The Fall

by Simon Mawer

“You open it,” said Jamie.

  The man’s grip tightened on my shoulder. He’d identified me as the weaker of his captives. He pushed me forward. “Open the door, you little bugger.”

  I reached out and took the handle and turned it. The door was locked. “I can’t.”

  The man swore. Jamie grinned at me. The man slackened his grip on my arm. “You just stay there, you hear me?” he said.

  I nodded.

  “Don’t you bloody move.”

  I shook my head. Cautiously, as though I might overbalance if he did not set me quite right, he released me. I stood still. He reached into his pocket, and I stayed there, waiting for the hand to go deep into the pocket and grope for the key.

  “Go, Rob!” Jamie shouted.

  I ran, skittering across the floor of the quarry, with the man’s curses following me and freedom all around me in the gray-blue, bruised colors of the slate. “Run, Rob!” Jamie called, and I ran, panic chasing me. Only when I reached the narrow defile between the slopes of slate and the road that led down toward the gate where the sign had told us to KEEP OUT did I pause.

  I looked back. The man and Jamie were nowhere to be seen. They must have gone into the hut. He had opened it and shoved Jamie in, and now maybe he would come out and start looking for me. I wondered what I should do. The problem was an acute one, compounded by fear and guilt. The man was an official, and we had been trespassing. We were in the wrong. But what of Jamie, now held hostage?

  I waited, and there was no sign of the man, no sound from the hut, no sound at all in the whole desolate amphitheater of the quarry. I waited. How long I don’t know, but finally, cautiously, I retraced my steps. The slate sounded like glass breaking beneath my feet. I tiptoed toward the alphabet of rusting machinery and the crouching building. There was no sound. I crept around the side. There was a window, bleary with grime, and beneath it some rusting steel stanchions. Carefully I climbed up on them and raised myself to the sill and peered in.

  Events in the stained shadows: a wooden-floored hut, a single room, maybe twenty feet by fifteen. Things around the walls — a pickax, a spade, a coil of rope, slabs of slate. There was a bunk bed made with slats of wood against one wall. Light came in from the window I look through and from another in the opposite wall, light from both sides creating a chiaroscuro that was as mysterious as a religious painting, was like a religious painting in fact, with Jamie on his knees before the man, as though at worship.

  I was strung between childhood adventure and adult horror. I didn’t understand what I saw. I sensed something, a charge, like the tension in the skin that you feel before lightning strikes, and the same dull sultriness, but I didn’t really understand. Now, of course, yes. I can interpret the memory, the image that lies there somehow among the wiring of my brain. But at the time I had no real idea, nothing against which I might judge, no yardstick, no place or point of reference.

  For a moment I watched the hurried, urgent movements. Then, as carefully as I had risen, I crept down from my perch and made my way around to the door. Softly, I tried the handle. There were sounds from within that I couldn’t identify, sounds that drowned the turning of the handle, that drowned all innocence. The door flung open.

  “What!”

  Daylight came in on the man, ridiculous with his overalls around his ankles, his flesh exposed, his face a white mess of shock.

  “What?” He grabbed at his clothes. “You little bugger,” he cried, in something like relief. Jamie had slipped away from him and stood in the background watching. The man was tucking himself away and talking at me. There was a breathless quality to his speech, as though he had been running. “Came back to see, did you? Dirty little bugger wanted me to do it. Little bugger asked for it. You’re a dirty little boy as well, I’ll bet. Is that right? Did you want to see what we were doing?”

  “We’re going home,” I said.

  The man laughed. It was a sound without humor, but it was a laugh all the same. “I’ve got some pictures,” he said. “D’you want to see? Girls. Their tits and all that. You want to have a look?”

  “We’re going,” I repeated. I was on the doorstep, ready to run, and the man was talking and buttoning up his overalls and shuffling toward me. From behind him Jamie was looking at me with an expression of something like fear. Was it fear? I didn’t really know. I’d not seen fear, except in the cinema. But it was something like that.

  The man came forward. “You want to look, don’t you? Tits.”

