The Fall (24 page)

It was Guy Matthewson’s last will and testament; it was written in pencil, the letters untidy and ill-formed like a child’s
first attempt at writing — a strange missive, part valedictory, largely unintelligible. The taller letters stood out like peaks
from the plateau of undulating scrawl, and for the most part it was unreadable. Jamie pointed out the words
all right,
the word
cold,
the phrase
my dear boy.
But it was not clear what, if anything, was expected of his dear boy. He was to be looked after, perhaps.
Look after my dear boy.
Did it say that? There was no real means of telling. Jamie tried to convince me that the final words were
all love, Guy.
Except you couldn’t read the Guy. It was just an approximate circle and a tail, like a spermatozoon.

A bitter irony, I thought, to make all that effort while you are dying — to hold the pad with one heavy mitt and clutch a pencil
in blistered, frozen, wooden fingers, and try and get your mind focused on the task only to have the resulting message prove
impossible to read.

“Your mother,” Jamie said. “She knew him, didn’t she? What does she think?”

I shrugged noncommittally “It was a long time ago. Before the war.”

He nodded. “There’s something…” Then he hesitated. He looked confused, almost distraught, as though to put his idea into words
would be some kind of betrayal.

“Something what?”

He cast around for the right words. “I don’t know. Something…almost deliberate about it, don’t you think? Do you think he
wanted to escape?”

“Escape?”

“I don’t know, really. From my mother, maybe. They can’t have been very compatible. And…” He hesitated, looking at the small
heap of possessions. “I think she had lovers even then. Something she said the other day…”

I felt a small knot of guilt somewhere inside me, a visceral thing like a lump in my chest. What, I wondered, did he know?
I tried to laugh the suggestion away. “Surely you don’t think he intended to die? Don’t be daft.”

He shook his head. “It’s not difficult. He was high up above the rest of the expedition. On his own, short of oxygen. It’s
not difficult to push yourself beyond the point of no return.”

“Come off it, Jamie,” I said. “Don’t be idiotic.” But I admit that the thought had crossed my mind. Climbing itself is an
escape, and death is the ultimate one. And it would have been an easy death. That sounds callous, but it’s true. Hypothermia
is
an easy death. Contrary to his appearance in that photograph, Guy Matthewson did not die in some kind of agony. His body
would have cooled down from the outside inward: first the extremities, the fingers and the toes, the tip of the nose and the
ears and cheeks, then the hands and the feet, then the limbs themselves, and, finally, the core. He would have simply slowed
down. Drowsiness. At about 33°C he would have begun to lose a true sense of where he was, of what the dangers were, of what
he ought to do. He would have drifted in and out of consciousness. Sleep — he would have wanted to sleep more than anything
else, more than life itself. So that’s what he’d have done: at about 30°C. There would have been no pain. He would have just
drifted off to sleep, dreaming no doubt. Dreams and hallucinations would have been more real to him than any view out across
the Himalaya or any concerns about his wife back in England. A few more degrees down the icy slope and that would have been
it — he would have been dead. And a hero.

That year, Jamie seemed driven to greater things. It was like catching the right moment when you’re surfing, catching the
big wave, going with the mass of water that is so much greater than you but using it to your own ends. “Matthewson and Dewar,”
they said in the climbing pubs, in the bars and the huts and the bothies. “Heard of them. Doing some good stuff. Isn’t he
the son of Guy Matthewson, the one they found on Kangchenjunga? Like father, like son.”

That summer, we went to the Alps. We lived in medieval squalor in a muddy campsite in the Chamonix Valley. For a few days
we joined up with a couple of Australian girls who appeared one evening and pitched their tent alongside ours, but for most
of the time we led a monastic life, fitted to the rhythm of the days and the exigencies of climbing. The weather settled into
one of its rare spells of calm. We divided our days between the valley and the high huts, between intense physical activity
and indolence. There was the simplicity of unquestioning faith about what we did. Everything in the mountains could be explained,
everything could be understood, every dilemma resolved. It was almost as though we were on a pilgrimage and were searching
for revelation, and like any pilgrimage, the journey was more important than reaching the goal.

“I don’t want this to end, Rob,” Jamie told me on one occasion. We were huddled together on a bivouac ledge two thousand feet
above the Frêney Glacier, with the gas stove roaring in the dusk and the stars scattered like ice crystals across a darkening
sky. He might have been talking of a love affair. And if love is what people need to explain the world, to make it rational
and comprehensible, then I guess that he was.

“It will end, though,” I warned him. “When we run out of money.”

He laughed in the darkness. “You’re a bloody cynic, Dewar.”

“An idealist needs a cynic. It’s the only thing that keeps him within the bounds of reality.”

“But does a cynic need an idealist?” he asked.

“Probably not. A cynic can usually get by well enough by himself — he just doesn’t climb so high or so hard.”

That season we did, among other things, the Northeast Spur of the Droites, the North Face of the Grand Dru, and the Central
Pillar on the Frêney Face of Mont Blanc; we retreated from high up on the Brouillard Face in a storm that rampaged across
the range for five days, killing four other climbers in the same area. Storms are like that: frenzied monsters that devour
the pilgrims with complete indifference. When we finally emerged from the blizzard and staggered into the Monzino Hut, we
were greeted with amazement by the climbers who had been stranded there. It was as though we had come back from the dead.

