Raves For the Work of

RUSSELL HILL!

“Russell Hill is such a sharp observer of the human scene, such an astute commentator on life in its joys and miseries, that you will find yourself turning the pages quickly to find out what new perception he will pass on to us next.”

—Los Angeles Daily News

“The images... are sharp and real and the characterizations finely tuned.”

—Library Journal

“Vividly rendered... Russell Hill is a fine writer.”

—Los Angeles Times

“A sublime piece of writing, atmospheric and touching... A brilliant sense of literary balance... Fantastic.”

—Mike Hodges, director of Get Carter and Pulp

“An inventive vision.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“Rollicking, tender, hard to forget... Should be required reading for anyone aspiring to write.”

—Cosmopolitan

“A gem of a book... Hill has a knack for description and an eye for detail.”

—Chicago Daily Herald

“Vividly drawn... insightful characterization and effective evocation of atmosphere give the novel substantial power.”

—Publishers Weekly

“A masterpiece. Once again Russell Hill has hit the mark.”

—Garry Sayer

“Leaving this spellbinding novel, readers will not be able to reduce its effect to easy themes. Russell Hill is tougher than that. But readers will know that they have been changed.”

—The Denver Post

The pub was crowded, thick with cigarette smoke, music from a jukebox, the room filled with shouting voices.

Maggie rose and reached out toward me. “Dance, Jack Stone?” She took my hand and pulled me to my feet.

“Where?”

She turned her head toward the far end of the room and towed me through the crowd. I looked back at Robbie and he raised his pint toward me, grinning.

Maggie slipped into my arms and we danced to a Frank Sinatra song, Frankie crooning strangers in the night, and it was as if Maggie weren’t there, she moved so gracefully. She flowed with me, her body touching mine, and I could hear her singing along, her voice buried in my shoulder. The record stopped and she continued to dance, and I felt self-conscious, as if the whole village must be watching us, but nobody was paying any attention and the next record came on and we worked our way back to where Robbie was sitting.

“She’s not half bad, is she?” Robbie said.

“She dances beautifully.”

“You play a tango and you watch her and it’s like watching fucking with clothes on. Oh my, my Maggie can dance, right, love?” He leaned across me toward her.

“What’s right?”

“That you can dance.”

“You want to dance, Robbie?”

“Not now, love. Maybe when we get back to the farm we’ll do a bit of dancing.” He nudged me in the ribs.

“Don’t be too sure of yourself, you cheeky bugger,” she said. “Come on, Jack Stone. Dance with me again.” The jukebox was playing another Sinatra song.

“Go ahead, Jack,” Robbie said, “warm her up for me.”

I think, at that moment, I could have killed the bastard...

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THE GIRL WITH THE LONG GREEN HEART

by Lawrence Block

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A TOUCH OF DEATH by Charles Williams

SAY IT WITH BULLETS by Richard Powell

WITNESS TO MYSELF by Seymour Shubin

BUST by Ken Bruen and Jason Starr

STRAIGHT CUT by Madison Smartt Bell

LEMONS NEVER LIE by Richard Stark

THE LAST QUARRY by Max Allan Collins

THE GUNS OF HEAVEN by Pete Hamill

THE LAST MATCH by David Dodge

GRAVE DESCEND by John Lange

THE PEDDLER by Richard S. Prather

LUCKY AT CARDS by Lawrence Block

ROBBIE’S

WIFE

by Russell Hill

A HARD CASE CRIME BOOK

(HCC-029)

First Hard Case Crime edition: March 2007

Published by

Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street

London SE1 0UP

in collaboration with Winterfall LLC

Copyright © 2007 by Russell Hill; lines from “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” by William Butler Yeats used with permission of A.P. Watt Ltd. on behalf of Michael B. Yeats.

Cover painting copyright © 2007 by R.B. Farrell

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Print edition ISBN 978-0-85768-353-3

E-book ISBN 978-0-85768-765-4

Cover design by Cooley Design Lab

Design direction by Max Phillips

The name “Hard Case Crime” and the Hard Case Crime logo are trademarks of Winterfall LLC. Hard Case Crime books are selected and edited by Charles Ardai.

Visit us on the web at www.HardCaseCrime.com

I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray, I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

W. B. Yeats

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

1.

She asked me if I would have fallen in love with her even if she hadn’t spoken so openly in the hallway of the farmhouse that morning. I didn’t know how to explain it. Up until that moment I don’t think I ever thought about the expression “falling in love.” But when I examine it, it’s never getting in love or becoming in love, like getting drunk or becoming pregnant — it’s falling in love, as if in the darkness I came to the edge of a precipice and fell into something quite unexpectedly. I didn’t step off or jump off, I fell. Sometimes I think it’s like those falling dreams I’ve had where I keep falling and it never ends, I never land, have no idea when the impact will be but it never comes. It’s exhilarating and terrifying at the same moment. Falling in love with Robbie’s wife was like that — dangerous and erotic and I didn’t know how to stop the fall. In the end I didn’t want to.

2.

Heathrow hadn’t changed. It was still the slightly dumpy maze of endless corridors and I wondered if there were any places a plane could park that wouldn’t be at least a mile from the terminal exit. I felt washed out, the way I always feel after a trans-Atlantic flight. Just ahead of me an Indian couple with four children, obviously coming home to England, were trying to keep the children from running ahead, struggling with so much carry-on luggage that I wondered how they had been able to board the plane.

Down two more flights of stairs and into the customs hall I found the line for non-EU passengers and waited while it moved slowly toward the lecterns where customs officers stamped documents, made inquiries. Everyone looked drugged.

“Visiting us on business or pleasure, Mr. Stone?”

“Business.”

“Which is?”

“I’m a screenwriter. I’m working on a new project that takes place in England.”

He raised his eyebrows. “That sounds interesting, sir. I hope you have a profitable stay with us.” He stamped the passport, slid it back.

I went down the long corridor toward the baggage claim, waited as the bags came up until my battered duffel came around, and went out through the green line. Nothing to declare, the sign said. Well, as far as I was concerned I had nothing to say and nobody to say it to. Lately nobody listened anyway.

There was the usual audience at the exit, rows of relatives and friends, limo drivers holding up cards with names on them, people hugging and scooping up grandchildren and kissing.

It would have been easy to hail a taxi but there was the money thing so I went down to the tube, struggled through the crowd and in a few minutes was rocketing in to Central London and the cheap hotel I’d booked before leaving Los Angeles.

I changed trains at King’s Cross and when I came up onto the street near Euston Station it was raining, the kind of gray English rain that always seems to greet my arrival in London.

Two nuns in black habit wearing black raincoats stood under an umbrella at the bus stop. It was a bright red and yellow golfer’s umbrella, wide enough to easily cover both of them, and I thought, great scene in a Woody Allen movie, but of course Woody writes his own scripts. Nobody else paid any attention to them. It was a steady parade of heads down, umbrellas up, Upper Woburn Place filled with black taxis shiny in the rain, those huge red buses lumbering along, and I wanted desperately to find a bed.

The desk clerk at the hotel waited while I found my credit card, ran it through the machine and waited again, wordlessly, while I signed. He slid a key across the counter and I went up the narrow stairs to the second floor, found room 22 and opened the door. It was a small room, barely wider than the bed, and it smelled musty. The window wouldn’t open and I pulled the shade, darkening the room, stripped off my clothes and slid into the bed. Rain drummed on the window but I was almost instantly asleep. The last thing I remembered was the insistent whine of jet engines, a constant noise that still filled my head, shutting out everything else.

3.

I awoke to an insistent knocking and was briefly panic-stricken, as if the noise came from outside the plane, perhaps an engine falling off or someone outside the plane trying to get in, banging on the window next to me, and I was momentarily confused until the room began to focus and I realized I was in the hotel. The banging came from the wall next to my head, an erratic thumping as if someone were softly knocking on the wall from the other side, and then I heard the woman’s voice squeaking out something and a man saying something over and over again and I had the urge to pound on the wall and yell shut the fuck up in there! For Christ’s sake, somebody was getting screwed a foot from my head. I looked at my watch. It was too dark to see the dial so I got out of bed and went to the window, pulling back the shade, but it was dark outside, not raining anymore, the street nearly empty of traffic, and I realized I had slept through the day. On the opposite side of the wall it was quiet. I turned on the light and it was 2:30. I had slept for twelve hours. There was, of course, nothing to do at that hour except wait for daylight. I thought briefly about thumping on the wall and making moaning noises. It was cold in the room, and the handle on the steam radiator was as stuck as the window had been so I dressed and sat on the bed with a blanket around my shoulders going over my notes.

Today I would see Nigel. He was a friend of Richard, my Los Angeles agent, and Richard insisted that I see him, let him know I was in England. “He’s a nice guy,” Richard said. “If you have a problem, you can rely on him.” That was when he slid the treatment for Pale Horse back across the desk. “You need to move on,” he said. Then came his little speech about how Hollywood is peopled by teenagers who are frightened at the idea of an original story — they want something that looks like Son of Titanic or the sequel to the last thing Tom Hanks made. But the Pale Horse idea was dead in the water and maybe I could get going again. He still didn’t see why I insisted on going to England

Six months ago, when I turned sixty, my wife — actually my second wife, but she’d been around a long time — gave up on me, said she was tired of watching me disintegrate, which seemed like an apt metaphor to me. For a long time I’d felt that my life was dissolving, and there were periods when I wondered if writing anything else down was worth the effort. I read something about Wright Morris — he stopped taking photographs and somebody asked him why and he said there wasn’t anything left he wanted to photograph. And then he stopped writing. Same reason.

So I hit on the idea of closing off my life in Los Angeles, taking what little I had left in my bank account and going off someplace where there was nothing to remind me of my impending sense of failure. I had a long talk with Richard who, bless him, had stuck with me through it all, suffering my whining and self-doubts, and I told him I was going to sell off everything I had, take all of my money and change it into English pounds and rent a cottage on the edge of nowhere and write non-stop until I had finished something that would satisfy the jackals and we would all make a piss-pot full of money and I would charter a yacht in the Aegean and we would all lie naked on the deck in the sun and give the finger to the rest of the world.

Richard didn’t say much. Why England? he asked.

It’s an ocean away, I told him, and they speak English. He countered with, why not San Francisco or New Orleans or Hawaii where there was sun? They speak English there, too. But he agreed that maybe a change of scene would help to jump-start me.

That was the actual word he used. Jump-start. And I had, for an instant, an image of a yellow tow truck backing up to me and attaching those red and black cables to my nose and tongue and starting the engine. There was this tremendous jolt that ran through my brain and suddenly I was writing at a furious pace, words appearing on pages, brilliant words, and there were lines of people waiting anxiously to snatch them as the pages filled.

Richard said he would let Nigel know I was coming. If I needed anything, Nigel would help. I could tell that he thought I was doing something stupid. I closed my apartment, sold my car, gave away my clothes and books to Goodwill, and now here I was, in a grotty English hotel waiting for daylight. The rain had started again. I had enough money to last six months, the receipt for the car rental, and a letter from the farmer at White Church Farm on the coast of Dorset where I’d rented a cottage telling me how to get there and boasting that the cottage had “all the amenities including an en suite toilet.”

It had turned gray outside the window and suddenly there was more thumping beyond the wall and I thought, Oh Christ, the rabbits are at it again and I banged on the wall with the heel of my hand, counterpoint to their rhythm, and I put my mouth next to the wall and began to chant, “Don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t stop, Oh shit, I’m coming!” and then I stopped and it was quiet on the other side of the wall, too. Not nice, Jack, I said to myself.

Finally, unable to stay shivering in the room any longer, I dressed and went down through the narrow lobby, let myself out into the slackening rain and walked toward Russell Square. There was early morning traffic, the white noise of tires on the wet street, and I looked for some place where I could get coffee or, more likely, tea, and maybe something to eat since I was suddenly ravenous.

The cafe had tables with a plastic surface that felt slightly sticky and behind the counter was a black woman with an enormous turban and a rich Caribbean voice who had a tiny grill. The menu on a chalkboard read “Full English breakfast” and I ordered one at the counter and sat at a table looking out at the wet street, more pedestrians now, buses full of people. It was nearly six o’clock. The woman called out to me and I picked up the thick white plate. On it were two greasy fried eggs, some bacon that looked more like fatty ham, two pieces of toast burned hard as rock, and a soggy slice of fried tomato. The tea was in a big mug, almost chocolate in color, rich with cream, and it was the only part of the meal that was good but I ate everything. I knew I’d pay dearly for the experience in another hour.

Back at the hotel I showered and sorted out my notes, re-packed my bag, checked the map to see where the car hire place was, and finally, at ten o’clock, I went downstairs and dropped the key on the desk in front of the clerk who silently took it and I went out to find that the rain had stopped again and it looked as if the sun was trying to break through, the weak light coming off the pavement in a dull reflection.

I took the underground to Charing Cross, came up into a full London traffic rush, nearly got myself killed because I looked the wrong way, and finally found Nigel’s office in a building that looked like it had probably housed Charles Dickens’ agent. I’d met Nigel once at a cocktail party in Los Angeles that Richard threw when MGM bought a script of mine. It never actually got filmed, but they paid me a shitload of money. That was the year we bought the house in Laurel Canyon. It seemed very easy.

Nigel was in his early fifties, one of those Englishmen who went to the right schools and had a house in the country and a little place in France and knew a lot about wine and which was the right club in London in which to be seen. He asked how Richard was and what my plans were and I told him I had rented a cottage in Dorset and planned to spend the next six months writing non-stop, a script about a coast-watcher in World War II, that I’d spent the last month doing research and had found an old man in Dorset who had been a coast-watcher and it would be one of those movies steeped in the war, sex, intrigue, a sure-fire winner, and as I talked I knew that I was making it all up as I went along, that I had no old coast-watcher and I didn’t have a script like that in mind, but it began to actually sound good, and I realized that I was making the same kind of pitch I’d made countless times to a bunch of Hollywood film people, trying, as I watched their faces begin to reflect thoughts of lunch or tennis, to pull them back, inventing absurd scenarios, trying to get them to think about me and my brilliance rather than drift off to thoughts of spending the afternoon in the beach house at Malibu banging the mistress.

There was, of course, no point in making a pitch to Nigel. He was merely a friend of Richard who might, if I needed help, put me in touch with someone. He was Richard’s friend, not mine, and he wished me luck and told me to keep in touch with him, my, Dorset was a good place to go if you didn’t want to be disturbed, sort of like dropping back into the 19th century if you asked him.

He looked at his watch, asked if there was anything else he could do and I thought briefly about saying fuck you, Nigel, but didn’t because his disinterest was natural. I was the client of a friend, we had met once, and then he said, “Be sure to let me see a treatment of your coast-watcher script,” and I knew that was a perfunctory offer, merely being polite, and I could hear Richard’s voice in the background reminding me that I was stepping off into the abyss. I had a moment of panic, knowing that Nigel couldn’t care less about my fictional coast-watcher, and knowing that I didn’t have a story, only the feeling that my brain was empty. I remembered reading somewhere that Fitzgerald thought he had used up everything. That the writing was gone and he was just like everyone else. Still, I had my cottage in Dorset reserved, and I would make a fresh start on something new. I felt as if I had wiped the slate clean and all that remained was for me to make the first new marks on it. I wanted desperately for things to change.

Downstairs, just outside the building I was accosted by a panhandler and I dropped all of my American change in his outstretched cap. Try spending that, I thought.

4.

It was gray again when I found the car hire agency, a tiny office in the corner of a garage at the end of the Northern Line, and it took less than half an hour to get on the road. The kid who gave me the keys assured me that I could be in Dorset well before dark, take the M25 to the M3, get off at the A303, go to Dorchester, ask somebody there for directions. Otherwise, “you’ll get lost in the fookin’ hedgerows,” he said.

It was white-knuckle time until I got onto the M3, driving a car with the steering wheel on the wrong side; the empty seat to my left seemed insanely wrong and I had trouble judging where the other side of the car was. Once I nearly got wiped out at a roundabout by a truck, looked the wrong way again and it came out of nowhere, missed the car by inches. On the motorway it seemed like every driver was intent on winning the Grand Prix at Brand’s Hatch, ripping along through a fine rain, and I tried to maintain a steady 60 mph, a slow crawl for most English except for the occasional Morris Minor with some old couple. By the time I realized I was hungry it was two o’clock and I was down in the countryside, the fields green, the sky still heavy. I turned off on the A303, a two-lane road where heavy trucks, no, they were lorries now, filled three quarters of the road and I stopped at a lay-by where a van was parked with a big sign that announced tea and sandwiches. The sandwich was not much more than two slices of white bread with some sort of ground meat paste smeared over it and the tea was a paper mug that seemed to be mostly milk but it was hot and the man who sold it gave me directions to Dorchester. I showed him my map to White Church Farm and he said yes, he’d been down along the coast, not hard to find, head for Lyme Regis, lots of signposting, not to worry.

It was late afternoon, the rain gone but the sky still heavy and darkening, when I found White Church Farm down a muddy track with the sea just beyond. Mr. Orchard, the farmer, came out of the low stone farmhouse, wearing a pair of muddy Wellington boots and a yellow rain parka.

“This way,” he said. “Park the car up here. You’ll never get it back up the track if you go down to the cottage with it. Never seen so much bloody rain, coming down stair rods all afternoon, pissing down, but maybe we’ll have another summer. We had summer last weekend, you know,” and he grinned, as if it were a huge joke.

I carried my duffel down the muddy lane that descended into the trees beyond the farmyard. The cottage was a low stone building, slate roofed, and he had to kick the door several times to dislodge it. “Rain swells everything,” he said. “Get a sunny day, it works like a charm.” But his accent, something I would learn later was Broad Dorset, made it sound like “Roinswellseverting. Gor asunnydai it works loik a germ.”

There was a single bulb hanging from a cord and he screwed in the bulb, lighting up the room. A bed was against one wall, a small table under the window next to the door, a chair, a small sink against the wall and a gray-painted armoire. There was a shelf along a wall with what looked like a hot plate, and a door that he opened to reveal a toilet in what was apparently a lean-to added to the cottage. He seemed quite proud of the toilet. “En suite,” he said, “just like the advert says.”

“Well,” he added as he stood at the door looking out toward the sea barely visible through the trees. “I reckon you be anxious to get settled in. We be having our tea about naow. Like the advert says, there’s breakfast at the house. We be having it about seven but if you be the kind what lies in, the wife will be happy to fix something up to eight. After that we be working and she be in an out.” And he was gone, trudging up the muddy path with a rolling gait, a yellow beach ball in green rubber boots, and I was left to sort out my new digs.

They were as bad as they looked. The bed was damp, the only sign of heat was a tiny fireplace with a bucket of coal next to it. It took me a half an hour to get crumpled newspaper to catch the coal on fire and finally I had a fire going but it made the room smell like fuel oil and I opened the window for fresh air, defeating the whole purpose. There was a lamp on the little table, and I set up my laptop, looking for some place to plug it in, connected my little transformer, and when that was done I felt better. I was armed, ready to do battle with words again, and I put on my coat, changed into some old tennis shoes and went out into the gathering dusk. I had a good feeling that something would happen here. I was as far from Los Angeles and failure as I could be. I would break the pattern in this grotty stone hut, write something that was fucking brilliant although I hadn’t a clue what that would be. A dog came wagging up alongside me, one of those blue and white and black sheepdogs with the puzzling eyes that look cloudy and strange, and it kept at my heel while I walked toward the sea, through an iron stile next to a gate, across a close-cropped field that slanted into the open. Pieces of yellow and gold sliced the clouds at the horizon and I wondered if it would be possible to find someone who had been a coast-watcher during the war, find a story here like the one I had invented for Nigel.

5.

The next morning I ate breakfast with the Orchards. She was a sunny woman, built like her husband, two fireplugs who chattered in a language that sounded vaguely like English while I wolfed down eggs and bacon and toast and jellies and tea in a big mug. I went back to the cottage to work but ended up taking a long walk toward the sea. It turned out to be too far off to get to, and I came back to the farmyard and drove until I found Lyme Regis on the coast where I looked for a store to buy food. I would have to do lunches and dinners on my own and I needed canned things I could open and heat on the hot plate. Mrs. Orchard had offered room in her refrigerator but I sensed that I was expected to keep to the cottage.

I wandered around Lyme Regis, went out onto the quay where they had filmed The French Lieutenant’s Woman and scenes from the Jane Austen series my wife had watched on TV, and I half expected people in costume to pop up but it was midweek and quiet and I was back at the farmyard by midafternoon. “Gor-blimey, you’re gonna write the fookin’ thing, you daft bugger,” I said to the dog who greeted me as I parked the car. The dog cocked his head. Obviously I needed practice.

But by the end of the week I had written almost nothing and had grown tired of crushing cockroaches as big as mice, mice the size of rats, and everything I owned seemed soft with dampness. I was certain the laptop would seize up at any moment. When Friday came I told Mr. Orchard my plans had changed and I wouldn’t be staying on for the month as I had planned, there was an emergency and I had to go back to the States. Fortunately the deposit covered the first week and I knew he expected something more than just a goodbye but I wasn’t about to spend any more and Saturday morning I was back on the road, no destination, just driving the maze of “fookin’ hedgerows” as the kid in London had said.

He was right about how easy it was to get lost. I went from village to village, finding a corner where a signpost showed arrows to half a dozen villages, and perhaps Dorchester further on, and when I got to the next intertwining of roads it seemed like the same signposts were there, different village names, Tolpuddle, Stourpaine, Hazelbury Bryan, Shillingstone, Maiden Castle, they all had the ring of some other time. Each was tiny, a church, a pub, a few stone houses, no more than wide places in the road. The roads were narrow, hedges rose on both sides and only occasionally was there a break where I could see into fields that were a rich green, clouds piled up along the horizon, the sun coming and going.

At noon I stopped in Mappowder at the Flying Monk, where I found four men in a room with a ceiling so low that the tallest one continually stooped when he stood up. I ordered a beer and was asked by the girl behind the bar, which one?

“What should I have,” I said to the man next to me. He turned and said, “You a Yank, are ye?”

“Yes.”

“Thought so. You sound like it. I’ve had American beer. I’d drink horse piss before I’d have any again.”

“Which one of these are you drinking?” I gestured toward the handles in front of the girl.

“Badger’s not bad. Depends on your taste, don’t it?”

I learned in the next half hour that Badger beer was made in a town not far away, that I should have the ploughman’s lunch, a chunk of rich cheddar cheese and a generous piece of warm crusty bread, several silvery pickled onions and something that looked like relish and was sweet. My neighbor told me it was pickle, and when I said in America a pickle was a cucumber soaked in brine he put his hand to his crotch and made like he was jacking off and said, oh, that kind of pickle, yes, that was a pickle here, too, but this was Branston pickle. We had several more beers. His name was Will, the other three were his two brothers and a cousin and they didn’t say much, just nodded their heads while Will talked non-stop about John Wayne movies and did I know the Terminator and he’d like to get a leg over Sharon Stone if you know what I mean. I ate my ploughman’s and another pint came.

“Can’t eat without sommet to wash it down,” Will said, and I bought the four of them another beer and realized I had gone through twenty pounds.

“Time we was back at work, Mary,” Will said, draining his glass. He heaved himself off the stool, wished me luck, and his three silent partners followed him to the door. I was alone with Mary, the girl behind the bar.

It was nearly two o’clock and I didn’t feel like driving the narrow roads. What I wanted to do was take a nap.

“Do you rent rooms?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “There’s just us what lives here. You can find some that do, though. Through the village and take the road to Cerne Abbas you’ll find a farmhouse, Sheepheaven Farm. Robbie Barlow and his wife does bed-and-breakfast.”

Sheepheaven Farm turned out to be a square box of a house set on the road with a farmyard beyond it, some outbuildings, a battered old Land Rover and a small sign on the corner of the house that had only the letters B&B, so small it would have been easy to miss. I had the feeling I had passed it earlier.

There seemed to be no sign of life when I pulled into the farmyard and I went to the concrete stoop on the side of the house and knocked at the door. A dog came around the corner of the house barking, and the door opened revealing a man in his early forties who was my height, slender, with a close-cropped black beard and deep-set eyes that seemed almost black.

“Shut up, Jack,” he said, startling me until I realized that Jack might also be the dog’s name. He gave a shrill whistle and the dog turned and trotted off.

“Sorry about that,” he said. “Jack thinks he owns the farm and there’s times when I wish he did. What can I do for you?”

“I’d like to rent a room for the night,” I said.

“We do that.” He paused. “You’re American?” Apparently my accent gave me away immediately.

“Yes.”

“On holiday?”

“Sort of,” I said. “I had lunch in the village and I’m afraid I had a few more beers than I should and what I’d really like is a place to lie down.” The beer, obviously stronger than any I was used to, had kicked in, and I knew I was in trouble.

He grinned. “And I bet I could tell you which buggers you were drinking with, too. Fifteen pounds cash and you get a clean bed and a good breakfast and for another fiver you can have dinner with us or you can go back to the pub and get pissed all over again. Maggie!” he called out. “We’ve got ourselves a weary traveler who needs ministering to.”

A tall woman with long auburn hair came into the room and that was when I first met Robbie’s wife.

6.

No, I didn’t fall in love with Maggie the moment I set eyes on her. All I wanted at that moment was to lie down, there was a buzzing in the middle of my forehead where somebody was boring a hole and I wasn’t sure that the ploughman’s lunch was going to stay where I had parked it. Christ, I thought, did they make that beer out of badger carcasses? Robbie took the keys to the car, went out and got my duffel and took it up the stairs. Maggie said what I needed was to sit in a hot bath for a long time, all I had to do was get my clothes off and she’d draw the bath. It was down the hall and I sat on the bed wondering how to get my trousers off when she came back and said that the tub was ready, here were some towels, take my time. Did I want to have dinner with them?

“I’m not sure,” I mumbled. “Food isn’t at the top of my list right now.” She laughed and said that was all right, she’d pop in on me later.

I stripped off, wrapped a towel around my waist and found the bathroom. She was right, the hot tub did feel good and I lay in it until the water was cold, the buzzing went away and I felt a lassitude that became a dozing half-awake state until a knocking on the door startled me.

“You all right in there?” came Robbie’s voice. “Not drowned or dead or anything.”

“No,” I said. “I’m coming out.”

Robbie opened the door a crack.

“My guess is,” he said, “that it was the Stryker brothers you tried to keep up with and then they went off to shovel shit at their uncle’s farm and they’ll be back on those same stools tonight and they’ll close the place up and the four of them will line up and piss on the wall along the road and be up tomorrow morning at first light to muck out the barn. Amazing fucking capacity. Anyway, you stepped into the minefield and it looks like you survived. We have a couple of hours before tea. You can settle up with me then. I’ve got work to do.”

He was gone and I went back to the room and fell asleep. I awoke in the late afternoon to a dull headache, dressed and went downstairs where I found a boy of about ten in the kitchen working laboriously over a school copybook.

“Hello,” I said. “I’m Jack Stone. I’ve rented one of your rooms for the evening.”

“I’m Terry Barlow,” he said. “My mother will be right back.” He bent again to his book.

She came into the kitchen and I was struck by the way she walked. She was barefoot and she rose on her toes with each step, as if she were about to float. Later I would learn that she had been a dancer, that she was always barefoot in the house.

“Well,” she said, “the wounded warrior arises.” Her voice was bright, lilting, and she grinned. She wore a long tattered skirt and a thick blue sweater and her long hair was done up at the nape of her neck with a thick rubber band. “You’ll be wanting a cup of tea.” She filled the electric kettle and turned it on.

“Sit down,” she said. “Don’t mind Terry. He’s struggling with an essay on a Roman hill fort and he thinks it’s a rubbish assignment.”

“School is almost out for the summer where I come from,” I offered.

Terry looked up. “Lucky buggers,” he said.

“Watch your tongue, laddie,” she said good-naturedly, tousling his hair with her fingers.

“And where are you from, Mr. Jack Stone?” she asked.

“Los Angeles. I’m a writer. I’ve come here to work on a film script but I’m not having much luck with it. My trouble is, Terry, that it’s a rubbish assignment that I set for myself.”

He didn’t look up, just kept writing, and I realized that he wasn’t interested in a conversation with a stranger.

“So,” Maggie said, “if the assignment is rubbish and you set it yourself, why not just change it?” She put a thick mug on the table and poured some milk into it, then paused. “I’m sorry, you’re American, you probably don’t want white tea.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “I’ve grown used to it this way. It’s quite nice.”

She filled the teapot with hot water, swirled it around, poured it out and spooned loose tea into it.

“Can you change the assignment? Bugger off your Roman hill fort and write something else?”

“Watch your tongue,” Terry murmured. Maggie put her fingers around the back of his neck and squeezed. “Cheeky,” she said.

“Actually, I don’t have much of an assignment. My problem is that I’m not sure I want to write anything anymore but that’s what I do for a living.”

“I used to dance,” she said. “Up until Mr. Big Shot here was born. I used to think it was all I would ever do. But I reinvented myself.” She poured boiling water into the teapot. “Is that why you’re wandering around Dorset? Looking for a new skin?”

As she poured the water she reached up with her other hand and undid the rubber band around her hair, letting it fall around her shoulders. She did it absently, as if she were unconscious of what she was doing, and then she reached back to the nape of her neck with one hand, gathering her hair in it, continuing to talk and, as if the hand had a mind of its own, it separated the hair into three strands, her thumb folding one strand over another, a finger lifting the third strand, braiding her hair effortlessly without thought or direction.

“And, you’re wandering around Dorset in the rain spending your afternoon drinking with yabboes and looking for a story?”

“What’s a yabbo?”

“A turnip. The Strykers were the kind of boys the headmaster might have called a bit thick. ‘Mrs. Stryker, the lads are a bit thick, but they’re good lads and they don’t mean no harm.’”

She had adopted a broad Dorset accent and Terry was looking up at her, fascinated.

So was I. I was captivated by her, and I could feel her grace and her wit and the fluid movement with which she changed character and I wished desperately that I were twenty years younger and that she was not married to the handsome black-bearded man who had answered the door.

She poured tea into the mug in front of me. “Drink that. It clears out the cobwebs. For the English it’s what cures everything. They’re bombing London? Have a cuppa tea. Can’t get your life together? Have a cuppa tea.” She drew out a chair and sat down, leaning forward, hands on her chin, looking directly at me. “Now, Mr. Jack Stone, tell us about your exciting life in Los Angeles and all the movie stars you’ve met and the wild women who love you and what Clint Eastwood is really like.” She reached over and tousled Terry’s hair again. He didn’t look up. “But keep in mind that Terry is still working on Roman hill forts so you’ll have to edit the wild women part accordingly.”

I didn’t know what to say.

7.

I had supper with the Barlows, a casserole that Robbie called Shepherd’s Pie which, he said, contained whatever leftovers Maggie had found, maybe it’s rabbit or a pork chop she’s minced up and possibly that rotten cat that’s been lagging around the shed, maybe the boot that Terry can’t find the mate to, we don’t stand on ceremony here, you eat whatever we’ve got. The pie was covered in a deep layer of mashed potatoes, browned and crisp around the edges, and whatever Maggie had put in it, it was delicious.

I didn’t say much, listened while they bantered and Robbie quizzed Terry on school, made him read his essay on the hill forts aloud, and I thought it was quite good for a ten year old. I said so but Robbie said no, it’s got a ways to go, he should go walk on Eggerton tomorrow, take Jack here with you, show him where the Saxons fought the Romans.

“You don’t need to go off early, do you Jack?” he asked. “Be a shame if you don’t see Eggerton.”

“Which is?”

“It’s a hill fort built by the Iron Agers. Trenches as deep as this house.”

I watched Maggie clear away the table. Still barefoot, she had changed into a white blouse and denim pants and when she reached up to put something on a high shelf I could see her small breasts tight against the white cotton and I thought, Robbie, you’re a lucky bugger and I said, “I was thinking of staying another night if that’s all right with you.”

“Fine. The room’s yours,” Robbie said. “How about it, Terry? Take Mr. Stone up Eggerton tomorrow? It’s Saturday.”

“Why don’t you take him, dad?”

I could tell that Terry wasn’t excited about the prospect of guiding the old American on a day off from school, but he was trying to be polite.

“Because I’ve got to go to market in Wintercombe, look for a calf.”

8.

Robbie was gone by the time I came down to breakfast and Terry was gone, too.

“I’m sorry,” Maggie said. “Your tour guide of Eggerton seems to have gone off with Jack.” She paused. “The other Jack. Four-legged Jack. The one with the English accent and brown fur.” She laughed.

“Robbie’s gone to market.” She set two mugs of tea on the table and sat in the chair opposite. “I’m curious, Mr. Jack Stone. What made you decide to stay on another night? There’s nothing in particular around here to see. No cathedrals or monuments or wee churches where Ethelred spent the night. We’re in the back of beyond. Except for Eggerton, which is, I must admit, rather grand, but it’s a windswept earthworks and not something I suspect you came looking for.”

She sipped her tea. She had on the same blue sweater and the same ragged skirt and she was, again, barefoot.

“I don’t know. It seemed like a good idea.”

“And this morning it’s not? There’s a lot of ideas that don’t look so good the next morning. I’ve had a few myself.”

“No, I feel good here. Maybe I can write something. Maybe I’ll write about you.”

“Is that what writers do? Wander around the countryside looking for farm wives to write about? What would you write about me, Jack Stone?”

“Why not just call me Jack?”

“Because every time I’ve said Jack for the last half dozen years something knee-high comes lagging round my legs and gooses me. Somehow you don’t fit that category.”

“And if you call me Jack and I come lagging around your legs and goose you, what will happen?”

“You’ll likely get a kick up the backside, which is what Jack the dog gets. So, Jack Stone, what would you write about me?”

I didn’t know how to answer that one. I’d write about how you float across the floor and how your breasts pressed against your blouse when you reached into the cupboard last night and how I lay awake imagining you down the hall, lying in bed with Robbie and I said, “That’s a hard question. I like to listen to people talk and file it away in the back of my head and I never know when something will come bubbling up. It isn’t so much the writing itself, it’s like filling a scrapbook with snapshots, never knowing which one will come alive on paper.”

“You were taking notes all that time you were pretending to love my Shepherd’s Pie, were you?”

“Something like that. You can’t trust writers. Anything you say or do is fair game to us. We dress you up in a different gown and use your words and your hair and your eyes and steal your soul.”

“And what would you do with my soul, Jack Stone? Sell it off to the highest bidder? What do you think it would fetch?”

“I’d keep it under my pillow.”

Christ, what possessed me? I barely knew the woman but something about her compelled the truth. There was no subterfuge in the face that watched me intently from across the scarred kitchen table. In Los Angeles everyone lied about everything. They lied about the amount of money they earned or who they slept with, the size of their dick; they lied with such skill and ease that they no longer knew what was true and what was not. And I was one of the liars, only now I wanted to tell her the truth, tell her how beautiful she was and how I was mesmerized by the way she walked and how I wanted to reach across the table and touch her hand that carelessly stroked the lip of her mug of tea.

“Well, Jack Stone, you flatter me. I’m not that much, you know. You can dress me up in a fancy gown and give me eyes like Nefertiti’s cat and I’ll still be a Dorset farm wife in an old blue jumper.”

“I think not. You said you were a dancer. You move that way in this kitchen, as if you’re still dancing to some orchestra the rest of us can’t hear.”

She traced her finger around the rim of the mug, watching me intently.

“You must be a good writer, Jack Stone, to see that in me. But I think you see what might have been, not what is.” She sipped her tea, still leaning forward so that she pressed against the table, then straightened, taking her long hair in one hand and reaching back with the other to knot it loosely at her neck.

“You’re an interesting man. Will I ever see what you write about me?”

“Perhaps.”

“And not much of a talker. But I suspect you listen well. There’s not much escapes you, is there, Jack Stone?”

“Now you flatter me.”

There was a sudden flurry at the window, a rattling, like gravel thrown against the pane, and Maggie turned to look. “Rain again,” she said. “Coming down stair rods. They’ll be soaked, all three of them. More tea?”

I shook my head.

“Then I’ll leave you to go upstairs and steal my soul. Or, you can write down here if you like. You’ll have the run of the house. I’ve got to go into the village and shop for tea.” She reached out and touched my hand.

“I like you, Jack Stone.” She turned and went to the hallway at the back of the kitchen, took down a raincoat from the row of hooks and put it on. She turned again toward me. “But I like Jack, the dog, too, and if you come lagging around me and try to goose me, you’ll still get a kick up the backside, same as him.” She bent, slipping her bare feet into her green Wellington boots, straightened and pulled the hood of her coat up over her head. “But I’d probably take my Wellies off first,” she added.

9.

I did as she suggested, went back up to my room and got out the laptop. I sat there, watching the screen for a while, typing in an occasional word to keep it from going to sleep, and I wrote down the Stryker brothers, reporting them as they sat in the pub drinking, and I was surprised how well I remembered the conversation, and I thought perhaps it could be worked into the coast-watcher story, the one I had invented for Nigel. But I found myself thinking of Maggie, reconstructing her, jotting down phrases I had heard her utter at the dinner table, the way her blouse pressed against her when she reached into the cupboard, the way her voice fell at the end of each sentence.

I worked that way the rest of the morning and when I stopped I looked again at what I had done. They were paragraphs, disconnected, no story there, only scenes, like sketches an artist might make as a study for some painting that hadn’t yet formed in his mind. There was Mr. Orchard in his yellow slicker, and his cloudy-eyed dog, and Robbie at the table, and Maggie putting on her coat. But they were good, that much I knew, and I wanted to share them with someone. It felt as if I were on the verge of something new and I felt energized as I had not felt in more than a year.

I went downstairs to the kitchen but it was empty. I went outside into the farmyard. The Land Rover wasn’t there, so evidently both Maggie and Robbie were still off someplace. I was hungry now, and I thought about getting in my car and going in to the village to the pub, but I felt hesitant, as if that would break the spell, and I would come back to find my paragraphs dull and lifeless. I explored the farmyard, looking into the big shed where a cow shifted in a stall, and a pool of water glistened on the stone floor. Beyond the shed was a low stone wall and beyond that the field rose, gently at first, then steeper, and there were sheep dotted on it, as if someone had taken a salt shaker and sprinkled the green slope with them.

Back inside the house I found the remains of the Shepherd’s Pie in the refrigerator and spooned some onto a plate. Although it was cold, it still tasted good, and I made myself a cup of tea. When I was finished, I washed the plate and cup, carefully replaced them and went back up to my laptop, but I found myself watching out the window, and eventually I saw Terry turn in through the gate and heard the door below open and close.

I unplugged the laptop and carried it downstairs. Terry was at the kitchen table, his copybook open, laboriously working on his drawing.

“Mind if I join you?” I asked.

“No, sir,” he said, without looking up.

I set the laptop on the table, opened it. The screen glowed blue and Terry glanced at it.

“Want to learn how to write a screenplay?” I asked.

He looked at me.

“The script for a movie film. It’s how movies start. Somebody writes it all down and then the actors and actresses act it out and the director films it. It’s what I do for a living.”

“Is it hard?” he asked.

“Not really. Here. It works like this.”

