Climbers: A Novel (13 page)

Moving the books about was surprisingly hard work. I went over there with her in the afternoons, ostensibly to help choose fresh stock for the weekend, trundle it over to the Lock on an old porter’s trolley, and set up the stall; but really so that I could watch her move tranquilly from box to box, packing and unpacking them. The air was warm and full of the slightly sour smell apples have even when they are perfectly sound. Light flared in from the street outside. There was always a muffled banging from the building next door, as of masonry being chiselled away: distant, rhythmic, self-absorbed. Pigeons nodded and bobbed among the squashed fruit near the door, cooing hypnotically. I leafed through the books she offered me, looking for signs of her personality; or stirred with my foot the boxwood splinters, the discarded tangerine wrappers – blue tissue paper with a bright yellow sticker – on the dusty concrete.

‘Let me see . . . shall I sort out some paperbacks now, do you think? Oh look,
Nostromo
! I bought this in Ontario. Ontario! I’m not saying how many years ago that was.’

She was less interested in the books than the dates she found pencilled in them, the inscriptions and marginal comments, the yellowed newspaper articles that fell from between their pages.

‘I never got past page sixty-three,’ she said, showing me the corner of that page, still folded down. ‘My writing in those days! Horrible! Shall we sell it or keep it?’

‘Sell it.’

There was a barred window high up in one wall of the store, looking out over an overgrown privet bush and a yellowish-grey brick wall. The boxes underneath it were always damp: every week we would find two or three books which had developed a thick white mould. These we threw on the pile of rubbish – lemonade cans, chicken bones, cigarette cartons and black dustbin bags – which gathered daily in a corner of the wall by the doorway of Fishon Gowns on the other side of the road. Pauline called it ‘The Graveyard’. Every time you went out with something, pigeons walked purposefully over to see what you had; while others, sick and blackened-looking in the sun on top of the old air-raid shelter at the junction with Buck Street, stared down without interest. The buzz of a sewing machine came from the clothiers.

Pauline held out a copy of
Nothing
by Henry Green.

‘I decided to save this.’

At night after the pubs and dance halls had closed people ran down Inverness Street smashing bottles and shouting. Pauline would touch the side of my face. ‘Don’t you ever find yourself frightened?’ But she would never say of what. Her body looked white and strange to me in the sodium light that leaked round the edges of the curtains, browning the bedclothes and glittering off the old-fashioned Coca-Cola bottle she kept on a shelf. I had revised my opinion of her legs, her breasts; I thought she was probably thirty-five or thirty-six. The shouts of the market traders woke me before her in the mornings, and I rather missed that when we got married and moved further over towards Camden Road.

‘I’ve already got a daughter,’ she told me two or three weeks before the wedding. It wasn’t so much a confession, I recognised, as a challenge. ‘I don’t suppose it matters, does it? She’s called Nina, and she lives with her grandmother, very happily, and I visit them every time I go up for a PBFA book fair. It’s easy from Ilkley, and I can even manage Harrogate.’

‘I’m astonished.’

‘Oh, Nina and I are great friends.’

Nina, I soon found, was about two and a half years old, with blonde hair cut in an exact neat fringe above her eyebrows. Outside the house she wore velour dresses in pink, or a pinny full of poppies; patent leather sandals and white ankle socks: but for her curiously mobile features and rather direct grey eyes she would have been what her grandmother called ‘a proper little girl’. Inside, she dragged a plastic toy around the floor all day long on a length of yellow string. It made a desultory clicking sound and then more often than not fell over.

‘Twisted!’ she said. She looked at me and shrugged. ‘All gone!’

While I untangled it for her she lifted her arms in the air slowly. A series of indrawn expressions passed like grimaces over her face, which she turned upwards so that she appeared to be gazing into a corner of the ceiling: suddenly it split across the middle in a smile so wide and toothless, with her eyes so seamed and slitted-up above it, that it looked like an old woman’s.

‘Push me,’ she said ecstatically. ‘In the pushchair!’

‘Nina, we don’t need the amateur dramatics,’ Pauline told her.

Later, when Nina had gone to bed, the grandmother said, ‘Those dungarees are a big tight on her, but I don’t want to put her into ordinary trousers yet. It’s another step in age, isn’t it?’ She smiled at me. ‘I hate to see them grow up,’ she said. ‘Don’t you?’

Before she retired she had been a district nurse.

