The Cottage on Winter Moss, page 3
Chapter Four
Although I had deliberately planned neither a route nor a destination, at the back of my mind I had an idea that the north Norfolk coast might be the perfect spot for my sabbatical—wild, unfrequented, inspirational. But when I approached the M25 one of the gantry information boards informed me of long delays on the M11. So I turned left instead of right and considered my options as the squat little MG fought bravely for its place on the road against the snarling saloons of businessmen and the thundering wheels of juggernauts. Spray hurled itself against the shallow windscreen, the stubby wipers ineffectual against its onslaught. Bob, clipped safely into the passenger seat, rested his head on my knee as though to give moral support. As much as I had not wanted to bring him along, I must say that having him beside me was a comfort.
There was no point in going south. That coast—I had decided that coastline was required—was crowded and expensive and much too close to London. I had already, by turning westbound onto the M25, discounted Essex and Kent. Cornwall, Devon and Dorset—far to the west—were all possibilities. So was Wales but, because Ivaan was—or had been—there, I felt disinclined for it. That left me with the north, and when the slipway for the M1 came into view I pressed the indicator.
As the major arterial route connecting north and south, the M1 is never a pleasant drive, and especially not on a Friday afternoon when people are heading out of the city to their weekend retreats. But, on this occasion, I found the traffic quite manageable, and the squall that had lowered over London soon cleared to offer a pale blue sky.
The sound system in the MG isn’t very sophisticated but I found BBC radio 4 in time for The Archers, which is my guilty pleasure, and then the afternoon play.
By three-thirty we had come to the junction with the M54, which would take me to my make-believe creative writing workshop at Warwick University, and, at the last moment, I took it. We stopped at the services and I walked Bob around the lacklustre, litter-strewn dog walking area before returning him to the car and heading to use the loo myself and to buy a cup of tea. I sat in the café. There were no messages or missed calls from Ivaan and, there and then, I wrote him off. I removed the SIM card from my old phone and activated my new one.
Perhaps there was something theatrical about deliberately obfuscating my whereabouts. What did it matter if people knew where I was? Who would even care? I had a few friends who might wonder, after a month or two, why they hadn’t seen me. But writing is a preoccupying, distracting business. We writers lose ourselves in our plots and characters; quite often they are more vivid to us than corporeal company. Even when we are surrounded by people, our minds are elsewhere. My friends are used to this trait in me, an emotional and intellectual absence that supersedes my physical presence. They understand the need for seclusion. They expect not to see me for weeks or even months. I could have simply said to them, ‘Look, I’ll be off the radar for a while. Don’t worry. I’ll be in touch when I’m done,’ and they would have accepted it. But something about this adventure called for a cloak of subterfuge, a mysterious element. I felt like Alice or Dorothy, or Lucy from the Narnia stories—all characters who had crossed some peculiar divide between reality and make-believe. As a child I’d always been something of a daydreamer, drawn to the world of make-believe. It may well have been my way of coping with Mum’s illness and death. Fiction, primarily, is escapism, isn’t it? A place where we can find a better world and be better people. I’d always thought of my writing as a foray into a strange country, but as a metaphor, not literally. Now I was making that journey and I wanted no bread-crumb trail, no skein of thread, to tempt me to turn back.
When I crossed the car park and eased myself back into the MG I felt like a different person. I had sloughed off the old—specifically Ivaan and the whole Hackney episode—and from now on would embrace whatever fate provided for me.
I drove for hours, taking—at what felt like random—the M6, discounting the North Wales option because a slow-moving lorry ahead of me indicated he was going that way. Darkness fell somewhere north of Preston but I drove on. The traffic seemed to fall away the further north I got. I passed slow lorries as they lumbered up the inclines, and was passed by faster cars, but there were times when I had the dark, unfurling ribbon of roadway to myself. The sky was clear, a dark arch of blue-black pricked by stars. To my right and left the shoulders of slumbering hills rose up, and a gibbous moon hovered above me, throwing a milky light that rendered everything in shades of pearl and pewter.
