by Simon Mawer
Caroline came over to say good-bye. There was a detached quality about her manner, as if I hadn’t been to see her just two days before. “I’m surprised you’re here, Robert,” she said. “I thought you’d quite broken with Jamie. What made you come?”
“He was my oldest friend,” I said. “Whatever happened after.”
“And Ruth?”
“And Ruth as well.”
She smiled. It was difficult to read her expression. Perhaps I was somehow to blame, was that it? I almost said something to that effect; I almost lost my temper with the woman. “How’s Diana?” she asked.
“She’s fine physically. Like I said when I saw you.”
“Did you?” The smile was wry now. “Memory, you see. The second thing to go.”
“What’s the first?”
“Robert, dear, I’m sure you can guess what the first is.” She touched my arm. “Give Diana my love. Tell her…”
“Tell her what?”
“Tell her that it seems that she won.”
“I don’t think she’d understand. I’m not sure that I do.”
She shrugged and turned toward the big black car that waited for her. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Nothing matters.”
We watched her drive away. For Ruth and me there was the journey back to the hotel, where refreshments had been laid out. The beer and the wine flowed. There was talk, there was laughter, there was reminiscence and the relating of absurd stories and hair-raising exploits. There is so much about the climbing community that derives from the Celtic fringes of Britain, and at a wake, climbers are as good as the Irish. Perhaps it’s because they have a lot of practice. I stood with Ruth and smiled and nodded, and for a moment I felt as though I were part of all this.
We got back late in the afternoon. It was already dark. Someone had turned lights on in the main building, but the place was deserted. We went to the kitchen as the natural focal point of the house. Ruth put a kettle on to boil. “He wanted his ashes scattered. Did I tell you that?”
“Yes, you did.” She’d even shown me the will. If my body can be recovered, I wish to be cremated and the ashes scattered… I liked that practical touch, if my body can be recovered. At least he hadn’t asked to be freeze-dried and left on Kangchenjunga.
“Will you do that for me?” she asked.
“If you’ll come with me.”
“I’ll come with you.” When the tea had brewed she poured two mugs and came and sat beside me at the table. She seemed smaller, somehow shrunken, as though she had aged two decades in the last twenty-four hours. She sipped tea and stared into the shadows that had collected in the corners of the room. We began to talk.
Part One
1
GO BACK. Go back a long way. Forty years, for God’s sake, so far away that the world seems a different place and the people populating it different beings altogether. My mother standing with me in the hallway of the hotel, her hand around my shoulders in a gesture that was almost protective, and the other woman coming in through the door with her own son in tow and a look of artificial surprise painted across her face. “Diana, darling!” she exclaimed. “How wonderful to see you after all this time!”
But there had been no matching intonation of surprise from my mother: no exclamation, no excitement. Mere statements of fact: “Meg. How long it’s been.” They embraced. It was a curious embrace, designed to avoid intimacy rather than welcome it: no part of body or soul actually came into contact except two cheeks, one finely powdered, the other naked. You notice these things as a child. You stand and watch, and things lodge in the memory like splinters in the eye. The woman was colored pink and cream and gold, and she had the air of someone from another world, an ambassador to a foreign and decidedly barbarous place. Gold jewelry at her neck (the neck showing the tendons, showing the first small fault lines of age), a narrow linen suit, and in the vee of the jacket, the smooth curves of her breasts.
“Actually I use Caroline now, not Meg,” this newcomer said.
“Caroline? Why on earth Caroline?”
“I prefer it, that’s all. And Caroline was always my name, after all. Margaret Caroline.”
“But you’ll still be Meg to me.”
“Darling, I’d rather not. Meg sounds like a sheepdog.” The woman with two names looked around the lounge (GUESTS ARE REQUESTED TO RESPECT THE PRESENCE OF OTHERS AND REFRAIN FROM TURNING UP THE VOLUME OF THE TELEVISION) with an expression of faint distaste. I saw the expression and felt ashamed. “So this is what you do now?”
“We survive.”
And then she paused in front of a photograph, the photograph of my father that hung there on the wall like an admonishment, like a reproach. “Alan,” she said. “How determined he looks.” She glanced around. “I did write when I heard about your breakup, but to your old home address. It was the only one I had.”
My mother smiled. At the time I wasn’t sure why, but now I understand. She was smiling at the lies. The woman turned her eyes on me. “And this is your son? What’s your name, young man?”
I told her I was Robert.
“Well, I’m Caroline. And that’s what you can call me: Caroline. None of that Mrs. Matthewson nonsense. And certainly” — she turned her mouth down — “not Meg.” We shook hands on the fact. Her grip was firm and soft at the same time, a strange sensation. “And this is Jamie.”
He stood there beside his mother with the sullen look of a child who has grasped what adulthood means and resents not having yet achieved it. “Jamie is just thirteen.” I was still a mere eleven, far below him in the precise hierarchy of childhood, further from him then than ever again.
There was an awkward pause while the adults wondered what to do with this incongruent pair of children. “Perhaps Robert can take you out and show you round,” Mother suggested.
Jamie hesitated.
