The Fall

by Simon Mawer

  “Not joking at all, mate. I reckon it’s on.”

  “But are we?”

  He grinned. He had all the obsession that you needed, the focus, the artist’s determination and the politician’s conviction. “Of course we are.”

  What did we do the next day? Probably something on the Orion Face again, some mixed route or other that took the line of a summer VS. Orion Direct, maybe, with a variant line out of the Basin halfway up. I have only the vaguest memory: his climbing above me, the little showers of splintered ice coming down, the impact of his ice ax and the scrape and grab of his crampons, and all the time his voice muttering silly things like “Brittle Edges” or “Traverse of the Sods” or “The White Cockroach” — all of them jokey Eigerwand references. I recognized the symptoms, the growing obsession, the sense that, like an inmate of a mental hospital, he was going to be muttering about the Eiger all the time, contemplating it, mulling it over in his mind, staring at photos, doing all those repetitive-obsessive things of the mentally disturbed.

  Back in London we leafed through a book he had borrowed from the library — Heinrich Harrer’s The White Spider. It was full of overblown prose and heroics on a mythic scale, but it was the pictures that Jamie wanted, especially the photograph that unfolded from the center to show the Face in more detail than any other picture, with little labels against all the famous features: the Shattered Pillar, the Difficult Crack, the Flatiron, the Death Bivouac, the Ramp, the Traverse of the Gods. Then there were shots of the original ascent in 1938, huddled figures plastered against the ice-encrusted rock trying to find shelter from the blizzard.

  “Looks like a Scottish winter route,” he said.

  “It’s over five thousand feet,” I retorted. “That’s not like anything in Scotland.”

  At the end of the book there was a full route description. We went over and over it, consigning it to memory, imagining ourselves in the midst of the tilting plane of the second ice field, working our way up toward the rotting cliffs that shut off the upper part of the Face. We struggled up the Ramp and teetered across the Traverse of the Gods with three thousand feet of space beneath us. “It’s nothing technical, Rob,” he insisted. “There’s nothing as hard as what we did last weekend in Scotland.”

  “But it’s over five thousand feet,” I repeated.

  And there was something else — a hand reaching out from the past to tap him on the shoulder. “Look at this.” He held out a school exercise book, a thing with a faded gray cover and stapled pages. “Just have a look”'

  The pages inside were brown with age. I glanced at the lines of faded ink in that vaguely familiar hand that had once written my mother’s name against some rock climbs in Wales. “Where did you find it?”

  “In an old trunk at Gilead House. It’s a log of his alpine climbs.”

  Grindelwald, summer 1939

  June 12th Mittellegi ridge, 4 hours from the hut. Fine weather and views. Descent by West Flank. Eigergletscher 5 pm.

  June 16th The Northeast Face (Lauper’s route). 16 hours. Descent to Mittellegi Hut. Pretty fine!

  June 19th Inspected N face (N for Nazi?) to Stollenloch. Looks plausible (pace Alpine Club!), need better weather. Next yr?

  Jamie was watching for my reaction. He was like someone who has given a present and wants to see joy and gratitude in the recipient’s face. “See?” he said, in case I hadn’t. “My old man practically did the North Face just a year after the first ascent. When all the old farts in England were calling it unjustifiable.”

  I smiled at his enthusiasm. “He only got as far as the Stollenloch. That’s the railway window, isn’t it? About a third of the way up and before the real difficulties. Plenty of people must have done that, even then.”

  “But look” — he pointed — “next year, it says, next year.”

  “And look what had happened by next year.”

  “Exactly. But what if, eh? What if?”

  I laughed. I knew that the only way to drive the demons from his mind would be to climb the thing, to beat his father in this at least. And then set his sights on Kangchenjunga.

  It was Jamie’s birthday a few weeks later. I gave him a book: Devils of Loudun — a book about madness and possession.

