by Simon Mawer
“It’ll do,” Jamie’s mother had said once, long ago. “It’s not home, but it’ll do.”
I stopped the car and climbed out. Below, the ground fell steeply away to the river and the town. I could see the Anglican church and the Methodist chapel, and the municipal offices, which were like a hybrid between the other two. There was the silver line of the railway to balance in its directness the silver meanders of the river. There was smoke in the still air, thin plumes like old-fashioned quills stuck in ink pots. Upstream of the town was the seventeenth-century bridge featured in the postcards. They claim that Inigo Jones built it, but his surname was the only Welsh thing about the man. Jones was London born and bred.
Before opening the gate, I got Eve on the mobile phone. I didn’t know when I’d be back. I’d have to stay for the funeral. Of course I would. And there would be a coroner’s inquiry, apparently. And then, when everything was over…
“Everything was over years ago, wasn’t it?” she said.
“Yes, but…” But what? I tried to explain and felt the inadequacy of words at the very moment I spoke them. There was a silence on the line.
“I rescued you from them once, Rob,” she said eventually. Her voice was quiet. “I don’t think I could manage it again. Not after all this time.” And then she hung up.
I waited a moment with the phone dead in my hand. Sounds: the barking of a dog and the bleating of sheep. The sound of sheep was the constant undercurrent to the landscape, an old crone’s griping or a child’s whining, a Welsh complaint. “Bloody sheep,” Jamie’s mother had said. Coming from her mouth, the word bloody had shocked. It was language. “Bloody sheep. God, how can we live here?”
I had gone with them to look, a long and stuffy journey in the back of a hired car. She had lost the way, and we had to stop in a village to ask an old man how to get there. “Gilead?” he repeated. “Gilead House? That’ll be up Gwytherin way. Not far, mind, not far.”
And sure enough it was not far, just up the hill above the town, on the side of the valley among the trees, a gray place, the woodwork in blistered white, with the lawns run to rack and ruin and the field at the front full of sheep.
“Bloody sheep,” she had said, standing there holding Jamie’s hand (he struggled to let go, but she gripped him hard). “However will we live here?”
But she did live there, off and on. Forty years and more.
I drove the car through and went back to close the gate, then drove slowly up the gravel to the space in front of the house. There was no one around, but when I rang the doorbell I heard shuffling footsteps inside. Someone fiddled at the lock on the other side of the door, and it was only then that I realized I hadn’t really asked Ruth about Caroline’s health. “Very much alive” was what she’d said. But what did that mean when you were what, eighty? I tried to work it out. Seventy? Seventy-five? I wasn’t certain, not because I didn’t know how long ago it was but because, I understood with a sudden shock, I hadn’t really known her age even then. I had nothing definite to add to the forty years that separated then from now, this hillside on the edge of summer from that same hillside so many summers ago. Listening to the scrabbling on the far side of the door, I thought about the epithets of decline and decay — arthritis? Parkinson’s? Alzheimer’s? — and was filled with sudden dread at the prospect of seeing her again.
The door opened. The face that appeared in the gap was lined and toothless. It contained within its features all the closed suspicion of the Welsh hill people. “A chi sy o’r Bwrdd Dwr?” it said.
I felt an absurd and irrational relief at the sight. It was a woman from the village, a woman who cleaned. “I’m sorry. I’ve no Welsh I’m afraid. Not really. Bore da is my limit.”
She looked peeved. “Are you the man from the Water?” she asked with exaggerated emphasis.
“I’m a man from England,” I said. “An old friend.”
The woman faced this disappointment stoically. “We’re expecting a man from the Water.”
“I’m afraid I can’t oblige. I just want to see Mrs. Matthewson if she’s in.”
“Well, she’s not receiving people.”'
“I think she’ll receive me. Tell her it’s Robert. Tell her that.”
The maid considered the matter carefully, her wrinkled lips mulling over the problem as though it were a taste.
“You aren’t Mary, are you?” I asked.
