The Fall

by Simon Mawer

  The very idea made her blush. “Breeches. I’ve got breeches.”

  He nodded. That was all right, then. “And boots,” he added. “Good stiff boots.”

  The next morning she left a note with the hostel warden for her companions when they got there. Gone climbing, she wrote. See you this evening. And she was waiting there in the cool dawn — mist skulking over the waters of the lake, shreds of cloud hanging across the mountainside opposite like dirty washing on a line — when his bike came into view, roaring along the lakeside and then puttering to a halt at the turning to the hostel where she was standing. He pushed up his goggles and waved, and she hurried over to him, feeling suddenly shy at making this early morning assignation with a man.

  “How are you?” he shouted above the noise of the engine. Somehow the question seemed a bit ridiculous. She was what she was. Couldn’t he see that for himself? A tallish, clumsy girl with lackluster, mouse-brown hair and crooked teeth and a diffident smile. There were no secrets here, no mysteries to unravel. “Fine,” she said.

  He edged the bike around so that it faced the way he had come. “Hop on then.” She swung her leg over and settled herself behind him. He had a canvas rucksack on his back, and so she was spared the problem of how to hold on — she could grab the rucksack instead of having to grab hold of him. “Ever ridden pillion?” he shouted.

  “No!”

  “Just go with it. It’s instinctive, like riding a bike. Hold tight!” He twisted the throttle, and the machine roared away. For an awful moment it seemed almost to pull itself from under her so that she had to cling on for dear life. That’s what she’d tell them when she got back that evening. Clinging on for dear life.

  “You all right?” he called over his shoulder.

  The wind made her breathless. “Fine,” she cried, and she was fine: exhilarated, excited, ecstatic, she was all of these things. The lake was still and lucid in the morning air as they drove along the shore. You could see the reflection of the valley wall inverted into its depth. Tryfan lay ahead, a mass of gray rock like a giant dinosaur laid across their path with its tail flung out toward the lake and its head butting into the mountain plateau on the right. Stegosaurus, she thought, recalling a visit to a museum in Oxford where dusty skeletons had stood, it seemed, like mountains in a cold and milky light.

  They passed the Climbers’ Club hut at Helyg among its grove of trees — the only trees in the whole blighted mountain landscape — and turned southward at the little village of Capel Curig to speed along the empty Mymbyr Valley, Dyffryn Mymbyr, with its two glacial lakes and the Snowdon massif blocking the far end. There was something unreal about the drive, something fantastic, daring, as wild as any climbing expedition. They battered along, and the road branched off to the right and began to climb toward the head of the Llanberis Pass. At the top they skidded to a halt, with a small shower of loose stones, in the car park of the hotel.

  “That was fun,” she said.

  He shrugged. “Let’s get some breakfast. I assume you haven’t had anything?”

  They went through into the warm fug of the hotel. The place was wood paneled, decorated with old photographs of bearded men wearing tweed jackets and nailed boots and holding coils of rope. There was the sensation of ancient ritual and tradition. They ate breakfast in a front room looking out at the narrow roadway and the mountain rising up on the far side. “That’s Crib Goch. You know that?”

  “I climbed it last summer,” she told him. “We did the Snowdon Horseshoe.” He listened to her account of her adventure as though it were a great mountaineering achievement. She suddenly felt a bit of a fool, talking like this about something that Guy Matthewson would surely find no more than an easy stroll. This was a man who had been to the Himalaya, climbed on Everest with F. S. Smythe. He’d even known Leigh Mallory so the story went, had even climbed with him when he was still at school. What could he care about her account of a summer day walking around the Snowdon ridge? And yet he listened and nodded and seemed impressed. “Jolly good,” he said. “Jolly good.”

  “I must pay my share,” she said when the bill came, but he brushed her suggestion aside and paid the whole thing himself. They went back out into the morning just as the sun came over the mass of the Glyders at the back of the hotel and flooded its light across the top of the valley. The light was magical, like an omen. She felt an absurd happiness as they remounted the motorcycle.

