On near level ground now, he strode across the tussocky grass toward the track that brought walkers up from Langdale. In summer this was a depressingly busy route, but today there was just a solitary hiker in blue crossing the broad fell, hurrying purposefully toward Esk Hause as though to a rendezvous. As he approached he saw that it was a woman, which prompted Clive to cast himself in the role of her man, in the assignation she seemed so keen to reach: waiting for her by a lonely tarn, calling her name as she approached, taking from his pack the champagne and two silver flutes, and going toward her… Clive had never had a lover, or even a wife, who liked hiking. Susie Marcellan, always game for something new, went to the Catskills with him once and turned out to be a helpless Manhattan exile, complaining comically all day long about bugs, blisters, and the lack of cabs.

By the time he had reached the track, the woman was half a mile ahead of him and beginning to drift off to her right, toward Alien Crags. He stopped to let her go in order to have the great upland field to himself. The crack in the sky was opening further, and behind him, on Rosthwaite Fell, a baton of light across the bracken redeemed the reputation of the color brown with fiery reds and yellows. He packed the waterproofs away, ate an apple, and considered his route. He was for climbing Scafell Pike now; in fact, he was impatient to set off. The quickest way up was from Esk Hause, but now that he had loosened up, he had it in mind to continue northwest, drop down to Sprinkling Tarn and down again by Sty Head, and make the long ascent by the Corridor Route. If he came down under Great End and went home the way he had come up, by the Lang-strath, he would be at the hotel by dusk.

So he set off at an easy stride toward the broad enticing crest of Esk Hause, feeling that there was not really so much physical difference between him and his thirty-year-old self after all, and that it was not sinew but spirit that had held him back. How strong his legs felt now that his mood had improved!

Skirting the broad scars of erosion caused by hikers, he made a curving route to the ridge ahead of him and, as so often happened, thought about his life in fresh terms, gladdening himself with recollections of recent small successes: a reissue on disk of an early orchestral piece, a near-reverential mention of his work in a Sunday paper, the wise and humorous speech he had given when awarding the composition prize to a dumbstruck schoolboy. Clive thought of his work in totality, of how varied and rich it seemed whenever he was able to raise his head and take the long perspective, how it represented in abstract a whole history of his lifetime. And still so much to do. He thought affectionately about the people in his life. Perhaps he had been too hard on Vernon, who was only trying to save his newspaper and protect the country from Garmony’s harsh policies. He would phone Vernon this evening. Their friendship was too important to be lost to one isolated dispute. They could surely agree to differ and continue to be friends.

These benign thoughts brought him at last to the ridge where he had a view of the long descent toward Sty Head, and what he saw made him cry out in irritation. Spread out over more than a mile, marked by brilliant points of fluorescent oranges, blues, and greens, was a party of walkers. They were schoolchil-dren, perhaps a hundred of them, filing down to the tarn. It would take him at least an hour to overtake them all. Instantly the landscape was transformed, tamed, reduced to a trampled beauty spot. Without giving himself time to dwell on old themes of his—the idiocy and visual pollution of Day-Glo anoraks, or why people were compelled to go about in such brutally large groups—he turned away to his right, toward Alien Crags, and the moment the party was out of sight he was restored to his good mood. He would spare himself the energetic ascent of Scafell Pike and instead make a leisurely return along the ridge and down Thornythwaite Fell into the valley.

In a matter of minutes, it seemed, he was standing on top of the crag, regaining his breath and congratulating himself on his change of plan. He had before him a walk that Wainwright’s The Southern Fells described as “full of interest”; the path rose and fell by little tarns and crossed marshes, rocky outcrops, and stony plateaus to reach the Glaramara summits. This was the prospect that had soothed him the week before as he was falling asleep.

He had been walking a quarter of an hour and was just climbing a slope that ended in a great tilted mottled rock slab when it finally happened, just as he had hoped it would: he was relishing his solitude, he was happy in his body, his mind was contentedly elsewhere, when he heard the music he had been looking for, or at least he heard a clue to its form.

It came as a gift. A large gray bird flew up with a loud alarm call as he approached. As it gained height and wheeled away over the valley, it gave out a piping sound on three notes, which he recognized as the inversion of a line he had already scored for a piccolo. How elegant, how simple. Turning the sequence round opened up the idea of a plain and beautiful song in common time, which he could almost hear. But not quite. An image came to him of a set of unfolding steps, sliding and descending—from the trap door of a loft, or from the door of a light plane. One note lay over and suggested the next. He heard it, he had it, then it was gone. There was a glow of a tantalizing afterimage and the fading call of a sad little tune. This synesthesia was a torment. These notes were perfectly interdependent, little polished hinges swinging the melody through its perfect arc. He could almost hear it again as he reached the top of the angled rock slab and paused to reach into his pocket for notebook and pencil. It wasn’t entirely sad. There was merriness there too, an optimistic resolve against the odds. Courage.

He was beginning to scribble out the fragments of what he had heard, hoping to will the rest into being, when he was aware of another sound, not imagined, not a bird call, but the murmur of a voice. He was so intent that he almost resisted the temptation to look up, but he could not help himself. Peering over the top of the slab, which jutted up over a thirty-foot drop, he found himself looking down on a miniature tarn, hardly bigger than a large puddle. Standing on the grass that fringed it on its far side was the woman he had seen hurrying past, the woman in blue. Facing her and talking in a low, constant drone was a man who was certainly not dressed for rambling. His face was long and thin, like some snouty animal’s. He wore an old tweed jacket and gray flannel trousers and a flat cloth cap, with a scrap of dirty white cloth wrapped round his neck. A hill farmer possibly, or a friend who disdained hiking and all the gear who had come up to meet her. The very assignation Clive had imagined.

This stark surprise, these vivid figures among the rocks, seemed to be there for his benefit alone. It was as if they were actors striking up a tableau whose meaning he was supposed to guess, as if they were not quite serious, only pretending not to know that he was watching. Whatever they were about, dive’s immediate thought was as clear as a neon sign: I am not here.

He ducked down and continued with his notes. If he could get the known elements on paper now, he could quietly remove himself to some place farther along the ridge and work at the rest. He ignored the woman’s voice when he heard it. Already it was hard to capture what had seemed so clear a minute before. For a while he floundered, and then he had it again, that overlaid quality, so obvious when it was before him, so elusive the moment his attention relaxed. He was crossing out notes as fast as he was setting them down, but when he heard the woman’s voice rise to a sudden shout, his hand froze.