North Face (16 page)

“No, I’m all right. Please have your clothes.” She held the shirt shakily towards him, setting her teeth to keep them quiet.

“I’m not cold; it’s a hot day really, you know. Look, tell me where your things are and I’ll bring them over.” She roused herself to give him a landmark, and he found them without much trouble. She did not look fit yet, he thought, to leave. “Can you manage?” he asked, trying not to feel an awkwardness which would communicate itself to her. “I can give you a hand, it doesn’t matter.” He tried to think up some further reassurance, but each phrase as he considered it sounded more offensive than the last.

“No, I can, thank you.” She spoke with as simple a courtesy as if he had offered to carry a parcel for her. He felt the same shiver of compassion that had moved him when she said that she was sorry. “I feel quite all right now. You go and get dressed yourself.” It was clearly impossible to convince her that she, and not the air, was cold; he left her in peace.

He was relieved to find, when he got back, that she had had a woollen sweater in her rucksack. She still looked very pale and pinched; but as soon as he got there, she scrambled to her feet and said, “Let’s go.”

“Not yet; it’s too long a climb. Stay in the sun and get warm again.”

“Climbing makes you warm. I’d rather go.”

Neil looked over his shoulder; the tide had receded, and the thing at its edge was almost exposed. He moved himself into her line of vision. “All right. We’ll rest on the way.” He picked up the rucksacks and, to keep her from looking round as much as to support her, put his arm round her waist. Most of his thoughts were elsewhere. He had just remembered something she had told him at their first meeting, and was wondering what, if anything, could possibly help.

When they reached the track, which was too narrow for two, she freed herself and went ahead. “Don’t go so fast,” he said, for the pace she was making would have been foolish for anyone in the best condition. She said absently, “Sorry,” and slowed down for a few yards, working up to the same speed again. A couple of hundred feet up, they came to a grassy shelf where the trees opened, and a splash of sun came through. He caught her arm.

“That’s enough, now. Sit down.”

She settled herself obediently on the thin grass, panting a little. The beach was hidden from here; a rounded recession of treetops showed only a silvery strip beyond them, bounded by the far grey coast of Wales.

“Why not break the rule,” he said, “and have a cigarette?”

“It isn’t a rule.” She smiled quite convincingly. “I’d like one in a minute. I think I shall have to do my hair first. I’m sorry to be so messy; but the tangles dry in if you don’t.”

“Carry on,” said Neil. He began to add, “I’m used to it,” and changed it to “I don’t mind.”

A comb was certainly urgent. She flung the rat-tailed mop forward over her face, and worried through it with dogged concentration. If one had planned for her a pose to underline her most immature aspect, he thought, it would have been this. The combing, on top of the salt and damp, left her hair darkened and almost straight. Nothing but a serge gym-tunic was wanting to complete an illusion which Neil, from his own angle, would have been ready to accept. The last half-hour, however, had shifted his perspective; his own angle had lost importance.

When she was ready he gave her the cigarette; he noticed that she could hardly keep it steady against his lighter. They smoked for a few minutes in silence, looking out at the trees and sea. After all, he thought, interference was futile; what could anyone do? Nothing except perhaps harm. Better leave things to their own movement. But in the half-relief which this thought engendered, he knew that it was his own movement, or lack of it, that he wanted to let alone; that this had become in most things his attitude of mind. She had told him this morning what she thought of it; it seemed a little ironical that she should be exposed to the first effects of her own advice.

He took a quick look at her profile, remarking again how a certain delicate strength, integral to its structure, was spoiled by an unfinished look which suggested not arrested growth but a kind of defeat. Pausing still irresolute, he considered the hopelessness of words: words which are the strait-jacket of the imagination, the sandpaper blunting all fine edges; which trample out ecstasy like a heavy corps-de-ballet dancing
Giselle.
Words, the supreme anaesthetic, he thought; and remembered the failures and aspirations of his youth. From this he came to the idea that it worked both ways; now was the time to make an asset of a liability. She would think him a thick-skinned moron, of course. But never mind.

