Two

AS SOON AS DAVID Mortimer put his foot on the stile and began to climb over, the dog began to dance.

It leapt about in front of him in the knee-high grass of the meadow, a black scribble of body outlined against the green landscape. David shaded his eyes against the morning sun. The dog looked like a cross between an Irish wolfhound and some other, smaller, darker breed. Gray wiry hair stood out in a shock all over its body, as if it were alive with static electricity.

He got down the other side of the stile, and the dog careered around him, its tail looping like a propeller. He watched the performance, waiting for the inevitable moment when it would stop in its crazy circling and stare expectantly at him.

He had no idea to whom the animal belonged; only that it came from the direction of the farm below, whose outbuildings—gray roofs, scattered sheds—could be glimpsed above the trees. He never saw it anywhere else but here; never in the village street, or in the back of some farm pickup, or skulking about, even, at the farm entrance. On cue, it skidded to a halt now, and stared at him, tongue lolling from its open mouth, eyes fixed on him in dumb entreaty.

It had a collar, even a tag hanging from it, but David had never learned its name. The dog would never allow him to come close enough to read it. He had found, on the first day he saw it, coming over this same stile, that the moment you raised your hand to this animal, even in friendship, the tail dipped down between its legs and it skittered backward.

“OK,” he said now. “Get going.”

It scooted immediately for the next field gate, making straight for Lewesdon Hill.

Lewesdon was a nine-hundred-foot-high outcrop at the very head of the Simene River; a small, meandering water that eventually joined its larger sister, the Brit, and rolled out into the English Channel at West Bay. Rising almost vertically on its south side above the fields, covered by its huge beechwood, the hill stood inland by seven miles from the Dorset coast.

David had probably walked this hill a hundred times. He had never tired of it. Nor of the country around it. Lewesdon was directly north of the great scoop of bay that sweeps from Portland to Exmouth, with Lyme Regis at its halfway point. The landscape of farms and fields and woodland, with its characteristically narrow lanes and hidden valleys, had once, a hundred million years ago, been a tropical sea, and the trees that grew here had their roots in sandstone and chalk. At Lyme Regis, in the first few years of the nineteenth century, Mary Anning had discovered the first skeletons of the ichthyosaur, plesiosaur, and pterodactyl in the ashy gray cliffs of Lower Jurassic rock; further up the coast, where the Brit merged, the great tower of East Cliff was sandstone, topped with a narrow band of limestone, and the cliff glowed gold even in the faintest sunlight.

But there was neither gold nor gray ahead of David. As he walked up the long incline from Broadwindsor to Lewesdon, everything was green, a complete undulating fertile green world, from the bright, almost acid green of the new beech leaves ahead of him, through the lighter turf, to the tangled shades of the hedges: a profusion of blackberry, nettle, hawthorn, and ivy.

He walked quickly, soon reaching the old embankment, a line in the grass where once a fence had divided the fields. He stopped, slightly out of breath from the climb, and looked back. The village, in its valley four hundred feet below, seemed asleep.

The dog was standing at the last field gate now, on the dried mud where the cows had trampled to get close to the water tub. David smiled at it. He opened the gate, and stepped into the wood, and then, as always, he stood for a few seconds, listening.

The very first time he had come here and seen the hill, he had thought it was like a cathedral, with the same hushed atmosphere. It was a vast room: a room that whispered and moved. One huge, heart-stopping church of trees.

It was different today—different in color, in sound. But then, it was always different. If you saw it in winter, it looked truly architectural, the gray trunks like bold watercolor strokes against the red woodland floor. In late spring, as today, the hill and the wood seemed intimately turned in one upon the other. Green pushed up from the leaf mold, and green reached down from the branches, and there seemed to be some private and ancient conversation being carried on. There was a friction, a rhythm.

He smiled to himself, and wiped the mossy smear from the palm of his hand, the legacy of the gate. He knew a lot about trees, but with all his academic theory and experience, he actually had a creeping conviction that he knew nothing at all. Not about what these mute creations really were. Nothing about what was actually going on.

Beeches were a case in point. They were beautiful monsters. Next to yews, they were mere adolescents, of course. They towered in their colonies, and looked designed or drawn, because they were so lovely in their shape, and so extraordinary in their colors. But there was a disquieting sense of their greediness and strength. As he passed the first few now, David touched the nearest trunk.

