A Walking Guide

by Alan S. Cowell

  Before lunch, in the chilly hotel bathroom, with its little bowl of potpourri on the shelf beside a mirror framed by pink floral wallpaper, she was not displeased with what the young man saw. Save for the smudges under her eyes that, late at night, turned darker and deeper, she was still whole, still thirty-something and far from middle age. A Ferragamo silk scarf in rust colors offset her black polo neck and sandy golden hair, shining like polished bronze with no hint of gray. In her black, tailored slacks, her waist and thighs were snug and tight from workouts. There was, possibly, a certain haughtiness that people sometimes mistook for arrogance, not realizing that this was the laager around her doubts. There was, indeed, a sharp edge to her voice when she thought people forward or insulting. But that was not what the young man had seen: single woman, of very slightly advanced years, alone and drinking. Mature. Practiced. Good tits. Great arse. Quite a looker. Obviously hot to trot. Maybe an afternoon of lubricious delight. And it would be so easy. He was not bad looking. The lunchtime beers had not yet overlaid his midriff with fat. He removed his jacket to reveal a pert enough backside. He did not limp or stumble, or maneuver with his hands to raise his beer glass. His eyes shone like a puppy’s, almost disguising the lizard glint of the rutting male. He’d know some little place where a room could be had and no questions asked before they went their separate, sated ways. Who would know?

  She would know. That’s who. She would know she had allowed herself the thought: why does Joe not look at me like that anymore? Why has the fire that burned into the night in Jadini become such a dull ember in such a short space of time? Most of all, she would know she had allowed herself to be seen as no more than the sum of physical attributes associated with arousal.

  In the dining room, she and the stranger were the only guests, their tables facing one another across an expanse of folded napkins, shining glassware, pink linen and silk posies. Polished horse brasses adorned old, low beams. Hidden speakers, turned low, broadcast generic versions of old songs: she deciphered one that began “Trains and boats and planes,” but gave up trying to recall the lyrics or who first wrote or recorded it. Beyond her field of view, behind a screen, the kitchen echoed to the sound of a slammed saucepan, hissed rebukes. The manager, or owner, fussed in a desultory, vaguely offended way, as if he were seeking a scapegoat for unfulfilled expectations—a full restaurant, a Michelin star, a hint of gratitude from a life of disappointment.

  The rain spattered on the narrow sash windows. She chose shrimp cocktail and venison salad. He ordered soup of the day and the roast lamb with another pint of bitter. If she looked his way, he would be looking at her, like a cheetah in the savanna, coiled and awaiting the signal. Or a hyena. One smile would do it, one stretch of her shoulders to offer a glimpse of her breasts. Is this how it happened? She had never tried before, prided herself on never entertaining a one-night stand, although that had been a matter of definition in her college years. But, in fact, how did it happen? As a grown, mature woman with a career and commitments, it would be easy enough to start an affair, but how would it then end? Begin, say, with an afternoon quickie in an anonymous bed complete with worries about transmissible diseases and the availability of condoms suffusing the ineffable delight of exploring a new, naked body, an introduction to new odors, habits, requirements, dimensions. Then, wham-bam, thank you sir. On your way and me on mine, wiping away the fluids and the guilt, showering off the betrayal. Or would the phone calls start coming: I have to see you again. I’ve left my wife and three-month-old baby. And Joe standing with a buzzing receiver in his good, right hand saying: wonder who that was. Or, we seem to be getting a lot of wrong numbers these days.

  The shrimp cocktail was all bottled mayonnaise stained with ketchup. The venison salad was stringy. The wine had brought a soothing, familiar glow that softened life’s cruel edges. Then he was sitting at her table: wonder if you’d like to join me for coffee in the lounge. His accent was strong, northern, the flat vowels and muscular consonants more pronounced than Joe’s. Was she to be his Lady Chatterley? Coffee? Why not? Really, Eva, where was the harm in a cup of coffee? Where was the guilt?

  “Thanks, OK.” She saw triumph, almost surprise, flare in his black eyes and thought: Get a grip, woman.

