‘Where are we?’ I said.
‘It’s a mystery tour,’ Adam said, with a smile.
I drifted off to a half-sleep and when I woke up properly noticed an old Saxon church by the road in an otherwise featureless landscape. ‘Eadmund with an A,’ I said sleepily.
‘He lost his head,’ said Adam, beside me.
‘What?’
‘He was an Anglo-Saxon king. The Vikings caught him and killed him and cut him up and scattered his body all over the place. His followers couldn’t find him and there was a miracle. The head shouted, "Here I am," until they found it.’
‘I wish that bunches of keys did that. I’ve often wished that my house keys would shout, "Here I am," so that I wouldn’t have to search every single pocket of everything I own to find them.’
At a fork in the road there was an ornate war monument with an eagle on it to people in the RAF. We went right.
‘We’re here,’ said Adam.
He pulled into the side of the road and switched off the engine.
‘Where?’ I said.
Adam reached into the back of the car for the camera. ‘Come,’ he said.
‘I should have brought my boots.’
‘We’re only walking a couple of hundred yards.’
Adam took my hand and we walked away from the road, along a path. Then we turned off the path, into some trees and then up a slope, slippery with leaves still decaying from last autumn. Adam had been silent and thoughtful. I was almost startled when he began to speak.
‘I climbed K2 a few years ago,’ he said. I nodded and said something affirmative but he seemed lost in his own world. ‘Lots of great, great climbers have never done it, lots of great climbers have died trying. When I was at the top I knew intellectually that it was almost certainly the greatest climbing thing I would ever do, but I felt nothing. I looked around but…’ He made a contemptuous gesture. ‘I was up there for about fifteen minutes, waiting for Kevin Doyle to join me. All the while I was calculating the time, checking my equipment, going through the supplies in my head, deciding on the route down. Even as I looked around, the mountain was just there as a problem.’
‘So why do you do it?’
He scowled. ‘No, you don’t get my point. Look.’ We were emerging from the trees on to some grass, almost moorland. ‘This is the landscape I love.’ He put his arms round me. ‘I was once here before, and I thought it was one of the loveliest spots I had ever seen. We’re in one of the most crowded islands on earth but here we are on a patch of grass that’s off a path that’s off a track that’s off the road. Look at it with my eyes, Alice. Look down there, the church we passed nestling in the land as if it had grown there. And look round there at the fields, underneath it but they seem close up: a table of green fields. Come and stand here, by this hawthorn bush.’
Adam positioned me quite carefully and then stood facing me, looking around, as if orienting himself precisely. I shook him off, bewildered and uncomfortable. What had all this to do with his dozens of infidelities?
‘And then there’s you, Alice, my only love,’ he said, standing back and looking at me, as if I were a precious ornament he had put into a shop window. ‘You know the story that we are all broken into two halves and we spend our lives looking for our other self. Every affair we have, however stupid or trivial, has a bit of that hope that this might be it, our other self.’ His eyes turned dark suddenly, like the surface of a lake when a cloud has moved in front of the sun. I shivered in front of the hawthorn bush. ‘That’s why they can end so badly, because you feel you’ve been betrayed.’ He looked round and then back at me. ‘But with you, I know.’ I felt myself gasp, my eyes water. ‘Stand still, I want to take a photograph of you.’
‘Christ, Adam, don’t be so odd. Just kiss me, hold me.’
He shook his head and raised the camera in front of his face. ‘I wanted to photograph you here, in this place, at the moment that I asked you to marry me.’
There was a flash. I felt my knees give way. I sat down on the damp grass and he ran forward and took hold of me. ‘Are you all right?’
Was I all right? A feeling of extraordinary joy rose up in me. I stood up and laughed and kissed him on the mouth, firmly: a pledge.
‘Is that a yes?’
‘Of course it is, you idiot. Yes. Yes yes yes.’
‘Look,’ he said. ‘Here she is.’
And there, indeed, I was, open-mouthed, wide-eyed, taking shape, colours deepening, outline hardening.
‘There we are,’ he said, handing it to me. ‘It’s a moment, but it’s also a promise. For ever.’
I took the picture and put it in my purse. ‘For ever,’ I said.
Adam seized my wrist with an urgency that startled me. ‘You mean it, don’t you, Alice? I’ve given myself before and I’ve been let down before. That’s why I brought you here, so that we could make this vow to each other.’ He looked at me fiercely, as if he were threatening me. ‘This vow is more important than any marriage.’ Then he softened. ‘I couldn’t bear to lose you. I could never bear to let you go.’
I took him in my arms. I held his head and I kissed his mouth, his eyes, the firm jaw and the hollow of his neck. I told him I was his, and he was mine. I felt his tears on my skin, hot and salty. My only love.
Twelve
I wrote to my mother. She was going to be very surprised. I had only told her that Jake and I had separated. I hadn’t even mentioned Adam before. I wrote to Jake, trying to find the right words. I didn’t want him to hear it from anyone else first. I met more of Adam’s friends and colleagues – people he had climbed with, people he’d shared tents with and crapped with and with whom he had risked his life – and everywhere we went I could feel Adam’s appraising eyes on me, making my skin prickle. I went to work and sat at my desk, loose with remembered and anticipated pleasure, and pushed paper around desks and sat in meetings. I meant to ring up Sylvie, and Clive, and even Pauline, but somehow I always put it off. Almost every day now we would receive silent phone calls. I got used to holding the receiver a bit away from my ear, hearing the raspy breathing and putting the phone back on its stand. One day wet leaves and earth were pushed through our letterbox, but we ignored that as well. If occasionally I felt anxious, the anxiety was drowned out by all the other turbulent emotions.
I learned that Adam cooked great curries. That television bored him. That he walked very fast. That he mended the few clothes he owned with meticulous care. That he loved single malt whisky and good red wine and wheat beer, and hated baked beans and bony fish and mashed potatoes. That his father was still alive. That he never read novels. That he was almost fluent in Spanish and French, the bastard. That he could tie knots with one hand. That he used to be scared of enclosed spaces, until he was cured by six days in a tent on a two-feet deep ledge on the side of Annapurna. That he didn’t need much sleep. That his frost-bitten foot still hurt him sometimes. That he liked cats and birds of prey. That his hands were always warm, however icy it was outside in the streets. That he hadn’t cried since he was twelve and his mother died, until the day I said I would marry him. That he hated lids to be left off jars and drawers to be left open. That he took showers at least twice a day, and clipped his nails several times a week. That he always carried tissues in his pockets. That he could hold me down with one hand. That he rarely smiled, laughed. I would wake up and he would be beside me, staring at me.