The Fall

by Simon Mawer

  They walked down the screes and back to the foot of the crag. “I’ve got some lunch for the two of us,” he said.

  “Oh, I never thought —”

  “You’re my guest. It wasn’t for you to think about things like that.”

  “But I invited myself.”

  “No you didn’t. I could just as easily have said that I hadn’t any time to spare on teaching a beginner, but I didn’t. So I invited you, and I’ll provide the picnic lunch.” He unwrapped a packet of sandwiches and handed her one.

  “Ham!” she cried. “How on earth did you get ham? Oh, this is unfair. You cannot do this.”

  He grinned. “I’m well known at the hotel.” There were also two bottles of India Pale Ale. “You do drink beer, don’t you? There are no glasses, so you can’t be very ladylike.”

  “Are you making fun of me?” she asked sharply. She didn’t know why she said it. Perhaps it was because she suddenly thought how unsuitable this encounter was and wondered what her parents might think if they knew about it: their daughter out for the day on her own with a man of over thirty — and a conchie at that. Whatever the reason, she said it, and he looked embarrassed. “Of course not.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to snap. I just…oh, I don’t know what I just.” And she felt every one of those years that stood between her age and his, the difference between being a girl and being a woman. She desperately wanted to be a woman so she would know what to say to him and how exactly to say it. She ate in silence. Maybe the whole day had been spoiled.

  Below them a car ran down the road from the head of the pass, almost the only car they had seen. War was returning the mountains to their primeval desolation. As if to confirm that, an aircraft flew over, the drumbeat of its engines rising and falling, the sun flashing on its fuselage for a moment. “A Flying Pencil!” she cried.

  He looked around. “What?”

  “That aeroplane. A Flying Pencil, that’s what they call them. A Dornier. Oh my goodness, it’s the first I’ve seen. A German.” The aircraft disappeared southward over Crib Goch and Snow-don. Where were the fighters, the Hurricanes and Spitfires? she wondered.

  “How on earth do you know that?”

  “What?”

  “The name of that aeroplane.”

  She smiled apologetically. “I did a course with the Observer Corps. At home.”

  “Where’s home?”

  “Chester. Near Chester, anyway. A little village. We had someone come round and give a lecture about how we could tell enemy aircraft and that sort of thing.” The attempt at conversation seemed to die away. He ate his ham sandwich and drank from his bottle of beer while she contemplated, with fear and something close to excitement, the question that she wanted to ask. Maybe fear and excitement were almost the same thing anyway: they certainly seemed to be when you were rock climbing — the fear of slipping, of falling, of swinging off the cliff on the end of the rope, being inseparable from the excitement of moving in the vertical plane, using holds that you never imagined could support you, making moves that seemed impossible. She took a breath. “Why are you a conscientious objector?” she asked.

  There: it was out in the open now. For better or for worse.

  Had he heard? He kept chewing, kept staring out over the green-and-gray valley, almost as though he hadn’t. “Because of the last time,” he said finally. “The last war, the so-called war to end all wars. I grew up in that. I’ve thought about it a lot, and I decided that it wasn’t a war between two peoples. It was a war between the governing classes of two countries, between the politicians. Nothing’s changed.”

  “Except for Hitler and the Nazis.”

  “They’re just politicians. Nothing more. The German people have never been allowed their say, not under fair conditions.”

  “They seem pretty enthusiastic about it all. If you listen to the news.”

  He laughed humorlessly “But whose news do you listen to?”

  “And if they invade? What then?”

  He picked at a tuft of grass. He suddenly no longer seemed the confident mountaineer, the man who could breach precipices by skill and courage. Rather, he appeared to be confused and anxious. “I don’t know what then. For God’s sake, I don’t have all the answers anymore than anyone else. But I’ll not fight. I don’t believe in it, and I won’t do it. Wars will cease only when men stop fighting.” The speech seemed to have upset him. He turned away from her and looked up across the mountainside, toward the skyline of rocks.

  “I respect you for it,” she said. “Don’t think I don’t.”

