The Fall (15 page)

T
HE RAIN CAME IN
over the Irish Sea, thin and mean and gray. It rattled at the windows of my room as though trying to get in. “Where did you
get these things?” my mother asked, unpacking my suitcase and finding a shirt and a wide and flowery tie from a boutique in
the King’s Road. They seemed symbolic of all that London had to offer: bright and brash against the self-pitying gray of Wales.

“Jamie’s mother bought them for me. They’re Christmas presents.”

“First a watch and now these. What’s Meg trying to do, take you over?”

“It’s
Caroline
now, Mum. She’s Caroline.”

“What do you care?”

“It’s just what she’s called.”

“She was always Meg. It’s a silly, pretentious affectation of hers to change her name. Typical of her type.”

“What
is
her type, Mum?”

“You tell me.”

We stood glaring at each other across the litter of unpacked clothes. I suppose she wanted to know the truth, but you can’t
ask directly, can you? In case you get the answer you don’t want to hear. What if I had told her? Yes, Caroline and I have
slept together: we’re lovers. What if I had said that? But I didn’t. I just shrugged instead. “I don’t know what you mean.
She’s just Jamie’s mother. A bit of a laugh at times…different from most people her age.”

“What do you mean by that? She’s no older than I am.”

“That’s what I meant by it.”

We found that funny. She laughed, and I laughed with her. “Maybe I should start wearing miniskirts. Can you imagine what they’d
say round here? And call myself Jezebel or something.”

It was when she laughed that I could see the woman who was in those wedding photos, the woman my father had married. I told
her about Eve. “She’s all right,” I said. “Her old man’s a barrister.”

“That sounds very respectable.”

“You mean, she’d make a suitable daughter-in-law?”

She smiled at my teasing. “You know what I mean.”

“And we all went to this place in Sussex where you climb. I had a go. Jamie said I can go climbing with him. Maybe when he
comes here at Easter. He says we can go to the Llanberis Pass and he’ll show me.”

The amusement slid clumsily from her face. “What do you want to do that for?”

“For fun. He says it’s great. Scary and exciting.”

“It’s dangerous. Look what happened to his father.”

I knew she was going to say that. I had the response ready. “But
you’ve
done it. You went climbing with him, didn’t you?”

“How on earth do you know that? Did Meg —”

“Caroline didn’t say anything. We found his notebook, that’s all. Jamie’s father’s. There’s your name in it.”

Mother took a careful breath. It seemed to be difficult for her, as though breathing had become something that you had to
learn and she needed practice. “What did it say?”

“Just your name against a couple of climbs, that’s all. ‘Second: Diana Sheridan,’ that kind of thing. Is it true?”

Her expression was difficult to interpret — guarded, puzzled, underpinned by something approaching fear. “Of course it’s true,”
she said quietly. “It was before Meg ever knew him.”

“You never said.”

“Why should I say?”

“What’s the problem, Mum?”

“Nothing’s the problem. Nothing at all.” She looked around my room as though searching for distraction, and found none. “Just
that I think perhaps…”

“Perhaps what?”

“Perhaps I was in love with him.”

I felt embarrassed, awkward in the presence of adult emotion. Emotion was foreign to her, and her display of it a shock. “It
doesn’t matter, Mum,” I said.

She nodded. “It does matter,” she whispered. “It
does
matter.”

And I had the sudden and terrible thought that she was still in love with him and had always been in love with him — this man
who had married someone else and anyway was long dead on some distant mountain. Love was an emotion I had laid claim to with
Caroline, but in truth it seemed to be something that I could pick up or leave aside as I wished. I thought perhaps that I
loved Eve now. And yet here was an adult who seemed scarred by love, almost literally so, the tissue still growing over the
wound and giving her the stiff, expressionless face of a burn victim.

