The Fall (49 page)

H
E HEARD
a few weeks later. A letter finally came through the tortuous channels of the military machine that was now governing the
wreckage of Germany—an envelope camouflaged by official stamps, one of which said
OFFICIAL CENSOR
in blue letters and bore the hieroglyphic scrawl of some nameless army captain. He rang Meg at work. His voice was unsteady,
as though he didn’t quite know how to pitch it, as though he had reverted to adolescence and his voice was breaking all over
again. “What is it, Guy?” she asked. “What’s the matter?”

“I’ve just heard about Greta and Charlotte.” He seemed to cough or clear his throat or something. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m
sorry. I’ve just got a letter. From Greta’s father.”

“Tell me.”

“They’re both…”

There was another silence. “Guy? Guy, are you there?”

There was a silence on the line for a moment, that silence that the telephone brings, which is the silence of detachment,
the silence of complete separation, as though the other person was not there at all.

“Guy?”

“In an air raid last year,” he whispered. “They’re dead.”

“Meet me,” she said. “Can you? Now?”

“I suppose I can get away.”

“Of course you can. It’s not as though there’s a war on. Meet me outside Horse Guards Parade, ten minutes.”

He was waiting for her when she got there. The guards outside the gates were still in khaki, but there was a truck parked
inside and the sandbags that had barricaded the building for the last five and a half years were being removed. Things were
changing; the country was loosening up. She waved from the other side of the street and crossed through the traffic, and when
she reached Guy, she held his hands and stood on tiptoe to place her cheek against his for a moment. “Darling Guy,” she whispered.
“Darling, darling Guy.”

They walked through the archway and into St. James’s Park. It was a warm day. There were people sitting on the grass, just
as they used to in peacetime. This
was
peacetime, for God’s sake. The country was still dominated by things military, but it was peacetime. A military band was
playing from the bandstand, and there were mothers pushing carriages, and it
was
peacetime, and Meg was suddenly, unconscionably happy. She held Guy’s hand tightly, as though to comfort him.

“They weren’t in the city,” he was saying. “Apparently they’d gone to relatives in the country—a market town south of Frankfurt.
For safety,” he added, in case the point hadn’t been taken, in case the irony had been missed. “Something went wrong, some
bloody Pathfinder dropped the target markers in the wrong place, something like that, and the town got hit. Flattened. Five
hundred bombers or something, all aiming for Frankfurt, all on the wrong target.”

They walked some more. The band played “Land of Hope and Glory,” and someone in the small crowd applauded. “Fuck,” Guy said
quietly, and the word was shocking on his lips, far more shocking than it would have been coming from her own. “Fuck everything.”
He said it loud enough for passersby to overhear. A woman looked appalled and muttered something to her companion:
shell shock,
maybe, or
socialist.
Or perhaps it was just a complaint about how there was a different class of person in officer’s uniform these days.

“I’m sorry,” he said to Meg as the women walked on.

“Don’t be.”

“It’s Lotty. My daughter. Oh, yes, and Greta in a kind of abstract way. But Lotty…”

“Of course.” What does one say to the bereaved? There had been so much practice in recent years, and yet no one had got much
better at it.

“Poor little Lotty. It’s what I said at the match, isn’t it?”

“The match?”

“The cricket. That quotation from Alice…”

“I never liked the Alice books,” Meg said.

They crossed the Mall. There was a small crowd outside the palace, hoping to see a sign of the royal family. The sandbags
had gone there too. “Time,” she told him. “That’s what you need. Just time. Time cures everything.”

He tried a laugh. “But we haven’t got time, have we? You’ve got to get back to work.”

It was a joke of a kind. She laughed encouragingly. “I’ve got all the time in the world. I told my wing commander that I was
taking the day off, and he always agrees to what I say.”

“How do you manage that?”

“By not going to bed with him.”

They walked. They went almost entirely by parks, right across the city, from St. James’s to Green Park, then across the road
at Hyde Park Corner and into Hyde Park itself. There were horse riders along Rotten Row and some boats on the Serpentine,
all those peacetime things. At Speakers’ Corner there were the usual orators and the usual hecklers. Someone was talking about
famine in India and the dismemberment of the British Empire; another was preaching the end of the world. A man with one arm
was arguing about the future of Europe, about how it was time to throw off the yoke of capitalism. Marble Arch was decked
with union flags, but the triumphalism of the city was only halfhearted. The future held too many unknowns. Revolution hung
on the coattails of war.

“What’ll you do now?” Meg asked as they crossed Bayswater Road, their feet on pavement for almost the first time. “Once you’ve
been demobbed, I mean.”

“There’s the family business. Shoes. Unfortunately it’s not a very good time for shoes, but we’ll muddle along.”

“Didn’t you make army boots?”

He laughed. “As a matter of fact, we did. But I don’t think there will be much of a market for them now.” He fell silent.
“And I want to get back to the mountains if I can. Before it’s too late.”

Meg shivered, as though she was cold in this day of sunshine. “I think I hate the mountains.”

“You were there in North Wales.”

“That was
then,”
she said. “That was another person in another place. So much has happened since.”

