19 JANUARY
The struggle is intensifying. It is like being sealed into a grey snowball which keeps gathering defeats. However much I wash, I seem to smell of dirty winter trains and exhaust. The eye desperately seeks beauty and light, but winter is a miser at the moment, giving nothing but bills. The result is inarticulacy. Facing a lecture theatre full of students, I cannot entertain, digress and make them laugh, as I hope to normally. The words and the lightness will not come. Instead I write everything down first, and work through it carefully and slowly, so that I will not be left gulping in silence. The working, connecting, creating brain seems to shut down completely, leaving a dirge of an inner monologue that will not shut up about failure and mediocrity and guilt. There are many moments in seminars when I realise, with gasping relief, that concentrating on the students and their work has taken me away from that voice, for whole hours at a time. At the ends of days I feel too frightened and boring and repellent to go out with my friends on the staff. Instead I flee to the Adelphi Hotel.
Working in Liverpool and living in the Pennines often means nights in the Adelphi. It is the most eccentric institution, a neoclassical white monument wrapped around an interior little changed since the days of the transatlantic liners, upon which it is modelled. Waking here is like finding yourself a passenger on a ghost liner. There are great cracks in the plaster in the courtyard. Buddleia bushes sprout from the corners. The plumbing complains of the monstrous difficulty of serving hundreds of bathrooms, while the heating must burn tonnes of the national coal supply every winter day. The Victorian hope for the triumphs of future generations still hangs in the huge heart of the Adelphi’s inner court, a massive space under chandeliers, its columns painted in orange-cream and white, decorated with towering glass and fanlights; it is architecture’s answer to the might of the RMS Titanic.
Until recently there was a Father Christmas doll above the reception desk with a calendar that began on Boxing Day and counted down the days remaining until Christmas. I am sorry it is gone. It was the first sign that you had entered a peculiar world.
I am regularly the youngest guest in the place: it is a staple of pensioners’ bus tours from Scotland and the North East. I chat with fellow travellers in the lifts as we drift sluggishly between floors. ‘We’ve had a good time, but I’m glad to be going home today,’ I have been told, several times. We share an affection for the prices: £33 tonight, for a cosy room, a large double with two doors, back to back, the inner covered in green leather.
Running the place is a crushing daily labour. On an afternoon last week I came across three cleaners slumped on the floor in a corner of corridors where there are no CCTV cameras, their backs to the wall. They gave off an exhaustion you are rarely permitted to see. I recognise some of them now.
‘Is it haunted?’ I asked one today.
‘Third and fourth are,’ she said.
I am on the fourth tonight, but this room is definitely not haunted. Of the dozens of bedrooms where I have stayed, there was only one in which something felt wrong. It was a rainy, angry winter night. The room was on the top floor at the back, looking inwards. I opened the door and something in me shuddered. There was an angry draught of cold and damp and a feeling of savage dejection. I went back to reception and asked for another room.
A winter hotel, the heating always on full, the Adelphi is in its element this cold, wet night, as if far out at sea. Freezing rain slathers down in the inner courtyard. You would rather be too hot than cold at all.
My favourite Adelphi story, almost certainly apocryphal, comes via Jeff from one of his friends.
‘He was checking in and a guy came down to reception and said, “I’ve just been mugged in the corridor on the second floor.”
‘The receptionist said, “Oh no. Not again.”’
The all-you-can-eat buffet is the heart of the hotel. Eight pounds fifty gets you a free run at a mound of food. The cabbage is good. The gravy is familiar. The roast potatoes are a reassuring yellow mush of fat. Then you must choose between battered fish which looks as though you could club a cat with it, beef like black iron turnings, a chicken leg which is too big to come from a terrestrial chicken, and the liver. I eat the liver on the grounds that a huge hit of vitamin A is probably what January needs. The slightly urinary tang does not put me off, nor the little tubes of arteries in their purple couches. I have Jenny Diski for company, Skating to Antarctica. My fellow diners are pallid, slow-moving, some silent but none alone. With the grand, high ceilings, where there are the moulded coats of arms of the Masons and the all-seeing eye, among other designs, and under the gaze of the white-faced waitresses, you could be in a confused dream of Eastern Europe.
