Climbers: A Novel (14 page)

‘There’s a place to park here somewhere.’

Five or six vehicles were already lined up in it. Children ran about between them, sheltered from the wind by a stone wall and a tuck in the farmland, while their parents had tea out of a flask or pointed back the way they had come at the road falling away into the valley. There was a man in one of the fields above flattening the grass at carefully chosen spots with heavy blows from the back of a spade; he stopped to massage the small of his back and watch two of the children hunting for grasshoppers.

‘Here’s one! I’ve got one!’

‘There’s one here! There’s one here on a rock! Oh, I’ve killed it.’

Their mother had a blue picnic stove going. While she tried to fill the kettle at a dried-up stream that came out under the wall, her husband was kneeling on the gravel in his shorts looking through the driver’s door of their home-painted maroon and yellow car. He went round to the boot and got out an old windup gramophone in beautiful condition, and with great care made it play ‘Moonlight in Vermont’, ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’, and something the chorus of which went,

An old woman further down the row of cars seemed to enjoy this one. She smiled and waved, nodded her head in time, tapped her fingers on the arm of the folding chair they had put her out in; he waved back and played it twice more, while some pages torn from
Peaches
blew round his reddened ankles in the sun.

‘Christ!’ I said. ‘Look at them! Do you want to go somewhere else?’

Pauline, who had been watching them with an expression I couldn’t interpret, laughed.

‘They’re only people,’ she said. She felt about in the glove compartment. ‘I had a comb in here somewhere but I think it’s dropped down the back.’

‘I really think we ought to be at the hospital. Your mother’s on her own.’

She got out of the car and slammed the door.

‘I
thought
you weren’t saying much!’ she shouted in at me, with her face up close to the glass.

We went back to London by train a few days later. Pauline didn’t want to drive. The weather was hot, the local connection dark and noisy, clogged with air that had been breathed before. At Leeds a bald man catching the same Inter-City 125 dropped his spectacles on the platform at our feet.

All the way down to London, immense columns of smoke rose from the burning stubble in the fields. Near at hand they were a thick greyish white; on the horizon, faint, brown, dissipated smears through which the late sun burned like a blood orange. Misty lenses and feathers drifted over the dark stripe of woodland, the flint churches and comfortable houses between Newark and Peterborough. A little further south Pauline counted twelve plumes of smoke. ‘You can see the flames now!’ But the other passengers seemed not to care. The carriage was almost empty anyway: a family two or three seats away played cards quietly; whenever the train slowed, the man who had dropped his spectacles walked irritably up and down the aisle or complained about the chill of the air conditioning.

Near Peterborough in the twilight, everything became fluid, deceptive: a charred field with small white puffs of smoke hanging just above the ground revealed itself as a long sheet of black water, fringed with reeds and dotted with swans; even the stubble, burning in the middle distance like a line of liquid fire, sometimes resolved into the neon signs of factories and cinemas. It was soon dark. I went to the buffet, and when I came back Pauline asked me,

‘Doesn’t it break your heart to see anything so beautiful?’

Then she was quiet again until we got closer to London and she noticed a long row of lights saying S
TEVENAGE
, S
TEVENAGE
in the night.

A month or two later she sold the Citroën; and not long after that got the chance to move back into her old flat. ‘It’s so cheap I’d be a fool not to miss it,’ she said. ‘People shouldn’t live on top of one another, after all.’ We were in the fruit store, with the cracked ladders and the copies of
Valmouth.
At the end of the year, books smell damp, fruit smells cheap and out of place; whitewash rubs off the wall at a touch, leaving the whorls of your fingertips clearly outlined. ‘We can meet here again, just the way we did! Do you think anyone would buy this?’ It was a book-club edition of Peter Fleming, with all the photos torn out. I shrugged and dropped it on to the floor. ‘And what if we met in a cafe again, by accident? Wouldn’t that be strange?’ About that time I began to have a dream of an endless conversation between two women:

‘I think it’s just as well not to be.’

‘It’s just as well.’

‘I’m over it now you know.’

‘You’re accepting more.’

‘Yes. Yes. I’m accepting more now.’

