The Fall

by Simon Mawer

  She lifted a hand. “Surely you’ll stay for lunch? It’s a long way to come just for a cup of coffee.” “I —”

  “Of course you will. I tell you what…” And now there was an uncertain quality to her smile, as if she wasn’t sure of what she would tell me, or exactly how. “You wouldn’t like to earn some pocket money, would you? I need someone, and it’s difficult to get people out here. Someone to do some clearing out for me. We’re doing some alterations, you see. This was Guy’s house,” she said, “his great love —”

  “Guy?”

  “Jamie’s father. He wanted to live here, but of course I preferred London. He used to make me feel quite disloyal. Dear Guy…”

  “He was a mountaineer, wasn’t he? Jamie told me.”

  “Oh, yes, he was a great mountaineer. A regular British hero.” Irony or a plain statement of truth? I couldn’t tell. She seemed to speak of the man she had married as though he were still there, as though he was a fool, as though she was still in love with him, as though she rather despised him. All these things in the few occasions she referred to him. “And now we want to make the place livable, so I need some help. Of course you don’t have to say yes straightaway. Of course not. Let me show you, and then we’ll have some lunch and you can tell me what you think. I’m sure a boy like you would like to earn a little extra, and I’m sure your mother would be delighted. I know what it’s like shelling out pocket money all the time. Let me show you round.”

  So we did a tour of the house, peering into rooms, edging through doors, tripping over steps. Unlike its owner, the place seemed awkward, a body that had been assembled out of different ill-fitting parts, with corridors from one part to another that warranted extra steps to make the join, with right-angle corners, and alcoves and crannies and doors that only half opened because of a wall in the way. Around the abrupt turn of one particular corner, we came to what she called the “games room.” It was long and wide, occupying the whole width of that wing of the house. We looked at the rubbish left by previous occupants: a broken sofa, an old table, empty trunks, an ancient mattress, that kind of thing. There was an open fireplace with a mantelpiece of cast iron. The only evidence of games was a full-size snooker table — she referred to it as pool — with its baize torn and rotten. “We’ve not touched anything here, as you can see, but now the plan is to convert it into guest rooms. I just need someone to do the clearing out. And then there could be other things you could do. You know what it’s like without a man about the house. There’s always the garden.”

  Afterward we ate lunch together in the cold dining room — and of course when she asked me about the work, I said yes, I’d do it. A few quid would come in handy. And she smiled quickly, as if that was good but not so important really; doubtless she could always have found a lad from the village.

  Mother was suspicious when I told her. “Why?” she asked. “Why?”

  “Why not? It’ll give me something to do, never mind the money.”

  Perhaps the money was what swayed her from outright proscription. “Do what you like,” she said. “Don’t take any notice of me.”

  “But why shouldn’t I?”

  “I haven’t said you shouldn’t.”

  “Then what have you got against her?”

  “Nothing, my dear. I’ve nothing against Meg. I’m just disappointed in her, that’s all. Her horrid flashiness, the way she seems to think herself so much better. The way she…” Her disapprobation died away into a vague and impatient gesture, a kind of childish petulance. It was one of those moments when I understood something for the first time, or thought I did: that adults could operate on the same level as children, that they could have dislikes that were based on nothing more than irrational prejudice.

  “Well, I’m going to take the job,” I said.

  “Do what you like,” she repeated, and I realized that in some ill-defined way I was being disloyal.

  So the next day I boarded the train to Llanbedr again and took the same bus up to Gilead House, and there was Caroline already at work in the games room with music from a portable record player — a stack of forty-fives beside it — thumping out into the dust-laden air.

  “Diana didn’t mind?” she asked.

  Mendaciously, I shook my head.

  “That’s fine then.”

