The Fish Ladder (18 page)
Authors: Katharine Norbury
By the time I got back to the hotel I was soaked. I walked up the wax-polished staircase, feeling the burnt-caramel oak of the banister rail, its textured grain sticky beneath my wet hand, and at a right-angled bend met another splintered recollection, bright and translucent as film. I had a sudden clear image of myself crouching on this first-floor landing, my hair unkempt, the laces of my damp pumps dirty as worms, and watching in fascination through the wooden rails while my uncle, who was a jazz musician, and had the floppy hair and angular cheekbones of Chet Baker, raised one hand in warning, and argued vehemently across the stairwell – presumably in full hearing of everyone, because the space would have amplified the sound – with the waistcoated and tweedy figure of Mr Yields, who blinked, and polished his spectacles, but nonetheless stood his ground.
I don’t need you to teach my wife how to fish!
The first time we came here Mr Yields had Mrs Yields with him, but in subsequent years he always came alone. On that first occasion I had assumed Mrs Yields was his mother because their children hadn’t come with them. Possibly they didn’t have any. Her lilac-tinted hair billowed in a wispy cloud over an apricot twinset and pinkish pearls, the colour matching the plastic arms of Mrs Yields’ spectacles. My only memory is of her reading in the drawing room one evening, and folding a soft leather bookmark into the spine of her novel, adjusting the glasses on her nose, as my uncle and cousin appeared laughing in front of her, resplendent – as they saw it – in chest waders. They were going out to fish, beneath the bridge, at night. Mrs Yields didn’t seem to find anything funny about a man and a boy wearing waders in a drawing room, and this had made them laugh even more.
In subsequent years, Mr Yields had told us, his wife went to stay with her sister because she claimed that the Highlands didn’t agree with her. I developed the idea that Mrs Yields was an invalid, a word that meant nothing to me, but sounded exotic, although of limited interest. I imagined it involved having breakfast in bed, only all the time. I had seen
Rear Window
by Alfred Hitchcock in which the invalid wife is chopped up and put in a trunk. But I think I may have made the invalid part up because I couldn’t see why anyone would want to stay behind when they could have been on holiday in Scotland. With us.
I tried to make sense of the memories. I searched the numbered doors for clues. As I did so one of them opened and a woman stepped out. Before the door closed again I glimpsed a double bed and behind it a casement window. A man was sitting on the bed, pulling on a pair of socks. The bed and the casement were familiar to me. I was sure that I had a recollection of Mr Yields sitting on the edge of my aunt’s bed, framed by this same casement window, or, at any rate, one very like it. Auntie Marge often suffered with her lungs, but why would Mr Yields be sitting on her bed? Yet I remembered standing in the doorway, looking at them both, my aunt beneath a gold-coloured eiderdown, her fever spent, drifting in and out of sleep, but still wearing lipstick. Mr Yields had been engrossed in the newspaper crossword and had remained perfectly motionless, his pipe tucked into the corner of his mouth, although he raised his eyebrows in greeting when he saw me standing there, the pipe momentarily slipping.
One of the reasons we know so much about the Celts is that the Romans wrote about them when they came to Britain. Cassius Dio, a Roman chronicler, noted a British woman’s response to an acerbic remark made by the Empress Julia Augusta: ‘We fulfil the demands of nature in a much better way than do you Roman women; for we consort openly with the best men, whereas you let yourselves be debauched in secret by the vilest.’ It occurred to me that my aunt, for whom I would have flown to the moon had I been able, may well, in her prime, have been a fine example of her race. Although they are both now deep into their eighties my uncle remains devoted to Marge, and she in her way to him, despite a slightly hysterical decade of divorce when it was never really clear who the wronged party was. They never remarried, but grew slowly back together, in the same way that bark heals around initials carved in a tree. A stroke, some years ago, slowed Marge down, softened her. But she still sees no reason to elucidate the myths that have grown with her, shrouding her like brambles. I commented recently on a photograph of her youngest son, taken when he was a little boy, struck by his bright blue eyes and Viking looks in such contrast with the black hair of his siblings.
‘Where on earth did he get that hair?’ I said, realising, only as the words left my mouth, what I’d done. But her eyes crinkled mischievously.
‘Do you think the time has come to tell the truth?’
I stared hard at the photograph. Observed the Chet Baker cheekbones and the mop of unkempt hair. It was a different colour, but that apart, my cousin was the image of my uncle. ‘Do you?’ I asked, and she had pealed into laughter, saying:
‘Now, are we going to have another gin and tonic or will you go and open a bottle of wine?’
I shivered as I turned the key in the door to my room. I put the bivouac bag and the map of Caithness on the bed. The map looked innocuous in its orange and silver covers with a photograph of a lone cyclist. Yet somewhere among its creases was the place where I would be sleeping the following night. Given how cold I was feeling the idea seemed at best unlikely, at worst foolish. I decided to have a bath. Going back into the corridor, I found a bathroom tucked beneath the eaves. I brought the towels from the bedroom and placed them on a Lloyd Loom basket; the cracked floor was ancient lino. I ran the bath using only the hot water tap because a granite chill permeated everything, even though it was August. An art deco mirror above the sink, which was flanked with engravings of angular sea creatures, steamed over quickly. Condensation trickled down flaking tongue-and-groove walls. The water in the bath cooled as rapidly as it filled, the cast iron stealing the heat. I ran the hot tap constantly, the water gurgling into the overflow, until I felt warm enough to turn it off, whereon a protest broke out in the pipes. The rain, which seemed to have set in for the night, rustled at the window, slipped across the slates, and I seemed to lose my grip on time, in this space beneath the roof, the old house becoming a memory box, where recollections matted with dreams.
