by Janet Neel
3
McLeish woke slowly at six-thirty the next morning with the alarm making its peculiarly irritating electronic noise. He forced his eyes open, remembering why he had set it. He had to meet Alan Fraser and Mickey Hamilton at eight a.m. at the foot of the cliff in the Coire Dubh. He gazed blearily at Francesca who was roaming round the room clad in decent white cotton knickers and a pair of purple and yellow football socks. She stopped in front of the mirror, thoughtfully holding a purple and yellow football shirt against her.
‘No,’ he protested, half awake but clear in his mind. ‘It looks terrible on you. Where did you get it?’
‘Tristram. It looked terrible on him, too, which is probably why it is hardly worn. He was only at Grantchester a year, and of course none of the others were at the same school.’
‘I should throw it away,’ he said, crawling out of bed, opening a drawer and looking with pleasure at the pile of ironed and mended shirts which Francesca had created out of the chaotic pile of dirty and buttonless laundry he had shamefacedly brought with him. He had been much touched by this unexpected piece of domesticity on the part of the fierce Francesca, and had taken it as a major compliment to himself. As she bent to pull up one of the awful socks, revealing a large name-tape indicating that the sock was the property of T. M. W. Wilson, he suddenly realized that there might be an alternative hypothesis which better fitted the observed facts.
‘Francesca, did you do all the sewing for the boys when they were at school?’
‘Mum did a lot. But getting four trunks organized at the beginning of every term needed all hands to the bucket. Why?’
McLeish, reluctantly confirmed in his suspicion that, so far from being treated with proper feminine deference, he had merely received the same matter-of-fact treatment as any brother bringing home a school trunk full of torn and dirty clothes, did not enlighten her. He relieved his feelings by vetoing both football shirt and socks. She gave him a thoughtful sideways look, but put on another shirt and white socks.
‘Why are you up so early?’ he asked, sorting kit into a rucksack, and she grinned at him.
‘I’m seeing you on your way with a good breakfast in you, same like it says in all the books. What about a cuddle?’ She walked into his arms and he held her, listening to her breathe.
‘Pity I decided to go climbing today.’
‘You’ll like it when you get there. Don’t let them bully you into going faster than you meant.’
An hour and a half later he was at the foot of the main climb, uneasily conscious of the weight of his rucksack and the stiffness of his back. He turned a corner and came on Alan and Mickey, sitting on a rock, warming themselves in the sun. Alan looked him over professionally, and told him to empty his rucksack so they could check his kit. Much to McLeish’s relief, Alan threw out some of the heavier stuff, providing substitutes from his own kit and observing that it was very interesting to be reminded what people had climbed with ten years ago.
‘I’ll lead, you in the middle, and Mickey can be last up, all right? Just you shout if I go too fast – I don’t know how strong you are so I’ll just set off nice and easy.’ There was no discernible trace of patronage in the matter-of-fact statement, but McLeish braced himself to do his best.
He wasn’t, of course, in this class, he decided 500 feet up, fingers jammed in a narrow cleft, his left foot pressed into a minute indentation in the rock as he felt with his right foot for the invisible ledge that had supported Alan Fraser at this point, but he was doing all right, climbing with borrowed skill behind this superb leader. Fraser looked like a dancer on the rock as he went up, cursing his bruised ribs, and McLeish felt clumsy and earthbound behind such elegance. But sheer strength also has a place in climbing, and McLeish, despite being a good thirty pounds heavier than either of the other two, held his place, and did not feel, at the top of the second pitch, that he had much delayed them. He arrived, panting but pleased with himself, on the narrow ledge which already contained Alan Fraser, who appeared to be hardly breathed but whose bandaged right hand was bleeding again, slowly soaking through the layers covering it. It was clear that sympathy, or even comment, would be unwelcome, so McLeish belayed himself on a a rock spike and peered out and down to where Mickey was crawling round a tricky overhang. Making a bit of a meal of it, he thought, then gripped the rope and braced himself back against the rock as he saw Mickey’s right hand come off and his shoulder swing away from the rock. The steadying pull on the rope brought Mickey back in, and he managed to get a secure grip, but he moved both feet and his left arm quickly to avoid the pressure on his right shoulder.
