Film Diary: The Man Who Knew Too Much (Alfred Hitchcock, 1955)

Never work with children and animals, runs the old show-business saw. Film-makers might be wise to add to this advice: never make a feature of a catchy song , for it will grow greedy and swallow the film. The history of popular music is littered with songs from long-forgotten films – perhaps the classic example is the song from Hall Bartlett’s Unchained, a pleasant but unexciting flick about a California prison with an enlightened governor, now notable only for the unwitting film debut of Dexter Gordon who just happened to be on hand, and its Melody which became one of the most-recorded songs of all time.

Unchained was made in 1955, the same year that Hitchcock made this remake of his own 1934 film. Presumably he wasn’t completely satisfied with the early version, so you’d expect him to make sure he got it right this time. But The Man Who Knew Too Much doesn’t come easily to mind when you think of the Hitchcock greats. I bet you’d all recognise the song though. It’s as much part of Doris Day as the yellow basket was part of Ella.

This is all rather unfair to a fine film. If it sits in the shadow of North by North West or Rear Window it’s probably because James Stewart doesn’t sparkle like Cary Grant, and Doris Day can’t counter his hapless Ordinary Joe with the same touch of glamour that Grace Kelly could give him. Still, the pair of them carry off their portrayal of an unlikely couple wandering blindly into a net of international intrigue, espionage and assassination with their son – the sort of winsome brat so beloved of 50s American cinema – as the McGuffin. You do have to wonder how an international singing star manages to settle down to a life as mother and wife to a gauche Indiana quack. There’s a story here, hinted at but never explicitly told, which would make more sense if Jimmy were Doris’s shrink, but anybody who thought Doris Day was there just for her voice and were unaware that she could act too would be seriously impressed by the scene in which her husband has her all but begging for her medication.

This is good Hitchcock. The crucial scene in the Albert Hall is breathtaking, real edge-of-the-seat stuff. Will The Man Who Knew Too Much eventually be elevated to its rightful place in the pantheon? Who knows – whatever will be, will be. The future’s not ours to see…

Film Diary: A Beautiful Mind (Ron Howard, 2002)

A biography of a distinguished mathematician seems an unlikely source for an Oscar-winning blockbuster. But it’s precisely that aspect, coupled with real curiosity about the work as well as the life of John Forbes Nash, a brilliant but eccentric character (who is still alive so I’d better watch my step), that drew me to it. I never distinguished myself at maths but I penetrated the subject far enough beyond the tedium of the way it’s taught in schools to retain a fascination for it.

What we get is a film that dwells on eccentricity at the expense of mathematics. As a portrait of a man battling with some pretty fearsome devils – Asperger’s syndrome, one assumes, to start with and ultimately a nasty case of paranoid schizophrenia. The central enigma is the demarcation line between what is real and what is Nash’s delusions. By keeping it that simple, it works pretty well as a crowd-pleasing thriller. There’s always the old question to ask about “why now?” Why choose 2002 to make a film which centres on whether or not the threat of terrorist attack on US soil is real or fantasy. Can there be parallels with the real world being hinted at here?

All the same, I get a strange feeling with this film that I’ve seen it all before. These diaries are, for the most part, impressions and not studies. One of these days, though, I’d like to do a thorough analysis of the films of Modern Hollywood (say, post-Jaws), and see just how far each and every big Hollywood production follows the same schema; psychological buttons pushed, emotional strings pulled, all at carefully-planned strategic points. The result is a film that is seductively easy to watch, that draws you right into it, and leaves you afterwards feeling strangely, empty, like a Chinese meal.

What did I learn about John Forbes Nash? Nothing at all, very much, that I didn’t know already. That he was brilliant and arrogant; that like many with an autistic-spectrum condition he could be very charming; that he could make a right fool of himself in public places. Some things I knew about seem to have been carefully airbrushed out, not least his alcoholism and his bisexual promiscuity. Anybody hoping to learn about what Nash actually did would be disappointed. He is best-known for game theory, and this is barely hinted at – after losing a game of Go he complains that Go was a flawed game because he had played first and played a perfect strategic game so should have won (Nash later invented Hex as a game similar to Go that could always be won as suggested.) Any maths heavier than that is hinted as by the stereotypical blackboard scrawl of the geek. Yes, Nash isn’t to be seen as a beautiful mind at all, but as a one-man freak show. Well, what do you expect of somebody so sad as to be a mathematician?

