It was amazingly dilapidated. Much of the glass at the front had been replaced by inaccurately cut oblongs of hardboard; something seemed to have been split out of one of the upper windows to dry as an unpleasant brown smear on the stone. The barn roofs sagged and wanted slates; uncovered rafters are an agony and here crude patches of corrugated iron did little to mitigate it. One corner of the cottage had been battered repeatedly by confused motorists returning at night from the pubs of Ambleside to the National Trust camp site at the head of the valley; the same fire that had wasted the fern on the slope above had charred and cracked it; small stones and mortar made a litter of the road.
I untied the binder twine that fastened the gate and wandered around knocking shyly on doors and calling out. The valley, bludgeoned into stillness by the sun, gave back lethargic echoes.
Road-walking tires my mutilated foot quite quickly. I keep a stick buckled to my pack where an ice axe would normally go and try to have as little recourse to it as possible: the first two miles had forced it on me that day. I knocked down a few nettles with it, watched the sap evaporate. Two or three minute figures were working their way slowly down the Band, heat and light resonating ecstatically from the 2900-foot contour behind them. I sat on an upturned water trough, blinking and cursing Lyall for his absence.
I’d been there for perhaps a quarter of an hour wondering if I could hear the valley bus when he came out of the house, swirling dirty water round an enamel bowl.
“Good God!” he exclaimed sarcastically and the stuff in the bowl slopped down the front of his trousers. “The famous Alpinist deigns to visit.” He shot the water carelessly into the nettles. “Why the hell didn’t you knock, Egerton? Shy?” I had the impression that he’d been watching me ever since I arrived. It wouldn’t have been beyond him.
“You’d better come in,” he said staring off into the distance, “now you’re here.”
The intervening years had made him a parody of himself—lined and raw, all bone and raging, unconscious self-concern; he’d developed a stoop, a “dowager’s hump,” during his London days; a small burn on his neck seemed to be giving him trouble and he kept his head at a constant slight angle to ease the inflammation caused by his collar. He remembered I was there, nodded at my stick. An old cruelty heliographed out like the light from the peaks.
“Your fine mountaineering cronies won’t be so interested in you now, then? Not that I’d have thought that thing stopped you buying their beer.”
It may have been true. I honestly hadn’t thought of it until then. “I’ve learnt to live with it,” I said, as lightly as I could.
He paused in the doorway—Lyall always walked ahead—and looked me up and down. “You don’t know the half of it, Egerton,” he said. “You never will.” Then sharply: “Are you coming in or not?” The crags of Bowfell broadcast their heat across Mickleden, and the Pikes gave it back like a thin high song of triumph.
What the outer dilapidation of the cottage led me to expect, I don’t know: but it was nothing to what I found inside; and despite all that has happened since it still unnerves me to think of that place.
Plaster had fallen from the ceiling of the grim cubbyhole of a kitchen, and still lay on the cracked tile floor; an atrocious wallpaper meant to represent blond Swedish panelling, put up by the maiden ladies or one of their tenants in an attempt to modernize, bellied slackly off the walls. In the living room there was only plaster, and one wall had actually fissured enough to admit a thin, wandering line of sunlight—just as well, since the windows let in very little. Across this tenuous wafer of illumination, motes danced madly; and the place stank.
All the furniture was scarred and loose-jointed. Everywhere, objects: table-lamps, ashtrays and paltry little ornaments of greenstone: and nothing whole. Everything he owned had become grubby and tired and used in a way that only time uses things, so that it looked as if it had been broken thirty years before: a litter of last month’s paperbacked thrillers, spilling with broken spines and dull covers and an atmosphere of the secondhand shop from the bookcases; gramophone records underfoot, scratched and warped and covered in bits of dried food from the dinnerplates, with their remains of week-old meals, scattered over the carpet.