  He laughed. “You don’t have to be polite.”

  “I’m not being polite. I mean what I say.”

  “But you should say what you mean.”

  “I do; that’s the same thing, you know.”

  He looked around at her. She saw that his look was something else, not just the look of polite amusement that it might have been. “Not the same thing a bit,” he said.

  A small bubble of laughter lodged somewhere behind her sternum. She waited expectantly for him to continue.

  “Why,” he said, smiling, “you might just as well say that ‘I see what I like’ is the same thing as ‘I like what I see.’”

  It was as though they had exchanged passwords, recognized each other in the dark. She released the laughter and blushed at the same time. “But do you?” she asked.

  “Do I what?” His gaze was very steady, as if he was examining her blush and trying to judge the reason for it.

  “Do you like what you see?”

  “Very much,” he said, and turned away again and began to clear up the scraps of litter from their lunch. “Now what do you want to do next? Are you game for another climb? I’d thought we might try the Spiral Stairs.”

  “Fine,” she said. “The Spiral Stairs sound fine.”

  So they climbed the Spiral Stairs, which had originally, so Guy explained, been named Sodom, but someone in the Climbers’ Club had objected, and so another title had to be chosen. They laughed at that, at the idea of a stuffy old Blimp objecting to such a name; it was rather rude, she thought, although she was uncertain exactly what it meant. The climb itself was at the left-hand end of the Columnar Cliffs. It started from the foot of that awful corner, the corner that had never been climbed but might be one day, and it went out leftward on small holds, out over empty air. Guy shouted to her to be careful, for if she came off there she’d swing like a pendulum below him.

  “Thanks for the warning,” she called back sarcastically. She was beginning to get the measure of him.

  “You’ve got a head for these things,” he shouted. “You’re okay.”

  “You like what you see, is that it?” Somehow being there on the crag, with the wind blowing around them and the rough rock beneath her fingers, gave her the courage to say it.

  “And I see what I like,” he called back.

  They finished the climb up easy slabs to the top of the crag, and as though to greet their triumph, the sun broke through the clouds and illuminated the litter of scree and the crags of rock. They sat together in the sunshine for a while, and she knew what she wanted him to do, which was what he had done when she had completed the first climb, which was to put his arm around her. Just that would have been fine. Nothing more. But he didn’t. He just sat there for a while and then stood up and said, “Well, perhaps I should be getting you back to your friends.”

  “Not especially,” she said. “They’ll be all right by themselves. I left them a note.”

  “Still,” he said, and she thought perhaps that he wanted to get rid of her. It wasn’t until they were down at the road and about to get onto the bike that he asked whether she was interested in doing some more climbing, and she answered that, yes, of course she was.

  “How long are you here?” he asked.

  “Tomorrow and Sunday.”

  He kick-started the engine. “Tomorrow, then?” he yelled above the noise.

  �
�Tomorrow’s fine.”

  He left her on the road, and she walked up the drive to where the youth hostel lay in its small grove of trees. Her friends weren’t there. They’d gone to the Carneddau, the whaleback mountains on the far side of the valley, and they didn’t get back until the evening. “Where were you?” they cried when they tramped in and found her there waiting for them. “What’s all this ‘went climbing?’”

  “That’s what I did: I went rock climbing.”

  “Rock climbing?”

  “With Guy Matthewson. And he’s taking me again tomorrow.”

  “Is he indeed?” said Meg.

  They sat down to their meal, laughing and joking, eager to hear about the day’s adventures. In retrospect, it was a poignant evening. Did they know it at the time? Perhaps they sensed it. Innocence had only a few more weeks to run. Already the boys had their call-up papers — one was already in uniform. Already the girls had volunteered for the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force or the Women’s Royal Naval Service or something. The war was about to stir them up in its wanton manner, send two of them off to die, one of them to be captured, all of them to grow up and into a different world. But for the moment, they sat around the supper table and talked and laughed as though the future didn’t matter, while Diana regaled them with stories of minute holds and vertical precipices, and they laughed and joked and quizzed her about Mr. Guy Matthewson. Was she hot on him?

