not from talk but from experience, even though from someone else’s experience, how long it really was possible to live without shops, without bureaucratically and commercially modified products, without even watered cash. All that was needed was to be alone in the right place with the right person.

He even saw it as possible that the two of them might remain in the house indefinitely: were it not that his ‘disappearance’ would inevitably be ‘reported’ by someone, doubtless first by Arthur Thread in the office, so that his early exposure was inevitable. That, after all, was a main purpose of science: to make things of all kinds happen sooner than they otherwise would.

Each morning, after Nell had returned from her sorties and had set things in the house to rights, she descended naked to the spring and sank beneath its waters. She liked Stephen to linger at the rim watching her, and to him it seemed that she disappeared in the pool altogether, vanished from sight, and clear though the water was, the clearest, Stephen surmised, that he had ever lighted upon. Beyond doubt, therefore, the little pool really was peculiarly deep, as Nell had always said: it would be difficult to distinguish between the natural movements of its ever-gleaming surface, and movements that might emanate from a submerged naiad. It gave Stephen special pleasure that they drank exclusively from the pool in which Nell splashed about, but, partly for that reason, he confined his own lustrations to dabblings from the edge, like a tripper.

Stephen learned by experience, a new experience, the difference between drinking natural water and drinking safeguarded water, as from a sanitized public convenience. When she emerged from the pool, Nell each day shook her short hair like one glad to be alive, and each day her hair seemed to be dry in no time.

One morning, she washed her shirt and trousers in the pool, having no replacements as far as Stephen could see. The garments took longer to dry than she did, and Nell remained unclothed for most of the day, even though there were clouds in the sky. Clouds made little difference anyway, nor quite steady rain, nor drifting mountain mist. The last named merely fortified the peace and happiness.

‘Where did you get those clothes?’ asked Stephen, even though as a rule he no longer asked anything.

‘I found them. They’re nice.’

He said nothing for a moment.

‘Aren’t they nice?’ she inquired anxiously.

‘Everything to do with you and in and about and around you is nice in every possible way. You are perfect. Everything concerned with you is perfect.’

She smiled gratefully and went back, still unclothed, to the house, where she was stewing up everything together in one of the new pots. The pot had already leaked, and it had been she who had mended the leak, with a preparation she had hammered and kneaded while Stephen had merely looked on in delighted receptivity, wanting her as she worked.

He had a number of books in his bag, reasonably well chosen, because he had supposed that on most evenings at the rectory he would be retiring early; but now he had no wish to read anything. He conjectured that he would care little if the capacity to read somehow faded from him. He even went so far as to think that, given only a quite short time, it might possibly do so.

At moments, they wandered together about the moor; he, as like as not, with his hand on her breast, on that breast pocket of hers which contained his original and only letter to her, and which she had carefully taken out and given to him when washing the garment, and later carefully replaced. Than these perambulations few excursions could be more uplifting, but Stephen was wary all the same, knowing that if they were to meet anyone, however blameless, the spell might break, and paradise end.

Deep happiness can but be slighted by third parties, whosoever, without exception, they be. No one is so pure as to constitute an exception.

And every night the moon shone through the small windows and fell across their bed and their bodies in wide streaks, oddly angled.

‘You are like a long, sweet parsnip,’ Stephen said. ‘Succulent but really rather tough.’

‘I know nothing at all,’ she replied. ‘I only know you.’

The mark below her shoulder stood out darkly, but, God be praised, in isolation. What did the rapidly deteriorating state of the walls and appurtenances matter by comparison with that?

*  *  *  *  *

But in due course, the moon, upon which the seeding and growth of plants and of the affections largely depend, had entered its dangerous third quarter.

Stephen had decided that the thing he had to do was take Nell back quickly and quietly to London, and return as soon as possible with his reinvigorated car, approaching as near as he could, in order to collect their possessions in the house. The machine would go there, after all, if he drove it with proper vigour; though it might be as well to do it at a carefully chosen hour, in order to evade Harewood, Doreen, and the general life of the village.

He saw no reason simply to abandon all his purchases and, besides, he felt obscurely certain that it was unlucky to do so, though he had been unable to recall the precise belief. Finally, it would seem likely that some of the varied accessories in the house might be useful in Stephen’s new life with Nell. One still had to be practical at times, just as one had to be firm at times.

Nell listened to what he had to say, and then said she would do whatever he wanted. The weather was entirely fair for the moment.

When the purchased food had finally run out, and they were supposedly dependent altogether upon what Nell could bring in off the moor, they departed from the house, though not, truthfully, for that reason. They left everything behind them and walked down at dusk past Burton’s Clough to the village. Stephen knew the time of the last bus which connected with a train to London. It was something he knew wherever he was. In a general way, he had of course always liked the train journey and disliked the bus journey.

It was hard to imagine what Nell would make of such experiences, and of those inevitably to come. Though she always said she knew nothing, she seemed surprised by nothing either. Always she brought back to Stephen the theories that there were two kinds of knowledge; sometimes of the same things.

All the others in the bus were old age pensioners. They had been visiting younger people and were now returning. They sat alone, each as far from each as space allowed. In the end, Stephen counted them. There seemed to be eight, though it was hard to be sure in the bad light, and with several pensioners already slumped forward.

There were at least two kinds of bad light also; the beautiful dim light of the house on the moor, and the depressing light in a nationalized bus. Stephen recalled Ellen Terry’s detestation of all electric light. And of course there were ominous marks on the dirty ceiling of the bus and on such of the side panels as Stephen could see, including that on the far side of Nell, who sat beside him, with her head on his shoulder, more like an ordinary modern girl than ever. Where could she have learned that when one was travelling on a slow, ill-lighted bus with the man one loved, one put one’s head on his shoulder?

