Limestone and Clay Read online

  In the kitchen he looks at the piles of greasy crockery and cutlery, the crusty roasting-tin, and sighs. Strictly speaking it’s Nadia’s job. Cook doesn’t wash. But she’s not there and they were his friends. He picks potato peelings and coffee grounds from the blocked plughole and runs the taps.

  Nadia wears a strong musky perfume in the crooks of her elbows and between her breasts. She is darkly, strongly female in a way that used to scare him. Not his type. The first time they made love had been completely unexpected. He had gatecrashed a party at her house, along with some friends. They’d never even met before, and exchanged no more than a cursory word all evening, but somehow he’d been left behind at the end of the party among the bottles and overflowing ashtrays. She’d started to clear up around him, assuming he was asleep, but he was watching. And there was something about her, something about the way her breasts pressed against the stretchy velvet stuff of her dress, or about the way the damp tendrils of her hair made ringlets against her neck, or just about the unselfconscious way she moved that moved him, and he had reached out, half hopefully. She had hesitated and them let him pull her down beside him and hold her. He had been surprised by her softness and her womanly smell, amazed by the way his body responded, a Pavlovian response which seemed to bypass his brain altogether. He had followed her into her bedroom and found the experience of her almost too intense, the dark shadows, the soft depths, the scented puff of hair that crinkled against his belly making him want to yelp at the sensation. It had been like the first time all over again for him. It was the first time he had been so engulfed in sensation, lost himself completely.

  In the morning he had woken and seen that her sleeping face was smudged with mascara and lipstick, which he ought to have disapproved of, but which moved him instead to tenderness. She lay on her side, facing him, so that her breasts were squashed together, a dark crease between them. Her nipples were pinkish-brown, large as pansies, and around them were little wisps of hair. He touched one of her nipples experimentally with his fingertip and watched, amazed at the way it crinkled, stirring like a growing thing. He looked at her face then and saw that her eyes were open and that she was grinning. As he kissed her smudgy face he experienced a slithering sensation, both exhilarating and exasperating, that he only recognised later as the beginning of falling in love.

  Five years. He squirts detergent in the water and whips up a foam with his fingertips. And something needs to happen now. A child might do, might prove the catalyst they need to propel them forward. He washes the wineglasses first in the clean water and rinses the bubbles off under the tap. He looks up and catches the empty eyes of one of Nadia’s masks, a mask with a lopsided smirk. He echoes the expression and loads the sink with plates.

  Nadia walks and walks. She is hot inside her coat though her fingers and her ears are cold. She walks down a road of semi-detached houses and hesitates outside Sue’s. The lights are on and she can see the bright cartoon blinking of the television set. The children will be sitting round it – even Robin, the baby, watches. Nadia’s baby, the five-month one, would be due about now. She should be bulky now, walking with difficulty, her coat buttoned tight around the bulge. May 1 was the date. Has Simon thought of that? She could not talk about it without tears – and there have been enough of those already. If, by some miracle, this time … She walks on. She cannot bear to go in. Not that she resents Sue’s family, or begrudges her her children. But just now Robin would tear at Nadia’s heart with his round brown eyes and his way of snuggling on her lap. Sunday is not a day for calling on families, anyway. Sunday is a day for family patterns, fathers and mothers and knives and forks, strolls and bathtimes and stories. Nobody visited on Sundays, she remembers – except proper visitors, uncles and aunts who stayed overnight. Nobody dropped in casually. That was more a Saturday thing. Her father would have hated it. He liked to sleep late on Sunday mornings and then wake up and wallow in the bath. He’d walk to the pub before lunch, for a snifter, he said, and come home smelling lovely, of whisky and cigar smoke, benign and ready for lunch. After lunch he’d wash up, with Nadia and Michael drying and putting away, and then they would all drive out into the country to pick strawberries or kick a football about or sledge. Or if the weather was really terrible they’d watch old films on the television and eat slices of home-made cake. It would have been awful if anyone had dropped in. An intrusion.

  It is still light, but there is the feeling that it should, by rights, be dark. Lights are on and leaves flutter darkly, and there is the irritable twitter of invisible birds. Nadia walks until she feels the first spots of rain, and then she turns towards home, hoping that Miles and Celia have gone. She thinks about a cup of tea, a bath, something soothing on the television, an early night.

