The Fall
Page 37
The path was fenced in where it ran near the edge. A sign issued its statutory warning: DANGEROUS CLIFFS. “Ruth, be careful,” I called out. “The grass is wet.” But she had already climbed the fence and was walking down the slope on inadequate town shoes.
Panic welled up inside me. “Ruth! Be careful!” What did I think? That she might throw herself off? But she just stood as though she had not heard me, as though she had not registered the anxiety in my voice. I slithered down to her and took her elbow. “I can’t think of anything to say,” she murmured, more to herself than out loud to me. “A poem or a prayer or something. I should say something.”
Abruptly she opened the lid, inverted the urn, and shook the contents out into the air. There seemed to be a great deal of the stuff, a cloud of white and gray, a ghostly presence above the cliff, dispersing quickly into the breeze. “Oh God, how awful,” I heard her cry. The grass at her feet was smudged with gray. She replaced the lid and turned to me, weeping, the tears running down her cheeks like rain, her small body shaken by sobs. I held her against me.
“Do you remember that first climb?” she said when she had calmed down. “Here. Do you remember?”
“Of course I do.”
She nodded, as though the fact of remembering was good enough. “I don’t think we did very well by him, did we?”
I didn’t reply. I didn’t think it was the kind of comment that required a reply, and anyway a full reply would have taken too long. I held her steady, and together we climbed back up the slope to the path. Holding each other’s hands tightly, we walked away from the cliffs toward the car park. “Will you be going back home, Rob?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Give Eve my love. She never liked me, did she? But give her my love just the same.”
“Of course I will.”
“And your mother,” she added as we climbed into the car. “You must give her my love too. I liked your mother.”
“You only met her that one time.”
“But I got to know her well. So give her my love.”
“She doesn’t always remember, but I’ll try.”
“Try your best.” She sat there in the passenger seat staring ahead through the windshield. There was something in her expression that made me wait, some quality of uncertainty or expectancy.
“Shall we go?” I asked, with my hand on the ignition key.
She took a deep breath, then exhaled slowly. “There’s this,” she said. She reached inside her jacket and took out an airmail envelope. “I found it yesterday among his things.” It was battered and crumpled, and the flap was carefully slit open. For a moment I thought she had found the very thing that the coroner had been hinting at, a suicide note or something like it, but somehow it seemed too old to have been anything that Jamie might have just written. I took it from her and turned it over to see how it was addressed. To Ruth, I assumed. Or to Caroline, perhaps. Or maybe even to me.
There was no address, just the name written in smudged ballpoint pen: Mrs. Diana Dewar.
“What the hell’s this? This is my mother, for God’s sake.”
“Have a look,” Ruth said.
I pulled out two sheets of flimsy airmail paper. There was no sender address. The first line was simply Camp 4—23,000 feet, 15th April. And then, Diana darling.
They talk about your heart stopping. It’s a cliché, but like all clichés it is grounded in experience. My heart stopped — seemed to stop, really stopped? I don’t know. I felt a moment’s suspension of time and emotion, a moment’s void that was filled abruptly with a hurrying beat and something akin to anger. “What in God’s name is this?” I asked.
She shook her head helplessly. “I told you. I found it when I was going through his things. I didn’t really know what to do with it, Rob. Perhaps I should have just torn it up.”
I glanced over the writing and turned the page. The script ran halfway down the second page and ended with the looped signature: Guy.
“What is it?” My mind stumbled clumsily over the words. I felt a kind of panic, a feeling that things were running out of control. Like falling. “I mean, what’s this all about?”
Guy. A letter from the grave. It had been found on his body, of course. I measured the time, in decades — two? three? Who had opened it? Jamie, of course. But when? I tried to read the words, but it was difficult. My eyes had lost their focus; so had my mind. I looked across at Ruth and saw nothing but anguish there, no help and no comfort. I looked back at the pages of writing, and I understood only that I had understood nothing — nothing about my mother, nothing about Jamie and Caroline, nothing about me. Nothing about who I was or who I might have been.
