The House On Nazareth Hill Read online

  ‘Except he might wake.’

  ‘It was just a silly woman’s idea.’

  ‘Less of the silly,’ George said, feeling her withdrawing from him although she was standing still. ‘If he is asleep I suppose I could leave him a note.’

  ‘Saying what?’

  ‘I’ll think of it,’ he said to counteract her sudden scepticism. ‘That I’m not at the Priestleys’ and they don’t know where I am, for a start.’

  ‘Will you call me if you’re staying down?’

  ‘That I will.’ It occurred to George that he was sounding decisive about taking the least decisive course. ‘Let me find out what’s happening,’ he said, and hurried downstairs, tugging his keys free of his trousers pocket. He inched the key into the left-hand door at the foot of the stairs, and edged the door open, holding his breath.

  Smells of leather and boot polish met him. Though the polish smelled fresh, that needn’t mean his father was still awake. He switched on the hall light and eased the door shut, and had taken one muted step when the old man started to grumble in the main room. ‘Who’s that? Is that you?’

  ‘Who else is it going to be?’ Louder and with less of a sigh George called ‘It’s George, father.’

  ‘See you don’t leave that lamp on. That’s money you’re spending, and one day you’ll know.’

  ‘How could I forget,’ George muttered, and slapped the switch. Darkness like the heavy smells made visible sprang from the panelled walls as he trudged towards the solitary light and his father’s wheezing. ‘I thought you’d gone to bed.’

  ‘That’s what you thought all right.’ His father gripped the arms of the reclining chair with his arthritic hands and heaved his upper body erect, dragging his legs after it. Above the severe stripes of his pyjamas and dressing-gown his pouchy face looked loosened by inactivity, the grey lumps of eyebrows drooping over eyes whose brown had faded like an old photograph, the cheeks increasingly unable to support themselves and the lower eyelids, the nostrils of the long flat nose no longer bothering to withhold their hairs, the bottom lip exposing its underside in a constant expression of petulance. ‘You thought I’d be dead to the world because I didn’t know the score, did you?’ he said, the last few words expiring in a wheeze. ‘I know how to keep myself alert and don’t you tell anyone otherwise. Here, put these away since you’re up.’

  He’d been polishing yet another pair of his boots, these for walking rather than climbing, their soles as thick as his hand at the ball of his thumb. George balanced the cloth and the tin of polish on top of them and bore them into his father’s bedroom. As he elbowed the light-switch, the stack of gear opposite the foot of the rumpled untucked bed—boots, rucksacks, ropes, pitons, hammers—emitted a muffled clank, no doubt because his weight on the floor had disturbed the heap, though for a moment he imagined some small animal lurking in it, which dismayed him. He dumped the boots on top of another pair and knuckling the light off, strode back into the main room. ‘Father, I really do think you should consider finding someone who’d appreciate—’

  ‘Don’t be starting. You can sell what you like once you’ve planted me, but as long as you can bear to put up with me, every stick of it stays.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t like waste.’

  ‘None of it would be wasted if you used it instead of prancing about in other people’s gardens. Get yourself fit while you’ve some legs,’ the old man said, dealing his own a slap which made him snarl with pain.

  ‘Father, please be careful of yourself. Gardening keeps you fit, believe me.’

  ‘Pulling up daisies is your idea of exercise, is it? Look at you. You’re as feeble as you ever were,’ the old man said, although rather than looking at George he was lolling his head back. ‘Forever trailing after me and your poor mother and whingeing whenever we wanted to climb.’

  ‘If that’s the mood you’re in I’m going to bed.’

  The old man brought his gaze down from his memories, and George saw his eyes were wet. ‘Maybe before you shut me up in mine you’ll have the decency to tell me what went on upstairs.’

  ‘I was about to,’ George said, blinking moistness back. ‘We had some good times though, us and mother, didn’t we? We had some laughs.’

  ‘A few. Aye, there’s always the past.’ His father rubbed his eyes to focus on him. ‘She was proud enough of you, I’ll leave you that. Used to say you made something of the land when we only trod on it.’

  ‘We can make something of the present too, can’t we? I thought you were pleased we landed here.’

