North Face: A Novel

by Mary Renault

  Over the coffee, Neil was visited with an inspiration. “What about the castle? After all, it’s what we came to do. There’s a moon up, now.”

  “It will be locked up,” said Ellen; and then, “still, the outside would look nice by moonlight, I expect.”

  The little town was almost asleep already. In the square a few decorous couples were virtualistically walking-out. A cat shot across a road in the agarophobic way of cats, becoming leisured and graceful in the shadow of a wall. It was growing cool; Ellen, when she went up to her room, had put her white sweater on. Her hair was freshly brushed; in the colourless light she looked very virginal, slight and young.

  A last band of tarnished gilt still hung in the west, so that the dim oil-light in the houses below it looked like the sky shining through. It was a still evening; scents of hidden roses and of box hung about the gardens in motionless clouds; one walked through edges of scent as one walks through the edge of shadows.

  They were silent at first. This was partly because the fresh air had been rather revealing, and they were going through private tests to be sure that they were sober enough for nothing to show. The outward aspect of this enquiry, at least, gave satisfactory answers. (“I can stand well enough,” thought Neil, hazily recalling Cassio on a like theme, “and I can speak well enough. This is my right hand and this is my left.”) The moon did not seem, like the sunset, too good to be true; it was what one had a right to expect, indeed obvious and inevitable. It was the past, not good enough to be true, which was receding into fantasy. (“God’s above all … For my own part, no offence to the General, or any man of quality, I hope to be saved.”) The tree-roofed lane to the castle opened before them like a cave.

  It became evident, when they were inside, why the courting couples in the square had been so circumspect and prim. The others were here. They lined the track, in an avenue as regular as that of the trees, invisible against the hedges till one was within a yard or two; motionless, and so silent that the rare murmur of a monosyllable sounded overt. But the lane, like the square, stood for a definite gradation in the progress of love, all the interlocked shadows were vertical. In this small quiet town there were none of the makeshifts which, in city spaces, contrive to look at the same time furtive and defiant. For those who wanted it, the dark countryside offered the same shelter as to the foxes and the birds; the lane had a prestige.

  Ellen, picking her way over unseen ruts which the dry weather had hardened, wondered whether when two couples met coming or going they acknowledged one another, or preserved the convention of solitude which was clearly the rule of the place. Tonight, though, strangers were present; something indefinable, like interruptions in an electric current, made her aware that as they passed all the regular members broke off their silent concerns and, in deeper silence, stared. When she found that this caused her no real discomfort, she knew that she shouldn’t have had the lager, but didn’t care.

  Her foot turned on a sharp edge of hardened mud; she gave a startled gasp as she got her balance again.

  “Careful,” said Neil softly, and slid his hand under her arm.

  This was not only more comfortable, but, as she at once discovered, much more decorous and correct. She no longer felt conspicuous when they passed the next radar-beam from the hedge. It seemed natural too, that his voice had dropped to just the same pitch as the infrequent voices between the trees.

  The track widened; there was a smell of wood-smoke; against a gap in the trees a block of shadow showed, the roof of the caravan. From inside it came suddenly the thin crying of a baby, and a blurred murmur; then both died away. Involuntarily Ellen faltered in a step, and hung back.

  “It’s all right. They’ve turned in.”

  He had whispered—not to wake them, perhaps—and had tightened her arm in his, pulling her against his side. When, presently, they met the first ambulant couple returning down the lane, the silent circumnavigation, the convention that they had not seen each other, followed exactly the etiquette that she had imagined.

  The walk had become rather forgetful of its destination, and it was with a sense of abruptness and surprise that, rounding a bend, they found themselves at the wooden gates of the castle grounds. The lane led nowhere else; hence its popularity. Beside the gates was the cottage lodge where the caretaker lived. Ellen, feeling shy again, slid away to try the catch of the doors.