  We worked in silence, more or less, with Caroline giving instructions every now and again. I carried broken chairs and an ancient mattress and other rubbish down awkward back stairs and out into the garden; I helped strip wallpaper. The music set the emptying room reverberating. I watched her, this strange other presence, and hoped she didn’t notice my look. I saw the outline of her breasts inside her shirt. I saw grime on her face where she had wiped sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand, and dark stains of sweat growing beneath her arms. That was disturbing, the discovery that she could sweat just as I did. She wasn’t as she had seemed when she had come to stay in our hotel all that time ago. She wasn’t brass and brittle; she was sandy and blurred, softened by time and fashion, paradoxically younger and more accessible — more or less the same age as my mother, yet younger by far.

  At the end of the day, she drove me to the station in the Mercedes. I’d never been in a car like that before: tan leather upholstery and walnut veneer. The interior smelled of her perfume, that blend of things that I couldn’t decipher. She glanced at me from time to time and smiled. As I opened the door of the car to step out into the station forecourt, she leaned across the seat and handed me two envelopes. “This one’s for you; the other’s a letter for your mother.”

  I opened my envelope on the train. Inside was one pound, ten shillings in two notes. Absurdly I felt demeaned, as though my work should have been given for free.

  “Five shillings an hour,” my mother observed tartly. “That’s generous.” She opened the envelope with her name on it, scanned the letter inside, and then tucked it away. “Meg,” she said. That was all. The single syllable carried with it a strange tone of impatience, as well as suspicion and faint regret.

  “What did she say?”

  “She said what a good worker you are. How like your father. ‘Quite a dutiful Scot’ were her words.”

  “Did she know Father?” I knew almost nothing of him: a few photographs, a few anecdotes, a letter at Christmas and another on my birthday, nothing more. Dear boy, he used to write, almost as though he had forgotten my name. I think my mother feared that as I grew up I would decide to go in search of him and would thus unravel the intricate knot of their separation. I think she feared that she might lose me to him.

  “Of course she did. Meg was one of the bridesmaids at our wedding.”

  That fact startled me. I didn’t know what to do with it, what it meant. My mother’s wedding seemed so long ago, an event that had happened to other people in another age. But when asked about it she unearthed a photograph album, and sure enough there they were, those ghosts from the past: my father, blunt and prematurely balding (looking about fifty I thought), wearing the kilt and a black velvet jacket; my mother, unexpectedly pretty in a long white dress with a train thrown carelessly around her feet; and that other figure, brown hair permed in the fashion of the time, the shoulders of her dress cut wide, her smile faintly knowing: Meg.

  I thought of her. I thought of the sweat beneath her armpits and the loose shifting of her breasts inside her shirt. In my room I examined my face in the mirror, looking for signs that I was something other than a mere child, something that might be attractive to Caroline Matthewson. The metamorphosis of adolescence was a slow and painful process. Enough hair grew on my upper lip to warrant shaving once or twice a week. There was a faint beard down the side of my jaw. There was a small constellation of acne spots across my forehead and a gathering of them beside my mouth. Shag spots. It was said that masturbation encouraged them: chocolate, fried food, and masturbation. No wonder there was a national epidemic.

  How many times did I visit the Matthewson house that summer?
A dozen, maybe — a precise number with vague borders. Once, she was not even there, the absence of the white Mercedes conspicuous in the driveway. Once, there were friends visiting, a couple from the United States with loud clothes and a carefully wrapped and decorated daughter who avoided my eye when we were introduced, as though she had been warned about the behavior of the natives and knew them to be dangerous. Sometimes Caroline smiled distantly at me when I arrived and left me alone — to dig out the border in the walled garden, to shift garbage from an outbuilding, to light a bonfire of all the combustible trash that I had gathered together. Sometimes she seemed to have time for me, or time for the work that I was doing. “Why in God’s name didn’t we do this earlier?” she exclaimed more than once.

  One morning, when I was working on my own in the games room, Caroline called up the stairs to me. “It’s Jamie. Robert, are you there? It’s Jamie.” Expecting to see him, I ran downstairs. But it was only his disembodied voice on the telephone that she held out to me, not Jamie himself coming in at the front door, eighteen years old now and so changed from when we had last been together. On the phone he sounded oddly indifferent. “Hi, how you doing?” And lower-pitched, adult really.

  “How are you?”

  “Bored. Hey, you get my card?”

  “Yes.”