They found themselves outside her apartment. They hadn’t planned anything, but that was the direction their walk had taken
them and it seemed obvious. “Anyone at home?” she called as she opened the door There was no reply. The radio was chattering
away to an empty sitting room, something about the new bomb that had been dropped on Japan.
Atomic,
that’s what they were calling it. Splitting the atom, splitting the world apart, apparently. “When will Deidre learn?” Meg
said, turning the thing off. She looked around. Guy suddenly seemed very miserable standing there in the middle of the untidy
sitting room, somehow dwarfing the place, somehow ill-suited to the drab furniture, the tattered sofa and overstuffed armchairs.
“Do you want anything? A cup of tea? A drink? Whisky, gin? We’ve got stacks of stuff. Someone I know in the Ministry of Food…”
There was a nervous haste to her words.

He shrugged.

“Guy,” she said. She went over to him and put her hands onto his shoulders and lifted herself up onto her toes to kiss him
on the mouth. He didn’t move, didn’t respond, let her press her lips to his and then look at him quizzically. “Shouldn’t I
have done that?” she asked.

He cast around for something to say, as though he might find the right words lying around in that untidy room, among the cheap
magazines and the scattered cushions. “I’m sorry. I’m just…distracted. Confused.” And quite suddenly he was weeping, looking
around the room for words and weeping, and Meg was holding him, her arms around him clumsily as though to restrain him from
doing himself harm.

Afternoon to evening. Sunlight coming through the windows of her bedroom like shards of glass, piercing discarded clothing
and entangled limbs, crumpled faces and eyes that blinked against the dazzle. They talked, not of much, but of the future:
fanciful talk, high, wild talk of mountains and glaciers. He would go to the Alps, to the Himalaya; they would buy a house
in Wales; they would have children. He would live again, not in this limbo that he had occupied for so long. Her warm, moist
body gave him hope, and he gave her hope that there was a contentment to come, not always striving after things that were
intangible. Meg had never felt more optimistic. “Darling,” she said, holding him there, in a way that Greta never had, “do
you want to do it again?”

They were married the next spring. It was a Registry Office affair in Kensington, where they had found an apartment. Diana
had promised that she would come down from Liverpool, but at the last minute she couldn’t—some family thing up in Scotland—and
there was only a telegram from the two of them:
WISHING YOU BOTH VERY BEST FUTURE STOP MUCH LOVE DI ALAN.
The Registry Office ceremony was a bit absurd really, with the registrar trying to imbue the whole thing with a sense of ritual,
as though he was a sort of secular priest. “Marriage is a most solemn undertaking, before friends and relatives, and before
the State itself, embodied in me.” That kind of thing. There was a lunch party afterward. There was Guy’s mother, old and
fragile and disapproving of Meg. There were half-a-dozen of his climbing friends, members of the Alpine Club with an air of
Harris Tweed about them. There were friends from their offices. Meg’s colonel, Tommy, drank too much and told Guy that he
was fucking lucky to have got her and a fucking bastard to have taken her away from him and did he know that she could do
the most marvelous thing with her mouth and her fingers. “Like this.” And the fool blew through his lips and ran his fingers
over them at the same time so that he made a blabbering noise like a little baby. It was a joke. Through his laughter he asked,
“Weren’t you a conchie once?”

Guy stiffened. “As a matter of fact, I was.”

“Blue funk, was it? Bloody coward, are you?”

At which point Meg appeared at Guy’s side as though she had been conjured out of the air. “Tommy, you’re drunk,” she said,
leading Guy expertly away. “When the doodlebugs came over,” she said, “Tommy spent the whole time in the shelter underneath
the Ministry. Something to do with secret planning, he used to say. I don’t know what color it was, but it was a funk sure
enough.”

After the reception, they climbed into Guy’s old Riley. With cans clattering along the road behind them and a notice saying
CLIMBER TYING THE KNOT
hanging on the trunk, they set off out of the city along Western Avenue. They paused in a turnout to remove the decoration
and then continued on to Oxford, where they stayed at the Mitre. The next day they went on, up the A
5
toward Wales. “Somewhere rather special,” Guy said when Meg asked where they were going. “Somewhere I’ll bet you’ve never
been.”

And he was right. Meg had never been there before, never even imagined that such a place could exist in dull, gray Wales,
the strange little seaside village that they finally reached, a collection of buildings clinging to the cliffs of a headland
and overlooking the estuary of a river. It was more like somewhere in Italy, the Amalfi Coast, she thought, although she had
never been there. There were cottages and follies in pink and yellow stucco. There were cobbled alleyways and little arches
and a campanile; there were fountains and statues; there was pine and rhododendron and holm oak. It seemed a kind of dream,
a transport out of the drab, monochrome postwar world. “That was where Noël Coward wrote
Blithe Spirit,”
Guy said as they passed one of the cottages. And the whole place seemed appropriate to the creation of fantasies, the conjuring
up of dreams. They stayed in a small cottage with a bedroom and a sitting room that smelled vaguely of damp. From the low
windows there was a view over the estuary south toward Harlech. In that cottage, for those five days, in the rather uncomfortable
double bed, with the windows open and light reflected upward against the low ceiling from the tidal flats, she felt happy.