  They were locked, of course. There was an interval of uncertain pause. To accept defeat at once meant a clear choice between walking back again, and adopting with no more pretence the ritual of the lane.

  On Neil’s side, this was complicated by something more positive. Not to put too fine a point on it, he wanted to show off. He had not altogether stood out today for practical efficiency; now, under the influence of the lane, the moonlight, emotion and several drinks, he wanted to compensate for this, not by being practically efficient but by some lawless defiance of circumstance and fate. Pushing self-criticism overboard, he ran an eye, calculatingly, along the shadowy line of the wall.

  Though it was high, it looked like child’s play. Most of it was simply the old outer rampart of the castle, the broken upper courses filled in with dry-walling. The old wall (they had begun by silent consent to prowl along it) went in many places right to the top. Its stones were massy, often the size of boulders, and roughly joined.

  “Look at that,” he whispered. “There’s nothing to it. Let’s take a chance on a private view.”

  Her eyes met his, a faint shine in the shadows. They squeezed through a thin place in the hedge, and followed the wall into a field. Out of the trees, it seemed nearly as light as day; the fissures between the stones were etched in inviting relief.

  “It looks all right here,” he said.

  She stood close up to him, surveying the wall. He did not try to touch her; imperceptibly the mood had shifted, it would have been out of key now. It is quicker to respond to these changes than to define them. He did not think that they had become boy and girl, reverting to the first sexual responses of daring display and shocked admiration; he merely adapted himself to it, without knowing with which of them, or in whose instinctive need, it had begun.

  She said, “If it’s as good on the other side … It must be frightfully illegal.”

  “I’m going up first in case there’s barbed wire at the top. Wait till I get down again.” The note of command dropped, without jar, upon an admiring submission.

  “For goodness’ sake be careful,” she whispered below him as he began to climb. “It’s very dangerous to slip on wire.”

  “My college,” he said over his shoulder, “had ten-inch iron spikes. I went over them about once a week.” He paused to add, “Tight, too, as often as not.”

  The cracks were smaller than they had seemed, belying the false emphasis of the moon; but he went up quickly, pleased to know she would discover that it was trickier than he had made it look. There was no wire at the top, but, on the other side, a very convenient tree with a limb almost touching the top of the wall. He came down and reported.

  “It’s a bit awkward in the middle. Stand on my shoulder when you get there.” There was no real need for this; it was, in point of fact, the lordly generosity of the schoolboy impressing the female with her dependence; but it felt quite natural. She said that she hoped she wasn’t hurting him, and he said, “Good Lord, no. Take a good shove off.”

  On the broad top of the wall, he steadied her while she reached for the branch to swing herself down. It was springy, and just right for her weight. “Marvellous,” she said at the bottom; and pleased by this, he launched himself off with casual ease. The branch, strained already and charged with an additional three stone, broke with a crack that splintered the night, leaving the last five feet of his descent to the uncompensated force of gravity.

  “Are you all right?” He had come down on hands and knees, and she was tugging urgently at his arm. He straightened, grinned at her and sucked a graze.

  “Is it bleedin
g? I’ve got a handkerchief I haven’t used.”

  “Sh-sh,” he said, and pulled her into the shadow under the tree.

  The sound of a door opening and shutting had carried clearly in the quiet from the cottage a hundred yards away. They flattened their backs against the wall; it was largely from a sense of drama that he gripped her round the waist. Trying without success to hold their quickened breath, they waited till everything was quiet again. It had the awkward thrill of young experiment; and they pretended afterwards that it didn’t count, as the young do at such times.

