The Fall (37 page)

She discovered her own nightdress and dressing gown beside the bed. “Who brought these?” she asked a nurse. The girl swept
past in a rustle of starched apron. “Some doctor. Scotsman, I think. Never seen him before.”

Visiting time was in the afternoon. Diana sat up in bed and watched the people come in, the husbands with bunches of flowers,
mothers with things to bring comfort, no visitors below the age of twelve. Sometimes you saw a young child being held up at
the door of the ward to wave at its mother in a distant bed. The noise in the ward got louder, a railway-station noise, the
noise of the public. Only after the first rush were there two visitors for Diana, each eyeing the other warily, neither knowing
who the other was, how much the other knew. “I’ve brought you chocs, darling,” Meg said. “Black Magic. Cost a packet.”

Dewar had brought a bouquet of flowers. “They’re from the unit,” he was careful to explain. A note attached to them said
Knocked off from a bombed-out florist
and was signed
Bert and the rest.
She smiled. She recognized it as the first smile since the loss of the baby, the first smile for days. The shadow, perhaps,
of the baby’s smile that would never be.

There was desultory, difficult conversation before Meg leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. “Must fly, darling, and I
don’t want to be a gooseberry. I’ll give you a tinkle.”

They watched her clip her way down the ward. She managed to impart a measure of glamor to her Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
uniform, even wearing issue stockings. Men followed her with their eyes, watched the swing of her slender legs and the movement
of her backside. “She’s an attractive girl,” Dewar said. He rolled the
r
’s as though he was savoring the words.

“That’s what they all say.” There was an awkward pause. “Was it you that went round to get my things?”

He nodded. “Aye, I did. And I met the lovely Mrs. Warren.” There was another silence;
pregnant
this particular one, Diana thought. She surprised herself almost smiling at the idea. Dewar kept his voice low so that he
wouldn’t be overheard: “Did she do it?”

“Do what?”

“Whisht,
Diana. You know very well what. When I knocked she was terrified that I was the police.” He made two syllables of the word
—
pol-is.

Diana shrugged. “If you’re going to interrogate me, you can go.”

“I don’t want to interrogate you. But it was a terrible thing to do.”

“It’s done,” she said. Her finality surprised her. “There’s no use looking back. And I’m not sure it’s any of your business,
Dr. Dewar. You were very kind. You looked after me and all that, but that’s only what any doctor would do.”

Dewar nodded. He picked at a button on his jacket. Harris Tweed, the jacket, of course. There was even a gingery thread in
the cloth to go with the ginger of his hair. “I spoke to the Matron. You’ll be out tomorrow morning. Where will you go?”

She shrugged. “Back to the Warrens’, of course. Back to the unit. Where else?”

“You should rest up a bit. Go home, maybe.”

“And brood about it? And have to evade my parents’ questions? No thanks.”

“My invitation still stands,” he said.

She smiled. He seemed almost comic, with his Scottish manner and his Scottish turns of phrase — what the devil did
whisht
mean? — and his awkward shyness. “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe.”

“That’s the same answer as last time. Can’t I have a more definite one?”

“I suppose you can,” she said. And suddenly she found herself overwhelmed by the fact that this man, who despised what she
had just done, still wanted to see her. The understanding brought her to the brink of tears. Which wasn’t hard to do in her
present state. “Yes,” she said.

I
SUGGESTED TO EVE
that she come, but she refused. It was not an easy conversation.

“I don’t want to go, and I don’t want
you
to go either. I don’t want you to climb mountains, and I don’t want to be sitting there at the bottom when they bring your
body down.”

“That’s ridiculous — ”

“Is it? How many has that bloody mountain killed? Thirty, forty?” Her eyes glistened. She didn’t weep — she was too tough for
that kind of thing — but she walked dangerously close to the edge of tears. One false step might have thrown her over the precipice.
“And then there’d be Ruth, wouldn’t there?”

“Of course.”

“Well, can’t you understand that I don’t like her? Can’t you get that into your head? Can’t you grasp the fact that I hate
to think of you and her fucking together — ?”

“That’s past — ”

“Is it? Is a thing like that ever past?” She managed a laugh. “You’d like it, wouldn’t you? The pair of you, I mean. You and
Jamie. You’d like to have the little women waiting for you to come back from the war. Well, I’m not playing. I have other
battles to fight.”

So there were just the three of us in Jamie’s battered old camper van when we set off on the crosschannel ferry to Calais.
The vehicle had a
Ban the Bomb
sign on the back and the slogan
Make Love Not War
across the front, and flowers painted by Ruth along the sides — gentians and edelweiss, as well as daisies. It stuttered across
Europe with the three of us taking turns at the wheel.

We spent the first night in a farm near Soissons, and in the morning we were woken up by the farmer’s daughter, who was standing
at the door of the van and holding out a plate with three fresh eggs on it.
“Pour le petit déjeuner,”
she said. What did she make of the three inhabitants of the van? Ruth with her lean breasts and angular shoulders sitting
between the two men — a tense little trio of jealousy and desire. Perhaps she thought nothing of it. Adults occupy a different
world from the young, and foreigners a different one still.

That day, we drove on to Switzerland and reached Interlaken in the afternoon. The weather was gloomy. Clouds hung down over
the twin lakes and shrouded the mountains. The world beneath was gray and green. Ruth took the wheel for the final leg. I
lay in the back on the pile of climbing gear, and Jamie sat in the front because he knew the way. “Used to come here on family
skiing holidays,” he said.