‘Which arm was it Mickey broke?’ McLeish asked, sotto voce, over his shoulder.
‘That one.’ Alan Fraser close beside him with a hand on the rope sounded sardonically amused. ‘I’d not ask him about it, though; he’s trying to get right to be in the running for K6.’ He peered round McLeish and advised Mickey to take his time, which had the effect of galvanizing the other man into activity. ‘Of course, we’re all wanting to go to K6.’
A scuffle as loose stones shifted on the rock beneath told them Mickey was just below them, and Alan said he would move on since there was not room for three on this ledge – or not when one was the size of McLeish. He set off up a long sideways fissure in the rock, moving easily, not bothering with pitons though McLeish felt one or two might not come amiss if he was going that way. On the heels of this thought, Mickey hauled himself on to the ledge, obviously in pain, sweating and greenish-white. McLeish wordlessly offered him half a Mars Bar which he took gratefully and ate in two bites, hunched over his sore shoulder.
‘You’re going well,’ he said civilly to McLeish, swallowing the second mouthful. ‘So’s that bugger up there. You’d never know he half killed himself two days ago. It was a bad fall, wasn’t it?’
McLeish confirmed that he had expected to find a corpse rather than a climber so lightly injured that he would be on the hill again two days later.
‘He’s a bloody fool to have been climbing alone in that mist.’ Mickey glanced up to where Fraser was just disappearing round a bend. ‘He’ll tie off there, so you’d better go.’
McLeish nodded, unhurriedly refastening his rucksack. ‘I understand you and Alan are going to the Himalayas?’
‘We hope so. We may have to buy our way in.’
‘Can you do that?’ McLeish asked, startled.
‘These days, yes. There’s a couple of American multimillionaires – they’re both not bad climbers – and they just put up enough money to buy an extra team of porters or a few more young climbers to carry loads, and that way they give the expedition leaders a better chance of getting people on to the summit. And the millionaires get to go along, too. It’s fair enough – I just wish I had the cash.’
McLeish nodded, and tucked this information away. He moved out on to the rock, and felt his left foot slip. Cursing, he recovered it, and shut out every consideration from his mind other than getting across that perilous pitch without disgracing himself. A difficult twenty minutes later he was once more beside Fraser on a narrow ledge, breathing rather too hard. Fraser waited courteously until he had his breath, then indicated with a downward jerk of his head three small figures spread out about fifty feet up from the bottom of the cliff opposite, a very much easier proposition than the side of the Coire on which they were engaged.
‘That’s the nursery slopes over there,’ he said, grinning at some private joke. ‘Hamish McDonald, who has the hotel is instructing,’ he added informatively. McLeish looked down to see what was amusing Fraser, and his eyes focused on a familiar splash of colour: the banned purple and yellow socks, separated from the vetoed purple and yellow shirt by a long expanse of leg and a very short, bunchy pair of purple rugger shorts, the whole spread-eagled hopelessly on a piece of cliff.
‘Francesca,’ he confirmed grimly, as the small figure struggled to unglue her right foot, being just audibly shouted at by Hamish for her pains.
‘She’s planning to surprise us. Decided to sneak off with old Hamish and learn to climb.’
‘You don’t need to feel rejected, Alan. The first walk she took with me, I’d no idea she’d never really walked anywhere, so I ran her off her feet. She got cold and wet and furious. She just isn’t going to let that happen again.’ He considered the distant purple and yellow figure broodingly.
‘I’ll tell you something just as funny.’ Mickey had managed the last pitch very much better, and was clearly feeling happier with himself. ‘The other girl is Sally Vernon – see, just now, coming round that buttress? You offered to teach her, didn’t you Alan? She’s decided to go for Hamish.’
A little sharp, thought McLeish, studiously watching the climbers on the other side and wincing as Francesca banged her knee on an awkward corner. Had she had the grace to consult him, he would have told her that shorts were not the most sensible wear for a beginner – a decent pair of sweat pants would have saved her a lot of grief. And she would boil in that football shirt of Tristram’s, serve her right.
