'Swineshead, Stragglethorpe, Coddington, Clumber Park' while the sight of villages awakening as milk floats groaned through the streets was enough of a treat for Johnny. As the road swung northwest towards the motorway, Ben saw the leafless tips of trees at the edge of a wood turn golden with the dawn. The sight seemed so like a promise that he felt enlivened at once.
Before the car reached the westbound motorway, peaks appeared in the distance, gleaming with snow. By now the children were insisting they were famished. Ben stopped at the first motorway service area, though if he had been alone he would have driven to Stargrave without a break. 'Finish your drinks in the car,' he said as soon as they'd done eating, and waited for them outside the toilets like a stereotype of a father-to-be outside a delivery room.
Half an hour later he came off the motorway through Leeds too soon. What appeared to be the most direct route to Star-grave led him through streets teeming with Saturday shoppers so contemptuous of vehicles that he had to restrain himself from leaning on the horn. At last the crowds were left behind, and the road found a river to follow. As he trod on the accelerator, he felt the heat of the city fall behind as if he was emerging from a suffocating room into the open air.
The terraces of houses which flanked the road out of Leeds gathered themselves into a few small towns, and then they petered out. The moorland road sloped upwards between dry-stone walls, frozen explosions of stone miles long, bordering fields and tracts of gorse and heather from which protruded squarish lichened rocks like ruined houses being swallowed by the moor. The road climbed gradually for half an hour towards limestone ridges bare except for a crust of snow gleaming beneath the glassy sun. The smoke of lonely farmhouses vanished into a thin sky which held neither clouds nor birds. Winds cold as frozen snow set the gorse and heather shivering. Every time the car sped over a ridge, Ben expected to see Star-grave ahead. He must be assuming that it wasn't as far across the moors as it had seemed to him as a child, and his expectancy was making him nervous, until he started talking to distract himself. 'When I wasn't much more than your age, Johnny, I came all this way by myself.'
The boy gasped in admiration. 'Why?'
'You know Daddy's parents died when he was young,' Ellen said. 'His Auntie Beryl took him to live with her before he'd had a chance to say goodbye properly, and so he came back.'
Ben opened his mouth and closed it again. He felt as if she'd stolen his memory and rendered it banal. He was trying to recall what had really been in his mind the last time he'd returned to Stargrave when Margaret rebuked him. 'You shouldn't tell Johnny things like that or you'll have him wanting to do it too.'
'You wouldn't run away and leave us, would you, Johnny?' Ellen said.
Just shut up for a moment, Ben was close to shouting, let me think – and then the road swung around a curve enclosed by spiky walls and climbed into the open, and he saw the railway bridge ahead. The line had been disused for years; a mass of sullenly green weeds led away from both ends of the parapet and vanished among standing shapes of limestone which the years since his departure seemed to have rendered even more grotesque, more nearly meaningful. His foot wavered on the accelerator, because he felt suddenly cold. He gripped the wheel and sent the car racing under the low dark arch.
The road curved upwards beside the overgrown railway, and the moors above Stargrave came into view, dominated by limestone crags which made Ben think of icebergs. Ellen gave a sigh of pleasure at the view, but he found he was holding his breath. The car reached the crest of the slope, and Sterling Forest and the Sterling house both rose to meet him.
The shared movement made them seem part of a single entity, as if the tall grey steep-roofed house was posted as a sentry for the forest wider than the town. The forest was a darkness hovering above Stargrave, its tens of thousands of trees rooted in shadow under their canopy of sombre green. Before he could grasp these impressions, they were driven out of his mind by the sight of a For Sale board outside the Sterling house.
At the junction of the main road and the rough track which led to the house, he stopped the car beside a bungalow he didn't recognise and stared bewildered at the sign outside his childhood home. 'Can't we go in?' Margaret said.
He was unexpectedly daunted by the idea of visiting the house while it was occupied by people he didn't know. Realising that they were his tenants, or would be once his aunt's will had gone through probate, aggravated his nervousness. At least one of the tenants was at home; someone had just appeared at the window of a room on the middle floor – Ben's old room. The vague pale face at his window made him feel ousted. 'I haven't got the key,' he said, and drove into the town.
At first it looked as he remembered it, the chunky buildings huddled beneath the moor, Church Road leading up from the main road to the church above the station and down again to the market square, The Crescent describing a smaller curve below Church Road, the narrow crooked side streets climbing across them from Market Street. The view infected him with nostalgia, even when he passed a torn poster for a concert in
Leeds by a band called Piss In The Sink, until he was confronted by the names of several of the shops: Country Taste Pizza Parlour, Video Universe, Brats Boutique, The Food Trough… Presumably some of these were meant to appeal to tourists; the railway station had been turned into an information centre for climbers and ramblers, flanked by a record store called The Bop Shop and a furniture-maker's by the name of Suites and Sawer. 'Half a wit is even worse than none,' he growled, and headed for the Station Hotel.
It was a thickset three-storey building which occupied one side of the square. In the darkly panelled lobby, beneath the stalactites of a chandelier, a woman was poring over a ledger, ticking off amounts with a stub of pencil as chewed as a dog's rubber bone. 'Mr and Mrs Sterling and the kiddies,' she said in a Yorkshire accent as broad as she was. 'Write yourselves down and I'll show you up.'
Since the vintage lift was out of order she led them up the wide staircase, emitting a wheeze as each stair gave a creak. 'Keep your hand in your pocket, lad,' she said as Ben made to tip her. The children switched on their television and bounced on their beds while he lay down for a few minutes to relax. 'How does it feel to be home?' Ellen said from the bathroom.
'I don't know yet,' he said, and swung his legs off the plump slightly shabby counterpane as soon as she managed to turn off the rickety taps. 'I'd better head for the estate agent's. They may not be open this afternoon.'
'Come on, you two, we're going out again.'
'Can we have lunch at the pizza restaurant?' Johnny begged.
'If we can't find somewhere even more like paradise,' Ben said.
Tovey's estate agency was on the northward stretch of Market Street. A photograph of the Sterling house gleamed and dulled on a rotating pillar in the window. A portly young man with a scrubbed smile and eyebrows like an inverted Mexican moustache came to meet him and shook hands with him. 'Henry Tovey. How can I help you?'
'I'm Beryl Tate's nephew. I see you're selling her house.'
'We do have that for sale. Please allow me to express my condolences, by the way. I only met the lady once, but she was always a pleasure to do business with.'
'Have you had any offers for the house?' Ellen said.
'Not yet, but business is always slack at this time of year. Normally we might not have put the property on the market so soon after your tragedy, but Miss Tate had been most insistent that it should be advertised as soon as possible.'
So Ben's aunt had come to Stargrave in order to get rid of the house. 'What do her tenants think about the sale, do you know?' Ellen said.
'Most of them had already moved away. We assumed that was why Miss Tate decided to sell.'
'I was wondering if we could have a look around the house,' Ben said.
'By all means. Would you happen to have some identification so that I can keep our records up to date?' Tovey glanced at the photocopy of the will Ben had brought with him. 'Ordinarily we'd show people over the property, but I'm sure that isn't necessary in your case. You may as well hold onto the key.'
'You don't think whoever's in the house will mind if we just go in?'
'Put your mind at rest, Mr Sterling.' Tovey held the door open for them and said 'Your aunt's last tenant moved out once he got wind of your aunt's intention to sell. There's nobody at all in the house now.'