She gave a fugitive smile, as if trying to show that it was all of no account. “It was so long ago now I barely remember.
We spent a whole weekend climbing together. He taught me how. How to use a rope and all that kind of thing. And on Sunday
he dragged me up a climb that was too difficult really. We had a bit of a struggle getting up. But…” There was a cast to her
eyes, as though she were looking somewhere else, somewhere beyond the narrow confines of our hotel, of the kitchen where she
prepared breakfast and afternoon teas with the assistance of Mrs. Jones from the council houses nearby, of the interminable
lists, of shopping, of repairs, of things to do and things to be done.

“But?”

She shrugged. “It was fun. Funny. We laughed a lot. But the war had just begun, and after that I went down to London to join
an ambulance unit and he went back to Manchester. He was, you see, a conscientious objector. He had to face some kind of tribunal.”

“And then…?”

“And then.” She shook her head and looked around for something to do, some chore to bring things back down to earth. “Then
the laughing stopped,” she said.

North Wales 1940

Y
OU’RE GUY MATTHEWSON,
aren’t you?” she said as the descending climber approached her. She had been watching him coming down the rough path from
the cliffs for some minutes but had only recognized him as he got nearer. He looked startled at being spoken to.

“Yes, that’s right,” he said.

She blushed. “I’m Diana Sheridan. A bit like the actress,” she added. “Only she’s Dinah.”

“What actress?” he asked.

She reddened. Was it ridiculous to expect that anyone might make the connection? “It doesn’t matter,” she said, and held out
her hand toward him. For a dreadful moment he looked at it as though he was not going to take it, as though he might leave
it there, thrust out into the space between them. Then he clasped it solemnly and shook it, and looked at what he had done
and apologized for making her hand dirty. “I’ve just been wrestling with a muddy groove, I’m afraid.”

“Oh, that’s all right. Where?”

He gestured vaguely up the hill, up the gray rocks and green rakes of grass. “Up there.”

“Were you on your own?”

“I tend to be these days. I’m a conchie, you see. Not popular.”

She blushed again. She wished he hadn’t mentioned the matter of his being a conscientious objector, which was rather embarrassing,
like having scabies or something. You wanted not to have to talk about it. Almost, she smiled and walked on. Almost, he merely
nodded at her and passed her down the narrow path. But she screwed up her courage and asked the question, and on reflection
she told herself that it was only because he was at a disadvantage, crippled by the fact of objecting to the war, that she
had dared. “Would you take me climbing?” she asked. “Up there?”

He looked at her with curiosity. “If you wish. Surely
you’re
not on your own…”

“I’m at the youth hostel. I’ve got friends coming up tomorrow, but…”

“But?”

“They’ll just want to go walking.”

“And you —”

“Would rather do some proper climbing.”

He smiled for the first time. It was just a momentary thing, so quick that she thought perhaps she had imagined it. His whole
face was transformed by this smile. At rest his face was rather reserved, private, a bit awkward. “Why not?” he said.

So they agreed to meet the next morning. He would come for her with his motorcycle — she didn’t mind riding pillion? — and she
would be ready on the road outside the hostel. At seven o’clock. They’d go around to the Llanberis Pass on the other side
of the mountains.

“Why there?” she asked.

“Why not?” He was looking at her thoughtfully. He was head and shoulders taller than she, and he was looking her up and down
as though making some kind of assessment. Could you tell whether someone would make a climber just by looking at them? “I
hope you’ve got some slacks,” he said. “Don’t want you climbing cliffs in a skirt, do we?”

The very idea made her blush. “Breeches. I’ve got breeches.”

He nodded. That was all right, then. “And boots,” he added. “Good stiff boots.”

The next morning she left a note with the hostel warden for her companions when they got there.
Gone climbing,
she wrote.
See you this evening.
And she was waiting there in the cool dawn — mist skulking over the waters of the lake, shreds of cloud hanging across the
mountainside opposite like dirty washing on a line — when his bike came into view, roaring along the lakeside and then puttering
to a halt at the turning to the hostel where she was standing. He pushed up his goggles and waved, and she hurried over to
him, feeling suddenly shy at making this early morning assignation with a man.

