North Face: A Novel

by Mary Renault

  To a man climbing in boots it would have meant awkwardness, a drag on speed, discomfort to be shrugged off and put-up with. To a man climbing in rubbers, it meant that within minutes his feet would encounter, not points of grip and friction, but a greased slide. Socks might have served, if he had been wearing any; but it had been too hot.

  The thunder sounded again, nearer. For the first time that day, he felt an eddy of air cross his face, and in the eddy a faint touch of chill.

  He was already past the halfway point. With a reasonable hope that his route would go, a total certainty that retreat would be slow and (to say the least) highly delicate, there was nothing but to go on.

  The second ledge sloped steeply and was covered with friable stuff. His instincts recoiled from it at sight; with a sound handhold, it was good enough to brace one foot on for a rest. There was no time to rest long. Working out to a small buttress he edged up to the third ledge. This, somehow, he would have to use.

  The buttress ended as an extension of the ledge itself; but as soon as he got his head over, he saw he must work round to another point. From the buttress-top to the face, there was nothing but a long steep tongue of scree; not, like that of the first ledge, a thin coating over rock, but thick, indefinite, based loosely on dry earth. There was no sign of a handhold, and he had no time to waste on digging about for one. Leaving the buttress, he made his way with some trouble to the tapered edge of the ledge. The other end would have been better, but that way there were no holds.

  A complete view of the ledge confirmed his worst surmises. The surface, combined with the angle, made it clearly impossible unless the handholds were sound. They had better be; he saw at once that there was no hope of a higher traverse to the crack, or any alternative way to the top.

  The thunder was a good deal closer now. The first distant flicker of lightning made him realise, by contrast, how little daylight was left. A long, quiet sigh sounded across the trees. He called “Anyone below there?” and heard an echo slap back the last word at him, but nothing more; he tested the ledge, at once dislodging stones. The sound of the first brought back a memory, from which he pulled his mind away. The sense of urgency pressed on him, with alternative waves of disturbance and release. He was aware of being on a bad, careless, unjustifiable climb, of which all the roots of his training were ashamed; but the new unconsidered passenger within him, its vacuum filled, felt the negative pleasure which is the cessation of pain.

  The handholds were there. He shifted on to the first by degrees, trying to argue with the distrust which flowed into him through his fingers. There had been no doubt, till now, of the soundness of the rock. Here it was sharper, more recently broken; it felt solid, but linked itself unpleasantly in mind with the chute of rubble on the slide. He distributed his weight with catlike circumspection, the main to the hands, the lesser to the feet.

  A mounting rumour rustled in the trees. Just after the next thunder-roll a new air touched his face, cool, and damply sweet.

  He tested each handhold he came to; but the thought of speed, increasingly pressing on his mind, made the tests a little less exhaustive than they had been. Now he was above the tongue that sloped down to the buttress; there were only another few feet to go before he reached the crack. When he found the next and necessary handhold, he discovered that it was an undercut.

  It was a hold that must be taken from below, giving no lift, only a counterpoise, a straight pull outward from the rock, along the line of the strata: when the rock has one’s perfect confidence, a useful hold enough. He gave it every test which was possible while still committing his weight to the other hand; but if he were to use it, he must put more on his feet. In the deepening dusk, his eyes was gladdened by a small tuft of grass; it argued a certain coherence below. By crossing the place quickly and lightly, he could make the crack. In it, just out of reach, there was a good deep hold. The structure of the crack reassured.

  Setting his foot on the grass-tuft, he pulled on the undercut, shifting his balance to it from the other hand. There would be only a second, while he changed hands on it, when it would take the whole outward pull. The moment came; and, at the point of direct tension, he felt it move. An instantaneous reflex brought his foot down on the grass-tuft. There was a little dry, tearing noise; his foot slipped downward. He flung his whole weight out against the undercut. With a motion that seemed grading, almost lethargic, it parted from its root in the face, and came away.

