The Fall

by Simon Mawer

  She climbed it. Of course she did. I led to the first stance and then brought her up, giving her a tight rope on the hard moves and landing her like a gasping fish on the ledge beside me.

  “Wow,” she said.

  “You wait for the next pitch, my darling,” I warned her.

  “Don’t you darling me,” she replied.

  Jamie followed her up. There was a tight squeeze on the ledge, so Jamie went straight through to climb the second pitch. His hair blew in the wind, plastered across his forehead. “All right, kids?” he asked as he left the ledge and set off up the rock, climbing easily, going up with that casual, fluid grace. There was something of the circus performer about him, something of the ballet dancer, something of the mountebank with bells and ribbons, something of the plain fact of the manual laborer. We watched him move methodically upward, the gear jangling at his waist, his fingers feeling into narrow spaces, his body laying away from his holds, his toes smeared against the rock.

  “He’s all right, isn’t he?” Ruth said.

  I wondered about her, wondered about her vagrant manner, the undercurrents of aggression, the glances she gave him. “Yes,” I agreed. “He’s all right.”

  “You jealous?” she asked.

  “Jealous? What do you mean?”

  “Of him.”

  “Why should I be?”

  “You like him a lot, don’t you?” she said, and her expression said more than like.

  “Of course I do. We’ve known each other for years. As kids. Sometimes,” I added unnecessarily, “I love him.” And I was angry at the momentary lowering of the barrier, the moment’s vulnerability.

  “Is that so?”

  “Not what you’re thinking. Not that.” I was looking upward, following Jamie on the crux, paying out the rope as he moved, ready to hold him if he came off, ready to save his life, for God’s sake. I watched the swaying of his body, the outrageous way he moved up as easily as if he were climbing a ladder. He found a sweet combination of holds and almost danced across onto the slab, and then vanished from our sight.

  Ruth touched my arm. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” I replied. “It’s okay.” But I wasn’t sure what she was apologizing for.

  Jamie began taking in the rope. His voice came to us above the sound of the sea and the laughing of the gulls: “I’ll keep it tight!” he yelled. “Ruth! Climb when Rob tells you, and I’ll keep the rope tight.”

  I turned my attention to the ropes and explained to her how she was to do it. “He’s got a runner up above the hard moves so that you’ll be held from above. But you’re going to find it damned difficult.”

  She ran her tongue over her lips. Although she tried not to show it, I could see she was nervous. “I’ll manage.”

  I held her shoulders as she shuffled past me. There was the sudden breath of some perfume she was wearing, a dark, exotic smell. Patchouli oil. She glanced at me mere inches from my face and gave me a faint smile. Then she moved a fraction forward and kissed me on the cheek.

  “I’m climbing,” she called out, just as we had taught her. And she began to pull herself up the rock. Her ascent wasn’t the most beautiful thing in the climbing world, nor was it the purest. She took a tight rope some of the way, and once or twice she came adrift and hung back on it. But she never gave up, never surrendered to panic or fear or any of those things. “Take a pull on the rope!” Jamie’s voice called out at one point, and she was game enough to shout back to him to piss off, and to scrabble up unaided. “Christ alive!” she yelled when she was once again in balance. I could see her knees shaking. “Christ alive! That was scary, Jamie. That was fucking scary!”

  I couldn’t see from where I was, but I could imagine him smiling across at her as she came up toward him, that watchful, thoughtful smile that was just like his mother’s. I could imagine his expression as he eased her across on the end of the rope like a fisherman landing a catch after playing it to exhaustion. “You’re doing all right,” I heard him call. And when she reached his stance on the slab, I could imagine him grabbing her by the arm and pulling her to safety and kissing her full on the mouth as she came toward him.

  3

  IT WAS RUTH who gave the climb its name. We had toyed with one or two — the Pink Panther, Floating Rib — but nothing that we were happy with. Naming a route was important, we explained to her. It sets the character. It establishes your ownership.

