A Hole in the Ground Page 3

  He was still immersed when Julie announced that she was ready to go out for lunch. “Any more exciting discoveries?” she asked.

  “Only that the original house on the site is supposed to have been built by William Rufus—I can’t think what he was doing up here. Oh, and there’s a furious account of an elopement in 1743, penned by the lady’s father.”

  “What fun! But how is it that no one ever sorted out these papers before? I thought all old family archives were kept behind a glass case in the library.”

  “Evidently not. I did know one revolting family that had a record of everything every member of it had done since about 1880, and that was kept behind a glass case. The last half hour of each day was spent writing up little Willie’s exploits in the family album. But people aren’t as orderly as that as a rule. The usual thing is to stuff all the old documents away in the attic until the family’s almost died out, and then the last of the line deals with them. That’s me, in this case.”

  Julie nodded. War had taken its toll of the Quilters. Laurence’s father, a professional soldier, had been killed on the Somme in 1916; his only brother, Francis, had died in the Spanish Civil War, fighting on what his mother had always sorrowfully referred to as “the wrong side.” The old lady, disappointed in the end even over Laurence, would certainly never have had the heart to disinter the glorious past from a bundle of documents. She had died embittered, and totally unreconciled to the changing times.

  “Well, I’d better go and clean up,” said Quilter. Julie sat fingering one or two of the yellowing papers until he returned, and then they took the station wagon and drove down to the Plough to eat.

  Over the meal, Quilter was full of their coming holiday. They had arranged to take the Riley across the Channel, and he was keen to make a tour of the Massif Central, which was new to him. He talked enthusiastically of places he had picked out from the Michelin guide and of possible routes, while Julie tried to look interested and kept her fingers crossed. Nothing in the world would make her happier than to have Laurence’s undivided attention and companionship for three uninterrupted weeks, but she knew from past experience how politics could spoil all plans. Last summer they had been going to the Tyrol for a month, but Laurence had changed his mind at the last moment because some fellow M.P.’s were making up a party to study conditions in Germany. Julie had tagged along, and had seen lots of ruins and lots of other M.P.’s wives, but little of Laurence. Then at Christmas they had been going to Madeira, but that had fallen through too because Laurence had been made a member of a Commission that had been flown out to the West Indies to report on some troubles there. After seven years she had grown philosophical about it—if you married a keen and active politician you married his job, and it was useless to complain because you didn’t see much of him except in a crowd. But perhaps this time they would be lucky …

  Quilter suddenly became aware that she wasn’t listening to him. “You do want to go, I suppose?” he asked with a touch of irritation.

  “But of course!”

  “I just wondered. It’s going to cost a packet of money, so don’t force yourself.”

  “Darling, don’t be silly. You know perfectly well that you’ve quite decided where we’re going, so there’s no point in-my having any other ideas. In any case, I always like what you choose in the way of travelling. I shall love it, but it’s not much use talking about names and places till we get there because they don’t mean a thing to me.”

  Mollified, he gave a superior male smile. She was pretty hopeless with maps—always said “Right” when she meant “Left” and mixed up contour lines with footpaths and county boundaries with railways. The rest of the meal passed amiably.

  “What about a stroll up the hill?” he suggested, as they got back to the cottage. “You’ve plenty of time.”

  For a moment she hesitated. She knew these strolls of Laurence’s, that so often turned out to be exhausting half day excursions, but it seemed a pity to spoil that good humour.

  “Yes, if you like,” she said. “I’ll just change my shoes, though.”

  There was really only one good way to start a short walk from the cottage. An old track, once the means of access to a lead mine higher in the hills, climbed smoothly up a protruding tongue of limestone that formed the extremity of the great mass that swept round the north of the Lakes from the Pennines. This was the way they went now, walking on the turf beside the track. Quilter was soon several yards ahead, moving with long springy strides. Every now and again he half-turned to shout some direction or warning-she must avoid a rut here, mind not to turn her ankle there. It was one of the ways, she supposed, in which he liked to mark his male superiority again, and it always slightly irritated her. However, she was glad enough of his support a few minutes later when they stopped on a steep rise to get their breath. The sudden halt after climbing made everything appear to be in movement, and for a second or two sky and green grass seemed to be swinging around her. Then the touch of vertigo passed and she was able to look out and down towards the coast. The sea was a pale blue, with a fine weather haze over it; the river sparkled pleasantly in its bed at the foot of the escarpment. Blean looked less garish at this distance. Only the plant seemed really out of place, a monstrosity compelling the unwilling attention. “What an eyesore!” she said.

  He nodded. “Yes, they’ve certainly spoiled the view from here. Ah, well, I did my best.” Quilter had been on a committee that had pleaded, but pleaded in vain, that the plant should be built farther up the coast. “We can always turn our backs on it, though. Excelsior!” He took Julie’s arm and drew her snugly against his side, helping her up the slope. Her head came just to his shoulder. He seemed more aware of her now and presently stopped again and held her away from him, looking down at her.

