North Face: A Novel

by Mary Renault

  It slipped out unprepared, leaving him afterwards with an unpleasant constriction in the chest, and a determination to face it out. There was, however, no need.

  “I’m sorry,” she said at once. “What an awful thing to do. I can’t imagine what possessed me.”

  “I don’t suppose anyone’s down there,” he said with grudging reassurance, “but you can never be sure.” Her penitence made him, for obscure reasons, angrier than a retort. Perhaps it was only her still-averted face which gave the illusion that the apology had been offered not to him, but elsewhere. Neither of them had, at present, any more to say; and there was silence for several minutes.

  Ellen’s back relaxed; she turned round to him, propped on one arm. “There’s going to be a storm tonight. The air’s too thick to breathe. Please don’t let’s be cross with each other.”

  He moved over to her, pulled her backward into his arms, and kissed her. Between one reason and another, he was not as gentle as he had meant to be. She did not quite resist him, but her response stopped quickly and he could feel her tense, wary, and ready to slip away at the first chance he gave her. He let her go. She made an unhappy little movement towards him, hesitated and stopped.

  “Let’s have lunch,” she said.

  It was too hot to be hungry, but he saw sense in her suggestion. It is difficult to feel intensely while dividing up food and rearranging it under a system of barter. As usual she slipped him a sandwich too many in exchange for the cake; but the routine argument fell flat, for neither could finish a full half-share.

  “They say,” said Ellen, looking at the remaining slices whose edges had already begun to curl, “that if we had to eat an eighteenth-century breakfast for dinner, our stomachs would burst and we’d drop dead.”

  “All the same,” said Neil, who had been chiefly defeated by the liquescent margarine, “I wouldn’t mind working through one gradually, say over a week.”

  After a pause Ellen said shyly, “You might not think it to look at me, but I don’t cook too badly—I mean, with what one can get.”

  For a moment his mood lifted, and their eyes met in a smile. But all this came a little late; ready to detect flight in anything, he saw her preparing another bolt-hole, the labyrinthine warren of domesticity. Even when they talked about plans, this image had never presented itself to him; it carried too many associations with the past, from which he still shied away. Like most people who married nowadays, they would have nowhere in particular to live; with all its discomforts, this vagrant and irresponsible prospect had had an unconfessed charm for him. Sometime, inevitably, they would gather a home about them as a stone gathers moss. Meantime, the picture at the back of his mind had been of camping here and there, making a secret world in strange rooms and love in strange beds, subduing casual environment as illicit lovers do. He had not thought the thing out so clearly as to know that the picture had grown on him with her elusiveness, that he wanted her in a kind of vacuum, in order without interference to explore and possess her. Aloud, he asked her how good she was at cooking on a gas-ring.

  “Quite good. I hate these house-proud types.”

  She might have read his thoughts in order to meet them halfway. It was like all her other promises, he thought, notes of hand upon securities that failed when she called them in. Desire stamped its impatience on his mind; things could not go on forever like this, and had already gone on longer than enough. Echoing what seemed, just then, the complaint of the whole visible world, he decided that the air must be cleared. A little later, when the strain still palpable between them had settled down, but certainly today.

  They had drifted, all this while, into another long silence. Ellen had got out a comb and smoothed her hair; she had managed to buy, on the way up, an imitation tortoiseshell slide, heavier than the grips she was used to wearing, which kept worrying her and needing adjustment. She put the comb away, and fidgeted with something in the collar of her dress. At the movement his anger concentrated, without warning, as if under a burning-glass, to a single point. He never saw the small prickly leaf she tracked down and threw away.

  “You know,” she said, turning round, “I think the more one gives in to this weather, the worse it gets. We’d probably feel much better if we ignored it and did something. What about that face you were talking about yesterday, the big one? It will be in the shade, by now. Let’s go and climb.”

  Neil said slowly, “It’s as near vertical as makes no matter.” This unattached statement committed him to nothing. The quiet world stood poised on its knife-edge, not yet moving.

