The Fall

by Simon Mawer

  “Come on, young Dewar,” he called, holding the end of the rope for me to tie on. “Give it a go.” The rope ran up from the belayer at the foot of the cliff to a sling looped around a tree at the top, then back down to the climber: a kind of pulley effect. Someone tied me on, and I tried a few climbs myself. The rock bulged, holdless and awkward. It was like trying to climb up a rusty metal tank. Eve cheered me on, which was gratifying. Jamie stood at the foot of the rock, holding the rope and shouting instructions.

  I stalled on a sandy overhang.

  “Come on, Dewar!” he called. I scrabbled and slithered. “You’ve just got to reach over and use the crack above. You’ve just got to do it.”

  It was the first time that I heard that edge in his voice, the merciless tone of the torturer — the torturer who knows that he can stand more pain than you. “I can’t reach the fucking crack!” I yelled.

  “Well, then, you’ll fall off. That’s all there is to it. You’ll fall off, and I’ll save your life.”

  I duly did. My sweating fingers lost their grip and I slumped exhausted on the rope, and he held me tight and lowered me down to the ground and then caught me clumsily in his arms. The audience laughed as you might laugh at a comedian doing a pratfall. “That’s not bad,” Jamie said, his arm around my shoulders comfortingly. “5b.”

  I assumed it was a mark out of ten or something. It didn’t sound very good. Eve held my hand when we all decamped to the nearest pub. “I thought you did wonderfully,” she said. She sat beside me in the pub, smoking and sipping a gin and lime and toying with a sandwich. She was pale, like a plant grown under glass. The Arran sweater she wore was her brother’s. “Of course you know about Jamie’s father, don’t you?” she asked.

  “What about him?”

  “He was some kind of English hero. Frozen to death on Mount Everest or something. He must have told you.”

  “I know something. I think it was Kangchenjunga.”

  “They’re all the same. Great piles of rock.” She made a face — disparagement, disapproval, something like that — and glanced around to see who might overhear. But we were in a corner, and the rest of the group was involved in a game of darts on the other side of the bar. “Well, the thing is, he’s trying to live up to his father’s name. Trying to be the hero. And after all, his mother…”

  “What about his mother?”

  She sniffed. Eve was a London girl, born and bred. She looked soft, but she had a Londoner’s hard edge and, despite private schooling, London vowels in her voice. “Well,” she said. “She’s not much to live up to, is she? I mean, her knicker elastic is rather loose.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “They keep falling down, darling.” She noticed that I reddened. Of course she did. She was too sharp not to. But she was too sharp to mention it at the time. The occasion would arise, of course. She would store that little piece of knowledge away in some dark recess of her mind where revenge and blackmail brewed, and one day she might use it. She was a barrister’s daughter, with a barrister’s gift for sensing the weaknesses in a witness’s story.

  That evening back at his house, Jamie and I talked about fathers and lack of fathers, just as we had all those years ago in North Wales. We seemed very close. We sat on his bed and drank beer from the bottle and conjured fathers out of the stuff of our imagination. You create a father in your own image if you haven’t got one; I guess that’s it. I had a father, although materially I never saw him and never really knew him. But still he was there to dull my fantasy. Jamie, on the other hand, was able to create his own father out of fantasy and wishful thinking — his father was tough and forthright and noble and sensitive, the kind of man who wants to know what is over the next hill, in the next valley, the kind of man who lives on the edge of the inhabited world, pushing beyond the frontiers. “I reckon somehow he’s there, watching,” he said. “Does that sound daft?”

  “Yes, it does,” I told him. “Bloody daft.”

  He laughed and pushed me away. For a moment we struggled together, a play fight over the absurdity of Jamie’s father watching over him. But in a sense he was there, in Jamie’s room: he looked out at you from a dozen framed photographs. He was there among a group of climbers standing at the snout of the Rongbuk Glacier; he was poised with apparent ease on a rock face somewhere in Wales, a rope hanging from his waist; he was sitting on a boulder in the sun, smoking a cigarette and dressed in tattered breeches and a collarless shirt, looking like a manual worker taking a tea break. The mountain that formed the backdrop to that photograph was dark and forbidding, a great triangular mass cast in shadow with ice and snow cascading down its flank. “That’s in the Alps,” Jamie said. “It’s got it on the back. It says after the Lauper, June 1939. That’s the Eiger.”

