Pulse

Lynn said, but he could tell she was a bit edgy about it. ‘Will you wrap them up again for my birthday?’
    ‘I’ll do more than that. I’ll clean your Brashers specially. Oh yes,’ he said to the cashier, ‘and we’d better have some polish. Classic Brown, please.’
    Before they went walking next, he dubbined her boots to make the leather supple and strengthen the waterproofing. As he slipped his hand inside the fresh-smelling Brashers, he noted again, as he had in the shop, that she took half a size smaller than Cath. Half a size? It felt like a full size to him.
    They did Hathersage and Padley Chapel; Calke Abbey and Staunton Harold; Dove Dale as it narrows and deepens to Milldale; Lathkill Dale from Alport to Ricklow Quarry; Cromford Canal and the High Peak Trail. They climbed out of Hope to Lose Hill, then along what he promised her was the most scenic ridge walk in the entire Peak District, until they came to Mam Tor, where the paragliders gathered: huge men who sweated up the hill with vast packs on their backs, then spread out their canopies like laundry on the grassy slope and waited for the upcurrent to lift them off their feet and into the sky.
    ‘Isn’t that thrilling,’ she said. ‘Wouldn’t you like to do that?’
    Geoff thought of men in hospital wards with broken backs, of paraplegics and quadriplegics. He thought of mid-air collisions with light aircraft. He thought of not being able to control the wind and getting carried higher and higher into the cloud, of coming down in unknown landscape, of getting lost and scared and peeing yourself. Of not having your boots on a path and a map in your hand.
    ‘Sort of,’ he replied.
    For him, freedom lay on the ground. He told her about the trespass on Kinder Scout in the 1930s: how walkers and hikers had come out from Manchester in their hundreds to the Duke of Devonshire’s grouse moors to protest against lackof access to the countryside; how it had been a peaceful day except when a drunken gamekeeper shot himself with his own gun; how the trespass had led to the creation of national parks and registered rights of way; and how the man who’d led it had died recently, but there was still one survivor, now 103, living in a Methodist old people’s home not far away. Geoff thought his story soared better than any bloody paraglider.
    ‘They just went trampling across his land like that?’
    ‘Not trampling. Tramping, perhaps.’ Geoff was pleased with this emendation.
    ‘But it was his land?’
    ‘Technically, yes. Historically, perhaps not.’
    ‘Are you a socialist?’
    ‘I’m in favour of the right to roam,’ he said cautiously. He didn’t want to put a foot wrong now.
    ‘It’s all right. I wouldn’t mind. Either way.’
    ‘What are you?’
    ‘I don’t vote.’
    Emboldened, he said, ‘I’m Labour.’
    ‘I thought you would be.’
    In his walking log, he noted the routes they took, the date, the weather, the duration, ending with an L in red for Lynn. As opposed to a blue C for Cath. Times were about the same, regardless of the initial.
    Should he get her a trekking pole? He didn’t want to push it – she’d refused all offers of a walking hat, despite having the pros and cons explained to her. Not that there were any cons. Still, better a bare head than a baseball cap. He really couldn’t take a walker in a baseball cap seriously, male or female.
    He could get her a compass. Except he already had one himself, and rarely consulted it. If ever he broke his ankle, and had to tell her through the pain to set off across the moor using that tumbledown sheepfold as a reference pointand keep heading NNE – showing her how to turn the instrument and set a course – then she could have his for the purpose. No, one compass between two, that was right, somehow. Symbolic, you could say.
    They did the Kinder Downfall circuit: Bowden Bridge car park, the reservoir, pick up the Pennine Way to the Downfall, fork right at Red Brook and down past Tunstead House and the Kinderstones. He told her about the average rainfall, and how when it froze the Downfall turned into a cascade of icicles. One of the sights for the winter walker.
    She didn’t answer. Well, anyway, they’d have to get her a fleece if they were going up two thousand feet in winter. He still had the issue of Country Walking with the fleece test in it.
    In the car park he looked at his watch.
    ‘Are we late for something?’
    ‘No, just checking. Four and a