  ‘You weren’t serious about your pots?’ Simon says. He is pouring tea. ‘Anything to eat?’

  ‘No. I’m still stuffed. Half serious. I am stuck. And as I said, I can’t see the point any more.’ Simon frowns and hands her her tea. ‘I mean, I think of a new shape, a new idea, something to hang on the wall, or some functional thing. I invent it. I make it. And there it is, tra-la, another thing. Do we need more things?’

  Simon considers. ‘More beautiful things, I think, yes.’

  Nadia frowns. ‘Yes, well. Thanks for washing up. I would have done it.’ She takes her tea and sits in the sitting room in front of the gas fire. She feels her shins warm up and remembers the mottled blue of her grandmother’s shins, plain to see even through thick mouse-coloured stockings. ‘She’s cooked her legs,’ her mother had said when asked, ‘sitting so close to the fire. Legs in the fire near as damn it. It’s a wonder she hasn’t gone up in smoke.’ And Nadia had imagined meat, dead cooked meat on her grandmother’s shinbones, and been sickened as well as fascinated. She picks a last shred of lamb from between her teeth and sits in the Lotus position instead, smoothing her dress in a warm tent over her knees.

  Simon sits down on the sofa behind her. ‘You might just as well say what’s the point of exploring, of what I do, of what I’m going to do. Of finding a way through.’

  ‘I do say that.’

  ‘And discovery. What’s the point of that? Finding a new species, say, bats or something.’

  ‘Well?’ Nadia unfolds her legs and turns to face him.

  ‘Well it’s obvious. It increases human knowledge and, in a way, power.’

  ‘Power!’

  ‘Yes. Don’t scoff. Over nature.’

  ‘Ah, so that’s it.’ Nadia points her toes and reaches over to grasp them, her face flattened against her knees.

  ‘No. Or not just that.’

  Nadia sits up straight, raising her arms above her head. She exhales loudly, letting her hands flop to her lap. ‘I suppose you’d say then, by the same token, that by moulding something out of clay I’m exercising power over nature.’

  ‘Depends how you want to look at it.’ Simon looks at her irritably. ‘By creating something beautiful you’re increasing the world’s stock of beauty.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Nadia says. She lies on her back and pushes herself up on her hands and feet. The Crab. She cannot be bothered to argue. ‘Ouch,’ she says, and lowers herself to the floor. ‘Belly still too full.’ She gets up and sits on the sofa beside him. ‘I suppose you’re all ready for Friday? The Three Musketeers.’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘Sorry.’ Nadia puts her hand on his knee. ‘I really can’t stick Celia,’ she says, without really meaning to. ‘She makes me go like this. That’s why I went out.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘It’s the way she goes on I can’t bear.’

  ‘Yes,’ Simon agrees, and Nadia looks at him with sharp surprise. They sit quietly for a moment listening to the vague murmuring of the television in the flat downstairs.

  ‘Did I tell you about the goose?’ Simon asks.

  ‘Goose?’

  ‘It fell down Boss Hole – in the eighteenth century I think it was – and three days later it emerged fr
om Curlew Cavern with its feathers all singed – by the fires of hell, they said. That was the first inkling that there was a way through.’

  ‘But if it’s never been found in all this time!’

  ‘Doesn’t mean it isn’t there.’

  ‘Doesn’t mean it is, either, Simon.’

  ‘It is there. It just hasn’t been traversed, that’s all.’

  ‘I don’t want to argue about this again, but,’ but she can feel the anger rising, the wheel of the argument creaking round again as it has creaked round periodically throughout their time together, ‘but is it worth risking your life for … for a hole? Would Roland say it had been worth it, do you suppose?’

  ‘I know what I’m doing. And anyway, I’m not sure that he wouldn’t think it was worth it.’ Simon draws into himself, with a stubborn set look that Nadia recognises and which drives her irresistibly to goad him, to wipe the look off his face, to make him think.

  ‘It’s perverted,’ she says.

  ‘Perverted! That’s a new one. How do you work that out?’

  ‘To put yourself in danger for the fun of it …’

  ‘Fun!’

