The Fall

by Simon Mawer

  It was Jamie who introduced me. He was doing a master’s degree at the London School of Economics at the time, some confection of sociology and economics that was popular in those days. This was the period when he underwent that metamorphosis: Jamie becoming Jim, his voice acquiring an edge, the glottal truncations of the capital city. At the same time, he was moving up in the firmament of climbing — putting up new routes, seeking out unexplored crags, laying plans. People noticed him, watched him, listened to what he had to say, asked his advice, deferred to him. Voices hushed when he came into the pub.

  “This is Robert Dewar,” he announced, putting his arm around my shoulders. “Rob’s an old friend of mine. In fact, he was my very first climbing partner. Isn’t that right, Rob? When we were kids.”

  People looked up from their beers and their discussions and greeted me in that incurious manner that climbers have because the only thing that matters is what you have done and what you are planning to do. “Hi, Rob,” they said, and allowed me into the conversation and the drinking and the margins of their plans.

  For a couple of months that summer I climbed with different partners, whoever happened to need a second. Jamie was away in the Alps, but when he got back he suggested that we try something together. His regular partner had just taken up a post at Glasgow University on their return from France, so Jamie was more or less on his own. By that time I’d been up to Wales and done some routes in the Pass, and had an epic on the West Buttress of Cloggy that became something of a legend in the club. It hadn’t been my fault. We were climbing a route called the Sheaf, and the guy who was leading went off-route onto the much harder White Slab and then got gripped. He was moving neither up nor down, just standing on tiptoe with his knees shaking and his fingers locked. I took some credit for managing to climb a pitch unprotected to find a belay so that I could get the rope down to him from above. Others had been on the cliff to see the farce, and Jamie had listened with glee to the lurid tales of brown pants and white faces. “Sounds as though you’ve got a head for this sort of thing,” he said. “Let’s see how it goes.”

  “Why not?” I said. “If you’ll make allowances for me…”

  “You don’t need allowances.”

  And so I began to climb with him. Most Friday evenings after work we would dump our rucksacks into his Volkswagen camper and flee the city — up the MI in the gathering dusk and across the sprawl of Birmingham to the A5 and the mountains of North Wales.

  We shared the driving; we shared the food; we shared almost everything. We developed a routine, a way of talking with minimum words, a way of being together and tolerating each other’s defects. I slept beside him, cooked meals with him, drank with him, prepared the gear with him, and stumped up dull hillsides with him to the foot of the crags; then I watched him move up some obscure stretch of vertical rock with the easy, almost derisive grace of a cat.

  “Come on, youth!” he would call down when I had to follow. “You can if you think you can. There’s nothing about climbing that isn’t in the head.”

  There is, in a sense, a male and a female side to a climbing partnership: the lead climber is the active member, the demonstrative, the risk-taker; his second is passive, supportive, there when needed. And although the climbing world is a promiscuous society, there are such partnerships that acquire something of the permanence of marriage. Ours became like that. When, for some reason, one of us couldn’t manage the Friday-evening appointment, the other saw his temporary partnership with someone else as a brief and shameful adulterous affair.

  I began to see the world through his eyes, to spot the lines up a cliff just like him, to learn to anticipate the excitement of discovery as he did, the pure sensual joy of movement in the vertical dimension, the sensation of bending the body to your will, the almost sexual conquest of rock. There was a sense of the elemental about Jamie’s progress up rock, of his being one with the mountain. He climbed so much better than I did. He always climbed better. I was what they called solid and reliable, while Jamie was brilliant and gifted. I relied on strength and a grim determination, but Jamie used his body weight to advantage, knew the limits of balance, the limits of holds, the subtle dynamics of movement in the vertical and horizontal dimensions; he understood instinctively the physics of vectors and the mathematics of triangles of force. He thought with his body. I remember the assurance of his movements, the quiet method with which he attacked the difficult pitches, the speed with which he moved, his sureness on glazed rock. “We can do it, youth” was his call.

  Together we did the big, hard routes on Cloggy and on the Anglesey sea cliffs. There was the odd new route — Jupiter on Dinas Mot, for one — and a raid in late autumn on Scotland, where we stole a choice line on Carn Dearg that Scottish climbers had been looking at and falling off. Ambition burgeoned.