All right. I enjoyed it, and I thought Russell Crowe pulled it off with surprising aplomb. But I didn’t wake up this morning still haunted by it, and I doubt if I’ll remember much about it in a couple of weeks time.

Film Diary: The Thirty-Nine Steps (Alfred Hitchcock, 1935)

Long before there was James Bond, in an age when the cinema was still a novelty and the enemy was Kaiser Bill, there was Richard Hannay, suave hero of John Buchan’s riproaring yarns. Buchan may or may not have realised that his brand of muscular adventure was perfect fodder for the film industry but she sure scored a bullseye. All that was needed to make it memorable was the budding talent of Alfred Hitchcock. Now why would somebody want to make a film with slippery Germans in 1935 of all years? Just as the year before Robert Graves had written a Roman epic also full of slippery Germans? Was something going on that not everybody was seeing properly? It’s even updated to the 1930s.

So, a mysterious and very frightened woman takes refuge in Hannay’s flat. Before the sun rises she’s dead with Hannay’s breadknife in her back, and there the fun begins. There are spies and there are establishment figures of decidedly fuzzy loyalty. There’s a dramatic escape by train including an episode in a compartment with an unknown woman, and there’s a dramatic confrontation in a wild and lonely place. A quarter of a century on, Hitchcock will do much the same thing again, in colour and with the inimitable Cary Grant in the lead, as North by North West. It will be a great film but it won’t be half as charming as this one.

Film Diary: Watership Down (Martin Rosen, 1979)

To my shame it’s only four years since I read Watership Down for the first time (it was one of the very first books I obtained through Bookcrossing.) For more than a quarter of a century before that, the thought of a book or a film about anthropomorphic bunnies made me a bit queasy. But I loved the book because it was dark and not in the least sentimental, and had a great deal to say about the human condition and the state of the world.

It took until now to see the film, and then only prompted by the fact that Tom Ewing’s excellent Popular blog had reached 1979 and Art Garfunkel’s strikingly dark and moving song Bright Eyes, taken from the soundtrack. The song is woven into the fabric of the film but I was a little surprised to find that it didn’t dominate as I’d feared. Instead there’s a score by Malcolm Williamson that owes a great deal to Vaughan Williams, and that’s apt because what this film does most beautifully is to evoke the countryside of he Hampshire/Berkshire borders perfectly. So lovingly has the background been created in watercolour that sometimes it was easy to forget that this was an animation. Nor was it in the least idealised. This is a countryside complete with electricity pylons and full of hidden dangers: badgers and foxes, hawks, humans with snares, and other rabbits less than cuddly of demeanour.

A hefty novel – 500 pages in this case – is always difficult to translate into a manageable film, let alone an animation, but this film remains remarkably true to teh original. Some minor things have been changed, a lot has been missed out, but nothing has been lost. It’s understandable that the horrors of the Efrafa warren are focused on, and I thought it was a shame that the effete and over-sophisticated rabbits of Cowslip’s warren were glossed over (although I actively disliked this bit of the novel – it came across to me as anti-intellectual, although I did get the point.) But it keeps the dark flavour of the novel intact.

It’s about as far from Disney as you can get, but it’s none the worse for that.

Film Diary: Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner (Stanley Kramer, 1967)

1967.  Martin Luther King is making headlines at the head of the civil rights movement.  In a third of the States, mixed-race marriages are illegal.  Vigilantes hunt down voter registration campaigners.  Hell, killing a Negro doesn’t even count as murder.  And the Oscar for Best Picture goes (all right, will go to) a film in which a black FBI man comes face to face with a rednecked Alabama police chief. 

