Читать книгу On Beulah Height - Reginald Hill - Страница 16

Ellie Pascoe was ready for fame. She had long rehearsed her responses to the media seagulls who come flocking after the trawlers of talent. For the literary journalist doing in-depth articles for the posh papers she had prepared many wise and wonderful observations about life and art and the price of fish and flesh, all couched in periods so elegant, improvement would be impossible and abbreviation a crime.

For the smart-arses of radio and television she had sharpened a quiverful of witty put-downs that would make them sorry they’d ever tried to fuck with Ellie Pascoe!

And for her friends she had woven a robe of ironic modesty which would make them all marvel that someone revealed as so very much different could contrive to remain so very much the same.

She’d even mapped out a History of Eng. Lit. account of her creative development.

Her first novel, which she steadfastly refused to allow to be published, but whose discovery in her posthumous papers was the literary event of 2040 – no make that 2060 – is the typical autobiographical, egocentric, picaresque work by which genius so often announces its arrival on the world stage. Much of it is ingenuous, even jejune, but already the discerning eye can pick out that insight, observation and eloquence which are the marks of her maturity.

Her second novel, which after much pressure and considerable revision, she allowed to appear at the height of her fame, is the story of a young woman of academic bent who marries a soldier and finds herself trying to survive in a world of action, authority and male attitudes which is completely foreign to her. The autobiographical elements here are much more under control. She has not merely regurgitated her experience, but first digested it then used it to produce a fine piece of … art.

(That metaphor needed a bit of work, she told herself, grinning.)

But it is in her third novel, which exploded her name to the top of the best-seller lists, that the voice of the mature artist – assured, amused, amusing, passionate, compassionate, compelling and melismatic – is heard for the first time in all its glory …

After Peter had left that Sunday morning, she lay in the sun for a while, playing the fame-game in her mind, but found that it quickly palled. If it ever did happen, she guessed it would be very unlike this. Reviewers, interviewers, and programme makers might be the poor relatives at the great Banquet of Literature, but one tidbit they were always guaranteed was the Last Word.

So finally her thoughts turned to where she had been trying to avoid turning them – to Peter.

She knew – had known for some time – that something was going on inside him that he wasn’t talking about. He wasn’t a reticent man. They shared most things. She knew all the facts of the case which had thrown up the devastating truth about his family history. They had talked about them at great length, and the talk had lulled her into a belief that the wounds she knew he had suffered would heal, were already healing, and only needed time for the process to complete. She was sure he had thought so too. But he’d been wrong, and for some reason was not yet able to admit to her the nature of his wrongness.

So far she hadn’t pressed. But she would. As wife, as lover, as friend, she was entitled to know. Or, failing those, she could always claim the inalienable right of the Great Novelist to stick her nose into other people’s minds.

The thought made her pick up her notebook and pen and start considering the jottings she’d made for her next opus. But looked at with these personal concerns running around inside her head, and this sun beating down on its outside, the jottings seemed a load of crap.

Dissatisfied, she got up and went into the house in search of something that would really stretch her mind. All that she could come up with was a pile of long neglected ironing. She switched the radio on and set to work.

It was, she discovered (though she would not have dreamt of admitting it outside the cool depths of the confessional which, as a devout atheist, she was unlikely ever to plumb anyway), a not unpleasant way of passing a mindless hour or so. From time to time she went outside again to give herself another shot of ultraviolet, followed by another slurp of iced apple juice, while the local radio station burbled amiably and aimlessly on. She even ironed some bed sheets with great care. Normally her attitude to sheets was that, as one night’s use creased them like W. H. Auden’s face, what was the point in doing much more than show them a hot iron threateningly? But Rosie, she guessed, would have been sleeping on Jill Purlingstone’s smooth and crisp sheets last night, and while the Pascoe house might not be able to compete by way of swimming pools and ponies, in this one respect, on this one occasion, her daughter would not feel deprived.

The radio kept her up to date with reports of the marvellous weather and how the incredible British public were finding intelligent ways of enjoying it. Like starting fires on the moors or sitting in crawling traffic queues on the roads to and from the coast.