  “He’s about fifteen years older than me, for goodness’ sake,” she protested.

  “And a conchie,” added Meg.

  The barbed comment put Diana on the defensive. “That’s not the point, is it? He’s hardly a coward if he climbs like that. It’s just what he believes.”

  “So what does he believe?”

  But she didn’t really know.

  “He’s a Commie, isn’t he?” Eric said. “That’s what I’ve heard.”

  “I’ve no idea. I only met him yesterday, and we spent most of today fifty feet apart on either end of a rope. We didn’t get to discuss politics. You don’t do that kind of thing on a rock climb.”

  “But you must be able to say what he’s like. Is he — for God’s sake let’s stop beating about the bush — is he good-looking?” It was Meg asking, of course.

  “He’s…interesting. Rather austere.”

  “God, that’s a bit of a put-down.”

  “Can I come with you tomorrow?”

  “Go with her?” Hilda cried. “Oh, for goodness’ sake, Meg, you’d be a real gooseberry!”

  The high-pitched and excited voices, the soon-to-date slang, the ceremony of innocence, soon to be drowned. Within two months, Diana would be pulling the headless body of a woman from the rubble of a bombed house in Stepney. Within a few months, Eric would be stumbling through the dark and smoke of a stricken Whitley bomber to grab his parachute pack and throw himself out into the Arctic night above the city of Duisburg. Within a year, Martin would be posted missing in the North Atlantic; Hilda would be killed by a flying bomb in 1944 in South London.

  “I’m not sure that we should leave you alone with him, Miss Diana Sheridan,” Meg said with a wicked smile. “How do we know he’s not a rotter?”

  Diana laughed at the warning.

  2

  THE NEXT DAY the cloud was low, and there was drizzle in the air. Surely they wouldn’t be able to climb. Most of the others set off up the north ridge of Tryfan, but Meg decided to stay behind. She didn’t feel all that well. Perhaps it was something she had eaten — that corned beef, maybe.

  “Oh, Meg, don’t be such a spoilsport!” Hilda had cried, but Meg could not be persuaded. “I’ll be able to check out this man of Diana’s,” she said. “We don’t want her falling into the wrong hands, do we?”

  So the two of them stood together at the roadside huddled into their anoraks, waiting for Guy Matthewson. He might not even come, Diana decided. She was surprised, and a little annoyed, to discover how disappointed she was at the thought; she was also surprised, and a little afraid, to discover how angry she was that Meg was standing there beside her.

  But he did come. Of course he did. First there was his bike far in the distance and then the sound of it tearing through the cold, damp morning. She was amazed that she could ever have doubted him. “Good morning, Miss Sheridan,” he shouted above the engine noise as he drew up beside the two girls.

  “Good morning, Mr. Matthewson,” she replied formally. Bantering. Arch, her mother would have said.

  He pushed his goggles up onto his forehead. They had made red marks around his eyes. “And who’s your friend? Will you introduce me?”

  “Margaret York,” Meg said quickly. “Pleased to meet you.”

  “Margaret York? It sounds like someone out of the Wars of the Roses.” He grinned as they shook hands, and Diana felt a small, treacherous throb of jealousy, as though that smile and the shaking of hands implied some sort of complicity between the two of them. “What are we planning to do?” Diana asked.

  “Is your friend coming with us?”

  “Meg’s not well,” Diana said quickly. “The others have gone on, but Meg wasn’t feeling up to it.”

  “I’m not that bad —”

  He looked disappointed. “But it’d be a bit tricky with a rope of three,” he said. “The weather’s not up to much, and I was planning a pretty long route. Maybe some other time?” He smiled. It was quite disarming, his smile. Meg had no option but to smile back.

  “Maybe,” she agreed.

  Guy looked at Diana. “So is Miss Sheridan ready?”