  I moved back into the full daylight. “Come on, Jamie.”

  And as though he had suddenly woken from sleep, Jamie moved. He pushed past the man and ran out into the open.

  “He wanted to do it, the dirty little bugger,” the man called after him. And then, as we ran away toward the track: “You won’t say nothing, will you? It’s our secret, isn’t it?”

  We made our way back down toward the town in silence. The railway station was deserted. We found a bench and sat down and waited. I don’t know how long it was before the train appeared. Say, three-quarters of an hour. Something like that. Jamie said nothing for a long while. When he did finally speak, it was matter-of-fact, as though this was just an everyday kind of thing: “He made me do it. That’s what happened. He said he’d let me go if I did it.”

  “Are you going to tell?”

  “Tell?”

  “Your mum or something.”

  “What is there to tell? He’s just a queer.”

  The train came. A few passengers got out. We were the only ones to climb on board. A guard in uniform waved a flag and blew his whistle, and the train pulled out of the station. Jamie seemed indifferent, staring out of the window. The train went into the tunnel. There was blackness beyond the window, and Jamie’s face was floating in the darkness. I felt immensely distant from him, as though he had gone far, far away and this was only some kind of image of him, a television image sent from a long way away. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. He was speaking thoughtfully, as if he was trying to work out whether it really did matter or not. “It doesn’t matter,” he repeated.

  When we emerged from the tunnel, he glanced at me and then back out of the window. “It wasn’t that bad. Just a thing. Like your own.”

  His mother was on the platform when we reached Llanbedr, scanning the carriages for some sign of us and smiling and holding out her arms when Jamie stepped down from the train. I saw her wry expression when he twisted out of her arms as she bent to kiss him. Then she looked up and caught sight of me through the window and waved. Did you have a good time? her mouth said. Doors slammed and the guard’s whistle blew, and the small train drew out of the station. Did you have a good time? Strange how I could read the words on her lips. Lips. That buzz.

  3

  I DIDN’T HEAR FROM Jamie after that. The event had affected our relationship. Friendships were like that — fragile things that might withstand a storm and yet could come to pieces in your hands for no very clear reason. Brittle, like slate. Was it something to do with the man in the quarry? Maybe, maybe not. My mother had once been a friend of his mother’s — best friends, she said. And now? That friendship too had vanished. Occasionally she might say something about Mrs. Matthewson, but it was always in dismissive terms: “Oh, yes, we were close once, long before you were born. Before the war, during the war. But you know how people drift apart.”

  I nodded. I knew.

  So Jamie Matthewson became nothing more than a memory, one of those passing acquaintances that punctuate a childhood, someone you pick up and dump in the deposits of the mind and leave there, possibly to encounter again at some unimaginable time in the future on a street corner or in a bar or at a party, when the differential of age no longer counts.

  But then I received a postcard at school. There was no sender address, and the card had only reached its destination by a fluke, for the address was a hazard of vague recollection on his part, the name of the school imperfectly recalled from a casual conversation we must have ha
d: Robert Dewar, Rhodes School, Surrey is what it said. When was this? Memory plays its trick of distorting time, bending the irreducible dimension. Years later, perhaps three. The dimensions of time are strange and plastic, like Dalí’s watches that I admired in those days, like Henry Moore’s sculptures with their deceptive curves, their mysterious orifices, their smooth and endless surfaces. The message was signed James, and I wasn’t even sure who James was until I deciphered the scrawled question See you in Wales? at the end. The picture on the card showed mountains quite different from those low-slung Welsh ones that we had admired as kids: they were the towering, snow-crusted peaks of the Bernese Oberland: Jungfrau, Mönch, Eiger. The Young Woman, the Monk, and the Ogre, a trio of curious eroticism. We climbed the Jungfrau, Jamie had written; but who we signified was never explained.

  I felt a small tug of envy. Whoever Jamie was now, wherever he was, whoever that collective we signified, he had achieved something of that ambition we had casually discussed years earlier: to climb mountains. I had only slogged up Snowdon in mist and rain, and spent a miserable weekend camped in the Lake District with a school group. But Jamie had done the real thing: the Jungfrau.