  “But only for a second. I really have to go.” Even to herself, she sounded hopelessly stuck-up. The victory kindling faltered in the younger man’s eyes. His name, it turned out, was Desmond, Des to his friends. From Manchester. He wore no ring, but that meant nothing. Her name, she discovered, was Maria. From Watford. Was he heading south? Then she was heading north. Was he in business? No, just passing through, a long diversion from the M6, because he loved the Lakes, the fells, Wordsworth country. Well, then, have a good journey, Des. And thanks for the coffee.

  But she had permitted herself to imagine the alternative outcome, and, as she left the hotel in the mid-afternoon rain, waving to him as he climbed into his sporty little car, she was almost overwhelmed: she had been wanted, desired, out of the blue—perhaps lusted after would be a better description; she had frittered her time on a meaningless, gratuitous flirtation that could never have come to anything. But it had satisfied a need for attention that she felt as keenly as other people did: so why did Joe fail so utterly to understand that, why did it not seem to be a factor in his calculations when he abandoned her, placing her second to the Balkans or the Gaza Strip or to the specter she feared most—the figure who haunted them, slid between them like a wraith, a genie that rose from her nocturnal whisky bottle to fill her with rage and desolation? In most recent times, of course, she had good reason to believe from his behavior that his ghosts had not been laid, as if his illness had recalled the phantoms from the past. But why could he not understand that attention, thoughtfulness, simple old-fashioned caring cost nothing but paid huge dividends? Betrayal was just as easy by default as by commission, so how often had she been betrayed, in one definition or the other? She felt a quick, violent urge to drive after the young man—like in a Bond movie—overtake him, race him so that the tires of their speeding cars almost touched on a winding, sunlit road; and finally fall into whatever bed he chose, give way to a simple, carnal urge for a new, taut, stranger’s body.

  Then Joe’s image came to her, struggling across the high ground, limping, lost.

  Well, you did well for yourself, she said out loud. Four hours of freedom and you’re anybody’s.

  —

  She was to stay the night—set up advanced base camp, Joe said jokingly—in a suite at a lakeside hotel still further north, over Dunmail Raise and along the somber shores of Thirlmere, an artificial lake, built from the flooding of two smaller meres to provide water for the toiling masses of Manchester ninety-six miles of gravity-fed pipeline to the south. But, in the car, with a road map unfolded over her knees and the engine turning to provide heat, she decided on a different route—freedom, indeed!—back south then, at Ambleside, taking a right turn, almost retracing her route of the morning but veering off into the Langdale Valley. The map showed a narrow track, marked with arrows apparently denoting steepness, that snaked over a place called Blea Tarn before dropping down to the Little Langdale valley and the Wrynose Pass, where he planned to make camp. She would surprise him. That suddenly seemed the most obvious plan. He had said there should be no contact until he arrived in advanced base, but she knew he would not object to seeing her, to being surprised, overwhelmed by events, as so often in the beginning, when he had parked his motorcycle suddenly at an Umbrian roadside to roll with her into a hedgerow, and the passengers crowding a small, speeding car had cheered as they passed. Or, yet earlier, when she had halted her Land Rover on a trail above the Rift Valley and straddled him in the rough grass, breasts bare to the African wind, while kites circled and a herd of Thomson’s gazelles looked on with mild interest.

  How could anyone be expected to stand fast against a whirlwind, a tornado like that, a typhoon that tore everything from its roots and anchors and pinnings? How could she not ha
ve fallen under Joe Shelby’s spell? When she thought of the young man at lunch, Desmond or whoever he really was, she flushed to think she already knew betrayal, not as a victim but as a perpetrator. In the warm interior of the car, her cheeks reddened.