“Go on,” said his own mother with just a hint of impatience. “Robert’s mother and I have so many things to talk about.”
We both stood there in our uniform of the times — blue Aer-tex shirts, gray shorts, gym shoes, the one pair black, the other white — and waited.
“Well go on, then.”
So Jamie and I walked out into the garden, side by side but not together, walked idly down the lawn kicking at things that presented themselves for kicking, and when we looked back we could see the two women talking in the sitting room, their images latticed by the leads of the window: the one with her mouse-colored hair, and the other a perfect blonde. I wondered whether I could read the movement of their lips — my mother’s thin and hard, his mother’s perfectly carved out of coral lipstick. Lips. The word buzzed in my imagination.
“My father has another family,” I announced. I suppose I felt the need to explain. “That’s why he’s not here.”
Jamie reckoned this piece of information for a moment and then played a winning move. “Mine’s dead,” he retorted.
“Dead?”
“Dead. He died in the mountains.”
“You can see the mountains from the hill up there.”
“Those aren’t real mountains. They’re just Welsh mountains. My father died in the Himalaya.” He pronounced the name Him-ah-lya. “On Kangchenjunga.”
I had never heard of Kangchenjunga. “How did he do that?”
“A storm. He died of cold.”
I thought about this. Dying of cold was the death of heroes, the death of Scott and his companions. “What’s it like to have a dead father?”
He thought about it a bit. “It’s okay,” he said.
After that first encounter, the Matthewsons, mother and son, came to stay in the hotel. It was only for a couple of weeks during the summer holidays while they were doing up their house. They took three rooms on the first floor — “Three rooms, can you imagine?” my mother exclaimed — and for almost the first time, I had a companion. Despite the difference in age, we were united in much: an alien Englishness among the Welsh, a shared lack of a father, the sha
red fact of being an only child, a shared curiosity in what went on around us. Powerful similarities, centripetal forces that pulled us together across the barrier set up by the years.
I worshiped Jamie, I suppose, with that dogged admiration that the young can have for the immediately older — far greater than if he had been an adult. In the next few weeks, I followed him around like an acolyte. We kicked cans around on wasteland nearby. We had a tense encounter — an uneasy blend of familiarity and suspicion — with some other kids at the recreation ground, an encounter in which Jamie’s greater age and belligerence won the day. We made casual friends with a solitary girl called Bethan, who lived in the council houses. We watched contrails high in a rare blue sky and debated whether they were Russian spy planes preparing to take the capitalist world for their own. Perhaps we could see satellites up there among the night stars, Russian sputniks looking down on our own fragment of Earth. Together Jamie and I went into town. I followed him along the seafront, past benches with glum vacationers, amid the alien accents of Liverpool and Manchester. He walked quicker than me; I seemed to spend the whole time struggling to catch up. We found an arcade with slot machines. One of them was a what-the-butler-saw machine. Jamie fed it with pennies and then stood aside for me to peer into the viewer. I could make out vague and ill-focused tits and a froth of lace. It was education of a kind.
One day we spied on people in case they might be spies, stalked random strangers around the streets, watched a Bryl-creemed man going from door to door trying to sell brushes to housewives. “Clear off, you little buggers!” he shouted when he noticed us following him. “I’ll tell your parents of you.”
I went in fear for the rest of the day in case he had that power, to know names and addresses and parentage from a mere glimpse of someone’s face. But Jamie merely laughed. “I think he fucks the ones that want it,” he said. And added thoughtfully, “Maybe they get a free brush.”
The word fuck was possessed of a strange potency, a password into the unknown adult world. Jamie had got hold of a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, published by Penguin at 3/6d, phoenix-covered and newly risen from the ashes of censorship, and we leafed through the pages for fuck and its derivatives. They occurred twenty-six times. We counted. He told me the book was his mother’s. My mother would surely never have read it, certainly would never have owned it; never in a million years would she have uttered such words. The fact that Jamie’s mother possessed it, had read it, and had played those words over to herself in her mind, made her seem dangerous and subversive. I watched her with the careful eyes of a spy, saw the curve of her calves, the arabesques of chin and ear, the subtle hollow at the base of her throat, and the gravitational funnel between her half-hidden breasts.
“I’ve seen my mother,” he told me. “In the nude.”
“You never.”
“Bloody have. She doesn’t mind. As long as you’re family.”
I wondered what it might be like, the sight of his mother stark naked. My own mother was tightly prudish. I could not imagine her exposing herself for me to feed at her breasts, never mind opening her legs to let me out in the first place. And yet Jamie’s mother had allowed herself to be seen naked.
“What’s she like?”
He shrugged. “Like any woman. Tits. Hair.”
“Hair?”
“Down there.”
“You’ve seen it?”
“Sure.”
Hair seemed counterintuitive. All other evidence in my possession (but there was little enough) was to the contrary — statues, paintings, anything like that, even the pictures in the slot machine. Men were hairy. Paintings showed that, and I’d seen it in the changing rooms of the municipal swimming pool. Men were big and dark and hairy. But not women. I discovered a book of art reproductions in the guests’ lounge and showed it to Jamie as evidence. Sir Peter Paul Rubens, whoever he might be. Women who didn’t seemed concerned about their figures. Flesh piled up like uncooked dough, but no hair.