  There wasn’t much farther to go. Guy kicked the engine into life and let the machine freewheel down the road for a few hundred yards before coming to a halt at a narrow bridge. The valley they were in was flat-floored and steep-sided, ground out by the passage of a glacier at some immeasurable time in the past. Brown slopes of grass and bracken rose up on either side, with outcrops of rock like broken teeth embedded in an ancient, fossilized jawbone.

  He pointed up the hillside above them. “The Columnar Cliffs. Aren’t they fine? They have another name, of course: some Welsh name, all hack and spit. But we call them the Columnar Cliffs.”

  Diana looked where he was pointing. They were square-cut crags, like huge cenotaphs carved out of the side of the mountain by a gargantuan stonemason. You thought of the Cenotaph in London, of course, where the soldiers paraded on the eleventh of November to commemorate the Great War; you also thought of things more distant, ancient and mysterious and Druidic — dolmens, menhirs, cromlechs. The center of the crag was split open like a book, a right-angled vertical corner soaring upward for, what? Hundreds of feet? More than one hundred, surely. The cliff seemed to lean over, hang right over them as though it might suddenly release its hold on the mountainside and come crashing down right onto them. “We’re not going to climb that?”

  He laughed when he saw where she was pointing. “The corner? Not that.”

  “Can it be climbed?”

  “It hasn’t yet. I’d say it was impossible, wouldn’t you? It seems to overhang, but in fact it is just plumb vertical. We’ve sniffed round it. Someone will probably make it go one day, I dare say. You’d need rubbers, though, and a feeling for suicide.” He lifted the rucksack onto his shoulders and led off up the hillside with Diana struggling along in his wake. They stumbled over scree. His boots were nailed, and the nails scraped at the rocks as though trying to tear them. The path led them up toward the right, away from the terrible corner. They settled at the far end of the cliff where a buttress of rock stood proud on the main mass. “That is where we will conduct our lessons,” he said, and there was something ridiculously pedantic about his tone, as if he were a schoolmaster. He unpacked the rope and uncoiled it onto the ground. Flaked it out was the term he used. He threw the bottom end out to one side so that he could tie her on. “Do you know your knots?”

  “Not really.” She laughed nervously at the pun. And, thank God, Guy laughed too. She thought of him as Guy although she hadn’t dared use his Christian name, nor any name at all, come to that. She wondered how she would address him, how he would expect to be addressed. Mr. Matthewson? Was that right? He must be, what? Thirty, thirty-one? And she was a mere nineteen, and the difference was all the difference in the world.

  “We’ll use the bowline,” he said. He looped the rope over her like a lasso, and then came and stood close behind her, his arms around her front, his body not touching her, carefully not touching her. She was painfully conscious of his closeness there on the morning hillside with the ground unsteady beneath her feet and the rocks rising up in front of her and his arms around her and trapping her with the rope.

  He made a loop. “Remember the rabbit.”

  “Rabbit?”

  She felt the breath of laughter on her neck. “You’re a rabbit, aren’t you? A tyro, a beginner. So” — he shook the end of the rope to show her — “the rabbit comes up out of the hole, goes around the tree, and then goes back down the hole.” And, in his hands, the end of the rope did just that, went up through the loop, went around behind the rope, and then went back down into its hole. He pulled the
knot tight against her belly, and there was a moment of contact, his hands against her stomach, his thighs against her backside. Then he pulled the knot to pieces and stepped back.

  “Now you do it.”

  They spent a few minutes practicing. He showed her how to hold the rope while he was climbing and explained how he would tie on at the first ledge that he reached — belay was the word he used — and then she would come up to him. And he explained the calls they would use so that each would know what the other was doing. “That’s it, really. I climb, belay at a suitable place, bring you up, and then you belay and I climb up to the next stance. All right?”