4
IT WAS ONE OF those climbing hotels: all low beams and wood paneling and an open log fire that was often burning well into spring. Sometimes they even had it lit during the summer. She sat over by the window, nursing a half pint of beer and feeling rather self-conscious because these places were still male-dominated even though things had changed in that way since the war. There had been women heroes in the forces, women in the ambulances, women fighting in the occupied countries, women keeping the factories going. Fat lot that mattered now, mind, what with rationing still going on and unemployment so high and the Labour Government, which everyone had put so much faith in, having such a difficult time. Somehow she couldn’t bear the thought of Churchill getting back into power. It felt like taking a step backward into the Blitz.
She sipped her beer and took a bite of her sandwich — Spam, of course — and glanced out of the window: a slope of grass and heather slanting up into the cloud, gray rocks like tombstones.
Rain flecked the glass. The clouds were sagging with water, like a ceiling when the bath upstairs has overflowed. Will there be a sudden rupture? she wondered. The simile made her smile.
“Diana? Diana Sheridan?”
She looked around. Momentarily her eyes were dazzled from looking at the approximate daylight outside: she saw just a shape standing over her, a silhouette.
“Yes, I —”
“It’s Guy.”
Panic, or something very near panic. Panic’s little sister. As a girl she used to drink Peardrax and think herself ever so grown up. Cider’s little sister, it was called. She looked past him toward the group at the bar, toward a shifting haze of cigarette smoke. “Oh, goodness…”
“Do you mind…”
“What?”
He laughed softly. The sound of that laughter — faintly mocking, slightly self-deprecating — was so familiar. “I just wondered if I might join you for a moment…”
Panic. Sweat on her forehead and breaking out in her armpits. She tried to smile at the shadow. “Yes.”
Another little breath of amusement. “Yes, you do, or yes, I may?”
“I’m sorry?” Was he laughing at her?
“Yes, you do mind, or yes, I may sit down?”
“Oh goodness, yes, of course. Sit down. I’m sorry. You gave me quite a…” What did he give her? Quite a shock? Quite a surprise? Quite a turn? whatever that meant. It was the sort of thing her mother was always saying. Quite a turn. Turn for the worse, presumably. Or turning over of the heart, an unpleasant feeling, a reminder that the organic was only just there below the skin and quite beyond one’s control. “Start,” she said. She moved over as though to make room for him on the banquette beside her, but he took the chair on the other side of her table, thus saving her the embarrassment of proximity. “You gave me quite a start. I was daydreaming.”
“A penny for your thoughts. But sixpence for your dreams.”
She smiled. The panic subsided. Absence of panic was something positive, a strange welling up of contentment. “How strange to see you after all this time, Guy. Is Meg…?”
“She’s in London. With the baby…”
“Oh, yes, the baby. She sent me a snap. He looks lovely. You must be very proud.”
“Yes, of course.” He looked around. “Your husband?”
“Well, what a surprise this is. How many years ago —?”
“Seven,” she replied, too quickly.
He seemed amazed. “Seven. And you’ve been married now, for…?”
“Two.”
“Any children?”
“Not yet, but we’re hoping.” She sipped her beer, feeling herself blush. “You and Meg have put us to shame. Why have you abandoned the new mother?”
“Preparation for an expedition. We’ve got our sights on Everest. There’s quite a race on to get there first. Us. The Swiss. I think the Germans and the Italians are out of it for the moment.”
“Good luck.”
“Thanks.” He hesitated, as though he might be looking for a way to go.
“I’m sorry about Greta and Lotty,” she said. “Meg told me in a letter.”
“Yes,” he said, as though mere affirmation was sufficient. “It was a difficult time, but Meg was wonderful…”
“She’s a great help when things are difficult.”
“Yes, she is.” He seemed to cast around for something further to say. “Your husband…I’m sorry, it’s awful of me but I’ve forgotten his name…”
“Alan.”
