‘Why don’t we leave the rest till tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Then I’d feel up to walking round with you.’
‘Today’s our last day.’
Norton couldn’t think of an answer to that.
It was only when they passed the fifty-seventh bear that he realized how upset Sadie was. The bear lay stretched into the road ahead of them, a ponderous brown Sphinx occupying a pool of sunlight. Sadie could not have missed seeing him: she had to pull out into the left lane to get round, but she set her lips and said nothing, accelerated, and shot them past a bend in the road. She was driving recklessly now. When they came to the junction near the great rainbow pools, she drove by so fast that a group of people about to cross the road jumped back in alarm, and the ranger with them yelled out angrily ‘Hey, slow down there!’ A few hundred yards beyond the junction Sadie began to cry. Her face puckered up and her nose reddened; tears streamed into the corners of her mouth and over her chin.
‘Pull up,’ Norton ordered at last, taking the reins in hand. The car bumped off onto the shoulder of the road, bucked once or twice, and stalled. Sadie collapsed like a rag doll over the steering wheel.
‘I didn’t ask anything else,’ she sobbed vaguely. ‘All I asked was the pools and the springs.’
‘Look,’ Norton said, ‘I know what’s the matter with us. It’s about two o’clock, and we’ve been driving around six hours without a bite.’
Sadie’s sobs quietened. She let him untie her straw hat and stroke her hair.
‘We’ll go along to Mammoth Junction,’ Norton went on, as if he were telling a soothing bedtime story, ‘and we’ll have hot soup and sandwiches, and see if there’s any mail, and we’ll climb all the hot springs and stop at all the pools going back. How’s that?’
Sadie nodded. He felt her hesitate for a second. Then she blurted ‘Did you see the bear?’
‘Of course I saw the bear,’ Norton said, hiding a smile. ‘How many is that, now?’
‘Fifty-seven.’
With the waning of the sun’s force, the pleasant, pliable shape of Sadie’s waist in the crook of his arm, Norton felt a new benevolence toward humanity bloom in him. The irritable flame at the base of his skull cooled. He started the car with a firm, complacent mastery.
*
Now Sadie strolled, well-fed and at peace, a few yards ahead of him, invisible, swathed in a mist, but surely his as a lamb on a leash. Her innocence, her trustfulness, endowed him with the nimbus of a protecting god. He fathomed her, enclosed her. He did not see, or did not care to see, how her submissiveness moved and drew him, nor how now, through the steaming, suffocating baths of mist, she led him, and he followed, though the rainbows under the clear water were lost.
By the time they completed their circuit of the boardwalk, the sun had gone under the hills and the tall pines walled the deserted road with shadow. As he drove, a touch of uneasiness made Norton glance at the gas meter. The white pointer registered empty. Sadie must have seen it, too, for in the obscure, fading light she was watching him.
‘Do you think we’ll make it?’ she asked, with a curious vibrancy.
‘Of course,’ Norton said, although he was not at all sure. There were no gas stations until they got to the lake, and that stretch would take over an hour. The tank had a reserve, of course, but he had never tested it, never let it run below a quarter full. The upset with Sadie must have taken his mind off the meter. They could so easily have filled up at Mammoth Junction. He switched on the long beams, but even then the little cave of light moving ahead of them seemed no match for the dark battalions of surrounding pines. He thought how pleasant it would be, for a change, to see the beams of another car close behind him, reflected in the rear-view mirror. But the mirror brimmed with darkness. For one craven, irrational moment, Norton felt the full weight of the dark: it bore down on top of his skull, pressed in upon him from all sides, brutally, concentratedly, as if intent to crush the frail, bone-plated shell that set him apart.
Working to moisten his lips, which had gone quite dry, Norton started to sing against the dark, something he had not done since childhood.
‘You wanderin’ boys of Liverpool
I’ll have you to beware
When you go a-huntin’
With your dog, your gun, your snare …’
The plaintive cadences of the song deepened the loneliness of the night around them.
