North Face: A Novel

by Mary Renault

  “How do you do,” said Neil with fogged politeness. “This is the Barlock bus, isn’t it?”

  A look of deep satisfaction settled on Mrs Lambourne’s round face. She speared a needle into her wool. “There. That’s just what I thought. The moment I saw you I said to myself, Now I wonder if they’ve taken this for the Thursday bus to Barlock?”

  “Where does it go, then?” Neil was still not quite in touch with developments.

  “You mean this bus? Why, this one, it doesn’t what you might say go anywhere. Just back to the garage. My husband and I live up by there. He always picks me up on a Wednesday, when he drives the bus back. I thought as soon as I seen you there, ‘Now I wonder if they’ve got in by mistake.’”

  “Oh,” said Neil. “Thanks very much.” He and Ellen got up. “Perhaps you could tell us where the right one starts from?”

  “The Barlock buses, they start from here. But they don’t run after four-thirty, only on market day.” Simplifying this further, she added, “Thursday, market day is. Today’s a Wednesday.”

  Having agreed that this was so, they thanked her again, and left.

  “Good thing you asked her,” said Ellen quite cheerfully. “She must be wrong about there not being another. Summer time-table, I expect.”

  “I’ll have another look,” said Neil, with spurious ease. In his experience, country dwellers were rather more accurate about the local bus service than about sunset and dawn. Before he got to the board, he had guessed what he would see there. He was right. Beside the figure 6.30 a small letter t, which he had overlooked, gave reference to a footnote: “Thursdays only.” A glance at his watch told him, further, that it was nearly seven. He walked back to Ellen, assimilating all this.

  “I’m afraid we’ve had it. I’d apologise if there were anything to say.”

  He braced himself for tact. She would say it was a mistake anyone might make, as she often did too; and he would see her looking alert, ready in future to rely on herself.

  Instead she exclaimed triumphantly, “There! What did I tell you? I said it always went in threes.”

  “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars. I didn’t read the marginalia.”

  “If it hadn’t been that it would have been something else. It’s a gremlin. It’ll be all right now we’ve worked it off.”

  She often used, involuntarily as he knew, these scraps of Air Force slang. This was the first time it had been followed by a moment’s constraint between them. “It looks,” she went on quickly, “as if we’ll have to walk. Oh, well, we’ve had quite a lazy day.”

  “Walk? It’s more than twenty miles, and the sun will be down in half an hour. No, it won’t come to that. There must be a car for hire somewhere. Come and have a drink, they’ll know in the pub.”

  They went back to the Wheatsheaf. “No, you don’t,” he said, when she told him that hers was a beer. “I owe you a drink and you’re having one.” He gave her a large sherry; himself, he felt he could do with a double. The barman was encouraging: Mr George, in New Street, had a car. Neil settled Ellen in a corner with some Tatlers (it was the kind of place that has Tatlers in the lounge bar) and went off to see about it alone. He supposed it would be fairly expensive; she was the type who, given the chance, would worry about this.

  Mr George, surprised at supper, came to the door wiping his mouth. He displayed interest in their predicament, and a sympathy that filled Neil with instant misgiving. Mr George was sorry. Late as it was, he’d have taken the car out again, seeing how things were; but he’d been out with a party all day, and hadn’t above a gallon of his petrol allowance left. No, there wasn’t another car for hire, not hereabouts. He returned, with a civil goodnight, to the kippers whose smell had followed him to the threshold.

  Neil turned back into the street. Already the sun was on the horizon. The situation, reduced to its now inescapable essentials, accompanied him quietly on his way.

  Just as he was telling himself that at least there was nothing worse left to happen, he heard his own name called, on a note of jocular disbelief. By the time he had traced the sound to its source, it was too late to do anything.

  Templeton was an old colleague, a mathematician of (Neil had been assured) brilliant abilities. In less specialised matters, he displayed a mental age of about ten years. They had not met since 1940; Templeton, who had been doing something statistical in the Army, had declined reinstatement and gone impressively City. He now pumped Neil’s hand up and down (he was also a treat arm-gripper and shoulder-tapper, eking out a limited vocabulary by these means) and announced that this called for a drink.

