North Face: A Novel

  “Take it easy, my dear,” he said. “Take it as it comes. It’ll be all right.”

  They walked back as they had come, his arm round her waist and her hand on his holding it there. The sea still made its soft plashing against the jetty, and a hushing noise on the shingle of the beach. The stars brightened. They were silent, and separate in themselves, for the rest of the way.

  Miss Fisher looked up from the picture-postcard on which for the fourth time she was trying to vary the phrases. All four were going to colleagues who would probably compare them; but she was finding it hard to give the problem her whole mind.

  “I’m not one to be hard on anybody,” she said. “People are only flesh and blood, is what I always think, and they make a nice couple, in a way, you can’t deny it; a nice contrast if you see what I mean. As for having proof, that’s hardly likely, now is it, when you come to think? But I’ve got my own eyes, and that’s good enough for me.”

  “My own opinion,” said Miss Searle, “is that when an innocent explanation has not only been offered, but bears every mark of probability, the least one can do is to be charitable. Don’t you think so?”

  “I should say it depends what you mean.” Miss Fisher found it hard to find a fulcrum for her sense of injustice. Far from lacking charity, she felt herself to be reacting with toleration, even with some generosity, to a self-evident fact. “I mean when a girl can’t even pass a man the butter without blushing up to her ears—”

  “I can understand her embarrassment,” said Miss Searle tartly, “even better now than at the time.”

  “—and when he says ‘Thank you’ one minute as if she was a perfect stranger, and the next ‘Will you have a biscuit’ as if he was the family doctor pepping up an urgent case … well, that’s only one thing. I mean, well, there it is.”

  “From the little I know of Mr Langton, I should imagine he would feel responsible for the girl’s very awkward position, and sensitive to her shyness about it. I can’t see, myself, that any other explanation is necessary. Or kind.”

  Unexpectedly, Miss Fisher felt an aching behind her eyes. Blinking it away, and not trusting herself to speak, she asked herself protestingly whether she wasn’t behaving like a good loser; hadn’t she taken people as she found them, even wished them luck; what effort of kindness greater than these was required? She. licked a stamp, fixed it, swallowed, and said, “Well, everyone’s got their own opinion, and you can’t say more.”

  “I’m sure that’s much the best way of looking at it.”

  “And another thing,” said Miss Fisher, nature suddenly rebelling, “he tried to squeeze her foot under the table, only she’d got it tucked up round her chair.”

  “The table?” asked Miss Searle, pouncing on the syntactical error out of disgust for the rest.

  Flicked on a tender surface, Miss Fisher paused with another licked stamp congealing in her hand.

  “I ask you,” she said bitterly. “It’s pitch dark outside. What do you suppose they’re doing now?”

  “I have no idea. And I hardly feel it concerns either of us. Oh, dear, it seems to be later than I thought; I must really get to bed. Goodnight.”

  Miss Fisher, giving her attention to pulling the sticky stamp from her fingers, did not respond.

  13 Fixed Anchor

  “WHAT IS IT NOW?” asked Neil.

  Ellen looked disconcerted. With his back to an old ash-tree, he was looking straight out across the moors; it was she who had been watching him.

  “Nothing’s the matter. Why?”

  Neil got out his pipe, cleaned the bowl with a twist of dry bracken, shook it out, and began to fill it. The silence became a contest of wills.

  “When I said nothing, I meant nothing I could tell you without feeling a fool.”

  “If you say so. I wouldn’t know.” He got out matches, and turned over on his stomach to shelter the flame.

  “You’ll never do it, in this wind.” She picked up her sweater from the grass and, kneeling over him, held it beside his head for a screen. He thanked her; but she saw that he had already got the pipe drawing without it. She drew away again, and arranged the sweater to sit on.

  There was another pause; then Ellen spoke again, in a sudden rush. “Well you asked for it. It’s just that there are times when you frighten me.”