  Part Four

  London 1940

  1

  DIANA WAS BILLETED in Kentish Town, in a town-house belonging to a Mr. and Mrs. Warren. Mrs. Warren was vast and pallid. She looked as though she had been assembled out of suet by the Ministry of Food to advertise an arcane aspect of austerity or rationing: Mrs. Lard the Greedy-Guts or something. Her husband was a narrow, mean man with the reek of stale clothes about him. He lived off some kind of indemnity and passed most of his time at home in the kitchen, working at the kitchen table. He was always repairing things — bits of greasy machinery, cogs and cams and sprockets, parts of bicycles or motorcycles. Grease was ingrained in the surface of the table, giving it a dark patina of age and filth. “’Course, ’e knows what ’e’s doin’,” Mrs. Warren would say proudly as he worked. “An engineer, ’e was. In the mines.”

  “The mines?”

  “Coal mines, dearie.”

  Diana hadn’t associated coal mines with London. Mines were South Wales, or Nottingham, or places farther north and even more foreign to her. “Kent, darling,” said Mrs. Warren with heavy sarcasm. “Coal mines in Kent. Where you bin livin’ all this time? It’s not just hop fields and thatch cottages them planes are fightin’ over; it’s bloody coal mines an’ all.”

  Mr. Warren’s lungs were bad from the mines, so he said. He coughed and wheezed to prove it. And he complained. Complaint seemed to be his natural state. He complained about the war; he complained about the rationing; he complained about the inconveniences; he complained about the regulations, particularly the regulation that had planted Diana Sheridan on him. His wife shivered and wobbled around her husband and applauded his complaints. “Isn’t he a caution?” she would say. “’Course, he fought in the last war, so he knows what it’s all about, don’t you, dearie?”

  Diana occupied the back room upstairs, the room that had belonged to the Warrens’ son, who was in North Africa with the army — “sittin’ on ’is arse and playin’ wiv ’imself” was how Mr. Warren put it. The room looked out over the exiguous garden with its Anderson shelter and its rows of vegetables and, beyond that, other gardens and the backs of the neighboring terrace. Two of those houses had been hit in one of the early raids, so there was a surprising gap in the row, with a view through to a tiny park where an antiaircraft gun was hunkered down behind sandbags.

  Diana worked twelve-hour shifts. When she was on the night shifts, her life was inverted, a mirror world in which she was awake during a nighttime of dark and flashing light, of noise and screams, and asleep in the full light of day, in the back room of the Warrens’ house, amid quotidian noises — footsteps on the sidewalks, people talking, voices calling across the garden fences, dogs barking, the occasional vehicle grinding past — and dreams of burning houses and shattered bodies.

  Her ambulance unit was based in Clerkenwell in what had once been commercial garages and an underground meat store. The first-aid post was next door in a converted butcher’s shop. She traveled back and forth to the unit by Tube — the Northern Line, one of the deepest and therefore one of the safest. In the afternoon there were long lines of people waiting outside the station for four o’clock, when they were allowed down to find shelter. When she traveled back in the morning from the night shift, they were there on the platforms, rows of them huddled beneath blankets. You had to step over them. It was like stepping over a plowed field and trying not to muddy your shoes.

  “Oi, mind where you’re putting those dainty feet, miss,” people called.

  “Can’t you mind where you’re fucking walking?”

  “Can’t you see we’re fucking sleeping?”

  The smell was almost unbearable at times — the stench of unwashed bodies, the smell of damp and dirty clothing, the stink
of urine, the stink of feces. They used the tunnels as lavatories, shitting in the darkness and wiping themselves with bits of newspaper. Man reduced to the level of beast, living in caves, soiling himself, not caring. Promiscuity was rife; that’s what Meg said. And much of the Tube wasn’t even safe from the bombs. The station at Bank suffered a direct hit, and rumors put the deaths at more than one hundred. A high-explosive bomb could go fifty feet down through solid ground; that’s what people said.

