The Fall (50 page)

H
AVE YOU SEEN?
” Eve said one day. This was not long after I’d started work at the gallery. We were renting a flat in Ful-ham, and I’d got
home early. She had come in later and was unloading shopping onto the kitchen sideboard and talking to the bags of vegetables
and packets of tea. “Have you seen?” It was the kind of thing she always said, always with that assumption that it would be
obvious what she meant.

“Have I seen what?”

“You haven’t, then?”

“How do I know until you tell me?”

So she said it, in her flat, matter-of-fact voice, with the London vowels and glottal stops, the sound that drove her father
mad: “Jamie Matthewson’s gett’n’ married. To Ruth.” She noticed, of course. She wasn’t even looking at me at the time, but
still she noticed: my expression, my mood, the small shock I felt — maybe I transmitted something through the air, some subtle
hint of pheromone or some fractional electrical disturbance that emanated from my brain. She noticed everything.

“What happened, Rob?”

“What do you mean?”

“Between you and Jamie and her. In Switzerland. You’ve never said.”

“Oh, for God’s sake…”

But she wasn’t going to be deflected by mere anger. Eve had been in the front line in Grosvenor Square. She’d been charged
by police horses and hit by batons. In Paris her eyes had run with tear gas. She wasn’t going to be deflected by a bit of
phony anger. “Well, what
did
happen?”

I felt the need to justify myself, like a witness being questioned by a prosecutor. “We were cooped up together, facing the
biggest climb of our lives…”

“And?”

“Things got out of hand,” I replied warily.

She smiled at my discomfiture. “She likes that kind of thing, does she? Bit of a tart, really.”

“I thought those were the kind of morals you approve of.”

“In theory, darling, in theory.”

“Anyway, I owe her a lot. You know that. She saved my life.”

The smile faded into something close to regret. “Well, I’m afraid I can’t
save
your life, Rob,” she said. “But I can preserve it.”

I can’t deny that she was right. She did preserve my life. Together we flourished. Our lives flourished; our family flourished.
Two children, the first one born fashionably out of wedlock, the second shortly after a brief ceremony at the Registry Office.
And, in the meantime, Porteus Fine Art blossomed. The seventies and eighties were the right time to be selling works of art.
Canvases of hard-edged acrylic were the perfect symbols of those years of brash money and emotional nihilism: the customers
had the one and aspired to the other. We pandered to the buyer’s prodigality and the artist’s greed, and made money on the
margin. And the assistant employed reluctantly by Harold Porteus, the hopeless university dropout with half a foot, became
an appreciated manager and later a valued partner, thanks to an injection of cash — partly from Eve when an uncle died and partly
from me when my mother finally retired and sold the hotel.

But we didn’t go to Jamie and Ruth’s wedding. An invitation did come, but we were abroad at the time, a long-standing trip
to Eve’s family cottage in France. Her father’s sixtieth birthday. Something like that. So we didn’t go to the wedding and
we didn’t talk about Ruth or Jamie again, and they remained outside our lives, figures of memory that we could do with what
we pleased, but which we were never going to share.

We bought a house south of the river. It was just when the area was being discovered and exploited, the run-down terraces
being tarted up like old whores finally admitted to polite society. Later we bought a second house in the country, with a
paddock and a pair of ponies to go with the pair of daughters. Eve mellowed from New Left to New Labour, from throwing bricks
at policemen to collecting money for the miners, to waving banners at the local foxhunt. We’d come home.

The relationship between gravity and acceleration has long been known, but what about the relationship between time and acceleration?
Is there an equation to describe that? For the first few decades, you are merely slithering down an incline, like kids playing
around on a snow slope, laughing and joking. You can even pretend you’re having fun. It happened to a group of schoolchildren
near the summit of Snowdon one winter. I remember reading about it in the newspaper: a few of them slipped and down they went,
laughing and shouting, slithering on the hard snow of the ridge, having fun. But, like life itself, the slope was convex:
the farther they went, the steeper it got. They didn’t have ice axes, and they weren’t wearing crampons. It wasn’t fun at
all. At the bottom, a cliff was waiting for them.

One day I was on the steeper slopes and wondering what had happened to the last two decades, when the receptionist at the
gallery (no Courrèges dress any longer — a wide-shouldered black suit by now) buzzed through to my office. “There’s someone
to see you. An
artist,
I think.” Her voice fell as she said this.

I sighed. One doesn’t always want to meet artists. They are your lifeblood, but they are also your burden. “Can’t you deal
with it?”

“Very insistent, Mr. Dewar.”

“Can’t you fix an appointment?”

“Apparently not.”

So I finished whatever I was doing and went through into the gallery, into the pure whitewashed space where a Hockney Californian
swimming pool was hanging, a classic that we had on exhibit prior to its auction. There were one or two browsers shuffling
around. There was that hushed muttering that you get with visitors in church: they know that something is going on here, but
they don’t really understand it. They know there is meaning and intent, but they can’t always grasp it. The artist, the inconvenient
artist wearing regulation jeans and a leather jacket, was standing in front of the Hockney She turned to me at the sound of
my footfall behind her.

Twenty years and a dozen Christmas cards between this moment, in front of a pool of blue acrylic on a sunny Californian day,
and the last time I had seen her. A small avalanche of emotion swept through me, an icy rivulet, a glittering stream of crystals
of memory: pretty enough, but dangerous. Two decades amount almost to a lifetime, maybe an entire lifetime if you happen to
be unlucky. And there she was, turning from the painting and looking at me thoughtfully because she knew who she was about
to see and was prepared for it, whereas for me it was all surprise.