O
N MY RETURN
from the Alps I holed up in my flat in London to try to pick up some pieces of my vagrant life. I had to earn some money;
I had to catch up with my university work; there was Eve to see. Jamie’s call a few weeks later seemed an intrusion on an
existence that was, in some way, returning to normality. “I’ve made a discovery, Rob. You’ve got to come up and have a look.”

“I can’t get away that easily.”

“Take the weekend off.”

“Weekends are the most difficult time.”

“Midweek, then. Just come and have a look, Rob. Don’t let me down.”

I argued a bit, but I knew from the start that it was no good. Jamie was committed, and there was no respite. So I hitchhiked
up the A
5
to North Wales, and we met up that same evening at a pub in Llanberis. He was sitting alone, nursing a pint of beer in a
corner of the bar and wearing a secretive smile. The daft thing was that I was pleased to see him, pleased to see that conspiratorial
grin, those hooded, thoughtful eyes, the hands that were never still.

“What’s this all about?” I asked. “It’d better be good. Eve thinks I’m crazy. I’m not sure I don’t agree with her.”

“You are, Rob. Crazy. Both of us are.” He glanced around to see that we weren’t overheard and then leaned forward and spoke
in a whisper: “I’ve found a cliff. A sea cliff. Virgin. It’s fucking marvelous.”

I laughed. I felt angry at being dragged back into his plans so soon, but still I laughed at the sheer bloody-mindedness of
the man. Even after our campaign in the Alps, he could still find delight in the diminutive British crags. It was a measure
of his obsession.

So we drove to see. The place was away from the mountains and over the bridge to the island of Mona, where the Druids had
once reigned. We wound through narrow lanes and past undistinguished villages, out onto the deserted cliff top. There was
an empty car park and a notice warning walkers about
DANGEROUS CLIFFS.
Beyond the rim of the world was Ireland.

Jamie pulled on the brake. The wind rocked the van on its suspension. “Here we are. No one around — no climbers, no one shitting
behind a rock, no sardine tins, no orange peel, nothing. Virgin.”

Ducking our heads against the gale, we left the van and climbed over a fence. Noise was all around us, the distant abstract
noise of the waves and the closer noise of the wind, which is not the wind’s noise at all — it’s your own noise, the wind rushing
past your own ears, roaring and gusting against your mind. The bull roar of nature. And above it all, the crying of seabirds — a
desolate, anguished sound.

A slope of coarse grass led down to the edge of the cliffs. “Watch out!” I yelled against the racket. “The grass is wet.”
We slithered down, grabbing at each other’s hands, clutching at rocks, clutching at straws. Herring gulls and kittiwakes shrugged
their shoulders at our arrival at the edge of the cliff, leaning and tilting into the updraft and jeering at us as we peered
over the edge. A precipice of pink gneiss fell away from blistered lips of grass and stone: at the base of the cliff the sea
dashed upward in clouds of spray.

“What do you reckon?” he shouted.

“It looks promising.”

“Promising? It’s bloody brilliant.”

“How the hell do we get down?”

“Abseil.”

“And if we can’t climb out? I mean, what’s the rock like, for God’s sake? What happens if it just comes to pieces in our hands?”

Jamie laughed, his expression a mixture of the delighted and the demonic. “We swim, youth. We swim.”

We clambered back up the slope to the car park. The wind was less here, and we could talk without shouting. “When can we start?”
Jamie was asking. “We don’t want some other bastards coming along and stealing it, do we?”

“I’ve got the job to think about.” I was working for a security firm as a watchman at various depots in London suburbs. It
was night work, and the idea was that I could catch up on my university studies and earn a bit of money at the same time.

“Fuck the job,” Jamie said. “I’ll lend you some money.”

“I can’t always be cadging off you.”

“Yes, you can.”

So I rang the firm to tell them I wouldn’t be available for a week or two and called Eve to say that I was staying up in Wales
for a while, and for the next few days Jamie and I lived in his camper van once again, among the usual litter of sleeping
bags, canned food, and hardware. They were days of high wind and sun, careless days imbued with that strange freedom that
climbing brings, where the only rules are the physics of friction and the only law is the law of gravity. Each morning, we
made some kind of breakfast of tea and bread and jam, before shouldering our gear like workmen — plumbers, maybe, or stonemasons — and
tramping across the rough meadows to the nearby edge where the land finished. Gulls circled in the wind as we climbed, complaining
at our presence and shouting derision at our puny efforts.

“What a place!” Jamie yelled into the wind as he lowered down to the tidemark. “What a fantastic fucking
place!”
That’s how I remember him, grinning like that, a cross between the beautiful and the malicious, pale hair, blue eyes like
the pale sky toward the horizon, his sunburned lips that were somehow like his mother’s, his face still scorched from the
Alps, alight with whatever it was he and I searched for in any kind of climbing: something sensual, something almost sexual,
a physical charge that would find its echo in memory and give us something to recall, just as someone in the shadows of age
recalls a past love.