The Fall (52 page)

Oh, it was a fine and affecting performance, tugging alternately at heartstrings and sinews, mixing memory and fear with pure,
untrammeled physical exhaustion. And at the end, after the sweat and the agony, with the summit conquered for a brief Nirvana
of fifteen minutes, Jamie’s own face appeared full-screen, fiery red and ash gray, hideous with the agonies of high-altitude
effort. There was tumultuous applause. People in the front row even stood, as though he were an opera diva or something.

“Fantastic,” my neighbors said to one another. “Amazing.”

I joined the line of admirers going up to shake his hand, to buy his book and get it autographed. He smiled distractedly at
each supplicant, as though he had forgotten exactly why he was there and who all these people were. Perhaps his mind was still
up in the high Himalayan valley. I wondered whether he would even recognize me. “Hi, Jamie,” I said when my own turn came.

He gripped my hand and smiled at me as though he were smiling at a distant view. “Hi.”

“It’s Robert,” I said.

“Robert,” he repeated, bending to write in the book.

“Robert Dewar,” I said. “For God’s sake, Jamie: it’s me! Rob!”

People around us were staring. Someone behind said, “Get a move on. You’re not the only one.”

Jamie looked up from the book, where he had already written
to Robert.
I watched his gaze come into focus, his expression metamorphose from indifference through various stages of memory and regret
to a kind of tired smile, the smile that you might give someone who has done the wrong thing for the hundredth time, but you
are willing to accept it yet again. The people around us had edged away, sensing that they were watching something more than
a mere encounter, sensing the possibility of theater. “Rob,” he said. “What on earth are you doing here?”

“I was wondering whether I was in the book.”

He glanced down at it, frowning slightly. “I hope you didn’t pay for it.”

“Of course I did.”

“Well, you must have your money back.” He turned to the girl at the table. “Give him his money back. He’s already paid for
it. With his toes.”

Despite my protests, I found money being pressed into my hand. Someone edged me aside and thrust his own copy forward. But
Jamie ignored him, putting his hand on my shoulder and moving us away from the table, away from the line with its burden of
books. Behind us there was a small disturbance of outrage. “Rob,” he repeated. “It’s good to see you. I’ve heard all about
you. From Ruth…”

I gestured to the disappointed line. “What about all them?”

He looked around distractedly. “You wait here,” he said. “You wait here, and then we’ll go and find us a drink. How about
that? I’ll just do my duty, and then we’ll go and get a drink.”

“Don’t forget we’ve got dinner arranged, Mr. Matthewson,” the girl from the publishers said.

He looked at her and shrugged. “It’s just been canceled.”

We found a pub down toward the Cromwell Road. There were tables on the sidewalk outside, put there in the hope that it might
be a warm and sunny evening. I fought my way through a crowd of university students to get to the bar. As I waited for the
beers, I wondered where all this might be leading. Surely Ruth and her art meant more to me now. Surely Jamie was no more
than a curio, a thing one finds by chance when searching through the deposits of memory. He didn’t matter any longer.

When I took our drinks back to the table, he was sitting there, staring across the street as though hoping that the buildings
opposite might fade away and be replaced by something more desolate—a valley wall, perhaps, or a mound of moraine or the snout
of a glacier. He had the manner of someone who lives in the wilderness and is awkward in the face of the rituals of city life,
uncomfortable in ordinary clothes. I noticed how he patted his pockets and glanced around nervously before picking up his
beer. He nodded at me, as though to reassure himself that we were really here, having a drink together in a pub in London.
“Your foot,” he said. “How’s your foot?”

“It gives me a bit of pain in winter. Nothing I can’t put up with.”

“Of course. How long’s it been, Rob?”

“Over twenty years.”

He nodded. “A lifetime. You’re looking all right. Bit paunchy, but all right.”

“It’s all that walking around art galleries that I do.”

He laughed. “Ruth said that. She said you were the predator of the galleries, tearing the unsuspecting artist limb from limb.
You seem to have made her quite a name, Rob.”

“It’s her merit, not mine.”

“But it’s only through you that she’s had this success. Only since you took her on.”

“Are you wondering whether she’s one of my victims?” I wanted to make a joke of it, but he took my words seriously. Was it,
I wondered, the effect of too much time spent too high with too little oxygen? Perhaps all that work in the death zone had
destroyed his sense of humor along with the millions of brain cells that it was supposed to. “Perhaps,” he said. “Perhaps
that has something to do with it. Jealousy. You must know that.”

“You think we might have taken up where we left off all those years ago?”

“Perhaps.”

I shook my head. “Things change, don’t they, Jamie? People change. I’ve been married to Eve for years now. Fifteen, sixteen?
I always forget; she always remembers. We were living together for a couple of years before that. We’ve got two kids, a dog,
three cats, two ponies, and a budgerigar. I’m not going to throw all that over just for a memory. Especially not the budgie.”

Finally he laughed. “I suppose you’re right. They were good memories, though, weren’t they?”

“They were all right. Like all memories, you can make of them what you want.”

He sipped his beer. “You were lucky to get out when you did, you know that?”

“Why lucky?”

“To do something else.” He gestured at the tables around us, the purely urban sound of people in a crowd, of private conversations
in public places. “To get used to all this shit. You know I sweat when I come to the city? You know I feel more afraid than
when I’m gripped on a mountain? Panic, can you imagine?”

“It’s only what you’re used to.”