  I looked at this mountain that had the reputation of a killer and at Jamie’s father sitting in front of it with the casual smile of the invincible. Except that he wasn’t invincible. The mountains finally got him, didn’t they?

  “Do you want to see his notebook? It’s a logbook of all his climbs. Mother found it.”

  I’d seen it, of course, but I didn’t tell Jamie that. The notebook had made its journey down from Gilead House and was now kept in a desk in the sitting room, like the relic of a saint tucked away in an altar. Jamie opened it.

  CIC hut, Ben Nevis, Easter 1939

  Thurs. 6 April: Comb Gully (in the wet). 2nd ascent?

  Good Fri. with MacPhee et al: a new gully between Observatory Buttress and the Indicator Wall. A fine achievement

  Saturday: 8th: A washout

  Sunday 2nd April: Tower Ridge. Solo, under blue skies!

  Monday and Tuesday: prospecting on the Orion Face, without success…

  “See what he did? All his climbs. Scotland, Wales, Lake District.” I was sitting at the desk to read it. He stood behind me with his hand on my shoulder, reaching over to turn the pages:

  Fri. 9th August 1940: Columnar Cliffs — Spiral Stairs and Flying Buttress (Difficult). DS 2nd.

  Sat. 10th: Milestone Buttress — Direct (Difficult); Tryfan E Face — Grooved Arête (Very D). DS 2nd.

  Sun 11th: Glyder Main Cliff — Direct Route (Severe). Diana 2nd.

  He moved to turn them again, but I stopped him. “What’s this?” I asked. Behind us the door opened. Caroline came in and walked over to see what we were doing. “That’s not to be touched,” she said. “Anyway, Robert’s already seen it.”

  “Seen it?” said Jamie.

  “At Gilead House, when he was helping me clear out. When I found it.”

  She reached over to take the book, but I kept my finger on the page. “What’s this?” I repeated, looking around at her. “Who’s DS? It says Diana. Who’s Diana?”

  Caroline stopped. Her expression was an untidy blend of amusement and embarrassment. “Diana?”

  “Yes.” I pointed. And somehow I felt angry, a diffuse, confused sort of anger. As though things had been kept from me. “It says DS here. And then Diana.”

  There was a silence, Jamie and me looking around at his mother, and she looking back at us with something like anxiety in her expression. “Diana’s your mother,” she said flatly

  “My mother?”

  “Yes. Didn’t she ever tell you?” She tried to sound careless about it, as though it were obvious really. “She climbed with Guy.”

  “She climbed with him?”

  “They met in Wales before I knew him. They climbed together.”

  “I can’t believe it.”

  “It’s true.”

  “She never told me. I never knew.”

  Caroline took the book and closed it. “What child ever knows his parents?” she asked. It sounded like a quotation. Something from the Book of Proverbs, perhaps.

  A couple of weeks later I was invited to stay at Eve’s house. Her parents were away. It wasn’t clear whether they knew about me being there or not, but then I suppose Caroline’s aphorism works both ways: there was quite a lo
t these parents didn’t know about their daughter. She had got hold of some pot, and I doubt they knew about that. “Do you want to try?” she asked. “Or doesn’t it fit in with your Welsh Methodist upbringing?”

  “I’m not a Welsh Methodist. I’m not even Welsh. My father is Scottish.”

  She made a face. “That’s even worse. Wee free or something. Does he beat you with a tawse?”

  “He left home years ago.”

  “Lucky you,” she said.

  We spent most of Saturday on the floor of the sitting room, giggling and smoking and listening to records. She held the joint between her last two fingers and cupped her hand to her mouth to inhale. The musty scent filled the air. “Are we very depraved?” she asked.