  “You didn’t reply.”

  “I didn’t have your address.”

  “You could have got it from my mum.”

  She stood there, just beside me, close enough for me to get a breath of that perfume. “Why didn’t you get in touch last Easter?” I countered.

  He ignored the question. “I climbed the Jungfrau and the Eiger, you know that? The Mittellegi Ridge. And you know what? The first British ascent of the Nordwand was only last autumn. Can you imagine that? Maybe I’ll do that one day.”

  There was an awkward pause while I searched for something to say. The word Nordwand meant nothing to me, but I didn’t want to ask. The line crackled ominously, like the lightning of a distant storm.

  “Look, get my new address from my mum, okay? I’m going to university in autumn. We’ll be in touch.”

  Would we? I felt privileged that he had even mentioned the possibility. I handed the phone back to Caroline. “I’ll get back to work,” I said. She smiled distractedly, still talking on the phone to her son, who was three thousand miles away, saying look after yourself, don’t get sunburned, things like that. I suppose I felt privileged to be admitted to the Matthewson family, at least in some lesser, surrogate role.

  One day she was going through an old trunk, and she called me over. “Look what I’ve found. Guy’s old notebook. Jamie will love this.” It had a black cover and marbled endpapers. I looked over her shoulder, breathing in her scent while she turned the pages. The entries were in blue-black ink, painstakingly inscribed in an even, perfect script:

  Helyg. March 1941:

  Clogwyn y Grochan — Brant (Very Severe), John B 2nd

  Carreg Wastad — Crackstone Rib (Severe)

  Dinas Mot — the Nose (Very S), with JME

  Milestone B. Soap Gut & Chimney (Severe)

  Tryfan — Grooved Arêête / Belle Vue Bastion (V Severe); Munich climb (without the piton!) (Very S).

  Words, terms, jargon. They meant nothing to me. And what, in God’s name, was Soap Gut? It sounded fatty and slimy and rather revolting.

  “Those are the rock climbs he did.” She looked up at me. “What do you think?”

  I didn’t know what I thought. I thought he was a hero. I thought Jamie was lucky to have a hero for a father. I thought that my own father — stout, Scottish, and distant — was a poor substitute, even for a dead one. Caroline put the book aside. Among the papers and files in the trunk, there was also another book, a published one with a battered dust jacket: Kangchenjunga, the Sacred Peak. She flicked through the pages and stopped at one of the plates and showed it to me. Guy Matthewson, the last photograph was the caption. A roughly bearded face grinned cheerfully at the camera. He was sunburned on his cheeks, and his lips were chapped. His goggles were pushed up onto his balaclava, and the rings of pale skin around his eyes gave him a faintly clownish appearance. I found it strange that you could grin like that with your death only a day or two away; as though you ought to have some kind of premonition.

  “There,” she said, looking at me. What was I to make of her expression? Did she want sympathy? Did she want admiration? Did she still want consolation after more than a decade? It was hard to relate her to a man who climbed mountains, who had a battered, weather-scorched face and who died in the cold on some distant Himalayan peak. “He was a wonderful man,” she said softly. I felt a mixture of embarrassment and jealousy, jealousy over a man long dead who could still evoke this emotion. There almost seemed to be tears in her eyes.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  She blinked and wiped at her eyes with the back of her wrist. “Nothing,” she said. “Dust.” And maybe I was wrong and it had been dust.

  On another occasion she cried, “Hey, listen to this,” and put a record on the player. It was Chubby Checker, twisting once again. Amid laughter I watched her dancing there in the middle of the half-empty games room, absurdly, her hips revolving, her legs writhing like snakes. Fascinated, laughing, sweating with embarrassment and desire, I watched her.

  “Come on. Join me.”

  There was a moment when I might have danced with her. There was a moment when the possibility beckoned. But the song came to an end (a mere two minutes, thirty seconds), and she took the record off the turntable and smoothed her jeans down over her narrow hips and laughed either at me or at herself, or maybe at both of us together as we stood awkwardly there in the middle of the room. I was aware of her eyes on me, her expression (I glanced up and saw the look) thoughtful. I felt vividly that barrier that exists between human beings, the gulf of a few feet of empty air that is so difficult to bridge. I wanted to say things to her but dared not. And I guessed, but couldn’t tell, that the same ideas moved through her mind, eating away at her composure.

