by Simon Mawer
“It’s only what you’re used to.”
“I’m not used to people.” He smiled into his beer. “Or talk. Or anything very much. I mean, look at this bloody place. How do you bear it?”
I shrugged. “You don’t seem to spend much time here, not according to Ruth.”
“Sure. But it can’t go on forever, can it? I’ve felt the limits for years now. And then, what is there?”
“Gentlemanly retirement in Wales. You’ve got the business, haven’t you?”
He made a face. “The business is crap. It’s run by some twenty-year-old who climbs E7 when he’s off form. All purple leotards and bulging pectorals and chalk bags. When he’s not climbing, he screws Ruth.” I protested at this, but he dismissed my doubts with a laugh. “You know better than me? He’d be mad not to. There she is on her own, working away on her bloody paintings, and me halfway up some godforsaken mountain in the Karakoram. What else is there for her to do in the evenings? Or him, come to that. She probably likes it like that. She’s always liked a bit more than she’s entitled to, hasn’t she?” He was watching me. That hooded, hounded look of his. I’d catch him watching me like that in the old days sometimes, look around and find that his gaze was on me.
“Ruth thinks the world of you,” I said.
He didn’t respond directly, but smiled as though I were a child, exhibiting a child’s naïveté. “Remember Grindelwald? That time before we did the Eiger.”
“Of course I remember. How could I forget?”
And he laughed, a sudden, harsh sound like a shout across a mountain valley, so that people at nearby tables glanced around as though expecting trouble. “Tell me,” he said. “What did you think?”
I didn’t want to answer. I didn’t want another of his bloody arguments. I’d avoided them for more than two decades and now we’d met up like this, pure chance, more or less, and here he was banging on about the same old thing. “Do you want something to eat?” I asked. “They’ve got reasonable food here, I think. Or we can find a restaurant.”
“You haven’t answered my question.”
“We all three knew the score, Jamie,” I protested. “We’d been drinking. We were nervous, charged up, waiting for the weather to break, keyed up to do the biggest climb of our lives…” Something welled up inside me that was close to anger. Maybe it was a kind of frustration and a small pinch of fear and a touch of uncertainty, things that blend together to give a parody of anger. I looked around, as though planning an escape. At one table there was a group of French tourists sipping half pints of bitter with obvious distaste and arguing about the cost of something; at another, a couple of students from Imperial College sat conspiratorially over two pints. They had hair like something made from patent leather. I noticed that the girl had a lump of metal through her tongue and a row of rings around the rim of her ear, like tiny carabiners on a climbing rack. I turned back to Jamie. “Christ, it was nearly thirty years ago, Jamie.”
He smiled, as if he knew a joke that I didn’t. “Haven’t you ever talked about it with her? In between discussing her pictures?”
“We talk business, not childhood, Jamie. We talk exhibitions and contracts and percentages and that kind of crap. It’s a business relationship.”
“Ruth knew right from the start, I think.”
“Knew what? In God’s name, what the fuck are you talking about, Jamie?”
“Women know, don’t they? They’re more perceptive, that’s what everyone reckons.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Remember Bethan? Remember that afternoon, just the two of us?”
“Kids,” I said, “messing about.”
He sat back in his chair. He wasn’t looking at me any longer, but at the beer in front of him, at the beads of condensation that ran like tears down the glass. He wiped them away with a finger, smiling a tight smile, the kind of smile you give when you’re in pain, the kind that signifies that it hurts but that you’re going to put up with it, like you put up with the headaches and the pain in the lungs, the cerebral edema, the diarrhea, the vomiting, all those things of high altitude. Then he looked me directly in the eye. “Thing is, my whole life has been an escape, Rob. Escape from Guy Matthewson, from my mother, but above all”—he nodded, as though the idea had just occurred to him—“from you.”
I suppose I stared at him. It was like being struck—oh, lightning, stone-fall, avalanche, anything you please. Or as if he had suddenly leaned forward across the table and done the job himself—hit me across the face with his fist. And for that moment I felt as though the whole of our childhood was illuminated in a different light, the whole of our friendship rendered in different shades, new colors. I experienced, I think, something close to panic. “Jamie…” I said, but I didn’t say anything more. I couldn’t think of the right words.
He picked up his glass and emptied it, then replaced it on the table between us. “The trouble is, I’ve been wrong all the time. I think the person I’ve really been trying to escape is myself. That’s why it’s been so difficult.” And with that he got up from the table and walked away down the street, as though he had just remembered something but would be back in a moment. But he didn’t come back. I called out to him, but he didn’t even turn to look at me. Perhaps he didn’t hear.
Behind me the French tourists had finished their beers and were leaving. The students still argued in low, urgent voices. The city went on more or less as it always went on, unconcerned and uninterested.
3
THE CORONER’S COURT was as solemn as a Welsh chapel — might have been a chapel once in fact, with its ogive windows and steeply pitched roof. Outside there was a certain amount of pushing and shoving, the sparking of press flashes, a crew from Harlech Television waving a boom mike above the crowd, that kind of thing. But inside it was as serious as a Methodist Sunday service. The coroner eyed Ruth over the top of his spectacles and expressed his sorrow at the untimely demise of her husband — he used the word demise, as though mere death wouldn’t do justice to the occasion — and the pathologist delivered his report in the tones of someone reading a lesson: “Multiple fractures of the cranium and widespread internal injuries,” he said. “Rupture of liver and spleen…”
In the narrow seat beside me, Ruth stiffened. Her hand gripped mine.
