The Fish Ladder (26 page)

During the years in which Granddad was unwell, my grandmother, Doris, worked as a bookie’s clerk. She told us of the diminutive jockeys and their bright silks, as the men were weighed in the scales. Throughout the years, when Granddad was staring in the mirror, Doris was the only breadwinner.

I stopped again. This, too, seemed far-fetched. What would a Methodist be doing working at a racetrack, and a woman with children at that? And how would she have got there? The nearest racetracks were at Aintree, in Liverpool, and Haydock Park near Manchester. Without access to transport, they may as well have been on the moon. Maybe Doris had simply worked for a bookkeeper, or a local accountant. Perhaps it was I who had made the leap from bookkeeper to bookie, and embellished it with half-remembered scenes from
National Velvet
, in which a young Liz Taylor won the Grand National, or very nearly did, on a farm horse. My time frame for all these events was, in any case, extremely woolly. The fragments of story pulsed and glowed like lumps of molten ore in mud, scattered over an indeterminate period that was punctuated by hardship and war. The stories were familiar to me. But I had never before laid claim to them, or attempted to share them.

Still, somewhere in the hardship years – that came between the war years – Dad won the Highfield Tannery Scholarship. He had gained, briefly, the highest mark in his year at the village school, but a Methodist had never won the School Prize before, and so the examination papers had to be remarked. This meant Dad now had the second highest mark after a girl called Sheila McKnight, who beat him by one per cent. The school wasn’t known for its gender equality, but it was clearly better that the prize went to a girl who was an Anglican, than to a boy from Chapel. This, at any rate, was the view expressed by the Methodists and I was aware that it, too, had a ring of legend about it. But Dad quite definitely won the scholarship. Mr Posnett offered, in addition to the bursary, to buy Dad’s uniform and books, his protractor and compass, ruler and pens, his Latin grammar, his dictionary. But the tannery workers declined the offer and instead they had a whip-round. Fred was one of their own. He had all that he needed for the grammar school. Later he obtained a government bursary to study at the university in Liverpool. The tannery continued to support him. Mr Posnett made it clear that Dad should ask for whatever he needed. Once again, the villagers made sure he was properly kitted out. There were no summer holidays, on account of the war, and after two years he completed his bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering. By the time he had graduated, with first-class honours, peace had broken out, erratic and wild, and Dad was never called upon to fight. When he completed his master’s, and Mum was twenty-two, he asked her to marry him at the top of Tryfan, a mountain in Snowdonia. Afterwards they jumped between two monoliths called Adam and Eve, almost ten feet above the ground. This was known as the Tryfan step, and conferred the Freedom of the Mountain on all who successfully completed it.

‘My goodness, she must have been fit!’ said the nurse. I’d forgotten that she was there.

‘She was,’ I said. ‘She once ran a hundred yards in 11.4 seconds. A research chemist, who had been a Cambridge Blue, saw her race at the ICI recreation ground, and wanted to train her, there’d ever been talk of the Olympics. But they weren’t able to pursue it, on account of the war.’

Mum didn’t stir, and when morning came I took Evie to Liverpool to buy her a dress for the funeral. They would switch off Mum’s machine at four o’clock. I could wear the same black Nicole Farhi suit that I’d worn at Dad’s funeral. After all, I’d never worn it since. But when we got back to the car there was a message on my phone. Mum had opened her eyes. She looked at her nephew, Peter, who had come to hold her hand. Evie took the bag with her new dress in it and squashed it into the glove compartment. We arrived at the hospital at three o’clock, to find Mum sitting up in bed, a cup of tea in front of her, a slice of buttered toast in her hand.

‘I really don’t feel very well,’ she said.

Mum remained in hospital for weeks. While her astonishing and unlikely recuperation unfolded, I moved between her home, the Welsh cottage, our new home in London, and Barcelona. By the end of the summer we had left Catalunya. Evie began the autumn term at a primary school in Battersea, and I finally took the opportunity to have the mammogram that I had postponed at the start of the summer. I hadn’t yet had time to register with a doctor in London, so I went to the same hospital in Chester where Mum was still a patient.

The radiographer said: ‘That doesn’t look like a cyst.’

It was white, the lump, which meant it was a solid mass, and it had tiny arms that shot out like spider’s silks, or pincers. It was uneven, and knobbly. Like a crab.

