Now, he thought, he could sleep. He could eat something and lie down on the bed and sleep peacefully and innocently. Tomorrow when he was rested and fit again he would go back to work. Perhaps Lyn’s body would never be found, perhaps as time went by there would be nothing left of it but the bones and these would gradually crumble and dissolve until they became one with the stony surface of the moor …

The pavements of Tace Way were covered with a gleaming skin of rain and water dripped in heavier drops than the rain from neat little front garden trees. Outside Mrs Newman’s house was parked a van with Bale’s Pet Shop on its side. That reminded Stephen about having Peach destroyed, something which would now have to wait until tomorrow, but which would be a very natural act on the part of a deserted husband. Hadn’t he read somewhere, whether as fact or fiction he didn’t know, that Elizabeth Barrett’s father had destroyed, or wanted to have destroyed, her spaniel when she ran away with Robert Browning? Act normally. The normal thing would be to rid oneself of the runaway woman’s pet.

He went into the house and into the kitchen but he felt too exhausted to eat. Mrs Newman would come across the road soon, now she had seen he was back. He locked the back door and took off the phone receiver, took off his boots and jacket and went upstairs. Still wearing his jeans and shirt, he lay down on the bed and pulled the covers over him. For a moment or two he lay there, listening to the gentle patter of the rain, and then he slid into sleep.

A sound from downstairs awoke him, he didn’t know how long afterwards. It was still raining lightly. The sound had been one of the interior doors closing, and now he could hear footsteps. Had he, after all, forgotten to lock the back door?

Surely Mrs Newman wouldn’t come upstairs after him, but these footsteps were mounting the stairs. Stephen sat up as the bedroom door came open. He jumped off the bed and backed against the wall with a cry of terror.

Lyn had come into the room and was looking at him.

16

His nerves must be very bad, she thought. He looked as if he had seen a ghost. She stood about a yard in from the door and spoke to him gently.

‘I’m sorry if I startled you, Stephen. I’ve come back for my things and for Peach.’

He didn’t speak. He stood against the wall, his hands flat against it as if he were only prevented from further retreat by that solid mass.

‘I saw the car, I knew you couldn’t be at work, but I thought you must be out on the moor. I wouldn’t have come in like that if I’d known you were here.’

Still he didn’t answer. She began to feel afraid of him again. For a while she had succeeded in conquering this new fear of Stephen. Because she couldn’t let herself feel afraid of Stephen, poor frightened Stephen, she had stopped Nick coming with her to Tace Way, but now the fear was coming back. She forced herself to take a few steps forward and to speak steadily.

‘It wasn’t right of me to run away like that while you were out on Saturday. It was because I got in a panic.’ She didn’t mention his having hit her but her hand went up involuntarily to her bruised left eye. ‘Being away these two days,’ she said, ‘I think it’s made me understand — you’ll be glad to be rid of me, won’t you, Stephen? You don’t need a — a mother any more.’

He moved away from the wall and she flinched a little. But he wasn’t coming near her. He sat or half fell onto the bed and turned away his face. She was sure then that he wasn’t going to speak to her. The cupboard where her clothes were was on his side of the bed, but she went up to it and slid back the doors. She took out an armful of clothes almost haphazardly, the skin on her back tingling with apprehension. Again she drove herself. She turned and held out her hand to him, though she knew better than to touch him.

‘Won’t you speak to me? We may not see each other again. Stephen?’

He jumped up and climbed away from her over the bed. It would have been funny if it hadn’t been so horrible. He scrambled across the bed on all fours, dropped on to the floor, ran across the passage and into his study. She heard the key turn in the lock.

Nick had made her promise not to lift the suitcases herself. She had laughed at him but she had promised. She had survived Stephen’s violence and the baby had survived and she was going with Nick to London. Except that it would have upset Stephen she would have sung out loud as she carried the armfuls of clothes downstairs and packed them in the cases.

Her mother came across the road. ‘I knew something was up when he said you were going to his uncle Stanley’s. I said to your dad, Stanley Naulls wouldn’t have folks round, he might have to give them something to eat and drink.’

Lyn smiled. ‘I kept phoning you but you don’t hear the phone when you’re out in the garden. I knew you’d start wondering, it was a relief when I got hold of you in the afternoon.’

Mrs Newman carried the cases out and put them in the back of the van. ‘I can’t help feeling a bit weepy, Lyn. We’ve never had a divorce in our family. It’s a shame you ever married him, he was never a real husband to you. When you three were little there was a man like him lived in one of those pair of cottages on the Thirlton road …’

‘Mum,’ Lyn said, ‘don’t send Stephen to Coventry, will you? Don’t not speak to him or anything.’

Joanne was in the garden, standing by the baby’s pram. Lyn went up to her and they embraced clumsily because it was the first time for years that they had kissed each other.

‘I’ll miss you. I’ll be so dead bored I’ll die.’

‘I’m not going to Australia,’ said Lyn. ‘I’m not going to the other end of the world.’

‘Might as well be. Oh, I do envy you, you are lucky.’

‘I know,’ said Lyn, ‘I know I am.’

She picked Peach out of the yellow maple tree and gathered him into her arms and put him on the passenger seat of the van. He sat erect, staring out. Lyn turned the van round, waved to her mother and her sister. She saw her mother wave, burst into tears and rush into the house, but she hesitated, slowing only for a moment before driving on and out of Tace Way. And soon the moor unfolded on either side of her, Chesney Fell and Foinmen’s Plain to the right, to the left the quivering copses on the Banks of Knamber. She would never need to see it again except as an occasional visitor. Once when she was first married, walking along the Reeve’s Way with Stephen, she had found lying on the turf a skin shed by an adder. Now it seemed to her that the silvery-grey moor was her own snakeskin that she was sloughing off, peeling it off behind her, as she went on to new ways and new things.

The skin that was the moor wrinkled and shrivelled and rolled away and Lyn drove down into north Hilderbridge, down North River Street, over the bridge to the Moot walk and Nick and the southbound train.

The shock of it prostrated Stephen. He lay face downwards on the floor in his study. He listened to Lyn’s footsteps moving about the house, to her voice and her mother’s, a distant wordless sound like the twittering of birds, to the front door closing. By that time he knew it had been Lyn, was Lyn, not a ghost or some frightful emanation from his own fear or guilt. He knew by then that it was Lyn who had walked into the bedroom and therefore that he hadn’t killed Lyn on Saturday afternoon.

He got up and went across the passage and into his bedroom and looked out of the window. Bale’s van had gone. The baby’s pram stood on the Simpsons’ lawn but both women had gone in. It had stopped raining and a pale sun was shining through the layers of cloud. He could remember so clearly the events of Saturday afternoon. He had come home and seen Lyn standing at the window, standing there in her blue jeans and white tee-shirt, her hair cloaking her shoulders, and without motive, without even particularly wanting to do it, with nothing but a desire too urgent to resist, he had sprung at her and killed her. Yet just now he had seen her and heard her speak.