I opened the program, keyed in CHARACTER and then typed in JACK.

“There,” I said. “There’s one character. That’s Jack. Now, all I have to do is put down what Jack says.”

I typed in, Hello Terry. How was your day?

I touched the character key again, and typed in TERRY. “Now I’ve got two characters. Here. You do it. Put in what Terry says.” I swiveled the laptop in front of him.

“You don’t have to plug this in, then, do you?”

“No, it’s got batteries inside. We could do this for the next six hours before I have to charge it up again. Go on, tell us what Terry says.”

He paused, looking at the screen, then with one finger he pecked out: OK. How was your day?

I swiveled the laptop back, hit the key and JACK popped up. “See, it remembers who I am.” I typed in: I went to London, bought a new Aston Martin, drove down the motorway at a hundred miles an hour and had lunch in the Flying Monk.

“You did that?” Terry asked.

“No, I’m making it up. That’s the fun in this sort of thing. You can make up whatever you want. You don’t have to put down the way things really are. You can put down anything the way you want it to be.”

“How do I get Terry back?”

“Here, press this.”

He did and TERRY popped up. He carefully pecked out: Did you get pissed again?

At that moment the door opened and Maggie came in, carrying bags of groceries. We both watched while she set them on the counter, shucked her coat.

“Well,” she said. “What are you two doing?”

“We’re writing a movie,” Terry said. “Mr. Stone and I are writing a movie story.”

“Will we all be rich when it’s finished, Jack Stone?”

“We have to finish it first. Then my agent has to sell it. Then some producer has to make it into a movie and Terry will be at university by the time your ship comes in.”

She smiled and began putting the groceries away. Terry was pecking away again at the keyboard and I watched her as she brushed her hair back over her shoulders, bent to put cans in a cupboard, reached up to take a pot from above the stove. As she did so, her sweater rose and I could see the roundness of her stomach and where the old skirt hung against her hips and I thought, there’s another scene I can write and then she turned and looked at me and I looked back at Terry, suddenly feeling I had been caught out.

Terry stopped typing and I looked at what he had written.

You must have got pissed because you wet your trowsers.

I looked at him and he looked back solemnly, but I could tell that a grin was close to the surface.

I hit JACK and typed: No, I didn’t wet myself. I spilled tea on myself.

Terry hit the key and began to peck again.

TERRY: Was the tea hot?

My turn. JACK: Yes, it was hot. Oooh, did it burn!

TERRY: Poor Willie. Does he have to go to hospital?

And Terry was giggling uncontrollably, head down on the table.

“What are you two doing?” Maggie asked, coming toward the table. I hit the DELETE key and the screen went blank.

“Whoops,” I said. “I’m afraid I erased it. We’ll have to start over again.”

At that moment Robbie came in and Terry asked, “Did you find a calf?”

“No, nothing worth having. You working on your paper, are you?”

“Mr. Stone and I were writing a movie story.”

“Is that so? You giving lessons, Jack?”

“No, just having a bit of fun.”

He opened Terry’s copybook. “You need to get this done, lad. Thank Mr. Stone and then get at it.”

“He was working on it when I came down. I’m afraid I was the one who interrupted him. My fault.”

“Not to worry, Jack. He knows what he’s got to do.”

I took the laptop back upstairs and wrote out a scene in which Maggie rose on her toes, took the pot from the shelf, and when it was done I looked at it again and realized that it bordered on the erotic and I thought, get hold of yourself, Jack. But it was good writing and I saved it, along with the other pieces I had done that day, and went downstairs to the kitchen. Maggie was telling Robbie that he needed to lighten up, that Terry wasn’t headed for Cambridge the next morning, and Robbie was telling her that they had to start early, he didn’t want his boy to end up shoveling cow shit the rest of his life, and I felt guilty, since my interruption of Terry’s work had obviously triggered the argument. They stopped when they realized I was there and Robbie asked if I wanted to look around the farm before tea. We put on coats and went out into the chill air. The sun was low in the field, barely over the hedgerow on the west side, and it was a misty evening, the air heavy with the promise of more rain. We went out to the shed where Robbie raked the old straw out of the stall and replaced it with new straw.

“Don’t get yourself wet,” he said. He wore boots so he could walk through the wide pool of water.

“This time of year it puddles up in here. The stones were set a hundred years ago and they’ve slumped. I could put a new floor in, pour concrete over it, but I like the stones and when summer comes, if it ever does, it dries up. Bit of a cockup in winter, though.”

We went back outside to the wall and stood, watching the sheep on the slope. Jack, the dog, had appeared and was close behind Robbie’s heels.

“Jesus,” he said. “Sheep are strange creatures. They’re silent all day and then all night they talk to each other, crying out like some chorus of lost souls.” He paused, watching the still white shapes, their heads down, grazing. Then he spoke, his voice not much more than a whisper: “Lords, I protest. My soul is full of woe.”

He turned to look at me, his face indistinct in the failing light. “But they don’t look much like King Richard’s court, do they, Jack? Did they keep you awake last night?”

“No, I slept like a log.”

“You’re lucky. Maybe it’s because I depend on the dumb things to feed us. Christ, they can do stupid things, one starts to run, the others follow, they’d go over the edge of the world unless Jack, here, stopped them.”

The sun had dropped now and it was cold. “Would you fancy a beer, Jack?”

“Me or your clever dog?”

“He’s a teetotaler, this Jack is. How about you? You haven’t sworn off, have you?”

“No.”

Inside, the kitchen was warm and Maggie was taking something out of the oven that Terry called toad and I would learn was Toad In The Hole. It was another pie, with a thick crust and brown gravy oozing from cracks in it. Hidden inside were sausages, and it was obvious that it was a favorite of Terry’s. I asked Robbie why it was called toad in the hole and he laughed.

“You may not want to hear this one right now, Jack.”

“Why not?”

“It’s a bit rude.”

Maggie said, “Save it, Robbie,” and he grinned at her.

“You want to hear it, Jack?” and when I hesitated, he said, “Toad comes from Old English, and the word was closer to turd, which, as you can see, a sausage resembles.” He speared a sausage from his plate and held it up.

“Story is, they took a stale loaf of bread and punched holes in it and either they poked stale turds in it to feed the starving or the sausages looked like turds so they called it turd in a hole. And a toad, all shiny among the leaves, looks a bit like a fresh one, too.”

He took a bite from the end of the sausage.

“That’s enough!” Maggie said. Terry was hunched over his plate, his shoulders shaking as he fought to control his giggles.

“Maggie, this is scholarship. It’s what I came away from university with.”

“And it’s my tea you’re calling turds in a hole. Mister Stone must think we’re a bunch of savages.”

“No,” I insisted. “It hasn’t spoiled things a bit.”

“Maggie’s bark is worse than her bite, Jack.”

“You can show him some teeth marks, then,” she said, spooning another portion onto his plate.

Robbie quizzed Terry about his school, and they made plans to go off the next morning to bring some sheep back from a field where, Terry said, “There’s rabbits! Lots of rabbits, Mr. Stone. Would you like to come, too?”

Robbie smiled at me. “You’re welcome to come along, Jack. It’ll take us most of the morning. I think of it as my Sunday morning church.”

“I’ll pass on this one, Robbie. And, if it’s all right with you, I’d like to stay on a few more days. Today was a good day for me. I’ll spend my morning in church writing.”

“Suit yourself. If you change your mind you’re welcome to come.”

Maggie was looking at me as if she were studying me, and I wondered if she had noticed how much I had been studying her, watching the way she broke off a bit of crust from the pie, placing it in her mouth, her lips closing over the tips of her fingers; how she absentmindedly traced her finger along the ridge of bone just below her neck, sliding it along the neck of her sweater. I stayed in the kitchen as Maggie cleared away the dishes and washed up while Robbie and Terry went to watch the television.

“You’re not much of a talker tonight,” she said, her back to me as she stood at the sink.

“I’m enjoying the warmth and the softness of this house,” I said.

“It’s not always warm and soft. We’ve got on our company manners.” She turned to face me. “It’s not always what it seems, is it?”

“Perhaps not. Still, I like watching the three of you.”

“You have any children, Jack Stone?”

“No.”

“Watching you with Terry this afternoon, I thought, you’d make a good father.”

“More like a grandfather at my age.”

“Rubbish. He likes you. You don’t talk down to him the way most adults do with children.”

“He’s a smart boy.”

“He is.” There was a subtle change in her voice. “I suspect his father was like that in this house when he was that age. It’s a shame we can’t freeze them so they can’t change.”

I lay awake for a long time that night, unable to sleep, listening to the bleating of Robbie’s sheep. He was right. They seemed to be talking to each other in some strange language, crying out, “I’m here, I’m here, I’m over here,” as if afraid that light would come again and they would be alone.

10.

The next morning I slept in so that once again Robbie and Terry were gone when I finally came down.

“You’re keeping banker’s hours, mister Jack Stone,” Maggie said, pouring me a cup of tea. A weak sun slanted in through the open curtain at the window above the sink.

She offered to fix what she called a proper breakfast but I told her no, I was late and she needn’t bother, just some toast and a piece of cheese.

“What’s on your menu today? The sun is out, first time in weeks, it feels like. Off for a walk?”

“What will you do?”

“Take a bit of a walk, take a bath, straighten up the house, have something ready to eat when those two come back all covered with mud.” She lifted her hair with both hands, stretching it back behind her head, and began to tie it into a knot.

Invite me to walk with you, I thought, but she said, “You’ll be wanting to write now, won’t you? You’ll have the house to yourself for a bit. We’ll all be out of your way. Take your tea up to the room if you want, or bring your machine down here. The Rayburn keeps this room warm.” I must have looked puzzled, since she added, “The cooker,” gesturing toward the big old stove. She went to the hallway at the back door and took a jacket off a hook.

“If you decide to go out, don’t worry about locking up,” and she closed the door after her.

I went back up to my room and stood at the window and watched her go across the farmyard, disappear around the end of the shed and emerge a few seconds later in the field, walking toward the rise above the farm. I watched as her figure grew smaller until she topped the rise, turned and stood, facing the farm. I wondered if she could see me standing there at the window. Then she disappeared over the rise and I sat at the laptop and wrote out a paragraph describing Maggie breaking off a piece of the crust of the pie, her lips closing over her fingertips, only I kept writing, following her finger as she touched the neck of her sweater, watched as she slipped her hand down inside her sweater, cupped her breast in her hand, turned to look directly at me, as if inviting me to touch her as well, and when I had finished the page I realized that I was writing erotica, and I deleted it and wrote another scene in which a woman crosses behind a stone wall and walks up a field and I thought, I should have asked her if I could walk with her.

I tried again to write but nothing came and finally I went downstairs, put on my jacket and went out. I thought of following in the direction Maggie had gone, perhaps finding her somewhere on the hillside, but instead I walked along the road until I came to the village. I went into the post office store, bought a cellophane-wrapped sausage roll and a soft drink in a plastic bottle and went back onto the road, walking through the village, until I came to a crossroads. I sat on the stone wall and ate the sausage roll, a foul thing that tasted of sawdust and grease, and washed it down with the soft drink, some sort of orangeade that was mostly sugar and water. Then I walked back to Sheepheaven Farm where I found Robbie in the farmyard changing a tire on the Land Rover, cursing the frozen lug nuts.

“Fucking piece of shit!” He noticed me and said, “Sorry about that, Jack. Local dialect.”

“I’ve heard it before. You do it very well.”

He stood, wiping his hands on the legs of his trousers. “What exciting things did you find to do in this country backwater?”

“Not much, I’m afraid. I wrote a bit this morning, went for a walk, had a plastic sausage roll from the post office store.”

“Oh shit, Jack, you should have asked Maggie to make you a sandwich.”

“She went off for a walk. I didn’t want to bother her.”

“So you’ll be staying the night? Having supper with us?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Would you do me a favor?”

“If I can.”

“Would you steady my shoulders? I’m going to stand on the lug wrench and see if I can’t jar this fucker loose.” He put one foot on the arm of the wrench, raised up the other foot and as he balanced on the arm of the wrench I reached out to steady his shoulders. I could feel the muscles beneath his jacket, and his wiry shoulders, and I thought how hard he was compared to my own soft body and I suddenly envied him, his age, his handsome face, his dark hair and beard, the energy that seemed to emanate from his body. He raised himself and brought his weight down hard on the wrench, rose and repeated the motion and there was a crack as the nut came loose.

“You’re a good man, Jack,” he said. “I owe you a pint for that one.”

I watched while he finished changing the tire and then followed him into the house where he washed his hands in the kitchen sink only to be interrupted by Maggie who came into the kitchen and said sharply, “How many times have I told you that you wash up somewhere else! Not in my kitchen sink!”

“Sorry, love,” he said, wiping his hands on his trouser legs.

“Jesus, Robbie, you’re worse than a child!”

“Come on, love,” he said, approaching her, but she turned and rose on her toes to pull something from the cupboard.

“I’ve been properly rebuked, Jack,” Robbie said with a grin.

Supper that evening was quiet, and I felt as if there were some sort of undercurrent running through the house, some disquietude I had not noticed before. I went up to the room early, leaving Robbie in front of the telly and Maggie clearing up the kitchen. I tried to write but it was no good and I turned out the light and lay on the bed listening to the noises of the house, the faint chatter of the television, and later the footsteps as they came up the stairs, Terry’s voice as he said good night mum, good night dad, and the ticking of the dog’s claws on the stairs as it went back down to the kitchen.

I slept badly, waking often. Once I turned on the light, tried to write, but again no words came. I finally got up when it began to grow light, went down to the silent kitchen. I thought about making myself a cup of tea but decided I might make noise that would wake them and instead put on my coat and went out into the farmyard. It was cold, wet, water dripping from the eaves, the bleating of sheep somewhere, and the trees on the far side of the field were indistinct, hazy. I walked along the road for a while. Somewhere there were doves waking in the trees. When I came back, Maggie was in the kitchen, it was warm and she wordlessly set a cup of tea on the table.

“For me?” I asked.

“You look like you need it,” she said. “And where were you walking to at this hour of the morning?”

“No place in particular.”

“I came down just in time to see you go across the field,” she said. “I almost went after you. Would you have minded the company?”

“Not at all. I wish you had.”

“Perhaps later, we’ll take a proper walk before you go,” she said.

She busied herself making breakfast and Robbie appeared. He asked me if I had slept well.

“No,” I said. “It was a restless night. Sorry if I woke you.”

“Didn’t wake me,” he said. “I heard the sheep and I listened. Sometimes there’s something worrying them, maybe a dog. Sets off an alarm in my head.”

“Was it anything?”

“No, they were just complaining. Pissed off that they’re sheep and not lions.” He pulled up a chair. “Well, Jack,” he said. “You’re off this morning?”

“It looks like it.”

“Bound for where?”

“I have no idea.”

“Must be lovely to be footloose and fancy free, come to a crossroads and flip a coin.”

“I came here to work,” I said. “I thought I’d be able to write something new, get a fresh start, but it doesn’t seem to be working out.”

We finished breakfast and it wasn’t until Robbie had left to take the flat tire into Gillingham for repair, shaking my hand and wishing me luck as he went out the door, that I realized Maggie had said nothing since Robbie had entered the kitchen. Terry went off to school and I was left in the kitchen with Maggie, who busied herself clearing up the dishes, washing them, stacking them on the counter to drain.

“I’d like to take that walk with you,” I said.

She smiled at me. “All right. Give me a minute to put something on,” and she went upstairs. I waited at the table, noticing that Terry’s copybook was still there, open to the essay on Roman hill forts. I turned it around and there was a careful drawing of the fort with stick figures loading a rock thrower and others with spears climbing over an earthen bulwark. Underneath were the words, “bugger off shouted Hadrian’s men.”

Maggie came into the kitchen wearing pale yellow corduroy trousers and a red sweater with a red scarf around her neck.

“No chance of losing sight of you,” I said.

“When it’s gray like this, I sometimes crave a bit of color. Otherwise I’m afraid I might disappear.”

“Not much chance of that.”

Maggie stopped by the kitchen door to pull on her Wellington boots and said to me, “Here, put on Robbie’s. Otherwise you’ll be mired in muck before we get back.”

We crossed the farmyard and went up the hill, the same direction she had gone the day before, and she was quick, moving up the slope easily. I felt my chest tighten but I tried not to let on. I was glad when the slope leveled off at the top and we turned toward the trees on the far side.

“Are you all right?” she asked. “I’m a bit of a mountain goat, so if we’re going too fast, just pull on my leash.”

Jack, the dog, had come with us, and he was ranging in front, head down, working back and forth as if he were on the hunt for something.

We paused to look down at the farm and I said, “You were quiet during breakfast. I don’t think you spoke a word.”

“There wasn’t much to say.”

“What does that mean?”

“Just that. There are times when I think words just fill the air. Robbie did enough talking for the both of us.”

“He didn’t say much.”

“He said enough. I’m glad you wanted to walk with me.”

“And why is that?”

“I like you, Jack Stone. You have a kind face and a kind manner and I feel easy with you.”

“You can’t know me.”

“I think I do. I think you’re the kind of man who would listen to me if I wanted to tell you something important.”

“And what would that be?”

She continued to look down at the farmhouse. It was misting again, and the farmhouse began to disappear as we watched, as if it were being erased by some unseen hand. I pulled the hood of my jacket over my head but Maggie stood still, her hair wet and shining.

“Perhaps it’s because you’re a stranger and I know that you’ll leave and I’ll never see you again. So I can tell you things that I can’t tell someone who will see me tomorrow.”

“And what would you tell me?”

“That sometimes a black cloud comes over me and I see the women in the store in the village and I see myself standing among them and I cannot stand the idea of being that kind of a woman and there seems to be no way out.”

“Somehow I don’t see you becoming that sort of woman.”

“You don’t know what it’s like. It’s like quicksand. Only it sucks the life out of you and you end up standing there on the corner watching them go into the pub and you’re talking about which one is shagging that girl with the short skirt in the next-but-one council house and that’s what’s left of your life.”

“Why don’t you and Robbie leave?”

“I’d go in a flash. With Robbie it’s different. I keep waiting, hoping it’s not too late.”

She turned toward me, pulling her wet hair back with one hand, touching my cheek with the other. “So, Jack Stone,” she said, “here you are with a woman who sounds as if she’s auditioning for the National Theater, or, more likely, an episode of East Enders on the telly. Didn’t bargain for this when you asked me if I wanted to walk, did you?”

She took her hand away. “Enough of this. You wanted a walk,” and she turned, striding off along the top of the field. I watched for a moment, and even in the bulky jacket and boots and trousers she had a grace that quickened me. If it were in my power I would take such a woman away from the village, find her a sun-streaked place where she could be what she wanted to be. Which was, I quickly thought, the kind of foolish fantasy that old men have when they watch a graceful younger woman walk along the top of a field in the gathering rain. I hurried to catch up with her.

She didn’t talk about herself again. She questioned me about my life in Los Angeles, why I had come to Dorset to write, what it was like to make up stories. She seemed genuinely interested in me and I found it easy to talk with her. We came down out of the field at a weir in a small stream and stood for a while listening to the water rush over the lip, brown and foaming.

“I come here often,” Maggie said. “I like that sound. It quiets the demons.”

“It’s hard to imagine demons in a place like this.”

“They’re all around us.” She hugged her arms to her chest and spoke to the foaming weir.

We crossed a narrow iron footbridge with a rusted gate, and came out onto a road that eventually led us back through the village. At the post office store there were three women who stood, watching us approach. “The witches of Endor, Robbie calls them,” Maggie said. “I could fit right in.”

“I doubt it,” I said.

“You’re a kind man, Jack Stone. It’s an endearing quality. Here,” she said, and took my hand. “Give them something to talk about. Give them half an hour and the whole village will think you’ve got a leg over me.”

That afternoon I wrote out my walk with Maggie, made it a scene in which the two characters, Jack and Maggie, stood looking down at the farmhouse, and I gave her Maggie’s words exactly as she had given them to me and then I added the scene where the three women stood on the edge of the road in front of the store:

THE WOMEN’S POV:

Jack and Maggie walk toward them down the road and Maggie reaches out and takes Jack’s hand.

JACK AND MAGGIE’S POV:

Three women stand, heads together, apparently gossiping. The pavement is wet and they wear dresses with bulky jackets over them. One has a baby in her arms.

CUT TO: MAGGIE AND JACK’S CLASPED HANDS

MAGGIE:

This will give them something to talk about. Give them a half hour and the whole village will think you’ve got a leg over me.

JACK:

And Robbie?

MAGGIE:

He’ll think it’s a lark. He calls them the witches of Endor.

But I didn’t stop there. I went on to the farm, saw Maggie go up the stairs, followed her and she undressed and I wrote it out, each detail of her body as I imagined it, and then I stopped, thought, Jesus, Jack, You’re sixty fucking years old and she’s young enough to be your daughter and it’s time you packed up and moved on.

11.

When I came into the kitchen with my duffel bag, Maggie was at the table, writing. She looked up and said, “I was leaving you a note. I’m off to do some shopping in Gillingham. You’re off?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Where’s your next stop?”

“I have no idea.”

“You’re welcome to stay on. We enjoy your company.”

“Thanks. I feel comfortable here. What do I owe you?”

“Sixty pounds will do.”

“No,” I said, “I had supper with you three nights. It’s more like seventy-five.”

“Suppers weren’t much, Jack Stone. I’d feel badly charging you for Shepherd’s Pie.”

I laid the money on the kitchen table. “I feel as if I’m taking advantage of you,” I said.

She smiled. “It would cost you more than sixty quid to take advantage of me.”

Then she did something that surprised me. She rose and came to me, putting her arms around me, holding me tightly for a moment before drawing back and saying, for the third time, “I like you Jack Stone.”

“And I like you, Maggie.”

“Come back and take another walk with me,” she said.

There was an awkward moment and I said, “Tell Robbie thanks for me,” and I went out into the farmyard. There was no sign of Robbie or Jack the dog, or the Land Rover. I drove through the empty village and turned toward Sturminster Newton, where I bought a sausage roll at a bakery and a bottle of beer in a little grocery store and I had lunch beside an old mill pond and as I listened to the rush of water over the stone lip I was reminded of Maggie and what she had said at the weir the day before. And I tried to remember if I had put my arms around Maggie when she had held me. I could still feel her body pressed against mine.

I drove north to Glastonbury, a two hour drive, and found the High Tor, a stone tower on a hill outside of town. I parked along the edge of the road and crossed the field, climbing the rutted slope, slipping in the muddy earth until I was at the top, sweating, my trousers wet to the knees, and I waited in the lee of the tower until my chest stopped heaving. There was no magic in this place, only a cutting wind and a few sheep far below. It was growing dark and what I wanted was to be warm and I stumbled back to the car, changed into dry socks and trousers and at the first pub I saw, I parked and went in. It was hot inside, noisy, and I ordered Shepherd’s Pie but it wasn’t like Maggie’s. This one was a thick crust covering a shallow bowl of gravy with bits of gristly meat and chunks of soft potato. But it was hot and I washed it down with a pint and had another and then nursed a third one while I watched noisy darts players in the smoke-filled room, half-dozing until finally I went to the toilet and found myself leaning against the wall above a stone trough, trying not to piss on my shoes. When I asked the bartender, he told me they had no rooms, wasn’t sure at this hour who would, and I realized it was past eleven.

It was raining again when I went outside but the cold air felt good and I sat in my car, knowing that I was in no condition to drive. I would nap for a bit, and was almost immediately asleep.

12.

At first I thought it was a nightmare. I was rocking back and forth violently and there were dimly shouted words but I couldn’t tell where they were coming from. Then I realized that I was still in my car and it was rocking from side to side and there were figures outside, men who were heaving the car back and forth and one of them hit the window on the passenger’s side with his fist and the glass turned to spidery cracks. I was awake now, and frightened, and the car seemed as if it would turn on its side when there was another voice and a whistle and shouts.

“Off! All you lot! Piss off!” And someone shouted “Coppers!” and the car settled and the figures were gone.

The windows were fogged, apparently from my breathing inside the car while I had slept and the flashlight beam that came to the driver’s side made the glass a brilliant opaque white.

“You in there,” the voice called out. “You all right?”

“Yes,” I managed to reply.

“Roll down your window.”

I fumbled with the key, putting it in the ignition, felt for the window button and finally the window slid down. I still couldn’t see a face, but the flashlight was full on me, then roamed inside the car.

“Would you mind stepping outside, sir? Keep your hands where I can see them.”

I opened the door and stepped out, stumbling as I did. Unseen hands caught and steadied me.

I was aware that there was a second man on the far side of the car, examining the shattered window. The man in front of me lowered the flashlight and in the dim light of the pub car park I could see that they were two policemen. A police car with a blue pulsing light was only a few feet from my car.

“Would you mind telling us what you were doing here at this hour?”

“Apparently I fell asleep. I had supper in the pub and a few beers and when I came out I didn’t think I should drive. I thought I’d take a short nap.”

“Not a particularly good idea to be here at this hour,” he said.

“What time is it?”

“After two. Just your bad luck to have that lot find you.”

“What were they trying to do?”

“A bit of fun. Turn your car on its side. Turn you turtle is what they call it. You’re lucky we spotted them.”

“Thank God you did.”

“Would you mind showing us a bit of identification, sir?”

I got out my wallet, found my passport and he examined it carefully.

“Well, Mr. Stone, you think you’re all right to drive now?” He shone the flashlight on my face. “Here,” he said, holding out his index finger. “Follow me if you will, please.” The finger moved from side to side, up and down. Then the light dropped.

“You have a place to stay, Mr. Stone?”

No, I thought, and then, because I didn’t want to explain my aimlessness, I said, “Yes, a place called Sheepheaven Farm in Mappowder in Dorset.”

“You’re a long way from there, sir.”

“I came up to see the Tor. It was only going to be a day trip.”

“And you have people there waiting for you?”

“Yes.”

“Would you like us to contact them, let them know that you’re all right?”

“No, not at this hour.”

“Would you like us to file a report on your window?”

“No. It’s a rental car and it’s insured.”

“Well, in any case, there will be a report on file, Mr. Stone. We’ll take your license number and if you could show us the rental receipt and the registration we’ll let you get on your way.” He spent a few minutes writing down the information, gave me back my passport and my California driver’s license. “You’re a long way from California, Mr. Stone. I hope this doesn’t spoil your stay here in the UK.”

“No,” I said. “I suppose there are people like that everywhere these days.”

“You’re all right, then?”

“Yes,” I said. “And thank you.” He stood, watching me get into the car. I started the engine and he did not move, waiting for me to drive out of the car park.

Once on the road I wondered where I would go. I had no place to sleep and I was in no condition to drive all night. It would be another four hours before it was light and I thought of going back to London, finding my cheap hotel, turning the car in, but I was exhausted and the road was wet and bleary. The only place I could think of was to go back to Sheepheaven Farm. I could park in the farmyard and when daylight came I could explain things to Maggie and Robbie and they would let me sleep and tomorrow I would get a fresh start, go back to London, end my odyssey, run back to Los Angeles with my tail between my legs. I drove the two hours south, came into the farmyard with the headlights off, turned off the ignition and fell asleep again. I awoke to the barking of Jack the dog, and Robbie’s face peering through the window at me.

13.

“Fucking cretins,” Robbie said. “They’re everywhere. There’s no longer any shame to being an arsehole. I used to go see Bournemouth play football but they were everywhere, picking fights, shouting obscenities, getting pissed and vomiting all over the place. Fucking pigsty it was, so I stopped going. You got away with a smashed window, Jack. Better that than a smashed head.”

“Can I get the room back for tonight? Clean up a bit? Maybe have a cup of tea?”

“Good Christ, Jack, you sound like a proper Englishman. Get your car nearly turned over, drive half the night, and what is it you want? A cuppa tea.” He laughed and said, “Of course you can have the room. And Maggie will fix you a cup of tea and you can take a bath and later we’ll go have a pint and you can tell your war stories to the Strykers. And they’ll be wanting to go up to Glastonbury and find those yabboes and do a bit of bashing themselves. Only for a good cause, mind you.”

I went into the kitchen with Robbie where Maggie, turning, said, “Jack Stone! What a surprise!”

“Jack here needs a cup of tea and a bit of care, Mags. He’s had a touch of bad luck. I’m off to Stur, Jack. Market day. I’m still looking for a calf. You’re in good hands with Maggie.”

I sat at the now familiar table and had a cup of hot tea and Maggie sat across from me and listened to my adventure and shook her head and said, “What you need is more than a cup of tea, Jack Stone.”

She went to the cupboard, brought down a bottle of scotch and took two glasses off the drain board. She poured a finger of scotch in each one, set them on the table and said, “I don’t do this often. I’m glad you’re back. And I’m glad you’re safe.”

“I don’t think I was in that much danger, Maggie. The policeman said they were doing it for the fun of it.”

“Not my idea of fun,” she said. “Still, I’m glad you’re all right.”

She sipped at the scotch, then reached out to touch my hand and said, “I watched you drive out of the farmyard and I thought how brilliant it would be to be able to drive off, make the first turn and go on without ever turning back.”

“It didn’t work out so well for me.”

“No, that’s not what I mean. Just the idea that I could go off on my own, no compromise, nobody to ask or say, I’ll be back at five or I’m going shopping. Just to be able to go.”

“What about Terry? And Robbie?”

“I couldn’t leave Terry behind. I’d take him with me.”

“Terry’s your only child.”

“Yes,” she said. She looked toward the kitchen door, as if she expected him to suddenly appear.

“He would have had a brother.”

“You wanted another child?”

“No. I got pregnant. Terry was six. But I didn’t want another child. I love Terry, but somehow another child seemed more than I could bear.”

“What happened?”

“I had an abortion. I had it killed, Jack Stone. Sucked out of me and flushed away.” There was a stillness in the room so heavy that I could feel it pressing on us.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. You didn’t do anything.”

“Did Robbie want the child?”

“I never told him. No one else knows. I don’t know why I’ve told you. Now you know a terrible secret about me. Are you good at keeping secrets, Jack Stone?”

“Yes.”

“I thought so. And you? Will you tell me a terrible secret?”

“I’m not sure I have any.”

“Rubbish. We’ve all got them. I could probably fill a dustbin with yours.” She touched my hand again, smiling. “I’m filled with them. I’m a cesspit of dark secrets.”

“That’s nonsense.”

She sipped at the glass, made a grimace as she swallowed. “Of course it is. It’s the scotch talking.” She poured another finger of scotch into her glass.

“You should slow down. I don’t want to be blamed for getting you soused before noon.”

“Not to worry. I’ll be the proper farm wife, have the supper on, do the washing up, trot off to bed like a good girl.”

“Somehow this doesn’t sound like you.”

“You don’t know what I sound like, Jack Stone.” Her voice had a hard edge to it, as if she were about to accuse me of something.

“No, I suppose I don’t.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice softening. “That was uncalled for. It’s just that when you drove off, I suddenly wanted to be driving off with you.”

“You would have had an ugly experience.”

“Maybe we wouldn’t have gone to Glastonbury. If I had gone off with you, Jack Stone, where would you have taken me?”

“Majorca. Spain. Morocco. Some place where there’s lots of sun.”

“I’d like that,” she said. She sipped again at the scotch, set the glass on the table and rose. “Time for me to become the farm wife, Jack Stone. There’s things to be done. If you’re up to it, we’ll take a walk later. Go listen to the river. Go on up to the room, draw yourself a bath, take a nap. Come down when you feel like it.” She drank the rest of the scotch, squeezed my hand before releasing it. “I’m glad you came back,” she said.

14.

I went upstairs and drew a bath and then fell asleep and woke in the failing light of late afternoon and came down to the kitchen to find Terry sitting at the table.

“Hello, Terry.”

“You’re back, sir.”

“Yes. Looks like you can’t get rid of me.”

“Mum says you nearly got turned over in your car by some bad men.”

“Let’s say I had a bit of an adventure, but nothing terrible happened to me.”

“Are you going to turn it into a movie?”

“Not a bad idea.”

“If you had your computer we could write it out,” he said.

“Should I go up and get it? You won’t get in trouble for neglecting your schoolwork, will you?”

“I’m almost done.”

So Terry and I sat at the table, writing dialog for a movie in which an American tourist gets attacked by English thugs and, according to Terry’s version, leaps out of the car and thrashes them thoroughly.

“You make me out to be a hero,” I said. “I’m afraid I’m a rather ordinary man who wouldn’t stand a chance in real life.”

“Mum said to Dad that you were a tough nut to crack.”

I wondered what the conversation had been about. How had I come up between Maggie and Robbie? I thought of asking Terry to tell me more about what he had heard but then thought no, not a good idea, Jack. Leave it alone.

“So, Terry, what do you think of our movie?” I asked. “Should we read it out at supper for your mum and dad, just like they do in Hollywood?”

“You mean make a real movie?”

“No, they get a couple of actors to read the script out loud, see how it sounds, pretend that it’s the movie before they decide to make it. What do you say? We’ll practice it, and surprise them?”

I spent the next hour with Terry, watching him stride about the kitchen, waving his arms, coming back to the laptop screen to read another line, speaking the words with obvious relish. He’s his father’s boy, I thought. He’s watched his father and he’s got his manner, even though he doesn’t know it. And for the first time in my life I wished that I, too, had a child who would have mimicked me.

Maggie came in soon after, carrying grocery bags, and shortly Robbie arrived.

“Did you find a calf?” Terry asked, and Robbie said no, they were a sorry lot, but he’d be off first thing in the morning to a farmer in Winterbourne who said he had some likely animals and how was I?

We had tea and afterward Terry and I read our script to the applause of Maggie and Robbie and after Robbie had gone upstairs to put the boy to bed Maggie said, “Not many men would do that with a ten-year-old, Jack Stone.”

“I enjoyed it. He’s a good boy.”

“He likes you.”

Jack the dog had curled up at my feet and I said, “Dogs and little boys seem to like me.”

“Don’t sell yourself short, Jack Stone. Robbie likes you, too.”

“And you?”

“And me. I get the feeling you’ve been burned enough times so that you’re afraid to reach out. You might be surprised.”

“And what happened to our walk this afternoon?”

“I looked in on you but you were sleeping like a baby and I didn’t have the heart to wake you. And I had shopping to do, so I left you alone. But tomorrow, first thing, after the boys are off, we’ll take that walk. I promise.”

As she said that, Robbie came back into the kitchen. “Promise what?” he asked.

“Promise that if he asks me to run away with him to Majorca next week, I’ll go, but you’ll have to find someone to cook and do the washing and get Terry off to school on time.”

“Not easy,” Robbie said with a grin. “But there’s that bird who lives in the council house just down from the store. I’m not sure what kind of a cook she is.” He paused and Maggie said, “You’ll have to get in the queue behind the Strykers, Robbie. I think she’s booked for next week!”

“I’m not promising anything,” I said.

“A likely story,” Robbie said.

Robbie asked if I wanted to go down to the pub for a pint, but I begged off. I was suddenly very tired. Upstairs in the room I lay on the bed for a while, listening to the rise and fall of their voices in the kitchen, wondering if I were a part of whatever it was they were talking about. Don’t flatter yourself, Jack, I thought. I turned on my laptop and tried to write for a while and I wrote out the scene where Maggie and I had stood at the weir. I invented a long dialog between us in which I told her how beautiful she was and then I wrote a scene in which the two of us stepped onto a white beach and Maggie stepped out of her old skirt and stripped off her blue sweater and plunged naked into the sea. I could see her swim out to the breaker line and then watched her head just above the water as she swam parallel to the shore, occasionally raising her arm to wave to me. When I read over what I had written, I knew it was good, but I also knew it was a fantasy that had no ending, only dream-like scenes that floated, disembodied, linked by nothing except my longing.

Maggie and Robbie’s voices grew louder as they came up the stairs and then I heard Maggie say, “Quiet. We’ve got someone in the guest room,” and Robbie saying, “Fuck him. You’re not paying attention to what I’m saying at all,” and Maggie’s voice, insistent, sharp, “I hear you Robbie Barlow, but you don’t hear me anymore. You talk but you don’t listen,” and then they were behind their door and the voices were muffled and I went back to bed and shut out their voices and willed myself to sleep.

15.

The next morning I slept in so that once again Robbie and Terry were gone when I finally came down.

“Do you fancy that walk?” Maggie said, pouring me a cup of tea. Behind her the curtain was lit by sunlight.

“I thought you’d never ask.”

“Then finish your tea, and I’ll be ready.”

A few minutes later she came back into the kitchen wearing her yellow pants and red sweater again, this time with a huge black scarf wrapped around her neck.

“Quite dramatic,” I said.

She twirled the end of the scarf and said, “My life is full of drama. When I’m dead and gone someone will write it out and it will be called The Sheepheaven Chronicles and every village wife will read it and weep.”

“I’m afraid I heard you and Robbie last night as you came up the stairs.”

“Not to worry, Jack Stone. We argue all the time. It’s called married life. You should be familiar with that.”

“I’m sorry I said anything. It’s none of my business.”

“Don’t be sorry. Let’s take our walk,” and she reached out and took my hand, pulling me through the door into the farmyard.

“Sun!” she called out, raising her face to the weak sunlight. And she released my hand and began to run across the farmyard toward the stone wall, pausing to look back, calling out, “Come on, Jack Stone! Stir yourself!”

I caught up with her and we climbed the field but this time we turned the opposite direction at the top, headed for a distant copse of trees. We stopped once to look back down at the farm and she pointed out the spire of the church in the next village, and further on the rise of Bulbarrow Hill. As we stood there she leaned back against me and it seemed natural to put my arms around her, and she remained, reaching up to pull my arms tighter around her body, her hair a tangle just below my face and she said, “I can feel your heart racing, Jack Stone.”

“I’m not used to walking so quickly,” I said.

“Oh dear, I thought it was racing because of me.”

“It probably is.”

“Then you will take me off to Majorca to lie in the sun?”

“This afternoon.”

“No, I’m afraid I can’t make it this afternoon. Not unless we can be back in time to fix tea.” She turned her head so that she could see me and said, “You’re a funny man, Jack Stone.”

“You mean an odd man?”

“No, I mean funny. You have a sense of humor but you keep it hidden. You keep nearly everything hidden, don’t you, Jack Stone?”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Look.” She pointed toward the copse where there was a low bank just before the trees. “Look at that rise, tell me what you see.”

I looked at the long low rise, uneven ground that was dotted with shrubs and bracken, and I wondered what it was that I was supposed to see.

“It’s just a rise in the field,” I said.

“No. Look again. Really look.”

I stared at the rise and then I noticed a slight movement and as I looked there was another movement, as if there were something on the rise and, as if the stretch of rough ground were being brought into focus by some unseen hand, I saw more movement and it became rabbits, one and then two and then dozens, browsing along the rise, moving imperceptibly as they ate, and I said, “Rabbits! There’s dozens of them!”

“Yes. And if I hadn’t told you to look, by the time we got closer they would all have gone to ground and you would have been none the wiser. You need to know when to look and where to look, Jack Stone. You’re a writer, you should know that.”