  “I don’t blame you.” She spoke quite humbly and without reproach. “But, truly, Neil, that was the only time I lost my nerve on rock; and it couldn’t happen when you were there.”

  “Good lord,” he said quickly, “I didn’t mean that.” And with this phrase of simple instinctive decency, the poised bowl heaved, irrevocably. She was waiting now to know what he did mean. Ruat coelum.

  “I only meant that I can’t take you up rock at that angle with loose jewellery dangling about. It only needs to catch on something when you’re shifting balance. Sorry, but it’s up to you.”

  “Jewellery?” She looked at him in perfectly blank bewilderment. “But you know I don’t wear it. You can see I’ve got none on.”

  “I can’t remember ever having seen you without it. I thought it was a fixture, perhaps. If I’m wrong, never mind.”

  Her face altered; he saw the movement, quickly checked, of her hand up to her throat. She was watching him, but he could not read what was in her eyes, defiance or fear. She said, almost stupidly, “You don’t mean my medal, do you?”

  He made no answer, wondering if he looked to her as he felt, and ceasing to care.

  She said at last, “I always climbed in it. It never caught on anything. It’s too short.”

  “Playing about’s one thing, and climbing’s another. Do the thing properly, or let it alone.”

  The conflict in her face had stopped. It was impenetrable, and as hard as his own.

  “I may not be much good myself. I don’t say I am. But I was taught properly, if that’s what you mean.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” he said.

  “You can do as you like.”

  Again he did not answer, but for a different cause. He was watching the change which was transforming her into someone he did not know, a quiet fanatic, with a fanatic’s uncommunicating eyes.

  “You said something like this a few minutes ago.” Her voice seemed curiously dissociated from her still face. “I didn’t say anything, I couldn’t believe you meant it.”

  “It would probably have been better unsaid.”

  “It would have been much better unthought.”

  “Perhaps.”

  Things moved quickly, as they do between peoples whom propaganda has wrought up into a state of furious self-defence. At the sound of the first shot, mobilisation was complete.

  “If this was what you wanted,” she said, “you should have told me before. Perhaps I ought to have known. But I thought—”

  “Yes?”

  “I thought truth meant something to you, and that you wouldn’t want anything that came from selling it out.”

  “Truth’s a large loose word, If you mean fidelity, why not say so?”

  “Very well. Then that’s what I mean.”

  “So long as we know.” In a moment’s clarity, he compared the reality on which they had embarked with the delicate lines of his blue-print, the brutalities of the field with the staff college map. Noble abstractions usher in the war; human animals, wounded, threatened, insulted and bereaved, tread the bright banners in the indistinguishable rubble underfoot, careless with pain. “You’re telling me that short of a sell-out, there’s nothing left, is that it? I should call that being honest rather late in the day.”

  “That isn’t true.” But she spoke in anger, so that she seemed to offer nothing, simply to throw off an accusation. She paused for a moment, lookin
g at him, not in the hesitation of remorse but of one who chooses a weapon. “I’ve tried to be straight with you. It’s you who make it impossible. I could have been—very fond of you. You must have seen that, but it wasn’t enough.” Her face, so often blurred with uncertainties, had a terrifying, abstract purity of line: the skin looked clear and bright, her eyes shone at a point beyond him. “You want what shouldn’t be given, as—as a sort of scalp. You have to have everything, and be everything. Not because you love me, to stand right with yourself.”

  The abuse of an angry child, he thought; feeling the slight external pain, the deep uncomprehended injury, that signals a mortal thrust. He felt himself to be very cool and indifferent, even causal, at the moment of abandoning himself to revenge.

  “I don’t want the past,” he said. “I don’t even want to hear about it. All I need to know is where you’re living now. You talk about truth. Lying’s like charity, it begins at home. You’ve decided you’re being fair to everyone, I gather, if you step into a living man’s bed with a dead man round your neck.”