I listened to the news, more Archers, an arts programme and a political debate before the petrol gauge suggested a fill up was required and my bladder indicated an emptying would be timely.
I took the next exit, which brought me to a roundabout. A petrol station—unnervingly illuminated by flickering fluorescent tubing and echoing with the ghostly strains of eighties rock music—was the sole sign of civilisation. Beyond it, to left and right, I could see no glimmer of light, no sign of habitation at all. The kiosk was dimly lit but the pump worked and, while I dispensed petrol, I looked around me at the deserted, eerie—but immensely satisfactory—scene. Presently a youth shambled into view from some garage behind the kiosk where, I imagined, he had been tinkering on some decrepit engine to the accompaniment of Guns N’ Roses. He wiped his hands on a rag and then pushed open the shop door for me.
‘Do you have a loo I could use?’ I asked him.
He nodded towards the far corner of the tiny sales area and I spotted a door, half hidden behind a stack of baskets displaying crisps that were declared—almost proudly, on a hand-written sign—to be “Out of Date.”
I used the loo and selected a few bits and pieces from the shelves: a bottle of water, a bar of chocolate, a packet of nuts. There were sandwiches, also soggy-looking sausage rolls and doubtful pies, but I didn’t like the look of them. I would have liked some fruit but there was none.
When I had paid, I pulled the car over to a layby and let Bob out for a snuffle along the verge before pouring half of the water into his bowl and scooping a couple of handfuls of his kibble on top of it. He looked at it askance for a few moments as if to say, ‘What’s this? No gravy?’ but then, with a sigh, began to eat it. I ate a few squares of the chocolate and wished I had a hot drink. The air was decidedly chilly, somehow thinner than London air, but noticeably clean-smelling. Apart from the sound of an occasional car passing below on the motorway there was no noise at all. I felt strangely peaceful, free and happy, but also quite tired, and I decided I would stop at the next hotel in the hope they would accommodate Bob.
The roundabout offered only two exits apart from the ones that led back to the motorway. I toyed with the idea of getting back on and going further north, but it felt wrong. There were signposts at the other exits that had names I didn’t recognise, which I saw as a thoroughly good omen. One of them—Hogget-in-the-Hole—appealed to me because it sounded like somewhere in Middle-earth and accorded with my idea of having crossed into a land of make-believe. I headed towards it.
The road was a decent enough “A” road, though twisting like a switchback in places, steeply climbing and then just as precipitously plummeting. We went through one or two places that might have been villages—clusters of literally three or four houses, all darkly curtained—but passed no pub, hotel or guest house. I saw no signs that pointed to anything that might be a town. There were no streetlights. The beams of the car raked endless hedgerows, copses, fields and paddocks.
Gradually, we seemed to leave the hilly country behind us. From time to time I could glimpse, over the neatly trimmed hedges, vast flat plains as dark and featureless as oceans. In the far distance what I took to be masts—but what kind, and for what purpose I could not guess—were gaily arrayed with red lights. It seemed to me the road was gradually wending me in their general direction. Occasionally there was a junction and I sat at it, the engine idling, while I peered down the dark throats of the lanes and tried to make out the words on the signposts. These were old, the lettering obscured by clinging tendrils of ivy or flaked away into rust. If they were legible, they meant nothing to me. They promised nothing in the way of overnight accommodation or dinner. I reached over to where my phone balanced on the dashboard. It was 11 p.m. 4G signal was nil. I drove on—further and deeper into the dark, strange landscape.
After about an hour the road became notably less good, narrower and more winding. I had not, that I knew of, turned off the road I had been following but it—like me—suddenly seemed less certain of its way. I was tired, and, perhaps, slightly panicked. I took the first turning that offered itself, but this lane took me between high hedges that leaned towards each other to form a sort of tunnel. It offered no possibility of a three-point turn. The surface of the road was loose gravel, with a ribbon of grass down its centre; decidedly worse than its predecessor, and my sense of anxious disorientation increased. The darkness outside the car was so intense and heavy it felt oppressive. I slowed to snail’s pace, inching forward through the black velvet of the night. Then, abruptly, the lane came to an end at a T junction. There was a signpost but the top was missing, leaving me clueless. I threw my hands up in despair, my sense of being trapped in a maze augmented. I looked at my phone again—still no signal and, in any case, I had no navigational app.