  Stepping forward out of the shadow, they seemed to pass also out of time. On a gentle knoll, whose sides were still cleared for a bow-shot round, the castle stood in full moonlight, secret and solitary, too far lost in its own stillness to resent intrusion; a deep sleeper does not lay a finger on his lips. It could never have covered much ground: a small courtyard, a hall into which the solar above had dropped two hundred years before, and the keep, standing like a hard core from which the fruit has fallen away. It was Norman; thick and narrow-eyed; forty feet of wall were still perfect. Now that the accretions of Plantagenet and Tudor had had their four or five centuries of ephemeral life and passed, like the comparative frivolities they were, the keep was the hold, as it had been in the beginning. Once it had been choked with ivy; later guardians, to save the fabric, had axed through the arm-thick roots, and there were no leaves now to reflect the moon, but the skeleton fingers still meshed the walls like giant lace.

  Neil and Ellen walked up to it softly, remembering it in the afternoon. What jolly communal squeals, what private giggles, what heart-searching confidences must have littered the air; no print was left on the silence. Expanding like a night-flower, the personality of the place had spread and extinguished them. Neither period nor picturesque but again a hard cold mentor of the countryside, the stump of the keep squinted out through its slit eyes, as its hard Norman builder has squinted past the nose-piece of his helmet; a strong warden, but bad to cross. It was in some such place as this, Neil thought, that the boy in Ellen’s story had starved himself in the dark, without consolation or hope, dying at last as his father shook him like a dog. At the time, trying to know the teller through the tale, part of his mind had been away; now it was easier to imagine than a contemporary atrocity sterilised by newsprint. For a moment his hair prickled.

  The cruelty of the keep added that spice of danger which, even if only imagination supplies it, is needed to sharpen an escapade. They had come to the remains of the inner gate; a notice board, half legible in moonlight, announced that the penalty for something was five pounds. They looked at one another with a silent laugh. (The keep too, which had helped to enforce the Angevin game-laws, was concealing perhaps a dark sardonic Norman smile.)

  Inside the courtyard the grass was mown and rolled, like a pile carpet under the feet. This part was fourteenth century; its maimed proportions were still courtly and gracious; presenting the other side of the picture: Aucassin and Nicolette, goldwork and lutes and missals, velvet and vair. The two invaders were becoming increasingly separated from reality, feeling the night, and the castle, theirs by right of conquest. It offended them, when they reached the round-arched doorway into the keep, to find it closed with a wicket of ash-stakes, strongly bound with wire. There was no room at the top to climb over. Neil, who was long past a sane inference that these precautions might relate to the state of the masonry, examined the padlock; but the blade of his knife was too broad to go in, and a hair-grip of Ellen’s (the sole support of her front hair, which at once tumbled forward into her eyes) was too flexible. He explained this, leaving it to be presumed that if he were equipped with the tools to which he was accustomed, no lock could withstand him. The hair-grip was done for, and had to be thrown away.

  They explored the outside of the keep, discussing it in stealthy voices, like a surprise-party at a siege. Even the lowest arrow-slit was twenty feet from the ground. Neil observed, however, a deep fissure, caused perhaps by subsidence in the earth, zig-zagging down the wall, half masked by the brittle skeleton of the ivy. The moonlight mapped it, enticingly. To his somewhat overcharged imagination—now ready for anything but anticlimax and defeat—it seemed ideal. Ellen followed his look. The enjoyable fright, with which she had responded so far to his exhibition, changed in her face to something much more real. He was concentrating, and did not notice it.

  “That looks fairly feasible,” he remarked. “Do you mind if I have a crack at it? It won’t take me long.”

  “Please don’t. I don’t like the look of it.”

  He noticed that her voice had altered, and thought that she didn’t want to be left alone in the white silence, under the menace of the tower. Secure in a godlike sense of his own immunity, he said kindly, “Look, I’ll still be in call. I only want to see how it goes.”

  “I don’t think it’s safe. I’ve got a feeling about it. If you go up there, I think you’ll fall.”

  “That’s just atmosphere. I know what I’m up to.” He saw her eyes dilated with fear under her loosened hair. “Not still got the gipsy on your mind? After all, we’ve broken our third plate.” He turned to the keep. Weathered in old blood and death, massively indifferent, it drowsed under the moon.

  A hand caught his sleeve.