‘One night as I lay on my bunk
A dreamin’ all alone …’
Suddenly, like a candle in a draft, Norton’s memory flickered. The words of the song blacked out. But Sadie took it up:
‘I dreamt I was in Liverpool
Way back in Marylebone …’
They finished in unison:
‘With my true love beside me
And a jug of ale in hand
And I woke quite broken-hearted
Lying off Van Diemen’s land.’
Forgetting the words disturbed Norton: he had known them by heart, surely as his name. His brain felt to be going soft.
In half an hour of driving they passed no landmark they recognized, and the pointer of the gas meter was dipping well below empty. Norton found himself listening to the tenuous whirring of the motor as to the breathing of a dear, moribund relative, his ears cocked for the break in continuity, the faltering, the silence.
‘Even if we make this,’ Sadie said once, with a taut little laugh, ‘There will be two more bad things. There’ll be a trailer parked in our car space and a bear waiting at the tent.’
At last the lake loomed before them, a radiant, silvery expanse beyond the dark, cone-shapes of the pines, reflecting the stars and the ruddy, newly risen moon. A flash of white crossed the headlights as a stag galloped off into the brush. The faint, dry reverberation of the stag’s hooves consoled them, and the sight of the open water. Across the lake, a tiny crownlet of lights marked the shops of the camp center. Twenty minutes later they were driving into the lit gas station, laughing like giddy adolescents. The engine died five yards from the pump.
Norton hadn’t seen Sadie so gay since the start of their trip. Sleeping out, even in state parks, among the other tents and trailers, unnerved her. One evening when he had walked off along the lake shore for a few moments, leaving her to finish up the supper dishes, she had become hysterical—run down to the shore with her dish-towel, waving and calling, the blue shadows thickening around her like water, until he heard her and turned back. But now the safely-passed scare of darkness, the empty tank and the unpeopled road was affecting her like brandy. Her exhilaration bewildered him; he shouldered the burden of her old cautions, her rabbitish fears. As they drove into the campground and around D-loop to their site, Norton’s heart caught. Their tent was gone. Then, flushing at his own foolishness, he saw that the tent was merely hidden behind the long, balloon shape of an unfamiliar aluminum trailer which had moved in on them.
He swung the car into the parking space behind the trailer. The headlights fixed on a dark, mounded shape a few yards from their tent. Sadie gave a low, exultant laugh. ‘Fifty-eight!’
Distracted by the bright lights, or the noise of the engine, the bear backed away from the garbage can. Then, at a cumbersome lope, it vanished into the maze of darkened tents and trailers.
Usually Sadie did not like to cook supper after dark, because the food smells attracted animals. Tonight, though, she went to the camp ice chest and took out the pink fillets of lake trout they caught the day before. She fried them, with some cold boiled potatoes, and steamed a few ears of corn. She even went through the ritual of mixing ovaltine by the yellow beam of their flashlight and cheerfully heated water for the dishes.
To make up for the loss of the water bag and his carelessness about the gas tank, Norton was especially scrupulous about cleaning up. He wrapped the remains of the fried fish in wax paper and stored it in the back seat of the car, along with a bag of cookies, some fig newtons and the ice chest. He checked the car windows and locked the doors. The tru
nk of the car was packed with enough canned and dry goods to last them two months; he made sure that was locked. Then he took the bucket of soapy dishwater and scrubbed down the wooden table and the two benches. Bears only bothered messy campers, the rangers said—people who littered food about or kept food in their tents. Every night, of course, the bears traveled throughout the camp, from garbage can to garbage can, foraging. You couldn’t stop that. The cans had metal lids and were set deep in the ground, but the bears were sly enough to flip up the tops and scoop out the debris, rummaging through wax paper and cardboard cartons for stale breadcrusts, bits of hamburgers and hotdogs, jars with honey or jam still glued to the sides, all the prodigal leavings of campers without proper iceboxes or storage bins. In spite of the strict rules, people fed the bears, too—lured them with sugar and crackers to pose in front of the camera, even shoved their children under the bear’s nose for a more amusing shot.
In the furred, blue moonlight, the pines bristled with shadow. Norton imagined the great, brutish shapes of the bears padding there, in the heart of the black, nosing for food. His headache was bothering him again. Together with the headache, something else beat at the edge of his mind, tantalizing as the forgotten words to a song: some proverb, some long-submerged memory he fished for but could not come by.