Finally, with the ironing finished and the apple juice replaced by a long gin and tonic, she sat down calm of mind, all passion spent, at about six o’clock, just in time to hear a report of a major traffic accident on the main coast road.

There was an information number for anxious listeners. She tried it, found it engaged, tried the Purlingstones’ number, got an answering machine, tried the emergency number again, still engaged, slammed down the phone in irritation and as if in reaction it snarled back at her.

She snatched it up and snapped, ‘Yes?’

‘Hi. It’s me,’ said Pascoe. ‘You heard about the accident?’

‘Yes. Oh God, what’s happened? Is it serious? Where …’

‘Hold it!’ said Pascoe. ‘It’s OK. I’m just ringing to say I got on to the co-ordinator soon as I heard the news. No Purlingstones involved, no kids of Rosie’s age. So no need to worry.’

‘Thank God,’ said Ellie. ‘Thank God. But there were people hurt …’

‘Four fatalities, several serious injuries. But don’t start feeling guilty about feeling relieved. Keeping things simple is the one way to survive.’

‘That what you’re doing, love?’ she asked. ‘How’s it going? No mention of developments on the news.’

‘That’s because there are none. We’ve got a couple of dog teams out on the fell now and as many men as we’ve been able to drum up with all this other stuff. You’ve heard about the fires? God, people. I’m going to join the Lord’s Day Observance Society and vote for making it an offence to travel further than half a mile from home on a Sunday.’

Beneath his jocularity she easily detected the depression.

She said, ‘Those poor people. How’re they taking it?’

His memory played a picture of Elsie Dacre’s wafery face, of Tony Dacre who’d finally come down off the hillside, his legs rubbery with grief and hunger and fatigue. He said, ‘Like something’s been switched off. Like the air they breathe is tinged with chlorine. Like they’re dead and are just looking for a spot to drop in.’

‘So what happens now?’

‘Keep looking till dark. Start again in the morning. A few other things ongoing.’

Nothing he had much hope in or wanted to talk about. She tried to think of something comforting to say and was admitting failure when the doorbell rang and she heard the letter box rattle and Rosie’s voice crying impatiently, ‘Mummy! Mummy! It’s me. We’re home again. Mummy!’

‘Peter, Rosie’s back,’ she said.

‘Thought I could hear those dulcet tones,’ he said.

‘I’d better go before she breaks the door down.’

‘Give her my love. Take me when you see me.’

When she opened the door, Rosie burst in crying, ‘Mummy, look at me, I’m going to be brown as you. We had five ice creams and three picnics and Uncle Derek’s car blows really cold air and I can beat Zandra at backstroke.’

Ellie caught her, hugged her and swung her high. I remember when I was like that, she thought. So much to tell, that vocal cords seemed inadequate and what you really need is some form of optical-fibre communication able to carry thousands of messages at once.

Derek Purlingstone was smiling at her on the doorstep. He was a tall Italianately handsome man in his mid-thirties but looking six or seven years younger. His origins were humble – his father had been a Yorkshire coal miner – but he wore the badges of wealth – the Armani shirt, the Gucci watch – as if they’d been tossed into his cradle.

She smiled back and said, ‘Three picnics. That sounds a bit excessive.’

‘No, we had a breakfast picnic and a lunch picnic and a tea picnic and we drove through a fire …’

‘A fire? You were near the accident?’ she said to Purlingstone, alarmed.

He said, ‘You mean the pile-up on the main road? I heard it on the news. No, we used the back road, bit longer, damn sight quicker. The fire was up on Highcross Moor as we came back. Lot of smoke, no danger, though there seemed to be a lot of police activity round Danby.’

‘Yes. Peter’s there. There’s a child gone missing, a little girl.’

He made a concerned face, then smiled again.

‘Well, lovely to see you, Ellie, especially so much of you.’

His tone was theatrically lecherous and his gaze ran over her bikini’d body in a parody of bold lust. Ellie recalled a sentence from some psycho-pop book she’d read recently: To conceal the unconcealable, we pretend that we’re pretending it. Purlingstone was what her mother would have called ‘a terrible flirt’. Ellie had no problem dealing with it, but sometimes wondered how close it came to sexual harassment when aimed at younger women in subordinate positions at his office.

