The Fall (10 page)

“Well, I’m going to take the job,” I said.

“Do what you like,” she repeated, and I realized that in some ill-defined way I was being disloyal.

So the next day I boarded the train to Llanbedr again and took the same bus up to Gilead House, and there was Caroline already
at work in the games room with music from a portable record player — a stack of forty-fives beside it — thumping out into the
dust-laden air.

“Diana didn’t mind?” she asked.

Mendaciously, I shook my head.

“That’s fine then.”

We worked in silence, more or less, with Caroline giving instructions every now and again. I carried broken chairs and an
ancient mattress and other rubbish down awkward back stairs and out into the garden; I helped strip wallpaper. The music set
the emptying room reverberating. I watched her, this strange other presence, and hoped she didn’t notice my look. I saw the
outline of her breasts inside her shirt. I saw grime on her face where she had wiped sweat from her forehead with the back
of her hand, and dark stains of sweat growing beneath her arms. That was disturbing, the discovery that she could sweat just
as I did. She wasn’t as she had seemed when she had come to stay in our hotel all that time ago. She wasn’t brass and brittle;
she was sandy and blurred, softened by time and fashion, paradoxically younger and more accessible — more or less the same age
as my mother, yet younger by far.

At the end of the day, she drove me to the station in the Mercedes. I’d never been in a car like that before: tan leather
upholstery and walnut veneer. The interior smelled of her perfume, that blend of things that I couldn’t decipher. She glanced
at me from time to time and smiled. As I opened the door of the car to step out into the station forecourt, she leaned across
the seat and handed me two envelopes. “This one’s for you; the other’s a letter for your mother.”

I opened my envelope on the train. Inside was one pound, ten shillings in two notes. Absurdly I felt demeaned, as though my
work should have been given for free.

“Five shillings an hour,” my mother observed tartly. “That’s generous.” She opened the envelope with her name on it, scanned
the letter inside, and then tucked it away. “Meg,” she said. That was all. The single syllable carried with it a strange tone
of impatience, as well as suspicion and faint regret.

“What did she say?”

“She said what a good worker you are. How like your father. ‘Quite a dutiful Scot’ were her words.”

“Did she know Father?” I knew almost nothing of him: a few photographs, a few anecdotes, a letter at Christmas and another
on my birthday, nothing more.
Dear boy,
he used to write, almost as though he had forgotten my name. I think my mother feared that as I grew up I would decide to
go in search of him and would thus unravel the intricate knot of their separation. I think she feared that she might lose
me to him.

“Of course she did. Meg was one of the bridesmaids at our wedding.”

That fact startled me. I didn’t know what to do with it, what it meant. My mother’s wedding seemed so long ago, an event that
had happened to other people in another age. But when asked about it she unearthed a photograph album, and sure enough there
they were, those ghosts from the past: my father, blunt and prematurely balding (looking about fifty I thought), wearing the
kilt and a black velvet jacket; my mother, unexpectedly pretty in a long white dress with a train thrown carelessly around
her feet; and that other figure, brown hair permed in the fashion of the time, the shoulders of her dress cut wide, her smile
faintly knowing: Meg.

I thought of her. I thought of the sweat beneath her armpits and the loose shifting of her breasts inside her shirt. In my
room I examined my face in the mirror, looking for signs that I was something other than a mere child, something that might
be attractive to Caroline Matthewson. The metamorphosis of adolescence was a slow and painful process. Enough hair grew on
my upper lip to warrant shaving once or twice a week. There was a faint beard down the side of my jaw. There was a small constellation
of acne spots across my forehead and a gathering of them beside my mouth. Shag spots. It was said that masturbation encouraged
them: chocolate, fried food, and masturbation. No wonder there was a national epidemic.

How many times did I visit the Matthewson house that summer? A dozen, maybe — a precise number with vague borders. Once, she
was not even there, the absence of the white Mercedes conspicuous in the driveway. Once, there were friends visiting, a couple
from the United States with loud clothes and a carefully wrapped and decorated daughter who avoided my eye when we were introduced,
as though she had been warned about the behavior of the natives and knew them to be dangerous. Sometimes Caroline smiled distantly
at me when I arrived and left me alone — to dig out the border in the walled garden, to shift garbage from an outbuilding, to
light a bonfire of all the combustible trash that I had gathered together. Sometimes she seemed to have time for me, or time
for the work that I was doing. “Why in God’s name didn’t we do this earlier?” she exclaimed more than once.

One morning, when I was working on my own in the games room, Caroline called up the stairs to me. “It’s Jamie. Robert, are
you there? It’s Jamie.” Expecting to see him, I ran downstairs. But it was only his disembodied voice on the telephone that
she held out to me, not Jamie himself coming in at the front door, eighteen years old now and so changed from when we had
last been together. On the phone he sounded oddly indifferent. “Hi, how you doing?” And lower-pitched, adult really.

“How are you?”

“Bored. Hey, you get my card?”

“Yes.”

“You didn’t reply.”

“I didn’t have your address.”

“You could have got it from my mum.”

She stood there, just beside me, close enough for me to get a breath of that perfume. “Why didn’t you get in touch last Easter?”
I countered.

He ignored the question. “I climbed the Jungfrau and the Eiger, you know that? The Mittellegi Ridge. And you know what? The
first British ascent of the Nordwand was only last autumn. Can you imagine that? Maybe I’ll do that one day.”

