Molly had remembered little of this place—a few stored images that she would pull up and talk of occasionally. The hens that laid their eggs in the hedge, where they weren’t supposed to. Ice on puddles. Those homemade toys. Blood on her leg after she had gashed it on a gate. This gate, here? Ruth set aside the photograph book and considered the ducks, the willows, the water. Molly never spoke of those; perhaps they were furnishings so mundane, so accepted, that they vanished from her memory. What kind of duck is that, and that?
Brian was clattering down the stairs. He appeared in the doorway, looking rather smug. “Some rejigging of the resources. I am sleeping on the couch in the study, and you are having my bedroom. I’ve changed the sheets. I want you to wake up in the morning and see the frescos.”
“Oh—you shouldn’t have done that. But it’s a very kind thought—thank you.”
“Now I need to pay some attention to our supper, or you’ll regret the decision to eat here rather than have a jaunt to Williton.”
He returned presently with glasses of wine. “All under control.” He pointed at the book of photographs. “Yesteryear is big business. You’ll have noted the brown signs on all sides—the place is made to earn its living, and a good slice of the living is what’s over and done with.”
“The steam train.”
“That—and a good deal else. But transport is of much interest, here as anywhere. Vintage car rallies. Gatherings of old tractors.”
“I wonder why. Vintage leaves me cold, I’m afraid.”
“It’s a man thing, on the whole. Not this man, either. Though transport as such is certainly grist to my mill. How people got where they did, and why. Perceptions of time and space. Early travelers. The movements of armies. Oh dear, I’m off again.”
“Please keep going.”
“You’re being very tolerant. I get quite bottled up, on my own here, and become the Ancient Mariner when a visitor appears. Have you ever heard of the Harepath?” He described the west country track, still visible at points up on Exmoor, along which Saxon farmers moved when summoned to war—the army path. “Ninth-century motorway. Now they certainly saw space differently.”
“So do children. The world shrinking as they grow. Maybe they experience the whole process—from crawling to staggering to running. And they always want to get to the other place—the elsewhere.”
He laughed. “I’d not thought of that. I like it.”
“Alice,” said Ruth, “drinking from that bottle, and getting larger and larger. Her arm sticking out of the window. That’s all about confusions over size and space.”
“Of course. Thank you. I see a promising digression here.”
“And what about fairy story? The seven-league boots. That’s about somehow defeating space.”
“Jack and the beanstalk. Quite so. The Arabian Nights—magic carpets. This is a rich seam.”
“And time comes into it too. The Sleeping Beauty. Rip van Winkle. What’s all that about?”
“Hmmn…Escaping time? Stepping aside. Resisting the dictation of.”
From the kitchen there came an imperative ping. They both laughed.
Brian got up. “That is telling me the potatoes are nearly done. And I must put the chops on.”
“What shall I do?”
“The salad, perhaps.”
They ate with the door open onto the evening. Ruth thought: This was not supposed to happen. I am supposed to be in Devon now, not sitting here having a meal with someone I never met until a few hours ago. About to sleep in the room in which my mother was born. This is a kink in time—my personal time. Contingency moving in—twitching you off course. That passing car, the stone on the road, and me—all meeting up at that moment.
Brian pointed out that bats were flying past—a black flicker against the midnight blue sky. “Now the bat perception of space is something else, by all accounts. I think we won’t go there. Shall we have coffee outside? Dark—but not particularly cold.”
He guided her across the grass with a torch, to the seat he had put under one of the old apple trees. From there, the cottage was a shadowy outline; the lit window glowed, private and inviting. Crisp stars above. The bats.
“An owl has to hoot,” said Ruth. “To make it pure film set.”
“I’m afraid they do, occasionally.”
“Lucas—Heron Press Lucas—remembered it being very primitive back then. A standpipe outside. And he never mentioned the frescos. I suppose he forgot them.”
“Do you think I should have public open days?”
“And a brown sign?” She laughed. “I think not. Sacrilege. They’ll be for a select few only.”
“A Matt Faraday Society, perhaps? Annual conference on Blue Anchor beach.”
“He does have his admirers. It’s connoisseur stuff.” She paused; behind this talk there lay the reality of the young man and woman who had been here, once. Beached, now, decades past, while the place strode on.
“I went to Crete once, a few years ago,” she said. And told him about that time. Well, not quite all. And Brian, too, it seemed, knew it, had visited when in pursuit of ancient Mediterranean trade routes. For a while, that sunsoaked landscape hung against the Somerset night.
“Are you getting cold?” He stood up. “And we didn’t finish that wine.”
