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“I’m sorry,” I say. Then I release her hand, buckle myself in, and reverse out of the parking space.
She clears her throat and directs me to turn right out of the car park, and I head along the main road toward the western end of the town, and turn onto a B-road. “Tomorrow I’ll take you to some of the other villages on the moors,” she says, “but today we’ll just have a look at the landscape.”
I follow her directions along narrow lanes with high hedgerows, having to reverse twice when I meet a car coming the other way. After about ten minutes, we pass over a cattle grid, and she says, “We’re on the moors now.”
It’s not long before the hedgerows clear, and either side of us the ground opens out to the upland area of Dartmoor National Park.
“This is all granite under peat,” she says, “and sometimes it peeks out from the grassland and forms what we call tors. We’ll go up to Haytor now—it’s the best known one.”
“Does it rain a lot here?”
“God, yes. There are a lot of bogs with cotton-grass and sedges—all that purple and pink, and the sprinkles of white. Fox Tor Mires was the inspiration for Conan Doyle’s Great Grimpen Mire, you know, inThe Hound of the Baskervilles?”
“Oh, really? I love Sherlock Holmes.”
“Me, too! I’ve watched all the Jeremy Brett series as well as the modern ones.”
“Yeah, same, and a lot of the movies, too.”
We continue talking about our favorite portrayals of the fictional detective as I drive along the winding road through the vast, open moorland. At one point, I slow down as we pass a group of small, wild, Dartmoor ponies.
Following Heidi’s instructions, I turn off and slot the car into a space in the Haytor car park, and we get out. I’m sure that usually it’s a wet, rather miserable walk, but today it’shot as, the sun beating down on us, forcing us to don our sunglasses, and to apply the sun lotion that Heidi has brought in her purse onto our arms and faces.
“Don’t forget your neck and ears,” she says. “Bend down.”
I dip my head, and she tips a little of the lotion onto her fingers and smears it across the back of my neck. I lift my gaze to hers as she rubs it in. “You’re taking a surprisingly long time to do that.”
“Gotta be thorough,” she replies, giving me an impish smile.
When she’s done, we continue walking up the path to the rocks. It only takes us five minutes, and then we’re at the top of the hill, looking out across the amazing patchwork of colors forming the moors. Turning south, I can even see the sea. It’s a fantastic view.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” she says.
I look at her profile, the breeze making her blonde hair dance around her face. Her cheeks are pink from the sun. She’s still wearing her sleeveless yellow top and shorts and no jacket, and she shivers a little as the wind whips across the rocks.
“Stunning,” I say, only half referring to the tor.
She doesn’t notice. “There are several prehistoric settlements up here,” she says.
“Really? I would’ve thought it would be far too cold.”
“It was warmer back then, and the moorland was covered with trees. Neolithic farmers cleared some of the forests and established the first fields. And of course there are lots of individual standing stones, stone circles, and stone rows.”
I look at the ancient landscape, awed to think a man could have stood here, on this spot, five or six thousand years ago. The New Zealand landscape can be breathtaking, but we don’t have anything like this.
“I can see you’re a teacher,” I say as we begin to walk back down the path. “You make it sound so interesting. It makes me want to study archaeology.”
“You should! There are loads of deserted medieval villages here, too. You should see some of the aerial photographs, they’re fascinating.”
I love her enthusiasm and her obviously vast knowledge. She looks so young, but her expertise reminds me that she’s twenty-five.
Despite the sun, she shivers again, and I say, “Are you cold?”
“A bit. It’s so breezy. I should have brought a jacket.”
“Come here.” I put an arm around her and rub her arm. I know I shouldn’t, but I want to touch her. I can’t help it. She fascinates me.
If she’d stiffened or pulled away, I’d have apologized and dropped my arm, but she doesn’t; she nestles against me and slides an arm around my waist, and so we walk back to the car like that, borrowing from each other’s body warmth. It’s with some reluctance that I move away from her in the car park, and I’m sure I see the same unwillingness in her to separate.
