![Two men on the moors](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2023/12/29/TELEMMGLPICT000361151649_17038673465500_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqqVzuuqpFlyLIwiB6NTmJwfSVWeZ_vEN7c6bHu2jJnT8.jpeg?imwidth=680)
The Great Conversation: an exclusive short story by Rose Tremain
A new year's trip into Exmoor leaves two old friends lost in the wilderness – unable to find the words they had been longing to say
![Two men on the moors](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2023/12/29/TELEMMGLPICT000361151649_17038673465500_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqqVzuuqpFlyLIwiB6NTmJwfSVWeZ_vEN7c6bHu2jJnT8.jpeg?imwidth=680)
The holiday-let was called The Elms.
Charlie had said to David, “Good name, then: dead trees.” But David had said to Charlie, “Don’t stress. It’s in nice countryside. And with a sauna hut.” And Charlie had said, “OK that’s huge. Already imagining the fluffy white towels.”
Old friends since university, 50 now and married, with noisy teenage daughters, they’d resolved to spend this one New Year together, away from their families, away from the city jobs which cramped their minds. “Walking and talking, right?” said David. And Charlie had said, “Absolutely. Get all the stuff out. All the man-s---.”
When they drove from London, stopping at a motorway service station with the kind of vast food court which always brought on in them feelings of comfortable greed, they each pictured The Elms as a cosy English nook, with log fires and attic bedrooms blanketed into quiet by ancient thatch. “Ace idea, this trip,” said Charlie, stuffing in a prawn sandwich. And David, chewing a pastrami wrap, said, “Snap. Should have organised it sooner.”
They arrived in the dark. Stumbling in under a bulkhead light, they saw that the sitting room of The Elms had been furnished almost entirely by deck chairs and they stood among these, shivering and suddenly tired. David whipped out his phone. This was his reflex response to all the faults of existence: complain, get help, get instruction, find a remedy. But now he swore. “No effing connectivity. Are we under a hill, or something?”
“Probably,” said Charlie. “I thought I heard a sheep crying when we got out of the car.”
They sat down in the deck chairs: plonk, plonk. A sort of laughter came on.
They unpacked the car and brought into the kitchen a foil-wrapped cold chicken, a pack of sourdough rolls, and a bottle of rioja. Fragile heat reached them from an oil-fired range. Finding only mis-matched plates and glasses, Charlie said, “Got a picture already of these skinflints: take our cash and give us junk.”
“I guess they knew who we were,” said David.
“Like who?”
“Careless people.”
They sat down at a kitchen table scarred by burns. David opened the wine and poured it out. Charlie said, “So when, exactly, are we going to start on our significant jabber.”
“Tomorrow,” said David. “When we sniff the glorious Exmoor air.”
“Like we’re rescue dogs,” said Charlie. “Given a new chance?”
They laughed and drank the wine and tore the chicken apart with their hands. From time to time, David picked up his phone and stared at it. Once, he went outside and waved it about in the darkness, in case a signal was lurking there under the sighing trees and the stars. Left alone, Charlie wondered, “What made us so certain we could even find what needs resolving because, personally speaking, I think we’re both in the f---ing dark.”
“Still nothing,” said David as he came back inside.
“Charge it up tonight,” said Charlie. “Tomorrow on the moor, you’ll get the map app and everything.”
“Try yours,” said David. “You haven’t tried yours.”
“No,” said Charlie, “I decided not to bring it. I wanted time out.”
David looked pale under the kitchen strip-light. “You’re actually telling me that we’re in the middle of Exmoor with just a single malfunctioning phone?”
“I guess.”
“You know that feels rash?”
“No. It just feels un-ordinary. Like people used to be, when elms were alive.”
A gate from the back garden gave onto a steep and narrow path, which led directly to the moor. The morning was cold and bright, with a tracery of frost on the bracken. David and Charlie began to climb.
“This kind of air knackers my lungs,” said Charlie after a while. “I feel I want to call a nurse.”
David smiled. He was once again holding up his phone. “We’re higher now,” he said, “so I should get at least one bar, but there’s nothing yet. How do people manage, who live here?”
“Nobody lives here,” said Charlie. “Look at what’s all around: lumpy grass and this dead fern stuff and some kind of pip-pip noise which must be birds. We’re in the wilderness.”
David was trying to access the map app, which would be their guide on the walk. The familiar blue circle appeared at last on its lit green ground and he felt relieved, as he always did, by the sight of this. The circle was him. And he liked to imagine some god-like entity, barrelling round the earth, guiding him through time and space. With pride in his voice, he said, “We’re headed for Old Barrow Plantation.”
“Now, I’m reassured,” said Charlie and walked on.
Charlie had picked up a slender limb of fallen ash to use as a staff. Armed with this, he strode ahead of David so that they fell into a pattern of walking silently, in single file. And after a short while, Charlie realised that he quite liked this. He could just be. At the edge of his vision, he noticed a holly tree, a thing of beauty with its jewelling of berries. He stopped and looked at it. He could remember for an insubstantial moment the feeling of wonder when he was a boy and the Christmas holidays came around and stretched before him without any quantifiable end. And he thought that this was what he’d wanted to talk about to David: how time hounded a grown-up life, how his mind felt like dough, how even love was such a fragile kind of thing, how the breaking of a new year could fill him with despair.
“Don’t you feel all that?” he said.
“Feel what?” said David.
Charlie now noticed that David was out of breath and it cheered him to think that he was more fit than his friend.
“No, nothing. I was just wondering if you needed to sit down?” he said.
“Sit down where?”