A mother and her adult daughter are dining three tables away. Towards the end of the meal the mother goes slightly berserk. She has found a hair in her food. She roars and raves, shouting at the waitresses, storming out, warning anyone who speaks back to her, ‘Don’t go there!’
She has a local accent, as do most of the waitresses. You wonder if guest and staff all rather wish they could take the problem outside, but they are trapped in their roles. Perhaps it does not do a great deal for your sense of self-standing, to find yourself eating an eight-quid-fifty buffet of school mush at the Adelphi on a callous night in January.
In my ugly office, in the ugly building where I work, with tedious admin to service, I wonder how many office workers across the country count themselves fortunate today. At certain moments when the windows darken and the overhead light is particularly stark, there must be currents that run through all of us, to which we all feel uniquely subject, of absolute despair.
21 JANUARY
We were up throughout the middle of the night, from about three to half past four, while Aubrey summoned a series of phantom poos and asked to be told stories. We woke late from thick sleep, gummy-headed. Icy mist drifted through the trees and the woods were patched with white snow spots like freezing mould. You half expected to see a TV-documentary team pushing through the undergrowth, recording the emergence and thawing of a new world. Paleoclimatologists believe ice may have covered the whole planet more than once, making a series of Snowball Earths. The retreat of the ice must have left scenes much like Hardcastle Crags this morning. Something between mist and sleet dripped out of the grey above.
Aubrey and I declared ourselves very doubtful about walking, but Rebecca is never deterred. She chivvied us into our outdoor gear and we set off for the moors above Cragg Vale. For most of the way up England’s longest continual ascent you drop off into a steep valley, and rise again, up, up to Withens Clough. From the moment we parked the car everything changed. The mist thinned and wisped. There was sunlight. The surface of the reservoir was fluted with the tiniest vibrations, just enough to haze the reflections of the further banks so that the frozen moors lay sleeping on dreams of themselves. Sunlight caught in the droplets on the fence wires and I became fascinated by the rays and tiny images within them, and by the microscopic spheres of water on the stalks of mosses. Ordinary Moss, Latin name Brachythecium rutabulum, is a delightful plant, like a host of tiny green diplodoci standing together, their heads bent heavy on the ends of long necks, above foliage which is furred and feathered like tiny green birds’ feet.
There was proper snow here, crumping underfoot. Just below the reservoir was a scattering of four or five brown-white birds: snow buntings. I had never seen them before. One sat on a tree beside the track in good light long enough for me to be sure, to be as sure as I could be without binoculars – yes! I really do think so. And it was the right time and place for them, too. They are amazing birds, able to survive in twenty degrees below freezing. Apart from one raven, they were the only creatures we saw or heard. There were prints of foxes, rabbit and a hare as we walked on. The track turned up and over the moor into thick mist. On the edge, as we moved into it, the air around us whitened and thickened; you could see it condensing between your eyes and the ground – something about the light on the
snow seemed to catch the mist in the instants of its formation. We pressed on, circling towards Stoodley Pike, a thunderous obelisk commemorating the defeat of Napoleon, visibility down to a couple of dozen yards. And then, as we came to the lip of the land, where it falls 1,000 feet down to the Calder Valley, and the sound of a train rose from the fog far below – the miracle.
We glimpsed a burning silver disc of sun, and then quickly, so quickly, the sky paled and blued, and air absent of mist grew like lakes in the distance. Now another bluff appeared three miles away, and now another a mile beyond that, and sun and mist and the noses of the moors swam together, shoaling and clearing as if a pod of orcas were surfacing in an Arctic bay. Far to the north were lagoons of pure turquoise. We seemed to gaze on islands and inlets of sea, and a black-bellied cloud, and then blue nearer us, and the snow shone in the sun. There was a wonderful lifting in the sight of it, like the granting of a brief rest. I felt like a prisoner on day release.
