8. Mar, 2021

'Blue John'

The countryside had an unreal quality to it, as if they had entered a fairy-tale landscape.  Very green hills had round domes topped with perfect crowns of lollipop shaped trees.  Further on, as it became more rugged,  a limestone escarpment yawned high up, gaping like the bony plate of a whale’s mouth, as if that were all of it that showed, petrified and landlocked by some ancient sea change.  The sight seemed surreal.  The narrow road then plunged between peaks as sheer and steep as the jagged glass mountain that must be climbed, barefoot and bloody, by the young bride in ‘Prince Wolf’ searching for her enchanted love.  Their little red car, lost in the scale of things, seemed as fragile as a ladybird’s carapace, in danger of being trampled by the giant things here.

“Wow!” exclaimed Steph.  “I had no idea it would be like this!”

“I told you,” said Ray.  “Holidays in the sun are all very well but look what you’re missing.”

“Rain,” said Steph.  “Mostly.”

“Oh, I’ve got lots of things I can show you!” claimed Ray rather boastfully, as if he bore some personal responsibility for the local splendours.

Now and again, there was something complacent about Ray that jarred with Steph but everything else was going so well between them that she didn’t dwell on it.  When he said this now it sounded glib, as if he had shared these delights many times before but after all, what of it if he had, thought Steph?  They had met abroad, on one of those sunshine holidays Ray was now mocking, and it had been something of a whirlwind romance conducted away from family and friends.

“Have you seen Ant and Dec anywhere?” Ray had said, peering humorously at her through the fronds of greenery sprouting from her ludicrously enormous cocktail.  The bar was also decked out in fake and real lianas dangling around the trellises.

“It is rather like meeting in a jungle, isn’t it?” Steph had laughingly answered, receptive to this congenial looking man joining her with his drink. “Get me out of here!”

Things had gone quite easily from there, Steph being widowed and Ray, by his own admission ‘a repeat divorcee.’

“I’ve got a very chequered history, I have to warn you,” he had said with self-deprecating irony, intriguing her immediately.

In fact, his life story was not so bad as all that.

“You see, Steph, I’m a born romantic,” he had confided when they were in bed together and she had finally asked about his own past partners after several evenings of him listening to her own accounts with sympathetic interest.  “I like marriage and stability, but I hit the times when women wanted to be free.  I’m not someone to stand in anyone’s way.”

Steph’s perception of Ray from then on was of someone gallant, a person of generous chivalry rather somebody who had just been left flat or had left others similarly.  They got married soon after the holiday ended, quite quietly, and Ray encouraged Steph to think of herself now.  Her grown up and also married daughters had expressed surprise that perhaps it was rather soon after Dad’s death but then, Mum had never liked to be on her own, they both agreed.  All had been cordial at first, but they were on this weekend break to escape family pressure.  Steph had told Ray soon after they married that she still felt sad in the old family home.

“Sell it!” he had said in his celebratory way.  “It’s your house.  You can do what you like with the money.  Enjoy it!”

“But - the girls won’t like it.  I mean, we always said it would be sold by them after, you know, and the money split between them.”

“Nonsense!” Ray had declared heartily.  “They don’t care about that.  They’d be the first to say so!  Besides, things are different now.  It’s your money in the bank, that, not theirs.  Life is for living, Steph!”

The girls did object, though, saying that Ray had no right to pressure Steph into buying a new place for the two of them.  But here, it seemed that they were wrong.

“I’ve still got my housing association double bed flat we’d be more than comfortable in,” Ray said.  “What’s the point in all those material things hanging round your neck if they’re no good to you?  Spend your money on yourself, girl.  Holidays anywhere you like, meals out, dancing.  You love all that!”

Steph realised, of course, that what she did now included Ray, but she found this reckless joie de vivre a liberating force.   As Ray put it,

“You’ve spent all your life looking after everybody else and now it’s your turn!”

Steph agreed that it was.  The house went on the market and a buyer was even now finalising the contract.  She and Ray had so far hardly spent any time yet anyway either in her house or at his flat, making the most of everything they could think of to do away together.  Her daughters had been both concerned and hurt by the house sale, so she had agreed with Ray that they would whisk themselves away again while the solicitors dealt with final affairs, out of arguments’ reach.  It was the kind of escapism she would never have dreamed of indulging in before and that,  in itself, felt like a flight of fancy even before they had arrived here.

They drove on and back up the other side of this forbidding looking ravine where, in the cleft of the next valley, paragliders soared on thermals like mythical winged creatures.  It was as if pterosaurs still lived in this peculiar isolation.  Eventually, twisting further up narrow road ribbons to come right out on the peaks, they parked on a windy plateau.

“Wait till you see this!” Ray told Steph.  “The Blue John mine is unique.  It’s the only place in the world this mineral is found.  It’s fabulous in every sense of the word!”

They paid for tickets and there was a little time before the next trip down was due to begin, so they looked around the gift shop, where Steph chose a pendant in the purple blue stone with yellow shot through it.

“Wear it for luck,” Ray said, fastening it round her neck after buying it for her.

Steph had never been much of a one for credit cards, but Ray recommended the plastic, whipping out their new joint card now.

“What’s to worry about?” he laughed at her reflexive demur.  “Just keep transferring to 0% interest and it’s on the never never!”

“You’re terrible!” Steph said, not meaning it at all because Ray always made her feel that every day was made for being like a child let loose in a sweet shop.

