by Simon Mawer
I will be willing to see you, he wrote, as long as you come on Saturday afternoon. He was quite specific about the timing. “You’ll lose a whole day on the hill,” Jamie protested.
“You go ahead and do a route with Ruth,” I told him. “Get her wielding an ice ax. I’ll see you in the evening.”
The house was outside Glasgow, on the north shore of the Firth of Clyde, a solemn, solid Victorian building with views over the water. Davie had agreed to drive me. He dropped me off and promised to wait outside until I emerged. “I’ll come running if I hear gunshots,” he assured me.
A sign saying SURGERY pointed to a side entrance, but I went up the front path and rang the doorbell. I didn’t have long to wait before the door was opened. He stood there, looking at me. He was sandy-haired, stout, and balding, older than I had pictured him, but that was only because I had imagined him absurdly young, frozen at the age he was in the few photos that my mother kept.
“I’m Robert,” I said.
He thought about this. It was almost as though he was making up his mind whether I was telling the truth or whether I was some kind of impostor. “It’s good to see you, Robert,” he said finally, holding out his hand. As I grasped it, I felt an absurd wave of emotion, as if physical contact had established some other kind of communication, that subtle connection that you were meant to feel with flesh and blood. Ruth would have given it some spiritual gloss; Eve would have denied it all: “pure sentimentality” she would have said.
“You’d best come in, my lad,” he said, laying his hand on my shoulder. “You’d best come in.”
The hallway was stuffy and dark. There was evidence of his second family: coat hooks with raincoats of all sizes, an umbrella stand that held tennis rackets and a cricket bat as well as a walking stick and a couple of umbrellas. The sitting room was decked out with photographs of smiling children, smiling wife, smiling dog.
“They’re out for the moment,” he explained. “I thought it’d be for the best if…”
“If what?”
“If they weren’t here. The family, I mean. It’s just that the wife is Catholic.”
I was, I confess, confused. “Catholic?”
“Aye. The, ah, situation has been a wee bit trying in the past. The fact is that there are those at her church who consider that she is living in sin.”
“Sin?”
“Aye,” he said.
“I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”
“I daresay things are different in London, but in this part of the world there’s still a finely developed sense of sin. She’s living with a divorced man, you see.”
I wasn’t sure whether he was joking. I found that I couldn’t read either his expression or his tone. “Now, would you like a good cup of tea?” he asked, as though tea might make everything clear. I accepted the offer, and he busied himself in the kitchen for a moment. He’d got things ready — a tray with mugs, a plate of ginger cookies. We sat opposite each other, as if conducting negotiations, perhaps for alleviating some of this burden of guilt that he and his family appeared to carry. I think he was expecting me to make the next move, but I kept my silence like a true Scot.
“Have ye come far?” he asked eventually.
“From London.”
“Of course. From London. And how’s your mother?”
“She’s fine.”
“That’s good. And yourself, what are you doing now?”
“I’m at university in London. Reading English. But mainly I climb. I mean, climbing seems to take up most of my time at the moment. That’s why I come up to Scotland quite a bit.”
Did he seem surprised by this? Interested, certainly. “Is that right? I did some climbing myself when I was younger and fitter. I was quite a Munro bagger in my time.”
“Perhaps it runs in the blood.”
“Your mother loved the mountains, you know that? I see that you’re her child, clear enough.”
“That’s what people say.”
“Aye, it’s there plain enough. And what are you doing now?”
“I said. I’m at university.”
“Of course, you said…”
The conversation was one of those stop-start affairs during which no one topic has the energy to keep things going for more than two or three exchanges. It was this fact that awoke the anger in me, the fact that I couldn’t even hold a decent conversation with him. “Did you never want to find out about me?” I asked suddenly. “Did you never care?”
He almost flinched. “Care?”
“About the fact that you had a son, for heaven’s sake!”
