North Face: A Novel

  He remembered the morning after the Phillips episode; her bathe on the wickedly unsafe beach, her stupid climb (he was hardly the one to reproach her with that). Vainly he tried to remember if he had seen anything inside the room; clothes on a chair, a pair of shoes. The light had been off; he had seen nothing. He argued with himself: if she were gone he would be helpless till morning; it would be far better not to find out. All this was useless. He had to know.

  Everyone made some degree of sound in sleeping; he need only open the door a crack, listen a moment, and go. His footsteps in the passage, if anyone heard him, could be simply accounted for by walking on to the lavatory further down.

  He paused on the roof steps, his dressing-gown tugged by the cool wind, looking at the sliding stars and thinking that when he came back they would be different for him, but in themselves the same.

  The passage was close after the roof, very dark, and tinged with soapy, powdery female smells, all foreign to his remembrance. He found the door. It was shut. Anyone might have shut it. He could hear nothing through it, but, with instant conviction, knew that she was there. With this knowledge came the realisation that to open it was out of the question. He imagined her waking; her horrified, tense indrawn breath; his own attempts at explanation sounding more sordid with each fresh start. When he had gone he would question his certainty of her presence, and have no peace; but that couldn’t be helped.

  He was turning away when something arrested him; he came back, and listened again. He had not been mistaken. It was a thin, exhausted sound, like a reflex which is wearily resisted; it must have worn itself almost out, and would shortly cease. All his thinking came to a standstill. He opened the door, and went in.

  The sobbing was extinguished with a finality like death. Rigidity could be felt in the room’s very air. He closed the door behind him, and, with some dim idea of proving his good intentions, put on the light.

  The room was like a junk-shop. Strewn in the litter of transit, even luxurious clothes look shabby and defenceless; these looked like one of those derelict little accumulations which are quickly bundled away when someone has died. The light he had switched on was a reading lamp on a rickety, arty little table beside the bed. She had been lying flung forward; her face, turned sideways on the pillow, blinked at him with dazzled, drenched and dilated eyes. With the idiocy of strong feeling he said, “What’s the matter?”

  She was slow to recover from the sudden light. He was horrified by what he had done; did one never learn? He waited for her to say “Go away,” in order to apologise, and go. Through the glare, now, her eyes had found him. Expression returned to her face. He saw that it was the face of one unbelievably reprieved at the foot of the scaffold.

  He could say nothing, and besides there was nothing to say. He crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed, and she threw herself into his arms and clung there, choking and shivering. Her hair under his mouth was tangled into a mat from the pillow; her tears ran down between his pyjama-collar and his neck.

  After some time, in which a long conversation seemed to have been exchanged without a word spoken, she said, “I thought you’d gone.”

  “I thought you had.”

  “I’ve been here all evening.” It turned out that when he had passed her door she had been in the second bathroom, with the taps turned on. Having no handkerchief with him, he wiped her eyes with the corner of the sheet. No fresh tears came; she was wrung dry.

  “You’ll catch cold,” he said, and pulled the eiderdown round her shoulders. She had on a pair of pale-blue cotton pyjamas, the kind that cost five shillings at Marks and Spencers before the war. They looked old enough to date from then; a patch was let in under one of the arms. She had put the medal on again; it hung down outside, fully visible. He saw it as a detail among other details, like the pearl button on which it had caught.

  He was rather clumsy with the eiderdown. She struggled out of it, too quickly for him to hide his bandaged hand. She took it between hers and said in a whisper, “What’s this?”

  “Nothing. Only a scrape. Miss Whatsit did it up for me.”

  “How did you do it?”

  “Fooling about. I slipped on a bit of scree.”

  “Where?”

  “I forget now. It isn’t anything.”

  She stared into his face. He tried to brazen it out, but had to look away. Still staring in silence she began to shiver again, violently and rigidly. He hauled up the fallen eiderdown, and through it patted her on the back.

  “Shut up,” he said in his disciplinary voice. “We’re not having this flap.”

  She was almost quiet at once. “I’m terribly sorry.”

  “I should hope so too.”

  She sat up straight in bed, with the eiderdown over her shoulders. He put an arm round her to keep it there. Her eyes were puffy with crying, her lashes stuck together. She looked as if she needed a thermometer and a basin of bread-and-milk.

  “Neil,” she said, looking at the tops of her knees. “I’ve thought now, I see what we ought to do. I’ll sleep with you when it’s all right for you, when you’re free I mean; as soon as you say. I don’t mean,” she went on painstakingly, “to make up for what I’ve done. I mean because I should like to. Then you’ll get me out of your head, and you’ll be all right.”

