Fell of Dark

‘From the way his daughter’s looking at us, he’s obviously described the scene to her too.’

‘Well, it’s too good a tale not to be retold.’

Our soup arrived in the slim brown hands of Marco. I ate with gusto.

Peter’s suggestion that we had a couple of drinks in the bar after dinner I firmly refused. I left him there and watched the telly for a while, struck up a conversation with a couple from London, read half a page of the Daily Telegraph, then went to bed.

It had been a splendid day. I had a self-congratulatory sense of physical achievement. I was well fed, pleasantly sleepy and lay in a comfortable bed. To cap it all, a large yellow moon shone right outside my window. I saluted it and fell asleep.

I don’t know what time Peter came up but when the knock came at our door in the morning he was already up and dressed. He looked pale and told me as we went down to breakfast that he was suffering from sunburn as a result of our bathing party the day before.

‘I can’t walk today,’ he said. ‘I doubt if I’ll ever walk again.’

Marco’s smiling greetings had gone almost unacknowledged and the little Italian did not look at all happy when he brought us our bacon and eggs.

‘Not to worry,’ I grinned. ‘Today we go by train.’

Marco slammed Peter’s plate down in front of him. His thumb was in the fringe of the egg. As he removed his hand the egg came with it, then sliding free, it fell towards Peter’s lap. Peter with the casual rightness so hated by Jan lifted the edge of the tablecloth and caught the greasy object. He looked expressionlessly at Marco, then spoke.

‘Marco, can’t you organize something that makes sense out of this chaos?’

Marco’s underlip suddenly shot out and he began to gabble in Italian, lowly at first, but soon swelling in volume till everyone in the room was looking at us. Ferguson and his daughter, I noticed, had just come in and were standing by the door openly observing the scene with great interest.

Marco reached some kind of climax and halted. I thought of applauding, but a look at his face made me think again. He was very angry. Peter still sat there holding the tablecloth like a bridal train.

Ferguson moved over to us and spoke sharply in Italian. Marco caught the remnants of the egg up in his hand, flung it on to the plate and strode away to the kitchen.

‘Thank you,’ said Peter, releasing the tablecloth and standing up, partly to avoid the last oozings of the egg yolk, partly in acknowledgment of Miss Ferguson who was hovering behind her father. ‘That was kind. May I introduce my friend, Harry Bentink.’

‘Hello, Bentink. We have met in a manner of speaking. And I heard a great deal about you last night.’

‘How do you do,’ I said, half standing up with a bit of fried bread impaled on my fork which I waved nonchalantly at the girl. The bread fell on to the table.

‘You’re not having much luck with this table, are you?’ said Ferguson. ‘Come and share ours.’

He did not stay for an answer but moved across to the corner where he had been sitting the night before. We followed.

‘My daughter, Annie,’ he said. The girl smiled politely but said nothing. I got the impression she was scrutinizing me very closely behind her impassive façade.

‘Are you here on holiday or business?’ I asked.

‘Bit of both,’ he said. ‘Never know what you’ll see on the mountains.’

‘That’s true,’ said Peter in what I recognized as his facetious tone. ‘We saw a blue and a white tit only yesterday, didn’t we, Harry?’

He kicked my leg gleefully under the table. I lashed back and caught the girl’s ankle. She drew away in greater unease than I felt the situation warranted.

‘Sorry,’ I said.

‘That’s all right,’ she said. ‘Will you excuse me?’

She rose and left. She’d only had a thimbleful of grapefruit juice. I let my practised eye recreate the limbs under the skirt as I watched her go through the door and smiled approvingly.

She did not come back and we finished the meal practically in silence.

Replete, Ferguson folded his napkin neatly, looked at each of us in turn and asked, ‘What are your plans today?’

‘We’re going to see the sea,’ said Peter. ‘But first we’re going on a mysterious train journey.’

Ferguson laughed.

‘Oh, Lile Rattie,’ he said.

‘What?’ said Peter.

‘The miniature railway. It’s great fun if the weather’s fine. And it runs to time.’

Peter looked across at me and raised his eye-brows apologetically at having spoilt my surprise. I grinned back and looked suggestively at my watch. He nodded.

‘Well, Mr Ferguson, thank you for the use of your table. We must be off, however, while the day is young.’

We all stood up and shook hands.

‘Enjoy yourselves,’ said Ferguson.

‘You too.’

As we went out of the dining-room I looked at Peter curiously.

‘Why didn’t you answer Marco?’ I knew he spoke excellent Italian.

He shrugged.

‘He was just being rude.’

‘What did Ferguson say to him, then?’

Peter laughed.

‘He told him to bugger off or risk losing his unmentionables!’

Half an hour later we were striding down the road into the railway station. More than a station, it is a terminus and the incongruity of both setting and proportion have always endeared the place to me. Peter looked without comment at the narrow track and the low platform. There were not many people around at this time of the morning, I mean not many waiting to catch the train to Ravenglass, though when the train itself arrived it was quite full of trippers and hikers. They got out and dispersed. We put our knapsacks in one of the tiny open compartments and walked up the track to inspect the locomotive. Peter examined everything very closely, full of amused delight.

‘It’s marvellous, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘It’s not an intrusion into the place. Not like all those bloody motor-cars you find parked all over the place. You could run up Helvellyn in something like this and even Wordsworth wouldn’t object.’

The exhilaration of feeling the rush of air on your face, of being able literally to lean out and pick flowers as you pass is almost indescribable. Perhaps the sense of inhabiting in reality for a while the imaginative world of childhood has something to do with it. Certainly the (so it seemed) inevitable sun, the royal blue sky, the smell of things growing, to which the occasional whiff of steam or smoke seemed a natural addition, all these contributed to the enchantment of the moment. Peter looked like a child on a perfect birthday.

‘Thalatta, thalatta,’ he murmured softly to himself, eyes straining ahead to take everything in. ‘Soon we will see the sea.’