Climbers: A Novel (26 page)

‘If you’re fetching sandwiches,’ Normal reminded me, ‘I’ll have cheese salad in a bap.’

He waited until I was halfway to the door then called across the shop, ‘No I won’t, I’ll have tuna and salad cream. Derek, where’s that peg hammer?’

If you look straight down an Inter-City second-class carriage, the landscape on both sides of the train flies past in your peripheral vision like images in a split-screen film. You have only an instant in which to recognise an object before it becomes a blur. The day I went down to see Pauline everything was dissolving into water anyway, bridges, houses, trees.

On the telephone we had agreed to meet in the Bistro Europa at King’s Cross.

‘It’s just the station buffet, really,’ I remember her apologising. ‘The pizza’s awful but at least they’ll give you a glass of wine with it. I don’t suppose we’ll want to eat anything anyway.’ There was a pause, in which I could hear irregular tappings on the line, hesitant and far-off, as if someone else was trying to communicate on it. ‘Anyway, at least we both know where it is,’ Pauline finished.

Neither of us had remembered that the Manchester trains come in at Euston: I had to walk along the Euston Road, which was shiny with rain, as dark at eleven o’clock in the morning as a winter afternoon, and choked with buses.

‘I’ll probably be late,’ she had warned me. I was already an hour too early. I didn’t want her to arrive without my seeing her. We would both be nervous, I told myself: I must make sure there would be somewhere we could sit.

The Bistro Europa was decorated a sort of mauve colour. ‘Edwardian’ fitments on curved brass stems illuminated cream panels let into the walls at intervals, but left the rest of the place rather dim. It was almost empty – one or two tourists on their way home from Australia and the Middle East; a fat man in a two-piece beige suit who sat laughing at a paperback book – but despite this I couldn’t settle. I went out to the concourse to study the Arrivals board (as though it was Pauline who was coming in by train: as though somehow I had been the one to remain in London while she lived aimlessly in the provinces waiting for something to happen to her). I came back in again. A couple began to quarrel dazedly among their luggage with its bright Cathay Pacific labels.

‘I’m with you,’ the woman said suddenly.

She got up and stood in front of the man to attract his attention.

‘I am
with
you, you know.’

‘I know,’ he acknowledged. He stared up at her glumly. ‘I know that.’

The rest of the tourists sprawled across the dull red nylon-plush banquettes, stunned by the heat, the smell of food, and the steam from the coffee machine behind the counter. Local trains pulled in and out of the nearby platform. A woman came in and sat down by the door. She looked up at the clock.

It was Pauline. She had arrived early, too. She had on a Guernsey sweater a bit large for her, a faded grey skirt and cheap white plimsolls. Her hair had been cropped short and, I thought, dyed black. It made the bones of her face stand out strongly. Otherwise she was exactly as I had first met her. She placed her large soft leather handbag on the table in front of her and regarded it for a moment – her hands seemed to be a little larger-knuckled than I remembered, reddened as if she had just finished the washing-up – then took out a copy of
The House in Paris
which she began reading inattentively, pausing every minute or two to look round the Europa, fidget with her handbag, or cross and uncross her legs.

The second I recognised her a kind of reluctance, a kind of languor overcame me. It was pleasant and dreamy, like the onset of anaesthetic, and I associated it with childhood.

If I had waved, if I had stood up and called, ‘Here! I’m over here!’ or walked across to her table and said, ‘Hello. Didn’t you see me when you came in?’, I would have broken out of it there and then. Instead, I allowed it to harden into paralysis. Though the Europa was more crowded now, and its commonplace noises – voices, plates, the rattle of cutlery and plastic trays – quite loud, everything seemed to reach me only with effort, from a great distance.

Pauline went to the telephone and put some money in it. She was forced to dial the number twice before she got through, then shout to make herself audible.

‘What
is
your name?’ I heard her ask. ‘Oh, Chris. Chris, of course. Chris, I’m so scatty. Isn’t that awful, forgetting names?’

Chris, another book dealer perhaps, had nothing for her.

‘OK, Chris, see you, listen I’ll ring you back, don’t bother to ring me.’

And she sat down again.