Despite this, and despite his fat-cat job in a privatized industry, she quite liked the guy and was very fond of his wife, Jill, who dressed at Marks and Sparks and had insisted that little Zandra went to Edengrove Junior rather than, as she put it, ‘some Dothegirls Hall where you pay through the nose for monogrammed knickers.’

‘No time for a drink?’ she said.

‘Sorry, but better get back. Zandra’s feeling a bit under par. Too much sun, I expect. She’s got her mum’s fair skin, not like us Latin types who can pour on the olive oil and let it sizzle, eh?’

The hot gaze again, then his hand snaked out and for a second she thought he was reaching for her breast, but all he did was ruffle Rosie’s short black hair before moving off to the Mercedes estate whose colour coincidentally matched the shade of his jeans. Coincidentally? thought Ellie. Bastard’s probably got a colour co-ordinated car for all his fancy outfits. Miaou. Envy wasn’t her usual bag, and really she was quite fond of Derek. It was just that in this weather it would be rather nice to have some form of in-car air-conditioning a touch more sophisticated than the draught through the rust holes in her own mobile oven.

Rosie’s voice broke through her thoughts, crying, ‘Mummy, you’re not listening!’

‘Yes, I am, dear. Well, I am now. Come and sit down and tell me all about it. I’m sorry Zandra’s not well.’

‘Oh, she’ll be all right,’ said the girl dismissively. ‘I want to tell Daddy all about it too.’

‘And he’ll want to hear,’ said Ellie. ‘So I’m afraid you’ll have to tell it all again when he comes home.’

The prospect of having a second captive audience was clearly not displeasing. Rosie’s day now spilled out in a stream-of-consciousness spate in which sensations and emotions drowned out details of time and place. The only downbeats were that Zandra had started feeling poorly on the way home and that Rosie had lost her cross. The Purlingstones were Catholic and Zandra wore a tiny crucifix round her neck on a fine silver chain. Rosie had indicated that her life would not be complete without one. Ellie, on more grounds than she cared to enumerate, had told her, no way! But when her daughter with considerable ingenuity had ‘borrowed’ a dagger-shaped earring from Ellie’s jewel box, threaded a piece of blue ribbon through it and hung it round her neck as a cross, neither of her parents had felt able to take it away.

Ellie made a note to hide the other one of the pair, then felt guilty. Was she thinking like this because of her genuine opposition to all forms of revealed religion? Or did it have anything to do with her mixed feelings of great delight that her daughter had apparently had the best time of her life, and small resentment that she could have had it despite her own absence?

Someone else was absent too, she noted. It had been interesting to observe over the past couple of weeks how reality in the shape of Zandra had edged out fiction in the form of Nina.

She said casually, ‘Nina wasn’t there then?’

‘No,’ said Rosie dismissively. ‘The nix got her again. Can I have a cold drink? I’m a bit hot.’

So much for imaginary friendship, thought Ellie. Now you’re here, now you’re back in the story book!

She said, ‘No wonder you’re hot after a day like that. Let’s see what we’ve got in the fridge, then I’ll rub some of my after-sun lotion on just to make sure you don’t start peeling like an old onion. OK?’

‘OK. Will Daddy be home before I go to sleep?’

She yawned as she spoke. The effort of telling her tale seemed to have drained all the energy from her.

‘I doubt it,’ said Ellie. ‘From the look of you, I think we’ll be lucky to get you into bed before you go to sleep.’

‘But he will be coming home soon as he finds the little girl?’

Oh, shit. Something else to remember from her own childhood, how sharp her ears had been to pick up and note down scraps of adult conversation.

She recalled Peter’s description of the missing child’s parents – like something’s been switched off – and another line came into her mind: so deep in my heart a small flame died.

She put her arms round Rosie and hugged her so hard the child gasped.

‘Sorry,’ said Ellie. ‘Let’s go find that cold drink.’