“I’m Alice.”
“I remember Mary.”
There was a smile there among the suspicion. “Mary was my sister, God bless her.”
“I remember her well.”
“Do you now? Do you?” Memory was a kind of password. “Well, you’d best come in. I’ll find if Mrs. Matthewson can see you. Mr. Robert, you say?”
“Robert. Just Robert.”
She shuffled off. I waited in the hall, the dark-brown hall with the longcase clock that paced out the silence. Stairs led upward into shadow. There was a stained-glass window at the turn of the stairs: an Arthurian knight looking toward his lady, a piece of vapid Burne-Jonesery. I remembered that. I remembered laughing at it because she had laughed. There were pictures on the walls: watercolors of Welsh hillsides and an oil painting of an urban street — one of the slate towns, the slate cliffs laid on with a palette knife that brought to them the very texture of the rock itself: lucid slabs, slick with rain. I knew that style well enough, even without seeing the signature at the bottom:
Ruth Phoenix, 1979
Then there was the jawbone of a shark, fished — I recalled the story — off Nantucket. That was what Caroline had told me, laughing at the memory of it. “I caught it myself, while the men jeered and told me I could never do it and all that sort of crap. But I did it. And there it is.”
How much had changed? I couldn’t be sure. The illusion of memory gave me everything, all the artifacts, all the objets d’art (I could hear her enunciate the French phrase): a tortured glass bottle — Lalique? — that was like some intimate female organ; a porcelain shepherdess — Meissen? — that laughed at the onlooker as though flaunting her recently lost virginity; another oil painting that may have been (but she had never dared subject it to the expert’s curious gaze) by Marie Laurencin. I peered at the thing with new eyes now and knew just the man to examine it and value it. On the opposite wall there was even a photograph showing Jamie: a crouched figure in silhouette, his bandaged face looking out from under a helmet, with plunging cliffs behind him and bright alpine meadows far below. Jamie at Death Bivouac. I knew that photo well: I had taken it myself.
From upstairs there was the noise of talking, but I couldn’t make out any words. Then a light footfall at the top of the stairs. “Yes?”
I turned from the photo. Someone was coming down. She turned at the landing and paused in front of the stained glass, looking down at me. “Yes?”
There was a shock at seeing her, of course. Something physical like a fist, a child’s fist perhaps, swung playfully into the stomach when you weren’t expecting it. A convulsion of heart and diaphragm. The blow had been intended as a joke, so you had to smile.
“It’s Robert,” I said.
“Robert, yes.” She smiled vaguely. For a moment I wondered whether she even remembered.
“I came to see how you were. I’ve been over at Jamie’s place. With Ruth. I’ve come to say how sorry I am.” Paltry words. Maybe that was what made her smile. Paltriness had always amused her. She was wearing trousers (she’d have called them slacks) and a white shirt (she’d have called it a blouse), and her hands were clasped in front of her as though she had to do that to stop a tremor. As she came down the final flight of stairs, she moved cautiously, with one hand on the banister and the other still clasped in front of her. “Have you been to see him?” she asked.
For an awful moment I thought that she hadn’t understood. I imagined — it was a fleeting moment of horror, like the sudden perception of a death — that her mind had gone. “Caroline, Jamie’s dead,” I told her gentl
y.
She came up close to me, as though it was necessary to bring my face into focus. It was like looking at someone through a screen, a Japanese screen of some kind, rice paper or whatever: the woman I had known peering out through the layers of time. “I know what Jamie is,” she said softly. “I know exactly what Jamie is. I have had practice in this, don’t forget.” Her left hand, which had gripped the banister, which had gripped many things in its time, gripped my arm. The other hand remained where it was, slack and idle across the base of her belly. She leaned forward and presented her cheek for me to kiss. Her skin was soft and smooth.
“You’re looking very well,” I said.
