Climbers: A Novel

by M. John Harrison

  If you had wanted to you could have climbed from five in the morning until ten at night: Normal, though, arranged to go out, turned up late, and under the pretext of looking for a piece of equipment, checking a guidebook or finding a picture of some new route in a magazine, took you to his house instead. There a lassitude overcame him. He made cups of instant coffee, leafed through the catalogues he still got through the post from contacts in the trade, and told you stories about himself: while you watched anxiously as the light slanted round the room towards mid-morning, interrupting when you could bear it no longer.

  ‘I thought we were going to Cave Dale?’

  Sometimes he just didn’t turn up.

  When he did get out he wanted to sit in the cafes as if it was still February, or look for his old friends and introduce you to them; now that the summer had come it was as if he didn’t want it after all.

  The heat reminded me of my last day in London.

  I had been impatient to leave by then. I had been spending three weekends out of four on the sandstone outcrops in East Sussex: anything to get away from Camden Town where in summer the Irishmen sleep the day away in parks, their fat red shoulders covered with strips of peeling skin like shreds of Kleenex, and a skim of rubbish bobs companionably past on the Regent’s Canal in the frying light – lumps of Styrofoam packing like decayed heads, slivers of wood and soft-drink cans bound together with a creamy brown curd of detergent foam and oil. I had given up the keys to my flat. I felt contained but energetic, as if I only had to push with my arms to be somewhere else. When I went to say goodbye to Pauline, she was answering the telephone.

  ‘We’d love to come,’ she said into it. ‘Yes. Yes, his name is Anthony. Didn’t I tell you? He’s from Guyana.’ She laughed. ‘Yes. Black. Very black indeed!’ After a pause she said, ‘I’ll bring him then. OK. Yes, it was time to meet someone older. I was so bored with all those boys—’ She laughed again and put the phone down.

  ‘Those bloody old women in Notting Hill,’ she said to me.

  One of her cats jumped up on to the table in front of her. She sighed and rubbed its sandy belly, buried her face suddenly in its fur – ‘Oh, Rutherford you smell so wonderful! Hello Rutherford! Oh, hello!’ – then stared at the books piled by the toaster and the empty plates: Art and Act, Vision and Design in a first edition, Flemish Painters. She touched the spine of the Roger Fry. Sunlight projected obliquely on the nylon carpet the image of the window frame behind her. One thick vertical bar crossed at three-quarters of its length by a thinner, shorter one, both enclosed in a parallelogram of shadow: a strange figure, the dark part the colour of earth and lichen, the bright parts green and gold. All morning the sun had been forcing it round to the north. It elongated itself to escape. Eventually it would go too far and break to pieces against the shelves of books, but not before the cat Rutherford had got down in it and wriggled with pleasure.

  ‘Let’s have some tea,’ said Pauline. ‘I can easily make some!’ she added as if this ability had suddenly surprised and delighted her.

  She went to the sink with the breakfast plates and a knife, then stopped there, kettle not yet offered to the tap, the strong light falling across her face and arms from the window like the light on a becalmed sail. She was looking out across the flat roof where she sometimes sat in the evening in one of two or three bleached kitchen chairs, listening to the traffic go up Camden High Street towards Hampstead. She would be, I thought, forty or forty-one that year. One the floor near her feet the cat tried to attract her attention by touching her ankle tentatively with one paw.

  ‘Just look at this animal! Don’t you wish you could feel like that? I mean really alive and inside yourself? Rutherford, I love you!’

  Water banged in the pipes. She turned the tap off; on again; off.

  ‘So!’ she said. ‘Manchester! Oh, I hope you’re going to be really successful there!’

