North Face: A Novel

by Mary Renault

  He carried the cards and pad to the fancy cabinet in which they lived, and opened the drawer. On the far side of the room, the other two women were discussing bridge-fiends, their malice and rancour, the pleasant change provided by a friendly game. Something moved beside him; Ellen put down the bridge-marker by the cards in the drawer, as he put in the score-pad. Her hand slid along to his; he covered and held it. The voices talked on, and the world was still.

  “I’ll come back.” She spoke in a breath of voice so slight that he had to watch the movement of her lips. He tightened his hand on hers and let her go.

  The voices of the women, sleepy and perfunctory, chatted on the stairs. He could hear, at intervals, Ellen’s almost monosyllabic counterpoint; then a little sentence, a run up and down on two or three notes, too far to catch words. The room was smoky and stale; he flung the curtains back, and the window wide. The hot clouds that had hung about all day were thinning; the moon came through with a vague shadowless brightness. He crossed to the doorway and turned off the light.

  Upstairs a door shut, then another. He stood where he could be seen at once, against the window, so that she should not be bewildered, or afraid of being taken by surprise. A stair creaked softly. When she came in, he did not move to meet her. She stood for a moment with her hand on the door, then pushed it to. He did not hear the latch; she was still leaving, he thought, a path of escape.

  Her face, as she crossed the room to him, looked dimly luminous, like the low sky outside. When she was close, she wavered for a moment and still he did not move. There was nothing to tell her that she did not know. It was not till he felt his lips touched by the falling strand of hair that he drew her in, and lifted it back from her eyes.

  Finding that she was not very sleepy tonight, Miss Searle decided to read in bed for half an hour. This, she had found, seldom failed to settle one, unless one had some definite worry, which tonight was certainly not the case; it was only that her brain had been a little over-stimulated by the game. The evening could hardly, in fact, have gone better, proving with what small effort a disinterested person could dissipate misunderstanding, smooth out awkwardness and suspicion, and put people at their ease. She wondered how Miss Fisher was feeling now. In fairness one must admit that she had borne with patience and good nature her partner’s unsystematic play. No doubt she had been feeling a little ashamed of herself, which after all was only right. She must realise now that, if she had been correct in her surmises, the people concerned would scarcely have sacrificed the evening so cheerfully to a game of cards. Had some little gesture of this kind not been extended, they might well have been flung upon their own resources—and thus, inevitably, on one another’s—out of sheer embarrassment. Now everything was comfortable again; the whole unfortunate episode could be forgotten by everyone concerned, and the pleasant status quo restored.

  Cheered by these thoughts, she began to set her room in order for the night, a thing she always liked to do before undressing. What should she read? She was almost decided on Mansfield Park; but to make a final choice she must have her glasses. The case was in her bag; but it was empty. She remembered, now, that she had taken them off immediately the game was over, and must have left them somewhere downstairs. This showed the advantage of an orderly method; had she discovered this later, it would have meant going down in her dressing-gown. As it was, she had got no further than changing her shoes for her more comfortable moccasins.

  There was a two-way switch on the stairs; but Miss Searle, a conscientious fuel-saver, did not use it; the light from the landing penetrated dimly, but sufficiently, to the bottom. The hall itself was dark, but the door of the Lounge was close at hand. It was ajar, and opened soundlessly. The switch, she remembered, was inconveniently placed behind it. She took one suede-soled step into the room; but not a second.

  Outlined against pale light in a frame of blankness, a man and a woman were standing in perfect silhouette. They were in the posture of Solomon’s song: his left hand was under her head and his right embraced her. Her throat was thrown back, relaxed to his support; her hair spilled through his fingers. His stooping face was a little above hers, so that he seemed to lift it like a cup, and to look down into it without drinking. Their stillness, at this moment, was absolute, so that it gave the sense of arrested time; it seemed to Miss Searle that she must have remained transfixed at the door for minutes, during which they did not move. Then she heard the man say, very quietly, “Oh, God.” It had to her ears the sound of solitude, of deep grief and darkness. The strangeness of this voice confused and frightened her; she could not collect herself to escape.

