North Face: A Novel

by Mary Renault

  She waited till she heard Miss Searle’s door close, and overtook her on the stairs. She was dressed to go out: but, Miss Fischer thought, half-heartedly. Having established the fact that it was worth the rain, to get a spell of weather like this after it, she produced her news.

  It fell disappointingly flat. Miss Searle, happening to come down, had been an eye-witness of Mr Phillips’s departure. Having volunteered this, she seemed to hesitate. Her evident deliberation began to interest Miss Fisher.

  “His father had a stroke,” she remarked, “or so he told Mrs K.” She added, after a significant pause, “Funny his girl-friend not seeing him off. I should have thought, by this time, they knew each other well enough for that.”

  “Perhaps,” said Miss Searle, “she had a bus to catch.” She spoke with marked reserve. Miss Fisher was right in believing her to be a light sleeper. On the other hand, her room was on the opposite side of the corridor to Ellen’s, whereas Miss Fisher’s was next door. Miss Searle had heard enough to breed painful surmises, but not enough to create certainty. At the time, she had stifled her misgivings, partly because it was a Christian duty not to believe the worst of people, and partly because, had she continued to entertain them, they would have ruined her night’s sleep. She had never, knowingly, been under the same roof with this kind of thing before; the thought that it might be repeated on other nights had been quite horrible, and the Phillips exodus had come as an immeasurable relief. Now she wanted to brush the whole matter from her thoughts, and had almost succeeded in doing so until the look in Miss Fisher’s eye had thrust it back again. It settled her doubts. She became convinced immediately that nothing suggested with such vulgarity could ever have had lodgement in her own mind: she had examined the idea, it now seemed to her, only to dismiss it on the spot. This conviction gave poise and dignity to her reply. “A tragic interruption to a holiday. I hope the poor man will find his father still alive.”

  “Let’s hope so, I’m sure. It’s funny how many grandmothers turn the corner even after the funeral, round about Cup Final day.”

  “Indeed?” said Miss Searle. She pictured Miss Fisher on a wooden seat, eating something out of a bag and squired by a person with a cloth cap, a rosette, and probably a hand-rattle as well. Her face showed this all too clearly. Miss Fisher, who as a matter of fact thought football (except hospital rugger, of course) very common, was deeply resentful.

  “I’ve got my own reasons,” she said, “for what I think, and good ones too. But,” she concluded with dignity, “least said soonest mended, perhaps.”

  “I do so agree with you. After all, sickness and bereavement are serious matters, to the people concerned.”

  This gently stated truth reduced Miss Fisher to a strangled silence. If she did not feel literally capable of killing Miss Searle, she understood how murders happen. A swift panorama went through her mind’s eyes of the crying women, and tensely silent men, to whom she had brought cups of tea in her little office, turning out herself when she was busiest to leave them in peace; of the recurring effort to say with conviction her lines about a peaceful passing and feeling nothing at the end. She never forgot that though she had played her own role a hundred times, theirs was new and terrible to each of them; she dreaded getting mechanical. How dared this bloodless, desiccated woman, who’d have run a mile from five minutes of it, assume that she had no feelings just because she wouldn’t hide her head in the sand like an ostrich? Anger made her, for once, almost fully articulate.

  “You’re not much use to anyone that’s in real trouble,” she said, “if you’re afraid to look at life as it is.”

  She had intended the “you” as an indefinite pronoun. Miss Searle, however, chose to take it as a personal one. Her face grew rigid.

  “We should all take care, I think, not to generalise our professional outlook. The whole of life is not necessarily a case-history.”

  “Nobody said it was.” Miss Fisher had worked up, at last, to the voice she used when she had words with the night sister. “And if we all called it a case-history every time a healthy young couple jumped into bed, the world would be a dirtier place than what it is, and that’s saying a lot.”

