The Fall

by Simon Mawer

  She was there a lot in those days. She had an appealing matter-of-factness about her. She was unfazed by the sight of the two ruined, discolored toes that were all that remained on my left foot. She even seemed happy about things, content with my anger and my bitterness. She helped me up with the crutches, pushed me around the corridors of the hospital in the wheelchair, and brought me books to read, things to do — cards, jigsaw puzzles, a silly game with blocks of wood that you had to build into the tallest possible tower. We played that game against each other for hours. The person who collapsed the tower was the loser. “Rather like climbing,” Eve remarked dryly. “You don’t really have winners, just losers.”

  Jamie dropped in just once to see me. The pressure of work, he said in excuse. He was full of the television climb. “They’re talking bigger things. An alpine route, perhaps. Or even something in South America. And there’s this international expedition to do the Southwest Face of Everest. They want me to go along. I reckon this is it, youth. This could be the breakthrough.”

  “How’s Ruth?” I asked.

  Ruth was fine. She sent her love. Something told me that all was not well between the two of them.

  “She might have come to see me.”

  He nodded. He was looking at me carefully, as though weighing up my possible reaction to what he might say. What would it be? Was it that they were no longer together? Was that it? But when he did speak, it was just anodyne, something about being sorry, sorry about how it had panned out, sorry about the foot, sorry about everything.

  “It’s not your fault, Jamie.”

  “Maybe not. But it’s bloody awful luck, the whole thing. Still, you’ll soon be back to normal.”

  “The doctors say…”

  “What do they say?”

  I shrugged. What did I care any longer? “The circulation will never fully recover. Apparently it never really does. It’ll always give me problems, always be sensitive to cold. That kind of thing.”

  He looked concerned. “It’s tough, isn’t it?”

  Was it? I couldn’t separate what had happened from what I wanted, that was the problem. I wouldn’t be able to climb again, not properly; on the other hand, I didn’t really want to climb, not any longer. The fall had driven something out of me. I’d lost my sense of invulnerability, I suppose. And when you lose that, something else always takes its place: a disturbing sense of your own mortality.

  So Jamie went away — to be a star, to be a hero, to be what his father had been — while I remained with Eve. She appeared happy to be with me when it didn’t seem that I was really worth being with at all. I had no work, no degree, no toes worth the name on one foot, and no desire to follow the only thing that I seemed to have any talent for, which was the idiotic pursuit of picking out the most difficult line up a piece of cliff and then climbing it. And there Eve was, showing some kind of devotion when all around were losing theirs and blaming it on me. So I moved into her flat when I was discharged from hospital. She was working for some left-wing magazine at the time. She was always working for a cause, always with the hard edge of cynicism about her, always with a deep-seated sense of real conviction. In those days it was the Vietnam War and the campaign for nuclear disarmament; later it would be ecology and animal rights and anti-fox hunting. Maybe I became just one of her causes.

  “Of course, I could always go back home. My mother wants me to.”

  “And run a guest house?”

  “Private hotel,” I corrected her.

  “You’d be mad. I can just see you by the time you’re forty — fat and greasy and boring all the guests in the bar with stories of how you used to climb, how you were almost a hero —”

  “There’s no bar. We don’t have a license for a bar.”

  “You’d soon get one. If I’m really going to save you, you’ve got to get a job here in London. But what can a guy like you do? Other than fuck his best friend’s mother, I mean.” I remember the glare of her eyes, the kind of blue that you see painted on water taps to show which one is cold. “Don’t pretend,” she said. “I know perfectly well. Okay. She was probably a good lay — I’m certain she’s had enough practice — but that kind of thing stops now, do you understand?”

  “Or?”

  “Or I do.” She smiled. It was a smile entirely without humor.