‘Norton!’ Sadie hissed from within the tent.
He went to her with the slow, tranced gestures of a sleepwalker, zipping the canvas door with its inset window of mosquito netting behind him. The sleeping-bag had taken warmth from her body, and he crawled in beside her as into a deep nest.
*
The crash woke him. He dreamed it first, the tearing smash, the after-shattering tinkle of glass, then woke, with a deadly clear head, to hear it going on still, a diminished cascade of bells and gongs.
Beside him Sadie lay taut. The breath of her words caressed his ear. ‘My bear,’ she said, as if she had called it up out of the dark.
After the crash the air seemed unnaturally quiet. Then Norton heard a scuffling in the vicinity of the car. A bumping and clattering set in, as if the bear were bowling cans and tins down an incline. It’s got into the trunk, Norton thought. It’s going to rip open all our stews and soups and canned fruits and sit there all night, gorging. The vision of the bear at their stores infuriated him. The bear was somehow at the root of the filched water bag, the empty gas tank, and, as if that were not enough, he would eat them out of two months’ supplies in a single night.
‘Do something.’ Sadie huddled down into the nest of blankets. ‘Shoo him away.’ Her voice challenged him, yet his limbs were heavy.
Norton could hear the bear snuffling and padding along beside the tent. The canvas luffed like a sail. Gingerly, he climbed out of the sleeping bag, reluctant to leave the dark, musky warmth. He peered through the netting of the door. In the blue drench of moonlight he could see the bear hunched at the left rear window of the car, shoving its body through a gap where the glass should have been. With a crackle, like the fisting of a ball of paper, the bear brought out a little bundle of straw and trailing ribbons.
A surge of anger beat up in Norton’s throat. The damn bear had no right to his wife’s hat, mangling it like that. The hat belonged to Sadie as indissolubly as her own body, and there was the bear, ravaging it, picking it apart in a horrid, inquisitive way.
‘You stay here,’ Norton said. ‘I’m going to drive that bear off.’
‘Take the light. That’ll scare it.’
Norton felt for the cold, cylindrical shape of the flashlight on the floor of the tent, unzipped the door, and stepped out into the pale blur of moonlight. The bear had managed to get the fried fish out of the bottom of the car now, and stood reared, preoccupied, fumbling with the wax paper wrappings. The remains of Sadie’s hat, a grotesque crumple of straw, lay at its feet.
Norton aimed the beam of the flashlight straight at the bear’s eyes. ‘Get out of here, you,’ he said.
The bear did not move.
Norton took a step forward. The shape of the bear towered against the car. Norton could see, in the glare of the light, the jagged teeth of glass around the hole gaping in the car window. ‘Get out …’ He held the light steady, moving forward, willing the bear to be gone. At any moment the bear should break and run. ‘Get out …’ But there was another will working, a will stronger, even, than his.
The darkness fisted and struck. The light went out. The moon went out in a cloud. A hot nausea flared through his heart and bowels. He struggled, tasting the thick, sweet honey that filled his throat and oozed from his nostrils. As from a far and rapidly receding planet, he heard a shrill cry—of terror, or triumph, he could not tell.
It was the last bear, her bear, the fifty-ninth.
Mothers
Esther was still upstairs when Rose called in at the back door. ‘Yoohoo, Esther, you ready?’ Rose lived with her retired husband Cecil in the topmost of the two cottages in the lane leading up to Esther’s house—a large, thatched manor farm with its own cobbled court. The cobbles were not ordinary street cobbles, but pitch cobbles, their narrow, oblong sides forming a mosaic melted to gentleness by centuries of boots and hooves. The cobbles extended under the stout, nail-studded oak door into the dark hall between the kitchen and scullery, and in old Lady Bromehead’s day had formed the floor of the kitchen and scullery as well. But after old Lady Bromehead fell and broke her hip at the age of ninety and was removed to a Home, a series of servantless tenants had persuaded her son to lay linoleum in those rooms.
The oak door was the back door; everybody but the random stranger used it. The front door, yellow-painted and flanked by two pungent bushes of box, faced across an acre of stinging nettles to where the church indicated a grey heaven above its scallop of surrounding headstones. The front gate opened just under the corner of the graveyard.
