‘You’re kidding yourself,’ said Pauline briefly, ‘if you think that,’ and after our second or third visit told me, ‘I’d rather go there on my own really.’ She added by way of explanation, ‘I think we should all have private areas in our lives.’
So I saw Nina less often than I might have. When Pauline was visiting I went to the cinema, or, left in charge of the books, mooned in the Winter Gardens, Ilkley. There on the collapsible shelving on either side of him, as he sat on his hard chair under the impressive gilt balconies, each dealer had his copies of Henry Williamson, Phil Drabble, Mein Kampf, A Yorkshire Boyhood. Storm Jameson was less popular than she had been. I got on with them perfectly well, though I found quite early that they knew nothing about the insides of books. There was always a bright strongly smelling yellow stream in the urinal; while outside, Ilkley rested from its labours in the sunshine: comfortably-off, turned inward to face the past, old women on the benches, old men in cream cotton jackets, the scent of the fading stocks in the little parks.
(I got my dinner at the fish and chip bar, where you could sit down, or American Style Eats. The life that goes on in cafes is domestic but minimal. Alone in one you pour your tea, unwrap a knife from a paper serviette that says ‘Forte’ or ‘Thank you, we hope you will call again at Marie’s’; there is as much comfort as you like to create out of the rattle of crocks or the slump of the waitress’s shoulders, and no further claim on you as there would be at home.)
We did all four of us go to the swimming baths together one day. Rain dashed against the windows. Shrieks and shouts echoed back from the walls like the noises in a zoo, running together under the roof into a kind of undertone, a repetitive endless wailing. It was the hour of the afternoon reserved for the under-fives. The mothers glanced vacantly at one another above the heads of their children: little wet tails of hair lay on the brown napes of their necks. The babies milled slowly with their arms, rotating in the warm blue water. They stared at the flickering reflections; or, very close and without recognition, at a coloured ball floating on the surface of the water. Toddlers jumped in from the side – again – again! – while the attendant balanced on a step ladder in his grubby white shorts, tennis shoes and wet fawn socks, cleaning the windows. DEEP END, it said above him in huge block letters.
‘Jump now Nina! Nina, jump!’
I sat on the bench provided for spectators, watching Pauline and her mother trying to persuade the girl to swim. Nina, though, clung to the steps and looked up and down the pool. ‘Nina! Nina!’ they called encouragingly, but she wouldn’t jump. Below her proper little nylon swimsuit, her legs looked white and waxy; grimaces replaced one another on her face. ‘Oh dear,’ said the grandmother. ‘Oh dear, what a baby.’ Pauline tried wading about with Nina in her arms, but even that was too close to the water, and she had to be put back on the steps. In the end she fell in from them, howling, and the grandmother tugged her about by the hands, reciting nursery rhymes.
Pauline, who had begun to look impatient, swam a length of the bath and then swung herself powerfully out of it at my feet. Immersion had brought the blue veins near the surface of her skin. ‘I can’t stand any more of this,’ she said, walking off to get changed. ‘Let her drown!’ She laughed down at the other women.
Light flickered up from the bottom of the pool.
I waited for them in the lobby with its pink-lilac walls and cold radiators, its machines for serving confectionery. Old-fashioned fire-extinguishers stood under the notice boards. ‘Don’t touch anything, Robert,’ said a woman’s voice from the changing rooms. ‘Now don’t touch.’ In the green gloom of a tank by the door, tiny ornamental fishes moved languorously, or flicked like knifeblades as they vanished among the bubbles and weeds. Pauline came out first.
‘I know how Nina feels,’ I said. ‘I hated it at that age too.’
She stared at me.
‘Water,’ I said.
‘What good will it do her to avoid things?’
Nina was always falling. When they took her to Whitby she fell in the sea. At Dainty Debbie’s – where her grandmother took her once a week to buy velvet dungarees and blue plastic frogs to hold her hair in bunches at the sides of her head – the mole-like woman behind the counter asked her if she wanted to be an actress when she grew up, and she fell off a chair. She fell out of bed in the middle of the night and crawled about under it in a kind of confused rage looking for a way out, while the grandmother called, ‘Nina! Nina! Where are you?’, imagining the child had somehow left the room. One evening, showing off before she went upstairs, she fell through the glass coffee table in the lounge. It broke into ten or a dozen pieces and one of them, about three inches long, went into the small of her back.
