North Face: A Novel

  “Why, yes.” He put an arm round her and settled her against the stile beside him. “You know, I saw you next morning, too.”

  “Yes, of course. You know I—I didn’t, in the end?”

  “I hoped not, for your sake. Stop shivering, darling. There’s nothing to get in a state about.”

  She said, slowly, “Are you telling me now that you weren’t sure, and yet …”

  He wanted to tell her that he had been grateful for being given something outside himself to think about, but found that he could not begin on that; he doubted if he would ever be able to. “I knew that whatever had happened it couldn’t have been more than a—well, a painful irrelevance. That’s the essential, I suppose.”

  “I wish I could make you realise,” she said under her breath, “that you’re too good to get mixed up with me.”

  “Do try not to talk such—” In the stress of the moment he used an Army word, and hastily apologised; but she only laughed, as people do when something lowers their tension. “Don’t tell me the rest unless you like,” he said. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “I’d rather finish it now. You see, after Jock died, I found that—that I couldn’t feel anything about anyone.”

  He looked away. It had not been only for her sake that he had said she need not go on.

  “It wasn’t proud of it, don’t think that. Jock wouldn’t have let himself go if I’d been killed; he was too much alive. Besides, other people had put up with worse things and not thrown in their hand. I thought I’d better try and get over it. No one had taken notice of me, before Eric did; men don’t when you’re quite uninterested—unless you’re a beauty, I suppose. I was trying not to be a dead loss at some party, and he started then. He’s attractive, on the surface … you needn’t make a face, I wasn’t expecting you to agree. It seemed to me that if I ran away from this without giving it a chance, it would be rather defeatist. So in the end I agreed to come away with him here platonically … No, you can keep that one too. I know it’s very funny if you’ve read Plato, but Eric hadn’t so he knew what I meant.”

  “Don’t tell me you took one good look at him and thought he’d stick to it.”

  “No, but I thought he’d be straight. Of course there was a kind of understanding left open that if it went really well it might end differently. But what happened was that the first night, he turned up in my room as a matter of course. He thought I expected it.”

  “Oh,” said Neil. “I see.” He remembered her wretchedness, and wished desperately that he could see the event as anything but an embarrassing, trivial contretemps. It was no use; he was like a man who, after swallowing Indian curry, is asked to pronounce on a light wine. As an actor struggles to get into a part, he tried to make himself twenty-five, twenty-one, nineteen. “That must have been bloody,” he said.

  “I knew you’d understand; a lot of people wouldn’t. It was finding out that I’d got as far involved as that with someone who not only didn’t know if I was speaking the truth, but simply didn’t care. It was like suddenly knowing one had some squalid disease. To have come down to that—and then to remember.”

  This, he realised now, was what he had been waiting for from the start. He said nothing. His face was well trained, and reliable.

  “I tried to laugh it off in a way that wouldn’t hurt his feelings. But he felt I’d let him down, and said … well, I can’t tell you that. I didn’t guess till then how a lot of people live. I shouldn’t have said what I did to him afterwards—one finds it hard to believe that anything can get through. He didn’t mean any harm, as he saw it. I expect the fact was, he thought I was used to it.”

  “A perceptive type,” said Neil, suddenly angry.

  “Don’t let’s talk about it any more. It seemed worse than ever after I’d met you.”

  This time she was not passive to his kiss; she returned it, with an inexperienced attempt of ardour. At first he tried to believe in it; but last night had been too real to let him make mistakes afterwards. She was grateful for his understanding, and determined to reward it. Again he could not tell the quality of her inward resistance. It was not repulsion, nor indifference; such certainties do not admit of error. Rather it was as if she took fright at the first stirring of passion, not in him but in herself, and killed it wilfully, unhappy at failing him but by some stronger compulsion continuing to fail. He had a moment’s impulse to try and force a response from her; but his wits came to his aid in time, and he let her go. As he released her, she reached up and gave him a swift, parting kiss. It felt like an act of expiation.

