North Face (25 page)

“If he cared so little, why couldn’t you have signed it?”

“It wasn’t my story. Besides, Sammy had the sales-appeal. He’d climbed on Everest. His name’s nearly as big a draw as Shipton’s or Smythe’s.”

“Yes,” she said. “It is, now.”

“Let’s get back to brass tacks. What I’m leading up to is this. Sammy never married. When he was killed, it turned out that he’d left the royalties and all the rights to me. It sold about fifteen thousand, and they’re’ reprinting when they can get the paper, I believe. You don’t generally ask a woman to marry you, and tell her you’re chucking up your means of livelihood, all in the same breath. That’s the reason I brought all this up.”

Disregarding the conclusion, she said, “You’ll never get away with it. Hasn’t it occurred to you that you’ve got a style? I’d know it anywhere.”

“That was eight years ago. It’s different now.”

“You’ve been writing since?”

“I had a rather uneventful war, you know. It’ll need a good deal of going over before I do anything with it; how I’ve got the gall to ask you to take a chance on it, I don’t quite know.”

She was looking at him, and had been for some time, with a clear unselfconscious directness; she seemed to have forgotten about herself so that this reminder still passed her by.

“And if you hadn’t wanted to explain about money, I suppose you’d never have told me.”

“About Sammy, you mean?” He thought it over. “Hard to say. I’ve told no one else. Human nature being what it is, I daresay I should have intended not to tell you, and eventually spilled it out in bed at three in the morning.”

Feeling so much at home with her now, he had run on without thinking. Her startled blush, and sudden shrinking into herself, pulled him up with something of a jolt.

“Sorry, my dear,” he said. “That wasn’t meant for a pass. Just a train of thought.” She had turned it now into something more; but there was no need to tell her that.

“I know.” With what he could see was a considerable effort, she looked up again. “I should never do for you. You—you’re far too straight.”

“Look, darling, forget that for now. It was just a manner of speaking. I’m not trying to run you off your feet. We’ve still got a bit of time here, to start getting acclimatised. Camp Three.” Uncertainly, she returned his smile. “I won’t ask you again for a day or two; we’ll just take life as it comes. All right?”

“All right.” Breaking off a piece of heather, she twisted it between her fingers; then threw her hair back (there had been no time, this morning, to replace the broken slide), and said with such difficulty that it made her voice sound almost gruff, “I’ll tell you one thing. I shall never marry anyone, if I don’t marry you. I know that. I couldn’t have known you, and marry another person.”

“May I have that, please?” said Neil. She had been playing unconsciously with-the heather in her hand, and only seemed to become aware of it when he took it from her. She watched him with a blank kind of interest, as if she expected him to botanise on it, or perform an experiment. When he put it in his pocket-book, it seemed to take her entirely by surprise.

He wanted to say, “Do you love me?” He had been sober enough, through last night’s foolishness, to be afraid of asking her then. Now he was afraid she would take it for an attempt to commit her, and a betrayal of the truce he had just declared. In the end he only said, “Better be going, I suppose. If we’re late for lunch, we shall just about put the lid on it with Mrs K.” He got up, and pulled her after him.

As they walked on, she began again to talk about the book. She evidently, knew it well. He would have had more pleasure in this if he had not guessed whose gift it had been, but tried not to let himself think about it. In any case, something else had come into his mind. It was true that she was the first person he had told; the first without exception. In a moment of abrupt revelation, he understood why. He had trusted Susan with everything of his own, and it had seemed final, at the time. He had never owned to himself the instinct which had kept him from trusting her with something of Sammy’s.

They had come to the stile. He was about to step over, to give Ellen a hand from the far side, when she caught him back by the arm. Roused from his thoughts, he turned to her quickly; but she did not move towards him, and he dropped his hands.

“I know we ought to get back,” she said. “But you told me something, and there’s something I ought to tell you. Not the same kind of thing. I wish it were.”

Neil leaned back against the stile. He found his hand had closed on the wood in a betraying grip, and loosened it quickly.

“Yes?” he said evenly. “What is it?”

“It’s about the man who was here the first evening I came.”

Before he thought, he had said “Oh—that.”