  If she was lucky she would get back to the Warrens’ by nine o’clock in the morning. She’d let herself in with the key they’d given her and call out, “It’s me!” and go straight upstairs to her room. Often she just fell asleep on the bed there and then in her clothes. Exhaustion was like a dense liquid flowing in her veins, deadening her mind and her limbs, pulling her down into a world where she rehearsed the nightmare of the night’s work — the burning houses, the shattered bodies, a world picked out by the orange glow of flame and the play of searchlights against the sky, like swaths of chalk drawn across a school blackboard. Only sometimes did she find the energy to get undressed and have a wash first. The bathroom was a shack tacked onto the back of the house and was accessible only through the kitchen. She would knock on the kitchen door for politeness, and Mr. Warren would call out, “It’s all right, it’s quite safe to come in. I’m tied up.” The same damn joke, every day.

  “You want to watch him, dearie,” Mrs. Warren warned her proudly. “He fancies the girls, he does. Now, how about a spot of breakfast?”

  But she never felt hungry: faintly sick, usually, faintly revolted. “No thank you, Mrs. Warren. Just a cup of tea will do fine, thank you.”

  “Got to feed yourself up, you know. Mustn’t go without. Looking peaky, you are.”

  “I don’t really feel very well.”

  The woman examined her closely. Her eyes were tiny, like currants embedded in dough. But not shining and friendly: calculating and suspicious. “You all right?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “It’s that muck you eat at the canteen, I shouldn’t wonder.”

  “Probably.”

  Occasionally she thought of Guy, but life in London was so different from what she knew before, so stark in its contrasts, that she found it hard to conjure up any images of home or friends or countryside. She’d had letters from him, letters from another world. My Darling Porpoise, he wrote, when will we see each other again? In her mind he was wedded to the mountains, whereas now she inhabited an urban landscape where the cliffs were gutted buildings and the hills were piles of rubble, where plants were alien, intrusive things that sprouted between the paving stones or in the wreckage of bombed houses. She was not wedded to this new existence — that would be altogether too pure a relationship, too sanctified. She was living in sin with it. That’d do. In this new, fallen world the choughs were starlings and the doves were pigeons and the soughing of the wind was the wail of the air-raid siren. Guy Matthewson seemed too distant, in time and space and in another dimension that she could not quite identify — relevance perhaps.

  Dear Porpoise,

  My tribunal has turned me down. So I’m appealing because it’s an outrage. If they had accepted my registration, I would have been happy to volunteer for something useful. I mentioned the fire brigade…

  I think about you a great deal. I am sure you are very brave there under the bombs, but oh, it is such a terrible thing to put you and the whole country through. My own battle sometimes seems paltry. Take care of yourself, my sweet.

  With love, Guy.

  What did she think of that? She couldn’t really tell. Sometimes she thought the whole world of him, but at other times he just seemed a dream in this new, twilight nightmare that she inhabited.

  Sometimes she was on duty at the first-aid post itself, but often during a raid, she went out with one of the crews. It all depended on what was needed. Besides the driver, each vehicle carried a stretcher bearer and, occasionally, a nurse. At the start the nurse had been in full uniform: skirt and apron and stupid starched cap that you had to fold in a special way out of a semicircle of linen. It was damn silly trying to clamber over rubble in a skirt and black stockings, so the idea of traditional uniform had been abandoned soon enough. Now they wore overalls, with just a red cross armband to show what they were.

  Night duty varied. Things might be pretty quiet when all the activity was in another sector. They didn’t commit ambulances from one sector to another if they could help it because you never knew what was coming next in your own area; so some nights you just spent a whole watch talking or playing cards and listening to the bombers over someone else’s head and to the cough of distant antiaircraft fire. On nights like that, Diana learned a new skill: to talk about nothing. It was a knack people had — to talk about nothing, to exchange one anecdote for another, none of them of interest, each designed to prove a point that was, in itself, of no interest either. Families, friends, enemies — he did this; she did that; why don’t they do the other? A whole night’s conversation that left no imprint in the mind. It was a kind of anesthetic, dulling the sensibilities to other issues, other cares, other needs.

  But when the call was in their sector, chaos barged into their lives. Phones would ring, orders would be shouted, sirens would scream, and the vehicles would drive out of the garages to the latest incident. They would pick their way through the streets, make detours down side roads to get around obstructions, ease their way past rubble, crunch with painful slowness over shards of broken glass, bump over fire hoses that writhed across the roadway like snakes in a demented nightmare jungle. And end up in some forgotten street where flame roared and buildings collapsed and people died.

