by Simon Mawer
“I don’t know. I don’t know what I’ll do. My main concern is the tribunal, though.”
“When’s that?”
“This autumn. The date is not decided. Perhaps I’ll volunteer for something — the fire service, maybe. Perhaps they can use my skills.” He looked at her. “And you?”
“I’m a nurse. Only an auxiliary, but it’s better than nothing. There’ll be a need for nurses one way or another. I was going up to the university, Liverpool University, to read English. But —”
“You could still do that.”
“Not with the war on, I couldn’t. So I trained as a nurse. I’m going down to London next week. I’ll be working in Clerken-well.”
He nodded. She felt self-conscious. Perhaps she should be away from here, back in the hostel down the valley with her friends. “Will you have more tea?” he asked, and the question seemed to her hugely important, laden with significance quite beyond any matter of thirst, as though no meant leaving immediately and going back to the hostel and yes meant staying; as though no meant never seeing him again and yes meant the opposite, whatever the opposite might be. “Yes, please,” she said.
He leaned forward. As he lifted the pot, one of the other guests, a tweed-jacketed, gray-haired gentleman, came over. “Excuse my disturbing you,” he said. “But aren’t you Guy Matthewson?”
Guy half rose from his chair. “That’s right.”
“Struthwick. I was on the twenty-eight Everest expedition.”
“Of course.” Guy carefully replaced the pot and shook the man’s hand. “This is a friend of mine. Miss Sheridan. Diana Sheridan.”
Struthwick raised his eyebrows. “Not the actress?”
She blushed. “I’m afraid not. She’s Dinah. It’s quite close, though, isn’t it?”
“Just as charming,” the man said, bowing toward her and taking her hand. He turned back to Guy. “Gather you were planning to go to Everest yourself when this nonsense all blew up.”
“There was talk. With Shipton.”
“D’you know the German expedition to Nanga Parbat got trapped by the outbreak? Did you hear about that? The whole lot of them interned in India.” The two men laughed at the absurdity of it all and talked of mountains for a while. “Be a while before anyone can get back to the Himalaya,” the man said regretfully. “I hear you’ve registered as a CO.”
Guy seemed to brace himself. She saw the flesh tighten around his mouth, the skin go white. “As a matter of fact I have.”
Struthwick grunted. “Can’t be through lack of guts, can it? Not in your case.”
“It’s a matter of conviction.”
The man didn’t look persuaded. “I fought in the Great War. Don’t imagine you did. Can’t say I found it a very edifying experience. But still, there’s a matter of duty, isn’t there? Duty to one’s countrymen, I mean; not to the bloody politicians.”
“Perhaps we see our duty in different ways.”
“Perhaps.” Struthwick nodded toward Diana. “Well, I must leave you to your tête-à-tête. Delighted, I’m sure.”
The man moved back to his table, and Guy relaxed. It was as though he had been holding his breath throughout the encounter and now he could breathe. His voice was low and angry. “You know what’s happened, don’t you? You know what this bloody war’s done? It’s made me frightened of people, that’s what.”
There was an embarrassed silence. An intense discussion was going on at Struthwick’s table. Voices were lowered; eyes darted across to where Diana and Guy Matthewson sat.
“You’ve no reason,” she said softly. “No reason to be frightened.”
He shook his head and reached out to where her hand lay on the arm of her chair. “I’m sorry, Diana. That was an unforgivable outburst.” Slowly, lest his own retreat, she turned her own hand over so that, for a blessed moment, they were actually holding hands, there in the lounge of the Royal Hotel in Capel Curig as the rain dashed against the windows like a handful of hurled pebbles. “Understandable,” she replied, “not unforgivable.”
“The thing is, everyone I know seems to have joined up or been called up. And I’m out on my own with this personal war to fight. I feel so much alone”
“Is there no one else?”
He contemplated the view through the windows, saying nothing.
“Shouldn’t I have asked that?”
