‘That’s an odd thing to say, Frank. I do like it but that’s because my father used to tell me about the Arctic Circle, about Captain Cook and Franklin. Polar bears are beautiful beasts, but because I like to look at them in a picture does not mean I’d like to get anywhere near them and be eaten by them. Or see anyone eaten by them. Great heavens. I didn’t think that I was known as a person who likes violence and loneliness. Do you not look at this painting and see how bleak it is?’
Perhaps I sounded more indignant than I felt. In truth, I was merely embarrassed that he had exposed me so neatly.
‘Yes, yes I do. I’m terribly sorry, Grace. I didn’t mean to say – I expect that what I meant to say was that I’m attracted to the violence and loneliness in it and I was attributing my feelings to you. I thought that we shared something, you see. I do think of you as someone attracted to the elements. Well, it’s just that, when I used to come to tea, you were always charging off into the rain, when the others wanted muffins at the fireside. You seemed rather wild and your clothes were always a bit dirty with mud and now I’m being rude again and I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I apologize. I didn’t want to offend you and now I see by your expression that I have just made matters worse.’ He drew a sharp breath. ‘Grace, how is your father? Is he just as he always was?’
I liked to hear myself called Grace again. It was always Farringdon these days – Miss Farringdon from the lecturers – and it touched me to be called Grace. The North Tower bell began to toll and my friends would be putting their study things away, scrubbing the benches and heading for tea.
‘He’s frail but, in the way that I think you mean it, he’s the same. Actually, I haven’t seen him for two months. I should visit but—’
‘Quite. Grace, I say, it’s awfully good to see you again. I used to enjoy our talks when you passed my house sometimes. You always seemed so cheerful and hopeful, despite – well – sorry, I’m being rude again. You must think I came all this way with the sole intention of making impolite remarks, but nothing could be further from the truth. I have enormous respect for you and for your family.’
A scene lit up in my head as though Frank had popped a slide into a magic lantern. My family, in the drawing room, all frozen in a moment. Catherine was at the fireside, head bent over knitting needles, hair falling around her neck in copper coils. My father hunched under the standard lamp, elevated somehow in the little yellow coin of light, finger stump on the corner of the page of his book, ready to flick it over. My mother floated an inch or two above the carpet in the doorway, mouth open as though bringing some message. I remembered Frank on his last visit to our house, in the same doorway, his vain attempt to rescue Catherine.
‘So you’re happy here at college. Good. And did you all enjoy your excursion to the mountains?’
The change of subject was a relief. With my family I was the stubborn, unhelpful younger daughter, but Frank saw me as an independent, adventurous young woman and it seemed quite easy to be the person that Frank admired.
‘Yes, and we’re planning our next, and the next.’
‘Wilfred and I enjoyed ourselves magnificently In Oxford we’re usually in a room talking to each other, or waving our forks over dinner, and that is very well; but we found that in Wales we might walk for six or seven hours and not have passed a single word, and not realized it either. It’s a good thing for friends to do, isn’t it?’
‘I think so. Now, Frank.’ I leaned towards him for effect. ‘Wouldn’t you like to travel to such a place as this?’ I nodded at the picture. ‘Imagine. Not to be eaten by bears, of course, but to feel the terror of the landscape. You could paint it yourself.’
Frank shuddered, shook his head. ‘If you would lead the way, Grace, I might follow but I would hesitate to make my own way there.’
I was about to suggest that I would be glad to lead, but the moment was spoiled when Celia Horsfield entered the gallery with her mother and father. Celia was a few paces ahead of her parents, bleating loudly about which pictures they must like and which they mustn’t. Her black ringlets bobbed and bounced as she moved. She dictated a particular order for circulating the gallery and reprimanded her father for setting off in the wrong direction. I was reminded of a comment Locke once made – that the women who don’t want the vote are invariably the same ones who expect the trees and stars to bow to their wishes. Horsfield glanced at me, nodded, then fixed her eyes on Frank. Her eyebrows rose into a sly question. ‘Silly girl,’ I muttered. ‘How inconvenient.’ And I hurried out to the vestibule. A few minutes later Frank followed me and found me in my hiding place.