  As his hands left the rock, and his feet slipped lower, his efforts to grasp the receding face seemed protracted, rational, an infinite exploration of possibilities. Then he was face down on the scree, feeling it heap under him, experiencing with flat unbelief his gathering speed; while his body, which understood before him, dragged and struggled, and thrust fingers bent in violent and useless strength among the shifting stones. He thought, This is it, with the unreality of knowing that Australia is under the world; and felt his feet leave the edge.

  A sharp tearing, not like pain, wrenched his right hand; his arm, among unrealised movement, felt racking tension and arrest. His body swung sideways on it, and stopped.

  Among the scree, indistinguishable to the eye, projected a jag from the underlying rock. In his mind’s absence, the mysterious animal he inhabited, whipped back to its primeval swiftness, had found it, clawed and clung. Obeying the creature (his consciousness so far behind that it was still trying to apprehend the fact of death) he clenched his grip, and tried to reinforce it with that of the other hand, which would not reach. His legs from the knees down hung in space. When his mind overtook his body, it was to remark that in a few seconds he must let go.

  His first consecutive piece of feeling was to be angry with the animal’s idiotic resource. But for this, it would already be over, without apprehension or pain. Now, in an instant more, he would have time to be afraid; and, perhaps, not time to get beyond it, the most disgusting of all ways to go. Fear, he thought angrily, was futile. It would be pointless, inconsistent. Let him admit at once the truth concealed from himself but now manifest, that he had come to this place to die.

  The strain on his fingers was becoming agony. Reduced by the pain to a scarcely perceptible sensation, he felt the warm spread of blood over his wrist and down his stretched arm. He wondered how long it would be before anyone found him: and heard in memory, like some thing external, his own voice saying, “It’s ten to one you’d lie here for days.”

  Swiftly as his body had clutched the rock, his mind shot into an arrowy realisation which made nothing of time. He knew upon whom he was committing murder; a barbarous reprisal upon her helplessness, a massacre, a thousand times beyond the strength of her nature to bear. His dull resignation was stripped from him, like a smothering garment snatched away. The thought of dying in the act of this atrocity electrified him with a life whose force, spun out, would have kept him for a year. He did not think what he should do. It was merely inevitable that his left hand, groping among the scree, should encounter another outcrop, smaller than the first, but enough. Feeling the skin of his cut palm split again and tear with the contraction of the tendons, he began to pull.

  When he was far enough up the slide to press downward against the jag, instead of hanging from it, he started with infinite care to sweep the scree away. It rattled down into the gully; the thunder, for which he had no attention to spare, resounded. At first it seemed that there was nothing but sliding grit below; then he found a projection, then another. Within two minutes, he had got to the crack.

  The crack was to be climbed, so he climbed it. He could not recollect much about it afterwards, except that his red handprints had looked odd on the rock. He used jammed hand and foot pressure, he believed, for a good deal of the way; when he clenched his hand the fingers stuck to the palm, and pulled raw flesh when he opened them. After he had lain down in dry leaves at the top, he did not attempt to remember.

  The first drops of the thunder-rain fell, with a heavy and deliberate kindness, on his upturned
face.

  17 Summit Ridge

  HE WAS SOAKED TO the skin, and cold. The rain had been some time in penetrating the trees; now it brought down with it the aggregate from the leaves. A sound of falling water on the face below him changed to a steady pour. He had been thinking of nothing; getting to his feet, he discovered a ravenous hunger. After one or two false starts, he got to the cart-track which traversed the upper level of the woods; it led up to a farm, where they had once given him and Ellen tea.