But it was far more that she had somewhere, somehow learned. The slightest physical contact with her induced in Stephen a third dichotomy: the reasonable, rather cautious person his whole life and career surely proved him to be, was displaced by an all but criminal visionary. Everything turned upon such capacity as he might have left to change the nature of time.

The conductor crept down the dingy passage and sibilated in Stephen’s ear. ‘We’ve got to stop here. Driver must go home. Got a sick kid. There’ll be a reserve bus in twenty minutes. All right?’

The conductor didn’t bother to explain to the pensioners. They would hardly have understood. For them, the experience itself would be ample. A few minutes later, everyone was outside in the dark, though no one risked a roll call. The lights in the bus had been finally snuffed out, and the crew were making off, aclank with the accoutrements of their tenure, spanners, and irregular metal boxes, and enamelled mugs.

Even now, Nell seemed unsurprised and unindignant. She, at least, appeared to acknowledge that all things have an end, and to be acting on that intimation. As usual, Stephen persuaded her to don his heavy sweater.

It was very late indeed, before they were home; though Stephen could hardly use the word now that not only was Elizabeth gone, but also there was somewhere else, luminously better – or, at least, so decisively different – and, of course, a new person too.

Fortunately, the train had been very late, owing to signal trouble, so that they had caught it and been spared a whole dark night of it at the station, as in a story. Stephen and Nell had sat together in the bulfet, until they had been ejected, and the striplighting quelled. Nell had never faltered. She had not commented even when the train, deprived of what railwaymen call its ‘path’, had fumbled its way to London, shunting backwards nearly as often as running forwards. In the long, almost empty, excursion-type coach had been what Stephen could by now almost complacently regard as the usual smears and blotches.

‘Darling, aren’t you cold?’ He had other, earlier sweaters to lend.

She shook her head quite vigorously.

After that, it had been easy for Stephen to close his eyes almost all the way. The other passenger had appeared to be a fireman in uniform, though of course without helmet. It was hard to believe that he would suddenly rise and rob them, especially as he was so silently slumbering. Perhaps he was all the time a hospital porter or a special messenger or an archangel.

On the Benares table which filled the hall of the flat (a wedding present from Harewood and poor Harriet, who, having been engaged in their teens, had married long ahead of Stephen and Elizabeth), was a parcel, weighty but neat.

‘Forgive me,’ said Stephen. ‘I never can live with unopened parcels or letters.’

He snapped the plastic string in a second and tore through the glyptal wrapping. It was a burly tome entitled Lichen, Moss, and Wrack. Usage and Abusage in Peace and War. A Military and Medical Abstract. Scientific works so often have more title than imaginative works.

Stephen flung the book back on the table. It fell with a heavy clang.

‘Meant for my brother. It’s always happening. People don’t seem to know there’s a difference between us.’

He gazed at her. He wanted to see nothing else.

She looked unbelievably strange in her faded trousers and the sweater Elizabeth had made. Elizabeth would have seen a ghost and fainted. Elizabeth really did tend to faint in the sudden presence of the occult.

‘We are not going to take it to him. It’ll have to be posted. I’ll get the Department to do it tomorrow.’

He paused. She smiled at him, late though it was.

Late or early? What difference did it make? It was not what mattered.

‘I told you that I should have to go to the Department tomorrow. There’s a lot to explain.’

She nodded. ‘And then we’ll go back? ‘ She had been anxious about that ever since they had started. He had not known what to expect.

‘Yes. After a few days.’

Whatever he intended in the first place, he had never made it clear to her where they would be living in the longer run. This was partly because he did not know himself. The flat, without Elizabeth, really was rather horrible. Stephen had not forgotten Elizabeth for a moment. How could he have done? Nor could Stephen wonder that Nell did not wish to live in the flat. The flat was disfigured and puny.

Nell still smiled with her usual seeming understanding. He had feared that by now she would demur at his reference to a few days, and had therefore proclaimed it purposefully.

He smiled back at her. ‘I’ll buy you a dress.’

She seemed a trifle alarmed.

‘It’s time you owned one.’

‘I don’t own anything.’

‘Yes, you do. You own me. Let’s go to bed, shall we?’

But she spoke. ‘What’s this?’

As so often happens, Nell had picked up and taken an interest in the thing he would least have wished.

It was a large, lumpy shopping bag from a craft room in Burnham-on-Sea, where Elizabeth and he had spent an unwise week in their early days. What the Orient was to Harriet, the seaside had been to Elizabeth. Sisters-in-law often show affinities. The shopping bag had continued in regular use ever since, and not only for shopping, until Elizabeth had been no longer mobile.

‘It’s a bag made of natural fibres,’ said Stephen. ‘It belonged to my late wife.’

‘It smells. It reminds me.’

‘Many things here remind me,’ said Stephen. ‘But a new page has been turned.’ He kept forgetting that Nell was unaccustomed to book metaphors.

She appeared to be holding the bag out to him. Though not altogether knowing why, he took it from her. He then regretted doing so.

It was not so much the smell of the bag. He was entirely accustomed to that. It was that, in his absence, the bag had become sodden with dark growths, outside and inside. It had changed character completely.

Certainly the bag had been perfectly strong and serviceable when last he had been in contact with it; though for the moment he could not recollect when that had been. He had made little use of the bag when not under Elizabeth’s direction.

He let the fetid mass fall on top of the book on the brass table.

‘Let’s forget everything,’ he said. ‘We still have a few hours.’

‘Where do I go?’ she asked, smiling prettily.

‘Not in there,’ he cried, as she put her hand on one of the doors. He very well knew that he must seem far too excitable. He took a pull on himself. ‘Try this room.’

