by Simon Mawer
She wished she had some makeup with her. She rubbed her cheeks to bring a bit of blood to them and licked her lips to make them shine. Temporary measures. She loosened her hair and shook it out in an attempt to shake it into life, then brushed it through twenty times each side, turning her head to change sides, brushing it back from her forehead. She tried a smile, that awkward smile that never showed the humor that she felt; then she grimaced at her reflection and went downstairs to find Guy.
There were people in the bar. She was afraid of them. One of them rose and came over to her, and it was Guy, changed into gray flannels and a blazer. “What’ll you have?” he asked, and she was afraid of that too, having never been in a bar, having never really drunk alcohol except the occasional glass of wine at weddings and Christmas and things. “Mine’s a gin and tonic,” he said helpfully, so hers was too and she held it carefully in her hand in case it should escape and fall giggling to the floor.
Did she smoke?
She didn’t.
Did she mind if he did?
She didn’t.
“And here’s the menu.” He presented her with a large leather folder that looked like something you might find in a lawyer’s office.
“How grand,” she remarked. But the page inside was small and badly typed, and it told a sorry tale of brown Windsor soup and potatoes and carrots and something called brisket. They carried the menu through into the dining room and sat opposite each other at a small table by the window. Struthwick nodded and smiled at them from a table nearby. Diana blushed. She ordered a small glass of beer with her food, and Guy asked for a pint, there being, he had explained, little chance of wine these days. He raised his glass to her and proposed a toast that was almost a question: “To us?”
“If you like,” she said with a shrug. “To us.”
They talked about the day they had had, about what they might do tomorrow. They talked about where she had been to school and where he had been to university and whether she should have taken up her place at Liverpool or not. They talked about where they lived and had lived, of their parents and their families. They even talked a bit about Lotty, but nothing about Guy’s wife. And when they had finished their meal and had their coffee he suggested that they go out for a stroll — “if it’s not too chilly” — and so they went out into the gardens, down to the edge of the lake, which was black and gleaming like obsidian. They were scrupulous about the blackout even here, and there wasn’t a glimmer of light from the hotel, but the sky still glowed with a backwash of light from the sun. A crescent moon was held in the frame of the Gwynant Valley. Farther west, above the black pyramid that was Snowdon, hung a single brilliant star.
“Arcturus,” Guy said when she pointed. Did he know these things? Perhaps mountaineers needed to know the stars. Perhaps they navigated by them. She looked for Orion: the familiar shape of the constellation somehow made up for the terrifying coldness and distance of the stars. Sometimes she hated the stars, beautiful though they might be. But Orion wasn’t there; nothing that she could recognize was there. It was as though she found herself in a foreign country without any familiar points of reference. Guy laughed when she explained.
“Look, there’s the Plough,” he said, turning to her and pointing upward. “You’ll always see the Plough. But I’m afraid that Orion’s below the horizon now. We’re probably standing directly on top of him.”
“Standing on Orion?” The thought chilled her, that the constellation of Orion could be below their feet; that the universe was all around them, below them as well as above them; that they were suspended in its vastness; that the stars, the planets, the nebulae, all were all around them. For a moment she was dizzy with the thought. “That’s frightening, isn’t it?”
He took her by the hand. “You mustn’t be frightened. You were brave enough on the mountain today not to be frightened by anything.”
For a moment they stood like that, close together, with her hand in his, and then he moved a step toward her and kissed her.
She had been expecting it, of course. She wasn’t a fool, or naive or anything like that. And it certainly wasn’t the first time she’d been kissed. There had been a couple of boys already, one only the month before who had gone off to join the army and was now somewhere in Scotland and still wrote letters to her. Andy, his name was. She’d met him at a Ramblers gathering in the Lake District. But this was the first time that she had ever been kissed by a man. That was how she thought of it. Andy and the others had been her own age, more or less, but Guy Matthew-son was a man, with a man’s confidence, a man’s strength, a man’s fragile self-sufficiency. When he kissed her he held her firmly in the small of her back, just like they did it in the films, and his mouth was open for a moment. Hesitantly, his tongue touched her closed lips.
He let her go. “Didn’t you want that?” he said.
She didn’t quite know what to say. “It’s fine.”
“I’m sorry if I took advantage…”
“No, not at all.”
“I don’t really understand what’s happened.”
“I’ll tell you if you like.”
He laughed softly. “Tell me, then.”
“You’ve met a nice young girl in the mountains who’s shown a bit of sympathy toward you…”
“Is that all?”
“And she’s got a bit of a crush on you, I suppose. And given those two things, we both might make fools of ourselves if we’re not careful.”
He took up her hand and held it in both of his. “If you want it all to end here, then I’ll honor that.”
The word honor sounded very grand, rather loud, the kind of thing one said shortly before acting most dishonorably. Adolf Hitler used the word honor rather a lot. “Forget about honor,” she said. “I don’t think honor has done very well recently.”
He laughed again. There was enough light to see the gleam of his teeth. “You really are a most remarkable girl, Diana Sheridan. Is that what you think?”
“It’s not what I think. It’s the fact of the matter.”