  “That must be thrilling,” said Neil moderately.

  “I knew you’d make me feel a fool.”

  He put the pipe down on a flat stone, and moved towards her.

  “No. Not now. It stops me from thinking.”

  “We mustn’t do that.” He began coaxing the pipe again.

  “You made me tell you; it isn’t fair to make it so difficult. I don’t mean frightening in a simple way. You’re always kind to me, when anyone else wouldn’t be. When I know I’m being stupid and—and disappointing, you put up with it—”

  “Blessed are the meek.”

  “You’re the least meek person I ever knew. That’s what I’m trying to say. You’re kind for my sake partly, I know, and it’s good of you. But at the same time it’s as if you said, ‘You see, you can’t touch me.’ You put it up all round you, like a wall.”

  “In heaven’s name, Ellen, what do you want?”

  “I don’t know. You shouldn’t have made me say anything. It’s just a way you have of looking sometimes—suddenly shut up, and not wanting to be interfered with.”

  “I suggest you try the door and see if it’s locked.”

  “I do, and it is.”

  “My dear child, if it makes things any simpler, I was looking at the colour of those hills over there, and comparing it with something I saw near Delphi once.”

  “Yes, it would be something like that … Neil; what do you want with me?”

  “Silly of me not to have told you. I was thinking I had.”

  “You’ve never told me. You’ve picked me up like a stray cat out of the rain, and dried my fur and stroked me. You’ve said you loved me, but that can mean a lot of things. Neil, I must talk to you. Please don’t mind this. You’ve—had a bad time, and you’ve been a good deal by yourself, and I think it’s made me seem more important to you in some ways than I really am. I don’t think it would last with you. That’s all.”

  Neil considered her for a few moments, with narrowed eyes.

  “Look, my dear; there’s no need to do a sort of verbal Dance of the Seven Veils. Are you trying to say that I’ve been carried away by the fact that I want a woman, and you happen to be on the spot?”

  “No, of course not.” She blushed fiercely, through all the predictable stages.

  “What do you mean, of course not? Any man proposes because he wants a woman. If you don’t mean any woman, what’s it all about?”

  “I don’t know.” She was doing something to one of her shoes.

  “That does occur to a man for himself, you know, if he’s past twenty-five. The procedure is to make a strong effort of the imagination, if it’s important, and decide how she’ll seem at eight in the morning after you’ve been sleeping with her for a week. By the way, do you wear curlers in bed, or one of those bags?”

  “I don’t wear anything.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “It—it grows like this. I just tie it back.”

  “And do you put thick grease on your face, or thin?”

  “It isn’t grease. You’d be no wiser if I told you.”

  “Oh, one of those light things. Yes, you would. Shall you mind my shaving while you’re having a bath?”

  “I have it at night.” She took her shoe off, shook out a piece of grit, and put it slowly on again.

  “Well, I’ll need to shave at night, I expect, with a skin like yours, or you’ll be changing over to grease. But let it go. What are you in such a flurry about? You wanted to know if I’d looked any further ahead than getting into bed with you. It’s quite a reasonable question. D’you mind my talking to you like this?”

  “No,” she said under her breath. “Tha
t’s the …”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said No.”

  “After that.”

  “Nothing. I mean it wasn’t what I meant, so I didn’t say it.”

  “Anyhow, I’ve answered what you were trying to ask me, haven’t I?”

  “Yes.”

  “Haven’t you ever talked straight to anyone about these things before?”

  “I suppose … well, only to women sometimes.”

  “Still, you’d rather we just talked things over sensibly, without my making love to you and putting you off?”

  “Yes, of course I would.”

  “Darling, you shouldn’t let people have you for a sucker. I’ve been making love to you for the last five minutes. Rather sadistically, too.”

  Ellen finished fastening her shoe, and looked up. “You think I’ve got no sense at all, don’t you? If you really wanted to be cruel you could do better than that; you don’t need to tell me. Whatever I’m afraid of, it’s never that.”

