The Chalk Giants Read Free Page B

broken-off ears, and Richard Joyce who painted for a living and who must have Private Means. He knew them, though he couldn’t talk to them; and for their part it seemed they looked askance at the fat man in the corner, with his pained half-smile and always-furtive eyes.
    These folk formed, as it were, an inner circle of acquaintanceship. But there were many others; Andy who worked with John, Andy with his tanned good-looking farmer’s face who went with Penny who helped out sometimes in the bar; Ted and Arthur and the locals and Vicky who was tall and blonde and wore an Army uniform, they said she was a nurse; she knew Richard, he’d seen her with him a couple of times. And the tourists, the leggy warm brown summer girls who sat in the hayloft in the Barn with their men and laughed and drank cider and lager and sometimes wine. He liked the Barn Bar best, with its high cool walls hung with implements and harness and the thatched roof over the counter and the door standing open to the dusk and the moths circling in the pools of yellow light. He saw the place in dreams; and always Martine was there, Martine with her great dark eyes. Sometimes too he saw her in the hills, in the hidden villages and by the great rock pool. Then he would wake and realize that once more he was home, that he had been alone, that he would always be alone; he would stare into the mirror, at the balding head, the faded, heavy-lidded eyes, and know he would never go to that golden place again, that Northerton was where he belonged and where he must stay. But the simplest truths are the hardest to accept; so he would pack his things, just one more time, and hear his mother’s complaints, and the images would swirl hour on hour till he saw the hills again, the sea-mist striping their flanks. He would drive into the remembered yard; and always he would know as he pushed through the hotel door that this time she was gone, gone for ever. Yet always she was there.
    In the intervals between his trips he studied. He read the geology of the region; and its history, prehistory and architecture. Every fact that touched upon the place touched, it seemed, on her, made him feel fractionally less alone. So, increasingly, she towered in his consciousness; her face glowed above the hills, her slender hands cupped bays and sea. He discovered the Hardy novels, and in time the painter Nash; the hills and trees and standing stones, flowers that broke from their moorings to sail the sky, fossils that reared in ghostly anger from the rocks. Suns rolled their millstones of golden grain; and it seemed he heard, far off and far too late, the shock of distant armies. He became at times transfigured; then he would remember, and Northerton would claim him and the garage, the oil changes and grease-ups and job cards and M.O.T.’s; Chalky and the dogs, the telly and the dreary Sunday nights. His mind, circling, would balk once more at the inevitable yet wholly unacceptable fact: that he was fat, and bald, and forty, and that life was ended.
    This inner pain was such that greater issues tended to pass him by; so that it was with some surprise that he entered the Barn Bar one summer night to find the place unusually quiet, a handful of regulars and visitors clustered round a tranny that stood on the counter-top. The words he heard seemed no less and no more than the many uttered before; but the silence that followed them was intense.
    Martin Jones broke it. He sat hugging his knees, head back against the wall of the place, fair hair brushing the stone. ‘Well,’ he said in his quiet, carefully modulated voice, ‘it’s all happening. This is what we’ve been waiting for.’
    Ray stood frowning behind the bar, one hand laid, it seemed protectively, on the shoulder of Martine. ‘Charming,’ he said. ‘Come on, Martin, we’ve heard it all before.’
    The hippie shook his head. He said, ‘Not quite like this.’ He glanced round lazily. He said, ‘I’m looking forward to it.