Pat Barker - Border Crossing

Trouble or not, there was nobody here. Tom put his overnight bag down, arid sat on a bench beneath a poster advertising the delights of Whitby, and another proclaiming the 24-hour availability of the Samaritans.He was beginning to wonder how he should set about calling a taxi when he heard the click of high heels, and looked up to see a woman with long orange hair, trailing clouds of diaphanous fabric behind her.

‘Are you Tom Seymour?’

He admitted that he was.

‘Rowena Moody.’ She announced her name as people do who expect it to be known, though it meant nothing to him. T-m one of the tutors on this week’s course,’ she added, the drawl of dissolute grandeur drying to a schoolmistressy snap, as she realized the ‘Oh’ of recognition would not be forthcoming. ‘There’s a bit of a flap on at the moment. This is the night we have an outside reader, and Angus was hoping to have…’ Her voice sank reverentially over a name that even Tom, who read no literary fiction, knew to be famous. ‘I told him it wouldn’t happen. He’s not going to trail up here. As far as he’s concerned, there’s only a hole in the ground between London and Edinburgh.’

They were walking briskly towards the Land Rover. Ail those flying draperies were making Tom think of Isadora Duncan, but Rowena got herself safely behind the wheel and tucked the yards of silk chiffon around her.

They lurched forward across the car park and out of the station yard. It rapidly became clear that Rowena had no business behind the wheel of a Land Rover or any other vehicle. She was lethal. ‘Oops,’she said at one point, jamming on the brakes and placing her left hand in Tom’s groin to reinforce the operation of his seat belt. ‘I didn’t see him at all, did you?’

It was a relief to be out on the moors, where there were comparatively few cars, and the sheep saw her coming, and fled.

‘So how do you know Angus?’ she asked, in what passed for a quiet moment.

‘I don’t really. It’s a sort of a friend-of-a-friend thing.’ He should have come with a story prepared, since there could be no question of mentioning Danny.

‘So you’re not an aspiring writer?’

‘No, I’m a psychologist. I do write, but nothing creative.’ The sooner they got off this line of questioning the better. ‘Do you often tutor for this course?’

It was her third time. She was happy to chat about the arrangement: fifteen aspiring writers cooped up for a week with two professional writers: an apprenticeship system.

‘It becomes quite an emotional pressure-cooker — you’d be surprised. Some groups more than others, of course.’

‘How’s this one?’

‘We haven’t found the weirdo yet.’

‘Does there have to be one?’

‘If you’re lucky. Two or three, if you’re not.’

Perhaps Angus liked intense, enclosed communities. At any rate he seemed to have found himself another one, or a succession of them. ‘Does Angus teach?’

‘He’s teaching on this one, but no, not usually. He and Jeremy run the place. Jeremy’s his partner.’

There was a questioning note to her voice. He had an uncomfortable feeling that his sexual availability was being explored. ‘I haven’t met Jeremy either.’

‘No, well, he’s not here this week. I’m afraid it’s a case of when the cat’s away…’ She wrinkled her nose with fastidious malice. 1 wouldn’t care to claim the path to the tutors’ cottage has remained entirely untrodden.’

Without signalling or slowing down, she turned left on to a potholed lane bordered on either side by drystone walls. A steep descent, taken at speed, brought them to a low farmhouse that seemed to have burrowed into the side of the hill to escape the winds that had deformed every tree. Even now, on a peaceful autumn evening, a gust snatched at him as he got out of the Land Rover. On a stormy night you must feel you were out at sea.

Rowena led him into the house. Red-tiled floors, a huge vase of hemlock casting shadows across a whitewashed wall, a bowl of pebbles on a wooden chest. She swept into the kitchen and he followed. A tall, fair-haired young man was standing at one of the work surfaces, squeezing meat out of sausage skins into a bowl.

He looked up and raised his eyebrows. ‘Couldn’t get sausage meat, would you believe?’

‘Don’t let Angus see you,’ Rowena murmured. ‘I don’t think I could cope with a cardiac arrest. Where is he, by the way?’

‘In the office. Trying to find a replacement.’

‘Oh, not still.’

Angus was on the phone. He raised his thumb in the air when he heard Rowena’s voice, saying into the phone, ‘No, absolutely not. Of course I’ll come and get you, and you’ll stay over, won’t you? There’s no point going back tonight.’ He listened, said: ‘Forty minutes? All right, then,’ put the phone down, and punched the air with his clenched fist.

‘Success?’ Rowena asked.

‘Lucy says she’ll do it.’

‘Oh, thank God. Perks things up a bit, you know, midweek,’ she said, turning to Tom. ‘Getting somebody else in. They’re sick of us by then. Though I must say I think they’ll find poor Lucy something of an anti-climax.’

‘Well, sod their luck,’ Angus said, sibilant, but stagily so. ‘And you must be Tom.’ A warm, dry, firm handclasp, and a hard stare. ‘I’m afraid I’ve got to dash off, but we’ll see each other later. As I expect you’ve gathered, it’s been quite a day.’ He was taking the Land Rover keys from Rowena as he spoke. ‘Could you be a darling and tell them in the kitchen she’s a vegetarian? Tell them not to make a fuss — just make sure there’s plenty of salad.’

After he’d gone, Rowena pulled a face. ‘It’s always like this. He sweet-talks people into making the commitment, but then they don’t bloody well show up.’

The dining room had blackened beams, white walls and an ancient fireplace. Three tall windows overlooked the valley, which was now brimming with blue light, though the sun still shone on the distant hills. Tom sat next to Rowena. Angus and Lucy, a small, brown woman with a shy and sour expression, arrived late and sat opposite. The food was good and washed down with large quantities of wine.

‘There’s a kitty,’ Rowena explained, ‘but some of us bring our own as well.’

She spent the meal pointing out the course participants to him. There were two elderly ladies, sisters apparently, both widowed — one of them, after her husband’s death, had moved three hundred miles to be closer to the other — and until this week they’d been inseparable. Now they sat at opposite ends of the table, each looking, since there was a striking resemblance between them, like the other’s mirror image. Neither of them spoke to the people on either side.

‘That’s Angus, for you,’ Rowena said. ‘He always sees them individually, and he pokes and probes away till he finds out what makes them angry. Calls it the grit in the oyster. You find the anger, you find the voice. Well, what makes Nancy angry is that her father used to get pissed and beat her mother up, and her mother was an absolute saint who brought eight kids up on next to nothing. And what makes Poppy angry is anybody saying anything against her father, who was a marvellous man, never once the worse for drink in his entire life, despite being driven up the wall by a nagging wife. There’s only two years between them — and they seem to have grown up on different planets. Angus persuaded Nancy to write about the father’s drinking, and she read it aloud to the group. And Poppy got up and walked out. And they haven’t spoken since.’

‘Do you think it’s just a tiff?’

‘No, I don’t. I think it’ll take years. And you’ve got to ask yourself: what’s the point? Really, what is the point? I mean, okay, it was quite a nice little piece, but frankly we are not dealing with the Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf de nos jours.’