  ‘What then? Oh yes, sorry, the physical challenge, the physical and mental challenge. It is perverted, well decadent at least, to do that when other people have no choice but to put themselves in danger. What about miners? What a cushy life you must lead if you have to set up these challenges, flirt with death …’

  ‘Oh give it a rest.’ Simon reaches for the remote control and switches on the television. He flicks through the channels: hymns, wildlife, shrieking comedy, hymns. He settles for the wildlife programme and they stare together at a translucent magnified shrimp building a home from huge crystalline grains of sand. Inside, as it works, the tiny engine of its innards vibrates and pumps, and its long whiskers wave.

  ‘This minute creature,’ explains the narrator, ‘works ceaselessly to create ideal conditions for the survival of its young.’

  ‘Christ!’ exclaims Nadia. ‘I’m having a bath.’

  Simon watches a starving salmon beat itself to death in an effort to reach the right place to lay its eggs. It loses its fat sleekness and grows an ugly hook of a jaw so that it cannot eat, only fight for survival in the battle for the next generation.

  He flicks through the channels once more. There is a roar of synthetic laughter; a well-heeled congregation, their mouths agape at the climax of a hymn; a fat man singing on a hillside. He switches the television off and unfolds a large hand-executed underground map. A diagram of two cave systems with a maddening gap between them. It is for him to join the ends; not join them, of course, but discover the link. That is what he must do, and then there will be time to think. For it is dangerous, what he proposes to do, and no, it is not worth dying for. But he has to do it. He is set on it. All the things that Nadia says may be true. Some of them, but not what she says about decadence. For how can adventure, discovery, be decadent?

  He wanders into the bathroom. He likes to see her in the bath, compact and wet. The scented bath-foam she uses glistens on her body, catches in her pubic hair in a thousand points of light. She wears a silly bath hat, and lies back with her eyes closed, ignoring him. He dabbles his finger in the water and she slaps it away’as if it is a fly.

  ‘Was Scott of the Antarctic decadent?’ he asks. ‘Or Ranulph Fiennes?’

  ‘Yes,’ Nadia says.

  She is impossible. He gives an exasperated snort and returns to his map.

  Nadia is the first, the only, lover Simon has had who wasn’t a friend first. Most of them have been cavers. And he has shared with them the dangerous risk of trust. You have to let go, let yourself go into it, trust your fellows, know your safety is uppermost in their minds, just as theirs is in your own. Comradeship is nearer the truth than friendship, though Simon balks at the sentimental ring of the word – a clean exchange – unlike romantic love with its sticky emotional residue. And there is never more sense of achievement than in the exhausted jubilation at the end of a successful expedition. And more so, the nearer danger has approached; for then there is the feeling of having got away with something. He shakes that thought away. Most of his other lovers have been a part of this, and their love-making has never been so much an end in itself as it is with Nadia. More an affirmation of survival. Not for a long time has he been unfaithful to Nadia, not since he accepted that she had him. He has not been what he considers unfaithful, at least.

  He studies the map. It is a sort of puzzle. And he thinks he has the answer. It has only to be proved. There must be a link between the two systems: he is convinced there is a link. It is a way which has been tried. Five years ago a caver died – as Nadia never fails to remind him. His body was never recovered. He was simply lost. There is a place at the end of the mapped section of Curlew Cavern where it is necessary to duck under the surface of an underground stream for a few metres. Beyond that, the roof opens out and there is a dark hole, a crawl that slopes up, away from the water. Simon believes that this crawl must lead to the long shaft that is the end of the Boss Hole System, but the aperture is not visible there. Poring over maps, pacing the springing surface of the moor, Simon is more than ever convinced.

  He had been down there with Roland Charles, the caver who died. Together they had mapped the caves, experienced the excitement of almost, only-to-be-proved discovery. But Roland’s last attempt had been solo. Stupid. And he had paid the price. A solo death among the limestone, bones whitening in the rock. Since then, out of respect for Roland’s memory, as well as fear, no one has been back. It has taken Simon years to regain his determination, and months to persuade Celia and Miles that it is not foolhardiness to try again. Celia is the most cautious. It is she who is most often the voice of reason, the most fastidious checker of equipment, maddening often but slow and safe. A reassurance. And she is the slimmest, too, the lithest, the one most likely to be able to squeeze herself through the tiny gaps between the plates of rock.