‘So it is Sally,’ Alan Fraser said evenly. He looked sideways at McLeish and observed that the answer was maybe for them to collect some other women who would like to be taught how to climb, or taught anything else for that matter.
‘We’re wasting ourselves on that pair,’ McLeish agreed equably.
‘Oh, Alan’s not going to give Sally up,’ Mickey said, swftly. ‘She has a rich Daddy, which is what all us poor climbers need.’
Fraser continued to gaze across at the other side. ‘She’s engaged to be married to Mr Makin there, managing director and heir to Mr Vernon. She’s a nice girl.’
‘Too nice for you,’ Mickey said. It should have been a joke but suddenly it wasn’t and the air crackled with hostility. McLeish, who was watching Francesca make a nonsense of a comparatively simple stretch of rock, decided to take a hand.
‘Dear, oh dear,’ he observed mournfully, ‘Fran’ll be off in a minute.’ Both his companions, with some relief, peered across the gorge.
‘Sally’s not going too well, either,’ Fraser pointed out. ‘See Hamish trying to split himself between the both of them. He’ll be a weary man tonight, and him well north of fifty. Look at that!’ He raised his voice to a bellow: ‘Dirty old man!’ The unfortunate Hamish could clearly be seen to have taken a firm grip on the back of Francesca’s shorts, supporting her while she reclaimed her right leg. He abandoned her with a brisk pat on the bottom and slithered down to disentangle Sally, studiously ignoring the catcalls from the other side.
‘Good as a play.’ Mickey had recovered his equanimity. ‘Why, may I ask, is Francesca wearing Grantchester games strip?’
McLeish explained, tight-lipped.
‘Oh, Tristram Wilson – is she his sister? I was at Grantchester, in my last year, when he arrived with an enormous reputation as a treble. But his voice was breaking when he got there and so of course I never heard him sing. Is he any good now?’
McLeish, who was only musical to a limited degree, said that Tristram had turned out to be a tenor. The family view was that Perry’s voice was the better of the two, but that Tristram was the better musician.
‘If he is even spoken of in the same breath as Perry, he is good.’ Mickey sounded edgy, and Fraser suggested lazily that they might all go and assist poor Hamish in his thankless task.
‘She’d never forgive me,’ McLeish said placidly, and both younger men eyed him with something between pity and wonder.
‘Right, then.’ Fraser collected his thoughts. ‘We’ll go on up along there and try the pillars by the Black Lochan, if you’re still fresh, John? It’s a couple of miles along the ridge here, another Medium to Severe when you get there.’
McLeish, winding in rope and packing it in his rucksack, realized that they would pass just above the spot where Fraser had fallen three days ago, but decided not to mention it since the man himself appeared to be treating the whole incident as a mere social solecism. They took the narrow grass-covered ridge at a fast walk, then Fraser broke into a run as the ridge broadened out and sloped down for a few hundred yards.
‘Careful now, Alan,’ Mickey said, cheerfully, jog-trotting along easily. ‘You’d not want to trip over, would you?’
‘I just want to look and see what came loose.’ They trotted on, Fraser in the lead, all of them looking down at the smooth, worn, green surface, nibbled flat by the sheep who grazed nonchalantly on the edge of the cliffs. Mickey stopped to look at a rock, and Fraser slowed to let McLeish catch up.
‘Loose rock flaked off here?’
Mickey had come up with them.
‘Yes. Well, I suppose it happens.’ Fraser leant over the edge to look at the long scrape that marked his fall, stretching a hand back to McLeish to brace himself with the physical ease of a man who regularly trusts his life to others. McLeish slid his hand further up Fraser’s arm to avoid the scratched and swollen wrists, leaning back against his weight.
‘Jesus Christ but I was lucky.’ Fraser straightened up, the clear skin pale in the bright sun. ‘Well for me you and Francesca were there too – it would have taken the lads all their time to find me.’ He peered down again, braced by McLeish’s supporting hand.
‘Careful,’ Mickey said abruptly, and McLeish said calmly that he had him all right, and glanced over, surprising a look of wretched misery and pain on Mickey’s face. He looked back at the back of Fraser’s head, sharply adjusting his view of Mickey Hamilton. The poor chap was not only jealous of Alan Fraser as a rival climber, but he had complicated his life by loving him as well, to the point where he was agonizingly jealous of anyone who came near Alan Fraser, man or girl.
