In the ship’s cinema, Lin is watching the evening movie. She offered to stay with me, to take turns around the deck and then bury what’s left of our evening in the bar, but for once I want to be alone. I stare down. The folds of creamy water foaming back from the hull are mesmeric and the longer I stare at them the more I’m haunted by sounds and images from the last couple of weeks. My father slumped over on the commode, his eyes bulging, his head hanging down. The sad, sad figure he cuts in hospital, bewildered, cast adrift. The memories make me physically uncomfortable and I shift my gaze, looking out at the wake. The deck is empty. There’s no one around. It would be child’s play to climb the rail, pause for a moment, and then step off. This far out, this early in the year, it would be a terminal decision. The lights of the ferry would disappear in seconds. The pull of the wake would ease. Within minutes, you’d be numb with cold. Within half an hour, if you were lucky, you’d be dead. Tempted? Yes.
The following morning, we berth at eleven. Santander swims in the morning heat. We cruise through the lunchtime traffic without a second thought, pause at a village for lunch, and then head for the Picos. The depression, like the fog, has quite gone. The mountains lie ahead, visible now, a craggy frieze of charcoal grey paper some child has stuck to the very bottom of the sky.
The hotel nestles in a deep valley surrounded by seven thousand foot peaks. A few kilometres further on, the road dead-ends at a spot called Fuente De. We get out of the camper, awed by the semi-circle of towering limestone walls. The trekking book talks of a 2,400 ft sheer climb and I believe them. I’ve never seen anything like this in my life. Shadowed by the late afternoon sun, the sheer rock hangs like a curtain before us. There’s no one around. A teleferico sways slowly up to a tiny mirador beneath the clouds but the red and white cable cars are empty. Tomorrow we’ll come back here. We’ll buy our tickets, and tighten the laces on our boots, and ride up to the very top of the escarpment. Then, snow drifts permitting, we’ll plunge on, following the tiny dotted lines on our newly-acquired map.
Back at the hotel, we unload. The room is perfect. There’s a double bed, and an en suite bathroom, and the tall wooden shutters open on to a breathtaking view of the valley and the mountains beyond. Later, we descend to the terrace for treble gins. I’ve been half-learning Spanish for a year or two and I amuse the barman with a volley of ill-constructed interrogatives. Is it good above Fuente De? Are the footpaths open? Should we hire huskies?
Dinner is one long delicious blur. We feast on anchovies and sea-bream, softened by Rioja, and pick over the debris of the last month or so. Already, in 24 brief hours, what’s happened has the feel of history. There’s no point phoning for news. There’s nothing we can do. By eleven o’clock, cheerfully drunk, we’re in bed. Thank God for Lin.
Next morning, we’re back at Fuente De in time for the first cable car, narrowly beating a coachload of Spanish school kids. The car is small and despite the panoramic windows on all four sides, it feels hopelessly claustrophobic. A dozen of us somehow squeeze in. With a lurch, we set off. I’m at the back of the car, beside Lin, gazing down as our trusty camper van parked below gets smaller and smaller.
Normally, I’m good with heights. Flying doesn’t bother me, and neither does cliff walking, but this is something else. A minute or so later, halfway to the top, I’m fighting an urge that feels dangerously close to panic. We’re suspended here, trillions of miles above anything solid, and the only visible means of support is a sagging length of cable, pitifully thin. All it needs is one minor malfunction - a blown fuse, a kamikaze eagle, some dickhead of a Spanish fighter pilot showing off to his friends - and we’ll be hamburguesa. It’s not the latter thought that upsets me, the being dead. It’s the three and a half seconds before it happens, that eternity of time when you realise that something’s gone horribly wrong and that neither science, nor prayer, nor hopelessly crossed fingers can ever get you out of it. I fight the urge to fumble for Lin’s hand, steadying myself against the grab-rail beneath the window. Is this what it’s like for my father? Half way between the living and the dead? His senses confused? His brain unable to grasp just what’s going on?
