They had said nothing. They had stood in the dark until Peter had put his torch on, and then they had turned back, glad though, relieved, when they could light a match again. Stephen had gone out first, scrambling up the shaft, putting all his weight this time on the rope and wondering what would happen, whether they would ever be found alive, if the rope came unfastened from the spur of rock to which they had tied it. But not really frightened, buoyed up always by a child’s invincible courage, the courage that comes from a sense of immortality.

When he came out into the bright white daylight he had a shock. There was another boy there, standing by the mouth of the hole, looking down, looking at the twitching rope. Adults in those circumstances would have spoken to each other, but not children. Stephen didn’t know who the boy was or what he was doing on Big Allen and he didn’t speak to him. Nor did the boy address him or Peter. He stood a little apart from them, kicking at the scree, and then he walked off across Goughdale between the crumbling towers. Stephen could remember how hot it had been, the sky a dazzling white-blue, the heat making the air wave and shiver above the dry yellowed turf.

Dusk now brought a stillness and its own grey translucent light. He walked along the ridge of rock, trying to picture once more the place where Peter had run and fallen. At one point he knelt down and parted the heather with his hands, so sure was he that he had found it, but there was nothing but the scree and the tiny plants which grew amongst it. It had become too dark to search any more and it was cold. He shivered a little as he set off for home.

6

They had meant to go out to lunch, or Nick had. He said to come upstairs to the flat only to fetch his jacket, and then they would go and eat and talk and maybe sit by the river. It was the first really warm day of summer. Lyn went first up the stairs and into the set of big, shabby rooms with arched windows that seemed full of sky.

She turned to Nick as he came in. He looked like a thin, young boy, much younger than he really was, his brown hair like a monk’s without the tonsure. His skin was brown and his eyes a light clear hazel. One of his hands was on the door, the other extended to her. She looked at his fine, thin hands, the turned wrists where there were fair hairs on the brown skin, and put her face up to his.

He kissed her. He smoothed her hair back and held it and kissed her, tenderly, then harder, and this time when his mouth opened into hers she didn’t pull away. Her heart had been beating fast and her hands were shaking, but as he kissed her and his body pressed close against hers, the length of his body hard against hers, those signs of fear gradually ceased and she grew weak and curiously fluid in his arms. He put his hands on her breasts and she made a little soft sound.

The sun on the river threw reflections across the bedroom ceiling, down the wall. The ripple reflections moved in a continuous, tiny fluttering. They danced over Lyn’s body as she undressed, over lean, brown Nick, waiting for her. Her arms felt languorous, her flesh soft and relaxed as if she had just awakened from sleep. He felt with his hands the smooth, sleepy flesh and she took his mouth on hers, himself into her.

With pain. She twisted her face away and kept herself from crying out. Her body went as taut as a bowstring, and when she opened her eyes and looked into his face she saw there awestricken astonishment. He lay still inside her. And then, for his sake, she did what she had read should be done: raised her legs and arched her back and held him embraced and reached her mouth to his, and began to enjoy what she did. To enjoy as much as she was going to for this time, she knew that, and she smiled and held him and kissed him when she felt the convulsion and heard his breath released. The quivering net of light from the river seemed now to have set the whole room trembling. Down in the Mootwalk a woman laughed and from the water a swan gave its harsh, grating cry.

Nick, holding her, said quietly, ‘That was the first time for you.’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I’ve never understood,’ she said, ‘but there it is. Doctors are only of use if a — a person wants to be cured.’ She was very near to crying. She sat up and wrapped her arms round her knees, her hair falling round her like a cloak. He said nothing. She thought that if he said the wrong thing now everything would be over for her and him. And she was so used to the wrong things being said, to her tactless family, a mother and sister who shouted where angels feared to whisper, to Stephen and his inept words. If Nick made the mildest joke about virginity, about his luck, about impotence, about needing to eat after their exertions, she would dress and run away and it would all be over. She turned to him in despair and the tears were running down her face.

He took no notice of them. His eyes were half-closed and he was smiling a little.

‘Go to sleep with me for a while,’ he said, and he took her gently into his arms. He didn’t say he loved her but, ‘I think we’re going to love each other, Lyn.’

From the pulled and sagging pockets of his jacket, his Sunday-go-to-meetings suit, his only suit, Dadda produced a cairngorm and silver ring for Lyn and a pearl-handled Stilton knife for Stephen. Though they might have forgotten that the following day would be the sixth anniversary of their engagement, he with his prodigious memory had not.

‘It was me brought you together,’ he said as they thanked him. ‘But for me I don’t reckon you’d ever have set eyes on each other.’

It was true. He had more or less arranged their marriage, Lyn sometimes thought. Her first job on leaving school had been at Whalbys’. She had been a clerk-receptionist-phone-answerer-tea-maker and she had got the job through her uncle Bob who was as near to being a friend of Thomas Whalby’s as it was possible to be. He had never employed a girl before or since and now it seemed to Lyn that Dadda had hand-picked her for Stephen without the knowledge of either of them. Young, innocent, they had been malleable in those hands which were so practised in making something valuable out of raw or damaged material.

Dadda, having scrutinized his previous gift, the chestnut leaf table, for white rings, cigarette burns or dust in the carving, shambled about the room examining the legs of furniture. Although he didn’t say so, Lyn knew he was looking for the marks of Peach’s claws. Peach, who often sat on the chestnut leaf table, marking it no more than if he had been a fluffy cushion or a nightdress-case cat, watched gravely from the basket in which he was wise enough to sit when at home on Sundays. Lyn put the ring on and said it was a perfect fit.

‘Ah, I had the size of your pretty fingers by heart,’ said Dadda who was adept at making one feel a heel.

Trevor Simpson came in later and Lyn’s uncle Bob as well as the rest of them. There were hardly enough chairs to go round. Dadda withdrew into a corner, drawing up his spider legs. Uncle Bob said he could remember, from when they were boys, Tom had never been keen on cats.

‘A mild form of ailurophobia,’ said Trevor.

‘Look, lad,’ said Dadda, ‘I don’t have nothing mild. I don’t have nothing bloody mild.’

Joanne, vast, out of hospital the day before, sat eating chocolate biscuits.

‘If you go on like that,’ said Kevin, ‘you’ll be back in there before the week’s out.’

‘It’s not food, it’s fluid. If I’ve told you once I’ve told you five thousand times, it’s all fluid.’

‘Chocolate’s poison to horses, did you know that? It’s got some substance in it, theo-something. Racehorses have been known to die of eating chocolate.’

‘You mean me and racehorses have got something in common?’