North Face: A Novel

by Mary Renault

  This, thought Neil, is the last straw. The fool of a woman’s got herself stuck.

  Dropping his gear, he walked up to the foot of the cliff. She was fifty to sixty feet up, with nothing to check a very unpleasant fall. The path itself was narrow; she might well bounce off it and go on into the gully, which, here, was deep and choked with thorn.

  Raising his voice just above talking pitch (a sudden shout, if things were as they looked, might be more than enough) he said, “Hullo. Are you all right up there?”

  Her head moved, but not far enough to see clear of the rock. Anyone in good balance, he thought, could have managed that. He noticed too that she did not try to look down.

  “Who are you?” she said.

  Of all the damn fool questions, Neil thought. Shall I go back and fetch someone to introduce us? “My name’s Langton. We met at the house this morning.”

  “Oh, hullo,” said the girl. “I’m all right, thanks, I’m just resting.”

  Neil, whom this had rendered speechless, thought, Resting! She must be off her head. This is a nice proposition. His mind however was moving rapidly under conditions which had given him practise in rapid thought. The significance of her first question suddenly got through to him, with a muffled but hideous shock. She didn’t believe he could do it. Too old, or did he look like a crock?

  Hating her now without reserve, he looked at the rock again, and took off his shoes.

  “Hold on,” he said. “I’m coming up.”

  “No, wait. Have you ever climbed before?”

  “Good lord, yes,” he shouted, “Keep still and don’t fuss.” His elementary cause for her doubts had simply not occurred to him. She had the best of reasons to know that it was no place for a beginner. The surrounding scenery suddenly looked much better arranged. As he wriggled up round an awkward bit of overhang at the bottom (it was this, no doubt, which had put her off the sounder route) it occurred to him that not many women in her situation would have bothered to ask.

  A rope would be nice, he remarked to himself. There were plenty of trees at the top to belay to, and abseil her down if she had got to the paralytic stage. Having none, he might as usefully consider levitation. Pausing on a good stance at twenty-five feet, he studied the rock again. As he had thought, the route he had picked out was practicable all the way; but now the problem was altered. He would come up ten feet to the right of her, and in order to do anything would have to traverse along. The prospect looked unpromising; but till one was there it often did. The crack immediately ahead was good enough; too narrow to get the feet into, but as one edge projected it would do for a layback. He hooked his fingers in sideways, braced with his feet against the other side, and began to work upward. It was some years since he had had occasion to use this arduous trick, in which the arms bear the body’s weight and leverage as well; by the time he got out on to a ledge, the sweat was running into his eyes. He had been facing away from the girl; now, nearly level with her, he was able to look again, and could see a series of small holds which would get him there. Whether they would get her back was another thing.

  By this time he had got into her restricted line of vision, and took advantage of a good handhold to pause and give her a casual smile. The easier he could make it look, the better. She smiled back, with a strained hope and (he was pleased to see) a rueful respect. He perceived, though, a quivering movement in the hem of her dress where the sharp edge of colour showed it up. It was hardly surprising that, tense as she was, she should be starting a tremor; he had better lose no time. In a rational way, he knew the situation was a very sticky one; yet, curiously, the more he realised it the more his confidence grew. The fact was good and there was no time to examine it. His intimacy with the rock, the feeling that they belonged together and knew one another’s ways, was so natural and familiar that he did not welcome it back as a lost happiness; he simply accepted it, like the air.

  “Shan’t be long now,” he said. “Let’s see what it’s like your end.”

  “The ledges don’t go all the way.” He heard for the first time in her voice the tautness of desperation.

  “Too bad.” He affected a more cheerful scepticism than he felt; there was, as he had noted, a nasty hiatus. “We’ll give it another look.”