‘Grace, might we not find a chaperone so that we can continue this conversation over tea somewhere?’
‘I didn’t get the principal’s permission to have a visitor, so if I admitted to having one now you would be sent packing. Even brothers are frowned upon, never mind friends.’
‘It’s a pity.’
‘Besides, I have studying to do, letters to write. I am very busy today.’
Frank tipped his head to one side, grinned. ‘Come down, O Maid, from yonder mountain height.’
I backed into the corner. Frank glanced behind him, saw someone coming and stepped away until they had passed.
‘Tennyson,’ he said, when we were alone again.
‘What?’
‘My quotation just then. It was Tennyson.’
‘I know that.’
‘Sorry.’
We made our separate ways to the woodland behind the college and met by the pond. It was early evening, still light, but in that dark spot it was midnight. Frogs croaked and insects whirred above the water’s creased skin. Strange crackles and plops echoed around the pond and the trees. Frank reached for some bit of leaf caught up in my hair, pulled it carefully away and discarded it at my feet, like an unwanted garment.
‘Won’t do your reputation any good to go to dinner with the forest in your hair,Titania.’
I wanted to kiss him and almost did, but knew that I was supposed to wait for him to move first. Wind shook the trees and ran through my hair like soft fingers. It made me uneasy and a vague kind of anxiety made me stiffen slightly. He took my face in his hands, which was what I had wanted, but when he leaned to kiss me, I pulled back.
‘What?’
‘Catherine,’ I blurted, before I could stop. And I meant it, but I didn’t want to mean it.
Frank tried to mask his irritation with a smile. I wanted him to say that he would make it all right because, of course, I didn’t want to stop at all, but he said nothing. I had got it all wrong. I turned and stumbled over the rough ground, through the trees to Main.
The corridors were so long that if someone were crossing at the other end you could not recognize who it was. I have often dreamed of these corridors since, the wide staircases, the doors on either side to bedrooms, study rooms, classrooms, the many empty rooms on the corridors above, all with their fireplaces, windows, huge mirrors, waiting for future students to arrive and move in. Sometimes, when I have not been entirely happy, I have dreamed that I could go secretly to one of those empty rooms, light a fire in the hearth and curl up under a silky eiderdown. I wanted my bed now but, before reaching my room, Locke came from her study, snatched my arm and pulled me in.
‘Was it Frank Black?’
‘Horsfield told you?’
‘She’s telling everyone.’
I fell onto Locke’s chair, put my head in my hands then laughed.
‘He came, but there’s nothing to warrant gossip. Actually, it was very awkward and uncomfortable. I shan’t see him again, because of my sister, so it’s for the best but – ’ I stopped for breath – ‘I’m disappointed.’
‘I think that’s a pity when he likes you so much. I suppose he’s already left?’
‘He’s on his way to the station now.’
‘Farringdon, you fool, go after him. Go to the station now and talk to him. You can sort out the business with your sister later.�
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‘But what shall I say?’
‘Whatever you think of. Go on and catch him.’ She pushed me towards the door, opened it. ‘You’re not a coward.’
No, never a coward.
Frank was on the platform. He looked at his watch and glanced along the railway tracks. The train wasn’t due for ten or fifteen minutes. I wanted to speak to him, but I didn’t know what to say so I walked off. I loathed myself. I said aloud that I was not a coward, turned on my heel, returned to the platform and then walked away for the second time. Why could he not have seen and come after me?
I lingered for some time. Small, hard lumps of rain fell. Frank put up his umbrella, lifted it over his head. I watched until the train puffed in with its whistle and shrieks, unable to go to him, unable to call out his name but not ready to leave.