“Ruth.”

She gave a wintry smile. She was good at those. “You recognized me.” Her Welsh accent was still there, a flowing current beneath
the even surface of her words, faintly mocking. She had aged, of course: her complexion was a parchment tempered by wind and
sun. You could see the tendons in her neck and in the hand that went up to brush a strand of hair from her forehead. There
was some gold at her throat — a plain chain with a small gold ankh. “You’re looking good,” I told her. She grimaced. She
was
looking good, though. She had the kind of looks that age well: a dry angular structure to her face, a strong, lean body.
Her hair was still hennaed, but she was no longer wearing those gypsy clothes my mother had once complained about. A black
T-shirt beneath the bomber jacket. What was she now? Forty-seven?

We kissed. It was a hesitant, knowing kiss: knowing more than either of us was prepared to admit at the moment. We exchanged
the usual banalities. How long it’s been. How are you? How’s Eve? How are the children? Goodness, they must have grown, all
that kind of thing. How was Jamie?

“In Patagonia,” she said, carefully not answering my question. “He’ll be back in a couple of weeks.”

I had heard from him occasionally: a postcard, a phone call, those Christmas cards. For a couple of years, I had even gone
to the annual dinner of the City Climbing Club, and he had been there, and we had drunk a lot and reminisced a bit, and he
had even suggested that we do something together. But he was already out on a limb by then, gasping and grunting his way up
a succession of Himalayan peaks, risking cerebral edema for the sake of the charge that he got from standing on a tabletop
of ice and rock with a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of central Asia around him. K2, Annapurna, and Everest, the latter
two without oxygen. He was often above twenty-six thousand feet, the death zone from which only about half return. But he’d
returned. He had big lungs and a strong heart and tough arteries, a high lactate threshold and high hematocrit, all the physical
and physiological qualities that you need to go high. And something else: the obsession. On one expedition, he spent, so I
heard from an acquaintance, an entire day over twenty-six thousand feet on the Yalung Face of Kangchenjunga, searching for
his father’s body. He never found it. Perhaps the mountain had shrugged the relic away, sent it down the snow slopes and over
the cliffs, consigning the body of Guy Matthewson to the deep freeze of the Yalung Glacier to become an archaeological exhibit
in a thousand years’ time when finally it emerged from the snout. There must be scores of climbers encased in glacial ice
like that, ready to come out into the light of day dressed in a motley variety of tweeds and down and leather and plastic.
Or perhaps Jamie was just unlucky, and desiccated father and dehydrated son had failed to meet up by pure chance.

“Actually, I’m here on business,” Ruth explained. “I know I should have made an appointment, but…” She wanted us to have a
look at her work. She had some stuff in her van. “Perhaps…” She gave a small, diffident, self-deprecatory laugh.

“Perhaps?”

“Perhaps it’s good enough for Porteus-Dewar to consider?”

I smiled. I looked at my watch, at Ruth, at the gallery, at the Hockney with its stark blue that was almost the color of Eve’s
eyes. Swimming-pool blue. “Why don’t we…”

“Forget about it?”

“Have lunch first. Let me take you to lunch. Give things a bit of time to settle down.”

“Is that a brush-off?”

“It’s realistic. You’re asking me two things. One is to judge an old love —”

“Is that what I was?”

“—and the other is to judge a prospective client. I need to be able to separate one from the other.”

She laughed at my dissembling. “Ever the bastard,” she said.

“Is that what I was?”

“And you didn’t even realize it.”

We went to a wine bar nearby. Amid the noise of the lunch-time crowd, we exchanged lives across a diminutive table. I found
myself talking too much and laughing nervously at things that weren’t that funny, and telling her things that I shouldn’t
have, things about Eve, for example. From her I learned little: she’d helped Jamie with his mountain equipment business, his
photography, and his expeditions. She’d been on a few trips with him, the lightweight one to Makalu, another to Baffin Island.
She’d spent some time in villages in Nepal, doing volunteer work. And they’d had a couple of years in the States, in California.
“And now I wonder where I’ve been for the last twenty years.”

“That’s what we all feel. It’s called age.”

“So I thought I’d start by trying to find out who I was twenty years ago.”

“And have you?”

She frowned at me, as though she was trying to remember where she’d met me, trying to recall my name. “I’m here to check.”

“Does Jamie know about your coming to see me?”

She evaded the question with a sideways movement of her head, like someone seeing a falling stone out of the corner of her
eye and just shifting her head to avoid it. “He talks about you a lot, you know that? Always has.”

“What does he say?”

She seemed to wonder how to reply, whether to plunge into the past, her past, our past, or whether to stand aside. Eventually
she said, “He’s a strange man, isn’t he? I used to think it was something childish at first. When I first met the two of you,
I thought: a couple of kids looking for a bit of childish adventure. A bit of fun. And then I realized that it was something
more than that. I mean, at least kids come in when it’s suppertime. But he never came in, or if he did it was just to snatch
a bite to eat and then go out again. And the game was different. It wasn’t pretend danger, cowboys and Indians or British
and Germans or anything like that. Bang-bang, you’re dead, count up to twenty. This was real danger, and the guns were loaded.
And still he keeps playing.” For a moment the defenses were down. Her eyes were glistening. “Did you know they brought him
down from K
2
after some kind of collapse? Cerebral edema, or something. He was weeks in hospital. I mean, he’s putting his
mind
on the line, his fucking mind, Rob. It’s not just you with your wretched toes. It’s his whole bloody
personality
that he’s risking. And then I wonder, what else is there? Other than this obsession, I mean…”