The Travellers and Other Stories Read online

  Her damp face boiled with heat, her blue dress clung to her like another skin, her heart thumped like a big beating wheel. She took off her black coat, folded it over her arm, and carried it. She wished she could turn back here and go back down to the beck and splash her face and cool her throat with the icy water.

  Above her, a pair of peregrines rose in circles and vanished high up over the crags, into the blue. From beneath she could see the yellow flashes of their legs, the black streaks of their tails and wing-tips and as she watched them she imagined looking down out of the sky at the dark speck of herself moving slowly over the pale brown hills towards Creed’s bothy. The ground was boggy here, up on the higher ground after the path gave out. As she plodded through it the stiff grass brushed her bare knees.

  She wished she didn’t resemble her father. She wished she wasn’t tall as he’d been. She wished she didn’t have his springy hair and large beaky nose and pointy chin. She didn’t want Creed to open his door and think of her father and think that after all these years she’d come to him on some kind of religious mission. She didn’t want him to be surly and unwelcoming. She didn’t want him to slam the door in her face or bellow at her through one of his narrow windows and tell her to be gone. She didn’t want him to pull his gun on her. She wished she’d come up here that other day, with the dominoes. She wished this wasn’t her first time. She wished that the ice had been broken between them before now—that she could at least have become an ordinary neighbour to him. Come on, Michael, it’s just us now. Sit with me. Everyone else has gone. The old have died, the young are all in the towns. My brother Frank, remember? My sister Pam? They’re in Carlisle. Pam’s a nurse. Frank’s at one of the big hotels. The Glaisters have all gone. Partingtons too, and Capsticks and Pickthalls and Hawksmiths, all upped and gone.

  She wondered what Creed made of it all, this emptying out. She wondered what he felt when he turned up at the slaughterhouse with his new season’s lambs, or went into the places he visited for his supplies. She wondered if the people there exchanged secret glances and if he was made to feel uncomfortable. She wondered if he felt like she did and if in spite of everything that had happened in his life, he was always glad to come home.

  There was more wind up here.

  It cooled her face and made a rushing sound through the stiff grass and the bracken, a sound her father always used to say was the same sound he’d grown up with, the sound of the sea. When he said that, her sister Pam used to beg him to take them all on holiday somewhere to the coast, to Morecambe or Blackpool, somewhere sandy and warm where they could stretch out on towels and go bathing and eat ice-cream and see the lights and a show, and every year that they didn’t go she told Ruth that the first bloody chance she got, she was off out of here, away from this boring fucking dump of a valley, these pre-historic hills and struggling miserable little farms.

  Up ahead now, only another hundred yards, Creed’s bothy sat like a dark stone resting in the bottom of a deep smooth-sided bowl. All around it the tawny ramparts of the hills rose to the sky. There’d been no question this morning of setting off towards anything else; there’d been no question of the nine mile walk along the river to a road where she might sit for an hour and wait without a single vehicle passing. With each step now she felt her own slow, dragging gravity. Across the marshy ground she proceeded with difficulty and sometimes she stumbled.

  His yard was bordered by a woodshed and a privy and the L-shaped dwelling part of the bothy itself. Turf and ferns and a spongy blanket of moss grew on the thick shaley roof-slates. The bothy door was painted brown. Bronze lichen grew on his walls like rust. A trio of his black-faced sheep burst out from behind them when they saw her coming, bunching together and jostling each other in their hurry to get away, as if she was something dangerous.

  Oh Jesus, what would he say to her? Would he be appalled by the sight of her? Would he know who she was? Would he hold that against her? Would he look past her through the open brown door and out beyond the opening in his yard across the soggy uplands and the pale brown hills and down into the long tapering valley with its scattered emptied farms and ask her how in glory’s name it had happened? Would he turn sarcastic and ask her if she’d had a visit from the Holy Spirit?

  At the corner of his yard a rowan tree grew out of the stones. She leaned against it, breathed. The hour’s walk, the climb, had taken her half the day. Her hair felt prickly and dry as gorse. There was bog cotton in it, grass and cuckoo spit. Blood leaked out of her, filling her boots and coating the ground. She’d known since this morning that something was wrong.

