by Paul Watkins
The result was that while they ploughed ahead with their lives, I was content to drift, without the ambition, lust for money, or the need for recognition which so underpinned these other lives that anyone not caught up in the same pursuit must, these people assumed, be either mad or lazy or hiding even greater ambitions than their own.
There was a faint squeaking sound behind us, and a moment later Darcey Kidder rode past on her bicycle. She was heading alongside the playing fields to the little house she rented on the other side of the road which bordered the school grounds.
Higgins could see her house from the living room of his flat above the school library. The ceiling of this flat was sharply angled, since it was, in effect, the attic of the building. This meant that Higgins spent most of his time moving around it hunched over like Quasimodo. Despite the ridiculous level of discomfort, he kept the room because it meant that he was, by his own calculation, only fifteen seconds in a flat-out run from his classroom. This meant he could roll out of bed at 7:50 for an eight o’clock class and still get there on time.
Higgins held weekly blackjack tournaments in this flat for anyone who cared to join. Usually, it was just him and Houseman. Only rarely did I give up my Saturday evenings to join in, since I saw enough of them during the week.
Even while we played cards, Higgins kept a huge pair of binoculars on the table. They were made by Busch-Rathenow near Berlin, and the right lens was fitted with a ranging grid. He had gotten them off a German artillery officer at a place called Sidi Rezegh in North Africa. The artillery position had been overrun and most of the crew had surrendered, but the officer had pulled out a broom-handled Mauser and, aiming wildly, shot the cap off Higgins’s head. “It was a new cap, as well! I’d just had it sent down from Hobson’s!” he’d told me. There was no need to ask whether the German’s binoculars had outlasted him.
Now and then, Higgins would lift the binoculars and peer through his living room window at Darcey Kidder’s house across the playing fields.
He never saw anything except a light behind closed curtains, but when her lights went out, he would announce with a sigh, “She’s gone to bed.”
Then each of us would silently imagine what it might be like to lie beside her, to hear her breathing, and to see, in the soft glow of the streetlamp through the curtains, the pulse of her heart beneath the milky skin of her neck.
“Tamam,” Houseman would say quietly. This meant—in Arabic, I think—that everything was as it should be.
Stanley watched Miss Kidder floating past, his eyes fixed hungrily upon her.
“One at a time, Stanley,” I said.
“Right,” he said.
“I’m glad you’re here, Stan,” I told him.
“Yes?”
“I’m actually a bit worried about your uncle.”
“Are you?” he laughed. “Well, you’re always fussing over people. But I wouldn’t trouble yourself about him.”
I told Stanley about finding Carton in the alleyway.
Stanley shrugged it off. “He’s always coughing. He can’t help it. I think he spends a fair amount of time spluttering away out there in the alley. That’s where he goes to be alone.”
“It’s just that he seemed …” And then I did not know how to go on.
Stanley waited patiently for me to find the words.
“Fragile,” I said, eventually.
Again, he laughed at me. “I’ve heard him called a lot of things, but never fragile. Good Lord, William, he’s as tough as old boots! He’s practically indestructible. He gets in his dark moods from time to time, but he’s not fragile. There’s nothing wrong with him that hasn’t been wrong for as long as anyone can remember. That’s just who he is. Trust me.”
I had no choice but to do just that. I hadn’t seen Carton in years, and Stanley saw him all the time. Who was I to guess at the old man’s mental state? I felt a little foolish even for bringing it up. “So how are you and Miss Paradise?” I asked, glad to change the subject and guessing that this was what Stanley had come to discuss.
But instead of launching into his usual tirade, he merely shrugged, jangled the change in his pockets, and jabbed at the ground with the toe of his shoe.
“Oh,” I said sarcastically, “so now, after years of telling me everything whether I wanted to hear it or not, you have decided to tell me nothing.”
“This time is different. I told you it was.” He was watching the groundskeeper rather than making eye contact with me.
“She’s not like those Melancholy Angels,” I admitted. “But what do you see in her? That’s what I don’t understand.”
The groundskeeper turned and began to make his way slowly back along the length of the cricket pitch, white paint striping the close-cropped grass. With each footstep, the brass watch chain hanging from his waistcoat pocket swung and glinted.
Stanley began to pace along the white line of the cricket-pitch boundary, as if walking a tightrope. “All the other women have shared two things in common. They all knew exactly what they did not like, which amounted to just about everything. The other thing they had in common was that they had absolutely no idea what they did like. They could have anything, of course. If their rich parents didn’t pay the bill, they could easily find someone gullible like me who would. But they didn’t know what they wanted. Mostly they waited for other people to tell them what they should want, and then they wanted that for a while before moving on to something else.”
I tried to recall the faces of the women who had passed in and out of Stanley’s life. They flickered before me like a shuffled deck of cards.
“But Helen knows exactly what she wants. How can I not fall in love with that? How can this time not be different?”
Everything he said made sense. I understood perfectly why Stanley could become attached to someone like Miss Paradise. But in the end, it would make no difference. This time seemed as doomed as all the rest. More doomed, even, if that was possible. I could see it all happening in slow motion. The uncorrectable imbalance of emotions. The inevitable disaster, despite the promise that this time would be different. With Stanley, every time would be different. But the difference this time would be that his heart might get properly broken.