They looked all about them. They were on a high ridge, with the grassland massing at their feet and spreading out to every far horizon.
“We should have brought one of those f---ing deck chairs,” said Charlie.
He thought this might make David laugh, but David was once again looking anxiously at his phone.
“Low battery,” he said. “I charged it last night. How can it be saying ‘low battery’? And the map’s disappeared.”
Suppressing a nano-second of irritation, Charlie dropped his staff and took off his parka and laid this on the ground, near the shining holly tree.
“OK,” he said, “we’re going to sit down for a bit. Get your breath back, bro. Then we’ll go on.”
They sank to the ground and Charlie, gazing up at drifting clouds, said, “One of the things I’m quite liking here is the huge quantity of sky. In London, the sky seems sort of rationed, doesn’t it?”
David didn’t answer. “I just don’t see,” he said, “how, after 10 hours of charge, it can be saying ‘low battery’.”
“Well,” said Charlie, “maybe you plugged it in to a socket that wasn’t switched on. Those dead f---ing elm-people probably went around turning off everything except the fridge.”
David stared at Charlie. Had he checked the plug switch? He couldn’t remember. What he knew was that he felt in mourning for the map, for the blue circle that was him, for the guiding hand in space. Yet he saw that this was childish. He just had to switch the phone off and hope that by giving it a little rest, the battery would recover and the map would reappear for long enough to enable them to complete the walk. But what did “complete” mean? Because his mind was so weighted down by the tech failure, it felt to David, at this moment, that there was nothing worth talking about except that.
Reluctantly, he turned off the phone and put it in his pocket. He broke in half the Kit-Kat bar he found there and shared it with Charlie, so they sat there in silence, eating the chocolate and the sounds of the moor came softly to them: a sudden wind in the gorse, a carnival of small birds visiting the holly tree, the distant cry of a sheep. David looked up at what Charlie had called “the huge quantity of sky” and saw, as a sweet glimmer of silver light, a plane passing, miles above them and he found himself wishing he was on that plane, safe in his designated seat, being handed a meal tray by a pretty member of the inflight team.
When they began to feel cold and resumed the walk, Charlie understood: David didn’t want to talk. And, realising this, he now asked himself whether perhaps his friend wasn’t right. Could anything significant be gained from some big, pretentious airing of the ordinary human fear from which half the world surely suffered? Or more than half. Perhaps almost everybody in the universe felt it and mainly handled it by keeping quiet – by just existing and getting on with day-to-day survival: recycling trash, enduring a hard bench at the pre-school nativity play, gambling on love.
They passed a wooden signpost and examined unfamiliar names: Brightness Gully, Pennywhistle Wood.
They chose Brightness Gully. In woods, they thought some kind of darkness might close around them. And then, after half a mile, it began to close anyway. From the far-seeming horizon, a bruise-colour had gathered in the sky above them and let fall a silent whirl of snow.
They stood still and tried to see round the snow to where they’d come from, thinking to retrace their steps towards the signpost, but the snow fell in sticky flakes and had quickly covered the ground. A decision to turn back seemed to be the right one, but they had real no idea where “back” actually was. David took out his phone again praying to see his screen-saver light up with the smiling face of his eldest daughter, Jess. But the phone was now dark.
Watching David struggle with this disappointment, Charlie said, “If this was a film with pretend snow, what would Tom Hanks do?”
“It’s not a film, Charlie.”
“So. We’ve got to be the heroes of our own destiny, then. We’ve got to figure out what the screenplay writers would have up their sleeves for Hanks to do, like they figured it out in Cast Away. Because they wouldn’t let him die.”
David looked at his friend. Snow had fallen on the hood of his Parka and on his narrow shoulders. There was something of the child about him, the teenager with an agile mind that was always fond of laughter and David thought, that’s why this thing endures, this connection between us, because the boy in him is kind and funny and takes me with him to places I never normally visit.
He made a decision. He saw that they were standing in a shadowy dip and thought that it might orientate them to head for higher ground. The signpost had stood on a ridge and it was logical to believe that some other landmark would be visible from there: even the holly tree where the gathering of birds had arrived. So, he turned and strode on. He didn’t look behind to see if Charlie was following because he knew he had to be. He thought it wasn’t fanciful to imagine they had become mountaineers, held together by a rope.
But now they were experiencing one of the first afflictions of the mountaineer: deep cold. And feeling the distant alarm of this, David decided, “Here’s what I really wanted to talk about on this walk, how fear has grown in me in the last few years: an acute terror of finding myself frozen in a world I no longer understand.” But then he concluded that the moment for talking had gone by. What he had to do now was take charge for once. He had to lead them home.
A few yards behind him, Charlie could do nothing but obediently follow the hunched figure of his friend. He, too, was shivering, but he clenched his teeth in an obstinate kind of smile. “Idiot!” Charlie said to himself. “You imagined you’d come here to set out a spread-sheet of your life, but what could seriously be happening is you’re stumbling towards your death.” He asked himself what might lie between this moment – this New Year’s Day – and his last glimpse of the world, and could only conclude that it would be David he would see, not as he’d once been – a handsome boy, holding forth in a student bar – but a middle-aged man, plodding and silent, bent against the weather, slowly disappearing from sight.
Later that day, as they lay on the pine-scented benches of the sauna hut, Charlie covered his face with a white towel. “This could have been a snow shroud,” he murmured, “but then it wasn’t. And the towel is actually quite fluffy. I am definitely going to nick it.”
He waited for some comment from David, but none came. His friend was asleep with his phone beside him, within reach of his empty hand.