  “Look, my father’s got a friend who may be able to help you with a job…” She said father. If she’d said daddy, I’d probably have told her to get lost. “It might be up your street…”

  So I went for an interview. Went sounds as though there was speed and efficiency about it. I hobbled around, took a taxi, and hobbled out of the cab and into the place that had once been a warehouse down the far end of King’s Road. Nowadays it said PORTEUS FINE ART over the doorway, and the high, mean windows had been replaced by plateglass that gave the passerby a privileged sight of expensive white space and large abstract canvases. As we went in, a girl in a short geometric dress — something by Courrèges, no doubt — and cropped hair and ridiculous false eyelashes, clipped across the parquet flooring toward us.

  “I have an appointment with Mr. Porteus,” I said.

  “Then you must be Mr. Dewar.” She pronounced it Due-are. She was that kind of girl. “Would you walk this way please?” she asked.

  Eve said it. I thought it, or something like it, but Eve said it: “If he could walk that way, he wouldn’t need toes,” she said.

  Part Six

  London 1945

  1

  THE METAMORPHOSIS was complete: London had been a provincial city cringing beneath the bombs; it had become a metropolis, filled with uniforms and accents from all corners of the earth. Bomb damage was still evident — you still turned a corner and found a wasteland, with willow herb growing over the rubble — but the bombers had done their worst and the flying bombs after them, and now the war had moved on.

  How is Alan? Meg wrote. Do give him my love. He is awfully nice and really very devoted, and I’m so happy to hear about your engagement. It makes me feel quite on the shelf. That’s a joke: I’m having a wonderful time, and marriage couldn’t be further from my thoughts! You know what they say — go out with a Pole and come home with a Czech.

  She carefully added check in parentheses in case Di didn’t get the joke. Since she’d moved to the Air Ministry, she’d got in with a fast set. It was the Café Royale and the Trocadero and places like that most nights. This evening, when she’d finished the letter to Di and had a bath and changed, it was going to be the Café èlysée. Elysian fields, all right.

  There’s a rather dishy young colonel (my goodness, the colonels are only about thirty years old these days!), who’s something in Special Operations, she wrote. Will I surrender my virtue yet again? I wonder.

  The Café èlysée was off Leicester Square. The entrance was an inconspicuous door between a cinema and a tobacconist’s. You went downstairs into the foyer, where there was a bar on one side and doors ahead of you opening out onto the balcony. It was always a surprise to newcomers. First the shadowy foyer with people drinking at the bar, and then you pushed through the double doors and there was the café laid out below like a stage seen from the gods — gilt tables, red plush, the lights on each table almost like candles, the mirrors throwing the scene back at you from a dozen different directions. There always seemed to be a crowd there — men just back from the Middle East or Europe where they had risked life and limb, and with them women who were usually prepared to risk other things besides. The colonel — Colonel Tommy, she called him because that was what she’d heard his driver call him and she thought it rather fetching — had been delayed by some flap or other and telephoned her to go on ahead without him, and she was damned if she was going to worry about being a girl on her own, so there she was, descending the stairs in style and making her way between the tables toward the one that had been booked by her own group, and there was this man, sitting at a table with four others — two men and a couple of girls — five in all, a
nd Meg knew at once.

  She paused. Someone from her group waved at her. The man looked up. He didn’t recognize her. Of course he didn’t. A strong face, suntanned, looking more mature than so many of the others. Army general service uniform with the rank badges of a major.

  “Aren’t you Guy?” she asked.

  He got to his feet, looking faintly embarrassed. “Yes…but I’m afraid…”

  “Margaret York. Sounds like something out of the Wars of the Roses. That’s what you said. People call me Meg, although I always think that sounds like a sheepdog.”

  They shook hands, but he clearly still didn’t remember. Behind them the band came onto the diminutive stage to scattered applause. “I’m a friend of Diana Sheridan’s,” she explained. “We met in Wales…”

  He reddened. Even in the subdued lighting of the èlysée you could see it. “Oh, my goodness, yes,” he said, and sat down in his chair as though she had pushed him. “Are you in touch with her? How is she? Look, won’t you join us for a drink or something? Let me introduce you…” There was a shaking of hands with his friends and an exchange of brittle, instant smiles. Meg ordered a gin and tonic. Guy drew up a chair for her, and she sat down, crossed her legs, and looked at him thoughtfully. “I didn’t expect to see you in uniform,” she said. “Well, I didn’t expect to see you at all, come to that. But certainly not in uniform.”

