II. Before the Frosts

The Last Swim

Sunday, 4th October 1953

He was awake before the alarm, which was usual, and lay listening to find out why, which was also usual. The answer was nothing. No wind in the chimney, no rain on the slates, not a sound from the lane. A still morning, then. He had told himself on Friday that he would only go if it was still.

The kitchen was black and smelled of last night’s fire. Rufus lit the lamp, put the kettle on the ring and dressed by the range: the bathing costume first, cold as a wet sack, and everything else on top of it. A second jersey went in the haversack, because the first time he had done this, in 1934, he had not brought one and had spent the train home convinced he was dying.

Charlie lay on the hearthrug with his chin on his paws and watched all this without moving anything except his eyes. He knew the haversack. The haversack meant walking. It did not, as a rule, mean breakfast.

“You needn’t come,” Rufus said.

Charlie closed his eyes.

Rufus opened the door. The gravel of the yard, under the lamp, was grey with dew, and the moment the dog heard his master’s boot on it he was up, through the door and away down the lane like something fired from a gun, and did not look back to see whether anyone was following. Rufus pulled the door to and followed.

It was a mile over the hill to Delph and a mile and a half more up the valley to the reservoirs, and he walked it in the dark by the feel of the road. Below him the mill lodges lay like pieces of dropped pewter. Somewhere down the valley a train let off steam in a long sigh, and the sound came up to him late, the way sound does at night. Twice Charlie came back out of the black to make sure he was still coming, and twice went off again, satisfied.

It was the kind of walk on which a man goes over his lists. He had written this one in the back of his journal on the night of the equinox, under the words: Before the frosts. One. The fallen length of wall in the top field. Begun, and going well. Two. The chimney on the east side, which smoked. Not begun, and not begun since 1946. Three. Find out what Penny meant.

On the evening of the equinox she had left him an envelope. On the back of it, in pencil, she had drawn the lane, the cottage and his top field, with a small cross in the middle of the field, and underneath it, in her neat hand, three words: here be dragons. He had gone up with a torch the moment she had gone, and found, at the place where the cross was, three sheep. They had not been able to help him.

He had meant to ask her about it on the Saturday of the fruitcake. Then she had slipped on the path after supper, and he had caught her, and it had gone clean out of his head.

He had not kissed her. He wished that to be understood, if only by himself. They had walked back down to the lane talking about the tithe map, and on Wednesday she had come up to look at the wall as if nothing whatever had happened. Which, he reminded himself, it had not.

There was a light in Uncle Ned’s kitchen.

He had not expected that. He had mentioned the swim to Ned on Wednesday, over the gate, in the tone of a man mentioning that he might whitewash the privy, and Ned had said, “Tha’s a fool, then,” and gone back to his dahlias. But the lamp was lit, and when Rufus came level with the house the door opened and Ned came out into the road in his big coat and muffler, with a Thermos under one arm and Nell at his heel, as though they had arranged it weeks ago.

“You said I was a fool,” said Rufus.

“Tha is. I’ve come to see how much of one.” Ned set off up the road beside him. “Nell wanted a walk.”

Nell, a grey lurcher built mostly of legs and doubt, looked at Charlie. Charlie looked at Nell. They agreed, without discussion, that the arrangement was beneath them both, and went on ahead together.

At the head of the valley the road climbed, and the dark thinned, and by the time they came up onto the dam of the lower reservoir it had turned to that colourless half-light in which everything is exactly the same grey: water, sky, the long back of the moor beyond. Mist lay on the water to the depth of a man. It did not move. Above it the air was clear and very cold, and the first thin line of colour was coming up behind the hill.

“Six o’clock,” said Rufus, looking at his father’s watch.

“Aye. The Romans’d have been up an hour.” Ned nodded down the valley, to the field below the dam where the Romans had once kept a fort and had since let it go to sheep. “They’d not have made all this fuss.”

“The Romans,” said Rufus, “had hot baths.”

He went down the stone steps on the inside of the dam to where the water met the pitching, and sat on the bottom step, and began to unlace his boots. Ned stayed on top with the Thermos. It was the proper arrangement. It had been the arrangement, Rufus suspected, for about two thousand years: one man in the water and one on the bank telling him how it should be done.

He took off the jacket, the jersey, the shirt, the trousers, and folded them on the step in the order he would need them. He did this with great care, because it put off the next part.

“By,” said Ned, from above. “That costume.”

“It’s a perfectly good costume.”

“It were a perfectly good costume in 1934. Your mother’s never forgiven it. Stripes.” Ned considered it with the eye of a man who had engraved calico rollers for forty years and knew a pattern when he saw one. “They’ll see you from Oldham.”

“That,” said Rufus, “is the idea. In case of accident.”

He stood up. The air on his skin was not so bad. The stone under his feet was worse. He put one foot in the water, and the cold took hold of him at the ankle with a grip like a bailiff’s, and he took the foot out again.

“What’s it at?” called Ned.

Rufus looked at the water, at the mist, at the colour of the sky. He had given the matter some thought on the walk up. The air had been about forty on the road; the reservoir had had a warm September to take up heat from, and had been losing it for a fortnight. “Forty-eight degrees,” he said. “Near enough.”

“Did tha measure it?”

“I reckoned it.”

“Tha reckoned it.” Ned sounded pleased. “Tha’ll make a naturalist yet. Go on, then. It’ll not get any warmer while you stand there thinking about it.”

This was undeniably true. It was also, Rufus reflected, the whole of his father’s philosophy and most of Ned’s, and the one point on which the two men had ever agreed. He went down the last step and in.

