The Spell Read Online Free PDF Page B

the whole Bridport area, but mostly he just tarts up old queens’ dados. It’s called a country-house practice, darling. Of course, no one builds country houses any more unless they’re neo-classical pastiche by Quinlan Terry, so it tends to be repairs and turning them into flats.”
    “Dearest, you’ve never heard of neo-classical pastiche by Quinlan Terry.”
    Justin raised an eyebrow. “You’ll find me changed in many respects from the old lezzy you used to know.” He prised open a bottle of beer.
    Later they went for a walk up a rutted lane already mysterious in the early evening under thickly leaved hazels and oaks, and out on to the high seaward slopes above the village. It was an intermittent three-mile climb to the cliff-tops, which Justin said was too far, as a rule he would only go for a walk if it was, as the French say, in the car. But Alex suddenly felt the pull of the sea, a holiday freedom that had seemed impossible in the airless cottage. He sprang ahead on his long legs over the tussocky hillside.
    “We’re not in any hurry, are we?” said Justin, starting to breathe sharply and sweating enough for his face to give back an ethereal reflection of the light.
    Alex turned and gazed at him and the improbable landscape in which they found themselves. He supposed that in the right kind of fantasy he might have appeared as a golden-haired drover or hay-harvester; but it would have been a fantasy. “It’s all so green,” he said, gesturing gratefully.
    Justin came up and anchored him with an arm. “Yes, it’s the rain. I heard someone talking about it. Apparently it makes everything go green.”
    They went on up, through gaps in hedges, past the low outbuildings of a farm with nettle-choked sheep-pens and a van full of straw, along the fenced perimeter of a silent pine plantation. They went on a dipping plank across a quick little stony stream, which Justin took as a place to stop and point out how it ran down and around and was the stream that raced past the cottage. Alex began to get an Alpine sense of distance and scale, though they were only a few hundred feet up. Beyond the stream there was a belt of young green bracken shooting out of the brown detritus of last year’s growth, and high up in it they came to a shallow turfy scoop, the sofa of a stone-age giant, and sat down in it, looking back at other hills that climbed away more slowly northwards. In the huge open shelter of the valley the air was still and mothering, though Alex thought that up behind them there would be cooler breezes dropping about the cliffs.
    The village of Litton Gambril lay below, and Justin pointed out its few features with a lazy imprecision which couldn’t quite disguise his regard for the place, and for his own good fortune in living there. “That’s the church, and that’s the steeple, darling. Those are the houses of various old monsters. That house there, you can’t really see it, is where the Halls live, who I must say are the most fabulous drunks. They’re roaring drunk the whole time, except allegedly between about eight and nine a.m. We often go there, it’s like a pub that never closes.” Alex peered at the church, which didn’t have a steeple, but a tower whose ornate finials rose against green cornfields with an effect of unaccountable extravagance. There was a loose knot of old houses around it, and the high dark crest of a copper beech on the village green. Out to the right there were walkers on the stony track that led to the ruins of a castle – “Ruined by the Roundheads, darling,” said Justin, to whom even the dustiest of
double entendres
deserved the experiment of an airing. The cottage itself was completely hidden in its cultivated hollow at the village’s other end; but to Alex the whole place communicated a slow shock of domesticity and loss.
    He thought of his own neighbourhood in Hammersmith, nothing so self-contained, just a block or two worn half-invisible by use, the place in