  She moved off towards the stile; but he checked her with an absent movement, while he thought what to say. It was simple enough, after all.

  “This seems to have brought us to another thing we’d better get sorted out. I think myself that the idea of trying it out before marriage has a good deal to be said for it. Not that it tells you everything, God knows, but I’ve watched one or two disasters among people I know that it might have staved off.” She had been facing him when he began, and she continued to face him. Suppressing a moment’s temptation to tell her that he wasn’t a firing-squad, he went on, “But in case you’re wondering, after this other thing, what to expect from me at any moment, I’m telling you now so that we’ll know where we are. This whole divorce racket is just a joke in poor taste, but all the same, I’m seeing it through till the official deadline. What I want to avoid is any chance of a situation in which our future—and three other people’s—is going to depend on my committing perjury. The idea doesn’t attract me, and I shouldn’t be very good at it. That’s all. I just thought you might like to know.”

  Her strained suspense had made all this something of an effort. Now, without warning, her face crumpled. He had forgotten, among the morning’s difficulties, how charming her smile would be when she was really amused.

  “Thank you,” she said, “for telling me you wouldn’t be very good at committing perjury.” She hesitated, and put a shy hand on his arm. “Darling, you are a fool.” He reached for her, but she was too quick for him, and went smartly over the stile leaving him to follow.

  They both walked the next quarter-mile of road in a certain degree of abstraction. Presently, however, Ellen remarked in rather a subdued voice, “We’re almost there.”

  “Good lord. Yes, so we are.”

  Their pace became perceptibly less brisk; presently, by tacit consent, they stopped altogether.

  With an air of authority which he did his best to make convincing, Neil said, “I think it will be the best plan if you go and have lunch at the hotel. I’ll meet you afterwards of course. Then—”

  Ellen stood back on her heels. “Really, Neil. What do you take me for? If you think I’m going to lurk in a hotel while you take on all those women single-handed—”

  “Well, we can’t both talk at once, in any case. Can’t you trust me not to make a mess of it?” This struck him as distinctly subtle.

  “Of course we shall make the most ungodly mess of it, together or separately. So we might just as well do it together. I mean, it isn’t as if we could feel like casual acquaintances who’ve been annoyingly stranded, is it?”

  “No,” said Neil, wishing they were on the downs again; cars were passing at ten to the minute. “But all the same—”

  “Besides, I don’t want to have lunch by myself when I could be having it with you. Come on, or we’ll be late.”

  After this conversation, it was natural that they reached Wier View in a state of heroic resolution, each privately at concert-pitch and determined to carry off the situation with brilliant aplomb in support of the other. Fate was unlikely to resist such a target for anticlimax. The hall, the dining-room, the Lounge, met them with indifferent emptiness.”

  “Of course,” said Ellen with determined reasonableness, “people do go out, this time of the day. I don’t know why we should expect them to be all lined up in the hall.”

  The room vacated by Mr Phillips had been taken, the day
after he left, by an old gentleman of retired military cast, an overflow from the hotel where his family was staying. He had all his meals there, and had thus remained a complete stranger to the Wier View guests. He now made a leisurely progress down the stairs, keying up their expectation (for he was a little man with a light tread) for several long seconds before he appeared in sight. Seeing them standing-at-ease below him, he gave them a courteous but rather dissatisfied inspection (as if, thought Neil, they had been foreign troops whose deficiencies had to be treated with tact) acknowledged with clipped correctness their tardy greetings, and trotted out, leaving final deflation behind Mm.

  The clock made it, after all only ten minutes to lunch time.

  “I suppose,” said Ellen at last, “we’d better go and get tidy.”

  Neil completed this process rapidly (his room-mate of the night had generously lent him a razor in the morning). Feeling firm and resourceful, though a little underhand, he hurried past Ellen’s door and made his way down to the back of the house. He had never been, so far, into the kitchen. Perhaps the last five minutes before lunch might not be the perfect moment; but it was the man’s job to break the ice, and he was going to do it.