Beeches could grow up to a hundred and thirty feet high, with a hundred-and-thirty-foot canopy. They were also sensitive, probably among the most sensitive of all broadleaf species; sensitive to light, their leaves twisting on their stalks to face the sun; sensitive to injury, for the cambium layer, carrying all the functions of the tree’s circulatory systems, was very near the surface of the bark. Despite its potentially huge size, a beech always looked delicate in woodland, with its smooth, tactile skin and lack of lower branches.

Woodland beech rose out of a naked woodland floor, because the beech sucked everything clean with its shallow, labyrinthine roots. Beautiful, beautiful monsters; sensuous, all-absorbing giants.

David began to walk up the rise. Sun was streaming through the new leaves, and there was an undulating light. For a second, he had the feeling of walking on the bottom of an ocean, with light shimmering down through fathoms of greenish water. The names of the common beech ran through his mind in their rhythmic, musical phrases, and he matched them to each footstep: sylvatica, aspleniifolia, rotundifolia, rohanii, cristata. Fagus sylvatica—smooth, silky-haired in spring when the leaf was unfolding, and as waxy as a playing card in summer; aspleniifolia, the slender cousin, thin and spiky, each lobe erratically cut and the vein showing up through the center of the leaf like a white thread; rotundifolia—the plain and homely sister; rohanii so purple it was almost black; and cristata, an irrational explosion of misshapen clusters, with leaves as pale and thin as rocket.

The dog was still ahead of him; it paused occasionally to look back, to check that he was still following. After five minutes, David reached a point where the track curved slightly to the right, and, now level with the tops of the lower trees, there was a break in the canopy.

He could see the landscape clearly. Out there, about a mile or so east, was Waddon Hill, a Roman fort with medieval strip lynchets on its eastern slope—a ridged reminder of a feudal history, showing like green steps under the pasture. The Wessex Ridgeway ran at its base, from Stoke Knapp, through Chart Knolle and down into Beaminster. Somewhere out there was Netherbury, where the apple orchards in full blossom stunned the senses in spring. Further east still was Eggardon, a huge treeless escarpment, jutting out above the farms and fields like some vast ship. It was always windy up there, even in summer, as if the great hill were just tethered to the land by the faintest of lines, and might break away, in full sail, at any moment.

The dog came careering down to David, and stopped at his feet.

He looked down, and smiled. He picked up a stick, and threw it.

Then, turning away from the view, he followed where the dog had disappeared, over the crest of the rise.

It was mid-afternoon by the time he got back to Morton Abbas.

Despite its name, and its closeness to Morton House, an Elizabethan pile of some grandeur, the village was not pretty. True, it had some old sandstone cottages, and the church was twelfth century, and it had a bell tower that made the guidebooks, with a great cast bell called Arthur’s Ruin inside it. No one knew why the bell was called that; the name was inscribed along the rim, along with the foundry mark and the date, 1766.

But, while the puzzling bell and the churchyard—bedded with snowdrops in February, like miniature blankets on many of the older graves—were certainly a talking point, nothing else about the village caught much attention. It was a working farming community. In the winter, the back lanes were ruts of mud. In the summer, it seemed to sag in a pall of dust. There was a garage at the north end of the main street; it had a single diesel pump and sold charcoal and fertilizer. There was Michaels Hill Farm, with its 1960s farmhouse and a few scrubby paddocks, and the whole of its badger hill turned over to a quad-bike track. And, at the south end of the road, was the shop, with a green Spar banner over the door, and firewood packs stacked out front.

David came down the hill, still swinging the stick that the dog had dropped four miles behind him on Lewesdon. He reached the stream, and stopped on the bridge, and looked for some time at the weed-thick water. Then, he walked on, and around the bend in the road to the shop.

He could see Sara as soon as he rounded the bend, her blond hair scraped into a ponytail, her back bent over wooden pallets of groceries that had been delivered to the yard in front of the shop entrance.

David increased his step now, and called his sister’s name. She didn’t hear him: she was too busy trying to drag the potato sacks from the pallets, and into the store. As he watched, he saw Matt come out of the shop, Sara’s husband. Matt noticed David at once and waved to him, then tapped Sara on the arm. She straightened up, and shielded her eyes.