She turned around so that she faced me, still within the circle of my arms and she said, “I think you’re like that, Jack Stone. You’re like that rabbit warren. If anyone gets too close, you go to ground, leave a blank slate so they won’t know you’re there. But I can see the rabbits, Jack Stone. There’s more to you than meets the casual glance.”

She pulled away and walked toward the copse, turning to say, “Come on. We’ll walk to Shilling Okeford and have a cup of tea. We can pretend it’s a seaside cafe in Majorca.”

That evening, as we finished supper at the kitchen table, Terry said, “I don’t have any grandfather. Would you be able to be one for me?” He looked at his mother and father. “I don’t mean you’d be a real grandfather and have to live in England. You could still live in California and we could write to each other.”

“I don’t see why not, Terry.”

After the table had cleared and Terry had gone off to watch the telly, Robbie said to me, “You’ve made a casual promise, Jack. But it’s not casual to him. He expects that if he writes to you, you’ll write back to him. But you’ll be half a world away and he’s not important to you. Don’t make promises you won’t keep.”

“If he writes to me, I’ll write back.”

“Easy to say now, Jack.” Then he added, “Not to worry. I doubt if he’ll remember you once you’ve gone. You’ll drive out the gate and you’ll disappear from our lives. We’ll stand at the gate and wave to you, Jack. What was it Hamlet said? ‘Adieu, adieu! Remember me.’”

I looked across the kitchen to where Maggie was stacking dishes on the drain board. She had her back to us but something about the way she held herself told me that she was listening intently.

“I’m no ghost, Robbie.”

“No, you’re here all right. Flesh and blood. An exotic thing, like one of those barnacles on a freighter in the harbor at Southampton that comes here from some foreign sea and detaches itself and finds an easy home.”

“You think of me as a foreign barnacle?”

“No, Jack, I think of you as someone who has spiced up our lives, brought a bit of pepper to the stew. Stay on through Saturday night, Jack. We’ll go to the pub and you’ll see what village life is really like!”

He rose and went to the cupboard, brought down the bottle of scotch and said, “A nightcap. Maggie, how about you?”

“No,” she said. “I’ll take Terry up to bed, read him a story. You two can sit here and get pissed by yourselves.”

Robbie and I shared half the bottle, and when I went upstairs I was woozy, falling asleep immediately.

16.

I awoke to the sound of rain. It drummed steadily on the roof and the window and then there was the noise of the Land Rover engine starting. My head felt delicate and I didn’t feel like eating. What I wanted was a cup of coffee and I debated whether or not I should go downstairs and ask Maggie to make one for me. I got dressed, sat at the laptop and I pulled up the paragraphs I had written about Maggie, our walk, the Strykers in the pub, trolling down the screen, looking for something to stitch them together into some sort of relationship, trying to find a story that would link them, as if they were patches I could make into a quilt if only I could find the design. I didn’t hear Maggie and was startled to look up and see her in the doorway, holding two mugs of tea.

“Here, Jack Stone,” she said, holding out one of them. “Time for a break from your opus.”

I took the mug, set it on the table next to the laptop. When I turned back she was leaning in the doorway, watching me. She said nothing, simply looked, and I waited, wondering what she was thinking. Then she spoke:

“You’re a watcher, Jack Stone. A looker. That first evening you were here you were watching me, and the afternoon when you were pretending to write with Terry and at tea every evening. Even when you’re talking with Robbie I can feel your eyes on me, and I’m wondering what you’re looking at. What do you see in me that holds your attention, Jack Stone?”

I wasn’t sure what to say. She had caught me by surprise.

“Out with it,” she said. “You’re a big boy. What is it that you’re looking at so intently?”

She still leaned against the door jamb, raising the mug of tea to her lips and sipping at it, but her eyes never left mine.

“Am I that obvious?” I asked.

“Not to Robbie. Or Terry. But I can feel you watching me even when I’m not looking at you, and I’m wondering what you see in a Dorset farm wife in an old jumper and a raggedy skirt. Come on, mister writer, give me some words.”

I took a deep breath. “I watch the way your neck rises from your shoulders and the way you move barefoot across the floor and I try to memorize the way you move so I can come up here and write it down.”

“It’s all just fodder for your story?”

“There is no story.”

“There is no story? You mean all that stuff about your rubbish assignment was just a lie? You’re not really a writer, you’re a spy from the tourist board come to see if we treat our guests right?”

“No, I’m a writer. I’ve told you all about that. But now I have no story, just fragments. Bits and pieces. I’m hoping that something will happen to me, and it will all fall into place.”

“So, I’m bits and pieces, am I? And what else do you see?”

“You’re a remarkable woman. I wish I were twenty years younger.”

“You’re not so bad yourself, Jack Stone. And that twenty years older rubbish isn’t becoming.” She had raised one hand to the nape of her neck and was absently braiding her hair with her thumb and forefinger again. “You’ve a quiet manner about you, but I’ll bet you’re a real menace in Los Angeles.”

“No,” I said, “I’m nothing of the sort. I’m a rather ordinary man who is, according to his ex-wife, coming apart at the seams, and watching you has helped to stitch me together a bit. I’m sorry that I’ve been so obvious.”

She smiled. “There’s nothing to be sorry about, Jack Stone. Drink your tea.” She straightened as if to go but stood in the doorway a moment longer. Then she spoke again.

“If the truth be known, I fancied you that first afternoon when you came downstairs, hung over, looking fragile, as if I could clap my hands and you would fall into a hundred thousand tiny shards, and yet you were trying to make a conversation with Terry, telling him you had a rubbish assignment, too, and for some unfathomable reason I said to myself, there’s a handsome, gentle man and he’s only going to stay one night and what would happen if I went into his room in the middle of the night and fucked him but of course I didn’t do that, would never have done it, but it crossed my mind. And you stayed more than one night.”

I held my breath. I could not tell what she was doing or what it was that she was telling me. Was it just more of her acerbic wit? Or was she drawn to me? What could she possibly see in me that could match the way in which I was drawn toward her? It was absurd to even think about it. She had turned toward the hallway and she said over her shoulder, “And now I’m off to take a bath. Drink your tea, make a movie.” And she was down the hallway and I listened to the door of the bathroom close and the water begin to run, filling the tub. I waited, listening, and then the water stopped and it was quiet and I imagined her in the tub and I sipped the tea and turned on the laptop and wrote down the exact words she had said and then read them back to myself, silently mouthing them, read the line, “would never have done that,” and then listened again for the voice in my head as she said, “what would happen if I went into his room in the middle of the night and fucked him.”

I sat at the laptop, watching the words until they suddenly disappeared and the screensaver began to whirl. It was silent in the house and I waited, as if expecting someone or something, and then I rose and went down the hallway and listened at the door of the bathroom. I could feel a steady thump in my head, and my heart raced as I turned the knob and opened the door. I could see her in the tub, the half-finished mug of tea on the floor, and she looked at me and said, “I don’t remember inviting you in, Jack Stone.”

“If you tell me to leave, I will.”

“I’m finished,” she said, and rose from the water, her body wet and shining. “Hand me the towel, please.” She pointed to the towel folded on the edge of the sink.

I took the towel and held it, just out of her reach. She stepped out of the tub and stood, dripping on the tile floor. I began to towel her off, rubbing her shoulders dry, her arms, her breasts, and she stood silently. I knelt, toweling off her back and belly, wrapping the towel around each leg, pressing the cloth up into her crotch, my cheek pressed against her damp belly. Neither of us said anything. I felt her hands pull my head against her belly and we stayed that way for a moment and then she said, “Come up here,” and I stood and she unbuttoned my shirt and pressed her breasts to my chest and she said, “It’s good to be naked,” and I held her tightly. Then she pulled back, reached over and took her blue sweater, pulled it over her head and said, “I’ve got some knickers around here someplace.” She picked up the briefs from the chair, stepped into them. She took the damp towel from my hands, wrapped her wet hair in it and swirled it up into a turban.

“And now I’m off to get properly dressed and you’re off to add another fragment to your bits and pieces, mister Jack Stone.” She picked up her skirt and stepped out into the hall.

“If you get tired of arranging pieces, come down to the kitchen for a cup of tea.”

I went back to the little bedroom and sat at the laptop and wrote everything out, exactly as it had happened, Maggie standing at the doorway, Maggie rising from the tub, her skin wet and glistening, her shining wet hair, the damp softness of her belly, and when I was done I had several pages and I read them back and I liked what I had written, felt as if somehow I had been sleepwalking and now I was awake and I thought, yes, I could write about Maggie and Robbie and Terry and Jack the dog and the Stryker brothers and the crows that swirled up from the field outside the window.

I read over what I had written again and tried to work out what Maggie must have been thinking as she stood in the doorway and whether or not she expected me to follow her into the bath. “It’s good to be naked,” she had said. I knew I would stay another night at Sheepheaven Farm.

17.

When I came downstairs to the kitchen, Maggie was standing at the sink, shucking broad beans, dropping the green hulls into a paper bag at her feet. The kitchen was cold and she had a gray scarf around her neck.

“Supper?” I asked.

“That’s what you call it in America?”

“Sometimes it’s supper, sometimes it’s dinner. Depends on where you grew up.”

“I grew up calling it tea. Dinner was at noon when Dad came home from the shop.”

“Can I help?”

“No.” Her answer was quick. “You need to take a walk, Jack Stone, clear out of here, go up the field and give me room to breathe. Now.” She went into the hallway at the kitchen door and brought back a pair of green rubber Wellington boots. “It’s raining again. Here’s Robbie’s wellies. Put them on. Have you got a mac?”

“What’s a mac?”

“Oh, Jack Stone, you’re hopeless. It’s a waterproof. A coat that will keep off the rain.” She looked out the window. “It’s just a fine mist but you’ll be soaked without a mac. Take this one.” She pulled a jacket off a hook by the door. “Put this on and put the wellies on and get yourself off up the field, go any direction, and don’t come back for an hour.” She kissed me lightly, held the jacket out so I could put my arms in and turned me, zipping it up. I felt like a schoolboy being sent out to play.

“I’d rather stay and watch you here in the kitchen.”

“You’d rather stay and do more than that,” she said and she pushed me toward the door. “Put on the wellies and go.”

I did as I was told, went out into the mist, crossed the farmyard and went into the field. The trees at the far edge were soft in the mist and the hill beyond disappeared into the gray. A few crows picked ahead of me, swaggering, rising with hoarse calls as I approached. I walked until I came to a road, crossed, and began to climb the next field toward the top of the hill. Below me Sheepheaven Farm disappeared in what now seemed no more than a thick fog. Everything was indistinct and I labored up the wet slope until the walking became too difficult and I went laterally until I came to another lane, found a break in the hedgerow and came out onto the narrow road. My temples were pounding now and I slowed and came out onto the top of the hill.

I stood on the wet road looking back where it curved down toward Sheepheaven Farm. I imagined Maggie in the kitchen and tried to reconstruct her body standing next to the tub, tried to reconstruct the curve of her belly and I thought, perhaps it didn’t happen. But it had happened and I wanted to know if she had let me dry her off as a lark or if it was more than that. She couldn’t possibly be feeling what I felt, that much I was sure of. I was twenty years older, a graying tourist who had shown up a week ago, and except for our walks across the fields, we hadn’t spoken more than three dozen words, most of them in the company of her boy and her husband.

I pictured her leaning against the door jamb, tea mug in hand, saying she fancied me the afternoon I came down, hung over, into her kitchen and I could see her gliding across the floor, rising up on the balls of her feet as if she were floating, and I thought no, this is some old man’s fantasy, don’t make anything more of this than there is. Let it be a scene in a movie script you’re writing, nothing more. Don’t make a fool of yourself. I think that’s the thing I feared most at that moment. That I would say or do something and she would think of me as an aging bumbler, that I would miss all of the signals and be thought of as a stupid old man who had the arrogance to think that an attractive younger woman would suddenly want him, and I resolved to go back to the farm and pack my things and move on. But something in the back of my head told me I would not do that.

I turned again to the wet road and began to walk, this time more slowly. A track went off the road into the trees and I walked along it and found, to my surprise, an encampment consisting of two old buses that looked as if they had been municipal coaches at one time, both with metal smokestacks, a thin greasy smoke trailing off. The windows were boarded up and there were several old cars parked, along with crude lean-tos of corrugated iron and tree limbs against the buses and there were old chairs, various kinds of junk, and in the midst of it a vintage Mercedes Benz, obviously in good condition. I stood there, taking it in, and then I realized that there was a figure just beyond the buses who was looking at me, a dark man with long hair and a beard who was motionless so that he blended in with the trees and he was watching me and I turned and went back toward the road, feeling his stare on my back.

I went back down the road and followed the signposting into the village and on through the village, past the post office shop where two women, deep in animated conversation, stopped talking and watched me and as I passed one of them said, “Afternoon,” and I nodded and I knew they, too, were watching me as I went along the road out of the village. I was the American who was staying with Maggie and Robbie. No doubt everyone in the village knew that by now. Perhaps even the dark man at the encampment knew who I was. And how much else did they know? Did they know that I was in love with Maggie and that I had held her naked body that afternoon and she was there in the kitchen at this very moment, rising on her bare feet, waiting for me to come in out of the gathering evening?

At that moment, walking the wet pavement in front of the post office store, nodding to the village women and trying to bring the image of Maggie back into focus, I wasn’t aware that I had chosen the perilous fork in the road. It wasn’t until much later after everything had unraveled that I would begin to understand what had happened between Maggie and me. And by then I wouldn’t be sure whether I had fallen in love with Maggie or I had fallen in love with the idea of Maggie. I often turned over in my head what she saw in me. Eventually I came to believe that Maggie was never in love with me in the same way that I was in love with her. I came at a moment in her life when she was filled with unease. Her life with Robbie had become something expected with no secrets or surprises and I was something different and I was from far away. I don’t think she ever believed that I would fall in love with her and I know she had no idea I would threaten her very existence. Oh, I don’t mean Maggie and I weren’t in love. I think she loved me on some level that was fraught with peril as if she wanted to walk a tightrope, see if she could tiptoe across a chasm that was opening in her life. It was easier for me. I was flattered by her attention, drawn into her eroticism, swept away by passion that I had forgotten I ever had. She had awakened me from my sleepwalk, and still in the midst of a dream I did terrible things.

I kept thinking about how much of my life was accidental. I drank with the Stryker brothers and ended up in Maggie’s house. I could just as easily have stopped at the next village. I could have stopped at the second beer and left Glastonbury, gone on to London and, even now, I would be in Los Angeles in a rented room rather than walking a country lane thinking of Maggie. Or, the cottage at White Church Farm could have been warm and cozy and I would have stayed and written the script about the coast-watcher and it would have been competent and perhaps would have brought a small option and I would have drifted back to Los Angeles, like flotsam washed up on the beach at Santa Monica. But it hadn’t happened that way. I would not reflect on those events until it was too late.

I was tired and my legs ached when I came to Sheepheaven Farm and turned into the farmyard. Robbie’s Land Rover was there and the lights were on in the house. I came to the back door, opened it and stepped inside. It was warm and inviting and Terry was at the kitchen table, bent over his copybook. Robbie was next to him, cupping a mug of tea with his hands. He looked up at me and grinned.

“Angels and ministers of grace defend us! Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damned?”

“Horatio, there, was supposed to say ‘Look my lord, it comes,’” I replied, nodding toward Terry. Terry didn’t look up.

“Jesus, Jack, you impress me. I thought Americans only knew the lyrics to pop tunes.”

“Then I won’t say anything about English farmers who quote Shakespeare,” I said.

“Maggie! The ghost of Hamlet’s father needs a towel. He’s dripping all over your floor. And he needs a cup of tea.”

Maggie came into the kitchen with a towel and handed it to me wordlessly.

“So, Jack,” Robbie said, “where have you been off to? Not the pub and the Stryker brothers again?”

“No. Up on the hill near a woods where there were some old buses. Some sort of encampment. Strange place with a nice old Mercedes in the middle of it.”

“Travelers. Best to stay out of there, Jack.”

“Who are they?”

“Gypsies. They’ve been up in that copse most of the year. The police let them alone as long as they don’t nick anything around here and they’re clever enough not to foul their own nest. Still, they’re not to be trusted and you’d best give them a wide berth.”

“Real gypsies?”

“As real as they get around here. Sometimes you’ll see a cart and a horse but mostly they trade autos and live like you saw up in the copse. I had one put a curse on me last year. She came to the door and asked if she could get the mistletoe from the oak trees up the field. They sell it at Christmas. I said no, I didn’t want her climbing around up there, break her fool neck. Once you let them in, they’ll take advantage, be here for water, things go missing, so I told her no and she pointed her finger at me and said, ‘A curse on you!’ and she spat on my shoe and that winter I got laid up with a bad back, twisted something and got so I had to lie on the floor to get any relief and Maggie here said it was the curse. Right Mag?”

Maggie, who had been bustling around the stove didn’t turn, just said, “Served you right, you skinflint. You didn’t plant any mistletoe in those trees, it just grew there.”

Robbie grinned at me, reached back and slapped Maggie on her thigh.

“Watch yourself,” Maggie said, still not turning.

Supper, or tea as the Barlows called it, was a salmon pie, chunks of canned salmon in a pie crust with slices of hard-boiled eggs and some sort of cream sauce, and it was good, fragrant, with spices I couldn’t identify. Robbie said that the talk in market was of the news that foot-and-mouth disease had surfaced in the North, the army was already in and destroying animals, burning cows and sheep and pigs in huge pyres in the field. “Some arse of a pig farmer fed slops to his pigs and there was diseased meat from some kid’s lunch, Packy kids or something, some kind of meat that came from granny in Pakistan and now they’ll all be keen to run dark-skinned folk out of the country. They’ve found it on a farm in Wiltshire and God help us if it comes here.”

He looked at me intently. “You didn’t go into Wiltshire when you went north, did you?”

“No, I went to Glastonbury, climbed the Tor, and went to the pub. I drove back that same night. You found me in the farmyard in the morning.”

“And glad we were to find you, Jack. You’re welcome to stay on as long as you’d like, right Maggie?”

Maggie looked at me, then rose and began clearing the plates. “Maybe Jack has had his fill of us, Robbie. I’m sure there are more interesting things to write about than Sheepheaven Farm. That is, if you’re writing about Sheepheaven Farm. Is that what you’re writing about, mister Stone?”

“Not exactly, although there’s lots here that I find interesting. You have to remember that all of this is new to me. It’s old hat to you because you live it.”

“Then you need to get out and about. Walk Eggerton. Go look at the Cerne Giant. There’s not much here for you, Jack Stone.”

“Maggie, don’t be hard on the poor man,” Robbie said. “If he finds it easy to write here, let him be. Who knows? Maybe he’ll write about us and we’ll all be famous some day. Right, Jack?”

18.

Saturday night at the Flying Monk wasn’t like the quiet afternoon when I drank with the Stryker brothers. The pub was crowded, thick with cigarette smoke, music from a jukebox, the room filled with shouting voices. It seemed like half the village was jammed into the low-ceilinged room. Robbie found us room on the bench along one wall, half a dozen little round tables scarred by cigarettes and beer ranged in front of it. Robbie fought his way to the bar, returned with three pints. He leaned forward until his face was only a few inches from my ear.

“Local color, Jack. Put this in your fucking movie!”

Maggie rose and reached out toward me. “Dance, Jack Stone?” At least that’s what I thought she said, her voice barely audible above the hubbub.

“Did you say dance?”

“Yes.” She took my hand and pulled me to my feet.

“Where?”

She turned her head toward the far end of the room and towed me through the crowd. I looked back at Robbie and he raised his pint toward me, grinning.

There was a space at the far end of the room with a tiny dance floor and a huge jukebox that looked decidedly American. Although it was crowded around the edge, the space was kept open enough so that three or four couples could dance, and there were people I recognized from the village, a woman who had stared dourly at me from the village store and who was now dancing, her head thrown back, laughing.

Maggie slipped into my arms and we danced to a Frank Sinatra song, Frankie crooning strangers in the night, and it was as if Maggie weren’t there, she moved so gracefully. She flowed with me, her body touching mine, and I could hear her singing along, her voice buried in my shoulder. The record stopped and she continued to dance, and I felt self-conscious, as if the whole village must be watching us, but nobody was paying any attention and the next record came on, a polka, and there were stomping farmer lads all around us and we worked our way back to where Robbie was sitting.

“She’s not half bad, is she?” Robbie said.

“She dances beautifully.”

“You play a tango and you watch her and it’s like watching fucking with clothes on. Oh my, my Maggie can dance, right, love?” He leaned across me toward her.

“What’s right?”

“That you can dance.”

“You want to dance, Robbie?”

“Not now, love. Maybe when we get back to the farm we’ll do a bit of dancing.” He nudged me in the ribs.

“Don’t be too sure of yourself, you cheeky bugger,” she said. “Come on, Jack Stone. Dance with me again.” The polka was over and the jukebox was playing another Sinatra song.

“Go ahead, Jack,” Robbie said, “warm her up for me.”

I think, at that moment, I could have killed the bastard. Picked up the little pub table and beat him over the head with it, crushed him down to the floor until he was lifeless and gone off to dance with Maggie. I felt a surge of jealousy, thought, you lucky prick, you don’t have any idea how good you have it. Yes, you do know how lucky you are, and I would give anything if you could, at this moment, disappear, be swallowed up, go out to the loo to take a piss and get beaten to death by the Stryker brothers who mistake you for a feral dog that attacked their sheep or you suddenly remember that you’re already married to a woman in Tasmania.

Maggie and I danced again and when we came back to the table, Robbie raised his glass to us. “If I was a bit more steady, Jack, I’d go out there and show you how it’s really done. Christ, I need to take a piss.” He rose, a bit unsteadily, and said, “Come on Jack, time for a bit of relief from all these happy arseholes.”

We went to the loo, which required that we go outside the pub and around the corner of the building, a stone shed on the back of the pub where there was a metal trough along one wall, water dribbling through it, and Robbie leaned one hand against the wall as he fumbled with the fly of his trousers with the other and I could tell that he was slightly drunk. Another man came into the shed, stood between us, and as he unzipped his trousers, Robbie said to him, “Your fucking dog was worrying my sheep again. You let him loose one more time and he’ll come back to you one leg at a time.”

“For Christ’s sake, Barlow,” the man said, “that dog is thirteen years old. He’s not going to worry your sheep.”

“You heard what I said.”

“Well, piss off, Barlow,” and with that Robbie turned, and a steady arc of urine cascaded onto the man’s shoes. Robbie stood there, holding his cock in his hand, aiming it at the man’s feet and the man jumped back. “Jesus Christ, you bloody fucking nutter!” he shouted. “What the hell’s the matter with you?”

Robbie said nothing, just stood there, pissing on the cement floor, the urine spattering at the man’s feet and soaked trouser legs and I thought, Oh shit, someone’s going to get hit but Robbie only stood there with a grin on his face, as if it were all a huge joke, but it wasn’t a joke. His eyes were fixed on the man and they glittered and he didn’t look drunk at all, even though he swayed slightly as he carefully shook his penis and tucked it into his trousers, zipping his fly, his eyes boring into the other man. It was as if a switch had been flicked and the Robbie who called his dog to his heel and talked about Roman hill forts to his son and slapped his wife on the thigh had disappeared, replaced by something that was dark and dangerous and the man knew it because he backed out of the door, muttering “fucking crazy son of a bitch,” and Robbie said, “Well, Jack, you fancy another dance with my wife?”

We went out into the misting night and Robbie steadied himself on the stone wall of the pub, sucking at the night air for a moment. A lorry went by, its tires hissing on the wet pavement and then we were back inside the smoky pub. I looked for the man who had been in the loo, but he was nowhere to be seen. And when we sat down again next to Maggie it was as if nothing had happened. We had gone out to take a piss and we were back and here’s to you, Robbie said, glass raised. Nothing had happened and everything had happened. I had, for a brief moment, seen another Robbie Barlow and it was unnerving, the kind of feeling that comes when you’ve accidentally sliced yourself with a kitchen knife and the flesh opens and blood wells up but there’s no pain yet, just the realization of what you’ve done and the anticipation of the pain to come.

The pub was beginning to empty and I danced again with Maggie. Then Mary called out, “Time! Last orders!” and we went out into the drizzle and got into the Land Rover. Maggie sat between us, her thigh touching mine and in the darkness her hand pressed against me, gently massaging my leg, almost absentmindedly, her head on Robbie’s shoulder, half-asleep.

The house was dark and Jack met us silently at the door. Maggie went immediately upstairs and Robbie asked if I wanted a drink.

“Shot of brandy, Jack? Nightcap?”

“No, I think I’ve had enough.”

“Well, I think I’ll have one. See you at breakfast?”

“Sure.” I went up the stairs, paused at the top and watched the crack of light at the base of their bedroom door. Then I went into my room and undressed in the dark, crawled naked into the bed and thought of Maggie pressing against me on the dance floor, and I wanted her and I grew hard and I imagined her on top of me, her body pressing down against mine, and then I heard Robbie’s footsteps in the hallway and his voice in their room and I buried my head under the pillow, unable to bear the sounds.

19.

I awoke to the sound of the Land Rover starting, coughing, running until the engine smoothed out and then pulling out of the farmyard. It was still dark and I wondered why someone was leaving the house so early. I turned on the bedside lamp and looked at my watch. It was five A.M. and I turned off the lamp, lay listening to the house. Outside there was the faint bleating of sheep and above me the click of valves that I had come to know as the water tank in the attic. Someone was using water someplace in the house, either in the kitchen or in the bathroom. Then there was the soft padding of footsteps in the hallway and the door opened. Maggie slipped in, came to the side of the bed and leaned over, touching my face.

“Awake are you, Jack Stone?”

“Yes.”

“Robbie’s gone to the sheep market in Sturminster Newton. He and Jack. Terry spent the night with a school chum. So it’s just the two of us in this old house.”

She raised the covers and slipped under them. Her body was cold and she curled next to mine, sliding tightly against me for warmth. Her hair smelled musty and she smelled of sleep and when I reached around her to pull her more tightly she took my hand and pressed it against her and said, “Fuck me, Jack Stone.”

Just like that. Matter of fact. Get me a glass of water. Hold me. Close the door. I lay there, pressing my hand into her and waited for something else, but there was nothing else, only her body warming against mine and the quick banging of a door in the wind that startled me, as if someone had come into the house but she didn’t move, and we made love quietly, almost without effort, until her quickening breath told me she was about to come and afterward we lay, spent, the covers thrown back, our sweaty bodies cooling in the cold bedroom air and she spoke again.

“What have you done to me, Jack Stone? What possesses me to come into your bed like this?”

She reached over and turned on the little bedside lamp and turned back so she could look at my face. Her hair was a wild tangle and there were streaks of blood on her thighs.

“Not to worry,” she said. “It’s that time of month for me. I like making love when I’ve got the curse. It makes me feel closer to myself. I can’t get pregnant, for one thing, and I don’t want to have another child. But there’s something about mixing my blood with your juice that is — I don’t know how to explain it. It’s like swimming in the sea, so much water and it goes all the way to the horizon and you feel like you’re part of something so big that it can’t be measured. Do you understand what I’m talking about, Jack Stone?”

I didn’t. All I knew was that she had come into my room in the darkness and we had made love and it was as if I had stepped into the labyrinth where the minotaur lived, had gone into a place from which there was no return, a forbidden place I had been warned about. I touched one of her breasts with my finger and she pulled herself tight against my body and I kissed the tangle of her hair and I knew that I was deep in the labyrinth and I knew she had entered too, perhaps by some other opening or perhaps she had always been there.

“I should take a bath,” she murmured but she made no effort to move.

Then there was the sound of the motor in the farmyard and she stiffened. “It’s Robbie,” she said, “Why is he back?” She slid out of the bed, her heels thumping on the bare floor.

“I’ll take care of the sheets later. Just pull the covers up over them.”

The kitchen door banged open and Robbie’s voice called out, “Mags? Where are you? We’ve got trouble.”

She was suddenly gone from the room and water was running in the tub down the hall and Maggie’s voice called out, “I’m in the bath. Can it wait?”

Robbie’s steps came up the stairs and I could hear him clearly, his voice loud and insistent. “The fucking army has blockaded the road to Stur. Nobody gets in or out. We’re in a fucking quarantine area. They claim there’s foot-and-mouth at Stryker’s. Goddam officious pricks telling me no, sorry sir, you can’t cross over, you’ll have to go on back, nobody leaves until we sort this out.”

Maggie said something and Robbie came out into the hallway again, calling back, “Where’s Terry? Where’s the fucking American?”

Maggie said something again and Robbie went down the stairs. I could hear clattering in the kitchen and then his voice talking loudly on the phone.

I lay for a few minutes more, trying to sort out what had happened. It seemed as if it hadn’t happened, that I lay in bed half-awake, fantasizing making love to Maggie, that she hadn’t actually come into the room and the soiled sheets were some sort of crazy magic and the stains would be gone in a few moments, fade until they disappeared and I would wake and go downstairs and have breakfast and Maggie would say, “Slept in, did you, Jack Stone? Having wild dreams, were you?” But there was no doubt what had happened and Maggie was in the tub washing herself and Robbie was downstairs in the kitchen, his voice persistent and angry.

I wiped myself off with the sheets, stripped them from the bed and folded them flat so that the stains were hidden. I made the bed, dressed and went out into the hallway. I could hear the sounds of Maggie in the bath and I went down the stairs, trying to be noisy enough to announce my arrival. Robbie was still on the phone.

“That’s what they told me, Michael. I swear he said they were going to start putting down cattle and sheep before the day was out. They had a fucking big skip loader on a lorry.”

Robbie looked at me, rolled his eyes, and listened intently.

“No! I don’t care what Ian Brooks says. He couldn’t pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were written on the heel. He sees some sheep snot and he thinks he’s found the fucking plague!

“Well, get the vet in there before those arseholes begin their slaughter. Brooks could be wrong, you know.”

Robbie slammed the phone down. “Goddam county agricultural officer says that Michael Stryker has foot-and-mouth in his flock. They’ve quarantined everything between here and Mappowder, all along Bulbarrow to Sturminster and clear over to Shilling Okeford. Nothing goes in or out. The fucking army has moved in and it looks like you aren’t going anywhere, Jack. Shit!”

He pulled the electric kettle off the counter, filled it with water and turned it on. “Cuppa tea?” he asked. He reached into the cupboard, took down the bottle of scotch and poured a generous slug into a teacup. He looked at me questioningly. I shook my head. He downed the scotch, poured another slug and put the bottle back in the cupboard. The electric kettle began to hiss.

Maggie came into the kitchen, Her hair was wet and shiny and she smiled at me as if she were seeing me for the first time that morning, and said to Robbie, “So, what does this mean for us?”

“They’re culling to make a firebreak. It means if they put down Michael’s flock they’ll probably put down ours as well. They’ve been in a common field. It’s that fucking Ian Brooks, he’s panicked, thinks he’s found the sickness. Michael says it doesn’t look like it but they’re taking no chances, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t just go ahead and kill every living thing that walks on four legs!”

“It won’t help to go off half-cocked.”

“I saw Billy Gray in the village. They told him his flock had to go, too, and he looked like he’d been set on fire and put out with a wet chain. Christ, Maggie, if they put down our sheep, we’ve got nothing. Not a fucking thing.” He turned to me. “Sorry, Jack, you picked a good time to get locked up in a Dorset sheep farm.”

“You mean no one can leave the village?” Maggie asked.

“Something like that. Until they figure out what they’re dealing with. If you want to get out, Jack, you probably could. They’re setting up ponds in the road, using straw, filling them with some sort of poison so that anyone who drives through it gets disinfected. At least that’s the plan. Seems bloody stupid to me.”

“I’ll stay on, Robbie.”

“Suit yourself. Maggie, I’m going to take Jack and bring back the sheep up at The Poplars. No point in having that many of them that close to Stryker’s.” He looked at my puzzled expression. “Not you, the other Jack. You’d be about as useful as tits on a boar.”

He paused, then said, “Sorry, Jack. Oh, Christ, Terry’s off at Finchum’s. Can you fetch him Maggie?”

“He’ll be fine there,” Maggie said.

“I want him back here,” Robbie said, his voice rising. “I want to know that he’s here in this house. It’s all sixes and sevens, Maggie. The village feels ugly. Go get him. Please,” he added. “For my sake.”

He turned to me. “Put on some wellies, Jack, and come along. You’re probably not as useless as you look and you can see how smart the other Jack is. That is, if you want to. Be something for your movie, now, won’t it?”

I wanted to stay with Maggie, talk with her about what had happened, but it seemed hours ago that she had slipped into my bed and she was putting on her mac, stepping into her wellies. She reached out her hand for the keys to the Land Rover.

“Terry’s fine, Robbie,” she said. “We’ll all be fine.”

Robbie and I went off up the hill toward the copse where I had seen the travelers. The rain had stopped and it was slippery going until we crossed the lane at the top of Robbie’s field and moved into a sloping field that tapered off below the copse. Soon there were sheep and I watched as Jack shot to the far side of the flock, responding to sharp whistles from Robbie. Occasionally Robbie raised a hand in one direction or the other and the dog reversed, running at the sheep, hurrying them together. Once, when a bunch of them worked their way up against the hedge, Jack ran at them, bounding up onto their backs, scrabbling over them until he disappeared at the far side and suddenly they were moving toward us, Jack ranging back and forth along the hedge. By the time we got back to the lane there were fifty sheep in a tightly bunched flock. I hadn’t done much except keep Robbie silent company, once or twice standing where he told me so that the sheep wouldn’t make a run at an opening in the hedge.

The sheep spilled into Robbie’s field and spread out and Jack came to Robbie’s heel, sat there looking pleased with himself, and we came down the slope to the farmhouse. Terry came running out, breathless, full of talk about the army in the village, army lorries, soldiers with guns. We took off our muddy wellies and wet macs in the hallway and went into the warm kitchen where Maggie already had tea for us.

“Everything all right?” she asked.

“Fine,” Robbie said. “They’re in the near field and the rest of them are up to the enclosure by the Manor House so we’re a long way from Michael’s flock. I don’t know if that makes any difference. What was it like in the village?”

“Lots of army lads about, car park at the pub is full, Jean said Nick had been up to Gillingham and the roads were nearly empty.”

“Maybe I’ll go in and see what’s happening.”

“Have something to eat first.”

“I’m not hungry, Mags. You can feed Terry and Jack. I want to find Michael Stryker and see what’s happened to his flock.” He got up from the table, drained his tea mug and put on his mac. “They say it’s airborne so the rain is good for us. I’ll be back by tea time.” He turned as he touched the doorknob, the dog crowding his heels, and said, “Jack. You were useful. I’m happy you’re staying. Not just the money for the room, mind you. You’re a decent chap. Some day you’ll have to let me see what it is you’re writing. See if you’re as good at it as this Jack is at working sheep.”

Robbie and the dog left and it was quiet in the kitchen. Maggie said little. She fixed Terry bread and jam and asked if I wanted anything, but I said no.

“You had no breakfast,” she said.

“It was a busy morning.”

“Yes.”

“It started early.”

She didn’t reply. Terry went into the front parlor and turned on the television. Maggie busied herself. Finally I said, “Do we talk about this morning?”

“If you want,” she said. “What’s there to say?”

“Jesus, Maggie, you act as if it were an everyday occurrence!”

“No, Jack Stone. I don’t shag all my guests. Just the ones who rub magic dirt in my eyes.”

“And how many is that?”

“Just one so far. I’m not some hussy who sleeps around. You’re the first one in all the years I’ve been married. Oh, I’ve fancied one or two others, but this is the first time I’ve lost myself. I thought about you most of the night and this morning, when Robbie went off at the crack of dawn I lay there and I thought, no, Maggie, he’ll think you’re a slut, but my body betrayed me and I can’t explain it. It happened, Jack Stone. You brought magic dirt from your make-believe Los Angeles and I can’t help thinking about Terry in there and Robbie and his sheep. He isn’t really a sheep farmer, you know. He went to Cambridge and he’s a brilliant scholar. He’s a sheep farmer by accident. This morning I slept with you by accident. And watching you right now, I’d do it again. I’m sliding down a slope, Jack Stone, and I need to hold on to something. But I’m not sure what it is.”

“I never meant to make you unhappy.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“You’re a beautiful woman. There are probably a lot of men who have fallen in love with you.”

“Rubbish, Jack Stone.”

“It’s not rubbish. You carry yourself as if you know you’re beautiful. There’s a grace about you that’s hard to describe. I’ve tried to write it down for days now, but it eludes me. I can’t find the words.”

“Maybe what you need to write down is that you had a quick fuck before breakfast. Maybe that’s what you see, Jack Stone.”

“Don’t make fun of it, Maggie. You know it’s not that.”

I wanted to cross the room and hold her but she rose up on her toes, leaned against the table with her arms crossed and shook her head until her hair tumbled around her shoulders, a gesture that was at once defiant and self-deprecating.

Suddenly Terry was in the kitchen and Maggie swept him into her arms. “How’s my lovely shaggy boy?”

“Mum, are they going to kill all our sheep?”

“No, love. If they come for them, we’ll hide them under the beds.”

“Don’t be silly, Mum. We haven’t got that many beds!”

“Then tomorrow we’ll have to go to Poole and buy a hundred beds. It’s as simple as that.”

20.

Robbie didn’t come home for tea. Terry and I ate bangers and mash, much to his delight. Maggie ate nothing. She stood at the window looking out, and when we heard the Land Rover come into the farmyard she went to the door, opened it, and waited. Robbie came in, brushing past her, and it was obvious that he was drunk. He lurched to the table, sat down heavily, and shucked his wet coat off over the back of the chair into a heap on the floor.

He looked at me and at Terry, then gravely announced, “Withering and keen the winter comes. You know who said that, Jack?”

“No.”

“That was poor mad John Clare. Peasant poet. Poor fucking barely literate farm laborer who wrote poetry. Spent the best years of his life in the insane asylum. You know why, Jack?”

“I haven’t a clue.”

“Because he couldn’t feed his family and he left what little they had for them to eat and he went off into the fields to work and he only had a potato to eat and that went on for days and he saw things in the air and they thought he was mad and they committed him.”

He bent down, put his elbows on the table and propped his chin on them, looking directly at Terry. “Terry, me lad, round about the cauldron go, in the poison entrails throw.”

“That’s enough, Robbie,” Maggie said. “Go off to bed. You’ve had too much.”

“Not yet, Maggie my love. The tyrannous and bloody act is done. They dug a bloody big pit on Michael Stryker’s farm and they killed half his sheep and they threw them in and they burned them. Threw petrol on them and set fire to them. We must have a hunchback king on the throne.”

“That’s enough,” she said again. “Leave it alone.”

“Oh shit,” he said. “Have I offended anyone?”

Maggie took his arm, and he rose unsteadily. “How’s this one, Jack? Do you know where it comes from? Farewell to the little good you bear me. Farewell! A long farewell to all my greatness. The third day comes a frost, a killing frost! Damn, I forgot a line in there someplace.”

Maggie took his arm and guided him toward the hallway. He stumbled, fell to his knees and shouted, “And then he falls, as I do.”

21.

The next morning when I came down to the kitchen Robbie was there, Terry was finishing his breakfast and Maggie was nowhere to be seen.

