His steps slowed then stopped. There was reason for this, she told herself. They had reached the drive at one side of which sat the lodge where she lived. But then he turned her to him.
“Polly,” he said urgently. He caressed her cheek. “I feel so much for you. I know you’ve seen it. Won’t you please let me—”
A car’s headlamps caught them like rabbits in its beam, not coming along the Clitheroe Road but bumping and jolting along the lane that led beyond the lodge up to Cotes Hall. And just like rabbits, they froze in position, Brendan’s one hand on Polly’s cheek, his other on her arm. There could be no real mistaking his intentions.
“Brendan!” Polly said.
He dropped his hands and put a careful two feet between them. But it was too late. The car came upon them slowly, then slowed even more. It was an old green Land Rover, mud-spattered and grimy, but its windscreen and windows were perfectly clean.
Polly turned her head away from the sight of it, not so much because she didn’t want to be seen and gossipped over — she knew that nothing would spare her that — but so she wouldn’t have to see the driver or the woman next to him with her blunt greying hair and her angular face and, Polly could see it all so vividly without even trying, with her arm stretched out so that the tips of her fi ngers rested on the back of the driver’s neck. Touching and twining through that slicked-back, undisciplined, ginger hair.
Colin Shepherd and Missus Spence were having another lovely evening together. The Gods were reminding Polly Yarkin of her sins.
Damn the air and the wind, Polly thought. There was no justice. No matter what she did, it came out wrong. She slammed the door behind her and drove her fist into it once.
“Polly? That you, luv-doll?”
She heard the roll of her mother’s heavy footsteps trundling across the sitting room floor. The sound of wheezing accompanied this, as did the clink and clatter of jewellery— chains, necklaces, gold doubloons, and anything else her mother saw fit to deck herself out with when she made her wintertime morning toilette.
“Me, Rita,” Polly answered. “Who else?”
“I dunno, luv. Some good-looking chappie with a sausage to share? Got to keep yourself open to the unexpected. ’At’s my motto, that is.” Rita laughed and wheezed. Her scent preceded her like an olfactory harbinger. Giorgio. She sprayed it on by the tablespoon. She came to the door of the sitting room and filled it, so large a woman that she ballooned out in a shapeless mass from her neck to her knees. She leaned against the jamb, working hard to catch her breath. The entry light glistened against the necklaces on her massive chest. It cast a grotesque Rita-shadow on the wall and made a fleshy beard of one of her chins.
Polly squatted to unlace her boots. They were thick-soled with mud, a fact that did not escape her mother.
“Where you been, luv-doll?” Rita jingle-jangled one of her necklaces, an affair of large cat heads fashioned in brass. “You go for a hike?”
“Road’s muddy,” Polly said with a grunt as she forced off one boot and worked on the other. Their laces were sodden, and her fi ngers were stiff. “Wintertime. You forget what it’s like?”
“Wish I could, I do,” her mother said. “So how’s things in the metropolis today?”
She pronounced it metro-POH-lis. Deliberately. It was part of her persona. She wore a guise of spurious ignorance while in the village, an extension of the general style she adopted when she came home for her winters in Winslough. Spring, autumn, and summer, she was Rita Rularski, reader of tarot, thrown stones, and palms. From her shopfront in Blackpool, she foresaw the future, expounded on the past, and made sense of the troubled, fractious present for anyone willing to part with the cash. Residents, tourists, holiday-makers, curious housewives, fine ladies looking for a giggle and a thrill, Rita saw them all with equal aplomb, dressed in a kaftan big enough to fit an elephant, with a bright scarf covering her grizzled brambles of hair.
But in winter she became Rita Yarkin again, back in Winslough for a three-month stay with her only child. She put her hand-painted sign on the verge of the road and waited for custom which seldom developed. She read magazines and watched the telly. She ate like a docker and painted her nails.
Polly glanced at these curiously. Purple today, with a tiny strip of gold crossing each one diagonally. They clashed with her kaftan — it was pumpkin orange — but they were a decided improvement over yesterday’s yellow.
“You tiff with someone this evenin’, luvdoll?” Rita asked. “You got an aura shrivelled to nothing, you do. That a’nt good, is it? Here. Lemme take a look at your face.”
“It’s nothing.” Polly made herself busier than she needed to be. She banged her boots against the inside of the woodbox next to the door. She took off her scarf and folded it neatly into a square. She put this square in the pocket of her coat and then brushed the coat itself with the flat of her hand, removing both speckles of lint and nonexistent splatters of mud.
Her mother wasn’t to be easily sidetracked. She pushed her huge mass from the door-jamb. She waddled to Polly and turned her round. She peered at her face. With her hand palm-open and an inch away, she traced the shape of Polly’s head and her shoulders.
“I see.” She pursed her lips and dropped her arm with a sigh. “Stars and earth, girl, stop being such a fool.”
Polly stepped to one side and headed for the stairs. “I need my slippers,” she said. “I’ll be down in a minute. I can smell supper. Have you done goulash like you said?”
“Listen here, Pol. Mr. C. Shepherd a’nt so special,” Rita said. “He got nothing to offer a woman like you. Do you not see that yet?”
“Rita…”
“It’s living that counts.
Polly felt the stairs tremble. She turned, blowing out a gust of resigned breath. It was only the three months of winter that she and her mother were together, but in the last six years, day tended to drag upon day as Rita used every excuse she could find to examine the manner in which Polly was living her life.
“That was him went by in the car just now, wasn’t it?” Rita asked. “Mr. C. Shepherd his precious self. With
“It’s nothing,” Polly said.
“And there you’ve got it right. It’s nothing. He’s nothing. Where’s the sorrow in that?”
But he wasn’t nothing to Polly. He never had been. How could she explain this to her mother, whose only experience of love had ended abruptly when her husband left Win-slough on the rainy morning of Polly’s seventh birthday, headed to Manchester “to get something special for my extra-special little girl,” and never came home.
Rita had always seen her life in those terms. Every difficulty, trial, or misfortune could be easily redefined as a blessing in disguise. Disappointments were wordless messages from the Goddess. Rejections were merely indications that the most desired pathway was not the best. For long ago, Rita Yarkin had given herself — heart, mind, and body — into the safekeeping of the Craft of the Wise. Polly admired her for such trust and devotion. She only wished she could feel the same.
“I’m not like you, Rita.”
“You are,” Rita said. “You’re more like me than me in the first place. When did you last cast the circle? Not since I’ve been home, surely.”
“I have done. Yes. Since then. Two or three times.”
Her mother raised one sceptical, line-drawn eyebrow. “You’re the discreet one, aren’t you? Where you been casting?”
“Up Cotes Fell. You know that, Rita.”
“And the Rite?”