  Neil’s face altered. Sliding along the soft turf of the bank, he came beside her and took her hand.

  “What is it, then, stupid?”

  He turned her hand over—he was lying on one elbow a little below her—and kissed the palm. She said, “It must be awfully grubby,” and tried to sup away.

  “What is all this?”

  Looking past him, she said, “You only want to do things for me. You don’t need anything … I mean only … not anything really, and you wouldn’t take it if you did. You’re too proud.”

  His mind went back, involuntarily, over six months of effort towards personal survival. Trying the word curiously, he said, “Proud?”

  “You don’t think it’s true?”

  “More likely it’s just hardening of the arteries. At high altitudes the symptoms get worse.”

  “Can’t you ever stop laughing at me?”

  “I’m sorry. It’s one of those things where there’s nothing to do but laugh. We can do damn-all about it. It’s a kind of acquired reflex, like learning to swim. You may learn it on the ideal holiday, or you may get a push in the canal. But you don’t unlearn it again; and no one but a suicide ever wants to.”

  Presently she slid her fingers gently out of his; and he stretched out on the slope, in the sun and out of the wind. Her hand came down on his hair so lightly that he did not feel it till it moved. He flicked a quick, suspicious glance upward, to see what she was looking at; but she was looking at the hills whose colours had reminded him of Greece. Her slow pre-occupied touch was pleasant; he relaxed again.

  “You must tell me any time,” she said at length, “if I come pushing in on you when you want to be alone.”

  “It doesn’t make any difference … God’s truth, what do you think I am? Greta Garbo?”

  “You still don’t say why you want to marry me.”

  “To knock a bit of sense into you,” said Neil with restraint, “I shouldn’t wonder.”

  He saw a little laugh ripple down her body, under her blue linen shirt. Putting an arm suddenly behind her, he leaned up and kissed the base of her throat, where the light golden tan shaded down to white. For a moment he felt her fold herself round him, shy and warm. Then something hard struck softly against his face. The gold St Christopher, as she leaned, had swung forward on its chain. He stiffened; and, feeling his movement, she lifted her head from above his, and withdrew her arms.

  “Oughtn’t we to be getting on?” she said.

  “I should think so, if we’re going to get any tea.” He got out the map. Ellen dusted, carefully, the grass from her sweater, and put it on.

  They kept up a conversation for the next five minutes or so; long enough to make it clear to one another that no constraint existed. In a little while the silences grew longer, and presently they walked on quite enclosed in their own thoughts.

  Ellen’s mind had travelled inward to the fringe of its central trouble; and, retreating again, was wandering about the periphery, pausing at all those secondary uncertainties and failures of nerve which were easier to think about than the source from which they spread. Surely, she thought, she could force herself at least to master the small change of living, the trivial details that needed management and address. If not, she ought to be thankful that her ineptness amused him; and, indeed, she often was, as for instance that he had laughed her into stating badly when she wanted to disappear behind a hedge. She was useless, she thought, she could neither give nor take with grace, willing neither to be carried nor, in the last resort, to stand on her own feet.

  The footpath had divided into parallel tracks; they had taken one each to avoid walking single file; and, as often happened when he was pre-occupied, he had lengthened his stride and got ahead of her. She did not hurry—he would notice in a moment—but looked at his back, a relatively unfamiliar view. He moved without any appearance of speed, evidently in his natural rhythm, with the loose slouching walk which, over a distance, reduces effort; an impetus from the hips, suggesting to her mind the swing of the heavy climbing-boots which she had not yet seen him wear. It was impossible to imagine him in uniform; in any uniform, physical or mental. His long dark head, slim neck and narrow hips made the unbroken width of his shoulders more impressive from behind than from the front: the two superimposed isosceles triangles, the broad above the narrow, the elementary male diagram of the life-class, fitted him with scarcely a modifying curve.