“This morning you’ll have a belting good English breakfast,” he said, “fixed by the Lord of the Manor himself.”

“Where’s Maggie?”

“She’s punishing me for my transgression last night. She’s lying about up there reading a bad novel so here I am at the cooker. Feed our guest proper, she says, but you’ve become sort of like family, Jack-o, and if this keeps up we’ll have to give you a weekly rate.”

“You don’t look any the worse for wear.”

“Oh, I was that pissed, was I? Well, the Stryker boys were pissed as a newt, I kept up with them all right and I never lost my wits. This morning I’m going over to Stryker’s and see what the army’s doing with the rest of his flock. The boys said it was a bloody awful sight yesterday.”

“All right if I come along?”

“No reason why not. More grist for the writer’s mill, Jack? You won’t see anything like this on a movie set, I’ll wager.”

He was busy at the Rayburn, the cast-iron cooker that not only served as the stove but also heated water and gave off enough radiance to warm the kitchen. He dished up a plate with fried eggs, several browned bangers, and two grilled tomato halves. I remembered the English breakfast I had been served my first morning in London. This was nothing like it.

“Are you eating?” I asked

“If I could get hold of some nose of turk and tartar’s lips and a cauldron to cook them in, maybe I could make a charm to settle my gut. Don’t let that spoil your appetite, though.”

“Can I go with you, dad?” Terry asked.

“No, it’s no place for boys. You stay here and keep Jack close by. I don’t want him wandering. Your mother will need some company when she comes down.”

I finished my breakfast, Robbie carefully washed the dishes and set them on the counter to dry. The kitchen was spotless by the time we put on wellies and stepped out into the farmyard. There was a high overcast and we set off in the same direction we had gone the morning before, climbing up Robbie’s field, crossing the lane, then swinging around the brow of the hill where the travelers were encamped. We said little to each other. Robbie moved quickly and I had to work at it to keep up. It reminded me that I was sixty and lived a sedentary life. Ahead of us there was now a plume of soft gray smoke that rose beyond the next field. It was punctuated by puffs of oily black that rose like smoke signals.

“They’re at it already,” Robbie said.

We came over the brow of the last hill and paused to look down on Michael Stryker’s farm. The house was large, brick and stone, and there were outbuildings that were solid and walls of stone that stretched into the fields. In one field there was a scattering of lorries, tractors, a skip loader, and a deep trench that had been carved in the center. Black smoke rose from the pit and we could see the small figures of men moving about, a flock of sheep huddled in one corner of the field, their faint cries drifting up.

“We’ll go down through the poplars,” Robbie said, pointing to a line of trees that descended toward the back of the farmhouse. “No point in announcing our arrival. The boys said the farm was shut off with army lads at the gate.”

We came down through the thin stand of trees until we were in the back garden, climbed over the low rock wall, and went around the house into the farmyard. A heavyset man was standing next to another beat-up Land Rover, a dog at his heels.

“Michael,” Robbie said.

The man turned.

“What the hell are you doing here, Robbie? They say my farm is infected and you’ll traipse it back to yours and they’ll murder your flock as well.”

“Terry and Jack have been all over your fields, Michael. They look for rabbits up along the rise. They’ve done all but kiss your sheep. We came across the poplar field. Nobody saw us.”

“Still, these arseholes don’t give a flying fuck whether or not your sheep are sick. Kill ‘em all, that’s what Colonel Blimp over there says.” He gestured toward a squat army vehicle parked nearby. “Look at ‘em!” He pointed toward the pit where soldiers were dressed in white suits covering their boots and heads, white masks across their mouths. Two of them were pulling a dead sheep toward a skip loader. Already a half dozen sheep carcasses were piled in the scoop.

“It’s not the goddam anthrax or the fucking black plague, is it now? You’d think they was from Mars in their fucking costumes.”

“They’re only doing what they’re told, Michael.”

“Well, whoever’s telling them has his head up his arse, that’s for sure.”

The door of the army vehicle opened and an officer in battle fatigues stepped out. He came toward us and Stryker said, “Who’s your friend, Robbie? The nazi coming at us will want to know what you’re doing here.”

“Jack Stone. He’s a Yank who’s been staying with us for a few days. He wanted to see the lamb cookers up close.”

The officer stopped in front of us. The legs of his fatigues were bloused above the boot tops with precision and his black boots shone like glass.

“Who are these two, Stryker? I don’t remember seeing them before.”

“Why don’t you ask them yourself, you pansy killer?”

The officer’s stoic expression did not change. “And who might you be?” he asked Robbie.

“I’m Michael’s nephew,” Robbie lied. “This is an American friend. We live in the village and we came out to see Michael’s troubles.”

“Well, Michael’s nephew, you made a serious mistake. This is a quarantined farm and you have no business here whether you’re related to Mr. Stryker or not. You’ll leave and at the farm gate you’ll find two of my men who will disinfect your boots and you’ll stay on the hard road when you walk back to the village and stay off the verge and you won’t take any shortcut through a field or you’ll deal with me again and I won’t be civil the next time.”

He stood watching us, then spoke again. “Now. This moment. Leave.” He turned to Stryker. “You knew better than this, Stryker.”

There was a whoosh! as the skip loader dropped the petrol-soaked carcasses into the pit. An orange flame filled with oily black streaks shot up, drowning out the bleating of sheep in the corner of the field.

“I’m not my nephew’s keeper, Colonel Poufter.”

“You’ll keep a civil tongue in your head, Mr. Stryker.”

“What I keep in my head is none of your bloody damned business!” Stryker spat, missing the shiny boot by inches. “You need to get out of the weather before you get your boots wet.”

It was beginning to mist again. The sky dark, our faces lit with the orange glow of the burning carcasses; it could have been a scene out of a Brueghel painting, soldiers outlined against the fire, the skip loader poised to drop more sheep, flames boiling up and everywhere the stench of the burning flesh.

Stryker turned to Robbie. “Thanks for coming out, nephew. You be going back to the village now and tell them the nazis will be in later to loot and burn. Tell them to hide the women.”

The officer stood silently, arms folded across his chest and Robbie and I went to the front gate, pausing to step into a pan of green liquid while two young soldiers watched us. As we stepped out of the disinfectant, Robbie said, “There’s a man who wouldn’t be missed if somebody stove his head in.”

“The Colonel?”

He turned to the two soldiers. “If they gave you two real bullets, I’ll bet you’d slag that son of a bitch with the shiny boots. Right?”

“Sir?”

“Fucking puppets,” Robbie muttered.

We went back to the farm by way of the village, Robbie silent most of the way and he disappeared into the cow shed when we got to the farm, leaving me at the kitchen steps. Inside, Maggie was at the table with Terry. They were playing some sort of card game and Maggie looked up, asked, “What was it like?”

“Not good. They’re killing all of Stryker’s sheep. It looked like a Brueghel painting. The old Brueghel, the one who painted obscenities.”

Then I noticed Terry looking intently at me and I thought, the boy doesn’t need to know the details and I said, “They’re only doing their job. Apparently it can’t be helped.”

Maggie reached for another card, asked Terry, “Do you have any threes?”

“No,” he said, “go fish.”

“It’s all right Jack Stone,” she said. “You don’t need to sugar-coat it.”

22.

After tea that evening, Robbie turned on the telly, listening to the clipped accents of the BBC news readers, cursing softly as they described how thousands of cattle, sheep and pigs were being destroyed, followed by a brief statement from the Prime Minister, who appeared on the doorstep of Ten Downing Street. Robbie’s voice rose in anger.

“Fucking Blair, fucking arsehole prick, you wouldn’t know a sick sheep if you were buggering it. Maggie, he’s right out of Monty Python, oh Christ, this parrot’s dead, you thick twit!”

Maggie asked him to turn it off but he ignored her and she and Terry went upstairs. I, too, went upstairs and sat at the little table in my room and tried to write out the afternoon’s events. There was an oily smell in the room and I knew some of the dense petrol smoke from the fire at Stryker’s and probably other farms as well had drifted over Sheepheaven Farm. Downstairs the voice from the television droned absently.

I slept fitfully and woke in darkness. When I looked at my watch it was three o’clock and I lay there until I could stand it no more, got up and dressed and sat at the laptop. The screenplay was easy to start. The fires at Stryker’s farm were so perfectly suited to film, the outlined men and the animal carcasses dropping into the pit, flames billowing up. I wrote that first scene as if I were copying something from a page, and I backed up, began another scene.

INT. MORNING, UPSTAIRS HALLWAY DOOR.

JACK’S POV: Maggie stands in the doorway holding two mugs of tea.

MAGGIE:

Time for a break, Jack Stone.

(she holds out a mug of tea)

After that the scene fell into place. It was like writing in a journal and the dialog came spilling out of my memory word for word. By four-thirty I had written a dozen pages. I looked back over them and it was like reliving those moments, Maggie stepping out of the tub, Robbie standing with me next to Michael Stryker, the British officer coming at us; and I could see other scenes: the Stryker boys in the pub; Mary, the barmaid; Jack the dog scrabbling over the backs of the sheep.

It was still dark out, just past five, and the house was quiet. Unable to contain my exhilaration, I went quietly downstairs, put on a pair of wellies in the back hallway, pulled on a mac that hung on the hook with the others, and slipped out the kitchen door into the farmyard. It was damp and the air smelled of manure and straw. I could dimly see the shed and could hear the hoofs of the cow shifting inside. I crossed the farmyard in near blackness. Behind the shed was a pile of old timber and I felt in the dark, trying to find something I could use as a walking stick. I found a stick that would serve and went along the wall to the gate. I started up the slope in the direction that Robbie and I had gone when we went to the Stryker Farm, and was glad that I had the stick, using it to keep my balance on the slick grass. It had been close-cropped by the sheep, and as my eyes became accustomed to the darkness I could see the sheep clumped together off to my right, occasionally bleating at me as I climbed.

I reached the brow of the hill just before the hedge that separated the field from the lane, and I turned and looked back.

A light went on and I knew it was the farmhouse and then another light directly below it. The bedroom and the kitchen. Maggie was up and Robbie would be up, too, and I imagined her padding around the kitchen in her bare feet, rising up on her toes, her breasts free under the dressing gown tied loosely at her waist. The lighted windows were diffused by the rain that came now, softening the yellow points one above the other like the eyes of some animal lying on its side in the darkness. A light went on in the farmyard and I knew Robbie was going out to the shed. He would milk the cow, let it out into the pasture, clean the stall and come back in for breakfast.

I watched a few moments longer and then started down. I had forgotten the walking stick at the top and the slope was slippery. I lost my footing several times, falling backwards, sliding for several yards before I was able to brake myself with my heels in the soft turf. I knew I would be a muddy mess when I got to the bottom.

I was soaked through by the time I got to the wall at the edge of the farmyard and I climbed over rather than work my way along the wall to the gate. As I passed the barn the dog barked and Robbie came to the open door, a pitchfork in hand.

“Holy Jesus,” he said. “If I didn’t know it was you, I’d think maybe you was a nutter running from your keepers.”

I stood in the spreading light, looking down at my ruined shoes, my trousers caked with mud, and I knew I looked incredibly foolish.

Robbie had a huge grin on his face as he stood looking out into the rain. “I could ask where in the hell you’ve been or I can just assume that you’re a daft American who likes to wander around in the rain and dark. May I suggest you come in here and take off what’s left of your clothes. You go traipsing into Maggie’s kitchen like that and you’ll know what wrath is.”

I went into the shed where there were several sheep penned at the end, and a bare light bulb hanging down with a cord running from it to what looked like a large electric shaver. It had long teeth along the face and piled on a pallet next to it was a mound of sheep’s wool, dirty gray on one side, pure white on the other, long slabs of it, and among the penned sheep was one naked sheep, pale and skinny.

“Shearing time?” I asked.

“Not really,” Robbie replied. “Not for another month. But Michael Stryker told me the army put down Billy Gray’s flock and they’ll put the rest of Michael’s down tomorrow and it didn’t make sense to kill sheep with perfectly good wool on them. So he said I should shear mine, just in case they decide to do my flock in too.”

“But isn’t the wool diseased?”

“No, it needs a host that’s living, and if I bag this with camphor and store it in the rafters, after all this shit is done and gone, I can at least get a few quid out of it. I’ve got a chap in Southampton says he’ll take the lot. He won’t ask questions. I won’t get full value but at least I’ll get something.”

“I thought the government was going to reimburse farmers for the animals they kill.”

“I can see you’re a real Mary Poppins, Jack. They’ll take a year and they’ll haggle over how much it’s going to be and we’ll see endless pieces of paper. Big farmers like Michael can weather that, but for me it means going on the dole.”

“But when they come for your sheep, they’ll see that they’ve been sheared.”

“If they decide to come for my sheep, then Will and his brothers come over and we dig a pit and I do them in myself, save the fuckers the trouble, and tell them I couldn’t bear for anybody else to slaughter my sheep. They’re dumb enough to buy that story. Besides, I won’t shear them all at once. I figure if I do five sheep every morning and five every night, I can do most of the flock in ten days. I turn the sheared ones in with the flock and they’ll blend in. It’s not all about the money, Jack. It’s my way of punching that pompous prig in the shiny boots. Now you get out of your wet kit and wrap yourself in this.” He offered me a blanket that hung over the edge of a stall. It had the rank smell of sheep and cows and was rough to the touch.

Robbie opened the edge of the pen, grabbed a sheep by a leg and dragged it out. Jack the dog stood, watching the other sheep, tense, and when one of them made a bolt for the opening the dog nipped at it, just enough so that the sheep turned in panic and rammed into the others.

In a flash, Robbie had the sheep on its back, the head between his legs, and he took the clipper, turned it on, and cut a wide swath up the belly, turning the wool away from the skin, returning to make another pass, and I watched as he expertly peeled the wool off the legs, then shifted the struggling sheep to its side and continued up toward the spine.

Suddenly he let out a yelp, and dropped the cutter. He bent to pick it up again. “Fucking thing’s wearing out,” he muttered, and I could see that the cord was frayed and he had obviously gotten a quick electric shock.

I waited until he finished and released the naked sheep. He pushed the mound of wool onto the pallet and straightened up. “Baa baa, black sheep, have you any wool,” he said. “Yessir, yessir, three bags full. Ten quid a bag, Jack. One for my master, one for my dame. One for the old chap who lives down the lane. You know what that means, Jack?”

I shook my head.

“It means the poor fucking farmer didn’t get but a third of what he sheared. Lady Uppercrust got a bit since she owned the field, and the old chappie down the lane, he must have been the tax collector, and it hasn’t changed all that much. Just the names. Only now two and a half bags goes to the Inland Revenue. These were my father’s shears. Poor fucker used them for thirty years. But he could shear a sheep in a minute, clean as a whistle, not a nick, not a drop of blood, not a tuft left anywhere. Naked as the day they were born. He’d shit in his pants if he could see me here now. He wanted me to be an educated man, letters after my name, wear a coat and tie. Here I am, stink of sheep with their shit smeared on my boots, you need only half a fucking brain for this kind of work, Jack. Be a good trick if I fried myself with his shears, wouldn’t it? I got to fix them before they electrocute me. That would be a good joke. Dorset sheep farmer gets a charge out of shearing his sheep. Make a good tabloid headline. You best be getting into some dry clothes before you catch your death.”

“As near as I can tell, you’re an educated man, Robbie.”

“If you don’t have the fucking letters after your name in this country, Jack, the upper class pisses on you. I’m a sheep farmer, and I’m no better than those lads you got shitfaced with.” The anger in his voice told me the conversation was over. He reached for another sheep and Jack the dog edged back.

I stripped off my clothes, wrapping myself in the old blanket and crossed the farmyard to the yellow light of the kitchen door.

23.

Wrapped in the blanket, I went into the house where Terry began to giggle and Maggie eyed the bundle of wet clothes in my hands.

“What have we here, Terry? One of America’s red Indians come with an offering? What in the world happened to you, Jack Stone?”

“I went for an early morning walk.”

“Looks more like an early morning crawl in the muck. Here, let me take those,” and she reached out for the wet clothes. As she took them, her hand stroked my wrist momentarily, a soft gesture that was like an electric touch. “I’ll wash these and we can hang them by the Rayburn. They’ll be dry before noon. You’ll probably want to run a bath before you have breakfast.”

Robbie was in the kitchen when I came down in dry clothes and he watched me as I ate the hot scones that Maggie set on the table. Finally, he said, “Well, Jack, are you staying on another night? Or have you had enough of Dorset farm life?”

“I don’t want to get in the way of things,” I said. I looked at Robbie. “Do you want me to settle up now?”

“No, that can wait until tea time. I’m off to Southampton to flog off some wool.”

He went to the hallway and took down a jacket. “I’ll be back by tea time, love.”

My wet pants and shirt and socks were, I could see, arranged on a drying rack next to the Rayburn. There was no school, Maggie explained, because of the troubles with the farms. Terry stayed at the table, drawing pictures of army lorries and sheep lying on their backs with X’s for eyes and I went upstairs to my script. I worked for a while, and the words didn’t come as easily as they had in the early hours, but I was satisfied with what I was doing and could hear Richard’s voice saying, “Now this is more like it, Jack.” It was the first time I had thought of Richard and my Los Angeles writing life since I had come to Sheepheaven Farm.

I stared at the laptop and then it went blank as the screen automatically went to sleep. I realized that I had been staring at it for several minutes. I was thinking of Maggie downstairs someplace, and I closed the laptop, went out into the hall and down the stairs. She was in the kitchen, standing at the sink, peeling potatoes. She turned her head as I came into the kitchen.

“What are you up to, Jack Stone? Off for a walk? The great screenplay all finished?”

“No and no.” I put my hands on her shoulders and began to knead the base of her neck.

“Oh yes,” she said. “Right there. I’m full of knots.” She stopped peeling potatoes, put her hands on the edge of the sink. I kept massaging her shoulders, feeling the little ridges of muscle with my thumbs.

“You’ve got strong hands,” she said. “Where did you learn to do this?”

“In another life,” I said. “I was Cleopatra’s masseuse.”

“No adders here,” she said. Then she bent her head forward and said, “Yes, right there. That’s it,” and let out a little yelp. “It’s all right, it’s good pain,” she said. “Keep at it, Jack Stone.”

I worked on her shoulders for a bit, then reached around and unbuttoned the top buttons of her blouse so that I could pull it over her shoulders and her bare skin felt good under my hands and I felt myself hardening, and I wanted her more than ever. She didn’t move, stayed bent over the sink and I moved my body closer to hers until I was pressing against her and she said, “No, Jack Stone, not now,” but she was pressing back against me, moving her body, and I slid my hands down over her shoulders until I was cupping her breasts and she said, again, softly, “No, Jack Stone,” but she reached up and brought one of my hands down to her crotch and I pressed against her, pulling her body back against me and her head came back against me, her hair in my face and I kissed the top of her head and slipped my hand down inside her skirt, pressing my finger into her and she said, “You’ll make me come,” and I said, “Yes, come. Now,” and I pressed my finger harder, sliding it in her smooth wetness, pulling her against me while she bent forward over the sink, grabbing the edge with both hands and as I moved my hand faster I could hear her voice, quick sobs and unintelligible words and her body tightening, her fingers clenching the edge of the sink.

It’s hard for me to remember what else happened. I know we sat opposite in the kitchen talking, and she said she didn’t want anybody to get hurt, not Terry or Robbie, and I should go away but when I said, “Do you mean go off for a walk or pack my bag and leave the farm?” she said, “You should probably go away from here. I don’t know what to do about you.”

“When? Do you want me to go now? Tomorrow?”

“Soon.” That was all she said. I remember stroking her face, tracing her cheekbones with my fingers and her eyes were closed, as if she were a half-asleep cat and then she opened her eyes and said, “Out, Jack Stone. Out of my kitchen. Go for a walk until you walk into the sea and bring me back a lobster or a piece of jade as big as your fist. Go!” She rose and pulled her hair back, knotting it, and went to the sink where the potatoes lay, half-peeled, turning brown.

I put on a mac and went out into the gray light of mid-morning and I walked across the field in the direction that Terry had run. But I thought only about Maggie standing at the sink in the kitchen and Maggie bent over the edge of the sink and her quick sobs and I thought, go away from here, Jack Stone, leave her alone, you’ll only do great harm if you stay, but I knew that I would go back to the farmhouse and I would tell Robbie that I wanted to stay on, and I would stay until something happened that forced me to go.

24.

All went well in Southampton, Robbie said. “The bugger knows what I’m up to and he’s right with it, said if I wanted to knacker some of the lambs on the sly he’d take care of it, but I told him no, I drew the line at that.”

It was mid-afternoon, and a weak sun was trying to shine. “I’ll stay on another night or two, Robbie,” I said.

“You’re all right, Jack,” he said. “A bottomless pit of pound notes. Nat West Bank, you are, Los Angeles branch.”

“No, I don’t have all that much. And when I run out, I’ll turn tail and run.”

He laughed. “Stay on here, Jack-o, on the dole with us when the army knackers our sheep.”

He was nervous about Terry being off with Jack, and asked if I knew which direction they had gone. I pointed up toward the rise in the field and he said, shit, I told him not to, and set off determinedly in that direction. I watched him grow smaller as he climbed the field and then was conscious of Maggie at my elbow.

“He’s off to find Terry, isn’t he?”

“Yes. He worries too much. He forgets that he wandered off in these fields at that age. Terry’s a lot like Robbie, but Robbie can’t recognize that.”

She hugged her arms around her chest and said, “Come back inside. Have a cup of tea with me.”

The kitchen was warm, heat radiating from the Rayburn, and Maggie filled the kettle.

“Did you know Robbie when he was a boy here?” I asked.

“No, I met Robbie at Cambridge. He was a medievalist. I came there with a touring company of the Ballet Rambert. I trained at the Royal Ballet School and then got picked by the Rambert and I danced in one of the companies that went out into the counties. We did Ondine in Cambridge. The stage was canted and the curtain opened on the deck of a ship at sea, the backdrop rising and falling, and all of us moving as if the ship were rising and falling and suddenly this handsome man bolted from his seat for the door. Afterwards, in the dressing room, we all laughed about it, but then he showed up. Turned out he was there to see one of the other dancers, and he’d had too much to drink before the performance and when the curtain went up and the backdrop rose and fell and the ship moved and we rose and fell as well, he suddenly felt sick, and he went outside the hall and lost it all in the shrubs.”

She was intent on her story, as if she were back in Cambridge and we weren’t standing in her kitchen anymore.

“It was Robbie, and he came to apologize but she thought he was an idiot for getting drunk before seeing her on stage. She was a principal. I was just a slip of a girl in a crowd of dancers. But I liked the looks of him. I told him if he wouldn’t get sick all over me, I’d go out for a drink with him. He said not to worry, he was pretty much emptied out.”

“You were a bit forward then, too, weren’t you?”

“Not really. I just fancied him and there were all those girls and he was being dumped so he was fair game. If you didn’t strike while the iron was hot, you were out of luck.”

“And you married him?”

“Not that night. He came down to London to see me. I came up to his digs in Cambridge. One thing led to another.”

“And you stopped dancing?”

“Not right away. I stayed with the Rambert and Robbie was at Cambridge but I came up to see him as often as I could. Oh, Jack Stone, we did it in doorways and in his car in car parks and under the stairwell in a lecture hall while some bloke was nattering on about Francis Bacon. We were like rabbits.”

“And then you got married?”

“After a year. I danced for a while longer but I couldn’t keep up the passion for it. Not and be Robbie’s wife.”

She was fingering her hair again, pulling it back so that I could see her cheekbones in sharp relief and I wondered what it would have been like to see her dance. “Do you miss the dance?” I asked.

“At first. You see me in the kitchen peeling potatoes or making tea or mucking out the fridge but you have no idea what I was like when I danced. It was hard work, Jack Stone. Bloody hard work. Tie on those toe shoes and you were in for agony, feet actually bloody at times, but you danced right through the pain, stretched your body until you thought it would break, felt the music in your bones, oh it was, as Robbie would say, fucking brilliant.”

“I wish I had seen you.”

“You might not have liked me, Jack Stone. I didn’t have room for anything else.”

“But you made room for Robbie?”

“He was an alchemist. He could turn lead into silver.”

“Was he teaching at Cambridge?”

“No, he was a student. There I was, shopkeeper’s daughter with the Rambert, and he was a sheep farmer’s son wearing a shiny black gown, but he never got the Oxbridge accent right. And he swore he’d never touch another sheep. I swore I’d never end up like my mum in the kitchen. And here we are.”

“What happened?”

“His Dad had a stroke, we came down to help his mum tend to him and Robbie took over the farm. It was supposed to be temporary, but it didn’t turn out that way. Robbie learned it all over again, the things he saw as a boy, we got Jack and he doubled the flock and his mum was after me to get pregnant. She wanted a grandchild but I was afraid that if I had a baby I would be fixed in stone in her kitchen. His father hung on for another year and then he went and it was as if he pulled her after him. The life went out of her, Jack Stone, and I was terrified.”

“Terrified of what?”

“Of becoming like her. Of having my life defined by my husband.”

“And you had Terry?”

“I didn’t plan on it, but he’s here and I love him dearly. He doesn’t ask me for anything. But maybe that’s part of being ten years old. You haven’t learned yet to make demands. I was thirty when I had him. And this year I turn forty, Jack Stone. I’ll be an old lady.”

“Nonsense.”

“She never saw him.” She began, unconsciously, to braid her hair. “Robbie’s mum. She never saw Terry. She died and we put her in the village cemetery by the church, next to Robbie’s father. There’s a grand view of Eggerton from there. Robbie says it’s as good a spot as any to end up in. And we stayed on. But enough about me. What about you, Jack Stone? Were you always a writer?”

“I think so. When I was a child I made up stories. My father said I was a consummate liar, but I always thought of them as stories about somebody else. I went off to university and ended up teaching for a while, but I grew tired of the pretension, and I wrote a novel that got good reviews and I lived in Los Angeles where it’s all about the movies and somehow I drifted into it.”

“And are you famous in America?”

“No.”

“That’s it? Just, no?”

“That’s it. I made a living and I wrote some things that were, I thought, really good, most of which never saw the light of day, and then everything slowed down. It was as if I were in a movie where the director thought slow motion was a good idea and it suited me, walking slowly, barely conscious of the world around me. Have you ever been to America?”

“No.”

“It’s a strange place, especially where I lived. The sea isn’t anything like it is here. I went down to Chesil Beach the first week I was here. The wind was so strong I could stand on that pile of stones and lean into the wind, spread my arms, almost as if I were flying. It’s much more gentle in California, and the sun shines too much.”

“Oh, god, Jack Stone, if only the sun would shine more here! I would lie naked in the sun until I turned to a crisp!”

She reached across the table, put her hand on my arm, stroking it. Her eyes seemed to look right past me, as if she were talking to someone just beyond my shoulder.

“And you don’t like the sun, do you, Jack Stone?”

“No, I like the sun. But I want it to be an old sun, the kind that fills a sea like the one Odysseus sailed. I spent a week once on the edge of Italy, facing Corsica, and I wrote part of a story on the little terrace that looked out over the Mediterranean that was really good. Nobody took it, but it was good. You would have liked that place, Maggie.”

“You think so, do you? And what do you know about me, Jack Stone?” She looked directly at me.

“Last Spring I went to London,” she said. “One afternoon I put on my coat and took a hundred quid and got on the coach and went to Gillingham and took the train to London. I didn’t leave a note for Robbie or tell anyone, I just left.”

“Why?”

“I have no idea. I suddenly felt the kitchen closing in on me and I went outside and the sky was falling and I left. Went away. I went to London and I took a room and I went to the Royal Ballet that night. I wanted to see them dance.”

She stood, rose on her toes as if she were about to dance, then leaned forward to grip the edge of the table. She looked down, talking to the scarred wooden surface.

“They were doing something new, something I didn’t know, and when the lights went down and the dancers came onto the stage I suddenly felt sick. I wanted to throw up. They floated across the stage and I thought, Oh Christ, I’m going to throw up and I tried to rise but my legs wouldn’t work. They wouldn’t fucking work, Jack Stone. I couldn’t stand and I sat there and choked back my vomit and closed my eyes and waited until the end and then, when everyone was gone, an usher helped me to a cab and I got back to the room and the clerk helped me up to the bed and I lay there, my legs numb, and I wanted to die. But I didn’t.”

“I’m glad of that.”

“You don’t know me, Jack Stone!” Her voice was hard and she looked up from the table and she said, “You want to wake up with me at your side in the morning? Is that what you’d like? Well, you’d find another side to me, one you might not like so much!”

She looked back down at the table.

“And then I slept and when I woke my legs worked and I went back to Waterloo and caught a train and came back with my tail between my legs.”

“And Robbie was waiting for you?”

“Robbie never said a word. It was as if I had been here all the time. I came back into this farmhouse and it was as if I had never been gone. Not a word, Jack Stone.”

“Did you tell him where you had gone?”

“He didn’t care where I had gone.”

“Perhaps he knew.”

“No. What he knew was that I would come back. He was sure of that. I could see it in him.”

“You never told him about your legs?”

“I never gave him the satisfaction.”

“So it was the dance that you missed?”

“Do you ever play ‘what if’?”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“What if. What if Robbie had shown up sober that night in Cambridge. Would that other girl be living at Sheepheaven Farm and I’d be someone else? Do you ever play that game?”

“Not for a long time.”

“What if the Land Rover turned over and some Dorset copper came to the house and said, ‘I’m sorry, Mrs. Barlow, there’s been an accident.’”

“You don’t mean that.”

She stood erect, ran her hands through her hair, stretching it back so that her cheekbones lifted and she turned to me and said, “You’d like to wake in the morning with me at your side, wouldn’t you? Turn over and find your arm across me and hear me breathing and feel the warmth from my body?”

“Is this part of your ‘what if’ game?”

“No. It’s idle chatter. Pay no attention to me. Write it down in one of your movies. You could call it ‘The Mad Housewife of Sheepheaven Farm.’ There’s a hundred thousand women in kitchens just like this who would flock to see it.”

She reached out and took my hand.

“It’s time for that cup of tea, Jack Stone.”

She brushed her hair over her shoulders with her fingers, looking down at me. “Where are we going, Jack Stone? I don’t want any broken hearts.”

She had taken me by surprise, and I hesitated. Suddenly she was asking me something that I had been thinking about the whole time, as if she had read my mind.

“I hadn’t thought about that,” I lied.

“It’s time we thought about it. I think about it. I don’t want anybody to get hurt, not you or me or Terry. I like talking with you, and I like being with you and I like it when you touch me. You like being with me, and you like touching me. That’s obvious, isn’t it? What do you expect, Jack Stone?”

“Just a day at a time. I’ll take whatever I can get. I don’t expect anything more than that. I’ve no right to expect more than that, have I?”

“I don’t know. All I know is that I can’t seem to help myself. It’s as if a window is open and the rain is coming and I can’t close the window, it’s stuck, and sometimes I think, just leave the window open and wait for the rain, stand there and get soaked, but I still tug at the window. Do you understand?”

“I understand that I love you.”

“Don’t say that. Don’t expect too much from me. You’ll only be disappointed.” She gathered the tea mugs and went to the sink. I followed her, putting my arms around her waist and she took my hands, carefully removed them and turned to face me. “Not now, Jack Stone. I feel too much like my mum in her kitchen. I can’t dance any more. Go break somebody else’s heart.”

I went off for a walk along the lane. Dense fog covered everything, leaving vague white spaces between trees, fields lost just beyond the hedgerows and the fog sucked up the sound, leaving everything soft and out of focus. I walked toward the village and it was like walking on a treadmill with only the bit of pavement in front of me apparent. Out of the fog came a man bundled in a mac and he passed silently, hands deep in his pockets and when I turned he’d been swallowed by the fog and then a dog trotted past and suddenly there was a magpie flattened on the pavement, as if I were walking in place and the pavement were moving under me. I was struck by the image of a man walking on a treadmill while his life passed under him, and somewhere in front of him a giant hand set things on the treadmill, put a farmhouse B&B there, and then a woman for him to fall in love with and a man who tended sheep and a boy and a dog and four men on bar stools, all of them sliding past, and he must walk steadily or he, too, will be swallowed up by the nothingness behind him. I came to the stone bridge across the stream at the far end of the village and stood there in the fog, the stones of the low bridge wall wet, and there was the small brass plaque set into the wall that read: “Anyone who defaces this bridge will be transported.” Put there, Robbie explained, a hundred years ago when they sent people off to Australia for committing crimes. Oz, he called it. Imagine, he said, some village punk left his initials on the bridge with a spray can last night on his drunken way home and today he’s off to the other side of the world to work at forced labor in an opal mine! That would get his attention!

I tried to think of Maggie in the kitchen and Maggie dancing but all I could conjure was the Maggie who stood before me, dripping, while I toweled her off. I thought about going to the pub and having a beer but I walked on through the village and it was empty, as if there had been a plague and I was the only person left and I walked for several hours, no sense of time passing since there was no sun.

25.

It was late afternoon when I came back to Sheepheaven Farm and Robbie’s Land Rover was in the farmyard. I found him in the shed with a half dozen sheep, several of them sheared. I watched for a while from the doorway, Robbie unaware that I was there, and then went into the house. Maggie and Terry were at the table in the kitchen, and when I came in Maggie said, “Well, Jack Stone, you’ve been gone for a while. I thought maybe you decided to walk back to America.”

“No, I’m still here.”

“So I see.”

I stood for a moment longer and Maggie looked at me, saying nothing, raising the mug of tea to sip at it, and I went upstairs to my room and took off my damp clothes. I sat at the laptop but there was nothing to write and I looked out into the grayness that was descending on the farm and then Maggie was in the doorway again.

“It’s time you left, Jack Stone.”

“Are you sure?”

“No, I’m not sure of anything.”

“If I asked you to go with me, would you?” I already knew the answer to that question.

“No.”

“You know that I’ve fallen in love with you.”

“Yes. I know that. And when I’m around you it’s as if my nerves are exposed, as if my skin is raw and if you were to come closer to me my body would betray me.”

I started to get up but she said, “No. Please don’t.”

“When do you want me to go?”

“Now. This moment. While I still have my resolve.” She turned and was gone and I sat there, wondering what I had done to cause this. I packed my things in the duffel, feeling numb, and I came down the stairs to find Robbie in the kitchen with Maggie and Terry.

“What’s this, Jack? You leaving us?”

“Yes. You’ve got enough on your hands without me to get in your way.”

“You’re no trouble, Jack. And it’s late. Where are you off to? You can stay tonight at no charge, get off to an early start tomorrow. Right, Mags?”

“Let mister Stone decide for himself, Robbie.”

“You’re sure, Jack?”

“I’m sure, Robbie.” But, of course, I wasn’t sure. It had all happened so quickly, as if a wind had come up and slammed shut a door quite unexpectedly, and I looked at Maggie, hoping for some sign that I should stay, but she turned and left the kitchen.

“It’s time I moved on, Robbie.”

“Suit yourself,” he said. “It’s been good having you. Terry,” he said, turning to the boy, “say goodbye to Mr. Stone.”

Terry looked up from his copybook.

“Goodbye sir,” he said.

“Did your essay on the Roman forts turn out okay?”

“Yes sir.”

“Good. Then I’ll be going.”

Robbie shook my hand, wished me well. I said I hoped the trouble with the foot-and-mouth would be over soon. Robbie assured me that they’d survive.

And I left Sheepheaven Farm.

I looked back as I went out the gate but Maggie was nowhere to be seen, only Robbie trudging off toward the shed, Jack at his heel. My first thought was to drive up to London, but I turned toward the coast and in less than an hour I was in Lyme Regis. It was getting dark and I looked for a place to stay, found a cheap bed-and-breakfast on a side street and had fish and chips at a takeout not far from there. I spent a fitful night in a tiny room with chintz curtains and heard the rain come back while I lay thinking of Maggie.

The next morning I had breakfast at a little table in a glass conservatory off the kitchen of the house, the rain sheeting down overhead, and it was the usual eggs and a rasher of fatty bacon and cold toast. I put my duffel in the car and sat at the wheel looking at the map and then I found a phone box and telephoned Sheepheaven Farm. I couldn’t just drive off and not see her again, and when she answered, there was a pause after I said, “Maggie? It’s Jack.”

I wondered if she would hang up.

But she didn’t. I wanted her to come down to Lyme and have lunch with me, I said. It wasn’t right to just walk out of the house without even a goodbye, and I wasn’t going to go anyplace until she at least talked to me and she said she didn’t trust herself to just talk to me and I said we’ll meet in a cafe and have a sandwich and tea and it’s terribly important to me. Please, please, I thought as I waited for her answer and then she said yes, she would come down, where should we meet. Across the street was a little cafe and I gave her the name of it and the street and said I would wait there for her.

After she hung up I found I was sweating, as if I had run a great distance, and I looked at my watch and thought, what will I do to make the next four hours run quickly.

Maggie showed up at noon, ducking into the little cafe, her hair wet, and when she took off her mac I could see that she was wearing a gray sweater and gray tailored trousers and I felt a rush of excitement. But lunch went slowly, talk of Robbie and sheep and Terry and what I would do next and finally she said she needed to go back to the farm. We had skirted around everything important.

26.

She leaned forward, pulled her hair off her shoulder and twisted it around her finger, then tossed it back over her shoulder and, raising her hands to the sides of her head, combed her fingers through her hair, pulling it back, accentuating her cheekbones.

“I think,” I began.

She touched her elbows to the table, hands holding her face, smiling. “You think what?”

“I think,” I began again and I realized I didn’t know where the sentence would end. There were times when, after I left her, I would talk to myself, finishing sentences I meant to say to her, sentences I rehearsed when she wasn’t there, important things I wanted to share with her, questions that needed answers, feelings I wanted to put into words and now I wasn’t sure of what it was that I was going to say, only that I knew that after she was gone I would want to call her back, tell her wait, wait, there’s more. There’s always more.

“I think that this past week has been the most important week in my life. You have no idea how much I love you.”

The smile faded. She studied me, said quietly, “I love you, too.”

I knew there was more I wanted to say and she could feel it and she said, “And?” and waited, watching me. I found myself rearranging the fork next to my plate, smoothing the paper napkin, and I was aware of the couple at the next table talking.

“I want you all the time,” I said.

Her face went flat. “Where was all of this going?” she said. “What did you expect of us?”

“I’ve told you I have no right to expect anything more than a day at a time. I don’t expect anything more,” and she said, “Good. I don’t want anyone to get hurt. I wanted it to be a lark to see you and talk to you but I can’t seem to stop myself. You need to go away from me and Sheepheaven Farm. You need to leave me alone, Jack Stone.”