  The driver she liked working with best was called Bert. She had expected almost everyone in London to be called Bert, but in fact, he was the only Bert she encountered. “Albert Jones, Esquire,” he said, giving her a look. “But if you’re very good to me, you can call me Bert.” Because he had been a taxi driver in peacetime, Bert could always find a way around obstructions. “I got the Knowledge, ’en I?” he would explain mysteriously, and the Knowledge took on extraordinary proportions in Diana’s mind, as though it were a great philosophy — the secret of life or something. He would peer through the windshield into the dust of an explosion and say, “Just like a fucking pea-soup fog, if you’ll forgive my French,” but he always seemed to know where he was. The vehicle — a Ford V-8 motorcar converted into an ambulance — would creep around corners and down alleyways, and somehow it would always find its way to their incident.

  They always called them “incidents.” It was a bureaucratic euphemism. At first it had been “occurrence,” but then “incident” had caught on. The etymology of disaster. It might be high explosive, in which case there would be collapsed buildings and people buried, and the injuries would be contusions and fractures and internal hemorrhaging. Or it might be land mines, parachuted gently down through the night sky to explode at street level and blast people and buildings into unrecognizable fragments. Or it might be oil bombs and incendiaries, in which case the casualties would be burns. The burns were the most terrible, with whole bodies charred and scorched and the skin peeling off to show fiery red beneath. The pulse would flutter away into oblivion under the anxious press of her middle finger; what had been a face would be torn open to the whole world like one almighty scream, life itself evaporating from the gaping mouth.

  In her memory one incident merged into another, a confusion of sight and smell and sound. Above all, sound. The concussion of high explosive and the crack of the antiaircraft batteries, the rattle of incendiaries falling on roofs and sidewalks, the throbbing of the pumps and the rhythmic droning of the bombers, high up and invisible above the underlit ocher clouds. She scrambled over scree slopes of rubble, carrying splints, carrying bottles of saline drip, bandages, tourniquets. “Nurse! Nurse, over here!” was the call. She stumbled and struggled; she wriggled into tunnels cleared through the rubble to get to buried bo
dies and deliver shots of morphine; she helped ease shattered limbs from beneath house beams; she applied splints as they lifted bodies out, and tied tourniquets to staunch the bleeding. Sometimes they dispensed with the splints and just tied ankles and legs together; sometimes the only tourniquet was her own thumbs, pressed deep into the slime of a bloody thigh. The wounded were often coated in a fine powder of dust. Mixed with blood, the dust turned into a kind of mud. The stench of drains, the stench of gas from broken mains, the stench of damp from old cellars, the stench of unwashed bodies, and the hard, sulfurous smell of high explosive enveloped her. Sometimes a burning gas pipe lit up the scene with a hellish light. Sometimes a whole backdrop would be a burning building, smuts flying high into the lurid orange cloud, the flames the color of burns: a crimson tainted with black, a bone whiteness at the heart. Hell was the obvious metaphor. Dante’s Inferno, a medieval world of plague and torment with devils silhouetted against the light playing whips of water into the heat. Overhead the drone of invisible aircraft and the barrage balloons like maggots against the putrid flesh of the clouds, and the great rush of sound that was a falling bomb, falling through four miles of air, rising in pitch to a shriek before it vanished somewhere over the rooftops and there was the gust of an explosion and the tremor of the ground shock. You never had time to hear the one that got you; that’s what people said. Bert explained it to her, and his explanation carried some kind of weight: “Them bombs travel at something near the speed of sound, see? Which means they sort of like, catch their own sound up, see? So you don’t hear it. Not until the last second anyways.”

  It never happened to her. It seemed strange. You felt so vulnerable down there on the ground with the bombers sliding above the clouds and the bombs coming down like a celestial lottery, and yet always falling somewhere else. Did it mean that she was somehow chosen? Or was she perhaps excluded?