  When I went home for the holidays, I searched in vain through my mother’s address book for the Matthewson’s telephone number. “I don’t think I ever wrote it down,” she said. “Anyway, why do you want to go chasing around to find him?”

  “He was good fun. And he wrote to me. I mean, Christ, Mum, he was a mate.”

  But the name Matthewson did not even appear in the telephone book. Matthews, yes, many of them. But no Matthewson. “Ex-directory, I suppose,” Mother said, her tone suggesting that being listed in the telephone book went with moral purity while deliberately keeping oneself out was a sure sign of turpitude. “Typical of Meg.”

  So I went to find him. I took the train to Llanbedr once again, and at the station I had to wait half an hour for a bus, and even then I wasn’t sure that it was the right one. Gwytherin, I remembered. The bus crawled through the town, past a church and a cinema and the cattle market, and soon the road was climbing up, winding past drystone walls, past fields of luminous green where sheep grazed, past woods of a green so dark that it was almost black. A fox sloped across a hillside. And there, suddenly and surprisingly, was the place that I more or less recalled but with a new sign now, the name engraved on a slab of slate:

  Gilead House

  In the drive, incongruous on the Welsh hillside, was a large white Mercedes.

  As I pushed open the gate and walked up to the house, it began to rain, a mere drizzle out of the slate-gray sky. I rang the doorbell. There was a long pause before I heard noises on the far side. The door opened, and a face peered out at me, a suspicious female Welsh face with dark eyes and dark hair. “Yes?”

  “Is James in?”

  “James?” A lilt of surprise. “No.” The vowel drawn out, exaggerated, given a short life of meaning: disappointment, amusement, faint ridicule. I almost apologized and went away; I almost turned tail.

  “Mrs. Matthewson then?”

  “Who shall I say it is wants her?”

  A voice came from behind, from out of sight in the shadows of the hallway. “Who is it, Mary?”

  Mary looked over her shoulder. “It’s a young man wants Master James, ma’am.” Master James. A good, servile touch, that.

  “Well, what’s his name?” said the voice from behind. She came forward, stepping out of memory just as Mary stepped aside. She was smaller than I recalled. The relativity of age. Of course she was exactly the same height, but I had grown taller; taller than her by a head now, looking down at her standing there in the doorway in her tight white-cotton trousers and pink denim shirt. But it was she who seemed to have grown smaller and somehow — but I was uncertain of such things — younger. She had done her hair differently, the spirit of the times catching even the adults now. It no longer had that shiny nylon look, but appeared darker and more natural. Wheat colored: the same streaks, the same darks and lights, as a field of wheat. I blushed. “I was looking for James.”

  “Oh?” She hadn’t recognized me. She smiled vaguely as though trying to assemble an appearance of hospitality and wondering whether the effort was worthwhile.

  “I’m Robert.”

  “Robert?” And the expression changed, shifted, lightened into a true smile, a slow and remarkable metamorphosis. “Robert, of course. Diana’s son. How” — a breath’s pause as she looked at me with something like recognition — “remarkable. My goodness, how you’ve grown!”

  “I thought —”

  “You thought you might find Jamie? What a shame. He was here last Easter. I told him to try and contact you, but you know what he’s like. Come in anyway. Let me get you something. Why didn’t you telephone?”

  I noticed things as I followed her inside: paintings, objects, particular pieces of furniture, the kinds of things that you collect to make a place yours. The jawbone of something, perhaps a shark, hanging there on the wall: it had the shape of an hourglass, rimmed with ivory daggers. Since I had looked around it on that previous visit, Gilead House had become something that our house never really was: a home.

