A-choo
The game carried them across Westmorland, past places with blunt and peppery names, like Ravenstonedale, Nettle Hill and Orton Scar, each song providing a vignette, so that by the time the scenery began to change, she knew about his Sunday school, his best meal and his worst hangover, the cousins in Dublin, piano lessons, his first crush and his voting history, each story inconsequential in itself but adding detail, as if increasing the resolution of a photograph. Such conversation always carried with it the danger of a sudden derailment – even quite late in her marriage, Neil could startle her with Strong Views on corporal punishment or some cruel school anecdote – but she found that she liked Michael’s picture more as it accumulated detail. There were no political upsets, he was principled but not pompous, and she even liked most of the music, though she found herself unable to separate it from his domestic past: this was the soundtrack to his life with Natasha and she was struck by the strange intimacy of listening to another couple’s music, the songs they’d cooked and eaten and made love to, as if she’d been caught going through their cupboards. There must have been associations he would rather not share. Certainly she was editing her own copy as she went (Six years is too much. Try four.) For the most part, the conversation was frivolous and self-conscious, like an episode of a short-lived podcast, but she told herself that this was fine, that conversation, like music, could serve different purposes, in this case distraction from vast distances.
Eventually the moors began to soften and buckle, then suddenly descend into a valley, like the crease in a book. They were approaching Eden, Michael said, and there was something of a paradise about the view from Smardale Gill, a great long-legged viaduct braced across the valley, an idealised landscape from an eighteenth-century painting.
‘Go on, then,’ she said. ‘I know you want to.’
‘What?’
‘Tell me about viaducts.’
He laughed. ‘It’s a railway bridge.’ Then, without catching her eye, ‘Are you getting the train tonight?’
‘One more day?’ she said, watching him. ‘If that’s all right with you.’
‘No, I’d like that. You’ll get to cross the Pennines. See the Dales. And you did bring twelve pairs of pants, so …’
‘Will I get to see the shirt again?’
‘What choice do I have?’
‘Okay. One more day and I’ll leave you.’ They climbed the valley’s flank and she felt they’d found their rhythm now, in every sense. Her feet and knees and shoulders no longer complained, smiling no longer felt unnatural and she’d abandoned her private language too, fwa and petah, flu-ah and cha-ha. She no longer fretted when they fell silent, though also thought there was a conversation that must be had. She felt the pressure of it building and a certain pleasure in this pressure, like the tickle of a suppressed sneeze. The trick would be not to sneeze in his face.
Fields, farmyards, the backs of houses, the high street. After the moors, the town seemed a metropolis of Methodist church halls and Co-ops and bakeries. The pub where Michael was staying was full or perhaps he just wanted to save her from another Black Dog, but a series of phone calls won her a coveted room in ‘the best BB in the Eden Valley’. A BB, she feared, was like staying with a great-aunt you’d never met, but Sunnyview Lodge was large and handsome, with a neat privet hedge and stained-glass transom, and there was something courtly and old-fashioned about being dropped off at the door like this.
‘I feel like a war-time refugee,’ she said. ‘With my London ways.’
‘Shall I pick you up at seven?’
Being picked up: it was courtly and old-fashioned, and she had a momentary worry that it might not be proper, a single young lady out after dark with a gentleman caller. This costume-drama atmosphere persisted as she was shown to her room – ‘Boots off, if you don’t mind’ – by a landlady with a perm like a mauve moped helmet, prematurely familiar so that Marnie was instantly ‘my love’ and ‘my darling’. There was a guest lounge with maps and guides, a full English breakfast, of course, and, in the Lavender Suite, a fireplace, a pale pink candlewick bedspread, a cast-iron bed frame, which had escaped being melted down to make Spitfires. ‘No guests,’ the landlady said, but there was a complimentary bottle of home-made sloe gin tied with a bow, home-made shortbread in a biscuit barrel, a selection of teas …
And suddenly she was alone in 1942. Only the rumble of lorries on the main road broke the illusion. Marnie boiled the kettle, charged her devices, lay on her bed and heard the bedsprings creak, wrenching her mind around to Twisted Night, which felt more forbidden than ever, as illicit as a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.