  Feeling better for this, she watched Miss Searle’s face with some curiosity. The little patches of colour had congested, in an ugly stagnant mauve, on her sallow cheeks. It made Miss Fisher uncomfortable; but she honestly did not see that she had been needlessly cruel, or that her assault had been aimed at the defenceless. Twenty years of hard fact had narrowed an imagination that had been willing, but never very subtle: she could sympathise with pain, with loss, with the fear of death, with the simpler frustrations of ambition or love. She could sympathise with the fear of difficult thinking; she had often felt it herself. She could not sympathise with the fear of truth, or think of it as being in any way conditioned: she thought of it merely as she would have thought of another nurse who refused to dress a septic case when there were no gloves.

  Without compassion, feeling only that she had taken down a pretentious arrogance, she stood, her stocky figure firmly planted, and watched Miss Searle walk down the garden path to the road.

  Miss Searle, for her part, made her way unseeingly down the lane till a furious hooting, and a sound of grinding brakes, roused her to a sense of her surroundings. A van-driver, who had had a more unpleasant half-second than she, was swearing at her in the reaction of relief. She caught two of the words as he passed. The whole world seemed to have become obscene. Now to her previous sensations was added that of acute physical fright. Her legs were shaking under her. When she reached the sea-front, she sank down on the first seat she could find.

  She felt not only defiled, but a victim of the bitterest injustice. She believed in love, and in preserving a high ideal of it. To confirm her belief, she had herself been in love twice, experiencing on each occasion some years of romantic secret unhappiness. Each time, she had realised she was in love shortly after becoming certain that the object, once by a vow of celibacy and once by approaching marriage, was placed forever beyond hope. She had never doubted that these facts represented the will of God, and that her spiritual development owed much to their uncomplaining acceptance. Often when she looked about the world she wondered how women she knew could endure the makeshift, unbeautiful relationships to which they so inexplicably abandoned themselves. She concluded that they must be naturally insensitive, and preferred to leave it at that. With the passing of years, she had come by unnoticed degrees to feel that the elementary emotions were in themselves signs of an aesthetic deficiency, and especially so when they were strong. They only modern novels that found permanent room on her shelves were about women of exquisitely refined sensibility, to whom a dozen unkind or tasteless words, a moment’s falling away from perfect tact by a loved one, were lethal, the end of the world. They reinforced her faith that she was herself adjusted only to relationships like this. Her own loneliness had become for her simply the proof of a discrimination to which nothing was tolerable but the best.

  This assurance enabled her after a short time to forgive Miss Fisher, as she would have forgiven a tramp for being unwashed in view of the lack of facilities. She pitied her, a blade whose edge had been blunted on humanity’s necessary chores; there was a place in the world for such instruments, adapted to work on which a finer tool would break. She felt compassion also for young Mr Phillips, still in anxious suspense on the train, and for Miss Shorland, deprived of a promising friendship and slandered besides. These exercises soothed her mind, but her nerves still felt much upset; it would be better to take a brisk turn along the front, to blow the cobwebs away. She rose. A boy and girl on the other end of the seat, who had picked one another up only twenty minutes before, watched her off, discerning the relief in one another’s eyes with hope and delight.

  At this rate, thought Miss Fisher, the queue wouldn’t be in before the big picture began.

  The pavement outside the cinema, in a windless angle of street, was hot underfoot;
inside it would be stuffy. Cinemas always seemed to upset one’s complexion for hours afterwards, she had thought, this morning, that this was one of her better days.

  “Double and three and nine,” said the commissionaire.

  A couple who had been standing further back in the queue walked briskly past her. The woman’s self-satisfaction seemed to be printed between the shoulder-blades of her disappearing back. The film would have been going for ten minutes or so at this rate, and it probably wouldn’t be worth seeing round. She had dangled it in front of herself like a carrot in front of a donkey, to give herself an interest; an artificial carrot, she thought.