  Caroline. The name reverberated in my mind. It had a sound to it, a color, a scent, a mood. The colors were pale and pastel, yellow and blue, but not the intense blue of the sky seen at altitude: the smudged blue of the Welsh sky when it wasn’t raining. The sound was brass, but not brassy — the chiming of a bell. The scent was a musky citrus. The mood was smiling, but with an undertow of sorrow.

  These were my thoughts that summer. The sixties were burgeoning with fantasies of peace and love and liberation. I too had a dream, but I proclaimed it to no one. It was a dream of concupiscence, a scented dream, a veiled dream rehearsed to the gyration of hips and the thoughtful manipulation of hand and body in the quiet of my own room, with the Rolling Stones on the record player, asserting that time was on my side: a solitary, adolescent dream.

  That must have been the last occasion that I went to Gilead House that summer. “Here,” she said to me that afternoon as I said good-bye. “Let me give you the number of the London house. Then if you ever need somewhere to stay…”

  I watched her scribble on a piece of embossed writing paper. Her writing had assurance and panache. Caroline in London, she wrote, and the number and address. I folded the page and put it in my pocket.

  She looked at me closely, her eyebrows drawn together in a slight frown as though she was struggling to make sense of what she saw. “I mean it. Come and see me.” And then she did something quite remarkable: she lifted herself up on her toes, with her hands on my shoulders, and put her cheek against mine. “I’ll miss you,” she said.

  “And I’ll miss you,” I whispered. It was a statement of great daring, hovering on the edge of confession. Then she kissed me softly on the very corner of my mouth. There was the dampness of her saliva, like a secret promise.

  4

  AUTUMN, THE ANTICLIMAX of the year, the season of my birthday and the coming of the age of consent. I received a card from my mother as well as a shirt with a t
ab collar that she had bought at some boutique in Liverpool — Lord John or King Cool or something. There were some records and a few other cards, from grandparents, from an aunt and uncle, from godparents. And a postcard, days late.

  Dearest Robert,

  I know it’s your birthday because you made a point of telling me the exact date, and even so I’m late! So, happy late birthday. I have also bought you a present. If you would like to take up my invitation to come up to town, I’ll give it to you. Next weekend? Let me know. Jamie will be here.

  Love, Caroline

  From the other side of the card a woman’s face looked up at me: a woman in tears, her face broken up into jagged planes like shards of broken glass. She held a tattered handkerchief to her cheeks. The printed rubric said “Woman Weeping, portrait of Dora Maar: Pablo Picasso.” It was, I guessed, her idea of a joke.

  I phoned her number, just to check. Her voice was distracted, as though she wasn’t sure whom she was speaking to. Yes, it was okay that weekend. Fine. Even though…

  “Even though what?” She seemed remote and uninterested. I felt the intricacies of mixed emotions, worse at sixteen than at fifty, worse at sixteen than at any other age probably.

  “Nothing. It’s okay if you want to come.”

  “How do I get there?”

  “You’ve got the address, haven’t you? Find the place in the A to Z. I can’t possibly explain.” Disappointment as a counterpoint to excitement, reality as a counterbalance to fantasy: a dizzying seesaw. Why should she be interested in me, for God’s sake? Anyway, I was going to see Jamie, wasn’t I? Jamie, who had been a friend long ago and in a different lifetime. What would he be like, having put on as many years as I had but having in the meantime crossed the threshold of adulthood? He was now at university. He had, so he had written, been climbing on Ben Nevis with the university mountaineering club. Not like Snowdon, he had written. More like the Alps. See you in London some time. A man. A university student, grown-up and self-assured, with the experience of sailing in the West Indies and climbing in the Alps behind him. I was going to see him, and what did it matter that his mother sounded indifferent on the phone? Shit, she was an adult, and I was just a kid.