Lyall was tall and ectomorphic, with a manner already measured, academic, middle-aged. His face was long and equins, its watery eyes, pursed mouth and raw cheeks accusatory, as if he blamed the world outside for his own desperate awkwardness. He did: and affected a callow but remorseless cynicism to cover it. He was a brilliant student, but already comically accident-prone—constantly scratched and bruised, his clothes stained with oil and ink and food. His background (he had been brought up by two impoverished, determined maiden ladies in Bath) chafed the tender flesh of my own early experience under the bleak shadow of the southern end of the Pennines—the open-coffin funerals of a failing industrial town, a savage unemployment, black Methodism.
We must have made a strange pair in those endless Winter fogs: Lyall as thin as a stick, hopeless in the tweed jacket and college scarf his aunts insisted he wear, his inflamed nose always running, his wrists and ankles protruding dismally from the awful clothes; and myself, short of leg, barrel chested and heavily muscled about the shoulders and ridiculous long arms for the solitary climbing and fell-walking that had in adolescence become my passionate escape from the back-terraces of the North. In those days, before the Dru accident, I could do a hundred press-ups with a fifty-pound pack on my back. I was sullen, dark, aggressive, and so terrified of being nicknamed “Ape” by the fragile, intellectual young women of the modern languages faculty that no-one but Lyall ever had the miserable chance. God knows why we do these things to ourselves.
So: it was a temporary alliance. I had memories of Lyall’s high, complaining voice, his ruthless wit and feral disappointment as we separated on the last day of the last term. He took a poor Honors, due to an unfortunate bicycle accident a week before Finals: but mine was poorer (although somewhat ameliorated by the offer of a junior instructorship I’d received from an Outward Bound school in Kenya). His handclasp was curt, mine cursory. We were both faintly relieved, I think.
We never sought each other out. I believe he tried several jobs in the provinces before becoming the junior personnel officer of a small manufacturing firm in London, which was where I met him again, quite by chance, some two or three years later.
A week off the boat from North Africa—and finding it almost as difficult to accept the dirty chill of late Autumn in the city as to accept bacon at a hundred pence a pound after Kenya’s steak at twenty-five the kilo—I was wandering rather morosely about in the West End, wondering grimly if I could afford to go into a cinema and waste another evening, when I spotted him teetering at a kerb trying to hail a taxi. Two ignored him while I watched. He hadn’t changed much: his ghastly college scarf was now tucked into the neck of a thin raincoat, and he was carrying one of those wretched little plastic “executive” cases. The contemptuous grooves round his mouth had deepened.
“Oh, hallo Egerton,” he said off-handedly, staring away from me down the road. He looked drunk. One of his hands was inexpertly bandaged with a great wad of dirty white gauze. He fiddled with his case. “Why on earth did you come back to this rat-hole? I’d have thought you were better off out of it.”
I felt like a deserter returning to some doomed ship only to find its captain still alive and brooding alone over the white water and foul ground: but I was surprised to be remembered at all, and, when he finally captured his taxi, I agreed to go home with him.
It turned out that he’d been in another taxi when it became involved in some minor fracas with a pedestrian, and had to get out. “I should have been home bloody hours ago,” he said sourly. That was all: and by the time we reached his flat I was beginning to regret an impulse which had basically been one of sympathy. There was an argument with the driver, too, over a malfunctioning meter. It was always like that with Lyall. But Holloway isn’t Cambridge.
He had two poky, unwelcoming rooms at the top of a large furnished house. The place had a sink, a filthy gas-stove and some carpets glazed with ancient grease: it was littered with dirty crocks, empty milk bottles, every kind of rubbish conceivable; everything in it seemed to be damaged and old; it was indescribably cheerless.