  Neil meditated escape; but it would look odd, and an anxiety not to be commented on was too firmly rooted in him, nowadays, to be shaken off quickly. He could do with a drink, besides. Vividly aware that the only decent hotel in the place was the Wheatsheaf in which Ellen was waiting, he looked about, saw, across the street, the lights of a fly-blown little pub, and with desperate bonhomie steered Templeton in it.

  The story of Templeton’s war took some time; but, though fond of talking about himself, he did not push it to fanaticism. He was quite out of touch, he said; how was the old place? Anything sensational happened lately? Templeton supposed not, it never did, though by God, when you were in that rut, if the Head lost his spectacles in chapel it seemed melodramatic. Never again, said Templeton, who was looking prosperous and had put on a significant amount of weight. And what was Neil (dark old horse) doing here on the loose? Shaken off the old harness too? That was the stuff. (His gaze filmed tactfully from Neil’s jacket which was very pre-war.) When, by the way, had he acquired that mèche blanche? It must go over big with the women, Templeton surmised. “Distinguished,” he added, after a profound choice of words.

  This seemed to Neil a good moment to go and fetch another round. Returning with it, he urged Templeton back into autobiography. It worked so well that he repeated it several times, after which the worst seemed to be over; it was now only a question of getting away. He relaxed, leaning back in the recess where they had found a rickety bench to sit on. The little bar was thick with a rich Somerset burr, as soothing as the roucoulement of wood-pigeons. Templeton, who had reached the phase of nostalgia, was telling an interminable story of how he had once got the better of the Modern Languages master about time-tables for the Senior School. Listening to one word in six, Neil reflected that another drink would have been one too many, but that he needn’t have another now; Templeton was well away. As for himself, he was just at the optimum, a peak of beautiful, untroubled lucidity and peace.

  It was at this moment that someone at the bar said, solemnly and sententiously, “No denying it. It’s a happy release.”

  “Who wants to deny it?” said Neil. He smiled up at the electric light shade, which had the insignia of a brewing firm painted on it in three colours. There was, he thought, something apocalyptic about it.

  “Eh?” said Templeton. “Didn’t get that.”

  “I didn’t say anything. I was listening to you.” A happy release. He knew where he was, and could not imagine why he had been denying it so long. A happy, very happy release.

  “Yes,” he said, when Templeton wound up. “That was the term when by some queer coincidence all the boys sang the same variant of the school anthem, and all the parents heard the words.” After which he made his excuses briskly, relying on the strategy of surprise, and found himself suddenly alone in the little street, his hand still retaining a tactile impression of Templeton’s hearty but curiously inadequate hand-grip, which felt as if the bony structure had decomposed into brawn. Above him was a red and green sunset, whose perfect composition looked most improbable; and the certainty which remained clear and apart from it all, like the single star which came out as he looked.

  Ellen put down her third Tatler as he came in. It felt odd to be seeing her among all the little accidents of reality: a strand of hair loose from her slide, which he hadn’t noticed before, a splash of mud across one sandal. A
long-haired tabby kitten, which had picked her up in his absence, lay sleeping along her lap, its nose with a lopsided white patch (distinguished, thought Neil) dangling between two white-gloved paws over the point of her knee. A mediocre sporting print hung slightly askew on the wall above her head.

  Seeing him standing before her silent, she said, “Never mind. It can’t be helped, anyway.”

  Neil pulled himself together with a quick jerk. This, of course, was what he ought to have been thinking of all the way here. The difficulty now was that it was so hard to realise he hadn’t communicated it all to her already: Mr George’s regrets, Templeton’s smugness, the technicolour sunset and the star. To begin now seemed no more than a perfunctory form of words.