‘Does it look like cancer?’ I asked. The radiographer paused.

‘Yes.’

‘Can you think of anything else, in your experience, that isn’t a cyst, and isn’t cancer, that this might be?’

This time she didn’t hesitate. ‘No.’

‘I have a ten-year-old daughter,’ I said. ‘I have to live.’ The radiographer took a biopsy. The device sounded like the dead-bolt that vets use to kill a horse. I gasped as it nipped the muscle of my chest wall. The area began to swell. Afterwards I sat and waited with some other ladies, all of us dressed in lilac surgical gowns, outside a nurse’s room, our day clothes in plastic crates. I couldn’t raise Rupert on the phone. I called my sister-in-law, Maria, who happened to be near by, and she came to sit with me.

‘I didn’t want to come here.’ It was a blonde woman speaking, her roots showing wiry and grey. ‘I come here from Caernarfon. They said I should do it on account of my mum. She’s died of it.’ The rest of us were silent. ‘I wouldn’t have come if they hadn’t told me to. I don’t want to be here.’ A woman sitting next to me leaned forward. She asked the lady from Caernarfon about her journey, asked if it had been difficult to get to Chester, asked her how long it had taken. A nurse brought me tea in a china cup and saucer, and some custard creams on a doily-covered tray. I noticed that some of the other ladies also had trays. The obvious luxury in an NHS hospital made me feel both special and apprehensive. A nurse told me that the result of the biopsy wouldn’t be available until after the weekend, but that eighty per cent of women with breast cancer survived it. Rupert and Evie expected me home in London, but the hospital advised me to wait.

I went back to Mum’s empty house, but I was skittish, and couldn’t keep still. More than one friend said
I’m sure it will be fine
and this seemed strange to me, because what I’d seen on the ultrasound hadn’t looked fine. I recalled the way the radiographer had glanced at the nurse, the way the architecture of the room had appeared to tighten.

I packed an overnight bag and took Mum’s car. I drove towards the mountains of Cumbria, two hours north of Chester. When I reached the Lake District I drifted west, towards the Wasdale Valley, and parked the car at the head of the deep lake called Wastwater, beneath the buttressed, stubborn flank of Great Gable and the Scafell Massif. I didn’t need a map for this place. I knew it better than anywhere on earth. I had first climbed Scafell with Dad, when I was Evie’s age, wearing shorts and thin-soled plimsolls, through which I had felt every stone, Dad’s big hand wrapped around my little one.

When Dad had been a doctoral candidate his supervisor, Geoff Calvert, built a cottage in the Lake District out of anything that came to hand. The stones were random rubble. The Crittall windows, which were almost as big as the walls, had been salvaged from a hospital in Liverpool. Geoff told his graduate students that anyone who helped with the construction could have a week’s holiday, gratis, for life. And so, every summer, we spent a week at the cottage. There were gas lamps in the early days, run off Calor gas canisters. Later, electricity was provided from a car battery. The water passed through a charcoal filter directly off the mountain behind. And there was a bath beneath the kitchen draining board. We went on expeditions in the day, to the mountains, and the lakes, and laughed and played cards at night.

So I had climbed Scafell, on one of those feted summer days, my hand in Dad’s for much of the way, though he had carried me back down on his shoulders, not because I was tired, but because I could feel the stones through my worn-out plimsolls, although my brother had teased me mercilessly for being a baby. Afterwards Mum insisted that we drove to Kendal, so I could have some proper walking shoes. I know that the memory was of Scafell because of a great wall of rock that loomed over us, forbidding as a Cunard liner. The rock-wall led to a passage, and the passage was called Lord’s Rake. It rose like a ladder, up and down in a diagonal zigzag, and emerged at the summit of the hill. The combination of the wall, which acted as a landmark, and the narrowness of the passage made Lord’s Rake a safe route, even in mist, because you could feel your way, and know exactly where you were, even if you couldn’t see. A roughly carved cross at the start of the rake marked the place where, on a warm September afternoon in 1903, four young men, all experienced climbers, ‘skilful, careful and modest’, had inexplicably fallen to their deaths. But Lord’s Rake led beyond the cross, obliquely rising through dips and cols, some as narrow as a horse’s saddle, and it carried the traveller across, not over, the buttress.