  “Mary, can you get us some coffee or tea, which would you prefer?” Mrs. Matthewson’s question slid easily from the maid to me as I stood there looking up at the curious object. “Oh, that? Yes, that’s my trophy. I fished it off Nantucket. Yes, I caught it myself while the men jeered and told me I could never do it and all that sort of crap.” The word crap. My mother would have been appalled. “But I did, and there it is.” She laughed, and I had a brief and fugitive glimpse of gold. I followed her up the stairs past the stained-glass window of a medieval knight and his lady and into what she called the morning room, which was actually a sitting room looking out over the top garden and the woods at the back of the house. There was an oil painting on the wall, a portrait of a girl with a blank face and eyes like black pebbles.

  “Is that you?” I asked.

  She laughed delightedly. No, it was something she had picked up at a flea market. The phase flea market struck me. It may have been the first time I’d heard it. I imagined a kind of rummage sale, like they had in the local church: stalls selling old clothes that hummed with insect life. “I think it may be an original. Do you know Laurencin?”

  I didn’t. Together we examined the painting, the heavy layers of paint, the signature scrawled along the bottom: Marie Laurencin. And as we looked, Mrs. Matthewson’s scent came to me, an insidious blend of things I couldn’t put names to: musk and orange and sandalwood and jasmine, perhaps those, something far more subtle and convincing than any painting by Marie Laurencin, whether original or copy. “The trouble is,” she said (and the scent was on her breath as well), “I don’t dare have an expert look at it. In case it isn’t.”

  She left the painting and settled into an armchair, and watched me with interest, curiosity almost, as if she was trying to work something out and would come up with the answer in a moment. Her feet were bare, the toes pinched from wearing pointed shoes. Her feet were the only thing that betrayed her age. “So, Robert, what a pleasant surprise this is. And how you’ve grown! I would say quite a man, but that would be patronizing, wouldn’t it? So I won’t.” She smiled. Even white teeth. Capped, I could hear my mother saying. “And how’s Diana? I really should get over and see her, but it’s finding the time. And I’m not here very often, with the house in London.”

  It wasn’t finding the time, I knew that. This woman was a different being altogether from my mother, almost a different gender. I couldn’t imagine them doing anything together, couldn’t imagine them having exchanged clothes or confidences or boyfriends, or any of the usual currency of girlhood. But whatever might have happened in the past, nowadays they certainly had no point in common. “I’m sure she’d love to see you again, Mrs. Matthewson.”

  “Oh, for goodness’ sake, Caroline.” She smiled. “But not, I repeat not, Meg. I don’t think your mother is
quite as fond of me now as she used to be.”

  I protested eternal affection on the part of my mother. Caroline smiled knowingly and changed the subject with that lack of guile that adults believe children will fall for. “So you came all this way to find Jamie? What a shame.”

  “He sent me a postcard from the Alps.”

  “He was there with friends of his father.”

  “But he posted it from America.”

  “Dear Jamie, so typical of him. To write a card in one place and post it in another. He’s in the Bahamas now, I think. Sailing. He doesn’t really like sailing. I don’t imagine he’s enjoying himself very much. This autumn he’s off to Scotland.”

  “Scotland?”

  “He’s going to university there. Saint Andrews. For me he’s barely out of knickers and already he’s off to university. He’s only just seventeen. And you must be, what, sixteen?” She looked at me thoughtfully, as though searching for a way to rid herself of this uninteresting child. I shifted in my seat.

  “Nearly,” I said. “Nearly sixteen.” I was conscious of her disconcerting eyes on me.

  “So tell me. Tell me all about you. What are you doing now?”

  I told her anyway, although I knew she couldn’t possibly be interested — about school mainly, about lessons and exams and sports. And I watched her, seeing shadows of Jamie there — the same coloring, of course, and something about the shape of her face, the curve of her jaw — but seeing other things that she had lent no one: the strange mobility of her mouth, whose lips I last saw mouthing the words Did you have a good time? on the station platform, a mouth that seemed small when composed but large when she smiled, a sudden, surprising change of expression that almost ambushed you.

  “And at school?”

  “I said, I’ve just done my exams.”

  “Of course. You said.” She was looking around the room in that way people do when they are searching for something further to say. She’d lost interest. I felt myself redden, and I cursed the sensation. I half rose from my chair. “Perhaps I’d better…”