  “I’m sorry I’ve been so long,” he said sitting down beside her. “I met a fool I used to know and couldn’t lose him.” He broke off, discovering with a sudden shock that the forthcoming conversation wasn’t in the least perfunctory, and the sooner he convinced himself of it the better. “I’m even sorrier to tell you there seems to be no transport at all. I don’t know where to begin apologising for all this.”

  “It’s all right,” she said. “There’s a peace on. Things like this are happening all over England.”

  She spoke quite naturally; and, remembering how easily her shyness came to the surface as a rule, he guessed she must have been preparing this effort for some time. “We’ve broken our third plate, anyhow,” he said. “And Crown Derby at that.” It was an excuse to smile. Almost any other would have done.

  “Well,” said Ellen briskly, “we swore to be rough about it, however embarrassing it was. The first step is to admit it embarrassing, I suppose.”

  “You’re telling me.” They had both, however, relaxed in their chairs. The kitten, dimly aware of some change in its resting-place, shot out its prickly claws and sheathed them again.

  “I suppose,” she said, “it’s definite now that we’ll have to put up somewhere here?”

  “I don’t see what else. It wouldn’t be so bad if Mrs K were on the phone. The fact that she’ll probably sit up for us till midnight, voicing her fears aloud, is going to give us a build-up we could do without for a start.”

  Ellen stroked a finger down the kitten’s spine; an electric ripple of fur ended in a twitch of its pointed tail. “After all, we’re never likely to meet any of them again.”

  Neil forbore to tell her that this was one of humanity’s less reliable bits of wishful thinking. Her determined cheerfulness had stirred something in his mind. It was incredible he should have forgotten; but there had been so much else to think about. There had been, besides, something about the transient Mr Phillips easy to forget, a certain essential inconsequence. It was unlikely, though, that anyone else at Wier View would see it in that light. “Two men, my dear, in one week …” He looked up, refusing, for a moment, to accept the fact that there was nothing one could say. Their eyes met.

  “Look here,” she said, “please don’t worry about this. It doesn’t matter. It never really matters what people think.”

  “I’ll look after all that. I’ve had a certain amount of practise in making people see sense.”

  “Of course it’s all right. I’m not bothering about it at all. What’s really on my mind is that I’ve hardly got any money with me. Can you lend me some?”

  “Well, good lord,” he began, “seeing this was all my fault …” and stopped; of course he couldn’t settle her hotel bill for her. There must be any number of people, he supposed, who would carry all this off without batting an eyelid. He felt an intimate, secret pleasure in the fact that she wasn’t one of them. “We’ll fight that out later on,” he said, and gave her a couple of pounds; at which point they both became aware of the barmen, watching the transaction with interest. Suddenly, helplessly, they both began to laugh. The kitten looked resentful, and bicycled with its claws.

  “I can’t help it,” said Ellen presently, and then, “I wonder what happens if you meet a gipsy and don’t buy any lace?”

  “God knows. It’s too good to be true, isn’t it?” What he really meant was the diabolic perfection of the timing; they were neither one thing nor the other, and too much could be understood between them, but not enough. It was, for a moment, purely exasperating that he couldn’t remark on this point to her.

  “By the way,” he said, “I’d better order dinner.” He did so, and came back with a couple of sherries. He had forgotten all about Templeton by this time, and only remembered when he started his drink and found that it didn’t feel like the first of the evening.

  Ellen, looking doubtfully at her own, said, “No, but this makes three. You left me with one, and I had another while you were gone because the barman looked as if he thought I should.”

  “Good. Let’s drink to the gipsy. We haven’t tried that yet.”

  “I feel much better already,” said Ellen presently.

  “So do I. If we’d had any sense, we’d have got down to this sooner.”

  They smiled at each other; the half-amused private smile of people who are aware of being a little lit-up, but not too much and in company so trustworthy that it cannot matter. The exchange of this confidence made them finish their drinks absently, and evolve a number of small jokes in order to smile again. It was not for some time that Ellen remembered she had not been to the desk yet about a room.