There is no describing it, and he did not try to, then or afterwards. There was the cold, which was total, and knocked every thought out of his head. Then there was the need to breathe, which he did, in great ragged gasps he could hear echoing off the dam. And then, after perhaps half a minute, there was something else. The cold was still there, but it had become a fact, like the weather, and in the space it left behind everything was very clear and very quiet.

He swam out through the mist with a slow breaststroke, his chin just above the water. Inside the mist there was nothing to see but a small circle of pewter water, and his own hands coming together and parting in front of him. He could hear Charlie barking on the dam, the high, affronted bark the dog kept for people doing things he did not approve of. He could hear Ned telling Charlie to hush. Then, as he went further out, he could hear nothing at all but the water at his mouth.

The sun came over the hill.

It did not rise so much as arrive. One moment the mist was grey, and the next it was gold, all of it at once, lit from inside, and he was swimming through a room made of light. A heron got up from somewhere very close, which was a shock to them both, and went away over his head with slow, offended strokes, trailing its legs. He turned onto his back and watched it go. Above the mist, the sky was clean pale blue, with not a single cloud.

He thought: I shall remember this. And then, because he was an honest man even in cold water: I shall want to tell somebody about this, and I shall know exactly who, and I shall not.

It was then that he heard it: a steady, laboured snorting, somewhere behind him in the mist, and coming closer. He trod water and turned round. Out of the gold came Charlie’s head, ears flat, eyes very wide, swimming with the grim expression of a dog who has never been asked to do this and has decided to do it anyway. He had never been in deeper water than the beck. He came alongside, took a firm mouthful of the striped costume at the shoulder, and turned for the dam.

Rufus, who was a perfectly competent swimmer, allowed himself to be rescued.

They came in together, the dog towing and the man doing most of the work. On the dam, Ned was laughing. He had stopped by the time they reached the steps, but not by much.

Ned had the Thermos open when he came up the steps, and was pouring tea into the lid. Rufus took it with both hands. His fingers had gone the colour of candle wax and would not properly close. Charlie came up the steps behind him, shook himself thoroughly over the clothes Rufus had folded so carefully, and sat down on the towel.

“Off,” said Rufus.

Charlie did not move. He had saved a life, and considered the towel his by right. Nell, who had waded into the shallows up to her knees and was standing there in a state of philosophical calm, looked at him with contempt.

“She’s more sense than the pair of you,” said Ned. “Here. Drink that. How long were you in?”

“Eight minutes.” He had not looked at the watch; he had counted. It came to the same thing.

“I did twenty, once. 1911. They had to fetch me out wi’ a boathook.” Ned looked at Charlie. “Same principle.” He sat down on the top step, carefully, the way men of sixty-nine sit on stone, and coughed once into his muffler, and looked annoyed with it. “Damp,” he said, before Rufus could ask. “Every last morning o’ the year, I came up here. From 1901, when I were seventeen, to 1939. Bar four years in France, when I had other water to think about.”

Rufus towelled his hair and said nothing. He had heard it before, but not for a long time, and not here.

“The last morning of 1939,” said Ned, “I came up and stood on this step, where you’re sat. And I looked at it. And I thought, what for?” He turned the Thermos in his hands. “And I went home. And after that there were the war, and after the war I were sixty-two and had more sense.”

“You could come in with me now,” said Rufus. “Next time.”

“I could not.” Ned smiled at the water. “But somebody ought to. It’s a waste of a good reservoir, else.”

Rufus pulled the jersey over his head and took a long time finding the armholes.

They walked back down the valley with the sun on their backs. The mist had gone off the water as if someone had lifted a cloth, and the moor above was all rust and ochre, the bracken dying from the top down. Charlie and Nell ran ahead through the wet grass at the roadside, putting up meadow pipits that went away in little complaining bursts. Somewhere towards Delph, the church bells had started.

“And how,” said Ned, “is Miss Vance?”

He said it to the road in front of him, lightly, as he might have asked after the price of coal.

“Forty-eight degrees,” said Rufus.

“I asked after Miss Vance.”

“I heard you.” They walked on a few paces. “She’s well. She was up on Wednesday. She had a look at the wall.”

“Did she.”

“She set a stone in the footings. One I’d passed over twice.” He heard himself going on, and could not seem to stop. “She has a very good eye for it. For a stone. She turned it over once and put it in, and it sat as if it had been cut for the place. I’ve walled that length twice in my life, and I don’t think I’ve ever set a stone like it.”

Ned said nothing at all. He took out his pipe, looked at it, and put it back in his pocket without filling it, which Rufus did not notice, because he was explaining the correct batter for a field wall in a south-westerly exposure, and went on explaining it as far as Ned’s gate.

At the gate, Ned stopped.

“I’ll tell your mother you were in,” he said. “She’ll say you’ll catch your death. I’ll tell her you won’t.” He considered his nephew for a moment, the wet hair, the red hands, the jacket buttoned wrong. “Tha’s more like me than tha knows, Rufus. That’s not altogether a compliment.”

He went in. Nell went in after him. The door shut.

Rufus stood in the road for a while, trying to work out what the old man had meant, and failing, and then whistled up the dog and went on home over the hill.

He saw the marks when he came into the yard.

The dew had gone off the gravel by then, but the tyre track was still there, a single clean line in the damp at the edge, where the stones gave way to earth: up from the lane to the door, a short curve where a bicycle had been turned, and back down again. There was nothing on the step. The door was as he had left it. Whoever had come had waited a little, and found nobody at home, and gone.

Charlie put his nose to the track, followed it to the door and back to the lane, and then lost interest and went indoors to his rug.

Rufus stayed in the yard.