  “Just slightly.” We giggled at being only slightly depraved. She passed me the joint. Her mind was unsteady, lighting on things at random. She spoke a bit about Jamie. “I don’t think he fancies women, do you?”

  I laughed. “You think he’s queer?”

  She had that trick of ignoring what you had said, just going on with her own line of thought. “He doesn’t fancy you, does he?”

  “Me?”

  “He always talks about you.”

  “That doesn’t mean he’s queer.”

  “It does if he fancies you and he doesn’t fancy me.” She looked at me with her head on one side and her eyes ill-focused. I remember the size of her pupils, as black and shining as obsidian, rimmed with that startling blue. “Do you fancy me?”

  I did.

  “Then you better show it,” she said.

  5

  THE RAIN CAME IN over the Irish Sea, thin and mean and gray. It rattled at the windows of my room as though trying to get in. “Where did you get these things?” my mother asked, unpacking my suitcase and finding a shirt and a wide and flowery tie from a boutique in the King’s Road. They seemed symbolic of all that London had to offer: bright and brash against the self-pitying gray of Wales.

  “Jamie’s mother bought them for me. They’re Christmas presents.”

  “First a watch and now these. What’s Meg trying to do, take you over?”

  “It’s Caroline now, Mum. She’s Caroline.”

  “What do you care?”

  “It’s just what she’s called.”

  “She was always Meg. It’s a silly, pretentious affectation of hers to change her name. Typical of her type.”

  “What is her type, Mum?”

  “You tell me.”

  We stood glaring at each other across the litter of unpacked clothes. I suppose she wanted to know the truth, but you can’t ask directly, can you? In case you get the answer you don’t want to hear. What if I had told her? Yes, Caroline and I have slept together: we’re lovers. What if I had said that? But I didn’t. I just shrugged instead. “I don’t know what you mean. She’s just Jamie’s mother. A bit of a laugh at times…different from most people her age.”

  “What do you mean by that? She’s no older than I am.”

  “That’s what I meant by it.”

  We found that funny. She laughed, and I laughed with her. “Maybe I should start wearing miniskirts. Can you imagine what they’d say round here? And call myself Jezebel or something.”

  It was when she laughed that I could see the woman who was in those wedding photos, the woman my father had married. I told her about Eve. “She’s all right,” I said. “Her old man’s a barrister.”

  “That sounds very respectable.”

  “You mean, she’d make a suitable daughter-in-law?”

  She smiled at my teasing. “You know what I mean.”

  “And we all went to this place in Sussex where you climb. I had a go. Jamie said I can go climbing with him. Maybe when he comes here at Easter. He says we can go to the Llanberis Pass and he’ll show me.”

  The amusement slid clumsily from her face. “What do you want to do that for?”

  “For fun. He says it’s great. Scary and exciting.”

  “It’s dangerous. Look what happened to his father.”

  I knew she was going to say that. I had the response ready. “But you’ve done it. You went climbing with him, didn’t you?”

  “How on earth do you know that? Did Meg —”

  “Caroline didn’t say anything. We found his notebook, that’s all. Jamie’s father’s. There’s your name in it.”

  Mother took a careful breath. It seemed to be difficult for her, as though breathing had become something that you had to learn and she needed practice. “What did it say?”

  “Just your name against a couple of climbs, that’s all. ‘Second: Diana Sheridan,’ that kind of thing. Is it true?”

  Her expression was difficult to interpret — guarded, puzzled, underpinned by something approaching fear. “Of course it’s true,” she said quietly. “It was before Meg ever knew him.”

  “You never said.”

  “Why should I say?”

  “What’s the problem, Mum?”

  “Nothing’s the problem. Nothing at all.” She looked around my room as though searching for distraction, and found none. “Just that I think perhaps…”

  “Perhaps what?”

  “Perhaps I was in love with him.”

  I felt embarrassed, awkward in the presence of adult emotion. Emotion was foreign to her, and her display of it a shock. “It doesn’t matter, Mum,” I said.

  She nodded. “It does matter,” she whispered. “It does matter.”