  —

  She recalled how Jeremy Davenport had been devastated, returning from his stay in Serengeti with crazy tales to tell of a crazy woman, brimming with adventures to lay at her feet, like a gun dog with its booty, but finding her gone from Nairobi and, at Jadini, unwilling to see him except in Joe Shelby’s company. Her father, too, disapproved of her new liaison—the first time he had failed to interpret her feelings, give her the benefit of the doubt. Her friends in Nairobi—the photographers and conservationists, the aid workers and society hostesses—sided with Jeremy, and had little time for Joe Shelby. At first, Jeremy Davenport had tried to brave it out, refusing to allow a trace of emotion to disfigure his tanned, aquiline features. He went about his business in his immaculate safari suits, confirming his client list, laying in stocks for his next trip to the bush with wealthy, overseas visitors—film and champagne, smoked salmon and beers, ammunition in case things went wrong. Then he launched his countercampaign, pleading, striving in vain to reestablish authority. Come with me, he said, to the new camp in the Mara, the one with the big tents with wooden floors and the crystal on the table. Just talk. Please talk. He telephoned at odd hours, waylaid her as she left her store in Nairobi, wrote letters for the first time she could remember. The dark patches under his eyes broke through his perennial tan. Surely all the years together are worth something, surely I deserve a hearing: I’m not asking for everything, just a chance to persuade you to love me again because I can’t live without you; you are my life; you are everything. Just like me. Just don’t turn away from me. We can go anywhere, to Paris, London, New York. We can have adventures, romance. Mauritius or the Seychelles. Please just tell me, he said, what I can offer and whatever it is I’ll do it, because I can’t bear this. Then there were the drunken calls, the vile insults—harlot, whore—and, a day later, the delivery of roses accompanied by craven apologies.

  —

  In divorces, they say, you either get to keep the furniture or the friends. She got neither. As if reading from a script, her friends told her Joe Shelby was a womanizer, a home wrecker, a known philanderer, too fond of the bottle and the weed, too fond of his bylines and adventures and one-night stands. He was tied to her, to the crazy one, the Frenchwoman. She was the mistress of his soul and would ever be. In his heart he would never leave her and he would always be drawn to her because they mirrored one another. But none of the cardboard cutouts matched the man she slept with, and she looked away from her friends and family, ignored them until much later when one barb from her father broke through her defenses and was never dislodged. “You know, you’ve broken Jeremy,” he said, almost casually, as he stood and watched her pack the day before she finally departed to join Joe Shelby, first in Rome, then on to London. “He waited all his life for you. And now he’s a wreck, a shadow. He will never forgive you or the shame of it. Not in his heart of hearts. You must beware of his vengeance. All your life. And you could have played it so differently.”

  —

  In these short, brutish days of an English autumn, the taunt returned with greater frequency, no longer so stealthy, no longer a cloaked figure that pounced to surprise her with a whispered denunciation, but a brazen accuser: you destroyed a man who loved you, and why? Because your body ached and thrilled and your mind and soul were silenced, seduced? Because a transient weaver of dreams spun a myth for you and you clutched at it, falling from the grace that you, above all people, had been given in such generous measure?

  As the Umbrian hedgerows and African savanna receded, so, too, did her inquisitor become more bold: where is your Grand Passion now? Where is the thrill of the moment that blinded you to the consequences? Remember: Romeo and Juliet died young, but you have a whole life stretching ahead of you to fill with regrets, tied to a cripple. You were Eva and Jeremy, Jeremy and Eva, a couple with a destiny of togetherness, companionship, a solid nucleus. And now you are a sub-division of Eva and Joe, a particle freed of gravity and weight.