  Eve and I still saw each other. It was a nervous relationship held together by mutual attraction, undermined by memories, fragmented by my absences in the hills. She was part of some political group with a badly printed weekly news sheet called Red Rag. They were antibourgeois, anti-imperialist, anti-Communist, antiwar, antipeace. “What the fuck are you for?” I shouted at her during one argument. And she just smiled at me and turned the question around. “What are you for, Rob?”

  I knew she had other boyfriends besides me; I could imagine exactly what she did with them, that was the trouble. “If you are going to go off with Jamie Matthewson all the time,” she said, “why don’t you look for another girl — someone with hairy legs and BO who enjoys slogging up mountains.”

  I protested. What exactly I protested wasn’t clear — devotion, fondness, fascination, desire, all the components of love without the thing itself, perhaps. She was a wonderful mess of contradictions, sometimes almost apologetic about her beauty, as though to look like she did was a counterrevolutionary act. “Why don’t you come along with us?” I suggested.

  “A ménage à trois? You’ve got to be joking.”

  “Well, you used to fancy him.”

  “And then I met you. Remember? And in my eternal stupidity I fell for you.”

  “That’s a very bourgeois sentiment.”

  “I know. I spend all my time fighting it.”

  We used to laugh at things like that. They were careless days, bereft of the personal anxieties that accumulate over time like those mutations that gather in your cells as you age. Her infidelities and my trips to the mountains seemed to pose little threat. Eve and I could break up after a row, and then we could pick up again and apologize tearfully and carnally, and the damage done never seemed terminal. Everything that happened was curable — time was the universal balm, and we had plenty of it.

  After the New Year, the Scottish winter settled in. Jamie and I began to commute between London and the far north. During the week we saw little of each other — we lived in different parts of the city — but on Friday afternoons we would meet up for the long drag up the highway. Memories are of the journey as much as of the climbing. Is there some mechanism in the brain that achieves this? At the time, the climbing was what mattered; the journey was incidental, a tiresome interlude. But now what I hear is the clattering of that air-cooled engine somewhere behind us and the radio hammering out pop music and the road signs going past — Birmingham, Manchester, Penrith, Carlisle — Jamie at the wheel, his body leaning slightly forward so that he could peer through the windshield down the shafts of light, his face underlit by the instrument panel.

  The Borders were desolate spaces of black, the northern slopes streaked with snow; the city of Glasgow was some kind of haven where we’d stop at the house of Jamie’s old climbing partner, David Cattenach, who’d have food ready for us, and whisky, and news of whether the mountains were in condition and who had climbed what and what the latest unsolved problem was. “Here come the bloody Sassenachs!” Davie would shout as we tumbled out of the van, stunned by noise and imperfect sleep. “Come to sully the virgin Scottish hills with their greasy English hands.” And
for an hour we’d be drawn into the subculture of Scottish climbing, an underworld with its own cant, its own rituals, its own coteries and hierarchies.

  After that it was back into the van, sometimes with Davie as well, and more hours to travel, past the black stretch of Loch Lomond, past Crianlarich and the Bridge of Orchy, with the big hills looming out of the night. When the windows were down you could feel the breath of snow on the air, and if you peered upward into the blackness, you could see the upper slopes gleaming white beneath the moon. Where the road turned westward on the Moor of Rannoch, we’d stop the van and get out and look at the jaws of Glencoe ahead of us, with the blunt mass of the Buchaille Etive Mor like a great broken molar beneath the night sky. It was a monochrome world, a world in negative where the snow shone white and the rock was a deep absence of light, an absorbing void. The winter climbs beckoned — the treacherous ridges and the desolate snowbound corries, the steep snow gullies and the vertical ribbons of ice.

  They found Jamie’s father in the spring. I think that Jamie had been expecting it to happen. The possibility, the probability of his father being found, loomed over his childhood and youth like the threat of congenital disease. He had always known that his father was there somewhere, encased in a glacier possibly, but equally possibly just preserved by the cold, dry air. Sooner or later some expedition would come across him.