“Death would have resulted from any one of these traumas,” the pathologist observed, as though inviting us to take our pick.
Then there was a pause and a shuffling of the cast and the offering of various testimonies: one of the mountain rescue team and one of the walkers who had been witness to the whole thing, a schoolmasterly type with balding head and tweed jacket, the kind of guy you’d find in the Pen-y-Gwryd Hotel reminiscing about Hillary and Tenzing. “He had no ropes,” this man said. “Nothing at all. And then he just came off.”
“Did you see Mr. Matthewson begin this climb?”
“Not really, no. We noticed him when he was some way up. One of my group said the climb was called the Master’s Wall, one of these extreme —”
The coroner peered over his spectacles at the mountain rescue man where he sat in the audience. “Is that correct? The Master’s Wall?”
The rescue man half stood, feeling awkward at being called out of turn, as though the ritual was being disturbed. “I believe it was the Great Wall. A different route, a little to the left. The Master’s Wall is considerably harder.”
“There are harder climbs than this one?” the coroner asked. “Is this wall not vertical and holdless?” The elaborate negative was a fine touch. There followed a discussion over the terms vertical and holdless, as though these were conceptual and philosophical rather than purely physical. “The Master’s Wall is graded E7,” the mountain rescue man explained. “Great Wall is E4.”
“E7, E4? They sound like food additives.” A mutter of amusement sounded around the room. Even Ruth smiled.
“E stands for Extremely Severe. Once upon a time it used to be called XS.
E7 is high in the class. Great Wall is E4; considerably more straightforward.”
“Easier?”
“None of these climbs are easy. To a nonclimber they would seem impossible.”
“To you?”
The rescue man smiled wryly. “They are all beyond me.”
“Then perhaps excess is the correct way to describe them?” the coroner suggested.
“Well, they can be protected,” the rescue man said. He suddenly seemed to realize that climbing was under some sort of criticism. “These days you can use special equipment to protect yourself against a fall.”
“Ropes, you mean?”
“Ropes and a whole lot of other things. Nuts, friends, lots of different protection gear. Climbing can be very safe.”
“But Mr. Matthewson is dead. It seems he lacked whatever you said. Friends”.'
“Jim Matthewson wasn’t using any protection. He was climbing solo.”
“And would he have expected to climb at that standard without any such…”—the coroner glanced down at his notes — “protection?”
There was silence in the courtroom, a silence made all the more intense by the fact that it was not silent, that people strained forward in their chairs, that reporters’ pens scratched at their notepads, that someone whispered something.
“I really don’t know. He was a very experienced climber. I believe he used to climb at that standard —”
“Used to?”
“I don’t really know what standard he would be expected to climb at now.”
“Mr. Matthewson was fifty-two years old.”
The rescue man shrugged. “Extreme climbing is a young man’s sport.”
Ruth leaned toward me. I felt her breath in my ear, the subtle intimacy of breath and memory: “Is this some kind of trial?” she whispered. “Can’t they just sign the papers or whatever and let us go?”
But the coroner had called Dominic Lewis to give his view of events, and she had to turn back to the intricacies of the inquiry, the small rituals, the barbed comments with their hidden poisons.
Lewis looked uneasy sitting up there by the coroner’s desk. He fidgeted and fiddled, he moved his knees as though ready, at a moment’s notice, to dash out of the courtroom. A callow youth in the guise of a man. I wondered about what Jamie had said to me about this young man and Ruth. She didn’t move as Lewis talked, just sat there staring straight ahead with her expression set against the blizzard.
“I can’t really say much,” Lewis said. “I wasn’t a direct witness.”
“But you were a friend of Mr. Matthewson. And both his climbing and his business partner.”
“Yes, I was that.”
“So you can tell us whether his behavior was normal, the kind of thing you might expect of him?”
Lewis shrugged. “It’s the kind of thing I’d have done.”
“But you’re not Mr. Matthewson.”
“No.”
The coroner thought for a moment. “And have you done it, Mr. Lewis? Have you soloed the climb called Great Wall?”
Lewis sniffed. “As a matter of fact, yeah. Summer before last.”
“So you would consider it a normal thing to do?”
“For someone with the right ability, with a lot of psychological preparation.”
“Does that include Mr. Matthewson?”
“The other fellow just said it. Extreme climbing is a young man’s sport.”
“And Mr. Matthewson was not a young man.”
“It was above his standard. Quite frankly, for someone like him, it was suicidal.”
The word sounded loudly in the stuffy courtroom. Beside me, Ruth winced. Her nails dug into my hand. The coroner looked up from what he had been writing. “To what standard did Mr. Matthewson climb?” he asked.
“Oh, extreme, yeah. E2, E3 maybe, but roped. You know what I mean? Roped, not solo. HVS solo, maybe, but not Great Wall.”
