The Fish Ladder (2 page)

Shortly before she left, Sofia invited some of the mothers from the school gates over for supper. I was one of them. I pressed the buzzer by an electric foot-gate and her head of security asked me to state my identity and articulate the purpose of my visit. Overhead, a three-quarter moon competed with the intruder lights of the house. When the gate opened I stood outside the front door while the guard phoned Sofia, who confirmed the information I had given him. He admitted me to the hallway and opened a second door. I passed beyond him into a stylish, austere room where a glass table was set with damask napkins and ornate heavy silver. A centrepiece of unfamiliar flowers with beaded stamens, delicate as sugar, dropped ochre dust onto the table; it was like the powder on the wings of moths.

Beyond the table the women from the school gates sat talking on two low sofas. Sofia waved a greeting, the phone still in her hand. Behind her French windows opened onto a wooden deck. There was a swimming pool, filled with anthracite shadow. The reflection of the houselights crackled over its surface, illuminating bits of twigs and insects. The water looked cold despite the heat. It shivered with the vibration of the filters. Sofia had once invited me to come over and swim with her, and I had bought a black Calvin Klein bikini, the most expensive swimsuit I had ever owned, but the swim had never materialised, and now, I supposed, it never would. There was a tennis court, its bubble-gum surface speckled with pine resin and littered with fallen needles. There were swings and a climbing frame for the children. A high, bougainvillea-draped wall promised both shade and privacy. A slip of tyres and the hiss of brakes indicated the proximity of traffic lights on the other side of the wall. A magpie clattered in a tall pine and a blue-black feather curlicued to the ground. The place was reminiscent of a cloister, although a curiously secular one.

Inside the room the women sipped champagne from crystal glasses. A Lebanese butler attended to our needs. My eyes kept snagging, returning to his features, because he reminded me of a famous English actor. Eventually I asked him if they were related.

‘Who is Steven Berkoff, Señora?’ he replied.

The girls had fallen over themselves to give Sofia something to remember them by: a Hermès scarf. Gucci anything. Fleur de The Rose Bulgare, a perfume said to have been created by the House of Creed for the actress Ava Gardner, who fell in love with Frank Sinatra, Old Blue Eyes, in Tossa de Mar, an hour’s drive from where we were sitting. I had had no idea what to give.

The most special thing that I had discovered that year had been the book I have already mentioned,
The Well at the World’s End
by Neil M. Gunn. It told of a well ‘whose water is so clear that it is invisible: when the two lovers first find it, they think it is empty . . .’ I had told Sofia about the novel, and she made me promise to write down what it was, and who had written it, and instead I gave her my copy. I gave Sofia my book because there was no time to buy another, and I was glad, because I had passed on something good.

And yet.

The Well at the World’s End
tells the story of a journey. The protagonist goes alone into the wild places of Scotland and tells anyone who asks that he is searching for the well at the world’s end. His name is Peter Munroe, which may or may not be a play on
Peter the rock on which I will build my Church
and
munro
, as in a Scottish peak over three thousand feet. He is a successful academic, although now at the end of his youth. His wife’s beauty is beginning to fade. Their only child – like that of Gunn himself – was stillborn. He is motivated by an indeterminate, and bittersweet, longing; the anticipation – were he to fail to act on this impulse – of something like
chagrin
, in the sense of both sadness and disappointment.

He is unable to articulate this feeling with any adequacy beyond the idea of the well. So he sets off into the wildest parts of the country, and finds adventure both in the land and in those he meets, discovering all kinds of different things about himself. Truth hovers at the corner of his vision, sometimes flickering in the landscape just ahead of him, sometimes appearing to one side of his path, only to disappear when he looks at it head-on.

In my heart I knew that Sofia would never make such a journey, even should she want to. It would mean bodyguards and chefs, servants and tents, tables and chairs and a four-wheel drive, cameras and digital surveillance. It would be like being on location with a heavily armed film crew. Sofia could never do it. But I could. My relative lack of wealth and absolute anonymity gave me a different kind of freedom. And the more I thought about it, the more I became determined to undertake Peter Munroe’s journey, although I couldn’t have explained why. I, too, had reached the end of my youth. I, too, had lost an unborn child. These were, possibly, the only points of connection between me and the fictional hero; but maybe that was enough. I certainly shared a sense that there was something beyond my grasp, something out of reach, and perhaps the idea of a secret well was as good a way of expressing it as any.

After Sofia left I tried to buy a new copy of the book, but discovered that it was out of print. In the three months since I had found it,
The Well at the World’s End
had, quite literally, disappeared. I found a society associated with the writer, who was himself long dead. I communicated with people in his home town. I wanted to know if the journey described in the novel was real and, if so, where was it from and where did it lead? Did the places mentioned in the book exist? Was there a well that had inspired the writer? The general view was that the journey was real, that there had been a well, and that Neil Gunn had filled his kettle at it, but that no one, for the life of them, could remember where it was. Mr Gunn’s nephew, Dairmid Gunn, was the one most likely to know, but he was away just now and no one knew how to contact him. I set the idea of the well to one side.

Gunn had written another book called
Highland River
and I was able to track down a 1975 paperback. It arrived a few days before Evie and I flew to Britain for the holidays. I didn’t have time to read it before we left, but I opened a page at random:

‘And what will you do with yoursel
f
?’

