The Fall

by Simon Mawer

  We laughed. We talked; we discussed art and her art, and her travels and climbing and a whole lot of things. She knew more than I did; she’d done more, and she understood more. “Tell me about Jamie,” I said to her. And she looked at me carefully, as though reading things in my face. “You tell me about Jamie. You know him better than I do. According to him you practically grew up together. And now you practically live together.”

  “I wasn’t talking about Jamie and me.”

  “So what were you talking about?”

  “I was talking about Jamie and you.”'

  She looked at me quizzically. “Are you jealous?”

  “I just want to know where we all stand. Tell me.”

  She didn’t. She was evasive and equivocal, neither admitting nor denying. She’d had some kind of disagreement with him. He seemed to want a kind of female carpet to beat at intervals, that’s what she claimed. “He’s childish. In the worst way. Spoiled child. He’ll learn. If he wants me like he says he does, he’ll have to learn.” She paused to give her words weight. “Perhaps it’s something to do with his mother.”

  I tried to shrug the comment away. I tried not to seem awkward and embarrassed beneath her gaze. “Did you meet her?”

  “Yes. She was charming.”

  “She is.”

  “Distant and detached, but charming.” A pause, a smile of something like complicity. “But I understand what you saw in her.” She phrased it in the past tense — quite deliberately, I thought — as though challenging me to reveal whether my affair with Caroline was quite over.

  We got back to the house at eleven, and my mother was there, more or less waiting for us. Ruth was friendly and disarming. She could be that when she wanted to. She smiled and asked the right questions and gave the right answers. Having a father who ran a pub gave her some sort of advantage, I suppose. The two of them ended up having coffee together and talking about all sorts of nonsense, and I went to bed and left them to it. Some time later I heard them go up to their rooms. Ruth’s room was above mine, and I could hear her moving around above me. I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, conscious of her presence there, almost as though she was in the same room as me, as though I could sense her stirring in her sleep, as though her perfume filled my own room on the floor below. I didn’t know whether she was on my side or not, or whether she had been sent by Jamie as some kind of emissary. I didn’t even know if there were sides.

  The next day was heavy and still, with the promise of thunder. Ruth decided to stay another day. I felt honored by her presence, uncertain of her motives. We spent the morning going around the castle at the mouth of the river, one of the great fortresses that Edward I had built for the subjugation of the Welsh. In the afternoon we drove into the hills. We drove at random, turning onto the first side road that took our fancy because it seemed to be narrow and winding and deserted. The road climbed past the occasional farmhouse. There were pastures marked out by drystone walls behind which sheep grazed. I had to climb down to open gates for the Land Rover. The truck’s wheels rattled over cattle grids, and the sound was an intrusion, something metallic and harsh in a soft, pacific valley. On one side of the road the remains of an abandoned lead mine emerged from the bracken. Beyond the ruins, a narrow, silent lake lay like a steel blade thrust into the hills.

  Ruth parked near the water and reached over into the back for her bag. “Let’s get out and have a look.”

  I followed her down through the reeds to the water’s edge. There was a wooden landing dock, but no boats, no people, nothing to break the sultry weight of the afternoon. She dropped her bag and kicked her sandals off and walked out to the end of the dock to look. Out in the middle of the lake, two cormorants were sliding through the water like snakes. We watched the birds for a while, until with a sudden fluid motion, they vanished beneath the surface. For a long while — how long could they stay submerged? — there was nothing but Ruth standing there above the water looking out over the hard steel of the lake. When the birds eventually emerged, they were somewhere else, somewhere far away, somewhere that you had not expected them to be, as though there had been a disjunction in the fabric of time and space within the water and what had been in one place at one moment had appeared suddenly in another.

  Ruth called over her shoulder, “Shall we swim?”

  “We haven’t brought our things.”