“How are you?” he shouted above the noise of the engine. Somehow the question seemed a bit ridiculous. She was what she was.
Couldn’t he see that for himself? A tallish, clumsy girl with lackluster, mouse-brown hair and crooked teeth and a diffident
smile. There were no secrets here, no mysteries to unravel. “Fine,” she said.

He edged the bike around so that it faced the way he had come. “Hop on then.” She swung her leg over and settled herself behind
him. He had a canvas rucksack on his back, and so she was spared the problem of how to hold on — she could grab the rucksack
instead of having to grab hold of him. “Ever ridden pillion?” he shouted.

“No!”

“Just go with it. It’s instinctive, like riding a bike. Hold tight!” He twisted the throttle, and the machine roared away.
For an awful moment it seemed almost to pull itself from under her so that she had to cling on for dear life. That’s what
she’d tell them when she got back that evening. Clinging on for dear life.

“You all right?” he called over his shoulder.

The wind made her breathless. “Fine,” she cried, and she
was
fine: exhilarated, excited, ecstatic, she was all of these things. The lake was still and lucid in the morning air as they
drove along the shore. You could see the reflection of the valley wall inverted into its depth. Tryfan lay ahead, a mass of
gray rock like a giant dinosaur laid across their path with its tail flung out toward the lake and its head butting into the
mountain plateau on the right.
Stegosaurus,
she thought, recalling a visit to a museum in Oxford where dusty skeletons had stood, it seemed, like mountains in a cold
and milky light.

They passed the Climbers’ Club hut at Helyg among its grove of trees — the only trees in the whole blighted mountain landscape — and
turned southward at the little village of Capel Curig to speed along the empty Mymbyr Valley, Dyffryn Mymbyr, with its two
glacial lakes and the Snowdon massif blocking the far end. There was something unreal about the drive, something fantastic,
daring, as wild as any climbing expedition. They battered along, and the road branched off to the right and began to climb
toward the head of the Llanberis Pass. At the top they skidded to a halt, with a small shower of loose stones, in the car
park of the hotel.

“That was fun,” she said.

He shrugged. “Let’s get some breakfast. I assume you haven’t had anything?”

They went through into the warm fug of the hotel. The place was wood paneled, decorated with old photographs of bearded men
wearing tweed jackets and nailed boots and holding coils of rope. There was the sensation of ancient ritual and tradition.
They ate breakfast in a front room looking out at the narrow roadway and the mountain rising up on the far side. “That’s Crib
Goch. You know that?”

“I climbed it last summer,” she told him. “We did the Snowdon Horseshoe.” He listened to her account of her adventure as though
it were a great mountaineering achievement. She suddenly felt a bit of a fool, talking like this about something that Guy
Matthewson would surely find no more than an easy stroll. This was a man who had been to the Himalaya, climbed on Everest
with F. S. Smythe. He’d even known Leigh Mallory so the story went, had even climbed with him when he was still at school.
What could he care about her account of a summer day walking around the Snowdon ridge? And yet he listened and nodded and
seemed impressed. “Jolly good,” he said. “Jolly good.”

“I must pay my share,” she said when the bill came, but he brushed her suggestion aside and paid the whole thing himself.
They went back out into the morning just as the sun came over the mass of the Glyders at the back of the hotel and flooded
its light across the top of the valley. The light was magical, like an omen. She felt an absurd happiness as they remounted
the motorcycle.

There wasn’t much farther to go. Guy kicked the engine into life and let the machine freewheel down the road for a few hundred
yards before coming to a halt at a narrow bridge. The valley they were in was flat-floored and steep-sided, ground out by
the passage of a glacier at some immeasurable time in the past. Brown slopes of grass and bracken rose up on either side,
with outcrops of rock like broken teeth embedded in an ancient, fossilized jawbone.