She shook her head. “Forget the compliments. The only thing about age is the surprise it brings. Death is no surprise, of course, but you never know who is going to die. I’ll bet he put his money on me first. And I bet you did too. You probably thought that I was already dead and buried, didn’t you?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Caroline.” The name seemed absurd on her aged body, a young woman’s name given in error.
“Oh, yes you did.” Another of her traits, to brook no argument. She walked away into the drawing room, where there were other photos — Jamie’s father looking youthful, like a corpse preserved — other artifacts, other memories enshrined. An old, polished gramophone from the time when they still made them like pieces of furniture. And on the wall another of Ruth’s paintings, a nude, this one, a woman standing beside a bed, her flesh blurred by sunlight from a window: white limbs and a smudge of pubic hair.
“What would you like? Tea?” She rang for the maid, and I remembered the box of little mechanical flags on the kitchen wall, one for each room in the house, to signal which room had rung. There was even a green baize door dividing off the servants’ quarters. Caroline had laughed when she had shown me that. It was one of those things that accumulated, like parts of an argument, to convince her that this isolated house on an isolated hillside was a place where she might live.
“The other thing about age,” she said, “is that it’s only once you are old that you realize that things are for keeps. What seemed an interesting experiment is actually the only existence that you have or are going to have. Why did you leave it so long to come back?”
“It doesn’t seem long,” I replied evasively. “It seems like yesterday.”
She laughed. “That’s another trouble with age,” she said. “Thirty years ago seems like yesterday.”
Alice came into the drawing room with a tray. While Caroline poured the tea with her left hand, her right remained couched in her lap like a small, helpless pet. It was only then that I understood that something was wrong with it, wrong with the mechanism of nerve and muscle that was meant to move the thing. She saw my glance. “A stroke, my dear,” she said. “Just a little one. My doctor assures me that I could go on for years yet.” She crossed her legs. Her ankles were still narrow, but they had a wasted look to them, as though slenderness had given way to fragility.
“So tell me,” she said. “How is your mother?”
I shrugged. “She’s in a nursing home. Oh, she’s well enough physically, but…her mind wanders.”
Was there sympathy in her expression? It wasn’t happening to her, that was clear enough. Her mind was there, all right. “And tell me about you,” she said. “Married? Of course. I remember Jamie telling me. Are you happy?”
“I’m content.”
“That’s a very equivocal response. Children?”
“Two. Girls. Twenty-one and seventeen. University and A levels.”
“And what does Daddy do?”
“Don’t you know?”
“Should I?”
“I thought Ruth might have said. I’m in the art business. Contemporary art. A gallery in London, another in Birmingham of all places. An associate gallery in New York.”
“Bisected cows in formaldehyde, that kind of thing?”
“Not often.”
She looked thoughtful. Somehow I could see the younger woman behind the mask of age. “But happy?” she asked again. “Is Rob happy?”
I shrugged. Don’t you grow out of happiness? Isn’t happiness what kids hope for? Wasn’t adulthood the understanding that there is no real happiness, not long, sustained, and unequivocal happiness? “I told you. I’m content.”
Caroline smiled as I knew she would. Blurred by age, it was her familiar smile nevertheless. “Equivocal,” she said. She had taught me the word, like so much else. “Dear Robert, as equivocal as ever.”
3
THERE WAS SOME KIND of religious service for Jamie. It was Ruth’s idea, Ruth’s insistence, even though Jamie had not been a churchgoer, hadn’t believed in anything as far as I knew. “What alternative is there?” she asked when I protested. “Just a dreadful crematorium thing?”
I rang home and suggested that Eve come, but she declined. “They were your friends,” she said. “Not mine. And look how they treated you…”
The service was held in the local church. The place was full, of course. There were names I knew, a few faces that I recognized, all of them hard-edged and weathered, one or two of them bearded. The survivors. One in eight Himalayan climbers fails to return; if you are talking about going high, then the statistics get worse: less than half of those who go above seven and a half thousand meters survive to tell the tale. Oh, yes, there were as many ghosts at Jamie Matthewson’s funeral as live mourners.
