think that’s possible?’
‘Yes,’ I said. Meaning, no.
Twenty-five
The history I had learned at school, but mostly forgotten now, fell into convenient categories: the Middle Ages, the Reformation, the Renaissance, the Tudors and Stuarts. For me, Adam’s earlier life now fell into similar categories: stripes of separated time, like coloured sand in a bottle. There was the Lily Age, the Francoise Age, the Lisa Age, the Penny Age. I never talked to Adam about his past now: it was a forbidden subject. But I thought about it. I picked up little details about the women he had loved, and slotted them into the larger picture. As I did so, I realized that there was a gap in the chronology – an empty space where a woman should have been but wasn’t. It might just have been a year or so without a committed relationship, but that didn’t seem to fit into what I had come to see as the pattern of Adam’s life.
It was as if I was watching a beloved figure walking across the landscape towards me, always getting closer, when it was suddenly swallowed up in mist. I calculated that it was about eight years ago, this hiatus. I didn’t want to interrogate anybody about it, but the sense of needing to fill in the gap grew stronger. I asked Adam if he had any photos of himself when he was younger, but apparently he had none. I tried to find out, from casual questions, what he was doing at that time, as if I would eventually be able to join the insignificant dots to reveal a significant answer. But while I discovered names of peaks and perilous routes, I never found a woman to fill in the space between Lisa and Penny. But I was the world expert on Adam. I needed to be sure.
One weekend in late March, we returned to his old family house. Adam needed to fetch some of his equipment, which he kept stashed away in one of the large outhouses, so he had hired a van. ‘I don’t have to return it until Sunday. Maybe we could find a hotel for Saturday night.’
‘With room service,’ I said. It never occurred to me to suggest we should stay with his father. ‘And an en suite bathroom, please.’
We set off early. It was a glorious early-spring morning, icily clear. There was new blossom on some of the trees, mist rolling off the fields we passed by on our way northwards. Everything felt newly hopeful. We stopped at a motorway service station for breakfast. Adam drank coffee and didn’t eat his Danish pastry while I had a large bacon sandwich – stringy pink rashers between slices of greasy white bread – and a mug of hot chocolate.
‘I like women with an appetite,’ he said. So I finished off his pastry too.
We arrived at about eleven and, like a fairy story, everything was as it had been on our last visit. There was no one to greet us, and no sign of Adam’s father. We went into the dark hall, where the grandfather clock stood guard, and took off our coats. We went into the chilly living room, where a single empty tumbler stood on a side table. Adam called out for his father, but there was no reply. ‘We might as well start,’ he said. ‘It shouldn’t take long.’
We put our coats back on and went out by the back door. There were several old outhouses of varying sizes behind the house for, as Adam explained, there had been a working farm attached to the estate. They were mostly derelict but a couple had been patched up, new slates put on the roof and weeds cleared from their doorways. I peered in through the windows as we passed. In one, there was broken furniture, boxes of empty wine bottles, old storage heaters and, shoved into the corner, a netless table-tennis table. Wooden tennis racquets were stacked on a broad shelf, a couple of cricket bats. There were numerous tins of paint ranged on the shelf above them, their sides dripping with different colours. Another shed was used for tools. I made out a lawn-mower, a couple of rakes, a rusty scythe, spades, forks, hoes, great bags of compost and cement mix, toothy saws.
‘What are those?’ I asked, pointing to several gleaming silver contraptions hanging from large hooks screwed into the wall.
‘Squirrel traps.’
There was one building I wanted to go into, for through the broken glass I had seen a grand china teapot without its spout poking out of a large box, and hanging from a hook, a ripped, useless kite. It looked like the place where all the worn-out family effects were kept, the ones that no one wanted, but no one could quite throw away. There were trunks on the floor and stacked containers. It all looked so well ordered and so sad. I wondered if all the things that had belonged to Adam’s mother had been put here, long ago, and never been touched since. I asked Adam, but he pulled me away from the window. ‘Leave it alone, Alice. It’s just stuff he should have got rid of years ago.’
‘Don’t you ever look through it?’
‘What for? Here, this is where my stuff is kept.’
I had never imagined there would be so much of it. It almost filled the long, low room. Everything was neatly packed and stored; lots of the boxes and bags had labels on them, with Adam’s bold script slanting across. There were ropes, of different thicknesses and colours, in steep coils. An ice axe hung from the beams. There were a couple of backpacks, empty and fastened down against the dust. One slim nylon bag was a tent, the other, shorter, was a Gore-Tex sleeping bag. A box of crampons stood by a box of long thin nails. A box full of assorted clips, screws, clamps. Bandages in Cellophane wraps stood on a thin shelf, and on a broader one a Calor gas stove, a few canisters of gas, pewter mugs and several water bottles. Two well-used pairs of climbing boots lay to one side.
‘What’s in this?’ I asked, poking a squashy nylon sack with my toe.
‘Gloves, socks, thermal underwear, that kind of thing.’
‘You don’t travel light.’
‘As light as I can,’ he replied, looking around. ‘I don’t carry this stuff for fun.’
‘What are we here for?’
‘This, for a start.’ He pulled out a largish bag. ‘This is a Portaledge. It’s like a tent you can bolt on to a sheer cliff side. Once I spent four days in it, in a raging storm.’
‘Sounds terrifying,’ I shivered.
‘Cosy.’
‘Why do you want it now?’
‘It’s not for me. It’s for Stanley.’
He rifled through a Tupperware box packed with tubes of ointment, picking out a couple and stuffing them into his jacket pocket. He took one of the ice axes off the beam and laid it beside the tent. Then, hunkering down on his haunches, he started pulling out little cartons and boxes and examining their labels. He looked entirely focused on his task.
‘I’m going for a wander,’ I said eventually. He didn’t look up.
Outside, it was warm enough to take off my coat. I walked over to the vegetable garden, where a few decayed bolted cabbages swayed, and weeds climbed the frames meant for runner beans. Someone had left the hose tap running slightly, and there was a great puddle of mud in the centre of the garden. It was all rather depressing. I turned it off, then looked around to see if Adam’s father was anywhere in sight, and marched firmly towards the ramshackle building where I’d glimpsed the china teapot and the kite. I wanted to look through the boxes, pick up the objects that Adam had had as a child, find photographs of him and of his mother.
There was a large key in the lock that turned easily. The door opened inwards. I shut it quietly behind me. Someone had been in here quite recently, for the thick dust only lay over some of the boxes and trunks, whereas others were fairly clean. In one corner I saw the skeleton of a bird. There was a thick, stale smell in the room.
I had been right, though: it was where old family things were stored. The teapot was part of a china tea-set.