White America is polarised between the old-guard bigots and the liberal intelligentsia intent on sweeping them away. But what happens when those liberals come under scrutiny?  What happens when the daughter of a crusading San Francisco newspaper proprietor brings home the man she’s fallen head-over-heels in love with and plans to marry come hell or high water?  And the man concerned is a brilliant doctor and medical academic who just happens to be Sidney Poitier?  And what about his parents? And, er, the black skivvy in this exemplary liberal household?  The racial revolution of the sixties has been the subject of a lot of films, but not many of them have turned the spotlight so searchingly on the motives of the white middle-class campaigners.

For all that it had its finger on the Zeitgeist (as it were), it’s a curiously old-fashioned piece.  By that I don’t mean that its mid-sixties ambience seems ‘dated’ now – it’s of its time and thet’s fair enough.  But it looks so terribly stagey.  The most surprising thing about it is that it won the Oscar that year for Best Original Screenplay, because it looks like a theatrical performace, acted out before a painted backdrop of San Francisco Bay as if it were a piece of early Alan Ayckbourn.  There are a couple of moments when the action moves away from the house – presumably intended to emphasise the aging  Spencer Tracy’s growing estrangement from the bright young world around him – and they are gruesomely, wince-inducingly, bad.  But it would be unfair to judge the whole film on two short scenes.  It rolls fairly predicatable on to a conclusion in which Tracy gathers all the protagonists around him to give a long speech like an avuncular Poirot, and you want to scream at him to stop wittering and get to the point.  Then you remember that Spencer Tracy was seriously ill at the time, that Stanley Kramer didn’t know if he was going to make it through filming, that it was the last scene he would ever record in a long and distinguished career.  He would be dead in just a few days.

Film Diary: Life Is Sweet (Mike Leigh, 1991)

The essence of Mike Leigh is simple. Take a bunch of assorted characters, all larger than life but all very believable. Throw them into a dysfunctional suburban nightmare, and just let them get on with. There’s little in the way of plot but oodles of insight into human nature, especially of the kind to be found in the neglected wastes of north London, with all its limited horizons. There’s a whole world out there, but they can’t see beyond the limits of their housing estate.

Everybody here shines. Alison Steadman as the tireless mother hen who laughs infuriatingly at her own jokes, and Jim Broadbent as her meek husband, a cook who dreams only of running a ramshackle hamburger stand. The terrible twins, Claire Skinner who crops her hair and works as a plumber and might go for a fortnight in America one day if she gets round to it, and Jane Horrocks in huge round glasses who doesn’t have a clue what she wants to be, except very, very angry. Steven Rea as a drunken wide-boy and, best of all, Timothy Spall’s gormlessly intense would-be restaurateur.

It’s all very theatrical. Stagey, I mean. It leaves you with the feeling that it ought to be played out in the round above a pub somewhere. Mike Leigh hasn’t, by 1991, quite found his cinematic feet yet, but he does a good job here. Very enjoyable. And totally bonkers.

Film Diary: The Searchers (John Ford, 1956)

It’s so easy to poke fun at John Wayne. He’s such an inviting target; his bone-headed stubbornness, his neanderthal attitudes, his apparently wooden acting. What’s harder is trying to explain how it is he turns up in so many excellent films, and not in minor roles either. Stagecoach and Red River are up there with the greats of any genre, and so is The Searchers.

The history of the Western has been about the America of the European settlers coming to terms with what it has done: what it has destroyed as much as what it has achieved. It’s been a hard lesson to learn, especially as the awful realisation of what was visited on the people who were already there. John Wayne fits into this history perfectly. He’s the embodiment of Manifest Destiny; the pioneer who ain’t gonna let nobody stand in the way of his fortune; the man who takes just what he wants and blasts away anybody who gets in his way. Even his own brother, if his brother has the woman he wants.

And he really hates Injuns. He lost his mother to them. He hates the red man so much that, when he comes back late from the Civil War and finds that his brother’s family have adopted as their own the part-Cherokee boy Marty, the look he gives would freeze whiskey in the full heat of noon in Monument Valley. He hates them so much that he shoots them in the back as they ride away from him. Some Hero of the Old West! He’s even determined to kill the niece he and Marty have been tracking for five years, taken by the Comanche, because she’s become assimilated with them.