Back inside, she said, “What time is the windscreen man coming tomorrow?”
He looked vague. “Oh—I’m not too sure. I’ll call them first thing. Do you have a deadline for getting to Devon?”
“Well, I told my stepfather I’d probably be there about lunchtime.”
It was nearly midnight before Ruth got into bed. They had talked on. Generalities; particularities. Lying there, before she fell deeply asleep, she was aware of a continuous flow, rare with a stranger, in which one theme segued into another, without a break, in which his views on contemporary farming practices had somehow become Ruth’s account of selling artworks. She had glimpsed a life: a marriage long expired, a flat in that northern city, students, colleagues, commitments. She knew that she too must be supplying clues, hints. They cleared up the kitchen together; later, there was a polite skirmish about who should use the bathroom first. As she washed, Ruth looked at the shaving stuff, his bits and pieces, and realized that it was years since she had shared a bathroom with a man. This is all very odd, she had thought. But odd is all it is. That’s all.
When she woke, it was full morning. Eight o’clock, and the bird life in full cry. She got up, drew the curtains, and lay there looking. She counted the figures. Were they meant to be a sequence, a troop, or the same couple repeated all around. They had no features, they were just flying figures—arms, legs, breasts, buttocks. The woman was fuller, softer; he was more taut, more muscular. Were they Lorna and Matt?
She heard Brian go downstairs. Then he came up again, and there was a knock.
“Come in.”
Gingerly, he stuck his head around the door. “Thought you might care for a cup of tea.” He put it on the chest of drawers and was gone.
When she came down he was getting breakfast. “I’ve spoken to the man, and it seems he can’t make it until after lunch. Is that going to be a problem for you?”
“Not for me. I can tell Sam. But I’m not going to take up any more of your time. I’ll just sit around—or go for a walk—and you must get on with what you’re doing.”
He grinned. He seemed to be in high spirits, like someone about to go on holiday, about to break out. “I have a plan. Sit. Toast coming up. Marmalade or honey? Tea or coffee?”
She watched him as he reached for this and that, talked. A little clumsy—the bread knife got dropped; short-sighted—he had to peer at a label before tutting and throwing a jar into the bin. “No, no—use before January.” She was wanting to smile. Why? His mood was contagious. Outside, the morning sang on.
The plan involved a drive, a walk. “My mystery tour. Your introduction to these parts. Up over the moor for a bit, then down to the alabaster bea
ch in honor of Matt’s little figure.”
Introduction? She thought. Am I coming back?
It was a day of flying sun and cloud, the light changing from moment to moment. The stubble field alongside the cottage was yellow as sunshine. Beyond, the hillside was brilliant—a complexity of fields, a copse, one single patch of rich red earth—all of it set against dark gray cloud, against which stood a rainbow.
They got into his car. He was cavalier with the lanes, whipping confidently ahead, bolting into gateways when something came. They climbed, they rose up into space, amid the great slack contours of the moor, that reached away, that folded down into green combes. They stopped, got out, and walked for a bit along a heathery path, sat for a while on a great stone by a gate. He waved a hand: “Dunkery Beacon. Highest point. We haven’t got time to go up. Perhaps another…” He bit off the end of the sentence, looked away.
She concentrated on the view: the purple hillside, a flare of yellow gorse, a little knot of sheep in a gully. What did he…? Is this what I think?
They got back into the car. He was talking fervently of some conservation issue, his eyes screwed up against the sun.
She found that she had said, “You need dark glasses.” It was meant to be a thought. She told herself: don’t be a fool. This is not happening. Calm down.
He said, “You’re right. I think there are some in that pocket. Could you…”
She found the glasses. He fumbled in her hand for them, took a bend rather too fast, narrowly missed the rear end of a sheep grazing on the verge. “Sorry. Nearly got it. The local roadkill.”
They came down from the moor, drove across a vale, skirted Minehead. He waved at sparkling white canopies in the distance: “Butlins. Temple of holidays. You get used to the architecture. I quite like it.” They arrived at the coast, the sea. He pitched the car through a caravan site. “We park here. Bit of a scramble down the cliff.” They got out, left the caravans behind and the playing children, lolloping dogs, and walked over short turf pocked with rabbit holes. Someone’s kite had escaped, a ribbon of blue that undulated overhead. Gulls floated, banked, fell beyond the clifftop in front of them. They climbed up, and were on the edge: a gray pebbled beach below, rocks, an expanse of shining muddy sand. Far off, a frill of waves, the tide right out. Ruth stood, taking all this in. He was beside her, and when she turned to speak he was not looking ahead but at her, had been for moments, she sensed—an intent look, an intimate look, that hung on after she turned to him.
