The Fall (22 page)

The next morning was cool and clear. He had left her alone in the early hours, and they had slept on apart. Now there was
a strange mixture of shyness and intimacy between them as they met in the corridor before going downstairs together. “How
are you this morning?” was all that he said. “Are you all right?” He bent toward her and kissed her on the cheek almost as
an afterthought, as an uncle might kiss a favored niece. Had she wanted anything more? Certainly she felt that there ought
to
be
something more, some celebration of her rite of passage, some acknowledgment that something now linked them more securely
than any hundred-foot length of hemp rope.

They were the first down to breakfast. It was a blessing that there was no one else there to see them enter the dining room
together and whisper about them. She picked up a newspaper as a distraction. It reported a quiet day. Bombs had fallen on
Norwich, but casualties were light. There were no losses of aircraft, either by the enemy or by the Royal Air Force.

“On a day like this we can do something challenging,” Guy said as he ate his toast.

Did she want a challenge? She remembered him naked against her and reddened at the recollection, there in the dining room
with the ancient waiter moving among the tables. It was a strange memory, a tactile one, a memory that someone blind might
have, composed of touch and pressure and delight, and that sensation of falling, and the sudden halt. She possessed a part
of him, and she wanted to talk about it; yet she was held back by this apparent indifference, this businesslike discussion
of where they should go and what they should do. She had expected him to be changed somehow, yet he appeared the same — brisk,
reserved, slightly impersonal.

“I think we’ll go to Bochlwyd. We can do something on the Glyder Main Cliff. The Direct Route, that’s what we’ll do. You’ll
love the Direct Route.”

So they spent that final morning up in the hills, clambering about on more rock and maneuvering the rope and calling down
cliffs to each other. They climbed the route he had chosen, and she couldn’t follow him on one passage and had to go by a
detour over on the left. The Rectangular Excursion, he called it. Every feature in the crags seemed to have a name — the Capstan,
the Veranda, the Chasm. There was a facetious tone to them, the spirit of enforced jollity and deliberate understatement,
the spirit of the past. She panicked when she had to traverse back to the original line of the route. She was expected to
cross a smooth slab of rock using sharp handholds alone, her feet just scraping on the holdless rock below, and halfway across
her strength gave out. It seemed a sudden thing, like water draining from a tank. “I’m going to fall!” she shouted up at him.
“Guy, I’m going to fall!”

The rope ran diagonally up the cliff away from her. If she let go there she would make a great swing across the cliff beneath
him.

“I’m going to fall!” she screamed at him, and his voice came back quite relaxed about it all, quite calm and collected.

“No you’re not, Porpoise. Just get your left leg up into the crack to help you. It’s not very elegant, but it’s safe.”

She hung on with weakening hands and scrabbled on the rock with her feet and finally, blessedly managed to cock her leg upward,
almost as though she was mounting a man’s bicycle. It was a bit better like that.

“But how the hell do I move?” she cried.

“It’s Sunday,” came the reply. “Such language is inappropriate.”

“Damn Sunday! I want to get out of here.”

“Then you must sort of shuffle along.”

“I can’t.”

“Well, darling, you haven’t really got an option. Unless you wish to become another fixture of this famous cliff. The Porpoise,
we’ll call you. I can just see it in the guidebook: ‘an interesting feature that commemorates an epic attempt during the early
nineteen-forties.’”

“Oh, shut up!” His facetious comments spurred her to anger. From somewhere deep inside she found reserves of strength and
was able to push herself along, with her left foot up in the crack and her hands pulling as best they could and her free leg
doing nothing more than scraping at the smooth rock below. Eventually she reached the ledge where Guy was belayed. He pulled
her to him and kissed her. “Darling,” he said, “you were marvelous.” And stupidly she burst into tears.

From the top of the climb they scrambled up to look at the view. The summit plateau was a desolate wasteland of broken rock,
mottled with sunshine, battered by wind. They looked out across half of North Wales, across the ranks of mountains, as far
as the sea glimmering in the distance. It was an ancient and weary landscape. For all the play of sunshine and cloud shadow
across the slopes, she suddenly thought it a sad and defeated place.

Guy was talking of the tribunal. He was talking of the men who would read through his haphazard explanation of why he would
not fight and would ask him pointed, probing questions and shake their heads at fumbled answers. “If they put me in prison,”
he said, “I think I’ll kill myself.”

“They don’t imprison people,” she protested. “Surely they don’t imprison people. Not this time.”

“Who knows? If I claimed religious objections it would be easy. Quakers and the like. But someone like me, with no faith,
no belief at all…and a wife and child who are German…”

It grew cold in the wind. They climbed back down a gully and ate their picnic lunch at the foot of the crag, beside a boulder
that was called, appropriately, the Luncheon Stone. Out of the wind the sun was warm. Diana lay back in the grass and looked
up at high broken clouds where an aircraft, a mere silver crucifix, drew out a long white line across the sky. The sound of
its engines came down to them almost as an afterthought, almost as though it had nothing to do with the machine.

“What happens next, Guy?” she asked.

He laughed. “My dear Porpoise, we’ve had the most intensive three days. We’ve met, fallen in love —”

“—Have we?”