They moved on quickly to the foot of the pinnacle and Fraser considered it.
‘Do you want to lead?’
McLeish, fully conscious of the honour that was being done him, considered the pitch carefully. Though it looked straightforward enough, it was ten years since he had climbed seriously. It was irresistible, he decided; never mind these careful calculations.
Twenty minutes later they were at the top, and McLeish was out of breath but deliriously happy. He felt twelve feet tall, and well capable of running up the next pitch if need be. Fraser looking amused, said gently that he thought he’d better lead on the next one, since there was a difficult corner, but he would hand over on the final pitch. McLeish followed him up, visited suddenly with the strength of ten, and took over the last pitch with barely a rest, arriving at the top in a state of ecstasy. He waited for Alan Fraser to arrive, neat, contained and graceful as ever, blood seeping through the bandages on both hands but showing otherwise no signs of wear, and confided in him that Francesca would have to learn how to do this, or be prepared to sit by while he did, because having found climbing again he could not give it up.
‘You’re all right there,’ Fraser observed, amused. ‘She’s decided to learn – it’ll have been her, not Sally, who got Hamish away from the bar to teach them.’
‘Is Sally not well able to get her own way?’
‘Oh yes. Her parents wanted her in the business, but she held out, and did what she wanted at University. Then she trained in another firm. She’s now going into the family firm, but on her own terms, as a qualified engineer.’
McLeish was impressed and said so, and, feeling at ease with and deeply grateful to his companion, he added apologetically that despite Francesca he couldn’t get used to having girls doing men’s work, and making nothing of it.
‘No more can I. I’m used to wee girls who work in typing pools in Glasgow, and are easy impressed by the great climber, you know? I still feel they ought all to be in the kitchen.’
‘Barefoot and pregnant,’ McLeish agreed heretically, stretching long legs into the heather, blissfully happy in the bright day. How shocked Francesca would be, he thought smugly. As a man happy and fulfilled in his chosen career, he was not threatened by her ability and attack, and indeed rested secure in the knowledge that his attraction f
or her was precisely that he was engaged in the real world of action rather than the shadow world of political advice. But Fraser, now, without formal qualifications, without steady earnings, whose chosen way of life could be disrupted utterly by illness or accident, might well feel differently about a girl with a degree and a professional qualification, daughter of one of the country’s richest men.
‘I don’t want to marry,’ Fraser said to the sky. ‘I don’t want to do anything else but climb. Never have, and I don’t think I ever will.’ He sat up with a jerk, embarrassed. ‘Where’s Mickey? We need to rescue poor Hamish from those women.’
Mickey was climbing slowly, so McLeish and Fraser stood and cheered him on, feeling comfortably superior. It had been a wonderful day, McLeish thought, shouting insults across the intervening distance like a teenager. They gave Mickey a rest at the top, then they all abseiled down, making a race of it, and McLeish hit the ground at the bottom, and fell over because his legs had suddenly lost all strength.
‘Timber!’ Mickey shouted joyfully, and as they hauled him to his feet McLeish would have willingly forsworn his promising career as a detective for ever.
They trotted down the path, Fraser leading, apparently completely fresh, though cursing his strapped ribs. McLeish, jog-trotting just behind him, tried between gasps to express something of his joy in being helped to recover a much-loved skill, but Fraser brushed off all thanks, and they dropped out of the high valley, still running, breathless and scarlet with the sun and the day.
4
John McLeish woke to the sound of wind and rain; no point at all in getting up this early, he thought luxuriously, and looked speculatively across to the other bed in the room where nothing of Francesca was visible but the top of her head. He thought of getting into her bed and waking her up, but fell asleep on the thought and by the time he woke again, two hours later, she was up and eating breakfast in the living-room of their small cottage, with a coal fire blazing to counteract the damp that crept out of the old, thick walls in wet weather. Not the least of the incompatibilities between them, he thought, sleepily accepting a cup of tea, was the difference in their body clocks: Francesca was at her best in the mornings, while he was always wide awake and ready for another day’s work at nine in the evening.