  She could no longer recall the Scotsman’s face, only his sandy hair and his pale body.

  When he was gone she realised she didn’t know his name or the name of his town or what job he did in the rest of his life or if he had a wife and children. She wasn’t used to conversation and they’d hardly talked.

  He told her he’d come over Rampsgill Head and round Blea Tarn and after that the fog had come down and he’d had no compass and had to continue on his hands and knees, worried that he’d turned himself round and wasn’t where he thought he was and that on one side or the other there might be nothing but crag and scree and a sheer plunging drop to the bottom. When he saw her light he’d thought at first it must be the sun or the moon, a small whitish glow in the murk.

  In the morning he’d thanked her for the hot breakfast and her warm bed. He was glad the ugly weather had brought him to her door, he said. He’d had a nice time.

  She could see nothing now, even in the daylight everything was dark and all she could feel was the raised lump of the cross at her throat. She wished she hadn’t worn it. She was afraid again it might make Creed angry, that anything like that might disgust him still, that he’d send her away. She began to tug at the chain and fumble with the clasp at the back of her neck. Her last mad thought was that she wished there was some way she could tidy herself up. At least put a comb through her hair.

  Creed’s dogs found her in his yard.

  He didn’t recognise her but he knew she must be one of the Reverend’s daughters from the valley, whichever one had stayed behind. He could see the bevelled edges of a crucifix beneath the blue fabric of her dress. He couldn’t remember her name but over the years he’d seen her many times, a dark point down there, moving between her house and the church. He’d seen the cars that once in a while fetched her away then brought her back along the track beside the river. Her lips moved a little and he wondered if she was praying. There was blood on the stony earth of his yard. A large clot, dark and ragged like liver on the hem of her dropped black coat.

  Creed was brawny and white-haired and tall. He lifted her up and carried her inside and put her on his bed. In his whole life he had never seen so much blood.

  At the sink he rolled up his sleeves and scrubbed himself and slipped his right arm up inside her. He moved his hand up past the torn and pulsing placenta and found the breeched legs, the curving beads of the small spine. Ruth’s eyelids fluttered and Creed didn’t tell her that she’d come too late. He knelt by the bed and stroked her hair and told her in a soft voice that she was a good girl, a brave girl. He repeated the same whispered words over and over the way he did with his sheep when they couldn’t birth and they were suffering and miserable; and when he was sure there was no more time and no other way he boiled up a pan and went in under the breastbone with his razor and brought out the child, a tiny curled-up girl with a pointy chin and a small beaky nose and a glistening cap of sand-coloured hair, and when the long night ended and morning came and Creed had done everything he could with his boiled cloths and his needle and his fine cotton thread, when he’d tried every desperate thing short of a prayer to stop the blood and there was nothing at all, now, that could be done and it was over, he went and stood for a long time looking out through one of his arrow-slit windows at the sloping fell aflame in the dawn with the child in his arms.

  She was light as a leaf and just as beautiful.<
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  He’d call her Rowan, after the tree in his wall.

  He wished his wife could see her.

  NOTHING LIKE MY NIGHTMARE

  THE DAY SHE left I thought of all the things that could go wrong: that she’d lose her passport or her glasses or run out of anti-bacterial handwash. Or the nuns wouldn’t be there to meet her and take her to the school as they’d promised. Or she’d go to the cash machine her first day in the city and it wouldn’t give her any money. Or she’d get a blister on her foot like the one she got in Solva last summer from her new sandal and it would get infected and she wouldn’t go to the doctor in time and it would grow gangrenous and she’d end up having to have her leg amputated, or she’d have brought the wrong kind of adapter, or the travel towel she’d bought from Millets would be worse than useless, or her plane would crash, exploding in a ball of black fire somewhere high above the mountains—but when we got there, the old man in the bright shawl said it was nothing like that. It just broke in two like a bread roll, spilling crumbs from the sky.