I plumped for a left turn. This lane was tortuously winding and potholed, then, suddenly steeply descending. An owl came out of nowhere, gliding on outstretched wings that just skimmed over the hedge. It almost hit the windscreen. I braked hard, throwing Bob forward and making my luggage shift, but thankfully I hadn’t been going fast because of the potholes and so we escaped unscathed. I put the car into gear and continued, but my hands trembled on the steering wheel. The car carried bravely on along an avenue of what I took to be ancient trees. I felt as lost, as disorientated and as desolate as I had felt when Dad died; having my hands on the steering wheel where his hands had so often rested deluged me with a sense of abject loneliness.
I began to feel cold. The heater of the car wasn’t very efficient and the soft-top let out more heat than it kept in. The imperative to find somewhere to stay, to eat, to rest was strong, but it was clear these remote areas of the country were not like London, where there is a Brewer’s Fayre and a Travel Lodge on every corner. There, twenty-four-hour coffee outlets and burger restaurants are everywhere, but that rabid consumerism had clearly made no inroads in the desolate, unpopulated region I had come to. If I had been less tired and less overcome by grief I might have been delighted; what else had I wanted, after all, than somewhere different, unspoiled, quiet and remote? But as I guided the car down the seemingly endless, aimless lanes I was forced admit to a sensation of overpowering fright and panic. I reached out my hand and caressed Bob’s head, feeling extremely glad that I had him by my side.
Suddenly the lane came to an end at a junction. In front of me was a line of scrubby-looking grass and then … nothing. Beyond the grassy fringe I could see no landscape at all. The canopy of night reached down from the heavens to the horizon. It felt like the edge of the earth sailors of old used to believe in. I turned off the engine and opened the door. I was parked on the junction, but it seemed so unlikely any other vehicle would appear now, when I had not seen a single one for the past two hours, that I did not worry about it. I unclipped Bob from his seatbelt and, before I could get out of the car myself, he had scrambled across me and climbed out. He planted his feet on the grey ground and gave a vigorous shake before lifting his muzzle and sniffing the air. Slowly, I got out of the car, pulling a fleece from behind the seat and putting it on.
There was an odd tang—sharp, briny, mineral—and dampness in the uncannily still air, and yet there was a sense of gigantic movement, shifting and surging, not far away. The earth’s crust felt thin beneath me. A noise that was not wind, not traffic, not mechanical, rumbled across the road. Bob’s tail began to wag and he padded across the road towards the line of spiky grasses. I followed him, scrambling up the verge with difficulty because the ground really did give way underneath my feet; it was dry, soft and yielding. The grasses were long, as high as my knee. The verge stretched for perhaps five yards and then fell away. Everything beyond it was shade and gloom, a vast lake of impenetrable dimness; but far, far out, the reservoir of shadow was relieved by the occasional glimmer of reflected starlight. It heaved and shifted and, at last, I identified the rumble, crash and suck that reverberated in the air and shook the ground—it was the sea.
I don’t suppose Bob had ever seen the sea before. It awoke something in his sedentary soul and suddenly he was off, down whatever precipice there was beyond the dune. I saw the flash of his tail and then he was gone. My sense of desolation was sudden and overwhelming. I called his name but my voice was lost, snatched up into some strange vortex of night and eddying air. I stepped closer to the edge, but with no idea of its steepness or height, or what might lie in the pool of gloom at my feet, I did not dare follow him. I don’t know how long I stood, whistling and shouting into the abyss. Once or twice, at an immense distance, I heard him bark. I could imagine him running along the tide line, snuffling in seaweed, dancing in and out of the waves that must, somewhere a long way across the beach, be curling onto the shore.