“Of course. Alan. Does Alan know? About us, I mean. Does he know about us?”
She turned away, almost as though he had struck her. “Us?” She looked at the gloomy hillside and the spitting Welsh rain, at the rock, gray and shining in the wet like pewter. “No, he doesn’t,” she said to the window.
“No regrets?”
“What about you?”
“You haven’t told me about you yet. And I asked first.”
He doesn’t know, she thought. He doesn’t know about the baby, about the abortion, about the awful weight of guilt. He wouldn’t be acting like this if he did. Meg hasn’t told him. It must be the only secret she has ever kept in her whole life. She tried to laugh. “Let’s talk about other things, shall we? What are you doing now? Other than climbing, of course. How is Meg and the baby? And the family business — wasn’t it shoes? Tell me all those things.”
So he told her: the neutral things, although precious little was neutral when you came to think about it. He told her about the shoe factory, which was struggling with a depressed market and difficulties in getting trained staff, and he told her about the baby and Meg’s failed attempts at breast feeding and things like that. “Meg insists on staying in London, but I’m trying to persuade her that it’s much better to bring up a child in the country. She has” — he hesitated — “her own friends in town. In fact, I’ve hatched a plot. Do you want to hear about it?”
Of course she wanted to hear. All these things were fragments she could cling to, like someone clinging to the wreckage long after the ship has gone down.
“Well, we’re going to buy a house here.”
“Here in Wales? Oh, how wonderful.”
“I say, going to, but actually I already have. That’s part of the reason for my coming here, to see the solicitor about the conveyancing. Got it all tied up only yesterday.”
“Where? Where is it? What’s it like?” For a moment she toyed with the fantasy of owning a cottage somewhere here, in the Nant Gwynant Valley, perhaps. Among the trees, with a view of Snowdon rising in the background. There’d be a baby, of course, and the father coming in from the hills in the evening, clumping up the path and pushing open the low cottage door and ducking his head as he stepped inside, and calling out a greeting. He was a silhouette against the light, so she couldn’t see his face…“Oh, what a marvelous idea, to have a house here…”
He laughed at her enthusiasm. “But who knows if it will tempt Meg? We’re renting a flat in London, and that seems to be all she wants. ‘Buy something in Town,’ she tells me. She doesn’t seem to have any idea of the cost in London. But here things are different…” He paused. “I tell you what…”
“What?”
“When does Alan get here? How’d you both like to come and have a look?”
“At what?”
“The house, Porpoise. The house.” He said that. Porpoise. Quite without thinking. He’d called her Porpoise that weekend and used it in his letters to her and that was it. And yet now he used it almost as though he had been using it habitually, over and over for all those seven years.
She blushed and looked away again, out of the window. “It’ll have to be another day. He’s not joining me until the day after tomorrow. He’s got some conference up in Edinburgh, and I couldn’t bear being stuck in the house all on my own and so I came on ahead of him…”
“Oh.” There was a pause. His sipped his beer. “That’s that, then. I’ve got to get back to London by then.”
“Shame.”
There was another pause. She was expecting him to go. There was no reason for this awkward little conversation to continue, and she was expecting him to end it, almost hoping really. It would be so much easier. She smiled at him and put the last piece of her sandwich in her mouth and looked back out of the window.
“Look, why don’t you come anyway?” Guy asked. “This afternoon’s a washout. Why don’t we drive over and you can have a look? There are one or two things I have to do…”
“I’d love to.” She spoke softly, more to the window and the view of the sodden hillside than to him.
“I mean, if you’ve got any other plans, then fine…”
“I’d love to.”
“But it wouldn’t take more than half an hour to get there. Well, forty minutes perhaps —”
She turned her head and looked at him. “Guy, I’d love to,” she repeated.
