‘I don’t smoke, myself,’ he would say. ‘She was sick in the morning sometimes until I gave up smoking. We guessed it was the smell of the ashtrays first thing.’
Shortly after they came over from Manchester, Normal and his wife moved into one of the new estates which were being built high up on a narrow remnant of moorland between the pipeworks and the M62. It had displaced one or two run-down farms and cottages and a lot of stone walls, and was designed in a crescent shape facing south-west. It seemed to have more service roads than an ordinary topology would allow for, going out like spoke after spoke through bleak muddy expanses of new grass. They lived in one of hundreds of small houses with underfloor electric heating and thin interior walls, pebbledashed on the outside, with a yellow front door and varnished wooden panels under each ground floor window. The gales and rain of their first winter there, squirting in parallel to the motorway across Rishworth Moor, fetched the pebbledash off and cracked the paint, while the varnish simply wore away, leaving the wood beneath whitish grey, like the planks of some small boat abandoned on a beach.
Neither of them had owned a house before. Soon after they moved, Normal slipped off a bedside chair and put his foot through the top of the new dressing table.
‘I was really gripped. Scent was flying everywhere. I couldn’t get my leg out.’
He had been trying to hang above the bed a panoramic view of the Aiguilles; later the same day someone saw him in Huddersfield with a piece of chipboard under his arm. He was like a man in a foreign country. You found him in the afternoon in a stone-cold box room levering open a stiff window with a screwdriver. He worked for two days on a project then started something else. Before she would let him leave his job his wife had made him agree to take responsibility for the housework. After that the landing always smelled of unwashed clothes, stuffed into the blue plastic launderette bag under the bathroom sink, and a cold draught blew across the kitchen from the irregular hole he had chiselled in the wall one Saturday for the waste pipe of the plumbed-in Hotpoint.
His wife never knew what to expect when she got home from work. One Wednesday it had been a blowlamp, of all things, going full bore on the bathroom shelf. ‘No Norman, of course. No Norman anywhere. He’d dropped everything to go and fetch some friend of his whose car had broken down in Stoney Middleton.’ She had looked everywhere, but there was no Norman. ‘Only this propane blowlamp roaring away not two inches from the plastic tiles. Never mind some climber’s car! What about my house?’
Normal grinned slyly across the kitchen table.
‘You know you love me. Any more chips? Oh go on: don’t be tight!’
This seemed to please her.
‘What am I going to do with him?’ she would appeal to you. ‘Norman! Don’t eat like that!’
She washed her hands of him: ‘What would you suggest?’
(Going out late from the house one night in January, Mick from the pipeworks answered in a low distinct voice, ‘Kick the fucker’s arse and make him grow up.’ His breath steamed in the bitter air as he fastened his coat collar and looked along the street. She was standing behind him on the doorstep, but she said nothing and I don’t think he knew.)
She had made some effort to decorate the place nicely. In the sitting room they had heavyweight beige wallpaper featuring in relief a venous network, as if someone had stuck the bleached skeletons of leaves on it with great care while it was still wet. Looking closer you saw it was a motif of elm trees, half-abstract, transformed. Against this, on glass shelves and small stacking tables, was displayed her collection of artificial flowers – morning glory a filmy transparent blue, paper sweet peas, orange lilies which looked almost real. She hadn’t been collecting them for long but already she had examples from all over the world: some of them were quite valuable and old. At mid-day in the empty room the light illuminated their delicate shabby petals. There was sometimes even a faint scent.
‘I know I’m wrong,’ Normal’s wife would say, ‘but I always associate that with my pansy.’
And she would take it down to show you, a crushed, dusty little thing made in the Twenties out of black velvet, the centrepiece of the collection. ‘Isn’t she beautiful? So much nicer than the modern plastic ones! She purrs if you stroke her. Can’t you imagine her, pinned on a green tulle dress smelling of California Poppy? Oh, I could never call her “it”. She’s a real personality to me.’
The trouble was now that Norman never bought anything but vases. Christmas, birthdays, anniversaries, it was always a vase!
