Authors: Julian Barnes
‘I thought we were going to get married.’
‘That’s why we aren’t,’ Cath had replied.
‘I don’t understand.’
‘No, you don’t.’
‘Will you please explain?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because that’s the whole point. If you can’t see, if I have to explain – that’s
why
we’re not getting married.’
‘You’re not being logical.’
‘I’m also not getting married.’
Forget it, forget it, it’s gone. On the one hand, she liked you making the decisions; on the other hand, she found you controlling. On the one hand, she liked living with you; on the other, she didn’t wan’t to go on living with you. On the one hand, she knew you’d be a good father; on the other, she didn’t want to have your children. Logic, right? Forget it.
‘Hello.’ He surprised himself. He didn’t say hello to women he didn’t know in the lunch queue. He only said hello to women he didn’t know on walking paths, when you got a nod or a smile or a lifted trekking pole in reply. But – actually, he did know her.
‘You’re from the bank.’
‘Right.’
‘Lynn.’
‘Very good.’
A small moment of genius, remembering her plastic name-tag through the bullet-proof glass. And she was having the vegetarian lasagne as well. Did she mind … ? No, fine. There was only one free table. And it was just sort of easy. He knew she worked in the bank, she knew he taught at the school. She’d moved to the town a couple of months previously, and no, she hadn’t been up to the Tor yet. Would she be OK in trainers?
The next Saturday she wore jeans and a sweater; she seemed half-amused, half-alarmed as he got his boots and pack out of the car and pulled on his scarlet mesh-lined Gore-tex jacket.
‘You’ll need water.’
‘Will I?’
‘Unless you don’t mind sharing.’
She nodded; they set off. As they climbed out of the town, the view broadened to include both her bank and his school. He let her set the pace. She walked easily. He wanted to ask how old she was, whether she went to the gym, and say how she looked taller than when sitting down behind the glass. Instead, he pointed out the ruins of an old slate-works and the rare breed of sheep – Jacobs, were they? – that Jim Henderson had been farming since people down south started wanting lamb that didn’t taste like lamb, and were happy to pay for it.
Halfway up it began to drizzle, and he grew anxious about her trainers on the wet shale near the top. He stopped, unzipped his pack, and gave her a spare waterproof. She took it as if it was quite normal that he’d brought it. He liked that. She also didn’t ask whose it was, who’d left it behind.
He passed her the water bottle; she drank and wiped the rim.
‘What else have you got in there?’
‘Sandwiches, tangerines. Unless you want to turn back.’
‘As long as you haven’t got a pair of those awful plastic trousers.’
‘No.’
He did, of course. And not just his own, but a pair of Cath’s he’d brought for her. Something in him, something bold and timid at the same time, wanted to say, ‘Actually, I’m wearing North Cape Coolmax boxers with the single-button fly.’
After they started sleeping together, he took her to The Great Outdoors. They got her boots – a pair of Brasher Supalites – and, as she stood up in them, walked tentatively to a mirror and back, then did a little tap dance, he thought how incredibly sexy small female feet could look in walking boots. They got her three pairs of ergonomic trekking socks designed to absorb pressure peaks, and she widened her eyes at the idea of socks having a left and a right like shoes. Three pairs of inner socks too. They got her a day-pack, or a day-sack, as the hunky assistant preferred to call it, by which point Geoff felt the fellow beginning to get out of line. He’d shown Lynn how to position the hip belt, tighten the shoulder straps and adjust the top tensioners; now he was patting the pack and juggling it up and down in far too intimate a way.
‘And a water bottle,’ Geoff said firmly, to cut all that off.
They got her a waterproof jacket in a dark green that set off the flame of her hair; then he waited and let Hunk suggest waterproof trousers and get laughed at in reply. At the cash desk he handed over his credit card.
‘No, you can’t.’
‘I’d like to. I’d really like to.’
‘But why?’
‘I’d like to. Must be your birthday soon. Well, some time in the next twelve months. Got to be.’
‘Thank you,’ Lynn said, but he could tell she was a bit edgy about it. ‘Will you wrap them up again for my birthday?’
‘I’ll do more than that. I’ll clean your Brashers specially. Oh yes,’ he said to the cashier, ‘and we’d better have some polish. Classic Brown, please.’