Far away to my right I thought I could see pinpoints of lights—a settlement of some kind, I speculated—hunkered down on the coast, where, surely, there would be a hotel or a B&B, somewhere I could lay my head. But when I blinked and looked again I could see only shades of night, layers of shadow and dim. I decided I had imagined the lights, dreamed them into being. How could there possibly be, I reasoned, any civilisation out here in this utter, desolate wilderness?
Finally, overcome by fatigue, I crossed back to the car and drove it to a sort of indentation in the dune—a layby, a passing place, a car park? I had no way of knowing and, in any case, was too tired to care. I reclined the seat as far back as it would go, pulled a travel rug over me, and closed my eyes.
At some point in the night, Bob came back. His whines roused me to half wakefulness and I opened the door to let him in. He crawled across me, damp and smelling strongly of seaweed, and settled himself on the passenger seat. He sighed once, heavily, and in a manner that communicated extreme contentment, and then went to sleep.
I woke, cold and stiff, at dawn. The windows of the car were steamed up, running with condensation. My rug was beaded with moisture. A warm fug of doggy-dampness rose off Bob as he snored. His coat was thick with some greenish brown crust that, last night, had undoubtedly been primordial slime. The seat beneath him was silvered with fine particles of sand. I reached out and stroked him fondly, glad he had found his way back to me and suddenly sure, from now on, he always would.
Chapter Five
As I climbed out of the car and stretched my back, the scene that greeted me was nothing short of spectacular. Where, the night before, there had been only an endless expanse of formless murk, now a panorama of ultraviolet luminosity arrayed itself before my eyes. In the night, the cloud had dispersed to leave a dawn sky that was the colour of mother-of-pearl. The hardly-risen sun behind me stretched my shadow to a grotesque length on the shivering grass but illuminated the soft grey beach and the benignly shimmering sea in a facsimile of the sky’s colours: pearl, mercury and pale mauve. The beach was dotted here and there with tortured sculptures—black, gnarled and faintly terrifying—which became, on a closer look, ancient tree stumps, logs and branches I supposed had been washed ashore long ago, now bleached and petrified permanent features of the landscape. The coastline to the left arced to a headland beyond which I could see nothing at all. To the right it curled in a perfect bay of shingle enfolded within a fringe of flat, sage green dune. At the furthermost reaches of this—I had to squint to make it out—there was a line of what I took to be buildings. A village! At the very least a hamlet! The buildings sat low, squat, as though crouched to the ground, an intriguing gaggle of roofs and chimney pots only just emerging from the twilight, but so promising to me. I could make out nothing more than that they did exist and were not, as I had told myself the night before, a figment of my exhausted mind.
I thought of breakfast, a pot of tea, a hot shower, and could have wept for joy.
Beyond the settlement the land rose again to a bluff that reached out into what, I saw now, was a firth, separating this coast from another. Across the iridescent waters lay a far hilly country of fields and clustered copses and, in the distance, a substantial mountain. The whole promontory was wreathed in mist—hazy, ethereal. It was breath taking, scarcely real. I knew I was tired and needed food and drink, but standing there in the dawn half-light did make me feel as though I had come into some fantastical domain. On the other hand, it disappointed me to find I had not, as I had thought, reached land’s end. There was more over there, and I could go further. Perhaps my journey was not done. There was only one way to find out. I got back into the car and turned the ignition.
The name of the village alone should have answered my question—Roadend. What clearer signal did I need?—except for the two hanged figures that dangled from a twisted, cobweb-swathed tree just beyond the village boundary. Both corpses were festooned in shapeless black capes. Skeletal feet drooped from the hems about four feet above the ground. Their heads lolled, half-severed by the thick hemp of the nooses, their faces mercifully covered by hanks of woolly hair. My sharply intaken breath exploded in a gale of laughter when I saw the placard one of them clutched in its bony fingers. Hallowe’en Night at the Winter Arms, 8 till late. Of course! Last night had been Hallowe’en.