  CRINKLE CRAGS

  Chapter Eight

  GRASMERE, ENGLAND. SEPTEMBER 2000

  She turned the car south, winding past Rydal Water, where the poet had lived and written of his daffodils and the bliss of solitude. She did not want the bliss of solitude. Solitude merely encouraged her accuser. She wanted a passion that could transcend a wet tent and a crippled man. But the only passion she could muster was anger at the rapaciousness of these people, these Lake District merchants with their milking of other people’s achievements—the Wordsworth Hotel, the Beatrix Potter gift-shop, Dove Cottage, Lakeland fudge. Joe Shelby told her that, years back, in the winter, the Lake District closed to all but the truly committed—the climbers, the walkers, the hill farmers in their mud-spattered Land Rovers carrying hay bales and snake-bellied sheepdogs. In those times, he said, in winter, the pubs were cold and unwelcoming and the fells were lonely, empty places where the streams cascaded and the pathways turned to rivulets and the peat moss lay in swampy ambush for the careless walker. Now it was year-round cash register. Every cotton baron’s mansion and oversized Victorian vicarage had been turned into a “country house hotel” with five-course dinner menus and a full English breakfast. Prosperity brought people here all year round on “weekend breaks.” Every walker had a full outfit of expensive gear, stowed in shiny cars parked outside hotels that had no closed season. It was the new, market-driven England, the one he didn’t recognize but still found tugging at his soul. Up there, he was looking for the old one to see if that had been packaged, too, as an exemplar of the market’s power. If he got to the top, he’d probably find someone selling Kendal Mint Cake or Peter Rabbit figurines.

  The road was infuriating. Even if she had wanted to pursue Des in his sports model, the way ahead was blocked by small cars each containing a matched set of pensioners, dawdling, tootling, maintaining a steadfast twenty miles per hour along a twisting blacktop that did not permit overtaking, even in a powerful car like hers. She imagined each vehicle loaded with the day’s newspaper and homemade sandwiches and a thermos flask of sweet, milky tea to accompany bland conversations that followed routes devised over decades to skirt around touchy subjects or painful issues, borne on the familiar sights that the road revealed: isn’t that where we picnicked, before the kids left home? Isn’t that where X caught a fish and Y fell into the lake?

  But was that so unfamiliar? Back home, in Africa, you would drive past a tree or a rock and realize that, unconsciously, you had been seeing that same object for so long that it had become part of you, part of the frame into which you dovetailed your existence. That was where she would have finished up with Jeremy, bumping along a sandy track, past the same broad acacia tree in the same sunstruck Rift Valley, watching a herd of nibbling giraffes that had been there—one generation or another—forever. Joe Shelby made no room for such certainties. He led a double life. She sensed it, knew it now. They—the old team that preceded her—were too often in the same places; their bylines gave them away. And there had been far more damning evidence that she did not wish to dwell on now lest she cease to believe his protestations of innocence and be made a fool.

  After the dawdlers in the cars came the cyclists, in bright yellow slickers and crash helmets, pedaling all over the narrow road, waving at her with righteous anger when she blasted the car horn to pull by.

  At Ambleside she followed the road signs for Great Langdale, past a spectral rugby pitch in the mist, through a place called Clappersgate, adjusting the heater controls of the car to de-mist the windscreen as the rain sluiced across it with ever greater vehemence, as if it was all personal, not just weather. The hills above her might not even have existed and her vision extended only to the narrow stone walls and the wooden gates leading into fields where the shrouds of mist turned the she
ep into ghosts. She glimpsed a road sign telling her she was passing through Elterwater—“Please drive carefully through our village”—but it might just as well have said Ouagadougou or Mogadishu, places that seemed more familiar because of the rambling, doomed continent that embraced them. Alone in the car, her memories strayed not quite randomly, searching out the milestones, the turning points, the intersections of circumstances that propelled a decision she would not have been called upon to make if he and his Frenchwoman had not arrived at Naivasha. The classic scenario—the intruder, the rogue molecule, crashing and banging to produce fission. But if there had been meltdown—and, of course, there had—why had she not seen from the very start that she would never be alone with the man who carried her away from her beloved Africa? Why had she trusted him to bury his dead the way she had consigned Jeremy Davenport to the netherworld of new history? Why had she ignored the jealous tracker’s signs—the distant, wistful looks, the lacunae in the narrative? Months earlier, when he returned from the Balkans, something had changed and she had chosen to ignore it, attributing the silences to his preoccupation with illness and decline. Considering what came later, that, surely, was the moment for the inquisitor’s icy gaze and stiletto questions. For there had been a new element after his Balkan visit, an unspoken rebuke, as if she had been secretly compared and found wanting. But she had done nothing. From the very beginning she had looked only in the direction she wished to, averting her gaze from the snares, the tripwires he declined to remove from their common path.