Esther tugged her red turban down around her ears, then adjusted the folds of her cashmere coat loosely so that she might, to the casual eye, seem simply tall, stately and fat, rather than eight months pregnant. Rose had not rung the bell before calling in. Esther imagined Rose, curious, avid Rose, eyeing the bare floorboards of the front hall and the untidy strewing of the baby’s toys from front room to kitchen. Esther couldn’t get used to people opening the door and calling in without ringing first. The postman did it, and the baker, and the grocer’s boy, and now Rose, who was a Londoner and should have known better.
Once when Esther was arguing loudly and freely with Tom over breakfast, the back door had popped open and a handful of letters and magazines clapped onto the hall cobbles. The postman’s cry of ‘Morning!’ faded. Esther felt spied on. For some time after that, she bolted the back door from the inside, but the sound of tradesmen trying the door and finding it bolted in broad day, and then ringing the bell and waiting until she came and noisily undid the bolt, embarrassed her even more than their former calling in. So she left the bolt alone again, and took care not to argue so much, or at least not so loudly.
When Esther came down, Rose was waiting just outside the door, smartly dressed in a satiny lavender hat and checked tweed coat. At her side stood a blond, bony-faced woman with bright blue eyelids and no eyebrows. This was Mrs Nolan, the wife of the pub keeper at the White Hart. Mrs Nolan, Rose said, never came to the Mothers’ Union meetings because she had no one to go with, so Rose was bringing her to this month’s meeting, together with Esther.
‘Do you mind waiting just another minute, Rose, while I tell Tom I’m off?’ Esther could feel Rose’s shrewd eyes checking over her hat, her gloves, her patent leather heels, as she turned and picked her ginger way up the cobbles to the back garden. Tom was planting roller berries in the newly-spaded square behind the empty stables. The baby sat in the path on a pile of red earth, ladling dirt into her lap with a battered spoon.
Esther felt her little grievances about Tom’s not shaving and his letting the baby play in the dirt fade at the sight of the two of them, quiet and in perfect accord. ‘Tom!’ She res
ted her white glove, without thinking, on the earth-crusted wooden gate. ‘I’m off now. If I’m late getting back, will you boil the baby an egg?’
Tom straightened and shouted some word of encouragement that foundered between them in the dense November air, and the baby turned in the direction of Esther’s voice, her mouth black, as if she had been eating dirt. But Esther slipped away, before the baby could heave up and toddle after her, to where Rose and Mrs Nolan were waiting at the bottom of the court.
Esther let them through the seven-foot high, stockade-like gate and latched it behind them. Then Rose crooked out her two elbows, and Mrs Nolan took one, and Esther took the other, and the three women teetered in their best shoes down the stony lane past Rose’s cottage, and the cottage of the old blind man and his spinster sister at the bottom, and into the road.
‘We’re meeting in the church today.’ Rose tongued a peppermint drop into her cheek and passed the twist of tinfoil round. Both Esther and Mrs Nolan refused politely. ‘We don’t always meet in church, though. Only when there’s new members joining up.’
Mrs Nolan rolled her pale eyes skyward, whether in general consternation or simply at the prospect of church, Esther couldn’t tell. ‘Are you new in town, too?’ she asked Mrs Nolan across Rose’s front, leaning forward a little.
Mrs Nolan gave a short, joyless laugh. ‘I’ve been here six years.’
‘Why you must know everybody by now!’
‘Hardly a soul,’ Mrs Nolan intoned, causing misgivings, like a flock of chilly-toed birds, to clutter at Esther’s heart. If Mrs Nolan, an Englishwoman by her looks and accent, and a pub-keeper’s wife as well, felt herself a stranger in Devon after six years, what hope had Esther, an American, of infiltrating that rooted society ever at all?
The three women proceeded, arm in arm, along the road under the high, holly-hedged boundary of Esther’s acre, past her front gate and on under the red cob wall of the churchyard. Flat, lichen-bitten tombstones tilted at the level of their heads. Worn deep into the earth long before pavements were thought of, the road curved like some ancient riverbed under its slant banks.