  ‘I’ll like it better once I know how many rooms we’ve got.’

  ‘Five, the same as everybody,’ George said, wondering if his father had convinced himself they’d been given an inferior apartment. ‘This one, two bedrooms, kitchen, and the one nobody can live without.’

  ‘There’s more than five in here. There’s some that are smaller.’

  ‘There aren’t, truthfully, I swear. Just the airing cupboard by the kitchen, and everybody will have one of those.’

  ‘I’d watch out, swearing round here. You never know who might be listening.’

  He was rambling, George thought uneasily; it was his age. Then the old man said ‘Go on, get it over with. Call whoever it is.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean, father.’

  ‘Don’t give me up for doolally just yet. That’s the fourth time you’ve looked at the phone since you came in.’

  George couldn’t recall having done so that often, and felt as though part of himself that hadn’t grown up had conspired with his father to betray him. ‘I’ll take it through,’ he said, picking up the cordless telephone from beside his father’s chair. ‘Shall I make us both a drink?’

  ‘Not this late, not with my bladder,’ said his father with a look which declared that he knew the offer was an excuse to get George out of the room.

  George ran the cold tap in the kitchen and filled a glass so as not to seem entirely dishonest, and gazed out at the gleaming husks of parked cars as Ursula’s phone began to trill. One pulse would signify that she had been waiting eagerly for him, two that she was resigned to not seeing him, three that she wanted him to realise she was disappointed in him, four that she’d had enough of him… ‘Hello?’ she said breathlessly, cutting off the fifth trill.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘You’re busy.’

  ‘I think I’d better be.’

  ‘I’m with you.’

  ‘I wish you were.’

  ‘Another time, perhaps.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ Belatedly afraid that she would think or choose to think he was referring to more than her meeting his father, George stammered ‘Soon, I hope, for you and me.’

  ‘I expect so. No,’ Ursula said, and having denied him the breath he was about to take, added like a mother promising a child a treat ‘I’ll go so far as to say you can count on it. You look after your dad tonight and I’ll look after you another.’

  ‘That improves everything.’ George would have been happy to prolong their companionable silence if his father hadn’t uttered a peremptory wheeze. ‘Well, I’d better…’

  ‘Go and be dutiful.’

  ‘And you be beautiful,’ he said, surprising himself.

  ‘I’ll try. Sleep tight.’

  ‘Don’t let anything bite,’ George said, and felt he’d spoiled the mood. As his father wheezed more vigorously he broke the connection and took the phone back to its niche among the climbing manuals and souvenir chunks of rock shelved in the main room. ‘No need to try,’ he murmured, having realised he should have told Ursula that.

  ‘First sign of madness,’ his father cautioned, and stared harder at him. ‘Which reminds me. Who was the crazy woman who kept cackling like a witch?’

  ‘Nobody I know.’

  ‘Then you must be going about with your eyes shut and your ears plugged. Cackling away all the time I was on the blower to your friend upstairs.’

  ‘There was nobody like th
at. It must have been a crossed line.’

  ‘I thought she was laughing at me.’ To George’s relief, he seemed mollified, at least on that subject. ‘So what did I miss up there?’ he said, clawing at the lapels of his dressing-gown to cover his cobwebby chest.

  ‘Mostly talk about security around the place.’

  ‘What’s up with it?’

  ‘Nothing, father. No reason to get worked up. That old tree may be cut down in case it endangers the building. I won’t be mourning it. It’s too dark underneath, for one thing.’

  ‘Too dark for what?’

  ‘For anything to grow, it seems like. And there was talk of some kind of security watch, not that I imagine there’ll be much to watch for. This place is built like a fortress. Nobody with any sense would try to break in.’

  ‘How am I supposed to know who’s meant to be in?’

  ‘Shall we have everyone round for a drink? It can be an early Christmas party before I drive you round to see your friends. And once the weather’s better I’ll take you some of the places where you used to walk and climb.’

  ‘You’re a good lad sometimes.’ The old man dug his fingers into the arms of the chair and attempted to propel himself out of it, then subsided with a deflated wheeze. ‘Give us a hand up, will you? All this waiting round has tired me out.’