  “There’s a blanket in the back.” I went and searched in the back of the vehicle among a spare wheel and a jack and what appeared to be the components of an ancient tent. When I came back with the blanket, Ruth had unbuttoned her shirt and tossed it on the dock. She stood there in only her skirt, the snake of her spine clearly visible, her ribs like ripples across the sandy skin. I felt something sticking in my throat. “Ruth,” I called, “there might be someone…”

  She ignored me. I watched her undo a cord at her waist and then drop her skirt around her feet and bend to pull her briefs down. As she pulled the scrap of cotton over her foot, some part of me recognized that awkward arabesque: a Degas bronze of a dancer bending to examine her right foot, the shape of a drawn bow, a taut spring, the tension transmitted through the substance of the afternoon like the vibration from a stretched skin. She threw her briefs onto the wooden planks of the dock, and for a moment she stood there lean and naked, a figure of pale surprise against the water, an exclamation mark, raising herself onto her toes to punctuate the still afternoon. Far beyond her, the cormorants moved like two question marks on the even surface of the lake. Then she dived, curving up and over and vanishing into the water with a fluid grace.

  I went to the edge. I could see her shape, elusive and distorted by the undulations of the water, moving away from the stage. Far out she broke the surface and turned back to the shore with her mouth open in something that was halfway between a laugh and a scream — delight, pain, triumph, protest. “Are you coming in or not?” she called.

  “It looks cold.”

  “It is cold. Perishing. You’re a coward.”

  What to make of this? What to make of her? There was something swimming beneath all this like the secret, silent movement of a cormorant in the depths. I felt disquiet, a blend of anticipation and unease and plain guilt — the guilt of nakedness out here in the open air, the guilt of betrayal: that I would betray her if I didn’t join her and would betray Jamie if I did. “Do you need courage to be cold?” I called back.

  She swam back toward the landing dock in a slow crawl and reached out to grab the planks at my feet. White knuckles. Glittering drops of water ran down her puckered forehead. Her lips were mauve, her eyelashes matted by the wet. “You do, Dewar. A great deal of courage.”

  Then she pushed away and swam back into the deep, and turned and looked back, treading water and watching me, no more than a head out there on the surface, her hair plastered against her skull like wet paint. I glanced around, but the valley was empty: no people underneath the livid clouds. I half turned away from her — a fleeting modesty, I suppose — and undressed hurriedly. But I had to face her when I went to the edge.

  “Brave enough?” I called.

  “Dive,” she cried. “Dive!”

  I didn’t. Instead I lowered myself gingerly into the icy water and pushed out toward her. “You are a coward, Dewar,” she cried in delight.

  We swam cautiously around each other, careful not to touch, breathless with laughter and cold, our feet searching down into the dark, tarnished depths and finding nothing beneath us. There was a disturbing intimacy in swimming together like this, bathed in a shared liquid like fetuses in the same amniotic fluid. Her legs shivered and gleamed in the shadows. I could see the paleness of her breasts and the darkness of her hair. Our legs touched, and then, for a moment, our hands. “Maybe there’s a monster,” I suggested.

  “Oh, there is,” she agreed. “And it’s green-eyed.”

  The water was too cold to stay in long. When we climbed out it was with a sudden modesty, turning away from each other, glanc
ing aslant to see and not be seen: a glimpse of her dripping flank and the side of one loose breast — a nipple as brown as chocolate. We only had the blanket to dry us and keep us warm. We crept beneath it and pulled it over us in a tent and crouched against each other, shivering with cold.

  “Ruth…” I said. She hushed me to silence, but I insisted: “What about Jamie?”

  She shook her head, clinging to me and shaking. Her teeth chattered. “Don’t ask,” she whispered. “Don’t ask. If you ask, then it will all vanish in a puff of smoke.”

  So I didn’t ask. There on the hard wood of the landing dock, we huddled together while I rubbed her flanks to get warmth into her spare flesh. I touched my mouth against her shoulder; I touched her cold breasts; I felt the hardness of her nipples and the chill of her thighs. Occasionally we kissed. And slowly the warmth came back into her body. And when my hand found the rough patch of wet hair, she shifted herself against me and said, “Yes,” very softly into my ear. “Yes, do that. Yes.” And after a while she came to some kind of climax, very mild, without anything but that whispered word in my ear: yes, yes, yes, repeated over and over.