And I said, “Don’t worry,” but I lied because by then I had already been caught up. She had thrown magic dust at me and I was bewitched. I understood how the prince picked Cinderella out of all those girls. It wasn’t because she was the prettiest of the girls in the court. It was because she danced with him and pressed her body against his and whispered in his ear what she wanted him to do to her and her voice must have had the same bright insistence that they could do anything together and he would live forever and she would listen to his secrets and tell no one else. And I lied when I told her not to worry, that I wouldn’t get hurt, because I was hurting at the thought of not seeing her and now her eyes were filling and I knew if she cried I would cry, too, so I said, “Don’t you dare,” and she smiled and I knew that once again I had lied. I pretended everything was okay when what I really wanted to do was lean across the table and say, “I can’t stand the idea of not seeing you, of not talking to you, a great basket of secrets lies inside me that I want to tip out and sort through with you and I want your secrets, too, and I want to wake in the morning and see you sleeping next to me and I want to fuck you and stand naked with you, leaning into the wind on Chesil Beach.”

But I didn’t.

I knew very little about her yet I thought I knew her well, as if I knew things about her that she had never told me. I wanted to hold her tightly.

The waitress came with the bill, waited while I dug in my pocket and I put down a ten pound note, far too much but I told her to keep the change because Maggie had risen from the table and was on her way out the door. I caught up with her and the bright sun reflected off the windows of the buildings along the quay. We walked the two blocks to the car park in silence.

It was dark in the car park and we stood at the side of the Land Rover and kissed and she pressed against me and I wanted to press hard against her, let her feel my growing hardness, but she opened the door and was suddenly behind the wheel, saying “Goodbye, Jack Stone. Write and tell me everything you’re doing. Please don’t forget me.” And I knew that after she had gone I would wonder why I did not touch her, feel her breasts, run my hands down her hips, press my fingers into her, just as every time we parted I wished we had done other things; that I had said the words that lay in the back of the drawer, unspoken.

I turned and walked back down the ramp, deliberately not watching her drive off, aching, wanting to call her back, wanting to shout wait! I want to tell you everything. I want us to cling together like leeches! I want you to wait while I find the words!

27.

I spent that night in the same B&B. It was another restless night and the next morning Mrs. Salt, the proprietor, asked me, as she set the plate of fried eggs and bacon in front of me, “Are you all right, love? You look peaked.” She pronounced it “peek-ed,” the same way my aunt pronounced it when I was a child.

I packed my bag and sat in the car again, looking at the map, but I didn’t drive off to London. I went back to the cafe where Maggie and I had lunch and I had a cup of tea and a biscuit. I was becoming English, I thought, and remembered Maggie’s words the first afternoon I had come down into her kitchen about tea and the English.

The counter man, when he re-filled my cup, commented on the weather. “Sheeting down rain, isn’t it? Never seen so much rain this time of year. Must be those rockets they send up into space. Disturbs the sky, don’t you know?”

I nodded, went back to my table at the window. A man opened his car door, ducked out into the rain, locking his car, coming toward the cafe with his head down only to veer off at the last second. Pigeons huddled on the ledge of the building opposite and a neon sign reflected dully on the wet asphalt.

A blind woman appeared at the right of the window holding on to a brown seeing eye dog. The dog was wet and patient and the woman was wrapped in a plastic raincoat with a hood that came halfway across her face.

At the edge of the window on the stone steps just out of the rain sat a seedy looking man, unshaven, wearing a greasy jacket. He was smoking a cigarette and he watched the blind woman’s dog pass disinterestedly. The dog paid no attention to him.

She could be half a world away, I thought. It was an abstract idea. Distance doesn’t matter when someone is out of sight. I remembered reading someplace that the Navajo had no future tense in their language. Or maybe it was some other people. It didn’t matter. They couldn’t say something like I’ll see you tomorrow or There’s a woman over that hill and if we go over the ridge we will see her. Everything for them was either in the present or the past. Either it was happening at that moment or it had happened. Far-off places were unthinkable. How much easier that would be, I thought.

I realized I had not moved in a long time. It had been a day of long empty pauses. The morning had slipped past me and I could not remember any of it. I sipped my tea. It was lukewarm and bitter.

I remembered climbing the stone steps to a crumbling ruin one summer in Italy. It seemed like it had happened in another life. It had been a hot day and it was cool next to the stone wall. The light off the sea was blinding and Corsica was only a dim blot in the distance. “Corse,” the German boy had called it. There had been a little apartment with cool tiled floors and thick stone walls and shutters that kept out the sun. Light came through the slats, patterning the dark floor and whitewashed walls.

I left the cafe and drove north from Lyme, wandering along the lanes, the way I had done the day I had first come to Sheepheaven Farm. But I found myself drawn toward the farm. I came through the village and there was the beat-up Stryker Land Rover in front of the pub and the little gaggle of wives in front of the post office store. They watched as I drove past, and further down the road I slowed as I came near the entrance to the farm. But the Land Rover wasn’t in the farmyard and I passed the gate, drove on to the Tolpuddle road, went east and circled so that I came at the farm from the lane on the north. I paused at a break in the hedge and looked down toward the farmhouse but it was over the brow of the hill and I could see nothing. I kept on driving, finding myself on a B road toward Devon. I was aimed at the sea and Los Angeles beyond that, but I wanted to turn back and see Maggie again.

The road topped out along the ridge and the hedges were low so that I could see the outline of Eggerton across the valley. It looked like the prow of a huge ship, the earthworks thrust forward, deep ridges where the trenches had been cut and I pulled off onto the verge and got out. Clouds ran along the ridge toward the sea like torn bits of oily mechanics’ rags. To the west it was black and the road in the vale below me was black, reflecting occasional headlights. Another storm was coming and fine rain began to slant in toward me. There was the faint white noise of water running, tiny streams that ran in every crack of the hillside. Eggerton was a low outline, dimly seen, shaped like a woman lying face down and I thought again of Maggie. There was nothing beyond, no lights, only the black thickness of the approaching storm.

I thought of hiking out onto Eggerton, and took the next road that dived off the ridge into the vale, but when I got down at the bottom the roads began to fork and I couldn’t figure out how to get back up toward Eggerton. It was above me now and had lost its shape and I wandered for a half hour in growing rain before I gave up. A signpost read LYME REGIS 12 MILES and I followed it, coming into Lyme from the other end, and I drove to the same B&B and when Mrs. Salt answered the door I asked if I could stay another night.

She raised her eyebrows and said, of course, why hadn’t I asked her that morning, and I said that the rain had changed my plans. She, too, said that she had never seen so much rain. “They say the Stour is up to the car park at the bottom of town in Blandford and the shopkeepers are moving things out.”

I had the same tiny room, a bed, a small table and a single chair. Mrs. Salt brought a cup of tea up to the room. “Warm you up, love,” she said. I got out the laptop and plugged in my little transformer. I scrolled down the screen until I came to the Sheepheaven script and I wrote out the cafe scene, and then wrote another scene in which I imagined Maggie standing in that red sweater and yellow trousers in the bedroom at Sheepheaven Farm.

INT. BEDROOM AT THE FARM – LATE AFTERNOON

JACK’S POV: MAGGIE STANDS, her hair framing her face, erect nipples punctuating the red sweater, her slim body beckoning to Jack in the dim room. The curtains are drawn and she stands watching him, the soft swell of her breasts underneath the fabric so erotic he thinks he will cry. He feels himself growing hard and he remembers her words, “but you can’t touch me.”

JACK THINKS, “I will have to cut off my hands.”

And I knew that I would have to re-write the scene, back up and give Maggie her voice to tell him that he must not touch her, and Jack would need an interior voiceover to show that he is thinking he cannot control himself, and I realized that I had, once again, slipped into a parallel world where I watched Jack as if he were some other person. I worked for a while longer, but I found I could not sustain the scene, kept cutting away to Maggie as she got into the Land Rover, and finally I gave up, put on a sweater and a coat and went downstairs. I brought Mrs. Salt the empty teacup and saucer and she said, “You’re not going out into this, are you love?”

“It seems to have let up,” I said.

“Well, you’ll have to come back to Lyme when the sun is out. It’s lovely down by the quay. That’s where they made that movie with Jeremy Irons.”

“My wife saw it on American television.”

“Did she now? And where is your wife, Mr. Stone?”

“I’m afraid she’s not my wife anymore.”

“Oh dear. I’m sorry about that,” she said, obviously embarrassed by the answer.

“That’s all right. It happened years ago.” Or at least it seemed as if it had happened years ago.

28.

I escaped Mrs. Salt and walked in blustery wind down to the quay. There was a narrow channel that came into the small harbor with ghostlike surf and the white noise of waves coming in. Lyme Regis Head was no more than a dim outline fading into the gray sky that became the gray of the surf and the sea and sometimes a big roller came in through the channel, spume drifting off the top, spilling along the sides of the channel and still the continuous surf pounded and rushed in a long noise that never stopped and shore birds ran ahead in the wet sand inside the harbor, fading into the fog. I found a telephone box and went into it, out of the wind, debating whether or not to call Maggie again. I rehearsed what I would say, that I needed to see her one more time, I would promise not to bother her again, I was going home to Los Angeles, she would never see me, but I wanted to see her alone, without other people at the next table. Could she trust herself to come away for an hour or two tomorrow?

Finally I picked up the receiver, dropped in the coins and waited. There was the distinctive double ring of an English telephone, once, twice, three, four times. I waited, counting the rings and had almost given up when I heard Maggie’s voice.

“Sheepheaven Farm.”

“Maggie, it’s Jack.”

Long pause. Then, “Where are you?”

“I’m still in Lyme Regis. Maggie will you do one last thing for me?”

“Perhaps.”

“Will you see me one more time?” Now I rushed into my explanation, not letting her interrupt, hoping that I would be convincing enough and when I came to the end I waited.

“I’ve been thinking about you,” she said.

“Just for an hour or two. I’ll find a place where we can be alone.”

“Just for an hour,” she said. “That’s it. Promise me, Jack Stone.”

“Yes.” It was more than I could have hoped for. “I’ll call you first thing tomorrow morning and tell you where I am. All right?”

“Yes.”

“Are you all right?”

“Yes.” Her voice, though, was guarded, and I wondered if she would answer the phone in the morning. I wanted to end the call quickly, before she changed her mind.

I collected my things from Mrs. Salt’s B&B and drove to Blandford. I remembered that there was a visitor center at the bottom of the town where the board outside had advertised holiday rentals. Perhaps I could find a cottage where Maggie and I could meet.

Mrs. Salt had been right about the River Stour. It was a wide brown expanse, spreading across the fields, turgid with streamers of white foam slowly swirling. At the bridge entering Blandford the river pulsed against the stone wall, and the car park was underwater, the river lapping at the shops that fronted it. The holiday center was in a small octagonal building at the end of the bridge and I expected it to be closed but there was an older woman inside, and when I entered she got up from behind the small desk and said, “Good afternoon, sir. Can I help you?”

“I’m looking for a cottage for a night for my wife and myself. Something simple, inexpensive.”

“You’re on holiday, are you?”

“Yes.”

“It’s been a terrible spring, and I’m sorry you don’t have better weather. But perhaps we can find something.”

She crossed to a rack of brochures and began going through them.

“Perhaps a bed-and-breakfast?”

“No, something where we can be off by ourselves.”

“Here’s something. The Fulhams have a cottage just north of their village. And I suspect, in weather like this, that it won’t be occupied.” She took out a sheet with a photograph of a stone cottage. It looked vaguely like the one I had rented at White Church Farm.

“If the river isn’t too high, that is. The cottage is across the river from the farm, but they’re quite a distance up the river from here and the bridge is an old one, quite safe. Would you like me to give them a ring, see if it’s available?”

“Yes, please.” I waited, browsing through leaflets for the steam fair and the miniature village at Wimbourne while she telephoned.

“Yes, it’s quite all right,” she said as she hung up. She gave me directions and I drove north from the town, up through Stourpaine, toward Wintercombe where, after several tries, I found the farmhouse. I rented the cottage for two nights, and drove in the lowering light a short distance to where a bridge crossed the Stour. The river was high and brown here, too, but it was narrow and it funneled safely under the low arch. The cottage was another fifty yards down a graveled track, but unlike Mr. Orchard’s pig shed, when I entered this one I found whitewashed walls, a big bed and several chairs, a neat kitchen and an oil stove that lit as soon as I turned the switch. Within minutes the cottage was warm and I wished that Maggie would arrive immediately and spend the night with me.

I worked for a while on the script, wrote out a scene in which the two of us were together in the cottage, and it wasn’t until well after dark that I realized I hadn’t had anything to eat since my mid-morning biscuit and tea in Lyme Regis. I decided not to look for a place to eat. In the darkness I didn’t trust myself to find the cottage again. There would be time enough tomorrow when I went into the village to telephone Maggie.

29.

I woke several times in the night, each time looking at my watch only to find that I had slept fitfully for an hour. At dawn there was a faint light at the window and when I pulled the curtain aside I could see a weak sun over the edge of the trees. It was a good sign, I thought. I waited until the sun was well above the trees and I knew it was past breakfast time at Sheepheaven Farm. Maggie would be in the kitchen by now, Robbie off working, Terry at school.

I drove into Wintercombe and found a red telephone box next to the post office store. Maggie answered immediately and I quickly told her where the cottage was. I didn’t want to hear her say she had reconsidered, and she said she would be there. She could get away late in the afternoon, she said. It would only be for an hour. She sounded upbeat. I was ecstatic.

The post office store had nothing in the way of wine or champagne, only bottled water and soft drinks. No, said the shop assistant, a teenage girl wearing a blue smock, they didn’t have any alcohol. I’d have to go to the pub for that. I bought a sandwich wrapped in plastic and a package of cookies and an apple and I drove back to the cottage. The sandwich turned out to be stale and the apple was soft but I didn’t care. Maggie would be there in six hours and the time couldn’t go fast enough. I walked along the edge of the river for a while, watching the water swirl at the edge of the field. A heron picked its way along the edge of the water across from me, stepping delicately in the spongy grass.

The weak sun began to fade and I walked back to the bridge, stood at the center and looked down at the river, dark now, the water no longer a soft brown, but cold and nearly black. I thought about how quickly the sun had gone. One minute it was flooding the vale and the next it had gone over the hill and it was if someone had pulled a shade over everything, the wind rising in the trees, and I zipped my jacket tight. She had said she would be there by four o’clock and it was already four, but she had to come a long way and I knew I would stand in the center of the bridge where I could see the graveled track coming down from the highway. There was no point in going back to the cottage and waiting there. The river was shadowy now, and the rushing water through the stone arch was louder, a continuous sound like the wind. I walked to the far side of the bridge, then came back to the center and I tried to picture Maggie, her long hair and her gray eyes, imagining that she was making the turn from the motorway, accelerating up the long straight stretch that led into the now black line of trees, switching on her headlights. If she made the turn at this moment — I looked at my watch — she would be here in fifteen minutes. Perhaps she had already made the turn and was, at this moment, turning off above me, winding down the lane toward the bridge. I listened, but there was no motor, only the wind in the trees and the continuous background of the river.

Or perhaps she wasn’t coming at all, was now in her kitchen, starting supper, looking out the black window over the sink and wondering if I were still waiting for her. I heard a motor and listened but it was on the road above and it faded. The wind had turned cold and I hugged my arms to my chest. Birds popped erratically out from beneath the bridge, darting low over the water, and when I turned and looked downstream I could see the light from the farmhouse among the trees and it looked warm and inviting.

I walked to the near side of the bridge and thought about going back to the cottage, but I turned and walked back toward the center of the bridge. It was dark now, the river barely visible, and then I saw the headlights coming down the track toward the bridge, and they blinked once, twice, and I knew it was her and I felt more than just relief — it was as if I had never really expected her to come. Yes, she had said she would be there, and yes, I had believed her, but seeing the car, headlights dipping and rising as it came over the lip of the bridge, knowing that she was at the wheel, driving toward me, filled me with a kind of wonder, as if I had won a lottery, had bought a ticket and held it until it was crumpled in my hand, hoping that the number they drew from the rising column of tumbling numbered balls would miraculously be mine and now, as the car came onto the bridge, the planks on the bridge vibrated and rumbled and as she drew abreast I could see her face and she was smiling, looking straight ahead as if she could not see me next to the rail and she drove on across the bridge toward the farm. I broke into a trot behind the Land Rover, watching the brake lights glow red as she stopped at the far side of the bridge and I began to run.

30.

When Maggie got out of the Land Rover I took her in my arms, held her tightly, and said, “I didn’t think you’d come.”

“I said I would,” she said. “I have no idea why I agreed and all the way here I kept thinking, I should turn around, this isn’t what I want, but I’m here, Jack Stone, and it’s just for an hour and then I’m gone. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“I felt like some part of me had been amputated and then there was your voice on the telephone.”

We went into the cottage and I hugged her again, and I could feel her pressing against me and I said, “Come to bed with me, Maggie.”

She said nothing, only slipped the old blue sweater up over her head and stood there, naked to the waist and she said, “It’s good to be naked,” and pressed against me again.

We lay on the bed side by side, and I told her that I was working on the screenplay and it was filled with images of her and she said she was glad that I was writing again.

“You’ll take that back home with you, Jack Stone, and it will be a piece of me to remember.”

I touched her face as she was talking, trying to memorize her features with my fingers, and then she rose, straddling me, lowering herself and I slipped into her body as if she had sucked me in. She arched her back, her breasts taut against her chest and she began to slide her hips forward, then back, rotating her body slowly, her head back, mouth open, and it felt as if I were rising through her body all the way to her throat, beyond her throat, until I touched her brain, and I lifted my hips in time to her movement, her head back so far now that her long hair touched my legs, and I heard her cry out, come with me now, and I thought of the magician who sweeps off his top hat, shows it to the audience, shows that it’s empty, runs his hand inside the hat, turns it over and taps it and then places it on the table and covers it with a silk cloth and a beautiful woman comes to his side and he weaves his hands back and forth and she whips off the cloth and he reaches inside and out comes an endless stream of silk and he reaches in again and brings out a bouquet of roses and reaches in again and out comes a white rabbit, held by the ears, struggling, and he hands it to the beautiful woman and reaches in again and out comes a dove, cupped in his hand, and he raises his hand and the dove opens its wings and rises into the lights and disappears and he picks up the hat and shows it to the audience and it’s empty.

And I felt that way, as if she had taken the silk and the flowers and the rabbit and the dove from my body, sucked them up into her body, into her brain, leaving me like the empty top hat, and I felt my body filling again, this time with love, and she leaned forward, pressing herself against me, kissed me and I was whole again.

31.

We lay on the bed, spent, touching each other tentatively, and then Maggie asked, “Do you ever feel like you’re someone else?”

“You mean, like you’ve lived some other life before this one?”

“No,” she said. “I mean like you’re inside someone else’s skin. Somebody made a mistake. As if you went to a party and went into the bedroom and picked up a wrap that you thought was yours only when you got home and took it off you realized it wasn’t yours, it belonged to someone else. It’s as if I’m wearing someone else’s skin, and there’s somebody out there wearing mine, living the life I was meant to live. I don’t mean I hate my life. I like it, I do well in it, but there’s this sense of unease, as if...” She let her voice trail off.

“As if what?”

“I don’t know.”

“As if you were meant to be a dancer and not a farm wife?”

“I should go now,” she said.

“Stay with me.”

“No, Jack Stone. It’s been an hour and we promised that’s all it would be. I know that when I get back to the farm I’ll feel badly about this. I’ll make tea for Robbie and Terry and I’ll soak in the tub for a long while and I’ll wonder why I came one more time.”

“Do you feel badly now?”

“No.” She touched my face. “You’re a sweet gentle man, Jack Stone. You touch something deep inside me. I have no idea what it is. But I want things to be like they were, with the other Jack lagging around my legs and Terry and Robbie at the table and I want to take down the bed-and-breakfast sign and turn the clock back. I need to go, Jack Stone.”

She rose from the bed, bent over and picked up the old blue sweater. I reached out, took her hand and pulled her back toward me.

“What if there were no Robbie?”

“That’s a stupid question, Jack Stone.”

“Yes,” I said, “but what if there were no Robbie? What if he didn’t exist? Would you stay with me?”

“I said it once. The question is stupid. There is a Robbie and a Terry and there always will be. I love you and I love Robbie and I love Terry and I even love old Jack the dog, and it’s all different and I can’t explain it.” She stopped, her hands pressed to the sides of her head, as if she were holding her head together and then she said, “No, it’s not like I love you and I love him as well. Don’t ask me again Jack Stone, please. There’s no magic wand here. Robbie won’t disappear in a cloud of fairy dust.”

“If I stay here, will you come to me again?”

“No. No matter how often you call, I won’t come again. Please go home to America. Put an ocean between us. I think of Robbie right now, shearing sheep in that shed, desperate, and he’s in a black mood all the time and he needs me, all of me, not part of me. He’s waiting for the army to come, they’ll come, no doubt of that. Part of me is here with you. I love you, Jack Stone, but I can’t see you. I have a living, breathing husband. I’ve made that bed myself. That’s where I’ll sleep tonight.”

I could see Robbie in the dark shed with the sheep and I wanted him to disappear. I felt the way I had felt in the pub, desperate for Robbie to fall into a well, be crushed by Will Stryker’s tractor, be transported to Australia where he would be lost in an opal mine. Perhaps, I thought, in his black mood he will kill himself, but I knew that Maggie was right. He wouldn’t disappear. He was there, now, shearing the sheep, and Maggie was dressing to go to him.

Maggie pulled the blue sweater over her head, reached up and pulled her hair out of the neck, shook her head so that her hair flew loosely about her face.

“What did you see in me, Maggie?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, why me? Of all the men you’ve met, why did you end up here with me? I’ve nothing to offer you.”

“Don’t sell yourself short, Jack Stone.”

“But why me? Sixty years old, worn out, and look at you. You could have anyone.”

“Do you want a list? Is that what you want? You want me to take out my grocery pad and write down all the reasons?”

“Tell me one.”

“You’re a handsome man, Jack Stone. And you’re smart and kind and most of all you love me. I think you’d do anything for me. If I asked you to swim the river for me tonight, you’d do it, wouldn’t you?”

I thought of the turgid brown water pulsing under the bridge and I nodded.

“I know you would, and that’s a bit frightening. And if I say to you, go away because I cannot live with you and Robbie at the same time, I know you love me enough to do just that.”

She had stepped into her skirt and she stood there, running her hands through the tangle of her hair.

“If there were no Robbie, if something terrible happened to him tomorrow, yes, I would stay with you, Jack Stone. But things don’t just happen by themselves. We make them happen. And I cannot make Robbie go away.”

She reached out to where I lay on the bed and touched my face. “Will you get dressed and come out to see me off?”

I dressed while she waited at the door and we went out to the Land Rover. It was black and the noise of the river was continuous, a sliding rush that filled the air. I could imagine Robbie trying to swim the river, caught in the current, his head bobbing under, disappearing in the darkness, swept away.

“I told Robbie I was going shopping at Tesco in Bland-ford.” Maggie pointed to some grocery bags in the front seat. “I shopped before I came here.”

I put my arms around her, pulled her close.

“Goodbye, Jack Stone.”

We kissed and she got into the car and I told her to take care of herself, that I would write to her, and she said, yes, tell me when you become rich and famous, and she started the Land Rover and went over the bridge and up the track, the headlights illuminating the row of trees and then Maggie was gone.

32.

The cottage was no longer warm and inviting. It was empty and I felt drained. I packed my things into my duffel bag and drove across the bridge in the darkness, headed for London. I would wait a week, come back to Dorset, somehow see Maggie again. The M3 was filled with traffic, despite the late hour, headlights coming at me from the wrong side, and I felt disoriented and angry. I blamed myself for asking the question about Robbie, as if that were what had caused Maggie to pull away from me.

It was midnight when I got to London, and I wandered around, lost among one-way streets, finally finding Russell Square, parking on a street not far from my little hotel. The same desk clerk was on duty, and I could smell whisky. Yes, he said, it was a bit late, and yes, he could find me a room and would I be wanting a help up with the bag, sir?

I tipped him, took my bag and the key and found the room on the top floor, a climb of four flights of stairs since the elevator wasn’t working. It felt like the first night I had come to the hotel from the plane and I slept until nearly ten o’clock the next morning.

I took the car back to the rental agency, explained the cracked window as vandalism and filled out a form, listing the Glastonbury police as the source for a report. I came back in on the Northern Line. A smiling young woman was at the front desk and I asked her if there were a weekly rate for my room. Two hundred and eighty pounds, she said. I did the mental arithmetic and realized that I would be paying nearly sixty dollars a night. It was cheap by London standards and I paid it but I knew that if I kept spending at this rate I’d be out of money within a month.

I spent the next few days alternating between working on the screenplay and walking the streets of London. Somehow, what had happened at Sheepheaven Farm seemed like some other world, a parallel universe where characters made love and walked in the countryside and dogs scrambled over the backs of sheep while I watched from my safe vantage point in London, unconnected to those events.

Always, though, I imagined Maggie, rising from the tub, lowering herself on top of me, I remembered kissing her nipples, her passion infusing me as I walked in Hyde Park, seeing couples walking hand in hand and imagining Maggie there with me, swinging her hand in mine.

Several times I found myself in a phone box wanting to call Maggie but I didn’t, I went back to the room, wrote out descriptions of her, began to write alternate scenes in my screenplay in which Maggie and Jack were in that little flat on the edge of the Mediterranean where I remembered the sea, or Maggie and Jack met again in the stone cottage in Dorset, or Maggie suddenly knocking on the door of my hotel room and Jack opening the door and there she was in her old blue jumper, smiling at him.

I went once to see Nigel, told him I was working on a screenplay and he seemed interested in the premise.

“You ought to send a treatment to Richard in L.A.,” he said. He asked how the coast-watcher story was coming and I said it was on hold but I had this marvelous character, a woman who was a Dorset housewife, the one in the new screenplay, and I would let him see some parts of it.

“I have no idea where this story is going,” I said. “But she’s the most compelling character I’ve ever written.”

Nigel said the next time he talked with Richard he’d tell him I was on to something. I don’t know why I went to see Nigel. He was someone to talk to, someone I knew, however casually, and I wanted to tell him about Maggie and me, that it wasn’t fiction at all, that there was this woman in a country farmhouse who was in love with me and I was in love with her only we were separated by something neither of us understood.

I went back to my hotel and I buried myself in my writing, imagining Jack and Maggie together, writing furiously, the words tumbling out.

33.

Always, though, I returned to the scene where Maggie drove off and the phrase ‘What if there were no Robbie?’ echoed. I imagined Robbie coming out of the pub, half-drunk, climbing into his Land Rover and driving down the road and then, when he came to the roundabout, he didn’t look to the right, just as I hadn’t looked that first morning I had rented a car and had nearly been broad-sided by a lorry, but there was no roundabout between the pub and Sheepheaven Farm and Robbie wasn’t smashed by a lorry.

And I imagined Maggie showing up at my room, escaping once again from Dorset; this time she hadn’t gone to the ballet, she had come to me, but the hallway was empty and I walked once again on Upper Woburn Place, down Euston Road to Regent’s Park, making a giant circle that would end in my room and the laptop and Maggie.

I was passing St. Pancras church when I saw the notice “Memorial Service” and heard the faint sounds of an organ. It had begun to rain again and I stepped inside. St. Pancras isn’t one of those restored churches — it’s a bit seedy on the outside, dark inside, well-worn, a church that’s still in constant use and I had wandered in there before. I stood at the back, watching the small knot of people dressed in black, sitting silently along both sides of the nave.

“May I help you, sir?”

The voice came from a young man in a black cassock who had materialized at my elbow.

“I’m afraid I’m intruding,” I said.

“Did you know the young man?”

“Who?”

“The memorial service. The young man it’s for.”

“I’m afraid not. I heard the organ. I came in out of the rain. I should go.”

“It’s quite all right. If you want to stand back here, no one will notice.”

“Who was he?”

“A stonemason. He was doing some work on St. George’s Church, not far from here, and the scaffolding collapsed. Tragic. A young man with a family. Here.” He handed me a sheet of paper. At the top was St. Pancras and an elaborate cross and underneath was written:

Kevin Overend

Beloved husband of Brenda Overend,

father of...

and there was the usual list of names, children, father, mother, brothers, sister.

“You might say he died doing the Lord’s work,” I said. “Working on a church.”

“Hardly.” The voice had lost its softness. “He died doing work for a contractor, replacing stones in a buttress.”

I didn’t look at him. I knew what was going through his mind. Was I an idle tourist, or was I one of those creeps who go around attending funerals? Or was I some sort of Jesus freak who might hang about and interrupt the sanctity of his memorial service?

“Thank you,” I said, and I stepped out into the rain. The street was filled with traffic, black taxis and red buses and the wet noise of tires and all I could think of was the fact that Kevin Overend had been alive last week while I was at Sheepheaven Farm and now he was dead. One minute he was hoisting a stone into place and the next minute Kevin Overend was going end over end toward the pavement. You’re here and then you aren’t. Simple as that. Fall off a scaffolding, Robbie. Would Brenda be off dancing in the pub next week? Out with her girlfriends while her mother watched the children. “Be good for you dear to get out,” mum would say. And what was Brenda thinking there in the nave in her black dress? Good riddance? Sorry you’re gone, Kevin, but I owe a pint to the chap who forgot to tighten those bolts on the scaffolding?

But Robbie didn’t climb on scaffolds with heavy stones and there was no chance he would suddenly disappear. A woman came toward me, and she looked, for a moment, like Maggie, and I started toward her, called out, but she continued walking and I realized it wasn’t Maggie. She walked with a clumsy gait. I turned away and imagined Robbie across the street, hailing me, waving his hand, and darting out into the street and a bus crushing him, thumping over his body while the street came to a standstill, pedestrians froze, cars stopped, a freeze-frame in a script I was writing in my head, and I turned down Euston Road, searching for a pub where I could have a drink.

Coming back from the pub I suddenly began to speak out loud, head down in the rain, a movie pitch, something I had done dozens of times, two hundred words, tell the important part of the story, capture their imaginations. I could picture those familiar Hollywood faces around the table and I leaned forward, intent, stopping at a bus shelter, sitting next to a man, telling him how Robbie might disappear. And then I rose and went back to my room and took off my wet clothes and sat naked at the laptop, wrapped in a blanket while I wrote repeated pieces of the pitch, and I thought of myself in third person, wondering what Jack would do and how Jack could make Robbie disappear. At first I thought in terms of Robbie getting sick or having an accident. But Jack couldn’t count on Robbie getting sick or having a road accident. Somehow there had to be something that could happen to Robbie on the farm that would be fatal. Like Kevin Overend’s fall. Something that would be a natural act on the farm. There would, of course, be a police inspector in this script, and I thought of who would play the part, perhaps Alan Bates and then I thought, no, Clive Owen, he plays that smart detective who always gets his man only this time Jack would foil Clive Owen, plan this thing so perfectly that Owen would come to the farm and get out of his black police car and he would tell Maggie, who was waiting for him in the kitchen, that he had examined every aspect and he was sorry, but it was an unavoidable accident, just one of those freak things, I know that doesn’t make it any better, Mrs. Barlow, but there’s nothing more I can say.

Now the trick was to plot this thing so carefully that it would become just that.

INT. FARM SHED, DUSK

Robbie is shearing the sheep, and we watch him, standing in a puddle of water, peeling off the wool and suddenly he throws the shears into the air.

ROBBIE:

Fucking piece of shit!

(He picks up the shears and examines the frayed wires, then jiggles them until the shears come to life again.)

English current is 220 volts. That’s why I needed this little transformer for my laptop. There was a pool of water that seemed to permanently be in front of the stalls. If Robbie were to be standing in the pool of water, and the shears dropped into them, then he’d suffer an electrocuting shock. How many films had I seen where the woman was in the tub and knocked her hair dryer into the water? Or someone plugged a curling iron in and dropped it into the tub, and the blonde shuddered and died and it was a terrible accident? The only thing was to make sure he was in that water. Jack would have to come up behind him, hit him with something, stun him, and then make sure the wires on the shears were exposed.

INT. SHED

Robbie falls into the water. The shears lie next to him.

Closeup of the shears. Suddenly there’s a blinding light.

Yes, I thought, Jack is home free. Clive Owen will come and he’ll see where Robbie hit his head against the front of the stall and he’ll find the shears with the frayed cord and he’ll come to the only possible conclusion.

34. EXT. CAR HIRE AGENCY, MORNING

JACK AND THE YOUNG MAN walk around the car while he inspects it, noting a scratch on the plastic bumper, a chip in the windshield.

YOUNG MAN:

No point in you paying for somebody else’s misfortune.

He checks them off on the sheet, now soggy from the misting rain, and hands Jack a copy, turns and ducks back into the garage. Jack slides behind the wheel and drives out of the industrial park, onto the A16 and, in a few miles, onto the M3, heading west.

EXT. MOTORWAY

It seems like he drove this same route months or years ago, but it’s really only four weeks since he went off to Dorset in search of White Church Farm, resolved to write something that would put him back on the map in Richard’s office. Richard and Los Angeles are a dim memory now, as is Mr. Orchard and the wretched hut JACK rented on the coast.

JACK’S POV: The windshield begins to fill again with rain.

FLASH BACK TO: The clerk in the hotel commenting that this is the rainiest, coldest Spring that England has ever recorded.

JACK’S POV: He turns the wipers up another notch and they work steadily back and forth. Car after car passes, sending up sheets of water. Apparently the English have no fear of driving at high speeds in the rain. But he isn’t in a hurry. He will take the same road he took a month ago, turning off at Dorchester, arriving in the lane outside Mappowder just at dark.

It’s early enough that Jack knows he will have to kill time someplace and he thinks of detouring through Gillingham, north of Mappowder. It’s enough out of the way that Maggie or Robbie are unlikely to be there on some errand, and he can find a pub where he can stay dry and wait for evening.

EXT. GILLINGHAM – NARROW STREET

Gillingham is gray and wet and it’s late enough so that the streets are empty when he comes through the roundabout near the train station. He finds a pub and parks the car.

INT. PUB – LOW CEILING, DARK

Jack goes in to find it nearly empty, only a few lonely drinkers and a barmaid absently polishing glasses. He orders a pint and takes it to a table by the window where he sits.

CUT TO: WINDOW, LOOKING OUT

He watches the rain sheet down, going over his schedule again, hoping that Robbie will take advantage of the terrible weather to go out into the shed to shear more sheep. Perhaps he has sheared all of them already and will be in the warm kitchen.

CUT TO: KITCHEN – SHEEPHEAVEN FARM

Terry is working on a drawing and Jack the dog is lying near the cooker and Maggie, rising on the balls of her feet, is floating about. It will all be luck, he knows, that Robbie will be in the shed when he arrives. He will have to time it right.

CUT TO: SHED; ROBBIE WITH A SHEEP CAUGHT BETWEEN HIS LEGS

Robbie is shearing a sheep, having started before dark, and Maggie will wait tea a bit longer. If Jack has calculated right, Robbie will remain in the shed and Jack will arrive just after the light goes. Jack has watched him twice before and knows he will have to arrive at the precise moment he has planned.

INT. PUB – JACK’S POV

It’s three o’clock and already darkening because of the steady downpour. A half hour from Gillingham to the road outside Mappowder, five minutes to park the car off the lane, another ten minutes to walk across the field to the shed. It will be dark enough at six so he will have to leave Gillingham by five, but he doesn’t want to sit for two hours nursing a beer. There’s too much chance that he will be remembered. He will have to leave soon, drive for an hour or find another place to kill some time.

He finishes his pint and goes back out to the car, drives south from Gillingham for a half hour until he’s nearly parallel with Mappowder, then east, away from the village, toward Blandford.

EXT. CAR COMES UP A NARROW LANE BETWEEN HEDGEROWS

He circles around and comes at the village from the south, finds the lane at dusk and parks. He knows the spot, a break in the hedgerow where he has several times walked.

The rain has slackened by the time he’s on the lane. He easily finds the gap in the hedgerow and stops the car along the verge.

CUT TO: JACK GETTING OUT OF THE CAR

He walks inside the gap to make sure the ground isn’t too soft. The last thing he wants is to have the car stuck when he comes back, but the ground is hard enough, the rough flint and stone of Dorset unplowed along the edge and the car fits neatly against the hedge, well hidden from the road. Jack zips his Mac, pulls the hood over his head and starts across the field. He can see the lights of the farmhouse and light spilling from the shed when he gets closer. Mud clings to his shoes, making his feet feel heavy. He stops about twenty yards from the shed, wondering if Jack the dog will sense him coming and warn Robbie. With any luck the dog is inside the house with Terry. Jack hears some bleating and then, listening carefully, he hears the high-pitched whine of the electric shears and he feels a surge of excitement.

At the back of the shed is the pile of old timber and he bends in the near blackness, feeling for a piece that’s long enough that he can easily grip. He finds a piece about the size of a baseball bat, wet and heavy, and swings it a few times and then goes to the corner of the shed where the whine of the shears is louder. He hears a bark and then Robbie’s voice.

ROBBIE:

Jack! Mind the sheep!

JACK’S POV:

He steps into the open doorway and there is Robbie, bent over, a struggling sheep between his legs, the wool peeling off in a long strip and Jack the dog turns and looks at him and then turns back to the opening in the pen, making a quick dart at a sheep that has moved into it. The sheep lunges back, tumbling against the others. Jack steps forward, raises the piece of timber over his head and taking another step, swings it at the back of Robbie’s head.

In that instant, Robbie raised his head, and looked straight at me and there was a terrible moment of recognition. He threw up one arm to ward off the blow, but it was too late, the wooden weapon caught him in the temple and there was a sound like a splitting watermelon and I remembered when I was a boy finding Halloween pumpkins with friends and hurling them out into the street, watching them smash. Robbie went down in a heap and the sheep struggled loose from his collapsed body, coming toward me, and Jack darted past, turned the sheep back in and the half-naked animal was driven into the pen. The dog was so intent on the huddled sheep that he paid no attention to Robbie’s body, darting forward again to nip at a sheep that tried to bolt.

Robbie lay motionless on the wet floor, blood oozing from his head, and I dragged him to the puddle of black water next to the stall so that his head was next to the post where I hoped they would think he had struck it and then I picked up the shears. They had gone off automatically when Robbie dropped them. I unplugged them, and tugged at the frayed wires at the base of the shears, worrying them until I had them exposed. I carefully plugged them in again, holding the shears gingerly, and then, making sure that I wasn’t standing in the pool of water, I dropped them. There was a blinding blue-green flash that filled the shed, and it was suddenly black, fuses blown. Jack began to bark frantically and I felt sheep surge past me toward the open door. I went with them, stumbling blindly and now I was running, climbing the low wall to the field, the rain coming down again, slipping, the muddy field grabbing at my shoes. All I could see was Robbie’s startled face and then the green flash and I felt sick, paused to vomit, bent over, hands on knees, and began to run again, struggling up the field.

Behind me Jack was barking, sheep were bleating, and I struggled, head down, almost on all fours, gasping, up the slippery slope toward the far end of the field. Once over the brow I paused for breath, and I could see Robbie’s startled recognition again and I thought, what if he isn’t dead? What if he’s only unconscious and when he wakes he’ll remember me standing there swinging that piece of timber with both hands and this time Clive Owen will hunt me down, knock on my hotel room door, and I would see him there with a young constable and hear his clipped British accent and I sank to my knees and I hoped that Robbie wasn’t dead, that I had only stunned him and that the electricity hadn’t been enough to harm him and I repeated over and over again, out loud, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” and I began to run again toward the car.

