13

The visit to Finn’s home left Black with an overpowering urge to escape to the hills. Ditching his plans to head straight back to Oxford, he headed west. After a brief stop for groceries and whisky, he continued along twisting back roads and lanes through villages whose names had long ago become signposts to his sanctuary: Clehonger, Kingstone, Vowchurch, Michaelchurch, and finally up the hill to Craswall – more a hamlet than a village – where the air became cooler and keener and the tended fields gave way to windswept hills.

The lane narrowed and dog-legged up a steepening gradient. Thick grass grew in the middle of the crumbling tarmac, which became steadily looser and more potholed before merging into a rough dirt track that crossed over a cattle grid before splitting in two. The left fork led up to an old stone byre used by the local farmer for lambing and shearing. Black turned right. The track wound through a copse of hawthorn and emerged on the far side as no more than a pair of wheel ruts that took him over a short, steep rise and down into a sheltered dell. There the 500-year-old stone cottage named Ty Argel, Welsh for ‘Secret House’, stood on a small area of flat pasture next to a stream. To the side of the building were two ancient apple trees and a stone shed. Behind it, the bracken-covered hillside rose steeply towards the upper slopes of the Black Mountains.

Black drew up in the long grass that had overwhelmed his parking spot, jumped down from the cab and breathed in deeply. He grabbed his bags of provisions and lugged them up the sloping dirt path to the front door.

Ty Argel was less a house than a glorified cabin built from flat slabs of stone dug from the hillside by sixteenth-century shepherds. When he had bought it, there had been two small dark rooms downstairs and two above, a wooden outhouse and a pump at the back door fed by the stream. Over the course of three summers and with occasional help from Finn, Black had spent his leave gutting it back to four bare walls, one of which then collapsed, requiring him to rebuild it from the ground up. The heavy oak front door opened into a single stone-flagged room with a small rustic kitchen at one end and a sitting area arranged around a wood stove at the other. An open staircase led up to a mezzanine big enough to accommodate his bed and a small bathroom. The power line stopped at the farm half a mile away, so the lights were powered by an array of solar panels on the roof and water heated by the stove.

No TV. No internet. An occasional phone signal but only when the sky was clear, which wasn’t often. If Black was in need of entertainment he had his history books and vinyl record collection and there was always the endless distraction of an old cottage to keep weathertight. A small puddle of water inside the front door confirmed that the patch-up job he had done on the roof two years before needed redoing – properly this time. He’d get to it when his paper was written. Slipping unconsciously into the routine he repeated each time he returned, he checked the power levels on the solar battery pack, opened the stopcocks, switched on the pump that filled the water tank from the borehole, then fetched wood from the log store. Twenty minutes later he was trimming a red-hot stove that was warming the lime-washed walls and bringing his coffee to the boil.

Lunch was a hunk of bread, cheese and cold meat, which he ate outside in the shade of the apple trees. He had built the table at which he sat from an ash that had once stood by the stream until a summer storm had brought it down. Finn had helped him plank it up on an old diesel-powered saw bench he had bought at a farm sale. It had been a long day of sweat and cursing. Finn had accused him of being a mad hermit and yelled at him to move to a proper house and get himself a wife. Black had never cared much for indulging nostalgic memories, but his old friend had worked his way into the grain of this place. Everywhere he looked, there were more reminders: he had helped him set the lintel over the back door and rebuild the stonework above it as high as the roof. The date inscribed in the cement beneath the apex of the gable was in Finn’s hand. Of the two of them, and to Black’s lasting frustration, Finn had been by far the better builder, untrained, but with natural ability like that possessed by men who knew engines without ever having opened a manual.

Eventually, the procession of unprompted recollections grew too much and Black tried to banish them from his mind, reminding himself that sentimentality was the very opposite of what had bound him and Finn together. Yes, they had been firm friends away from their work but they had gone about their military tasks with cold, rational detachment. They had been professional soldiers who had accepted the risks. Death was always a possibility, but both had known that it was most likely to come about as the result of poor judgement or lack of planning, with bad luck trailing a distant second. If Finn had made a mistake in Paris, it was a great pity, but not a tragedy. Tragedies happened to the innocent. There was nothing innocent about Finn.

Enough.

Impatient with his mind’s restless churning and disconcerted by the unfamiliar feelings they were stirring, Black tossed his crumbs to the sparrows, changed into his walking boots and set off up the hill, determined to keep going until his thoughts became his own.

His muscles complained loudly as he pushed on up to the ridge and continued across the level summit to the trig point at the top of the Twmpa. He paused a while to rest and take in the fifty-mile view across mid-Wales: a thousand shades of green rippling with shadows cast by a restless sky. Buffeted by the wind, he followed the ridge south for six miles, then, as dark clouds moved in from the west, descended towards the valley bottom before making his way back northwards, following the narrow trails cut through the heather and bilberry by sheep and wild ponies.

The storm broke when he was still an hour from home. He picked up to a jog, abandoned the paths and took the shortest route across open country. Chest heaving, he slipped and scrambled over wet, tussocky grass to the accompaniment of thunder claps that ricocheted off the mountainsides with the drama of exploding shells. The clouds grew lower still, shrouding the landscape in mist. Without map or compass he was forced to navigate by memory and instinct. He had lost his touch: having made his way back over the ridge, rather than hit the stream he had planned to follow to his front door, he found himself chest-high in bracken. Wet to the bone and with no chance of retracing his steps, he bush-whacked downhill before eventually emerging in familiar territory, though well off course.

Feeling every one of the twelve miles he had covered in his aching legs, Black stepped gratefully out of his sodden clothes and into a hot shower. The sensation of the near-scalding water needling his flesh was close to bliss. His body and mind slowly unwound in tandem, the accumulated tension of the previous forty-eight hours yielding to a pleasantly leaden sensation.

Heavy and relaxed, he dressed in jeans and an old plaid shirt and drifted downstairs to reward himself with a large whisky in front of the fire.

Here’s to you, old friend. So long.

He raised his glass in a silent toast and drank.