North Face (6 page)

“Caught in the rain?” enquired Neil, his impulse to retreat yielding to a bewildered curiosity. “Well, it can be unpleasant on some pitches, but I don’t quite see—”

“It’s always coming in.” She pointed to a paragraph ending “The climbing is very exposed hereabouts, but the finish is near at hand.”

Rigidly controlling his diaphragm, Neil reflected that a good laugh ought not to be wasted in times of short supply. When he could manage, he said, “It’s only a kind of jargon, you know. Comparable with boxing journalese. It just means you don’t look down thereabouts unless you’re quite sure you want to.”

“Oh,” said Miss Fisher. A light first dawned, then dazzled. “You mean it’s a terrific precipice?”

After suppressing a slight shudder (Miss Fisher would have felt much the same on hearing the words “wonder drug”) Neil gave a cautious and qualified admission that something on these lines was meant.

Miss Fisher’s excitement mounted. She felt she was getting the principle of the thing. “So, really, all this is a way of saying that it’s frightfully dangerous?”

This revolted Neil’s sense of the proprieties too grossly to be let pass. He sat down on the arm of the sofa, and gave her a short discourse on climbing ethics.

She heard him out with careful attention, and then said, “Well, even if you only do what you feel you can manage, I shouldn’t have thought it was frightfully
safe.”

Neil found himself grinning at her. There was something bracing about her stolid commonsense; he forgave her her assault on the niceties of what was, after all, a highly mannered convention. “Neither is crossing Oxford Street,” he said, “if you come to that.”

It was now clear to Miss Fisher that she was being treated to a series of heroic understatements. The fact that he had sat down was distinctly encouraging. A maxim of hers, seldom found wanting, was, “When in doubt, get them talking about themselves.” She continued to pursue it.

“I should think it must be terribly hard work. No wonder they say Strenuous. Cutting steps in all that rock.”

“Steps?”
said Neil dizzily. “You didn’t mean
cutting
steps?”

Miss Fisher hastened to retrieve her error; it was so long since she had seen the film. “No, of course; it would take too long, wouldn’t it? I was really thinking of those iron spikes you knock in to step on.”

Neil savoured, for a second or two, a vision of the Pillar Rock triumphantly scaled on a Jacob’s-ladder of
pitons.
He locked all his muscles in resistance, but it was no good. He laughed, started to apologise, and laughed again, helpless with joy.

She seemed, he saw with relief, quite happy about it. A nice woman, and restful, he thought. “Do forgive me,” he said at length. “I think you’ve probably been reading Whymper,” and proceeded to lighten her darkness a little more. In the process, it emerged that he had been up the Matterhorn. Seeing her eyes dilate and her mouth open, he explained hastily that he had only gone up by the Zermatt route, to look at the view; but it was too late. Whymper or not, for her the Matterhorn was clearly established as the next thing to Everest, and there, unshakably, it would remain.

By now he was determined that at least he would leave her with some kind of distinction between rock-climbing and mountaineering. As he came to a pause after doing his best, he found himself thinking that he must really write and tell Sammy the one about cutting steps. It was about time he shed the habit of saving things for Sammy, after three years.

She was quick to pick up a point; from the first, he had not made the mistake of confusing her complete ignorance of the subject with stupidity. Feeling, with sudden embarrassment, that he was getting didactic (he had grown rusty in the small give-and-take of conversation) he dried up rather abruptly; but she took over at once, and they had a little gossip about the amenities of the house. She was much easier, if less stimulating to the intelligence, than Miss Searle. When she asked him if the view was good from his room in the tower, he pulled himself up just in time on the verge of offering to show it her. There were other reasons, beside the risk of misinterpretation, why this would not do.

“I wonder,” she said, “who we’ll get instead of the Winters.”

“Why, are they going?” He did not attempt to veil his cheerfulness, judging from her tone that it would not give offence.

“Yes, tomorrow, so Mrs K said.” She added, regretfully, “I don’t know who’s coming, she had to go before I could ask her.”

“Oh, well, we’ll soon know,” said Neil, successfully hiding his indifference on this head. He was tired of having dinner in hotels, which was incidentally expensive, and of inventing excuses to Mrs Kearsey for his absence; he felt grateful for the information. They parted cordially.