  He’s a snob, she thought, if you care to look at it like that. Perhaps what’s wrong with snobbery is that it’s so many centuries since it was applied to the right things. It needs revising, in an age where a whole school of advertising lives by blackmail, trading on people’s piddling little fears of having less expensive gadgets than the Joneses or too few dates, and a whole school of propaganda tries to scare people into believing that it’s anti-social to have a personal sense of right and wrong. The man who owns his own soul is the natural aristocrat, like the man in the old West who owned his own horse; a caballero among the hombres. What is it but the cream of snobbery, to risk your life over years, perfecting an art that has no audience, unless it’s one or two fellow-artists whose standards are as strict as your own? And he’s honestly surprised when one calls him proud.

  “Sorry,” he said, stopping and turning back to her. “I will do it. You just want to shout Hi.”

  “It’s all right. I’m only lazy.”

  “I’ve rushed you till you’re pink in the face. Throw something next time. Take it easy; look, here we are.”

  The townlet they were making for had come into sight beyond the hump of the moor; soon they came down to hedges, then to lanes and roads.

  “This,” said Ellen, “looks like the kind of shop where they sometimes have hair-grips. I think I’ll try; I’m down to my last one again.”

  “Blaming me? I like it without. Still, you’ve as much right to the use of both eyes as the next, I suppose. I’ll wait for you here.” He sat down on the low whitewashed wall of a cottage garden, on the other side of the narrow street.

  Ellen went into the shop, which sold a little of most things, but mainly mineral-waters and sweets. A deliberate old man was helping a woman with five ration-books to choose a month’s supply of acid-drops and peppermints and liquorice allsorts. The conference seemed endless. Ellen wandered round the few square yards of space, glancing at the boxes and cards, and sometimes, for variety, out into the street through the open door.

  Neil, waiting, looked at the ubiquitous hydrangeas in the front gardens, remarked the similarity of their pinks and blues to those of litmus paper, and decided to ask the next scientist he met whether they responded to reagents in the soil. Not that modern scientists ever knew such things; universal curiosity had gone out with the seventeenth century.

  These reflections were disturbed by a snuffling sound, a couple of yards away. Looking round, he saw a girl child of five or so, her blue west-country eyes, under a thatch of pale Saxon hair, blurred with indecision and distress.
Her nose was running; she sniffed again, ineffectively. She was a clean, well-kept little girl, and evidently felt her position keenly. Hesitantly she picked up a fold of her pink cotton dress, looked at it in conflicting agonies of conscience, and dropped it again.

  In a habit-formed response, which he could not arrest in time, Neil’s hand went to his pocket. She padded up to him, looking hopeful and relieved.

  “Shall I blow it for you?”

  “Yes, please.”

  He shook out the handkerchief; accuracy was usually tricky. As always, the indeterminate scrap of nose was lost among the folds; but he managed to track it down.

  “Come on, then; blow.”

  She planted her feet apart, leaned forward, and threw into play every muscle of her body except the ones directly concerned. “That’s no good. You blow with your nose, not your knees.”

  It ended with his doing all the work himself; it always had. She emerged crinkled with laughter.

  “Didn’t blow with my knees.”

  “It felt like it. Run along, now; they’ll be looking for you.”

  “I’m playing in our garden.”

  “Better get back there, then.”

  He picked her up under the armpits to lift her over the wall. Under sliding layers of cotton, her round firm little body wriggled between his hands. She scrambled with her feet on the top of the wall and stood up. He had to go on holding her, to keep her from falling.

  “You’ve got funny hair.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “What you put on it?”

  “Nothing. It’s striped.”

  “Like our kitty?”

  “That’s right. Over you go.”

  “Don’t want to. Why’s it striped?”

  “Ask your kitty. Heave over.”

  “No. Jump me right up high.”

  “Not now. I’m busy.” Suddenly he remembered having said this, too, before.