“HVS?”
“Hard Very Severe.”
“But he tried Great Wall.”
“Yes.” Lewis shrugged. “Who knows why? I can’t explain it.”
The coroner pondered. The people in the audience shifted in their seats, uncertain where the inquiry was going. “The business in which you and Mr. Matthewson were partners,” he said. He never made a mistake, never used the present tense when referring to the dead man, never slipped on the treacherous slope of solecism. “The…ah…Matthewson Mountain Center. Has it been a success?”
“We’ve had our ups and downs. What business hasn’t?”
“But recently?”
“It’s okay. We’ve introduced a new line in plastic mountain boots, and there’s the guiding business. It’s been going all right. I mean, everyone seems to want to climb Everest these days.”
The coroner nodded, looking at Lewis, glancing at Ruth sitting in the front row beside me. Abruptly he asked Lewis, “Do you have any reason to think that Mr. Matthewson might have done this climb deliberately? I mean deliberately chosen to climb something that he knew he would fail on?”
The fidgeting in the room stopped. There was traffic noise from outside. Ruth whispered something. It must have been “Oh my God.” God came into it, of that much I was certain.
“I don’t get you,” Lewis said. “Jim take the chop deliberately? You’re joking.”
“I don’t think this is the place for jokes, Mr. Lewis.”
The court waited. Lewis flushed slightly. “No,” he said. “It would not have been in character for Jim to risk something like that.”
“And you don’t see any grounds for his acting out of character on that occasion?”
“No. No, I don’t.”
The coroner nodded. He thanked Lewis for his testimony. He looked around the assembled company — the journalists, the climbers, the curious public, and the incurious officials — and he decided that he had heard enough. “I commiserate with Mrs. Matthewson for the stress that all this has brought to her at a time when doubtless she needs to be left with the comfort of those close to her,” he said. And then he wrote something on a form in front of him. “I return a verdict of death by misadventure.”
Wasn’t it a foregone conclusion? What did anyone really expect? Jim Matthewson, climber, mountaineer, had come to the same sticky end as so many of his kind. You die frozen on some Himalayan ridge, starved of oxygen, starved of warmth, or you die in a crumpled mass of bone and muscle at the foot of some ridiculous lump of rock in the green and pleasant British countryside. You could think of it as a terminal illness, climbing.
We walked out into a thin drizzle, and flashes fired like magnesium flares in our faces. Lewis and I had Ruth between us, covered in a raincoat like the victim’s mother in a child abduction case. We hurried her through the small crowd and into the refuge of my car. “I’ll get back to the Center, then,” Lewis said.
“You do that,” I told him. Ruth was weeping. Sitting in the passenger’s seat, she was weeping silently, tears streaking her cheeks. She had made up that morning to look good in front of the cameras — she didn’t often wear makeup — and now that the stuff was smearing her cheeks like dirt, she looked dreadful. I climbed in beside her and slammed the door shut. “You know what he thought?” she whispered as we pulled away from the reporters and photographers. “He thought that Jamie might have done it deliberately. Climbed a route he knew he couldn’t manage until he fell off. Suicide, that’s what he thought.”
The windshield wipers swept back and forth, clearing a space in the chaos of rain. “Why on earth would Jamie do a thing like that?”
I glanced across and saw Ruth’s face set in pale stone. I knew. I knew it in my bones or however it is you know such things. Guts. I felt it in my guts. How did people ever make the mistake of thinking that the heart is what rules the emotions, when it is so obviously the guts? I suppose I should have felt angry on his behalf or something. Can you do that, feel emotion for someone else?
We left the town and crossed over the bridge to the isla
nd. “He loved you, you know that?” she said.
“I know. We talked about it. That time we met in London. He seemed confused.”
She said nothing, just stared through the windshield at the familiar landscape. New highways were being built on the island to take the extra tourist traffic, but we found the familiar road, winding between small fields. There was the sense that you were climbing out of the villages, out of the settlements, up to the edge of something strange and wild. Nestled against a hillside was the pub that her father had owned. Ruth made a small sound when the building came into sight — it may have been a sigh, may have been a small ironic laugh.
“Who runs it now?” I asked.
“No idea. I think it belongs to one of the big breweries. There’s a manager, I think.”
Beyond the pub, up toward the cliffs, there was now a proper car park. A notice signed by the Countryside Council for Wales explained what animals and plants you might see along the cliff path, species that you wouldn’t see any longer if you didn’t respect the environment. There were pictures of puffins, guillemots, and razorbills.
After I had parked the car, Ruth sat still for a while as though gathering strength for the task to come. Then she reached over the seat and lifted the container out of the back. It was an urn made of a heavy gray plastic that was designed to look like ceramic. She held it with both hands, as though it was a great weight. “Come on, let’s get it over with.”
We left the car and went through a gate and along the cliff path. Over to our left, the sea was as dull as lead, stretching away toward a pearly gray horizon. Gulls heaved their wings and cried at the sight of us, afraid that we would interfere with their lives. There were flecks of drizzle in the air, but it was no longer raining as it had been inland. That had always been one of the advantages of the place: often you could climb in sunshine when it was raining in the mountains.