He stood looking at the track for rather longer than a man generally looks at the mark of a bicycle tyre, with the towel still over his shoulder and his hair drying in the sun. Then he went in and raked out the range and laid the fire, and put the kettle on, and got down two cups before he noticed what he had done, and put one back.

The Last Cope

Saturday, 17th October 1953

The barometer had gone up in the night, and was still rising. Rufus tapped it on his way through to the kitchen, as he did every morning, and looked at it for some time. A rising barometer meant no rain, and he had told his journal that he was waiting for rain.

Outside, the wind had backed into the south and gone soft. The yard was dry. The slates were dry. The water butt by the back door, which he had emptied on Thursday so that he could measure what the next proper rain put into it, held exactly what it had held on Thursday, which was a quarter of an inch of leaves.

He had taken the Friday off from the works to finish the wall. Schofield had told him to. Walter Schofield had the next drawing board to his at Avro, in Chadderton: a small, square man who had been a fitter on Rufus’s squadron in the war, and who missed nothing. On Thursday afternoon Schofield had leaned across and found him drawing, very neatly, in the margin of an aeroplane part, a length of drystone wall. He had rubbed it out for him before anybody else saw it.

“Take the Friday, Rufus,” Schofield had said. “Tha’s owed it, and tha’s no use to the firm. A man who draws walls on the firm’s paper is either courting or daft.” He had considered the matter. “I’ll not say which.” Then, going back to his own board, he had said which. “Courting.”

He went up to the top field before breakfast to look at the drainage.

The wall ran across the field from the old gatepost to the corner by the rowan. Eleven yards and a foot of it were new, a shade paler than the old wall at either end, as new stone always is until it has had a winter. Along the top the copes stood on edge, as tight as books on a shelf, and about a third of the way along there was a gap the width of one of them. He had sighted along that gap from the back door at dusk on Friday, and from the gate at dusk, and once more, with the lamp, at an hour he did not intend to record.

It was the first thing on his list, and it was all but done. It was also, as he had established with a tape on the first day of the wall, within a yard of the place where Penny had drawn her cross. He had not asked her about the cross. He had a great many questions he had not asked her, and he kept them, on the whole, where he kept the envelope: in the inside pocket of his jacket, where a man keeps the things he means to get round to.

The ground below the gap was dry. He pressed his heel into the turf to make sure. It was dry. He crouched and looked at the footings, and at the through-stone below the gap, and at the small stones of the hearting where they showed between the faces. Everything was exactly as he had built it, and nothing in it had any water to get rid of.

On the wall top beside the gap, where it would be handy, lay the cope he had chosen for it: a good, square-shouldered piece of gritstone, a little longer than its neighbours, with a clean face. He had chosen it on Friday at about two o’clock, and carried it up himself. He had not been able to explain to himself why a stone that was to go on after a week of rain needed carrying up on the Friday, so he had stopped asking.

Charlie came and sat down beside him, and looked at the gap, and then looked at him.

“Drainage,” said Rufus.

Charlie yawned, all the way down to his back teeth, and went off to see about a rabbit.

He found things to do. He split a week’s kindling, which took an hour, and stacked it, which took another. He oiled the chain on the Thunderbird, which did not need it, and wiped the tank, which did not need that either. He went up to the top field three more times, once for the drainage and twice for no reason he could name, and on each visit the gap was the same width and the ground under it was the same dryness.

The fieldfares were in the rowan at the corner, as they had been since Wednesday: forty or so, grey-headed, quarrelsome, chacking at one another like a tin of stones being shaken. They had stripped the top of the tree on the first day and worked down. By eleven there were a few clusters left on the lowest branches, and the birds were going at them with the urgency of men in a queue who can see the counter. Rufus stood at the gate and watched them for a quarter of an hour. It was a perfectly good thing to watch. It also happened that from the gate you could see the whole of the lane, down as far as the bend.

At a quarter past two he was in the yard, sweeping it for the second time, when he heard the bicycle.

He heard it before he saw it: the tick of a freewheel on the last steep stretch of the lane, and then nothing. She always got off at the bend and walked the last of it. She said it was for the view. Then she came round the end of the wall, pushing the machine, in the belted canvas coat and the tartan headscarf, with her dark hair coming out from under it in the wind, and her map case slung across her back. She propped the bicycle against the yard wall, at the very spot where the tyre track had been a fortnight ago. Rufus noticed this, and said nothing about it.

“Good afternoon,” he said.

“I’ve come to believe it,” said Penny.

“It’s up the top,” said Rufus.

“I know where it is, Rufus,” said Penny. “I’ve seen it before.”

Charlie met them at the field gate and threw himself at Penny’s knees, and then walked ahead of them up the field with his tail going, as though he had built the wall himself and wished to show it off.

Penny walked it from end to end on the field side without saying anything, with one hand trailing along the copes. Rufus had seen her read a map in the same way: from one corner to the other before she would say a word about it. At the far end, by the rowan, she turned round and walked back, counting under her breath.

“Eleven yards and two feet,” said Penny.

“One foot,” said Rufus.

“Two. You’ll have measured from the through-stone at the end, and the end isn’t the through-stone. It’s the gatepost.”

He considered this. It was, he was obliged to admit, entirely possible. He had measured it from the through-stone.

She stopped at the gap.

“You’ve missed one,” said Penny.

“I’ve left one off,” said Rufus. “It’s a matter of drainage.”

“Is it.” She looked at the turf under the gap, and at the sky, which was blue from the moor to Oldham with not a cloud in it. “Has it rained?”

“Not as such,” said Rufus.

“Not as such,” said Penny. She crouched and laid her palm flat on the grass under the gap, the way a mother feels a child’s forehead. “It’s dry as a bone, Rufus.”

