by Simon Mawer
They remained like that for a while. She could feel him shivering, as though with cold. She remembered another occasion, that same tremor. She remembered so much that was compressed into so short a time. “Guy,” she said. Her tone was neutral. She might have been doing no more than calling his attention to something out there in the watery sunlight of the garden, out there among the hedges and the gravel paths and the dark holm oaks on the hillside.
“Oh, Porpoise,” he said quietly, “what have we done? What the hell have we done?”
She had a sudden sensation of something like nausea, something like panic — a sense of desolation so powerful that for a moment she wondered whether she would be able to bear it. She closed her eyes and put her hand up to her throat. She was going to fall. He gripped her shoulder as though to hold her steady. “What shall we do, Porpoise?” he whispered in her ear. “What the devil shall we do?”
Her hand moved from her throat to his cheek, to hold him against her. Things were plain: there was no way out, no escape, no solution. It was like a terminal disease. You tried to comfort the patient, of course, but you mustn’t raise false hopes, you mustn’t tell lies. She spoke to the empty garden, the rank hedges, the weed-ridden paths: “There’s nothing we can do, is there?” she said.
“Why ever did you write me that letter? Why did you break things off?”
Whatever happens now will be irrevocable, she thought. Every error, even the tiniest slip will have its consequences. It was like climbing, like that rock climbing she did with him all those years ago: the tiniest slip might be fatal. Carefully, so as not to disturb anything, she said, “I had no choice. You were married. We couldn’t go on. And now we both are, to different people.”
“So what do we do? Nothing?”
She turned to face him. “What else do you suggest, Guy? We break up two marriages in order to try a third? And then how long would that be, and what strain would it put on us, and would we even survive? You’ve even got a child…”
“We love each other, don’t we?”
It seemed a childish question. “I suppose we do,” she agreed. “We must, mustn’t we, after all this time?”
“Yes, we must.”
They stood there helplessly, facing each other, feeling peculiarly childish, for childhood is when you are helpless; adults are meant to act for themselves and know when to act. And paradoxically, amid all this helplessness, she felt contentment. The boundaries were precisely drawn, and within those narrow boundaries, the boundaries of this moment, she was free. “I suppose I’ve never not loved you. I suppose it was that ridiculous thing that they have in the films — love at first sight, that moment when I saw you coming down off the mountain toward me.”
“And me. The same.” He touched her face, as though to convince himself of the reality, to fix the memory in his mind. His finger traced the curve of her jaw, the subtle contours of her cheek and her lips. “I’ve got my stuff in the car,” he said. “I was going to camp here. Doss down in one of the rooms. For God’s sake, there are enough of them.”
“I’m booked in at the hotel.”
“It doesn’t matter, does it?”
“Not really.” She followed him down the stairs, out of the front door to collect things from the car. It didn’t matter at all. They were like children having some kind of adventure, playing at camping, playing it for real but knowing that it was not serious, that it wouldn’t last, that at the end the adults would call them in from play and they would have to dismantle the tent. From the trunk of the car they got his Primus stove, some cooking pots and tins of food, and an old tartan traveling rug. Then they searched the house and discovered a couple of chairs and, in one of the back rooms, an old mattress, which they struggled with up the stairs. They chose a room on the first floor, looking out on the top garden. There was a broken sofa, an old table, some empty trunks, and, with its baize torn and threadbare, an old snooker table. Most of the rooms had gas fires, but this one had an open fireplace with a black cast-iron mantelpiece, something from the early years of the century with sinuous Art Nouveau curves. “Let’s make a fire,” Diana suggested.
“We don’t need a fire in this weather.”
“But let’s have one anyway.”