‘I hate these places,’ said Pauline. ‘They can always find something wrong with you if they try.’
We sat on the curved plastic chairs in the Royal Infirmary, drinking cups of coffee from a machine. Pauline had driven us up overnight in her old tinny Citroën. It was nine thirty and in the strong morning light everything already seemed to be too clean and sharp-edged. From one corridor you glimpsed another one like it at right angles – sun splashed across it to a notice and a yellow door opened on a tiled room. A figure walked past from right to left and then from left to right again. Off the waiting area, with its blue carpet, were other waiting areas where other women gazed expressionlessly at you from behind hatches and dispensary windows in a meaningless replication of space. I felt dizzy, and as if my skin was more sensitive than usual to the movements of the air.
We were there for an hour, while Pauline’s mother tried to find out what was happening. Once or twice we thought we saw her wandering about with a docket in her hand. She had been waiting all night for news. She peeped into an open office, went in, and then came out again. ‘Well then, is that all right?’ I heard her say, then, ‘But what’s his name? Oh, I see.’ She went away slowly down the passage, her bulk and her off-white coat giving her for once a defeated air.
‘I don’t know how she manages,’ said Pauline. ‘I wouldn’t know where to start.’
An empty wheelchair was pushed past.
‘There you are,’ she said, as if it contained a helpless patient only she could see. ‘You come in perfectly all right and go out wearing a neck brace.’
She shivered.
‘Are you cold?’
‘No, I’m tired. It’s that bloody little car.’
Voices came from another corridor.
When Pauline’s mother came back she said, ‘We’ll just have to wait.’ For a moment as she stood in front of me I thought she was an orderly or a nurse. It was the pale coat. In a place like that even somebody you know can be mistaken for an official: you don’t recognise them immediately, especially if they come from an unexpected direction. ‘We’ll just have to be patient.’ She looked very discouraged. She settled herself heavily in one of the plastic chairs. She wouldn’t have coffee from the machine; it was too strong. ‘I just think of her pulling that little aeroplane about on the floor,’ she said suddenly, as if she had been thinking about it all night, ‘when she should have been in bed.’
‘I can’t wait here,’ said Pauline. ‘I can’t bear it here another minute.’
‘She had us all wound round her little finger,’ the grandmother was saying as we got up. She called out after us, ‘I don’t think it can be the spleen. The spleen would have gushed.’
Outside the town, where the traffic signals were festooned against a lowering sky, the road climbed up between conifer plantations, through the odd prosperous village with its churchyard full of cedars, then over rough pasture and half-drained moorland. It was a curiously tiring landscape. Pauline drove for twenty minutes, slowly at first then faster. ‘I hate that expression,’ she said. ‘ “Wrapped around her little finger”.’ She studied the road as if it puzzled her, narrowing her eyes momentarily at each bend. ‘Poor Nina.’ On top of the moor the car rocked in the wind; rusting tractors, canted over in trenches
they had dug themselves, lay scattered over the bare, peaty slopes; the road began its steep descent into the Vale of York.
‘There’s a place to park here somewhere.’
Five or six vehicles were already lined up in it. Children ran about between them, sheltered from the wind by a stone wall and a tuck in the farmland, while their parents had tea out of a flask or pointed back the way they had come at the road falling away into the valley. There was a man in one of the fields above flattening the grass at carefully chosen spots with heavy blows from the back of a spade; he stopped to massage the small of his back and watch two of the children hunting for grasshoppers.
‘Here’s one! I’ve got one!’
‘There’s one here! There’s one here on a rock! Oh, I’ve killed it.’
Their mother had a blue picnic stove going. While she tried to fill the kettle at a dried-up stream that came out under the wall, her husband was kneeling on the gravel in his shorts looking through the driver’s door of their home-painted maroon and yellow car. He went round to the boot and got out an old windup gramophone in beautiful condition, and with great care made it play ‘Moonlight in Vermont’, ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’, and something the chorus of which went,
Someone’s been polishing up the sun,
Brushing up the clouds of grey –
How did they know that’s how I like it?