  The footholds were there, but they were narrow; socks had given a good friction-grip at the crack, but he wished now he had stopped to put rubbers on. The girl, he was pleased to see, was wearing them with boots, she might have been tolerably secure; as it was, without the bite of nails or the support of leather, her muscular tension must be getting intolerable. She must have lost her nerve badly; there was a good little crack in reach of her nearer hand, but, clearly, if she moved she expected to fall off, in which case she very well might. He got to the last foothold and measured the distance. For him, it would have been an easy stride; she could do it, he was sure, if she could be made to think so.

  “You’re all right,” he said. “Look. Use that crack and come along to where I am now. The holds are fine this way, right to the top. The crack,” he repeated distinctly. “A foot to your right.”

  “There’s, nothing in it to grip on.” There was still reason in her voice, though panic was not far from the surface.

  “No, I know. It’s a jammed-fist hold you want. Don’t you know that one?”

  “No.” Her eyes looked dilated. If she made a false move now, however, slight, she would certainly fall.

  Neil reached up with his right hand. It found what he had hoped for against hope; a beautiful incut notch, a straight pull-up, perfect. He closed on it, the sense of security it gave running all over him. Giving it his weight, he stretched out his left hand; it just reached her wrist. He gripped it, pinning it against the rock.

  “Let go with this hand,” he said peremptorily. “You don’t want it now, it’s only a balance. I’ve got a hold like a house, up here. Come on; do as I say.”

  She let go slowly, keeping her eyes on his. She looked a little like St Peter walking dubiously on the sea. The part for which he had cast himself seemed suddenly rather overwhelming.

  “That’s it,” he said firmly. “One good hold and you’re O.K. Keep your hand loose while I move it—all right, I’ve got you—and clench your fist when I tell you. Now.”

  She closed it obediently. In this shape it wedged firmly, like a chockstone, into the narrow crack. Neil drew a silent breath of relief.

  “Right. No need to worry now; you can put everything on that if you want to.”

  He had got her just in time; she wasn’t paralytic yet. Through the stretched lines of her dress he could see clearly the steadying of her muscles.

  “Good. The other hand up there. Come along, now, get going. I’ll’ tell you when to start fussing about your feet.”

  “Cigarette?”

  He rolled over on the dry grass and held the case out to her; convention seemed rather belated, and he could do with a rest.

  “Have you enough?” The girl, who had been lying on her back in a stupor of fatigue, tilted her head limply on one arm. “They’re hard to get round here.”

  “Plenty.” He rolled a little nearer, and gave her a light. Her face was flushed and her forehead damp after the last gruelling pull; she hadn’t learned to let her balance work for her arms. She looked like a schoolgirl just off the hockey-field, and the competence with which she drew on the cigarette seemed precocious.

  “I don’t smoke out of doors as a rule, but I did need this one. … The thing I feel worse about than anything is that I asked you if you’d climbed.”

  “Why? It was very ethical of you.” He smiled at her. “Punctilious, in the circumstances, I thought.”

  “It was no more than decent in the circumstances,” said the girl abruptly. “I’d never have done it, if I’d thought anyone was about.”

  She spoke in the manner of one who makes a reasonable statement; and suddenly looked uncomfortable. It gave her the look of a tongue-tied adolescent so strongly that he knew it
must be deceptive; but he lacked energy to go into the matter.

  “I’ve got some chocolate,” he said drowsily. “But it’s downstairs.”

  “Mine is too. I want a drink more; do you think the stream’s good.”

  “I not only think, but know, that it drains at least two farms. Try sucking a pebble. Did I miss a step in the reasoning just now?”

  “No.” There was a pause. “All I meant was that it’s not like a mountain. If I’d fallen it wouldn’t have matt—I mean it wouldn’t have meant a risk for anyone, to pick me up.”

  “Pick you up? It’s ten to one you’d have lain there for days. How many people do you meet in here?”

  “I thought of that later … One doesn’t expect, in this kind of country, an expert to come along. I was afraid of someone thinking they ought to do something, and then … You know, if I could start fresh I believe I could do it, now, after watching you.”

  “I’d give it a miss for the present. Twenty feet of lay-back’s a bit strenuous for a woman. That’s the way you ought to have come.”