  He rang me early one morning. “Have you seen?”

  “Have I seen what?”

  “Go out and buy the Times.”'

  I did as I was told. I wandered blearily along to the nearest newsstand and bought the latest edition. It wasn’t on the front page, of course, but it featured prominently in the international section. It seemed an appropriate story for the Times — British, slightly absurd, replete with heroism and failure. From our correspondent in Kathmandu. There was a grainy photo of a slope of snow and an outcrop of rock and a humped figure propped against it. Beside the figure was a pole, bearing what looked like shreds of washing drying in the wind. Americans plant Buddhist prayer flags as tribute, the caption said. There was a diagram that showed where the body had been found: an approximate drawing of the Yalung Face of Kangchenjunga and the height marked in — 26,500 feet.

  The team is bringing down certain items found on Mr. Matthewson’s body, the story explained. These are believed to include a final note addressed to his wife.

  Later that morning, I phoned my mother. “Did you see about Jamie’s father?”

  “Of course I saw.”

  “Apparently he was just sitting,” I said.

  “Yes…”

  “Covered in snow, of course, but just sitting against a rock. Frozen.”

  “Yes, I saw…” Her voice faded away. She made a little sound on the other end of the line, a small catlike sound, a mewing. She was shivering: it suddenly dawned on me that my mother was shivering there on the end of the telephone line, shivering with fear or misery or plain, imagined cold. “Poor Guy,” she whispered. “He would have hated all this attention.”

  That evening, Eve and I met Jamie for a drink. He’d been dealing with the press all day, and now he seemed nervous, as though he was uncertain how to behave, as though a tragedy were being staged and he wasn’t sure of his lines.

  “Are they bringing him down?” I asked.

  “It’s too dangerous. Apparently they sort of buried him. Covered him with some rocks, conducted a ceremony. Prayers and things. A kind of funeral.” He hesitated, sipping from his beer and looking around the bar as if someone might be watching. “You know I’ve always felt that he was kind of alive, looking over my shoulder. You know what I mean? I could discuss things with him, ask him things and get some kind of answer. It was a comfort.” He smiled, as if at the absurdity of the idea. “But now, suddenly, he’s really dead.”

  Eve took his hand. I remember feeling a small thrill of jealousy at the sight of her pale, almost translucent fingers gripping his. She was solicitous and comforting with him, but after we left him her sympathy vanished. She seemed angry at the pair of us, as if somehow we were responsible for a distant death on a Himalayan mountain. “Climbers have some kind of death wish,” she said accusingly. “They court it. Climbing is the ultimate escapism. I mean, you don’t want to die like my grandmother did, going gaga in an old people’s home. But who the hell wants to be freeze-dried at the age of forty-five?”

  To my surprise I saw that there were tears in her eyes. “No one,” I assured her. “No one wants that.”

  “Then why do you pursue such a fucking silly pastime?” I put out a hand to touch her cheek, but she brushed it away. “I don’t want to be the brave widow fending off the press when you get killed,” she said. “Are you so stupid that you can’t see that?”

  “Is that a marriage proposal?” I asked, but she wasn’t amused.

  Weeks later the things that the American climbers brought down from the mountain were duly delivered to the Matthewson household. Caroline had fled to North Wales to escape further attention from the press. Jamie rang me. “Do you want to come and see, Rob?”

  I hesitated. “Isn’t it a bit ghoulish?”

  “I’d like you to see.”

  So I went around, and we stood in the sitting room in front of a little pile of personal effects that might have come from the pockets of a road-accident victim. Jamie picked through them vaguely. There was a cigarette lighter inscribed with love, M, an old leather wallet, a bunch of keys, even two tickets for a London theater, relics of a life snapped off without warning. “I guess they were the keys to Gilead House,” Jamie said, holding up the key ring. He seemed distracted, as though these traces of his father had awoken old, blurred memories and he was trying to sort through them without success. “I hardly remember him. Just as though I had seen snapshots of him. In black and white. Isn’t that strange? I don’t remember him in color.”