“It’s wetter there than I allowed for,” said Rufus. “In general.”

“In general,” said Penny. She stood up and looked at him with her head a little on one side, which was how she looked at a survey sheet where the contours did not agree. He found he had become very interested in the coping at the gatepost end.

Then she looked at the stone he had left ready on the wall top.

“Is that the one?” said Penny.

“That’s the one I picked,” said Rufus.

She turned it over in both hands, looked at the bed of it and at the face, and set it down again where it had been. Then she went to the heap of spare stone in the corner, where the fallen wall had been sorted in September into throughs and copes and hearting, and past that to the small heap beyond it, where the rejects went. She turned over three before she chose a fourth. It was a narrower stone than his, and darker, with a ring of old grey lichen on one face. It had been on this wall before, in some other place, for a long time. Rufus knew it. He had thrown it on the reject heap himself, on the first day, as too short for anything.

“That one’s short,” said Rufus.

“It isn’t short,” said Penny. “Your gap’s long.”

He took the string line out of his pocket, where it had been all day for no reason, and fastened one end to the gatepost and walked the other end out along the wall top, and stood at the far end sighting along it with one eye shut. It gave him something to do with his hands, and somewhere to look.

Penny set the stone on edge in the gap. It would not go. She lifted it out and turned it end for end, and set it again, and this time it went down with a small grinding sound and sat.

“Give us the mell,” said Penny.

He gave her the mell. She knocked the stone twice. The second knock had a different note from the first, duller and closer, which is the sound a stone makes when it has made up its mind. She stood back. Rufus looked along the string. The top of her stone was true to the line, as true as any of the others. It was, if he was honest, truer than the one he had picked would have been, because his had been a quarter of an inch proud and he had been meaning to dress it.

“There,” said Penny. “Now it’s finished.”

“It was finished yesterday,” said Rufus. “Bar drainage.”

“It wasn’t finished yesterday,” said Penny, and gave him back the mell.

Charlie, who had been waiting for this, jumped up onto the wall and set off along the top of it, placing his feet with care, the full length from the gatepost to the rowan. Rufus had forbidden this on Friday. It had held him then.

“Will it hold him?” said Penny.

“It held him yesterday,” said Rufus.

“Charlie. Off,” said Penny, and Charlie got off, which he had not once done for Rufus in three years.

They stood together by the new stone. The fieldfares went up out of the rowan all at once with a clatter, and wheeled out over the field and away towards the hawthorns on the far side, and the rowan stood behind them with nothing left on it. Below, the whole valley lay open in the sun: the slates of Dobcross, the chimneys at Delph, the long brown back of the moor going up to Standedge. It was very warm for October.

“This is the same length I did in ’48,” said Rufus. “It never was right at the bottom end. I thought I’d got it right that time.”

“I know,” said Penny.

He supposed he must have told her. He told her most things about walls.

She stayed where she was for a little while, a yard or so along from the stone she had set, looking down the field towards the lane. Then she took the headscarf off and shook out her hair, and the sun was full on it, and the warm wind off the moor took hold of it.

Something happened to Rufus’s breathing then, much as it had on the bottom step at Castleshaw, when the water first took hold. He became aware that he had been looking at her for longer than a man generally looks at anyone tying on a headscarf. He looked away, down the valley, at the mill chimneys in Delph, and kept looking at them. It took more doing than it ought to have. When he looked back she had tied the scarf on again.

“I’m perished,” said Penny, which could not possibly have been true, and set off down the field to the cottage with the dog at her heel.

He put the kettle on the range and got down two cups. Neither of them went back.

She drank her tea in the good chair, and Charlie, for once, did not dispute it. She told him about a parish boundary on the 1840 tithe map for Saddleworth which went straight through the middle of a farmhouse at Diggle, so that the farmer’s wife had for a hundred years cooked her dinners in one township and eaten them in another. Rufus asked which township the privy was in. Penny said that was exactly the kind of question she would expect from an engineer, and that it was in neither, being outside the boundary altogether, and that it had been the subject of a dispute in 1871. He did not know whether to believe her. He very seldom did, and she was very seldom wrong.

At half past four she said the light would be going, and it was. The clocks had gone back a fortnight ago, and the afternoons stopped short now, like a train running out of line. He walked her down to the yard. She lit the lamp on the bicycle, and pulled on her gloves, and looked up the field once, to where the top of the wall ran against the last of the sky. From the yard you could see the whole line of it.

“It’s a good wall, Rufus,” said Penny.

“It’s a fair wall,” said Rufus. “It’ll want watching, at the bottom end.”

“Everything wants watching,” said Penny, and went off down the lane, and the lamp went with her. He watched it go: a small yellow point that came and went between the walls, and was there, and was gone, and was there again at the bend, and then did not come back.

He stayed at the gate a while after there was nothing left to watch. The lane was very quiet. The yard seemed somehow larger than it had at dinner time, though nothing in it had moved. Charlie came out and leaned against his leg, and Rufus found that he was still holding the top bar of the gate, and let go of it.

When she had gone he went up to the top field in the dusk, with Charlie, and stood at the gate.

There was nothing to see. That was the point of it. The top line ran clean from the gatepost to the rowan, against a sky going green and then grey, without a notch in it anywhere. He looked along it for some time, the way a man looks along a straight edge for a fault and is put out not to find one.

Then he went down and lit the lamp in the kitchen, and got out his journal, and wrote the date, and the barometer, and the wind. He wrote that the rowan had been stripped by three, and that the fieldfares had gone on to the hawthorns.

He sat for a while afterwards with the pen over the page. Charlie, on the hearthrug, opened one eye.

“Drainage,” said Rufus. He blotted the page, and closed the book, and went up to bed.