  The woman’s hand slipped away from about his neck: it touched, softly, his cheek and temple, curved upward over his head, and drew it down. What followed was like the meeting of quicksilver: a pausing contact of separate shapes, a flash into identity too swiftly complete to be recorded by the eye. Now the fused shadow was almost as motionless as before; only the woman’s arm stirred uncertainly, till in a movement of sudden strength it caught his waist, and clung. A different stillness now, and a different silence.

  Miss Searle never knew how she got out of the room. If she had seen the back-tilted throat gripped in the act of murder (which would have offered the release of action and screams) she could have felt no more than she felt now. Often, in parks and fields, she had come upon couples in much more of outward abandonment, tumbled on the grass, and had only turned away in the distaste she might have felt for the antics of dogs, with the same absence of personal impact. But with this terrible entity, this unknown, piercingly hostile and excluding force, she had talked, sat at table, smiled. She felt nothing clearly: only (as one feels a bodily pain too blinding to admit of thought) a searing humiliation, a consciousness of being cheated, derided and alone. She knew only one thing, that she must make no noise; she backed velvet-footed through the door; seeing in imagination, as a spy eluding capture sees torment and death, the clasped shadow parting and lancing her with eyes. She dared not move the door again. Through it, as she went, she heard a light broken murmur, a wordless catch of the breath; and an answer, lower and firmer, comforting it to silence.

  Upstairs, she moved about her room in the track of habit, in the sugar-pink light from the art-silk shade, undressing, folding her clothes. As she hung her cardigan she saw one of the pockets distorted by an angular bulge, the outline of her spectacles. She put them in the case, and the case on the bedside table.

  When she was ready, she said her prayers. She prayed for a long time: for all such as had erred and were deceived, against the perils and dangers of this night, for the means of grace and for the hope of glory. But she could only see the hard pink sheen of the counterpane between her fingers, receiving indifferently the spreading circles of her tears.

  15 Slip by the Leader

  THE CLOUDS LAY SUPINE in the heavy sky, gravid with thunder and waiting listlessly for labour to begin. Meanwhile, the inertia of the air deepened till it seemed too dense to be shifted by anything; one felt that even the gestating storm must be smothered, and was contained in it already dead. In the sheltered horseshoe by the sea, walking and breathing were burdens. Neil and Ellen had struggled up through the stagnant lanes, in search not so much of privacy as of air. They had meant to go on the moors; but in the unmoving cloud-gaps the earth and sky pushed the sluggish heat back and forth between them, like plates of brass. From the cliff-top, the woods below had offered shade, and the tenuous hope of a breeze.

  They were resting now on a grassy ledge below the brow. Beyond the flat oily sea, the Welsh coastline had the colour and weight of lead. When a twig or a leaf fell it seemed to drop with exhaustion, and all the rest hung lax, ready to follow.

  Ellen lay on the grass, watching the tree-tips which, stirring in air-eddies imperceptible to the flesh, gave some relief if only to the eyes. Her hair was spread indifferently in the thin grass and parched moss; the pale yellow of her dress was darkened with damp at the armpits and in a line round he
r waist where the belt, which she had loosened now, had held it to her body. She had lifted her arms to feel the dim coolness of evaporation; her hands were folded behind her head.

  Neil had taken off his shirt altogether, and hung it on a spur of rock. He had worn off the sense of superiority which this advantage gives to the human male, and, propped against a mossy boulder, had started a pipe which he was too thirsty to enjoy. The boulder, soft at first touch, grew spiny within minutes to the bare back; he shifted, irritably, for the third time. There was room on the grass-patch for two; but he had already decided against it.