  He had not spent much thought on his appearance till the farmer’s wife, looking terrified, tried to shut the door in his face. He pulled himself together in time to call something out to her; she peered again, and let him in. Dripping beside the kitchen range he followed her mild slow gaze to the rent in his trouser-knee through which a raw graze showed, the earth-patches on his shirt dissolved to mud, the bloodied handkerchief wrapped round his hand. She lent him her dead father’s dressing-gown (he had been bed-ridden, she confided, for ten years before he was taken; the stuff smelled of old sickness and camphorballs) while she dried his clothes and dog-stitched the tear. Her husband, a huge, clean, softly moving man with deep Devon eyes, offered the awkward sympathy of the sane toward afflicted aberration, there had been a lad once fallen thereabouts, a wild-like sort of a lad, birds’-nesting they reckoned he must have been. As soon as they had got a fire going in the parlour they put Neil in there; he did not deprecate this, guessing that in the kitchen he was in their way. At a round mahogany table he ate fried bacon and chitterlings and drank mugs of thick dark tea. The fire of dry logs crackled, spurted and grew incandescent at the heart. His meal finished, he sat, his chin propped on his good hand, staring across the table at the flames.

  A moment of reality, he thought, shows us how far we are straggled from our roots; exposing the false sensibility, thin efflorescence of talk and print, which presents the clumsy griefs we inflict on one another as wounds without cure. In the spirit, as in the flesh, the principle of life runs deeper; we leave it untapped, fidgeting with the surface of our self-esteem. Not in search of death, but of life, he had gone to the rock; to be measured in seconds perhaps, perhaps to be bought with death as soon as realised; life, and reality, none the less. Not for appeasement, or compensation, or forgetfulness, he had turned to a woman almost a stranger, and, after an acquaintance of days, sought a responsibility which might well have daunted him after a year. Desire, a condition inevitable but secondary, had fogged the issue. Her need, her conflict, her trapped and muted life, had drawn him like an unclimbed face which promises difficulty and exposure increasing at every pitch; but at the summit the realisation of oneself and of the mountain, union and release, a sky whose spaces humble, but no longer humiliate or appal.

  He had chosen his climb and slipped at the crux of it, through impatience and bad judgement and blindness to the weather-signs; and, in a stupid artificially civilised negativism, had accepted the end. Now, illuminated by their physical counterparts, the shock of falling, the lacerations given and received, took their proportion against the central impulse, like the torn hand on which, at the imperative moment scarcely feeling its injury, he had raised his weight and climbed. The skin would be scarred, perhaps, but he would climb on it again. He had not the arrogance, nor the defeatism, to assume in her a vitality less than his own.

  When he left the farm, he had a good deal of difficulty in persuading them to let him pay for his meal; they clearly thought him one of those helpless irresponsibles for whose protection cities exist, and were ashamed to exploit him.

  While he ate, the storm had passed the zenith; its spent thunder was trundling to the east, the wind had steadied under its burden of rain. Soon he was soaked again; but he had started warm and fed, and he went briskly. His hand, however, was beginning to smart and throb; finding it burned more when it hung downward, he walked with it pushed into the front of his shirt.

  It was just after ten when he reached Wier View. There were lights in the upper windows (Ellen’s, which faced away, he could not see) and one in the hall. He wished there were a separate way into the tower. He was getting tired; the thought of all the women clucking over his tatterdemalion entrance exhausted him in advance; they might say something to Ellen, besides. A car had just driven away from the door; he hung about for a minute or two before letting himself in quietly.

  He had not, however, left it long enough. The nurse was at the hall-stand mirror, tidying her hair. She had not seen him; he half thought of going out again. The hall light seemed strong after the wet darkness. He had a moment’s fresh and detached view of her; her profile looked jaunty and dubious, resolute over a quelled dejection. He took a step backward, his hand on the door.

  Too late; she had turned. To his unexpected relief, she did not gape. After her first start, she surveyed him carefully, as if he were something not much put of the way, but needing classification.

  “Well, Mr Langton, what happened to you? I suppose you fell down one of those cliffs?”

  A sudden, relaxed comfort crept over him. He had felt the same when at eight years old he had returned from some silly exploit, triumphant but a little shaky at the knees, to his mother’s resigned crossness and kind hands.

  He said, meekly, “Not all the way.”

  “I should hope not indeed. A good job I didn’t stay out any later. How much blood have you lost?”