When I declined the offer of a can of soup (partly because he was at pains to let me see he had nothing else in the cupboard where he kept his food, and partly out of horror at that mephitic stove) he shrugged ungraciously, sat crosslegged on the floor among the old newspapers and political pamphlets—he seemed to have become interested in some popular nationalist organization, to the extent anyway of scrawling “Rubbish!” or “A reasonable assumption” in the margins of some of the stuff—and ate it ravenously straight out of the pan. He was preoccupied by some slight he’d received at work. “Bloody jumped-up filing clerks,” he explained, “every one of them. You’d better sit on the bed, Egerton. There’s nothing else, so you needn’t bother to look for it.”
Later, he insisted on going out to an off-license and fetching back some half-pint bottles of stout. This produced a parody of fellowship, strung with gaunt silences. We really had nothing in common any more, especially since Lyall would mention Cambridge only in the cryptical, barbed asides of which he was so fond.
But he seemed determined; and I took it as a desperate attempt on his part to achieve some sort of contact, some sort of human feeling among all that cold squalor. His loneliness was apparent—in deference to it, I talked; and I was quite happy to fall in with his mood until I realized that he had adopted a most curious conversational procedure.
This consisted in first eliciting from me some reminiscence of my time in Africa, then blatantly ignoring me as I talked—flickering through the pages of a girlie magazine, picking up books only to toss them aside again, staring out of the uncurtained windows at the ominous pall of sodium light outside, even whistling or humming. He took to breaking in on my anecdotes to say, apropos of nothing, “I really ought to have that scarf cleaned,” or “What’s that racket in the street? Damned lunatics”; and then when (perfectly relieved to escape from what had become an agonizing monologue) I made some answering remark about the London air or traffic, demanding:
“What? Oh, go on, go on, you mustn’t pay me any attention.”
I talked desperately. I found myself becoming more and more determined to overcome his scarcely-veiled sneers and capture his attention, inventing at one point an adventure on Mount Nyiru that I simply hadn’t had—although it did happen to a fellow instructor of mine shortly after his arrival at the school.
It was an eerie experience. What satisfaction he could have had from it, I can’t imagine.
“Fairly pleased with yourself then, are you?” he said suddenly. He went on to repeat it to himself, rocking to and fro. “Fairly pleased—” And he laughed.
In the end, I got up and made some excuse, a train, a matter of an hotel key: what else could I have done?
He leapt immediately to his feet, the most ludicrous expression of regret on his face. “Wait, Egerton!” he said. He glanced desperately round the room. “Look here,” he said, “you can’t go without finishing the last bottle, can you?” I shrugged. “I’ll only chuck it out. I’ll just—”
He lurched about, kicking up drifts of rubbish. He hadn’t taken that flimsy raincoat off all night. “I can’t seem—”
“Let me.” And I took the bottle away from him.
I bought my knife at Frank Davies’ in Ambleside, more than twenty years ago. Among its extensible, obsessive gadgets is a thing like a claw, for levering off the caps of bottles. I’d used it a thousand times before that night; more. I latched it onto the cap with my right hand, holding the neck of the bottle with my left. An odd thing happened. The cap resisted; I pulled hard; the bottle broke in my hand, producing a murderous fork of brown glass.
Beer welled up over a deep and painful gash between my thumb and forefinger, pink and frothy. I stared at it. “Christ.”
But if the accident was odd, Lyall’s reaction was odder.
He groaned. Then he began to laugh. I sucked at the wound, staring helplessly at him over my hand. He turned away, fell o
n his knees in front of his bed and beat his hands on it. “Bugger off, Egerton!” he croaked. His laughter turned suddenly into great heaving sobs. “Get out of my sight!” I stood looking stupidly down at him for a moment, at the thin shoulders crawling beneath that dirty raincoat, the miserable drift of Guardians and girlie magazines and Patriotic Front literature: then turned and stumbled down the stairs like a blind man.
It wasn’t until I’d slammed the outside door that the full realization of what had happened hit me. I sat down for a minute among the dented bins and rotting planks of the concrete area, shivering in what I suppose must have been shock. I remember trying to read what was daubed on the door. Then an upstairs window was flung open, and I could hear him again, half laughing, half sobbing. I got up and went down the street; he leaned out of the window and shouted after me.