  We didn’t speak on the way back home — almost like one of those silences that you have after a quarrel, when you are each picking over the ruins of the argument like survivors looking through rubble for something worth preserving. But there had been no quarrel. There had been only compliance. Mrs. Jones, the woman who helped out at the reception desk, watched us suspiciously as we came into the hotel.

  “Where’s my mother?” I asked.

  “She’s out, Mister Robert. And the boiler needs looking at. I didn’t know what to do.”

  “I’ll ring the man later.” We climbed the stairs to Ruth’s room. Once there, we talked. Sitting side by side on the bed, we had one of those absurd, intense conversations that you have when you are young: analytical, emotional, confessional, mendacious. She had the power to destroy me and Jamie, we both knew that. Possibly herself as well. “What do you want, Ruth?” I asked her.

  “I don’t know,” she whispered. “I just don’t know. Jamie, you, I don’t know. Sometimes I think I want all the men in the world and all the women too.”

  “And what does Jamie want?”

  She laughed at that but never answered the question.

  Ruth at work in her studio at the back of the pub: she worked barefoot, wearing torn jeans and an old cotton smock. Her hair was dusty with plaster. The studio was two rooms of an outbuilding knocked into one. It was whitewashed and slate-floored, lit by wide windows that faced northward toward the Hebrides. There was an old stained sink, broken cupboards with sheets of paper and cardboard, jugs and vases full of brushes. The air reeked of the organic smell of solvents. Piled against one wall were canvases and in the center of the room was a block of slate on which she was working. She showed me the work, pointing out the fractures, the designs she had etched. “It’s a bloody awful stone to work with,” she complained. “Tough, splintery, and difficult. Like the Welsh. But look at the texture; look at the sheen!” She passed her fingers over the surface. “Like a seal’s skin.”

  Near one wall there was a canvas on a heavy easel. The canvas was large — five feet by four — primed with white and blocked in with masses of color: hard edges of gray and slopes of moss green. Across the middle of the canvas was a great swath the color of steel. This paint was laid on thick and smooth. It gleamed lucidly, like wet slate. In the midst of this gray, Ruth had painted two black question marks. And then, on the bottom edge where there was green again, there was a tall, thin blade of white, its arms raised up to form the letter y.

  Did she have a name for the work?

  She smiled. Why?

  4

  WE DIDN’T TELL Jamie. Our intimacy was our secret. We shared it in a look, through a touch, by a secret and treacherous smile. Perhaps we were ashamed of what we had done, but shame is an emotion that can sit happily alongside others: desire, excitement, the palpitating thrill of the forbidden and the unknown. Was Jamie the innocent dupe, the victim of our deceit? At times I felt that he knew something. I would feel his eyes on me when we were all three together, and when I looked around, he would flush faintly and look away, as though just to suspect me was to do me an injustice.

  Ruth never moved into his flat in London, but whenever she was in the city, that is where she stayed. She was what he called his migratory bird — a joke that had more than a grain of truth in it because there was something birdlike about her movements — but a splendid bird, an eagle or an osprey: her sudden arrivals in London, having hitchhiked down from Wales with nothing more than a leather bag thrown over one shoulder; her rapid, excited presence in our London life for a few days; her equally sudden and mysterious departures. I often wondered whether there was another man, or maybe men, elsewhere in her life. I think now that there may have been many, and some of them quite casual. Possibly the men she won lifts from on the A5 that led the way to the mountains. Possibly as part of her pursuit of what she liked to call self-knowledge.

  “She’s all right, isn’t she?” Jamie asked me.

  “She’s great, Jamie,” I reassured him, although I wasn’t sure myself.

  That winter, Jamie and Ruth spent much time in North Wales. His idea for a mountain center had taken off with a sudden and surprising momentum. I remember the first sight of the place he finally bought. It was up a rough track behind Llanberis, past rows of slate-workers’ cottages. There was an old sign that announced BRYN DERW, and a long, low house, and a building in the background that might once have been a miners’ bunkhouse. It was raining when we got there, of course. The place was gray and dank, glistening in the wet. We climbed out of the van, and Ruth took Jamie’s hand and the three of us stood there looking at it as one might look over some famous archaeological ruins. Ruth translated the name: “Oak Hill.”