‘Out came the stomach pump!’ she would exclaim at breakfast. ‘
Down
went the saline. I kept thinking, “How long? How long?” because after half an hour, you know, you’re supposed to get them into Out Patients. But then – blork! – up it all came, twenty aspirins, enough for kidney failure.’ She illustrated this anecdote by nodding her head forward over the table and moving both hands rapidly away from her gaping mouth. ‘Blork! I was so relieved.’

I liked her. She spoke of a ‘sea fret’, meaning a cold mist; she described herself as having to wait all morning at the butcher’s, ‘looking like cheese at fourpence’. In age, her face had become pouchy. Her heavy spectacles, blue-rinsed hair and full-lipped, slightly slack mouth had given her the almost middle-European look many older Yorkshirewomen have. She loved Nina, but it was clear that when she looked at her she was seeing other children. She greeted with delight each remembered way of laughing or standing, of refusing to do something, by staring absently down the neat rather bleak garden at the flowering privet with its drift of fallen petals the colour of turned brass. It might have been a sister or a cousin she was seeing, in another garden fifty years ago; it might have been a younger brother caught picking marguerite daisies as big as fried eggs and turning his head away to shout, ‘It wasn’t me.’ She glimpsed their mannerisms intricated in every action. She watched the child each time it wept or waved goodbye – ‘Goodbye!’ – as if she was trying to decode it.

‘Is it you she sees,’ I asked Pauline, ‘when you were Nina’s age?’

‘You’re kidding yourself,’ said Pauline briefly, ‘if you think that,’ and after our second or third visit told me, ‘I’d rather go there on my own really.’ She added by way of explanation, ‘I think we should all have private areas in our lives.’

So I saw Nina less often than I might have. When Pauline was visiting I went to the cinema, or, left in charge of the books, mooned in the Winter Gardens, Ilkley. There on the collapsible shelving on either side of him, as he sat on his hard chair under the impressive gilt balconies, each dealer had his copies of Henry Williamson, Phil Drabble,
Mein Kampf
,
A Yorkshire Boyhood.
Storm Jameson was less popular than she had been. I got on with them perfectly well, though I found quite early that they knew nothing about the insides of books. There was always a bright strongly smelling yellow stream in the urinal; while outside, Ilkley rested from its labours in the sunshine: comfortably-off, turned inward to face the past, old women on the benches, old men in cream cotton jackets, the scent of the fading stocks in the little parks.

(I got my dinner at the fish and chip bar, where you could sit down, or American Style Eats. The life that goes on in cafes is domestic but minimal. Alone in one you pour your tea, unwrap a knife from a paper serviette that says ‘Forte’ or ‘Thank you, we hope you will call again at Marie’s’; there is as much comfort as you like to create out of the rattle of crocks or the slump of the waitress’s shoulders, and no further claim on you as there would be at home.)

We did all four of us go to the swimming baths together one day. Rain dashed against the windows. Shrieks and shouts echoed back from the walls like the noises in a zoo, running together under the roof into a kind of undertone, a repetitive endless wailing. It was the hour of the afternoon reserved for the under-fives. The mothers glanced vacantly at one another above the heads of their children: little wet tails of hair lay on the brown napes of their necks. The babies milled slowly with their arms, rotating in the warm blue water. They stared at the flickering reflections; or, very close and without recognition, at a coloured ball floating on the surface of the water. Toddlers jumped in from the side – again – again! – while the attendant balanced on a step ladder in his grubby white shorts, tennis shoes and wet fawn socks, cleaning the windows. DEEP END, it said above him in huge block letters.

‘Jump now Nina! Nina, jump!’

I sat on the bench provided for spectators, watching Pauline and her mother trying to persuade the girl to swim. Nina, though, clung to the steps and looked up and down the pool. ‘Nina! Nina!’ they called encouragingly, but she wouldn’t jump. Below her proper little nylon swimsuit, her legs looked white and waxy; grimaces replaced one another on her face. ‘Oh dear,’ said the grandmother. ‘Oh dear, what a baby.’ Pauline tried wading about with Nina in her arms, but even that was too close to the water, and she had to be put back on the steps. In the end she fell in from them, howling, and the grandmother tugged her about by the hands, reciting nursery rhymes.

Pauline, who had begun to look impatient, swam a length of the bath and then swung herself powerfully out of it at my feet. Immersion had brought the blue veins near the surface of her skin. ‘I can’t stand any more of this,’ she said, walking off to get changed. ‘Let her drown!’ She laughed down at the other women.

