North Face (35 page)

“I could say the same,” he said, with the peace of a long perspective. “But it’s all over now.” For a while he consoled her in silence. Presently she recovered enough to look, rather blankly, from the chaos of the room to that of the bed. He laughed, and helped her to fish up the eiderdown and spread it out. While they were doing this, it occurred to him that, from a standpoint which it was hard to take seriously at the moment, he had been very indiscreet.

“I’m going in a minute,” he said. “God knows what time it is. You’d better get some sleep.”

“So should you.” She turned to smile at him.

The light had begun to feel hard and strident; unconsciously he had narrowed his eyes. The pulled muscles ached draggingly in his arm and side; his hand throbbed; a variety of small strains and bruises seemed to have stiffened up. One had taken these minor mishaps in one’s stride, a few years ago. Still, it had been a long day after a short night; there wasn’t much in it.

“Oh, my darling,” she said, her voice suddenly changing, “what have I been thinking of?”

“What’s the matter?” This, he remembered with dim amusement, was where he had come in.

“You’re dead tired. Why haven’t I looked after you?”

He had begun telling her not to make a fuss about nothing; but her arms felt warm, her breast soft; it was much more comfortable lying down, and there seemed no need to protest for a minute or two. A little of this
laissez-faire
revealed an overstatement: he was tired, certainly, but he wasn’t dead. That this fact had communicated itself appeared in the changed rhythm of her tenderness, deep and shy. There was a critical little pause.

After all, he thought, why this obstinacy on a point of order? It looked, in the light of the moment, merely silly, and it had become factually pointless besides. If a long arm of mischance caught up with him, perjury no longer came into it. The evidence as it stood was final; as well, then, a sheep as a lamb. He felt her hand move over his head, tentative and trusting. They were beyond the awkward intrusions of the spoken word. She was saying that it was inconceivable he should be wrong, tonight, about any of their concerns. So far he had brought her; if it seemed well to him that she should part with her virginity as a casual epilogue, after an exhausting emotional crisis, in the abrupt and flickering desire of weariness—a satisfaction as brief and trivial as the biscuit which, wakeful, one reaches from the bedside tin—then this must be the perfect, the only possible thing, and she would embrace it gladly. He had been trained for a good many years in another kind of technique which sets high premiums on tactful cooperation and the finer points of style: one did not ask a spent companion to haul one, needlessly, up the last difficult bit on a tight rope. There was a time for all things; they could, and would, do better.

Without ambiguity or misunderstanding, they settled the question between them in a wordless way; and, too tired for sharp gestures of abnegation, declined into a gentle physical sentimentality. In some late and lethargic phase of this, he felt the eiderdown wrapped tenderly round his shoulders; he had been a little cold, lying outside, and had nothing against it. Closing his eyes again, he made a mental note to be out in five minutes; it would be quite easy for someone who didn’t keep his wits about him to go to sleep.

He must nearly have dropped off, he realised presently, recalled by a twinge in his arm with a sudden start. She, poor child, had gone flat out in these few minutes; from her profound relaxation and slow quiet breathing, one would think she had been asleep for hours. Careful not to disturb her, he reached for her wrist-watch which lay near the medal under the lamp. He blinked at it, the light in his eyes. Perhaps he had it upside down. The hands stayed, however, with firm persistence, at five forty-five.

After all, he was too drowsy to work up a panic about it. Mrs Kearsey, whose piercing alarum reached him sometimes through the roof, got up at six-thirty; and, by. now, insomniacs of the earlier hours would have dropped off. He returned Ellen her eiderdown, indulged a moment of unashamed emotionalism by kissing her hair on the pillow, and put out the light as he went. The wind had got up again; somewhere a window clicked, or a door. But the passage was soaked in slumber. He went up to the roof and the iron stairs.