Until the age of seventeen she had been a drum majorette. Among the flowers was a framed photograph of her in the sexless gold-frogged uniform jacket and short pleated white skirt: an unattractive child, named Margaret after the princess, with a wide mouth eager to please and a head of tight American curls. She was even taller now; her cheeks had fattened out. She came from one of the villages south-east of Huddersfield along the Wakefield Road. Her father still lived there. It was a dull place, not even picturesque, the houses up close to the road, with aprons of mud splashed up by the heavy traffic, overshadowed by a television transmitter and an unimaginative Victorian folly she called ‘my castle’. She seemed to miss it, and once said to me:
‘We’re very much on the bleak side of town here.’
It was the middle of the afternoon by then. I had found her on her own in the house, her face puffy, as if her eyes and nose had been running. A faint yeasty smell seemed to cling to her faded pink cotton housecoat, and to the wallpaper in the lounge, like the smell of herbal medicines. I thought perhaps she had been taking something for a cold. When I asked if Normal was in she sat down on the maroon imitation-leather sofa and looked away from me. Her feet were bare. It was hot. Behind her on their glass shelves the artificial flowers looked dry and colourless.
‘It’s just that he was supposed to be collecting me this morning.’
I put my bag down in the middle of the carpet, in a bar of light. Once you have decided to go climbing the whole sense of the day, its whole meaning, lies in that. You have dedicated it. It is no longer any use for anything else. At Beeston Tor, at Cratcliffe or Ravensdale, the hard climbs will draw you on after them, into the sunshine out of the wells of shadow. Do anything else and you will still be there. Do anything else and you are only storing up a kind of boneless fatigue for yourself, because it demands as much energy to imagine climbs, to pre-empt them, as it does to climb them. I had been awake early and now I was half asleep. I laughed, and said to Normal’s wife to prompt her,
‘I thought he might have forgotten me. He’s been a bit vague lately!’
Eventually, as if it was an effort, she said:
‘You call that “a bit vague” do you?’ And added after some thought: ‘You climbers?’
The housecoat, I saw, had a design of stylised blue flowers joined by strands of yellow creeper and clusters of washy indigo leaves behind which in a much paler pink, so that they looked ghostly and very far away, were the trees and bridges, the stone pagodas and campaniles of some Chinese Gothic Italianate park. It was too short. She pulled it round her suddenly and stood up. ‘Do you want some tea?’ she said, going over to the kitchen door. ‘I won’t offer you any home-brewed beer, even though we’ve got forty pints of it on the floor—’ She wrenched the door open and the smell I had thought was cold-cure poured in, washing over us like the thick half-fermented reek that fills the car when you drive past a city brewery in the morning.
Before they moved from Manchester she had insisted on fitted kitchen units – remembering how in her childhood someone had repeated that the kitchen was the heart of the house, ‘the pivot of the household’, and getting in a firm from Leeds to measure them up – with melamine fascias meant to represent polished wood, aluminium strips along the recessed handles of the drawers, surfaces that could be cleaned at a wipe. Normal had pulled one of the higher ones off the wall. A plastic barrel had come down with it, spattering sour grey pulp down the wall, along with half a doz
en cider bottles which now lay broken on the lino among the detached shelves and other odds and ends – some funnels of different sizes, a length of clear tubing, sodden cardboard packets. When I tried to imagine how he had done it I was surprised to feel a sudden tired contempt for him. The stink was enough to make you sick.
‘There!’ said his wife. ‘You see?’
Her desperate theatrical gesture with the door had only caused the housecoat to ride up awkwardly over her naked buttocks, so that I could see the fold of flesh beneath them, and beneath that the dull blue veins on the back of her thighs, the angry red lines where she had sat across one of the seams of the sofa. ‘It doesn’t even smell of beer!’ In her misery her face was drawn back into a shiny grin which made her look even more like the counterfeit of the red-cheeked majorette in the photograph. (If you went there in the evening she would tell you towards the end of the meal, ‘My father keeps all those uniforms. Every time I grew out of one he put it away in tissue paper! Isn’t that sweet? ’ )
‘If you want to know,’ she said, ‘this is what happens when you ask to borrow your own car. I said he could have it back this afternoon, but oh no: that wasn’t good enough for Normal.’ She rubbed her eyes and laughed.
