Tace was married, so there was naturally no question of his marrying Helena. But he hadn’t deserted her, he had arranged a suitable marriage with his under-gardener, had given the couple the lodge to live in and had had the child named after one of his sweetest heroines, Brenda Nevil of Wrenwood.
Stephen never much cared to think about sex. In the past, when his thoughts had turned to it as a young boy’s thoughts will, his body hadn’t followed his mind. All he had been able to envisage was his mother, so slight and fair, being mounted first by Dadda and then by the lorry driver. So it wasn’t the sexual aspect of Helena’s affair that interested him but its romantic side. He imagined Helena coming to some trysting place on a summer night, to the Banks of Knamber perhaps, or like Lady Irene and Alastair Thornhill, to the ghost of a road, the Reeve’s Way, as it threaded through the Vale of Allen, and Tace meeting her there in the twilight. Love children, he had read, were more beautiful, more charming and more favoured by destiny than those born in wedlock. His mother was and must still be such a one. For the loss of her he had compensated as best he could, first with the imaginary friend he called Rip, then with the moor itself, but in May he thought of her still and with a curious longing.
It wasn’t for many weeks after coming to Chesney that Peach ventured out. His favourite places to be were the chestnut leaf table and the top of the mahogany tallboy under the landing window on which he lay for hours, staring at the peaks and plateaux of the moor.
He grew large and plump and round-cheeked, but he was without kittenish ways as if his sad experience had robbed him prematurely of his youth, yet when he sat on Lyn’s lap in the evenings he gave himself up to a drowsy and contented purring. His first excursion from the house took him no farther than the garden. Next time he was off and away. When two hours had passed and he hadn’t returned, Lyn imagined him finding his way back to Bale’s and by this act leading her there in search of him. She imagined herself reunited with Nick through the cat’s agency, as lovers might be in some fairy story.
But Peach didn’t go to Bale’s or to his former home in Hilderbridge. He came back in the evening, bringing Lyn a fieldmouse. Her mother had come over to tell her Joanne had been kept in hospital with high blood pressure and threatened eclampsia. She had gone to St Ebba’s antenatal clinic and they had kept her there. When Mrs Newman saw the mouse, though it was dead, she jumped on a kitchen chair and squealed. Peach took back his gift, which he had laid at Lyn’s feet, and sat with it in his mouth, making cross twittering growls.
Stephen wrote for ‘Voice of Vangmoor’: ‘Those who declare our moorland puts up a poor showing when it comes to wildlife, should contemplate some of the offerings of my ginger tomcat: fieldmice, a shrew and even a water vole.’ Author’s licence, he told himself, though he had hesitated over the water vole. ‘Wild flowers too are to be found in abundance. Not only is the bilberry putting forth its globular pinkish-green blooms and the uva-ursi prolific with blossom this spring, but a few orchids may be spotted. I myself was lucky enough last week to see a fine sample of the Lesser Twayblade and another of the Small White Orchid, rare occurrences as far south as this and in these times. Readers of our great Vangmoor novelist, Alfred Osborn Tace (or viewers, as one must say these days!) will be familiar with the scene in Wrenwood in which Brenda Nevil hunts for specimens of this orchid for her bridal bouquet.’
It was true that he had found the orchid. A little cluster of it was growing among the damp rock ledges between Big Allen and Mottle Foin near where the Hilder ran down. Stephen came upon the flowers by chance after he had left the path and struck out across the rough marshy ground.
The sky was the way he liked it best and thought best suited to the terrain it overcast, piled with cloud in pillars and columns and towers and ramparts, so that in places the vapour seemed not insubstantial but composed of solid masonry. The surface of the moor itself glowed with the flowerbuds on the grasses and the tiny recumbent plants and there was a feel in the air of new springing life. The orchids, fresh and perfect against the damp stone, growing between cushions of bright green moss, had creamy flowers, fragrant and triplelobed. Stephen had hardly been able to believe his eyes.
Tace, describing the orchid in his novel, had also told where it was to be found, and within a few years every tuber and plant of leuchorchis albida had been stripped from the moor. Here, by the Hilder, was far west of the site of the plants mentioned in Wrenwood. Stephen resolved to be wiser than his grandfather and, while telling his readers of his discovery, not to disclose its whereabouts.
He didn’t even tell Lyn. She liked flowers and planted flowers in their garden but he often felt she didn’t really care about the moor. When she asked him if he would come with her to see Joanne he put forward the excuse of having his article to write, so Lyn went with Kevin.
‘I reckon you’re very wise not going in for this lark,’ Joanne said, shifting the mound of her body uncomfortably under the bedclothes. ‘If you get like weakening, just remember me. D’you know, they could keep me in here right up until the baby’s born.’
‘They won’t do that,’ Lyn said. ‘They haven’t got the beds.’
‘She’s brought it on herself with overeating,’ said Kevin.
For once Joanne didn’t round on him. She sighed. ‘It’s all fluid, they say. The baby isn’t even very big. I’m like one of those water beds, stick a needle in me and I’d go down to nothing. Pity they can’t.’
Lyn left the two of them together. St Ebba’s, the maternity hospital, was a good way farther down North River Street from Hilderbridge General, but there had been no room left in St Ebba’s car park and she had used the car park of the rambling, foinstone, turreted building that had once been the Three Towns work-house. It was nearly eight o’clock of a sunny evening, still light, as light as afternoon, but cool as early June often is. The trees in the grounds were in full, fresh leaf, and behind them the sun declined towards the moorland horizon, its rays making a brilliant silver-gold glare through the tracery. Lyn took one of the gravel paths into the grounds of the general hospital, walking towards the sun that dazzled her eyes so that she screwed them up against it. Her hair was loose today and she wore a blue and white striped cotton dress with her mother’s birthday gift cardigan. She had several pairs of sunglasses, perks of Gillman’s, but she had forgotten to bring a pair with her.
She saw the man, not very tall, thin, wearing jeans and a tee-shirt, coming along the path towards her, towards the main gate into North River Street, but the sun blinded her and she didn’t know him. He saw her and stopped. She closed her eyes and passed her hand over them and looked again. When she saw it was Nick Frazer something very curious happened. She behaved as she had never thought it would be possible for her to behave. She didn’t think. It was a reflex, the result of those weeks of thinking and longing and wondering. She ran to him and into his arms. He put out his arms and caught her and held her, and they stood there on the gravel path in the grounds of Hilderbridge General Hospital, embraced as if they had long been lovers and had known each other with profound emotion and physical joy and had been parted only to meet again now, by chance, so felicitously.
‘I’ve thought about you every day, all the time,’ he said.
‘Oh, I know, I know,’ she said.
‘I knew exactly why you didn’t come and I thought you knew why I didn’t come to you. But it was a deadlock, no way of breaking out of it. I even hoped that damned cat would find his way back so that I’d have an excuse to ring you.’