The Fall

by Simon Mawer

  After lunch she drove her van around to the back of the gallery, to the unloading bay. I could sense the tension in her. It was like the moment when the jury has filed back into court after a long deliberation, and the foreman is standing to deliver the verdict. Only here I was judge and prosecution as well as jury. She opened the doors of the van, and I helped her out with a couple of carefully wrapped canvases. We carried them inside. I knew. I guessed from the faint smile on her face as I untied the string and unwrapped the sheet that covered the first canvas. I stood back and looked at the painting that I hadn’t seen in over two decades, the painting that was, in some way, part of me. Questing cormorants cruising the pewter surface of the lake; the exclamation of her own body, as naked as a blade, poised to pierce the water.

  She stood back, looking at me, trying to gauge my reaction.

  I nodded.

  The next canvas was a work I had not seen: the same scene a second or two later, the cormorants arching down and a white flesh arrow stabbing through the surface — a Welsh Big Splash,

  the Californian sunshine modulated to a smudged and watery light the color of pearl.

  “What do you think?”

  I tried not to laugh. “How do you expect me to judge them? In God’s name, Ruth, how do you expect me to be objective about those?”

  “Then try these. They’re recent ones.” They were abstracts that, on closer inspection, proved to be figurative — intricate and exact paintings of slabs of rock, of cracks and chimneys, ribs and walls and narrow, insidious ledges. One was called Cap, another Dome. “Yosemite,” she said. “Jamie was climbing, and I painted.” Her tone was almost apologetic, but there was nothing to apologize for. The paintings were intriguing, suspended between the purely abstract and the exactly figurative, things of texture and shade and subtle gradations of hue and tone, just like rock itself — rock architecture. There was another called Pen-dragon, a composition in pink and gray and lead white, a thing of flesh and bone and tendon, cut up the middle by an irregular dotted line. The line of our climb.

  I laughed with pleasure.

  “And this is what I’m doing now.” Smaller and more curious, they were what she called her slates, reliefs constructed in various shades and colors of rock, abstract compositions of texture and form that seemed like the mountains and hills that the stone came from.

  I felt her watching me for some hint of what I thought. “Have you been selling locally?” I asked.

  “A bit. My bread and butter is landscapes. You know the kind of thing.”

  I smiled. “They’re our bread and butter too.” We talked a bit more, about the art market, about the chances and the possibilities. I wondered what she really wanted, and what I wanted, come to that. One of the larger canvases showed three human figures on what looked like a stage. They seemed naked, androgynous, devoid of face or feature. Behind them loomed a great black triangle, as threatening as a vulture, as overwhelming as a mountain. The painting was entitled Trinity.

  “It was dangerous, wasn’t it?” I said, looking at this work. “The three of us, I mean.”

  She shrugged. “It’s happened before.”

  “Will it happen again?”

  She looked around at me with that smile and shook her head. “I don’t think so, Rob. Do you?”

  “Why not?”

  “Because after all this time the stakes are too high — children, homes, husbands and wives, all that. You don’t just toss a coin for all that, do you?”

  “You know about that?”

  She gave a wry smile. “When he told me I almost rang you up to tell you that you were the winner after all.”

  “When was that?”

  “A few months after.”

  “And why didn’t you?”

  She shrugged. “Because of Eve, I suppose. Perhaps it was the only time I’ve acted selflessly. But I left Jamie just the same —”

  “You left him?”

  “Told him he was a male bastard and walked out on him.” She laughed. “We were apart for over a year.”

  “I never realized…”

  “There were a lot of things you didn’t realize…”

  “About?”

  She turned back to the painting, picking up the canvas as though to take it back to the van. “About Jamie. And me. We’re pretty lousy together, but we’re worse apart. It’s that kind of relationship.”

  “Leave it,” I said.

  She stopped, the canvas held across her chest like a shield. “Leave it?”

  “The canvas,” I said. “Leave the canvas. You want to try and sell the thing, don’t you?”

  And she looked down at the picture that she was holding and laughed, perhaps with relief.

  “Guess what?” I asked Eve when I got home that evening.

  She didn’t look around from whatever it was she was doing, something on the computer, some case that one of her pressure groups was pursuing. “That’s my line,” she said.

  “Guess who came to the gallery today.”

  “Picasso?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “How sad. Matisse then. How do I know, for God’s sake?”

  “Ruth. Jamie Matthewson’s Ruth. Ruth Phoenix.”

  “I thought she was dead too.”

  “Phoenix risen from the ashes. She wants us to represent her. Brought some of her work for me to look at. It’s good.” I explained too quickly, I know I did.

  “The ashes of what?” she said sourly, looking around at me for the first time.

  2

  WE SHOWED ONE or two of Ruth’s paintings in the London gallery and a few more in the new Birmingham one. It wasn’t difficult to move them. The landscapes—reminiscent of Stanley Spencer, all slate fencing and barbed wire and sere bracken—were snapped up with some regularity. They allowed the purchaser to have a landscape on the sitting room wall that was something better than pretty rolling hills and cows chewing the rural English cud. And then someone made an offer for the large canvas that I called the Welsh Big Splash, and he asked to see some other work by the same artist and then to meet her. He was an American with Welsh ancestry, and he was just what Ruth needed, a collector with a desire to be a patron. “He revolts me,” she said.