  Yes, she was ready. She climbed on behind him and grabbed his rucksack just as she had done the day before. The sensation of jealousy dissolved. She felt almost sorry for Meg, standing there alone in the mean morning. “See you later,” she called, and Meg waved a hand and tried a smile and shouted back, “Bye, bye, darling. Be good.”

  “Hold tight!” Guy called, and they accelerated away along the lakeside. The steep rocks of Tryfan’s north ridge drew nearer. The others were somewhere up there, stumping up toward the top. Perhaps they’d catch sight of them. “I thought we’d stick nearer to home this time,” he shouted, and drew the bike to a halt just where the rocks of Tryfan reached the valley floor, where there was a milestone at the roadside marking the tenth mile. Ten miles from where? She looked up the steep slopes of the mountain, where the ridge rose up toward the clouds. Her eyes followed the skyline and then moved down through the rakes of grass and heather and scree. There was a line of tiny figures trudging up among the boulders, like soldiers setting off to the front. “There they are!” she cried, pointing. She counted six. Two of them paused and looked around. She waved, and one of them — was it Hilda? — waved back.

  “I hope your friends know what they are doing up there in the mist,” Guy said.

  “They’ve done a lot of walking.”

  “Margaret’s a pretty girl,” he said, apropos of nothing.

  “That’s what everyone says.”

  “Is it? I’m sorry to seem just one of the pack.”

  What did he mean by that? They climbed over the drystone wall that bordered the road and set off up the beaten path toward the rocks. Guy climbed quickly, with a long, easy gait. He had climbed in the Alps, climbed in the Himalaya, been up to twenty-six thousand feet. Beside that, the Welsh mountains must be mere hills. Diana was thrilled to be in his presence, let alone to be actually setting out on a climb with him, another climb. He was almost — she hardly dared express the thought to herself — a friend. And Meg was back at the youth hostel.

  The path steepened and began to thread its way upward through the rocks, around to the east side of the mountain where the major climbs were. He looked at her as she scrambled after him. His expression suggested that her opinion might mean something. “I thought we might give Grooved Arête a try. It’s on the East Face, and it’ll take us right up to the summit. What do you think?”

  “You’re the leader.”

  “It’s a real mountaineerin
g route, that’s the thing. We couldn’t have managed it safely with a rope of three and certainly not with a total novice like your friend Meg. Are you up to it? There’s a good breeze, which should keep it dry, and I don’t think the weather’s going to get any worse. I say we give it a go. Grooved Arête is tricky in the damp but not desperate. Except for the slab.”

  “What slab?” she asked anxiously.

  He smiled. He was teasing her and she knew it: delighted in it, in fact. He had changed from the day before: she felt that he had allowed her through his outer defenses into some kind of familiarity. “Ah,” he said, “the slab.”

  “What slab?” The slab became the great threat as they clambered up through the chaos of rocks that formed the lower part of the mountain; a threat and a joke, like something she had both laughed and trembled at when she was a child, a ghoul or a ghost in a story or something. They gained height, over great boulders that were jumbled together as though thrown down in a heap by a petulant child. There were short steps to climb, and he watched her with attention at these points, almost as if he were an examiner and she some kind of student. “You’re doing all right,” he said. “You’ve a good sense of balance.”

  “I insist you tell me about the slab,” she said as she caught up with him. They had reached an angled terrace that ran along under the base of the main cliffs. Guy had halted where someone had scratched the letters GA on the rock. The cliff rose directly upward from here, like the wall of a gothic cathedral, fluted and ribbed. You expected gargoyles and groins and Quasimodo skulking around the misty heights above. “If you don’t tell me, I won’t do it.”

  He laughed as though he understood that it was an empty threat. “It’s called the Knight’s Move.”

  “That sounds like something from Alice.”'

  He agreed. “It’s a very Looking-Glass business, climbing. You climb up in order to go back down, and very often you have to run as fast as you can merely to stay in the same place. You’ll see soon enough. The slab is a sort of angled checkerboard, if you’ve got a bit of imagination. And to climb it you move up a bit and then sideways, just like the White Knight.”