When Elizabeth had become ill, the double bed had been moved into the spare room. It had been years since Stephen had slept in that bed, though, once again, he could not in the least recall how many years. The first step towards mastering time is always to make time meaningless.

It was naturally wonderful to be at long last in a fully equipped deep double bed with Nell. She had shown no expectation of being invited to borrow one of Elizabeth’s expensive nightdresses. Nell was a primitive still, and it was life or death to keep her so. He had never cared much for flowing, gracious bedwear in any case; nor had the wonder that was Elizabeth seemed to him to need such embellishments.

But he could not pretend, as he lay in Nell’s strong arms and she in his, that the condition of the spare room was in the least reassuring. Before he had quickly turned off the small bedside light, the new marks on the walls had seemed like huge inhuman faces; and the effect was all the more alarming in that these walls had been painted, inevitably long ago, by Elizabeth in person, and had even been her particular domestic display piece. The stained overall she had worn for the task, still hung in the cupboard next door, lest the need arise again.

It was always the trouble. So long as one was far from the place once called home, one could successfully cast secondary matters from the mind, or at least from the hurting part of it; but from the moment of return, in fact from some little while before that, one simply had to recognize that, for most of one’s life, secondary matters were just about all there were. Stephen had learned ages ago that secondary matters were always the menace.

Desperation, therefore, possibly made its contribution to the mutual passion that charged the few hours available to them.

Within a week, the walls might be darkened all over; and what could the development after that conceivably be?

Stephen strongly suspected that the mossiness, the malady, would become more conspicuously three-dimensional at any moment. Only as a first move, of course.

He managed to close his mind against all secondary considerations and to give love its fullest licence yet.

*  *  *  *  *

Thread was in the office before Stephen, even though Stephen had risen most mortifyingly early, and almost sleepless. It was a commonplace that the higher one ascended in the service, the earlier one had to rise, in order to ascend higher still. The lamas never slept at all.

‘Feeling better?’ Thread could ask such questions with unique irony.

‘Much better, thank you.’

‘You still look a bit peaky.’ Thread was keeping his finger at the place he had reached in the particular file.

‘I had a tiresome journey back. I’ve slept very little.’

‘It’s always the trouble. Morag and I make sure of a few days to settle in before we return to full schedule.’

‘Elizabeth and I used to do that also. It’s a bit different now.’ Thread looked Stephen straight in the eyes, or very nearly. ‘Let me advise, for what my advice is worth. I recommend you to lose yourself in your work for the next two or three years at the least. Lose yourself completely. Forget everything else. In my opinion, it’s always the best thing at these times. Probably the only thing.’

‘Work doesn’t mean to me what it did.’

‘Take yourself in hand, and it soon will again. After all, very real responsibilities do rest in this room. We both understand that quite well. We’ve reached that sort of level, Stephen. What we do nowadays, matters. If you keep that in mind at all times, and I do mean at all times, the thought will see you through. I know what I’m talking about.’

Thread’s eyes were now looking steadily at his finger, lest it had made some move on its own.

‘Yes,’ said Stephen, ‘but you’re talking about yourself, you know.’

Stephen was very well aware that the sudden death some years before of Arthur Thread’s mother had not deflected Thread for a day from the tasks appointed. Even the funeral had taken place during the weekend; for which Thread had departed on the Friday evening with several major files in his briefcase, as usual. As for Thread’s wife, Morag, she was a senior civil servant too, though of course in a very different department. The pair took very little leave in any case, and hardly any of it together. Their two girls were at an expensive boarding school on the far side of France, almost in Switzerland.

‘I speak from my own experience,’ corrected Thread.

‘It appears to me,’ said Stephen, ‘that I have reached the male climacteric. It must be what’s happening to me.’

‘I advise you to think again,’ said Thread. ‘There’s no such thing. Anyway you’re too young for when it’s supposed to be. It’s not till you’re sixty-three; within two years of retirement.’ Thread could keep his finger in position no longer, lest his arm fall off. ‘If you’ll forgive me, I’m rather in the middle of something. Put yourself absolutely at ease. I’ll be very pleased to have another talk later.’

‘What’s that mark?’ asked Stephen, pointing to the wall above Thread’s rather narrow headpiece. So often the trouble seemed to begin above the head. ‘Was it there before? ‘

‘I’m sure I don’t know. Never forget the whole place is going to be completely done over next year. Now do let me concentrate for a bit.’

*  *  *  *  *

As the time for luncheon drew near, another man, Mark Tremble, peeped in.

‘Glad to see you back, Stephen. I really am.’

‘Thank you, Mark. I wish I could more sincerely say I was glad to be back.’

‘Who could be? Come and swim?’

Stephen had regularly done it with Mark Tremble and a shifting group of others; usually at lunchtime on several days a week. It had been one of twenty devices for lightening momentarily the weight of Elizabeth’s desperation. The bath was in the basement of the building. Soon the bath was to be extended and standardized, and made available at times to additional grades.

‘Very well.’

Stephen had at one time proposed to tear back; to be with Nell for a few moments; perhaps to buy that dress: but during the long morning he had decided against all of it.

His real task was to put down his foot with the establishment; to secure such modified pension as he was entitled to; to concentrate, as Thread always concentrated; to depart.

He had not so far said a word about it to anyone in the place. The two seniors changed in the sketchy cubicles, and emerged almost at the same moment in swimming trunks. There seemed to be no one else in or around the pool that day, though the ebbing and flowing of table tennis were audible through the partition.

‘I say, Stephen. What’s that thing on your back?’

Stephen stopped dead on the wet tiled floor. ‘What thing?’ ‘It’s a bit peculiar. I’m sure it wasn’t there before. Before you went away. I’m extremely sorry to mention it.’