By now it was half past twelve, but she seemed more puzzled than impatient. Why did I make her wait like that? Because every movement of hers only extended my paralysis. She checked her watch. She examined her face in a small make-up mirror, touched the inner corner of one eye with a Kleenex. Bending over her cupped hand, she made the unconsciously graceful gesture of someone removing a contact lens. I knew that when she dropped cleaning fluid on to the lens, which she had transferred deftly on to the back of her hand, it would look like a pearl. There seemed to be a pane of glass between me and events; the longer I sat watching Pauline through it, the longer I would have to sit.

Suddenly I thought, It’s because I don’t know what to say.

I thought: If I could leave without being seen, and then come back in again! I could apologise for being late, as if my train had only just arrived, and break out of this. It’s only because I don’t know what to say.

The Bistro Europa has two doors, hidden from one another partly by the internal architecture of banquettes and partitions; partly by the dim lighting. They slam monotonously as you sit there in the half-light trying to guess what is in your omelette. They open on to the same platform, but one is closer to the station entrance, so that you are more likely to use it if you have come by taxi, or up the steps from the Underground station, than if you have got off a train. Pauline was sitting by that one. I managed to make myself get up and go out of the other.

Outside, I stood on the platform for a minute or two listening to the announcements – this train was late, that one early, another one had problems with its power car but was expected on time. When the ten a.m. from Sheffield Central arrived, and the platform became crowded with people bumping the corners of their suitcases into one another’s legs, I went to the lavatory.

A man asked me if he could use my comb, because he had left his in Newcastle at seven o’clock that morning. (I imagined him waiting for the train, passing a styrofoam cup of tea thoughtfully from hand to hand to warm himself up as he walked along the platform in the raw cold; but he had no luggage.) He had come down for a job interview. ‘Me hair’s quite clean,’ he said anxiously. ‘It war washed only last night.’ He was as nervous as an animal; but speaking to him gave me an obscure sense of relief.

Outside the Europa again I looked in through the window, to see Pauline still there, head bent over
The House in Paris
. I was struck by the vulnerability of the nape of her neck now that her hair was so short. Then, instead of going back inside as I had planned, and starting everything from the beginning again, I left the station, turned right along Euston Road and caught the next Inter-City to Manchester. It was quiet and cool; until Wilmslow I had the carriage all to myself.

May ignited briefly, then doused itself. I was walking past the registry office when after a week of sunshine it began to rain again, without warning, straight down out of an apparently clear blue sky. It was lunch time. The bright light fell without interruption across the tender new leaves of the horse chestnut tree in the forecourt. Underneath it a wedding party, mainly women in thin summery blouses, shivered and looked upward. Would the bride come out at all now? I took my sandwich back to the bookshop, where the owner gave it a contemptuous glance then stared out across the waste land the other side of Tib Street at half a dozen drunks standing about in a circle in the rain, and complained:

‘Punters’re a bit slow this week.’

He slid the wooden cash drawer in and out speculatively, as if testing a new idea.

‘You’d think the spring would stir them up a bit,’ he went on. The second-hand trade was buoyant, but his major suppliers were giving him trouble. ‘Get the juices flowing. That’s what we want, Mike, eh? Those juices flowing.’ He made a ring with his right thumb and forefinger and moved it eloquently up and down. ‘Jesus Christ, look at that lot out there.’

When I wasn’t working I would sit all afternoon in Piccadilly Gardens – because I couldn’t be in High Adventure all the time – until the starlings gathered to scrape and shriek in the trees; or wander up and down the fantastically-tiled corridors of the Corn Exchange. By half past five the streets were full of secretaries in fur coats the colour of marmalade, with boots to match. They hurried past, heads down, laughing. ‘Do you know, I looked at my watch and it was three o’clock!’ In the window of John Lewis’s, two assistants wrestled irritatedly with a mannequin. Eventually it came in half at the waist and they left the naked torso sticking up out of the carpet like a woman standing in a pond.

‘Sorry I couldn’t get down to see you,’ I wrote to Pauline, ‘the day I said I would. I had the chance to go to Wales with a really hard climber called Normal.’