  ‘You needn’t have waited. I’d have told you all about it in the morning.’

  The old man gave him a look which summed up a whole paragraph of rebukes. ‘Just help me out of this.’

  George stooped over the chair and slid his hands through his father’s clammy armpits to hoist him to his feet. ‘Tickles,’ his father snarled, writhing so violently that George almost couldn’t hold him, and emitted a series of protests which seemed entirely random as George, having managed to sneak an arm around him, helped him out of the chair. ‘Not so fast’ and ‘You’re squeezing the breath out of me’ and ‘Mind, you’ll have me—’ and ‘Can’t you see I’m—’ was some of what he said before they succeeded in reaching the hall. When George attempted to steer him towards his bedroom he said ‘I want the—’ George held that door open, and shut it as his father wavered to the toilet, slapping the tiled wall at each step. Then there was silence which an eventual flushing betrayed as having concealed a shy hushed urination, and his father emerged to blink about him, unsure which way to turn. George led him by the elbow into the master bedroom, but as soon as his father had lowered himself in a series of arrested motions like still photographs onto the edge of the bed he protested ‘I can manage now.’

  George was closing the door when a car glared out of the dark where the moor met the sky, then prowled away into the night. Though the old man pretended the view which his son had insisted he take meant little or nothing to him, George had caught him enjoying it when he thought he wasn’t being observed. George eased the door shut to leave him alone with it, and was making for the bathroom when his father said in a voice that might have been intended only for himself ‘There was someone else in here before.’

  Since nothing followed except at least a minute’s creaking of the bed, George advanced to the bathroom. He washed his face and scratched his scalp with a comb through the flat blond turf of his hair, he brushed his teeth and awakened their nerves with a handful of water, he directed his stream at the bowl above the pool in deference to his father, and then he turned off the bathroom light and tiptoed along the faintly glimmering hall to his bedroom.

  It was practically bare. He liked that, and the starkness of the few items of furniture—the wardrobe and chest of drawers as white as the rectangle of the bed, its pillow squashed by the tucked-in sheets; the dressing-table in whose mirror he checked that his outline hadn’t sagged during the day. He inserted himself in the bed, trying to leave the sheets undisturbed, a game he’d played since early childhood. His hand found the cord above the pillow and let the room reveal its nature: total darkness.

  He liked the dark. It made the room feel smaller, close as the sides of his bed, as if the walls had moved to contain him in a cell that was as remote from the rest of the world as he wanted his sleep to be. Keeping his hands beneath the sheets so as not to be tempted to reach beyond the edges of the bed felt like making a pact with the room. He closed his eyes, inviting the darkness to render his mind blank. He was descending into sleep, past memories which floated upwards and were gone for the night, when it occurred to him, too gently and vaguely to jar his mind awake, that in some way the Priestley household more than resembled his own.

  4 - The breath of a spider

  ‘You do understand, don’t you?’

  ‘It’s your decision, Mrs Raistrick. So long as you’re comfortable with it, it’s not for me to understand.’

  ‘I don’t want you to feel I’ve let you down, Mr Priestley, when you’ve been so kind.’

  ‘I’ve no reason to feel let down that I know of. I thought you might have some.’

  ‘I won’t have you thinking that.’ The widow sat forward so vigorously that her chair thumped its hind legs on the worn carpet of her sitting-room. ‘You mustn’t blame yourself because my husband wasn’t as thorough as you. I hope you won’t blame me for not doing what you said those other people did who weren’t your clients.’

  ‘I only wanted to make you aware of all the options.’

  ‘You did, and I’m grateful, but I wouldn’t have wanted my hubby thinking I had to lie because of him.’

  ‘Of course if you believe that’s involved…’

  ‘Don’t you, Mr Priestley?’

  Oswald had meant to sound agreeable without committing himself, but her eyes were asking more of him. ‘We can hope,’ he said as positively as he could.

  ‘And we can pray, can’t we? That never harmed anyone.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s so,’ said Oswald, and had to clear his throat. ‘Well, I just dropped by to see that things were as all right as they could be.’