“This sounds like Through the Looking-Glass again. So: if that’s the fact of the matter, what do you think?”
She turned away from him, putting up a hand to straighten her hair, making little gestures of anxiety. For God’s sake, what did she think? “I don’t really know what I think, Guy. I think that we might never see each other again. I’m off to London shortly and goodness knows what’ll happen there. And you’ve got your blessed tribunal to face.”
She felt him grow tense beside her. She suddenly understood that he had forgotten all about the tribunal, as though their being together like this had achieved what climbing also seemed to bring: forgetfulness. She looked around at him. “I think perhaps I’m quite happy to make a fool of myself,” she said.
“That sounds very calculating.”
“Oh, I can calculate. I’m quite a mathematician.”
“Does that reduce me to the level of a problem?”
“A conundrum, maybe.”
“What’s the answer then?”
“Oh, there’s no answer. If there were, it wouldn’t be a conundrum.”
Once in her room, Diana changed into her nightdress. She pulled back the bedclothes and placed a clean handkerchief on the bedside table. It felt as though she was preparing for something medical, something that she might have done in her nurse’s training. Then she cleaned her teeth and climbed into bed and lay on her back staring at the slope of the ceiling, at the cracks in the plaster and the irregular stain where damp must have seeped in. She could taste the mint in her mouth and feel the grit of the toothpaste when she ran her tongue across her teeth. She felt like a child again, waiting in bed for something to happen — an illness to leave her, her father to come back from working late, some family crisis to reach its head.
The sounds of the hotel — the banging of air in the water pipes, the closing of doors, people talking to one another in muffled tones — settled down. It must have been abou
t half an hour later that she heard footsteps on the stairs and the creak of a floorboard in the corridor outside. There was a fingernail tap on her door, a tiny mouselike sound. It might almost have been that, an animal in the wainscot.
She turned the bedside light off and called softly, “Come in.” The door opened. For a moment pale light spilled into the room, and she could see the silhouette of his figure. Then the door closed, and there was just his presence in the blackness and his footsteps crossing the floorboards. His voice was just above her. “Where are you?”
“Here.”
A hand reached through the darkness and touched her face. She took hold of it, felt the sinew and the bone and the hard edge of his nails. There was the same physical sensation that she had experienced while climbing, the same sense of fear and excitement so mingled together that neither could be distinguished from the other. She pushed the bedclothes aside and made what room she could for him. He was shaking as he lay alongside her. “You’re cold,” she said softly.
“Not cold, no. Afraid maybe.” She could feel his breath against her neck, as though words had a weight, a substance to them.
“Not of me.” She laughed at the idea. “Surely not of me.”
“I’m afraid for both of us, I think. Of what might happen.”
“Does it matter, if it’s what we both want?”
He laughed and kissed her face very softly, as though tasting the different textures — her eyelids, her cheekbones, her nose, the faint down on her upper lip, the soft membranes of the lips themselves — as though trying to understand her by touch alone. He had drawn her nightdress up. It was around her waist now, and his hand was on her belly, stroking her.
“Guy.” There was a hint of uncertainty in her tone. His name was still strange to her, still new and foreign. “Guy?”
“Diana,” he whispered, and again, “Diana,” and the mere exchange of their names seemed an intimacy as great as anything that was happening now, as great as the shameless opening of her legs and the sudden, startling presence of his hand there. She arched herself against him. Delight flooded the basin of her body like a flash of light in the darkness. “Guy,” she whispered, as though there was some kind of danger and she was trying to warn him, “Guy, be careful.” But then it was too late to do anything about it, for they were falling. She cried out with the shock of it, the feeling of release and the thrill of fear. It would stop, she knew that — a fall must always come to a stop eventually — but for the moment she didn’t care, there was just the sensation of falling, and the shock, and Guy clinging to her.
The next morning was cool and clear. He had left her alone in the early hours, and they had slept on apart. Now there was a strange mixture of shyness and intimacy between them as they met in the corridor before going downstairs together. “How are you this morning?” was all that he said. “Are you all right?” He bent toward her and kissed her on the cheek almost as an afterthought, as an uncle might kiss a favored niece. Had she wanted anything more? Certainly she felt that there ought to be something more, some celebration of her rite of passage, some acknowledgment that something now linked them more securely than any hundred-foot length of hemp rope.
They were the first down to breakfast. It was a blessing that there was no one else there to see them enter the dining room together and whisper about them. She picked up a newspaper as a distraction. It reported a quiet day. Bombs had fallen on Norwich, but casualties were light. There were no losses of aircraft, either by the enemy or by the Royal Air Force.
“On a day like this we can do something challenging,” Guy said as he ate his toast.
Did she want a challenge? She remembered him naked against her and reddened at the recollection, there in the dining room with the ancient waiter moving among the tables. It was a strange memory, a tactile one, a memory that someone blind might have, composed of touch and pressure and delight, and that sensation of falling, and the sudden halt. She possessed a part of him, and she wanted to talk about it; yet she was held back by this apparent indifference, this businesslike discussion of where they should go and what they should do. She had expected him to be changed somehow, yet he appeared the same — brisk, reserved, slightly impersonal.