He said, “There’s the path down. Mind how you go—it’s sometimes slippery.”
She forgot what she had been going to say, followed him down. His back, his outline, just ahead, seemed infinitely familiar: that green shirt, his gray-flecked hair, the slightly awkward action, as though he found his legs too long. How can a person you’ve not known for twenty-four hours become familiar?
They walked on the shingle. He pointed out the seams of alabaster in the cliff, gray and rose-colored. “Apparently the time to find good bits is after the winter, when there have been cliff falls.” They picked up a couple of small chunks. As must Matt have done, thought Ruth. Brian found another, and another, pressing them into her hands. “What do I do with all this?” she protested, laughing. Her cotton sun hat was full of opaque, veined rocks.
“Goodness knows. Doorstops? Paperweights? Objets d’art?”
They sat on a slab of rock. A gull watched children fishing in a pool. Further off, a boy reeled out another kite. Thin cries all around—other children, a calling parent, other gulls.
“The tide seems to be…”
“When are you…”
Both speaking at once. Both now embarrassed.
“I was going to say,” she said, “that the tide is coming in. Waves a bit nearer.”
“Right. Time and tide, and all that. Wonderfully concentrates the mind. I am fifty-four.”
“I am forty-four.”
“I know. I mean, I didn’t know—what nonsense. What I meant was…I’m getting to the point when there’s a certain tendency to seize the day.”
“This one,” said Ruth, staring ahead, “is a particularly seizable one.”
“What I had been about to say was—when are you likely to be this way again?”
He turned. She turned. And now they are looking at one another. In silence. She does not, for a moment—for moments—answer. She looks at him, and in his gaze she sees a possibility of something she has not yet known. It glimmers. In what she feels, in what she sees. A future floats in her head. I know, she thinks, and he knows, and we each know that the other knows. There is no need to say anything. Yet.
“Oh,” she said, “I’m not sure. But I shall be. Definitely. Sooner or later.”
“Sooner,” he said, getting up. “Shall we meet the tide?”
They walked down to the waves. Ruth waded in a little way. The water coming in warm over the mud, your feet sinking in. They returned to the car, talking about anything, about nothing in particular, about everything—this sub-text hanging in there now, unspoken, understood. They stopped at a pub, ate sandwiches, wondered at the array of real ales, laughed over the pretensions of the menu. Brian sighed: “Gone are the days of scotch eggs and a ploughman’s.”
Back at the cottage, there was a van parked outside. “He’s beaten us to it,” said Brian.
Ruth’s car had a new windscreen. The mechanic was sitting on the doorstep, making out an invoice. Brian went inside while Ruth wrote a check.
“Nice spot,” said the man. “Been here long, have you?”
“Oh—I’m just a visitor. I’m leaving now.”
“Have a good journey, then.”
She went inside. Brian was sitting at the kitchen table, with the blocks and the alabaster figure in front of him. She said, “I’ll just go up and get my things together.”
Upstairs, she put her case on the bed, gathered up her brush and comb, toilet bag, nightdress, her other pair of shoes. She packed, then sat on the bed, looking around her, to check for anything forgotten. She was aware of the dancing figures; she was aware, too, of sounds beyond the window—those enraptured birds, the far-off train. It seemed as though she had been here, in this place, for a very long time, as though the last twenty-four hours had strung out like elastic, unrelated to an ordinary day. Someone else, not her, some other Ruth, had left home yesterday; today, she was this new person, who was staring at a possibility, at a probability, at—perhaps—a certainty.
She went down.
He said, “I’m going to come clean. The windscreen chap. I fixed for him to come in the afternoon. So there could be more time. He would have come at ten. Entirely underhand, I’m afraid.”
“Yes, entirely.” She was smiling.
He got up. “I suppose you’re going to go now.”
“Yes.”
He picked up her bag. She took the blocks, and the figure. They went outside. The bags, the block, and the figure were put into the car.
“When?” he said.
“Soon.”
“It had better be.”
They stood there, face-to-face. He reached out, put his hands on either side of her shoulders, held her thus for a moment. Then he stepped aside.
Ruth got into the car. He watched her put the keys in the ignition, start up.
“Do you know where you’re going?”
“Probably not,” she said. “It won’t matter.”
She drove out of the gate. When she glanced in the mirror she saw him standing there, one hand raised. Then she turned into the lane—that would take her away, that would bring her back.
Penelope Lively, Consequences
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