  “Only what’s here.” He held it out. She exclaimed, not in horror but in disapproval and disgust.

  “Don’t tell me you’ve had that horrible dirty rag next to it all this time!”

  “It was a handkerchief once,” he apologised. “I didn’t have anything else with me.”

  “You ought to carry proper first aid, doing that sort of thing. Never mind, let’s get it cleaned up and have a look.”

  Upstairs, Ellen’s door hung emptily open; no one was about. She took him to the bathroom, fetched a handful of paraphernalia, and ran the tap. “No, don’t pull it, it’ll be stuck by now.” When the handkerchief had been soaked off in warm water, she took him under the light and peered, silently, into the gritty, ragged-edged, ploughed-up wound. It made him feel rather sick himself.

  “You’re in luck,” she remarked. “It’s missed the tendon all right!” He nearly said, “I know,” but this seemed presumptuous, so he refrained.

  “I suppose, if you hadn’t run into someone, you’d have gone with all this muck ground into it all night. The way people ask for trouble! Now keep running the cold over it. I’ve got some tweezers boiling on the ring in my room.”

  She fetched them and got to work. Setting his teeth silently, he felt thankful her attention was engaged. Without looking round as she poked and probed, she said, “I know it hurts. You’re being ever so good.”

  Lulled by her cosy realism, his pride succumbed without a struggle: next time he felt like drawing a sharp breath he did so, and was much relieved.

  “Now don’t watch this part, it’ll set your teeth on edge.” He looked obediently at the wall while she snipped off the loose skin. “There. That’s all the nasty part finished. It just goes to show—I never go on holiday without some flavine cream. Keep it in my spongebag; the mess it makes if it leaks you’d never believe.” A slimy emulsion of a violent orange went on to the lint; its first contact brought smoothness and ease. She padded it over with wool and wound on a firm intricate bandage. “Well,” she remarked, “that ought to keep you quiet for a bit. Would you like a couple of tablets, just to sleep on tonight?”

  “No,” he said quickly; and then, “No, thanks, it’s very good of you, but I always sleep.”

  “One of the independent ones, aren’t you? Now don’t forget …” And she gave him a number of instructions which, for quite five minutes afterwards, he remembered to the letter. “And I wouldn’t waste time getting to bed; you look all in, and who’d wonder. Have you had a meal?”

  He explained that he had, and started to thank her. She was cleaning the blood from the basin with a swab of c
lean wool; his handkerchief, rinsed already, hung on the edge. A silly headband, earrings, the forgotten trappings of coquetry, framed her plain preoccupied face as she cleaned, scrupulously, round the base of one of the taps. He had been much at strain today: suddenly he had to swallow, his pretty speech stuck in the midst of a phrase. “Goodnight,” he said, “and God bless you.” He thought she turned as he got to the door; but he was feeling embarrassed, and did not look round. As he went, it occurred to him that he could still not remember her name.

  In the corridor, Miss Searle passed him in her dressing-gown. She gave one glance, and went by with rigidly averted face. It was odd, he thought, that in these all-concealing garments women should feel undressed.

  The rain was finished. He lay for a long time with the door open, watching the stars skim between still-seeming clouds in the washed sky. The drowsiness he had felt by the farmhouse fire had left him. He ought to take some medinal, he supposed; he had had none for a week now, so that would be all right. He would need to be clear in the head tomorrow; before he considered what to say to Ellen, it would need some resource merely to get a word with her alone. Should he write a note, perhaps, and leave it under her door early? If so what should he write? He could think of nothing. A slow, blank certainty possessed him that there was nothing. He could apologise, retract, explain for himself; it would be decent, but unmeaning. He could not retract on her behalf the position into which he had forced her. She herself might not be able to retract it; it had become, perhaps, unalterably true.

  As he faced this possibility, memory suddenly presented him with the picture, two hours old now, of her open door. A new thought, insanely overlooked till this moment, struck him with a force that jerked him up sitting on the bed. She might have gone already. She might never have returned.