“Well, hello,” she said, as David got close, one hand on her hip. “I thought you must have emigrated.”

“I haven’t been gone that long.”

“Five hours,” she said.

Through the shop window, close to the till, he could see Hannah in her chair. The baby was staring out at him with round, china blue eyes.

“You’ve got a visitor,” Matt said.

David looked at them both, one to the other, and back again. “Who?”

“John Crane.”

David looked hard at Sara. “God,” he said. “I don’t believe you. You actually rang him.”

“I rang him back, yes,” she replied, meeting his glare. “He’s left a lot of messages.”

David glanced back at his brother-in-law. “Can you think of anyone in the world I would want to see less than bloody Crane?” he asked. “Anyone at all?”

She crossed her arms. “No dice this time,” she told him resolutely. “This time you’re talking to him. And you’re going back.”

David grinned at her. “You look like Mum when you’re stressed,” he said.

“Oh, yes?” she answered. “Well, here’s another bit of Mum. Get a job and stick at it.”

David sighed. He glanced at Matt, who was smiling to himself and trying not to show it, nudging the pallet with the edge of his shoe.

“How do you stand her?” David asked him. “What a gorgon.” He looked back at Sara affectionately. “Look,” he said, “I’m not arguing about it.”

“That’s right,” she replied evenly. “Because for once in your life you’re going to hold on to something. You’re going back next term. You’re going to do that, David.”

David sighed, almost theatrically. “Right,” he said. “Where is he?”

She caught his arm. “You go in there and tell him you’ll come back,” she said.

He didn’t reply. He started for the shop. She held on to his arm, pulling on the sleeve of his shirt. “Listen, David,” she said. “Don’t do this all over again.” By way of reply, her brother smiled, and blew her an elaborate kiss.

“I mean it,” she warned him, as he went through the door.

John Crane was sitting in Sara’s back room, wedged fastidiously in one corner of the overstuffed couch, trying to avoid the cat. The tabby was perched on the opposite arm, tail twitching, its glare fixed on Crane and the smoke spiraling from the cigarette. Crane was wearing a dark sports jacket, a pale blue shirt, and chinos. His hair had been cut, David noticed. Cut so short that you could see his scalp.

In Crane’s hand was one of the children’s toys, a hideous yellow pony with a purple mane. He was dangling it by its tail, and smiling to himself. He looked up as David came in. “Hello, David,” he said easily. “Nice walk?”

David flopped down in the shabby armchair by the fire and started taking off his boots. “Hello, John,” he replied. “Out of your usual stamping ground.”

“I thought I’d look in on you.”

The two men regarded each other. Crane continued smoothly.

“I hear you’ve been over to Morton House to advise them on their Davidia!” He at last stubbed out the cigarette in a saucer. “Of course,” he added, “there’s no one more qualified to advise on Davidia. I should say that was in your blood.”

David stretched out his legs. “Word travels fast,” he observed, without trying to keep the sarcasm out of his voice. “Drink?”

“Too early in the day, thanks.”

David smiled. “That’s not like you, John,” he said. “What’s the matter? Blood pressure, or cirrhosis?”

“Neither.”

“Angela getting on your back again?”

Crane flushed.

David looked at his watch. “I have to get my nephew from school in a minute,” he remarked. “What did you come here for?”

Crane gave him a calculating look, and did not smile. “Child minder and gardener and shopkeeper,” he said. “Still. As long as it keeps you busy.” He laced his fingers over his stomach, looking David up and down. “Got any further with the Wilson book?”

David looked past Crane, out to the back garden, a bald patch of lawn edged by dilapidated flowerbeds. “I’m not writing a book.”

“Oh?” Crane said. “You talked a lot about it a few months ago, when we interviewed you. I rather thought that’s why you’d run out on us. To write your masterpiece.”

David glanced back at him expressionlessly. If Crane wanted a rise out of him, he wasn’t going to get it. “I haven’t run out on you,” he said. “I gave my notice.”

“And left before the post was filled,” Crane said.

David looked down at his hands.

“Your sister is very concerned for your welfare,” Crane said.

“My sister worries a lot.”

“And you don’t worry at all.”

David looked up again. “Actually, John, I don’t,” he replied.