“And she likes me,” said Stanley. “It’s not the same old dog-and-pony show where I spend all my time trying to keep them amused because I know they’ll leave the minute they get bored. That was why I wanted you to stay last night. So you could see that we really do get along together.”
I turned on him. “But why?” I demanded. “I see why you like her. But …” I couldn’t even say it.
Stanley had to finish the sentence for me. “Why does she like me? Is that what you can’t figure out?”
I stared at the ground. “I’m sorry,” I muttered.
“Why don’t you ask her yourself?”
“Oh, right,” I muttered.
“No, I mean it. She said she wanted to meet you.”
“Why didn’t you mention me to her before? She said she thought I had died in the war.”
Stanley stopped on his tightrope, turned, and began to walk the other way. The soles of his shoes were powdered white from the dried paint. “I don’t know,” he huffed. “I asked her about her and she asked me about me. I don’t know any of her pals, either. But now that we are getting along so well, she wants to know what kind of friends I keep. And what’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing. Sorry.”
“That’s the way it goes with relationships. You ought to have one someday, and then you’d know.”
“All right!” I held up my hands in a gesture of surrender.
“Anyway, you’re all set for lunch on Saturday at the Climbers’ Club. She’s giving her last lecture. You’re to meet her afterwards in the dining room.”
The school bell rang.
“I have to go,” I said.
Stanley slapped me gently on the arm. “You’ll be there, right?”
I nodded.
/> “Try not to exhaust yourself saying nice things about me,” said Stanley. “If the subject comes up, I mean.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll tell her you’re magnificent.”
“Do you promise?” he asked suddenly.
“Of course I promise. Don’t be ridiculous.”
We set off across the courtyard in different directions, Stanley towards the street and me towards the classrooms, where students shambled in, carrying their bundles of books.
“Remember your promise!” called Stanley, as he disappeared through the school gates and out into the constant rolling thunder of the city.
WALKING DOWN THE PORTOBELLO ROAD, I felt the particular energy of London on a Saturday afternoon. Sunday, it would be different, and during the week it would be different once again. But Saturdays had something special and I loved them the best.
Almost every Saturday morning during the term, I caught a No. 10 bus from just outside my flat, which would bring me to the top of the Portobello road. From there, I’d stroll down the hill to Ladbroke Grove. I could have gone straight to Ladbroke Grove on the No. 17 bus, but I liked to wander with the Portobello crowds past antique stalls, the vendors lost in their obsessions of leather suitcases, binoculars, fountain pens, and walking sticks. Beyond them, where the road leveled out, I passed by fruit sellers with cigarettes wagging from their lips who called out in almost indecipherable Cockney, praising the ripeness of tomatoes, the newness of potatoes, the freshness of leeks.
When I reached Ladbroke Grove, I would roam among the old bookstalls, returning home after dark with bread and cheese and a wicker-wrapped bottle of Italian wine to keep me company. Then I would spend the night reading whatever dusty volumes I had bought that day, drinking the wine from the bottle, and eating lumps of cheese off the end of an Opinel knife.
During the school year, St. Vernon’s did not allow us much free time, so I guarded my Saturday afternoons carefully. But today was different. Miss Paradise was waiting.
The dining room of the Climbers’ Club was small, with walls the color of custard. There were no windows, which made the place feel stuffy. This was offset somewhat by several paintings of mountain landscapes. One showed the Bellevue Spa at Kleine Scheidegg, hunched in the shadow of the Eiger. Another had a view of the Matterhorn from the chapel at Platten, and there was a photograph of the shrine to Our Lady of the Snows at Lac Noir, its sepia print glowing in dusty brown light.
All of the tables were filled. A hum of talk mixed with the clink of spoons in soup bowls.
At the long table, which ran the length of the left side of the room, sat Carton with his twelve guests.
I had forgotten about Carton’s Saturday lunches, and quietly cursed myself for not remembering.
Beside Carton sat Archie in his gray suit with his red skull-and-crossbones tie.
Carton saw me standing in the doorway. He grinned and raised his battered tankard in salute, then drank from it and grinned at me again.
It sent a shudder down my back. His bared teeth looked the same as Archie’s, and I thought back to that night in the alley, when Carton’s eyes had vanished in the shadows. Despite Carton’s grim bravado, that strange fragility I’d glimpsed in him before was still there now. It seemed to hover around him, like the smoke of his cigars. But I didn’t know what it meant, or if it was just my imagination. There was nothing I could say about it anyway, not without feeling like a fool, as I had done when I’d mentioned it to Stanley.
I scanned the room until I saw a woman sitting by herself at a table near the kitchen door. It took a second glance before I realized this was Miss Paradise. She was not wearing her heavy mountaineering clothes this time. Instead, she had on a navy blue dress with a white collar and white fringe on the ends of the short sleeves. Her face was almost hidden by a small white cloche hat, which had a flower tucked into the brim.