  It will be done this time. The stubborn earth will not hold out again. Underneath the tussocky moor there is a way and it will be traversed. And Simon will be there.

  He avoids the word ‘obsession’. In the context of caving, it’s a word that suggests hazard and irrational action. But still, in Simon’s dreams, night after night, the limestone yields to him. He penetrates the whiteness. It gives way to the probing of his torch beam. The water parts for him, the air is pocketed sweetly against the cave roof, and the squeeze is no squeeze but an easy crawl which opens into triumph. This is the happy dream he has, a bright dream: after the easy crawl there is a rimstone pool, the water is so clear it is invisible, still as no surface water can ever be. Under the water is a round blue bowl, and in the bowl is a heap of golden coins. Treasure glints in the crystal water and an eyeless fish of palest pink swims round and round the bowl. All around are white stalactite straws, pencils of frost reaching from ceiling to floor. He shivers with the cold beauty and then he awakes. If dreams are omens, he does not believe this, but if they are to be considered omens, then surely this is a good one?

  In the dark, in the rain and the wind that scour the moorland, a lost sheep stumbles. Its woolly legs bend under it and the heather gives way, a pad of fibrous earth splits over a gap between rocks and with a startled bleat the sheep plummets down a deep vertical shaft. Its back is broken by the fall. It lies on loose shale in the utter darkness. Its feeble mind makes no sense, sees no shape, and because of the merciful snapping of its cervical vertebrae it feels no pain. In the black cold numbness it closes its eyes and knows no more.

  Sand

  Nadia wakes with a sour taste in her mouth. It is early. She watches the cold light extend through the gloom, illuminating the open wardrobe, the hanging clothes, sharpening the narrow black shadows and folds.

  Between her legs there is a stickiness. If it is blood then it is over. Once again. She lies still. All that is visible of Simon is one shoulder, grey in this light, and the ruffled back of his head. Af
ter five years she can still be moved by his beauty, the soft wing of shadow cast by his shoulderblade onto the smoothness of his back. The strong curve of Simon’s shoulder is like marble in the early light, a virtuoso sculpture, solidity and life captured in dawn and grey. She imagines this shape in clay, massive, hollowed, glazed grey with a tinge of pink to indicate dawn, or life.

  There is a definite dampness. She gets up carefully, imagining the brownish map she will leave behind on the pale green sheet, but in the gloom there are no colours and she cannot see. In the bathroom she finds no blood, only a white moisture. As she sits on the toilet she feels sick, an awful, definite nausea. Recognisable, undeniable. The silly hope is there again, flapping its wings against her diaphragm. But she is tired of it, the rhythm of hope, despair and resignation that prints its pattern over her months and years. She should have learnt not to hope by now. Think about something else.

  Her feet are cold on the kitchen floor. It is not yet seven o’clock. She lets up the blind and finds the sky flushing with just the pink she’d like to use for a glaze if she was to sculpt the shoulder, an impossibly subtle rosiness which glints on wet slate roofs and makes them glow, which plays with the cherry blossom, spreading a faint shadowy blush on its whiteness like the warmth of skin.

  Nadia makes a pot of tea and returns to the bathroom while it brews. She runs hot water in the basin, splashes her face, and, feeling sluttish, scrubs inside her nightshirt at her armpits. She rubs cream into her face and brushes her hair. She frowns at her reflection. There is a dark hair growing on her upper lip. She tweezes it out and the sharp sensation brings tears jumping to her eyes.

  She pours the tea and takes it in to Simon. ‘Time,’ she says. He groans. He has moved, hunched himself under the quilt so that his shoulder is hidden. Nadia sits cross-legged on the bed. She runs her hand over her legs, shaved smooth last night. Her toenails are coral pink. The tea tastes dirty. This is familiar, but she drinks it resolutely. Simon is sensitised to every clue. She will not let the stupid hope out of herself, she will not infect him. She thinks of a drawstring bag, the neck tightly drawn up to trap its wriggling contents. She purses her lips to match.