  “Where are the oaks?” I asked.

  “We’ll plant them,” Jamie said. His tone was sharp, as though I had been offering a criticism. “Can’t you imagine it? Done up, I mean. Matthewson Trekking and Climbing. Cottage industry sort of thing. Just imagine bringing a bit of economic life back to this area.”

  He had some money, and it cost nothing to buy the cottages. The slate mines were dead or dying; the owners were desperate to sell and no one was desperate to buy. So Bryn Derw passed into the ownership of Jamie Matthewson, or maybe the family firm itself, and he set about converting the property. Ruth was often there. Once, Eve came up with me from London, and all four of us had a ridiculous and drunken weekend camping in one of the outbuildings while builders were at work on the roof of the main house. The path to Cloggy was nearby, and when the weather was dry — which wasn’t often — we could make our way up to that gloomy and atmospheric cliff and climb one of the easier routes in the damp cold.

  And one day Caroline came up to look things over. She drove over from Gilead House on a raw December morning when all the colors were tones of gray and the mountains skulked beneath a bruised sky. Beyond the roofs of the town, Llyn Padarn was like an ingot of polished pewter pressed into the valley floor. When I discovered that Caroline was expected, I had suggested that it might be better for me to go, but Jamie turned on me as though I had insulted him. “You’ll bloody stay,” he insisted. Perhaps my being present would amount to some kind of penance, a retribution for the damage I had done. Or perhaps it would be an exorcism of adolescent jealousies. So, feeling vulnerable and foolish, like a child caught out in some shameful wrongdoing, I hung back in the doorway to the main building as the white Mercedes turned in at the gate.

  I hadn’t seen Caroline for a couple of years, and I had wondered how she would be. I wasn’t disappointed. She had gained some of the lineaments of age, but she still wore her beauty and her sexuality in that explicit and defiant way, as someone might wear a fine but slightly out-of-date dress. “Robert,” she said with a faint and complicit smile after she had greeted Jamie and Ruth. “I haven’t seen you in ages.” She p
laced her hands on my shoulders and rested her cheek against mine and then, as though confirming that her memories and mine were indeed all true, whispered my name again. “Robert.” Over her shoulder I saw Jamie’s expression. It was a look of mingled pain and satisfaction, as if all this were necessary in order to extirpate some malignant growth in the body of our friendship. Ruth watched us thoughtfully, perhaps conscious of the power of this emissary from an older generation.

  We went around the property, Caroline picking over it as though looking for bargains. She was a great cynic. I hadn’t understood this when I had first known her, but I saw it now — cynicism sliding beneath the surface of her beauty like a treacherous current in a placid lake. “But darling, who’s going to spend money on climbing?” she asked when he outlined the project. “People spend money on things that are sensual. Clothes, food, that kind of thing. Sex. But who the hell’s going to spend money on slogging up mountains in the rain? Your father invested a small fortune in climbing, and he didn’t earn a penny.” She laughed. I remember her laughter; I remember her smiling at me to see if I was still stirred by her presence. I remember the disturbing sensation of seeing the two women together in the same room — Ruth and Caroline, both of whom I had loved. Ruth knew it; that was the disturbing thing. Neither Jamie nor Caroline knew the whole, but Ruth did. Ruth and I held the whole delicate construct of my betrayal in our hands.

  When the Scottish mountains came into winter condition, plans for Bryn Derw were shelved. Once again we began to commute between London and Scotland, Ruth often coming with us, taking her turn at the wheel. And once, just once, I stopped off in Glasgow to visit my father. When I asked my mother for the address, I was surprised that she even knew it. “I suppose I can’t stop you,” she said.

  “Why should you wish to?”

  She only shook her head, as if shaking the question away and with it the whole matter of her failed marriage. So I wrote him a letter, a cautious, impersonal letter explaining that I was often in his part of the world and would like to meet him. I mulled over how to address him and settled for Dear Father. Somehow I was faintly surprised even to receive a reply.