‘What’s it look like?’ asked Stephen. ‘Can you describe it?’ ‘The best I can do is that it looks rather like the sort of thing you occasionally see on trees. I think it may simply be something stuck on to you. Would you like me to give it a tug?’

‘I think not,’ said Stephen. ‘I am sorry it upsets you. I’ll go back and dress. I think it would be better.’

‘Yes,’ said Mark Tremble. ‘It does upset me. It’s best to admit it. Either it’s something that will just come off with a good rub, or you’d better see a doctor, Stephen.’

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ said Stephen.

‘I don’t feel so much like a swim, after all,’ said Mark Tremble. ‘I’ll dress too and then we’ll both have a drink. I feel we could both do with one.’

‘I’m very sorry about it,’ said Stephen. ‘I apologize.’

*  *  *  *  *

‘What have you been doing all day?’ asked Stephen, as soon as he was back and had changed out of the garments currently normal in the civil service, casual and characterless. ‘I hope you’ve been happy.’

‘I found this on the roof.’ Nell was holding it in both her hands; which were still very brown. It was a huge lump: mineral, vegetable, who could tell? Or conceivably a proportion of each.

‘Your father would be interested.’

Nell recoiled. ‘Don’t talk like that. It’s unlucky.’ Indeed, she had nearly dropped the dense mass.

It had been an idiotic response on Stephen’s part; mainly the consequence of his not knowing what else to say. He was aware that it was perfectly possible to attain the roof of the building by way of the iron fire ladder, to which, by law, access had to be open to tenants at all hours.

‘I could do with a drink,’ said Stephen, though he had been drinking virtually the whole afternoon, without Thread even noticing, or without sparing time to acknowledge that he had noticed. Moira, the coloured girl from the typing area, had simply winked her big left eye at Stephen. ‘I’ve had a difficult day.’

‘Oh!’ Nell’s cry was so sincere and eloquent that it was as if he had been mangled in a traffic accident.

‘How difficult?’ she asked.

‘It’s just that it’s been difficult for me to make the arrangements to get away, to leave the place.’

‘But we are going?’ He knew it was what she was thinking about.

‘Yes, we are going. I promised.’

He provided Nell with a token drink also. At first she had seemed to be completely new to liquor. Stephen had always found life black without it, but his need for it had become more habitual during Elizabeth’s illness. He trusted that Nell and he would, with use, wont, and time, evolve a mutual equilibrium.

At the moment, he recognized that he was all but tight, though he fancied that at such times he made little external manifestation. Certainly Nell would detect nothing; if only because presumably she lacked data. Until now, he had never really been in the sitting room of the flat since his return. Here, the new tendrils on the walls and ceiling struck him as resembling a Portuguese man of war’s equipment; the coloured, insensate creature that can sting a swimmer to death at thirty feet distance, and had done so more than once when Elizabeth and he, being extravagant, had stayed at Cannes for a couple of weeks. It had been there that Elizabeth had told him finally she could never have a child. Really that was what they were doing there, though he had not realized it. The man of war business, the two victims, had seemed to have an absurd part in their little drama. No one in the hotel had talked of anything else.

‘Let’s go to bed now,’ said Stephen to Nell. ‘We can get up again later to eat.’

She put her right hand in his left hand.

Her acquiescence, quiet and beautiful, made him feel compunctious.

‘Or are you hungry?’ he asked. ‘Shall we have something to eat first? I wasn’t thinking.’

She shook her head. ‘I’ve been foraging.’

She seemed to know so many quite literary words. He gave no time to wondering where exactly the forage could have taken place. It would be unprofitable. Whatever Nell had brought in would be wholesomer, inestimably better in every way, than food from any shop.

As soon as she was naked, he tried, in the electric light, to scrutinize her. There still seemed to be only the one mark on her body, truly a quite small mark by the standards of the moment, though he could not fully convince himself that it really was contracting.

However, the examination was difficult: he could not let Nell realize what exactly he was doing; the light was not very powerful, because latterly Elizabeth had disliked a strong light anywhere, and he had felt unable to argue; most of all, he had to prevent Nell seeing whatever Mark Tremble had seen on his own person, had himself all the time to lie facing Nell or flat on his back. In any case, he wondered always how much Nell saw that he saw; how much, whatever her utterances and evidences, she analysed of the things that he analysed.

The heavy curtains, chosen and hung by Elizabeth, had, it seemed, remained drawn all day; and by now the simplest thing was for Stephen to switch off what light there was.

Nell, he had thought during the last ten days or ten aeons, was at her very best when the darkness was total.

He knew that heavy drinking was said to increase desire and to diminish performance; and he also knew that it was high time in his life for him to begin worrying about such things. He had even so hinted to Arthur Thread; albeit mainly to startle Thread, and to foretoken his, Stephen’s, new life course; even though any such intimation to Thread would be virtually useless. There can be very few to whom most of one’s uttered remarks can count for very much.

None the less, Nell and Stephen omitted that evening to arise later; even though Stephen had fully and sincerely intended it.

The next morning, very early the next morning, Nell vouchsafed to Stephen an unusual but wonderful breakfast – if one could apply so blurred a noun to so far-fetched a repast.

Stephen piled into his civil service raiment, systematically non-committal. He was taking particular trouble not to see his own bare back in any looking glass. Fortunately, there was no such thing in the dim bathroom.

‘Goodbye, my Nell. Before the weekend we shall be free.’

He supposed that she knew what a weekend was. By now, it could hardly be clearer that she knew almost everything that mattered in the least.

But, during that one night, the whole flat seemed to have become dark green, dark grey, plain black: patched everywhere, instead of only locally, as when they had arrived. Stephen felt that the walls, floors, and ceilings were beginning to advance towards one another. The knick-knacks were de-materializing most speedily. When life once begins to move, it can scarcely be prevented from setting its own pace. The very idea of intervention becomes ridiculous.