“Of course I cared, Robert. But this was the way your mother wanted it. Diana wanted no help, no sympathy, no apologies. She’s a determined woman. Might be a Scot herself.” There was a faint flicker of amusement when he said that, even, I fancied, a glimmer of remembered affection. “She said to me, ‘There’s a life to get on with. I’ve got to begin right away.’ That’s what she said.”
“But why?” I asked. “Why did you break up?”
He paused, looking at me with a pinched expression. “Does she never speak of it?”
“Never.”
“Then how could I? I mean, there are things that are private between two people, aren’t there?”
“But there are three people here.”
He smiled, and again there was that small hint that he might have a sense of humor buried somewhere beneath the Scottish Presbyterian exterior. “At least three,” he said.
“So who are the others?”
“My family, for a start.” He shook his head. “Look, what’s done is done, and there’s no use crying over spilled milk — ”
“That sounds like the kind of thing she’d say.”
“Is it now? You know, it’s that long ago I hardly remember? But I do remember that she would quote from poems and that kind of thing. Alice in Wonderland was a special favorite. And Wordsworth.” The conversation seemed to have reached safer ground. “She always wished that she’d done English at university. If the war hadn’t come along she’d have gone to Liverpool University, did you know that? She had a place.”
I didn’t. I confessed that I was surprised.
“Aye, so she did,” he said. “She was a clever woman, cleverer than I deserved. Anyways, I’m sorry about it all, laddie, but really there’s nothing more to be said. Raking over the past does no one any good.” We spoke a bit more, hedged around other issues, resolved nothing. Finally he clapped his hands on his knees and pushed himself up from his chair. “Well, I’ll not be keeping you, Robert. But it’s been good to see you again. You’ve grown into a fine man, even though your hair’s a wee bit too long.” And this time he did smile, and I could see that there was a sense of humor lurking beneath the dour exterior.
I followed him into the hall. For a moment he tried to show something like fatherly affection, patting me on the shoulder.
“To have grown up without a father must have been a difficult thing, Robbie.”
I stood there in the open doorway looking at him. “I don’t know. I’ve nothing to compare it with.”
And then he did something strange, something that seemed right out of character, if you can read a man’s character by a mere half-hour’s meeting: he embraced me. It was an awkward, clumsy gesture and all the more moving for that. “God go with you, Robert,” he whispered. “God go with you.”
Davie was waiting for me outside. “How did it go?” he asked as I climbed into the car. I attempted a grin. “I don’t really know. I’ve nothing to compare it with.”
That amused him, but I was serious. It’s hard to know what you feel if the emotion is new. I had thought I was in love with Caroline. I had thought that I hated my father. Experience had taught me that both emotions were false, or at least that they only told part of the story at a particular part of the time. “Come on,” Davie said. “If we get a move on we’ll make the Fort before the pubs close.”
That Sunday, Jamie and I made the
first winter ascent of a route on the Orion Face of Ben Nevis. It was a complex mixed route that wound its way up icefalls and over verglassed rock for more than a thousand feet, a piece of route-finding that owed everything to Jamie’s genius for moving in a vertical world. Sometimes it was easy, chopping our way up compact snow-ice; sometimes we teetered up heaped crystals that had the texture of potato chips; sometimes we were climbing iced-up rock pitches with crampons and ice axes. The sunlight glittered from diamonds all around us. There was space below our heels and the sensation of flight in our hearts. We could never fall. Almost, for those breathless hours, we felt that we might fly.
When we finally emerged into an arctic whiteness on the summit plateau, the sun was setting in a welter of red and black over the Isle of Mull and the distant Atlantic. Jamie’s yell of triumph was puny against the roaring wind, no more than a sparrow’s cry. We stumped across the plateau to find the path down. Orion the Hunter hung in the gathering blackness overhead as we descended. Below us, in the shadows of Glen Nevis, were the lights of the van where Ruth and Davie were waiting.