They drove beneath the drab slopes of the Glyders. There were the twin lakes, lying along the valley floor like a smear of quicksilver in the palm of someone’s hand. There was the Royal Hotel, looking drab and run-down, as though it too had just been through a war. Guy seemed to read her thoughts. “The Canadian Army used it,” he said. “Arduous training center.”
She felt herself blush. “I remember standing in the garden and looking at the stars. Looking for something familiar.”
“Orion.”
“And you said that it wasn’t visible at the moment…”
“We were standing on it.”
“That’s it. Standing on Orion. The thought terrified me.”
“You didn’t seem terrified.”
“I never do,” she said.
The house was out of the mountains, in a softer valley. They drove across the river by a narrow stone bridge and picked their way through a town, and then climbed up through the hills on the far side, through fields and woods, around narrow curves and into small, hidden valleys. He brought the car to a halt where there was barely room for two vehicles to pass, where there was a slate wall and a slope of grass where sheep grazed. Always sheep in this country, their bleat like a perennial complaint. A gate, with a sign, the paint blistered and flaking, saying GILEAD HOUSE, a gravel drive with weeds growing down the middle, and then the house itself tucked back into the hillside against a patch of woodland — slate-gray stones and a slate roof and the windows and doors picked out in white. “That’s the place,” he said.
“It’s lovely.”
“Needs a lot of work done.”
He got out to open the gate, and they drove through onto the rough track and up to the front of the house. There were some breaks in the cloud, errant shafts of sunlight touching features of the hillside, the fields of luminous green, the dark woods. “Gilead,” she said. “Isn’t it biblical?”
“Part of it was some kind of chapel,” Guy said. “Let me show you round.”
And then the words rose out of her memory, from somewhere, a Sunday-school lesson, perhaps. She had this memory for words, for lines, for the oddments of literature. “‘Is there
no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there?’” And she thought of Alan, of course, who most assuredly was a physician not there.
“How very clever of you.” Guy was searching in his pockets for the key. “Where’s it from?”
“Isaiah, I think. Or maybe Jeremiah.”
The front door — wide and ponderous as a chapel door — opened onto a dark hallway. There was the sour and flinty smell of dust. They looked into desolate rooms, shuttered and dark. A few bits and pieces had been left by whoever had last lived here: a broken chair in a corner, a wicker table, a plank, a tea chest. The rooms still had gaslights on the walls, and bellpulls to summon servants from behind the moth-eaten green baize door. The kitchen had slate flagstones on the floor and a large black range set into one wall. In the scullery there was an ancient mangle, like an instrument of medieval torture.
Guy worried about whether the place was too big, whether it would be possible to heat it, whether it would make a home.
“It will be wonderful,” she assured him.
“Do you think Meg will like it?”
Diana laughed. “That’s a different matter.”
A staircase led upward into the shadows of the first floor. At the halfway landing was a tall window of painted glass: a knight and his lady, bordered with sinuous vines, dull with dust. “Arthur and Guinevere,” Guy said.
“Why not Lancelot?”
“Maybe it is Lancelot.”
The treads creaked and flexed under their feet as they went upstairs. A long passage led past the bedrooms. There were cobwebs, dust, the minute scratchings of vermin in the wainscot. Inside the empty rooms, shafts of light cut through cracks in the shutters and revealed swarms of dust motes. “Are there ghosts?” she wondered out loud.
“There are always ghosts,” he assured her.
The house was set into the hillside, so at the far end of the passage, French windows looked onto some kind of upper garden. More words came to her. Down the passage that we did not take, toward the door we never opened. Where were they from? The win-dowpanes were bleary with grime. She cleaned a patch and peered out onto weed-ridden gravel paths and low box hedges, an attempt at a formal Italian garden here in the cool Welsh summer. Guy struggled with the lock and finally got the key to turn. He pushed the door open with difficulty and moved aside for her to go out. It was one of those moments of confusion: she stepped forward and halted in the doorway; he was following her out and bumped against her as she stopped. She stood still on the edge of the daylight, with him against her, his hands on her shoulders.