Free Mischief by Fay Weldon Page A

mongrel lengths of branch from some unnamed and undistinguished tree. Edgar hands Mona her stick, takes up his own and sets off. Minette picks up hers and follows behind. So much for disgrace.
    Edgar is brilliant against the muted colours of the hill a tall, long-legged rust-heaped shape, striding in orange holiday trousers and red shirt, leaping from hillock to hillock, rock to rock, black stick slashing against nettle and thistle and gorse. Mona, trotting along beside him, stumpy-legged, navy-anoraked, is a stocky, valiant, enthusiastic little creature, perpetually falling over her stick but declining to relinquish it.
    Mona presently falls behind and walks with her mother, whom she finds more sympathetic than her father as to nettlesting and cowpats. Her hand is dry and firm in Minette’s. Minette takes comfort from it. Soon Edgar, relieved of Mona’s presence, is so far ahead as to be a dark shape occasionally bobbing into sight over a mound or out from behind a wall or tree.
    ‘I don’t see any iron men,’ says Mona. ‘Only nettles and sheep mess. And cow splats, where I’m walking. Only I don’t see any cows either. I expect they’re invisible.’
    ‘All the iron men died long ago.’
    ‘Then why have we come here?’
    ‘To think about things.’
    ‘What things?’
    ‘The past, the present, the future,’ replies Minette.
    The wind gets up, blowing damply in their faces. The sun goes in; the hills lose what colour they had. All is grey, the colour of depression. Winter is coming, thinks Minette. Another season, gone. Clouds, descending, drift across the hills, lie in front of them in misty swathes. Minette can see neither back nor forward. She is frightened: Edgar is nowhere to be seen.
    ‘There might be savage cows in there,’ says Mona, ‘where we can’t see.’
    ‘Wait,’ she says to Mona, ‘wait,’ and means to run ahead to find Edgar and bring him back; but Edgar appears again as if at her will, within earshot, off on a parallel path to theirs, which will take him on yet another circumnavigation of the lower-lying fortifications.
    ‘I’ll take Mona back to the car,’ she calls. He looks astonished.
    ‘Why?’
    He does not wait for her answer: he scrambles over a hillock and disappears.
    ‘Because,’ she wants to call after him, ‘because I am forty, alone and frightened. Because my period started yesterday, and I have a pain. Because my elder child sits alone in a car in mist and rain, and my younger one stands grizzling on a misty hilltop, shivering with fright, afraid of invisible things, and cold. Because if I stay a minute longer I will lose my way and wander here for ever. Because battles were fought on this hilltop, families who were happy died and something remains behind, by comparison with which the Taniwha, sightless monster of the far-off jungle, those white and distant shores, is a model of goodwill.’
    Minette says nothing: in any case he has gone.
    ‘Let’s get back to the car,’ she says to Mona.
    ‘Where is it?’ enquires Mona, pertinently.
    ‘We’ll find it.’
    ‘Isn’t Daddy coming?’
    ‘He’ll be coming later.’
    Something of Minette’s urgency communicates itself to Mona: or some increasing fear of the place itself. Mona leads the way back, without faltering, without complaint, between nettles, over rocks, skirting the barbed-wire fence, keeping a safe distance from the cows, at last made flesh, penned up on the other side of the fence.
    The past. Minette at Mona’s age, leading her weeping mother along a deserted beach to their deserted cottage. Minette’s father, prime deserter. Man with no eyes for Minette’s distress, her mother’s despair. Little Minette with her arms clutched rigidly round her father’s legs, finally disentangled by determined adult arms. Whose? She does not know. Her father walking off with someone else, away from the wailing Minette, his daughter, away from the weeping mother, his wife. Later, it was found that one of