“Bloody Sassenachs,” Davie protested when he heard what we had done, “coming here and stealing our routes.” He had to get back home because he had an appointment first thing in the morning. We waved him off, then clambered into the warm fug of the van and threw off our gear. Ruth had a kettle on the boil for tea and had opened a bottle of whisky.
“How was your old man?” Jamie asked. It was the first time the visit to my father had been mentioned. I really didn’t want to speak about it.
“He’s just that: an old man,” I replied.
“But he’s your father, for God’s sake,” Ruth said.
“I don’t really know what that means,” I told her. “Don’t you see? Never having had one, I don’t understand.”
The next morning we woke early. We said little while we packed the things away and prepared to leave. We took turns driving during the long journey south.
During the next week, a warm front moved in from the Atlantic. Rain swept across the British Isles, bringing a halt to any possibility of decent climbing and forcing us to stay in London. Our lives were like that, predicated on the vagaries of the weather or the rhythms of the tides. Ruth had got tickets for a concert — the Incredible String Band, two guys with long hair and beads and flared trousers who sat cross-legged on cushions up on the stage and plucked one-string fiddles and blew kazoos. Eve joined us. Afterward the four of us had dinner in a Chinese restaurant off Gerard Street. There was laughter and a bit of an argument about politics and personal philosophy. Scientology had started it all. The members of the Incredible String Band were Scientologists. Scientology suddenly seemed to be Ruth’s thing, probably because it wasn’t Eve’s. The two women were two different faces of the times — the mystical and the political in uneasy juxtaposition. When we got back to Jamie’s flat, the argument continued: music on the record player — the aimless psychedelics of the later Stones — and the four of us arguing and smoking and drinking, often laughing, sometimes swearing.
“Know thyself,” Ruth said. “That’s the key to happiness. Who you are and where you’re going. It’s the old Buddhist thing.”
“Bourgeois crap,” Eve retorted. “A luxury.” She had climbed behind her street barricades and was waving the red flag and firing at will: “Most people in the world can’t afford to know themselves. They can’t even afford a decent meal.”
“But I’ve seen them. In India, for example. They might not afford what you call a decent meal, but they are happier than we’ll ever be. They know themselves, understand their place in nature.”
“Oh, for God’s sake! That’s just feeding them religion instead of feeding them food. The opium of the people.”
“Opiate, the word is opiate.”'
“It’s the same fucking thing! It’s in translation anyway. Opium will do. Hashish, if you like. The hashish of the people. Just a bloody religious drug.”
“It’s not a drug. It’s searching for the truth. Accepting who you are. Like what Rob was doing when he went to see his father.”
“When he did what?” Eve turned on me. “You went looking for the bastard who abandoned your mother?”
I hadn’t mentioned it to her; that was the trouble. “It wasn’t quite like that…”
“But that’s exactly what it was. You see? More bloody opium.”
“His father, for God’s sake,” said Ruth. “Why shouldn’t he go looking for him?”
“Because he’s a bastard, that’s why. Because the bastard abandoned his responsibilities, that’s why.”
“But he’s Rob’s own flesh and blood.”
“It’s not flesh and blood,” Eve retorted. “It’s just a teaspoonful of sperm.”
Later Ruth and Jamie went off to his bedroom, leaving Eve and me alone. She sprawled on the sofa, smoking and eyeing me through the haze. “Why didn’t you say?” she demanded.
“Because I didn’t really want to talk about it.”
“But you told her.”'
“I didn’t tell her. She just happened to be there.”
There was a pause. Eve inhaled some of her own personal opiate. “You fancy her don’t you? The way you were looking at her this evening. I think — ”
“What do you think?” I snapped. “What the hell do you think?”
She smiled in quiet triumph. “I think you’ve slept with her, haven’t you?”
I tried to laugh the whole thing off, edge the conversation into neutral territory, but Eve was persistent. “Does Jamie know? I’ll bet he doesn’t. Christ alive: first his mother and now his girlfriend. What kind of bastard are you, Rob?”