“Haven’t we?” He ticked them off on his fingers and ran out of fingers: “We’ve fallen in love, made love, ascended four rock
climbs, had breakfast lunch and supper, argued, shouted, laughed, and cried. It’s been pretty exhausting. And you want to
know what happens
next?”

She laughed, wondering whether he did love her and whether she did love him, and what the point was of talking about it when
the war was there, just beyond the horizon. She was no fool. She knew that happiness was transient, blown away by death, by
illness, by a dozen lesser things. But for that moment, lying on a Welsh hillside in the sun, she was happy.

O
N THURSDAY EVENINGS
people gathered in the White Horse pub off Theobalds Road. They gathered to plot, as though they were participants in a clandestine
war — terrorists or guerrillas of some kind. There was the sharing of an arcane language, the secret whispering in corners of
the bar over some plan, some new discovery. Men and women from all backgrounds and all social classes: a strange democracy
united in the pursuit of the absurd. They called themselves the City Climbing Club. It was an eclectic group of people, with
almost as many women as men, as many bad climbers as good. You found your own level. Two of the members had just returned
from Pakistan, where they had failed, in a Himalayan storm, to climb the Trango Tower. Others struggled up sedate V Diffs
such as Grooved Arête or Flying Buttress in North Wales. One of the members denied that it was even a climbing club at all.
“Not in the usual sense of the word, at any rate,” he said thoughtfully. “More a knocking shop.”

It was Jamie who introduced me. He was doing a master’s degree at the London School of Economics at the time, some confection
of sociology and economics that was popular in those days. This was the period when he underwent that metamorphosis: Jamie
becoming
Jim,
his voice acquiring an edge, the glottal truncations of the capital city. At the same time, he was moving up in the firmament
of climbing — putting up new routes, seeking out unexplored crags, laying plans. People noticed him, watched him, listened to
what he had to say, asked his advice, deferred to him. Voices hushed when he came into the pub.

“This is Robert Dewar,” he announced, putting his arm around my shoulders. “Rob’s an old friend of mine. In fact, he was my
very first climbing partner. Isn’t that right, Rob? When we were kids.”

People looked up from their beers and their discussions and greeted me in that incurious manner that climbers have because
the only thing that matters is what you have done and what you are planning to do. “Hi, Rob,” they said, and allowed me into
the conversation and the drinking and the margins of their plans.

For a couple of months that summer I climbed with different partners, whoever happened to need a second. Jamie was away in
the Alps, but when he got back he suggested that we try something together. His regular partner had just taken up a post at
Glasgow University on their return from France, so Jamie was more or less on his own. By that time I’d been up to Wales and
done some routes in the Pass, and had an epic on the West Buttress of Cloggy that became something of a legend in the club.
It hadn’t been my fault. We were climbing a route called the Sheaf, and the guy who was leading went off-route onto the much
harder White Slab and then got gripped. He was moving neither up nor down, just standing on tiptoe with his knees shaking
and his fingers locked. I took some credit for managing to climb a pitch unprotected to find a belay so that I could get the
rope down to him from above. Others had been on the cliff to see the farce, and Jamie had listened with glee to the lurid
tales of brown pants and white faces. “Sounds as though you’ve got a head for this sort of thing,” he said. “Let’s see how
it goes.”

“Why not?” I said. “If you’ll make allowances for me…”

“You don’t need allowances.”

And so I began to climb with him. Most Friday evenings after work we would dump our rucksacks into his Volkswagen camper and
flee the city — up the MI
in the gathering dusk and across the sprawl of Birmingham to the A
5
and the mountains of North Wales.

We shared the driving; we shared the food; we shared almost everything. We developed a routine, a way of talking with minimum
words, a way of being together and tolerating each other’s defects. I slept beside him, cooked meals with him, drank with
him, prepared the gear with him, and stumped up dull hillsides with him to the foot of the crags; then I watched him move
up some obscure stretch of vertical rock with the easy, almost derisive grace of a cat.

“Come on, youth!” he would call down when I had to follow. “You can if you
think
you can. There’s nothing about climbing that isn’t in the head.”

There is, in a sense, a male and a female side to a climbing partnership: the lead climber is the active member, the demonstrative,
the risk-taker; his second is passive, supportive, there when needed. And although the climbing world is a promiscuous society,
there are such partnerships that acquire something of the permanence of marriage. Ours became like that. When, for some reason,
one of us couldn’t manage the Friday-evening appointment, the other saw his temporary partnership with someone else as a brief
and shameful adulterous affair.

I began to see the world through his eyes, to spot the lines up a cliff just like him, to learn to anticipate the excitement
of discovery as he did, the pure sensual joy of movement in the vertical dimension, the sensation of bending the body to your
will, the almost sexual conquest of rock. There was a sense of the elemental about Jamie’s progress up rock, of his being
one with the mountain. He climbed so much better than I did. He always climbed better. I was what they called solid and reliable,
while Jamie was brilliant and gifted. I relied on strength and a grim determination, but Jamie used his body weight to advantage,
knew the limits of balance, the limits of holds, the subtle dynamics of movement in the vertical and horizontal dimensions;
he understood instinctively the physics of vectors and the mathematics of triangles of force. He thought with his body. I
remember the assurance of his movements, the quiet method with which he attacked the difficult pitches, the speed with which
he moved, his sureness on glazed rock. “We can do it, youth” was his call.