The Fall (14 page)

“Don’t you trust them?”

“Do you think you’re trustworthy?”

“No.”

“Well then.”

We danced, shuffled a bit more. “You know he tried to take me climbing?” she said.

“Who?”

“Jamie, of course.”

“He took you
climbing?”

“He tried. Some grotty place in Sussex, I ask you. He goes on about climbing all the time. All hearty, shinning up rock faces
or something. What’s the point? You’ve only got to come down again. Hey, d’you smoke?”

I didn’t.

“Shame,” she said. We kissed again. “You know,” she said, pushing her belly against me, “you should
ask
a girl before you go getting an erection against her.” And with that she slipped her arms from around my neck and wandered
off to find a smoke. Later I saw her in another room sitting cross-legged with a joint in her hand and a fatuous expression
on her face. She waved. I wandered off among the litter of bodies and bottles and thought of Caroline. In the room upstairs
the folksinger with the lousy voice was advising his girl not to think twice; but I just couldn’t help it.

The next day a group of us piled into cars and drove into the country. It was the place that Eve had mentioned during the
party — a sandstone escarpment hidden away in some wooded corner of Sussex where climbers from London went if they couldn’t
get away to Wales or the Lake District. Eve herself, dressed in a battered pair of jeans and an Arran sweater several sizes
too big for her, was one of the group.

“In God’s name, why do I put up with it?” she complained.

“Because you’re chasing Jamie?”

She eyed me thoughtfully through a haze of cigarette smoke. “I don’t chase men; they chase me,” she said.

The climbing crag was no more than a twenty-foot-high shelf of dirty rock buried in a scrappy piece of woodland. The ground
beneath it was beaten into hardpan by the passage of thousands of city-bound rock climbers desperate for somewhere to practice
near the capital. Harrison’s Rocks. Anyone in the climbing world will tell you. “’Ard, scruffy little climbs,” one world authority
has described them. The group of us gathered at the bottom and watched Jamie wander up a few routes where other people struggled.
I remembered him in the quarry, the easy flow of his body up the rock. There was laughter and shouts of derision, the competitive
banter that he seemed to love.

“Come on, young Dewar,” he called, holding the end of the rope for me to tie on. “Give it a go.” The rope ran up from the
belayer at the foot of the cliff to a sling looped around a tree at the top, then back down to the climber: a kind of pulley
effect. Someone tied me on, and I tried a few climbs myself. The rock bulged, holdless and awkward. It was like trying to
climb up a rusty metal tank. Eve cheered me on, which was gratifying. Jamie stood at the foot of the rock, holding the rope
and shouting instructions.

I stalled on a sandy overhang.

“Come on, Dewar!” he called. I scrabbled and slithered. “You’ve just got to reach over and use the crack above. You’ve just
got to
do
it.”

It was the first time that I heard that edge in his voice, the merciless tone of the torturer — the torturer who knows that
he can stand more pain than you. “I can’t
reach
the fucking crack!” I yelled.

“Well, then, you’ll fall off. That’s all there is to it. You’ll fall off, and I’ll save your life.”

I duly did. My sweating fingers lost their grip and I slumped exhausted on the rope, and he held me tight and lowered me down
to the ground and then caught me clumsily in his arms. The audience laughed as you might laugh at a comedian doing a pratfall.
“That’s not bad,” Jamie said, his arm around my shoulders comfortingly. “5b.”

I assumed it was a mark out of ten or something. It didn’t sound very good. Eve held my hand when we all decamped to the nearest
pub. “I thought you did wonderfully,” she said. She sat beside me in the pub, smoking and sipping a gin and lime and toying
with a sandwich. She was pale, like a plant grown under glass. The Arran sweater she wore was her brother’s. “Of course you
know about Jamie’s father, don’t you?” she asked.

“What about him?”

“He was some kind of English hero. Frozen to death on Mount Everest or something. He must have told you.”

“I know something. I think it was Kangchenjunga.”

“They’re all the same. Great piles of rock.” She made a face — disparagement, disapproval, something like that — and glanced around
to see who might overhear. But we were in a corner, and the rest of the group was involved in a game of darts on the other
side of the bar. “Well, the thing is, he’s trying to live up to his father’s name. Trying to be the hero. And after all, his
mother…”

“What about his mother?”

She sniffed. Eve was a London girl, born and bred. She looked soft, but she had a Londoner’s hard edge and, despite private
schooling, London vowels in her voice. “Well,” she said. “She’s not much to live up to, is she? I mean, her knicker elastic
is rather loose.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“They keep falling down, darling.” She noticed that I reddened. Of course she did. She was too sharp not to. But she was too
sharp to mention it at the time. The occasion would arise, of course. She would store that little piece of knowledge away
in some dark recess of her mind where revenge and blackmail brewed, and one day she might use it. She was a barrister’s daughter,
with a barrister’s gift for sensing the weaknesses in a witness’s story.

That evening back at his house, Jamie and I talked about fathers and lack of fathers, just as we had all those years ago in
North Wales. We seemed very close. We sat on his bed and drank beer from the bottle and conjured fathers out of the stuff
of our imagination. You create a father in your own image if you haven’t got one; I guess that’s it. I had a father, although
materially I never saw him and never really knew him. But still he was there to dull my fantasy. Jamie, on the other hand,
was able to create his own father out of fantasy and wishful thinking — his father was tough and forthright and noble and sensitive,
the kind of man who wants to know what is over the next hill, in the next valley, the kind of man who lives on the edge of
the inhabited world, pushing beyond the frontiers. “I reckon somehow he’s there, watching,” he said. “Does that sound daft?”