But when I reached the hedge and worked my way along it until I found the opening, I couldn’t find the car. I thought perhaps in the darkness I had gone too far, so I doubled back, hunched over at a half trot, stumbling over roots and clods along the hedge, but the field began to slope down and there was neither an opening nor a car. I doubled back, stumbling, blindly putting one foot in front of the other in the darkness, slipping on the muddy track, almost falling, wondering at each step if I would step in a hole or a rut and twist my ankle and still I ran. The rain had been light but now it was harder and it stung my face and I knew it was no longer rain but sleet. Another degree and it would turn to snow. I was soaked and suddenly the opening was there, the pavement of the road a lighter black. I got down on hands and knees and felt for the tire tracks and they were there, filled with water, and there was broken glass, crumbs from a broken car window and I realized that the car had been stolen. I remembered Robbie saying I should lock the car even in the farmyard since it might get broken into. The fucking English countryside isn’t safe from the bastards anymore, he said, and now the car was gone, a rental car parked just inside the entrance to a field between high hedgerows along a little-traveled road in the rain and dark and it had been an easy target. I knew I couldn’t stay where I was and I remembered the travelers at the top of the ridge. They were up there in the copse, the ancient buses, parked in a haphazard circle surrounded by makeshift lean-tos and abandoned cars. If I were you I’d steer clear of them, Jack. That’s what Robbie had said. If anybody would take money to hide me I knew they would. It was my only chance now.

I went through the opening in the hedge and crossed the road, searching for a break on the other side. I finally found a weak spot, worked my way through the hedgerow into the field and began to climb. It was an easy slope, tall grass, and I was worried that I was leaving a track that would easily be followed in the morning, but I continued, now at a half-trot.

Suddenly the field was no longer tall grass but freshly plowed and I slammed into the wet earth, landing on my shoulder and side, the pain shooting up my arm. I lay there for a moment, listening to my breath come in harsh gasps, moving my fingers on my numb hand, hoping that nothing was dislocated or broken, and then I pushed myself upright, rose unsteadily and started out again. Through the rain I could see the blurry lights of Hazelbury Bryan off to the left and the ground began to rise. Clumps of mud clung to my shoes, making them heavy to lift. I slowed, moving at a fast walk, my breath still coming in gasps, temples pounding, wet to the skin now, the sleet stinging my face, forcing myself to keep moving.

Another hedge loomed in front of me and I ranged along it to the right. Finally I found an iron gate and when I climbed over it I found to my surprise that I was standing on pavement. It must be the road to Mappowder, I thought, and I tried to remember where I would be. If I cross the next field and go up I will have to bear left if I hope to find the travelers.

The hedge on the opposite side of the road was impassable, higher than my head, a thick bramble of branches and thorns. More panic. I was out on the road in plain sight of any car that came, but the blackness of the hedgerow lessened and it was another gate and I was over it and into a field of rape, thigh high, and I knew I would leave a trail across it that would be easy to follow. In the daylight the rape was bright yellow, blinding to the eyes under the sun, and my passage would be a steady unbroken line through it and that was no good. I stopped, trying to catch my breath. I could no longer see the lights of Hazelbury Bryan, only the red of the beacon on top of Bulbarrow Hill, and the rain was letting up.

Then I saw the pulsing blue light of the police car coming down the side of Bulbarrow, disappearing along the hedgerow, reappearing when the road broke open. I watched to see if it was coming in my direction. Like a blue strobe in the blackness the light passed off toward the south, then disappeared, only to reappear closer as the car took another road, this time moving toward me.

I waited until I was sure it was on my road, stumbled to the edge of the field and lay in the rape just at the hedgerow, waiting while the motor grew louder and then there was the slur of tires on the wet pavement and the lightening as the headlights swept the road and the blue light pulsed and the car was gone. I lay there, gasping for breath, the pounding in my head so loud I wondered that the passing car had not heard the insistent beat like the bass from some idiot East L.A. teenager’s car radio thumping through my body.

I pushed myself to my feet again and searched until I found the gate. I trotted down the pavement looking for another break, hoping it would be a field where sheep were kept for that would mean grass and it would curve smoothly up the hill to where the copse was and the trees and the travelers.

They would take my money and hide me. Or they would steal my money and turn me over to the police but that was unlikely since they had nothing but contempt for the police. Perhaps they would steal my money and turn me back into the night. It didn’t matter. They were my only chance now.

The hedgerow was growing smaller and I could see the yellow of the rape only as a lightness in the rain that had come again in earnest, slanting in, cold and hard, and as I ran I remembered a Herbie Mann record that I gave away in Los Angeles and the insistent beat of ‘Coming Home’ pounding in time to my feet, the jazz flute piercing the night rain and I lurched on, letting the remembered music carry me.

Another lightness in the hedge beckoned and I went off the road, stumbling up against the muddy bank, coming suddenly to my knees. But it wasn’t a gate or an opening and I went back on the road at a half trot until, fifty yards further, I found a gate and climbed over it and into a field and it was close-cropped grass and I remembered that this was the field on the Mappowder road where Robbie had taken the sheep the day I took the long walk across the fields from the farmhouse.

There was a fierce pain in my chest and I wondered if my heart would burst and they would find me in the morning when the rain stopped. I slowed, forcing myself to keep moving, stumbling, the pain in my chest rising into my head, and I slowed to a walk, trying not to gasp, remembering somewhere from my teenage years a warning from a high school coach that if I gasped too heavily I would hyperventilate and lose consciousness.

Now I stumbled blindly in the icy rain, the field rising sharply. Somewhere there would be sheep and above me the blackness of the copse and the travelers and respite from the rain and the pain in my body. My arm and shoulder were numb and I wondered if I had broken something in my fall. I stopped and turned, trying to hold my breath, steady the pounding in my head and I looked out into the space where I knew on a clear day I could see three or four villages but there were no lights as the rain came steadily.

I climbed at a walk, my shoes heavy with mud, the blackness of the copse near, rounding the shoulder of the hill onto flat ground, the dim outlines of the two buses just in front of me, no lights, no voices, but the smell of smoke told me that there had been fires where the smokestacks were. I stood, breathing heavily, and there, facing me, was the black-bearded man I had seen that day I hiked away from the farm.

He spoke. I half-expected some sort of Eastern European accent, since Robbie had warned they were gypsies, but this voice had an accent that would have been common in London. “Help you, mate? You lost?” But it wasn’t a voice of comfort, offering help to a lost hiker. It was a hard voice, as if he had caught me trying to steal something.

“Yes,” I said. My voice was hoarse, gasping. “My car was stolen, I need some help.”

“It’s the middle of the fucking night, mate. You don’t expect me to drive you someplace at this hour.”

“No. If you’ve got a dry place where I can stay until daylight, I can sort this out.”

“You mean go to the coppers and tell them your auto got nicked.”

“I’m not sure. Maybe I just couldn’t find it in the dark.”

“Maybe you was hoping to nick one yourself.”

“No. I can pay for the night.”

“You think this is some fucking B and B, mate?”

“Please. Just some place out of the rain and a blanket. I’ll pay you.”

“There were copper’s lights in the vale tonight and you show up here all muddy in the middle of the black and I’m thinking it’s more than just a blanket that you want. I’m thinking what you want is a place to hide and those places don’t come cheap.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “Either my car has been stolen or I couldn’t find it in the dark. All I want is a dry place for a few hours.”

“I’m thinking maybe you should piss off, mate. And then, again, I’m thinking you sound desperate for a place to be right now. I’m thinking it will cost you fifty quid for a seat on the coach and another fifty quid for a blanket.”

I was shivering uncontrollably now and a hundred pounds seemed cheap. But I knew that if I agreed, he would know that I was in some sort of trouble, that the last thing I wanted was to see a policeman, and I would be at his mercy. I had no choice.

“You’re taking advantage of me,” I croaked. “You know I’m too cold and wet to go any farther. If I could make it to the village I could find someone to take me in, but I can’t go any farther.”

He didn’t reply. He moved away toward the coach and I followed. He pulled open the door and climbed up the short steps toward the driver’s seat. I followed.

It was dark inside and suddenly a flashlight flared and he set about lighting an oil lantern. The dull glow from the lantern illuminated the interior of the coach and I could see that most of the seats were gone, there was a small pot-bellied stove at one side, and in the back what appeared to be sleeping quarters, bunks along each side. An old couch was along one wall, there was a table and several chairs. Nothing was distinct. A woman’s voice from the darkness at the back of the bus said, “Who’ve you brought in here,” and he said, without emotion, “Shut your mouth.”

He turned to me and said, “A hundred quid, mate.” He reached out his hand.

I fumbled in my pocket, pulling out my soggy wallet. I counted out five twenty-pound notes. There were still another five bills in the wallet and I sensed he knew it, too. He was the kind of man who could count money with his nose, that much I knew. The coach smelled of bodies and sour food, strange spices, sweat, smoke and damp. He smoothed the notes, took a small roll of bills from his pocket and added mine to it. “Over there, mate,” he said, motioning to the couch. I sat. He went toward the back of the coach, pulled a blanket off one of the bunks. The voice said, “Give me back that!” but he snatched the blanket away, saying, “Shut the fuck up.” He threw the blanket at me, watched while I pulled it around my shoulders. “That’s your spot,” he said, pointing again to the worn couch. “Don’t move from it.”

35.

I was conscious of the smell of oil and rank clothes and something cooking, and I woke groggily, sitting up on the worn couch to see two women wrapped in layers of clothes, one watching me, the other cooking something in a frying pan on the potbellied stove. It was warm and I was inside an old bus, the driver’s seat empty, most of the seats removed, and then I remembered Robbie and the terrible hike up the wet fields and I looked around for the dark traveler. He was nowhere to be seen.

Neither woman spoke when I sat up. The one looking at me was younger, a tangle of wild hair framing an almost feral face, and she nudged the other woman who turned to look disinterestedly at me. She was older, stout, layered in coats and sweaters with her hair coming out from an old watch cap pulled down around her ears. She grunted and turned back to the skillet.

“Where’s your man?” I asked.

There was no response.

I shucked off the blanket and stood.

The young woman who had been silent suddenly spoke.

“You come from Sheepheaven Farm.” Her voice rose accusingly. “You been there, that much I know. I put a curse on that mean bastard and now he reaps the curse. It touched you, too. There’s black smudges on your soul, the devil’s fingerprints, I wager. The devil’s fires will blaze, you mark my words. You best be getting a long way from those fires or they be burning you, too.”

I had a sudden image of the great pyre in the Strykers’ field, the petrol-fueled carcasses blazing in the half-dark, the smell of burning wool and hides, the stink of charred flesh. And I could see Robbie’s startled look as I swung the club and the bright flash before everything went dark and I felt sick again, and I stumbled out of the coach. The dark traveler stood a few yards off and he spoke.

“Sleep well, did you mate?”

I looked past him to where my small white rental car was parked behind the coach.

“That’s my car,” I said.

“Is that right? You parked it here last night, did you?”

“You stole it, you thieving son of a bitch!”

“Let’s just say somebody retrieved it for you.”

“It was here all the time!”

“Are you accusing me of nicking your car, mate?” His tone was threatening. He took out the roll of bills from his pocket and fingered it.

“I reckon you want to drive off from here and my guess is that you’d like to do it right away and not spend a lot of time discussing the matter. So, another hundred quid would make things right, if you know what I mean.”

“I don’t have a hundred pounds.”

“Empty your fucking pockets, mate. You want your car, you can have it. If you don’t want me to tell the coppers you came here in the middle of the night all caked in muck, my guess is you’ll pay me and leave and I won’t even remember you were here.”

“You don’t want to call the police. I’ll tell them you stole the car and you’ll be in for a shitload of trouble.”

He smiled. “You could take that to Ladbrokes and they’d give you hundred to one. Be cheaper to drop a hundred quid and be done with it, wouldn’t it mate?”

“I’m not your fucking mate!”

“You’re nothing to me, you quivering cunt. You want your car?”

I had no choice. I took my soggy wallet out of my pocket, counted out the rest of my twenty pound notes and he took them without a word. I crossed to the car and looked in the broken driver’s window. The ignition had been punched out and a tangle of wires dangled below the steering wheel.

“How do I start it?” I asked.

“Touch them two wires together, the red one and the black one. Same as a key.”

He turned and went toward the coach, obviously finished with me. I got into the car, took the two wires and touched them together and the starter cranked, the engine coming on just as if I had turned an ignition key.

I went north on the A36 until I met the M3, then turned east toward London. I tried not to think about Robbie. What was done was done. I felt a strange calm, a numbness that stayed with me until the traffic began to stack up as I neared the city. It took all my concentration to drive, and I went straight to the hotel, changed my clothes, and drove out to the car hire agency.

I explained to the same young man that I had surprised car thieves on a road in Devon, and they had fled, leaving me with the ignition wires hanging.

“Lucky for you they took off. If it were me, I’d have given them the bloody car,” he said. I had taken insurance on the car and he said I wouldn’t owe anything.

“You get a police report?” he asked.

“It was out in the country. I have no idea where the police were,” I explained.

“That’s all right,” he said. He gave me some forms to fill out, asked me where it had happened, and I pointed to a spot on his map.

“Country’s not safe anymore,” he said. “They steal them right off the forecourt. Thieves and murderers.”

I took the underground back into the city and bought a bottle of scotch at a liquor store on Woburn Street. When I was, once again, in my grotty little room on the fourth floor, I filled a glass and downed it, and I drank steadily until I was unconscious.

I awoke with a splitting headache, my lips cracked and dry, and I drank glass after glass of water, pausing once to throw it all up in the toilet down the hall. I fed coins into the water heater in the loo, stood in the shower repeatedly until I felt human again and then I went out to walk, something that I would do a great deal of in the next few weeks.

36.

For the next several days I did nothing except walk and buy newspapers, hoping to see some report of what had happened in Mappowder, but none of the London papers reported anything beyond the big cities. Unless it was the kind of crime that made it into the tabloids, anything that happened in villages in the West might just as well have happened in a foreign country. The events of that night in the shed became vague, almost as if someone else had swung the timber at Robbie’s head.

There was a nagging hope that Robbie had only been injured by my attack and I half expected the police to show up at my room although how they would have tracked me down was unclear. But as the week wore on, I became convinced that it was not possible to survive the blow I had struck, and the electric shock that followed. Robbie had disappeared.

I began to work on the screenplay again, and I spent hours at the laptop writing scenes in which Maggie and Jack were together: in a tiny flat along a beach in Italy, the sun blazing on the water; in a cottage in the middle of a hillside vineyard in France, the workers’ voices coming through the open windows at first light, the two of them stroking each other’s bodies in the afternoon heat. Jack and Maggie became two people whose lives I chronicled separately from the Jack and Maggie of Sheepheaven Farm.

At the end of the first week I thought about telephoning Mary at the pub in Mappowder, making the excuse that I had left something there and asking her if there were any news about the Barlows. But I didn’t, fearing that the worst might happen and she would relay my call to the authorities. I would wait at least another week before going down to Dorset to see how things had turned out. If Robbie were dead, he would, no doubt, be buried in the village plot where his parents were. And I wouldn’t want to arrive too soon after that. Things needed to settle down.

I spent another week holed up in the hotel room, hemorrhaging money, walking back to sit at the laptop and re-read the scenes where Maggie and I had made love. I wrote another scene in which the two of them lay on a hilltop, and when I had finished that scene I realized that it was a California hilltop where I had located them, their clothes off, their bodies glowing in the sun. I think I kept putting the two of them into sunlit scenes because the English weather continued to be gray and foggy. It was no wonder, I thought, that the English fled each year to Spain and France and Greece where they took off their clothes and burned their skin.

Sometimes the scene in the shed in which Robbie’s startled gaze met me as I swung the timber came flooding back and I would put on my coat and walk at top speed, take the underground to another part of London and walk my way back to the hotel until I was exhausted and I could only think of Maggie in her blue jumper, barefoot, her voice saying, “what would happen if I went into his room in the middle of the night and fucked him.”

The fourth week I changed to a room in a boarding house behind the crescent, a dingy rabbit warren filled with marginal human beings. I tried not to think of myself as one of them. I was counting days now, and at the end of the sixth week I made plans to go back to Sheepheaven Farm. I found another cheap car hire agency and arranged to rent a car.

37.

The village looked the same. But, I thought, it’s probably looked the same for a hundred years. I slowed as I went past the pub to make sure the Land Rover wasn’t parked in the little parking lot next to it. I saw no one as I passed through the village and that was good. Somehow I didn’t want to see anyone, only find Maggie at the farmhouse. I rehearsed what I would say, how I would profess shock at Robbie’s death, how tragic it was, could I do anything? We would have a cup of tea, sit in the kitchen and I could reach across the table and stroke her hand, and then, when it began to get dark I would ask if I could stay, only a bed to sleep in, nothing more, and I would be in the same house with her and Robbie wouldn’t be there, she would be alone in her bed, and if she came to me only for comfort that would be good, too.

I was at the farm, and as I turned in at the gate I saw a different car drawn along the side of the house, a blue Saab sedan, and a woman hanging clothes on the line only it wasn’t Maggie. Perhaps, I thought, it’s a sister or someone to help her in her grief, but the farm looked different somehow, the curtains in the windows strange. I waited, the car drawn just inside the gate, and the woman stood at the line, clothespins in her mouth, watching me. A dog came around the corner of the house toward the car and it wasn’t Jack. It was a heavy-set dog, the kind that ends up next to the fire, not running after sheep in the field, and I put the car into reverse, backing out into the road, turning back toward the village. I would go to the pub, ask Mary how things were in the village, ask how the Barlows were, did they still take people in? My temples were pounding. Had I waited too long? Was Maggie gone?

There was a beat-up Land Rover next to the pub but it wasn’t Maggie’s. It was piled with farm tools and one fender was crumpled and I recognized it as the Strykers’.

Inside it was dim and familiar and there were the Stryker brothers along the tiny bar, pints in front of them. One of them turned as the door opened.

“Hey, it’s the Yank!”

I came to the bar and stood next to them. Mary stood expectantly opposite, as if I hadn’t been gone for weeks, had been in the night before.

“Hello, Mary.” I turned toward the Strykers. “What am I drinking?” I asked. “It was some sort of animal beer that’s made nearby, right?”

“Badger, mate. That’s what you was drinking.”

“So,” I said as I eased onto the remaining stool. “How are things in the village?”

“Same thing. Only the army’s gone and the plague went with them.”

“Did they kill all the sheep around here?”

“Only our uncle’s and Billy Gray. Turned out the others weren’t infected. Or so they said. Ask me, and I’ll tell you there wasn’t no plague, just Blair buggering farmers.”

“How are the Barlows? They still taking in tourists?”

There was a stillness. Nothing moved except one of the Strykers began turning his glass on the bar, sliding it gently in a circle before lifting it and draining it. He set it on the bar and Mary picked it up, holding it under the spout, expertly drawing it full, setting it wordlessly in front of him.

“Is that a bad question?” I asked. “Nothing wrong, I hope.”

“You wouldn’t know, you not being here and all.” It was Will Stryker, the tall one, who turned to face me. “Just after you left they was an accident out at the farm. Robbie got hurt bad.”

“Hurt? How? Is he still alive?”

“Something went wrong with the shears, he got fried by the electricity, hit his head something awful, Maggie found him in the shed hardly breathing.”

“But he’s alive?”

“Worse than that. He’s alive all right but he’d be better off dead. He’s paralyzed, can’t do no more than shake his head and shout at you in some gibberish. They say he’s all right inside his head but he just can’t tell anybody what happened and he can’t take care of himself, can’t even shit by himself.”

“Are they still out at the farm?”

“No, they was there for a while, but Maggie couldn’t deal with Robbie and the sheep and the boy. So she up and sold it. It went quick at auction, she put it up two weeks ago and some toff from Southampton bought it only he don’t run sheep, now, he just comes down on weekends, says he’s going to retire in the countryside, live the life of the squire.”

“Where did she go?”

“Maggie? Nobody knows. The boy went up to an uncle in Yorkshire, right, Mary?”

Mary spoke for the first time. “Maggie couldn’t bear to have him around Robbie. Robbie was all the time shouting and you couldn’t understand him and there was no way to quiet him down so she sent Terry and Jack off to her brother and his wife.”

“And Maggie? You say she’s gone, too?”

“A few days ago.”

“To her brother’s?”

Will Stryker spoke. “Nobody knows. She didn’t tell nobody. Although I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she wasn’t somewheres with that poufter who could dance.”

“Shut up, Will Stryker,” Mary said. “You’ve no cause to say things like that.”

“What poufter who could dance?” I asked. “Somebody from here?”

“No,” Will said, “he was a nurse what the county sent to help Maggie out, lift Robbie, take him to the shitter, clean him up, he stayed out to the farm and we all thought he was a poufter. I mean, what’s a man doing being a nurse? But he wasn’t no poufter, was he Mary?”

Mary didn’t reply. She picked up a pint glass, carefully polished it with a dish cloth and, turning, put it on the back bar with the others.

“Well, I think he got a leg over Maggie if you know what I mean and maybe it wasn’t just Maggie, now was it, love?”

Mary turned back to Stryker and said, “Shut your gob, Will Stryker or you’ll be doing your swilling in some other trough.”

“Touched a nerve there, I think, Yank. Anyway, Maggie, she ups and puts Robbie in one of them car parks for cripples down at Bournemouth where he sits all day in his wheelchair drooling and shouting in a strange tongue and she sells the farm and goes off with the kid, don’t tell nobody where she’s going, and if you was to ask me I think she went with the nurse who was maybe doing some extra nursing. So, Mags is gone, so is the kid and the dog, and Robbie is in a nursing home in Bournemouth and some arsehole who talks like he’s got a stick up his arse has bought Sheepheaven Farm and it’s a shame because it was a good farm, but that’s the way things is going in the village, Yank. Ain’t you glad you asked?”

I had waited too long. Maggie was gone. And Robbie wasn’t dead, but he might just as well be dead. Luckily for me, he couldn’t tell anybody what had happened that night.

“Are you sure nobody knows where Maggie has gone?”

Stryker lifted his glass, half-emptied it and put it down slowly on the bar. “Not a word to anybody. Unless Mary, here, knows. The two of them was thick as thieves, wasn’t you, love?”

Mary said nothing.

“How would I find Robbie?” I asked. It wasn’t that I wanted to see Robbie, but I wanted to hear his gibberish, know for sure that Robbie couldn’t say anything about what had happened in that shed. And maybe the people where he was hospitalized would know where Maggie was.

“Mary, here, knows. She’s been down to see him. Takes him a can of lager. He takes it through a straw, don’t he love?”

“You’re a pig, Will Stryker.”

I drank my pint and bought Will and his brothers another. I changed the subject, asking them about the foot-and-mouth and they told me it had run its course, they had only destroyed the uncle’s sheep and Billy Gray’s and then it surfaced again in Devon and the army went north. “More cowshit from Labor, no different from the Tories,” he said. “They don’t give a tinker’s damn about us country folk. They’d rather eat goose shit from Froggyland than pay attention to us.”

Eventually the four of them rose and went off, leaving Mary and me in the pub, the silence so thick I could hear the clock behind the bar ticking.

“So, Mary,” I asked, “Do you think Maggie went off with that fellow?”

“No. He wasn’t nothing to Maggie. He wasn’t nothing more than a few hours without Robbie. He was company for her. I went out to the farm and Robbie was a trial, he was, shouting all the time, they had to tie him in his wheelchair or in his bed, he kept trying to get up but he couldn’t get up, he fell on the floor, sounded like he was cursing somebody or something. And he never let up. Not unless Simon, he was the nurse, give him an injection. Then he was just a vegetable, looking off into space. Simon liked to dance, same as Maggie. They’d come here sometimes for an hour when Robbie was drugged, get Mrs. Gray to watch Robbie for a bit.

“Maggie danced something marvelous. But she wouldn’t dance with nobody but Simon. The Strykers, they wanted more than a dance, that’s for sure. They’re good lads but they can be pigs, they can. I liked Simon. But he and Maggie weren’t having it off, that’s for sure.”

“Do you know where she went?”

“She went up to Yorkshire to get Terry, up at her brother’s place. But she isn’t there no more. I sent her a letter, it come back.” Mary leaned against the back bar, neatly folding the bar rag, leaned forward and placed it next to the taps.

“Will said you went down to see Robbie.”

“I did, yes I did. I took him a can of lager. He shouted something awful at me, thrashed around in his chair. He did have some of the lager, though. Through a straw. That’s how they mostly feeds him. He’s nothing but skin and bones.”

“Maybe I’ll go down and see him.”

“He might know you. They say he’s got some brain left and it’s mostly his body what don’t work. ‘Course he can’t talk so’s anybody can understand him and his head lolls about something awful, like one of them dolls with a rubber neck. They has a kerchief tied around his forehead to lash him to his chair.”

“And Maggie? Does she see him?”

“Not that I know of. For a while she come down from Yorkshire to see him but she told me it was too painful, him jabbering and shouting at her. She wouldn’t bring Terry after the first time. She said it wasn’t Robbie no more, just some sack of flesh what made awful noise. It wasn’t her Robbie no more.”

“You mean she just left him and she hasn’t come back? That doesn’t sound like Maggie.”

“No, it don’t, but you take yourself down to Bournemouth and see him and you’ll understand.”

She unfolded the rag and ran it over the clean bar top.

“But she has a brother in Yorkshire?”

“That she does. I don’t know if she’s there or not. Maybe she just don’t want no more letters from me. Maybe what they had at the farm was all spoilt and she wants no part of any of us.”

“I’m probably going to be up there next week. If I had the address of her brother I could stop in, tell her how sorry I am. And if she’s there, I could let you know.”

Mary leaned back again, folding the bar rag.

“I’d leave her alone if I was you, mister Yank. Now, if you’ll not be having another one, I think it’s time you went.”

“And if I wanted to see Robbie?”

“You be my guest. He’s down to Bournemouth at a place called Precious Care Home. It’s owned by a chap named Alfie Precious, which is why it’s called that. Them what lives there says it ought to be called Precious Little Care Home since they get precious little. It’s in the directory.”

Mary turned her attention away from me and it was obvious that she had no more to say. Or wanted to say. But if I went down to Bournemouth, saw Robbie, perhaps I could get Maggie’s address, or at least the place in Yorkshire where her brother lived. And perhaps Maggie did come to visit Robbie from time to time. And I would find out if Robbie could say anything about that night in the shed.

38.

The quay in Bournemouth was a broad street that curved along the sea. Along one side were shops and hotels facing the water and on the other was a low stone wall that fronted the wide flat beach below the street. Across the curve of the harbor green hills were a dim outline. In the cold gray light of early afternoon it had none of the charm of a seaside resort. Summer was not here, and the paddleboats were stacked against the stone wall, the shacks that sold fish and chips and candy floss were shuttered. There were few people on the wet sidewalks and the beach was deserted except for a bundled old man with a dog on a leash. Seagulls walked boldly on the pavement, scattering momentarily for the occasional bus. I drove to the end of the quay, turned and came back and then turned off into the town. The blocks behind the hotels and shops were filled with guest houses, continuous rows of Victorian town houses, steep steps going up the front of each one, each block a single long building with a brick facade, only the trim on each house different.

I found the address of the Precious Care Home in the telephone directory in a petrol station just off the roundabout entering the city and after consulting the map and making several wrong turns I discovered that it was only a few blocks from the quay. It, too, was a brick Victorian building, two stories, separated from the other buildings on the block by a narrow alley filled with overflowing rubbish bins. I parked and stepped out into the cold wind that swept up from the sea.

I expected it to be warm inside the building but it was cold and clammy in the little lobby. There was a sliding window in one wall with a shelf in front, apparently where visitors checked in, but there seemed to be no one in the cubicle behind. I looked for a bell or a buzzer, but there seemed to be no way to summon anyone.

Then a door opened and a large woman in a flowered dress came out.

“How may I help you?” she asked.

“I’m hoping to see a patient,”

“You have someone staying with us?”

“He’s a friend. A mister Robbie Barlow? Is he here?”

“Oh, how nice,” she cooed. “A visitor for Robbie. You’ll have to sign in. A formality, you know, authorities want to know everything about everything these days.” She slid the little window open, reached in and took out a small register. There was a ballpoint pen attached to it with a string and I wrote my name.

“And your address?” she said, looking over my shoulder.

“I’m just traveling through. I may spend the night here in Bournemouth.”

“Well, that’s all right,” she said. “I judge from your accent that you’re not English. American? Canadian?”

“American.”

“Then just write America. I’m Agnes Precious. My husband and I are the proprietors. That’s why it’s named the Precious Care Home,” she bubbled cheerfully. “Although we like to call ourselves the caretakers.” She looked again at the register, then at me. “This way, Mr. Stone” and she stepped back through the door, holding it open for me. We were in a long corridor with a high ceiling, dark wainscoting and a worn wooden floor. It had the look of an old hotel with transom windows above each door. It smelled of urine and disinfectant and stale laundry. At the end of the corridor we came into a wide room filled with old people in wheelchairs. Potted plants were along the wall where a bay of windows looked out at the building opposite. There was a table in the center of the room with half-finished puzzles covering it and a television set flickered on a shelf in one corner. Most of the chairs faced the TV, but others were haphazardly scattered with slumped occupants who seemed asleep. I noticed that all of them had cloth cummerbunds that held them in their chairs.

“Robbie!” the woman called out to a chair near the window. “You have a visitor!”

I wasn’t prepared for it. The man in the chair was emaciated, hollow-eyed and he shook. He vibrated, as if he were sitting on some continuous electrical connection, his hands in his lap loosely shuddering, his head bobbing, shoulders, arms, the constant shaking of someone who has been put in a refrigerator or is lost in a blizzard.

“You have a visitor,” she shouted again. I wondered if he were hard of hearing or if she shouted simply because she needed to get through the chattering framework. “It’s a Mister Stone.”

Robbie suddenly began to grunt and then a torrent of guttural shouts bubbled from his lips, spittle flying, and it seemed as if he were trying to talk or focus his wildly flying eyes.

“Oh dear,” she said. “Sometimes he gets this way with someone new. We think it’s his way of recognizing them. The doctors say he’s still got a good brain, although how they know that is beyond me. Have you got a good brain, Robbie?” she asked. “Can you recognize your friend here?”

Robbie continued to blurt noise, and the spittle turned yellow, as if phlegm were coming out as well.

“Never mind,” she said. “He’ll settle down in a minute or two. I’ll leave you two to chat.”

I stood there in front of the wheelchair and I could swear that he was trying to lunge at me, and there was something fierce about his eyes that told me he knew who I was and he remembered the night in the shed.

“Can you hear me, Robbie?” I asked.

He continued to shout. No one else in the room paid any attention. At least I thought they were shouts. Obscenities, angry accusations.

“I’m sorry. I know that’s not enough, but I’m truly sorry.” His chin was wet with slobber and it flew in all directions as his head vibrated and I wanted to wipe it off for him and I wanted desperately to leave. Mary had been right when she said it wasn’t a pretty sight. But Mary hadn’t clubbed him into this and I was sure that the intensity of his shouts was recognition of who I was and what I had done. One thing was certain, Robbie Barlow wasn’t going to be able to tell anyone that I had tried to kill him.

“I’ll come back, Robbie,” I said. I needed to escape and I looked for Mrs. Precious but she was nowhere to be seen. I looked down the corridor but there seemed to be no one there and then, through an open door, I saw an orderly pulling stained sheets off a bed.

“Can you tell me where I’ll find Mrs. Precious?” I asked.

He threw the sheets into a cardboard box on the floor.

“Down the hallway, first door on the left, mate.”

Mrs. Precious was at a small desk, a cup of tea at hand, sorting through some papers. “A problem, Mr. Stone?”

“No, I’m leaving for a bit, but I’ll probably stop in again.”

“That was quick,” she said, arching her eyebrows.

“I was wondering,” I said. “His wife? Mrs. Barlow? I think her name is Maggie. Does she come to see him often?”

“No, we haven’t seen her in some time. She sends his keep by mail regular, she does.”

“And would you have an address for her?”

“That would be Mr. Precious’ bailiwick, Mr. Stone. He keeps the books. You’d have to speak to him.”

“Is he here?”

“No, he don’t come in until afternoons. I do the mornings. And why would you be wanting Mrs. Barlow’s address, if I may ask?”

“I just thought I’d like to drop her a note, tell her how sorry I am about Robbie’s accident.”

“Well, that’s nice of you, Mr. Stone. You come back this afternoon and Alfie, that’s my husband, you talk to him.”

On the way out of the building I saw the placard taped to the glass next to the door.

HELP WANTED APPLY WITHIN

NO EXPERIENCE NECESSARY

I drove back to the quay and found a pub facing the sea. It was dark inside, clammy, and the bartender pulled a beer for me, commented on the weather and left me to contemplate my options. I would go back to the Precious Care Home and find Alfie Precious. If he kept the books as his wife said, he would have Maggie’s address. I could track her down, make some excuse for seeing her, but I thought of Robbie’s shuddering body and I wasn’t sure I could face Maggie, knowing what I had done. Perhaps, with time, it would go away. If I waited long enough, Robbie would die and he would be no more than a photograph in a scrapbook, but again the image of his emaciated body vibrating in the wheelchair came back to me and I felt sick.

I finished the beer, went outside and walked along the promenade, the sharp wind cutting at my face, the sea flat with a white chop that looked sinister. A huge ferry backed out of a slip in the harbor and wheeled slowly before heading out toward France. I could go to France, I thought. I could also go back home to Los Angeles. Or, I could go back to Precious Care and find Alfie Precious and get Maggie’s address. I knew I would try to find Maggie. She was a magnet and I was nothing more than iron filings on a sheet of paper, and if the magnet touched the paper, the filings darted toward it, unable to do anything else. I would carry the knowledge of what I had done to Robbie, and to Maggie and Terry as well, with me and I would find her and somehow it would sort itself out.

I went back to Precious Care and found Alfie Precious in the same office where I had last seen his wife. I told him I was a friend of the Barlows, had been in that morning to see Robbie. Wasn’t it a tragedy, I said.

“He’s alive,” Alfie said, “and I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not. But they don’t give him much chance of living very long, no matter how we feeds him. So we takes care of him and it’s nice that you come to pay him a visit. Some of our folks don’t see anybody they know. We’re all they got.”

“I was wondering if you have an address for his wife?”

“You said you was a friend of theirs?”

“Yes, but I haven’t seen either of them since before the accident. I thought if you had her address I could send her a note. Express my sympathies.”

“I’m afraid, Mr. Stone, that’s not possible. You say you’re a friend, but you have no idea what kinds of scamps come in here. Bill collectors, insurance folks, even them what sells coffins and funerals. No, I don’t have an address for Mrs. Barlow for you.” He turned toward his desk, as if he were dismissing me.

“I can understand that, Mr. Precious. Perhaps if I gave you a note, you could send it along to her, let her know I was here?”

“No, I wouldn’t be able to do that either. Matter of fact, she don’t have an address. I get the payment each week from a bank, comes regular as clockwork, so unless she lives in the bank, I don’t have any idea where she is. And if you’re such a good friend, I’d say you ought to be knowing where she lives. Wouldn’t that make sense, Mr. Stone?”

“It would. But I knew them when they lived at Sheepheaven Farm in Mappowder, and I’ve been on the continent on business. Her friends in Mappowder said she was at her brother’s house in Yorkshire, but I’m afraid I must have that address wrong, since the note I sent to her last week came back to me.”

“And where be you staying, Mr. Stone?”

“Here in Bournemouth. At least for a few days.”

“If you give me your address and I hear from Mrs. Barlow, perhaps I’ll call you.”

“That’s kind of you, Mr. Precious. I’m afraid I don’t know the street address, but I can bring it by first thing in the morning. Would that be all right?”

“You can leave it with the wife.” He began to rearrange papers on his desk and I knew I was being dismissed.

“I’ll go out and see Mr. Barlow, if it’s all right.”

“Oh, quite all right. They’re always grateful for a visitor. We don’t stand on ceremony here, Mr. Stone. You know the way?”

I went back down the long hall into the common room and found Robbie in the same spot he had been in that morning. Somehow I felt compelled to see him, talk to him, assuage my guilt, I suppose. In any case, when he saw me he broke into the same guttural shouts, slobbering and vibrating and I waited opposite in a plastic chair for a break in his outburst.

I sat there, enduring Robbie’s abuse, for I was sure that’s what it was, for a long time. Finally I spoke to him.

“I asked about Maggie, Robbie. They tell me she sends a check every week, but they don’t know where she is. What am I to do?”

He shouted again, this time a quick yell, and I thought to myself, he’s just told me to fuck off. It was as if I could understand the code in which he was speaking, and I could take the transposed sounds and reassemble them and I could make sense of the slobbering noise that came from his shuddering body. Of course, that was nonsense, although I paid closer attention to the next utterances, hoping that somehow they would become clear. But Robbie began to drift off, exhausted by his performance, and eventually he slipped into silence, his head slumped forward, straining at the cloth bandage that tied it to the back of the wheelchair. Even though he seemed to have drifted off into sleep, he vibrated, quick random movements that seemed as if they were brought on by someone poking him with an electric prod.

I watched him for a while longer. I had told Alfie Precious that I would bring my address the next day. And if there were any chance of my finding Maggie, it would be here at the Precious Care Home. Alfie’s claim that he had no way to get in touch with Maggie was a lie. He had to have some way to contact her. So I needed to find a place to stay in Bournemouth. More importantly, I had to get rid of the car, an expense that was draining my dwindling bank account. And I would have to find something cheap to stay in. Then it dawned on me that I could take a job with Alfie. The placard in the door advertised work. No experience necessary, it said. He probably needed orderlies or clean-up people, and there was no reason I couldn’t work for him and be near Robbie, which meant that if Maggie came to see him, as eventually she must, I would be at hand. I could ingratiate myself with Alfie and Agnes, and I would pry out of them the name of Maggie’s bank. I would somehow find out where she was, and I would see her again.

39.

I left Precious Care, and hunted for a cheap hotel in Bournemouth. I found one in the back of the town, a brick building that had seen better days, with a sign in the front door that said “rooms to let.” It had the same look as the hallway at Precious Care, and the elderly man who showed me the room looked as if he had been a part of the building for years. It was a room not unlike my cheap room in London, a bed, chair, small dressing table, an old armoire on one wall and a bathroom down the hall.

“We lets the rooms by the week, sir,” he said as we went back to the front hallway where there was a pay phone and several umbrellas in what looked like a waste-basket until I realized, with a start, that it was a hollowed-out elephant’s foot. I paid him for the week, took my things from the car, and looked for the car hire agency in the phone book that hung from a chain next to the telephone. The nearest office was in Salisbury and when I telephoned them they said yes, I could drop the car off there, it would mean an extra charge of thirty pounds, but that was cheaper than driving it back to London and taking a train down to the coast, so I drove the hour to Salisbury, left the car, and took a bus from Salisbury to Bournemouth. For some reason the image of the empty elephant’s foot filled with umbrellas kept popping up, and I could see natives gathered around the dead elephant, sawing off the feet, balancing them on their heads and following some Victorian white hunter back to camp.