  So many sounds of activity were going on inside that he could not be sure whether anyone had answered his knock. His hand on the doorknob, he paused, seized with sudden misgiving about having shaved; involuntary castaways should manage less neatly. Fortifying himself, he decided that this was not the kind of thing a woman would think of.

  He went in.

  Afterwards, he was never quite successful in recalling all the details of the interview. He tried several times, moved by anxiety to convince himself that it had gone off perfectly. He did remember, however, that Mrs Kearsey had been running to and fro, at what seemed to be high pressure, between the gas cooker and the table, and that her face, as he appeared, expressed less of moral censure than of frenzied irritation. He was also vaguely aware that she had been rebuking the little maid in a voice rather different from the one she used in the Lounge, and that he had entered in the middle of it. She had on an old chintz apron, none too clean; this she hurriedly and reproachfully removed, while he put over his opening speech. During the rest of the dialogue, the maid was scuttling in and out with trays; and Mrs Kearsey turned round, every time she came back, to watch her activities and correct them in a distraught sotto voce.

  Resolved not to be put off by any of this, Neil stood his ground, and affected an imperturbable, easy charm. He had resurrected this manner from the days of his first appointment, where the Head’s domineering wife had responded to it fairly well; and did not pause to reflect that he had not tried it on Mrs Kearsey before. She seemed at least to be looking at him with awakened interest, and (after the maid’s activities had subsided) to be hanging on his words. When he had run himself to a standstill, she replied briefly to the effect that she had been a little worried last night, but that accidents would happen, and that she was glad to know they were safe and sound. Detecting a note of reserve, and anxious to leave no telling point unmade, Neil assured her that he would have rung up last night to explain, if she had been on the phone. With a noticeable drop in temperature, Mrs Kearsey replied that it was a convenience, if it hadn’t been for the war; but that one couldn’t have everything nowadays the way one had been used to. Of course not, he agreed a little too hastily; no, quite. There was a pause. Mrs Kearsey rushed to the cooker, where a saucepan connected with the next course was boiling over. Having dealt with this and finding him still there searching for an exit-line, she remarked, with the air of one stating the obvious, that it was a pity she hadn’t known in time to get lunch for them, but after having kept supper hot for two hours last night, she really hadn’t known what to do, and she expected they would have made arrangements. He assured her they had, with an air of one accustomed to take charge of such situations, which almost convinced himself. Mrs Kearsey said that in that case she would expect them for supper, and returned to the saucepan. He became aware that the interview was over.

  He went out into the corridor, wiped his brow (the kitchen had been like an extension of the oven) and said to himself that as she hadn’t asked them to leave she must evidently have been satisfied. The thought visited him that landladies cannot easily expel guests who behave themselves on the premises, whatever they do elsewhere; but he did his best to dismiss it. He had better find Ellen, and take her along for a meal. Their public debut would now have to remain in suspense till supper-time.

  Ellen was not in sight; but he heard voices, just inside the door of the Lounge. She must be there; they had caught her unprotected. He strode to the door.

  Just before he got there, a voice reached him. It was Miss Searle’s, full of well-bred sympathy and understanding.

  “How awkward for you. I remember something very similar happening to a colleague of mine, on a walking-tour in Dalmatia. But the British Consul was very helpful.”

  Then he heard Ellen. She was stammering. In the grip of her intractable shyness, she sounded like a schoolgirl having a session with the better kind of housemistress.

  “Yes—and of course we hadn’t anything with us, not even a toothbrush; if I hadn’t had a rucksack I don’t suppose the hotel would have taken me in. And there wasn’t any s-soap; it’s awful trying to get clean with just water. And it was even worse for Mr Langton; he had to go to an awful little place in a back street, and didn’t even have a room to himself.”

  It was the perfect approach. She couldn’t have done better if a producer had coached her in it for weeks. When Miss Searle crossed the hall in response to the gong, Neil stepped unobtrusively out of sight.