“We shall have to see the police about this, I’m afraid,” he said. She looked round; he could see that this external fact came strangely to her; he had expected it would. “Don’t worry, though, it’s only a formality and I expect I can do most of it. You’ll have to make a deposition, that’s all. They’re used to it, on a coast like this.”

She leaned back, easily, against a slab of rock behind her. “Yes,” she said with brisk naturalness, “of course, they must be. I think I’d better come along with you; they’re sure to want me sooner or later. We may as well get it tidied up straight away.”

Thank God, Neil was thinking, I didn’t let this go. He did not pause to examine his own sense of urgency, which was born of a realisation that she was not the Sensitive Type. He had been in love with one of these in his early twenties, and it had taken him eighteen painful months to discover that she could get over anything in half an hour, by the fortifying process of covering everyone in range with a guilt-laden sense of their own inadequacy. It had been like the enormous mount which lets no one forget that the small weak etching it encloses is Art. This was something else. This determined cunning, as of an injured animal trying to hide itself in a protective background, was something he recognised. He knew it, too well.

The bracing strain of responsibility, which he had almost lost the feel of, tightened in his mind; but he did not notice it. He felt misunderstood and lonely, as people do when they must handle a hurt animal that only knows the pain.

“I’ll see them first,” he said, “and find out what they want. Then you can do your stuff if you have to. There can’t be much to investigate, though. He had on his parachute-harness. Must have been posted as missing weeks ago.”

She looked round at him quickly; he had been ready for it, and met her eyes. “Hard luck on the poor bloke; he probably flew through the war without a scratch.”

He wondered what he had better do if at this point she simply got up and walked off; he would probably have done it himself. Instead she said, with a flat kind of submission, “The war hasn’t been over very long.”

“Too long,” he said. “Much too long. I’ve no special knowledge but I know that much.”

“I forgot I’d told you.” She seemed to re-discover her cigarette and drew on it, looking away.

“You know, don’t you, there’s no conceivable possibility?”

“I suppose not.”

“There’s no supposition about it,” said Neil sharply. In his determination to convince, he used his disciplinary classroom voice; she looked, for a moment, almost startled. “Sorry,” he said. “But you’ve got to snap out of this, you know.”

“Please,” she said, “you mustn’t bother about me. I’ve been enough trouble already. I can’t think why every time I run into you I have to make an embarrassing nuisance of myself.”

“Now look here.” Neil was getting unconsciously into his stride. Boys too have their painful reserves, and piercing them had sometimes been his thankless but necessary job. “You can drop all that stuff. I’m supplying all the nuisance-value at the moment. I know that. You’re wondering why in God’s name I haven’t the elementary tact to shut up, and I know that too. But—”

“Of course I’m not wondering,” she interrupted him. “I’m not such a fool as that.”

In the presence of this quiet comprehension, he felt the master’s-study approach jolted somewhat out of gear. “All right, then, we know where we are. I want to bust this up for you before it has time to sink in. The more flat-footed I am about it all, probably the better. There’s a poem of Brooke’s about someone shooting off a stream of platitudes at a crucial moment … No, of course, people your age don’t read him.”

“‘The view from here is very good.’ It is, too, isn’t it?” She sat forward hugging her knees, as if she were fighting her own listlessness. “No, you’re perfectly right. And you’re right in what you haven’t said, too.”

“Such as?”

“That all this personal stuff’s completely insignificant.”

“I haven’t said it, and I wasn’t going to.”

“No, I know you weren’t, because there’s no answer. We know it’s true and it’s at the back of everything, now. This—this feeling that one hasn’t the right to feel.”

He was shocked into momentary silence; she was too young for this. Presently he said, “My dear, that’s the sickness of the age. Let’s stick to the personal, where we can do something, even if it isn’t much.”

“You can’t do that after you’ve seen the other.” She locked her hands more tightly round her knees; he thought that she was shivering and said, “Are you cold? If so we’ll move.”

“Not really; the sun’s quite hot here. You want to make me talk about this, don’t you? Well, I will, why not? What’s happened is that I’ve seen a corpse in the water, and it happened to have flying kit on or something that seemed like it, so now I know how Jock looked.”

