THE THURSDAY OF Whit week, my parents’ afternoon off. On days like this, school holidays or bank holidays, we often drive up the Dales: drystone walls, no trees, and a wind whistling like winter in the telegraph wires. But today it’s sunny and we’ve stayed in the valley, and now we’re pulling into the car park, very crowded, at Bolton Abbey. A brown river churfles past the ruin. A line of stones picks its way across—silver buttons on a dead man’s chest. Trout leap out of their bull’s-eyes to snatch up flies. I ask if we can get out and play here, but my father says, ‘No, let’s find somewhere quieter,’ and off we go, past the Strid (just a step across the churning water, but if you slip you never come up again) and on towards Burnsall. My mother has gone shopping in Harrogate. Auntie Beaty is with us instead.
She’s not my real Auntie, but my father calls her that because he says she is almost family. He met her three or four years ago, when she and her husband Sam became managers of the golf club. When my parents go to pubs, my sister and I have to stay in the car, with lemonade and crisps. But at the golf club we can wander off down the fairways looking for lost balls, or play in the yard at the back. I like the yard, the crates of empties stacked under the steamy kitchen window, the wasps you have to mind out for in the orangeades and Britvics. My parents stay a very long time inside, at the bar, where Auntie Beaty or Uncle Sam serves them. Once everyone was very merry and invited us in and we had shandy, and also onion and sugar sandwiches, which are much nicer than you think they’re going to be.
When he has time for a round of golf as well as the bar, my father lets me caddy for him. I wheel his trolley over the frizzed grass, past larks’ nests, the ball like a tiny white ulcer in the mouth of a bunker or green. There is one hole, the sixth, where we always see a lapwing, also known as a peewit or plover says the Observer Book of Birds . It’s a lovely black and white colour, with a crest like one of Auntie Beaty’s black curls. When we trundle the clubs past, it flies up, making terrible cries, as if it had been hurt or had lost something, and then suddenly it crashes to the ground and rolls and flops about with a broken wing. My father says not to be fooled, that it’s perfectly healthy and knows what it’s doing, and all its playacting is for just one thing—to lead us away from the nest. Once it flew straight at Uncle Gordon’s head when he hit his second shot into the rough—he had got too close to the nest and it was desperate to scare him off.
‘Why do we spend so much time with Auntie Beaty?’ I asked once when we were driving back over the moors.
‘Because she’s a bit sad, and needs help,’ he said.
‘Why?’
‘For one thing, she and Uncle Sam can’t have children. And they also have money troubles.’
‘Do you give them money?’
‘I help with their accounts, so they’ll learn to understand money and look after it themselves.’
But they can’t have learnt to look after money yet, because he is still there most nights till very late, and today Auntie Beaty has come out driving with us, and is sitting in the front of the car holding Josephine while my sister Gill and I sit in the back. Josephine—Josie—is nearly two now, and noisy, and has red cheeks and curly black hair. I can remember the day she was born. My father took my sister and me along to the maternity hospital, Cawder Ghyll: we couldn’t go in, so he held us high at the window nearest Auntie Beaty’s bed on the ground floor, and we saw the cot with the black head in it. Josie had been a surprise, and my father said we didn’t have to feel sorry for Auntie Beaty and Uncle Sam any more: their troubles might not be over, but they had children now, which was a blessing. My mother wasn’t there that day, though Cawder Ghyll was the hospital she delivered babies at, and she had delivered Josie too.
Auntie Beaty comes to our house a lot. Once I walked into the bathroom when she was feeding Josie: it felt funny, as if I shouldn’t be there, but she didn’t mind, and I saw her big white breast and the brown nipple when Josie took her mouth away. Another day she brought her Dad with her, Josie’s grandpa: he stood at the edge of the raised bottom lawn, where the aubrietia climbs up the wall on to the paved edgings, and suddenly he tipped backwards and fell on his back on the gravel three feet below. He lay there, flat and white and gasping like a fish, and Auntie Beaty screamed, but my father came running with his little bag and helped him up and said it was all right, he must have lost his balance, it wasn’t a heart attack. Auntie Beaty has been coming round even more since then. She is always laughing and my father is always laughing, though not my mother. Sometimes Auntie Beaty is kind, gives me crisps and sherbet fountains, hugs me till I taste the perfume on her neck and lets me test how springy her black curls are. But other times Gillian and I say we’re fed up playing with Josie, and my mother is sarcastic. Then my father gets cross and says we’re all family and helping Beaty, and where’s the harm?