She looked at him questioningly. “What did you think it was going to be?”

“Nothing. I’d no idea. Carry on.”

“We pretended when we got here that neither of us had known the other was coming. That was just to look better. Really I was going to—to have an affair with him.”

“Well, I knew that, of course.”

He had thought this would help her along; but she looked so lost that he added, “Don’t worry, though; you put it over all right with the others. The don believed it implicitly.”

She said at last, “You knew all the time?”

“Why, yes.” He put an arm round her and settled her against the stile beside him. “You know, I saw you next morning, too.”

“Yes, of course. You know I—I didn’t, in the end?”

“I hoped not, for your sake. Stop shivering, darling. There’s nothing to get in a state about.”

She said, slowly, “Are you telling me now that you weren’t sure, and yet …”

He wanted to tell her that he had been grateful for being given something outside himself to think about, but found that he could not begin on that; he doubted if he would ever be able to. “I knew that whatever had happened it couldn’t have been more than a—well, a painful irrelevance. That’s the essential, I suppose.”

“I wish I could make you realise,” she said under her breath, “that you’re too good to get mixed up with me.”

“Do try not to talk such—” In the stress of the moment he used an Army word, and hastily apologised; but she only laughed, as people do when something lowers their tension. “Don’t tell me the rest unless you like,” he said. “It doesn’t matter.”

“I’d rather finish it now. You see, after Jock died, I found that—that I couldn’t feel anything about anyone.”

He looked away. It had not been only for her sake that he had said she need not go on.

“It wasn’t proud of it, don’t think that. Jock wouldn’t have let himself go if I’d been killed; he was too much alive. Besides, other people had put up with worse things and not thrown in their hand. I thought I’d better try and get over it. No one had taken notice of me, before Eric did; men don’t when you’re quite uninterested—unless you’re a beauty, I suppose. I was trying not to be a dead loss at some party, and he started then. He’s attractive, on the surface … you needn’t make a face, I wasn’t expecting you to agree. It seemed to me that if I ran away from this without giving it a chance, it would be rather defeatist. So in the end I agreed to come away with him here platonically … No, you can keep that one too. I know it’s very funny if you’ve read Plato, but Eric hadn’t so he knew what I meant.”

“Don’t tell me you took one good look at him and thought he’d stick to it.”

“No, but I thought he’d be straight. Of course there was a kind of understanding left open that if it went really well it might end differently. But what happened was that the first night, he turned up in my room as a matter of course. He thought I expected it.”

“Oh,” said Neil. “I see.” He remembered her wretchedness, and wished desperately that he could see the event as anything but an embarrassing, trivial contretemps. It was no use; he was like a man who, after swallowing Indian curry, is asked to pronounce on a light wine. As an actor struggles to get into a part, he tried to make himself twenty-five, twenty-one, nineteen. “That must have been bloody,” he said.

“I knew you’d understand; a lot of people wouldn’t. It was finding out that I’d got as far involved as that with someone who not only didn’t know if I was speaking the truth, but simply didn’t care. It was like suddenly knowing one had some squalid disease. To have come down to that—and then to remember.”

This, he realised now, was what he had been waiting for from the start. He said nothing. His face was well trained, and reliable.

“I tried to laugh it off in a way that wouldn’t hurt his feelings. But he felt I’d let him down, and said … well, I can’t tell you that. I didn’t guess till then how a lot of people live. I shouldn’t have said what I did to him afterwards—one finds it hard to believe that anything
can
get through. He didn’t mean any harm, as he saw it. I expect the fact was, he thought I was used to it.”

“A perceptive type,” said Neil, suddenly angry.

“Don’t let’s talk about it any more. It seemed worse than ever after I’d met you.”

This time she was not passive to his kiss; she returned it, with an inexperienced attempt of ardour. At first he tried to believe in it; but last night had been too real to let him make mistakes afterwards. She was grateful for his understanding, and determined to reward it. Again he could not tell the quality of her inward resistance. It was not repulsion, nor indifference; such certainties do not admit of error. Rather it was as if she took fright at the first stirring of passion, not in him but in herself, and killed it wilfully, unhappy at failing him but by some stronger compulsion continuing to fail. He had a moment’s impulse to try and force a response from her; but his wits came to his aid in time, and he let her go. As he released her, she reached up and gave him a swift, parting kiss. It felt like an act of expiation.