  “No. You’re not to. I know you’ll be killed.”

  He turned back again, quickly, and before she had been ready for it. The light irresponsible froth settled in his mind, leaving the reality from which it had risen, strong, clear and still.

  “All right,” he said quietly. “I’ll pass it up.”

  In the suddenly tautened and expanded silence, the whistle of a train sounded miles away, and, nearer, the fluster of a half-roused bird deep in leaves. He heard her draw in her breath; her voice, shaken and unsteady, began snatching at words. “Well, anyone could see—” It stopped at the first touch of his hands on her shoulders.

  “There’s nothing to be frightened of,” he said.

  Like all first kisses, it tried to do too much: to explore and explain, demand and persuade and reassure; to satisfy the spirit and the blood. Like the rest it struggled with its incompleteness, losing its way among confused impressions, the surface coldness of lips and hands, the structure of bone under flesh and flesh under clothes, momentary distractions in the touch of hair: and, when it was over, both love and desire protested that they had been caught unready, and that everything had left off before it had begun.

  Afterwards, because they were both people condemned to make life more difficult, if also more interesting, than is strictly necessary, they looked at one another. It is small wonder that the second kiss so commonly follows the first with a promptness that owes as much to cowardice as to passion. But these two, overtrained to effort and unaware in the simplicity of their hard experience that they were doing more than human beings must, scanned one another’s faces in the moonlight, getting no answer, since each was wholly absorbed in questioning; and not pausing to reflect that they were being what comfortable people call “intense,” and had brought it on themselves.

  They were still standing embraced, however; and their bodies, which had found no difficulty at all from the beginning and had only needed a breathing-space in which to get used to one another, began to ask impatiently what the trouble was. Suddenly, their exchange of confidence and of trust seemed answer enough. The seeking eyes grew vague, the intent faces cloudy and still. He touched her lips lightly, a moment of prelude, and there was a little pause in which they held their breath.

  It was at this point that they became aware of something disturbing the peace of their closed eyelids. They opened them protestingly, and found themselves neatly picked out in the beam of a powerful torch, directed from a few yards away. The sudden glare, striking their unaccommodated pupils, was so painful that they had not, for some seconds, even the wit to let one another go.

  An apocalyptic voice, righteous and affronted, said, “Here, here, now. We can’t have non
e of that in here.”

  Moving instinctively, Neil put himself between Ellen and the light, and squinted into the halo of impenetrable blackness it had created round it. The light continued to focus him, relentlessly, full in the face, and to deliver judgement.

  “Closed to the public, these grounds are, since eleven o’clock. You’re committing an offence under the bye-laws.” The light appeared to gather moral indignation; it wobbled a little. “This building here’s National Trust, open the proper times. I got enough to do in the day, seeing the public behave, without no one breaking in at night for carryings-on. There’s places outside for that … Anyone wanting to do it decent.” Clearly feeling that nothing could be added without spoiling it, the light left it there.

  Neil for his part had received some benefit from the sermon. It had given him a moment for recovery and, even more valuably, informed him that it wasn’t the police after all. He had discovered, besides, that tonight there was practically no human contretemps which could get near enough to him to make him feel a fool.

  “Sorry,” he said. “But the place was a bit congested this afternoon, wasn’t it?”

  The light seemed to find this not quite what it had expected. Its beam described an uncertain arc, and settled on the ground. Its attendant genius could now be dimly seen, with pyjama-lapels showing under some kind of greatcoat, and a general air of grievance in the joints. Neil took advantage of the relative darkness to reach back and give Ellen’s waist a reassuring pat.

  “That don’t make no difference,” said the light, clinging to its dignity, “what it’s like in the day. No one’s got no business in here, this time of night.”

  “I’m afraid,” said Neil sympathetically, “we got you out of bed. The least we can do is to pay our entrance fee.” He advanced to the light, finding behind it a waxed sandy moustache, steel spectacles, and an open, not unreceptive palm.