by Simon Mawer
“Didn’t you make army boots?”
He laughed. “As a matter of fact, we did. But I don’t think there will be much of a market for them now.” He fell silent. “And I want to get back to the mountains if I can. Before it’s too late.”
Meg shivered, as though she was cold in this day of sunshine. “I think I hate the mountains.”
“You were there in North Wales.”
“That was then,” she said. “That was another person in another place. So much has happened since.”
They found themselves outside her apartment. They hadn’t planned anything, but that was the direction their walk had taken them and it seemed obvious. “Anyone at home?” she called as she opened the door There was no reply. The radio was chattering away to an empty sitting room, something about the new bomb that had been dropped on Japan. Atomic, that’s what they were calling it. Splitting the atom, splitting the world apart, apparently. “When will Deidre learn?” Meg said, turning the thing off. She looked around. Guy suddenly seemed very miserable standing there in the middle of the untidy sitting room, somehow dwarfing the place, somehow ill-suited to the drab furniture, the tattered sofa and overstuffed armchairs. “Do you want anything? A cup of tea? A drink? Whisky, gin? We’ve got stacks of stuff. Someone I know in the Ministry of Food…” There was a nervous haste to her words.
He shrugged.
“Guy,” she said. She went over to him and put her hands onto his shoulders and lifted herself up onto her toes to kiss him on the mouth. He didn’t move, didn’t respond, let her press her lips to his and then look at him quizzically. “Shouldn’t I have done that?” she asked.
He cast around for something to say, as though he might find the right words lying around in that untidy room, among the cheap magazines and the scattered cushions. “I’m sorry. I’m just…distracted. Confused.” And quite suddenly he was weeping, looking around the room for words and weeping, and Meg was holding him, her arms around him clumsily as though to restrain him from doing himself harm.
Afternoon to evening. Sunlight coming through the windows of her bedroom like shards of glass, piercing discarded clothing and entangled limbs, crumpled faces and eyes that blinked against the dazzle. They talked, not of much, but of the future: fanciful talk, high, wild talk of mountains and glaciers. He would go to the Alps, to the Himalaya; they would buy a house in Wales; they would have children. He would live again, not in this limbo that he had occupied for so long. Her warm, moist body gave him hope, and he gave her hope that there was a contentment to come, not always striving after things that were intangible. Meg had never felt more optimistic. “Darling,” she said, holding him there, in a way that Greta never had, “do you want to do it again?”
They were married the next spring. It was a Registry Office affair in Kensington, where they had found an apartment. Diana had promised that she would come down from Liverpool, but at the last minute she couldn’t—some family thing up in Scotland—and there was only a telegram from the two of them: WISHING YOU BOTH VERY BEST FUTURE STOP MUCH LOVE DI ALAN. The Registry Office ceremony was a bit absurd really, with the registrar trying to imbue the whole thing with a sense of ritual, as though he was a sort of secular priest. “Marriage is a most solemn undertaking, before friends and relatives, and before the State itself, embodied in me.” That kind of thing. There was a lunch party afterward. There was Guy’s mother, old and fragile and disapproving of Meg. There were half-a-dozen of his climbing friends, members of the Alpine Club with an air of Harris Tweed about them. There were friends from their offices. Meg’s colonel, Tommy, drank too much and told Guy that he was fucking lucky to have got her and a fucking bastard to have taken her away from him and did he know that she could do the most marvelous thing with her mouth and her fingers. “Like this.” And the fool blew through his lips and ran his fingers over them at the same time so that he made a blabbering noise like a little baby. It was a joke. Through his laughter he asked, “Weren’t you a conchie once?”
Guy stiffened. “As a matter of fact, I was.”
“Blue funk, was it? Bloody coward, are you?”
At which point Meg appeared at Guy’s side as though she had been conjured out of the air. “Tommy, you’re drunk,” she said, leading Guy expertly away. “When the doodlebugs came over,” she said, “Tommy spent the whole time in the shelter underneath the Ministry. Something to do with secret planning, he used to say. I don’t know what color it was, but it was a funk sure enough.”