  She drew herself back slowly on to her heels, then to her feet. Her clenched hand was pressed against her heart; seeing her knuckles whiten, he seemed to see the thing they covered stamping its circle on her flesh.

  “I can understand now,” she said clearly, “why your wife ran away.”

  There was silence. The words hung in the air with a curious unreality, as when a child brings out some obscenity it had picked up parrot-wise, and tries over for the sake of the sound.

  “You’ve saved this up for a long time, haven’t you?” she said, as if groping her way back to language she understood. “Now I’ll tell you the truth, if you want it so much. I’d unlive my whole life, if it would bring Jock back again. Every moment of it, and forget it as if it had never been. And now you know.”

  “Yes,” he said. “That seems to cover everything, doesn’t it?” This was his line, in the script as it stood, he waited, unconsciously, for some director to recognise the impossibility of the whole sequence, to shout “Cut!” and bring them back to the beginning, with the lighting changed, new dialogue, and a not incredible plot.

  She was still too, except that gropingly she put out her hand and closed it round the trunk of an ash-tree beside her. It was the tree on which it was necessary to hang one’s weight as one swung from the ledge to the rocky path. For a moment he saw reflected in her eyes his own helpless incredulity, as if the tree had been a prompter, signalling her exit from the scene which, unbelievably, had been shot and left to stand. In this instant strangely at one, they expressed the same instinctive appeal, the same dawning realisation of the irretrievable, the same desolate protest. When she spoke aloud, it was in a dead, formal little voice; it sounded like a comment on an incident many years closed.

  “I want to apologise. You’ve been very considerate, and I’ve treated you very badly. One doesn’t know oneself how one will feel. We just have to remember it would have been worse than this, if we hadn’t found out in time.”

  His silence had, like her words, the quality of retrospection.

  “I said a horrible thing to you just now,” she began again. “I didn’t mean it and it wasn’t true. It’s you who deserve someone better. I’m a drifter, you see, I realise things when it’s too late. It’s not much use to say I’m sorry now. Is it?” The flatness of her voice changed, on the last words, to a sharp insistence, flung at his silence as her endurance of it snapped suddenly and unforeseen.

  “Never mind,” he said. “I daresay I asked for most of it.”

  “No. I—” To their half-stunned minds all this futility became for the first time audible, like the loose slamming of a door on an empty room.

  Her arm bent, putting her weight on the tree, and she began to turn. At the last moment, her set face broke; her other hand groped at her neck; and he saw in the movement what he had been too fixed in unhappiness to see when she had made it once before: frustrated seeking, an unaccustomed insecurity, loss. Seeing the realisation in his face, she cried with a helpless bitterness directed nowhere, “I knew this morning … I knew something terrible would happen when I took it off.”

  He started to his feet; an involuntary physical exclamation, without aim. She shrank back. “No. It’s no use. You know it’s too late for anything. Oh, please. We must get away from each other now.”

  As she swung upward to the path, her blindly placed foot slipped; it seemed for a moment that she would fall, and, without thought, he ran forward and put out his arm to catch her. But her grip on the tree saved her balance; she found her feet, then the path above, and went into the thick trees out of sight.

  16 Straight Pull Out

  THE CLOUD-GAPS HAD closed together, making the sky a solid grey blanket over the parched and breathless land. Giving it a moment of half-dulled attention, Neil thought the leaden light must mean that the storm was about to break, though he could neither hear nor feel the signs. He looked at his watch; it was the day itself that was failing. The cliff-shadows, reinforced by trees, caught the long autumn twilight first of all. The time he had spent here, putting off the first movement that would have its counterpart of quickening in the mind, had seemed infinite, yet he had supposed it shorter by the clock. Now the hours of inertia behind him gave him a sickened sense of defilement, like a drug or a debauch. The lunch-wrappings still lay on the ledge beside him, pointing the squalor; he screwed them up, to bury them under a stone.