It was as if some new shift of his personality, some radical escalation of his morgue and his bitterness, had coated everything about him with a grease of hopelessness and age. I was appalled; and he must have sensed it, because he grinned savagely and said:
“Don’t twitch your nose like that, Egerton. Sit down, if you can find something that won’t offend your lilywhite bum.” But he must have regretted it almost immediately—making tea with an air of apology that was the nearest he ever came to the real thing, he admitted, “I don’t know what I’m doing in this hole. I don’t seem to be any better off than I was.” He had got a job correcting publishers’ proofs, but it gave him nothing, “Not even much of a living.” While I drank my tea, he stared at the floor.
I got nothing but the weather from him for about half an hour. Then he said suddenly: “I haven’t seen—what was his name?—Oxlade—lately. You remember him. The guitarist.”
I was astonished. Probably the last time either of us had seen Oxlade was at Cambridge, just before he went down in the middle of his second year to sing with some sort of band and then Lyall had loathed the man even more then the music, if that were possible.
I chuckled embarrassedly. All I could think of to say was, “No. I suppose not.” This threw him into a temper.
“Christ, Egerton,” he complained, “I’m doing my bit. You might join in. We’ve got little enough in common—”
“I’m sorry,” I began, “I—”
“You’ve brought some bloody funny habits home with you, I must say.” He was silent again for a moment, hunched forward in his seat looking at something between his feet. He raised his eyes and said quietly: “We’re stuck with each other, Egerton. You need me again now. That’s why you came crawling back here.” This with a dreadful flatness of tone.
I looked for my rucksack. “There’s a place where I can camp further up the valley,” I told him stiffly; perhaps because I suspected he was correct.
We were both on our feet when a large vehicle drew up in the road outside, darkening the room further and filling it with a smell of dust and diesel oil; airbrakes hissed. It was the valley bus, and down from it stepped Lyall’s wife. Lyall, tensed in the gloom, seemed to shrug a little—we both welcomed the interruption. “Look, Egerton—” he said.
He went to let her in.
She was a tall, haggard woman, ten or even fifteen years older than him and wearing a headscarf tied in a strangely dated fashion. Her legs were swollen, and one of them was bandaged below the knee. From under the headscarf escaped thin wisps of brownish hair, framing a quiet, passive face. They greeted one another disinterestedly; she nodded briefly at me, her lips a thin line, and went immediately into the kitchen, swaying a little as if suffering from the heat. She was carrying two huge shopping bags.
“You didn’t tell me we’d run out of coffee,” she called. When she returned, it was to throw a couple of paperbacks on the floor in front of him. “There weren’t any papers,” she said. “Only the local one.” She went upstairs, and I didn’t see her again that day. Lyall hadn’t introduced her, and I don’t think he ever told me her name.
I didn’t want to stay, but he insisted. “Forget all that,” he said. Later, he opened some cans into a saucepan. While we ate, I stuck to Cambridge, the safe topic, and was glad to see his customary sense of the ridiculous steadily replacing the earnestness with which he’d introduced the subject of Oxlade. Afterwards, “Let me do the washing up,” I offered: and so cleared enough floor space to unroll my sleeping bag. Nobody had unpacked the shopping; I couldn’t coax more than a trickle from the kitchen taps. Lyall looked cynically on.
After he’d gone to bed, I heard them arguing in tight suppressed voices. The sound carried all over the house—hypnotic but meaningl
ess. The darkness was stuffy and electrical, and I hadn’t got rid of the smell.
They were up and sparring covertly over some domestic lapse before I got out of my sleeping bag the following morning—the woman throwing things round the sink, Lyall prowling restlessly out into the garden and back again. If my presence had acted as a brake the night before, it was clearly losing its effect; by the time breakfast was ready, they were nagging openly at one another over the eggs. I would have been more embarrassed if the argument had not been over who was to unpack yesterday’s shopping.
“I emptied the bloody Elsan yesterday,” said Lyall defensively. “You do the shopping, not me.”
“For God’s sake who eats it?”
I drank some reconstituted orange juice and bent my head over my plate. The woman laughed a bit wildly and retreated into the kitchen. ” ‘For God’s sake who eats it?’” asked Lyall, ignoring me. I heard her scraping something into the sink tidy. There was a sudden sharp intake of breath. A moment later she reappeared, holding up her left hand. Blood was trickling slowly down the wrist.