After the reception, they climbed into Guy’s old Riley. With cans clattering along the road behind them and a notice saying CLIMBER TYING THE KNOT hanging on the trunk, they set off out of the city along Western Avenue. They paused in a turnout to remove the decoration and then continued on to Oxford, where they stayed at the Mitre. The next day they went on, up the A5 toward Wales. “Somewhere rather special,” Guy said when Meg asked where they were going. “Somewhere I’ll bet you’ve never been.”
And he was right. Meg had never been there before, never even imagined that such a place could exist in dull, gray Wales, the strange little seaside village that they finally reached, a collection of buildings clinging to the cliffs of a headland and overlooking the estuary of a river. It was more like somewhere in Italy, the Amalfi Coast, she thought, although she had never been there. There were cottages and follies in pink and yellow stucco. There were cobbled alleyways and little arches and a campanile; there were fountains and statues; there was pine and rhododendron and holm oak. It seemed a kind of dream, a transport out of the drab, monochrome postwar world. “That was where Noël Coward wrote Blithe Spirit,” Guy said as they passed one of the cottages. And the whole place seemed appropriate to the creation of fantasies, the conjuring up of dreams. They stayed in a small cottage with a bedroom and a sitting room that smelled vaguely of damp. From the low windows there was a view over the estuary south toward Harlech. In that cottage, for those five days, in the rather uncomfortable double bed, with the windows open and light reflected upward against the low ceiling from the tidal flats, she felt happy.
Part Seven
1
HAVE YOU SEEN?” Eve said one day. This was not long after I’d started work at the gallery. We were renting a flat in Ful-ham, and I’d got home early. She had come in later and was unloading shopping onto the kitchen sideboard and talking to the bags of vegetables and packets of tea. “Have you seen?” It was the kind of thing she always said, always with that assumption that it would be obvious what she meant.
“Have I seen what?”
“You haven’t, then?”
“How do I know until you tell me?”
So she said it, in her flat, matter-of-fact voice, with the London vowels and glottal stops, the sound that drove her father mad: “Jamie Matthewson’s gett’n’ married. To Ruth.” She noticed, of course. She wasn’t even looking at me at the time, but still she noticed: my expression, my mood, the small shock I felt — maybe I transmitted something through the air, some subtle hint of pheromone or some fractional electrical disturbance that emanated from my brain. She noticed everything.
“What happened, Rob?”
“What do you mean?”
“Between you and Jamie and her. In Switzerland. You’ve never said.”
“Oh, for God’s sake…”
But she wasn’t going to be deflected by mere anger. Eve had been in the front line in Grosvenor Square. She’d been charged by police horses and hit by batons. In Paris her eyes had run with tear gas. She wasn’t going to be deflected by a bit of phony anger. “Well, what did happen?”
I felt the need to justify myself, like a witness being questioned by a prosecutor. “We were cooped up together, facing the biggest climb of our lives…”
“And?”
“Things got out of hand,” I replied warily.
She smiled at my discomfiture. “She likes that kind of thing, does she? Bit of a tart, really.”
“I thought those were the kind of morals you appro
ve of.”
“In theory, darling, in theory.”
“Anyway, I owe her a lot. You know that. She saved my life.”
The smile faded into something close to regret. “Well, I’m afraid I can’t save your life, Rob,” she said. “But I can preserve it.”
I can’t deny that she was right. She did preserve my life. Together we flourished. Our lives flourished; our family flourished. Two children, the first one born fashionably out of wedlock, the second shortly after a brief ceremony at the Registry Office. And, in the meantime, Porteus Fine Art blossomed. The seventies and eighties were the right time to be selling works of art. Canvases of hard-edged acrylic were the perfect symbols of those years of brash money and emotional nihilism: the customers had the one and aspired to the other. We pandered to the buyer’s prodigality and the artist’s greed, and made money on the margin. And the assistant employed reluctantly by Harold Porteus, the hopeless university dropout with half a foot, became an appreciated manager and later a valued partner, thanks to an injection of cash — partly from Eve when an uncle died and partly from me when my mother finally retired and sold the hotel.