Sure, it’s a dreadful thing that the Comanche torch the settlers’ homesteads with the settlers inside and abduct the children. But it’s also pretty bloody awful for the US Cavalry to charge through a tepee village on sight massacring men, women and children alike. And in the end it’s the Comanche who come out of The Searchers smelling sweeter. In 1956 America was waking up to what it had done to its indigenous people, The Searchers still has a touch of moral ambiguity about it, but the Western has come some way from Red River a few years earlier where cutting the throat of an Indian was no obstacle to being family entertainment.

It’s the ambiguity that made the ending, which I won’t give away, such a disappointment for me. It’s undoubtedly a great film, but for now it must yield to Red River the title of My Favourite Western.

Film Diary: Saturday Night Fever (John Badham, 1977)

I had never seen Saturday Night Fever before. Not when it was the big pop-culture phenomenon of early 1978 (only to be surpassed later in the year by Grease, which I did see at the time and will probably not be revisiting.) Not since, and with any luck I might have escaped forever. But then the estimable Popular site reached 1978 and this film couldn’t be ignored any longer.

One reason why I hadn’t been tempted before was my perception, not unique to me, that this was a bit of fluff designed to promote the then-hot disco movement in general, and the musicaol careers of Robert Stigwood’s charges in particular. A piece of product placement on what was then – a more innocent age when merchandising wasn’t the plague it is now – a more innocent age.

It seems I was wrong in my snap judgement, and that’s why Saturday Night Fever had to be worth a look.

And yes, this is a much more substantial film than the 1978 hype would have had you believe. Yes, the disco is at its core, and yes, there’s a lot of Bee Gees songs (and the Bee Gees, though never considered “cool”, could write damned good songs spoilt only by Barry’s put-on squeaky “disco” voice. It’s based on a Nik Cohn story in a New York newspaper and Cohn himself has admitted that he based it on the lives of West London mods, but there’s surely more than a slice of Alan Sillitoe here. Think of another classic film with “Saturday Night” in the title. Consider that this, too, is about a working-class lad in a dead-end job, whose family doesn’t understand him, who thinks he is god’s gift to women, whose life revolves around letting his hair down on a Saturday night on the local dancefloor. And hanging out with a gang on the edge of criminality, full of macho posturing. Get my drift?

There, too, is the immortal story: man can screw any woman he likes except the one that he really wants, who teaches him a few life lessons. Karen Lynn Gorney does this bit marvellously, saving the film from the kind of gloop I had feared, by managing to look great without being in the slightest glamorous.

It’s not that great a film but it;s not a bad one either. And there’s the dancing, which in the end really is what it’s all about. While there is some of the tedious macho strutting I was dreading, I found myself pleasantly surprised to see that much of the dancing was the sort of dancing I recognised; they probably wouldn’t have called it leroc but the moves sure looked like leroc to me, particularly those moves borrowed from salsa, And I can do that! Or I could before arthritis in the knees put paid to it.

Anyway, I’m glad I saw it. I may watch it again one day, but not for a while.

Film Diary: Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Blake Edwards, 1961)

Once there was a well-known model, a star of the roadside hoardings and the nocturnal fantasies of young men, who lived two floors up from us in Notting Hill. One warm evening as I sat out front having a cigarette, she came down to dump a pizza box in the bin, dressed casually and without makeup. In her natural state she was pretty enough, though more so than many others, but what struck me at that moment was just how brittle she seemed; so lonely and vulnerable underneath the glitz.

And so it is with Holly Golightly, the central character of Truman Capote’s novel, and the somewhat toned down (for understandable reasons) film of it. In the novel Holly is a prostitute. There’s no direct suggestion of that in the film but then a tart is a tart even when dressed up as a high-class escort, and we know that tarts have hearts by convention. Holly flits through her Warholian demi-monde with insouciance whether partying or carrying messages to a mobster in Sing Sing, in little black dress with iconic cigarette holder or draped in a bedsheet. But scratch the surface and there’s a different Holly. Behind the psychotic gold-digger there’s the country girl yearning for a rural Texan home, lost and lonely in the big bad city. This is the Holly that finds her counterpart in Paul, gigolo and washed-up writer, and if only she could see there’s more of a future for her there than in any number of ageing billionaires, well that’s the play.