Clag

Saturday, 24th October 1953

The sycamore at the top of the top field had been stripped on Friday. Rufus could see it from the back door, every branch of it, black and bare against the cloud, and the leaves lying in a yellow drift along the lee of the new wall. The tawny owl that roosted in it would be sitting tight somewhere, pressed against the trunk, not caring. Rufus called him the Alderman, on account of the way he sat over the field all day like a man on the council bench, missing nothing and saying nothing until dark.

Two days of wind and rain had blown themselves out in the night, and left the kind of morning that comes after a blow: showers, bright between, the slates drying in patches, the yard running, and a sky over the moor that could not make up its mind.

Penny came at one, with her bicycle clips still on, which meant business.

“I’ve a stone to find,” said Penny.

“I’ve a great many stones,” said Rufus. “Most of them are in the top field.”

“Not one of yours,” said Penny. She unbuckled the map case and took out a tracing, folded small, and held it flat against the yard wall for him to see. “The tithe map puts a boundary stone on Harrop Edge, forty yards north of the old packhorse track. The Ordnance sheet doesn’t show it at all. One of them is wrong, and I’d like it to be the Ordnance Survey.”

“And you want a witness,” said Rufus.

“I want somebody to carry the tea,” said Penny.

He fetched the Thermos, and the ash stick from behind the door, and his compass from the drawer, which he put in his jacket pocket from habit and not from any expectation of needing it.

“Come on then, old lad,” said Rufus.

It was a wasted invitation. Charlie had been standing at the gate since the word stone.

They went up behind the cottage, through the top field and over the stile, and out onto the rough ground below the edge. The bracken was down now, beaten flat by two days of rain, the colour of an old penny. Every ditch was talking. A shower came over from the west while they were on the steep part, and went on towards Yorkshire, and the sun came out behind it and lit up the whole hillside wet, so that every blade of moor grass had a drop on it.

“Your mother’s boggart lives up here,” said Penny.

“So she says,” said Rufus. “She told me again on Wednesday, in a letter. Four sides.” He found a handhold on the gritstone and went up a step. “It has, she tells me, a particular dislike of engineers.”

“Sensible boggart,” said Penny.

On the top it was blowing, a cold, clean wind from the north-west with the smell of wet peat in it. The edge ran away in both directions, block after squared block of dark millstone grit along the skyline, and from it you could see the whole of the parish laid out below like a sheet on a table: Dobcross, the church, the Loom Works chimney, the lodges, the canal ruled straight along the valley bottom, and the walled fields going down to it in their hundreds. Rufus found his own top field and the new length of wall in it, a shade paler than the rest. He did not point it out. Penny looked at it for a moment, and did not point it out either.

They found the packhorse track, a sunken line of old setts going off across the moor, and Penny paced forty yards north from it along the edge, counting under her breath, and stopped.

There was nothing there but heather.

“Forty yards,” said Penny. “It ought to be here.”

“Perhaps the surveyor in 1840 paced it,” said Rufus.

“He’ll have chained it. They did.” She stood with the tracing in one hand and looked about her, and then walked on another ten yards, and another, and then stopped and parted the heather with her boot.

It was there: a squat grey stone a foot high, leaning a little, with a groove cut across the top of it and a letter on either side, half buried in lichen. She knelt down and rubbed the lichen off one of the letters with her thumb.

“Fifty-two yards,” said Penny. “The tithe map’s wrong too. But less wrong.”

“Which do you prefer?” said Rufus.

“The one that’s less wrong,” said Penny. “It’s the most you can generally ask.”

She got out a pencil and made a note on the tracing, and Rufus poured the tea into the lid of the Thermos, and they drank it turn about, standing by the stone, with their backs to the wind.

“There was a stone like this at Diggle,” said Penny, “in 1789. Two townships wanted it in different places. So for eleven years, by night, a few yards at a time, they moved it backwards and forwards between them, until neither side could say where it had started.”

“That isn’t surveying,” said Rufus. “That’s warfare.”

“In Saddleworth,” said Penny, “there’s very little difference.”

Charlie, meanwhile, had found something in the heather that had been dead a good deal longer than he had been alive, and brought it over to show them. It was the jawbone of a sheep, bleached white by the weather, with most of its teeth still in. He laid it at Penny’s feet, as one finder to another.

“That’s very kind of you, Charlie,” said Penny, “but I’ve found mine.”

“Leave it,” said Rufus.

Charlie picked it up again and gave the matter some thought, then put it down on Rufus’s boot instead. It was a compromise, and it was as far as he was prepared to go.

It was about three o’clock. He knew because the church clock in Dobcross struck the hour below them, very small and clear, and then he could not hear it any more.

He did not see it come. Nobody ever does. One moment the far end of the edge was there, block by block, against the sky to the north; the next, it was not, and the edge simply stopped about a quarter of a mile off, as if it had been rubbed out. Then the rubbing came towards them. It came along the edge at a walking pace, grey and silent, swallowing the stones one after another, and the light went thick and flat, and the wind dropped.

“Clag,” said Rufus.

“I can see that, thank you,” said Penny.

It reached them. It was cold, and wet without raining, and it smelled of peat and of nothing at all. The view went first, the whole parish gone in a breath, and then the far stones, and then the near ones. In a minute there was a circle of heather perhaps fifteen yards across, with Penny standing in it and the boundary stone at her feet, and beyond that a grey wall on every side, without a seam in it.

Charlie came and sat on Rufus’s boot, which he had not done since he was a pup.

