The Fall (26 page)

I couldn’t see from where I was, but I could imagine him smiling across at her as she came up toward him, that watchful, thoughtful
smile that was just like his mother’s. I could imagine his expression as he eased her across on the end of the rope like a
fisherman landing a catch after playing it to exhaustion. “You’re doing all right,” I heard him call. And when she reached
his stance on the slab, I could imagine him grabbing her by the arm and pulling her to safety and kissing her full on the
mouth as she came toward him.

I
T WAS RUTH
who gave the climb its name. We had toyed with one or two — the Pink Panther, Floating Rib — but nothing that we were happy with.
Naming a route was important, we explained to her. It sets the character. It establishes your ownership.

“But it’s not yours,” she protested. “It’s nature’s. It’s a piece of geology.”

“The cliff belongs to nature,” Jamie said, “but the route is ours.”

She nodded. “Okay. You need something Welsh, something with resonance.
Pendragon,
that’s what you should call it.
Pen-dragon
.”

Pendragon: Dragon Head, the banner that the legendary kings of Britain carried into war. It sounded good.

That evening, she sat us down in the kitchen of the pub and cooked supper. It was a Tunisian dish — something with fish and
couscous. She’d been to Tunisia, all along the North African coast, in fact, and into the desert. “To the Aïr.” Neither Jamie
nor I knew where the Aïr was. We’d never heard of it. Before that there’d been that year at the Slade when she thought she
might be an artist, and a year in Israel on a kibbutz when she thought she might marry a Sabra.

“But you didn’t?”

“I didn’t.” Now she was thinking of going back to university. Celtic literature it would be this time, the Mabinogion and
the Arthurian cycle. But, of course, she was still painting and sculpting. Ruth Phoenix. Her work had attracted interest — there
had been an exhibition of sculpture in Liverpool. She had a piece at the Institute for Contemporary Arts in London. Her studio
was in a converted stable at the back of the pub, but she wouldn’t show it to us, not yet. There was something personal and
inviolate about it, she said.

So Jamie and I ate and listened and looked at each other and at her; we guessed, both of us at the same time, that something
new had happened in our lives.

“And all you two guys do is climb?” she asked.

“More or less,” Jamie agreed. He was amused. There was the light of mockery in his eyes as he glanced at me. “Do you do anything
else, Rob?”

I didn’t.

“I didn’t think so. We just climb.”

“Jamie’s got a father to live up to,” I said, “but I just do it because I can’t think of anything else to do.”

“What about his father?” Ruth asked.

“Jamie’s father?” I looked at him. “His father was a mountaineer. Didn’t you see? You must have been abroad. It was all over
the papers. The discovery of his body, I mean.”

“His
body?”

“He died years ago,” Jamie said. I could tell by his tone that he didn’t want to talk about it. “Nineteen-fifty-four, on Kangchen-junga.
Some climbers found him just this spring.”

There was the way that Ruth was looking at him. You remembered her looks. There was a cast in her eye, a curious reflective
value that made you wonder what she was thinking. “It must have been dreadful.”

Jamie shrugged. “I hardly remember him. Just a sort of shadow in the background of my childhood.”

“And you climb to live up to his reputation?”

“That’s just Rob fooling about,” he replied impatiently. “I climb because I love it. Perhaps it’s in the blood.”

“Do you know something else?” I said. I suppose I was a bit pissed. I suppose we both were. The euphoria of the day’s climbing
had evaporated. “Do you know something else about Jamie’s father? My mother was in love with him. Did you know that?” I looked
from one to the other. Surely they had understood what I was saying? “My own mother,” I repeated to make it clear, “was in
love with Jamie’s father. Jamie’s mother and my mother were rivals in love.”

He laughed dismissively “It was a schoolgirl crush, Rob. Mother told me about it. It was at the start of the war, years before
she married my father.”

I think it was his laughing that annoyed me. I’d seen my mother close to tears; I’d seen her life blighted by marriage to
my father, a man whom she didn’t really love. I’d felt something of her pain. For a few moments I felt protective of her.
I turned to Ruth. “Jamie’s mother stole him from her. My mother always felt that.”

He laughed again. “Caroline’s good at stealing men, isn’t she?” he said. “Doesn’t stop at young boys, either.”

“What do you mean by that?”

There was the sound of the kitchen around us, the murmur of the refrigerator, something cooking on the stove, noise from the
bar coming through the hatch, but there was silence among the three of us. Ruth sensed the undercurrents. She had no way of
knowing what was going on, but she was a clever reader of people’s emotions; she knew when the stakes were high. Jamie took
a sip of beer and placed the glass down with care beside his plate. Then he looked straight at me with an equivocal smile,
two smiles, the sardonic and the faintly amused. “I think you know exactly what I mean.”