  “You’ve done a great deal of climbing, haven’t you?”

  Anyone whom this could please, Neil thought, must be softening up. “I used to,” he said briefly, “before the war.”

  “Where abouts?”

  “North Wales and the Lakes. Scotland mostly. The Dolomites; and a time or two in the Alps.”

  The girl looked up at the trees for several seconds in complete silence. Then she said, so flatly that it sounded brusque, “I was only learning when the war broke out. My young man was trying to teach me. But he’s dead how.”

  “That’s bad luck,” said Neil unemotionally. He had had, indeed, no time to feel anything; and this seemed to be what she had intended. Her lack of expression, which could have passed for callousness, gave him no sense of affront; he felt curiously at ease with it. He said, “The man’s dead that I did most of my climbing with, too.”

  “I’m sorry.” She pulled up a tuft of grass on which her hand had been lying. “Jock was shot down over the Channel, in 1940.”

  He said, in the same impersonal way, “I suppose there are worse ways for a climber to go. Sammy Randall went down in a submarine.”

  “How horrible.” Startled imagination put, for the first time, feeling into her voice. Suddenly she said, with a queer suppressed eagerness, “You don’t mean S. J. Randall, do you?”

  “Yes. Did you know him?”

  “No, but Jock talked about him so much. He had all his books; not only the one he made his name on, the early ones too. Once he very nearly met him. Some man was going to fix it up, and then at the last moment he was ill—the friend, I mean—and it fell through. I’ve never seen Jock so disappointed over anything since he was thirteen.”

  The words had come pouring out of her, like something dammed up for years. She spoke, not with unhappiness, but it seemed with a kind of pleasure at finding herself able to speak. Neil, to whom time was not likely to bring this indulgence, felt a stab of envy. He only said, “You must have known each other a long time.”

  “Since I was born.” She seemed ready to say more, and to be checked not by constraint but by a fresh thought. “It’s selfish of me to ask you, I know. But would you mind telling me something about Randall—any little thing, it doesn’t matter? It’s only that Jock would have liked so much to talk to someone who’d climbed with him.”

  Neil wondered whether she had any idea how much she had said. There seemed nothing, now, about her look at the breakfast-table that morning left to be explained. He began to talk quickly, lest she should realise this herself.

  “He was a deceptive type to look at. No physique on the surface at all. I don’t know where he kept his muscles; he climbed on nerve and balance mostly, but they were there when they had to be. You’d never have guessed what a reach he had, either, because of the way he stooped. I remember him taking a bet once at a pub in North Wales—”

  At the end of the story, before he had time to go on, she broke in, “Your name’s not Langton, is it?”

  “Yes. I’m afraid the introductions were a bit sketchy just now.”

  “Did you tell me? I’m sorry, I was past taking it in. Mine’s Ellen Shorland. But he writes about you, of course. In the first book, and—”

  “Yes, I’m the hero of the dead sheep episode. Sammy always did have a fourth-form sense of humour.”

  “Are you?” It was the first time he had seen her smile. It revealed one of those triangular dimples which surprise sometimes in a thin face where there seems no room for them, and one noticed the delicate springing arch of her brows. “I wasn’t thinking about that, though. It was the part about—” She fumbled with the Welsh.

  “Clogwyn d’ur Arddu? I did that one with him, yes.”

  “Oh, I wish Jock were here!”

  She had spoken with complete simplicity, as of someone delayed by a missed train. What showed in her face next moment was not remembered grief but a hot embarrassment. Grief, as he guessed, was too familiar to have any ambushes left for her; she only felt ashamed of having betrayed a habitual way of thought. “I mean—” she stammered, and blushed with the glowing transparency of snow at sunrise. The flush of physical effort was no longer there to disguise it; she turned quickly away.

  Affecting an unobservant casualness, Neil said, “It’s funny you should say that. Only just now I heard something I thought would give Sammy a laugh, and I nearly sat down to write to him before I remembered. Some people take you that way. It’s too bad they didn’t meet; I should think they’d have got on.”