But we didn’t go to Jamie and Ruth’s wedding. An invitation did come, but we were abroad at the time, a long-standing trip to Eve’s family cottage in France. Her father’s sixtieth birthday. Something like that. So we didn’t go to the wedding and we didn’t talk about Ruth or Jamie again, and they remained outside our lives, figures of memory that we could do with what we pleased, but which we were never going to share.
We bought a house south of the river. It was just when the area was being discovered and exploited, the run-down terraces being tarted up like old whores finally admitted to polite society. Later we bought a second house in the country, with a paddock and a pair of ponies to go with the pair of daughters. Eve mellowed from New Left to New Labour, from throwing bricks at policemen to collecting money for the miners, to waving banners at the local foxhunt. We’d come home.
The relationship between gravity and acceleration has long been known, but what about the relationship between time and acceleration? Is there an equation to describe that? For the first few decades, you are merely slithering down an incline, like kids playing around on a snow slope, laughing and joking. You can even pretend you’re having fun. It happened to a group of schoolchildren near the summit of Snowdon one winter. I remember reading about it in the newspaper: a few of them slipped and down they went, laughing and shouting, slithering on the hard snow of the ridge, having fun. But, like life itself, the slope was convex: the farther they went, the steeper it got. They didn’t have ice axes, and they weren’t wearing crampons. It wasn’t fun at all. At the bottom, a cliff was waiting for them.
One day I was on the steeper slopes and wondering what had happened to the last two decades, when the receptionist at the gallery (no Courrèges dress any longer — a wide-shouldered black suit by now) buzzed through to my office. “There’s someone to see you. An artist, I think.” Her voice fell as she said this.
I sighed. One doesn’t always want to meet artists. They are your lifeblood, but they are also your burden. “Can’t you deal with it?”
“Very insistent, Mr. Dewar.”
“Can’t you fix an appointment?”
“Apparently not.”
So I finished whatever I was doing and went through into the gallery, into the pure whitewashed space where a Hockney Californian swimming pool was hanging, a classic that we had on exhibit prior to its auction. There were one or two browsers shuffling around. There was that hushed muttering that you get with visitors in church: they know that something is going on here, but they don’t really understand it. They know there is meaning and intent, but they can’t always grasp it. The artist, the inconvenient artist wearing regulation jeans and a leather jacket, was standing in front of the Hockney She turned to me at the sound of my footfall behind her.
Twenty years and a dozen Christmas cards between this moment, in front of a pool of blue acrylic on a sunny Californian day, and the last time I had seen her. A small avalanche of emotion swept through me, an icy rivulet, a glittering stream of crystals of memory: pretty enough, but dangerous. Two decades amount almost to a lifetime, maybe an entire lifetime if you happen to be unlucky. And there she was, turning from the painting and looking at me thoughtfully because she knew who she was about to see and was prepared for it, whereas for me it was all surprise.
“Ruth.”
She gave a wintry smile. She was good at those. “You recognized me.” Her Welsh accent was still there, a flowing current beneath the even surface of her words, faintly mocking. She had aged, of course: her complexion was a parchment tempered by wind and sun. You could see the tendons in her neck and in the hand that went up to brush a strand of hair from her forehead. There was some gold at her throat — a plain chain with a small gold ankh. “You’re looking good,” I told her. She grimaced. She was looking good, though. She had the kind of looks that age well: a dry angular structure to her face, a strong, lean body. Her hair was still hennaed, but she was no longer wearing those gypsy clothes my mother had once complained about. A black T-shirt beneath the bomber jacket. What was she now? Forty-seven?
We kissed. It was a hesitant, knowing kiss: knowing more than either of us was prepared to admit at the moment. We exchanged the usual banalities. How long it’s been. How are you? How’s Eve? How are the children? Goodness, they must have grown, all that kind of thing. How was Jamie?
“In Patagonia,” she said, carefully not answering my question. “He’ll be back in a couple of weeks.”