Firewood was easy. They collected it along the edge of the woods at the back of the house. It was damp, but not sodden; in one of the outbuildings they found a pile of kindling, put aside by some previous occupant for a fire that had never been. “Maybe the chimney’s blocked,” Guy said. But the fire drew, the flames roared and crackled in the grate, and the dusty and desolate room suddenly acquired a warmth: ash gray transformed into warm ocher. Vague disquiet transformed into happiness. He turned to her and put his arms around her. She didn’t care what might happen. Alan might phone the hotel and discover that she was not yet in, but how could that matter? The remainder of her life might be a misery, but how would that stand against this fragment of joy snatched out of time and context?
When they made love later that evening, she did it with ease. She knew exactly how. She knew how to open herself for him, how to give every bit of herself to him, body and soul, without shame. It wasn’t like when she was with Alan. With Alan she felt awkward, almost as though he were a stranger even after all these years. But this was different, a great, racking, consuming possession, physical sensation elevated to the spiritual, lust made love, her whole body penetrated by his so that for those few moments they seemed not to be two people, but one and the same.
Afterward they lay together in front of the fire and he bent his head and kissed her, and she laughed with the impossibility of it all, with the excitement and the anticipation, and the sensation that she had somehow recovered Guy from the dead.
“What are you laughing at?” he asked.
“I’m not laughing at anything,” she retorted.
“That sounds like Alice.”
“It’s not, you fool. It’s just true. I’m laughing with something: happiness, to be precise. For the moment, I’m happy.”
“So am I,” he agreed. He lay back beside her, looking up at the ceiling. The firelight sculpted his face in shifting planes of gold and black. “But then what?” he asked. “What about tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow I’ll be unhappy.”
“Unless we meet again, like this.”
She felt a small stirring of excitement, or something like excitement. Fear, perhaps. “Again?”
“Why not?”
Fear. It was fear. This encounter with Guy was a lapse; anything else would be betrayal. This would soon be in the past, and she had long ago discovered that time was a great palliative, as soothing to the conscience as any biblical balm of Gilead. But to meet again would call for planning, and plans were in the future. Time had no power to assuage the guilt of what was yet to come.
Guy turned his head and looked at her. His smile was lopsided by the pull of gravity, giving it a wry, ironic slant. Or maybe that was there in his expression anyway. “Let’s face it,” he said. “Meg’s never going to come here, is she? Oh, for a visit, yes, perhaps — the chatelaine surveying her possessions. But she’s never going to live here. This will be my place. And yours. Our place.”
“What would that make me? Your mistress?”
“I’m not going to get into that argument. You know the answer.”
“Well, what about this one? You might be able to deceive Meg, but I couldn’t possibly betray Alan. Not in that manner. Not systematically, not make assignations. I couldn’t do it.”
“That begins to sound very much like hypocrisy.”
“Maybe I am a hypocrite. Maybe we both are.”
He moved toward her and touched her cheek. “Don’t start an argument,” he said quietly. “Not now.” He stroked the soft pulp of her lips, as though to soothe her momentary anger. “What’s the alternative?” he asked. “That we walk away from each other tomorrow morning and never meet again? Is that what you want?”
“I don’t know, Guy. I just
don’t know.”
“And one day years later we meet up. Maybe by pure chance, or maybe Meg arranges a meeting. A get-together, for old times’ sake. And we look at each other and realize that the greatest thing in both our lives never happened. Is that what you want?”
“I told you,” she said. “I don’t know what I want.”
He bent to kiss her. She found that she wanted him again. There was that terrifying desire rising in her once more. “Yes, you do, Porpoise,” he said as he lifted his lips from hers. “You know very well.”
5
THE NURSING HOME was a redbrick house with a solid, Victorian air about it. It had once been a private school, and the grounds that had once seethed with careless children were now haunted by forgetful adults, figures that shuffled and wandered and repeated over and over the little things they could remember.
“Mr. Dewar,” said the woman at the reception desk. “Of course.” She smiled, just to show that she knew who I was. “We’re doing very well this morning,” she said, “very well indeed. We’ve been up and about all by ourself.” I hated the collective pronouns: as though somehow she was sharing in the decline. But senility is like death — it’s something you experience alone.
“Is she in her room?”