“I’m sorry,” she said desperately. “I cut it on a tin-lid. I couldn’t help it.”
“Oh, Christ!” shouted Lyall. He smashed his fist down on the table, jumped to his feet and stalked out.
She looked bemusedly after him. “Where are you going?” she called.
The cut was a ragged lip running across the base of her thumb, shallow but unpleasant. Worried by the grey tinge to her sallow, ageing face, I made her sit down while I rummaged through the place looking for some sort of dressing. In the end I had to raid my pack for a bit of plaster. When I got back to her she was slumped head-down on the table, her thin bony shoulders trembling. I saw to her hand, wishing Lyall would come back. While I was doing it, she said:
“You wonder why I stay here, don’t you?”
The palm of her hand was cross-hatched with other, older scars. I might have been tempted to chuckle at the thought of these two sour accident-prones, trapped together in their crumbling backwater and taking miserable revenges on one another, if I hadn’t had recollections of my own—chilly images of London in late Autumn, the pall of sodium light outside Lyall’s poky rooms, the last bottle of beer.
“Lyall’s hard to live with,” I temporized. I didn’t want her confidences, any more than I wanted his. “At Cambridge—”
She took hold of my wrist and squeezed it with a queer fervor. “It’s because he needs someone.” I shrugged. She hung on. “I love him, you know,” she said challengingly. I tried to free my wrist. “So do you,” she pressed. “You could be anywhere but here, but you’re his best friend—”
“Look,” I said angrily, “you’re making this very difficult. Do you want your hand bandaged or not?” And when she simply stared: “Lyall just invited me to stay here. We knew each other at Cambridge, that’s all. Hasn’t he told you that?”
She shook her head. “No.” Color had come back into her face. “He needs help. I made him write to you. He thinks—” Her mouth thinned; she seemed to withdraw. “Let him tell you himself.” She looked down at her hand. “Thank you,” she said formally.
I spent the rest of the day sitting on the water trough, staring out across the valley at quite another range of hills and wandering who I’d meet if I went to one of the hotels for a drink. At about mid-day she came out of the house, squinting into the sunlight.
“I’m sorry about this morning,” she said. I muttered something, and drew her attention to a hawk of some kind hanging in the updraught over Raw Pike. She glanced at it impatiently. “I don’t know anything about birds. I was in social work.” She made a vague motion that took in the whole valley, the hot inverted bowl of the sky. “Sometimes I blame this place, but it isn’t that.” She had come out to say something else, but I gave her no encouragement. Perhaps I should have done. “Do you want any lunch?” she said.
Lyall returned with the valley bus.
“I suppose she’s been talking to you,” he said. He avoided my eyes. A little bit disgusted by the whole thing, I walked up to the New Dungeon Ghyll and spent the evening drinking beer. The place was full of tourists who’d been running up and down Mill Gill all day in tennis shoes, making the rest of us look like old men. When I got back, Lyall and his wife were in bed, the eternal dull complaint rising and falling soporifically through the cottage. I was half asleep when the woman suddenly shouted:
“I’m twenty-five years old! Twenty-five years! What’s happening? What’s happened to me?”
After that, I got up and paced around until dawn, thinking.
Heat pumped down the valley from the secret fastnesses of Flat Crags, from the dry fall at Hell Ghyll; up in the high gullies, the rock sang with it. Further down, the hanging Langdale oakwoods were sapless, submissive—heat had them by the throat. A sense of immanence filled the unlovely living room of the Lyall cottage, reeked on the stairs, fingered out from the bedroom like ectoplasm from a medium. Lyall took to staring for hours at the crack in the wall, hands clasped between his knees. His wife was quiet and tense. Her despairing cry in the dark still hung between them.
Into this strange stasis or prostration, like a low, insistent voice, a thousand small accidents introduced themselves: the insect bite, the hand slipping on the can-opener, a loss of balance on the stair—cuts, rashes, saucepans dropped, items lost or broken; a constant, ludicrous, nerve-wracking communication from the realm of random incidence. For half a day the kitchen taps refused to give water of any sort, then leaked a slow, rusty liquor even when turned off; four slates fell from the roof in an afternoon of motionless air; Lyall’s wife suddenly became allergic to the sun, and walked about disfigured.
