Julian Barnes - Pulse

‘I thought we were going to get married.’

‘That’s why we aren’t,’ Cath had replied.

‘I don’t understand.’

‘No, you don’t.’

‘Will you please explain?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because that’s the whole point. If you can’t see, if I have to explain – that’s why we’re not getting married.’

‘You’re not being logical.’

‘I’m also not getting married.’

Forget it, forget it, it’s gone. On the one hand, she liked you making the decisions; on the other hand, she found you controlling. On the one hand, she liked living with you; on the other, she didn’t wan’t to go on living with you. On the one hand, she knew you’d be a good father; on the other, she didn’t want to have your children. Logic, right? Forget it.

‘Hello.’ He surprised himself. He didn’t say hello to women he didn’t know in the lunch queue. He only said hello to women he didn’t know on walking paths, when you got a nod or a smile or a lifted trekking pole in reply. But – actually, he did know her.

‘You’re from the bank.’

‘Right.’

‘Lynn.’

‘Very good.’

A small moment of genius, remembering her plastic name-tag through the bullet-proof glass. And she was having the vegetarian lasagne as well. Did she mind…? No, fine. There was only one free table. And it was just sort of easy. He knew she worked in the bank, she knew he taught at the school. She’d moved to the town a couple of months previously, and no, she hadn’t been up to the Tor yet. Would she be OK in trainers?

The next Saturday she wore jeans and a sweater; she seemed half-amused, half-alarmed as he got his boots and pack out of the car and pulled on his scarlet mesh-lined Gore-tex jacket.

‘You’ll need water.’

‘Will I?’

‘Unless you don’t mind sharing.’

She nodded; they set off. As they climbed out of the town, the view broadened to include both her bank and his school. He let her set the pace. She walked easily. He wanted to ask how old she was, whether she went to the gym, and say how she looked taller than when sitting down behind the glass. Instead, he pointed out the ruins of an old slate-works and the rare breed of sheep – Jacobs, were they? – that Jim Henderson had been farming since people down south started wanting lamb that didn’t taste like lamb, and were happy to pay for it.

Halfway up it began to drizzle, and he grew anxious about her trainers on the wet shale near the top. He stopped, unzipped his pack, and gave her a spare waterproof. She took it as if it was quite normal that he’d brought it. He liked that. She also didn’t ask whose it was, who’d left it behind.

He passed her the water bottle; she drank and wiped the rim.

‘What else have you got in there?’

‘Sandwiches, tangerines. Unless you want to turn back.’

‘As long as you haven’t got a pair of those awful plastic trousers.’

‘No.’

He did, of course. And not just his own, but a pair of Cath’s he’d brought for her. Something in him, something bold and timid at the same time, wanted to say, ‘Actually, I’m wearing North Cape Coolmax boxers with the single-button fly.’

After they started sleeping together, he took her to The Great Outdoors. They got her boots – a pair of Brasher Supalites – and, as she stood up in them, walked tentatively to a mirror and back, then did a little tap dance, he thought how incredibly sexy small female feet could look in walking boots. They got her three pairs of ergonomic trekking socks designed to absorb pressure peaks, and she widened her eyes at the idea of socks having a left and a right like shoes. Three pairs of inner socks too. They got her a day-pack, or a day-sack, as the hunky assistant preferred to call it, by which point Geoff felt the fellow beginning to get out of line. He’d shown Lynn how to position the hip belt, tighten the shoulder straps and adjust the top tensioners; now he was patting the pack and juggling it up and down in far too intimate a way.

‘And a water bottle,’ Geoff said firmly, to cut all that off.

They got her a waterproof jacket in a dark green that set off the flame of her hair; then he waited and let Hunk suggest waterproof trousers and get laughed at in reply. At the cash desk he handed over his credit card.

‘No, you can’t.’

‘I’d like to. I’d really like to.’

‘But why?’

‘I’d like to. Must be your birthday soon. Well, some time in the next twelve months. Got to be.’

‘Thank you,’ Lynn said, but he could tell she was a bit edgy about it. ‘Will you wrap them up again for my birthday?’

‘I’ll do more than that. I’ll clean your Brashers specially. Oh yes,’ he said to the cashier, ‘and we’d better have some polish. Classic Brown, please.’

Before they went walking next, he dubbined her boots to make the leather supple and strengthen the waterproofing. As he slipped his hand inside the fresh-smelling Brashers, he noted again, as he had in the shop, that she took half a size smaller than Cath. Half a size? It felt like a full size to him.

They did Hathersage and Padley Chapel; Calke Abbey and Staunton Harold; Dove Dale as it narrows and deepens to Milldale; Lathkill Dale from Alport to Ricklow Quarry; Cromford Canal and the High Peak Trail. They climbed out of Hope to Lose Hill, then along what he promised her was the most scenic ridge walk in the entire Peak District, until they came to Mam Tor, where the paragliders gathered: huge men who sweated up the hill with vast packs on their backs, then spread out their canopies like laundry on the grassy slope and waited for the upcurrent to lift them off their feet and into the sky.

‘Isn’t that thrilling,’ she said. ‘Wouldn’t you like to do that?’

Geoff thought of men in hospital wards with broken backs, of paraplegics and quadriplegics. He thought of mid-air collisions with light aircraft. He thought of not being able to control the wind and getting carried higher and higher into the cloud, of coming down in unknown landscape, of getting lost and scared and peeing yourself. Of not having your boots on a path and a map in your hand.

‘Sort of,’ he replied.

For him, freedom lay on the ground. He told her about the trespass on Kinder Scout in the 1930s: how walkers and hikers had come out from Manchester in their hundreds to the Duke of Devonshire’s grouse moors to protest against lack of access to the countryside; how it had been a peaceful day except when a drunken gamekeeper shot himself with his own gun; how the trespass had led to the creation of national parks and registered rights of way; and how the man who’d led it had died recently, but there was still one survivor, now 103, living in a Methodist old people’s home not far away. Geoff thought his story soared better than any bloody paraglider.

‘They just went trampling across his land like that?’

‘Not trampling. Tramping, perhaps.’ Geoff was pleased with this emendation.

‘But it was his land?’

‘Technically, yes. Historically, perhaps not.’

‘Are you a socialist?’

‘I’m in favour of the right to roam,’ he said cautiously. He didn’t want to put a foot wrong now.

‘It’s all right. I wouldn’t mind. Either way.’

‘What are you?’

‘I don’t vote.’

Emboldened, he said, ‘I’m Labour.’

‘I thought you would be.’

In his walking log, he noted the routes they took, the date, the weather, the duration, ending with an L in red for Lynn. As opposed to a blue C for Cath. Times were about the same, regardless of the initial.

Should he get her a trekking pole? He didn’t want to push it – she’d refused all offers of a walking hat, despite having the pros and cons explained to her. Not that there were any cons. Still, better a bare head than a baseball cap. He really couldn’t take a walker in a baseball cap seriously, male or female.