Upstairs, hooking up the floral art silk which she had decided to wear this evening after all, Miss Fisher considered the all-day expedition which had been almost settled for tomorrow between herself and Miss Searle. It would be, the forecast promised, very hot; too hot, probably. Miss Searle had told her, once, that she was one of those people who never dreaded solitude, so it could not disappoint her to go alone. It would be nice, Miss Fisher had decided for her own part, to take a lazy day, just sitting about reading; or talking, at the most.

Downstairs in the Lounge, Neil, still anchored by indolence to the sofa, put his climbing guide safely in an inner pocket, got out his pipe, decided that there would not be time, and started a cigarette. He was tired, and bored by the prospect of going out again. The Winters, on their last evening, would almost certainly be out too; he would have stayed in, if he had not told Mrs Kearsey this morning not to expect him. He felt, too, an unacknowledged regret, as people sometimes do for a perverse sensation they have rejected. The dream in which Lettice Winter had appeared to him last night had been unpleasant, but irritatingly incomplete … He gave his mind an impatient shake, and got up.

“Oh, Mr Langton, are you going to be in?”

It was Mrs Kearsey, looking disconcerted; her voice was pitched in the tone which, as the Latin textbooks say, expects the answer “No.” He supplied it; adding with relief, “But I shall be in tomorrow.”

She seemed pleased; he had thought she would be glad to save the food, but, realising that she must have begun to think he despised it, improvised a little flattery, which was well received. He liked people who took a pride in their jobs; perceived that her rather trying refinement hid a quite real sensitivity; and was sorry to have upset her. The result, however, was a little too good.

“Now I
knew
there was something I’m meant to ask you,” she exclaimed in the conscious manner of one who has just thought of it. “These people who are coming tomorrow; I didn’t promise any definite room. I was thinking, you could just as well come down to Mrs Winter’s room on the first floor. It’s nice for ladies to be near the bathroom; but one of these that’s coming is a gentleman, so I don’t see, really, why he should have the choice before you.”

“That’s extremely kind,” he said hastily, “but I couldn’t be more comfortable than I am.” His room in the Tower, furnished with Victorian pine displaced by the improvements below, was much less hideous than those he had glimpsed on his way downstairs. He liked, when he could not sleep, to look through the open door at the sky. Perhaps Mrs Kearsey, who had a passion for locking things at night, had noticed this habit and deplored it. He found her several good reasons for staying; and ended, as one often does in such a case, by finding one too many. “Besides, if they’re together I daresay they’d like to be on the same floor.”

“Oh, no, Mr Langton. There’s nothing of that kind about it at all. They booked
quite
independently.” Neil listened with half an ear as she explained, with intricate circumlocutions, her feelings about what his former colleagues would have called “the tone of the House.” He found slips of the kind he had just made very undermining; it had not been like him, once, to make clumsy
faux pas.
He was never sure, now, when his brain would slip a cog, or he would become too much enclosed in himself to measure other people. When she ran to a stop, he explained that he had thought they might be brother and sister, or mother and son. This was so readily, indeed remorsefully, accepted that he felt quite ashamed of it.

By the time she had gone, it was getting on for dinner-time. Without troubling to change the disreputable tweeds he had walked in all day, he went out to the
Barlock Arms.

Miss Fisher, before putting on the floral crepe, had found a bathroom free and taken her best bath-salts into it. Dusting herself afterwards with talcum powder, she looked in the mirror with a dim sense of injustice. Why was it, she wondered, that it was never till she got her clothes on that her hips looked too heavy, or her waist too thick? Her search for an answer to this recurring question had not taken her as far as the National Gallery, which she might have found comforting. But, humble before the proportions of
Vogue,
she had never thought of seeing in herself a Ceres with neglected altars in the reign of unfruitful Artemis. She only turned her smooth dimpled hips from the unkind glass, wishing they were of the kind to set off a pair of well-cut slacks.

As she opened her door to go downstairs, another door opened. She and Miss Searle almost collided on the landing. Miss Searle gave a little smile, and passed on. If Miss Fisher had known it, it was the smile with which Miss Searle would have acknowledged, if absolutely obliged, an undergraduate wearing a fancy pin in her academic cap.