Frank and I were to have so many goodbyes in the time we knew each other. I believe that’s why I was paralysed that afternoon. I stood there at the platform’s end and I slipped a little outside time, just fell out of it all. I saw all the many partings to come and the pain that we would go on to endure. I actually saw them, jagged fiickerings of ourselves meeting and parting in light and dark. I was weighted with sadness and I was back in the picture gallery vestibule, watching but not having. Frank and I were connected but we would never be happy and I knew it, or thought it, as I stood and watched him under his umbrella. I should have spoken to him or gone away, not spied on his private moment but it was love, or the beginnings of love, so I exonerate myself. But it’s nothing now. The memory is grey as rain.
I wonder what Frank would say of our secret meeting if he were alive to tell me. He would surely admit that he went to Wales that spring with the intention of seeing me, and that Wilfred was in on the plan. I think he would also acknowledge that he saw me watching from the end of the station platform. I’ve considered it over the years and I cannot see how he could not have known that I was there. Yes, he saw me seeing him and, I imagine, he was amused but shy. I think he would have been amused.
Now he comes to me at night, when the wind roars, and we have nowhere to shelter except the dank rooms in my mind. Frank, my love. I would tear off all my limbs and bleed for eternity if I could return to that afternoon at the station. If I could step forward onto the platform and say your name, what would happen to us?
No, I should not want to go back, for I would not be able to do better even after these decades of life in between that ought to have taught me something, and yet I want it. I am still greedy and I want it.
I wrote to tell him that I was going with my friends to climb in the Alps. He replied the next day and wished me the best of luck. Perhaps I hoped that I would descend from grassy foothills to find Frank in the garden of my hotel and that, as we had in Wales, we might walk together alongside a deep stretch of water and we would talk of wild places.
Frank, my love, kneels at my feet. We’re in a sort of boat, you see. There is no sky. He shouts directions, instructions and warnings as the spray spatters his sou’wester and his ravaged, ungloved hands. Panic roughens the edges of his voice, but it’s all right. It is all right. The bad nights are not here. They have melted into the sea, some of them, and the others have floated into oceans of boiling green. I know where I’m headed. I always know. This is how we get through the nights now, Frank and me. This is how we always – we always . . . Ah no. I thought. . . No, of course. But where did I . . . ? Oh, Catherine.
Chapter Twelve
Dear Catherine,
If you ever come to London and think of visiting me, do not imagine for one second that you will be welcome. To stay away for fifteen years and never write a letter? It is unforgivable. I always apologized to you – for everything I ever did and more – but it is you who should have said sorry. The newspapers wrote many dreadful things and could you not have defended me? Could you not have stayed with me when I most needed you and ended up trapped in this vile house? And after all the years that I tried to help and look after you. You knew perfectly well that I was – am – innocent but you were too cowardly to help me. Well, I tell you something, dearest sister. You can stay in Scotland and mourn nasty George for ever, as far as I am concerned. I don’t care what happens to you. We are not sisters.
I hope Edinburgh is cold and damp.
Yours,
Grace
And that goes straight into the fire. Already I don’t mean it. I am in the past with all the lights blazing, almost blinding me. Only when I reach the end will I know what I am supposed to say to Catherine, but I do want her to visit. I do.
Father died, just where I am sitting now, in 1911. Catherine found him on the hearth rug in front of his chair, as though he had stood one final time, stumbled forward to get somewhere and collapsed. After the funeral I stayed at home for a few weeks, miserable with Mother and Catherine. Without my father at the centre of every activity in the household, no one knew quite how to behave or what to do. I sometimes sat in his chair and read his books, trying to go a little way into his mind, continuing our arguments from his point of view, then mine, as though I might now be able to resolve them, not quite believing that my father and I would never quarrel again. Even now, so many years since he left us, I scarcely believe it.
Mother and Catherine assumed that I had left college for good and kept asking why my trunk had not arrived. When I told my mother that I had no intention of giving up my degree, she thought that grief had made me mad and threatened to call the doctor. She said she had seen me fumbling around the hall, clutching the hand compass and taking bearings as though I had lost my way. It was true that she had seen me with the Brunton but I was never lost. I simply liked to hold and read the thing, and it had belonged to Father so it gave me some comfort. Occasionally I went around the house and garden with it, but only as a mild distraction. When I returned to college, I took the Brunton with me and left my mourning clothes at home.