“I’m sure,” she said. “I expect we’re having a rest after lunch.”
The corridor had an oilcloth floor and framed reproductions on the walls. Presumably the pictures had been chosen for their restful and positive qualities: there were bunches of flowers, bowls of gleaming fruit, that kind of thing. Children played quietly in a Delft courtyard. Cows grazed in a field near Flatford. There was a smell, of disinfectant and some kind of floral air freshener, and beneath that the sullen scent of urine. Gaunt faces watched me pass by. One or two smiled as though in recognition, but you could never be sure. When a nurse said, “Good morning, Mr. Dewar,” the certainty of recognition, the assurance of sanity, was almost a shock.
I paused at the door that had a card with Mrs. Dewar printed on it. When I knocked, I heard her voice, surprisingly strong and firm: “Who is it?”
“It’s me,” I called through the wood, and turned the handle.
She was sitting with her back to the door, at the desk that we had brought all the way from the hotel, the desk where she used to do the accounts and write her letters. She still sat at the desk with paper in front of her, although she no longer knew what to write, or to whom.
“Hello,” I said. She turned around to look at me, and the expression of puzzled confusion was suddenly replaced by a smile of recognition. It was like sunlight breaking through a pall of cloud. Sometimes she would frown when she saw me and say something quite absurd like “I don’t want them today, thank you,” as though I was a tradesman who had come to the back entrance of the hotel. Or — somehow this was better — she would merely look at me with a dead expression as if I wasn’t even there. Occasionally she would take me for one of the staff; often she would merely talk to me, politely, distantly, as though I were a vague acquaintance and she was happy to provide me with a few details of life in the home. But when there was real recognition in her face it brought me something like joy, a moment’s connection with who I was and had been. It linked me back to a past that I only dimly understood, a place in space and time that I had no wish to return to but which, being part of me, was somehow vital.
“Hello, Mum.”
That light in her face, the faint image of the young woman she had once been illuminating from within the aged person she had become. But she wasn’t looking directly at me. Her gaze was aslant, as though glancing off me into the past. “Hello, Guy,” she said.
“It’s not Guy,” I told her gently. “It’s Robert.”
“Hello, Guy,” she repeated.
I shrugged and took the letter from my pocket and unfolded it on her lap. “There you are,” I said. “At least it’s from Guy. You can’t read it, but there you are just the same. I’m afraid it’s about forty years too late.”
She smiled. I don’t think she had even noticed the sheet lying there on the floral cotton of her dress. Her hands were laid carefully on her knees as though she were posing for a photographer, and her gaze was still directed past my face. “In God’s name, why didn’t you ever tell me about him?” I asked her.
Diana darling,
I am writing this at camp 4, which is no more than a single tent in the ice and snow at present, but very safe. The country we walked through to get to our mountain is a marvel — rhododendrons and magnolias almost in full bloom, more spectacular than
farther to the west. Do you remember the rhododendrons of Port Meirion? Multiply those by, oh, I don’t know, one hundred thousand times! But now we are well up our mountain, and we are going to do great things. I feel almost literally on top of the world.
Which leads me to what I really want to say, which is this: I have just had a letter from Meg, brought up with the rest of the expedition mail. We had a blazing row before I left, and now she tells me what I have always suspected: James might not be my child. Might not, is not, I don’t know. Perhaps these things can be decided for sure these days. I know we two talked and talked about this and many other things the last time we were together. You said that you wanted to leave Alan and take Robert with you, and that I could not leave Meg and the child. And now there is this news. Although, heaven knows, it is not
James’s fault that his mother is as she is, my loyalties must now be to you and to our son. What exactly will happen between Meg and me, I don’t know — divorce, I suppose — but I will make what arrangements I can for James. That is for the future. For now all I can do is ask you this — will you accept me, Diana? In a month I will be back in England. Will you wait for me? Will you then accept all of my love, divided only between you and our son, forever?