At Stoodley Pike we turned away from the valley and took a track across the moor towards thick conifer woods. The path through them was wild going, bog and marsh, snow and mud, tussocked and threatening to suck us down. Aubrey rode on my shoulders, sharing my enthusiasm for a real adventure, and we talked of shaggy St Bernards rescuing benighted alpinists. On the further side we forged through marsh, bracken, bog and snow, Aubrey stalwart now and the terrain properly rough. It must have been like riding a drunken camel. We caught sight of the car and cheered.
‘I’m not coming back up here until the summer,’ Aubrey declared. Earlier, when we tried to persuade him to walk rather than be carried, the better to warm his poor feet, he said, ‘I’m not falling for your devious tricks!’
25 JANUARY
The pre-dawn darkness presses over Hebden Bridge, where two elderly men are taking coffee in the station café.
‘You’re even more antisocial than me,’ says one, ‘and I’m bloody antisocial.’
‘I don’t like people.’
‘I don’t like ’em either.’
‘I don’t even like animals.’
‘I don’t like dogs.’
26 JANUARY
Day breaks over Liverpool in the delighted crying of herring gulls as they turn in a towering blue morning, cold and clear. The pipes of the Adelphi stream steam. You see bright day-fires like this in New York, in London, in Marrakech: these are mornings for cities rising to the day, and every spirit is lifted.
My archetype of a winter city morning came in Saint Étienne, in the southern Massif of France. I had moved abroad for the first time, coming south on the train from Paris to teach English in a lycée. On the first night I drank with my new flatmates; one, Robert, a much older American, read Paul Valéry and Rimbaud and poured whisky until suddenly the walls tilted and the floor changed shape. At eighteen I knew nothing of hangovers and almost nothing of France. Waking to both was exquisite. Outside was a freezing blue brightness, and sunlight that seemed too raw for heat or colour, while through the flat, very quietly, ran a rill of music I had never heard before. ‘In my mind I’m going to Carolina,’ James Taylor sang. The hangover was no pain. It slowed time and heightened senses. Taylor’s voice, his slow melody, seemed to tune the whole day. The moment fell into that strange place of consciousness in which you are aware that what you are experiencing is being laid down like a tile in the mosaic of memory, to last as long as the mind. Everything was new: the black coffee hissing on the gas flame, the smell of baking outside, the sigh and moan of the trams. We went out into the Place Jean Jaurès. The cold was intense, as if the icy blue had taken form and texture.
‘Ça kai,’ Robert said. He hesitated; he had an American reserve about swearing. ‘It means . . . fuckin’ freezing.’
‘Ça kai,’ I repeated, relishing authentic French slang. ‘Ça kai!’
I gave it like a salute to the arches of the Hôtel de Ville, to the unfinished tower of the St Charles Cathedral, to the new frigid air of France.
That winter was the first of my adult life. We lived on little, experimenting with pasta tossed in raw egg, with turning packet soup into sauce and all the permutations of rice and tins. When we were paid by the schools where we taught we gorged on sumptuous kebabs, thick half-moons of bread stuffed with dripping lamb, sauce piquante and sauce blanche, and chocolate and banana crêpes from kiosks. We learned to make cassoulet out of fat and cabbage.
On frosty Saturdays I circled and criss-crossed the city. In the darkness before dawn one Sunday morning I took buses into the Massif to watch the sun rise over the snowfields and the city waking in the distance; to watch the play of light on the traffic, the steam of factories, the slide and sidle of trains and trams and the first flights overhead from Lyon. It was the strangest sensation – that moment of disbelief which comes with the twitch of comprehension at all the lives, the impossible myriad million deeds down there, taking place in an instant, in inconceivable profusion, and yet for a second the mind seems to glimpse the scale and variety of them, as if you look into the distant future or the far past and can actually see . . . It was never there, perhaps, but for the sensation of having glimpsed, which remains.