The cold clearness of the dawn air woke him, and he paused just below his door. After the warmth he had left, the wind struck sharply; but he was used to shelving discomfort when there was a good sky to see. This one, he thought, would be worth waiting for. Already the grey translucence in the east was paling; the moon had set; between thin bars of cloud, shadows on an upper twilight, the star of morning waited alone. It hung low, and trembled to itself in a remote soliloquy, meditating compassion or awe. As he watched, the first cloud caught the sun; its dim wreath of mist changed, slowly, to a clear and fervent profile, a pure cold incandescence growing from red to intense gold. The next cloud lit; the grey void between them was flooded with a pale, immaculate and ethereal green. Deep in this sea, Lucifer, son of the morning, faded like a liberated spirit, and died into light.

Sitting on the iron stairs, small and still among these presences, he recalled the day when he had come to Ellen on the beach with the lump of clinkered meteor in his hand. The pattern of the future, like that of the constellations, stood unchanged; but its threat of nothingness passed through him without a wound, for he was nothing, and everything, already. He was happy with the sky in its solitude, free from him and from time, and with the hills no longer troubled by his aspiration. In the remoter-seeming present, decision would be as heavy and effort as hard: but he hated nobody, he would do what he could and would face what was beyond his limit; the readiness was all. A picture came back to him of Sammy, his young ugly face tranquil in the light of a not so different morning, resting a sandwich on his knee to summarise.

We will fall into the hands of God and not into the hands of men. (The rest of the clouds were lit now, but beyond them the air, not yet bounded by its reflected blue, was transparent to the last height of space.) For as his majesty is, so is his mercy.

The gulls were waking, and, somewhere a long way off, two men shouted to one another across a field. It was too late now to get into a cold bed and count sheep; and, however he spent the time between now and breakfast, he could hardly be hungrier than he was already. Mrs Kearsey’s alarum sounded, a note of inspiration. If he arrived at the right moment on his way down to the beach, she had been known sometimes to give him a cup of her morning tea.

“I
DO NOT THINK,”
wrote Miss Searle, drawing her dressing-gown closer about her in the seven o’clock chill, “that I have ever been confronted, even in College, with a moral decision which weighed on me more. In fact I am not sure whether I am writing to you because I feel I
must
discuss it with someone of judgement and principle, or simply to clarify my own thoughts. In an issue like this, it is so easy to find two sides even to one’s own motives. One can say, for example, that these matters are for the private conscience of the people concerned, and thus give oneself the great relief of feeling no further responsibility. But then one realises that this is simply bowing to a pagan morality; that, perhaps, it is only loose-thinking opinion, and the
personal
unpleasantness, which one fears. One could not adopt this standpoint in, say, a case of theft; the criminal law would recognise one as an accessory. Surely, then, one becomes equally so under the, moral law.

“No one, it seems to me, can sufficiently condemn a woman who deliberately tempts a man at such a time; so, whatever the consequences to
her,
they can only be deserved. In the case of the man” …

She broke off; her fingers felt almost too cold to control the pen. She warmed them in the lapel of her dressing-gown, looking over what she had written; trying to make the lines on the paper fill the inward as well as the outward eye. She wanted to use them as a barrier against memory, as, two hours earlier, she had used her door as a barrier against sight. It was useless; she could still see the face she was trying to obliterate, as clearly as she had seen it in the lit doorway in the second before the light went out, drowsy and inward-looking, blurred and yet intent. The almost unseeing eyes, the tousled hair, the marks of a profound physical weariness partly smoothed by sleep—it had all been terrible to her. It was a whole world of rejected knowledge, a mine exploding security, a shaft into a darkness full of whispers, the revelation of a shame which must never, never be understood. It was life: it was death.

“In the case of the man, one may hesitate to form a personal judgement, since one cannot enter into their very different psychology; but, after all, the authorities of the Church have always been men, and have stood firmly, and I am sure rightly, against a separate standard. It would seem the height of presumption to set up one’s ignorance against their knowledge and experience.” (Considering this in some uncertainty, she crossed “and experience” out.)

“One must ask oneself, too, what future happiness either party could hope for on the foundation of a sin which must, inevitably, prevent each of them for having any respect for the other. However there is no real need to burden one’s conscience with such questions, since the ruling both of the Church and of the civil law is perfectly clear.