I sat in the front row between Caroline and Ruth. Caroline was in gray silk — the gray of ashes, the gray of slate, a gray that set off her still-bright complexion; Ruth wore black, a sharp black linen suit that made her look tough and vulnerable at the same time, the kind of trick she was always capable of pulling off. She had no makeup on, and her hair was pulled back and gathered up to emphasize the line of her jaw. Her expression was tightly pegged down — like a tent in a storm. Beyond her was Dominic Lewis, looking uneasy in something resembling a jacket and tie.
We sang a hymn, and the rector gave a little address about striving for the heights and seeing the Promised Land from the top of the mountain, and things like that. And then it was the turn of others: Carrington to say something about Jim on Everest, Jim as the selfless expedition member, the man whom you could rely on for help, or a joke, or a day’s hard slog at altitude to set up the top camp; Philips to talk about Jim standing in awe on the summit of K2 as they watched the sun set and steeled themselves to face the bivouac that would probably (but didn’t) kill them both. There was someone else to talk about Jim the businessman, the man who helped the local economy, the Englishman who had found a home in Wales; and Dominic Lewis mumbled a poem about Icarus falling from the sky. Auden, I suppose it was. Ruth had asked me to add something. I didn’t really want to but I couldn’t refuse, so when all the others were done I made my way up to the lectern. Looking out over the congregation, I wondered if they knew who the hell I was.
“I first knew Jamie when I was about twelve,” I told them, just to put them in the picture. “Later we climbed together. We shared a great deal, as one does with a climbing partner: meals, climbs, tents, bivouac bags, jokes, all that kind of thing. Occasionally we shared the lead. When he let me.”
They laughed at that. They were desperate to laugh. I stopped and looked down at them, and I wanted to say other things. I wanted to tell them about the first climb ever. I wanted to tell them about winters in Scotland and summers in the Alps. I wanted to tell them about Caroline — she looked up at me with a quizzical expression, as though she couldn’t quite recall my name — and my own mother who now languished in a nursing home and wondered who I was when I came to visit her. I wanted to speak about Jamie’s father. And I wanted to tell them about Ruth. Above all I wanted to tell them about Ruth.
There was a great silence in the gray church, a cold and expectant silence, almost as though they were waiting for me to tell them these things. “Probably we shared more than most,” I said. Ruth was watching with the faintest of Welsh s
miles. But I didn’t tell them; instead I opened a book and read to them:
“‘The play is over, and the curtain is about to fall. Before we part, a word upon the graver teachings of the mountains.’”
I don’t know if they recognized the piece — they sat there as you do at funerals, in a no-man’s-land between misery and embarrassment, and I couldn’t tell whether there was any recognition. “‘Still, the last, sad memory hovers round, and sometimes drifts across like floating mist, cutting off sunshine and chilling the remembrance of happier times. There have been joys too great to be described in words, and there have been griefs upon which I have not dared to dwell; and with these in mind I say, Climb if you will, but remember that courage and strength are naught without prudence, and that a momentary negligence may destroy the happiness of a lifetime. Do nothing in haste; look well to each step; and from the beginning think what may be the end.’”
The curious thing is how often people ignore that advice, in climbing as in life. I closed the book and resumed my seat, and we all sang “Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah.” It was a fine sound, no doubt.
After the funeral there was a sorry procession of cars to the crematorium. In the chapel I sat beside Ruth. She gripped my hand as we watched his coffin roll silently through a red-velvet curtain to the sound of heavenly electronic choirs. Caroline sat on the other side of her. Afterward we hung around in the rain outside looking at the sodden bouquets, reading the labels on them before the rain came and dissolved the ink. “Who are these?” I asked once or twice, but I didn’t get much of an answer: “Oh, just people he knew.” One of the cards said From all of us at the City Climbing Club — keep going for the top, youth. Ruth just looked away into the distance, across the acres of wet grass and the miniature memorial plaques.