The Snowing and Greening of Thomas Passmore (12 page)

“And you've never found out why he did it? You've never been told?”

“Mum won't talk about it,” I say, “not even to Brian. It's not as if I haven't asked enough times – and got my head bitten off.” There's a thin, flat pebble, which I pick up. I turn and try skimming across the water to make it skip, but the angle's wrong and it sinks straightaway. I wipe a drop of water off my watchstrap and it leaves a dark spot there; it's no longer the same brown leather strap of course, but I always think of it as his. “He left a letter, I think, but she destroyed it – burnt it. I'm not sure whether I was told that or whether I've dreamt it at some point. I've imagined all sorts of reasons why he did it: maybe he discovered he had some incurable cancer, maybe my mother was about to leave him, maybe he was depressed. She only ever said that he was weak, but I think he was probably sick.”

“Do you get angry with him?”

“Why? What for?”

“For leaving you.”

“I don't think so. With Mum perhaps. I wonder if she might have stopped it. I don't know what I think about him anymore. It's easier to imagine he died in a car crash. I try and do that sometimes, to see how it feels. But even so…”

“What?”

I say: “It's not knowing the truth, that's the worst bit; wanting to know and feeling it'd make a difference.” And I almost tell her that, to me, it seems that death is always just a fragment of a larger loss, but the phrase sounds phoney and so I keep it to myself. Even so, I believe that when we grieve, we grieve for ourselves more than the person who's died; we grieve for our lost opportunities and our sense of being less complete, and for the reinforcement of our own mortality. Grief is natural, but it isn't selfless, and it certainly doesn't do the dead any good. But if I said this, the words would come out wrong and I'd sound even more callous.

Kate says: “Maybe you should ask her again. Choose your moment. Tell her why you have to know. Try and get her to see it from your point-of-view.”

“Easier said than done.”

She shrugs.

“I will one day,” I say.

Kate finds another pebble. Once more she wipes it dry, holds it against her cheek, then drops it into the water.

“Splash!” she says.

She lies back on the rock and closes her eyes, and the day clouds over. It's hot in the sun, cool in the shade. There's a bank of clouds moving in, but just a small one in front of the sun. We've conjured up a couple of ghosts and I can feel them standing behind us, looking down, but I think I've learnt how to ignore ghosts and don't want to dwell on death, not now I'm with her – she's a stronger presence. What matters most is that it's the second day of our holiday, and that in just over a week's time she'll be leaving for almost three months in France; I might only see her once in that time, and then she'll go to London, and I might only see her once again between the end of September and Christmas. It leaves me anxious with wondering what we should be doing to make the most of every second. All I know is that she shouldn't be finding fault with me and I shouldn't be letting her down.

Leaning over her, I blow on her face, kissing her. She opens her eyes and the sun comes out again.

“How did you do that?” I say.

“What?”

“Work the sun. When you closed your eyes you made the sun go in. Do it again.”

And so she does, but it doesn't.

“My batteries are low,” she says.

“I'll recharge them for you later.”

“Promises, promises.”

But even our banter sounds tired, preoccupied, as if we're trying too hard not to think of some other thing – a dangerous thing to think about – which might trip us up again on one pretext or another.

In the evening, we go to bed early, planning to make love for hours on end, but it doesn't happen. When we get there, we talk, I yawn a couple of times and she grows cross. I feel drained and she seems impatient, so that when we try playing after that it's clumsy and forced and we can't find the fun in it, and so go to sleep irritable and more anxious than before.

Two days later, we're sitting in The Hare and Hounds beer garden having a drink for lunch. After a night of drizzle, the plastic chairs have dried in the sun, but the lawn's still damp. With the village huddled into the crease of the valley, surrounded and overlooked by untamed moorland, there's a sense of equilibrium between the natural environment and the imposition of humanity. The balance seems right.

I place a hand on Kate's hand. “I like it here. Do you?”

“Love it,” she says. “Although I'd prefer the cottage to ourselves. Mike left the bathroom in a pig of a mess this morning. Again.”

