Gently North-West Read Online Free Page B

the gate it looked docile. Gently was convinced it would soon turn left towards the crag, and Brenda remembered seeing, when down at the cottage, a slanting ridge which could have been the path. So they went through the gate and on upwards, though with not quite the
élan
of the first onset. Now, after each hundred yards or so, they paused to breathe and wipe sweat.
    The track indeed turned left: but only after another punishing ascent, followed by a scramble under young firs planted so thickly that beneath them was almost total blackness. Then it bore away in a steep, broken, slippery traverse, pointing to a goal of increased daylight above the dark night of the trees.
    ‘That’ll be it,’ Gently gulped. ‘There’s a big gap up there.’
    ‘Alleluia,’ Brenda moaned. ‘I’m not the girl I used to be. My poor, poor shoes.’
    ‘I’ll buy you some more in Balmagussie.’
    ‘If you don’t you’re a rotten swine – and you’re a rotten swine anyway.’
    The end came suddenly. At one moment they were dragging themselves over the rocks, with trees hemming them on both sides and threatening to bar the way ahead; the next they were out on soft turf, in a nakedness of light that dazzled them, with a soaring rockface on one hand and airy nothing on the other. They had reached the crag. At its foot was no more than a shallow apron of grass, ending in a second precipice and a rockfall which were hidden from below by the trees.
    They stood gasping, looking.
    ‘Worth it now?’ Gently asked.
    Brenda shook her head. ‘Nothing’s worth it – but it’s a pretty good view.’
    ‘That’s the cottage.’
    ‘So what about it?’
    ‘Those are the cars.’
    ‘I’ve seen a car.’
    ‘Look at the sun on the tops over there.’
    ‘George.’
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘Drop dead,’ Brenda said.
    She slumped down on the turf and lay flapping at her face with her hand. Gently grinned at her through his sweat and threw himself down beside her.
    The view was majestic. At this elevation the eastern braes had lost their steepness, and showed rolling heathy tops above the line of the forest. Southward the run of the glen was visible to its portal seven miles off, where, terminated on the right by a massive peak, it appeared to launch into the sky. All the loch could be seen. Its slanty reaches lay pale and skylike among the braes, at this end broad, with rushy boundaries, then narrowing to a distant silver arrow. Northward, where a secondary glen came in from the west, the strath broadened to a small plain, and the folding braes grouped around it to form a cauldron of misty woods.
    They lay silently watching for several minutes, then Brenda turned to Gently with a smile.
    ‘Big enough for you?’
    He took her hand. ‘Yes, big enough. Just.’
    ‘Of course you’re right about the size.’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘It’s what really makes the difference. With men too, as well as mountains. Do you think Bridget likes me?’
    ‘Bridget likes you.’
    ‘It’s important.’
    ‘Everything’s important and unimportant.’
    ‘Well, this is important.’
    ‘Bridget likes you.’
    ‘I could, of course, kick your teeth in.’
    Gently kissed her.
    ‘I wonder,’ she said, ‘if I could make you jealous, George. You’re so damned impregnable, that’s your trouble. Even if you were jealous it wouldn’t show.’
    ‘So why bother,’ Gently said.
    ‘Just an urge. All women have it. To make a man seething mad. To make it eat into his guts.’
    ‘Well, don’t frustrate the urge,’ Gently said.
    ‘But what’s the use if you don’t react?’
    ‘I might pretend, to help out.’
    ‘Jump over that cliff,’ she said.
    He kissed her.
    Brenda gave a little wriggle in his arms. ‘On the whole you talk too much,’ she said. ‘Not, in the normal way, that you talk a lot, but George, you do talk too much. Now please be quiet.’
    ‘Yes,’ Gently said.
    ‘Quieter still.’
    Gently was quiet.
    ‘Even quieter.’
    Gently obeyed.
    ‘There,’ she