There was an awkward pause while I searched for something to say. The word
Nordwand
meant nothing to me, but I didn’t want to ask. The line crackled ominously, like the lightning of a distant storm.

“Look, get my new address from my mum, okay? I’m going to university in autumn. We’ll be in touch.”

Would we? I felt privileged that he had even mentioned the possibility. I handed the phone back to Caroline. “I’ll get back
to work,” I said. She smiled distractedly, still talking on the phone to her son, who was three thousand miles away, saying
look after yourself, don’t get sunburned, things like that. I suppose I felt privileged to be admitted to the Matthewson family,
at least in some lesser, surrogate role.

One day she was going through an old trunk, and she called me over. “Look what I’ve found. Guy’s old notebook. Jamie will
love this.” It had a black cover and marbled endpapers. I looked over her shoulder, breathing in her scent while she turned
the pages. The entries were in blue-black ink, painstakingly inscribed in an even, perfect script:

Helyg. March 1941:

Clogwyn y Grochan — Brant (Very Severe), John B 2nd

Carreg Wastad — Crackstone Rib (Severe)

Dinas Mot — the Nose (Very S), with JME

Milestone B. Soap Gut & Chimney (Severe)

Tryfan — Grooved Arêête / Belle Vue Bastion (V Severe); Munich climb (without the piton!) (Very S).

Words, terms, jargon. They meant nothing to me. And what, in God’s name, was
Soap Gut?
It sounded fatty and slimy and rather revolting.

“Those are the rock climbs he did.” She looked up at me. “What do you think?”

I didn’t know what I thought. I thought he was a hero. I thought Jamie was lucky to have a hero for a father. I thought that
my own father — stout, Scottish, and distant — was a poor substitute, even for a dead one. Caroline put the book aside. Among
the papers and files in the trunk, there was also another book, a published one with a battered dust jacket:
Kangchenjunga, the Sacred Peak.
She flicked through the pages and stopped at one of the plates and showed it to me.
Guy Matthewson, the last photograph
was the caption. A roughly bearded face grinned cheerfully at the camera. He was sunburned on his cheeks, and his lips were
chapped. His goggles were pushed up onto his balaclava, and the rings of pale skin around his eyes gave him a faintly clownish
appearance. I found it strange that you could grin like that with your death only a day or two away; as though you ought to
have some kind of premonition.

“There,” she said, looking at me. What was I to make of her expression? Did she want sympathy? Did she want admiration? Did
she still want consolation after more than a decade? It was hard to relate her to a man who climbed mountains, who had a battered,
weather-scorched face and who died in the cold on some distant Himalayan peak. “He was a wonderful man,” she said softly.
I felt a mixture of embarrassment and jealousy, jealousy over a man long dead who could still evoke this emotion. There almost
seemed to be tears in her eyes.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

She blinked and wiped at her eyes with the back of her wrist. “Nothing,” she said. “Dust.” And maybe I was wrong and it had
been dust.

On another occasion she cried, “Hey, listen to this,” and put a record on the player. It was Chubby Checker, twisting once
again. Amid laughter I watched her dancing there in the middle of the half-empty games room, absurdly, her hips revolving,
her legs writhing like snakes. Fascinated, laughing, sweating with embarrassment and desire, I watched her.

“Come on. Join me.”

There was a moment when I might have danced with her. There was a moment when the possibility beckoned. But the song came
to an end (a mere two minutes, thirty seconds), and she took the record off the turntable and smoothed her jeans down over
her narrow hips and laughed either at me or at herself, or maybe at both of us together as we stood awkwardly there in the
middle of the room. I was aware of her eyes on me, her expression (I glanced up and saw the look) thoughtful. I felt vividly
that barrier that exists between human beings, the gulf of a few feet of empty air that is so difficult to bridge. I wanted
to say things to her but dared not. And I guessed, but couldn’t tell, that the same ideas moved through her mind, eating away
at her composure.

Caroline. The name reverberated in my mind. It had a sound to it, a color, a scent, a mood. The colors were pale and pastel,
yellow and blue, but not the intense blue of the sky seen at altitude: the smudged blue of the Welsh sky when it wasn’t raining.
The sound was brass, but not brassy — the chiming of a bell. The scent was a musky citrus. The mood was smiling, but with an
undertow of sorrow.

These were my thoughts that summer. The sixties were burgeoning with fantasies of peace and love and liberation. I too had
a dream, but I proclaimed it to no one. It was a dream of concupiscence, a scented dream, a veiled dream rehearsed to the
gyration of hips and the thoughtful manipulation of hand and body in the quiet of my own room, with the Rolling Stones on
the record player, asserting that time was on my side: a solitary, adolescent dream.

That must have been the last occasion that I went to Gilead House that summer. “Here,” she said to me that afternoon as I
said good-bye. “Let me give you the number of the London house. Then if you ever need somewhere to stay…”

I watched her scribble on a piece of embossed writing paper. Her writing had assurance and panache.
Caroline in London,
she wrote, and the number and address. I folded the page and put it in my pocket.

She looked at me closely, her eyebrows drawn together in a slight frown as though she was struggling to make sense of what
she saw. “I
mean
it. Come and see me.” And then she did something quite remarkable: she lifted herself up on her toes, with her hands on my
shoulders, and put her cheek against mine. “I’ll miss you,” she said.