Guy
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For much of the more recent climbing in this book, I only had to fall back on my own memories of the highs and lows shared with my onetime climbing partner Les Littleford. Information about climbing in the 1940s came from various sources—from Jim Perrin’s Menlove (1985) to Colin Kirkus’s Let’s Go Climbing! (1941). For the Eiger, I gained much help from Eiger: The Vertical Arena, edited by Daniel Anker (English edition 2000), and Harrer’s The White Spider (1959, 1965). There is also an impressive on-line account of a recent ascent of the Nordwand (1997) by Paul Harrington at: http://www.climbing.ie/exped/eiger/eiger.html.
For London during the Blitz, I used a number of published eyewitness accounts, such as Post D (1941) by John Strachey Raiders Overhead (1943, 1980) by Barbara Marion Nixon, and Westminster in War (1947) by William Sansom. There is also Angela Raby’s book The Forgotten Service (1999), which documents, in photograph and diary, the experiences of an ambulance unit during the Blitz.
The excerpt quoted by Robert Dewar on page 26 is from Edward Whymper’s classic work of mountaineering literature, Scrambles Amongst the Alps (1871).
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
SIMON MAWER has a degree from Oxford and lives in Rome. He is the author of Mendel’s Dwarf, The Gospel of Judas, and several other widely praised and prizewinning novels. He used to be an avid climber. After an apprenticeship on sea cliffs, he climbed extensively in the British Isles but retired from serious mountaineering after surviving an avalanche in Scotland.
The Fall
A NOVEL BY
SIMON MAWER
A READING GROUP GUIDE
The Real Fall
SIMON MAWER ON THE ORIGINS OF The Fall
I fell. Literally, not metaphorically. Probably like everyone else, I have also fallen metaphorically—mankind is the product of the Fall, after all; but this was a real fall. It was a blustery day of January, a quarter of a century ago, and I had just completed the difficult section of an ice climb on the Northeast Face of Ben Nevis, in Scotland. After I had a struggle with an iced-up chimney, it now looked as though the worst was over. Above there were just steep slopes of snow-ice, risin
g up to where clouds hid the summit plateau. I teetered on the points of ice axes and crampons, and turned to look down onto the top of my partner’s helmet some seventy feet below. I opened my mouth to call out.
“We’ve cracked it, Les!” That’s what I was going to say.
Hubris. As I turned to call to him, the avalanche began. At first it was a mere rivulet of ice crystals hushing down the snowfield and sweeping round me. We’d been climbing through this kind of thing all morning and I clung on, waiting for it to pass. But then the whole world went dark, and looking up I saw a great cloud of snow coming down on me. I remember praying. I think I actually prayed to the avalanche itself. Please don’t knock me off, I pleaded. But the avalanche didn’t listen. First it plucked one ice ax out of the ice, and then the other; then it flung me backwards.
Like Lucifer, I fell. I remember the vivid sense of release. All fear was gone. I went back over the ice chimney, down a short snow slope that we had climbed, and finally back over the main icefall below. And then I stopped. Quite suddenly, I was hanging upside down on the rope, one hundred and fifty feet below my partner. In the space of a few seconds triumph had become disaster. Lucifer had become the Hanging Man.
If a book can be said to have a starting point, then I suppose that incident was the beginning of The Fall. Much was to happen and many years were to pass before writing started. I abandoned climbing (the most direct result of the avalanche); I escaped Britain for the Mediterranean, where powder snow is unknown; I got married. In Italy I began to do seriously what I had always done before in a fragmentary fashion: I began to write. My themes were fate and faith, memory and recall, the past and its often-malign influence on the present. I wrote of Italy and Malta and Israel/Palestine. I wrote of the tyranny of genetics and the freedom of the self, and at the back of my mind was always the possibility, probability even, that I would one day write about climbing. So it was that, sometime in the first year of the new millennium, I took the road to North Wales, where my family had come from and where Robert Dewar and Jamie Matthewson had started out on their own lives. And The Fall began…