“That’s art,” Jamie said dismissively It was Bethan who put the matter beyond doubt, around the back of her father’s garden shed, hitching up her skirt for us to look. “You can’t touch,” she warned as she pulled her knickers down. “Touching’s rude.”
There wasn’t much to see: sparse brush strokes of dark hair and a small crease like pursed and smiling lips. “Just that?” I asked.
“There’s inside too,” she said.
“Not hair inside?” Hair inside seemed remarkable, like nostrils.
“Not hair, you silly. Things.” She pulled herself open for us to see, and there were indeed things, things coralline and glistening. Folds, membranes, a little bud. We were silent, watching. “That’s my pinkie,” she explained. “One day it’ll grow into a willy. Maybe.”
“Don’t be daft,” Jamie said.
“It will so.” Bethan hitched up her knickers. “Now it’s your turn.”
“Who said anything about turns?”
“It’s only fair.”
We stood there between the shed and the nettles, and debated the justice of the matter. “Not both,” I insisted. “Both’s not fair.”
“One of you then.”
So Jamie agreed. He was the kind who would agree. It was he who had suggested trailing the brush salesman, he who had discovered the penny-in-the-slot machine with the ancient photographs of naked women, he who had found the copy of Lady C. He unbuttoned and dropped his trousers and underpants, and stood there exposed. His penis was small and smooth, with a domed head like a mushroom. There were blond hairs around its base.
“Roundhead,” I said, eager to break the silence. “That’s a roundhead.” At school we divided ourselves into Roundheads and Cavaliers. Sometimes there were games of football, or tag, or even fights between the two groups. The Cavaliers seemed to be courageous and carefree like their historical namesakes; the Roundheads were determined and efficient with their helmeted heads.
“I’ve not seen one like that,” Bethan said thoughtfully. “Can I touch?” Remarkably the thing had begun to stir, like an animal roused from sleep.
“I thought touching’s rude,” I protested.
But Jamie said nothing. Everything about him was very still except the slow rise of his penis. “Okay,” he agreed finally, and she did touch, her small, grimy fingers going around it and moving the outer skin so that the head of the penis tasted, with its small mouth, the unfamiliar outside air.
“I’ve done this to boys till it spits sometimes,” Bethan said.
After we had left Bethan we walked home in silence, contemplating matters of sexuality. “Does your mother miss your father?” I asked eventually.
He shook his head. “She’s got boyfriends.”
Boyfriends sounded dangerous. “My mother still loves my father,” I assured him, although I wasn’t sure. “That’s what she told me.”
We climbed the hill at the back of the hotel. From there you could look down over the estuary and the suspension bridge and the castle. The tide was out, and the mudflats glistened like steel. We sat on the grass and looked at the mountains. When seen through rain-streaked clouds, the mountains seemed like storm clouds themselves; beneath blue skies, as we saw them that day, they looked like the abode of the gods, the Celtic gods who had once ruled this place of gray chapels and gray headstones and luminous green fields.
“What are you?” Jamie asked.
“What d’you mean?”
He picked up a stone and threw it at nothing in particular. “Roundhead or Cavalier?”
“Cavalier.”
“Show me.”
“No.”
“You saw mine.”
So I unbuttoned my trousers and showed him. It was a joke, a laugh, kid’s stuff. I didn’t stop him when he touched me. “You’re getting a stiff,” he said. Suddenly there was a great unease in my guts, a weakness in my knees, a sensation like falling. He laughed at my discomfiture. “You like that, don’t you?”
“Did you like it wit
h Bethan?”
“It was all right.”
I swallowed. “Well then.”
Later we lay in the grass and contemplated the mountains in the distance. “They’re nothing,” Jamie said. “Kangchenjunga is over five miles high. Can you imagine five miles high? Like an aeroplane.” I was silent for a moment, trying to imagine five vertical miles, which seemed so much more than five miles horizontally. “My father told me that it’s where the gods live,” Jamie said. “That’s what the people there believe. My mother says even he believed it, sort of. No one has ever stepped on the top, out of respect for the gods.” After a while he added, “He’s up there now, you know.”
“Up where?” I thought of heaven, somewhere up above the clouds. Had Jamie’s father perhaps been watching us?
“On the mountain. They never found him. They never brought him down. He’s up there on Kangchenjunga somewhere. My father. One day I’m going to climb mountains like him. One day.”
“So am I,” I said, because I was going to do what Jamie did. Whatever that was.
2
JAMIE SAYS his father was a mountaineer.”
“He was,” my mother agreed.
How do you read an adult’s face? Children have little practice in the art. The eleven-year-old that was me read her expression as sour and disapproving. “Was he a hero, like Jamie says?”
“He was to some people. To others he was just a man. A friend, perhaps. A special friend.”
“Was he a friend of yours?”
Was she smiling? A curious look that I didn’t understand; as close to a smile as pain is to pleasure. “He was a wonderful man. Very brave and a little foolish.”
“Is that why he died?”
“I’m not sure why anyone dies,” she said.