The Chalk Giants Read Free Page A

business,’ and Sidgwick said, ‘That’s a bloody funny place to put it,’ and they all started shrieking, Stan included, because he couldn’t help himself. Then Sidgwick lit a jumping jack under the table, they didn’t seem him do it till it was fizzing and went off; and Stan Potts’s brain worked with lightning speed so that he grabbed it and threw it over his head and ducked. The fat woman was yelling over the counter about the Principal, and Sidgwick was choking himself he was laughing that much.
    Her heels on the concrete floor were very distinct and sharp. She walked the length of the canteen, carrying the plate and set it down in front of him. He had to look up, though he couldn’t stop the laughing; and her eyes were snapping and glinting behind her glasses, there were red spots of anger on her cheeks. In the centre of the spoiled cakes, embedded in a meringue, were the remains of the cracker; and there were little white splashes of cream on her sweater, and one on her jaw.
    She said, ‘My cousin lost his eye through one of these, you big fat bloody thug. You must be mad. . .’
     
    He’d passed the road-block but he’d had to lie, he’d said he was going to Dorchester. The traffic was lighter now, the cars spaced out and moving at forty, sometimes forty-five. But nearly nothing was coming up from the west.
    His mind was empty; so to fill it, and keep away the things he didn’t want to see, he set himself to remember the road ahead. Wimborne, and the left turn by the Dorset Farmers, the little bridge, the long straight in the trees with the notice saying Welcome to Poole although you never really touched it; and the new roundabout at the bottom with the filling station, he could remember it being built. Then there was the other roundabout by the Bakers’ Arms and the research place, Admiralty they said it was, with the miles of high steel fence. Then the turn into Wareham, the siding where the oil tankers stood; and beyond, over the bridge . . . but his heart was thumping again, hammering, it seemed, painfully against his ribs, and he checked the thought half-formed.
    After that first chance trip he went back to Purbeck time and again; though the journey from the Midlands was a long one, five hours and more on a bad day. It left little from a weekend; just one night, and the following morning. The nights he spent in the bar; he would rise early on the Sunday, drive down to the castle or out on to the heath. The castle drew him, the vast shell of ruin topping its hill, the village straggling and crouching at the foot of the mound. Foursquare it stood in a great pass, flanked to either side by bulging heights of chalk. Once he climbed the nearer of the hills, sat an hour or more staring down at the ruined walls and baileys, the gatehouse with its leaning towers of stone. A chalk stream ran beside the mound. Tall trees arched over it, bushes clothed its banks; and here in autumn the glow-worms came, like cold green stars in the grass. He longed to take them back to her, jewel her fingers with them and her dark, rich hair.
    Other times he drove across the hills themselves, over the range road that was so often closed. There were hidden bays there, and empty, forgotten villages; and once he saw a horseman ride the forbidden cliffs, a mile or more distant, outlined against the pearly haze of sea. He discovered Kimmeridge with its blackened beach, the great house that overlooked the bay; Worth, its gnomish cottages hidden in sea mist, and Dancing Ledge with its lovely rock-carved pool. He was learning, too, the people who used the pub; John, as much a mystery to his friends, who knew, it seemed, every country you cared to mention and yet drove a tractor for a living; Martin Jones the hippie, with his floral shirts and wispy shoulder-length hair; Maggie who played guitar for the tourists sometimes in the Barn Bar, who lived in a white bungalow down the road with a birdbath on the lawn and a stone rabbit with