He released her hand and leaned forward to take up his cup and sip from it. With care he put the cup back on the tray. “There was someone else. There was my wife.”
She felt a jolt of emotion. It was like a slip while climbing, a sudden spasm of fear. “Do you want to tell me about her?”
He smiled. “In America I could plead the Fifth Amendment.”
“What’s that?”
“It gives you the right to refuse to testify against yourself.”
“Then say nothing.”
“Would you be happy with that?”
“What does my happiness have to do with it?”
He laughed faintly. “That’s what I’m trying to work out.” Then, as though he had come to a decision, he reached out and took her hand again. “She was called Greta. We’d been married five years.”
Diana waited. He was under more strain than ever he was when climbing, under more strain even than when talking to that Struthwick fellow. She could see that. She could read the patterns in his face, the minute tensions, the whiteness at the wings of his nose, the tightness at the corners of his mouth.
“And after those five years she left me,” he said flatly “And took our daughter with her. Charlotte. Lotty, we called her. She took Lotty with her.” He reached into his jacket and took out a leather wallet. “I have a photograph if you’d like to see.”
“Of course.”
He passed a crumpled snapshot across. From within its deckle-edged frame a young girl smiled for the camera: she was gap-toothed with pale hair, four, maybe five years old.
“She’s lovely.”
“It’s immaterial whether she’s lovely or not. She’s my daughter.”
She flinched. “But she’s lovely just the same,” she insisted.
He closed his eyes. “I apologize, Diana. I’m sorry.”
“It doesn’t matter, really it doesn’t.”
“Oh, but it does.”
She felt emboldened by his apology. “When did all this happen?”
“Oh, thirty-eight, I suppose. Can you put a date on that kind of thing? She left me in thirty-eight. We seemed happy enough during those five years; you might say intensely happy at times. Surely, she didn’t like me going off to climb, but does that explain how she could just leave? Perhaps she really just didn’t like me. Who knows? Who knows but her, I mean.”
“She never said? She never told you, talked to you, explained?”
“No. She just went. One day she was there, and the next day the house was empty and there was just a letter waiting for me when I got home.”
“How terrible.”
He looked at her, his face drawn and somehow suddenly old. “Terrible, yes.”
“Did she love anyone else?” How did she dare ask such a question? And yet she felt a curious sense of power over the man, power without responsibility, which seemed to her a dangerous combination.
“Other than herself?”
“And Lotty, presumably.”
He smiled. “I think perhaps she had a lover. But I don’t know for certain.”
“And you?”
Guy shook his head, looking away from her and out of the window. The clouds seemed to be breaking up after the last rain. There was a hint of pale sky in the west. Perhaps the weather was improving. “I was never unfaithful to her,” he said with quiet emphasis. “Never.”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t expect you to talk of these things with me.”
He ignored her. “I haven’t heard anything of her for more than a year. She used to send the occasional letter telling me about Lotty.”
“An occasional lette
r?” Diana was appalled, outraged. “Why don’t you see her? She’s your daughter, your own daughter, for God’s sake! Don’t you have every right to see her?”
He laughed. Whether he was laughing at himself or at her wasn’t clear. But he laughed, and the sound was loud among the subdued conversations in the hotel lounge, and guests looked around in disapproval. “Because Greta’s in Germany, Diana. Didn’t you realize? From her name, I mean. She’s German; my daughter is now German, a child of the Third Reich. They live somewhere near Frankfurt.” He shrugged. “Perhaps everything should be in the past tense: was, lived. God alone knows where they are now.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“You’ve got nothing to apologize about. Nothing at all.”
“I’m just…” She hesitated, blushing, feeling like a foolish child in the face of this adult disaster. Whatever she was about to say, she changed her mind. “Do you love her still?” she asked instead, and she didn’t really know what the question meant. She didn’t really understand what love was, wasn’t even sure whether it was a unitary thing that you could have and diagnose, like measles or the flu, or whether it was a whole complex of things, one of those syndromes that ate into your body and left you helpless.