The door of the Lounge had been open when, on leaving the garden, she had gone upstairs to change. She had had a brief but full view of Miss Fisher, whose manner had been not only ostentatious and crude but almost personally embarrassing. By it the little exchange of amenities on the lawn, which had been pleasant and civilised, was indefinably cheapened; at least, if a definition was possible, Miss Searle did not attempt it. Her inner censor was almost faultlessly efficient. Comfortably unaware of its activities she failed also to define her pleasure in the fact the roses on Miss Fisher’s dress were crimson, and her earrings scarlet.

Allowing, by mutual consent, an interval of a few yards to separate them on the stairs, they entered the dining-room almost simultaneously. Miss Searle, who was last, heard Miss Fisher say, “Well, this
is
a surprise,” and hung back distastefully; a repetition of this evening’s performance, she thought, would really be too much. It was Mrs Winter, however, whom Miss Fisher had rallied in this friendly way. For the first evening this week, both she and her daughter were in.

Miss Searle disliked Mrs Winter for the reasons which had caused Miss Fisher to pity and like her. She was a comfortable matronly body who, determined to be a social asset to her family, had self-sacrificingly made herself smart. Miss Searle thought her peroxide and rouge and built-up stays both vulgar and ridiculous; Miss Fisher thought so too, but recognised in them also, as Miss Searle did not, the pious pelican’s bleeding breast. Mrs Winter had once confided to Miss Fisher that she wanted to give her little daughter every chance, and it had nearly made Miss Fisher cry, when she had stopped herself from laughing. After years of drudgery in the Services, Mrs Winter had gone on to explain, it was time the poor child had a little fun.

The poor child was beside her now, her silk hair brushed back from a satin tan, her mouth, like red velvet, scroll-shaped in a face composed of fine flourishes and curls. She was leaning back in her chair, a pose which showed, under her cambridge-blue dress, breasts that lifted like those of an angel at the prow of a ship. Miss Fisher was ready to allow that she was fond of her mother. She was smiling at her now; a considerate, daughterly smile which seemed to say that nothing had really changed, that if the bedtime confidences had ceased these last few years it was only because there was, after all, so very little to tell.

Miss Searle, assenting politely to Mrs Winter’s opinion of the weather, wondered why young women spoiled their natural charm with artificiality. She thought this quite sincerely; to her, naturalness in young women implied obliviousness of their sexual function, the more oblivion, the closer to nature. Consciousness was artificiality; emphasis she would have described as vulgar, her vocabulary not including a more exact term. It will be seen therefor that her estimate of Miss Winter (whose taste in dress was much better than Miss Fisher’s) was quite a charitable one. Part of the blame, Miss Searle thought, attached to the mother.

It was at this point of her reflections that Mrs Kearsey, coming in with the sweet, said to the company at large, “I wish I’d thought to ask Mr Langton if he was going to be late back. He tells me, you know, when he remembers, he’s really very good about it. But he forgets sometimes, and then one doesn’t know what to do about the locking-up.”

“He’s been out walking all day,” said Miss Fisher, forestalling Miss Searle’s diffidence by half a second. “He didn’t sound to me as if he meant to make a night of it. I shouldn’t think he’d be long.”

Perhaps from an instinctive avoidance of one another’s glance, they both looked across the table. Miss Winter had been displaying the suspended animation of fish when the water freezes, and highly charged young women surrounded by their own sex. Now, she did not look up or move; she was merely all there. It was as if a little light had been quietly switched on under a crystal shade. Her mother had not altogether missed it. One could see the pelican conquer, not for the first time, an unformed questioning. All was well, her eyes concluded; and, in fact, very nice.

Miss Searle got up, and went over to the sideboard. “Miss Fisher,” she said, “these gooseberries look delicious. Do let me give you some.”

“Thanks aw’fly,” said Miss Fisher with sudden warmth. “I don’t expect they’ve got enough sugar, though. Have a bit of mine; truly, I’ve got lots.”

Miss Searle had strong principles about eating the rations of others. She dealt with them, this time; by accepting gratefully and making lavish passes with a few grains.