Everything’s going my way!
An old woman further down the row of cars seemed to enjoy this one. She smiled and waved, nodded her head in time, tapped her fingers on the arm of the folding chair they had put her out in; he waved back and played it twice more, while some pages torn from Peaches blew round his reddened ankles in the sun.
‘Christ!’ I said. ‘Look at them! Do you want to go somewhere else?’
Pauline, who had been watching them with an expression I couldn’t interpret, laughed.
‘They’re only people,’ she said. She felt about in the glove compartment. ‘I had a comb in here somewhere but I think it’s dropped down the back.’
‘I really think we ought to be at the hospital. Your mother’s on her own.’
She got out of the car and slammed the door.
‘I thought you weren’t saying much!’ she shouted in at me, with her face up close to the glass.
We went back to London by train a few days later. Pauline didn’t want to drive. The weather was hot, the local connection dark and noisy, clogged with air that had been breathed before. At Leeds a bald man catching the same Inter-City 125 dropped his spectacles on the platform at our feet.
All the way down to London, immense columns of smoke rose from the burning stubble in the fields. Near at hand they were a thick greyish white; on the horizon, faint, brown, dissipated smears through which the late sun burned like a blood orange. Misty lenses and feathers drifted over the dark stripe of woodland, the flint churches and comfortable houses between Newark and Peterborough. A little further south Pauline counted twelve plumes of smoke. ‘You can see the flames now!’ But the other passengers seemed not to care. The carriage was almost empty anyway: a family two or three seats away played cards quietly; whenever the train slowed, the man who had dropped his spectacles walked irritably up and down the aisle or complained about the chill of the air conditioning.
Near Peterborough in the twilight, everything became fluid, deceptive: a charred field with small white puffs of smoke hanging just above the ground revealed itself as a long sheet of black water, fringed with reeds and dotted with swans; even the stubble, burning in the middle distance like a line of liquid fire, sometimes resolved into the neon signs of factories and cinemas. It was soon dark. I went to the buffet, and when I came back Pauline asked me,
‘Doesn’t it break your heart to see anything so beautiful?’
Then she was quiet again until we got closer to London and she noticed a long row of lights saying STEVENAGE, STEVENAGE in the night.
A month or two later she sold the Citroën; and not long after that got the chance to move back into her old flat. ‘It’s so cheap I’d be a fool not to miss it,’ she said. ‘People shouldn’t live on top of one another, after all.’ We were in the fruit store, with the cracked ladders and the copies of Valmouth. At the end of the year, books smell damp, fruit smells cheap and out of place; whitewash rubs off the wall at a touch, leaving the whorls of your fingertips clearly outlined. ‘We can meet here again, just the way we did! Do you think anyone would buy this?’ It was a book-club edition of Peter Fleming, with all the photos torn out. I shrugged and dropped it on to the floor. ‘And what if we met in a cafe again, by accident? Wouldn’t that be strange?’ About that time I began to have a dream of an endless conversation between two women:
‘I think it’s just as well not to be.’
‘It’s just as well.’
‘I’m over it now you know.’
‘You’re accepting more.’
‘Yes. Yes. I’m accepting more now.’
‘I just don’t think I could fit into that. It would drive me mad.’
‘I mean I do so much.’
‘Of course you do. Of course you do.’
‘I get so upset.’
I often dreamed of Nina too, even after I went to live in Manchester. ‘Boots off!’ she would exclaim, turning her wizened little face up towards the ceiling. ‘Boots off!’
The first thing I heard Bob Almanac’s wife say was,
‘What can you do in a town where they pronounce quiche “keech” ? ’
She was a short, squarish woman, originally from Nottinghamshire, with black hair which she wore in a rough cap. Streaks of grey in it gave her a look of the intelligence and maturity she had submerged in her practical, patient manner; they combined with the lines round her mouth and the hollows at her temples to make you think when you were introduced to her that she was tired. Later you saw that she was holding back some permanent fear or irritation: she imagined she was ill, perhaps, or that she had particularly bad luck.