How do you measure the shifts in a relationship? Certainly my friendship with Jamie changed after that, although the change
was subtle and hard to define. And then I wonder, why should it have changed? Before that outburst, we both knew about Caroline
and me; the only thing new was that the knowledge was now out in the open — I knew that he knew. Ridiculous really, a kind of
puzzle, a tongue twister. He knew that I knew that he knew. But consider how many relationships survive sewn together with
tacit complicity and mutual deception. It’s the cold light of discovery that’s so dangerous. Better to live with the lies.

We said no more about it. The next day we were out on the cliffs again, talking occasionally about Ruth and saying nothing
about Caroline. Ruth came with us when she could get away from the pub. I watched Jamie and her together and sensed the bond
between them growing from mere attraction and curiosity into something else. Love? Did either of them surrender themselves
enough for that? Was there ever that extinction of self in their relationship?

We said no more about it. The next day we were out on the cliffs again, talking occasionally about Ruth and saying nothing
about Caroline. Ruth came with us when she could get away from the pub. I watched Jamie and her together and sensed the bond
between them growing from mere attraction and curiosity into something else. Love? Did either of them surrender themselves
enough for that? Was there ever that extinction of self in their relationship?

On the third evening, he didn’t sleep in the van at all. I lay alone in the darkness. If I sat up and pulled the curtains
aside, I could see down the hill to the pub, see the vague, glowworm light in one of the upstairs rooms, the room that was
hers, the room where she lay with Jamie.

The next day the weather broke. Gray cloud slid over the sea from Ireland and shrouded the coast. There was a thin drizzle
in the wind, with the promise of worse. Toward the south, the bulk of Cader Idris was shut away from human gaze. Jamie and
I discussed what we should do, but there was another person in the equation now and we had that gulf between us, a gulf that
was not a void but was filled with things — the detritus that comes with knowing each other too well and for too long, from
knowing too many secrets. And it seemed that he and Ruth had conceived an idea. They’d been discussing it together, apparently.
Just a fantasy. Something for a rainy day. “What the hell are you talking about?” I asked.

“A business.”

“A
business?”

“We thought of setting up a business.”

“What the hell do you mean, a business?”

“Climbing and trekking, something like that.”

I laughed. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“What’s so ridiculous? We could open a trekking and mountaineering center. Maybe even do some climbing gear.”

“Matthewson Mountain Boots?” I suppose my tone was mocking. Anyway, it angered him.

“Why not, Rob? Why the hell not? Christ, what’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing’s wrong with me.”

“Well you sound pissed off.” While the rain pattered on the roof, we sat there in the van wavering on the edge of a pointless
argument, like kids.

Later that day, they dropped me home. There was no more climbing to be done, and the spaces in our friendship had suddenly
become too narrow for me to fit in. “I should see my mother,” I said, “and maybe do something to earn my keep.” They tried
to persuade me to stay with them, but there was little conviction to their arguments.

The place wasn’t far away, but it always seemed like returning to another country: the familiar road, the familiar hill with
its view over the estuary, the familiar Victorian house that had the sign saying
HOMELEIGH — PRIVATE HOTEL
because my mother couldn’t bear the words
guest house.
Jamie parked the van in the road outside and came in to say hello. He gave my mum a kiss that she clearly didn’t expect,
and the assurance that, yes, Caroline was fine. He used that name.
Caroline
sent her love. Mother smiled tightly and nodded but didn’t, I noticed, offer hers in return. And then he clapped me on the
shoulder and climbed back into the van, and Ruth and he were gone, the old Volkswagen clattering away down the hill toward
the coast road that led through a litter of seaside resorts on the way to England.

“I rue the day that you ever started climbing,” Mother said as we watched the van depart. I liked that.
Rue.
It had a fine, old-fashioned sound to it. “Come on, Mum,” I told her. “When you were my age you were pulling Blitz victims
from the rubble. You’ve told me yourself. It was a damned sight more dangerous than climbing.”

“But there was a war on.”

“You could always have been a land girl and spent the war picking potatoes in safety.”

“And with Guy and Meg’s son. How strangely things work out.” She seemed puzzled, as though Jamie’s brief visit had confused
her, as though there were things she might say and think and she wasn’t sure about any of them. “It’s all water under the
bridge now, I suppose. At least he’s not taken after his mother.”

What on earth did she mean by that? Yes, he
had
taken after her. I saw shadows of her in his every expression, the hint that beneath the edges of masculine toughness there
lurked the ghost of that supple female strength. I saw Caroline in his petulance and in his thoughtful reserve. I had never
got near to the quick of her; I had never really got close to Jamie, either.

“Is that his girlfriend?” Mother asked.

“I suppose that’s what she’s becoming. We met her a few days ago.”

“Looks like a gypsy.”