  Some different texture in the handful of rubbish gave him pause; he had gathered up with it the yellow cotton belt from Ellen’s dress. He remembered her saying, as she threw it off impatiently, that one could fancy it weighed pounds. It seemed no heavier than the paper with which it was entangled. Separated from her, the stuff and the white buckle looked thin and cheap; the plainness of her things and their fresh harmless colours, had deceived him for some time into thinking them good. He turned the strip over in his hand; it was, probably, essential. When he got back he must leave it somewhere, where it could be found. He stuffed it into his pocket, and put on his shirt.

  The dusk, so far, was premonitory only; beyond the trees the sea still reflected, flatly, the heavy day. He threaded the cliffs by one of the wandering paths, working gradually downward; he did not mean to return till very late. Tomorrow he supposed he would leave; but from the thought of packing and looking up. trains his stretched mind bolted with the furious revulsion of weariness; tomorrow could look after itself. He walked on, emptiness like an intolerable burden which there was no place to lay down.

  An enormous shadow stopped him, like an out-thrust hand. He looked up. Just ahead, above and below him, split in the cliff at right-angles to the sea, was its one considerable face. The near side of the cleft, on which he stood, had crumbled and broken and was overgrown like all the rest; on the far side, a hundred and fifty feet were sheer. This was the cliff of which Ellen had spoken. Seizing, then, on a pretext which had been as good as any other, he had conveniently forgotten that in no case would he have taken her there. Even if he had had a rope, it would have been criminally unjustifiable; her form was not within miles of such a climb. It would have been a thing to try with Sammy, on the right day. With vivid clearness he could see Sammy standing beside him in a characteristic pose, his weight on one hip, his head tilted up and askew, rubbing the back of his neck and saying with pleased anticipation, as he studied the face, “Looks a bit ’aughty from here, doesn’t it?”

  Everywhere dark with shadow, the grey rock was streaked more deeply by oozings of water from within. Its almost vertical pitches were broken here and there by ledges, all sloping and mostly with evil loose surfaces. Quietly and insistently, its question sucked at his emptiness; like a lover whose word is to be trusted, it promised that the vacuum should be abundantly filled. He had no sense at all of making a decision; there was simply this, and nothing else in particular, anywhere, to do.

  He climbed down the wet boulders of the gully stream, and studied it again fro
m the foot. He had on the rubber-soled, shoes he used for dry rock-climbing, worn today for lightness in the heat. Useless on a wet surface, they would restrict considerably his choice of route; but if he went back for his boots, he might meet someone, and in any case the light would be gone. Accustomed to think clearly on such matters, he confronted for a moment the fact that he had never before knowingly begun a climb with unfit equipment, and that this climb was not one for a casual approach. All this was true but irrelevant, like a timetable for some place where one does not mean to go.

  Having scraped his soles on dry earth (his passage down the stream had already made them slippery) he began to climb.

  The first pitch was moderately difficult; the holds, following the strata like the ledges, sloped downward, but not at an impossible angle and rubbers gripped them well. Though the whole of his mind seemed engaged with their problems, there was still a part remaining which tested, as it always had since his boyhood, the relationship between himself and the rock. Once always met and satisfied, more recently frustrated and hungry, in the last week unconsciously content, this instinct encountered for the first time a complete nullity. The holds were there, one leading to another; the rock was of such a type, and such a formation. He climbed like a textbook, the conventional phrases for each step forming themselves in his head.

  The first ledge offered a better stance than he had expected; the scree was superficial and easily cleared. With dry accuracy he marked a projection where, if a second man had been following, he could have belayed the rope. From here there was, or should have been, a choice of ways; but the narrow chimney which first drew his eye was slimy with water. He would have to work up by small holds to the third ledge, traverse along it, and get to a crack at the other end which looked clean and dry.

  It was when he was halfway up the next pitch that he heard, for the first time, the roll of thunder over the sea.

  In the first moment of hearing it, it said very little to him. He was not on a mountain, and carried no steel. Soon however he became aware of a nagging, then of an alarm-bell in his conscious thought. When the storm broke, there would be rain.