The Moon Field. Judith Allnatt

with the barking of dogs and the rumble of a motor charabanc passing along St John’s Street. The sky was a hazy white and the green flanks of the hills rose in the distance behind the tower of the Moot Hall, their lines as familiar to him as the lineaments of his own face. Taking a deep breath to clear his lungs of the indoor smell of the post office, he caught the musky odour of horse dung and the sharper tang of motor oil. He paused to adjust the strap of the postbag and loosen his tie a little; then he turned down the alley at the side of the post office to collect his bike. He wheeled it out, leaning its saddle against his thigh, and went on in this fashion, bumping over the cobbles, past the Moot Hall and into the narrow streets beyond.

      The bike was a heavy, black, iron thing with a basket the size of a lobster pot and when George first got it, he’d not been able to manage it on the steep inclines. He’d needed to get off halfway up a hill and walk it up the rest, sweat darkening his fair hair and sticking it to his forehead. He had persevered though, pedalling a little further each time, thinking of his body as an engine that would benefit from work, and taking pleasure in the healthy ache of his muscles at the end of a day. His uniform jacket had needed to be let out along the back seam to allow for the growing breadth of his shoulders, and his mother, fitting the jacket on him, had called him an ‘ox of a man’ and made him smile. Now, by standing up on the pedals he could force the bike uphill, clanking and complaining, his solid frame bent over the handlebars, shoulders hunched and front wheel wobbling as he slowed for the steepest slopes. Having the bike meant that he could deliver to the farms and hamlets. His spirits lifted as soon as he got out among the fells and he happily left the younger boys to divide the rest of the town between them and deliver on foot carrying lightly loaded bags and returning more frequently to the office to refill them.

      George forced himself to walk at his usual pace along the street and up and down the steps of the guesthouses. There was no point hurrying, he told himself sternly, because if he arrived at the Manor House early she would still be lunching and he would have to deliver the family’s letters to the gatehouse, and would miss his chance again. No, he had to do everything as usual and must not leave the town until the Moot Hall clock struck one. That would bring him to the grounds around two o’clock, just as she set out down the lane from the house to take her walk but before she turned off right for the fell or left for the fields and the river.

      It had been at the bridge that he had first seen her. He had almost not noticed her in the dappled shadows of the alders that grew beside the river, right close against the stonework of the bridge; only the brightness of her white blouse had given her away, she was so still. She was holding a brown box in both hands and leaning against the parapet. George was struck by the way her straight brown hair was caught in a twist that sat neatly at the nape of her neck and how her posture, leaning forward to focus intently on something below, accentuated the slenderness of her waist. He slowed the bike, thinking to pass on the far side of the narrow bridge without disturbing her but the crackle of the wheels over the grit caught her ear and she turned, her hands still holding the object in front of her and looked at him as if puzzled for a moment. Her face … pale, with dark eyes, forehead slightly drawn, as if coming round from sleep, high cheekbones and full lips, which ran into upward indentations at the corners suggesting the tantalising possibility of a smile that was at odds with the serious expression of her eyes. Without even thinking, he put one foot down on the ground and stopped dead.

      ‘What are you doing?’ he said, blurting it out into the moment before she could turn away.

      ‘Preparing to take a photograph,’ she said.

      He got off the bike and wheeled it over to her. His family had only one photograph, a studio portrait of his parents: his mother seated, wearing her bridal gown, veil and circlet of flowers; his father standing stiffly behind her, one hand resting on her shoulder.

      She said, ‘I want to catch the way the light is reflecting off the water on to the rock,’ and pointed at the boulders that were tumbled midstream, the current divided by them into shining cords that glittered and threw up shifting patterns on their undersides.

      He nodded and they stood together watching the movement and listening to the rush and trickle of the water over the bed of smaller stones.

      ‘Can you see a pattern in it?’ she asked.

      ‘Nearly …’ he said, for it seemed that there was a pattern though it was complex and hidden just beyond his ability to grasp it.

      She turned to him. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘A nearly pattern. It’s just a little too quick for us to follow.’

      She held the camera up again and looked down through the viewfinder. She sighed and passed it to him, saying, ‘What do you think? It’ll be impossible to catch the sense of motion, of course.’

      The viewfinder had a greyish tint and George looked through it at a scene transformed in an instant to cooler tones. Gnats showed like grey dots above the surface of the water, their dancing as complex as the lights on the rocks beside them. Without the glare, the shifting lights were softer. He could see, on the shady side of the stones, dark bars beneath the water.

      ‘There are trout,’ he said, ‘lying up out of the heat.’

      ‘Are there? Where?’ She peered over the parapet at where he pointed. ‘Are you an angler?’ she asked.

      George shrugged. ‘I fish a bit. Mostly I just look a lot and so I see things.’

      She gave a little smile and he blushed as if he had said something stupid. He gave the camera back to her. ‘Will it be in colour? The picture?’ he asked, making an effort to conquer his shyness.

      She nodded. ‘The new film still isn’t as close to a natural palette as one would like; it’s better than monochrome though.’

      ‘Except for in the snow,’ George said.

      That smile again. George’s heart turned over. ‘I prefer painting,’ he blurted out; then, fearing he’d been rude: ‘I mean you can get the real colours then, all of them. I like going up on the fells in the evenings when there are greys and purples and the rust of the bracken, not just green, the slopes aren’t ever just green …’

      She looked at him then. Not as if he was being dull, as his little brother, Ted did, or as if he was unhinged as Arthur had once when he spoke to him about painting, but as if she was really, truly listening. She said, ‘… and clouds aren’t ever only white any more than the water’s ever only blue. Do you go down to Derwentwater to paint?’

      ‘Sometimes,’ George said, ‘and out on the tops: Cat Bells, Helvellyn. But I haven’t always got paints; sometimes I sketch. It’s expensive, you know.’

      ‘I don’t always take the camera,’ she said, ‘sometimes I just sketch too.’ She held out her hand. ‘Violet Walter. I live back there.’ She pointed towards the trees, beyond which, George knew, lay only one house, the Manor House with its grey roofs and many chimneys, impressive even against the rising ranks of evergreens that finished like a tideline halfway up the huge bulk of Ullock Pike, which over-towered all.

      ‘George Farrell,’ he said, taking her pale, perfectly smooth hand in his, then letting it go quickly in fear that she would think him too familiar. ‘P-P …’ he stuttered over the word ‘postman’.

      ‘Painter,’ she said and smiled.

      That had been in May. The first month he had looked for her often but his searching had been in vain because he had later learnt that she had been away. She told him that she had been staying with Elizabeth Lyne, an old school friend in Carlisle: describing another world of tea taken on the lawn, with white cloths under spreading elms, and dancing after twilight, music spilling like magic from the open throat of the gramophone.

      He had kept looking and had eventually been rewarded. Sometimes he just glimpsed a distant figure on the hillside as he passed with his bike and bag along the road below; then she would raise her hand to him and he to her, in salutation. Sometimes she would be coming towards him from home with her camera in its leather box slung across her shoulder and he would give