Crane watched him. Only his foot, tapping slightly in midair from his crossed leg, betrayed his irritation. Crane did not like to be seen to lose his temper. He liked his reputation as an infinitely reasonable man.

“I’ve been having a long chat with Sara,” he murmured.

“Oh, yes,” David said.

“This is your fifth teaching post in eight years.”

“And?”

“An observation.”

“You knew all that when you took me on.”

Crane nodded. “Yes,” he mused. “A year at a private school, a year in voluntary work. Two years for the Woodland Trust…”

“All on my C.V.,” David said.

“And all very worthy,” Crane admitted. “A year in Gambia, a year on VSO…”

“Life is short.”

“Is it?” Crane asked.

“I have a tiny attention span,” David responded. He shrugged his shoulders. “So beat me with a stick.”

“Your students are taking their A’s.”

“I do know that.”

“Is it normal to leave a school while examinations are on?”

“I gave my notice,” David repeated quietly.

“Your contract expires at the end of term, not three weeks prior to it.”

“I worked a lot of overtime with my classes. I can’t sit the exam for them.”

“But their term of study doesn’t finish with this year’s exams,” Crane said. “It finishes with next year’s A-levels.”

David closed his eyes temporarily, waited a beat. When he reopened his eyes, he shook his head. “Pretend I’m pregnant suddenly,” he said. “Who was it left at Christmas—Janine? She was pregnant.”

Crane stared at him. “Is this a joke to you?” he demanded. “You never gave us any hint, David. We’re a small school.” He got to his feet. He smoothed out the creases in his trousers, took out another cigarette, and lit it. He walked over to the mantelpiece, where he picked up a photograph. He seemed to be trying to calm himself. “They are very pretty children,” he remarked.

“They take after their mother,” David murmured. “Matt is too ugly.” He grinned at his joke.

Crane put down the picture. “How old are you, David?” he asked. There was an edge to his voice.

David put his head on one side speculatively, trying to guess where the question was leading. “I’m thirty, John. As you know. How old are you?”

“Thirty,” Crane mused to himself. “Not married. Would you call yourself a dilettante, David?”

“I couldn’t even spell it.”

Crane looked at him with an expression of studied sadness. “A dilettante,” he repeated slowly. “One who takes his subject light-heartedly.”

“There’s nothing wrong with being lighthearted.”

“A person without depth.”

David eyed him. “The two aren’t the same,” he answered.

“In this case they are,” Crane said. “You’re thirty years old and uncommitted to anything in life.”

David at last uncrossed his arms, and stood up. “You don’t know anything about me,” he retorted.

“I certainly know what I’ve observed, and I know what Sara has told me,” Crane replied.

“Look,” David said. “What have you come here for, really? To lecture me on life? To get me to come back and stare at an empty classroom? What? Because it seems to me you’re getting a hell of a lot of pleasure out of the lecturing.”

“I at least recognize my responsibilities,” Crane said.

David flushed. “Well, John,” he answered. “I don’t have any responsibilities, so my condolences. I don’t have Angela breathing down my neck, and I don’t have a board of governors, and I don’t have two monosyllabic sons to feed, thank God, and that’s the way I like it.”

They were standing face-to-face, almost toe-to-toe.

“You’re a brilliant man, David,” Crane said. “But even brilliant men need to live in the real world eventually.”

David continued staring Crane down for a few more seconds; then, he shook his head, his body relaxed, and he suddenly grinned. He looked about him on the floor for his other pair of shoes, kicked them out from under the table, and put them on. “Thanks so much for the advice. And for coming all this way on a wasted journey to give it to me,” he said. “Have a nice life.”

In the shop, Sara was standing with Hannah in her arms. “Where are you going?” she asked, as David strode past.

“To get Tom.”

“No, it’s all right,” she said. “I’ll go.” Her gaze anxiously went to Crane, who had followed David out of the sitting room.

David opened the door. He walked away, down the street, letting the shop door slam behind him.

Sara looked at Crane. “If you would just hold on for a while,” she said. “We could talk him round. I know he did like the job.” She glanced helplessly through the window in David’s direction. “I don’t know why he does this,” she murmured.

Crane smiled at her. He reached out, and touched the baby’s face momentarily. “Good-bye, Mrs. Reede,” he said.