Free Amsterdam by Ian McEwan Page B

their dullness, their lack of appetite for life. They had let him down. No one knew where he was, and no one cared.
    After five minutes of listening to the rain rattling on the fabric of his waterproofs, he got to his feet and climbed on up. Anyway, was the Lake District really a wilderness? So eroded by walkers, with every last insignificant feature labeled and smugly celebrated. It was really nothing more than a gigantic brown gymnasium, and this incline just a set of grassy wall bars. This was a workout, in the rain.
    More debilitating thoughts pursued him as he climbed toward the col, but as he gained height and the going became less steep, as the rain ceased and a long fissure in the cloud permitted a tiny consolation of diluted sunlight, it began to happen at last—he began to feel good. Perhaps it was no more than the effect of endorphins released by muscular exertion, or becausehe had simply found a rhythm. Or it might have been because this was a cherished moment in mountain walking, when one reached a col and began to cross the watershed and new summits and valleys inched into view—Great End, Esk Pike, Bowfell. Now the mountains were beautiful.
    On near level ground now, he strode across the tussocky grass toward the track that brought walkers up from Langdale. In summer this was a depressingly busy route, but today there was just a solitary hiker in blue crossing the broad fell, hurrying purposefully toward Esk Hause as though to a rendezvous. As he approached he saw that it was a woman, which prompted Clive to cast himself in the role of her man, in the assignation she seemed so keen to reach: waiting for her by a lonely tarn, calling her name as she approached, taking from his pack the champagne and two silver flutes, and going toward her … Clive had never had a lover, or even a wife, who liked hiking. Susie Marcellan, always game for something new, went to the Catskills with him once and turned out to be a helpless Manhattan exile, complaining comically all day long about bugs, blisters, and the lack of cabs.
    By the time he had reached the track, the woman was half a mile ahead of him and beginning to drift off to her right, toward Allen Crags. He stopped to let her go in order to have the great upland field to himself. The crack in the sky was opening further, and behindhim, on Rosthwaite Fell, a baton of light across the bracken redeemed the reputation of the color brown with fiery reds and yellows. He packed the waterproofs away, ate an apple, and considered his route. He was for climbing Scafell Pike now; in fact, he was impatient to set off. The quickest way up was from Esk Hause, but now that he had loosened up, he had it in mind to continue northwest, drop down to Sprinkling Tarn and down again by Sty Head, and make the long ascent by the Corridor Route. If he came down under Great End and went home the way he had come up, by the Langstrath, he would be at the hotel by dusk.
    So he set off at an easy stride toward the broad enticing crest of Esk Hause, feeling that there was not really so much physical difference between him and his thirty-year-old self after all, and that it was not sinew but spirit that had held him back. How strong his legs felt now that his mood had improved!
    Skirting the broad scars of erosion caused by hikers, he made a curving route to the ridge ahead of him and, as so often happened, thought about his life in fresh terms, gladdening himself with recollections of recent small successes: a reissue on disk of an early orchestral piece, a near-reverential mention of his work in a Sunday paper, the wise and humorous speech he had given when awarding the composition prize to a dumbstruck schoolboy. Clive thought of his work intotality, of how varied and rich it seemed whenever he was able to raise his head and take the long perspective, how it represented in abstract a whole history of his lifetime. And still so much to do. He thought affectionately about the people in his life.