“I’m not used to people.” He smiled into his beer. “Or talk. Or anything very much. I mean, look at this bloody place. How
do you bear it?”

I shrugged. “You don’t seem to spend much time here, not according to Ruth.”

“Sure. But it can’t go on forever, can it? I’ve felt the limits for years now. And then, what is there?”

“Gentlemanly retirement in Wales. You’ve got the business, haven’t you?”

He made a face. “The business is crap. It’s run by some twenty-year-old who climbs E
7
when he’s off form. All purple leotards and bulging pectorals and chalk bags. When he’s not climbing, he screws Ruth.” I
protested at this, but he dismissed my doubts with a laugh. “You know better than me? He’d be mad not to. There she is on
her own, working away on her bloody paintings, and me halfway up some godforsaken mountain in the Karakoram. What else is
there for her to do in the evenings? Or him, come to that. She probably likes it like that. She’s always liked a bit more
than she’s entitled to, hasn’t she?” He was watching me. That hooded, hounded look of his. I’d catch him watching me like
that in the old days sometimes, look around and find that his gaze was on me.

“Ruth thinks the world of you,” I said.

He didn’t respond directly, but smiled as though I were a child, exhibiting a child’s naïveté. “Remember Grindelwald? That
time before we did the Eiger.”

“Of course I remember. How could I forget?”

And he laughed, a sudden, harsh sound like a shout across a mountain valley, so that people at nearby tables glanced around
as though expecting trouble. “Tell me,” he said. “What did you think?”

I didn’t want to answer. I didn’t want another of his bloody arguments. I’d avoided them for more than two decades and now
we’d met up like this, pure chance, more or less, and here he was banging on about the same old thing. “Do you want something
to eat?” I asked. “They’ve got reasonable food here, I think. Or we can find a restaurant.”

“You haven’t answered my question.”

“We all three knew the score, Jamie,” I protested. “We’d been drinking. We were nervous, charged up, waiting for the weather
to break, keyed up to do the biggest climb of our lives…” Something welled up inside me that was close to anger. Maybe it
was a kind of frustration and a small pinch of fear and a touch of uncertainty, things that blend together to give a parody
of anger. I looked around, as though planning an escape. At one table there was a group of French tourists sipping half pints
of bitter with obvious distaste and arguing about the cost of something; at another, a couple of students from Imperial College
sat conspiratorially over two pints. They had hair like something made from patent leather. I noticed that the girl had a
lump of metal through her tongue and a row of rings around the rim of her ear, like tiny carabiners on a climbing rack. I
turned back to Jamie. “Christ, it was nearly thirty years ago, Jamie.”

He smiled, as if he knew a joke that I didn’t. “Haven’t you ever talked about it with her? In between discussing her pictures?”

“We talk business, not childhood, Jamie. We talk exhibitions and contracts and percentages and that kind of crap. It’s a business
relationship.”

“Ruth knew right from the start, I think.”

“Knew what? In God’s name, what the fuck are you talking about, Jamie?”

“Women know, don’t they? They’re more perceptive, that’s what everyone reckons.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Remember Bethan? Remember that afternoon, just the two of us?”

“Kids,” I said, “messing about.”

He sat back in his chair. He wasn’t looking at me any longer, but at the beer in front of him, at the beads of condensation
that ran like tears down the glass. He wiped them away with a finger, smiling a tight smile, the kind of smile you give when
you’re in pain, the kind that signifies that it hurts but that you’re going to put up with it, like you put up with the headaches
and the pain in the lungs, the cerebral edema, the diarrhea, the vomiting, all those things of high altitude. Then he looked
me directly in the eye. “Thing is, my whole life has been an escape, Rob. Escape from Guy Matthewson, from my mother, but
above all”—he nodded, as though the idea had just occurred to him—“from you.”

I suppose I stared at him. It was like being struck—oh, lightning, stone-fall, avalanche, anything you please. Or as if he
had suddenly leaned forward across the table and done the job himself—hit me across the face with his fist. And for that moment
I felt as though the whole of our childhood was illuminated in a different light, the whole of our friendship rendered in
different shades, new colors. I experienced, I think, something close to panic. “Jamie…” I said, but I didn’t say anything
more. I couldn’t think of the right words.

He picked up his glass and emptied it, then replaced it on the table between us. “The trouble is, I’ve been wrong all the
time. I think the person I’ve really been trying to escape is myself. That’s why it’s been so difficult.” And with that he
got up from the table and walked away down the street, as though he had just remembered something but would be back in a moment.
But he didn’t come back. I called out to him, but he didn’t even turn to look at me. Perhaps he didn’t hear.

Behind me the French tourists had finished their beers and were leaving. The students still argued in low, urgent voices.
The city went on more or less as it always went on, unconcerned and uninterested.

T
HE CORONER’S COURT
was as solemn as a Welsh chapel — might have been a chapel once in fact, with its ogive windows and steeply pitched roof. Outside
there was a certain amount of pushing and shoving, the sparking of press flashes, a crew from Harlech Television waving a
boom mike above the crowd, that kind of thing. But inside it was as serious as a Methodist Sunday service. The coroner eyed
Ruth over the top of his spectacles and expressed his sorrow at the untimely demise of her husband — he used the word
demise,
as though mere
death
wouldn’t do justice to the occasion — and the pathologist delivered his report in the tones of someone reading a lesson: “Multiple
fractures of the cranium and widespread internal injuries,” he said. “Rupture of liver and spleen…”