Before they went walking next, he dubbined her boots to make the leather supple and strengthen the waterproofing. As he slipped his hand inside the fresh-smelling Brashers, he noted again, as he had in the shop, that she took half a size smaller than Cath. Half a size? It felt like a full size to him.
They did Hathersage and Padley Chapel; Calke Abbey and Staunton Harold; Dove Dale as it narrows and deepens to Milldale; Lathkill Dale from Alport to Ricklow Quarry; Cromford Canal and the High Peak Trail. They climbed out of Hope to Lose Hill, then along what he promised her was the most scenic ridge walk in the entire Peak District, until they came to Mam Tor, where the paragliders gathered: huge men who sweated up the hill with vast packs on their backs, then spread out their canopies like laundry on the grassy slope and waited for the upcurrent to lift them off their feet and into the sky.
‘Isn’t that thrilling,’ she said. ‘Wouldn’t you like to do that?’
Geoff thought of men in hospital wards with broken backs, of paraplegics and quadriplegics. He thought of mid-air collisions with light aircraft. He thought of not being able to control the wind and getting carried higher and higher into the cloud, of coming down in unknown landscape, of getting lost and scared and peeing yourself. Of not having your boots on a path and a map in your hand.
‘Sort of,’ he replied.
For him, freedom lay on the ground. He told her about the trespass on Kinder Scout in the 1930s: how walkers and hikers had come out from Manchester in their hundreds to the Duke of Devonshire’s grouse moors to protest against lack of access to the countryside; how it had been a peaceful day except when a drunken gamekeeper shot himself with his own gun; how the trespass had led to the creation of national parks and registered rights of way; and how the man who’d led it had died recently, but there was still one survivor, now 103, living in a Methodist old people’s home not far away. Geoff thought his story soared better than any bloody paraglider.
‘They just went trampling across his land like that?’
‘Not trampling. Tramping, perhaps.’ Geoff was pleased with this emendation.
‘But it
was
his land?’
‘Technically, yes. Historically, perhaps not.’
‘Are you a socialist?’
‘I’m in favour of the right to roam,’ he said cautiously. He didn’t want to put a foot wrong now.
‘It’s all right. I wouldn’t mind. Either way.’
‘What are you?’
‘I don’t vote.’
Emboldened, he said, ‘I’m Labour.’
‘I thought you would be.’
In his walking log, he noted the routes they took, the date, the weather, the duration, ending with an L in red for Lynn. As opposed to a blue C for Cath. Times were about the same, regardless of the initial.
Should he get her a trekking pole? He didn’t want to push it – she’d refused all offers of a walking hat, despite having the pros and cons explained to her. Not that there were any cons. Still, better a bare head than a baseball cap. He really couldn’t take a walker in a baseball cap seriously, male or female.
He could get her a compass. Except he already had one himself, and rarely consulted it. If ever he broke his ankle, and had to tell her through the pain to set off across the moor using that tumbledown sheepfold as a reference point and keep heading NNE – showing her how to turn the instrument and set a course – then she could have his for the purpose. No, one compass between two, that was right, somehow. Symbolic, you could say.
They did the Kinder Downfall circuit: Bowden Bridge car park, the reservoir, pick up the Pennine Way to the Downfall, fork right at Red Brook and down past Tunstead House and the Kinderstones. He told her about the average rainfall, and how when it froze the Downfall turned into a cascade of icicles. One of the sights for the winter walker.
She didn’t answer. Well, anyway, they’d have to get her a fleece if they were going up two thousand feet in winter. He still had the issue of
Country Walking
with the fleece test in it.
In the car park he looked at his watch.
‘Are we late for something?’
‘No, just checking. Four and a quarter.’
‘Is that good or bad?’
‘It’s good because I’m with you.’
It was also good because four and a quarter is what it used to take him and Cath, and say what you will, Cath was one pretty fit walker.
Lynn lit a Silk Cut, as she did at the end of every walk. She didn’t smoke much, and he didn’t really mind, even if he thought it was a pretty stupid habit. Just when she’d done her cardiovascular system a power of good … Still, he knew from being a teacher that there were times when you had to confront, and times when you took a less direct route.
‘We could go up again after Christmas. In the New Year.’ Yes, he could get her the fleece as her present.
She looked at him, and took a deep puff on her cigarette.
‘If the weather got cold enough, that is. For the icicles.’