I was terrified that he might follow me, to some lighted, crowded tube station, still laughing and shouting. He’d been expecting that accident all evening; he’d been waiting all evening for it.
For a couple of weeks after that, a thin, surly ghost, he haunted me through the city. I kept imagining him on escalators, staring bitterly through the dirty glass at the breasts of the girls trapped in the advertisement cases; a question mark made of cynical and lonely ectoplasm.
Why he chose to live in squalor; why he had shouted “You aren’t the first, Egerton, and you won’t be the bloody last!” as I fled past the broken milk machines and dreary frontages of his street; how he—or anyone—could have predicted the incident of the last bottle: all questions I never expected to have answered, since I intended to avoid him like the plague if I ever caught sight of him again. I had four stitches put in my hand.
Then the Chamonix climbing-school post I had been waiting for came free, and I forgot him in the subsequent rush of preparation.
He stayed forgotten during a decade which ended for me—along with a lot of other things—on a stiffish overhang some way up the Dru, in a wind I can still feel on sleepless nights, like a razor at the bone.
When I left Chamonix I could still walk (some can’t after the amputation of a great toe), but I left counting only losses. The English were just then becoming unpopular on the Continent—but I returned to Britain more out of the lairing instinct of a hurt animal than as a response to some fairly good-humored jostling outside Snell’s sports shop. I simply couldn’t stand to be in the same country as the Alps.
At home, I took a job in the English department of a crowded comprehensive school in Wandsworth; hobbled round classrooms for a year or so, no more bored than the children who had to sit day after day in front of me; while on Saturday mornings I received, at the Hampstead hospital, treatment for the lingering effect of the frost-bite on my fingers and remaining toes.
I found quickly that walking returned to me something of what I’d lost to a bit of frayed webbing and a twelve-hour Alpine night. During the long vacations that are the sole reward of the indifferent teacher, I rediscovered the Pennines, the Grampians, Snowdonia—and found that while Capel Curig and Sergeant Man are no substitute for the Aiguille Verte group, I could at least recapture something of what I’d felt there in Cambridge days and before. I walked alone, despite the lesson of the Dru (which I am still paying for in a more literal way: French mountain rescue is efficient, but it can cost you twenty years of whatever sort of life you have left to you; up there, many people pray not to be taken off the mountain); and I discouraged that obsessive desire to converse which seems to afflict hikers.
It was on one of these holidays that I heard next from Lyall.
I was staying in the “Three Peaks” district north and west of Settle, and beginning to find its long impressionistic sweeps of moorland arduous and unrewarding. Lyall’s letter caught up with me after a day spent stumping halfheartedly over Whernside in the kind of morose warm drizzle only Yorkshire can produce. I was sufficiently browned-off on returning, I recall, to ruin a perfectly good pair of Vibrams by leaving them too close to Mrs. Bailey’s ravenous kitchen stove.
So the surge of sentiment which took hold of me when I recognized Lyall’s miserly handwriting may be put down to this: I was soaked to the skin, and receptive.
The letter had been forwarded from Chamonix (which led me to wonder if he’d been as drunk as he seemed on the night of the accident—or as indifferent), and again from my digs in Wandsworth: a round trip of absurd length for something which bore a Westmorland postmark. That in itself was curious; but it was the contents that kept me some time from my shepherd’s pie.
It seemed that Lyall’s maiden ladies had finally succumbed, within two months of one another and despite all that Bath could do, to the inroads of heart-disease; leaving him—“Almost as an afterthought,” as he described it, “among two reams of sound advice”—a property in the Langdale Valley. He had nothing good to say of the place, but was “hard up” and couldn’t afford to sell it. He had “funked” his personnel officership in London because the place had begun to “stink of appeasement”—an apparently political comment I couldn’t unravel, although by now, like all of us, I knew a little more about the aims of the Patriotic Front. He had married: this, I found almost incredible.
He suggested with a sort of contemptuous bonhomie that if I was “tired of grubbing about on the Continental muck-heap,” I might do an old friend the favor of dropping by to see him.