The trip took several hours, the coach stopping periodically to pick up or let off passengers, and it was nearly ten o’clock when I got back to Bournemouth and walked the empty streets back to my hotel. The elephant foot was there by the phone when I let myself in.

The room was cold and the steam radiator under the window was just warm to the touch. But there were several rough wool blankets and I wrapped myself in one, plugged in my laptop, packed my clothes in the armoire, and settled in. “Tomorrow,” I said out loud, “I will go to the Precious Care Home, get a job, and I will find Maggie. That’s a promise, Jack Stone.”

I slept fitfully. Perhaps it was the cold clamminess of the room. I had a dream that elephants on stumpy legs were being herded through the hallway of Precious Care, with Jack, the sheep dog, nipping at their heels and Robbie in a wheelchair, his body vibrating, shouting instructions at Jack. I found myself trapped in the common room with the elephants running at me, the floor vibrating and somewhere the voice of Alfie Precious shouting, “Have at him, Barlow! He’s a fraud!”

I spent the next morning in the room, sorting out my finances — I was running low on money, and had enough for another month at most. I tried to work on the script but nothing would come and I rehearsed what I would tell Alfie Precious. My story about business on the continent wouldn’t wash if I asked for a job at what couldn’t be more than minimum wage in a run-down home for cast-off old folks and cripples. I would have to pretend to make a clean breast of it, tell Alfie that I was down on my luck, needed to make enough money for passage home, and hope that he was cheap enough to hire someone who obviously didn’t have the legal standing to work in England. I would work Maggie and Robbie into the story, tell him that I had spent time at Sheepheaven Farm, had worked for Robbie and had come back in hopes of finding more work.

Finally I left the room, wandered along the promenade for a while and then made my way to the Precious Care Home. It was early afternoon and Alfie was in his office.

“Mr. Stone,” he said. “You’ve come back to us.”

“Yes, I said I’d leave off my address.” I held out the piece of paper with the address of the hotel.

Alfie looked at it, then at me. “Will you be staying there long?” he asked.

“I don’t know. That depends on you.”

He watched me carefully, not saying anything. I was struck by the ferret-like quality of his face, and I half expected his nose to twitch, whiskers to sprout from beside his thin lips.

“When I came in here yesterday, I’m afraid I wasn’t entirely honest with you.”

Alfie continued to look at me, his eyes unblinking. Alfie, you’d make a good poker player, I thought. You know when to keep your mouth shut.

“I’m afraid that I’m a bit down on my luck.”

“What, exactly, does that mean, Mr. Stone?”

“It means that I’m running short of funds, need a job in order to get back to the States and I suspect the British government would frown on my working for wages, since I’m not here to take a job.”

“How do you know the Barlows?”

“I worked for Robbie at Sheepheaven Farm for a short time. I came back down to the village to see if he would take me on again. And I thought if I could find his wife, maybe she’d lend me a bit.”

Alfie smiled. “You was thinking maybe she got some insurance money from her husband’s accident, was you?”

“No, nothing like that. I just thought maybe she’d lend me enough to get a ticket back home.”

“And you expect me to believe all this, Mr. Stone?”

“You can believe what you like, Mr. Precious. The sign on your front door says you need a worker. I’m willing to work. My guess is that you won’t mind if I’m not legal. My guess is that you’ll pay me less than you would a regular worker and you probably won’t have to pay taxes to the government or health insurance, the kind of things that employers in America have to do as well.”

“So, Mr. Stone, you be guessing that I’m willing to take a short cut around the law to save a few quid, do you? Wouldn’t there be penalties for employers in your country if they did the same?”

“Only if the worker is found out.”

“You’re no boy down on his luck, Mr. Stone. You’re a well-dressed man, same age as me, I’m guessing. Why do I think your story don’t ring true?”

“Let’s say I’ve made a few mistakes, Mr. Precious.”

“We’ve all made mistakes Mr. Stone.”

“Please call me Jack.”

“Well, Mr. Jack Stone, suppose I was to give you a job? And suppose you was to make enough to get yourself a ticket to America. In a few weeks you go skiving on me and who knows what you’d nick on the way out?”

I was struck by the fact that he called me Jack Stone, the same way Maggie had used both of my names, and at that point I wanted to say to him, you little rat-faced prick, all I want is Maggie’s address and it’s just possible that I’d nick your fucking head on the way out, toss it over the promenade into the fucking sea, but I said, “There’s that chance, Mr. Precious. But there’s also the chance that I’ll stay on several months since my guess is that you won’t be paying me enough to save up for a trans-Atlantic ticket in a few weeks and from what I’ve seen, there isn’t much worth nicking, as you put it. We both stand to gain on this. I get a paycheck, you get a cheap worker, and I’ll keep my mouth shut.”

“How do I know you’re who you say you are?”

I took out my passport and laid it on the desk. He thumbed through it.

“So, you came here near three months ago? And it says here you’re a writer. What does that mean?”

“It means that I used to make my living writing movie scripts, but I haven’t sold one in years and that’s why I’m down to my last few dollars.”

“Dollars won’t do you much good here, Jack. Pounds sterling it is, got the Queen on it. Used to be, when I was a lad, everything American was gold, but not no more, Jack. We does all right on our own.”

“So, is there a job for me?”

Alfie closed my passport and handed it back. “You don’t have much tick or you wouldn’t be staying where you are, that’s for sure. Three pound an hour, five days a week, twenty-four pound a day, less a pound a day for your tea, you eats the same as the folk what lives here, it ain’t much, but it’s filling, so that’s one hundred fifteen pound a week, paid in cash on Friday.” He chuckled. “My old man, he worked for the Duke of Carlisle, farm laborer he was. He used to get up on Friday and stretch out his arms toward the manor house and say, ‘It’s Friday! Today’s the day the Duke shits!’ You be here tomorrow, eight o’clock, Jack. I’ll try you for a week. We’ll see how you turn out.”

“What kind of work will it be?”

“They shits in their sheets, they needs to be fed, they need a kind voice, somebody to wash them and mop the floor and make sure they don’t fall out of their zimmer frames. Whatever it takes, Jack.”

40.

The following morning I came to work at Precious Care Home. Agnes Precious gave me a green smock to wear and I spent the morning mopping floors, washing out bedpans, and collecting soiled linen to take to the washing machine in the basement. There I met Ali, a slightly-built Pakistani whose voice rose and fell in a lilting sing-song and who, when he found out how much I was being paid, said I was being cheated.

“He’s a mean bastard, that Alfie Precious.”

I protested that he didn’t seem mean, just cheap, and Ali said, “No, that’s what I meant, he’s mean,” and he rubbed his thumb and forefinger together and said, “If you were to drop a single pence coin on the carpet he would hear it and pick it up when your back was turned!”

Ali, too, was being paid under the table and so was Joshua, a beautiful West Indian boy with smooth ebony skin who turned everything into song, making up rhymes as he piled dirty sheets in the machine.

“Dis bunch of linen, it be soiled,

de water swirls and takes away

all de things that sticks to it.

How come this mon make a living washing out shit?”

The work quickly fell into a routine and by the end of the week Agnes had me feeding patients and wheeling some of them out onto a little terrace for what she called “their morning airing.” Agnes took a liking to me, said I was good with the oldies, and she told me repeatedly that I shouldn’t be down on my luck, Mr. Precious had told her all about me, there was no reason a man as easy as I was shouldn’t be a success in life, sometimes she couldn’t understand how things worked out but weren’t we lucky not to be like them, meaning the patients who sat comatose in their wheelchairs or shuffled around in walkers. Some of them sat for hours on the edge of their beds, staring at the doorway as if expecting a relative to show up any minute.

One old man buttonholed me every morning as soon as I came into the common room.

“You!” He pointed a finger at me as if he were accusing me of stealing something. “Call my solicitor. I’m being kept here against my will.” Each time, when I demurred, he’d wheel back a few feet, shouting, “It’s not that you can’t. You fucking won’t. You’re part of the conspiracy, you are. I hope you end up in a place like this, you scurvy bastard!”

But the next time I’d see him, he’d be sweetness and light, want to play drafts or have me wheel him out onto the terrace. A pretty mum in her thirties came periodically to visit him with his two grandchildren and they hung back while she tended to Dad and he alternately cried that he wanted to come home where he’s loved and called her a slut, “nasty little scrubber, fuck everything in the village with trousers on, you would,” and the next moment “How are the roses? Will I be going home with you today, my love?”

And there was Robbie. At first I tried to stay away from him but Agnes had me feeding them, helping some of them to get dressed, and it wasn’t long before my routine in the mornings meant that I spent most of my time with what Agnes called her “chickens.”

“Time to feed the chickens, loves,” she’d announce and Joshua and I brought up stacks of trays from the kitchen in the basement, arranging wheelchairs along the common room table. It was impossible for me not to spend time with Robbie. Joshua literally danced along the lineup, singing songs he made up to match the meal’s menu.

“Peanut butter, good for you,

stick your teefs in like glue.

Eat your tuck, you’ll not go wrong,

Missus Agnes make it strong.

She make de soup from heads of fish,

dis haddock he make quite a dish.”

And with a flourish he would place a thick plastic bowl of watery soup in front of an old dear, sashaying back to take another bowl from the cart and invent a new stanza. Sometimes there was a smattering of applause, dry hands slapping gently, usually when Joshua’s song pilloried either Agnes or Alfie.

Robbie had to be hand fed and it was a struggle since anything more than liquid by straw had to be put in his mouth with a soup spoon, one hand holding his head steady, the other trying to get the food past the vibrating lips and jaw. Most of it went down onto the child’s plastic bib that was tied around his neck. I learned how to hold his chattering mouth, pressing my fingers and thumbs on his jaw so that it remained open long enough to get custard down him, or meat ground into a soft pâté, and Robbie no longer had to periodically be connected to tubes in order to get enough nourishment to maintain his steadily wasting body.

The second week I was there I broached the subject of contacting Maggie again with Alfie but he cut me short.

“Like I told you, Jack, I don’t have no address except for her bank and that’s something that’s none of your business. Maybe she’ll be coming down to see him come Christmas. There’s some what comes for a visit on special days. But I wouldn’t hold much hope for Robbie Barlow. I’ve seen his like before. They waste away, don’t last a year, no matter what we does. Everything inside shuts down. You mark my word, that lad isn’t long for us and if you was to ask me, I’d say it’ll be a blessing when he goes.”

I asked Joshua and Ali if they had ever seen Maggie. Both said no.

“Sometimes he gets a postcard from a lad named Terry,” Joshua said. “I see two, maybe three of them.” Joshua had the job of distributing mail and he often read the card or letter out loud to patients whose sight was failing or whose hands shook too much to hold the page. He embellished the messages with rhymes, repeating lines in his lilting Jamaican rhythm. I told him to let me know the next time Robbie got a card.

41.

I slipped into a routine at Precious Little. That’s what Joshua and Ali and the others called it. Maxine, the day nurse who tended to the medical side of the patients, arranging medications and checking blood pressures, became a daily source of gossip and cheer. She was a large woman who came into Precious Little at mid-morning in her hospital whites with a little white hat perched on her straw-colored hair like a Sir Francis Drake galleon under full sail.

I met the night people. There was a janitor named George who was obsequious, called me Mr. Stone Sir as if it were all one name. George rode an old fat-tired bicycle with a tiny gas engine bolted to the frame so that he could both pedal and motor along the flat stretches with the engine rattling loudly. He claimed it was his grandfather’s and “granfer rode it in the Blitz, he was a messenger, rode it right through them buzz bombs and all.” There was a practical nurse named Georgette who had the night duty. A non-descript girl in her thirties who arrived at the end of the day, she silently removed her coat, silently made tea, and for a while I thought perhaps she was mute but Maxine said, “No, she keeps to herself and perhaps she’s got good reason to do so, never mind that she’s no chatterbox, she keeps watch all night and tends to those what need her and she’s ever alert, she is, and that’s what she’s paid for and Alfie and Agnes ought to treat her better or they’ll lose her and they won’t find another one like her, that’s for sure.”

During the day there were Shirley and Wilma, two girls still in their teens who were, according to Maxine, school-leavers who ought not to be allowed to breed but “they will,” she said, “they will and if they was dogs or cats they’d be fixed only they certainly aren’t because they’re in heat all the time, leave a trail of poor boys barking up their skirts, there ought to be one of those government warning stickers on them.” Joshua called them “dey Surely Will Sisters.” They were never more than a few steps from each other and lived in fear of Maxine whose sharp “You lot! Get that bed made proper! Look alert or out you go!” rang out and poor Shirley and Wilma looked around but Maxine wasn’t in the same room with them, she was out in the corridor. But Maxine knew they’d done a sloppy job even if she couldn’t see them and dey Surely Will Sisters thought she could see through walls.

The rain finally stopped, the weather turned and there were a few warm days. Whenever there was a bit of sun, Bournemouth filled with people bound for the beach and the quay became filled with cars and people and beach chairs blossomed along the wall. A month passed with no postcard for Robbie and now when I fed him he no longer seemed to struggle as much; the strange cursing that I felt at the beginning had diminished.

Sometimes, when I had finished with the other patients, I’d wheel Robbie out onto the terrace. That’s what Agnes called the little balcony that looked out toward the sea, only you couldn’t see the sea from there, only the backs of the hotels along the quay. But it faced south so the light was stronger and I took a chair and sat in front of Robbie. I held his head with both hands to stop the shaking and looked directly into his eyes. His eyeballs rolled uncontrollably, which was why they couldn’t train him to answer questions the way they did with terminal MLS patients. They trained them to roll their eyes up and down for yes and side to side for no, but Robbie couldn’t control his eyes so there was no way to establish a pattern that would enable him to communicate. It was as if all of his circuits had been scrambled and he waited there behind his rolling eyeballs, thinking complete thoughts, trapped in a body that wouldn’t cooperate. His brain sent signals to his eyes, his mouth, his tongue, his hands, so many commands it was as if he was trying to do eight different things at once, neurons slamming into each other in confusion, a crowded rush hour car on the underground where all of the passengers are trying to get out at the same time, elbowing each other, cursing, and all the while the train ran full speed through the black hole under the streets, the door wide open.

I took his head in my hands and held it steady and I looked him straight in the face and I talked to him.

“Maggie was a good fuck, wasn’t she Robbie? The absolute best.”

He couldn’t answer, so I answered for him.

“How would you know, Jack Stone?”

“Because I shagged her, you spastic jellybean. I’ve told you that a thousand times.”

“You’re lying, you never shagged her, you’re too old. She’d have no interest in an old American prick like you.”

“That’s what you think. But you didn’t value her enough, Robbie. She was a treasure and you took her for granted.”

“Fuck you, Jack Stone. I never took her for granted.”

“I’m sorry. That was unnecessary. I apologize. You never took her for granted. But I’m not sure you knew how much of a treasure you had.”

His head moved under my fingers, and I swore it was a conscious movement, not just uncontrollable muscles being exercised at random.

“You see, Robbie,” and I bent so that my face was only inches from his, looked straight into his vibrating eyes, “I never meant to fall in love with her. But she was so graceful and so bright that I never had a chance. I never meant to hurt you. You were in the way. There I was, going full speed down the track toward Maggie and you were in front of me and I couldn’t stop.”

Robbie gurgled and then shouted, a harsh grunt that broke into babble, like someone speaking in tongues, possessed by God on Saturday night in the Holy Roller Church, and I held his head steady, spittle running down onto my thumbs that held his chin. He would have bitten me if he could.

“We need to get over this, Robbie. Every time we talk about her, you get emotional. We need to talk rationally about this, because Maggie is what we have in common. Can you see her? Here she comes, down the hall, barefoot, wearing that old blue vest from Marks and Sparks, as if she’s dancing, coming to see us, the two men who love her so much they would do anything at any time, no matter how unspeakable or dangerous, she has only to ask.”

We talked this way for a while until Robbie fell unconscious. He often did this, his frantic bobbing and weaving and shouting babble dying, slowing, until he sat, almost catatonic, his body vibrating ever so slightly, held to his chair by the wide cummerbund of cloth wrapped around his chest.

I know, you’re going to say, no, you weren’t talking to Robbie, you were making up all the words, talking to yourself, but I could feel his words in my hands, feel him telling me to fuck off, that I was the cause of all the pain that he felt, but he wasn’t as angry as he was when I first saw him. Sometimes I thought I could hear words in the cascade of sound that rushed from his lips, and I repeated them, asked him, Robbie, did you say you loved Maggie? Is that what you said? Where’s Terry? Where’s Jack the dog? And the sounds came again, like water over stones in a river, and I bent my face, nearly touching his lips, felt the spit on my cheek, and I listened for words of love.

The terrace was sheltered by a similar terrace above us, the floor where the ones who were dying were kept in hospital beds, surrounded by tubes and catheters and the smell of urine and disinfectant. The joke among the ones who, unlike Robbie, could communicate, was that you went “upstairs” to the next floor, and from there you went “upstairs” in a pine box. Even if it rained, Robbie and I often stayed out on the terrace. The rain seemed to soften him.

The doctors said that patients like Robbie had a limited life span. They had to supplement his diet since it was hard for him to get much food down and his internal organs were more likely to fail since they weren’t functioning normally. Muscles atrophied and he was more susceptible to infections. It was only a matter of time, they said.

But everyone was amazed at Robbie. He continued to hang on, seemed to be iron willed, and they said I had made the difference. “If it weren’t for you, Mr. Stone,” Maxine said, “we would have seen the last of Robbie Barlow some time ago.”

But I didn’t think it was that at all. It was Robbie’s anger that kept him alive. He refused to die to spite me, and he knew I couldn’t leave him alone because I held on to the slim hope that Maggie would show up. I was the symbiotic parasite that lived off the plant and the plant tolerated me because I helped to keep it alive by keeping the other pests at bay. I wasn’t this remarkably selfless person who tended so carefully to Mr. Barlow, the one Maxine pointed to and said, if we only had more like Mr. Stone, the world would be a better place. Maxine couldn’t see the dark of the shed and the rain coming down, as Maggie said, in stair rods, and Robbie’s startled face as Jack swung the piece of timber and the electric flash that filled the air. I went through the motions with the other patients, emptying bedpans, pulling off dirty linen and stuffing it in the bags, spooning jello into Mrs. Churchill’s sagging mouth, easing crazy Simon Salmon into the little shower where I held him against the wall, my hand on his bony chest, aiming the portable shower head at him and he squealed and I told him, “Shut up, Simple Simon, we need to get the fish stink off you.” I finished them all, then turned my attention to Robbie. I bathed him and talked to him and sometimes we took long walks on the quay along the beach. Summer finally came in late July and the streets filled, there were children running in and out of the water, the paddleboats dotted the harbor and the hotels and rooms were filled. I pushed his chair all the way to the end, more than a mile, and sometimes if there was a woman sunning herself in a chair on the beach who looked vaguely like Maggie, we stopped and watched her. Robbie was lashed to his chair with a cloth cummerbund and a kerchief around his forehead and I tucked in a blanket, no matter how warm it was. The blanket seemed to contain his vibrations. The English didn’t pay much attention to things like that. Nobody took the least notice of Robbie, shaking in his chair as we went down the promenade. Their beaches weren’t anything like those in Los Angeles. In L.A., anybody who doesn’t have the body of a teenager feels uncomfortable among the tanned and lithe, but on an English beach you saw middle-aged men with their pants legs rolled up, shiny black socks and oxford shoes, and portly women in bathing suits and pasty-faced young men and nobody seemed to care whether or not you looked as if you just stepped out of Vogue. Robbie and I were ignored.

42.

Sometimes after Robbie dropped off I sat with him and watched his gently vibrating body and thought about Maggie. How she had cut Robbie out of her life, as if she had lanced a boil or excised some sort of demon. At first I wondered how she could do that. She seemed too good, too much in love with Robbie, but as I cared for him and spooned gruel into him, and held his spouting mouth while he jabbered, spitting obscenities that only I could decipher, I knew that she was still in love with Robbie, but this creature wasn’t Robbie, he was someone or something else.

I knew couples like that in Los Angeles. When they divorced, each simply dropped the other off the radar, as if the seven or ten years they had spent together and the two children and the house in Brentwood had never existed. They had become other people, so it was easy to do. Robbie was no longer the person she loved. He had become a thing that gibbered and drooled and she wanted to hold onto the shaggy-haired man with the black beard who quoted Shakespeare and made love to her in dangerous places, his lithe body melting into her receptive touch.

My laptop seized up. I’d tried to keep the script going, and had written some decent scenes that took place at Precious Little, but when I’d tried to write out what happened at the shed that night everything took on a surreal quality, and I wrote as if in a dream. I deleted lines almost as fast as they appeared, saving only fragments. When the laptop crashed I shut it up for a week, then took it to a shop on the High Street that advertised computer repairs.

“We could get it running again, sir, but you’d be better off putting your money into a new one. Hardly cost effective to repair this one.”

“How about getting the files out?”

“Not a problem, sir. You leave it with us and we’ll download them onto a disk. Pick it up tomorrow, then?”

“How much?”

“Twenty pounds, give or take.”

The next day I had my dead laptop and a disk in a plastic envelope. I bought some school notebooks, like the ones Terry had been using as his copybooks, and tried to keep the script going, but somehow it wouldn’t work and after a few days I simply stopped writing. I kept a diary of the day’s events at Precious Little in one of the copybooks, though, filled with shorthand notes, just a log of the day’s events, sometimes a few lines from one of Joshua’s songs. I thought briefly about having the repair shop print out a hard copy of the script but didn’t. Money had become scarce. Alfie paid me four hundred and sixty pounds a month, my room took three hundred of that, food took another hundred and twenty pounds, so there wasn’t much left over. I washed my clothes at Precious Little, had a biscuit and tea for breakfast, ate my noon meal with Ali and Joshua and all three of us stoked up since we were being underpaid by Alfie and we often went home with peanut butter sandwiches or a sausage roll wrapped in a napkin. I usually had fish and chips and a beer in the evening, since there was no way to cook anything in my hotel room. I was sure that others cooked on hot plates since there was a regular smell of something cooking. I still had about seven hundred dollars in my bank account in Los Angeles and I knew I could draw on it to get home, but I didn’t want to touch it.

July became August and then the postcard arrived.

43.

“Post for Robbie Barlow, Jacko,” said Joshua that morning, holding out a postcard.

It was a picture of a sheepdog, much like Jack, posed in front of a flock of sheep. I turned it over and read:

Dear Daddy

Jack got hit by a lorry and we had to put him down. Mum won’t tell me anything about how you are so I’m going to get on a coach come August bank holiday and come to see you. Mum has a job in a library. I hope you are better now.

love, Terry

Obviously Terry knew nothing of Robbie’s condition and Maggie wasn’t telling him anything. I looked at the postmark and tried to make out where it had been mailed. All I could make out was Yorkshire and the date. It had been mailed two days before. So, Maggie and Terry were living in Yorkshire, no doubt with her brother or perhaps near him. And she had a job in a library.

I tried to piece out how I would go about finding Maggie if I were in Los Angeles. Go to the library and find the telephone directories for cities in her county. Look up Maggie Barlow, see if she’s listed. If she’s not, I’d go to the Department of Motor Vehicles and use their database to check on her license. Perhaps it was possible to do the same thing in England. Yorkshire was a county, so there must be marriage records and there I’d find Maggie’s maiden name, the key to her brother. She works in a library. Find the addresses of libraries in Yorkshire and call each one, ask for Maggie Barlow. Eventually I’d find the one where she works. Or, I could wait for Terry to show up on the coach to visit his father. August bank holiday was only a week off.

I waited, but Terry didn’t show up. Bournemouth filled with people over the weekend, and there was a steady stream of cars towing caravans going south toward Cornwall. By the middle of the following week it was apparent that Terry hadn’t boarded a coach to find his father. I’d have to try a different tack. I went to the police station, asked how I would track down someone’s address through a driver’s license, but I learned that the English were much more careful with the privacy of citizens than at home. I was told the police could make an official inquiry if I had a legal problem with someone, but I’d have to show cause first.

I went to the public library and asked the librarian if there were a telephone directory for towns in Yorkshire.

“Only for York, sir. There’s just too many others for us to carry them all.”

I found the telephone directory for York. There were plenty of Barlows but there was no Maggie Barlow or Margaret or M. Barlow.

Back at the desk the librarian suggested I go online and look for her. She pointed to a table with several computer terminals.

“You’ll find access over there. If she’s listed in a directory, you’ll no doubt find her.”

It seemed too easy, and it was. No listing for Maggie or Margaret but there were two M. Barlows in Yorkshire villages, and I copied them down. I went to the telephone box just outside the library steps and fed coins in, but neither call produced Maggie. Mary had said that Maggie had stayed with her brother in Yorkshire. And I didn’t know the brother’s name.

Inside the library I asked the librarian how I could find a list of libraries in Yorkshire.

“Which kinds of libraries, sir?”

“Just libraries.”

“There’s all sorts. Public libraries like this one, school libraries, the university has several libraries in York, there are even some lending libraries in villages.”

“I’m doing some research for a book and I need to look for source material in Yorkshire libraries. I’m not sure where the material might be, so I’m just going to have to make a door-to-door search, I guess.”

“You could go online and look for your subject, sir.”

“I’ve tried that. No luck. What I need to do is telephone and ask. I know it sounds tedious and perhaps useless, but it’s the last hope I have.”

She looked skeptical.

“Do you know how many branches a public library has?”

“Quite a few, I imagine.”

“More than just quite a few. And there will be a good many libraries that aren’t listed under library. They’ll be part of a school. The Mechanics Institute here in Bournemouth has a library, but it’s not listed in the directory under libraries. It’s for the students enrolled there, and of course they know about it, but the general public simply doesn’t have access.”

“Could I try anyway? Get a list of those libraries in Yorkshire that are public?”

She sighed.

“You’ll be on a wild goose chase, that’s certain.”

She nodded toward the table with the computer terminals.

“Over there you’ll find access. Enter libraries and you’ll get the search for what you’re looking for. Then, when you find the names, you can print them out and take them to the directory section. You can look up the numbers in York. If you can’t find it there, you can go back to the search and go to each library.” She rolled her eyes. “I hope you have a good deal of time, sir. You’ll need it.”

I did as I was told. The list of libraries was, as she had said, a long one. I looked up the libraries in the York directory and copied them down, then went back to the terminal and began the tedious task of looking up each of the other libraries and copying out a telephone number. For many of them there was no telephone listing, just the name of the library. I spent all of that Saturday looking up telephone numbers, and when I was in my room that evening I looked at it, and realized that the plan wasn’t going to work. Each phone call would cost me at least fifty pence at the pay telephone in the downstairs hallway. I couldn’t make the calls from Precious Little. Alfie was tight enough to look at every call made and I’d get the sack. I’d have to make the calls when libraries were open and that meant I’d have to call during the week, but I worked then. Some of them would, of course, be open on Saturdays, but school libraries would be closed, and besides, they weren’t listed under libraries. I realized that the librarian had been right. If Maggie worked in a school library, I’d have to call every school in Yorkshire. Not only that, nearly half of my list had no telephone number. There had to be another way. I’d have to find Maggie’s maiden name. That’s when he showed up.

44.

I first noticed him that night outside the fish and chips shop where I often picked up my evening meal. Seventy-five pence got me a single piece of haddock and a handful of chips in a greasy wrapper. A bottle of beer from the off-sale at the end of the street and I had a cheap supper. He was leaning against the wall as I came out of the shop with my fish and chips and as I passed him he gave me a long look and I thought nothing except that when I had gone a few yards down the street I thought to myself, I know him. He’s not just somebody who’s visited at the home or I’ve seen in a pub, I know him from someplace important and then I realized that he was the dark traveler, the gypsy who had stolen my rental car and taken my money and let me stay in his coach at the top of the hill above Sheepheaven Farm. And I realized at the same moment that he knew who I was. I turned and looked back, but he was nowhere to be seen. After that, I looked for him and two nights later when I approached the chip shop I could see him leaning against the same wall.

I turned around, headed back for my room, my heart beating rapidly. Apparently he wasn’t there by chance. The next morning, when I came into Precious Little, George was standing by his bicycle, clipping his pant leg, getting himself ready for his ride home.

“Mr. Stone Sir,” he said.

“Yes?”

“There was a bloke here last night looking for you. Said he was a mate of yours. Come just after you left. I just be coming on work and he asked if I knew an American chap and he described you spot on, and I said, yes, that be Mr. Stone, he works here but he’s gone. He asked where you lived but I don’t know that, do I, and besides, he was a bit of a spooky one, he was, black beard and all. I hope I done all right when I said you worked here.”

“No harm done, George. I think I know who he is.”

So the dark traveler had been to Precious Little. They knew me in the chip shop, and he must have asked about me there. He was looking for me and he would find me and confront me so there was no longer any point in avoiding him.

That evening he was, once again, leaning against the wall in front of the shop. As I passed him, he said, “Nice evening, mate.”

I ignored him, went in and got my usual piece of haddock. When I came out he fell into step alongside.

“Funny seeing you here, mate. A bit of a coincidence you might say.”

“How do you know me?” I asked.

“You can’t have forgotten me, mate. You come up that hill on a fierce night, all covered with muck and I’ve nicked your car and you emptied your wallet. No, I think you remember me well.”

“What do you want?”

“Well, the day you left there was coppers all over the village and it seems some poor sod got his head bashed in and at first they thought it was thieves he surprised but then they couldn’t find nothing to connect him to anybody else and they decided that he’d had an unfortunate accident, fell and bashed his skull and got his brain fried with a pair of electric shears, he did. The coppers come up to us, of course, we’re the first ones they always come to, and we had to clear out and we come on down here. Only I put two and two together and I’m thinking you wasn’t just taking a hike on the hill that night.”

I remained silent. We had walked past the street where the boarding house was, only I didn’t want him to know where I lived. I kept walking.

“I asked a few questions myself. There was a Yank, they said, name of Stone, he stayed at that farm. So I’m thinking to myself, what’s this Yank doing in the middle of the night, his car tucked into the hedge, all out of breath and willing to pay me two hundred quid to put him up and give him back his car and I’m thinking maybe he’s got something to do with the farmer who had an accident.

“So I asked around a bit and yes, there was an American staying out at that farm and he come into the pub with the two of them, the farmer and his foxy wife and he danced with the wife and I’m thinking, well isn’t that a bit of a coincidence.

“And then, there you was, wheeling some bloke in a sick chair down the promenade, just as bold as brass, and I said to myself, now there’s an opportunity.”

“Like you said, it’s a coincidence.”

“Me seeing you on the prom, that’s a coincidence. I’m thinking the other has a bit different smell to it.” He laid his hand on my arm and we stopped.

“We passed the turn to your digs, mate. I knows where you live, I knows where you work, and I’m thinking the coppers would find you on the hill that night just a bit more than coincidental.”

“What? You’d tell them you stole a car? Look, I was on my way to the farm and I stopped the car for a bit of a walk and you tried to steal it and I surprised you and you ran off and I went back to London with it and that’s it. You’ve got no proof I was ever in your coach that night.”

“I’ve got two women who saw you there.”

“You’ve got nothing. You’re all thick as thieves. Who’d believe you? Or them? You saw me when I went for a walk one day. You open this can of worms and you’ll be right in the thick of it all over again.”

“Are you a betting man?”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“How much would you be willing to stake on me not going to the coppers? What kind of odds do you suppose Ladbrokes would give you?”

“Suppose they believe you? What would you get out of it?”

“It’s not a question of what I would get. It’s a question of what don’t happen to you. You see, I’m thinking that the lady at the farmhouse, she’s mixed up in this, too.”

And suddenly I was panicked. If he dragged Maggie into this, then it wouldn’t matter what the outcome was, she would know what I had done, or at least harbor suspicions, and I would never see her again.

“Suppose I told you that I work at Precious Care because I’m broke, have no money.”

“Then I’d say there must be folk in America who have some money who wouldn’t want to see you all mixed up with the English law. I’m not a greedy man. Five hundred quid and you’ll never see me again.”

His hand was still on my arm, only now the fingers had tightened and his dark face was only inches from mine. I could smell cigarettes and some strange oil and his voice came from the dark bearded face as if it were disembodied, flat, impersonal, no malice, only a simple stating of fact. As if he were saying, ‘The world is round, mate. I thought you knew that.’

“And if I tell you to bugger off?”

“Then you’ve placed your bet, haven’t you?”

I weighed my options. If I paid him, it was an admission that I had something to hide and he’d still be around, a time bomb ticking away. He wasn’t likely to be satisfied. If I refused and he went to the police and dragged Maggie into it, all would be ruined.

“Look,” I said. “I’ve got nothing to hide and I’ve got no money. But you can do real damage with your wild story and I think you know that. You can ruin that woman’s life, what she has left of it. Her husband’s a vegetable, she’s lost her farm, and she doesn’t need you to hammer a nail into her coffin.”

I could suddenly see some teeth in his dark face and I knew he was smiling.

“Give me a few days to think about it. I might be able to scrape up some money just to make sure you leave the poor woman alone.”

“Listen, you pathetic cunt.” His voice was hard now, menacing, and he gripped my arm hard enough to make it hurt. “You make up your fucking mind. I’ll give you two days. Thursday night you be at the Kings Head at the bottom of High Street. That’s where you’ll find me. And don’t get any ideas about flying the coop. If you’re not there, I’ll fucking drop a coin to the coppers and they’ll get an anonymous tip about the Yank who was lurking about that farm the night the bloke got his head bashed in.”

He released my arm.

“And don’t you forget you’re on a fucking island, mate. And I’ve got an eye on you as well.” He turned and walked off into the night and I stood there, waiting. Somewhere there was a radio playing and I could hear music, perhaps from a pub on the next street over.

45.

What I noticed first was that his shoulders were no longer vibrating. The blanket was wrapped around his shoulders and his head so that for me, pushing from the rear, he was only a gray lump. But the shoulders weren’t moving, no motion at all, so I stopped and went around in front and his eyes were open, staring straight ahead, but there was no movement. He was still.

There was no point in taking his pulse. Robbie had given up. I took the blanket off his head so that I could see him more clearly and I pushed him slowly back to Precious Little, talking softly to him, apologizing again and again, and then I began to tell him what we were passing, there’s a girl in a pink bathing suit, Robbie, she’s a knockout, and there’s a little boy about Terry’s age, or he would be about what Terry was when I last saw him. He’s digging a pit in the sand and he’s all the way down to his waist, and his mum is reading a book and she’s got her skirt to her waist, only she’s not nearly so good as Maggie. You wouldn’t fancy her at all. I stopped at the toffee stand and bought a string of candy and offered some to Robbie. I talked to him and those passing by paid no attention, an older man talking to his crippled brother in a wheelchair and then we went on back to Precious Little and I wheeled him to the basement door by the dustbins. I went inside, looking for Ali or Joshua as I always did when I came back from a walk with a wheelchair patient. Alfie had a small lift for those who couldn’t climb stairs but it was hard to fit a wheelchair and another person into it at the same time so two of us always carried wheelchair patients in through the basement and up the stairs.

This time, I found Ali and told him that Robbie was down in the alley and he was dead.

“Sorry to hear that,” Ali said, “he was a sort of mate of yours, wasn’t he?”

We carried Robbie up to his room, laid him out on the bed and I told Maxine that Robbie had died.

“That’s a blessing,” she said. “I’ll tell Mrs. Precious.”

I knew what would happen next. Agnes would call Alfie and Alfie would call the coroner. A black van would show up, careful to park in the back by the dustbins where no one could see it. Ali or Joshua and I would carry the body back to the basement door where it would be strapped to a wheeled gurney, stowed in the van and the van driver would have tea while Alfie, who had arrived by then, would fill out the paperwork. Relatives would be notified and Joshua and I would clear out the resident’s room, box the clothes and few personal things and change the linen. With that, the dead one ceased to exist.

So it was with Robbie. I stood in the doorway and looked at his emaciated body and I tried to remember what he looked like at Sheepheaven Farm, but he had faded so that there were only snatches of remembered incidents: the night at the bottom of the stairs when he had shouted, “I have fallen and will not rise again,” his shrill whistle that sent Jack scrambling over the backs of the sheep. Hopefully, Maggie would come to Precious Little to make the final disposition of the body and collect Robbie’s few things. There was, of course, the chance that it would all be done by telephone and the post, but there were always things to sign. Whatever happened, it would happen quickly. Robbie was gone and now I would find out where Maggie was, that much was certain.

46.

I could see them on the street, waiting while a car passed, crossing toward the building. It was Maggie and Terry. Terry was nearly a foot taller than I remembered, a handsome boy, and he favored his father, shaggy black hair, slender, and he walked hesitantly, as if unsure of what he would find inside the building. They came to the concrete steps and disappeared beneath me. Maggie was in the same building and I was frozen.

Leaning on the hood of a car just down the block was the traveler. He would, of course, not know that the two people who had crossed in front of him were Robbie’s wife and son. Or, perhaps he did know them. One of his women had been to Sheepheaven Farm, had put a curse on Robbie, and it was possible that he recognized Maggie. And if that were the case, then I would hear from him again, and he would once again make his demand that I pay him or he would tell her what he suspected. The only thing to do would be to watch him carefully, and wait until Maggie and Terry left. If he followed them, then he knew who they were. If he ignored them, then chances were he didn’t recognize them. Maggie would be making arrangements for Robbie’s body. It would, no doubt, go back to Mappowder where his parents were buried. And that would be where I would go.

I wanted desperately to go downstairs, find Maggie and Terry, wrap my arms around her, put my hands in the small of her back, pull her tight against my body and go off with the two of them, find another kitchen where we could sit and have tea and wake in the morning with her body cupped against mine, and I wanted the dark traveler to disappear. Give up, I urged him. Go away. I’m a lost cause. You can’t do anything to me. I mouthed the words toward him, trying to send them into his brain, make him walk off. I would empty my Los Angeles account, give him what I had, and I was sorry I hadn’t already done it. But he was the kind who wouldn’t stop there, I realized. I would have to lose him, slip away from Precious Little, find Maggie. I could feel her in the rooms beneath me, and I knew that I would know where she was before the day was out.

I waited in the empty room, and the traveler didn’t move, lit a cigarette once, took out a newspaper from his coat pocket and read from it, and then, when I saw Maggie and Terry coming out from below me, I watched him carefully, waiting for any sign that he knew her. But he didn’t move, and they walked past him and I wanted to run down the stairs and follow the two figures that had turned the corner.

I went down to Alfie’s office where he said, “Jack! You missed her! Your Mrs. Barlow was here with her lad.”

“She’ll be back again, won’t she?”

“I’m afraid not. She made arrangements for her husband’s body and she’s off.”

“And Robbie?”

“He gets incinerated and his ashes goes up to a village past Dorchester. There’s a funeral home come to collect him from the coroner’s cold box this afternoon.”

“Did she tell you where she’s staying?”

“Afraid not, Jack. I suspect she’s on her way to wherever it is they’ll be leaving him.”

“Do they scatter ashes in this country or do they bury them in a churchyard?”