  Vexed by some roughness in the ground on which she lay, Ellen gave a languid wriggle, and subsided again. The movement caught the tail of his eye, and drew it against his, better sense. The childish down at the edge of her hair lay in dark feathers on her forehead; the clear skin between them had a fine beading like dew on ivory. Her eyelids were glossy, with dark fragile veins. The smooth-surfaced cotton of her dress, crisp this morning when she had put it on, was limp now, and if she wore anything under it at all it stopped at the waist. Her up-drawn breasts were outlined as frankly as if she had been naked: he saw that she was half asleep.

  It was with some trouble that he refrained from telling her, shortly, not to be so damned inconsiderate. Knowing that if he yielded to this impulse she would not, in any foreseeable future, relax naturally in his presence again, he suppressed it, leaving his inward resentment unrelieved. He turned to contemplation of the smoke which rose from his pipe in a blue vertical line. He was aware that he was a little on edge today, which was a pity, because presently he would have to talk to her, and it was essential to set about this with unemotional detachment.

  They had not talked at all last night, in any explanatory sense. It had all been too evanescent, fortuitous and easy to destroy. He had tried only to deepen and confirm it, and to avoid anything which in her next phase of reaction could bear witness against him. The innocence of her instincts had been profoundly moving; her tenderness had had undercurrents of the spirit by which she herself had seemed bewildered, disturbing him at levels which, as he realised when there was time to think, he had never till now put within a woman’s reach. He had felt in it a maturity of sorrow, finding expression, blindly, through her body, as if it had never resolved itself in her mind.

  There could have been—he had felt it at the time, and he thought so still—one natural and simple solution to it all. It seemed even that her own intuition, wiser than she knew, had sent her to him in search of it. To refuse it had not only been one of the most difficult things he had ever done; it had seemed, even to reason, a profitless folly. But unmaking a planned decision did not come easily to him; it never had, and, recently, the axiom that an act of will, once made, must be accepted like external fact, had been the basis of mere survival. His returning trust in himself still climbed, so to speak, on balance-holds alone; he shrank from disturbing its equilibrium, without acknowledging his fear. In any case, whatever her own principles were in the matter (he had never asked her, since there was to be no need) she would remember he had gone back on his word. So also would he. At this point, his inner discussion had ended; but virtue had not been, altogether, its own reward.

  After they had parted, and he had climbed to his eyrie in the tower, he had employed three wakeful hours in writing a poem, of the kind which one tears up next morning at sight. Having finished it, he became suddenly very tired. Some time later, he was making his way up the Col Tournanche, with a feeling that it was ill-advised to be there. The snow had that over-ripe perfection which conceals a threat; and as he noted this he heard the roar and grumbling echo of an avalanche in some hidden distance. It was better, now, to press on than to retreat; but the going was slow, a steep ice-slope masked by a fresh fall. Someone was working the slope ahead of him. It was Ellen; he caught her up. In her hands was the broken haft of an ice-axe, lacking a head; and wielding this useless rod she was trying, with stubborn futile incompetence, to cut steps. “What’s the good of that?” he called. “Here, take mine and I’ll show you how.” And he held his own axe out to her. She moved to take it, then drew back, clinging to the broken handle. “No; I couldn’t manage with that. I don’t want it. This one was given me and I use it always.” Instead of his feeling the exasperation proper to real life, in the dream it was as if she had struck him in the face. He said, “For God’s sake get out of the way, then, and let me do it”; and, roping her up to him, moved past her up the slope. At the same moment the sky thickened, the wind rose, and a blizzard of snow began. He tried to work into the rhythm necessary to good step-cutting, a technique he always enjoyed; but his goggles kept snowing up, making him stop to clear them. Now he was struggling with the old dereliction and despair, the knowledge that the mountain refused him. It had grown bitterly cold, and the wind was howling. Out of the noise of it, a voice shouted, “Say! Look behind you!” and laughed loudly. He turned; the untied rope lay trailing on the snow, she was nowhere in sight. The rest was a confusion of searching, anger and shame, the snow blinding him and his skill growing unsure, and at each failure the wind shrieking with laughter on the col. He woke to find himself, stripped for last night’s heat, lying naked in the transient chill before the dawn. Between the fading of the dream and full waking, he was visited by a nightmare that sometimes came to him in this phase, that today the world would end and that he had not prepared himself and would be smothered in the universal fear.