He shrugged her question aside. “So what do you think of me now? How does the noble Guy Matthewson add up? I’ve certainly given you a motive for my being a conchie, haven’t I?”
“I’m not adding you up, Guy.”
“No?”
“No.” Her eyes stung. It was ridiculous. They stung with tears.
Then he asked unexpectedly, “Would you be happy to keep in touch once we go away from here? Maybe we could exchange letters.”
“Of course.”
“Thank you. That’d be good. We can exchange quotations from Alice in Wonderland or something.”
“Maybe there’ll be a bit more to write about.”
He nodded. “Maybe.” He leaned forward and busied himself with the tea things, though the tea itself was cold, and the cakes, such as they were, had long been abandoned. “You wouldn’t,” he said, “like to have dinner with me this evening, would you?”
“I don’t really —”
“Of course not.” He looked up with a quick smile. “It doesn’t matter. You want to be with your friends.”
“I don’t have anything to wear. That’s what I was going to say. I’ve only got these things.”
“Well, that doesn’t matter at all.”
“Then I’d love to.”
“Perhaps…” He poured some tea. She noticed that his hand was unsteady. “Perhaps you would like to keep me company —?”
“Company?”
“Here at the hotel. If we’re dining together. I thought perhaps you might book in. If they have a room free…”
“But —”
“You would be my guest, of course. It might seem a bit irregular, but —”
“Yes,” she said.
“I’m sorry. It was foolish of me to ask…”
She turned away from him. “I said yes.”
“It’s just that I feel rather lonely these days,” he was saying, “and with your going to London and my tribunal and things. However much I wish it, it might be difficult to keep contact, and I thought we might spend this time together…”
“Yes,” she said again quietly, looking not at him but out through the windows up the valley. The sky was clearing. Behind the outline of the mountains the sun was setting amid a battlefield of broken cloud, the whole scene red and black and gray, like a vision of war, a bombed city, the gaunt ruins silhouetted against flame. “Yes,” she repeated. “If you can run me back to the hostel, I can get my things. Perhaps it would be easier if we did it immediately, before my friends get in. It’d be easier if I didn’t have to explain.”
“Yes. Yes, certainly.”
But they were there, of course. As she came in the front door of the hostel, she heard their voices in the dining room. She paused and listened. Hilda’s voice was raised in some kind of criticism of Eric. His navigation: she was accusing him of having got them lost on the summit plateau and there was laughter and denial, and someone else was leaping to his defense. Diana crept past and went up the stairs. She thought she heard someone call out, but no one came to look. It was a matter of moments to gather up her few things and stuff them into her rucksack. Guy had assured her that they wouldn’t turn a hair at the hotel, not at someone coming in with boots and rucksack and little else other than sweaters and things. They were used to climbers and walkers, had been for more than half a century.
She paused to listen. The sound of voices still came up from the room below, but when she crept back down the stairs with her rucksack over one shoulder, there was Meg standing in the hallway waiting for her. She had her hands on her hips, almost as though she was looking for an argument. “Di, it was you. We thought we heard a bike. Where the devil are you going? I read your little billet-doux, but…”
Diana shrugged. She knew she was blushing. “I’m taking a room at a hotel in the village.”
“A hotel? What’s wrong? Isn’t the hostel luxurious enough?” And then Meg’s expression dawned with understanding. “It’s your new friend, Mr. Matthewson, isn’t it?”
“I’m having dinner with him.”
“Di, are you about to do something very silly?”
“I’m taking a room by myself, if that’s what you’re asking. A single room. I’m not selling either my body or my soul. It just seemed the most convenient thing to do, given that it will be pitch dark and with the blackout he couldn’t possibly…”
“Oh, Di.” Sorrow and disappointment were carefully blended in Meg’s expression.
Diana felt a glimmer of anger. “Look, Meg. You can say what you like, think what you like, do what you like. But I’m nineteen years old and next week I’m going down to London and God alone knows what is going to happen to me, or to you, or to him if it comes to that. So I’m going to do this thing now because he has asked me to be his guest and that’s that.”