  “But he loves your accent,” I told her.

  So she found herself crossing the Atlantic in first class and being met at Logan Airport by a limousine sent by the Howell Jones Foundation. She was photographed for an American art journal, standing in open white spaces like a Giacometti figure in a gallery. A one-woman exhibition was set up in a SoHo gallery. The media came, eager for novelty. She had, quite suddenly, arrived.

  Jamie was no more than a figure in the background of all this. Ruth mentioned him occasionally when we met, told me what he was planning, where he was going, when he was returning. “What does he think about all this?” I asked her, meaning her success as an artist.

  She shrugged. “He’s hardly aware of it. He doesn’t understand it, so it doesn’t really interest him. He thinks it’s good for me, like exercise or a healthy diet or something.”

  “And me? What does he think about your working with me?”

  She gave that small laugh—part ironic, part bewildered. “I’m not sure what he feels, Rob. I never have been. I don’t think he knows either. I think…”

  “What?”

  “I think climbing is a substitute for feeling. It’s an evasion. That’s what I think.”

  Perhaps she was right. Perhaps that was what climbing did for you, like cocaine for an addict: a snort of Technicolor excitement to take the place of the chiaroscuro of ordinary life. “Anyway, give him my regards,” I told her.

  “Of course.” But something in her tone told me that she wouldn’t.

  And then one day I saw posters somewhere in London, in a bookshop. They might even have been in the Tube. In the Death Zone, was the title. A life above 26,000 feet was the subtitle, and behind it was the face of James Matthewson superimposed on a pyramid of ice and snow t
hat might have been the Mustagh Tower, might have been Jannu. Somehow the picture gave the illusion that he was trapped inside the mountain, peering out like a caged animal. Jim Matthewson at the Royal Geographical Society was written along the bottom of the poster, along with times and dates and even a price.

  I wondered whether to go. I wondered whether to suggest it to Eve. But in the end I went along by myself and lined up with a motley collection of city-bound climbers to buy a ticket for what was billed as a multimedia presentation to take you beyond the surface of things and into the real experience of climbing at altitude. Something like that. We filed into the hushed and reverential lecture theater like worshipers into a modern church, to find ourselves confronted, from the screen above the lecture bench, with the same mountain as on the poster and the same face staring out at us. To one side was a table with Jamie’s book piled high, the glossy cover with the same photomontage and the same title: In the Death Zone.

  “He’s amazing,” someone was saying beside me. “The only British climber who ranks alongside Messner and Kukuczka.”

  I’d heard of Messner, but I didn’t even know who Kukuczka was.

  We took our seats. The lights dimmed and hushed us to silence, and a voice came over the speakers explaining what we already knew, that the guest this evening had become a household word for daring and determination, that he had climbed in every continent in the world and stood on the top of six of the world’s eight-thousand-meter peaks, that he had been described as the leading British climber of his generation. And then Jamie stepped up to the microphone, pinned in the spotlight like a circus performer.

  Applause exploded around the theater, a sudden, concerted rockfall of sound. He looked up at the audience with a faint and cynical smile that reminded me powerfully of Caroline. His face appeared ragged and worn, as though it had been abraded too long by the wind and the sun, desiccated too often by altitude. He didn’t notice me among the hundreds there. Probably he was just enclosed in his globe of light, and we were nothing but an anonymous mass beyond the limits of his small, circumscribed world on the stage.

  “Climbing above twenty-six thousand feet,” he said, pausing to look at us, “you are working in the death zone.”

  Pictures of climbers appeared behind him. Color seemed dominant. The climbers wore brightly colored down clothing—blue and red and orange. They struggled up slopes of white snow trailing brightly colored rope, wielding brightly colored axes and hammers, clipping brightly colored carabiners into the only things that were not brightly colored: steel-gray pitons, silver-gray ice screws. The sky was the hard blue of altitude.

  “Over half the people who have ever been over twenty-six thousand feet have died doing it,” Jamie said. A monochrome photograph of a climber appeared on the screen, a shot of a man sitting on a boulder in the sun and smoking a cigarette. He wore tattered britches and a collarless shirt. The mountain that formed the backdrop was the Eiger, the North Face. “My own father was among them,” Jamie said, and the monochrome photo faded into a color one: a figure hunched at the top of a snow slope with its back against brownish rock and beside it a stick with prayer flags that fluttered in the Himalayan gale.

  Oh, it was a fine and affecting performance, tugging alternately at heartstrings and sinews, mixing memory and fear with pure, untrammeled physical exhaustion. And at the end, after the sweat and the agony, with the summit conquered for a brief Nirvana of fifteen minutes, Jamie’s own face appeared full-screen, fiery red and ash gray, hideous with the agonies of high-altitude effort. There was tumultuous applause. People in the front row even stood, as though he were an opera diva or something.

