“But I’m not dressed,’’ I would say each time, unklunking and unclicking my seatbelt.
"Oh, you are,” he’d assure me, testing the light.
And of course I was dressed for my photo. I always am.
So they look taken aback when I walk in the hotel bar on the moors. I make an entrance; gold head to foot and shining. That’s when I’m at my happiest, when I’m at my least reluctant to face the public. Roped in theatrical jewellery, with golden-heeled slippers and I’m…sheathed, I suppose is the word for it, throat to ankle in gold lame. Out to dinner in a dress I shouldn’t be able to sit down in.
I perch half-on, half-off a red barstool. I light black Sobranies for Cliff and myself as he orders our vodkas. The regulars go back to their darts, the other barman to his cable and satellite magazine.
Cliff tells me it’s all right; they don’t just do meals in a basket. We can go through and have dinner properly. Sometimes he talks to me like I'm Princess Anne.
In the bridal suite above the hotel barroom. Burgundy flock wallpaper and a baby chandelier. “Like being in a western,’ said Liz, twisting her back so he could find the zipper. “Like Destry Rides Again." She imagined herself all corseted up with a feather boa laid across her shoulders.
He lifted strands of hair away from her neck. Nowadays Cliff didn’t say much when they went to bed. At first he had been chatty, almost hearty, and Liz wondered if that was because he thought she liked that. He was naturally quieter than her. In the car he didn’t mind if the conversation died down. He could absorb himself in driving, which he loved. She became aware of how he changed gears, how he popped on different lights in the dark. Everything with great deliberation. Nothing was erratic about Cliff.
Down came her zip with a purr, unsealing the hard shiny fabric of her dress. She tried not to say anything else. Cliff’s easy quiet made her tire of the sound of her own voice. That was a new thing for her. Now all she said was, “Here,” and turned to undo his shirt. She felt the dark hair on the back of her hand and she grew hard just from that.
He kissed at her neck and then her mouth with hard, bunched, silly kisses. Again and again, like eating soft fruit. He made her laugh and tell him to stop. “Kiss me properly!”
“This is proper!” he said and started pecking at her again. "You’re making me all self-conscious now.”
“You self-conscious!” she smiled, because he was the most easy-going man she knew. At garages when he went to pay for petrol, he’d go loping in, holding the door open for anyone who wanted past. She would watch him talking with the girl serving, laughing about nothing. He behaved as if he didn’t mind about giving himself away.
When he came back out to the car with Coke and mints and a tub of Haagen Dazs from the garage freezer, he’d still have a cigarette clamped between his teeth. No one told him to put it out. It was as if, because he wasn’t concerned, no one else was.
"You worry too much,” he told her. “You’ll get ulcers.”
“Ulcers!” she said. Then she thought about her stomach lined with pale white dots. Like sequins on the inside for a change.
Let’s see where this goes. Why is it some people get all excited? They see a turn-off like this and away they go. Ferreting off into the wide blue yonder.
Liz couldn’t give a bugger. She was never much of an explorer. Stick me on the straight and narrow, she says, and I’ll not wander far. I like to know what’s what. A simple, prosaic soul; that’s what she wants to be. Straight up and down.
“Oh, don’t be sarcastic.”
“I’m not,” laughs Cliff, and he isn’t. He thinks it’s funny Liz like to think herself so normal. It tickles him.
He sees this turn-off which seems to lead nowhere. He wants them to chase up this road into a valley full of ‘sharp crests and blind summits’.
“Sums up my bloody life,” Liz tuts as they set off, with Cliff peeping his horn when they come upon each blind summit. It’s an eerie punctuation to their ride. Eleven miles into the middle of nowhere and then the road simply stops, as if the planner’s ink ran out, beside a lake the colour of old pennies.
As they get out of the car, Cliff says, "That mountain looks like two buttocks.” He’s always seeing shapes in things. Liz puts it down to him growing up on the Yorkshire moors, starved of diversions, bless him. She looks at this mountain.
"Honestly, you’re arse-mad, you are,” and she snorts with laughter. He thinks she looks like a horse. She looks round and sees only a dilapidated boat house right at the water’s edge. “This is what you’ve brought me all these miles to see? A burned out little house?”
“I thought there might have been more here,” he says, and tramps off through the broken shale and granite, looking for somewhere to pee. "You never know what’s there if you don’t look.”
To Liz the boat house looks like where a maniac would drive with a transit van full of prisoners. His victims would be found butchered up months later. It’s a landscape made for maniacs, this.
All the places