Rufus took out the compass. He had stood on this edge in clag before, more than once, and he knew the ground well enough to know that knowing it would be no use now. Men had walked off this edge in fog who had lived under it all their lives. Father’s saying came into his head: the dark has no moving parts. Fog had no moving parts either. It was only water, lying about. It was the man inside it who moved, and generally in a circle.

He had no great love of cloud on high ground. He had not had, for ten years. He put that where he kept it, and opened the lid, and let the card settle, and turned until the needle sat.

“Two hundred and twenty degrees,” said Rufus. “That brings us off the edge at the stile, or near it, and down onto the top-field wall. Three hundred and some paces to the stile, if I remember right.”

“If you remember right,” said Penny.

“I’ll count,” said Rufus.

“I’d expect nothing less,” said Penny.

The map case was on her back. He knew perfectly well what was in it, because he had seen it on her kitchen table more than once among the pencils and tracings: a prismatic compass in a leather case, ex-Army, a better instrument than his. She did not take it out. She buckled the tracing away instead, and pulled the headscarf tighter, and stood waiting, with her hands in her coat pockets.

He set off on the bearing, sighting on a tussock at the edge of what he could see, walking to it, sighting again. Charlie kept to his heel as though he had been tied there. After a dozen paces he looked back, and Penny was a shape in the grey with no colour in her, three yards behind and falling back, and in another three yards she would be gone altogether.

He stopped and held out his hand.

She came up and took it. Her glove was wet through, and the hand in it was cold. He shifted the compass to the other hand, and the stick under his arm, and went on.

It is not easy to walk a bearing across rough moor in fog with a compass in one hand and nothing free to keep your balance. He found that he could manage it. The ground fell away in front of them by degrees, heather giving way to rough grass and then to rush, and twice they came to a peat hag and had to go down into it and up the other side, and both times he went first and did not let go, and she came down after him and did not let go either. Somewhere off to the left a grouse got up, unseen, and told them to go back, go back, and its voice went round and round in the grey and seemed to come from everywhere. Charlie growled at it, low, and stayed where he was.

He counted. A hundred paces. Two hundred. At two hundred the ground steepened, as it should, and he slowed, and felt her slow beside him. Nobody spoke. There was nothing to say that would not have been about the fog, and they had already established that it was fog.

Three hundred paces. Nothing. He took ten more, and there was still nothing: only rush, and grey, and the sound of their own boots. He stopped.

He felt her hand tighten in his, and then, quite deliberately, loosen, the way you ease off a nut you have tightened past what it needs. The needle had not moved. It was the only thing on the hill that had not.

Then the church clock struck the quarter. It came up out of nowhere, from somewhere below and to the right, where the church ought to be. He checked the needle against it, and it agreed. He felt something in his chest let go a quarter of a turn, and went on.

At three hundred and twenty paces a dark line showed in the grey ahead and became the stile, a yard to the left of where he had aimed.

“You remembered right,” said Penny.

“Near enough,” said Rufus.

Neither of them mentioned the yard. He handed her over the stile, which needed only one hand, and came over after her, and the grey closed behind them, and they went on down the top field on the same bearing, with the slope under their feet and the wet grass soaking through to the knee, until the next dark line came up out of the grey, low and level and straight. It was the wall.

It was the new length. He knew it before he could properly see it, by the paleness of the stone. He walked them down to it and stopped, and put his free hand out flat on the copes, as he did with anything he was anxious about, and found that it was not anxious, and that under his palm, a little darker than its neighbours, with a ring of lichen on the face, was the stone she had set.

Then, and only then, he let go of her hand.

For a moment neither of them said anything. Below them the fog was thinning; he could make out the roof of the cottage now, and the smoke from the chimney going straight up and flattening, and Penny’s bicycle against the yard wall where she had left it. A blackbird was making a great fuss about something in the hawthorns along the lane.

Penny put both hands in her coat pockets.

“Fifty-two yards,” said Penny. “I’ll put it in the book on Monday.”

“You’ll want to tell the Ordnance Survey,” said Rufus.

“I’ve told the Ordnance Survey a great many things, Rufus,” said Penny. “They have never once written back.” She looked along the top of the wall, end to end, and then down at the cottage. “Is that kettle hot?”

“It will be,” said Rufus.

They went down through the field gate with the dog ahead of them, and he put the kettle on the range, and she took off her wet gloves and hung them over the rail to steam, and sat in the good chair with her stockinged feet towards the fire.

Charlie went out again into the yard, and came back with the jawbone, which he had carried all the way down off the edge in the fog without anybody noticing. He laid it in Penny’s lap.

“Third time of asking,” said Penny. “He doesn’t give up.”

“He’s a Labrador,” said Rufus. “They don’t know how.”

Penny looked at him over her tea, and said nothing, and let the jawbone stay where it was.

They talked for the best part of an hour, about boundary stones and the Ordnance Survey, and about his mother’s boggart, which Penny said had been very good to them, all things considered. Neither of them said a word about the way down.

At four the fog lifted off the tops altogether, as suddenly as it had come down, and the whole of Harrop Edge stood up again against a pale clean sky, block by block, as if nothing had happened to it. She looked at it through the window, and put her gloves on, and went.

When she had gone he sat down at the kitchen table and put the afternoon into the journal as figures.

The clag had come down at three, from the north along the edge, and lifted again at four. The boundary stone was fifty-two yards north of the packhorse track, and the tithe map and the Ordnance sheet were both wrong. The bearing was two hundred and twenty degrees, and the distance to the stile three hundred and twenty paces, his.

He did not write down the twenty paces in which the stile had not been there. There was nothing in them that needed setting down. He had the bearing, and the distance, and the time. If he ever had to do it again, that was all a man would need.

He put the pen down, and sat on by the fire with his right hand open on his knee.