I had returned to the place many times. When I was twenty-three I ran away from a love affair in New York, and had driven from Heathrow Airport in a rented car wearing a Jean Paul Gaultier suit and ice-pick Jimmy Choo heels. When I arrived at Scafell I rummaged in my travel bag, and then stripped in the National Trust car park, climbing the hill in Converse All Stars, my ex-lover’s Levi 501s and a man’s black cashmere sweater. I had nestled inside Lord’s Rake, and had felt safe, held, the cleft of rock filled with gritty snow, my cheek against the stone, the mist beading in my eyebrows and lashes, and settling in my bleached cropped hair.

This time, as I visited the mountain, I was hopeful, despite what I had seen on the ultrasound. I felt strong, although I also felt sick, and though my thoughts were as skittish as a bird’s on a twig peeping down at a lash-tailed cat, my heart sang. Wastwater glowed, a chasm of reflected light. There was a bathtub filled with water for the sheep. The September day was bright although the lower slopes of Scafell were veiled in shadow: the arc of the autumn sun remained low. I followed the footpath over a ridge known as Brown Tongue, walking between two nameless streams, keeping to the bank of the southern one, searching for a place to cross. But the stream was in spate, and at the ford it was not possible. I could see the stepping stones, sunk, conserved, beneath a dark slab of bubbling water. The water looked like glass. I decided to keep to the southern stream, and to follow its northern bank. As I walked higher over the humped side of the mountain I entered the natural amphitheatre that characterised Scafell. I could see Mickledore and Scafell Pike, which is the highest peak in England. Tucked away, to one side, was the summit of Scafell itself. I walked for an hour through bilberry and scattered rocks. In early summer Hollow Stones, for that is what this place is called, is a picture-book tapestry meadow, something from the loom of the Lady of Shalott, where only the unicorns are missing. But today it wore a different coat, the green grass caramelised into brown, a wheezy breath as the wind passed over it, some dried-out blackened seed heads. A dog had slipped its owner’s leash and trotted excitedly about, rounding up sheep, its sharp bark and their worried bleats hanging in the air about me, revolving like the shapes on a child’s cot mobile. I wondered if the owner was close at hand, or if any of the sheep were pregnant. The farmer might shoot the dog if he saw it. All these ‘ifs’. White haze made a ceiling for the sound and my anxiety. And then, quite suddenly, I had reached the spring that was the source of this innominate stream. The water spilled from beneath a rock as big as a car.

The rock is marked on A.Wainwright’s iconic guidebook drawing of Scafell, and labelled simply:
Big Boulder
. Beneath it is an ‘X’ and the word
Spring
. On the other side of the stream, the side of the way-marked footpath, the National Trust were building a staircase of rock in the interest of conserving vegetation and preventing soil erosion. The close proximity of this staircase to the boulder reminded me of the A303, which so narrowly misses the monument at Stonehenge, and where the proximity of heavy traffic to the ancient site mystifies spiritual tourists. The spring was choked with litter. This, too, seemed new. Paper wrappers and plastic crisp packets twirled and snagged in a pool the size of a washing-up bowl. Beyond it was the scree slope that led to the rake, and to the cruise-ship wall of rock.

I searched for a place to drink. There was a channel, litter-free, right underneath the boulder. Reaching in I pulled out handfuls of water, metallic, peaty, cold. I drank because I was thirsty, but also because I wanted something. I wanted the water to wash clean the results that I would receive on Monday. I found two acorns and two hazelnuts in my pocket, souvenirs of other walks, and I dropped them into the water. They were the nearest that I had to pennies. I straightened up, stiffly. An old gentleman with two long sticks appeared. He drew level and then walked past me. He picked his way meticulously and energetically, wiping the sweat from his chin, and pushing his false teeth out when he stopped to catch his breath. After about fifty yards he stared at his map, and then at the wall of rock.

‘It’s there,’ I called. ‘Just follow the scree.’ He nodded back at me, and after a few more minutes’ scrambling, a tall stick in each of his hands, his map on a cord around his neck, he vanished. I followed, then, persevering, until I too had entered the rake. I spread my palms over the cross that was carved in the rock, the memorial to the four dead climbers. The old gentleman had gone. The passage was filled with broken stones. Lemon-coloured saxifrage illumin­ated the monochromes. Splintered rocks leaned inwards, uncertain as old chimney stacks.