  It was all right. It was perfectly all right. He gave a brief smile and turned to the rock and began to climb. She watched the way he moved, the careful placement of his feet, sometimes using the nails — bladelike things along the sides of the soles — to bite onto a lip of rock. There was barely a scrape, never an uncertain move. “You keep your hands as low as possible,” he called down in his schoolmasterly manner. “Use them for balance, not to pull yourself up. That’s good technique, always in balance if you can. And always with three points in contact with the rock at any one time.”

  “What if you slip?” she called up. She didn’t want to use the word fall. To say the word fall would surely bring bad luck. Like mentioning the name Macbeth in the theater. He looked down at her. “Do you mean, if I fall? If I fall, I hit the ground just beside you. Unless you try and catch me.”

  Her heart gave a small leap of anxiety. “You’d die.”

  “That’s why the leader never falls. Of course, once we get farther up the climb then there’s a chance that you might hold me on the rope. I’d fall past you, but if we were sufficiently high, the rope would come tight before I hit the ground.” There was laughter and irony in his tone. He seemed so courageous up there on the steep ridge with nothing between him and certain death if he were to fall. And they called conchies cowards!

  He had reached a ledge. “I’ll tie on here and bring you up,” he called. “It’s really not hard. You game?”

  “Whenever you’re ready.”

  There was a moment’s delay, and then he called, “Taking in!” and the rope began to snake up out of her hands, the rough fibers almost burning her as it ran. “You can let it go!” he shouted. The rope came tight at her waist. “That’s me!” she cried, delighted to remember the call.

  “Climb when you’re ready.”

  “Climbing!” She stepped up to the foot of the wall. Like a diver stepping to the edge of the diving board. No, that analogy didn’t work at all. The victim of a firing squad stepping up to the post. That was more like it. There was something thick in her throat, a pulsing of fear behind her breastbone. She began to move up, keeping her hands as low as she reasonably could. As she climbed, the rope crept magically upward too so that there was always a slight slack before her and the feeling that at any moment she could cry out “Tight!” and he would snatch the rope against her and she would be safe.

  “You’re doing fine.”

  She glanced up and saw that he was grinning down at her — she’d not seen him smile like that before.

  “A few more moves and you’re there.” His voice was nearer now, and when she looked down there was space beneath her — fifty, sixty feet of air. As high as a house. “My gosh!” she cried.

  “Don’t look down if you haven’t a head for heights.”

  She climbed up toward him with a small spurt of exultation somewhere inside her chest. “It’s breathtaking,” she said. It was, literally. Breathlessly she reached him, and he leaned forward and put his arm around her waist to pull her up onto his narrow perch.

  “Was that good?”

  She assured him with that thrilling sense of elation that, yes, it was good. It was, in fact, wonderful. “Where do we go from here?”

  “Straight up.”

  They edged around each other on the small platform. There was that clumsy intimacy, when convention allows you a closeness of contact that under other circumstances would clearly be forbidden, like when you are dancing with someone. His hands on her hips for a moment, her hands on his shoulders as she moved across him. He tied her onto the rock just as he had been tied, then paid the rope out so that his end was coming from the top — these little details were important, he explained; you had to get them right or you would find yourself in the most frightful mess — and then he showed her how to hold the rope around the back of her waist.

  “Now, are you ready?”

  “I’m ready,” she assured him, and felt a great thrill that in some small way he was going to be dependent on her for his security, that, in a sense, he would be in her hands.

  “Climbing.”

  She paid out the rope as he went. He climbed straight up above her head, moving quickly and surely, without any pause or any uncertainty, until he disappeared from sight. She looked out over the valley, down to the road where the bike was parked, across to the other side where there was a crag rather like theirs (she thought of it as their crag although goodness knows she could hardly claim any kind of joint ownership). Two birds were circling around up there: ravens, maybe, or perhaps choughs. Above them the mountainside went on upward to the rocky ridges of Crib Goch along which she had clambered with Meg and the others only last summer. Little had she dreamed that within a year she would be climbing up the vertical rocks in this place with Guy Matthewson, or that Britain would be at war. Both thoughts gave her a shiver of fright.