The fire settled. Somewhere up on the moor the grouse would be telling the dark to go back. He had carried a great many things off a hill in that hand in his time: a compass, a stick, a dog with a thorn in his paw, once a ewe. None of them had stayed in it afterwards quite like this. He turned it over and looked at it, the way a man looks at a tool that has done something it was never drawn up to do, and then he turned it back.

He was still sitting like that when the dog came and put his chin in it.

Bonfire Night

Thursday, 5th November 1953

At half past seven, when Rufus wheeled the Thunderbird out of the shed to go to the works, the yard gate was not there.

He stood and looked at the place where it had been. The two iron hinge pins were still in the gatepost, sticking out into the air the way hinge pins do when there is nothing hanging on them, with a faintly embarrassed look. It was the morning after Mischief Night. He had been expecting something. He had not been expecting it to be the gate.

Wilf Kenworthy came up the lane on foot, pushing the post office bicycle, with his cap pulled down and his long striped muffler wound twice round his neck and his Wellingtons going slap, slap on the wet setts. He was red in the cheek from the climb. He stopped where the gate ought to have been, and looked at the gap, and then at Rufus.

“Morning, Mr Bramble,” said Wilf. “Tha’s no gate.”

“I’d noticed,” said Rufus.

“It’s in the mill lodge at the bottom,” said Wilf. “Stood up on its end in four foot of water, as if it were waiting for a bus. Stanley Broadbent’s down there now, looking at it. He’s got his notebook out.”

“Has he any idea who?” said Rufus.

“He’s got a list,” said Wilf. “Same list as last year. He’ll go round with it after school.”

Charlie had come out of the house at the sound of Wilf’s voice and gone straight to the right-hand pocket of his tunic, where the biscuits were kept, and sat down in front of it with his whole attention, like a man at a ticket window. Wilf gave him one without looking. Then he unbuckled the bag, and took out a long buff envelope, and held it for a moment before he gave it up.

It had On Her Majesty’s Service printed across the top, and a black frank, and Rufus’s name typed underneath.

“Another from the Government,” said Wilf. “That’s two in a fortnight, Mr Bramble. They’ll be wanting you back.”

“It’ll be about drawings,” said Rufus.

“Aye,” said Wilf. “It would be.”

He handed it over, and turned the bicycle round, and went off down the lane with Charlie walking beside him as far as the bend, in case there was a second biscuit. There was not. Charlie came back slowly, with the air of a dog who has been badly let down by the Post Office, and went indoors to his rug.

Rufus opened the envelope in the kitchen, standing up, with his gloves still on.

The first letter had come on the twenty-seventh of October. It had asked whether he would care to come to London “to discuss an appointment”, and said nothing about what the appointment was, in the way of letters that already know you will come. He had told his father, on Sunday, over the beef. He had told nobody else.

This one was shorter. It said that he was expected on Wednesday, the twenty-fifth of November, at eleven o’clock, and that a railway warrant was enclosed. The warrant was enclosed. It was made out in his name, return, Manchester to London, and it looked a good deal more certain of things than he did.

He read it twice. Then he folded it back into its envelope and propped it on the mantelpiece, behind the clock, where it could not be seen from the door, and went to work.

At Chadderton he drew all day, and kept his margins perfectly clean. Schofield noticed, and said nothing, which was worse.

When he came up the lane at half past five, in the dark, there was a lamp lit in his kitchen window and the gate was still not there.

Florrie had got the afternoon off from her headmaster, by means she declined to go into, and called at Werneth on the way for Mother’s parkin, and come on by the Delph Donkey, and walked up from Dobcross station with a basket on her arm, and let herself in with the key from under the stone. The black peas were on the side of the range, where he had left them soaking the night before, and had been simmering since four, because Mother’s card said four. The parkin was on the table in its tin. The whole kitchen smelled of treacle and ginger and wet coal.

“And how,” said Florrie, before he had got his coat off, “is Miss Vance?”

“You’ve been talking to Uncle Ned,” said Rufus.

“I’ve been talking to Mother,” said Florrie. “Which is worse.” She lifted the lid on the peas and looked at them. “And I’ve met your lodger.”

The lodger was a short-eared owl. Rufus had found it on Tuesday hung up on the barbed wire along the intake, with one wing torn, and had cut it free with his coat over it, and it was now living in a tea chest in the outhouse, on straw, with a sack over the top and a perch that Penny had rigged out of a broom handle.

“It looked at me,” said Florrie, “as if I’d come about the rent.”

At two minutes to seven, somewhere down in the village, the first banger went off. Charlie got up from the rug without a word, walked into the kitchen with great dignity, and lay down under the table. He would remain there, by Rufus’s watch, until twenty to eleven.

They carried the peas down in the big pan, wrapped in a towel, with the mugs and the vinegar bottle in Florrie’s basket.

The fire was in the field below Holy Trinity, where it always was. The boys had been chumping for it since the middle of October, dragging home every branch and old bedstead and broken door in the parish, and it stood higher than a cottage, with a guy on the top in somebody’s father’s trilby. It went up at seven, all at once, with a noise like a sheet being shaken, and the whole field turned orange, and every face in it.

Half of Dobcross was there. Hilda Whitehead from the Fox and Badger had brought a tray of treacle toffee, broken with a hammer, and was handing it out to children she approved of. PC Broadbent stood a little apart from the crowd with his hands behind his back, watching the boys of the parish one at a time.

“Your gate, Mr Bramble,” said PC Broadbent, when Rufus came level with him. “It’s stood against the wall of the police house. You may collect it at your convenience.” He looked at the fire. “I fetched it up out of the lodge myself, at a quarter past eight. By a quarter to nine there were two lads wanting to put it on that.”

