The Levels by Peter Benson

till late.’
    â€˜Where to?’ Muriel asked, threw her bag into the back of the van and eased herself into the passenger seat spring position. We drove west, out of the valley of The Isle, through the lanes to Curry Mallet.
    â€˜This is knackered,’ she said, ‘we could’ve taken the mini.’
    â€˜Who’s showing you these sights?’
    â€˜You are.’
    â€˜My sights, my van.’ Something else I thought, then, smart, pointing to things along the way.
    I know a hill, on the county border, where a line of trees climbs its spine and the locals burn fires. The weather, I knew it would, collapsed at midday, the wind strengthened, and a bank of grey cloud blew up from the west. Spots appeared on the windscreen. The wipers hadn’t been fixed. As the rain increased, and what Muriel talked about turned into what I talked about, we met a herd of cows walking from one Blackdown field to another. I slowed to a crawl, with my hands on the top of the steering wheel and my chin on my hands, staring at the farmer’s dog, chasing back and forth across the road, and I thought, a little, about Dick and Hector. It would be raining in Kingsbury, he’d be fretting over his bike getting wet, and the dog, who was beginning to take a back seat, would be laid flat under a lean-to, with a look in his eyes. ‘Cows. Let’s get them! Sod the bike.’
    Muriel’s voice echoed around the van, the empty plastic sacks, an old basket, the small piles of straw, like a tune, whistled, when you don’t know you’re whistling. Steam rose off the cows, hot, damp, bugged, as they turned off the road into one of the fields overlooking the odd, wooded clefts of land that drop to Hemyock, and Honiton.
    She leant across and tweaked my cheek. I felt her thumb and finger, warm against my skin, and she said, ‘You’re so ... nice and ... and, oh! I don’t know, there! You know? Picked!’
    I didn’t, and thought she wasn’t very good at explaining herself, then neither was I, how could I talk? But she had had education, not like mine, though I had been interested, she had been brought up to know things to do with words, and to do with being able to act, as a girl, more like a man than most men do. Open. Strong and direct. She knew what she wanted.
    â€˜This rain!’ she said, ‘Does it always rain like this?’
    â€˜No,’ I said.
    â€˜And aren’t we a long way from home?’
    â€˜Yes, but there’s a hill I want to show you, perfect for a picnic. Maybe we’ll have to go somewhere else now.’
    â€˜Why?’ she said, like it was a natural thing to sit in the rain. ‘Bit of rain never hurt anyone.’
    â€˜Don’t be so sure,’ I said.
    â€˜Chicken.’ She said it. I’d sit on the hill if I froze to death, to show her. City girl didn’t know what it was like at three hundred feet. I had looked on a map. I knew. Exposed to wind from every direction, huddled beneath a scorched scar the locals had made.
    I parked in the track above Bottom Farm, and we walked the quarter mile to the summit in drizzle, the first sign of cleaner weather behind us.
    â€˜That’s amazing!’ she said, when we’d put our stuff on the ground, and with my hands in my pockets, and her dress, damp, pressed against the backs of her thighs, sat down.
    She’d brought ham and cheese sandwiches the size of stamps, cut by her mother on a marble slab. Her mother painted pictures in watercolour of earth and sky. Muriel said they were monuments to nature, alive with the truth of their subject. I didn’t know what she meant, but said I’d look at them. We sat, facing east, as the grey clouds were blown away, down, like a curtain in front of us. The sun at our backs, propped on a blanket, I offered her a cigarette.
    â€˜Thanks.’
    We ate the picnic as the weather cleared, and the distant hills revealed themselves. North,