  His cry brought her up with a start: “Taking in!” The rope began to move rapidly upward until it once again came tight at her waist.

  “That’s me!” she cried, and her voice seemed high and feeble among this wilderness of gray rock. Had he heard? She began to undo the belay, thinking what a satisfactory nautical sound belay had to it, as though they were doing something as serious as sailing, which perhaps they were, sailing and rock climbing having things in common — ropes and knots, of course, but also the application of strength and the use of balance, and those distant views of wilderness, here the mountains, there the wilderness of ocean.

  She heard his call — “Ready when you are!” — and she shook the rope so that he took it in a bit more. Then she cried, “Climbing!” and set off after him, feeling rather solitary although she knew by the steady intake of the rope that he was there, out of sight but not out of mind. There was something wonderful about this progression up the rock, the two of them linked by the strange intimacy of the rope, separated yet united. Something organic, an umbilical cord. The thought made her blush. “You’re doing wonderfully,” he said as she joined him at the next stance. “Really wonderfully.”

  It took only a few minutes to swap over the belays and for Guy to start up the next stretch. Pitch, she reminded herself. Pitch was what it was called. “This one’s pretty straightforward,” he called. “The sting’s in the tail.”

  He began to traverse out toward the left, out across the wall, and then upward above her head. When she followed she discovered a vast space beneath her, the whole height of the cliff down to the distant scree slopes and the narrow snake of the road along the valley floor. “We’ll make a mountaineer of you yet,” he called down to her, and she grinned up at him with fright and fight, both those things deliciously blended into what she assumed was the total experience of rock climbing. They belayed at a narrow ledge, and the next pitch went farther up, so that they seemed to be flying now — and indeed that was the name of the route, wasn’t it? Flying Buttress, Guy had said. Finally they came to a narrow ledge. The rock above was split by a gash, like a knife-cut still choked with bits of flesh. It was a gruesome, elemental wound, rising up and opening out so that at the top it was almost wide enough to admit a human body.

  “Up there?”

  “The chimney. That’s the sting in the tail.”

  On the ledge there was only room for two of them if they were prepared to be closer than might be proper on a first-day’s acquaintance. He h
elped her tie on to some stones that were jammed in the bottom of the gash. “It’s a thread belay. It’d hold a falling horse.”

  She looked up to where he had to go. “You’re not going to fall, are you?”

  “I hope not.”

  “Have you ever?”

  He smiled at her and shook his head. “But keep it quiet or you may tempt the Fates. Now, you watch me carefully and see how I do it.” He scrabbled up directly above her with his boot nails scraping on the rock until, awkwardly, he was inside the shallow chimney and thrutching upward. Thrutch was the word he used. It was a fine, evocative word, with elements of clutch and thrust to it. Diana loved it, just as she loved the sight of Guy (she hadn’t yet called him that, hadn’t yet called him anything) actually doing it, grunting, shoving, and pulling — thrutching — and suddenly clambering cleanly onto the ledge above.

  “Phew!” He wiped metaphoric sweat from his brow. “Let’s see how you manage it.”

  And she managed it well, that was the wonderful thing. In a way, perhaps because she was smaller, she managed it better than he had. But there was a moment when things got difficult and she was just about to cry “Tight!” as he had taught her, and then she found something to grab on the left wall and that got her past the difficulties and the rest was easy. When she reached the summit of their crag, she found him sitting on the edge with the rope piled to one side of him. She came up to him with a broad smile — her first climb completed, for God’s sake! — and sat down beside him, and he put his arm around her shoulders and shook her gently. “That’s well done,” he said. “Well done, indeed. You seconded that better than many an expert I’ve seen.”

  “Thank you, Guy,” she replied, and hated it when he took his arm from around her shoulders and stood up to coil the rope, for it almost seemed that he was offended that she had addressed him by his Christian name.