“I’m obliged to you,” said Rufus.

“I’ve a list,” said PC Broadbent, and went back to watching.

Penny was already there.

She was standing on the far side of the fire, in the tartan headscarf, with her hands in the pockets of her coat and the light moving on her face. She saw them, and came round.

Florrie and Penny had been to the pictures together more times than Rufus had been asked along, and it showed. They looked at each other for about a second and a half, the way two good surveyors look at one map, and in a minute and a half they were talking about him in the third person, as if he had gone home.

“Does he still count his paces?” said Florrie.

“Three hundred and twenty to the stile,” said Penny. “Last Saturday. In a fog.”

“He used to count the stairs,” said Florrie. “At home. Every night. Fourteen. He’d tell you, if you let him.”

“Thirteen,” said Rufus. “And the landing.”

The two of them looked at him with exactly the same expression, and then looked back at each other, and went on. He found this a good deal more alarming than the fireworks.

Florrie ladled out the peas, and they shook the vinegar on, and stood eating them with their backs to the dark and their faces to the fire. The peas were black and soft and salty, with the sharpness of the vinegar on top, and they tasted exactly as they had tasted every fifth of November since he was four years old.

“Your mother’s?” said Penny.

“Mother’s card,” said Rufus. “I only warmed them.”

“Then they’re your mother’s,” said Penny.

She asked after the owl. He told her it was eating, which was the main thing, and that it had had a mouse on Wednesday and half a sparrow this morning, and had looked at him afterwards as if he ought to have provided the other half.

Then Penny said, looking at the fire and not at him, that the archive had asked her to walk the whole of the parish boundary. All of it, every stone, from Standedge round by Diggle and Castleshaw and back by the edge, and check it against the tithe map.

“At weekends,” said Penny. “It’ll take me till the spring.” She turned and looked at him then, across the steam off her mug. “You’ll carry the tea.”

Rufus said nothing.

He thought of the envelope behind the clock, and of the twenty-fifth of November, and of the spring, which was a long way off, and might, for all he knew, be somewhere else entirely. He found he could not get from any one of those things to the next. He looked at the fire instead.

Penny waited a moment. Then she turned back to Florrie, and asked her something about the school.

Florrie was watching him. She had been watching him, he realised, for some time: watching him look at Penny, and look away, and look at the fire. She finished her peas, and wiped her mouth, and leaned close enough to be heard over a jumping jack.

“You’re a fool, our Rufus,” said Florrie.

“They’re Mother’s peas,” said Rufus. “I only warmed them.”

Florrie looked at him for a long moment, and said nothing whatever.

A rocket went up from behind the church.

He watched it go, and could not help himself. It went up at an angle of perhaps seventy degrees, leaning a little into the wind off the moor. The stick was heavier than it needed to be, as they always were. He had it worked out before it burst: where it would stop climbing, and how far the wind would carry it, and that the stick would come down in the beck behind the vicarage, about forty yards short of the wall. It burst, in a shower of green stars, and the stars went out, and a moment later, behind the vicarage, there was a small splash.

It gave him a certain satisfaction. It always had.

He could tell you where a rocket would come down to within twenty yards. He could not have told you, if you had asked him, where he would be in the spring.

Penny went at nine. She had the hill to Uppermill to get over before the worst of the bangers started on the road.

“Come up again,” she said to Florrie. “Before Christmas.”

“I will,” said Florrie. “Somebody’s got to keep an eye on him.”

“Goodnight, Flight Lieutenant,” said Penny, which she had not called him in a long while, and went off along the edge of the field to find her bicycle.

They collected the gate on the way home. It was leaning against the wall of the police house, exactly where PC Broadbent had said, with the lodge still running out of it in a puddle on the flags. It was heavier wet than dry, as everything is, and there was nothing for it but for the two of them to carry it home between them: up the Square and up Woods Lane, in the dark, with rockets going up behind them all the way, one at each end of a dripping five-barred gate.

“This is your fault,” said Florrie, from the back end.

“How is it my fault?” said Rufus.

“I don’t know yet,” said Florrie. “But it will be.”

He hung it by lamplight, lifting it onto the pins while Florrie held the lamp, and it dropped onto them with a clank, and swung, and shut, as if it had never been anywhere. He tried it twice to be sure.

Indoors, Charlie was still under the kitchen table, and declined to discuss it. Florrie made a pot of tea and they drank it by the fire, and she told him about the children at the school, and about Mother, and about a new curate at home who could not pronounce his r’s. Rufus laughed more than he had meant to.

Then she got up to go up to bed, and stopped, and looked at the mantelpiece. The envelope was behind the clock. You could not see it from the door. You could see it very well from where Florrie was standing.

“Mother says you’ve had a letter,” said Florrie.

“Two,” said Rufus.

“Does Penny know?” said Florrie.

“It’s about drawings,” said Rufus.

“Aye,” said Florrie. “It would be.”

She picked up the candle, and went to the foot of the loft stairs, and turned round.

“Tell her yourself, our Rufus,” said Florrie. “Before somebody else does.”

She went up. He heard her count the loft stairs under her breath, out of pure spite, all the way to the top. She made it twelve. It was eleven. He let it stand.

He sat on by the fire. At twenty to eleven, when the last banger in Dobcross had gone off, or when he judged that it had, Charlie came out from under the table, and stretched, and went to his rug with the air of a dog who had handled the whole thing himself.

Rufus got up and took the envelope from behind the clock. He looked at it for a while, at his own name typed on the front of it. Then he put it back on the mantelpiece, face down, and set the parkin tin in front of it, and made up the settle for himself, and went to bed.