The van rattled up the Lauterbrunnen Valley, hemmed in by the mountain walls, winding between the cliffs. Waterfalls crashed
down through the trees anywhere they pleased, as though the whole place had only recently been hastily slammed together and
the fine detail still hadn’t been worked out. Rain spattered against the windshield and turned into sleet as we climbed. We
debated how long it had been like this, how much longer it would last, the usual futile weather debate that climbers always
have, as though talking about it might change it. “Just as bad as bloody Wales,” I protested. Jamie reckoned we might as well
turn around and go home, reckoned we might as well forget the whole fucking thing.

“You’re just trying to tempt fortune,” Ruth said dismissively “What will be, will be.”

“That’s your bloody Welsh fatalism,” Jamie cried. “That’s why you ended up with all those English castles.” You could feel
his energy, bound up and caged inside him by the mindless fact of weather and circumstance.

Ruth swung the van onto a side road where the sign pointed to Grindelwald. The engine clattered away at the back of the vehicle.
We swung around curves, swerved to avoid a mail bus, crawled behind a tourist coach; then the narrow confines of the hillside
opened out into the basin where Grindelwald sits, and there was the sensation that we were out of the claustrophobic ditch
and could breathe again. The air was chilly, and there were streaks of old snow in the sheltered slopes. We pulled into a
turnout to get our bearings. The meadows above the town lapped up to the base of the rock, but the cloud was down to two thousand
feet and you couldn’t see anything of the mountain. “Oh, damn you bastards!” Jamie shouted at the clouds.

Cows stood morosely in the damp like extras for a tourist postcard waiting for a photographer who hadn’t bothered to turn
up. A train grunted up through the meadows, past picturesque chalets. It was a brightly painted little thing, like something
out of Toyland. Jamie turned on me as though I was the final court of appeal. “You’ve not been here before. Believe me, Rob,
believe me: up there” — he flung an arm upward toward the gray pall directly overhead — “is the whole Northeast Ridge of the Eiger.
And there — just
there,
for crying out loud — is the dreaded, the ghastly, the murderous Nordwand itself, the Mordwand, the Murder Wall. Gets your
blood up just to think about it.”

But amid the gathering dusk and the gathered cloud, there was nothing to be seen. He might have been crazy, standing on the
side of the road and pointing out nothing at all with all the conviction of a lunatic.

Invisibility brought a sense of detachment to our presence there beneath the Eiger, almost as though there were no mountains,
there was no North Face to climb, there was no fear to overcome. We pitched a tent at the campsite and mooched around Grindelwald
in the evening. The place was like a frontline town in the tourist war, recently abandoned by the skiers and now occupied
by a different army — Japanese, mainly. To Jamie’s disgust, Ruth even bought some souvenirs — a miniature ice ax with
GRINDELWALD
engraved down the shaft, and a little arrangement of artificial edelweiss under a plaster model of the Eiger. “My parents
will love them,” she said. “I don’t care what you say. I can just see this ax among the horse brasses over the bar.”

The next morning was no different. We dropped in at the guides’ office on the main street to get a weather report. The man
behind the desk was lean and tough-looking, his face burnished by sun and wind to the color of polished oak. “Not to worry,”
he said. “The forecast is
gut.
This weather will clear, and high pressure moves in.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Jamie said.

“You’re just a pessimist,” Ruth remarked. She was the only one keeping a sense of balance, the only one who tried to get some
enjoyment out of the situation.

“You know what a pessimist is? A pessimist is someone who’s never disappointed.” Jamie smiled humorlessly at the guide. “What
are conditions like on the Face? Has there been a lot of snow? What’s the freezing level? Is the whole thing going to be one
big waterfall?”

The man frowned. “What face?”

“How many are there? Christ alive, who is this guy? The Nordwand, of course.”

“You are going on the Nordwand?”

“Is it out of bounds? I thought that was in the nineteen thirties.”

Ruth tugged at his sleeve. “Don’t start a row,” she said.

The guide was being pointedly polite, the way a policeman might be polite with a drunk shortly before bundling him into the
back of the squad car. “You know what you’re doing, sir?” he asked.

“I’m standing here having a nice conversation with you.”

The man’s smile was like a split in a sheet of ice. “I mean are you
able?
We are having problems with English climbers.”

“Nothing like the problems you’re going to have with this one.”

Ruth smiled sympathetically at the guide, as though the man she had to deal with was some kind of nutcase. I suggested that
Jamie shut up.

“I’m not going to shut up,” he said loudly. “What’s this guy want me to do? Sign an affidavit that we won’t expect a rescue
if we get into difficulties? The North Face is a
climb.
They talk about it as though it’s their personal property.” He turned to the guide. “Hey, youth, have
you
ever climbed it?”

The man looked nonplussed. “I have been on it,” he said.

“But have you
climbed
it?”

“I help in rescues.” He added pointedly: “The Englishman called Brewster.”

“Sure.” Jamie’s tone was full of contempt. It worked in any language. “I’ll bet you just went up on the train and nipped out
through the railway window to throw them a packet of sandwiches. The fellows that rescued Brewster were another couple of
Englishmen — Bonington and Whillans.”