  And I had the sudden and terrible thought that she was still in love with him and had always been in love with him — this man who had married someone else and anyway was long dead on some distant mountain. Love was an emotion I had laid claim to with Caroline, but in truth it seemed to be something that I could pick up or leave aside as I wished. I thought perhaps that I loved Eve now. And yet here was an adult who seemed scarred by love, almost literally so, the tissue still growing over the wound and giving her the stiff, expressionless face of a burn victim.

  She gave a fugitive smile, as if trying to show that it was all of no account. “It was so long ago now I barely remember. We spent a whole weekend climbing together. He taught me how. How to use a rope and all that kind of thing. And on Sunday he dragged me up a climb that was too difficult really. We had a bit of a struggle getting up. But…” There was a cast to her eyes, as though she were looking somewhere else, somewhere beyond the narrow confines of our hotel, of the kitchen where she prepared breakfast and afternoon teas with the assistance of Mrs. Jones from the council houses nearby, of the interminable lists, of shopping, of repairs, of things to do and things to be done.

  “But?”

  She shrugged. “It was fun. Funny. We laughed a lot. But the war had just begun, and after that I went down to London to join an ambulance unit and he went back to Manchester. He was, you see, a conscientious objector. He had to face some kind of tribunal.”

  “And then…?”

  “And then.” She shook her head and looked around for something to do, some chore to bring things back down to earth. “Then the laughing stopped,” she said.

  Part Two

  North Wales 1940

  1

  YOU’RE GUY MATTHEWSON, aren’t you?” she said as the descending climber approached her. She had been watching him coming down the rough path from the cliffs for some minutes but had only recognized him as he got nearer. He looked startled at being spoken to.

  “Yes, that’s right,” he said.

  She blushed. “I’m Diana Sheridan. A bit like the actress,” she added. “Only she’s Dinah.”

  “What actress?” he asked.

  She reddened. Was it ridiculous to expect that anyone might make the connection? “It doesn’t matter,” she said, and held out her hand toward him. For a dreadful moment he looked at it as though he was not going to take it, as though he might leave it there, thrust out into the space between them. Then he clasped it solemnly and shook it, and looked at what he had done and apologized for making her hand dirty. �
�I’ve just been wrestling with a muddy groove, I’m afraid.”

  “Oh, that’s all right. Where?”

  He gestured vaguely up the hill, up the gray rocks and green rakes of grass. “Up there.”

  “Were you on your own?”

  “I tend to be these days. I’m a conchie, you see. Not popular.”

  She blushed again. She wished he hadn’t mentioned the matter of his being a conscientious objector, which was rather embarrassing, like having scabies or something. You wanted not to have to talk about it. Almost, she smiled and walked on. Almost, he merely nodded at her and passed her down the narrow path. But she screwed up her courage and asked the question, and on reflection she told herself that it was only because he was at a disadvantage, crippled by the fact of objecting to the war, that she had dared. “Would you take me climbing?” she asked. “Up there?”

  He looked at her with curiosity. “If you wish. Surely you’re not on your own…”

  “I’m at the youth hostel. I’ve got friends coming up tomorrow, but…”

  “But?”

  “They’ll just want to go walking.”

  “And you —”

  “Would rather do some proper climbing.”

  He smiled for the first time. It was just a momentary thing, so quick that she thought perhaps she had imagined it. His whole face was transformed by this smile. At rest his face was rather reserved, private, a bit awkward. “Why not?” he said.

  So they agreed to meet the next morning. He would come for her with his motorcycle — she didn’t mind riding pillion? — and she would be ready on the road outside the hostel. At seven o’clock. They’d go around to the Llanberis Pass on the other side of the mountains.

  “Why there?” she asked.

  “Why not?” He was looking at her thoughtfully. He was head and shoulders taller than she, and he was looking her up and down as though making some kind of assessment. Could you tell whether someone would make a climber just by looking at them? “I hope you’ve got some slacks,” he said. “Don’t want you climbing cliffs in a skirt, do we?”