What was Nell making of these swift and strange occurrences? All Stephen was sure of was that it would be unwise to take too much for granted. He must hew his way out; if necessary, with a bloody axe, as the man in the play put it.

Stephen kissed Nell ecstatically. She was smiling as he shut the door. She might smile, off and on, all day, he thought; smile as she foraged.

*  *  *  *  *

By that evening, he had drawn a curtain, thick enough even for Elizabeth to have selected, between his homebound self and the events of the daylight.

There was no technical obstacle to his retirement, and never had been. It was mainly the size of his pension that was affected; and in his new life he seemed able to thrive on very little. A hundred costly substitutes for direct experience could be rejected. An intense reality, as new as it was old, was burning down on him like clear sunlight or heavenly fire or poetry.

It was only to be expected that his colleagues should shrink back a little. None the less, Stephen had been disconcerted by how far some of them had gone. They would have been very much less concerned, he fancied, had he been an acknowledged defector, about to stand trial. Such cases were now all in the day’s work: there were routines to be complied with, though not too strictly. Stephen realized that his appearance was probably against him. He was not sure what he looked like from hour to hour, and he was taking no steps to find out.

Still, the only remark that was passed, came from Toby Strand, who regularly passed remarks.

‘Good God, Stephen, you’re looking like death warmed up. I should go home to the wife. You don’t want to pass out in this place.’

Stephen looked at him.

‘Oh God, I forgot. Accept my apology.’

‘That’s perfectly all right, Toby,’ said Stephen. ‘And as for the other business, you’ll be interested to learn that I’ve decided to retire.’

‘Roll on the day for one and all,’ said Toby Strand, ever the vox populi.

Mercifully, Stephen’s car had been restored to a measure of health, so that the discreet bodywork gleamed slightly in the evening lustre as he drove into the rented parking space.

‘Nell, we can leave at cockcrow!’

*  *  *  *  *

‘I forgot about buying you that dress.’

He was standing in his bath gown, looking at her in the wide bed. The whole flat was narrowing and blackening, and at that early hour the electric light was even weaker than usual.

‘I shan’t need a dress.’

‘You must want a change sometime.’

‘No. I want nothing to change.’

He gazed at her. As so often, he had no commensurate words.

‘We’ll stop somewhere on the way,’ he said.

They packed the rehabilitated car with essentials for the simple life; with things to eat and drink on the journey and after arrival. Stephen, though proposing to buy Nell a dress, because one never knew what need might arise, was resolved against dragging her into a roadside foodplace. He took all he could, including, surreptitiously, some sad souvenirs of Elizabeth, but he recognized plainly enough that there was almost everything remaining to be done with the flat, and that he would have to return one day to do it, whether or not Nell came with him. In the meantime, it was difficult to surmount what was happening to the flat, or to him. Only Nell was sweet, calm, and changeless in her simple clothes. If only the nature of time were entirely different!

‘You’ll be terribly cold.’

She seemed never to say it first, never to think of it.

He covered her with sweaters and rugs. He thought of offering her a pair of his own warm trousers, but they would be so hopelessly too wide and long.

Islington was a misty marsh, as they flitted through; Holloway pink as a desert flamingo. The scholarly prison building was wrapped in fire. Finsbury Park was crystal as a steppe; Manor House deserted as old age.

When, swift as thoughts of love, they reached Grantham, they turned aside to buy Nell’s dress. She chose a rough-textured white one, with the square neck outlined in black, and would accept nothing else, nothing else at all. She even refused to try on the dress and she refused to wear it out of the shop. Stephen concurred, not without a certain relief, and carried the dress to the car in a plastic bag. The car was so congested that a problem arose.

‘I’ll sit on it,’ said Nell.

Thus the day went by as in a dream: though there are few such dreams in one lifetime. Stephen, for sure, had never known a journey so rapt, even though he could seldom desist from staring and squinting for uncovenanted blemishes upon and around the bright coachwork. Stephen recognized that, like everyone else, he had spent his life without living; even though he had had Elizabeth for much of the time to help him through, as she alone was able.

Northwards, they ran into a horse fair. The horses were everywhere, and, among them, burlesques of men bawling raucously, and a few excited girls.

‘Oh!’ cried Nell.

‘Shall we stop? ‘

‘No,’ said Nell. ‘Not stop.’

She was plainly upset.

‘Few fairs like that one are left,’ said Stephen, as he sat intimately, eternally beside her. ‘The motors have been their knell.’

‘Knell,’ said Nell.

Always it was impossible to judge how much she knew.

‘Nell,’ said Stephen affectionately. But it was at about that moment he first saw a dark, juicy crack in the polished metalwork of the bonnet.

‘Nell,’ said Stephen again; and clasped her hand, always brown, always warm, always living and loving. The huge geometrical trucks were everywhere, and it was an uncircumspect move for Stephen to make. But it was once more too misty for the authorities to see very much, to take evidence that could be sworn to.

The mist was more like fog as they wound through Harewood’s depopulated community. Harewood really should marry Doreen as soon as it becomes possible, thought Stephen, and make a completely new start in life, perhaps have a much better type of youngster, possibly and properly for the cloth.

Stephen was struck with horror to recollect that he had forgotten all about the costly book which had been almost certainly intended for Harewood, and which Harewood would be among the very few fully to appreciate and rejoice in. The book had not really been noticeable at first light in the eroding flat, but his lapse perturbed Stephen greatly.

‘A fungus and an alga living in a mutually beneficial relationship,’ he said under his breath.

‘What’s that? ‘ asked Nell.