  “Well?” she said, her face tilted provocatively.

  He grinned. “Not bad!”

  “Do you love me?”

  “You know I do.”

  “That’s all right, then.”

  He kissed her, and sighed. “I wish we could do this oftener. I wish we had nothing whatever on our minds and no other people to bother about, ever. We’re always happy when we’re walking. Do you remember that day above Talloires …?”

  “Perfectly, my love. You said we’d just pop into the next field—and we climbed two thousand feet and walked eight miles!”

  “So we did. What a brute I am! But you did damn well that day.”

  Julie smiled. It never occurred to Laurence that she was only pocket-sized and that the pace he set was rather gruelling, but she would always have endured anything rather than be left behind. “Anyway,” she said, “it was worth it. I’ll never forget that charming little chapel at the top.”

  “Nor I. Remember that pair of spectacles that some grateful pilgrim had left behind? Funny if he broke his neck on the way home!”

  “What a macabre sense of humour you’ve got,” said Julie. She took a deep breath. “Oh, darling, I do hope nothing happens to spoil our holiday this time …”

  “It won’t. It’s going to be the best ever.”

  They were just setting off again when a distant report reached their ears, and far below, in a field beside the Hall, a puff of smoke rose into the air.

  “They must still be clearing trees,” Julie said.

  Like many other landowners, Quilter had been selling some of his timber to help defray the expenses of the Estate, and the stumps were being blown up to make way for the plough. “It’s about time they’d finished,” he said. “Still, it’s the Trust’s worry now, not mine.”

  “You know you’ll think up something else to worry about,” Julie said with a wry look. “Come on, if we’re going to the top.”

  Once they were over the hump of the hill, the imperfections of the coastline were hidden and the view was magnificent. The distant fells were purple with heather and ling and far to the east the crags of Scawfell towered above the foothills. Quilter led the way to their favourite spot—
a depression, a bowl in the limestone, warm and sheltered and tinder-dry, where two monolithic granite boulders, brought down by some glacier a million years ago, straddled the bed of an old watercourse now choked with scree. The Quilters called these rocks the Pikes, and on a hot day like this they gave welcome shade. Julie flung herself full length on the hospitable grass among the wild thyme and the cushions of saxifrage, stretching out her arms with a sigh of deep content. Quilter dropped down beside her and lit a cigarette. The peace here was undisturbed, for the hikers and tourists all concentrated on the more spectacular country inland and the local folk rarely had occasion to pass this way. Julie thought of it as their own special preserve, which indeed it was, for the hillside was part of the cottage freehold.

  It was so pleasant lying there, and Laurence was in such a mellow frame of mind that Julie almost wished she hadn’t to go away. In the end it was he who suggested that they had better make their way down again if she wanted to catch her train.

  An hour later he saw her off from Blean station, settling her comfortably in a compartment which would be exactly in the middle of the train after it had been attached to the express on the main line. It wasn’t likely that the train would crash, but choosing a carriage in the middle always seemed to him a sensible precaution.

  The parting was casual. “Don’t forget to drop me a line,” he said, and gave her a perfunctory kiss. She waved once and he turned away, his mind already occupied with other things. As he drove back to the cottage, he was pleasantly aware of his freedom. It wasn’t that he had any special plans, but it was a relief to be alone. Now he needn’t talk or feel that he ought to talk; he needn’t account for his moods; he needn’t feel that he was being observed and studied and looked after; he needn’t worry lest some unfortunate remark of his should touch off an explosion. Julie was fun to have around sometimes but he often found her presence irritating. Even the way she effaced herself on his account annoyed him on occasion. The trouble was, he thought, that like all women she was demanding, and the fact that he’d trained her not to show it didn’t really make the atmosphere much easier. He really needed a mistress-housekeeper whom he could dismiss when he felt like it; not a wife who was always around.

  He brewed some tea when he got back, and then settled down in a deck-chair to continue sorting the family papers. His first interest had waned, and the pile now seemed formidable. The sensible thing, he reflected, would have been to get Jane up here for a day or two and let her give them the once-over first. He could hardly do that now, with Julie away. Still, he certainly wasn’t going to waste this fine weather—his body craved for exercise. He threw aside what seemed to be the inventory for an old sale and unfolded a sheet of stiff, parchmenty paper that crackled under his fingers.

  For some time he studied it with a puzzled frown, turning it this way and that but not making much sense of it. There were two spidery drawings in faded ink—plans or diagrams of some sort—with the compass points marked in the bottom left-hand corner. In the bottom right-hand corner was a signature—“Joseph Quilter”—and below that the words “Bleathwaite Hall, September 3rd, 1855.” Joseph Quilter—that must have been his great-grandfather.

