The Hollow Land Read Free Page B

was happy. But his mother was not. Edgy, fidgety, she couldn’t keep to her book. She looked at Harry once, twice. She wondered if there was something odd about him sitting there all by himself not wanting someone to play with.
    So much younger than James, she thought. I oughtn’t to be lying here. I ought to be off finding him a friend. He’ll be getting shy and funny. It’s not natural—droning on a horse rake.
    Also it was Sunday, which always meant scrambled eggs for supper and she had run out of eggs. She would have to go down to get eggs from Teesdales’. Perhaps Bell Teesdale might ask Harry to stay down there and play.
    So the two of them set off walking in the heat of the afternoon, up the ribbony road and tipping over the hill as the car had done, past the great sleeping lime quarry dazzling the sky; on past the row of dusty fir trees all covered in grey powder; under the bridge where the bones of a young woman and the bones of her child had been discovered by quarrymen last year. They had been curled together in a sleeping position, the child inside the mother’s arms for about four thousand years. You could tell their date by the way they lay curled. They were Beaker People. Harry’s mother thought that she perhaps ought to be telling Harry about all this, and especially about the date, because it would help with school.
    But Harry was zigzagging and droning ahead. He droned at the showers of blackberry bushes hanging over the road, pricking with pins, and at the dry beck with the little bridges down the village street. Looking down at the beck and the village was a farm called Castle Farm where a Great Lord of the Marches had lived more than three hundred years ago. He had loved the king and had ridden all the way from the fells to Westminster for a coronation. The jewels in his sword and harness and on his clothes had cost so much that he had no money afterwards and someone wrote it all down in a book. Harry’s mother knew all about it. She wanted to tell Harry. But Harry was too interested in the peeling paint on the rail of the little bridge and the ducks complaining of the lack of water in the beck. She wondered if it had been a dry day or a wet one when the Lord of the Marches had crossed the beck on his way to Westminster Abbey.
    In the middle of the village street Flora the fluffy dog lay curled in a shallow pothole fast asleep. No quarry lorries came by on a Sunday and so Flora felt safe. She knew Sundays like a Christian. Four tired, hot hens jerked russet necks out of a hedge and made long complaining sounds in their throats and bobbed back in again. Not a soul stirred down the village street.
    When Harry’s mother knocked on Teesdales’ front door—the farmhouse was close on the road—there was no reply and—a wonder, the door was locked. All Mrs. Teesdale’s lupins in the narrow front garden, pink and pale yellow and purple and lavender blue and deep rich glowing red like the Lord of the Marches’ rubies, stood there looking at Harry and his mother and saying clearly, “Did you forget then? They’ve all gone off to Morecambe to the sea. Even old Grandad Hewitson.”
    â€œThey’re all at the sea,” said a voice from a dark place. Harry’s mother turned to see
 
Flora’s master, Jimmie Metcalf (called Meccer), shadowy in the back of his tottery dark shed by the roadside. He had been lamed in the quarry long since and could work no more, but he kept in touch by sitting in the shed and watching the limestone go by in great white lumps on the lorries, and on Sundays watching his dog sleep in the limestone lane. He was a huge fat pale man with a large flat face and straight-ahead eyes. He knew every mortal thing you did, Mrs. Teesdale said, even before you had done it. Now he said to Harry’s mother, “Your eggs will be round the dairy at the back. It’ll not be locked.”
    â€œOh that