The Fall (3 page)

“She’s in the kitchen. Who shall I say —?”

“You shan’t.” I pushed past and went down the passage. The youth followed behind, no doubt wondering whether he had failed
in his duty as guard dog, no doubt wondering whether this visitor was going to pull out a notepad at the last moment and ask
Ruth how she felt about Jamie’s death and what it was like to be married to a man who defied death every day and crap like
that.

She was in the kitchen just as the guard dog had said. She was fiddling around with a coffeepot, occupying herself with trivial
things, which is what you do in circumstances like this. She turned to see who it was who had just come in the door, and there
were whole seconds when I could watch her expression register nothing at all, a performance that would have tried a lesser
actress beyond all imagining. Her hand went up to brush a strand of hair from her forehead. She did it with the back of her
wrist, a gesture that was so familiar. Her fingernails were cut short and stained with oil paint.

“Dewar,” she said. No surprise. A consummate piece of acting. She’d always called me by my surname, right from our first meeting.
Almost always.

The minder had slipped back into the shadows. “I heard the news on the radio,” I said.

She frowned. “Where were you?”

I shrugged her question away and went over to her, and she stood there while I put my hands on her shoulders and leaned forward
to kiss her on the cheek. There was that awful familiarity, the sensation that somehow, even after so many years, this was
where I belonged. “I thought maybe I could be of help. I don’t know how exactly.”

“Shoulder to cry on?”

“Perhaps.”

She offered me something. A beer, anything, something to eat perhaps? I took the beer and sat at the table. While she prepared
me some food, she told me what there was to tell, which was mainly about hospitals — “dead on arrival, actually” — and police
statements and that kind of thing. “There’ll be a coroner’s inquiry, but they say they’ll release the body for the funeral.”
Her mouth turned down. “It’ll be a zoo. Press, television. They’ve been on the phone all bloody evening.” Her Welsh intonation.
People say the accent is singsong, but that’s just being romantic. It’s flat-voweled and resigned, the voice of a people who
have always scratched a living on the edge of Britain ever since they were driven there by the invaders. The accent of defeat.

“What was he doing?”

“Doing?”

“Yes,
doing.
What happened? The radio report said nothing. Just a fall.”

She looked up at me. “Great Wall,” she said. “Solo.”

“He
what?”

“You heard.” Her face was lean and pinched. It looked as though she was in a gale, the wind battering past, the sound of it
in her ears, roaring past her ears so that it was difficult to hear what people said. You stood right near her and you shouted
and still the wind snatched your words away.

“Solo?
But that’s the kind of thing kids do.”

She shrugged.

“I mean it must be outside his range these days. Must have been. Even roped. What grade is it now? E3? When I knew it, it
was just ridiculous.”

“Four. It’s E4.”

“E4 solo? At his age? I mean, that’s suicide.” There was a silence in the kitchen. The windows were black as slate. There
was that faint, infernal smell of gas from the stove.

“He was fit,” she said eventually, as though something had to be said. “Always out, always climbing. You know.”

“I remember falling off Great Wall trying to second him. Had to take a tight rope. He thought it bloody funny. I remember
him peering down at me from the peg belay and grinning like an idiot.”

“He would.”

“Where is he now?” For a fraction of a second it had seemed that we were talking in the present, about the living, not the
dead. That lithe man, the laughter in his expression, the shadows in his eyes.

“The undertakers’,” she said. “I’ve discovered that they take everything off your hands. Complete service. What a discovery
to make. Look, you don’t have to be here, you know.”

“I want to be.”

“Have you got somewhere to stay? Do you want a room?”

“If you like.”

“Okay.” She looked away and found something to do, the way you do when you want distraction. There’s always something irrelevant
to do.

“What are your plans?” I asked.

“Plans?”

“About this place.”

“Oh, that. Sell my share, I guess. Nic’s a partner now, did you know that? Dominic Lewis. You know him?”

“I know the name. Was that the courteous reception committee?”

“He’s been a big help.”

“I’m sure.”

“And I’ll buy a cottage in Spain with the proceeds.” It was a joke. She smiled to show me that it was and I smiled back, and
there were echoes all around us. The past, the distant past. A whole lifetime.

She corrected herself: “Castle more like. Castles in Spain.”

“Or in the air.”

I slept in one of the rooms in the main building, beneath a low, sloping ceiling and watched over by a picture of Dominic
Lewis climbing Pendragon, which was one of our routes, one that Jamie and I had put up. I recognized the pitch clearly enough.
Like so much else it was ingrained in memory — the feel of the rock, the precise uncompromising curve of
that
hold,
that
crack, that small nub of quartz that was the key handhold. It was like an etching, the details scored into the mind because
they were experienced in every way at the time — intellectually, physically, all ways that there are to experience something.
“It’s just like sex.” That’s what Jamie used to say. “The physical and the mental together. Mind and matter.” Quite the little
philosopher, Jamie used to be. In the photo, Lewis was all flexing deltoids and purple leotards, looking up toward the camera
with his fingers curled like claws over a flake hold and his mouth in a half smile. The pink gneiss was all around him, the
sea boiling in the background: very photogenic. He was soloing, of course. No doubt he’d have done Pendragon on sight, as
a warm-up before tackling something hard. He was one of the new generation: bolts and chalk, rappel inspections and top-roping
to get the moves right.