  Her mind reverted to the morning, when from her window she had seen Mr Langton starting out. He had had on an old khaki shirt and old, faded grey flannels, with a battered rucksack, three parts empty, hung on one shoulder. As he went down the path she could see that he still had the loose easy stride of a young man. He had looked up at the sky once or twice as he walked, and she wondered for a moment if he would discern some unfavourable sign and turn back; but he had hitched his other shoulder into the rucksack and walked on out of sight. Now she suddenly knew—as if the moment had been a photographic film, standing in developing-fluid till the image appeared—that this was the moment in which she had given up hope.

  She did not recognise it with any sense of drama; it had happened before, and she dismissed it now with the kind of joke she kept ready for such occasions. There must be something the matter with me, she thought, the way I always go for these brainy types. She puzzled over it, unaware that the queue had shifted a little, so that the man who had been standing just behind her was now at her side. It can’t be genuine, she thought, or I’d go in for deep books and that in my spare time, like some of these new nurses do. Let’s face it, the only way I like it is hearing a man talk; and what’s he going to get out of that? Her own aspirations struck her as laughable to the point of farce. She had never entered the homes of any men engaged in creative work; the thought that she might find them, not infrequently, held together by women of temperament not unlike her own, never crossed the threshold of her humility. She dismissed the fading of her birthright, saying to herself that she was too old for such nonsense.

  “Double at four and six.”

  The queue trickled up, sluggishly. Was it worth waiting? With an irritable little sigh, she looked at her watch.

  “Excuse me, but might I trouble you for the right time?”

  “Ten to three.” She took in enough, in an inconspicuous glance, to decide on making it just more than a statement, touched with a note of friendly commiseration. Why on earth, she wondered, hadn’t she noticed that this was happening? It was so unlike her to be dense.

  Five minutes later, as she turned her back on the queue, she felt her own shoulder-blades flouting the unescorted. You can throw your whole life away, she thought, sitting around for a miracle to happen. Makes you an old maid before your time. I’ve had enough of them today.

  She kept Miss Searle’s face, defiantly, in front of her mind. It was easy, through that window, to renounce and deny the lost enchanted land.

  7 Running Belay

  “LOOK. I’VE FOUND A perfectly good broom.”

  “There’s a fresh lot of drift on this beach every day,” said Neil. “It’s an inshore current from down channel, I suppose.” He watched her turning over the bleached wood, feeling irritated with himself. He had seen her, from above, before she could possibly have seen him, and could easily have gone his own way. At the time, he had decided that if he appeared it would prevent her from monopolising the beach by undressing there again. Now he had involved himself in a conversation, and could see no excuse for getting away. Since he had brought it on himself, he might as well be civilised about it. He walked over to inspect the ship’s broom, and agreed that it was well-preserved. He himself had just found half a cork life-jacket, but did not spoil her fun by mentioning it.

  “It’s quite hard to buy good brooms now,” she said, inspecting the bristles. “I wonder if Mrs Kearsey would like it.”

  Reflecting that if she decided to drag it home, he could scarcely do less than offer to carry it, he said hastily, “It would fall to bits if it were used, I expect, after being in the sea.”

  “I suppose it would.” She laid it down meekly. She had sounded a little damped: he wondered if she had followed his train of thought, felt rather ashamed of it, justified it by common-sense, and experienced a silly urge towards rehabilitation. “What do you think of this?” he asked, producing a specimen of his own. “It’s been subjected to pretty intense heat, by the look of it. Queer stuff.”

  She straightened up, shaking a lock of soft brown hair out of her eyes. He showed her the thing, a brittle metallic lump, honeycombed by the pressure of expanding gases; she pored over it, and took it from him to turn it over. She had rather pleasant hands, cool and slim with nails decently kept but otherwise as nature made them. He hated varnish.

  “It looks like nothing on earth,” she said, and then, with a naive eagerness, “I tell you what, I wonder if it is.”

  “Is what?”

  “Nothing on earth. Do you know any geology? I don’t; it was only an idea.”