  Along with the relics, there were some photographs that the American climbers had taken. One just showed mountains, peaks that I recognized from books and magazines — Jannu like a fang in the foreground, and beyond, in the pearl-blue distance, Makalu and Everest. Below the peaks, clouds floated like scum on a pool. Someone had written on the back of the photo: view from the last bivouac. Then there was the same picture that had appeared in monochrome in the newspaper: a shot of a hunched figure at the top of a slope of white. The figure had its back to a brownish rock. Beside it was that stick, with prayer flags flying in the Himalayan gale like scraps of tattered underwear on a clothesline.

  The final photo showed a mask. It looked like a tribal mask, designed to frighten away demons. It appeared to be made of ivory, with two ebony disks for eyes and a roughly cut triangular nose with two holes for nostrils. There was a crudely carved mouth with shrunken lips and long teeth like a herbivore’s. Distinct moments after Jamie had shown it to me, I realized I was looking at Guy Matthewson’s face.

  “Not very pretty, is it?” Jamie said. He gave a small and unconvincing laugh, then made an ineffectual movement with his lips, as if trying to formulate words and finding that he had lost the knack. There was a glaze of emotion in his eyes. “And there’s this,” he said, unfolding a battered scrap of paper that had been torn out of a notebook.

  It was Guy Matthewson’s last will and testament; it was written in pencil, the letters untidy and ill-formed like a child’s first attempt at writing — a strange missive, part valedictory, largely unintelligible. The taller letters stood out like peaks from the plateau of undulating scrawl, and for the most part it was unreadable. Jamie pointed out the words all right, the word cold, the phrase my dear boy. But it was not clear what, if anything, was expected of his dear boy. He was to be looked after, perhaps. Look after my dear boy. Did it say that? There was no real means of telling. Jamie tried to convince me that the final words were all love, Guy. Except you couldn’t read the Guy. It was just an approximate circle and a tail, like a spermatozoon.

  A bitter irony, I thought, to make all that effort while you are
dying — to hold the pad with one heavy mitt and clutch a pencil in blistered, frozen, wooden fingers, and try and get your mind focused on the task only to have the resulting message prove impossible to read.

  “Your mother,” Jamie said. “She knew him, didn’t she? What does she think?”

  I shrugged noncommittally “It was a long time ago. Before the war.”

  He nodded. “There’s something…” Then he hesitated. He looked confused, almost distraught, as though to put his idea into words would be some kind of betrayal.

  “Something what?”

  He cast around for the right words. “I don’t know. Something…almost deliberate about it, don’t you think? Do you think he wanted to escape?”

  “Escape?”

  “I don’t know, really. From my mother, maybe. They can’t have been very compatible. And…” He hesitated, looking at the small heap of possessions. “I think she had lovers even then. Something she said the other day…”

  I felt a small knot of guilt somewhere inside me, a visceral thing like a lump in my chest. What, I wondered, did he know? I tried to laugh the suggestion away. “Surely you don’t think he intended to die? Don’t be daft.”

  He shook his head. “It’s not difficult. He was high up above the rest of the expedition. On his own, short of oxygen. It’s not difficult to push yourself beyond the point of no return.”

  “Come off it, Jamie,” I said. “Don’t be idiotic.” But I admit that the thought had crossed my mind. Climbing itself is an escape, and death is the ultimate one. And it would have been an easy death. That sounds callous, but it’s true. Hypothermia is an easy death. Contrary to his appearance in that photograph, Guy Matthewson did not die in some kind of agony. His body would have cooled down from the outside inward: first the extremities, the fingers and the toes, the tip of the nose and the ears and cheeks, then the hands and the feet, then the limbs themselves, and, finally, the core. He would have simply slowed down. Drowsiness. At about 33°C he would have begun to lose a true sense of where he was, of what the dangers were, of what he ought to do. He would have drifted in and out of consciousness. Sleep — he would have wanted to sleep more than anything else, more than life itself. So that’s what he’d have done: at about 30°C. There would have been no pain. He would have just drifted off to sleep, dreaming no doubt. Dreams and hallucinations would have been more real to him than any view out across the Himalaya or any concerns about his wife back in England. A few more degrees down the icy slope and that would have been it — he would have been dead. And a hero.