Catherine and I inherited a sum of money each, with a letter from Father telling us that it would be of help when we married. I read the letter twice to be sure that marriage wasn’t a condition of the legacy – it was not – and I used most of it to pay my debts to Aunt Edith and to Parr. I put the remainder aside for my trip to Switzerland.
Locke, Hooper, Parr and I took rowing lessons on the Thames. We performed exercises in the college woodland, to the bewilderment of other students and, once or twice, we went out at night and practised hauling ourselves up trees with ropes. The trees were not particularly high and it bore no resemblance to rock climbing, but we did everything we could think of to stay strong and develop our coordination ready for the mountains. We attended our usual classes in the college gymnasium, where a lecturer led gentle exercises in balance and agility with Indian clubs and wands. We cycled, walked, swam and, when we were giddy with the whole thing – yet needed more – went skiing down the staircases of Main with a long tea tray under each foot. It never worked well but it started quite a fashion among the students, until someone crashed into Miss Hobson at the bottom of the stairs and the practice was banned.
Parr took us to a lantern lecture at the Ladies’ Alpine Club headquarters in the Grand Central Hotel at Marylebone, and to talks at her mountaineering friends’ homes. We sat in rooms with men and women who recounted their climbs in the Alps, the Himalayas, of treks through the jungle, across the Near and Middle East, into deepest South America. They told of deadly insect bites and fevers, encounters with wild animals, hostile tribes and friendly tribes. Corners of the world uncovered themselves to reveal vivid flora and fauna we had never known existed. I took careful notes and tried to ask informed, pertinent questions, but in my imagination I was already a thousand miles away.
After an enlightening discussion on the ill effects of sunburn, the Society made a trip to a mountaineering store near Piccadilly to buy goggles and sun masks.
‘Teddy will appreciate it if I don’t return as a berry.’ With her skin already brown and freckled, I thought Hooper more egg-lik
e, but not unattractive. I was more concerned that she would change her mind and decide not to come. She sometimes said that she was so afraid of the Alps that she lay awake all night worrying. When she did sleep, she had nightmares about the mountains, about Teddy hating her strange hobby.
‘My lover couldn’t care less,’ Locke replied. She was probably talking about Horace, though there may have been a new beau by then. ‘But sunburn sounds unpleasant.’
‘And I need to stay pale so that my mother and sister don’t guess where I’ve been.’
‘Farringdon, you’ll have to tell your family when we go to Switzerland. It would be irresponsible to keep it from them.’
‘I can’t tell them. They’re in mourning weeds and think that I am too.’
Parr adopted what Locke called her ice-axe tone. All warmth and colour drained from her voice and what came out was a hard, clipped sound. ‘Then you should stay at home. It’s perfectly possible that you could be seriously injured or killed on the mountains. Have you even thought about that?’
‘Of course I have.’ But, no, I never thought that I would come to harm. In my imagination I was always surviving, rescuing weaker travellers, and returning weary but safe to cheering crowds, newspaper reporters and photographers. Perhaps this had come from my childhood fantasies of rescuing the three sailors in China but, whatever it was, I was not worried about dying.
The Ladies’ Alpine Club held an exhibition of mountaineering equipment and we went together on a Saturday. I remember it as a heady, sweet day and, in my giddiness, I persuaded my friends that we must each purchase a green Tyrolean hat. We stood in a row before a mirror and put them on. We laughed at our reflections – even Parr – but, I must say, the hats were rather fetching. We did not stop but went off to examine a range of new, lightweight tents. The stall-keeper, a genial young man who did not laugh at us or even express surprise at the sight of four mountaineering women in identical green hats, explained the equipment. The Whymper tent slept four, but the Mummery, which slept two, could be folded small enough to go into a pocket. I asked him to demonstrate this and he did so, two or three times, pronouncing that we lived in extraordinary times with such advances in the manufacturing of expedition equipment.
When Nights Were Cold Page 12