‘It’s the fundamental description of a lichen. You should know that.’

‘Don’t talk about it.’

He saw that she shuddered; she who never even quaked from the cold.

‘It’s unlucky,’ she said.

‘I’m sorry, Nell. I was thinking of the book we left behind, and the words slipped out.’

‘We’re better without the book.’

‘It wasn’t really our book.’

‘We did right in leaving it.’

He realized that it had been the second time when, without thinking, he had seemed ungracious about the big step she had taken for him: the second time at least.

Therefore, he simply answered, ‘I expect so.’

He remained uneasy. He had taken due care not to drive past the crumbling rectory, but nothing could prevent the nondelivery of Harewood’s expensive book being an odious default, a matter of only a few hundred yards. To confirm the guilt, a middle-aged solitary woman at the end of the settlement suddenly pressed both hands to her eyes, as if to prevent herself from seeing the passing car, even in the poor light.

The ascending track was rougher and rockier than on any of Stephen’s previous transits. It was only to be expected, Stephen realized. Moreover, to mist was now added dusk. At the putative Burton’s Clough, he had to take care not to drive over the edge of the declivity; and thereafter he concentrated upon not colliding with the overgrown stony waymark. Shapeless creatures were beginning to emerge which may no longer appear by daylight even in so relatively remote a region. Caution was compelled upon every count.

Thus it was full night when somehow they reached the spot where the track seemed simply to end – with no good reason supplied, as Stephen had always thought. Elizabeth would have been seriously upset if somehow she had seen at such a spot the familiar car in which she had taken so many unforgettable outings, even when a virtual invalid. She might have concluded that at long last she had reached the final bourne.

The moon, still in its third quarter, managed to glimmer, like a fragrance, through the mist; but there could be no visible stars. Stephen switched on his flash, an item of official supply.

‘We don’t need it,’ said Nell. ‘Please not.’

Nell was uncaring of cold, of storm, of fog, of fatigue. Her inner strength was superb, and Stephen loved it. But her indifference to such darkness as this reminded Stephen of her father, that wonderful entity, whom it was so unlucky ever to mention, probably even to think of. None the less, Stephen turned back the switch. He had noticed before that he was doing everything she said.

As best he could, he helped her to unload the car, and followed her along the narrow paths through the damp heather. Naturally, he could not see a trace of the house, and he suddenly realized that, though they struggled in silence, he could not even hear the gently heaving spring. They were making a pile at the spot where the house must be; and Nell never put a foot wrong in finding the pile a second, third, and even fourth time. Much of the trip was steep, and Stephen was quite winded once more by his fourth climb in almost no moonlight at all, only the faint smell of moonlight; but when, that time, he followed Nell over the tangled brow, the mist fell away for a moment, as mist on mountains intermittently does, and at last Stephen could see the house quite clearly.

He looked at Nell standing there, pale and mysterious as the moonlight began to fade once more.

‘Have you still got my letter? ‘

She put her hand on her breast pocket.

‘Of course I have.’

They re-entered the house, for which no key was ever deemed necessary. It might be just as well, for none was available.

Stephen realized at once that what they were doing was moving into the house pretty finally; not, as he had so recently proposed, preparing to move out of it in a short time. It was clear that once Nell truly and finally entered one’s life, one had simply to accept the consequences. Stephen could perceive well enough that Nell was at every point moved by forces in comparison with which he was moved by inauthentic fads. Acquiescence was the only possibility. The admixture in Nell of ignorance and wisdom, sometimes even surface sophistication, was continuously fascinating. In any case, she had left familiar surroundings and completely changed her way of life for him. He must do the same for her without end; and he wished it.

The moonlight was now insufficient to show the state of the walls or the curiously assorted furnishings or the few personal traps he had omitted to bear to London. Stephen had worn gloves to drive and had not removed them to lug. He wore them still.

None the less, when he said, ‘Shall we have a light now?’ he spoke with some reluctance.

“Now,’ said Nell. ‘We’re at home now.’

He fired up some of the rough cressets he had managed to lay hands on when he had borrowed the sottish Jarrold’s Land-Rover.

Nell threw herself against him. She kissed him again and again.

As she did so, Stephen resolved to look at nothing more. To look was not necessarily to see. He even thought he apprehended a new vein of truth in what Nell had said on that second day, still only a very short time ago, about her father.

Nell went upstairs and changed into the dress he had bought her. She had done it without a hint, and he took for granted that she had done it entirely to give pleasure. In aspect, she was no longer a part of nature, merging into it, an oread. Not surprisingly, the dress did not fit very well, but on Nell it looked like a peplos. She was a sybil. Stephen was scarcely surprised. There was no need for him to see anything other than Nell’s white and black robe, intuitively selected, prophetically insisted upon; quite divine, as ordinary normal girls used to say.

When he dashed off his gloves in order to caress her, he regarded only her eyes and her raiment; but later there was eating to be done, and it is difficult, in very primitive lighting, to eat without at moments noticing one’s hands. These particular hands seemed at such moments to be decorated with horrid subfusc smears, quite new. Under the circumstances, they might well have come from inside Stephen’s driving gloves; warm perhaps, but, like most modern products, of no precise or very wholesome origin. If ineradicable, the marks were appalling; not to be examined for a single second.

When Nell took off her new dress, Stephen saw at once (how else but at once?) that her own small single mark had vanished. She was as totally honied as harvest home, and as luscious, and as rich.

Stephen resolved that in the morning, if there was one, he would throw away all the souvenirs of Elizabeth he had brought with him. They could be scattered on the moor as ashes in a memorial garden, but better far. The eyes that were watching from behind the marks on the walls and ceilings and utensils glinted back at him, one and all. The formless left hands were his to shake.