  It grew light soon after, and he could not sleep again. This was partly due to hunger; he had been awake more than half the night. His brain, made restless by his stomach’s emptiness, ran back and forth, recapitulating, deducing unknown quantities, adding them up to this total or that. The upshot was that things could not drift indefinitely, subject to emotional climate and to chance. What he had been passing off to himself as tact was, more simply, funking a difficult crux on which the whole route depended. The proposition once stated in these terms, nothing remained but to do something about it.

  On the way up to the cliff-top they had scarcely spoken, except to grumble at the heat and encourage one another to push on. He had been as little in the mood for sentimental exchanges as she, and would have felt them irritatingly mistimed if they had been offered; yet, irrationally, while recognising his own mood he had been suspicious of hers, and had let it link itself with all her other withdrawals in his mind. Now, sheltered from the sun’s blaze and rested, he had swung back to a recollection of last night which was too vivid altogether; continuing in his reserve for altered reasons, he wanted the first sign to come from her, then began to demand it with the inner insistence of a suppressed cause. No sign had come. She had given herself up to the day’s lethargy with a facile completeness which, to his present mood, spoke of evasion as clearly as print.

  The yellow dress was cut fairly high at the throat, and she had not opened it. Her raised arms had pulled up two wrinkles, converging at a point; it seemed to him that they followed the outline of the gold chain below, and met at the ring of the medal, itself too flat and close to show. As clearly as if nothing had intervened, he could see the disc lying between her breasts, the warmth and weight of the gold an accustomed pressure; he could see the enamelled wings. She seemed to lie abandoned to it, like Leda to the swan.

  It would be better, he thought at this point, to have a conversation about something; but he felt angrily that to open some neutral topic would be a signal of defeat. Putting it off, he continued to look at her. Her breathing was quick and deep, labouring with the devitalised air; it rippled the muscles down the whole length of her body. Her lips were parted; she moistened them, just then, with a sliding point of tongue.

  Suddenly, without a warning sign, her dropped lids lifted and her eyes met his. She gave a quick jerky twist, sat up, clasped her knees in her arms, and settled with her back to him, looking at the sea.

  Unspoken dialogues of this kind did not make sense to Neil at any time, his view being that a little less false de
licacy in the world would leave people more time to practise the essential kinds. His bad angel, assuming an honest straightforward air, put this precept speciously before him.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Did I give you one of those looks as if I were undressing you?”

  She turned half-round, then away; he could see her struggling, helplessly, for the right answer.

  “I was, of course,” he added. “But the results were very nice.”

  This turned out to be once too often. Ellen straightened, and faced him squarely. “Sometimes,” she said, “you just make me think of a schoolboy trying to see how far he can go.”

  After the first shock, it quite pleased him to find her standing up for herself. If she had spoken with a little gentleness, or even a little humour, this effect would have lasted; as it was, his distrust returned at once to spoil it. He said with irony, “And it was too far, m-m?”

  “Yes,” said Ellen firmly. “I think I have all I need for the moment, thank you.”

  The effort required for this had left her taut and quivering all over; but she had turned back again, and in any case he was in no mood to notice it.

  “I keep trying to remember,” he remarked, “which department of that factory you said you worked in. Welfare, perhaps?”

  “You don’t know much about factories,” said Ellen over her shoulder. “The girls in my shop reported a man once for a lot less than that. He was transferred to the packing-room, too.” She kicked a pebble over the edge and added, “Everyone was very pleased.”

  Neil listened to the pebble, making its way down the cliff-faces in accelerating bounds. Supplied with a new and highly legitimate grievance, he said, “You know a stone like that becomes lethal after about a hundred feet, don’t you? I thought you were supposed to have been taught to climb?”