I nod. “We couldn't afford it without them.”

“I know that.” She's wearing a headscarf today, Romany- style, and frees her hand to retie it. “It's great leaving suburbia behind. I love breathing clean air.”

One of her gold earrings is hanging awry and I lean across to straighten it. “I could live somewhere like this,” I say. “A cosy cottage, a kitchen garden, few other houses in sight… It'd be heaven, don't you reckon?” I'm thinking of Nenford and what's been lost – of the imbalance.

“No.”

“No?”

“How would you earn a wage? How would you live?”

“I'd commute, or work from home – my own hours – or, with a couple of acres, we'd be self-sufficient. With a small orchard, we could grow our own fruit, make apple and blackcurrant pies; run a cottage industry.”

“
We?
Count me out. I've had enough of the small-town mentality in Abetsby. How narrow-minded would somewhere like this be? I want to see something of the world, Tom; to visit other places, other cultures, meet other people and new ideas. Don't you? I thought you did.”

“We could do both,” I say. “Have a cottage in the country, you know, and an apartment in Rome. It wouldn't have to be Britain.”

She stares into her pot of beer before speaking. “You're joking, right?”

I shrug. “Why?”

“Your view of the world. It's too romantic. Romantic at best, naïve at worst. A holiday's one thing, but you've been soaking up too much Hollywood crap, Tom. The real world isn't like that.”

“I wasn't meaning it like that. I meant I'd be happy whatever we were doing, as long as –”

“Life's about more than just being with someone.” She reaches up to her hair, undoes her scarf and shoves it into her bag.

“Yeah,” I say. “Of course.” But I don't really believe it.

We drink our beer, follow the road out the village, and then leave it to trek a zig-zag route to the top of the moor. Halfway up, we've both worked up a sweat, despite the wind singing through the heather and pushing at our backs. Close to the highest point, we follow sheep tracks on soil that's peaty black, dry and spongy, like the softest carpet, and then we plant stones on the cairn, in the manner of a hundred walkers before us.

We have to raise our voices to cut above the pounding of the wind.

“Heaven!” I cry.

“I'm beat!” she returns, and drops to a crouch against the heap of stones. “Out of condition. Couldn't manage another step.” Pointing to the horizon and three giant golf balls perched on a plateau of distant moorland, she says: “What the hell's that?”

“Fylingdales, I guess. Shit, I never thought they'd be that big.” And I squat beside her.

“Some sort of observatory?”

“Radar. An early warning system. Gives the politicians and royals four minutes' notice in case the Soviets decide to nuke us – enough time for the Yanks to retaliate, for the world to blow itself to smithereens. Welcome aboard the USS Great Britain.”

“The fifty-first state.”

“Yeah.”

“Very comforting.”

I squint to try and see beyond Fylingdales. “I wonder if you can see the sea from here.”

It's possible to trace the shape of the moors and a few valleys, but we can't see the sea and we can't even see Wightdale, which clings lower down one side of the hill. After ten minutes we walk on, brushing through dry bracken and over mounds of heather, our backs to the giant baubles.

“No people!” she shouts. “Just us!”

And less than two steps in front of us, a hare breaks cover. It leaps from where it's been basking into a manic zig-zag dance across the heath. Afew seconds of explosive energy and then gone again. We're frozen still, startled by the sudden burst and the frenzy of its dance.

“Bloody fantastic.”

Dropping lower, round the hill, we find ourselves on the lee-side, heading towards a sharp, wooded tributary of the valley. Protected from the wind, we feel the smack of the sun on our skin and know we'll burn.

Sitting down to admire the view, Kate undoes her shoes and peels off her socks and wiggles her toes in the coarse stubble of cropped grass. She lies back, eyes closed.

“It's good to stop, finish exams, be lazy for a while. I need this holiday.”

A skylark starts belting out its song: rising and falling, climbing and hovering, then dropping again. And then, without any rumble of warning, two Air Force jets scream through the sky, bursting along the valley and over the moors like bullets. Kate sits up, shields her eyes to see them strip away the distance – two red blades cleaving the sky in half, cleaving the day.

