The Fall (27 page)

Those were dull, wasted days of rain. I sat at the reception desk of the hotel and tried to do some studying. I rang Eve and
suggested she might like to come up and stay, but she was just about to go away with her parents to France, where her family
owned a small and dilapidated farmhouse. “I told you we might be going. What do you expect? You could have come.”

I noticed her use of the past tense. Whatever might once have been an offer now seemed to be lost. “Well, give me a ring when
you get back.”

“All right.”

Ridiculously I found myself hoping that she hadn’t really gone, or perhaps that she would come back early. When the phone
rang one morning a week later, I even lifted the receiver in the faint hope that it might be her.

It was a woman’s voice on the line, but it wasn’t Eve’s. Did we have a room for the night? I glanced disconsolately through
the register and found two rooms free. “Would you like a single or a double, madam?” I asked.

There was a hint of laughter in my ear. “Madam? I like that. Madam’s name is Phoenix.
Miss
Phoenix to you, Mr. Dewar.”

I felt a small stir of delight. “Ruth.”

“Can I come and see you?”

“To stay?”

“If you have a room.”

“Of course we have a room. I’ve just told you.”

“Well, then.”

“What about Jamie?”

There was a moment’s pause. “What
about
Jamie?” she asked.

She came that afternoon in her battered long-wheelbase Land Rover, the one that she had driven to the Aïr, the one with a
double roof to insulate the passengers against the sun and the winch between the front wheels so that you could drag the vehicle
out of ditches or up steep inclines. She seemed an exotic creature as she climbed down from the driver’s seat of this altogether
improbable vehicle: long skirt and sandals, a silk vest embroidered with sinuous forms resembling the organic patterns of
a Persian carpet, her wrists with silver bangles, her ragged hair stained with henna. All these things were trophies from
her travels in North Africa and the Middle East, and they conspired to give her the air of a hybrid being — half bird, half
human, wholly unpredictable. What my mother had dismissed as “gypsy.”

We kissed hesitantly, amused at seeing each other in this unexpected manner. Had Jamie and she quarreled? Had their little
relationship died at birth? Reluctant to ask anything, I led the way upstairs. I felt the need to apologize for the bareness
of the room, for the inadequacy of the whole place. The “millstone around the family neck” was how I described it.

She looked around at the narrow space. “It’s fine,” she said. “For God’s sake, stop apologizing. It’s perfect.” And as though
to stake her claim, she flung her bag — a red-leather shoulder bag incised with some oriental design — onto the bed.

That evening, we went out for a meal. We ate at a Chinese restaurant, one of those places with plastic lanterns and flock
wallpaper. Rubber plants were in the window, and chop suey was on the menu. “You know there’s a painting by Hopper called
Chop Suey?”
Ruth asked. “A woman sitting alone in a restaurant, and through the window you can see the sign —
SUE,
it says. The other bits are hidden. It’s a purely American dish, chop suey. You don’t find it in China.”

Had she been to China?

Not yet.

We laughed. We talked; we discussed art and her art, and her travels and climbing and a whole lot of things. She knew more
than I did; she’d done more, and she understood more. “Tell me about Jamie,” I said to her. And she looked at me carefully,
as though reading things in my face.
“You
tell me about Jamie. You know him better than I do. According to him you practically grew up together. And now you practically
live together.”

“I wasn’t talking about Jamie and me.”

“So what
were
you talking about?”

“I was talking about Jamie and
you
.”
'

She looked at me quizzically. “Are you jealous?”

“I just want to know where we all stand. Tell me.”

She didn’t. She was evasive and equivocal, neither admitting nor denying. She’d had some kind of disagreement with him. He
seemed to want a kind of female carpet to beat at intervals, that’s what she claimed. “He’s childish. In the worst way. Spoiled
child. He’ll learn. If he wants me like he says he does, he’ll have to learn.” She paused to give her words weight. “Perhaps
it’s something to do with his mother.”

I tried to shrug the comment away. I tried not to seem awkward and embarrassed beneath her gaze. “Did you meet her?”

“Yes. She was charming.”

“She is.”

“Distant and detached, but charming.” A pause, a smile of something like complicity. “But I understand what you saw in her.”
She phrased it in the past tense — quite deliberately, I thought — as though challenging me to reveal whether my affair with Caroline
was quite over.

We got back to the house at eleven, and my mother was there, more or less waiting for us. Ruth was friendly and disarming.
She could be that when she wanted to. She smiled and asked the right questions and gave the right answers. Having a father
who ran a pub gave her some sort of advantage, I suppose. The two of them ended up having coffee together and talking about
all sorts of nonsense, and I went to bed and left them to it. Some time later I heard them go up to their rooms. Ruth’s room
was above mine, and I could hear her moving around above me. I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, conscious of her presence
there, almost as though she was in the same room as me, as though I could sense her stirring in her sleep, as though her perfume
filled my own room on the floor below. I didn’t know whether she was on my side or not, or whether she had been sent by Jamie
as some kind of emissary. I didn’t even know if there
were
sides.