Such days die like gilded embers, glowing down. In the twilight on the train back across the flat-lands towards Manchester, two ladies are discussing death and disease.
‘I was pregnant with Tom when I lost his father. Now Pauline’s got Alzheimer’s . . . she went down as soon as she lost him.’
‘They do,’ says the other, ‘they do.’
To live with the weather, the damp and the darkness demands and imparts solidarity, strengthens friendship and families. If you look on the dimmer side of anything you are lost. When Uncle Chris turned the car over, his mother transformed the event into a triumph of luck.
‘Nobody was hurt,’ Jenny said, ‘that’s what I’m telling myself, and thank goodness.’
I hope I am becoming better at thanking goodness. It comes naturally in the summer, in happiness, in beauty. I look up and say, ‘Thank you – thank you!’ in a passionate whisper. But it is easy to thank goodness then.
In the winter you need strategies. I know of many, anecdotally. Among my friends are devotees of Bikram yoga, light boxes and counselling. Some dedicate themselves to cooking, cold-water swimming or medication. Northern Man knows how it is done in the dark time. I see him coming in a bobble of small, blazing lights. Down through the wood the white stars cascade and buckle, then with a whizzing sound the pack approaches. Now their voices well up in a deep, rooky cawing of Yorkshire accents. The mountain bikers are travelling in a conversation, as if the woods and the valley gloom are as snug as a pub. They are spattered in mud and sluiced in rain, their faces flushed with oxygen and bushed with beards.
‘Oh ’ee did yeah – an’ ah told ’im ’ee would!’
‘Ee’s a one for it though, you’ve got to give it to ’im.’
And they’re gone. I admire it hugely, that thrust and determination. They will set out in anything, the worse the better. They batter the weather back, pump up the hills and smash down the valleys. They baste the moors with their tracks and lash the twigs with their faces; they wear the mud like medals.
27 JANUARY
A mist day, a moss day, a day of rain that never quite fell. In the woods Aubrey and his friend Alex hurled themselves up banks, conquered rocks, swung on branches, danced and dived down mud heaps. They are impervious to this drear grey shroud.
No birds moved and few called, only the moss and the fungi seemed alive, though there were green spears where the narcissi were rising and the first snowdrops came out yesterday. Where the beck torrents through rapids it made a scarf of mist which floated over that one spot, a spectre. Later, in a twilit instant, there came a rushing roar over the valley, the Buttress trees bowed and shook and clouds tore themselves apart, a pale sky promising stars behind them. A blackbird and a robin sang as the light failed. There was a wild flaring of pinks and oranges in flaying streamers of high cloud as the moon rose,
waxing. Now there were two skies, one flying low and fast, small gigs and racing skiffs of cloud, while higher contrails crossed white paths and barely drifted. We have heard no owls for weeks but Rebecca saw one out the back, perched on the fence. There are mice around the water outflow in the garden; the tawny owl was in ambush, waiting.
In the moments when I am watching, recording or sharing these things with Aubrey or Rebecca, I am well. It is in the gaps between that the panic comes. Unable to do much beyond self-loathe, I dedicate myself to simple tasks. Brushing the carpet, taking out the recycling, hoovering, washing, drying, sorting and putting away clothes: for weeks I feel like a live-in domestic help, backing up Rebecca as she works.
29 JANUARY
Money worries, taxes, troubles. I have spent and not saved, and now I must scrabble for cash, cut all spending, and work out a way out of debt. And somehow I must not let the worry make me a terrible father and a ghastly person to live with. I will fail at this – I am failing at this, I know. The negative, like an egg hatching, produces a kind of dark thing which sits in my mouth, spitting out gloom whenever it can. I try not to speak.
The Light in the Dark Page 5