I think we all see a bit of Holly Golightly in ourselves if we’re honest. If only we could look as good with it as Audrey Hepburn does. She not only looks gorgeous, she conveys that little girl lost feeling so well, alongside the quiet perceptiveness that only others can see. I can’t imagine this with Marilyn Monroe in the lead, as originally planned. Oh, and Audrey sings Moon River like a dream. Many better singers have taken on the song and failed to rise to the origional.

As an affectionate and often bitterly funny portrait of Manhattan it prefigures Woody Allen, and particularly Annie Hall, to a very satisfying degree (Diane Keaton, I think, would be a pretty good Holly). But if I could award a special all-time Oscar for Breakfast at Tiffany’s it would surely be to the ‘unnamed’ ginger cat, Cat (which is a name isn’t it? As in Cat Ballou?), for best ever supporting role by a cat. Narrowly pipping the cat in The Third Man I think.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s is one of the select band of films that can be guaranteed to wrench a tear or two from my eyes at the end.

Whittaker Prize 2008: Round 4 entry

(Before anybody asks, there is no Round 3 entry. I sat out that round owing to illness.)

ROCKFALL (Prompt: going down an angle so sharp it makes Pythagoras puke)

“Do I have to go up there?”

Rachel tilted her head back and looked up. Before her the ridge struck upwards at an alarming angle, pimpled with jutting rocks and boulders and pock-marked with patches of crusty snow. Her legs seemed to have turned to a trembling jelly and beneath her ribs her lungs screamed “no more!” Some Historical Society weekend outing this was. Part of her mind was beginning to wish what she’d told Steve was the truth.

Craig was above her, one foot on a rock, looking down with a big silly smile on his face. “Twenty minutes, max,” he said. “You’ve done really well to get this far, Rach. You’ve done the really hard bit slogging up to here. Now the ridge should climb itself.”

“I really want to, Craig. But my legs are telling me they’ll strike if I push them any harder.”

“I love you, Rach.”

“I love you, too, Craig.” And she smiled, stepped forward, kicked her crampons into the ice and hauled herself up one step, pulling with her hands on the rock above. Craig was right. Now that she was climbing with all four limbs, it was easier than the long slog up the head of the valley. The way she was gaining height so quickly was exhilarating, too. One last haul. One last outcrop rounded, and the terrain flattened into a bare stony plateau. The wind, freed from all obstruction now, hurled itself at the mountain top so that Rachel, for an instant, was driven back on herself. Only with much stumbling and flailing of her arms did she manage to avoid an ignominious landing on her bottom, but Craig was there waiting with his arms held wide, so that she teetered forward into the warmth of his embrace. His mouth felt hot as it melted against her own.

“Are we alone then?” Rachel asked, pulling herself away from Craig’s face. She loved the way the wind picked up his long, fair hair and set it flying. She loved the way his blue eyes echoed the afternoon sky. She loved being with him, here, on this desolate mountain top.

“As alone as we’ll ever be,” Craig said. “In summer there’s a queue up the ridge, and the summit is heaving. But they don’t know what they are missing. Look!”

Craig unwound his arms from Rachel’s waist and waved a hand in a great sweep. Rachel tore her head from the comfort of Craig’s fleece and let her eyes follow the arm. In every direction, bathed in bright winter sunshine, lay succeeding rows of fells, a hundred shades of brown flecked with white and looking like toy mountains she could reach out and touch in the sharp crystalline air. Below, as if it were a puddle at her feet, Wastwater stretched along the line of the screes and pointed the way to the green coastal lands and the sea.

“What’s that over there?” she said.

“That’s the Isle of Man,” he said. “It’s about fifty miles away, but you could almost count the sheep on Snaefell. And that,” he swung his finger to the right, “is the coast of Galloway. And the other way you can even see the Welsh mountains. You won’t see that too often.”

Rachel cradled her head on Craig’s shouder. “I wish we could see our future as easily,” she said. “If I had a way of stopping time for ever, at a moment of my choosing, I’d choose now.”

Craig said nothing for a long time, but pulled her close and kissed her once more, slowly, succulently, and for an instant it seemed to her that her wish had been granted. Even the wind seemed to have frozen in its tracks.

