‘How’re you doing, Marc?’
‘Fine, Dad.’ Marc thrust a white plastic box forward. ‘My lunch,’ he explained. ‘Mum said don’t buy me any more of the sort of food you gave me last time.’
‘You told her about that?’
‘I had to. She asked.’
Automatically, Daniel turned and looked up towards his wife’s window. He could just see her, standing well back in the room, with her hands clasped together under her chin, as though she was cold. He waved, but got no response.
‘A bit of fried chicken every now and then won’t kill you, Marc,’ Daniel observed, as they walked down the street.
‘Mum said there’s no need to eat animals. It’s cruel.’
Daniel didn’t want to get dragged into that. ‘The car’s parked around the corner,’ he said, ‘as close as I could get. The town’s very busy.’
‘It always is on Saturday. You usually come on Sundays.’
‘I thought we’d do something different today,’ Daniel said carefully, anticipating opposition to this proposal.
‘You mean we can’t go bowling?’
‘We’ll give it a miss for once. The weather’s so fine. We’ll drive out into the country.’
The boy was silent then, but Daniel could sense his disappointment. As they drove away, to change the subject, he said, ‘How are your eyes now? No more headaches, I hope?’
Marc had had minor eye surgery a few weeks earlier. Daniel had been working in Scotland at the time, and hadn’t been able to visit him in hospital.
‘They’re okay. I can see for miles. And they say I won’t have to wear those thick glasses again. That’s why I’d rather have gone to the Indoor Sport Centre. I wanted to see if it made my bowling better. I bet I could beat you nearly every time now, Dad.’
‘You did pretty well before.’
‘But you were better.’ Marc reached out towards the radio. ‘Can I have some music?’
Daniel nodded resignedly. After all, the boy had taken his disappointment about the bowling quite well, and his reason for wanting to play games was a good one.
The car filled with yelping, thudding, electronic pandemonium.
From then on, conversation was out of the question.
Half an hour later Daniel had driven deep into the countryside and was following his inclinations, rather than map directions. He had more or less lost his way, though he didn’t want to admit that to Marc. When the boy, taking advantage of his newly improved vision, pointed out a limestone village, gleaming in the glaring sun, that had come into view a couple of miles ahead, Daniel drove towards it automatically, as though it had beckoned to him, and he was unable to resist its allure. It was the only point of interest in an otherwise featureless landscape. It seemed to be hovering a little way in the air, like a vision or mirage, but it sank back into its surroundings as they got nearer. The narrow lanes Daniel found himself negotiating to get to it were maze-like and confusing, but he navigated his way through into the little community at last, after a deal of twisting and back-tracking, and stopped the car at the first opportunity. He turned off the blaring radio at once, and clambered out of the car into an austere silence that was almost a shock.
The village was backed on three sides by hump-like hills, the lower slopes of which were divided into mutton-and lamb-infested fields enclosed by low stone walls. Ahead, a substantial, if somewhat squat looking, eighteenth-century house and an even older pub stood at right angles to each other, apparently blocking the way, though a sign indicated that the road turned left between them. A broad, deep stream slid smoothly alongside the street. Tiny houses, each with its own natty bib of garden at the front, clustered round the dusty parking space where Daniel had come to a halt, and others similar climbed one side of the slope the car had just descended. It was a picturesque setting, and the whole village had a neat, compact, scaled-down, almost toylike look about it.
‘This’ll do,’ Daniel said, leaning back into the driver’s door. Marc showed no sign of wanting to get out. He was gazing out at the clear, shining water of the nearby stream with a peculiar expression, as though the sight of it slightly annoyed him.
‘Is this where you wanted to come, Dad?’
‘I had nowhere in particular in mind.’
‘But there’s nothing here. What are we going to do?’
‘We don’t have to
Marc pulled his hat lower down his brow, said, ‘I’m thirsty,’ and hauled himself out of the car reluctantly, huffing like an old man. Daniel noted how overweight the overgrown boy still was, in spite of the health-food and vegetarian regimen his mother imposed at home. His big face was waxy, and beginning to go spotty. He was at the awkward age, changing inside and out. In less than two years he’d be a teenager, but he looked like one already, and a troubled one at that. Daniel wanted to tell him to take off the ridiculous hat, but he had only himself to blame for that, and Marc seemed proud of the thing, so he let it be.
The nearby pub looked shut. ‘A village this size is bound to have a shop that’ll sell us a can of Coke,’ Daniel stated optimistically, still feeling he had, perhaps unjustly, for selfish reasons, deprived his son of his ten-pin bowling. ‘Let’s go and find it.’
Marc grunted noncommittally, but did as he was bidden. As they ascended into the village, Daniel, who liked to think of himself as a countryman (because, thirty-seven years earlier he’d been born in a very remote part of England) was aware that he, in his sky-blue jacket and black shirt, and Marc in his baggy bad-boy town clothes and big, clumsy trainers, probably looked an odd and out-of-place pair. Not that there was anyone to pass judgment: nobody else was visible on the streets.
The village was made up of a number of large, ancient, characterful buildings linked together by clusters of small cottages and undistinguished terraces of minute nineteenth-century farm workers’ houses. These dwellings were tightly packed together: uncomfortably so, as though their inhabitants had been reluctant or unable to extend the boundaries of their community into the fields beyond. The streets were narrow, with many sharp turns. There were few people about, and they had a preoccupied, self-contained air, and hardly seemed to be aware of the two visitors as they passed.
Marc spotted a small shop down a side road, but it sold only faded arty-crafty souvenirs and dried flowers, and was shut anyway. It looked as though it had been shut for ever.
‘I wouldn’t like to live here,’ he moaned. ‘Would you, Dad?’
Daniel had to admit not. ‘But it makes a change,’ he insisted. ‘A bit of peace and quiet.’
In fact, the last remark was an understatement. The village was perfectly silent. No dogs barked, no human voices could be heard, no traffic disturbed the peace, no birds sang, and the few people they encountered moved without sound, as though they walked on shoes shod with velvet soles. The only audible noises were those made by Daniel and Marc, and they too soon grew quiet, hushed by the awesome taciturnity of their surroundings.
In the centre of the village they came upon what seemed to be a walled-off field, though it could have been an ancient village green, with what at first sight appeared to be some kind of ornate monument set in a hollow in the centre. This land, occupied in one corner by half a dozen seedy-looking sheep and their lambs, was more or less trapezium-shaped, and had a single point of entry and exit — a narrow lych-gate, like the entry to a churchyard, in the centre of the shortest of the two roughly parallel sides.
Daniel and his son emerged from the village at a point very close to the gate which, on inspection, they found to be held shut with a tightly wound chain and padlock.
‘Do you think that’s meant to keep the sheep in or us out, Marc?’
Marc missed the irony, and looked confused. Daniel smiled, and gave the gate a shove. The sound of the chain links grinding against the wooden gatepost tweaked the nerves of the sheep who raised their heads and stood still as statues for seconds, before sinking back into browsing complacency.
‘What’s that thing out there in the middle, Dad?’
‘Not sure. A war memorial for people from this place who died? That sort of thing. I can’t think what else it could be.’