‘I just don’t think I could fit into that. It would drive me mad.’

‘I mean I do so much.’

‘Of course you do. Of course you do.’

‘I get so upset.’

I often dreamed of Nina too, even after I went to live in Manchester. ‘Boots off!’ she would exclaim, turning her wizened little face up towards the ceiling. ‘Boots off!’

The first thing I heard Bob Almanac’s wife say was,

‘What can you do in a town where they pronounce quiche “keech” ? ’

She was a short, squarish woman, originally from Nottinghamshire, with black hair which she wore in a rough cap. Streaks of grey in it gave her a look of the intelligence and maturity she had submerged in her practical, patient manner; they combined with the lines round her mouth and the hollows at her temples to make you think when you were introduced to her that she was tired. Later you saw that she was holding back some permanent fear or irritation: she imagined she was ill, perhaps, or that she had particularly bad luck.

She worked in the health food shop.

‘None of you are getting enough kelp for what you do, of course,’ I remember her telling me. She glanced at me briefly and cynically, as if she could get from my clothes or the way I stood confirmation of something she already knew. ‘Those bloody depressions just keep coming up, don’t they? One after the other, like clockwork. Just like clockwork. I could graph them out for you on a bit of paper.’

And when I could think of nothing to say to this diagnosis:

‘Talk to the wall, talk to the wall. Oh well, you’ll learn.’

I asked Bob if she used her own products.

‘Oh yes,’ said Bob. They both did in fact. They found them very useful. ‘You’ve to be sensible about it,’ he warned me, ‘and not just to chuck things down you. A lot of people think, for instance, that just because bee-pollen’s helped them, zinc will too.’ He laughed. ‘Anne’s the expert, and I leave it to her.’

When he talked about her to us, it was with a kind of wondering admiration. She fasted, he told us, often for four or five days at a time, taking only water and vitamins. While it was apparent that this rather unnerved him, he tried to pass on to us his faith in her judgement. ‘She’ll occasionally get a bit of a headache on the third day, but it’s nothing to worry about. All the toxins are coming out by then, you see: the body’s beginning to eat itself.’ He offered us this achievement modestly, on her behalf. We had a picture of her in control of a dangerous equilibrium, like some trapeze artist of the body chemistry. Would she fall? It was possible
to
fall, Bob’s manner admitted. But it was the least important part of his job as ringmaster to work us up over that.

After I got to know her I sometimes went into the shop to buy things she or Bob had recommended – magnesium, high-dose capsules of vitamin B, mineral complexes and herbal dietary supplements which would for a week or two dispel my vague lassitudes or make me seem to climb a little better before they lost their effect. It was always empty, and for most of the day she seemed to sit twisted round on a high stool behind the counter, staring out of the window at the zebra crossing or over at the bleak apron of the Civic Centre opposite, where rain shone on the hexagonal paving slabs and the wind ruffled stealthily the shallow puddles, and where at dinner time she might see Gaz lurching along in his clogs eating a pork pie. It gave her a melancholy but intense pleasure to think about what other people ate.

‘The things they stuff themselves with,’ she would say absently as she served you. She had a way of remaining still for a long period after you had given her the money, then laughing shortly and throwing it into the drawer of the wooden till as if it was distasteful to her. Her wrists were thin, the tendons very prominent on the backs of her hands. ‘The stuff they eat!’

The shop did best at the end of a damp winter, especially towards the end of March. In summer, stock replacement was low. She sold out of the popular lines, and the colourful little packets and plastic tubs that remained seemed to gather dust from the sunlight. When her employers promoted her to manageress and suddenly moved the business into Sawter’s Yard, well back from the main street and up a cool alley with ferns growing out of the walls, you could see it was much reduced. They ran it down until it stocked only the hops and equipment for making your own beer; soon after that they closed it altogether. Anne Almanac seemed to close with it, and vanish.

I heard from Normal, who loved a gossip, that she was in London; from someone else that she had gone home to Retford or Worksop or wherever it was that her family still lived. A month or two later she was back. Bob never mentioned that she had been away.

‘She’s got him well under her thumb,’ was Normal’s opinion. ‘Well under it.’