“We have to go,” he said in the end. “If we’re to get back to the tent before it gets dark. And then…”

“And then we’ve all the time we need for each other.”

The sun was already dipping towards the sea. On the shadow side of the mountain it would soon be gloomy. Rachel heaved her pack onto her shoulders once more, and plodded off in Craig’s wake. There was a gully to descend, a steep and stony trail cascading between walls of slimy rock. Out of the wind it may have been but it gave off a chill that went right through all her protective clothing to the bone. It was not a place to be in bad light. She knew that a false step could meana twisted, or even broken, ankle, and help in this desolate place was a long way off.

“Rock fall,” Craig said, turning to face her. “Watch your step. It doesn’t look very stable”

The gully ahead was partly blocked by three or four large boulders; she saw one of them towering over Craig as he stood in front of it. From the way the broken faces of the rocks gleamed this was a fresh fall. The stagnant air of the gully was infused with an acrid, sulphurous smell, of stones struck together, that made her screw up her nose against it.

“Stay there,” Craig said. “I’ll go ahead and find the way through, and then I’ll call you.”

She watched him pass the biggest boulder to the left, then stepped towards a large flat rock at the side of the gully. It was slippery with algae; the ground vanished from under her and no amont of arm-flailing could stop her keeling over sideways, sending a shower of small stones tumbling downhill.

“Don’t make things worse,” Craig called. His voice seemed a long way off. Rachel sat on the flat rock and tried not to move as she watched Craig picking his way through the rockfall until he passed out of her sight.

The earth seemed to shudder. It was something Rachel could sense, but not see or hear, and it only lasted for an instant, but she could feel every muscle in her body clenching as if bracing itself for a crisis. Only then was a rumble, as if they were shooting over on the Eskmeals firing ranges. The big boulder seemed to stand up and flex itself, as if seeking a more comfortable position to sit, and then it was moving, shifting itself in slow motion a few feet further down the slope.

The sulphur smell intensified, ripping at her throat. And there was silence. Rachel breathed in, tuning her hearing to pick up the slightest sound. What she wanted to hear was the crunch of feet on stones, to know that Craig was still there, still moving about.

No sound came to her.

The light was failing. Above and behind her, shreds of cloud were drifting across the clear blue. A clammy chill seized her arms and insinuated itself into her windproofs. “Craig!” she called, and she heard the echo from the rocks but no answer from Craig. Rachel had felt alkone before; alone in her marriage to Steve, but for the first time in her life, she sensed what it was like to be completely, utterly, and helplessly alone.

She heaved herself to her feet. It was becoming hard to see the way past the fallen boulder in the growing shadow, but she inched her way towards it, feeling her way around the rock. Dread flooded her body, seeping up from her stomach. She wanted to screw her eyes tightly shut, the better not to see what she feared she would find, but she swallowed hard, breathed in, and edged around to the far side.

Her dread had steeled her. Craig was stretched on his belly, his head turned to one side, his face as pale as the moon against the damp rock. The lower part of his right leg was trapped under the boulder. There was nothing she could do to move it, not without the danger of the rock roll8ing forward and crushing him completely. Her first instinct was to check for a pulse. Her relief at finding one was tempered by the thought of the pain. Mercifully he was unconscious.

The blue had gone from the sky now, and fingers of mist probed the gully, bringing with them a fine drizzle. She knew the first thing to do was to keep him warm; the biggest danger in the fells was hypothermia, which crept up on you and made you feel warm and fuzzy and sleepy. His survival bag was strapped to his rucksack; it was a simple matter to unbuckle it and wrap it round him. The second thing was to fetch help, because there was nothing she could do for his crushed leg. That was a bigger problem. He had made her carry a whistle on a lanyard around her neck, and a torch in her own pack, but who was there to see or hear? In front of them, on this side of the mountain at the bottom of the gully, there was the empty expanse of Burn Moor, and the rugged desolation of Upper Eskdale. She doubted that there was even a shepherd out on those fells at this time of the day, of the year. She could try, but to have a real chance she needed to go back to the top of the mountain, alone and in the gathering darkness, mist and rain.