An hour later I pulled on a pair of jeans and a sweater. I tried to call Rupert, and then Evie at her cousins’ house, but there was no cover for my mobile and the rooms didn’t have telephones. I took Neil M. Gunn’s
Highland River
from my holdall. It described, in the form of a novel, the exact journey I hoped to make the following day.
A table had been set for me in the dining room, silver service, a crisp white damask tablecloth, but I had been alone all day. I suddenly craved the intimacy of the bar. There was a deep Knole sofa, next to an oak coffee table, in front of the fire, so I sat down and ordered a venison salad, followed by salmon. I watched the young barman talking to a German couple about whisky. He was tall, fair and blue-eyed, and exhibited an authority beyond his years. I wondered if he was the absent Callum who the receptionist had referred to earlier, the one who had failed to collect my bag. The German couple wanted to know if a single malt whisky was better than a blend, and if age was an indication of quality. He answered them knowledgeably, yet evenly, exhibiting no personal preference, nor implying any hint of stigma or qualitative judgement, so that while being very well informed about whisky – in the abstract – they did not seem any the wiser, with regard to making a decision, by the time he had finished. His face was as unreadable as a poker player’s.
I opened
Highland River
. It had been my intention to read the novel months ago, and yet a part of me wanted to experience the river first hand, rather than seeing it through the filter of the book. As a result of this I still hadn’t got beyond the opening chapters. But the Ordnance Survey map had set anxiety fizzing around inside me like a toy train on a loop track. The rain that still landed against the windows in handfuls, now as hard as grain, only served to increase my unease.
The book told how a boy was sent by his mother, early one morning, to fetch water from the well-pool. The well-pool was close to the river mouth, and he disturbed an enormous salmon there, silver and blue-backed. He wrestled with it, and brought it to land.
A curious mood of fatalism comes upon a salmon that has committed its life to a pool. Up and down it will go, round this boulder, by the side of that, turning here, turning back again there, but never making any attempt to leave the known ground. No barrage of stones will drive it forth, however successfully timed. The dangers of the shallows are the dangers of the unknown, of death. If the pool be just deep enough a salmon will pass between swimming human legs rather than be driven forth, and in this restless fashion will ultimately tire out its enemies.
Although drawn by the narrative, I was aware of a subtext, and at some level I was distracted by it, as though I was straining to hear a radio playing in another room. When I glanced up, it was to see the barman removing my plate and asking me if I wanted anything else. He was standing in the space between me and the coffee table. Our feet were almost touching. As if in response to my unspoken discomfiture, he glanced behind him and down at the table, which was heavy, and pressed into the backs of his calves. He shrugged, creating an impression of a vague but deliberate insolence. Well, surely it would have been more orthodox to lean across from the side to clear the table? I put down the book.
‘I’d like whisky,’ I said, ‘but I’ll come and see what you have.’ I eased past him and walked over to the bar. He was attentive, professional. As before, he gave nothing away. I made my selection, Glenfarclas, large, no ice, but he had several bottles of various ages, and I allowed him to guide me through this second stage. Another young man appeared. The two of them exchanged a few words. The second man was offering to make up my order, and I understood that the shift had changed. My barman placed the heavy tumbler on a tray, accompanied by a jug of water. I slipped down from the bar stool in order to move back to my seat by the fire, but in that moment a couple from the dining room entered. He and I watched as they sat down on the sofa, filling it. The tray was suspended between us. The barman looked from it to me, and his eyes darkened, a momentary flaring of the pupil, as he said:
‘Would you like me to bring this to your room?’
Not quite sure that I’d heard him right, I focused on the button that secured his white shirt, the top button remaining unfastened. The skin of his throat was pale and this, combined with the white of the cotton and the fairness of his hair, gave him a slightly studious look, although he exuded a butterscotch warmth. The shirt seemed tight across his shoulders, which were wide, and arched as taut as a bow. His waist was narrow, he was probably a climber, or perhaps a rower, the deltoid muscles pulling a ruck across the line of his shirt, the hand that held the whisky strong. The distance between us seemed to expand, and then shrink, very quickly, back to nothing. I was aware of the planes of his body that were facing mine, and sensed a movement as silent, yet frenetic, as Brownian motion filling the space between us.
I lifted my eyes and met his look, causeway to an unknown land. I was aware of the exquisitely finite nature of the moment.
‘I’ll take the whisky here,’ I said, ‘thank you,’ and as I lifted the glass the stones of my wedding ring glittered under the halogen lights of the bar. But I kept his gaze, was held by it, and for a few moments felt the promise implied there, the feckless possibility of sudden joy, ephemeral as the smell of hot bread. But then I dipped my head, and turned away, and when I looked again he had gone.
The A9 curved out above the village of Dunbeath, dwarfing the harbour town beneath it. The road looked like a boomerang placed across an architect’s model, and at first I missed the turning, and had to turn back and try again, to find the spiral slip road that curled down to the village. I stopped at the Dunbeath Heritage Centre and collected a tourist map, to complement my OS map, before parking the car close to the river. Above me, the traffic buzzed in a whining Doppler along the seaboard of the Eastern Highlands. Until this moment the A9 had been my path, since leaving Liz’s house it had formed my route, yet suddenly it was veering away from me. I stood beneath the road at the edge of a deep crease in the land. In front of me was the sea.