She moved off towards the stile; but he checked her with an absent movement, while he thought what to say. It was simple enough, after all.

“This seems to have brought us to another thing we’d better get sorted out. I think myself that the idea of trying it out before marriage has a good deal to be said for it. Not that it tells you everything, God knows, but I’ve watched one or two disasters among people I know that it might have staved off.” She had been facing him when he began, and she continued to face him. Suppressing a moment’s temptation to tell her that he wasn’t a firing-squad, he went on, “But in case you’re wondering, after this other thing, what to expect from me at any moment, I’m telling you now so that we’ll know where we are. This whole divorce racket is just a joke in poor taste, but all the same, I’m seeing it through till the official deadline. What I want to avoid is any chance of a situation in which our future—and three other people’s—is going to depend on my committing perjury. The idea doesn’t attract me, and I shouldn’t be very good at it. That’s all. I just thought you might like to know.”

Her strained suspense had made all this something of an effort. Now, without warning, her face crumpled. He had forgotten, among the morning’s difficulties, how charming her smile would be when she was really amused.

“Thank you,” she said, “for telling me you wouldn’t be very good at committing perjury.” She hesitated, and put a shy hand on his arm. “Darling, you are a fool.” He reached for her, but she was too quick for him, and went smartly over the stile leaving him to follow.

They both walked the next quarter-mile of road in a certain degree of abstraction. Presently, however, Ellen remarked in rather a subdued voice, “We’re almost there.”

“Good lord. Yes, so we are.”

Their pace became perceptibly less brisk; presently, by tacit consent, they stopped altogether.

With an air of authority which he did his best to make convincing, Neil said, “I think it will be the best plan if you go and have lunch at the hotel. I’ll meet you afterwards of course. Then—”

Ellen stood back on her heels.
“Really,
Neil. What
do
you take me for? If you think I’m going to lurk in a hotel while you take on all those women single-handed—”

“Well, we can’t both talk at once, in any case. Can’t you trust me not to make a mess of it?” This struck him as distinctly subtle.

“Of course we shall make the most ungodly mess of it, together or separately. So we might just as well do it together. I mean, it isn’t as if we could
feel
like casual acquaintances who’ve been annoyingly stranded, is it?”

“No,” said Neil, wishing they were on the downs again; cars were passing at ten to the minute. “But all the same—”

“Besides, I don’t want to have lunch by myself when I could be having it with you. Come on, or we’ll be late.”

After this conversation, it was natural that they reached Wier View in a state of heroic resolution, each privately at concert-pitch and determined to carry off the situation with brilliant aplomb in support of the other. Fate was unlikely to resist such a target for anticlimax. The hall, the dining-room, the Lounge, met them with indifferent emptiness.”

“Of course,” said Ellen with determined reasonableness, “people do go out, this time of the day. I don’t know why we should expect them to be all lined up in the hall.”

The room vacated by Mr Phillips had been taken, the day after he left, by an old gentleman of retired military cast, an overflow from the hotel where his family was staying. He had all his meals there, and had thus remained a complete stranger to the Wier View guests. He now made a leisurely progress down the stairs, keying up their expectation (for he was a little man with a light tread) for several long seconds before he appeared in sight. Seeing them standing-at-ease below him, he gave them a courteous but rather dissatisfied inspection (as if, thought Neil, they had been foreign troops whose deficiencies had to be treated with tact) acknowledged with clipped correctness their tardy greetings, and trotted out, leaving final deflation behind Mm.

The clock made it, after all only ten minutes to lunch time.

“I suppose,” said Ellen at last, “we’d better go and get tidy.”

Neil completed this process rapidly (his room-mate of the night had generously lent him a razor in the morning). Feeling firm and resourceful, though a little underhand, he hurried past Ellen’s door and made his way down to the back of the house. He had never been, so far, into the kitchen. Perhaps the last five minutes before lunch might not be the perfect moment; but it was the man’s job to break the ice, and he was going to do it.