“What a very dramatic little speech, darling. Have you been rehearsing it very hard?”
“Oh, for God’s sake —!” She tried to push past, but Meg held her arm. “Diana, this might be very silly.”
“Meg, darling, please let me go.”
Meg released her hold and followed her out to the car park. Guy was there, astride the bike. Meg gave him a long, cool look; she was good at long, cool looks. “Di has been most unfair keeping you entirely to herself.”
He looked embarrassed. “She’s a promising climber.”
“No doubt she’s having expert tuition.”
There was a pause, one of those loaded silences while people looked and measured and considered. Like playing bridge. Meg was good at bridge. She was good at most things. “Well,” she said, “remember that her friends are here.” She turned and went back inside. Guy breathed out sharply, as though he had been holding his breath.
“She’s very protective of you.”
“No she’s not. She’s just jealous. Or envious. I’m not sure which.”
He laughed as he kicked the starter. The bike roared into life. It was a familiar sound now, and strangely comforting. “Hop on.” The headlight threw a thin and inadequate slice of light onto the road ahead. “Bloody blackout,” he shouted as they moved off down the road. “Bloody blackout, bloody war, bloody everything. Everything but you.”
3
HER ROOM WAS a small, bare place up in the attic of the hotel. The ceiling sloped, the floor creaked, the window was difficult to open. Perhaps it had been used as a maid’s room and was only let to guests when no others were available. There was a single bed against one wall, a bedside table with a table lamp shaped like the Eiffel Tower, a wardrobe with one door jammed shut, and a chest of drawers with a mirror so that it could double as a dressing table. In one corner of the room was a wooden washstand with a china bowl on the top shelf and a large jug of cold water below. S
he had never been in a hotel room before, but if this was typical then she saw little difference from the boarding-houses where she had stayed when on holiday with her parents. There was that same sense of impermanence and indifference. On one wall hung an engraving of a fearsome mountain — Snow-don, it said. There were sheep in the picture, but no climbers.
As she turned from the picture she caught sight of herself in the mirror. “Diana Sheridan, what on earth are you doing here?” she asked her reflection. The face in the mirror gave a little grimace but offered no reply. It didn’t really have a reply, that was the truth of the matter. She was here on a whim. Nothing more, but that was plenty. Never before had caprice so ruled her life. Perhaps war, or the threat of war, did that to you. What would her parents think about this? Would they ever know? Anxiety as a counterpoise to anticipation. Anxiety is to fear as anticipation is to excitement. Had someone said that? Perhaps it was original. Was it clever? she wondered.
She unpacked her paltry things, laying out her only skirt on the bed, and above it the blouse that she had been saving to wear on the journey home. They’d have to do. She picked up the blouse and held it against her to see how it looked. It was pale blue and had a pleasing frill down the front, and she thought it suited her. Among the rest of her things there was a cardigan that wasn’t entirely disgraceful. But she hadn’t brought any stockings with her. Stockings were too precious now that there was talk of clothes being rationed. All she had was a pair of ankle socks. And she didn’t even have a decent pair of high-heel shoes, just lace-up walking shoes that might have been part of a school uniform. But then she could hardly have worn ankle socks with heels. She dressed and then tried to see herself in the mirror. No Looking-Glass world there: just the selfsame one that she inhabited, ordinary and dull except for the remarkable fact of the war and the curious fact of Mr. Guy Matthewson. She leaned toward the glass to examine her face. No Alice, either; just plain Diana Sheridan. Oh, people were always complimentary, always saying things like “What lovely eyes you’ve got” and “There’s character in that mouth.” Meg was a great one for reassuring her like that. But Diana knew well enough that praising the parts was merely damning the whole. She was, she thought, plain — honest, decent, and plain. The Americans had a term for it: homely. She had heard it in the cinema. She was homely. It had a fine, old-fashioned sound to it. Nothing to be ashamed of, she told herself.
