CHAPTER ONE

There was a green road winding across the landscape. A perfectly empty road: not a lead-grey road for glinting cars, but a green road, a grass road, a natural road - running level and still like a river. It started as far away as Greg could see, in the pale plain that blurred into the horizon over to his left. As it came nearer it was a green string across green fields, and then it disappeared behind a hill. Greg scanned to the right, and picked it up again, a stretch as straight as a Roman road, passing first some kind of disused quarry works, then a tiny house, intersecting with a grey minor road before vanishing once more among the belt of trees fringing the outskirts of the town. He traced the green line back again now to try to join it up to where he had lost it. The causeway by the toy house merged into a gently, then steeply, shelving hillside, and the line laid itself along a ledge around it as the ground dropped away beneath. Then, as a great river gorge cut down deep into the hillside and the olive green water curled through, Greg saw the line stop, turn dull brown and cross the river in, he counted, twenty slender, arched steps, and realised that the green line was an old railway line, the massive viaduct still keeping its course uselessly complete.

And the air hummed, a deep humming that swooped into buzzes and growls, beneath Greg as he looked out over the landscape from the top of the fell, and around him. Far below, tiny cars, lorries and coaches raced to and from the town on the wide white dual-carriageway. The traffic noise was incessant: three thousand feet up, it was all he could hear. The road seemed to part the land, to push the hills aside in order to make its way, and its groaning hum seemed like the energy constantly needed to keep it so. A metal, pylon-sound: you climbed this high so you could see all the land and hear its silence; instead the air whined like a fridge.

Not that the advertisement had said anything about railways. Greg had been leafing through the youth hostelling magazine at the dentist’s. They had wanted Assistant Wardens for the summer; he had been wanting out of London and the City, out of green screens and dollar rates and sandwiches at your desk so you could shout into the phone over lunch. Four years out of college, and the interview in the hotel suite during his final term had led to here: paid to have the jitters; paid to be steeled with euphoria; paid to make money for someone, or something. It was the responsibility, you assured anyone who asked, mostly yourself, the alarming responsibility. This was why it was an important job. This was why salaries were ... comparatively high. But Greg had come to feel no responsibility at all for fluctuating decimal points on wall screens: which ought to have been alarming, for him and his employers, but was only boring. He was haunted, rather, by a recent newspaper report of a long-distance coach driver convicted of reckless driving after his coach had ploughed into a queue of stationary vehicle at a contra flow. A second’s inattention after thirty years’ service, and six people dead: a second was all you needed, if you were only a bus driver.

On his last day in the dealing room his colleagues had taken him out to a wine bar and got a lot drunker than he did. Back in the office his boss had consoled him that he wasn’t mercurial enough for this line of work, perhaps, and Greg wondered if the man really meant stolid, or ponderous, which were the words that sometimes occurred to him about himself. This time, however, it felt like a compliment, since usually such thoughts came to Greg when he was standing at a crowded bar waiting endlessly and unsuccessfully to be served. His flat in Lewisham had been let for the summer, and the June day he left London was the morning after election night. On the television Trafalgar Square in the early hours had danced with blue rosettes; as results were declared, town hall after town hall had swelled with a belligerent roar. On the steps at the victorious party headquarters tender words were spoken about the inner cities: “So much to do ...” Greg sprawled on the floor in the dark cradling a bottle of Scotch, flicking first frenzied, then listless V-signs at the grey screen.

   By early evening he was hurtling in his Mini towards Carrock along the wide white road, windows down and hair astream: such a good road for getting some speed up! Green steeps of fell were either side of him, and the sky seemed huge. Entering the outskirts of Carrock he found a small town by the shore of a lake so long that the other end was out of sight, the fawn-coloured stone buildings straggling up the hillside around a sharply-climbing cobbled high street. There were wide tree-lined avenues of tall Victorian guest houses, half a dozen large hotels, several new closes of redbrick bungalows, and a boarded-up cinema. Cars towing caravans trundled around the one-way system. A cluster of youths drank cans of lager in an otherwise empty market-place.

   All prior communication had come to Greg direct from YHA headquarters - Greg couldn’t remember if any of their letters had mentioned the Warden’s name, and anyway he had left them behind in London. Now the Warden was offering his hand with a grim nod, but only countered Greg’s self-introduction mystifyingly with “Head Office led you the usual dance, then?” before about-heeling to attend to some new arrivals who were ringing the reception bell. Greg wandered around the hostel under the high, ornately-plastered ceilings, his shoes clicking on the black and white tile floors, wide wooden banisters creaking under his hand. Posters of Lakeland views curled off walls, stiffened with age, all fluffy clouds and azure skies and brown at the edges. people lugged heavy bags past him, burst out of steaming shower rooms on a dripping tippytoed run for a dormitory. Skylights laid slabs of corn-coloured evening sunlight across landings.