I thought of Jamie soloing Great Wall, a climb he could never have hoped to succeed on, not any longer, not these days. And
then I must have dozed, because the next thing I knew was a faint, mouselike sound, and when I turned there wasn’t the cold
blackness of the wall across the room anymore, but a faint gray trapezium of light. The door was open. A figure was standing
there, a black silhouette against the gray, like a minimalist painting. Mere shapes.

“Who’s that?”

Soft steps creaked on the boards. I felt her close presence in the darkness, a sensation that was midway between heat and
scent. “Do you mind? I just wanted company, you know. Feeling a bit
digalon.”

Calon
is heart;
digalon,
downhearted. It had been one of her words, one of her Welsh words that she allowed into her English.
Cariad
was another: darling, dearest, love. I said something — an apology, a warning, something — but she didn’t care. She lifted the
blankets and slipped in beside me. Even after a quarter of a century, she was familiar, the movements of her tough limbs,
the hard angles of her body, her loose breasts, her smell.

She’d gone by the time a gray, bleary dawn opened the narrow windows of my borrowed room. The whole incident might almost
have been a dream — or a memory.

B
REAKFAST WAS A
silent affair. The three of us watched one another warily, Lewis wondering exactly who I was and how I fit in to this strange
little world halfway up a Welsh hillside. Ruth avoided my eye, busied herself with making tea and coffee and that kind of
domestic thing that was so foreign to her.

“You used to partner Jim, didn’t you?” Lewis asked. He had flat Mancunian vowels that didn’t go very well with a flashy name
like Dominic. In the past he’d have been Don or Joe and would have driven up on a motorcycle to spend his weekends in the
Pass bivvying under a rock. Nowadays he was sponsored by a climbing-gear manufacturer. He had the name all across the front
of his fashionable shirt: Top Peak.

“For a few years.”

He smiled. “Did quite a few routes with him, didn’t you?”

“Quite a few. Pendragon was one.”

“’Course. Matthewson and Dewar, alternate leads.”

“You read the guide.”

“I didn’t flash it, if that’s what you mean. Nearly came off at the crux. Got gripped something terrible.”

“It doesn’t look like it in the photo.”

“That was for the camera.” He grinned and shoveled cereal into his mouth. “Fine route,” he admitted through the debris of
cornflakes. Or did he say
fun
route? “Necky Quite something, for those days.” There was a pause while he ate. Then, “You were on the Eiger with him, weren’t
you? That business on the North Face?”

“Yes,” I answered, but I didn’t say any more, and I didn’t encourage him to ask. I wasn’t going to discuss that with him.
I turned to Ruth. “Caroline. Is she —?”

She smiled knowingly. “Alive? Oh, very much so.”

“Still at Gilead House?”

“Yes. I spoke to her on the phone yesterday. I suppose I ought to go round, but…”

“I’ll go and see her.”

“She’ll be at the funeral.”

“I’d still better go.”

You must confront your past. At some time or other you must confront your past. It doesn’t flash before your eyes, I knew
that, but it’s always there. We are our past. There is nothing else, and none of it can be undone.

The drive took an hour and a half, back through the valley to the top of the Pass, up and over and through the mountains and
then down to where trees grew again and there were waterfalls and gray terraced houses picked out in white, with signs saying
BED AND BREAKFAST.
A verdant valley on the edge of the mountain wilderness. Beyond the town, the road wound up into the hills. I lost the way
once but picked it up again after backtracking for a turn or two. Nothing had changed much, but memory is selective: it doesn’t
give you a route plan. A sign pointed a stern Old Testament finger to Nebo, the mountain from which Moses was allowed to view,
but never reach, the Promised Land; then there was the familiar stretch of green meadow and the gray house halfway up the
hillside beneath the hanging woodland. The stable yard on one side and the upper garden at the back. A dry-stone wall of slate.
Roses and fuchsias set like jewels in a case of pewter and green velvet.
Gilead,
the quaint name from a chapel that had once stood there, part of whose walls were built into the house itself.

“It’ll do,” Jamie’s mother had said once, long ago. “It’s not home, but it’ll do.”

I stopped the car and climbed out. Below, the ground fell steeply away to the river and the town. I could see the Anglican
church and the Methodist chapel, and the municipal offices, which were like a hybrid between the other two. There was the
silver line of the railway to balance in its directness the silver meanders of the river. There was smoke in the still air,
thin plumes like old-fashioned quills stuck in ink pots. Upstream of the town was the seventeenth-century bridge featured
in the postcards. They claim that Inigo Jones built it, but his surname was the only Welsh thing about the man. Jones was
London born and bred.