  “Speaking from a complete ignorance of the subject, I was wondering if it could be meteoritic myself.” For no reason he found himself wondering if he had said this like a schoolmaster; she seemed encouraged, however, as if she had half expected a snub. It was odd, he thought, that a goodlooking girl (woman, rather, if one could remember it) should not have more confidence. The recent Mr Phillips, no doubt, had not done much to help. Continuing to stare absently at the piece of mineral in her hands, Neil thought, He seemed to have passed through some kind of orthodox school. God knows what schools let these types through without doing something to deflate their egos.

  “I expect,” the girl said suddenly, “you’re thinking much the same as I am.”

  “Well—” began Neil in a good deal of embarrassment, before reflecting that this was very unlikely. He smiled quickly and changed it to “Well?”

  “How long it will be before something like this is all that’s left of us too. Perhaps this is part of some other planet that grew a dangerous animal in its old age.”

  “Yes,” said Neil unwillingly. Like the pang of an old sickness he felt again, mocking his struggles, the deadening sense that his own trouble and effort were meaningless dust in the path of a cosmic disaster. Since he had ceased to believe collectively in humanity, the only answer he could see was beyond personality altogether, and, so far beyond his strength. He did not see much profit, or pleasure, in discussing all this.

  “You might as well forget all about it,” he said, “and go on picking up shells. You can’t do anything; you’re young. No one gets power till they’re half rotten. What does Leonardo say in one of those jottings of his? I thought I was learning how to live, while I was learning how to die.” He had not meant to say so much.

  “I don’t suppose,” she said a little impatiently, “that I’m so much younger than you are. No one’s young, who was more than a child when this began.”

  Considering what they were discussing, his momentary pleasure struck him as a fantastic comment on human vanity. Well, he thought, they dug up coupled skeletons under the lava at Herculaneum. He glanced at the girl; she looked too shy and vulnerable to be thought at in this way, and he talked on rather to protect her from his own mind than in any wish to share it.

  “It’s a drift,” he said, “like sand drifting into a ravine. You put out your hand, and it drifts through your fingers. Men in the mass are a dead weight, like shale. Take them separately, most of them know not to kill, or steal, or say ‘My people are better than yours, so clear out.’ But put a dozen together so that they can say, ‘Of course, I’m not doing this for myself.’ … Talk about the Truth Drug. They didn’t need to invent that, while they could watch a mob.”

  “What do you mean by a mob exactly?” She had looked up; she
had grey eyes, faintly streaked with brown in the centre.

  Neil smiled without amusement. “Where two or three are gathered together, there am I.” He had wanted to shock her, and, as soon as he had done so, could not imagine why. “I’m sorry; there’s no particular need to be blasphemous about it.”

  “It’s all right,” said the girl quietly. She did not speak as if she were smoothing a rebuke, but as if he had apologised for an involuntary sound of pain. He wondered why this did not make him angry.

  “The way I think of it,” she went on, “is that all these people who are running things are like a man who’s been told that he’ll die unless he knocks off drink. He believes it in an abstract kind of way; but each time he pours out another, he says to himself it’ll be all right if he knocks off before the next, and this one can’t be really decisive.”

  “You’re optimistic if you relate this kind of process to any individual personality, even the worst. Hitler was probably almost human, till the first time he got a cheer. No, it’s a drift, like sand.”

  She looked at the bit of clinker in her hand, as if he were telling her something about it; then straight into his face.

  “Well—what ought we to do?”

  He said, wearily but not unkindly, “My dear child.”

  “You mean it’s too late already?”

  “It’s a lovely day,” said Neil gently. “Here we are at the sea-side. Why not enjoy it?”

  She dropped the meteorite on the pebbles, where it fell with a dry brittle noise. “But isn’t all this because everyone’s saying that?”

  “Of course,” he said indifferently, more concerned with watching her. “Human drift is the most powerful force in the world. It wiped out a city of seventy thousand, only the other day. The people we think are controlling it are drifters too; just conspicuous pebbles lying on top.”