Into Suez Read Free Page B

in. Coming from the yard, removing his boots at the door and going to wash his hands, her stepfather asked, ‘What have you got there, lovely?’
    ‘Don’t be upset, Dad,’ she said. ‘It’s some stuff of Mam’s. For some reason it was stored at Irene’s.’
    Wiping his hands, he peered inside; saw the neatly packed notebooks, letters in their original envelopes, an album.
    ‘That would be Mam’s journals. Always busy with her writing, bless her.’
    That was all he said, level and apparently incurious.Settling down in his usual armchair, he closed his eyes, stretching out socked feet as he had every evening for as long as she could remember. Archie at eighty was lean and spry, fit as a man two-thirds of his age. Only he had less stamina for the hours of arduous labour and lapsed into stillness at the end of the day. Of course Don took the bulk of the heavy work and all the farm business, which Archie had always found a chore. Nia looked over at him. Fairly obviously he did not want to examine the contents of the box. He preserves his inner balance, she thought; he is a spirit level.
    Without opening his eyes, Archie made a loose fist of his hand and gently tapped his chest, in the region of his heart, as if knocking at a door.
    *
    The quiet sky buoyed Nia: she rode a thermal that came bouncing off the edge of the Mynd, circling so that she could look down on its spine at the sheer valleys deep in shadow dropping from Pole Bank. The homely irregularity of Archie’s farm was spot-lit, its quilt of fields green and tawny yellow; the stand of oaks like broccoli. The red spot that winked would be Don in the tractor. Turning west, the glider sighed its way over Caer Caradoc; then towards Wenlock Edge.
    That passion should be so peaceful, she could never have imagined before taking to the skies twenty years earlier. Ripped veils of cloud travelled beneath her, hiding and revealing the vast presences of the hills.
    At peace, Nia thought: Ailsa too is at peace. They’d scattered her ashes on the Mynd all those years ago. Now looking down on the volcanic rock of Caer Caradoc, thesandstone Mynd, the rich soil of the flood plain, the coral reef of Wenlock Edge, Nia thought: those atoms of Ailsa might have drifted anywhere. Or everywhere. The whole of this is my mother.
    Ailsa’s moment; the six hundred million years of the massif. The mind fainted at the time scale of that. When the tectonic plates buckled and the volcanoes were born, Shropshire had been south of the equator. So Ailsa belonged to the body of the round earth. Nowhere was she a foreigner.
    Nia made a sweet landing. Les came down ten minutes later. More and more, sister and brother lived for this, the necessity to earn their crust being intervals in their dream. In midwinter, when the mountain was white and icebound and nearly impassable, they’d struggle up in the Land Rover if they heard the club was open. Her brother met her in the clubhouse, where they clinked their customary glasses of brown ale.
    ‘I thought of Mam up there,’ she said.
    ‘Oh, right? What in particular?’
    ‘Not sure. A sense of her. Do you ever feel you’re walking in her footsteps?’
    Les shook his head and smiled. He was a literal, practical guy who managed a small chain of sports shops and called a spade a spade.
    ‘Do you remember the raindrop fossil she brought down from the Mynd?’ Nia asked him.
    ‘I do. Where is it now?’
    ‘She gave it to the museum at Carding Mill, didn’t she?’
    ‘That’s right. We ought to go and see it again.’
    One person couldn’t claim ownership of such a treasure: so Ailsa had declared, though anyone could seethe avarice in her eyes. It was a fragment of telltale rock about the size of a brick, from a sandstone layer that had weathered out on the Mynd. The rock was imprinted with the marks of a passing shower that had fallen on to dried mud. The mud dried; a new layer of mud silted down, dried fast and locked the raindrops’ traces