Listening in the Dusk by Celia Fremlin

holidays, for it had everything. It was part of an unspoiled stretch of the Downs from which, on a clear day, you could see away and away across the rolling green distances to the glitter of the sea itself. Being up there felt not merely like being on top of the world, it felt like owning it, as a God might own it. She remembered how they’d talked about this, she and Julian (about twelve and ten they must have been) as they stood on the summit one noonday, the sun blazing down and the breeze of the high hills blowing about their heads. In her class at school, a few days back, they’d been doing the Temptation in the Wilderness for a Scripture lesson, and the teacher had been trying to impress the children with the hugeness of temptation that Jesus had faced.
    “Just fancy. He was promised the whole world if he did what the Devil said! The whole world, just imagine it,” she urged the children. “Just imagine owning the whole world!”
    The words had come back to her as she stood amid the golden gorse and golden sunshine at the topmost point of Flittermouse Hill, and she was puzzled. In what sense don’t I own it? she wondered. Here it is. Here I am, seeing it, knowing it, being right in the centre of it, as far as I can see. How is this not owning it? How can owning it be a temptation, when you’ve already got it?
    She put the problem to Julian. He loved philosophical problems , even at that age. He thought about it gravely, his fairish hair blown about by the wind, and his eyes scouring the blue distances wherein the problem had its being.
    “It must have been different for Jesus,” he said at last. “I don’t think He bothered about things being beautiful. Look at the way He blasted that tree. I’m glad He’s not alive now.”
    This was blasphemy. Mary shuddered in delighted awe, as she often did at Julian’s more outlandish thoughts. She wondered what her Scripture teacher would have said if she had heard him?
    “Oh, but Julian, do you think one should …?” she began; but already his thoughts were elsewhere, his small wiry body suddenly taut and braced for challenge:
    “C’mon, Midge! Race you!” he cried; and they were off. He never did succeed in racing her during these early years, his legs were too much shorter than hers; but likewise he never gave up the hope that, this time, he just might. She heard his breath, gasping with determination, close behind her as she ran: in and out among the clumps of gorse, scrambling through thick bracken, and landing up at the entrance to one of the caves which were a feature of these upper slopes. Mary (or Midge as she was then) had often, when she was younger, wanted to continue their games inside one or other of the caves, turning it into a wizard’s castle, or a pirates’ hide-away or something, but Julian would not allow it. It would disturb the bats, he said. This was their bedroom, he explained, where they rested all day ready for their night’s hunting, and it would upset them terribly to have pirates and wizards and things charging in and out while they were trying to sleep. Mary had acquiesced, as she nearly always did to Julian’s pronouncements. Although he was nearly two years younger, he always seemed to know more than she did about almost everything; it was this, maybe, that made them such close companions all through the years of their childhood. The age-gap seemed to be nil; it was almost as if they were twins.
    Julian’s fascination with the bats, and their near-miraculous way of life, had grown and grown; but it was not until they were both in their teens that their parents had allowed them to stay out on the hillside late enough for successful bat-watching; and even then, it still provoked a good deal of parental unease.
    “There might be nasty men …” their mother had anxiously speculated, not realising (for how could she?) how ironic were these fears, in view of what was to come.
    By the time they were, what? Fourteen? Fifteen? the