She was studying the menu card, but looked up and smiled when I walked into the room. It was a lovely smile, so open and honest and unlike Carton’s skull-smirk from the other side of the room that the first thought through my head was, Oh dear, I am going to fall in love with this woman.
“I was afraid you wouldn’t show up,” she said.
“Why?” I asked as I took my seat opposite her.
“Because then I’d be summoned over to Carton’s table to hobnob with his guests and have my picture taken with his skeleton. Which smells, by the way.”
I didn’t want to get started on Carton. “That is a very pretty dress,” I said.
“A bit of a change from that frumpy climbing gear, isn’t it? The mountaineering kit was Carton’s idea.” She handed me the printed menu card. “I think he wanted to give the impression that I was just in off the glaciers. I told him I’d rather not, but as I suspect you know by now, he’s not very easily swayed. I just keep telling myself that each lecture I give, no matter what gear I’m sporting, earns me enough to spend another week up in the mountains.”
I liked her already, and I began to wonder if I could get through this lunch without liking her too much. The next hour passed quickly, as we exchanged stories of the lengths to which we’d gone to earn money for our various expeditions. I told her about selling my blood and she gave details of a disastrous month as a pastry chef in Edinburgh, which ended with her being not only fired but banished from the whole of Scotland by the hotel manager.
We talked about the cafés of Chamonix, the endless train ride down to Switzerland, and other things we had in common, each of us recalling the most minute details of this other life we had both lived but shared only as memories. I barely noticed the metallic-tasting vichyssoise and the lamb with a bitingly acidic mint sauce that passed under my nose during the course of the meal.
She spoke about the heavy photographic equipment, the way the cameras would seize up in the cold, and trying to reload film canisters with frozen fingers.
“But the results were worth it,” I said, remembering the photos I had seen in the lecture room when we’d first met.
She smiled. “Now they seem worth it, but I’m not sure you could have convinced me of that at the time.” She reached down under the table and retrieved a leather folder from where it lay at her feet. “Look at this one,” she said, and laid before me an eight-by-ten-inch photo.
I recognized it immediately. It was Carton’s Rock, taken from the edge of the glacier. The rock looked like the gnarled end of a chisel, streaked with snow, the precipice as black as ink and the snow like porcelain. I knew she must have walked up the same gravel road I had traveled with Sugden, Forbes, Whistler, and Armstrong.
It was a brilliant photograph. She had captured perfectly the fierce loneliness of the place, which spoke as much of the fear of mountains as the lure of those remote places. I glanced across at her, wondering if she knew I had been at that same spot where she’d taken the picture, and what had happened there.
“It’s Carton’s Rock,” she said. “I’m giving it to Mr. Carton as a present. He hasn’t seen it yet.”
I realized that she did not know. Not yet anyway. But it was bound to come out sooner or later, and I was already dreading the moment when it did. I handed back the photo. “He’s going to love that,” I said.
“Too bad I didn’t get any closer,” she said. “I hear that the view from the top is one of the great wonders of the world.” Helen went on to explain how she had used a red filter to highlight the contrast between the black and the white. “That’s a trick I learned from studying Ansel Adams,” she explained. She was just starting to tell me who Ansel Adams was when I asked her something that had been on my mind since I’d first set eyes on her.
“How did you ever get started in mountaineering?”
“Well.” She rested her elbows on the table and folded her hands together. She looked around the room and back to me again, as if she had been searching for the right place to begin. “I started climbing because I was told that I shouldn’t.” Then she raised one finger, correcting herself. “No. A
ctually I was told that I couldn’t. When I was eighteen, I went on holiday with my family to Switzerland, where my two brothers and my father planned to climb the Schilthorn. When I asked if I could come along, my father said absolutely not. I was expected to stay in Grindelwald and keep my mother company. My father went on to say that no woman should attempt a climb like that and, even if they could, it would be unladylike. So the next year, I went back and climbed it by myself. After that”—she let her hands fall open—“I didn’t care what people thought about a woman climbing as long as I could keep at it.”
It was only then that I began to see how much she and Stanley had in common. Both had been pressured to conform to the wishes of their families, and each had responded by doing the opposite. It seemed a great and unfair irony to me that the same stubbornness which drove her towards mountaineering had helped to push Stanley away from it, by refusing to become his uncle’s protégé.
By the time we’d finished our meal, the lunchroom had emptied out, and the waiter was staring at us desperately through the porthole window of the kitchen door.
Taking pity on him, we had our coffee in the main room, beneath the jutting heads of the trophy animals, who seemed, despite the blank stare of their glassy eyes, to be listening to every word we said.
“Stanley thinks the world of you.” She dropped a little jewel of brown rock sugar into her coffee cup.
“We’ve known each other forever,” I said.
“He’s quite charming,” she said, raising the cup to her lips.
I felt a twisting in my chest. I wished we were not talking about Stanley. Just then, I wished that Stanley did not exist. I stared at her straight nose and her softly rounded cheekbones and the way her eyes closed a little when she smiled, and I wondered suddenly if I would ever again be content to wander home alone on a Saturday night, with my bottle of wine and a crumbly-paged book for a companion.