  “Was it a good story?” He heard the quick relief in her voice, and what sounded like genuine interest as well. Discovering a solid enjoyment in sharing it, he told her about Miss Fisher and cutting steps. It had an immense success. Sammy himself could hardly have laughed with simpler enjoyment, or pursued the theme to more primitive depths of farce. For a few minutes she seemed about fifteen. Then she said, “It’s a shame, though, to laugh at her. She’s a rock of good sense really; and people like her always lay themselves open because they’re too much interested in other people to watch their dignity. I’d be glad to see her walk in at the door if I were ill, wouldn’t you?”

  “If I were too ill to mind being bossed about.” He was thinking what an odd mass of contradictions the girl was; her perceptions were those of a grown woman, her looks gained rather than lost by analysis; yet she seemed curiously cut off by a glass wall so that the last reaction she inspired was the natural one. He decided that it was this very negative quality, making her harmless but not uninteresting, which caused her company to seem unexpectedly easy. At the same time, he decided that all this had gone on long enough. He had more than a fortnight to go here, and must take care not to drift into anything that would prejudice his freedom for the rest of the stay. Tomorrow to fresh woods, he resolved, and pastures new. Immediately, he would see her back as far as the edge of the town, and then slip off; civil, but indefinite.

  “I suppose,” he said, “it wouldn’t be a bad idea to get moving before we stiffen up.”

  “Before I do, you mean,” she said smiling. She flexed her arm; an angular gesture which had so nearly been graceful that it was oddly irritating. “I’m starting to creak already. Thank goodness it’s only an artificial climb and we can walk down.”

  “Not strictly artificial.” They got up and dusted the ground from their clothes. “That applies when—” He went into the definition; and then, because she knew enough to ask intelligent questions, slipped into illustration. It was pleasant to talk of these things again: but, as he reminded himself, to her it was all a kind of keepsake, like the flower her grandmother might have pressed in a book. Exchanging ideas with women was always an illusion; they tagged everything on to some emotion, they were all incapable of the thing in itself. “I suppose the final fascination of Everest is—”

  He did not notice, in the end, when the first bungalows came in sight, and only remembered to excuse himse
lf within a few hundred yards of the gate.

  6 Route Abandoned

  “SUCH A SHAME,” MRS Kearsey had said to Miss Fisher that morning, “the very first day of the poor boy’s holiday. And I’m sure he could do with it; his work’s very responsible, from what he was telling me. But it seems his father’s subject to these attacks; blood-pressure, you know.”

  “High blood-pressure,” said Miss Fisher automatically. These lay people! She’d be talking about a gastric stomach next. Had a haemorrhage, I suppose.”

  “Something of that, I reckon.” In conversation with Miss Fisher, Mrs Kearsey was apt to relax her diction comfortably, as one kicks off tight shoes. “I gave him back his advance booking, I mean you can’t help illness and there’s plenty of enquiries this time of year. He was lucky not to be with Mrs Parsons up the road; he’d not have got a penny back from her.”

  Miss Fisher said that she hoped he appreciated it. For a moment, moved not by malice but by the mere impetus of gossip, she was on the point of touching upon the goings-on last night; but the girl, it seemed, was staying, and whatever she might have asked for there was no need to add to it. Miss Fisher discussed instead the amenities of Bridgehead, where she was going to spend the day. She had decided after breakfast that Barlock, though a pretty little place, was so slow that too much of it got you down.

  She hesitated in her room, wondering whether to suggest that Miss Searle might like to come too; it seemed just possible that she also found Barlock slow. She had looked a little dim at breakfast. Unless, of course, she had had a disturbed night? Miss Fisher had been on the verge of asking her; but it wouldn’t have done. There would be no harm, however, in telling her about the dramatic recall of Mr Phillips. Miss Fisher had the journalistic feeling for a scoop.