“Yes, go on.” He only spoke to give her some feeling of human company.

“Well, what about it? A few years ago I could have felt it was rather out of the way; the sort of thing that makes you say to yourself ‘I mustn’t see life like that, I must get back to normal.’ Only now it
is
normal; it’s trivial even. Someone who’d been tortured at Dachau, or crawled round the ruins at Hiroshima with their bone-marrow rotting away, would say I didn’t know what trouble meant. And they’d be right. A little thing like this is just enough to start your imagination off, and you can go on till it stops and still there’s more. And if it had even taught people anything … but already they’re deciding in what circumstances they’ll go on to something worse. How can one cope with oneself, or try to get straightened out, when it’s not worth taking seriously? What can one do?”

“I don’t know,” said Neil slowly. “The nearest thing, I suppose.” He moved up to her, sat back against the rock, and drew her into his arms. “Don’t worry about this. You’re cold and I haven’t got a coat to give you, that’s all.”

Except for the first hesitation of adjusting her balance to his, she made no resistance at all. She accepted him as she might have done the coat for whose absence he had apologized. She was cold, as he had guessed, with the deadly devitalised cold of nervous exhaustion, and he was warm like any other healthy animal on a day like this: he could feel her absorbing the warmth in instinctively as a starved cat does milk, and when he held her more tightly it was only to be sure that she got enough of it. She felt a little like a cat, he thought, with sharp slender bones under a supple coat of flesh; presently she began to relax, as a cat does that has been brought in out of the weather.

“I don’t make much of a Brains Trust,” he said. “You ask for bread and I give you a stone, or the next thing to it. And if I’d had a double whisky handy, I’d have given you that.”

“I know you would.” He could hear a dim smile in her voice.

“If I’d realised the state you were in I’d have done something about it sooner. You still feel like a fish; come over a bit more.”

It was no surprise to him, now, that she took it so simply. She was too drained for anything as vital as a sexual impulse to have any reality even in her imagination, and it had none for him either because of this.

“I felt so awful,” she murmured with vague apology, “and you’re so beautifully warm.”

“You want a hot drink inside as well. We can get some tea at that farm on the top. Comfortable? You know, none of this is as new as we think, all you were saying; the scale’s altered, that’s all. It’s all in
Hamlet
and
Lear.
Lear was old and rotten with-power; he took one good look and broke up … I’m only talking for the sake of it, go to sleep if you’d rather.”

“No, I shall keep thinking anyway. Don’t stop.”

“Hamlet was young, with phenomenal guts. He turned down every possible way of escape one after the other, beginning where Lear left off. The rest was silence. It still is. But we’ve been escaping into louder and louder noises for three hundred odd years … If our trained nurse, Miss What’s-it, could hear this conversation, she’d tell me I ought to be shot.”

“Perhaps she would. But she’d be wrong for once.”

“Hamlet moves in on all of us at last, like the ghost of his own father.

Dost thou not come thy tardy son to chide,

That, laps’d in time and passion, lets go by

Th’important acting of thy dread command?

“You didn’t talk this on the beach,” she said.

“No? I must be doing it now because it’s so obviously the ideal moment, when you’re all in and need to rest.”

“It is a rest, somehow,” she said. “I don’t know why.”

A cloud crossed the sun, and by contrast the air at once seemed cold. It caught her just as she had stopped shivering and made her start again; and, as instinctively as she might have pulled a coat together, she pressed herself against him. He held her firmly, and continued to hold her after the sun was out, and her shivering had ceased, and the contact of her body had begun to be warm instead of chill. Suddenly it became apparent to him that the present arrangement was outlasting its workability, and had better stop.

“I’m going to take off the blanket now,” he said, “or we shan’t make this farm in time for tea.”

“Yes, it must be getting late.” But she was leaned too far off her balance to move until he let her go. He had forgotten this when he spoke; or perhaps remembered it.

“Feeling warmer?” he said.

“Yes.” In the second’s delay which he had meant should not happen he felt the sudden, startled thumping of her heart. He got to his feet quickly, pulling her with him.