‘You climbers have got a lot to learn about him.’
She saw me looking at her buttocks.
‘Oh Christ,’ she said. She ran out of the room and I heard her going up the stairs. A door slammed.
I couldn’t find a mop or a bucket in the kitchen; perhaps I was looking in the wrong place. At the back of the house they had a twenty-five-yard strip of garden divided along part of its length by the washing line. The door to it was open so I gave up and went out there with some idea of waiting for Normal.
In his first enthusiasm he had dug it over, put up white board fencing, and started a rock garden in which it was his intention to have a rock from every major crag in Britain. He had a vision of great angular pieces of slate like gravestones, looming up at him out of the wet mist the way they had done in situ; lumps and nodules of that metamorphic, bubbly stuff from the sea cliffs at Gogarth, birdlimed or smelling of salt; a garden like a limestone scree which would break out at the right time of year, shady and steep, with ramsons or herb robert or shepherd’s purse. ‘But the biggest bit, right in the middle, will be from Cloggy. Think of it,’ he would urge us: ‘A bit of Cloggy in your own back garden!’ He had imagined it would put the crag out there for him, leaning up that ferocious golden colour it often has in the morning light. Perhaps it would have done. He sometimes trampled about out there at weekends even now, wearing a pair of Hanwag big-wall boots which rapidly picked up the thick gluey soil. But gaps had appeared in the fence – though he had patched them with scraps of corrugated plastic the black alsatian dog from the house next door still pushed its way through after closing time every night to eat Kentucky Fried Chicken bones on the lawn – and on wet days the concrete path ran out under the washing line like a duckboard on a building site.
It was tranquil in its way. Earlier in the year there had been some great blowsy poppies patched and rimmed with grey as if their lipstick had come off; irises which when their flowers collapsed looked like shreds of coloured Kleenex hanging on a stick. Now insects went busily through the long grass which, heat-browned, had choked the borders. All the gardens were dry that year. The use of hosepipes had been banned. Standpipes, we had heard, were in operation further south.
I sat for half an hour in the sunshine and the dusty smell of chamomile and seeding docks. Two or three gardens along, someone was cutting wood: the saw made its repeated gasping sound against the faint shouts of children playing somewhere over on the edge of the estate. Each gasp rose in tone until the cut wood thudded down on to concrete. This sequence was repeated four or five times, like a woman producing orgasm after orgasm in the sunny back garden, and the smell of creosote came up like the smell of an unguarded physical commitment to the moment. The gasps of the saw, the distant cries of the children, the hot sunshine, combined to produce in me both languor and excitement, each somehow amplifying the other.
Some of the stuff Normal had collected was already embedded in the baked earth as if it had always been there. It had come from the easily accessible cliffs of the Pennines. Prising one lump out with another I found he had pencilled on them dates and places; but these inscriptions were too blurred or faded to read. A flake of fine-grained sandstone came to light. It was about three feet square, and across it someone – not Normal – had scratched, ‘Crux hold of Orange Squash, Wilton Three’; and then, with an arrow, the instruction: ‘Undercling here’. I wondered who had been underclinging it when it came off. As I dropped it back into the pile I heard Normal’s wife flush the lavatory; saw out of the corner of my eye a movement behind the net in the window of an upper room.
It was when she came down and saw me looking across the remaining corridor of moorland towards the pipeworks that she said, ‘We’re very much on the bleak side here. When you’re not so busy climbing you’ll have to come and see how lovely the real Yorkshire can be.’ She laughed and turned a stone with her foot. She had put on a skirt and a blouse, to which she had pinned the black velvet pansy. ‘I see you’ve found the quarry. I call it his quarry.’
Attracted perhaps by the smell from the kitchen, an insect buzzed heavily past like someone shouldering his way into a shop; in the next house they switched a radio on, then after some argument off again.
‘Your hair’s very nice that way,’ Normal’s wife said. ‘Have you just had it cut?’
