“How very …” I searched for the word, “gratifying.”
“Oh definitely.” He was negotiating another narrow step and pointing out a broken section. “Makes me wish I could paint – you know the sort of thing, all blobs of paint and drama entitled ‘Girl in Raincoat by Waterfall’ or something equally unimaginative. But I shouldn’t be telling you this. You actually are an artist I gather?”
“How on earth did you discover that?”
Jim Bristol cast a captivatingly handsome smile over his shoulder that made a mockery of my tone. He also didn’t seem to notice that I had stopped dead with one hand gripping the metal rail. “Among other things, you put it on your registration form last night when you were collecting your key. I’m unashamedly nosey, you see – an occupational hazard you might say – so I noticed. What sort of things do you paint?”
“People mainly. What’s your occupation? If it makes you curious, I mean?”
“Have you got your sketchbook here? You do carry one, I presume? All artists do.”
He turned his head briefly to note that I had resumed walking – where else could I go, really, when the alternative was to run back up these lethal stone steps – and I shook my head in a lie. “Not today.”
“That’s a shame. I should have liked to see it – I’m sure you must be very gifted. Perhaps you can show me when we get back later. You’ll be having dinner at the hotel of course?”
I only gave a deliberately ambiguous, “I imagine so.”
He returned my smile with a more generous one of his own and stepped down off the last flight onto the narrow platform that marked the base of the gorge. It was surprisingly sunlit after the dank brown shade of our descent through autumnal trees. A narrow bridge was the only exit on the far side, spanning the surprisingly tame outflow from the final plunge pool. A yellow wagtail flew in to land bobbing on an outcrop on the towering cliff only to notice us and dart away again. It was the perfect place for a trap. He only said harmlessly, “I’d like that.”
Doubt rekindled, and this time with a vengeance.
I think he might have been intending to help me down off the last step but I kept my fingers firmly entwined in the straps on my bag. And even if his gesture wasn’t the sinister action I was watching for, the look he gave me as I stepped past him was almost certainly that of one who was checking whether his much-exercised charm was having its customary effect. It meant that, now, there was no need to wonder why I should be feeling so untrusting. Since attempting to travel quietly, it was, I suppose, inevitable that I would instantly find myself attracting attention from all sorts of quarters who would have normally let me pass unnoticed. But no one can pretend that ordinary men deal out this sort of unsolicited flirtation to perfect strangers. And certainly not when the setting is beyond isolated and the woman in question frequently feels that the stain of her failed marriage is written all over her like a marker to steer well clear. This might all seem like a plea to be contradicted, but the facts were there all the same.
The wagtail sauntered by, letting out a sharp tic tic of annoyance as it flashed away again. I put a pathetically unsteady hand on the rail of the footbridge but his voice called me back. “What do you plan to do with your day now?”
I made myself tear my gaze away from the both forbidding and inviting prospect of the towering ascent. Somewhere far, far above, a buzzard was calling. I turned to face him. He was crouching over his pack and focussed on attempting to draw out the tin that bore his sandwiches. He spared only one brief glance for me as he added, “Now that you’ve seen the sights here, I mean?”
“I don’t know. What exactly is it that you do, Mr Bristol? You said your job requires you to be inquisitive.”
If he noticed the brusqueness in my question he didn’t show it. He paused in his task, elbow resting easily on one grey-clad knee. “It’s not as exciting as I made it sound, I’m afraid. I’m just a civil servant; local government dogsbody – you know the sort, endlessly running around following up other people’s loose ends. Quite tedious really.”
I stared at him sideways beneath lowered lashes while pretending to examine the flowing water, trying to decide whether I could fit this person wearing the standard camouflage of the businessman-at-large with a vision of the same man, starched, collared and ensconced in any kind of bland office tedium. Somehow I really could not.
I watched as he lifted out the first neat triangle of his lunch, declining the tilt of a hand that offered another to me. The close walls of the gorge towered above us. Even now, eight days on, there were signs of the recent heavy rain. Truly sizeable branches and bits of rubbish had jammed themselves on this the lowest of the various steps of the waterfall’s descent and just beyond the little bridge I could see where a green furred boulder had been crudely thrust aside to reveal fresh stone underneath. For a moment something red flickered beneath the current and my heart turned over. It wasn’t his body. It was a fragment of different coloured stone and that was all.
That was all. It made me wonder how far down the treacherous course of this river the rescue team had dared to climb. And how much danger they must have encountered working hastily beside a river in spate purely because some hope still remained. This rough terrain would continue for some miles before the river widened into the easier floodplains that led to the sea. It seemed clear to me now that perhaps the buzzards might find him, but no one else would.
“Are you catching the train back later?” Jim Bristol’s voice was jarringly cheerful. I must have been hiding the desolation in my heart very well because he was oblivious. He had moved his bag to one side and was now leaning comfortably against the flat plane of the towering rock. He was about five yards away.
“The train?” I had to moisten my lips.
“I saw you on it this morning. I was wondering which one you would be taking back.”
“The last one,” I said smoothly, stepping onto the bridge. “I want to explore a little first.”
“Ah. I might see you on it.” He moved to take a bite from his last sandwich, seeming pleased with the information, and then paused with it inches from his mouth. “I’d like to talk more, if you don’t mind?”
That sense of alarm intensified sharply. He seemed innocently intent on enjoying his lunch but the quick glance I saw him cast before taking that next bite seemed to my heightened senses to contain far more than purely casual interest. And I was sure he couldn’t possibly have missed the fact that I couldn’t wait to get away from him. It suddenly occurred to me that if I didn’t hurry up and take my leave, he’d have finished his lunch and I’d find myself accepting his company for the ascent.
“I’ll look forward to it,” I lied.
He let me go. “Excellent. Enjoy the rest of your day.” The smile he gave was simply one of open friendliness but I must have climbed about two hundred steps before I allowed myself to slow down.
---
At least that’s what it felt like. The ascent rose in short aggressive bursts from pool to pool with the black cliffs of the narrow gorge towering above. My heart was pounding and my leg muscles were complaining to the point of nausea, but I almost enjoyed the sensation as a relief from the panic I was experiencing because a man from the hotel had drawn me into conversation. Because that, after all, was all it had been.
Now I was free of him, I even had time to feel the irony; I knew full well that I wouldn’t have felt the need to break into a run just as soon as I had climbed out of his sight, had my companion been a woman from the hotel instead.
It was all very predictable, of course, that the divorcee should have developed an aversion to men, but that didn’t diminish the inner debate that was roaring away in my head. The one that didn’t care about my