“Well!” she says, then lies back again, throwing her arms out wide to embrace the sky.

“So much for paradise,” I say and lie down beside her.

After a couple of minutes, and without changing her position, as if speaking to the sky, she says: “There's danger in being too much of a romantic idealist, Tom. If you expect too much you'll always be disappointed. It worries me what you might expect of me sometimes, in case you think I'm someone I'm not. One day you might wake up and realise I'm not the dream you thought I was. Nowhere's perfect, no one's perfect, and it makes life bloody impossible if you expect them to be.”

I say nothing, hoping she might think I'm asleep.

“Tom?”

“I know,” I say. “I don't.”

We stir at the end of the afternoon, stiff and sunburnt, and trudge in silence back to the cottage, both nursing the beginnings of a headache. Sore, tetchy and quiet.

The air's heavy the following morning and it's difficult to shrug sleep off. In the kitchen, Kate's got a book open at the table, which she appears to be reading as she picks at her toast. Mike and Anita are laughing in their bedroom and I know what they're up to. To drown out their happiness, our silence, I clear the table, run water into the sink, wash the dishes. The day's been sucked dry before it's even started.

As I stack the last of the dishes on the draining board, Kate stands and drops the remnants of toast into the bin. She's barely eaten. She picks up a tea towel, but then folds it in half and folds it again.

“Let's do something,” she says. “I can't stand this anymore.”

“What?”

“We need to get away. You and me. Be properly on our own. Something isn't working for us here.”

“Where can we go?”

“Anywhere. We don't have to stay here. Why don't we hitch to the coast? What about Whitby? If we like it we could find a small hotel and stay overnight. Treat ourselves.”

“Do you reckon we can afford it?” I know she's not wanted to draw heavily on her savings.

“I don't think we can afford not to,” she says. “Besides, now I've got a summer job I don't mind blowing a little cash.” And she chucks the towel at me to dry my hands. “Come on, we'll shove a few clothes in a backpack. I'll leave a note for Anita. They can have the place to themselves for a night.”

And so we do. The air's humid, we're sore with sunburn and it takes three rides and a couple of hours to reach Whitby, but we sit up at our first view of the sea.

The lorry driver who delivers us to the town centre says little once he's asked us where we're heading, whether we're on holiday together and what Kate's name is. He asks her because she's sitting in the middle, next to him, and she has to shout because of the racket of the engine, but he keeps grinning at her. After a few minutes she slides closer to me and places a hand on my knee, but he laughs and says something about the gear stick, which neither of us properly hears.

“How old are you then?” he asks out of the blue.

“Sixteen,” she lies, and I place an arm round her shoulder.

When we climb down from the cab and he drives away, she shakes her head. “I wonder what he's got on his mind,” she says.

And I almost tell her how it is that most blokes look at her like that, but then change my mind.

We paddle in the sea and push the sleazy bastard out of our day; we write postcards in a tea shop and wander the streets during the afternoon, looking in shop windows and at craft stalls, and I start imagining how it'd be if we lived somewhere like this.

We like Whitby well enough to book a room in The Anchor, an ancient inn close to the quay, and feel that, despite the mugginess, we've taken control of our world again. We might be back in a town, but with the North Sea lapping at the trawlers – with the tide slowly rising – it doesn't seem much tamer or less natural than being in the middle of the moors.

It's a tiny attic room, swamped by a queen bed and a large, mahogany wardrobe, and a sloping floor. A pocket of thick, hot, stale air is trapped there, but we push open the casement window in the gable wall and a pivoting window set into the pitch of the roof, and the air shifts a little.

Sitting on a bench overlooking the harbour, we fill our faces with cod and chips, soak up the smell of brine and old fish that drifts towards us, lick the salt and vinegar from our fingers. Even with the sun starting to dip, it's still clammy, but the air's so still that any movement seems to generate static. We share a bottle of lemonade, drop the occasional chip for the squabbling seagulls and smile at their edgy raucousness. We're sweaty and smelly, but who cares?