*  *  *  *  *

In the nature of things, love was nonpareil that night; and there was music too. Nell’s inner being, when one knew her, when one really knew her, was as matchless as her unsullied body. Goodness is the most powerful aphrodisiac there is, though few have the opportunity of learning. Stephen had learned long before from the example of Elizabeth, and now he was learning again.

Time finally lost all power.

The music became endlessly more intimate.

‘God!’ cried Stephen suddenly. ‘That’s Schumann!’ He had all but leapt in the air. Ridiculously.

‘Where? ‘ asked Nell. Stephen realized that he was virtually sitting on her. He dragged himself up and was standing on the floor.

‘That music. It’s Schumann.’

‘I hear no music.’

‘I don’t suppose you do.’

Stephen spoke drily and unkindly, as he too often did, but he knew that everything was dissolving.

For example, he could see on the dark wall the large portrait of Elizabeth by a pupil of Philip de Laszlo which had hung in their conjugal bedroom. The simulacrum was faint and ghostly, like the music, but he could see it clearly enough for present purposes, dimly self-illuminated.

He had taken that picture down with his own hands, years and years ago; and the reason had been, as he now instantly recalled, that the light paintwork had speedily become blotched and suffused. They had naturally supposed it to be something wrong with the pigments, and had spoken between themselves of vegetable dyes and the superiorities of Giotto and Mantegna. Stephen had hidden the festering canvas in the communal basement storeroom, and had forgotten about it immediately. Now he could see it perfectly well, not over the bed, but in front of it, as always.

‘Come back,’ said Nell. ‘Come back to me.’

The music, which once, beyond doubt, had been the music of love, was dying away. In its place, was a persistent snuffling sound, as if the house from outside, or the room from inside, was being cased by a wolf.

‘What’s that noise? That noise of an animal? ‘

‘Come back to me,’ said Nell. ‘Come back, Stephen.’ Perhaps she was quite consciously dramatizing a trifle.

He had gone to the window, but of course could see nothing save the misleading huge shapes of the flapping birds.

He went back to the bed and stretched out both his hands to Nell. He was very cold.

Though there was almost no light, Nell grasped his two hands and drew him down to her.

‘You see and hear so many things, Stephen,’ she said.

As she spoke, he had, for moments, a vision of a different kind.

Very lucidly, he saw Nell and himself living together, but, as it might be, in idealized form, vaguely, intensely. He knew that it was an ideal of which she was wonderfully capable, perhaps because she was still so young. All that was required of him was some kind of trust.

Held by her strong hands and arms, he leaned over her and faltered.

‘But whatever animal is that?’ he demanded.

She released his hands and curled up like a child in distress. She had begun to sob.

‘Oh, Nell,’ he cried. He fell on her and tried to reach her. Her muscles were as iron, and he made no impression at all.

In any case, he could not stop attending to the snuffling, if that was the proper word for it. He thought it was louder now. The noise seemed quite to fill the small, low, dark, remote room; to leave no space for renewed love, however desperate the need, however urgent the case.

Suddenly, Stephen knew. A moment of insight had come to him, an instinctual happening.

He divined that outside or inside the little house was Nell’s father.

It was one reason why Nell was twisted in misery and terror. Her father had his own ways of getting to the truth of things. She had said so.

Stephen sat down on the bed and put his hand on her shoulder. Though he was shivering dreadfully, he had become almost calm. The process of illumination was suggesting to him the simple truth that, for Nell too, the past must be ever present. And for her it was, in common terms, the terms after which he himself was so continuously half-aspiring, a past most absurdly recent. How could he tell what experiences were hers, parallel to, but never meeting, his own?

It would be no good even making the obvious suggestion that they should dwell far away. She could never willingly leave the moor, even if it should prove the death of her; no more than he had been able all those years to leave the flat, the job, the life, all of which he had hated, and been kept alive in only by Elizabeth.

‘What’s the best thing to do, Nell?’ Stephen inquired of her. ‘Tell me and we’ll do it exactly. Tell me. I think I’m going to dress while you do so. And then perhaps you’d better dress too.’

After all, he began to think, there was little that Nell had ever said about her father or her sister which many girls might not have said when having in mind to break away. He would not have wanted a girl who had no independent judgement of her own family.

The processes of insight and illumination were serving him well, and the phantom portrait seemed to have dissipated completely. The snuffling and snorting continued. It was menacing and unfamiliar, but conceivably it was caused merely by a common or uncommon but essentially manageable creature of the moors. Stephen wished he had brought his revolver (another official issue), even though he had no experience in discharging it. He could not think how he had omitted it. Then he recollected the horrible furred-up flat, and shuddered anew, within his warm clothes.

For the first time it occurred to him that poor Elizabeth might be trying, from wherever she was, to warn him. Who could tell that Harriet had not made a miraculous recovery (she was, after all, in touch with many different faiths); and was not now ready once more to accept him for a spell into the life at the rectory?

Nell was being very silent.

Stephen went back to the bed.

‘Nell.’

He saw that she was not in the bed at all, but standing by the door.

‘Nell.’

‘Hush,’ she said. ‘We must hide.’

‘Where do we do that?’

‘I shall show you. He could see that she was back in her shirt and trousers; a part of the natural scene once more. Her white dress glinted on the boards of the floor.

To Stephen her proposal seemed anomalous. If it really was her father outside, he could penetrate everywhere, and according to her own statement. If it was a lesser adversary, combat might be better than concealment.

Nell and Stephen went downstairs in the ever more noisy darkness, and Nell, seemingly without effort, lifted a stone slab in the kitchen floor. Stephen could not quite make out how she had done it. Even to find the right slab, under those conditions, was a feat.