The mirador at the top swims into view. It seems to take an age for the car to dock. The sliding doors open but as each climber steps out the car surges upwards, then sinks again, revealing brief glimpses of the dizzying drop below.
Minutes later, striding inland from the cliff face, I confess my little lapse. Lin’s genuinely surprised.
“I loved it” she says, “It was fun.”
Half-expecting a network of carefully signposted trails, we instead pursue the only track in sight. The view is stupendous, the plateau surrounded by yet another semi-circle of mountain peaks: Pico San Carlos. Pico Tesorero. Pena de Remona. From Fuente De, the lip of the sheer rock wall felt like the top of the world but up here we’ve discovered another tier on the Christmas cake.
We follow the trail for perhaps a kilometre. On a rock overlooking a vantage point to the east, three generations of a Spanish family lay sprawled in the morning sun. The women are dressed for the city: beautifully-cut suits, high-heeled shoes, heavy jewellry. Their men - portly, middle-aged - prowl up and down, muttering to each other. Extraordinary sight.
We walk on. The mountains are quite overwhelming, bigger and more awesome than I’d ever imagined. Lin feels it too. She stops and looks up at me.
“I just want to tell you how much I love you” she says, “There’s nowhere I’d rather be than here.” She’s rarely given to these outbursts and she sees the surprise in my face. He reaches up and kisses me. “Don’t worry” she says, “I just wanted you to know. Just in case.”
“Just in case what?”
“Just in case....you know....anything happens.”
She gestures warily at the surrounding mountains. Already, in less than half an hour, the light has changed three or four times, absurdly theatrical, and now torrents of cloud are spilling over the peaks and streaming down into this bowl-shaped plateau, diffusing the blues and the greys, turning beauty into something infinitely more menacing. She, like me, can’t believe what we’ve stepped into. It’s so big, so rich, so overpowering. It’s like a dangerous animal. We can’t take our eyes off it.
A kilometre inland from the teleferico, snow presses down onto the footpath. With the sun out, the temperature is comfortably warm. The summer melt has obviously begun but the snow lies heavy in the crags and hollows beside the path. Soon, we’re wading through it, heavy crunchy stuff. Ahead, a steep gorge leads into the heart of the central massif. The mountains tower above us on either side and more cloud swirls down from the peaks. It’s deeply forbidding and we elect for another path, zig-zagging away to the left. According to our map, this leads across the shoulder of a feature called Agujas de Tajahierro before coming to an abrupt halt. The snow is even deeper here and despite the absence of a footpath we press ahead. Soon the long file of trekkers and grannies and kids from the teleferico are behind us. With every step, the views change, each one jostling for precedence. Look at this. Look at that. It’s absurdly rich and it’s utterly private and best of all it’s just a little bit scary.
Traversing carefully across a deepish drift, you sense that a single slip could send you sideways and downwards, triggering a snowslide. As your footing moved bodily down the mountain, you might find a handhold but if you didn’t, you’d be over the edge. The naked limestone is surprisingly sharp. Even a minor fall could slice you to ribbons. Regardless, we press on, rewarded time and again with a fresh view, a new intake of breath. Mere prose can’t do these mountains justice. No wonder Wordsworth took to blank verse.
When the path gives out completely, we settle on a rock and swallow mouthfuls of water from the bottles. Down below us are old mine workings evidenced in the remains of squat, stone-walled shelters. Did men really live and work here? Labouring up from the valley floor? Hacking away at the limestone? Carting the stuff back down again?
Sudden sunshine bathes th
e surrounding peaks. I take photo after photo, the mountains deep-veined with snow. Minutes later, it’s pouring with rain, the view abruptly veiled by curtains of thin, grey cloud. Nervous now, we make our way back along the path, careful to use our own footprints in the snow, rungs of the ladder that served us so well on the outward trek. In an instant, the sun is out again, the rain gone, the views doubly transformed, and around that same shoulder of rock we can see tiny stick figures on the path from the teleferico, bent under enormous packs, plodding into the heart of the mountains.