I’m getting bored now in the back of the car, even though the roof’s down, our hair in our faces. I’m in training for the Olympics, the hundred, the two hundred, the four hundred, the high jump, the long jump. At last year’s village fête in our paddock, I came next to last in the under-nines dash, but I know I can do better this year. It was a bad day for other reasons. My mother had her terrible migraine, and maybe that affected my performance. I think it was my worst day ever—worse than when she skidded on the cow-muck and crashed the car; worse than when she ran screaming up the stairs because the wardrobe had fallen on top of Gillian; worse than when I was made to stay in bed all day as a punishment for still at my age dirtying my pants. I came back to the house after the tug-of-war and heard a noise from upstairs. She was moaning and rolling about on the bed, holding the back of her hand to her forehead. ‘Get Daddy, quick,’ she said, and I fetched him from the raffle, fast. I waited downstairs, then another doctor from the hospital came, and they told me to go back to the fête. At least I beat Christine Rawlinson in the race, but I should have beaten Stephen Ormrod as well. When I got back Lennie, the maid, said ‘It’s all right, she’s at peace now,’ and I thought she must mean: Your mummy’s dead. She wasn’t, and has had only two migraines since, but I worry that she might roll and moan with another strong one. In the Bible, when David is a boy, before meeting Goliath, he plays his harp at the court and the King’s headaches disappear. I wish I could cure my mother’s migraines like that, but I can only play the piano, and Mrs Brown says I need more practice before I can take Grade One. I think curing migraines is probably a much higher grade, Nine or Ten at least.
My father has turned off the lane on to a grass-seamed track between two gateposts. He parks the car, the handbrake clicking tight, the silence after the ignition key. We are at the top of a hill, above a rough meadow with thistles and buttercups and cow-parsley.
‘Why don’t you and Gill take Josephine down the hill,’ he says. ‘You’ll be all right—just hold her hand. We can watch you from here.’
‘Oh, Arthur, I’m not sure,’ says Auntie Beaty.
‘No, go on, they’ll be fine,’ he says. ‘Lovely day, no sheep or cows to worry them, wonderful spot for children. Blake will look after her: he’s nine now. Everything will be fine. Where’s the harm?’
So we walk down the meadow, Josie’s small hand trustingly in mine, which makes me feel big and in charge. I want to turn round to make sure my father and Auntie Beaty are watching us, but I don’t. I’m not like Lot’s wife in the picture at Sunday school. I’ll show them I can be trusted.
On the level ground at the bottom of the field, there’s nothing much to do, but I know we shouldn’t turn back straight away. Gill begins to pick buttercups. Josie sits down on her terry-and-plastic bottom. She’s too small to play games. I wish my father were here to sprint against. A lapwing wheels away from us, rising then plunging, and I think: ‘Enough of your tricks. I know your nest is near. I could smash every egg if I tried.’ I’ve learnt a lot about birds lately. We have a redstart’s nest in the wall below the billiard-room. There was a pied wagtail on the lawn this morning, headbobbing and lifting its skirt, putting food in the mouth of its chick, which was fluffy and even bigger than its mother and should be fending for itself by now. And that distant cry just now was a curlew’s, I think, getting faster and higher.
I look up the field to where the car’s parked, but the windscreen is lit and flaring and I can’t see behind it. It’s as if all the power of the sun were in the glass containing Dad and Auntie Beaty, and no one else can look on it without being blinded. I put my hand—flat, as if saluting—over my eyes, and look again. I think I can see two heads there, close together, safe inside the blaze. I wait for the car doors to open, and I hear my father’s voice again: ‘Everything will be fine. Where’s the harm?’