I had heard from him occasionally: a postcard, a phone call, those Christmas cards. For a couple of years, I had even gone to the annual dinner of the City Climbing Club, and he had been there, and we had drunk a lot and reminisced a bit, and he had even suggested that we do something together. But he was already out on a limb by then, gasping and grunting his way up a succession of Himalayan peaks, risking cerebral edema for the sake of the charge that he got from standing on a tabletop of ice and rock with a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of central Asia around him. K2, Annapurna, and Everest, the latter two without oxygen. He was often above twenty-six thousand feet, the death zone from which only about half return. But he’d returned. He had big lungs and a strong heart and tough arteries, a high lactate threshold and high hematocrit, all the physical and physiological qualities that you need to go high. And something else: the obsession. On one expedition, he spent, so I heard from an acquaintance, an entire day over twenty-six thousand feet on the Yalung Face of Kangchenjunga, searching for his father’s body. He never found it. Perhaps the mountain had shrugged the relic away, sent it down the snow slopes and over the cliffs, consigning the body of Guy Matthewson to the deep freeze of the Yalung Glacier to become an archaeological exhibit in a thousand years’ time when finally it emerged from the snout. There must be scores of climbers encased in glacial ice like that, ready to come out into the light of day dressed in a motley variety of tweeds and down and leather and plastic. Or perhaps Jamie was just unlucky, and desiccated father and dehydrated son had failed to meet up by pure chance.
“Actually, I’m here on business,” Ruth explained. “I know I should have made an appointment, but…” She wanted us to have a look at her work. She had some stuff in her van. “Perhaps…” She gave a small, diffident, self-deprecatory laugh.
“Perhaps?”
“Perhaps it’s good enough for Porteus-Dewar to consider?”
I smiled. I looked at my watch, at Ruth, at the gallery, at the Hockney with its stark blue that was almost the color of Eve’s eyes. Swimming-pool blue. “Why don’t we…”
“Forget about it?”
“Have lunch first. Let me take you to lunch. Give things a bit of time to settle down.”
“Is that a brush-off?”
“It’s realistic. You’re asking me two things. One is to judge an old love —”
“Is that what I was?”
&n
bsp; “—and the other is to judge a prospective client. I need to be able to separate one from the other.”
She laughed at my dissembling. “Ever the bastard,” she said.
“Is that what I was?”
“And you didn’t even realize it.”
We went to a wine bar nearby. Amid the noise of the lunch-time crowd, we exchanged lives across a diminutive table. I found myself talking too much and laughing nervously at things that weren’t that funny, and telling her things that I shouldn’t have, things about Eve, for example. From her I learned little: she’d helped Jamie with his mountain equipment business, his photography, and his expeditions. She’d been on a few trips with him, the lightweight one to Makalu, another to Baffin Island. She’d spent some time in villages in Nepal, doing volunteer work. And they’d had a couple of years in the States, in California. “And now I wonder where I’ve been for the last twenty years.”
“That’s what we all feel. It’s called age.”
“So I thought I’d start by trying to find out who I was twenty years ago.”
“And have you?”
She frowned at me, as though she was trying to remember where she’d met me, trying to recall my name. “I’m here to check.”
“Does Jamie know about your coming to see me?”
She evaded the question with a sideways movement of her head, like someone seeing a falling stone out of the corner of her eye and just shifting her head to avoid it. “He talks about you a lot, you know that? Always has.”
“What does he say?”
She seemed to wonder how to reply, whether to plunge into the past, her past, our past, or whether to stand aside. Eventually she said, “He’s a strange man, isn’t he? I used to think it was something childish at first. When I first met the two of you, I thought: a couple of kids looking for a bit of childish adventure. A bit of fun. And then I realized that it was something more than that. I mean, at least kids come in when it’s suppertime. But he never came in, or if he did it was just to snatch a bite to eat and then go out again. And the game was different. It wasn’t pretend danger, cowboys and Indians or British and Germans or anything like that. Bang-bang, you’re dead, count up to twenty. This was real danger, and the guns were loaded. And still he keeps playing.” For a moment the defenses were down. Her eyes were glistening. “Did you know they brought him down from K2 after some kind of collapse? Cerebral edema, or something. He was weeks in hospital. I mean, he’s putting his mind on the line, his fucking mind, Rob. It’s not just you with your wretched toes. It’s his whole bloody personality that he’s risking. And then I wonder, what else is there? Other than this obsession, I mean…”