  12 Overhang

  FROM THE ARM OF the harbour, the lamps of the whitewashed cottages made snaky ripples that seemed to wriggle nearer across the lazy sea. There was a smell of tar and seaweed; the infrequent mew of the gulls had the different note of night.

  “Did you mind coming out and giving them a bit more to talk about?”

  “No. I like it here.”

  “Supper didn’t go off too badly, did it? Though the don takes a dim view of me, I’m afraid. She’d think twice before she gave one of her students late leave to go out with me. Miss What’s-her-name was a bit subdued, I thought.”

  “Miss Fisher doesn’t miss very much.”

  “Well, we didn’t give them much to go on.”

  “Look, there’s a ship out in the channel.”

  They stood together, watching the port light which seemed scarcely to move against the irregular beaded points that picked out the coast of Wales.

  “Come here a moment.”

  “I am here.”

  “I’d like to be sure.”

  “Neil.”

  “Yes?”

  “If I’m going to think this over, you must too. No, I’m serious now. I’ve not known you very long, but I feel all this isn’t like you. If you were starting a climb, you’d want to find out more about the mountain first than you know about me. Whether the rock was good, or—or rotten. And if you started and then found it wasn’t justifiable, you’d turn back. You can now; you can any time.”

  “This one’s either justifiable or impossible. Is it impossible?”

  “I wish to God I could tell you. I think it would be fairer if I said yes.”

  We ought to have this out, he thought. Here and now. Every instinct told him that retreat from this moment would have to be paid for. But there were parts of his own experience that he still felt he would never be able to talk about as long as he lived; it seemed both cruel and unjust that he should ask more of her than of himself.

  “You don’t have to worry about me. I know what I’m doing and I’ve got no doubts about it. Incidentally, you don’t find out what rock’s like by standing at the root and guessing.”

  “I don’t know how you have patience with me.”

  “My dear, we’re both grown-up. I’ve made a headlong assault on you when you clearly weren’t ready. It must h
ave been pretty obvious to you that I simply let go because, one way and another, I was bloody sick of holding on. You had patience with me.”

  She said, half aloud, “I didn’t need any.”

  The spume blowing in from the sea had left a thin cool film of salt on her lips. She would not open them when he kissed her; but he felt her hand touch his hair and quickly fall away. She turned her face aside; seeking for her mouth he found her cheek instead. It was salt as her lips had been, but slippery and warm.

  “What is it?” He felt a sense of power and a certainty that not only the night was on his side. “Tell me now.”

  “Ought we to stay much longer? Mrs Kearsey may want to lock up.”

  “What is it?”

  “Oh, nothing. I’m afraid of all this.” She pulled one arm away to gesture vaguely at the night. “It looks like a canto in Don Juan. One can’t help it. It isn’t real.” Feeling his arms loosen she clung to him again; he could feel the catch in her breath. “Listen, Neil. Don’t risk anything on me. Never give me a chance to hurt you, even in little ways. I’m not worth it. Why do you have to do more than amuse yourself with me? I don’t mind if you do; I’d rather. I won’t be awkward, I promise; I won’t be any trouble to you at all, if only I know you’re not risking anything on me that matters.”

  “Thanks for the thought; but I can look after myself without a nannie.”

  “I’ve not been fair to you. I’ve let you give me too much. There are some people who are more—more involved by giving than by taking. If I hadn’t been utterly wrapped up in myself I’d have seen it before.”

  “My dear child, we could both play at this game till kingdom come. Why not stop talking like a book and give living a chance?”

  He took her back again. This time she was, as she had said just now, no trouble at all. Below the sea-salt, her mouth tasted by contrast sharply sweet. But, as before she had been too difficult, now she was too easy; her answers had a fluid kind of helplessness, like that of water moved by wind. Her mind was not in it; it stood, defeated and self-accused, somewhere apart. It made no sense to him that they could share this awareness without being able to overcome it. He let her go with disturbed senses and a spark of anger in his heart which, because he would not justify it, he would not own.