  He withered under her gaze. “I changed my mind.”

  “You did what? Good Lord, I thought you were immutable in your beliefs.”

  “It does sound dreadfully feeble, doesn’t it?” he admitted. “But when that business about the concentration camps came out — when was it? two years ago now? that announcement in Parliament by Eden — I sat down and I thought about everything…” He shrugged and looked at her as though for help. “You know what I mean?”

  She gave him her withering look. “Most people had worked that kind of thing out long before.”

  “Maybe I’m a bit slow.” He laughed awkwardly. “Anyway, they needed people with my skills to train squaddies not to fall off cliffs, and that’s more or less what I did — in North Wales. Arduous training, they call it. But now they’ve posted me to an office in Whitehall. Typical, isn’t it?”

  The band had started playing — some Benny Goodman number — and a few couples had got up to dance. “So tell me about Diana,” Guy said. “Is she well?”

  “Haven’t you heard from her?”

  “We exchanged letters for a while, but she sort of…told me to stop. Actually, when I got to London I did try and find her. Went to the place where she had been billeted…”

  “And?”

  He looked distressed. “Nothing. Bombed out. Well, of course I thought, oh my God, Di…So I asked around, in the local pub, the corner shop, the ARP post, that kind of thing. But the owners were the only victims, apparently. A Mr. and Mrs. Wardle or something —”

  “Warren.”

  “You knew them?”

  “I met them.”

  “Both of them killed, poor devils. Last winter in fact, a doodlebug, a direct hit. I must admit it’s a bit of a relief to know for sure that Di’s still…around.”

  “Oh, yes, she’s still around,” Meg said. She thought for a moment, sipping her gin and watching Guy’s face with care. Clearly he didn’t know, he didn’t know a thing. “As a matter of fact, she’s married.”

  “Married? Good Lord.”

  “Yes, married. It does happen. In Di’s case, to a doctor. He works in Liverpool General Hospital, although they met when she was here in London. They’re very happy.” It was hard to read the man’s expression — sadness of some kind, but a nostalgic sort of sadness, as though he was regretting a whole lot of things that were not just Diana: his life before the war, the mountains perhaps, his vanished pacifist principles.

  “Well, that’s excellent, then,” he said. “I’m glad she’s happy.”

  Meg glanced around. People were coming down the stairs from the balcony, her colonel among them. “I’m afraid I have to go.”

  Guy rose from his chair. “Maybe I could get in touch with you some time?”

  She thought for a moment, considering him carefully as one might consider the future and wonder what it had to offer. Then she opened her respirator case, found a pen, and bent to scribble on the back of a bill. “My phone number. There are three others in the flat, so someone’s usually there to take a call. One of my flatmates is on nights, so try not to ring in the morning.” And then she had gone to join her friends, easing her hips around the other tables, waving to Tommy, who suddenly seemed rather obvious, gauche even, loudmouthed and uninteresting beside Guy Matthewson. Guy’s eyes followed her as she went, watching the sinuous line of the seam down the back of her stockings. She knew it.

  He rang a few days later. They went out to the cinema together and to supper afterward. It was hardly a passionate encounter: he was polite and withdrawn, as though Meg were some kind of relative, a distant cousin perhaps, and he was doing all this out of a sense of duty. She felt cross throughout the evening, cross that he was not making a pass at her, cross that he could presume to take her out without doing so, cross that Diana had broken through barriers that seemed, for the moment, impregnable to her.

  When he dropped her back at her apartment, he got out of the cab and came around to her side and even accompanied her to the front door of the block, but no, he didn’t think he ought to come in for a coffee or anything. He ought to be getting back — an early start tomorrow. He put out his hand, and he actually expected her to shake it, shake his bloody hand, for God’s sake. “Don’t I even get a kiss?” she asked.