‘All the houses have a place like this,’ Nell explained.

‘Why?’ inquired Stephen. Surely Nell’s father was an exceptional phenomenon? Certainly the supposed motion of him was akin to no other motion Stephen had ever heard.

‘To keep their treasure,’ said Nell.

‘You are my treasure,’ said Stephen.

‘You are mine,’ responded Nell.

There were even a few hewn steps, or so they felt to him. Duly it was more a coffer than a room, Stephen apprehended; but in no time Nell had the stone roof down on them, almost with a flick of the elbow, weighty though the roof must have been.

Now the darkness was total; something distinctly different from the merely conventional darkness above. All the same, Stephen of all people could not be unaware that the stone sides and stone floor and stone ceiling of the apartment were lined with moss and lichen. No doubt he had developed sixth and seventh senses in that arena, but the odour could well have sufficed of itself.

‘How do we breathe? ‘

‘There is a sort of pipe. That’s where the danger lies.’

‘You mean it might have become blocked up?’

‘No.’

He did not care next to suggest that it might now be blocked deliberately. He had already made too many tactless suggestions of that kind.

She saved him the trouble of suggesting anything. She spoke in the lowest possible voice.

‘He might come through.’

It was the first time she had admitted, even by implication, who it was: outside or inside – or both. Stephen fully realized that. It was difficult for him not to give way to the shakes once more, but he clung to the vague possibilities he had tried to sort out upstairs.

‘I should hardly think so,’ he said. ‘But how long do you suggest we wait? ‘

‘It will be better when it’s day. He has to eat so often.’

It would be utterly impossible for Stephen to inquire any further; not at the moment. He might succeed in finding his way to the bottom of it all later. He was already beginning to feel cramped, and the smell of the fungi and the algae were metaphorically choking him and the moss realistically tickling him; but he put his arm round Nell in the blackness, and could even feel his letter safe against her soft breast.

She snuggled back at him; as far as circumstances permitted. He had only a vague idea of how big or small their retreat really was.

Nell spoke again in that same lowest possible voice. She could communicate, even in the most pitchy of blackness, while hardly making a sound.

‘He’s directly above us. He’s poised.’

Stephen mustered up from his school days a grotesque recollection of some opera: the final scene. The Carl Rosa had done it: that one scene only; after the film in a cinema near Marble Arch. Elizabeth had thought the basic operatic convention too far-fetched to be taken seriously; except perhaps for Mozart, who could always be taken seriously.

‘I love you,’ said Stephen. No doubt the chap in the opera had said something to the like effect, but had taken more time over it.

Time: that was always the decisive factor. But time had been mastered at last.

‘I love you,’ said Nell, snuggling ever closer; manifesting her feeling in every way she could.

*  *  *  *  *

Curiously enough, it was at the verge of the small, lustrous pool that Stephen’s body was ultimately found.

A poor old man, apparently resistent to full employment and even to the full security that goes with it, found the corpse, though, after all those days or weeks, the creatures and forces of the air and of the moor had done their worst to it, or their best. There was no ordinary skin anywhere. Many people in these busy times would not even have reported the find.

There were still, however, folk who believed, or at least had been told that the pool was bottomless; and even at the inquest a theory was developed that Stephen had been wandering about on the moor and had died of sudden shock upon realizing at what brink he stood. The coroner, who was a doctor of medicine, soon disposed of that hypothesis.

None the less, the actual verdict had to be open; which satisfied nobody. In these times, people expect clear answers; whether right or wrong.

Harewood, almost his pristine self by then, inquired into the possibility of a memorial service in London, which he was perfectly prepared to come up and conduct. After all, Stephen was an OBE already, and could reasonably hope for more.

The view taken was that Stephen had been missing for so long, so entirely out of the official eye, that the proper moment for the idea was regrettably, but irreversibly, past.

The funeral took place, therefore, in Harewood’s own church, where the father and the grandfather of both the deceased and the officiant had shepherded so long with their own quiet distinction. People saw that no other solution had ever really been thinkable.

Doreen had by now duly become indispensible to the rector; in the mysterious absence of Stephen, to whom the rector had specifically allotted that function. At the funeral, she was the only person in full black. Not even the solitary young man from the Ministry emulated her there. It had not been thought appropriate to place Stephen’s OBE on the coffin, but during the service the rector noticed a scrap of lichen thereon which was different entirely, he thought, from any of the species on the walls, rafters, and floors of the church. Performing his office, Harewood could not at once put a name to the specimen. The stuff that already lined the open grave was even more peculiar; and Harewood was more than a little relieved when the whole affair was finally over, the last tributes paid, and he free to stumble back to Doreen’s marmite toast, and lilac peignoir. The newest number of the Journal had come in only just before, but Harewood did not so much as open it that evening.

As Stephen’s will had been rendered ineffective by Elizabeth’s decease, Harewood, as next of kin, had to play a part, whether he felt competent or not, in winding everything up. Fortunately, Doreen had been taking typing lessons, and had bought a second-hand machine with her own money.

The flat was found to be in the most shocking state, almost indescribable. It was as if there had been no visitors for years; which, as Harewood at once pointed out, had almost certainly been more or less the case, since the onset of Elizabeth’s malady, an epoch ago.

A single, very unusual book about Harewood’s own speciality was found. It had been published in a limited edition: a minute one, and at a price so high that Harewood himself had not been among the subscribers.

‘Poor fellow!’ said Harewood. ‘I never knew that he was really interested. One can make such mistakes.’

The valuable book had of course to be disposed of for the benefit of the estate.

Stephen’s car was so far gone that it could be sold only for scrap; but, in the event, it never was sold at all, because no one could be bothered to drag it away. If one knows where to look, one can see the bits of it still.