The Woodcutter - Reginald Hill

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to a sheet of ice and went bouncing and slithering down the fellside for a couple of hundred feet, and when the mountain rescue team reached me, they reckoned I was a goner. Didn’t I mention this in one of my other scribblings? I think I did, so you’ll know that fortunately there was no permanent damage and a few months later I was back on the fells with nothing worse than a heavily scarred back.

      But what the experience did do was let me see close-up what a great bunch of guys the mountain rescue team was. They were really good to me. I was too young to join officially, but none of them objected when I started hanging out with them, and a couple of them really took me under their wing and taught me all about proper climbing.

      Mind you, I did sometimes have a quiet laugh when they roped me up to do some relatively easy ascent that I’d been scampering up like a monkey all by myself for years, but I was learning sense and kept my gob shut.

      Now at last we’re getting to Imogen.

      I was fifteen when I first saw her, she was – is – a year younger.

      I knew Sir Leon had a daughter and I daresay I’d glimpsed her before, but this was the first time I really noticed her.

      Like I said, after that first encounter with Sir Leon, whenever our paths crossed he greeted me as Wolf and always asked very seriously how the rest of the pack was getting on. I’d grunt some response, the way boys do. Once when Dad told me to speak proper, Sir Leon said, ‘No need for that, Fred. The boy’s talking wolf and I understand him perfectly,’ then he grunted something back at me, and smiled so broadly I had to smile back as if I’d understood him. After that he always greeted me with a grunt and a grin.

      There was of course no socialization between us peasants and the castle, not even in the old feudal sense: no Christmas parties for the estate staff, no village fêtes in the castle grounds, nothing like that. Sir Leon was a good and fair employer, but his wife, Lady Kira, my dear ma-in-law, called the shots at home.

      Scion of a White Russian émigré family, Kira was more tsarist than her ancestors in her social attitudes. She believed servants were serfs, and anything that encouraged familiarity diminished efficiency. For her the term servant covered everyone in the locality. In her eyes we all belonged to the same sub-class, related by frequently incestuous intermarriage, and united in a determination to cheat, rob and, if the opportunity rose, rape our superiors.

      I don’t think anyone actually doffed their cap and tugged their forelock as she passed, but she made you feel you ought to.

      So when Sir Leon suggested to my dad I might like to come up to the castle one summer day to ‘play with the young ‘uns’ as he put it, we were both flabbergasted.

      It turned out they had some house guests who between them had five daughters and one son, a boy of my own age, and Sir Leon felt he needed some male company to prevent his spirit being crushed by the ‘monstrous regiment’ (Sir Leon’s phrase again).

      I didn’t want to go, but Dad dug his heels in and said that it was time I learnt some manners and Sir Leon had always been good to me and if for once I didn’t do what he wanted, he’d make bloody sure I didn’t do what I wanted for the rest of the summer holidays and lots of stuff like that, so one bright sunny afternoon I clambered over the boundary wall behind Birkstane and walked through the forest to the castle.

      As castles go, it’s not much to write home about, no battlements or towers, not even a moat. It had been a proper castle once, way back in the Middle Ages, I think, but somewhere along the line it got bashed about a bit, whether by cannon balls or just general neglect and decay I don’t know, and when the family started rebuilding, they downsized and what they ended up with was a big house.

      But that’s adult me talking. As I emerged from the trees that day, the building loomed ahead as formidable and as huge as Windsor!

      Everyone was scattered around the lawn in front of the house. With each step I took, it became more apparent that the Sundaybest outfit that Dad had forced me to wear was entirely the wrong choice. Shorts, jeans, T-shirts abounded, not a hot tweed suit in sight. I almost turned and ran away, but Sir Leon had spotted me and advanced to meet me.

      ‘Uggh grrr,’ he said in his pretended wolf-speak. ‘Wolf, my boy, so glad you could make it. You look like you could do with a nice cold lemonade. And why don’t you take your jacket and tie off – bit too hot for them on a day like this.’

      Thus he managed to get me looking slightly less ridiculous by the time he introduced me to the ‘kids’.

      The girls, ranging from eleven to fifteen, more or less ignored me. The boy, stretched out on the grass apparently asleep, rolled over as Sir Leon prodded him with his foot, raised himself on one elbow, and smiled at me.

      ‘Johnny,’ said Leon, ‘this is Wolf Hadda. Wolf, this is Johnny Nutbrown. Johnny, why don’t you get Wolf a glass of lemonade?’

      Then he left us.

      Johnny said, ‘Is your name really Wolf?’

      ‘No. Wilf,’ I said. ‘Sir Leon calls me Wolf.’

      ‘Then that’s what I’ll call you, if that’s all right,’ he said with a smile.

      Then he went and got me a lemonade.

      I got no real impression of Johnny from that first encounter. The way he looked, and moved, and talked, he might have been a creature from another planet. As for him, I think even then he was as unperturbed by everything, present, past or future, as I was to find him in later life. He took the arrival of this inarticulate peasant in his stride. I think he was totally unaware that I’d been brought along to keep him company. I can’t believe that being the sole boy among all those girls had troubled him for a moment. That was Sir Leon imagining how he might have felt in the same circumstances.

      A tall woman, slim and athletic with a lovely figure and a face whose features were almost too perfect to be beautiful came and looked at me for a second or two with ice-cold eyes, then moved away. That was Lady Kira. The ice-cold look and the accompanying silence set the pattern for most of our future encounters.

      I’ve little recollection of any of the other adults. As for the girls, they were just a blur of bright colours and shrill noises. Except for Imogen. Not that I knew it was Sir Leon’s daughter to start with. She was just part of the blur until they started dancing.

      Most of the adults had moved off somewhere. Johnny, after two or three attempts at conversation, had given up on me and gone back to sleep. The girls had got hold of a radio or it might have been a portable cassette player, I don’t know. Anyway it was beating out the pop songs of the time and they started dancing. Disco dancing, I suppose it was – it could have been classical ballet for all it meant to me – the music scene, as they term it, was an area of teenage life that entirely passed me by.

      But presently as they went through their weird gyrations, one figure began to stand out from the half-dozen, not because she was particularly shapely or anything – in fact she was the skinniest of the lot – but because while the others were very aware of this as a competitive group activity, she was totally absorbed in the music. You got the feeling she would have been doing this if she’d been completely alone in the middle of a desert.

      The difference eventually made itself felt even among her fellow dancers, and one by one they slowed down and stopped, till only this single figure still moved, rhythmically, sinuously, as though in perfect harmony not only with the music but with the grass beneath her feet and the blue sky above, and the gently shimmering trees of the distant woodland that formed the backdrop from my viewpoint. Unlike the others, she was wearing a white summer dress of some flimsy material that floated around her as she danced, and her long golden hair wreathed about her head like a halo of sunbeams.

      I was entranced, in the strictest sense of the word; drawn into her trance; totally absorbed. I didn’t know what it meant, only that it meant something hugely significant to me. I didn’t want it to stop. I wanted to sit here and watch this small and still totally anonymous figure dancing forever.

      Then

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