   So then Greg had meandered out into the garden. on the other side of a gate in the bottom fence a path twisted up the tussocky slope, and when Greg followed it he found it ascending across the slopes of the fell to the rocky crag, and above the town.

XLV.          On the Projected Kendal and Windermere Railway

“Is then no nook of English ground secure

From rash assault? Schemes of retirement sown

As when their earliest flowers of hope were blown

Must perish ...”

   But already Greg’s mind was wandering. Throat-clearing, he thought, Get on with it ... He skipped to the next one:

XLVI

“Proud were ye, Mountains, when in times of old,

Your patriot sons, to stem invasive war,

Intrenched your brows; ye gloried in each scar.

(‘What pompous bullshit!’ thought Greg, yawning. ‘Falklands rhetoric!’)

That rules o’er Britain like a baneful star,

And clear way made for her triumphal car

Through the beloved retreats your arms enfold!

   There was a knock at the door. He was left with a mental picture of Wordsworth standing by a McAlpine’s Portakabin, complete with stern sideburns and wooden staff, beholding earthmovers and concrete mixers flattening the wide white dual carriageway across the valley. “Mm-hh?”

   Beyond the furthest pale reaches of the Anglepoise a tall girl in a short night-shirt was letting herself in, parting dark waist-length hair away from her face.

   Greg put down his book. The girl - she looked to be in her mid-twenties - drifted about his room, peeping round the curtain out at the dark, studying herself briefly in the mirror, drawing a finger down the label of his Scotch bottle on the mantelpiece. “Can I lie on your bed?” she said, curling up on the foot of his bed and closing her eyes.

   Greg nodded an open-mouthed “Yes!”, but the girl was smoothing the night-shirt over her thighs and sighing luxuriously. He watched her lying there, now still, her head on her hands, her mouth in a solemn smile. Eventually he picked up his Wordsworth again.

Swept onwards did the vision cross your view?

Yes, we were startled; and, in balance true,

Weighing the mischief with the promised gain,

Mountains, and Vales, and Floods, I call on you

   (There was a tall girl with long hair lying on his bed)

To share the passion of a just disdain ...”

(- and a railway line was just a green road with tracks on.)

   The girl sat up suddenly and scoured her eyes with her fists and beamed brilliantly at Greg “I’m doing a survey,” she said, and sighed. “Bunk beds are so narrow! It’s like sleeping to attention!”

  Really, Greg thought. He wanted to guffaw out loud. A po-faced poet ranting about railways, and the most forward girl in the world ...

   The girl burrowed her chin into the counterpane again. “I’m Ruth.”

   “When did you test the bunk beds?”

   Ruth looked hard at him. “I’m sleeping in the dormitory,” she said. “Here all summer, for some reason that escapes me. It’s for my thesis: on the geology of the Lakeland mining regions. I muck in with all the cooking and shit and get myself free board and lodging. I had the dormitory to myself a couple of weeks ago, but now the place is full of people every night - all staying here.”

   Greg said he was Greg, and all that, and asked if it was a good hostel.

   “I can’t seem to exchange one sensible sentence with the Warden,” Ruth said. “Food’s crap. But he sells Mars bars at reception.” She inclined her head in vague enquiry. “Who won the election?”

   "Where’ve you been?”

   “I heard it was on ... Out on the fell all day. I’m just in the middle of mapping the tungsten deposits on Scale Fell - the old mine was on the far side. It’s about three miles away.” She shook her head. “But I don’t talk to anyone here.” Ruth bounced off the bed and raised her bare foot to her knee in a pas de deux and said. “Well, it’s very nice to meet you, Greg,” with demure formality.

   “Mm, the Lakes are OK,” said Ruth abstractedly. “Thunacar, The Warden disappears up that a lot. Yes - you got a car? I walk there along the old railway line.”

   “I’d like to do that.”

   “Can I take the car then?” Ruth poured herself a swig of whisky from Greg’s Scotch bottle into his toothmug and stared at him over the rim as she nonchalantly tossed it back. “I’m sorry that woman won again,” she added afterwards, and pulled the bedroom door open again slowly. “Her hair ...”