She worked in the health food shop.
‘None of you are getting enough kelp for what you do, of course,’ I remember her telling me. She glanced at me briefly and cynically, as if she could get from my clothes or the way I stood confirmation of something she already knew. ‘Those bloody depressions just keep coming up, don’t they? One after the other, like clockwork. Just like clockwork. I could graph them out for you on a bit of paper.’
And when I could think of nothing to say to this diagnosis:
‘Talk to the wall, talk to the wall. Oh well, you’ll learn.’
I asked Bob if she used her own products.
‘Oh yes,’ said Bob. They both did in fact. They found them very useful. ‘You’ve to be sensible about it,’ he warned me, ‘and not just to chuck things down you. A lot of people think, for instance, that just because bee-pollen’s helped them, zinc will too.’ He laughed. ‘Anne’s the expert, and I leave it to her.’
When he talked about her to us, it was with a kind of wondering admiration. She fasted, he told us, often for four or five days at a time, taking only water and vitamins. While it was apparent that this rather unnerved him, he tried to pass on to us his faith in her judgement. ‘She’ll occasionally get a bit of a headache on the third day, but it’s nothing to worry about. All the toxins are coming out by then, you see: the body’s beginning to eat itself.’ He offered us this achievement modestly, on her behalf. We had a picture of her in control of a dangerous equilibrium, like some trapeze artist of the body chemistry. Would she fall? It was possible to fall, Bob’s manner admitted. But it was the least important part of his job as ringmaster to work us up over that.
After I got to know her I sometimes went into the shop to buy things she or Bob had recommended – magnesium, high-dose capsules of vitamin B, mineral complexes and herbal dietary supplements which would for a week or two dispel my vague lassitudes or make me seem to climb a little better before they lost their effect. It was always empty, and for most
of the day she seemed to sit twisted round on a high stool behind the counter, staring out of the window at the zebra crossing or over at the bleak apron of the Civic Centre opposite, where rain shone on the hexagonal paving slabs and the wind ruffled stealthily the shallow puddles, and where at dinner time she might see Gaz lurching along in his clogs eating a pork pie. It gave her a melancholy but intense pleasure to think about what other people ate.
‘The things they stuff themselves with,’ she would say absently as she served you. She had a way of remaining still for a long period after you had given her the money, then laughing shortly and throwing it into the drawer of the wooden till as if it was distasteful to her. Her wrists were thin, the tendons very prominent on the backs of her hands. ‘The stuff they eat!’
The shop did best at the end of a damp winter, especially towards the end of March. In summer, stock replacement was low. She sold out of the popular lines, and the colourful little packets and plastic tubs that remained seemed to gather dust from the sunlight. When her employers promoted her to manageress and suddenly moved the business into Sawter’s Yard, well back from the main street and up a cool alley with ferns growing out of the walls, you could see it was much reduced. They ran it down until it stocked only the hops and equipment for making your own beer; soon after that they closed it altogether. Anne Almanac seemed to close with it, and vanish.
I heard from Normal, who loved a gossip, that she was in London; from someone else that she had gone home to Retford or Worksop or wherever it was that her family still lived. A month or two later she was back. Bob never mentioned that she had been away.
‘She’s got him well under her thumb,’ was Normal’s opinion. ‘Well under it.’
But I see her like this: in Huddersfield, wondering if she can endure another year of sitting in Marie’s restaurant drinking coffee. At the Sainsbury’s checkout she hears a woman say, ‘Alec, get your foot off the biscuits. I shan’t tell you again. If you don’t get your foot off the biscuits, Alec, I shall knock it straight on the floor.’ Spring at last, and there is a strong smell of burning plastic along the ring road. The sun moves across the patterned bricks outside the bus station. The buses are parked obliquely while they wait: she gets on to one to take the shopping home, and from the top deck sees across to the next, where a girl is blowing her nose. I think now that she was down to the bone with ambition. Bob perhaps recognised something like that.
Climbers: A Novel Page 10