Killing Me Softly

Fourteen

‘The lady has narrow feet, Mr Tallis.’ He held my foot as if it were a piece of clay, and turned it in his thin hands.

‘Yeah, well, make sure it’s secure around the ankle. She doesn’t want blisters, all right?’

I had never been into this kind of shop before, although I had passed them by and peered into their dim, expensive depths. I wasn’t trying on shoes, I was being measured and fitted for them. My sock – violet and balding – looked shabby in this company.

‘And a high instep.’

‘Yeah, I’d noticed that.’ Adam took hold of my other foot and examined it. I felt like a horse being shod by a blacksmith.

‘What style of walking boot were you thinking of?’

‘Well, since I haven’t’

‘Basic trekking. Quite high, to support her ankle. Light,’ said Adam firmly.

‘Like the one I made for –?’

‘Yes.’

‘Made for who?’ I asked. They both ignored me. I pulled my feet out of their grip and stood up.

‘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.

I drank. I didn’t know what time it was, except that outside it was already getting dark. I didn’t know what we were doing here, and I would have said that I wished we hadn’t come, except that I had a new and vivid image of Adam as a boy: lonely, dwarfed by two aged parents, losing his mother when he was twelve, living in a large cold house. What kind of life must he have had, growing up alone with this stand-in for a father? The whisky burned my throat and warmed my chest. I had eaten nothing all day, and was obviously not going to get anything here. I realized I hadn’t even taken off my coat. Well, there wasn’t much point now.

Colonel Tallis also drank his whisky, sitting on the sofa and saying nothing. Suddenly his head tipped back, his mouth parted slightly, and a crackly snore came from him. I took the empty tumbler out of his hand and put it on the table beside him.

‘Come here,’ said Adam. ‘Come with me.’

We went back up the stairs and into a bedroom. Adam’s old room. He shut the door and pushed me on to the narrow bed. My head swam. ‘You’re my home,’ he said harshly. ‘Do you understand? My only home. Don’t move. Don’t move an inch.’

When we came downstairs again, the Colonel half woke.

‘Going already?’ he said. ‘Do come again.’

‘Do have a second helping of shepherd’s pie, Adam.’

‘No, thank you.’

‘Or salad. Please have some more salad. I’ve made too much, I know. It’s always so hard to get quantities right, isn’t it? But that’s why the freezer is so useful.’

‘No thank you, no more salad.’

My mother was pink and garrulous with nerves. My father, taciturn at the best of times, had said almost nothing. He sat at the head of the table and plodded through the lunch.

‘Wine?’

‘No wine, thank you.’

‘Alice used to love my shepherd’s pie when she was little, didn’t you, Alice dear?’ She was desperate. I smiled at her but couldn’t think of anything to say, for, unlike her, I become tongue-tied when nervous.

‘Did she?’ Unexpectedly, Adam’s face lit up. ‘What else did she love?’

‘Meringues.’ My mother’s face sagged with the relief of finding a topic of conversation. ‘And the crackling on pork. And my blackberry and apple pie. Banana cake. She was always such a slim little thing, you wouldn’t believe how much she could eat.’

‘Yes, I could.’

Adam put his hand on my knee. I felt myself flushing. My father coughed portentously and opened his mouth to speak. Adam’s hand pushed under the hem of my skirt and stroked my upper thigh.

‘It seems a bit sudden,’ announced my father.

‘Yes,’ agreed my mother hurriedly. ‘We are very pleased, of course we are very pleased, and I am sure that Alice will be very happy, and it’s her life anyway, to do what she wants with, but we thought, why rush? If you’re sure of each other, why not wait, and then…’

Adam’s hand moved higher. He put one sure thumb on my crotch. I sat quite still, with my hammering heart and throbbing body.

‘We are marrying on Friday,’ he said. ‘It’s sudden because love is sudden.’ He smiled rather gently at my mother. ‘I know it’s hard to get used to.’

‘And you don’t want us to be there?’ she warbled.

‘It’s not that we don’t want you, Mum, but…’

‘Two witnesses from the street,’ he said coolly. ‘Two strangers, so it will really be just me and Alice. That’s what we want.’ He turned his full gaze on me and I felt as if he were undressing me in front of my parents. ‘Isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ I said softly. ‘Yes, it is, Mum.’

In my old bedroom, museum of my childhood, he picked up each object as if it was a clue. My swimming certificates. My old teddy bear, with one ear missing now. My stack of old, cracked LPs. My tennis racket, still standing in the corner of the room by the wicker wastepaper basket I had woven at school. My collection of shells. My porcelain lady, present from my grandmother when I was about six. A jewellery box with pink silk lining, containing just one bead necklace. He put his face into the fold of my old towelling dressing-gown, which still hung on the door. He unrolled a school photograph, 1977, and quickly located my face, smiling uncertainly from the second row. He found the picture of me and my brother, aged fifteen and fourteen, and scrutinized it, frowning, turning from me back to the picture. He touched everything, running his fingers over every surface. He ran his fingers over my face, exploring every flaw and blemish there.

We walked along the river, over the icy mud, our hands touching lightly, electric currents running up my spine, wind in my face. We stopped of one accord and stared at the slow, brown water, full of glinting bubbles and bits of debris and sudden, sucking eddies.

‘You’re mine now,’ he said. ‘My own love.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes. I’m yours.’

When we got back to the flat, late and sleepy on Sunday night, I felt something under my feet on the mat when I went through the door. It was a brown envelope with no name or address on it. Just ‘Flat 3’. Our flat. I opened it and pulled out a single sheet of paper. The message was written in large black felt-tip:

I KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE.

I handed it to Adam. He looked at it and pulled a face.

‘Bored with using the phone,’ I said.

I’d got used to the silent calls, day and night. This seemed different. ‘Somebody came to our door,’ I said. ‘Pushed it through our door.’

Adam seemed unmoved. ‘Estate agents do the same thing, don’t they?’

‘Shouldn’t we call the police? It is simply ridiculous just to let this go on and on and do nothing.’

‘And tell them what? That somebody knows where we live?’

‘It’s for you, I suppose.’

Adam looked serious. ‘I hope so.’