The next day was heavy and still, with the promise of thunder. Ruth decided to stay another day. I felt honored by her presence,
uncertain of her motives. We spent the morning going around the castle at the mouth of the river, one of the great fortresses
that Edward I had built for the subjugation of the Welsh. In the afternoon we drove into the hills. We drove at random, turning
onto the first side road that took our fancy because it seemed to be narrow and winding and deserted. The road climbed past
the occasional farmhouse. There were pastures marked out by drystone walls behind which sheep grazed. I had to climb down
to open gates for the Land Rover. The truck’s wheels rattled over cattle grids, and the sound was an intrusion, something
metallic and harsh in a soft, pacific valley. On one side of the road the remains of an abandoned lead mine emerged from the
bracken. Beyond the ruins, a narrow, silent lake lay like a steel blade thrust into the hills.

Ruth parked near the water and reached over into the back for her bag. “Let’s get out and have a look.”

I followed her down through the reeds to the water’s edge. There was a wooden landing dock, but no boats, no people, nothing
to break the sultry weight of the afternoon. She dropped her bag and kicked her sandals off and walked out to the end of the
dock to look. Out in the middle of the lake, two cormorants were sliding through the water like snakes. We watched the birds
for a while, until with a sudden fluid motion, they vanished beneath the surface. For a long while — how long could they stay
submerged? — there was nothing but Ruth standing there above the water looking out over the hard steel of the lake. When the
birds eventually emerged, they were somewhere else, somewhere far away, somewhere that you had not expected them to be, as
though there had been a disjunction in the fabric of time and space within the water and what had been in one place at one
moment had appeared suddenly in another.

Ruth called over her shoulder, “Shall we swim?”

“We haven’t brought our things.”

“There’s a blanket in the back.” I went and searched in the back of the vehicle among a spare wheel and a jack and what appeared
to be the components of an ancient tent. When I came back with the blanket, Ruth had unbuttoned her shirt and tossed it on
the dock. She stood there in only her skirt, the snake of her spine clearly visible, her ribs like ripples across the sandy
skin. I felt something sticking in my throat. “Ruth,” I called, “there might be someone…”

She ignored me. I watched her undo a cord at her waist and then drop her skirt around her feet and bend to pull her briefs
down. As she pulled the scrap of cotton over her foot, some part of me recognized that awkward arabesque: a Degas bronze of
a dancer bending to examine her right foot, the shape of a drawn bow, a taut spring, the tension transmitted through the substance
of the afternoon like the vibration from a stretched skin. She threw her briefs onto the wooden planks of the dock, and for
a moment she stood there lean and naked, a figure of pale surprise against the water, an exclamation mark, raising herself
onto her toes to punctuate the still afternoon. Far beyond her, the cormorants moved like two question marks on the even surface
of the lake. Then she dived, curving up and over and vanishing into the water with a fluid grace.

I went to the edge. I could see her shape, elusive and distorted by the undulations of the water, moving away from the stage.
Far out she broke the surface and turned back to the shore with her mouth open in something that was halfway between a laugh
and a scream — delight, pain, triumph, protest. “Are you coming in or not?” she called.

“It looks cold.”

“It
is
cold. Perishing. You’re a coward.”

What to make of this? What to make of her? There was something swimming beneath all this like the secret, silent movement
of a cormorant in the depths. I felt disquiet, a blend of anticipation and unease and plain guilt — the guilt of nakedness out
here in the open air, the guilt of betrayal: that I would betray her if I didn’t join her and would betray Jamie if I did.
“Do you need courage to be cold?” I called back.

She swam back toward the landing dock in a slow crawl and reached out to grab the planks at my feet. White knuckles. Glittering
drops of water ran down her puckered forehead. Her lips were mauve, her eyelashes matted by the wet. “You do, Dewar. A great
deal of courage.”

Then she pushed away and swam back into the deep, and turned and looked back, treading water and watching me, no more than
a head out there on the surface, her hair plastered against her skull like wet paint. I glanced around, but the valley was
empty: no people underneath the livid clouds. I half turned away from her — a fleeting modesty, I suppose — and undressed hurriedly.
But I had to face her when I went to the edge.

“Brave enough?” I called.

“Dive,” she cried. “Dive!”

I didn’t. Instead I lowered myself gingerly into the icy water and pushed out toward her. “You
are
a coward, Dewar,” she cried in delight.

We swam cautiously around each other, careful not to touch, breathless with laughter and cold, our feet searching down into
the dark, tarnished depths and finding nothing beneath us. There was a disturbing intimacy in swimming together like this,
bathed in a shared liquid like fetuses in the same amniotic fluid. Her legs shivered and gleamed in the shadows. I could see
the paleness of her breasts and the darkness of her hair. Our legs touched, and then, for a moment, our hands. “Maybe there’s
a monster,” I suggested.

“Oh, there is,” she agreed. “And it’s green-eyed.”

The water was too cold to stay in long. When we climbed out it was with a sudden modesty, turning away from each other, glancing
aslant to see and not be seen: a glimpse of her dripping flank and the side of one loose breast — a nipple as brown as chocolate.
We only had the blanket to dry us and keep us warm. We crept beneath it and pulled it over us in a tent and crouched against
each other, shivering with cold.

“Ruth…” I said. She hushed me to silence, but I insisted: “What about Jamie?”

She shook her head, clinging to me and shaking. Her teeth chattered. “Don’t ask,” she whispered. “Don’t ask. If you ask, then
it will all vanish in a puff of smoke.”