  He shifted his position so that the evening sun fell full on the paper. The top diagram, as far as he could make out, was a sectional drawing of a long, sloping cave with several chambers. The other one looked like a plan, a bird’s eye view, of the same cave. Both were drawn without any indicated scale, nor were there any place names or reference points to show where the cave might be. Unless …

  Quilter’s interest suddenly grew. Those two jutting objects on either side of the entrance were surely the Pikes? They were very faintly sketched in, so faintly that he hadn’t noticed them at first, but now that he looked carefully their shape was unmistakable. Could it really be that there was a cave like this, a whole underground labyrinth, almost on his doorstep?

  He was greatly intrigued. He had never heard of any caves on the property, but then he had never heard until to-day of the rascals who had besieged the west wing with “crowes of iron!” Old Joseph would hardly have produced all this out of his head, and he had obviously gone to some trouble to preserve the record. Anyway, it would be amusing to stroll up the hill to-morrow and poke about a bit.

  Quilter put the paper carefully aside and turned to a fresh bundle.

  Chapter Three

  The fine spell, so rare in the Lakes in August, still showed no sign of breaking next morning, and the wireless confirmed that the day would be hot and dry. Quilter breakfasted in the open, his Times folded against the coffee pot. Once again he felt in splendid humour—even the tenseness of the Cold War, on which he so often brooded, to-day left him quite unmoved. He chuckled over an amusing fourth leader and glanced down the correspondence columns to see if the silly season had produced anything particularly bizarre. He noticed that one of his colleagues—a Lancashire M.P. named George Walters—was making a fuss about some unprotected munitions dump in his constituency. A good vote-catching letter, but George was known to be a pacifist with a perennial grouse against the Services, so he wouldn’t cut much ice higher up. Quilter poured himself some more coffee and thought for the hundredth time what a poor game backbench sniping was.

  His mail was now beginning to accumulate and one or two things in the latest batch claimed his attention so that he had to postpone his walk for a while. Three constituency parties had sent invitations to him to speak in the autumn and Jane wanted instructions; a university wondered if he could lecture on “Problems of Federation in the West Indies,” and a Sunday newspaper was anxious for him to review a book. Salmson, of the Foreign Policy Group, had sent a draft letter for circulation to the Press with a request for comments, and there were proofs of a propaganda pamphlet that Quilter had written for the Party’s publicity department. Battersby, a left-wing colleague, wrote to say that Ames couldn’t go to Yugoslavia in October after all and would Quilter like to go because if so he thought he could fix it. Quilter put that thoughtfully aside—he was far from “sold” on Tito, as some of his colleagues were, but it would be useful to see how things were shaping. In addition there was the usual batch of begging letters, formidable even after Jane had sieved them, and a considerable local post with various requests from constituents: Really”, thought Quilter, it was a bit thick for August.

  He dealt briskly with the most pressing matters, chiefly on the telephone, and by ten o’ clock he felt free to turn to pleasanter. things. He spent a little time oiling his nailed boots, which he hadn’t used since the Easter recess. Then he stuffed the one-inch map of the district into his jacket pocket, chose a stick from the rack, and set off up the hill. He hadn’t gone more than a few yards before he remembered that he’d left Joseph’s plan of the cave on the mantelpiece and went back to get it. The phone rang as he entered the sitting-room and he was soon caught up in a complicated discussion with the solicitors to the Trust. He got away at last, however, quite resolved that if the phone went again before he was out of earshot he would ignore it. He would have a quiet look at the site of the alleged cave, he decided, and then go on over the fells to Stickle Bridge, a comfortable nine miles before lunch.

  He climbed steadily, delighting in the feel of rippling thigh muscle and glad that he could go at his own pace without distractions. For the most part he kept his gaze straight ahead—he was not one of those people who kept stopping to watch a bird or admire a flower or note some special beauty of colour or form in the hills. Walking to him was primarily a release, an outlet for his surplus physical energy. It was also a means of freeing his thoughts from the entangling worries of daily life. Sometimes he had tramped for miles in these hills without being able to remember afterwards a single detail of the route he had taken. Instead of observing he would become lost in day-dreams, composing speeches, conducting interviews, rehearsing bits of dialogue, making love and quarrelling. The life of his imagination was more active even than his real life, and far more complex. As he
breasted the slope his lips moved a little, and smiles and frowns chased each other across his face. If he had met anyone he would have been thought eccentric, but he had the place to himself.

  Once he reached the Pikes he became practical again. The investigation shouldn’t take very long, for the crackling paper in his pocket left no doubt where the hole should be. Unless old Joseph had been dreaming, it was somewhere in the six-foot gap between those two massive stones. Now that he’d actually reached the familiar spot, Quilter thought it most improbable that he would find anything. To his eyes, no place could have looked a more unlikely site for a cave than this flat grassy expanse on the top of a hill.