‘I had a sort of fantasy he’d go to Mrs Africa’s and I’d go there after him and so would you and we’d meet.’

‘Did you? I had a feeling like that too. How mad we’ve been, Lyn. Lyn, Lyn, that’s the first time I’ve said your name. Except to myself, I’ve said it a hundred times to myself.’

She said in a level voice, though her hands were shaking, like puppets jerked on strings, ‘I’ve been visiting my sister. My brother-in-law’s with her now but visiting ends at eight and I have to take him home. I brought him so I have to take him back.’

‘Let him take your car and you stay with me,’ Nick said.

‘I can’t do that.’ They stood under a cedar tree. Nick took her in his arms and kissed her but, when his lips parted and she could taste his mouth, she drew back. There were movements in her body that frightened her. She said, and her voice wasn’t steady any more, ‘I have to take Kevin home now. Should we — should we see each other tomorrow?’

‘Lunch at the Blue Lagoon?’

She nodded.

‘I don’t want to let you go, but d’you know, I feel so ridiculously happy. I am awake, aren’t I? I haven’t succumbed to weariness at Uncle Jim’s bedside and fallen asleep? Of course I haven’t, I don’t dream, never have. It’s early closing tomorrow — we can have all the afternoon together.’

She smiled at him. Then she walked away quickly along the path to the car park. Kevin was waiting by the car, leaning his arms on its roof, bored, smoking a cigarette.

‘What d’you think of her, then?’

Lyn blinked at him. He seemed curiously unreal. ‘I’m sorry?’ she said.

‘Jo. I said what d’you think of her?’

‘She seems okay. How would I know?’

He got into the car beside her, gangling, long-legged, with big hands and feet. She realized for the first time fully consciously that she was ill at ease with, even afraid of, very tall men. Nick and she, they were proportioned to each other, they seemed to belong to the same tribe.

‘Okay if we pick up Trev?’

Kevin’s twin worked in some factory or mill in North Hilderbridge where he did the maximum overtime. He was waiting on the Jackley Road outside a pub called the Ostrich, Kevin’s double in every particular until he had grown a moustache.

‘Where’s old Steve got to, Lyn?’

‘Where d’you think?’ said Kevin. ‘I tell her she’s a moor widow.’

‘Yeah, but what’s he escaping from, Lyn? What’s with him he can’t adjust to reality?’

‘The moor’s real enough, I should think.’ She didn’t want to discuss Stephen.

‘It’s either an acute case of claustrophobia or his super ego could be compelling him to confront agoraphobia.’

‘Why don’t you apply for a grant and go and do a psychology degree at the tech?’ said Lyn.

Trevor began to explain why not, about the pointlessness of formal education in an area where knowledge depended so much upon intuition, and also about how much he earned with his overtime at Batsby Ball Bearings. She didn’t listen. She thought of Nick and then of Stephen. But what difference could this make to Stephen? She was depriving him of nothing, taking from him nothing he wanted or could possess.

A flock of sheep were in Goughdale, cropping the turf, dark-wooled, long-horned sheep of the breed called Big Allen Black. The outward signs of the disused mine workings beneath, the old windlass, the boundary stones, the ruined coes, rose out of the plain and showed black against the setting sun.

Would he, seventeen years afterwards, be able to rediscover the mouth of the hole that led down into the Goughdale Mine? He thought he could remember roughly where it was: on the side of Big Allen facing him, the northern face, almost at the foot and a little to the right of centre. Somewhere among the crags of limestone that made a broad shelf along part of the foin’s lowest slopes.

The hole was referred to by Tace as ‘Apsley Sough’, though ‘sough’, in these parts meant a drain or channel. He had sited it far from where it really was, half a mile down from where it was; he had obviously never seen it. And it couldn’t have been a sough or drain, for there could have been no reason to drain water into a mine. Joseph Usher, Tace’s hero, had hidden himself in a chamber of the mine but had been driven out by hunger and thirst and, having given himself up, been taken away to trial and execution. Stephen made his way across the dale towards the mountain by a path that ran to the west of the ruined engine house. It was growing cool, even cold, with the departure of the sun. The sheep lifted their heads and looked at him as he passed by but they made no sound.

The weather had been hot that August when he was twelve. Peter Naulls and he, searching for the hole into the mine, had got as suntanned as if they had been on the kind of holiday they never had, on the beaches of Spain or Italy. Peter had, literally, stumbled on the mouth of the hole. Running in some ritual or phase of a game — for they didn’t spend every minute of each day crawling and peering and prodding the ground — he had caught his foot in a root and fallen headlong. He had found himself looking into the infinitely complex growth of stem and grass and leaf and tendril and fine twig that covered the moor in a thick springy upholstery, but also beyond this, through and beside this, into clear darkness. Under his face, half overlaid by a crag shaped like a mushroom growth on a tree trunk, entirely obscured until his eyes were close up to it by the thick vegetation, was the open fissure which for thirty days they had searched for in vain. He had sprung to his feet and thrown out his arms and cried, for he had just been doing Archimedes’ Principle at school, ‘Eureka!’

Where was Peter now? The uncles and aunts presumably knew but Stephen himself hadn’t heard a word of him since he went away to college in London when he was eighteen. That departure to university of a man far less intelligent than himself had been a blow to Stephen. And Dadda’s comment — he occasionally deigned to recognize the existence of the Naulls clan — had done nothing to mitigate his sad resentment. ‘Bloody degree won’t get the lad a living in Naulls’s shop.’ Peter hadn’t been expected to work in the men’s outfitters, never had and never would.

But even in their search, strictly speaking, it had been Peter who had succeeded and not he. Peter, though fortuitously, had found Apsley Sough. It had been he who, with truth, had cried out, ‘I have found it!’

Next day they had gone back with ropes and a book on rock-climbing from the library to teach themselves about knots. Dadda would have locked Stephen up if he had known what was going on. Uncle Leonard and Auntie Midge, more appropriately to their characters, would have had nervous breakdowns.

The hole was not a vertical shaft. If it had been they might not have dared penetrate it very far. It had been bored or dug or had occurred naturally at an incline of about thirty degrees, so that all the way down into the mine, holding onto the rope, they had had purchase for their feet, had almost been able to walk down, though describing it thus made a dull and orthodox act of what had been the great adventure of their boyhood.

After a long descent the shaft widened a little, and the light of their torches showed them the interior of the mine, the southern end of the tunnellings. They dropped down into a chamber, the roof of which must have been seven or eight feet high, and where the air seemed quite fresh. It was cold, though, by contrast with the heat outside, and there was a cold, damp, metallic smell. They lit the candles they had brought and made their way along a passage which led out of the chamber, gazing wordlessly — he couldn’t remember that they had spoken at all while in there — at the arched limestone walls, at the tunnels that from time to time branched from this central artery, once into a wide gallery whose egress had been blocked by a fall of stone. And then the flames of their candles had gone out. They had noticed no difference in the quality of the atmosphere but the flames of their candles had gone out.