Read Online The Hollow Land by Jane Gardam - Free Book Online Page A

blocked the tunnel. The hole in the roof, its edges loosened first by them and by the dryness of the earth around, had crumbled and dribbled and showered into the darkness below. First the soil, then smaller stones and then the huge chunks and blocks of rock had settled in tons into the space prepared for them.
    There was no sign in the tunnel where five minutes ago they had looked up at the sky that the sun and the grasses and the sheep and the flying grouse were still passing a summer’s day hardly ten feet above their heads.
    And there was not the least chance in the world of getting out.
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    Mrs. Bateman, back from Penrith with her arms full of clean washing and a lot of parcels, walked into Light Trees’ kitchen and called, “Harry?”
    She looked in the back dairy and saw that the sandwiches for Harry’s lunch were still under the Pyrex dish and the apples and chocolate lay uneaten beside them. He’ll be hungry, she thought, when he does get home. He’s been off on the fell a long time. Still, he’ll be all right with Bell. Bell knows every inch up there and it’s a fine day. No mist to get lost in.
    She opened up one of the parcels she had bought in Penrith market and shook out a flannel nightdress with ribbons and lace, and a long apron of white cotton and a sacking apron to wear over it. “Lovely,” she said, parading about. “Museum pieces. Lovely.” She put on the white apron, which had a pinny top and cross-overs at the back. “Florence Nightingale,” she said, twisting before the mirror hung in the porch. She tied the sacking apron over it. “Now I’m ready to clean out my chicken-houses,” she said.
    â€œSilly,” she said next, “playing at being someone else. Ridiculous. Just as well I’m alone.” She began to unpack the rest of the shopping and the grandfather clock struck five.
    â€œI wonder where he is though?” she said, and went and stood on the step and stared about. Then she picked up the field glasses and went and stood in the Home Field. Through the glasses the fells lay as still and empty as they did through her eyes. “Harry!” she called. Her voice echoed. She went in and got the bell she used to ring for Harry to come in for meals when he was smaller and played in the beck, just out of sight.
    She kept calling and looking and ringing, but nothing happened. She went in and began to wash salad for supper, thinking that the sacking apron was just the thing for cleaning vegetables. She switched on the radio. She made a pudding. She realized that the radio had been telling her for some time the stock market prices in London and the details of the shipping forecast for the next twenty-four hours, and that listening to it she had been thinking all the time about Harry.
    She put down the potato peeler and set off up the fell.
    I suppose I could have waited till James came in or Robert got back from London. I’m over-anxious. I always was a bore about the children. Silly to worry so.
    She walked along the dry beck strewn everywhere with whitening thistles and climbed up to the top of the bouse, where someone seemed to have been digging lately. A lot of earth had fallen into a deep delve in the fell, with turf torn up and the roots of a may tree sticking up at an angle, feeling the fresh air for the first time since Queen Anne was on the throne. A shift, she thought. A landslip. Like when poor old Mr. Hewitson got injured. Quite a big one. Maybe it’s subsidence in the old mine. She thought of the honeycombs of rocks beneath her feet, and the rocks, hollow like bones, leading to underground rivers and ballrooms and cathedrals below, and shuddered. The one thing I’d regret about us coming up here would be if any of them ever took up potholing.
    She thought for a moment that she heard voices, and stopped. Then she thought she heard a faint metallic hammering noise, very thin and distant.