‘Geoff,’ she said. ‘You’re on my space.’
‘I just –’
‘You’re on my space.’
‘Yes, Miss Duke of Devonshire.’
But she didn’t think that was funny, and they drove home mainly in silence. Perhaps he’d walked her too hard. It was a bit of a stiff pull, a thousand feet or more.
He’d put the pizzas in the oven, laid the table, and was just pulling the tab on his first beer when she said,
‘Look, it’s June. We met in – February?’
‘Jan 29,’ he replied, automatically, as he did when a pupil mistakenly guessed 1079 for the Battle of Hastings.
‘January the 29th,’ she repeated. ‘Look, I don’t think I can do Christmas.’
‘Of course. You’ve got family.’
‘No, I don’t mean I’ve got family. Of course I’ve got family. I mean, I can’t do Christmas.’
When Geoff was faced with what, despite principled beliefs to the contrary, he nonetheless could only regard as gross female illogicality, he tended to go silent. One minute you were steaming along a track, the weight on your shoulders barely noticeable, and then suddenly you were in a pathless scrubland with no waymarks, the mist descending and the ground boggy beneath your feet.
But she didn’t go on, so he tried helping her. ‘Don’t much like Christmas myself. All that eating and drinking. Still –’
‘Who knows where I’ll be at Christmas.’
‘You mean, the bank might transfer you?’ He hadn’t thought of that.
‘Geoff, listen. We met in January, as you pointed out. Things are … fine. I’m having a nice time, a nice enough time …’
‘Gotcha. Right.’ It was that stuff again, that stuff he didn’t seem to be getting any better at. ‘No, course not. Didn’t mean. Anyway, I’ll turn the oven up. Crispy base.’ He took a swig of his beer.
‘It’s just –’
‘Don’t say it. I know. I get you.’ He was going to add ‘Miss Duke of Devonshire’ again, but he didn’t, and later, thinking it over, he guessed it wouldn’t have helped.
In September, he persuaded her to take a day’s leave so they could do the circuit from Calver. It was best to avoid the weekend, when every hiker and rock climber would be crawling over Curbar Edge.
They parked in the cul-de-sac next to the Bridge Inn and set off, passing Calver Mill on the other side of the Derwent.
‘Richard Arkwright is supposed to have built that,’ he said. ‘1785, I think.’
‘It’s not a mill any more.’
‘No, well, as you see. Offices. Maybe residential. Or a bit of both.’
They followed the river, past the thrashing weir, through Froggatt and then Froggatt Woods to Grindleford. As they came out of the woods, the autumn sun, though weak, made him glad of his hat. Lynn still refused to buy one, and he supposed he wouldn’t mention it again until the spring. She’d taken a tan these summer months, and her freckles showed more than when he’d first met her.
There was a sharp climb out of Grindleford, which she took without a murmur; then he led the way across a field to the Grouse Inn. They sat up at the bar for a sandwich. Afterwards, the barman muttered, ‘Coffee?’ She said ‘Yes’ and he said ‘No.’ He didn’t believe in coffee on a walk. You just needed water against dehydration. Coffee was a stimulant and the whole … theory was that the walk should be stimulating enough without any assistance. Alcohol: stupid. He’d even come across hikers smoking joints.
He told her some of this, which may have been a mistake, because she said, ‘I’m only having a coffee, right?’ – and then lit up a Silk Cut. Not waiting till the end of the walk. She looked at him.
‘Yes?’
‘I didn’t say anything.’
‘You don’t need to.’
Geoff sighed. ‘I forgot to point out the signpost as we got to Grindleford. It’s antique. Nearly a hundred years old. Not many left in the Peak District.’
She blew smoke at him, rather deliberately, it seemed.
‘And, all right, I also read somewhere that low-tar cigarettes are in fact just as bad for you because they make you inhale more deeply to get the nicotine, so actually you’re taking more of the toxins into your lungs.’
‘Then I may as well switch back to Marlboro Lights.’
They retraced their steps, picked up the path again, crossed a road and took a left by the sign for the Eastern Moors Estate.
‘Is this where the Bronze Age circle is?’
‘I think so.’
‘What does that mean?’
Fair enough. But also, there’s no point in not being yourself, is there? He was thirty-one, he had his opinions, he knew stuff.
‘The circle is coming up on the left-hand side. But I don’t think we should look at it this time.’