The Vow of Silence
Deep sleep. He had forgotten what a wild pleasure it was, and he found himself in high spirits, alone in the vast breakfast room. The kitchen had prepared a packed lunch, there was coffee in his flask, and it was all so wholesome and old-fashioned that he might have carried it in a spotted handkerchief at the end of a stick.
As the crow flew, his destination was just nine miles distant but he was not a crow and would have to zigzag for at least seventeen miles, more if the weather brightened and he decided to take the high route. There was mist in the air, the becks and waterfalls still flowing with the force of yesterday’s rain, and he had to stop frequently to clamber across the gills that crossed his path, plotting a route on slippery boulders and submerged stones, finding the momentum to swing to the other bank, willing himself light. There was always a point between his foot leaving the bank and landing on the slick black rock, when he felt a twist of panic, yet each time he found his footing, climbing steadily towards Lining Crag, looking back at the valley, saturated with all the potential of spring, the scent of wet earth and bruised leaves, a garden after heavy rain.
This was better, wasn’t it? In the presence of others, he’d been too concerned with their welfare and happiness, what to say and how to be. Now he could return to the original project, the thinking-through, the walking-off. Apart from bar staff and receptionists, he would not speak to another human being for eight days and, expressed like this, he felt a certain trepidation. ‘I understand you might want time to think,’ Cleo had said, ‘but why not just pay someone to lock you in their garage for a week?’
‘The views, Cleo!’
‘Views aren’t people. Lakes and rivers, they’re just things to point at. Besides, the two aren’t mutually exclusive. I remember when you liked other people.’
‘I do, in moderation.’
‘Hm. Well, at some point you’re going to have to let someone in.’ It was all too sombre for a last night. ‘Hey, Michael,’ she’d said, clutching his elbow, ‘let me in!’ and they’d laughed. ‘Well, not me, but someone.’
‘Hey, did you tell Nat I was doing this?’
‘Not her, though.’
‘I don’t mind, I just wondered.’
‘You know I can’t talk to you about Nat. I was talking about someone new.’
‘Bit too old for that now, I think.’
‘You are forty-two!’
Forty-two, product of six times seven, technically middle-aged but very much the beginning of that decade, and wasn’t forty-two a special number? Better still, if you subtracted childhood – another sixteen, no, eighteen years – then he was only twenty-four years into his adult life, and with this combination of arithmetic and numerology, he tricked himself into temporary youth, hopping from rock to rock, only losing momentum on the final scramble up to Grasmere Common. On the horizon, he could see a dot of red, the woolly hat of another walker, and he began to accelerate so that he might pass with the minimum of conversation. Heading to Grasmere? or Might brighten up later!, the kind of remark that’s a prophylactic against interest or engagement. But as he got nearer, he recognised the stance, doubled over and apparently calling the mountain a bastard. There was no way around and, besides, she’d seen him and now stood grinning at the summit, as if she’d pulled off some terrific practical joke.
He should have been annoyed but was not, not quite. He could postpone the vow of silence for a few miles more.