  “Fantastic,” my neighbors said to one another. “Amazing.”

  I joined the line of admirers going up to shake his hand, to buy his book and get it autographed. He smiled distractedly at each supplicant, as though he had forgotten exactly why he was there and who all these people were. Perhaps his mind was still up in the high Himalayan valley. I wondered whether he would even recognize me. “Hi, Jamie,” I said when my own turn came.

  He gripped my hand and smiled at me as though he were smiling at a distant view. “Hi.”

  “It’s Robert,” I said.

  “Robert,” he repeated, bending to write in the book.

  “Robert Dewar,” I said. “For God’s sake, Jamie: it’s me! Rob!”

  People around us were staring. Someone behind said, “Get a move on. You’re not the only one.”

  Jamie looked up from the book, where he had already written to Robert. I watched his gaze come into focus, his expression metamorphose from indifference through various stages of memory and regret to a kind of tired smile, the smile that you might give someone who has done the wrong thing for the hundredth time, but you are willing to accept it yet again. The people around us had edged away, sensing that they were watching something more than a mere encounter, sensing the possibility of theater. “Rob,” he said. “What on earth are you doing here?”

  “I was wondering whether I was in the book.”

  He glanced down at it, frowning slightly. “I hope you didn’t pay for it.”

  “Of course I did.”

  “Well, you must have your money back.” He turned to the girl at the table. “Give him his money back. He’s already paid for it. With his toes.”

  Despite my protests, I found money being pressed into my hand. Someone edged me aside and thrust his own copy forward. But Jamie ignored him, putting his hand on my shoulder and moving us away from the table, away from the line with its burden of books. Behind us there was a small disturbance of outrage. “Rob,” he repeated. “It’s good to see you. I’ve heard all about you. From Ruth…”

  I gestured to the disappointed line. “What about all them?”

  He looked around distractedly. “You wait here,” he said. “You wait here, and then we’ll go and find us a drink. How about that? I’ll just do my duty, and then we’ll go and get a drink.”

  “Don’t forget we’ve got dinner arranged, Mr. Matthewson,” the girl from the publishers said.

  He looked at her and shrugged. “It’s just been canceled.”

  We found a pub down toward the Cromwell Road. There were tables on the sidewalk outside, put there in the hope that it might be a warm and sunny evening. I fought my way through a crowd of university students to get to the bar. As I waited for the beers, I wondered where all this might be leading. Surely Ruth and her art meant more to me now. Surely Jamie was no more than a curio, a thing one finds by chance when searching through the deposits of memory. He didn’t matter any longer.

  When I took our drinks back to the table, he was sitting there, staring across the street as though hoping that the buildings opposite might fade away and be replaced by something more desolate—a valley wall, perhaps, or a mound of moraine or the snout of a glacier. He had the manner of someone who lives in the wilderness and is awkward in the face of the rituals of city life, uncomfortable in ordinary clothes. I noticed how he patted his pockets and glanced around nervously before picking up his beer. He nodded at me, as though to reassure himself that we were really here, having a drink together in a pub in London. “Your foot,” he said. “How’s your foot?”

  “It gives me a bit of pain in winter. Nothing I can’t put up with.”

  “Of course. How long’s it been, Rob?”

  “Over twenty years.”

  He nodded. “A lifetime. You’re looking all right. Bit paunchy, but all right.”

  “It’s all that walking around art galleries that I do.”

  He laughed. “Ruth said that. She said you were the predator of the galleries, tearing the unsuspecting artist limb from limb. You seem to have made her quite a name, Rob.”

  “It’s her merit, not mine.”

  “But it’s only through you that she’s had this success. Only since you took her on.”

  “Are you wondering whether she’s one of my victims?” I wanted to make a joke of it, but he took my words se
riously. Was it, I wondered, the effect of too much time spent too high with too little oxygen? Perhaps all that work in the death zone had destroyed his sense of humor along with the millions of brain cells that it was supposed to. “Perhaps,” he said. “Perhaps that has something to do with it. Jealousy. You must know that.”

  “You think we might have taken up where we left off all those years ago?”

  “Perhaps.”

  I shook my head. “Things change, don’t they, Jamie? People change. I’ve been married to Eve for years now. Fifteen, sixteen? I always forget; she always remembers. We were living together for a couple of years before that. We’ve got two kids, a dog, three cats, two ponies, and a budgerigar. I’m not going to throw all that over just for a memory. Especially not the budgie.”

  Finally he laughed. “I suppose you’re right. They were good memories, though, weren’t they?”

  “They were all right. Like all memories, you can make of them what you want.”

  He sipped his beer. “You were lucky to get out when you did, you know that?”

  “Why lucky?”

  “To do something else.” He gestured at the tables around us, the purely urban sound of people in a crowd, of private conversations in public places. “To get used to all this shit. You know I sweat when I come to the city? You know I feel more afraid than when I’m gripped on a mountain? Panic, can you imagine?”