  ‘Oh, they are. I’ve still got the house and what’s left in it, including all the memories. And with the money your firm is paying me I’m having an alarm put in, that’s one thing I’m sure of.’

  ‘Not the only one, I hope.’

  ‘You’re right. We can be sure of ours who’ve gone before, can’t we?’

  ‘I won’t argue with that,’ Oswald said, reflecting that she mightn’t be so certain of her late husband if he himself hadn’t lied to her on niggardly Raistrick’s behalf. He pushed himself out of his chair and felt a floorboard of the small room shift uneasily. ‘Well, I suppose I’d better…’

  The widow raised her hands as though lifting a large flat piece of dough, a gesture which ushered Oswald to the front door. As he opened it she gave him a sudden brief fierce hug and stepped back, fixing his eyes with hers. ‘You and yours look after each other,’ she said. ‘And if you don’t mind me saying this, since you’ve been such a friend…’

  Though he had no idea what he was inviting, Oswald felt bound to say ‘Please.’

  ‘I wish you were as secure in yourself as you deserve to be.’ She took hold of the latch and began to swing the door back and forth. ‘I’ll pray for you. I know you’d do the same for me,’ she said, and to stop herself presuming further, shut the door.

  Three paces took Oswald to the wooden gate, which felt metallic with frost. The night sky was cloudless, pinned up with stars, and every streetlamp and lit window was so sharply denned that their outlines appeared to have been cut out of the dark. Nevertheless he had to persuade himself to take a deep breath. It didn’t taste even faintly of fog, and so he released it as a long gasp of relief and marched himself uphill.

  Foggy nights were still bad. Any sight of the lamps at the edge of Partington starting to blur was enough to revive the most dreadful night of his life. He would feel the inside of his head growing raw, scraped hollow by the memory, which had room only for itself. Four years had digested some of it: the hours he’d spent wondering how far out of Sheffield Heather had managed to drive before t
he avalanche of fog had spilled down the Pennines; the number of times he’d had to reassure Amy as the radio broadcast another fog warning; the way the silence of the telephone had become a presence which he hadn’t dared acknowledge, even to himself—but the fading of these impressions had isolated worse. When Amy’s anxiousness had sent her to the bathroom he’d sneaked out of the house, willing Heather’s car to appear, and as a wind had dashed cold fog in his face, it had brought him the sounds from the motorway, the siren of an ambulance and then another and another, so tiny and distant he’d tried to believe they weren’t there at all.

  He’d listened for as long as Amy was upstairs, but then he’d had to go back inside, telling himself that an accident had blocked Heather’s way home. If he’d let himself think otherwise he would have had to act, and that would have frightened Amy for no good reason, he’d convinced himself. He’d watched television with her, watched some comedy show which had made the half an hour before the next news bulletin begin to seem endless, until Heather’s friend Jill from two doors up Pond Lane had come to ask her advice—about what, he never knew. Since she hadn’t heard the sounds from the motorway, he’d felt able to ask her to sit with Amy while, as he’d said, he went to see if Heather had broken down. He’d had to drive the four tortuous miles of unfenced road with excruciating slowness, but in retrospect it seemed to have taken him no time at all to come in sight of the motorway, or at least of the fog on it, pulsing a lurid blue around a gathering of puffed-up lights. Those had shrunk into clarity as he’d driven as far as the police van which had blocked the slip road; they’d glared into his brain as he’d seen the six cars mashed together among the ambulances—seen that the red Ford Anglia in the midst of the destruction was, despite the lockjawed grimace of its front and the jagged gape of its windscreen, unmistakably Heather’s. The pileup had smashed it around the wrong way, so that it was facing him, but all he’d managed to distinguish within the dark interior had been a glittering, a regular dripping of light on a great many fragments of glass. Beyond the wreck two men had been carrying a white cocoon on a stretcher to the nearest ambulance, and he’d lurched out of his car too fast to switch off the engine or slam the door or for the police to stop him. The fog had hacked at his throat, the icy tarmac had bruised his feet, and he’d continued to run, because there had been nothing else he could do, when he’d seen that the contents of the cocoon were entirely hidden, even the head.