  I picked the cat up. It gazed impassively, then rolled out of my hands and back on to the floor. I had already seen that, to climbers, climbing was less a sport than an obsession. It was a metaphor by which they hoped to demonstrate something to themselves. And if this something was only the scale of their own emotional or social isolation, they needed – I believed then – nothing else. A growing familiarity with their language, which I had picked up by listening to them as they practised on the indoor wall in Holloway, and their litter, spread out on a Saturday afternoon like a glittering picnic in the deep soft sand at the foot of Harrison’s Rocks, had already made me seem quite different to myself. Besides, I had done a fifty-foot classic abseil down a piece of blue polypropylene rope, in shorts and a running shirt: if I needed reminding of that the burns were still there on my neck and thigh. How could you remain the same when you had stepped off the top backwards in that way, straight out into the air and into whatever was going to happen?

  Quite soon I would meet Normal and begin to discover that this does not say all there is to say. Meanwhile the polypropylene – a material which will not take any kind of shock-load – glowed cheap, dangerous and colourful in a cupboard, and everyone I knew bored me. Their houses bored me and I showed it by doing two-finger pull-ups on the door frames. I felt as if I understood something about myself which Pauline would not now ever know. This made her appear vulnerable. For some reason I thought of that as a victory.

  So I said, ‘On a Friday night you can catch a train from Manchester Piccadilly and be in Derbyshire in fifteen minutes. That’s the only reason I’m going there. Oh, and you can get to Wales cheaper.’

  She looked down at the table.

  ‘Even so,’ she said quietly, ‘I hope something happens for you there. The kettle won’t take long.’

  The cat was scratching at the door.

  I had hated Pauline when I first met her, in a dull cafe in the provinces. ‘Look,’ she had said then, ‘you have exactly what you like and I’ll pay, OK? They’ve got something they call curd tart, oatcakes, all sorts of things.’

  With its wooden chairs just too small for adults and polished with use the place looked like the classroom of an old-fashioned infants’ school from which the children had run away. A wallpaper of tiny red and brown flowers – poppies perhaps – obsessively curving into one another, gave an effect of stealth. On one side of the room they had renovated a Victorian fireplace with a convoluted patent back, then stuffed its grate with coloured tissue. From the window you could just catch sight of a cemetery on the slope of a hill.

  ‘Curd tart is the “specialte maison”!’

  I laughed, and so did Pauline’s shy young American friend with the steel-rimmed spectacles. She was out to entertain us, especially the American, but all her stories were about food and drink, or people who had put something over on one another, and I wondered what to make of her.

  Her hair was scraped rawly back from her face and held in a bun with two plastic slides. She had on a pinkish T-shirt under which her breasts hung lumpily; a black cotton skirt; leather sandals from some Mediterranean visit. Her legs were bare, white with blue veins, and a little goosefleshed. She had come to buy some of my father’s books. That day I put her between forty-five and fifty, because though I hated the little cafe myself I resented her patronising it; and I thought for some reason she was the wife of a university lecturer. It wasn’t until later that I saw how beautiful her jaw was, or how her face could become so suddenly still and tranquil.

  ‘In fact,’ she said, ‘I got the Morris off him for twenty-five pounds less than he asked. I left him sitting on the running board with his head in his hands!’

  The American boy broke up a scone but didn’t eat it.

  ‘Why won’t they let you read industrial architecture at Oxford?’ he asked me. ‘Is it only snobbery?’

  Pauline laughed.

  ‘Or antiques!’ she said. ‘Wouldn’t that be lovely?’

  I saw the American look at her blankly then rest his eyes deliberately on the wall above her head, where in the picture-glass of one
of the paintings that hung there he could perhaps see reflected a wobbly image of the view outside: roofs and gable ends going up without perspective, stacked on top of one another at odd angles, filling the window so there was only a frieze of white sky at the top. He was eighteen or twenty but the spectacles often gave him a detached air which made him seem older. Next to his plate he had opened a book of Marianne North flower paintings.

  ‘If you’re interested in that kind of thing,’ I said to him, ‘I think you can take a canal trip through the town, to see the backs of the factories. It depends how long you’re going to be here.’

  ‘Oh, it’s much nicer to do that in France,’ said Pauline. ‘Two weeks in the Midi, with gourmet food and wine!’

  ‘Very nice,’ said the American boy.

  She got up immediately to pay.

