Watching the Climbers on the Mountain by Alex Miller Page B

offer him her formal sympathies. The muscular embrace of his cool hard body as they had rolled about together in the cascading water was still with her. Her brain danced with contradictions, accusing her of stupidity for all those daydreams—those freely indulged, voyeuristic and sensual imaginings! Nothing definite, to be sure, no conclusive realisations, everything vague and more or less suggestive. But there had been real expectations attached to them. There must have been—such imaginings are never an end in themselves.
    And what had he been thinking: There goes the boss’s wife, ‘Mrs Rankin’ . . . ? Quite simply, she admitted the unpleasant conclusion, he had never noticed that she was a young woman. A young woman? Is thirty-three a young woman? She was so accustomed to the company of Ward that she had always taken her youthfulness for granted—in her own mind there had never been a doubt. But was youthfulness the same thing as being young? She knew it was not.
    â€˜I was a bit lucky,’ he said, looking up suddenly from examining his feet.
    â€˜Yes,’ she replied. He was eighteen. Did he see her, then, simply as the more-or-less middle-aged wife of his boss? Nothing beyond that? Her sense of herself rebelled violently against such a possibility. I could beat him in a race to the top of this rock, she thought confidently. The rest is rubbish! Yet the difference in their ages was almost exactly the difference between herself and Ward; it was an almost precise mirroring of her position fifteen years ago. She had not thought of this before, and she wondered if such a coincidence, such a striking symmetry, could possibly be just that and no more. Or were there hidden meanings in such things? She did not enjoy this sort of speculation, however, so dismissed it. Whatever else, she thought, here we are, middle-aged or young, standing together in this warm spray, almost naked, having just a moment ago rolled about in the water hugging each other. The sort of thing lovers dream of doing. Surely we can’t stay on this ledge for much longer without having some kind of conversation?
    â€˜What were you doing?’ But even as she asked she had the hopeless feeling that she was trying to force into the open something that was not really there.
    How flat and fed-up she had begun to feel! Fifteen years! And in another fifteen she would be nearing fifty. She experienced a rush of suffocating urgency. How could anything ever really be resolved? The immense, unfulfilled loneliness of her life had come to stand before her, to remind her again of its unimaginable silence. Her sense of isolation was so immense that it would have crushed her long ago if she had not been herself a part of it, if it had not been a part of her, and if she had not sought in it at the deepest level of her consciousness the realisation of something greater than everything else she knew. And it would certainly have crushed her if there had not been in her character that peculiar perversity and tenacity which made her prepared to suffer for intangible and unlikely rewards. All she knew was that her life so far was not enough to satisfy her sense of who she might become.
    By now she felt mildly disgusted that the stockman should continue to fiddle with the slightly injured soles of his feet. She kept staring at him nevertheless.
    He looked at her, hesitating. ‘I was thinking about being an eagle.’ He searched her face, anxious for her reaction.
    She took a breath and just managed to stop herself from repeating aloud what he had said.
    He observed her uncertainty and quickly sought to explain himself. ‘Just daydreaming, eh?’
    â€˜To be one or win one?’ she asked, but he looked totally lost. ‘It’s just that they award stupid looking china ashtrays with golden eagles perched on them to the winners at the boxing tournament, and I thought you . . .’ she trailed off. ‘I shouldn’t