‘Oh, I’ll knock about and fish and that . . . Though actually I do have one small idea – I intend to walk a certain river to its source. It’s a thing I have wanted to do for a long time. That’s all really.’

‘Not a pilgrimage?’

‘Hardly!’

‘You mean that it is – slightly?’

I stared at the words
one small idea
, and felt their weight as they passed beyond my retina, a stone disappearing into a pool, aware already that something had happened, was happening, alive to the new disturbance.
I intend to walk a certain river to its source . . . It’s a thing I have wanted to do for a long time
.

So had I, though I had forgotten all about it. I remembered a geography lesson, my hair tied in plaits, my front teeth crossed.
The water table
, ladybirds beetling over the scarred varnish of my desk: they had got into everything that summer. Flicking their ruby bodies to the safety of the inkwell so I could liberate them at break-time, hiding them from the naughty boy who tugged out their lacy wings, so he could race them and they wouldn’t fly away. Understanding that I had drifted, the words
porous
and
igneous
before me in looping chalk, but it was too late to ask what it all meant. I had missed hearing the part about where the water started, and the diagram in the textbook offered nothing. If I got a detention the ladybirds might die.

I closed the book, ran my hand across the cover, its aged paper smooth as chamois. I read the description on the back:

The Highland river with its dark brown pools and sudden rushing shallows is a magical playground for little Kenn and his fellows. Here he battles for salmon with home-made hooks . . . With no conscious aim beyond satisfying the hunting instinct, Kenn’s journey up the river becomes a thrilling exploration into its source and the source of himself.

I turned it over and studied the picture on the front: a photograph of a brown river, descending purposefully over flat slabs of rock, a few farm buildings in the foreground, some bluish hills beyond. The river was a real river. It was called the Dunbeath Water.

I slipped the book inside a suitcase.

When Evie and I arrived in the UK, we went first to our family home in Cheshire. Rupert had stayed in Barcelona to work on his book, and he would come out in a few weeks to visit us. I looked up the Dunbeath Water on a road map. It was very far away. And it really didn’t look like much. About fifteen miles long, hunched in the top right-hand corner of Scotland, it was just a little way short of John O’Groats. There was no spring or loch marked on the map, no source or well – it simply vanished, a thin blue squiggle into a dazzling white page. It was in the middle of what appeared to be the emptiest part of the British Isles. I tried to find a better map, an Ordnance Survey map. But this seemed always to be missing whenever I was in a bookshop. And then I realised that to follow this river from the sea to the source I would have to make a return trip of around fifteen hundred miles, for a journey on foot of perhaps thirty. I decided that we would start closer to home.

Notes on
Swimming Pool

Humber

If you look at it on the map Spurn Point appears as a bent hairpin, slightly to the right of Hull, curving out into the North Sea and then back on itself. What it is, is a spit of land, of sand, of shingle, that separates the wide mouth of the Humber from the formidable North Sea. Towards the tip there is a lighthouse, which has fallen into disuse because the spit, every quarter of a millennium, breaches, and the whole thing starts again. Beyond that is a lifeboat station; it too awaits abandonment. Spurn is felt to be nearing the end of this particular incarnation. There is a road along it, made of flat square tiles, and the spit, sinuous as a cat, shifts constantly under it, so the road has to be remade, rearranged, in a new place, wherever the spine of the land finds rest.

I had just kissed Evie goodnight.

‘Where are you going?’ she asked.

‘I’m going to Spurn Point.’

‘Where is it?’

‘It’s on the other side of the country. Pretty much in a straight line from here. I’ll be back tomorrow afternoon,’ I said.

Evie arranged Jerome, a stuffed dog, next to her pillow.

‘I thought we were going to the cottage tomorrow.’

‘I know. We can go the next day,’ I said. ‘Will you and Grannie be all right on your own?’

‘Yes!’ she said. ‘We’re going to do baking.’ She glanced at me sideways along her cheekbones. ‘Sing long-and-winding?’ I held her hand and began to sing ‘The Long and Winding Road’ by the Beatles. By the time I reached the end, Evie was asleep. I tucked a curl of hair behind her ear, then bent to kiss her forehead, rested my face next to hers. I listened to her breathing for a while.

I had always wanted to walk to the lighthouse, and Mum had encouraged me to go. I hadn’t been alone all year, other than for the handful of hours when Evie was in school. Mum and Evie only saw one another in the holidays. Spurn Point formed the top lip of a river mouth, so it even fitted in with our holiday theme. Although the Humber wasn’t a river one could follow from sea to source. Strictly speaking, the name referred to the estuary. There had once been a freshwater river, a long time ago, when the ice had first begun to melt. But the River Humber had been displaced by the rising North Sea, and today the name describes the confluence of the rivers Ouse and Trent, joined later by the Ancholme and the Hull.

By midnight I had still not made up my mind to go. I sat on the end of Mum’s bed, the two of us drinking tea.

‘If you set off now,’ she said, ‘you’ll be there for sunrise.’ Her pale eyes were as blue as forget-me-nots. The bones of her hands in mine felt frail, yet pliant as feathers. She was eighty-one. A lovely lady, and an impassioned wanderer; Mum wouldn’t have hesitated for a moment. So I kissed her soft cheek, and laughed, and went out into the summer night, made black by the glow of the street lamp. There was no need for a map. I started the car and headed east, past Manchester, towards morning.