Six of anything, didn’t Craig tell her? Six flashes of the torch. Six long blasts on the whistle. She raised the whistle to her lips and blew as hard as her lungs would let her, but the mist seemed to soak up the sound like cotton wool. Again she blew. Three times, four, five, six. The breath drained from her body. A dull throb banged against her temples. Her arm seemed sapped of strength as she lifted the torch. When she pushed the button the mist lit up, punctuated by scintillations of ever more insistant rain. It was no good, nobody would see it here. She turned and looked up the gully, back to the top of the mountain, and the mountain frowned back at her, dark and fearsome.

“Here I come,” she muttered to herself, “for better or worse.”

Rain peppered her face and ran down her chin, seeking ways to penetrated her clothing and possess her. The rain made the stones of the gully even more slippery than they were before. Three times she slipped, sliding backwards down the scree and senting showers of stones tumbling down the slope. Once she landed face down on the bone-cold rocks. She closed down her mind, driving everything out of it but Craig, and by force of will-power she stepped out once more onto the summit. The wind was savage now, and she struggled to make headway, but she drover herself forward to the cairn from which she had looked on the Isle of Man. There was nothing to see now except a streak of paler grey over on the western horizon. Even in thick woolen gloves her hands struggled to grip the rubber torch. It took both hands to raise it and turn the light on and off, sweeping the beam six times over Wasdale and the neighbouring fells. The whistle stung her lips and clung to the flesh so that she felt a terror of the metal freezing to her mouth. The latest climb had sapped her breath leaving almost none for the six blasts, and when she had finished those she felt faintness wash over her. She wanted more than anything to sit in the lee of the cairn and rest, perhaps fall asleep, but she retained enough presence of mind to know that would be the last thing she’d ever do. Think of Craig, not me, she scolded herself. She’d done what she could. Now he needed her with him.

It was dark now. A black, enveloping, soggy darkness with no moon or stars. She had the torch and with that she could make her way down the gully, slowly and with infinite caution. The passage of time didn’t matter; she had lost all sense of that. It might be teatime or it might be nearly dawn, she didn’t care. All that mattered was getting to Craig as best she could, and if that meant easing herself down the scree on her bottom, then so be it. Inch by wet, miserable inch she crept downwards until she found the fallen boulder, and then she felt her way round to obstacle to find where Craig lay.

A new panic seized her. When her fingers found him, would he be as cold as the rocks now? It didn’t matter, she wouldn’t know; her gloves were sodden and inside them her fingers had very little feeling left. When she found his soft form she had just enough energy left to find her own survival bag, wrap herself in it, and lie down on top of him. He needed the warmth. She needed to sleep. She had just enough sensibility left to find his lips with hers, and to note with relief, before sleep seized her, that they were warm.

It took the roar of the helicopter to bring her round. The world was bathed in light that soaked through closed eyelids. Not the natural, healthy, light of the sun but the clinical glare of floodlights. She was lying down, wrapped in blankets and some kind of tin foil, and somewhere she could hear the crackly voice of a radio but the words made no sense to her. Her nostrils were full of the scent of wet grass. A woman’s voice cut through the murk as clear as a laser.

“You saved his life, you know.”

Whose life? It didn’t register. At last she forced herself to open her eyes. The woman standing over her had cropped, honey-coloured hair and wore a bright ornage jumpsuit. Next to her was the familiar face of…

Oh no!

Steve. Dear, kindly, dumb, Steve, smiling down at her, stupidly.

“I lied to you,” she said.

“You nearly died,” he said.

“I’ve been lying to you for years”

“That doesn’t matter. I’ll drive you home. You need looking after. We’ll sort things out later.”

She couldn’t look at him. Her head lolled to one side. She saw the stretcher, with Craig’s foil-clad body on it, being hoisted into the helicopter and she looked after it full of longing. The silence echoed around the fells.

“I’m not coming back,” she said.

“Rachel, he could have killed you.”

“Maybe,” she said. “But he showed me life. More life than you could ever give me.”

She looked at the woman in orange. “I’m going with him,” she said, with a flick of her head towards the helicopter.

And then she was being lifted into the air and carried towards the waiting helicopter, while Steve looked on with his mouth ajar.