Light flickered up from the bottom of the pool.

I waited for them in the lobby with its pink-lilac walls and cold radiators, its machines for serving confectionery. Old-fashioned fire-extinguishers stood under the notice boards. ‘Don’t touch anything, Robert,’ said a woman’s voice from the changing rooms. ‘Now don’t touch.’ In the green gloom of a tank by the door, tiny ornamental fishes moved languorously, or flicked like knifeblades as they vanished among the bubbles and weeds. Pauline came out first.

‘I know how Nina feels,’ I said. ‘I hated it at that age too.’

She stared at me.

‘Water,’ I said.

‘What good will it do her to avoid things?’

Nina was always falling. When they took her to Whitby she fell in the sea. At Dainty Debbie’s – where her grandmother took her once a week to buy velvet dungarees and blue plastic frogs to hold her hair in bunches at the sides of her head – the mole-like woman behind the counter asked her if she wanted to be an actress when she grew up, and she fell off a chair. She fell out of bed in the middle of the night and crawled about under it in a kind of confused rage looking for a way out, while the grandmother called, ‘Nina! Nina! Where are you?’, imagining the child had somehow left the room. One evening, showing off before she went upstairs, she fell through the glass coffee table in the lounge. It broke into ten or a dozen pieces and one of them, about three inches long, went into the small of her back.

‘I hate these places,’ said Pauline. ‘They can always find something wrong with you if they try.’

We sat on the curved plastic chairs in the Royal Infirmary, drinking cups of coffee from a machine. Pauline had driven us up overnight in her old tinny Citroën. It was nine thirty and in the strong morning light everything already seemed to be too clean and sharp-edged. From one corridor you glimpsed another one like it at right angles – sun splashed across it to a notice and a yellow door opened on a tiled room. A figure walked past from right to left and then from left to right again. Off the waiting area, with its blue carpet, were other waiting areas where other women gazed expressionlessly at you from behind hatches and dispensary windows in a meaningless replication of space. I felt dizzy, and as if my skin was more sensitive than usual to the movements of the air.

We were there for an hour, while Pauline’s mother tried to find out what was happening. Once or twice we thought we saw her wandering about with a docket in her hand. She had been waiting all night for news. She peeped into an open office, went in, and then came out again. ‘Well then, is that all right?’ I heard her say, then, ‘But what’s his name? Oh, I see.’ She went away slowly down the passage, her bulk and her off-white coat giving her for once a defeated air.

‘I don’t know how she manages,’ said Pauline. ‘I wouldn’t know where to start.’

An empty wheelchair was pushed past.

‘There you are,’ she said, as if it contained a helpless patient only she could see. ‘You come in perfectly all right and go out wearing a neck brace.’

She shivered.

‘Are you cold?’

‘No, I’m tired. It’s that bloody little car.’

Voices came from another corridor.

When Pauline’s mother came back she said, ‘We’ll just have to wait.’ For a moment as she stood in front of me I thought she was an orderly or a nurse. It was the pale coat. In a place like that even somebody you know can be mistaken for an official: you don’t recognise them immediately, especially if they come from an unexpected direction. ‘We’ll just have to be patient.’ She looked very discouraged. She settled herself heavily in one of the plastic chairs. She wouldn’t have coffee from the machine; it was too strong. ‘I just think of her pulling that little aeroplane about on the floor,’ she said suddenly, as if she had been thinking about it all night, ‘when she should have been in bed.’

‘I can’t wait here,’ said Pauline. ‘I can’t bear it here another minute.’

‘She had us all wound round her little finger,’ the grandmother was saying as we got up. She called out after us, ‘I don’t think it can be the spleen. The spleen would have gushed.’

Outside the town, where the traffic signals were festooned against a lowering sky, the road climbed up between conifer plantations, through the odd prosperous village with its churchyard full of cedars, then over rough pasture and half-drained moorland. It was a curiously tiring landscape. Pauline drove for twenty minutes, slowly at first then faster. ‘I hate that expression,’ she said. ‘ “Wrapped around her little finger”.’ She studied the road as if it puzzled her, narrowing her eyes momentarily at each bend. ‘Poor Nina.’ On top of the moor the car rocked in the wind; rusting tractors, canted over in trenches they had dug themselves, lay scattered over the bare, peaty slopes; the road began its steep descent into the Vale of York.