For maybe half an hour, we do our best to follow them but the snow in the gorge is deep, sapping our strength, and the walk quickly becomes a pain. This is a holiday, for God’s sake. If we’d wanted to suffer, we might as well have stayed at home.
We stop for a brief conference. Unspoken is an agreement that five precious days shall yield a good deal more than exhaustion. The weather is clamping in. Away to the north, we can hear thunder. Better to abandon the gorge and take the long trail down past Avila to the village of Espinama on the valley floor. 12 kilometres is a decent-enough alibi when it comes to the evening beers and dinner and even in cloud, we can’t miss the trail.
We retrace our steps. The Spanish family have gone. We plunge down a wide path that curls away into the mists below. In less than an hour, these mountains have become unrecogniseable, dim shapes looming above us. A brief glimpse of a saw-toothed peak ahead prompts laughter from Lin.
She points at it.
“Tolkien” she says, “We’re in the Land of the Hobbits.”
It begins to rain. A mile or so down the track, we find a refuge. A Scottish couple from Aberdeen are already encamped there, munching lengths of chorizo. We hunker down, staring out at the folds of sodden rock. A little later, the rain eases and we head on down the path. The guidebook has been rude about his particular camino, warning us to expect nothing but Land Rovers and tourists, but for the next two hours we don’t see a soul. Black sheep and goats and grey-faced cattle graze the steep, gorse-covered slopes on either side of the path. Soon, we’re walking through an abandoned village. Thick-walled boarded-up houses crouch on the mountain side, the terracota tiles on the roof anchored against the wind with an assortment of heavy grey rocks.
Beyond, the path steepens, dropping down to Espinama and the valley floor. We hunt for a bar, a place we can sit outside and enjoy the late afternoon sunshine, yet another change in the weather. In the middle of the village we find it. The local farmers have brought their little mini-tractors in for some kind of official inspection and they’re gathered outside, arguing passionately in an accent I don’t begin to understand. In the gloom of the bar I swop my rough Spanish and a handful of pesetas for long glasses of San Miguel. Men are playing cards around a table in the corner. A dog lays sprawled on the flagstones. Outside again, the farmers have moved onto the oldest of the tractors. Lin watches them, entranced. We have more beers.
Back at the hotel, we shower and go to bed. A while later, we dress again. Dinner lasts forever. The elderly Spanish couple on the next table are referring to Lin as my senorita. The implication brings a smile to both our faces, the kind of spontaneous compliment you could never invent. We can’t possibly be married. We’re too close, too involved, too passionate. We grin at each other. I’ve never been happier in my life.
The rest of the holiday passes in a haze of tumbling rivers, flower-strewn alpine meadows, circling eagles, and ever-stiffer climbs from the valley floor. The weekend comes and goes and by Tuesday morning we’re back on the ferry at Santander. The camper van is intact. We’re fit, brown, and immensely pleased with ourselves. Five days away feels like half a lifetime and we spend the afternoon sprawled on sunloungers as the Val de Loire pushes north across the Bay of Biscay.
The following morning, we close the Devon coast at eight. It’s another beautiful day, the dark, humpy rise of the cliffs shrouded in mist, the forecast promising 75 degrees by early afternoon. We drive off the ferry and take the road to Exeter. By mid-morning, we’re back in the Exmouth flat, eyeing the telephone. Neither of us wants to puncture our precious bubble and we spend the next four hours on the beach before returning to the flat.
The first call goes to Tom, my eldest son. He’s spent the weekend down at Southsea, keeping an eye on my mother, running her up to Petersfield to see dad.
“How is he?”
“Not too bad at all. Bit weepy sometimes but nothing outrageous.”
“And mum?”
“A star.”
Tom, bless him, appears to have given my mother the weekend of her dreams. He’s taken her out in the car. He’s spent the evening with her. He’s listened to her talking about the early days of her courtship. And he’s fast becoming an expert on the strange tides that wash around the upper reaches of our family.
“Did you know that there was nearly another one of you?”
I blink. The fact that I might have had a twin is news indeed. Tom puts me right.
“Not a twin. She got pregnant again. After having you. Then she miscarried.”
