When Nights Were Cold (16 page)

The corridors were so long that if someone were crossing at the other end you could not recognize who it was. I have often dreamed of these corridors since, the wide staircases, the doors on either side to bedrooms, study rooms, classrooms, the many empty rooms on the corridors above, all with their fireplaces, windows, huge mirrors, waiting for future students to arrive and move in. Sometimes, when I have not been entirely happy, I have dreamed that I could go secretly to one of those empty rooms, light a fire in the hearth and curl up under a silky eiderdown. I wanted my bed now but, before reaching my room, Locke came from her study, snatched my arm and pulled me in.

‘Was it Frank Black?'

‘Horsfield told you?'

‘She's telling everyone.'

I fell onto Locke's chair, put my head in my hands then laughed.

‘He came, but there's nothing to warrant gossip. Actually, it was very awkward and uncomfortable. I shan't see him again, because of my sister, so it's for the best but – ' I stopped for breath – ‘I'm disappointed.'

‘I think that's a pity when he likes you so much. I suppose he's already left?'

‘He's on his way to the station now.'

‘Farringdon, you fool, go after him. Go to the station now and talk to him. You can sort out the business with your sister later.'

‘But what shall I say?'

‘Whatever you think of. Go on and catch him.' She pushed me towards the door, opened it. ‘You're not a coward.'

No, never a coward.

Frank was on the platform. He looked at his watch and glanced along the railway tracks. The train wasn't due for ten or fifteen minutes. I wanted to speak to him, but I didn't know what to say so I walked off. I loathed myself. I said aloud that I was not a coward, turned on my heel, returned to the platform and then walked away for the second time. Why could he not have seen and come after me?

I lingered for some time. Small, hard lumps of rain fell. Frank put up his umbrella, lifted it over his head. I watched until the train puffed in with its whistle and shrieks, unable to go to him, unable to call out his name but not ready to leave.

Frank and I were to have so many goodbyes in the time we knew each other. I believe that's why I was paralysed that afternoon. I stood there at the platform's end and I slipped a little outside time, just fell out of it all. I saw all the many partings to come and the pain that we would go on to endure. I actually saw them, jagged fiickerings of ourselves meeting and parting in light and dark. I was weighted with sadness and I was back in the picture gallery vestibule, watching but not having. Frank and I were connected but we would never be happy and I knew it, or thought it, as I stood and watched him under his umbrella. I should have spoken to him or gone away, not spied on his private moment but it was love, or the beginnings of love, so I exonerate myself. But it's nothing now. The memory is grey as rain.

I wonder what Frank would say of our secret meeting if he were alive to tell me. He would surely admit that he went to Wales that spring with the intention of seeing me, and that Wilfred was in on the plan. I think he would also acknowledge that he saw me watching from the end of the station platform. I've considered it over the years and I cannot see how he could not have known that I was there. Yes, he saw me seeing him and, I imagine, he was amused but shy. I think he would have been amused.

Now he comes to me at night, when the wind roars, and we have nowhere to shelter except the dank rooms in my mind. Frank, my love. I would tear off all my limbs and bleed for eternity if I could return to that afternoon at the station. If I could step forward onto the platform and say your name, what would happen to us?

No, I should not want to go back, for I would not be able to do better even after these decades of life in between that ought to have taught me something, and yet I want it. I am still greedy and I want it.

I wrote to tell him that I was going with my friends to climb in the Alps. He replied the next day and wished me the best of luck. Perhaps I hoped that I would descend from grassy foothills to find Frank in the garden of my hotel and that, as we had in Wales, we might walk together alongside a deep stretch of water and we would talk of wild places.

Frank, my love, kneels at my feet. We're in a sort of boat, you see. There is no sky. He shouts directions, instructions and warnings as the spray spatters his sou'wester and his ravaged, ungloved hands. Panic roughens the edges of his voice, but it's all right. It is all right. The bad nights are not here. They have melted into the sea, some of them, and the others have floated into oceans of boiling green. I know where I'm headed. I always know. This is how we get through the nights now, Frank and me. This is how we always – we always . . . Ah no. I thought. . . No, of course. But where did I . . . ? Oh, Catherine.

Chapter Twelve

And that goes straight into the fire. Already I don't mean it. I am in the past with all the lights blazing, almost blinding me. Only when I reach the end will I know what I am supposed to say to Catherine, but I do want her to visit. I do.

Father died, just where I am sitting now, in 1911. Catherine found him on the hearth rug in front of his chair, as though he had stood one final time, stumbled forward to get somewhere and collapsed. After the funeral I stayed at home for a few weeks, miserable with Mother and Catherine. Without my father at the centre of every activity in the household, no one knew quite how to behave or what to do. I sometimes sat in his chair and read his books, trying to go a little way into his mind, continuing our arguments from his point of view, then mine, as though I might now be able to resolve them, not quite believing that my father and I would never quarrel again. Even now, so many years since he left us, I scarcely believe it.

Mother and Catherine assumed that I had left college for good and kept asking why my trunk had not arrived. When I told my mother that I had no intention of giving up my degree, she thought that grief had made me mad and threatened to call the doctor. She said she had seen me fumbling around the hall, clutching the hand compass and taking bearings as though I had lost my way. It was true that she had seen me with the Brunton but I was never lost. I simply liked to hold and read the thing, and it had belonged to Father so it gave me some comfort. Occasionally I went around the house and garden with it, but only as a mild distraction. When I returned to college, I took the Brunton with me and left my mourning clothes at home.