“Forget it, Eve. You’re talking nonsense.”
“Oh, no I’m not. I can read you like a book. She’s dangerous, that’s what Ruth is, and you’re a fool.”
“Why a fool?”
“Not to see the danger.”
I shrugged her fears away. Jamie and I never spoke about danger. Climbers don’t do that very much. There are two sorts of danger: objective and subjective. Objective danger is the type you can’t control — avalanche, stone-fall, that kind of thing. You try to minimize it: start early in the day when the loose rocks high up the cliff are still frozen into the ice; beware of fresh snow on old snowfields; avoid places prone to stone-fall. But it’ll get you if your number is up. Subjective danger is the type that you can do something about: you can minimize it by using protection and by not climbing above your standard; you can eliminate it by not doing the climb in the first place. But then you might get hit by a bus on the way to the pub. A bus is objective danger. The fact that you stepped off the sidewalk without looking is subjective.
Which kind of danger was Ruth?
An evening in some Highland pub — the Kingshouse? the Clachaig? I can’t remember. What I do recall, as so often, is the inconsequential and the essential but nothing whatever in between: certainly not the mediocre matters of geography or topography. The noise, certainly; I remember the noise. And the great press of damp bodies, figures reaching over shoulders to get their glasses to the bar. Puddles of beer or meltwater on the floor. And outside, the complaints of a typical Scottish night: a belligerent wind and the thrash of rain or sleet against the windows, like stones thrown by a gang of delinquent kids.
Ruth was there, but no Eve of course: just Jamie, Ruth, and me bivouacked around a tiny circular table, with people pressing behind us and someone leaning over and asking: “What yer done, Jimmy?” and Jamie looking up and saying, “Point Five Gully.” Which is internal evidence of a kind. Point Five Gully — a smear of ice one thousand feet high — is on Ben Nevis, so we must have been in Fort William.
After he had exchanged a few words with the other climber, I remember Jamie leaning forward across his beer and saying softly, “I think we ought to do the Eiger, Rob. What do you reckon?”
We had talked about getting over to the Bernese Oberland the previous summer, but we never made it. I ran m
y mind over the standard routes on the mountain: the Mittellegi Ridge, maybe even the Lauper Route up the Northeast Flank. We’d got some good Alpine routes behind us, and we could burn off any Scottish winter route. So why not the Lauper, which was one of the great ice climbs of the Alps? “Why not? If I can get away next summer — ”
“I was thinking more like this spring,” Jamie said. “As long as there’s not too much snow. It’s colder; the mountain stays in better condition. Less stone-fall.”
His concern about stone-fall was the first hint. “What route are you thinking about?”
He sniffed. Sniffing was one of the proletarian mannerisms he had adopted. He kept his voice low, although no one was too likely to overhear in that scrum of bodies. “The North Face,” he said.
There was a silence. The noise of the pub was all around us but detached from the silent implications of what he had just suggested. “The Eigerwand?” I whispered. “You’re joking.”
It wasn’t the kind of plan you broadcast around the place in those days. Not unless you wanted to be left looking like a bloody fool. It was still the great threat, still one of those routes you dreamed about during the day and had nightmares about when you slept. Not nowadays, I don’t suppose. Nowadays they climb the thing in a few hours; nowadays there are as many routes up the thing as there are up a typical Welsh outcrop. They’ve even given them silly names — the Sanction, after the film; Yeti; Symphony of Freedom, names like that. They’ve televised an ascent live. The face has been soloed and descended. It’s probably even been skied down. Nowadays it’s probably climbed by Japanese tourists in sandals. But in those days it still possessed weight. There were still only two routes up it: the classic 1938 route and the 1966 Direttissima, the one from which the American John Harlin had plummeted five thousand feet before he hit the ground. Oh, yes, in those days the North Face was still something that could get your name in the papers, alive or dead.