  ‘I wonder if they can tell us about toilets and things?’ she said.

  I met the American outside the lavatory a few minutes later. He smiled, his spectacles flashed shyly, and he stepped out of my way when there was no need to. From the lavatory you could hear the river; three days’ rain rushing down off the moor. Some uncarpeted stone steps led down to a mirror on the landing. I stood looking at myself there, waiting for them to leave. I had already said goodbye. A quiet murmur came up from the cafe, then I heard Pauline say, ‘They change the library round once a month. You suddenly find yourself quite lost.’

  A spoon rang against the rim of a cup. In a quite different voice she said: ‘Strange. That’s so strange. Are you coming, Martin?’

  Afterwards I realised she had been nervous. ‘You stared all the time,’ she told me. ‘At both of us. Martin was nervous too.’ And once I began to visit her there I found she felt more comfortable in London. She lived in an untidy flat above the fruit market in Camden, and at weekends had her own stall up at Camden Lock, where she sold Victorian prints and second-hand books. I never saw Martin again.

  ‘Some of my stuff is quite good,’ she said. ‘Modern firsts. You know.’

  She kept most of it in a fruit store, a place like a cave, cool and dark at the back, the door a square of dazzling sunshine through which you could see the railings in Stucley Place. Boxes of fruit went up to the whitewashed ceiling; against the wall leaned a broken ladder and two or three faded, neatly rolled canvas awnings. Unbranded three-piece suits, in plastic bags to keep them smart, lay draped here and there over the boxes of Antonio Mazzani peaches and Tasmanian apples, like empty executive glove-puppets: the trader with whom Pauline shared the rent of the store sold them as a sideline, from under the artificial grass on his barrow. She was always knocking them on the floor.

  She loved to sort through her stock, the peripheries of which sometimes merged in a fatal dreamy way with her own collection, absorbing editions she had replaced, novels she had outgrown long before she met me.

  ‘Oh,’ she would say suddenly, as if she had walked into a wall. ‘This is one of mine.’

  It would be Leonard Woolf’s Growing, or The Hunters and the Hunted by Sacheverell Sitwell – not so much reminders of as signals from another part of her life.

  Moving the books about was surprisingly hard work. I went over there with her in the afternoons, ostensibly to help choose fresh stock for the weekend, trundle it over to the Lock on an old porter’s trolley, and set up the stall; but really so that I could watch her move tranquilly from box to box, packing and unpacking them. The air was warm and full of the slightly sour smell apples have even when they are perfectly sound. Light flared in from the street outside. There was always a muffled banging from the building next door, as of masonry being chiselled away: distant, rhythmic, self-absorbed. Pigeons nodded and bobbed among the squashed fruit near the door, cooing hypnotically. I leafed through the books she offered me, looking for signs of her personality; or stirred with my foot the boxwood splinters, the discarded tangerine wrappers – blue tissue paper with a bright yellow sticker – on the dusty concrete.

  ‘Let me see . . . shall I sort out some paperbacks now, do you think? Oh look, Nostromo! I bought this in Ontario. Ontario! I’m not saying how many years ago that was.’

  She was less interested in the books than the dates she found pencilled in them, the inscriptions and marginal comments, the yellowed newspaper articles that fell from between their pages.

  ‘I never got past page sixty-three,’ she said, showing me the corner of that page, still folded down. ‘My writing in those days! Horrible! Shall we sell it or keep it?’

  ‘Sell it.’

  There was a barred window high up in one wall of the store, looking out over an overgrown privet bush and a yellowish-grey brick wall. The boxes underneath it were always damp: every week we would find two or three books which had developed a thick white mould. These we threw on the pile of rubbish – lemonade cans, chicken bones, cigarette cartons and black dustbin bags – which gathered daily in a corner of the wall by the doorway of Fishon Gowns on the other side of the road. Pauline called it ‘The Graveyard’. Every time you went out with something, pigeons walked purposefully over to see what you had; while others, sick and blackened-looking in the sun on top of the old air-raid shelter at the junction with Buck Street, stared down without interest. The buzz of a sewing machine came from the clothiers.