  “I fixed that for you.” Once again he felt the unreality of explanations. “That was all right, because I’m not staying here myself. I meant to have told you. I’m waiting for a divorce, and—well, the law needs a long spoon, like the devil. It’s better to give it a bit of a margin.”

  She had been playing with the kitten, which now curled round her hand, all teeth and claws, to point out that it was being neglected. She let it worry her fingers as if she did not feel it.

  “And you’ve spent all this time,” she said, “bothering about me.”

  “Well, naturally. My part’s purely technical. Besides …” What he had been about to say he was not sure, but this was not the moment to say it. He unhooked the kitten from her hand instead. “I fixed up at some bed-and-breakfast place I passed on the way here. It seemed rather an idiotic-looking manoeuvre to leave unaccounted for. I was going to tell you, though, in any case.”

  Ellen stroked the kitten, which was too young for a soothing technique and resented it; she seemed a little insensitive to its reactions. “It must be hateful, feeling you’re living under suspicion as if … How perfectly disgusting it is, the whole principle of this thing.”

  “I suppose it is. It hasn’t arisen much with me. But the thing’s almost through now; and apart from me, it would be a bit hard on my wife if it came unstuck.” Finding it didn’t matter now, he went on, “They want to get married before the baby’s born.”

  “Oh, I see.” He could feel her struggling desperately with her own inadequacy, and was unhappy not to be able to help. Presently she said, “You haven’t any children?”

  “Not now.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “I don’t think about it much. One has to cut free of things when what’s left is mainly destructive. It’s like surgery, I suppose.”

  She said, half to herself, “If one can”; and it was then that he noticed for the first time today (probably because it was the first time he had looked for it) the chain he had seen round her neck on the beach, just showing inside her collar.

  Not hearing till too late the hardening in his own voice, he said, “Even a limb becomes destructive, you know, after it’s dead.”

  For a moment something showed in her face which was not far from anger; but almost at once it changed to gentleness and remorse. Wanting neither to accept it nor to hurt her by rejecting it, he found a resource in the kitten. It was getting fractious, by now, from too much notice and sitting up past its bedtime, and responded to his advances by darting up Ellen’s arm and scrambling about precariously on the back of her neck. They laughed, the tension broken; Ellen fu
mbled after it, wincing as its claws caught in her hair.

  “He’ll scratch you. Here, let me.”

  He came behind her chair, and got hold of the creature round the middle. Its little body was soft and wiry, helpless and furiously vital. Her hair tangled itself round his fingers; its human texture, set against the feel of fur, an oddly exciting contrast different from any separate touch. When he had disentangled it, managing not to pull, she said, “Thank you. How strong they are for their size,” and took it from him. It squirmed crossly, impatient at being suspended so long in their meeting hands.

  “We’d better do something about this meal,” he said, “before everything eatable’s gone.”

  He ladled the kitten into the chair he had left. It stretched on the warmed cushion, closed its hazy blue eyes, sighed through its nose, and poured itself into the benign slumber of infancy. Neil gave it a grateful stroke as they went.

  In the dining-room they ate submissively what there was, talked a great deal about things of no importance, and had some lager, the house having run out of almost everything else. It was light, but added a certain gentle persuasiveness to what they had had already. The waiter, a sociable soul whose life was on the whole a dull one, became noticeably attentive to their table; and, getting a little above themselves, they played exhibitionistically up to him. During one of his enforced absences Neil said suddenly, “Good God. What on earth are we eating?”

  Ellen concentrated dimly. “Pink blancmange, I think, with something mixed in. Semolina, is it? And bits of cake.”

  “But the taste.”

  “It’s not exactly a taste. More like a smell that gets in your mouth. Perhaps they used bath-salts to colour it with.”

  “Where’s the menu gone? I collect the names they think up for things like this. I hope it’s in French.”

  “Chariot Russ,” said a helpful voice over his shoulder. “You shouldn’t have sat about out there till the pruins was off. I was wondering how soon you’d become alive to it, as they say.” Studying Ellen’s face, Neil suspected that the waiter had given her a benevolent wink before departing.