Page 62 of Crazy in Love at the Lonely Hearts Bookshop
‘I was trying to make the walk interesting,’ Noah protested. ‘I know you’re a city girl and I thought if I pointed out significant features, it would make the walk less …walky.’
‘And I appreciate that, I really do,’ Nina said, because she did, even if Noah pointing out significant features was making her want to scream. ‘I appreciate all the trouble you’ve gone to and how much time you must have spent in your hotel room in Glasgow putting this all together, but I don’t need to know about reservoirs or starlings and sparrows or whatever these scientifically interesting birds are.’
‘Curlews and peregrines actually,’ Noah said with a little sniff.
‘I went on a date with a guy called Peregrine once,’ Nina recalled. ‘He was so posh that what came out of his mouth didn’t even sound like English.’
Noah sniffed again as Nina slowly turned a full circle. ‘Do you want to go back then?’ he asked in the same huffy voice.
Nina turned again. ‘No,’ she said. ‘But look. Justlook.’
No wonder they described Yorkshire as God’s own country. The moors weren’t like the neatly clipped lawns and manicured paths of the parks that Nina was used to. Here, up this high, the sky, dark and grey, hung heavy and looked bigger, mightier than sky normally did. It was the perfect dramatic backdrop for the lush green below; every shade of green that Nina had names for, from sludgy khaki to rich emerald, moss and fern, to palest seafoam.
But the scenery stretching out before her from every side wasn’t pretty. There was a savage beauty to the land, deep seams riven through it, teetering, haphazard rock formations looming at every turn.
It was wild, untethered, elemental. And over the light patter of the rain on the unflinching stones from the old quarry, Nina could hear the wind wrapping around them.
‘Noah! Listen!’
‘I thought I was meant to be looking,’ he grumbled.
‘The wind … I think it’s wuthering.’
‘What even is wuthering?’
Nina put a hand to her ear. ‘It sounds like the wind’s calling us.’ She shivered and not just because she was bloody freezing. ‘This is the same wuthering that Emily Brontë wrote about and if you forget about the reservoirs and the quarry and Ordnance Survey marks, and just look around us, this,this, is what the Brontës saw. We might even be standing where they stood. Charlotte wrote about the waterfall so all three of them must have walked these paths two hundred years ago. That just blows my mind.’
‘It’s blowing mine too. Or that might just be the wind. Wuthering,’ Noah said and he wasn’t looking quite so cross now. ‘Shall we take a moment?’
‘Let’s.’
They stood side by side to appreciate again the rugged moors, the untamed landscape, how insignificant they both were compared to the vastness of nature.
‘OK, I’m done taking a moment,’ Nina decided. ‘How about you?’
Noah nodded. His face was quite raw from being so rigorously scrubbed by the wind. ‘Moment taken.’
They set off again and though Noah couldn’t resist a few informed remarks about the terrain or the occasional derelict cottage they came across, he kept them brief. Nina’s head was full of images of Cathy and Heathcliff. Now that she’d been here, she couldn’t wait to rereadWuthering Heights.
The last part of their journey to the waterfall involved clambering over stone steps slick with rain and unevenly dispersed like they’d been thrown down by an angry god.
Noah raised an eyebrow when Nina told him this. ‘OK, if you say so.’
‘I’m really big on the symbolism ofWuthering Heightsright now,’ she explained. ‘How the moors represent Heathcliff; all savage and unpredictable. Luckily, no one is going to make me write an essay on the use of nature as metaphor.’
‘Oh, that’s what I had planned for this evening – among other things,’ Noah said and then he smiled in a way that made Nina feel quite hot even though she was still bloody freezing.
They were joined for the last few metres of their journey by a small group of ramblers and then, at last! They were at Brontë Falls.
It had rained heavily the day before according to the man who was leading the ramble, which was why the waterfall was such an impressive sight as it gushed down a series of stone shelves that had been carved into the hill over thousands of years. There was a stone bridge at the bottom of the falls, though apparently the original bridge had been swept away in a flash flood in 1989, according to a small plaque.
‘Do you think it’s safe?’ Nina asked Noah before she stepped on to it. ‘I really want a selfie but I don’t want to be swept away by the current.’
Noah cast what looked like a professional eye over the water descending down from above. ‘Well, it is a pretty small waterfall as waterfalls go. I reckon you’ll be safe.’
It wasn’t the ideal conditions for a selfie. The lighting wasterrible.And even with it pinned up and mostly hidden under a polka-dot scarf, Nina’s hair looked awful and the wind and the mizzle seemed to have removed quite a lot of her make-up so that her …
‘Come on, you know you always look good,’ Noah said though Nina knew no such thing.