Did she? I’m staring out of the window at the broad sweep of the Exe estuary. One of the pleasure boats is nosing in towards the little wheeled landing stage they haul up and down the beach. A brother? A sister? After a lifetime as an only child, it seems scarcely credible.
“Are you sure she wasn’t making it up?”
“Positive. She said she always wanted a big family.”
This, I know, is true. When I was young, our house in Clacton was always full of kids. My cousin, Colin, practically became a brother. The Petersen girls - all four of them - regularly stayed for weeks on end. And in the middle of all that cheerful turmoil stood my mother - making picnics, borrowing bikes and beach huts, tugging on her trusty old bathing hat, and leading the pell-mell dash to be first in the sea. From these mental snapshots my father was always absent, a prisoner of the golf course or that day’s copy of the Daily Telegraph.
Tom is asking about the holiday. I tell him it was brilliant.
“Excellent” he says, “So don’t worry about the old boy. He was fine, just fine.”
The news comes as a kind of comfort but on the long drive back to Southsea we gradually fall silent. The problem with holidays is the realisation that they have to end. The problem with going away is coming back.
My mother is extremely pleased to see us. She perches herself on our sofa and accepts a glass of Rioja. She seems somehow smaller than a week ago and looking at her I have a sudden vision of what she must have been like as a little girl: the trusting smile, the big front teeth, the little legs kicking up with excitement, the overwhelming readiness to please. Inevitably, the conversation turns to dad.
“So how is he?”
My mother thinks about the question as if no one had ever asked it before and then pulls a face.
“He was such a handsome man,” she says, “It’s so sad, isn’t it?”
Fifteen
We drive Mum up to Petersfield the following evening. It’s a new-looking hospital, comfortably small, tucked off a quiet road to the west of the town centre. Cedar Ward lies at the back. Halfway up the long central corridor, I hear a voice I recognise. It sounds angry. It’s demanding attention.
“Miss!”
We all stop, Lin, Mum, myself. The voice again, louder, angrier.
“You! Look here, I’m not having it.”
It’s definitely my father. Something’s gone very wrong. I exchange glances with Lin. The Picos suddenly seem a million miles away.
We round the corner to the big day room that opens out onto a paved terrace. My father is sitting in a wheelchair. He’s wearing a short-sleeved shirt I don’t recognise and a pair of grey track suit bottoms several sizes too small. He’s pink-faced, trembling with rage. For a moment, he doesn’t appear to recognise us. Then a finger points at three nurses, crouched around an open fridge.
“You tell them” he shouts, “Go on, tell them.”
“Tell them wh
at?”
“About supper. Tell them. I got nothing. Nothing. One fairy cake. Nothing.” He turns back to the nurses. “It’s quarter past six. That’s what time it’s supposed to be. A quarter past six.”
I’m looking round. There are other patients in the day room. One of the women appears to be dead. Another keeps putting her hand in the air. Why she’s doing this isn’t entirely clear but her eyes are fixed on my father and she obviously wants him to shut up.
I bend over him, an act of pacification.
“Good to see you” I say lamely, “How’s it been?”
He stares up at me. His eyes are swimming with tears.
“You tell them” he says again, “I can’t get any bloody sense out of anyone.”
A brief conversation with a nurse establishes that my father was offered a full cooked tea at 5.15 and turned it down. I feel someone plucking at my arm. An old man is slumped in a chair at the nearby table.
“Take me to sea” he mutters, “Take me to sea.”
I glance round at my father. He’s broken down completely, howling his eyes out. Between gulps for air, he musters enough energy to rage on at the nurses. Fairy cakes. Missed meals. Everything upside down. Everything unfair. Everything crazy.
I’m getting uncomfortable about the nurses. At this rate, one of them will throttle him.
“This isn’t a hotel” I point out gently, “You can’t behave this way.”
He glowers up at me.
“Of course it’s a hotel” he shouts, “And it’s a bloody awful hotel, too.”
“Dad, it’s a hospital.”
“It’s a hotel. And you know what they served me? What you get here? One fairy cake!”
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