Catherine and I inherited a sum of money each, with a letter from Father telling us that it would be of help when we married. I read the letter twice to be sure that marriage wasn't a condition of the legacy – it was not – and I used most of it to pay my debts to Aunt Edith and to Parr. I put the remainder aside for my trip to Switzerland.

Locke, Hooper, Parr and I took rowing lessons on the Thames. We performed exercises in the college woodland, to the bewilderment of other students and, once or twice, we went out at night and practised hauling ourselves up trees with ropes. The trees were not particularly high and it bore no resemblance to rock climbing, but we did everything we could think of to stay strong and develop our coordination ready for the mountains. We attended our usual classes in the college gymnasium, where a lecturer led gentle exercises in balance and agility with Indian clubs and wands. We cycled, walked, swam and, when we were giddy with the whole thing – yet needed more – went skiing down the staircases of Main with a long tea tray under each foot. It never worked well but it started quite a fashion among the students, until someone crashed into Miss Hobson at the bottom of the stairs and the practice was banned.

Parr took us to a lantern lecture at the Ladies' Alpine Club headquarters in the Grand Central Hotel at Marylebone, and to talks at her mountaineering friends' homes. We sat in rooms with men and women who recounted their climbs in the Alps, the Himalayas, of treks through the jungle, across the Near and Middle East, into deepest South America. They told of deadly insect bites and fevers, encounters with wild animals, hostile tribes and friendly tribes. Corners of the world uncovered themselves to reveal vivid flora and fauna we had never known existed. I took careful notes and tried to ask informed, pertinent questions, but in my imagination I was already a thousand miles away.

After an enlightening discussion on the ill effects of sunburn, the Society made a trip to a mountaineering store near Piccadilly to buy goggles and sun masks.

‘Teddy will appreciate it if I don't return as a berry.' With her skin already brown and freckled, I thought Hooper more egg-like, but not unattractive. I was more concerned that she would change her mind and decide not to come. She sometimes said that she was so afraid of the Alps that she lay awake all night worrying. When she did sleep, she had nightmares about the mountains, about Teddy hating her strange hobby.

‘My lover couldn't care less,' Locke replied. She was probably talking about Horace, though there may have been a new beau by then. ‘But sunburn sounds unpleasant.'

‘And I need to stay pale so that my mother and sister don't guess where I've been.'

‘Farringdon, you'll have to tell your family when we go to Switzerland. It would be irresponsible to keep it from them.'

‘I can't tell them. They're in mourning weeds and think that I am too.'

Parr adopted what Locke called her ice-axe tone. All warmth and colour drained from her voice and what came out was a hard, clipped sound. ‘Then you should stay at home. It's perfectly possible that you could be seriously injured or killed on the mountains. Have you even thought about that?'

‘Of course I have.' But, no, I never thought that I would come to harm. In my imagination I was always surviving, rescuing weaker travellers, and returning weary but safe to cheering crowds, newspaper reporters and photographers. Perhaps this had come from my childhood fantasies of rescuing the three sailors in China but, whatever it was, I was not worried about dying.

The Ladies' Alpine Club held an exhibition of mountaineering equipment and we went together on a Saturday. I remember it as a heady, sweet day and, in my giddiness, I persuaded my friends that we must each purchase a green Tyrolean hat. We stood in a row before a mirror and put them on. We laughed at our reflections – even Parr – but, I must say, the hats were rather fetching. We did not stop but went off to examine a range of new, lightweight tents. The stall-keeper, a genial young man who did not laugh at us or even express surprise at the sight of four mountaineering women in identical green hats, explained the equipment. The Whymper tent slept four, but the Mummery, which slept two, could be folded small enough to go into a pocket. I asked him to demonstrate this and he did so, two or three times, pronouncing that we lived in extraordinary times with such advances in the manufacturing of expedition equipment.

Even Hooper delighted at the array of clothes, coats, nailed boots, silk sleeping bags, folding lanterns, pots, pans and miniature containers of soup and jam. If she still had doubts, then an article in the following day's
Mail
persuaded her that we were not betraying our sex. I took it to her room and read it to her.

‘Listen.
I have never known a lady climber to be either mean, gossipy or hysterical. Lady climbers invariably make good wives, good mothers and excellent chums.
You see?'

‘It's a relief to hear it from a newspaper. I knew it already, of course. Look, as long as you will all understand that I'll never be fast or especially good at it, I won't stay behind.'

‘Bravo. And here is all you need to learn about climbing:
Be very careful about the feet. At the close of each day bathe them well in hot water, and, after plunging them in cold and drying them, a little brandy may be rubbed in. Mind your boots, and keep them well greased.'

We went to Ambleside and Keswick, explored the Langdales, scrambled up Striding Edge and Jack's Rake, climbing one or two peaks each day. We rowed on Grasmere, forgot that this was exercise and pulled in the oars to lie and watch the clouds spill over the hills. In winter we returned to Wales for a few days to practise working on snow and ice. Parr gave me her spare ice axe as I had no money now to buy my own. The end was broken off so the handle was shorter than it should have been, but it was good enough. I learned how to stop a fall by throwing myself onto my front and sinking the axe into the snow. We screamed as we slid down our practice slope, axes over our shoulders, like strange warriors, ready to flip over and spear the ground. Hooper always came last, apologizing as she caught us up, but always doing her best. We applauded her pluck, until she told us that she did not need our applause and only felt a little insulted by it.

My mother did not disapprove of my excursions, thinking I was with a wealthy heiress and friends. She imagined country houses, parties with games, rich relatives, suitors, and all sorts of doors opening to a good future for me.