‘I need to collect it by next Friday,’ said Adam.
‘That’s our wedding day.’
‘That’s why I need to collect it by then,’ he said, as if it were obvious. ‘Then we can go walking at the weekend.’
‘Oh,’ I said. I’d figured on a two-day honeymoon in bed, with champagne and smoked salmon and hot baths between sex.
Adam looked across at me. ‘I’m doing a demonstration climb in the Lake District that Sunday,’ he said briefly. ‘You can come with me.’
‘Very wifely,’ I said. ‘Do I get a say in all of this?’
‘Come on. We’re in a hurry.’
‘Where are we going now?’
‘I’ll tell you in the car.’
‘What car?’
Adam seemed to exist on a barter system. His flat belonged to a friend. The car that was parked down the road belonged to a climbing acquaintance. Equipment was stashed away in various people’s attics and other places. I didn’t know how he kept track of it. He picked up odd jobs by word of mouth. Almost always they were doing him a favour in order to repay him for something he had done up one mountain or another. Some frostbite he had prevented, some arduous piece of guiding he had carried out, some calmness under duress, some kindness in a storm, some life he happened to have saved.
I was trying now not to think of him as a hero. I didn’t want to be married to a hero. The thought of it frightened me, aroused me, and put a subtle and erotic distance between us. I knew I was looking at him differently since yesterday and reading the book. His body, which I had until twenty-four hours ago thought of as the body that fucked me, had become the body that endured when no one else could. His beauty, which had seduced me, now seemed miraculous. He had staggered through a thin soup of air in a cracking cold, blasted by wind and pain, and yet he seemed unblemished by it. Now that I knew, everything about Adam was charged with his reckless, calm courage. When he looked at me broodingly or touched me, I couldn’t help thinking that I was the object of desire he had to risk himself on and conquer. And I wanted to be conquered; I did. I wanted to be assaulted and won. I liked him to hurt me, and I liked to fight back and then yield. But what about afterwards, when I was mapped and claimed as victory? What would happen to me then? Walking through slushy grey snow to the borrowed car, just six days away from our wedding day, I wondered how I could ever live without Adam’s obsession.
‘Here we are.’
The car was an ancient black Rover with squashy leather seats and a lovely walnut dashboard. It smelt of cigarettes. Adam opened the door for me, then stepped into the driver’s seat as if he owned it. He turned the ignition, then eased into the Saturday-morning traffic.
‘Where are we going?’
‘Just west of Sheffield, the Peak District.’
‘What is this, a magical mystery tour?’
‘To see my father.’
The house was grand, and also rather bleak, in its flat situation, exposed to winds from all sides. It was, I suppose, beautiful in an uncompromising way, but today I was looking for comfort, not austerity. Adam parked to one side of the house beside a series of ramshackle outhouses. Large feathery flakes of snow were falling slowly through the air. I expected a dog to run out barking at us, or an old-fashioned retainer to meet us at the door. But no one greeted us, and I had the uneasy impression that no one was there at all.
‘Is he expecting us?’ I asked.
‘No.’
‘Does he actually know about us, Adam?’
‘No, that’s why we’re here.’
He walked up to the double front door, gave a perfunctory knock, then opened it.
It was freezing inside, and rather dark. The hall was a chilly square of polished floorboards, with a grandfather clock in the corner. Adam took my elbow and led me into a living room full of aged sofas and armchairs. At the end of the room, a large fireplace looked as if it had been many years since it had seen a fire. I pulled my coat round me. Adam took off his scarf and wrapped it round my neck.
‘We won’t be here long, my sweetheart,’ he said.
The kitchen, with its cold quarry tiles and wooden surfaces, was empty as well, although a crumb-scattered plate and knife lay on the kitchen table. The dining room was one of those rooms used only once a year. There were unused candles on the round, polished table and on the stern mahogany sideboard.
‘Did you grow up here?’ I asked, for I couldn’t imagine children ever playing in this house. Adam nodded, and pointed to a black-and-white photograph on the mantelpiece. A man in uniform, a woman in a frock, and, between them, a child, posed outside the house. They all looked very grave and formal. The parents looked much older than I had expected.
‘Is that you?’ I picked up the photograph and held it to the light to see better. He must have been about nine, with dark hair and scowling brows. His mother’s hands were rested on his recalcitrant shoulders. ‘You look just the same, Adam, I would have recognized you anywhere. How beautiful your mother was.’
‘Yes. She was.’
Upstairs, in all the separate rooms, all the single beds were made, pillows fluffed up. There were ancient dried flower arrangements on each window-sill.
‘Which was your room?’ I asked Adam.
‘This one.’
I looked around, at the white walls, the yellow flocked bedspread, the empty wardrobe, the boring landscape picture, the small, sensible mirror.
‘But you’re not here at all,’ I said. ‘There’s not a trace of you.’ Adam looked impatient. ‘When did you leave?’
‘Completely, you mean? Fifteen, I suppose, although I was sent away to school when I was six.’
‘Where did you go when you were fifteen?’
‘Here and there.’
I was beginning to learn that direct questions were not a good method of eliciting information from Adam.
We went into a room that he said had been his mother’s. Her portrait hung on the wall and – a weird touch, this – a pair of silk gloves was folded by the side of the dried flowers.
‘Did your father love her very much?’ I said to Adam.
He looked at me a bit strangely. ‘No, I don’t think so. Look, there he is.’ I joined him at the window. A very old man was walking up the garden towards the house. There was a frost of snow on his white hair, and his shoulders were touched with snow too. He wore no overcoat. He looked so thin as to be almost transparent, but was quite upright. He carried a stick, but seemed to be using it to swipe at squirrels, which were corkscrewing up the old beech trees.
‘How old is your father, Adam?’ I asked.
‘About eighty. I was an afterthought. My youngest sister was sixteen when I was born.’
Adam’s father – Colonel Tallis, as he told me to call him – seemed alarmingly ancient to me. His skin was pale and papery. There were liver spots on both hands. His eyes, startling blue like Adam’s, were cloudy. His trousers hung slackly on his skeletal frame. He seemed quite unsurprised to see us.
‘This is Alice,’ said Adam. ‘I am going to marry her next Friday.’
‘Good afternoon, Alice,’ he said. ‘A blonde, eh? So you’re going to marry my son.’ His look seemed almost spiteful. Then he turned back to Adam. ‘Pour me some whisky, then.’
Adam left the room. I wasn’t quite sure what to say to the old man and he seemed to have no interest in talking to me.
‘I killed three squirrels yesterday,’ he announced abruptly, after a silence. ‘With traps, you know.’
‘Oh.’
‘Yes, vermin. But they still come back for more. Like the rabbits. I shot six.’
Adam came into the room with three tumblers full of amber-coloured whisky. He gave one to his father and handed another to me. ‘Drink up and then we’ll go home,’ he said.