“They does all sorts of things, Jack. I’ve known some what keeps them on the mantelpiece in a vase. There’s lots that goes to sea. Take the ferry to France and drop dad’s ashes over the stern halfway across. There’s one that put granny into cement and molded a Virgin Mary for the front garden if you can believe that. Mrs. Barlow don’t seem that kind though. I suspect he’ll be buried proper.”

I stood there, waiting for Alfie to finish, then I said, “Alfie, it’s time I moved on. Back to the States. I’ve been thinking about it, and I guess Friday’s my last day, if that works out for you.”

“You’ve been here longer than I thought you would, Jack.”

“You’re right about that.”

“You’ve earned your keep, Jack, I’ll say that for you.”

I’ve more than earned it, you cheap bastard, I thought. And now I knew where Maggie was. She’d be in Map-powder, waiting for Robbie’s ashes, and that’s where I’d find her. One more day at Precious Little and I would be gone. The traveler would have to whistle for his money. Knowing Alfie, there was no chance a stranger would pry out of him where Robbie’s ashes where headed.

“You’ve been fair, Alfie.”

“Well then, tomorrow it is, is it, Jack? There won’t be no send-off, though, your lot comes and goes, don’t it?”

I nodded.

“Oh yes,” he added, holding out an envelope. “Mrs. Barlow left this for you. I told her I had an American working for me who said he knew her. She said she knew you and left this note. I told her you were good to her husband and if she wanted I could hunt you down but she said no, just give this to you.”

I took the envelope and said, “Thanks, Alfie. See you tomorrow, then? Last pay day?”

“Tomorrow’s the day the duke shits, Jack.” He chuckled at his own joke. “Although I ain’t no duke, that’s for sure.”

I went down to the basement. There was a table in the kitchen where we had tea in midmorning but I was the only one there, and I opened the envelope. There was a single sheet of paper and in a neat hand she had written:

If you are the Jack Stone who stayed at Sheepheaven Farm, you need to know that I have closed the window and it is locked. I have crossed the room and found another door and, while I am grateful for what you have done here, I no longer want to stand in the rain, and the pain has subsided enough so that I can continue with my life. I can imagine that if I were to see you my resolve would crumble. I do not know why you did not see me. They said you were here. I cannot understand what drew you to care for Robbie. All of my energy goes into Terry, now. He grows to look more and more like his father. It has been a hard time for him. He, too, was damaged beyond repair. I do not miss the dance anymore. I have lost my blue jumper and did not buy another.

Maggie

I looked again at the envelope with Jack Stone neatly written on it. I read the note again. If she were to see me, her resolve would crumble. It was more that I could have hoped for. I would meet the traveler that night — I didn’t want him to try to contact Maggie. I’d give him some money. And on Friday I would collect my wages from Alfie, rent a car and disappear from Bournemouth. The pay wasn’t much, but a hundred and forty pounds would pay for the car for a week. Maggie would go to Mappowder to bury Robbie in the churchyard with his parents. She had not left an address but she must have known that I would go to Mappowder and I would find her there and I would be with her again. I felt a rush of adrenaline, could already see myself driving through green fields with Maggie waiting at the other end of the journey. I would collect my things from my room, come back to Precious Little and for a fiver George would let me bunk down in an empty room. I would take the bus to Salisbury tomorrow after I collected my pay, hire the car and be gone.

I read the note again. She had crossed the room and found another door? Another life? Someone else? Had she excised Sheepheaven Farm and Robbie and all that it meant to her? I could not be sure what she meant, but the phrase ‘If I were to see you, my resolve would crumble’ was the key. I would go where she was and she would see me. Nothing else mattered.

47.

I went to the Kings Head on Thursday evening. I had three hundred pounds in twenty pound notes in my pocket. I would give the money to the traveler, and I would buy some time with it. With three hundred pounds in hand, he wouldn’t be anxious to kill the goose with the golden egg. I would be gone by the time he came to collect the rest of it and having some cash in hand would help to keep his silence. He would harbor the thought that he would find me again and blackmail me, only we would be long gone from Mappowder and it was highly unlikely that he could follow us beyond there. If I hadn’t been able to find Maggie, certainly he wouldn’t.

I sat at a table in the corner as the pub filled, and it became noisy with shouts from the darts players rising over the hubbub, smoke filled the air and I waited, but there was no sign of him. I stayed, nursing my beer, eventually had another, and still he didn’t show. As the crowd began to thin out near closing time I went outside and stood at the door, looking across the promenade toward the sea. Strings of lights along the quay gave the harbor a festive look and I felt buoyant. He had either given up on me or something had happened to keep him from the appointment.

I watched for the traveler on my way back to my room, careful not to take my usual route, but there was no sign of him. The fact that the traveler hadn’t shown up made me nervous. Why hadn’t he pressed his blackmail threat? There was the chance that something had happened to him. There was also the chance that he would be waiting for me in the morning outside the rooming house. Or outside Precious Care. I would have to be careful.

I packed my clothes in my duffel bag. I was careful to take anything that might be a clue to who I was to the rubbish bin in the back alley so that when I was finished, the room was as spare as the night I had moved in. I took my duffel and my frozen laptop and made my way back to Precious Little.

When I left my room he was nowhere to be seen. I caught my breath each time a walker approached, but I arrived at Precious Little without seeing him. I found George in the basement kitchen with the kettle on.

“George, I’m leaving here after tomorrow.”

I laid a fiver on the table.

“What do you say I put my kit in an empty room upstairs and spend the night? Between you and me?”

He picked up the bill.

“You be my guest. Mr. Stone Sir.”

“And Georgette?”

“I’ll be telling her to pay you no mind. Cuppa tea, Mr. Stone Sir?”

I had tea with George, took my bag upstairs and found an empty room. It seemed strange. I had put the sheets on that bed myself and I remembered Mrs. Grace, who had died that week, lying in the same bed, her frail body no more than a fold in the blankets, the smell of death in the room, medicine and disinfectant and urine and the letting go of the body, all lingering for hours, the windows open while Joshua and I stripped the bed, washed the floor and boxed up what little was left of Mrs. Grace’s life. Now I lay in her bed wondering where the traveler was and why he hadn’t shown up, imagining meeting Maggie, my mind racing back and forth between the yawning chasm and soft green fields.

I couldn’t sleep, dressed and went back to the basement where I rummaged through the refrigerator, finding some leftover meat pie, and when I had heated it through, George showed up.

“Smelled something nice,” he said. “You be telling Mrs. Precious that it was you what ate that, will you? She’s got a count on everything in that fridge, she has.”

“Not to worry, George. She can take it out of my wage packet tomorrow.”

He sat down and I dished some up for him. I asked him what he spent his nights doing at Precious Little.

“A bit of this and a bit of that. I keeps the heat going, but not too much. Mr. Precious, he says too much heat ain’t good for the loonies and old folks. Makes them drowsy and puts them off their feed. I does the floors in the common room, empties the rubbish, keep a watch out. It’s just me and Georgette here, you know. And the oldies. And the loonies. Mostly oldies.”

“What do you do during the day?”

“Sleeps. Watches telly.”

“You have a girlfriend?

“Not so’s you’d notice. It’s hard to go places with granfer’s bike and take a bird.”

It became apparent that George’s most constant companion was the ancient bicycle.

It grew late, George went off to do a bit of this and a bit of that and I went back to Mrs. Grace’s bed. I remembered her as a quiet resident who never complained, a frail woman who carried herself with dignity.

I was awake early, long before first light. I could hear stirrings up and down the corridor. Old people often have difficulty sleeping and some of them wake in the dark disoriented, especially the ones Agnes referred to as “second children.” These were the Alzheimer patients who forgot where they were, or lived in a world of remembered times and when they awoke in the dark they cried out for mothers or fathers or sisters or brothers long since dead.

I could hear Georgette soothing someone and then George’s voice. Apparently a bit of this and that included helping Georgette with pre-dawn overload.

I dressed and went out into the cold morning. I walked along the quay, the shops shuttered, a single coach lumbering along, only the driver and a solitary passenger. I walked all the way to the end, as I had often done with Robbie in his wheelchair, and I stood looking at the sky beginning to lighten over the hills at the edge of the harbor. And then the cloud cover began to break a bit and suddenly there was an opening and the sun was blazing in it, like a furnace door that had been opened, and I watched while it changed from orange to hot yellow and my eyes ached and then the door began to close and I was conscious of the lapping of the waves along the beach, a slow slapping, and I was reminded of the gentle applause that Joshua received for his dinnertime songs. Seagulls cried out, fighting over the leftovers from someone’s late night takeaway, then scattered as a car drove through them, its tires hissing on the wet pavement. It was light now and if the traveler was watching Precious Little this morning, I didn’t want him to see me, so I walked back on streets parallel to the prom, cutting through the alley to enter Precious Little by the basement door near the dustbins.

Agnes wasn’t there yet, although Ali and Joshua were having a morning biscuit and tea. I went up to Mrs. Grace’s room, collected my things and brought them back to the kitchen.

“What’s up, Jacko?” Joshua asked. “Lost your lodgings?”

“No, today’s my last day. I’m going back to the States.”

A smile lit up Joshua’s face.

“You be a happier mon when you don’t have to work for the Duke and Duchess of Precious Little, dat for sure. Today de day de duke shits and you going to take dat little crap de size of a grape and fly home. You be a happy mon when you spread your wings, but we going to miss you, Jacko.”

“I’ll miss you, too.”

Ali sipped his tea and nodded.

I made a cup of tea and when Agnes came down the stairs I told her I had helped myself to some meat pie. I didn’t want George to get blamed for the missing portion.

“Mr. Precious tells me you’re leaving us, Mr. Stone. I’ll call that a going-away gift.”

Over her shoulder I could see Ali and Joshua bowing in mock supplication, looking up toward the ceiling and mouthing the words, ‘Thank you missus, thank you,’ and I realized that I was smiling broadly. I was smiling at their antics and smiling because I would see Maggie soon and there was no more Robbie, only a dim memory of a man I had met once who was a sheep farmer in Dorset who had suffered a terrible accident.

But the image of Maggie leaning against the doorway in the hall, cradling her mug of tea and saying ‘there’s a handsome, gentle man and he’s only going to stay one night and what would happen if I went into his room in the middle of the night and fucked him’ was as bright and clear as the two men who sat opposite sipping tea.

I went upstairs to arrange the common room for breakfast. Agnes was already making toast and rock-hard slices were being stacked on plates. Ali was making tea in chipped china pots. Each time I do something this morning, I thought, it will be the last time I do it. Joshua and I dressed those who could not dress themselves and I helped Mrs. Churchill who sipped her tea through a straw, tried to guide some of the porridge into Simple Simon’s mouth, the usual breakfast chores and as always it was a bit of controlled chaos. When it had settled down Joshua and I were off to change linen. I carefully looked out the window of the front of the building, but there was no sign of the traveler, nor was he at the back behind the dustbins. Another six hours, I thought, and I will have disappeared from Bournemouth.

At midmorning, while Joshua and I were still stripping beds, Ali came to tell me that Alfie wanted to see me. I was puzzled, since Alfie never came into Precious Little in the mornings. When I entered his office there was Alfie behind his desk and another man, middle-aged, balding, sitting in the chair opposite Alfie. He studied me carefully as I came in.

“Jack, this is D.C. Hoad of the Bournemouth CID. He tells me there’s an investigation into Robbie Barlow’s accident and he wants to speak with you.”

I must have looked puzzled because Alfie added, “Detective Constable Hoad. He’s a policeman.”

The man in the chair didn’t speak.

Neither did I. I tried to keep my face as expressionless as possible, as if I were simply the bloke who had taken care of Robbie at Precious Little.

Finally the man spoke.

“We’d like to talk with you, Mr. Stone. There are some questions about how Mr. Barlow was injured that perhaps you can help us with.”

“I’m afraid I wouldn’t be much help. I saw Robbie here some time after his accident.”

“But you spent some time at Sheepheaven Farm in Mappowder, if I’m not mistaken.”

“Long before Robbie got hurt.”

He rose, not taking his eyes off my face. “We think you can assist us, Mr. Stone. It would be helpful if you came to the police station with us.”

Who was us? He seemed to be alone. What could Alfie have possibly told him? Why had Alfie been called down to Precious Little in the morning?

“Is it necessary to go to the police station? Why not right here?”

“We prefer that you come with us, Mr. Stone.”

“But I’ve nothing to tell you!”

“You let us be the judge of that, Mr. Stone.” He turned to Alfie. “Thank you for your time, sir.”

“Is this because I was working illegally? Is that what this is?”

“No, Mr. Stone. Frankly, I have no interest in your arrangement with Mr. Precious.”

What the hell had Alfie told him? Why was I being taken to a police station? I sucked in my breath, held it a moment, slowly releasing it, and I took stock. There was nothing to worry about. They knew nothing. No doubt I was only another piece of a puzzle. Although Mary the barmaid and Will Stryker had told me Robbie had suffered an accident, apparently for detective Hoad there were unanswered questions. It was better to go along.

“Alfie,” I said. “What about my pay packet? Can I have it now?”

He opened the drawer of his desk, slid the brown envelope toward me. The detective watched with what appeared to be mild interest.

There was a police car outside and a uniformed constable leaning against the fender. He stood when he saw the detective, opening the back door of the car. He appeared to be no more than a boy, fresh-faced, rosy-cheeked, but he was obviously old enough to be a policeman. I doubted if he was the rest of the detective’s reference to ‘we’d like to talk with you.’

The trip was silent. It wasn’t until we came to the police station that I remembered my bag and laptop in the kitchen at Precious Little. No matter, I thought, Ali and Joshua would keep an eye on my things.

Inside, the detective stopped to chat with another man, then motioned for me to follow him. He went into a room with a table, several chairs and nothing else.

“Cuppa tea, Mr. Stone?” he asked, drawing a chair up to the table for me.

I sat.

“Yes, thanks.”

“Oliver?” He raised his eyebrows at the young constable who had followed us into the room, and Oliver scuttled out. The detective reached into a box on the floor, took out a recording tape and broke open the plastic sealing it. He snapped it into a tape recorder that was fixed to the end of the table and turned it on

“Today is the fourteenth of August, 2001. The time is eleven twenty-one. Persons present are Detective Constable Barry Hoad and Mr. Jack Stone.” He raised his eyes to focus on me and continued. “Mr. Stone, you don’t have to say anything. If you are charged with an offence it may harm your defense if you don’t mention something during the questioning which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence. And, of course, you have a right to have a solicitor present.”

“Am I being charged with a crime, detective?”

“Not at the moment. This is being done under what we call the codes of practice. You can look at a copy of the codes if you’d like.”

“It’s not necessary, detective.”

“Well, then, Mr. Stone, shall we start?”

“You’re in charge here. Like I said, I have no idea what it is that I know that might interest you.”

“Do you know a Miss Mary Bertram?”

“No.”

“Barmaid at the Flying Monk in Mappowder?”

“Oh, that Mary. Yes. I never knew her last name.”

“How about a mister Nick Monaco?”

“Never heard of him.”

“Were you ever in the gypsy camp at the top of the rise above Sheepheaven Farm?”

“I walked up that way once. Robbie Barlow warned me to avoid it when I told him where I’d been. He said they were people not to be trusted.”

“If I told you Nick Monaco lived in that camp, would that jog your memory?”

“Like I said, I walked that way — I never met anyone there.”

“Mr. Monaco says he met you. He says you spent a night in his coach.”

Good God! I thought. The traveler went to the police. Somehow I had missed him at the Kings Head and he had done as he threatened.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Let me explain, Mr. Stone. A police constable questioned Mr. Monaco the morning after Mr. Barlow was injured. It was routine. He was told not to leave the vicinity. Later, Miss Bertram was asked if there had been any strangers in the village and she told the constable that Monaco had been asking questions that day about Mr. Barlow’s accident, so the constable went back to question him again, but he and his lot had disappeared.

“Now I’m of the opinion that people do a runner when they’ve got something to hide, so he went on our wanted list. Two days ago Miss Bertram was in Bournemouth and she told us she went to Precious Care to take a lager to Mr. Barlow.”

He smiled. “Rather a nice gesture, don’t you think?”

I nodded.

“And she saw Nick Monaco across the street from Precious Care. She went to a phone box and called the police. Said it gave her such a start she never went in to see Mr. Barlow. So we were on the lookout for Mr. Monaco and we found him in the Kings Head. Does that ring a bell, Mr. Stone?”

“Does what ring a bell?”

“The Kings Head.”

“I know it. I’ve had a pint or two there.”

“You were supposed to meet Mr. Monaco there last evening?”

“I’m in the dark, here, detective. I left Sheepheaven Farm long before Robbie had his accident. I never met your Nick Monaco and I certainly never spent a night in anyone’s coach. As for meeting this man at the King’s Head, that simply never happened. No reason in the world for it to happen.”

At that moment Oliver showed up with two mugs of tea, setting them on the table in front of us. I was grateful for the interruption. I could feel my temples pounding and the balding man in front of me was beginning to sound like Clive Owen. His measured voice wasn’t accusatory. It was as if he were repeating a story for my benefit, careful not to skip over any details. He leaned forward and said, “Joining the interview is Police Constable Oliver Damory.” Then he turned his attention back to me.

“Mr. Monaco tells us that you came up the field into his camp in the rain, covered with mud, the night Mr. Barlow was injured.”

“He’s a liar.”

“Do you deny you were in that field that night?”

“Look, I don’t know this Monaco, never met him.”

“Bournemouth is peppered with CCTV, Mr. Stone. Closed circuit television cameras, fixed to utility poles, the fronts of buildings, aimed at places where we know things often happen. And there’s one in front of the Kings Head. That’s how we found Monaco. And you’re on tape talking to him two nights ago in front of a chip shop on the prom.”

“I don’t remember every punk who asks me for a fag outside a chip shop!”

“You haven’t answered my question. Do you deny you were in that field that night?”

Apparently the traveler had told him everything. My mind raced and I seized the story I had threatened the traveler with.

“Yes, I was there. I came back from London and I was coming through Mappowder in the evening and I thought it would be a lark to surprise Maggie and Robbie so I parked the car at the top of the field. But it started to rain and it got slippery so I went back to the car. I surprised someone breaking into it. I heard the window break and I yelled and whoever it was took off.”

Detective Hoad leaned back in his chair, sipping his tea.

“You can check with the car hire agency in London. They’ll tell you the car was damaged.”

“And you didn’t go down to Sheepheaven Farm?”

“It was muddy, my car had been broken into, it was raining and I felt stupid. I didn’t want to show up on their doorstep like that and I was headed back to London that night, so I drove back to my hotel, cleaned myself up and turned the car in the next morning. You can check it out.”

“We will, Mr. Stone. Why do you suppose Mr. Monaco would tell us you spent the night?”

“I have no idea. As you said, he was on your wanted list. I certainly wasn’t.”

“Why you, Mr. Stone? Why would he pick you out for his lie? That part puzzles me.”

“Look, I was a stranger in that village. I stood out like a sore thumb. If he wanted to shift suspicion, why not pick a stranger? And why would I want to injure Robbie Barlow?”

“That puzzles me, too, Mr. Stone. But Monaco has two eyewitnesses who say they saw you in the coach that night and the next morning.”

“Robbie said there were all thick as thieves. They’re lying.”

“There’s that possibility, Mr. Stone.”

“It’s no fucking possibility! It’s the fucking truth!”

“No need for that, Mr. Stone.”

“When can I go back to Precious Care?”

He rose. “Your tea’s getting cold, Mr. Stone. You’ll excuse me a moment?”

Then his voice became formal as he said, “The time is two minutes after twelve, and we are taking a break in this interview.” He reached over and snapped off the tape recorder.

I watched him leave the room. Oliver still stood by the door as if the teacher had asked him to be room monitor and keep order while he was out of the room. Oliver was silent, his hands clasped in front. I looked at my hands resting on the table, and I noticed that the backs had small brown spots, the kind that had been on the hands of my grandfather. When had those appeared, I wondered. My tea was, indeed, cold, but I sipped at it anyway. My throat was dry and I could feel Oliver’s presence behind me. In a few minutes the door opened again and Hoad came back to the table. “You need to go to the loo, Mr. Stone? Sorry I didn’t ask before.”

I shook my head.

He snapped on the tape recorder, saying, “The time is twelve fifteen, continuation of the interview with Mr. Jack Stone. Present are Detective Constable Barry Hoad, Police Constable Oliver Damory and Mr. Jack Stone.” He leaned back again in his chair.

“I’m puzzled by several things. Why would Nick Monaco make up such a story about you? Why would you want to injure Robbie Barlow? Why did you end up at Precious Care in Bournemouth taking care of him? You stayed there until he died, Mr. Stone. And according to Mr. Precious, you were the one who took primary care of him. As I said, it’s all very puzzling. I need a bit of time to sort it out.”

“There’s nothing to sort out! I went down there to see Robbie, there was a job, I was short of money, I worked long enough to make my fare back home. Taking care of Robbie was part of my fucking job!”

“Still, we’d like you to spend the night with us. Tomorrow we’ll sort all this out.”

“You can’t keep me here! Are you accusing me of attacking Robbie Barlow?”

“We’re not accusing you of anything yet, Mr. Stone.”

“Then I’m leaving.” I stood up and was suddenly conscious that Oliver had shifted so that he stood in front of the door.

“I think not, Mr. Stone.” Detective Hoad’s voice was no longer passive. “You’ll be assisting us in the investigation.”

“Are you charging me with a crime? Because if you aren’t, you can’t keep me here and there’s nothing more than that fucking gypsy’s lie for you to go on.”

“You’re confused about where you are, Mr. Stone. Under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act in this country I can detain you without charging you with anything. We can arrest you on suspicion of doing actual bodily harm to Mr. Barlow and we don’t have to actually charge you with a crime for another twenty-four hours. And if it turns out Mr. Monaco has, indeed, lied, then you’ll be free to go.” He smiled. “Think of us a free bed-and-breakfast, Mr. Stone. Fish and chips for supper. Breakfast as well.”

“What’s there to sort out?”

“A bit of a chat with Mrs. Barlow. Perhaps you had a falling out with Mr. Barlow. A few more questions for Mr. Monaco. A quick check with the car hire.”

He would talk with Maggie. He would tell her that I had been in the field at Sheepheaven that night. But surely she wouldn’t connect me with the attack on Robbie. All she could tell him was that Robbie and I were friendly. Hadn’t I walked to Stryker’s farm with him? Gone to the pub with Robbie and Maggie? Traded quotes from Shakespeare? He would find no reason to believe the traveler, I was sure of that. The car hire agency would confirm that the car had been broken into.

“Have your chat, detective,” I said. He reached toward the tape recorder, saying, “This concludes the interview with Jack Stone. The time is twelve thirty-three hours,” and he snapped the recorder off. He took the tape out, slipped it in a plastic bag and put a seal on the flap. “Goes into security, Mr. Stone. That way there’s no question in anybody’s mind that you got treated good and proper.”

48.

Oliver took me to the custody officer where I was booked. It was the first time in my life I had been jailed. I would be placed in a custody suite, I was told. They took my belt, shoelaces, watch, wallet, placed everything in a bag and had me sign for it. The custody suite turned out to be a small cell in a corridor walled with great stones, and I thought, holy shit, I’m in the mythical dungeon, only this one has uniformed constables and barred doors on rails that slide open with the ominous noise of steel on steel. I spent the afternoon on the thin mattress listening to the constant noise, men yelling, doors opening and closing, and in the late afternoon another constable came around and asked me, “Haddock or cod, mate?”

I must have looked puzzled because he said, “Fish and chips. Come on, mate, make up your mind. Haddock or cod? Or sausage and chips?”

“Haddock,” I said.

An hour later he returned with a bag, called out something and the door opened. I sat on my cot and ate my supper and wondered if I should have asked detective Hoad to call a solicitor.

That night I turned each scene over in my mind, trying to hear Hoad question Maggie, imagining her answers, trying to get inside her head when she heard I had been in the field the night Robbie had been clubbed. Could she imagine me rising out of the dark to attack him, or would she shut her mind to that possibility? I lay on the narrow bed and listened to the sounds of the jail, occasional shouts, the doors opening and closing, someone vomiting and a constable swearing and then, as the hours grew late the shouts became fewer and finally I fell asleep.

I awoke early, feeling washed out and when a constable brought tea and a biscuit I gulped the tea quickly, asking for another cup.

It was late morning when I was taken back to the interrogation room. Detective Hoad was already seated and another uniformed constable had taken Oliver’s place.

My duffel bag was on the floor next to Hoad’s chair and my laptop was on the table.

“Where did you get those?” I asked.

Hoad ignored me, unwrapping a new tape for the recorder. He turned it on and spoke.

“August fifteenth, 2001, fourteen thirty-one hours. Present are Detective Constable Barry Hoad, Police Constable Christopher Hanford, and Mr. Jack Stone, an American citizen of no fixed address.” He straightened up and looked at me, then at the duffel bag on the floor.

“Where did you get those?” I repeated.

“P.C. Damory collected your things from your former place of employment last evening.”

Hoad slid his hand across the table, lifting it to reveal a floppy disk in a plastic envelope.

“You recognize this, Jack?”

It was the first time he had used my given name.

“It looks like a disk for a computer.”

“It’s yours, isn’t it Jack?”

“I have no idea.”

“It appears to be a film script, Jack. And the main characters are named Jack and Maggie.”

“Where did you find this, Hoad?” I couldn’t remember his given name and I was tired of using his title, angry at myself for not destroying the disk.

“In your bag, Jack.”

“I don’t recall giving you permission to get my things. And I sure as hell didn’t give you permission to search my bag.”

“There you go again, Jack, confused about where you are. You’re not in America, Jack. Rules are a bit different here. Cricket and baseball both have batsmen but it’s not the same game, now, is it?” His hand went to the laptop and he undid the latch, raising the lid. The screen was on, glowing a pale blue. Apparently it had been fixed.

“So, Jack, you were shagging Robbie Barlow’s wife?”

“It’s a work of fiction, Hoad. None of that happened. You think every film you see is the truth?”

“The truth is an elusive thing, Jack. You didn’t answer my question. You were getting a leg over Mrs. Maggie, were you?”

His voice had lost its professional tone and he was edging closer to a Dorset accent, the R’s becoming broader, a playful rise in his voice at the end of his questions.

“I answered it. It’s a work of fiction. Fiction means not true, Hoad.”

“But Maggie admits it is, Jack. Chatted her up this morning, I did. What was it, Jack? You and her decided to get rid of her husband? And what did an attractive piece like her see in an old duck like you? Are you rich, Jack? Were you working at Precious Care just to keep an eye on Robbie Barlow? Slip him something to hasten his demise, did you?”

“I made it up! I fucking made the story up! That’s what writers do, Hoad!”

“But you made up a story that turned out to be true, did you? Made up a story about a bloke who fucks the brains out of some poor farmer’s wife and then drives down from London and parks his car behind a hedgerow and walks across a field where the farmer is shearing sheep and he searches in the dark for a piece of timber. What’s he going to do with that piece of timber, Jack? Build a house? And then, lo and behold, that farmer gets his head stove in and falls in a puddle and gets his brain fried and guess what? Two pages earlier your character was thinking to himself about English electricity and how it’s not like electricity in the States at all. Made all that up, Jack? Got a crystal ball, have you? Here.”

He held out his hand, palm up.

“Read my fortune, Jack. I’ll bet you can tell me what I’ll be having for tea a year from now.”

“I made it up. I never hurt Robbie Barlow. I never, as you so nicely put it, shagged his wife.”

“None of this is true, Jack?” He held the disk up with one hand, pushed the laptop to the center of the table so that the glowing screen faced me.

“It’s all coincidence, is it? Maggie Barlow’s lying to me?”

“There’s only one thing worse than being caught in a lie, Hoad.”

“And what’s that, Jack?” He leaned forward, reaching out to put his hand on my arm as if he were a friend reassuring me of his interest in my well-being.

“The only thing worse than being caught in a lie, Hoad, is to tell the truth and have no one believe you.”

“You may be right about that, Jack. I’ve taken cases into court where the truth was so obvious it could have been dressed in a clown suit.” He took his hand away from my arm, sat back in his chair. “But the jury, twelve people with their wits about them, didn’t believe me.”

Hoad pushed back his chair, stood, picked up the disk and held it out between us.

“I don’t believe you, Jack. And this time no one is going to miss the clown suit.”

49.

The room was silent and then Hoad bent down and spoke for the tape recorder: “Mr. Jack Stone, I am formally charging you with the crime of actual bodily harm against the person of Mr. Robbie Barlow. You have a right to have someone informed of your arrest. You have a right to consult privately with a solicitor and you should be aware that independent legal advice is available free of charge. You have the right to communicate with the American embassy or consulate. You have the right to consult the Codes of Practice for the Police and Criminal Evidence Act. It is August fifteenth, 2001, the time is fifteen hundred hours exactly and this interview with Mr. Jack Stone is concluded.”

He switched off the tape recorder. “You’ve been charged, Jack. You might want to learn the rules for cricket.”

I was taken back to my cell and later that day I called Nigel in London, told him where I was and what had happened. There was a long silence and then he said he would call Richard, and they would arrange for a solicitor.

Graham, the solicitor, arrived the next afternoon, a man in his forties wearing a rumpled suit and no tie, looking harried. He told me he had reviewed the evidence and although the statements that DC Hoad had taken weren’t yet available, he’d asked enough questions to feel that the case wasn’t as strong as Hoad had claimed. They had no actual forensic evidence to connect me with Robbie’s injury, their witnesses were the kind of people who were suspect in England, sorry about that, he wasn’t trying to be prejudiced, but it was a fact, and it would help. My incomplete script was damaging, but I was an established writer of fiction. They would, of course, call Maggie to testify and her admission of the affair in the witness box would be damaging. On the other hand, they could have charged me with murder, since my intent had been to make Robbie disappear and the only logical conclusion would be that I wanted him dead. That could still happen, he said.

I told him that I hadn’t meant to harm Robbie, I only wanted him out of the way.

“Did you do it?” he asked.

“I didn’t kill him,” I said.

“Look, I’m your solicitor. Whatever you say to me is held in confidence. Don’t lie to me. It won’t help.”

“I wrote about it. I put it down on paper. I’ve thought about it many times since.”

“Since what? Since doing it?”

“Robbie and I talked about it. I apologized over and over. I think he came to terms with that.”

“It’s my understanding that Barlow was a fucking vegetable and couldn’t tell anyone anything.” He was getting impatient with me.

“Look,” I said, “I just wanted him to disappear. And he’s gone. Finished.” I could imagine driving through the gate at Sheepheaven Farm, sheep dotting the slopes beyond the house.

“Pay attention, Jack. If they charge you with murder and make it stick, it’s automatic life. They’ll put you in some place like Dartmoor and you’ll be gone. Finished. If they stay with ABH, you’ll get seven years. It doesn’t help that you’re an American who was fucking an Englishman’s wife, either. And she won’t get a lot of sympathy. She’s lucky they haven’t charged her as an accomplice.”

“I don’t want Maggie to have to testify. Can’t we keep her out of this?”

“She’s the Crown’s witness, Jack. The only way for you to keep her out of the box would be to plead guilty, throw yourself at the Crown, and hope you win the lottery. Not a smart move, I’d say.”

But it turned out that it was a smart move. I was arraigned a week later in the Magistrate’s Court in Bournemouth in front of three men in business suits who accepted the Crown Prosecutor’s evidence and was sent for trial to the Dorchester Crown Court. I ended up in the remand section of the Dorchester Prison and it took nearly three months before I came to trial. In the interim I was visited twice by Nigel, passing along reassurance from Richard, who was paying for my solicitor.

Several times London tabloid reporters tried to talk to me but Graham kept them at bay. The less I said, the better it would be. It didn’t matter. After I was remanded to the Dorchester there were headlines: DORSET LOVE TRIANGLE TURNS UGLY, YANK SHOCKS LOVER’S HUBBY, and grainy photos of all of us.

Graham was right, though. I raised my hand to a guilty plea, the Crown stayed with the Bodily Harm charge, Maggie never was called to testify and I was given the maximum, seven years.

After that, things died down, the tabloids went on to other banners and Nigel stopped coming. The laptop and disk remained in the evidence lock-up in Bournemouth where, according to Graham, they would remain. It didn’t matter. I could retrieve them in seven years if I wanted.

I didn’t go to Dartmoor. I stayed at the Dorchester Prison. I remembered passing the building that first time I had driven down to White Church Farm. There was constant noise in the prison, men shouting, the clanging of steel on steel, snatches of song, the squeal of automated doors sliding. Klaxon horns announced the change of shift for the guards. I learned to sleep in the absence of darkness. Occasional nightmarish screams were followed by shouted obscenities. The cacophony died in the hours when, if I were outside, I would have sensed the beginning of the false dawn. During that time I sometimes imagined myself scrambling up the hill above Sheepheaven farm, falling to my hands and knees, the rain knifing at me, the muddy clods lit by periodic green flashes.

I would be sixty-seven years old when I left this place.

I was still in love with Robbie’ wife.

50.

“Stone! You have a visitor.”

I half expected Nigel. Or another reporter from a tabloid. But I had not had a visitor for the three months I had been in prison, and I did not expect one. I came into the long room with the numbered tables and followed the guard who motioned to an empty chair. As I sat down I saw that it was Graham on the other side of the table, his suit rumpled as usual, tieless, hair askew. He leaned forward as I pulled the chair toward the table.

“You don’t look any different, old boy.”

“Why should I? Nothing changes in here.”

“Settled in, are you? No problems?”

“Is that why you’re here?”

He smiled, leaned closer on his elbows.

“No, Jack. I was in the neighborhood and I dropped by to see if you were in.”

“Ho, ho, ho.”

“Not funny, am I? Christ, Jack, what’s it take to get a laugh out of you?”

“I didn’t expect to see you, Graham. Ever again.”

“Well, Jack, you were probably right in that assumption. No point in my coming around, is there?”

“So, why are you here?”

“A bit of news, Jack.”

“What kind of news?”

“About your Maggie.”

“Something’s happened to her?”

“In a sense, yes.”

“It has to do with me?”

“In a sense, yes.”

“Come on, Graham, quit fucking around.”

“How many times did you shag her, Jack?”

“What the hell kind of a question is that?” He was still leaning on his elbows, as if he were having a conversation in a bar with a friend. All he needed was a pint in one hand.

“Come on, Jack, remind me. How many times? Ten? Twenty?”

I thought back to Sheepheaven Farm, remembering Maggie slipping into bed on a dark morning, whispering ‘fuck me, Jack Stone.’

“It’s none of your goddamn business, Graham.”

“Come on, Jack,” he wheedled. “Tell me you shagged her fifty times. It gives my news a bit of a lift.”

“What news are you talking about?”

“How many times, Jack? I know you told me, but remind me, will you? A rough estimate.”

He leaned back in his chair, smiling, as if enjoying a private joke. I held up two fingers.

“Are you giving me the finger, Jack? Or are you telling me it was only two times?”

Two times. I mouthed the words silently.

“Twice? Only twice? Holy shit, Jack, that makes her the most expensive fuck since Cleopatra got laid.”

“You mean it’s three and half years for each time, is that it, you ambulance chaser?”

“No, it comes out to more than a hundred thousand pounds for each trick, Jack.”

“What the hell are you talking about, Graham?”

“It seems your sweet little Dorset farm wife took out an insurance policy on her husband.”

“So?”

“It was an unusual policy, Jack. One of those polices that doesn’t cost very much because the likelihood of the payoff is so rare. A bit like insuring your granny against getting pregnant.”

“What sort of a policy?”

“It was an accidental death policy, the usual kind. If Robbie died in an ordinary sort of accident, run over by a lorry, fell off the shed roof, it only paid a few hundred pounds. But if he were to be the victim of a violent crime, then the ante went up. Get mugged in Poole, lose an eye, five thousand pounds. Both eyes, ten. Legs, arms, that sort of thing. But it has to be part of a criminal act, and the chances of a sheep farmer in Dorset getting done in by a mugger are about the same as winning the lottery, Jack. Which is why the premium isn’t dear. Now here’s the punchline: if he gets killed, mind you the killer has to be convicted for the criminal act of doing him in, or at least doing the act that led to his death, then it goes up to two hundred thousand. There has to be a conviction in order to get a payoff. And, if it happens to him right there on his own property, they tack on another fifty. Know what that means, Jack?”

I shook my head.

“Your Dorset farm wife is a quarter of a million quid richer than she was when you showed up. She won the lottery, Jack. And it looks like you bought the ticket.”

“But Maggie had no way of knowing what would happen to Robbie!”

“Of course not, Jack. Rather gives you a bit of a start, though, doesn’t it? She takes out the policy and not a month later here you come, and suddenly she’s got her knickers down and you’re all hot and bothered. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”

“Graham, when I said to her, ‘What if there were no Robbie,’ she said it was a stupid question. She dismissed it outright! It wasn’t an option as far as she was concerned!”

“I suppose not. Still, things worked out for her, didn’t they? The insurance company had to pay since you raised your hand to the deed. She never even appeared in court, did she Jack? You made sure of that. So, in the end, she collected.”

“But Maggie said she didn’t want anyone to get hurt. She told me that in no uncertain terms, Graham.”

“And you believed her?”

“Of course I did.”

And I could hear Maggie’s voice saying, “If I asked you to swim the river for me tonight, you would, wouldn’t you?” Her voice came to me, whole, as if she were there in the long room with the tables and the buzz of talk and the hum of the overhead lights, but I could hear her and I could hear myself saying, “Yes.”

“What was it Hoad told you on that tape of your last interview? ‘It only matters if they believe you.’ Something like that, was it?”

I could see Maggie in her kitchen, hugging her arms to her chest, facing me.

“And you believed her, Jack, did you?”

I nodded.

“She’s not only a good fuck, she’s a clever lass, too.”

He bent over and began to search in a briefcase propped against his chair. I watched him fish out a computer disk in a plastic envelope. He laid it on the table.

“It’s not the original, Jack. That’s still in the lockup. But this is courtesy of DC Hoad. I told him there might be an appeal. I like him. He’s not your usual copper. He asked me to tell you to be on the lookout for a woman in a clown suit.”

He pinned the plastic envelope to the surface of the table with his thumb and using his forefinger, traced the outline of the disk. “As long as your screenplay is a work of fiction, Jack, there’s nothing in English law to prevent you from finishing it.” He picked up the envelope, held it in front of me.

“I can get a hard copy made and you can have it. It’s a legal document and you’re entitled to it. And you can write whatever you want. It’s up to you. My guess is that you only need to figure out the ending.”

He dropped the plastic envelope back into his briefcase. An officer was behind him and the visiting hour was up. A woman who vaguely resembled Maggie passed behind him and I realized that I could not conjure up a clear picture of Maggie’s face. It was as if she had drifted out of focus and I could not bring her back. And then I could see her, standing in the darkness of the stone cottage next to the river, and she was saying, “Things don’t just happen by themselves. We make them happen.”

There was a rising murmur of voices in the room, chairs scraping on the floor and I was conscious of Graham speaking to me.

“Jack? You OK?”

I nodded.

“What’s this clown suit that Hoad wants you to look for?”