They went to join the small cluster of people at the gates just being opened to go down.  The hand hewn stone staircase hacked into bedrock by long ago miners was to Steph even more like entering a fantasy world, as they descended down and down, deep into the limestone caverns beneath the high peaks of Derbyshire.  Flowstone glistened like living marble where water had trailed down the walls, mineral colours embedded in its shiningly frozen cascades.  It was silky smooth, soft feeling and cool to the touch.  Water dripped everywhere.  Stalagmites and stalactites were pointed out in various chambers by the guide, whose singsong delivery had a monastic, chanting quality to it, adding to the timelessly dream-like feel.  Lantern lights were roped daintily down the walls above them and they trekked onwards, ever deeper within.  Finally, they stopped in a cavern with a circular ceiling naturally vaulted by striated, calcified ribs of stone.  The stalagmites here were half formed shapes at various heights, like enchanted statues which might retake human form at any moment.

“The Eighteenth Century Lord Mulgrave,” the guide, rocking on his heels, described to them in his rise and fall delivery, “was an eccentric who brought a great feast down here to celebrate his miners.  Right down in the heart of the Blue John mine, fathoms deep.  The hall’s  banqueting table and chairs were all brought down to this very place, which has been known ever since as ‘Lord Mulgrave’s Dining Room’.  You can picture them here by candlelight, lit by magnificent standing candelabras, being served, these ordinary village men, by the hall servants in their liveries, with the duke himself sitting at the head of the banquet in all his finery.”

Steph could almost see it, hear the musicians he described playing chamber music echoing eerily in the corridors of the mines.  She imagined a ghostly assembly reliving the extravagant occasion, unseen and unheard, on the anniversary of their revels, year after year, growing paler and stiffer and stranger, the wraiths transmogrified too by dripping limestone.  She shuddered, feeling overwhelmed and smothered by the thought of the huge and inimical weight of the rocks above them.  What was the risk of water rushing back in and inundating it again, the whirlpool the guide said had formed the cavern long ago reappearing and trapping them down there forever?  Steph began to struggle to breathe, panic setting in.

“Steph!  Steph!  Are you all right?” cried Ray, flustered and anxious.  “It’s my wife!” he called as the guide stopped and came over.  “Oh, I shouldn’t have brought her down here!  Her heart, you know.”

“Sir, there are signs warning that this isn’t suitable for people with a heart condition.  It’s very strenuous.  Now, let me see to your wife.”

The guide was calm and just asked everybody to wait.  He led Steph to sit down on a rock.

“Just need a minute,” she gasped.

Steph hadn’t had a turn like this in a long time and she hadn’t seen any such signs, but then, people had been standing in a little group in front of all the notices outside the Blue John mine.  Gradually, she recovered herself and announced that she was ready to go on.  They had reached the end of the tour and it was time to make the lengthy ascent back up.  It seemed to take forever winding upwards, with Ray fussing constantly, asking if she could breathe and making her palpitating anxiety worse.

In fact, it seemed to be taking more of a toll of Ray himself, who was red faced and pale alternately.  When they got to the top, he fell to his knees.  Steph was horrified.   The medically trained guide sprang into action at once as Ray rolled over in a collapse.  They had a defibrillator in the tourist centre, and he worked on Ray while an air ambulance was called.  Steph found herself asking pointlessly what to do about the car, which she was assured would be safe where it was for the time being.  She felt as if they had barely escaped from a nightmarish entrapment in that underground palace of beguiling beauty.  The helicopter flew them over the magical looking country below them and then they were swept back to modernity and bleeping machines in hospital corridors. 

When Ray came round (Steph holding his hand and one of her daughters with her too) he had disbelief in his eyes.

“Oh, Ray, thank God!” cried Steph.  “You’re so right about everything!  I’m going to spend every penny on having the best time we possibly can.  You only live once, as you keep telling me, as if I didn’t know that already!  If only I hadn’t had that stupid panic attack down there and got you so stressed and worked up, this would never have happened to you!  Whatever made you think I had a heart condition?”

Ray’s eyes flitted to her daughter, Bea, who said,

“Did he?  All I said was he’d be giving you a coronary at your time of life, keeping you on the go all the time like that.  You’ve always been more coffee and doughnuts than dancing the night away.”

“Not anymore,” declared Steph.  “I’ll soon have you whirling around that dancefloor again, Ray, don’t you worry!  Guess what?  All the money’s come through from the house sale.  I’ve booked us on the most expensive luxury cruise I could find for when you’re better.  The first of many, Ray!  ”

“Steady girl,” said Ray uncharacteristically.  “Mustn’t fritter it all away at once.”

There was still a look of shock and confusion in his eyes.  Poor love, Steph thought, he can’t believe what’s happened to him!

“Oh, yes, we will!  You’ll soon be back to your old self.  We’ll be like that pools winner.  We’re going to ‘spend, spend, spend’!”

“She ended up broke,” said Ray faintly, his head falling back onto the pillow.

“He’s getting tired, Mum,” cautioned Bea.

“Yes.  You rest.  I’ll be back later and tell you all about the plans I’m making.  Aren’t we lucky, Ray, that the two of us met in Spain like that?”

“Oh, yes,” said Ray, still sounding rather flat.  “Luckiest man alive, that’s me,” and he managed a faint smile before closing his eyes, as if he just couldn’t cope with any more right then.

“Well, I hope he’ll be all right, Mum,” said Bea, as she walked away with her overexcited mother.  “I had my reservations about it but you marrying Ray really has given you a new lease of life, hasn’t it?”