There was something else there; he was his usual mixture of cold formality and old colloquialisms; “It’s not much to ask” and “Please yourself of course” were there; but underneath it all I sensed again the desperation I had witnessed in that squalid flat twelve or thirteen years before—a horrified sense of his own condition, like a sick man with a mirror. And his last sentence was in the form of an admission he had, I’m quite sure, never in his life made before:
“Since you seem to like that sort of mucking about,” he finished, “I thought we might walk up some of those precious hills of yours together. It’s what I need to cheer me up.”
That, tempered no doubt by a twin curiosity as to the nature of his inheritance and the temperament of his unnamed wife, decided me. I packed my rucksack that night, and in the morning left Mrs. Bailey’s inestimable boarding house to its long contemplation of Ingleborough Common. Why I was so quick to respond to him, I don’t know; and if I’d suspected one half of the events that were to follow my decision, I would have been content with any amount of rain, moss and moorland.
Ingleborough Hill itself is a snare and a delusion, since a full third of its imposing height is attained by way of an endless gentle slope bare of interest and a punishment to the ankles: but that morning it thrust up into the weather like a warning—three hundred million years of geological time lost without trace in the unconformity between its base and its flat summit, from which the spector of the brigand Celt chuckles down at that of his bemused, drenched Roman foe.
The Ambleside bus was empty but for a few peaky, pinch-faced children in darned pullovers and cracked shoes. Their eyes were large and austere and dignified, but for all that they taunted the driver unmercifully until they spilled out to ravage the self-involved streets of Kendal, leaving him to remark, “It don’t bother the kids, though, does it?” It didn’t seem to bother him much, either. He was a city man, he went on to explain, and you had to admit that things were easier out here.
In the thirty or so miles that separate Ingleton from Ambleside, geomorphology takes hold of the landscape and gives it a cruel wrench; and the moorland—where a five-hour walk may mean, if you are lucky, a vertical gain of a few hundred feet—gives way to a mass of threatening peaks among which for his effort a man may rise two thousand feet in half a mile of forward travel. If I saw the crowding, the steepness, of those hills as Alpine, it may be that the memory dulls in proportion to the wound’s ripening, no more.
The weather, too, is prone to startling mutation in that journey between Yorkshire and Westmorland, and I found the Langdales stuporous under a heat wave of a w
eek’s standing (it works, as often as not, the other way round).
Ambleside was lifeless. Being too early for the valley bus, and tiring finally of Frank Davies’ display window, I decided to walk to Lyall’s “property.”
Heat vibrated from the greenstone walls of the new cottages at Skelwith Bridge, and the Force was muted. A peculiar diffused light hung over the fellsides, browning the haunted fern; Elterwater and Chapel were quiet, deserted; the sky was like brass. I had some conversation with a hard-eyed pony in the paddock by the Co-Op forecourt when I stopped to drink a can of mineral water; but none with the proprietor, who was languid even among the cool of his breakfast cereals and string.
Outside Chapel I took to the shade of the trees and discovered a dead hare, the flies quite silent and enervated as they crawled over its face; a little further on, in the dark well of shadow at the base of the drystone, a motionless adder, eyeless and dried up. The valley had undergone some deterioration in the fifteen years since I had last seen it: shortly after I got my first sight of the Bowfell crags and Mickleden (the Rosset Gill path a trembling vertical scar in the haze), I came upon the rusting corpse of a motor car that had run off the difficult narrow road and into the beck.
Here and there, drystone scattered in similar incidents simply lay in the pasture, white clumps infested by nettles, like heaps of skulls; and when I came finally to the address Lyall had given me, I found the fellside below Raw Pike blackened up to the five-hundred-foot line by fire. I didn’t know then what I began to suspect later; I saw it all in terms of the children on the Ambleside bus, the price of bacon in Wandsworth—symptomatic of another kind of disorder.
And none of it prepared me for Lyall’s “property,” a low shambling affair of local stone, facing directly onto the road; the main cottage having two rooms on each floor, and a couple of ancillary buildings leaning up against it as if they would prefer not to but had no choice.
Strangeness Page 19