  He smiled wryly, and bent and kissed her gently on the cheek. Brother and bloody sister, she thought. She turned away and walked in through the door and didn’t even glance around as the car started up and drew away. That was the last she would see of Mr. Guy bloody Matthewson. She would consign him to the scrap heap of lousy dates.

  2

  ALTHOUGH IT CAME shortly after VE day, shortly after the end of the war in the West, shortly after those two days of cheering and laughing and herding rather aimlessly — and later drunkenly — around the streets of London, Diana’s wedding was a drab affair with little in the way of celebration. There were the uncles and aunts and cousins there, of course, but so many old friends were still far away. Not that Meg minded that, really. Somehow the friends from before the war had lost their relevance: they seemed to belong to another person and another century.

  “Darling, I’m wildly honored,” she had said when Diana had asked her to be a bridesmaid, “but I’m not sure that it’s really appropriate, is it? Aren’t bridesmaids meant to be just that?”

  “Just what?”

  “Well, maids, darling. You know, virgo intacta. Hardly the case, is it? Haven’t you got some adorable little cousins who can look coy and be sick all over their dresses?”

  “Well, it’s hardly the case with me either, and I’m wearing white.”

  “Maybe I could be a matron of honor,” Meg suggested as a compromise. “Mind you, that sounds as though I’ve got fifty-two-inch hips.”

  Di’s wedding dress was adapted from her mother’s. Rationing meant that a new one was out of the question, but she looked pretty enough, if a little passé. Alan was solemn and rather fine in kilt and tight black jacket. He insisted on explaining the finer points of his kit — the skean-dhu, the type of tartan, all that kind of nonsense — to anyone who would listen. That was rather a bore. And of course the inevitable jokes were made — about sporrans, about what Scotsmen wear beneath the kilt — but not in front of the groom. The couple seemed happy — they were happy, according to Di. “He’s very kind,” she assured Meg. “Very thoughtful.”

  The service was in the church in Diana’s village, and the reception was at a hotel in Chester. It was rather dull and really a bit thin on champagne. Meg slipped away and went upstairs to find Di in one of the bedrooms, where she was fussing over her going-away
dress. She was standing in front of the mirror in her underwear with the dress held against her like a limp and recalcitrant child. It was in some kind of nondescript gray wool, but it had still cost, Diana claimed, twelve coupons.

  “Darling, it’s lovely,” Meg said. “It makes you look positively respectable”.

  “Trouble is…”

  “What’s the trouble, darling?”

  “Alan knows I’m not.”

  “Oh, don’t be silly. Everyone’s been in your position these days.”

  “You haven’t.”

  “There’ve been a few close calls, I can tell you. Look, darling, there’s no point in just standing there posing. You’ve got to put the damn thing on. By the way…” She said it casually, tossed it into the conversation like someone throwing a stone into a pond, just to watch the ripples: “By the way, I came across your old flame the other day.”

  “Who’s that?” Di asked. “Eric?”

  “Don’t be silly, darling. How on earth could it be Eric? He was posted missing in action three years ago. No, Guy Matthewson.”

  Diana went pale. There she was, dressed in her underwear — parachute silk underwear, Meg happened to know, having been instrumental in getting hold of the material — and hugging her dress to her and looking as though she was about to be sick all over it. She sat heavily on the bed. “Oh my God,” she whispered.

  “Darling, what on earth’s the matter?”

  Diana shook her head. “Don’t say anything. To Alan, I mean. Not about Guy. For God’s sake.”

  “But my dear, why should I?”

  “Just don’t, that’s all.”

  “Of course I won’t.”

  “Alan has been so understanding…”

  “Of course he has.”

  “But —”

  There was a knock on the door, and Diana’s mother came in, wondering where she was, wondering what was keeping her, wondering whether she was feeling quite well. “You’re not having first-night nerves are you, darling?”