  SIBYL

  Sibyl (si · bil) 1. One of various women of antiquity who were reputed to possess powers of prophecy or divination.

  —The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary

  FOR A WHILE now, Sibyl Hadley has been watching the umbrella boy from her rented deckchair.

  He is wearing a pair of long turquoise shorts patterned all over with big white flowers and tied loosely in front, with laces, like a pair of shoes. He has beads in his hair and a smooth golden chest and smooth arms with ropy veins visible beneath the skin, a rise and then a hollow around each low-lying hip bone above the dangling laces of his flower-splashed shorts.

  He doesn’t seem to feel the cold—he isn’t, as far as she can tell, shivering even slightly in the wind, in the bright chilly sunshine. Sibyl herself is wrapped up like a parcel in layers of warm clothing—trousers and tights and a polo-neck sweater, a quilted waterproof jacket with the hood up. She has taken off her reading glasses and laid her book face-down across her lap in order to watch the boy as he goes about his work, planting the long metal spikes of the umbrellas in the damp sand, making sure they are securely buried and canted into the wind, then carefully unfurling their fluttering canvas shades.

  He’d smiled at her when she’d gone to the door of his little wooden hut to pay for her deckchair, and when she’d given him the money for it and her thumb had brushed against the skin of his open palm, it had sent a rush of feeling through the whole of her body.

  He’s busy now, locked in a struggle with the rising wind, trying to shake out the heavy folded shade on the last of the umbrellas, all of which, like the deckchairs, are available for rent, either by the day or by the hour. There. He’s done it. Sibyl watches him brushing the wet sand from his hands onto his shorts and shaking his beaded hair like a dog drying itself.

  There are tears in Sibyl’s eyes when she looks away, out across the flat grey water of the Channel and over at the peeling ochre façade of the old casino at the far end of the beach near the town.

  ‘Dear God,’ she whispers into the wind. ‘How did I get so old?’

  From the dining room of the Hôtel Mercure, Wade Abello looks out across the boardwalk to where the Englishwoman is sitting, bundled up in her deckchair with her book on her lap, looking out across the sea.

  At the market in town this morning he has bought her a dusty rough-hewn bar of hand-made lavender soap. It is wrapped in a brown paper bag and he is holding it now in his enormous right hand.

  He is a vast, pear-shaped man, Wade Abello, the owner of a feed store in Mason, Wyoming, and clad, today, in a huge pair of khaki trousers with an elasticated waistband, a neatly pressed short-sleeved shirt of peppermint green cotton seersucker that might otherwise do duty as a slip-cover for a good-sized armchair.

  He knows her name is Sibyl Hadley because he has read it upside-down in the maroon leather register at the front desk in the lobby.

  ‘Sibyl,’ he practises, feeling his heartbeat quicken.

  Yesterday, at the church in Dives, he’d looked in through the leper’s hole and seen her at the altar, praying.

  She didn’t kneel but her head was bowed and her eyes were closed and her hands were clasped together under her chin.

  He’d stood there for a long time, holding his breath and wondering what it was that a woman like Sibyl Hadley might be praying for at her age; if, by any chance, it might possibly be the same thing that he is.

  When the time had come for the minibus to leave the church and bring them back to the hotel, he’d considered asking her if he could sit next to her, but she was at the front and in the end he hadn’t been confident that he could fit into the narrow seat at her side without most of his body hanging out over the aisle, which would have meant that he’d have been blocking it when the young German family and the Italian newlyweds boarded the bus and wanted to get by. So he’d moved past her and sat down near the back and looked at the top of her head and now and then, when the sun went behind a cloud and the windows went dark, at the reflection of her face in the glass as they drove back along the coast.

  It’s been a disappointment to Sibyl that even though it is not yet the end of August, the Hôtel Mercure is less than half-full.

  Aside from herself, the only guests are a young German family and an Italian couple on their honeymoon, a fat American man in a luminous green shirt who looks at his feet whenever she smiles at him and has yet to address a single word in her direction.