  “But it’s not yours,” she protested. “It’s nature’s. It’s a piece of geology.”

  “The cliff belongs to nature,” Jamie said, “but the route is ours.”

  She nodded. “Okay. You need something Welsh, something with resonance. Pendragon, that’s what you should call it. Pen-dragon.”

  Pendragon: Dragon Head, the banner that the legendary kings of Britain carried into war. It sounded good.

  That evening, she sat us down in the kitchen of the pub and cooked supper. It was a Tunisian dish — something with fish and couscous. She’d been to Tunisia, all along the North African coast, in fact, and into the desert. “To the Aïr.” Neither Jamie nor I knew where the Aïr was. We’d never heard of it. Before that there’d been that year at the Slade when she thought she might be an artist, and a year in Israel on a kibbutz when she thought she might marry a Sabra.

  “But you didn’t?”

  “I didn’t.” Now she was thinking of going back to university. Celtic literature it would be this time, the Mabinogion and the Arthurian cycle. But, of course, she was still painting and sculpting. Ruth Phoenix. Her work had attracted interest — there had been an exhibition of sculpture in Liverpool. She had a piece at the Institute for Contemporary Arts in London. Her studio was in a converted stable at the back of the pub, but she wouldn’t show it to us, not yet. There was something personal and inviolate about it, she said.

  So Jamie and I ate and listened and looked at each other and at her; we guessed, both of us at the same time, that something new had happened in our lives.

  “And all you two guys do is climb?” she asked.

  “More or less,” Jamie agreed. He was amused. There was the light of mockery in his eyes as he glanced at me. “Do you do anything else, Rob?”

  I didn’t.

  “I didn’t think so. We just climb.”

  “Jamie’s got a father to live up to,” I said, “but I just do it because I can’t think of anything else to do.”

  “What about his father?” Ruth asked.

  “Jamie’s father?” I looked at him. “His father was a mountaineer. Didn’t you see? You must have been abroad. It was all over the papers. The discovery of his body, I mean.”

  “His body?”

  “He died years ago,” Jamie said. I could tell by his tone that he didn’t want to talk about it. “Nineteen-fifty-four, on Kangchen-junga. Some climbers found him just this spring.”

  There was the way that Ruth was looking at him. You remembered her looks. There was a cast in her eye, a curious reflective value that made you wonder what she was thinking. “It must have been dreadful.”

  Jamie shrugged. “I hardly remember him. Just a sort of shadow in the background of my childhood.”

  “And you climb to live up to his reputation?”

  “That’s just Rob fooling about,” he replied impatiently. “I climb because I love it. Perhaps it’s in the blood.”

  “Do you know something else?” I said. I suppose I was a bit pissed. I suppose we both were. The euphoria of the day’s climbing had evaporated. “Do you know something else about Jamie’s father? My mother was in love with him. Did you know that?” I looked from one to the other. Surely they had understood what I was saying? “My own mother,” I repeated to make it clear, “was in love with Jamie’s father. Jamie’s mother and my mother were rivals in love.”

  He laughed dismissively “It was a schoolgirl crush, Rob. Mother told me about it. It was at the start of the war, years before she married my father.”

  I think it was his
laughing that annoyed me. I’d seen my mother close to tears; I’d seen her life blighted by marriage to my father, a man whom she didn’t really love. I’d felt something of her pain. For a few moments I felt protective of her. I turned to Ruth. “Jamie’s mother stole him from her. My mother always felt that.”

  He laughed again. “Caroline’s good at stealing men, isn’t she?” he said. “Doesn’t stop at young boys, either.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  There was the sound of the kitchen around us, the murmur of the refrigerator, something cooking on the stove, noise from the bar coming through the hatch, but there was silence among the three of us. Ruth sensed the undercurrents. She had no way of knowing what was going on, but she was a clever reader of people’s emotions; she knew when the stakes were high. Jamie took a sip of beer and placed the glass down with care beside his plate. Then he looked straight at me with an equivocal smile, two smiles, the sardonic and the faintly amused. “I think you know exactly what I mean.”