“I think we’ll go to Bochlwyd. We can do something on the Glyder Main Cliff. The Direct Route, that’s what we’ll do. You’ll love the Direct Route.”
So they spent that final morning up in the hills, clambering about on more rock and maneuvering the rope and calling down cliffs to each other. They climbed the route he had chosen, and she couldn’t follow him on one passage and had to go by a detour over on the left. The Rectangular Excursion, he called it. Every feature in the crags seemed to have a name — the Capstan, the Veranda, the Chasm. There was a facetious tone to them, the spirit of enforced jollity and deliberate understatement, the spirit of the past. She panicked when she had to traverse back to the original line of the route. She was expected to cross a smooth slab of rock using sharp handholds alone, her feet just scraping on the holdless rock below, and halfway across her strength gave out. It seemed a sudden thing, like water draining from a tank. “I’m going to fall!” she shouted up at him. “Guy, I’m going to fall!”
The rope ran diagonally up the cliff away from her. If she let go there she would make a great swing across the cliff beneath him.
“I’m going to fall!” she screamed at him, and his voice came back quite relaxed about it all, quite calm and collected.
“No you’re not, Porpoise. Just get your left leg up into the crack to help you. It’s not very elegant, but it’s safe.”
She hung on with weakening hands and scrabbled on the rock with her feet and finally, blessedly managed to cock her leg upward, almost as though she was mounting a man’s bicycle. It was a bit better like that.
“But how the hell do I move?” she cried.
“It’s Sunday,” came the reply. “Such language is inappropriate.”
“Damn Sunday! I want to get out of here.”
“Then you must sort of shuffle along.”
“I can’t.”
“Well, darling, you haven’t really got an option. Unless you wish to become another fixture of this famous cliff. The Porpoise, we’ll call you. I can just see it in the guidebook: ‘an interesting feature that commemorates an epic attempt during the early nineteen-forties.’”
“Oh, shut up!” His facetious comments spurred her to anger. From somewhere deep inside she found reserves of strength and was able to push herself along, with her left foot up in the crack and her hands pulling as best they could and her free leg doing nothing more than scraping at the smooth rock below. Eventually she reached the ledge where Guy was belayed. He pulled her to him and kissed her. “Darling,” he said, “you were marvelous.” And stupidly she burst into tears.
From the top of the climb they scrambled up to look at the view. The summit plateau was a desolate wasteland of broken rock, mottled with sunshine, battered by wind. They looked out across half of North Wales, across the ranks of mountains, as far as the sea glimmering in the distance. It was an ancient and weary landscape. For all the play of sunshine and cloud shadow across the slopes, she suddenly thought it a sad and defeated place.
Guy was talking of the tribunal. He was talking of the men who would read through his haphazard explanation of why he would not fight and would ask him pointed, probing questions and shake their heads at fumbled answers. “If they put me in prison,” he said, “I think I’ll kill myself.”
“They don’t imprison people,” she protested. “Surely they don’t imprison people. Not this time.”
“Who knows? If I claimed religious objections it would be easy. Quakers and the like. But someone like me, with no faith, no belief at all…and a wife and child who are German…”
It grew cold in the wind. They climbed back down a gully and ate their picnic lunch at the foot of the crag, beside a boulder that was called, appropriately, the Luncheon Stone. Out of the wind the sun was w
arm. Diana lay back in the grass and looked up at high broken clouds where an aircraft, a mere silver crucifix, drew out a long white line across the sky. The sound of its engines came down to them almost as an afterthought, almost as though it had nothing to do with the machine.
“What happens next, Guy?” she asked.
He laughed. “My dear Porpoise, we’ve had the most intensive three days. We’ve met, fallen in love —”
“—Have we?”
“Haven’t we?” He ticked them off on his fingers and ran out of fingers: “We’ve fallen in love, made love, ascended four rock climbs, had breakfast lunch and supper, argued, shouted, laughed, and cried. It’s been pretty exhausting. And you want to know what happens next?”
She laughed, wondering whether he did love her and whether she did love him, and what the point was of talking about it when the war was there, just beyond the horizon. She was no fool. She knew that happiness was transient, blown away by death, by illness, by a dozen lesser things. But for that moment, lying on a Welsh hillside in the sun, she was happy.
Part Three
1
ON THURSDAY EVENINGS people gathered in the White Horse pub off Theobalds Road. They gathered to plot, as though they were participants in a clandestine war — terrorists or guerrillas of some kind. There was the sharing of an arcane language, the secret whispering in corners of the bar over some plan, some new discovery. Men and women from all backgrounds and all social classes: a strange democracy united in the pursuit of the absurd. They called themselves the City Climbing Club. It was an eclectic group of people, with almost as many women as men, as many bad climbers as good. You found your own level. Two of the members had just returned from Pakistan, where they had failed, in a Himalayan storm, to climb the Trango Tower. Others struggled up sedate V Diffs such as Grooved Arête or Flying Buttress in North Wales. One of the members denied that it was even a climbing club at all. “Not in the usual sense of the word, at any rate,” he said thoughtfully. “More a knocking shop.”