  Pauline held out a copy of Nothing by Henry Green.

  ‘I decided to save this.’

  At night after the pubs and dance halls had closed people ran down Inverness Street smashing bottles and shouting. Pauline would touch the side of my face. ‘Don’t you ever find yourself frightened?’ But she would never say of what. Her body looked white and strange to me in the sodium light that leaked round the edges of the curtains, browning the bedclothes and glittering off the old-fashioned Coca-Cola bottle she kept on a shelf. I had revised my opinion of her legs, her breasts; I thought she was probably thirty-five or thirty-six. The shouts of the market traders woke me before her in the mornings, and I rather missed that when we got married and moved further over towards Camden Road.

  ‘I’ve already got a daughter,’ she told me two or three weeks before the wedding. It wasn’t so much a confession, I recognised, as a challenge. ‘I don’t suppose it matters, does it? She’s called Nina, and she lives with her grandmother, very happily, and I visit them every time I go up for a PBFA book fair. It’s easy from Ilkley, and I can even manage Harrogate.’

  ‘I’m astonished.’

  ‘Oh, Nina and I are great friends.’

  Nina, I soon found, was about two and a half years old, with blonde hair cut in an exact neat fringe above her eyebrows. Outside the house she wore velour dresses in pink, or a pinny full of poppies; patent leather sandals and white ankle socks: but for her curiously mobile features and rather direct grey eyes she would have been what her grandmother called ‘a proper little girl’. Inside, she dragged a plastic toy around the floor all day long on a length of yellow string. It made a desultory clicking sound and then more often than not fell over.

  ‘Twisted!’ she said. She looked at me and shrugged. ‘All gone!’

  While I untangled it for her she lifted her arms in the air slowly. A series of indrawn expressions passed like grimaces over her face, which she turned upwards so that she appeared to be gazing into a corner of the ceiling: suddenly it split across the middle in a smile so wide and toothless, with her eyes so seamed and slitted-up above it, that it looked like an old woman’s.

  ‘Push me,’ she said ecstatically. ‘In the pushchair!’

  ‘Nina, we don’t need the amateur dramatics,’ Pauline told her.

  Later, when Nina had gone to bed, the grandmother said, ‘Those dungarees are a big tight on her, but I don’t want to put her into ordinary trousers yet. It’s another step in age, isn’t it?’ She smiled at me. ‘I hate to see them grow up,’ she said. ‘Don’t you?’

  Before she retired she had been a district nurse.

  ‘Out came the stomach pump!’ she would exclaim at breakfast. ‘Down went the saline. I kept t
hinking, “How long? How long?” because after half an hour, you know, you’re supposed to get them into Out Patients. But then – blork! – up it all came, twenty aspirins, enough for kidney failure.’ She illustrated this anecdote by nodding her head forward over the table and moving both hands rapidly away from her gaping mouth. ‘Blork! I was so relieved.’

  I liked her. She spoke of a ‘sea fret’, meaning a cold mist; she described herself as having to wait all morning at the butcher’s, ‘looking like cheese at fourpence’. In age, her face had become pouchy. Her heavy spectacles, blue-rinsed hair and full-lipped, slightly slack mouth had given her the almost middle-European look many older Yorkshirewomen have. She loved Nina, but it was clear that when she looked at her she was seeing other children. She greeted with delight each remembered way of laughing or standing, of refusing to do something, by staring absently down the neat rather bleak garden at the flowering privet with its drift of fallen petals the colour of turned brass. It might have been a sister or a cousin she was seeing, in another garden fifty years ago; it might have been a younger brother caught picking marguerite daisies as big as fried eggs and turning his head away to shout, ‘It wasn’t me.’ She glimpsed their mannerisms intricated in every action. She watched the child each time it wept or waved goodbye – ‘Goodbye!’ – as if she was trying to decode it.

  ‘Is it you she sees,’ I asked Pauline, ‘when you were Nina’s age?’