“Yes, it does,” I told him. “Bloody daft.”

He laughed and pushed me away. For a moment we struggled together, a play fight over the absurdity of Jamie’s father watching
over him. But in a sense he
was
there, in Jamie’s room: he looked out at you from a dozen framed photographs. He was there among a group of climbers standing
at the snout of the Rongbuk Glacier; he was poised with apparent ease on a rock face somewhere in Wales, a rope hanging from
his waist; he was sitting on a boulder in the sun, smoking a cigarette and dressed in tattered breeches and a collarless shirt,
looking like a manual worker taking a tea break. The mountain that formed the backdrop to that photograph was dark and forbidding,
a great triangular mass cast in shadow with ice and snow cascading down its flank. “That’s in the Alps,” Jamie said. “It’s
got it on the back. It says
after the Lauper, June 1939.
That’s the Eiger.”

I looked at this mountain that had the reputation of a killer and at Jamie’s father sitting in front of it with the casual
smile of the invincible. Except that he wasn’t invincible. The mountains finally got him, didn’t they?

“Do you want to see his notebook? It’s a logbook of all his climbs. Mother found it.”

I’d seen it, of course, but I didn’t tell Jamie that. The notebook had made its journey down from Gilead House and was now
kept in a desk in the sitting room, like the relic of a saint tucked away in an altar. Jamie opened it.

CIC hut, Ben Nevis, Easter 1939

Thurs. 6 April: Comb Gully (in the wet). 2nd ascent?

Good Fri. with MacPhee et al: a new gully between Observatory Buttress and the Indicator Wall. A fine achievement

Saturday: 8th: A washout

Sunday 2nd April: Tower Ridge. Solo, under blue skies!

Monday and Tuesday: prospecting on the Orion Face, without success…

“See what he did? All his climbs. Scotland, Wales, Lake District.” I was sitting at the desk to read it. He stood behind me
with his hand on my shoulder, reaching over to turn the pages:

Fri. 9th August 1940: Columnar Cliffs — Spiral Stairs and Flying Buttress (Difficult). DS 2nd.

Sat. 10th: Milestone Buttress — Direct (Difficult); Tryfan E Face — Grooved Arête (Very D). DS 2nd.

Sun 11th: Glyder Main Cliff — Direct Route (Severe). Diana 2nd.

He moved to turn them again, but I stopped him. “What’s this?” I asked. Behind us the door opened. Caroline came in and walked
over to see what we were doing. “That’s not to be touched,” she said. “Anyway, Robert’s already seen it.”

“Seen it?” said Jamie.

“At Gilead House, when he was helping me clear out. When I found it.”

She reached over to take the book, but I kept my finger on the page. “What’s this?” I repeated, looking around at her. “Who’s
DS?
It says
Diana.
Who’s Diana?”

Caroline stopped. Her expression was an untidy blend of amusement and embarrassment. “Diana?”

“Yes.” I pointed. And somehow I felt angry, a diffuse, confused sort of anger. As though things had been kept from me. “It
says
DS
here. And then
Diana.”

There was a silence, Jamie and me looking around at his mother, and she looking back at us with something like anxiety in
her expression. “Diana’s your mother,” she said flatly

“My mother?”

“Yes. Didn’t she ever tell you?” She tried to sound careless about it, as though it were obvious really. “She climbed with
Guy.”

“She
climbed
with him?”

“They met in Wales before I knew him. They climbed together.”

“I can’t believe it.”

“It’s true.”

“She never told me. I never knew.”

Caroline took the book and closed it. “What child ever knows his parents?” she asked. It sounded like a quotation. Something
from the Book of Proverbs, perhaps.

A couple of weeks later I was invited to stay at Eve’s house. Her parents were away. It wasn’t clear whether they knew about
me being there or not, but then I suppose Caroline’s aphorism works both ways: there was quite a lot these parents didn’t
know about their daughter. She had got hold of some pot, and I doubt they knew about that. “Do you want to try?” she asked.
“Or doesn’t it fit in with your Welsh Methodist upbringing?”

“I’m not a Welsh Methodist. I’m not even Welsh. My father is Scottish.”

She made a face. “That’s even worse. Wee free or something. Does he beat you with a tawse?”

“He left home years ago.”

“Lucky you,” she said.

We spent most of Saturday on the floor of the sitting room, giggling and smoking and listening to records. She held the joint
between her last two fingers and cupped her hand to her mouth to inhale. The musty scent filled the air. “Are we very depraved?”
she asked.

“Just slightly.” We giggled at being only slightly depraved. She passed me the joint. Her mind was unsteady, lighting on things
at random. She spoke a bit about Jamie. “I don’t think he fancies women, do you?”

I laughed. “You think he’s queer?”

She had that trick of ignoring what you had said, just going on with her own line of thought. “He doesn’t fancy
you,
does he?”

“Me?”

“He always talks about you.”

“That doesn’t mean he’s queer.”

“It does if he fancies you and he doesn’t fancy me.” She looked at me with her head on one side and her eyes ill-focused.
I remember the size of her pupils, as black and shining as obsidian, rimmed with that startling blue. “Do
you
fancy me?”

I did.

“Then you better
show
it,” she said.