“There is only
one
thing which makes me hope that, perhaps even in the interval before your reply reaches me, this very painful decision may be taken out of my hands. You will remember my telling you in my first letter about a Miss Fisher whose conversation was so trying! Her efforts to attract the attention of this man to herself have been so obvious as to be most embarrassing; so that she has naturally taken a morbid (and clearly malicious) interest in all these developments. I have no doubt she will have made it her business to know about this most recent one. The question is whether one is justified in letting her take steps (as I feel sure she will) from the wrong motives, and spare oneself the ordeal of acting from the right ones. Since she will no doubt do so in any case, one’s effort would after all be superfluous. If as a result one were questioned in any investigation, of course one could only speak the truth. She loves to hear her own voice, and will no doubt make quite evident what she intends to do.

“Do please bear with this long epistle. I know how many calls you have on your time …”

She finished the letter, dressed, and took it out to the letterbox at the bottom of the road. It was almost time for breakfast. She would wait now until she heard Miss Fisher going downstairs. Much could be learned, this morning, from a little quiet observation.

Miss Fisher, throwing odd ends of bandage and lint into her wastepaper basket, reflected that it wasn’t like her to leave these messes overnight. She had brought them in from the bathroom, meaning to get rid of them immediately; but there had been something indefinably warming in their visible presence about the room. One was incurably soft, she thought. Men were a curse: careless, wrapped up in themselves, not giving a damn unless they wanted something, and as blind as bats even then. One had known all this for a good fifteen years: and still one of them had only to come along looking a bit under the weather, knocked about through his own silly fault, shiftless and guiltily casual like a kid; and there one went again, soft as tripe. You patched them up; you cared, incredibly after all this time at it, how much it hurt them; you let them see it; and if they went maudlin over you for half a minute, you felt they had done you proud. And then, the first thing you knew …

Well, thought Miss Fisher, wiping the greasy edge of the flavine cream pot and examining the inside of her sponge-bag for stains, he might have cause to remember one after all. He must have been off his head—here in the house, when there were miles of country available all day, and with that shaky alibi for the other night which the King’s proctor could almost certainly crack up. And the walls so thin you could hear almost what people said, crying and carrying-on. Probably he’d found out about the Phillips boy. But that sort always knew how to soften a man up.

If he hadn’t had the sense to remember anything else, couldn’t he have remembered that sanctimonious cat only just across the way? No wonder the male expectation of life was shorter; there wasn’t one who’d live long enough to get a woman into trouble, if some other woman weren’t fool enough to wrap him up in cottonwool.

It was at this point of her meditations that Miss Fisher, who had moved over to the window, saw Miss Searle going down the path with a letter in her hand.

So she
had
been up to something. Miss Fisher had felt it already, in every bone. Well, now one knew where one was. Suddenly, Miss Fisher felt much better.

It was one word against another, and surely to goodness they’d have to listen to the person with the room next door. If it wasn’t enough to say one had been awake all night and had never heard a sound, there’d be nothing for it but to go the whole hog in a good cause. One had been into the girl’s room at—one-thirty, two?—to ask for some aspirin, but hadn’t liked to wake her, seeing her so sound asleep. Bright moonlight—well, light enough—you could see all over the room. Not that she deserved it; but there was someone else who needed a lesson much more. It would make
her
look a bit of a fool, to be shown up trying to blacken a respectable man; she might not be so sure, after that, that all the answers came out of books.

When the case was over, at the back of the court, or in one of those corridors you saw on the films with lawyers dashing about, Miss Fisher would give her a look. No need to say anything. Just a look.

As for him, there were plenty who wouldn’t care to take the risk of saying Thanks; but he wasn’t like that. Nothing definite, of course, he wasn’t a fool. Just take one’s hand perhaps, and say—oh, well, something about having appreciated it, and making all the difference to his life. They were all alike; whatever you did for them they forgot in five minutes. One ought to have more sense and, in fact, one had. And yet …