  How do you measure the shifts in a relationship? Certainly my friendship with Jamie changed after that, although the change was subtle and hard to define. And then I wonder, why should it have changed? Before that outburst, we both knew about Caroline and me; the only thing new was that the knowledge was now out in the open — I knew that he knew. Ridiculous really, a kind of puzzle, a tongue twister. He knew that I knew that he knew. But consider how many relationships survive sewn together with tacit complicity and mutual deception. It’s the cold light of discovery that’s so dangerous. Better to live with the lies.

  We said no more about it. The next day we were out on the cliffs again, talking occasionally about Ruth and saying nothing about Caroline. Ruth came with us when she could get away from the pub. I watched Jamie and her together and sensed the bond between them growing from mere attraction and curiosity into something else. Love? Did either of them surrender themselves enough for that? Was there ever that extinction of self in their relationship?

  We said no more about it. The next day we were out on the cliffs again, talking occasionally about Ruth and saying nothing about Caroline. Ruth came with us when she could get away from the pub. I watched Jamie and her together and sensed the bond between them growing from mere attraction and curiosity into something else. Love? Did either of them surrender themselves enough for that? Was there ever that extinction of self in their relationship?

  On the third evening, he didn’t sleep in the van at all. I lay alone in the darkness. If I sat up and pulled the curtains aside, I could see down the hill to the pub, see the vague, glowworm light in one of the upstairs rooms, the room that was hers, the room where she lay with Jamie.

  The next day the weather broke. Gray cloud slid over the sea from Ireland and shrouded the coast. There was a thin drizzle in the wind, with the promise of worse. Toward the south, the bulk of Cader Idris was shut away from human gaze. Jamie and I discussed what we should do, but there was another person in the equation now and we had that gulf between us, a gulf that was not a void but was filled with things — the detritus that comes with knowing each other too well and for too long, from knowing too many secrets. And it seemed that he and Ruth had conceived an idea. They’d been discussing it together, apparently. Just a fantasy. Something for a rainy day. “What the hell are you talking about?” I asked.

  “A business.”

  “A business?”

  “We thought of setting up a business.”

  “What the hell do you mean, a business?”

  “Climbing and trekking, something like that.”

  I laughed. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “What’s so ridiculous? We could open a trekking and mountaineering center. Maybe even do some climbing gear.”

  “Matthewson Mountain Boots?” I suppose my tone was mocking. Anyway, it angered him.

  “Why not, Rob? Why the hell not? Christ, what’s wrong with you?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with me.”

  “Well you sound pissed off.” While the rain pattered on the roof, we sat there in the van wavering on the edge of a pointless argument, like kids.

  Later that day, they dropped me home. There was no more climbing to be done, and the spaces in our friendship had suddenly become too narrow for me to fit in. “I should see my mother,” I said, “and maybe do something to earn my keep.” They tried to persuade me to stay with them, but there was little conviction to their arguments.

  The place wasn’t far away, but it always seemed like returning to another country: the familiar road, the familiar hill with its view over the estuary, the familiar Victorian house that had the sign saying HOMELEIGH — PRIVATE HOTEL because my mother couldn’t bear the words guest house. Jamie parked the van in the road outside and came in to say hello. He gave my mum a kiss that she clearly didn’t expect, and the assurance that, yes, Caroline was fine. He used that name. Caroline sent her love. Mother smiled tightly and nodded but didn’t, I noticed, offer hers in return. And then he clapped me on the shoulder and climbed back into the van, and Ruth and he were gone, the old Volkswagen clattering away down the hill toward the coast road that led through a litter of seaside resorts on the way to England.

  “I rue the day that you ever started climbing,” Mother said as we watched the van depart. I liked that. Rue. It had a fine, old-fashioned sound to it. “Come on, Mum,” I told her. “When you were my age you were pulling Blitz victims from the rubble. You’ve told me yourself. It was a damned sight more dangerous than climbing.”