  It’s the weather, apparently, that’s keeping people away—the cold and the unseasonable wind. The days are quiet and the nights are empty, the only sounds things she wishes she didn’t have to hear: the noisy whooping of the wind outside her window, and the even noisier whooping of the Italian newlyweds in the room next to hers.

  Three times now they have woken her in the small hours; she can hear them through the wall. Three nights running they have woken her and she has lain there till dawn beneath the crisp clean sheets of her comfortable double bed unable to go back to sleep.

  Yesterday at the church in Dives she’d prayed.

  After listening to the guide tell them about the blessing of the Norman ships before they set off on their conquering journey across the Channel, she’d walked up to the altar and bowed her head and clasped her hands together and prayed and then immediately felt ridiculous.

  It was years since she’d set foot in a church except to look at the things inside, and even if she still said things like ‘Heaven help me’ and ‘God forbid’ she no longer believed they had any power or meaning.

  Perhaps that had been part of the problem, believing that they did. Perhaps her mistake had been to tell herself, as the years slipped by, that what happened or didn’t happen in this life was of no importance; that none of it really mattered because if you were patient and did not dwell on things too much, your reward would come later. Well she didn’t think that any more, especially since her illness. Her prayer yesterday had been, in every possible way, a nonsense, an aberration, and all the way back to the hotel on the minibus she’d scolded herself for doing something so stupid and pathetic. For an hour and a half after they got back to town she’d walked along the beach, all the way up to the Roches Noires and back, gulping down the air.

  Looking now at the umbrella boy, it occurs to her that she could pay him.

  There’s a piece of orange nylon rope knotted around the handle of the open door to his little wooden hut and it looks to her as if the door could be tied shut.

  It would be dark inside which she thinks on balance she’d probably prefer. Even though she would like to see him she is shy about him seeing her.

  She closes her hand around the folded notes in the pocket of her quilted jacket and counts them with her fingers; wonders if what she has with her is likely to be enough, or if he might ask for more.

  There are other things in her life she always thought would happen that never did, but this is the only one of them, she’s discovered la
tely, that seems important. It is the only one of them, now, she really, really minds about.

  In her head, in her best French, she rehearses a form of words that will convey to the boy what it is she wants; what it is she has somehow ended up going her entire life without.

  What Wade pictures is him and the Englishwoman hiking up to one of the flat alpine meadows in the mountains above his brown-shingled house in Mason.

  The two of them tucking into a picnic of cold grilled chicken sandwiches with mustard mayonnaise on thick slices of fresh rye bread. Some cold beers. A few slices of apricot Danish from the bakery over in Marbleton. Maybe some crumbly Canadian cheddar and a box of hand-made chocolates.

  Then both of them shedding all their clothes—his khaki pants and his peppermint shirt, her padded trousers and her sweater and her quilted waterproof jacket—the two of them together out in the open air in Wyoming on top of a mattress of tough flattened grass with the remains of their picnic around them; he, Wade Abello, doing everything perfectly—knowing, somehow, exactly what to do; the Englishwoman called Sibyl Hadley throwing back her head and yodelling with pleasure and delight and a low deep-throated shudder of relief.

  With her hand curled around the money in her pocket Sibyl runs through in her head the words of her short but, she hopes, clear speech.

  She goes over it several times, making various changes and corrections, hesitating over whether to use ‘je veux’ or ‘je voudrais’, I want or I would like, and then she stops.

  The boy is in his hut now, leaning against the frame of the open door. He has finished putting up his umbrellas and is smoking a cigarette.

  Sibyl looks at him, watches the gentle rise and fall of his chest, the movement of his lips, and slowly her fingers uncurl from around the money in the pocket of her coat. The folded notes slip free of her empty hand, and for the second time today her eyes fill with tears. She knows that it is beyond her to ask him, that she cannot possibly do it, and it comes to her then, to Sibyl, in almost the same moment and with all the clarity of a vision or a prophecy, as she sits alone in her rented deckchair on the beach in Trouville in the last week of an unseasonably cold August in the summer of her sixty-seventh year, that the only event now of any importance she can reasonably expect to experience in what remains of her life is likely to be her own death.