I stared at her.
While I still lived with Pauline we went to a ‘psychic’ who gave demonstrations on most weekdays in the North London area. He appealed mainly to women who found they had nothing to do in that part of the afternoon which sags out – especially in winter – between the hairdresser and the children’s tea, and he preferred to work in clean but draughty modern halls, panelled with light wood and smelling of polish, used in the evenings for other functions: lectures, Bunuel films, political meetings. There would be a shrouded projector at the back, thick blue velvet curtains, a lectern pushed to the side of the platform.
Sleet touched the tall windows the first time we went. That was in Golders Green, and darkness was already drawing round some shrubs and a bench in the gardens outside. It was odd to sit there at three o’clock in the afternoon among all those women. It had a kind of intimacy.
‘Now give him the benefit of the doubt,’ Pauline had warned me on the tube from Camden. ‘Or you can just stay outside. It’s only an hour.’
He was a man of about fifty-five or sixty, tallish, who wore an old-fashioned tweed jacket and whose resonant but haggard professional voice sometimes took on a nicely judged edge of irritability. He had a practical face: but it was so white and bony you thought immediately of a terminal disease, and of all his practicality committed there, to the control of his own panic. It was his own panic, I suppose, that enabled him to recognise theirs.
‘I think we could have the curtains closed,’ he said.
His method was to work his way along the rows saying to one woman, ‘You have what I call the artistic temperament,’ and to another, ‘You have just returned from that so-difficult trip abroad you feared.’ He stood awkwardly in the middle of the platform and picked them out by pointing to them, two or three from each row. ‘Well, there was nothing to be frightened of, was there?’ Clearly he was guessing these things from an item of dress or a sun tan; neither did he hide the fact that many of the women were already regulars of his, with habits and circumstances known to him. ‘Did he buy you that ring in the end dear? And was it that ring?’
Yet they sat so patiently, relaxed by the distant hum of traffic making its way down endlessly into the city, nodding and laughing and exclaiming to encourage him. If they couldn’t immediately relate to their own lives the things he said, they signalled by willing frowns that they were prepared to puzzle over it. It was after all an insight and they were not
going to waste it. It seemed quite sufficient to them.
‘You’re a woman of the world, dear, and you know how to help him. I can say that to you I think, can’t I, without giving offence?’
He could.
As his hour wore on he sometimes prompted them openly. ‘I see a lady. An old lady. Yes, I see an old lady and she. Yes, she isn’t very well. An old lady in a room. In a room upstairs.’ Used up in his own struggle to keep from evaporating away, he looked along the rows of seats for help. ‘Now does anybody here know an old lady like that? I do sense her very strongly, very close. She’s very close to us now. Does anybody remember an old lady like that? Yes, dear? Does that mean something to you, dear? Does it? She’s in a red dressing gown and she’s reading a book. I can tell you that if it helps. It is a Bible, dear? Does that mean anything to you?’
By now it did. Someone had recognised this spectre as her grandmother, seen once in childhood, after that never again.
‘Well she thinks it’s time to sell that thing you were talking about, dear,’ he said. And then, producing their previous exchange, at Belsize Park a week before, as if it was in itself a psychic sleight of hand: ‘You remember we talked about it last time?’
‘Oh yes,’ she whispered, delighted.
The women near enough to hear her nodded at one another significantly, and also with a sort of angry commonsensical triumph. This was the advice they would have given, all along.
Whenever he felt their attention begin to wander he jerked his head up as if he could hear a voice and said impatiently: ‘It’s no good. I can’t tell you what you want if you don’t speak clearly.’ The effort to hear was costly, and made him seem even more ill. It gave his face the inanimate look of a mask, or a painted balloon on a piece of string which someone had tugged sharply towards one of the upper corners of the room and then released. He asked the women puzzledly, ‘Is there anyone here called Erica or Eileen?’ They stared at one another. This time, though they were sympathetic, they were unable to help. One of them had a daughter whose name was Eveline. But the message, elusive, garbled, fragmentary, sporadic as a twitch, didn’t seem to be for her.
Climbers: A Novel Page 11