Lyall’s response to these events was divided equally between irritation and apathy. He brooded. Several times he took me aside as if to broach some mutually embarrassing subject, and on each occasion failed. I couldn’t help him: the raging contempt of his Cambridge days, applied with as much rigor to his own motives as to those of others, was by now a memory. Out in one of the barns, cutting a piece of zinc to mend the roof, he said, “Don’t you ever regret your childhood, Egerton?”
I didn’t think I did; I didn’t think childhood meant much after a certain age. I had to shout this over the screech of the hacksaw. He watched my lips for a while, like a botanist with an interesting but fairly common specimen, then stopped working.
“In Bath, you know,” he said, brushing his lank hair off his face, “it was all so clear-cut. A sort of model of the future, with neat sharp edges: English, Classics, Cambridge; and after that, God knows what—the Foreign Service, if the old dears had a thought in their heads.” He laughed bitterly. “I had to play the piano.” He held up the hand with the dirty ball of bandage on the thumb. “With this.” He looked disgusted for a moment, but when he turned away, his eyes were watering.
“I was really rather good at it.”
This picture of the young Lyall, shut in some faded Regency drawing room with a piano (his limbs protruding amazed and raw from the tubular worsted shorts and red blazer his maiden ladies would doubtless have insisted upon), was ludicrous enough. He compounded it by yearning, “We never deserve the future, Egerton. They never tell us what it’s going to be like.”
When I tried to laugh him out of it, he went angrily off with, “You might show a bit of interest in someone else’s problems. It’d take your mind off your precious bloody foot.”
He came back to the house late, with a half-empty bottle of brandy. God knows what fells he had been staggering across, red-faced and watery-eyed, his shirt pulled open to the waist. His wife and I had been listening to Bach; when he entered the room, she glanced at me and went straight upstairs. Lyall cocked his head, laughed, kicked out at the radiogram. “All that bloody Lovelace we had, eh?” he said, making some equation I couldn’t follow.
“I don’t know what I am, Egerton,” he went on, pulling a chair up close to mine. “You don’t, either. We’ll never know the half o
f it,” he said companionably. “Eh?” He was bent on baring his soul (or so I imagined): yearning for the emotional storm I was equally determined to avoid—Cambridge, recrimination, the maudlin reaffirmation of our interdependence. “Have a bloody drink, Egerton,” he demanded.
“I think you ought to have some coffee,” I said. “I’ll make you some.” I went into the kitchen. “You bloody prig,” he said quietly. When I went back, he had gone upstairs. I listened for a moment, but could hear nothing. In the end I drank the coffee myself and went to bed. That night was one of vast heat and discomfort: the rancid smell I had noticed on my first day in the cottage oozed from the furniture as if the heat were rendering from the stuffing of the cushions some foul grease no scrubbing brush could touch; my sleeping bag was sticky and intolerable, and no amount of force would move the windows; I lay for hours in an exhausted doze poisoned by nightmares and incoherent, half-conscious fantasies.
Groaning from upstairs disturbed that dreary reverie.
A sleepy moan, the dull thump of feet on the bedroom floor; something fell over. There was a moment of perfect silence, then Lyall saying loudly, “Oh Christ, I’m sorry then.” Somebody came stumbling down through the thick, stale darkness of the staircase. My watch had stopped.
“Egerton?” called Lyall, bumping about in the dark. “Egerton? Egerton?”
He sounded like a dead child discovering that eternity is some buzzing, langorous dream of Bath. I heard him cough once or twice into the sink; then the brandy bottle gurgled, fell onto the kitchen tiles and was smashed. “Oh God,” whispered Lyall. “Do you ever have nightmares, Egerton? Real ones, where you might just as well be awake?” I felt him coming closer through that ancient velvet darkness. “All this is my fault, you know.” He swallowed loudly. He tried to touch my shoulder.
“You could get another job,” I suggested cautiously, moving away. “The proofreading doesn’t seem to make you much.”
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