But I see her like this: in Huddersfield, wondering if she can endure another year of sitting in Marie’s restaurant drinking coffee. At the Sainsbury’s checkout she hears a woman say, ‘Alec, get your foot off the biscuits. I shan’t tell you again. If you don’t get your foot off the biscuits, Alec, I shall knock it straight on the floor.’ Spring at last, and there is a strong smell of burning plastic along the ring road. The sun moves across the patterned bricks outside the bus station. The buses are parked obliquely while they wait: she gets on to one to take the shopping home, and from the top deck sees across to the next, where a girl is blowing her nose. I think now that she was down to the bone with ambition. Bob perhaps recognised something like that.

‘I don’t smoke, myself,’ he would say. ‘She was sick in the morning sometimes until I gave up smoking. We guessed it was the smell of the ashtrays first thing.’

Shortly after they came over from Manchester, Normal and his wife moved into one of the new estates which were being built high up on a narrow remnant of moorland between the pipeworks and the M62. It had displaced one or two run-down farms and cottages and a lot of stone walls, and was designed in a crescent shape facing south-west. It seemed to have more service roads than an ordinary topology would allow for, going out like spoke after spoke through bleak muddy expanses of new grass. They lived in one of hundreds of small houses with underfloor electric heating and thin interior walls, pebbledashed on the outside, with a yellow front door and varnished wooden panels under each ground floor window. The gales and rain of their first winter there, squirting in parallel to the motorway across Rishworth Moor, fetched the pebbledash off and cracked the paint, while the varnish simply wore away, leaving the wood beneath whitish grey, like the planks of some small boat abandoned on a beach.

Neither of them had owned a house before. Soon after they moved, Normal slipped off a bedside chair and put his foot through the top of the new dressing table.

‘I was really gripped. Scent was flying everywhere. I couldn’t get my leg out.’

He had been trying to hang above the bed a panoramic view of the Aiguilles; later the same day someone saw him in Huddersfield with a piece of chipboard under his arm. He was like a man in a foreign country. You found him in the afternoon in a stone-cold box room levering open a stiff window with a screwdriver. He worked for two days on a project then started something else. Before she would let him leave his job his wife had made him agree to take responsibility for the housework. After that the landing always smelled of unwashed clothes, stuffed into the blue plastic launderette bag under the bathroom sink, and a cold draught blew across the kitchen from the irregular hole he had chiselled in the wall one Saturday for the waste pipe of the plumbed-in Hotpoint.

His wife never knew what to expect when she got home from work. One Wednesday it had been a blowlamp, of all things, going full bore on the bathroom shelf. ‘No Norman, of course. No Norman anywhere.
He’d
dropped everything to go and fetch some friend of his whose car had broken down in Stoney Middleton.’ She had looked everywhere, but there was no Norman. ‘Only this propane blowlamp roaring away not two inches from the plastic tiles. Never mind some climber’s car! What about my house?’

Normal grinned slyly across the kitchen table.

‘You know you love me. Any more chips? Oh go on: don’t be tight!’

This seemed to please her.

‘What am I going to do with him?’ she would appeal to you. ‘Norman! Don’t eat like that!’

She washed her hands of him: ‘What would
you
suggest?’

(Going out late from the house one night in January, Mick from the pipeworks answered in a low distinct voice, ‘Kick the fucker’s arse and make him grow up.’ His breath steamed in the bitter air as he fastened his coat collar and looked along the street. She was standing behind him on the doorstep, but she said nothing and I don’t think he knew.)

She had made some effort to decorate the place nicely. In the sitting room they had heavyweight beige wallpaper featuring in relief a venous network, as if someone had stuck the bleached skeletons of leaves on it with great care while it was still wet. Looking closer you saw it was a motif of elm trees, half-abstract, transformed. Against this, on glass shelves and small stacking tables, was displayed her collection of artificial flowers – morning glory a filmy transparent blue, paper sweet peas, orange lilies which looked almost real. She hadn’t been collecting them for long but already she had examples from all over the world: some of them were quite valuable and old. At mid-day in the empty room the light illuminated their delicate shabby petals. There was sometimes even a faint scent.