‘You Are Here’
She’d have been hard-pushed to find it on the map but there must have been a point where she thought she was falling in love, somewhere between Marrick and Marske perhaps, in an area of woodland, shady, damp and pungent with wild garlic, where the path had started to rise once more above the river. No majestic vista, just a steep, muddy incline, dim and chilly on an overcast day.
The whole morning had been like this, teetering uncomfortably in single file along the verges of busy B-roads, then picking their way through scrappy, litter-strewn birch woods, past signs that warned against fly-tipping. The solemnity of the previous day had dissipated but gloom seemed to linger in their surroundings, the grey sky sagging above them, like an old plaster ceiling that would surely collapse soon.
‘I’m sorry it’s not prettier,’ he said, ‘on your last day.’
‘I don’t mind,’ she said, meaning it, happy in his company. Before long they left the river and roads behind, clambering up through Steps Wood, so-called because—
‘Is it because of the band Steps? Was the band Steps formed in these woods?’
‘If you don’t want to know—’
‘Okay, is it because of all the steps?’
‘Because of these flagstones, so the nuns could get from the abbey to Richmond. These are called Nuns’ Steps.’
‘Which was also the original name of the band Steps,’ she said, and he smiled and she thought, Look at us, sparking off each other. ‘Can we stop for a second?’
They stood for a while, her hand on his shoulder, his on hers. It was exactly the kind of place where they might kiss and she looked up and waited. ‘How are you feeling?’ he asked.
‘Like a sweaty nun.’
‘It’s all downhill from here.’
‘Yes, you keep saying that and it never is.’
‘One or two small climbs, but I promise we’ll be in town by tea-time and you can be on your way.’
‘Sounds like you’re trying to get rid of me!’ she said, a blatant feed line but they moved on. She was becoming increasingly aware of the clock, of it counting down with the miles, of what needed to be said. Instead they descended into a valley, lapsing again into companionable silence. Note: ‘companion’ sounds like a golden retriever. ‘Comfortable silence’ better? In the long, dead hours with Neil, at the breakfast table, in front of the TV or in restaurants, she’d sometimes tried to persuade herself their silence was to be expected, because what was there to talk about? It was not even silence, more of a drone, the humming of a pylon or the buzz of a fridge as she wondered, How do I break this? What can I say? But in these last few days with Michael the silences were no more alarming to her than the gaps between songs, easy and ordinary because soon another song would start.
Halfway across a meadow he stopped, finger in the air. ‘Hear that?’ It was a bird’s call, a little upwards scale and then a wheeze. ‘What’s that?’
‘Chaffinch?’
‘No.’
‘Blue tit? Starling? Is it a kestrel?’
‘You’re just listing birds.’
‘Okay, tell me, nature boy.’
‘That is the song of the yellowhammer. It’s very distinctive, it’s meant to sound like words, a phrase. Listen. What’s the phrase?’
She listened. ‘Is it “I like you but just as a friend”?’
‘It’s “a little bit of bread with no cheese”.’
She laughed. ‘Yeah, right.’
‘I know.’
‘The bird’s not talking about cheese. It doesn’t understand the concept of cheese.’
‘I realise that. It’s, you know, country lore.’
‘Ah, country lore!’
Of course conversation wasn’t everything and passion would have to be part of it too, and it was true, that if forced to describe ‘a type’, she would not automatically have gone for ‘middle-aged geography teacher’. This was not love at first or even fourth sight and when she tried recalling his face on the train, it had a blurred quality, like something seen through a steamy window. Now she could see it when she closed her eyes – she’d tried – and perhaps a face was like one of those magic eye pictures that everyone had been crazy about as kids, made of abstract shapes and patterns, perhaps the trick was simultaneously to concentrate and relax until it becomes clear and you think, There it is. Concentrate and relax. Certainly she loved looking at him now, his mouth, his eyes, his body too, which she could piece together from glimpses, not one of those silly, sleek, lightly muscled things, but appropriate: the body of a once-gifted amateur footballer who now plays a little badminton. Again she thought of the Lavender Suite, his leg between hers, his hand beneath her dress. Was she meant to be looking at this tree? Look at the tree, Marnie. The tree. Concentrate and relax.
Or perhaps she’d simply fallen for this landscape, rolled him into the fells and the forests. She’d never met someone on holiday but knew that such relationships did not always survive a change of background. She tried to picture him away from the moors and mountains, dropping him into her world like a figure in an architect’s model. Here was Michael outside Brixton tube station; here he was outside the Ritzy Cinema. Brockwell Park seemed a little restricting but perhaps she could take him to Kensington Gardens, let him run around. In her local Italian, she imagined him alarmed by the prices but saying nothing. Now here he was climbing the stairs to her flat behind her. He seemed larger in a small room, but now he was at her table laughing, and now in her bedroom, kissing her, lifting her dress over her head, yes, that all worked, that all made sense.
Of course there might be a tweak or two. She felt ambivalent about beards but the grey was fetching and perhaps with a trim, a dab of oil … My God, was she really contemplating grooming him? She was, in the same way that she wanted to smooth down his hair, which had no style at all, just a permanent exasperated air. It would be a blow to discover that all his trousers unzipped at the knee and she expected there to be two or three more shirts, but all of these things were fixable.
Fixable. A mistake to think of an adult as an old chest of drawers to be stripped and oiled and almost certainly he would have his own notes, but she’d caught the looks too, even on the train when they were strangers. No one could have called her vain but there was something very attractive about being found attractive, and perhaps attraction was like sound, the slightest whisper bouncing back and forth, amplifying itself in a feedback loop until it became almost unbearable, until someone surely had to say something about all that noise.
On the approach to Richmond, they passed a sign, a large board with a map of the path they were following, the scrawled red line from west coast to east, an arrow two-thirds of the way across labelled ‘You Are Here’.
‘Look at what we did together,’ she said.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘It’s quite something.’
‘And this …’ She measured out the remainder of the journey, a hand-span. ‘This is nothing,’ she said, and wondered, What if he asked me to stay on and finish the walk? Is that what he wants? If he asks me, if he asks me, I will. I will stay with him and walk into the sea.