  “But there was a war on.”

  “You could always have been a land girl and spent the war picking potatoes in safety.”

  “And with Guy and Meg’s son. How strangely things work out.” She seemed puzzled, as though Jamie’s brief visit had confused her, as though there were things she might say and think and she wasn’t sure about any of them. “It’s all water under the bridge now, I suppose. At least he’s not taken after his mother.”

  What on earth did she mean by that? Yes, he had taken after her. I saw shadows of her in his every expression, the hint that beneath the edges of masculine toughness there lurked the ghost of that supple female strength. I saw Caroline in his petulance and in his thoughtful reserve. I had never got near to the quick of her; I had never really got close to Jamie, either.

  “Is that his girlfriend?” Mother asked.

  “I suppose that’s what she’s becoming. We met her a few days ago.”

  “Looks like a gypsy.”

  Those were dull, wasted days of rain. I sat at the reception desk of the hotel and tried to do some studying. I rang Eve and suggested she might like to come up and stay, but she was just about to go away with her parents to France, where her family owned a small and dilapidated farmhouse. “I told you we might be going. What do you expect? You could have come.”

  I noticed her use of the past tense. Whatever might once have been an offer now seemed to be lost. “Well, give me a ring when you get back.”

  “All right.”

  Ridiculously I found myself hoping that she hadn’t really gone, or perhaps that she would come back early. When the phone rang one morning a week later, I even lifted the receiver in the faint hope that it might be her.

  It was a woman’s voice on the line, but it wasn’t Eve’s. Did we have a room for the night? I glanced disconsolately through the register and found two rooms free. “Would you like a single or a double, madam?” I asked.

  There was a hint of laughter in my ear. “Madam? I like that. Madam’s name is Phoenix. Miss Phoenix to you, Mr. Dewar.”

  I felt a small stir of delight. “Ruth.”

  “Can I come and see you?”

  “To stay?”

  “If you have a room.”

  “Of course we have a room. I’ve just told you.”

  “Well, then.”

  “What about Jamie?”

  There was a moment’s pause. “What about Jamie?” she asked.

  She came that afternoon in
her battered long-wheelbase Land Rover, the one that she had driven to the Aïr, the one with a double roof to insulate the passengers against the sun and the winch between the front wheels so that you could drag the vehicle out of ditches or up steep inclines. She seemed an exotic creature as she climbed down from the driver’s seat of this altogether improbable vehicle: long skirt and sandals, a silk vest embroidered with sinuous forms resembling the organic patterns of a Persian carpet, her wrists with silver bangles, her ragged hair stained with henna. All these things were trophies from her travels in North Africa and the Middle East, and they conspired to give her the air of a hybrid being — half bird, half human, wholly unpredictable. What my mother had dismissed as “gypsy.”

  We kissed hesitantly, amused at seeing each other in this unexpected manner. Had Jamie and she quarreled? Had their little relationship died at birth? Reluctant to ask anything, I led the way upstairs. I felt the need to apologize for the bareness of the room, for the inadequacy of the whole place. The “millstone around the family neck” was how I described it.

  She looked around at the narrow space. “It’s fine,” she said. “For God’s sake, stop apologizing. It’s perfect.” And as though to stake her claim, she flung her bag — a red-leather shoulder bag incised with some oriental design — onto the bed.

  That evening, we went out for a meal. We ate at a Chinese restaurant, one of those places with plastic lanterns and flock wallpaper. Rubber plants were in the window, and chop suey was on the menu. “You know there’s a painting by Hopper called Chop Suey?” Ruth asked. “A woman sitting alone in a restaurant, and through the window you can see the sign — SUE, it says. The other bits are hidden. It’s a purely American dish, chop suey. You don’t find it in China.”

  Had she been to China?

  Not yet.