We had driven to Tremadoc on impulse, I told her, at seven o’clock in the morning, in Normal’s three-litre Capri with its giant back tyres, then climbed at Extreme (then called ‘XS’) ‘and above’ all day before racing home through the night, our one good headlight glaring drunkenly down the carnivorous throat of the A498. Prenteg, Beddgelert, Glanaber went behind us in clusters of lights. ‘Normal’s a complete maniac. We were on the outskirts of Betws by nine!’ I described how he had eaten eight Mars Bars; how at the junction with the Llanberis road, I had hung out of the side window of the car at ninety miles an hour, suspended inside the intensity of the moment, gazing out into the cloudy spaces of Pen-y-Pass and wishing – however windy and cold it was, however much it frightened me – we could go and climb Cenotaph Corner in the dark.

‘Normal took three twenty-five foot bombers off The Mongoose. He thinks he might have popped a tendon in one of his fingers, his idea of a perfect day.’

I had great hopes of Normal then, so I constructed him boldly for Pauline, in broad sweeps, from the monolithic materials that came easiest to hand – speed and the night, the traditional and the new, his own hyperbolic tributes to other climbers. I felt able to tell such lies because by then he had taken me climbing at last; although hardly to North Wales. Normal could never separate events from places. Boredom lit him up with nostalgia for his old Black Pudding Team stamping-grounds: domestic, almost urbanised venues scattered across Lancashire and the north-west, many of which turned out to be memorable only for something which had already happened to him there –

‘The trouble with Anglezarke,’ he would muse, waving his hand up at Left Wall, where the brittleness and peculiar hot colour of the gritstone had inspired route-names like Terror Cotta and Terra Firmer, ‘is that it really needs a group of people’ – by this he meant a gang – ‘to give it character. You should have been here the day we bricked Teapot, on Golden Tower!’

‘You threw stones at someone while he was climbing?’

‘He was soloing it! Great, eh?’

That May, Thornton-in-Craven Quarry, a shallow but extensive pit outside Colne, was one of these blue remembered Shangri-Las. We went there in his wife’s car on a foul Saturday afternoon. At first it seemed exotic enough. The workings were elliptical, a quarter of a mile long, like the score-mark left by some glancing meteoric collision a million years ago. At one end, where they deepened mysteriously, was a small lake as blue as an eye. To get to the climbs, it turned out, you had to push your way through some undergrowth then, using a bit of frayed
in situ
rope, slither down a chute of disintegrating limestone and black mud. You stood at the bottom of that and in front of you, completely unexpected, was an enormous sweep of slabs going up two hundred feet, so that for a moment you could only grin at one another and exclaim.

‘Look at that,’ said Dirty Derek. ‘All that rock.’

Dirty Derek had decided to come with us at the last moment.

‘The beauty of it is,’ Normal tempted him, ‘there aren’t any routes. You can climb anywhere, you can just go where you like. And you can use
pegs
for protection!’

He added: ‘In fact you have to.’

What he was trying to tell Derek was that as soon as you danced up across the lip of that vast expanse, you were lost. There were cracks everywhere, draped like a net over the rock: but they were full of mud, bossed over with moss, and they led nowhere. You could see all the way to Keighley, as Derek put it later, but you had no idea which direction to set off in. Reeling from this exposure, we zigzagged in a vague panic from one delusory feature to the next, looking for somewhere to take stock. The pool swung about beneath us, as if viewed from a helicopter. Thunderstorms, driving north and west to harangue Ribblesdale, split the sky in half and caused us to huddle together on deteriorating ledges, all tied to the same sapling and surrounded by a faint luminescence emitted in sympathy by the patchy crust of the rock.

‘Be careful with that bloody camera!’

‘We should be going upwards more,’ Dirty Derek decided when it was his turn to lead, and off he went, slipping and slithering, swapping feet helplessly as he tried to mantelshelf on to shrubs and bits of moss. Dislodged material rolled down the slabs, gathering speed in the gloom. Briars clutched matily at his woollen hat. Normal and I found most of his protection pegs bedded in mud. We could lift them out with our fingers.

‘Nice pegging, Derek.’

‘What do I know about it?’ Derek called down huffily. ‘I’m a member of the free-climbing generation. I feel guilty knocking a nail into a plank.’

‘A member of the free love generation,’ I said. ‘Ha ha.’

Up near the top, where the slab steepened exponentially into the graph of some catastrophe, the holds were flaking off like dead skin when you tried to use them. The climbing was easy enough, but I began to shake with excitement. I held the palm of my hand up in front of me in the thundery lights: I’m here, I thought.