  The general effect of all this was so funny that he would have laughed, if he had not also been nervous of becoming emotional. “Of course we will,” he said calmingly. “People do who get married. I’ll send you a little book about it.”

  “Please don’t make fun of me.”

  “I’m not, darling. Thank you very much.”

  “It’s just obstinacy,” she said urgently. “You never will go back on anything. You must see for yourself that you can’t be in love with me.”

  “Well, I am.” This sounded like a prep-house argument, he thought.

  “Oh, nonsense.” She turned round to him, with a weary kind of reasonableness. “You? You could have anyone in the world.”

  “For God’s sake,” he said sharply, “don’t be such a bloody God-damned fool.” He pulled her against his shoulder. One slapped their faces for hysteria. It seemed a little drastic: he patted her again, looking away.

  “You know nothing about me.” She was suddenly quite steady, and compellingly calm. “You don’t know what I’m really like, or what I’ve done. I’ve got in the way once before of a man who was better than I am. He’s dead. I killed him. Now I’m good for nobody. You may as well know.”

  The words seeped into his consciousness slowly. They remained quite meaningless. Staring at her, trying to make something of them, he found his eye caught by the medal on its chain. She followed his look, and made a movement of assent.

  “But you told me he …” He stopped, helplessly. He ought to be experiencing some cataclysmic shock or change; she ought to feel different in his arm. Everything was exactly the same. “I don’t believe it. You couldn’t take life. How did it happen?”

  “Nothing happened. That was it. I didn’t do anything. That’s how I killed him.”

  His mind following vaguely its lines of association, he said, “You were climbing, you mean?”

  “Oh, no. Jock wouldn’t have let me kill him on a climb. He was too good.”

  He said, trying to think, “Of course he was. Outstanding, I should say … How did he die?”

  “He died as I told you he did. He was shot down by a Messerschmitt over the channel. I don’t mean that I murdered him. No one else would say so. He wouldn’t have said it himself. That doesn’t alter it.” She sat forward, her hands round her knees. “It doesn’t seem real to be telling anyone about it. I’m glad it’s you that I’ve told. Not only because it’s due to you, because it’s what I deserve.”

  He stared past her shoulder at the disordered room, seeing it as a vague pattern of drooping and horizontal colours. Taking his arm away he sat back against the head of the bed. He felt too much concentrated in himself to be touched. It
was not against what she would tell him that his force was keyed, but for his own effort; the crucial pitch, hidden till now by a twist of the route, showed at last its first vertical and delicate holds.

  He said, “I don’t know anything yet. Would it be difficult to start at the beginning?”

  “No. It isn’t difficult any more. It’s only that I can’t believe, now, that you need telling. I shall have to go through it as if I were talking to myself.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Go on.”

  “We were a kind of cousins; our mothers were step-sisters. They read Cinderella when they were little and made up their minds not to be like that, and ran to the opposite; they were inseparable, like twins. It was the same when they grew up; they married safe men who wouldn’t take them far away. Most of the time they managed to live in the same town. Jock says he can remember me being born, but I think he made that up, he was only two. The first thing I remember at all is him hitting me in the bath with a red celluloid fish.

  “You know, when I realised I’d made you hate him, I kept not believing it. It still seems incredible, somehow, that you can’t know him for yourself and have to listen to me. I’ve felt it’s you and he who would be going off and doing things together, and me left out.

  “You know how some people get a cliché stuck to them like a label, because it’s really the only possible thing to say. I can’t ever remember a fresh person who didn’t say Jock had a sunny nature, as if they’d found something out. The ones who were proud of not making obvious remarks used to put it in quotes. You couldn’t help it. A room really looked lighter when he came into it. He was fair and brown. Not at all good-looking; you could see it in a photograph, but in real life no one took it in.

  “He hadn’t much in the way of intellect, either. I suppose by a lot of tests, he wasn’t even very intelligent. Have you ever met a person who seemed to live purely by instinct, and yet never to put a foot wrong?”

  “Yes. Sammy was like that. On a climb, and in other ways.”

  “I wonder why they missed meeting … Jock had no principles, none at all. He was straight, and nice to everybody, because he wouldn’t have enjoyed life any other way. He was good like one drinks water, thinking of something else. I don’t know what he thought about evil; nothing, probably. One of those things you muddle through till it’s over, like fog.

  “As soon as I could get about, I was always being pushed off on him while our mothers talked. He took a lot of living up to, because he took things for granted so. He’d never tell you if you were a nuisance to him, which made you mind much more. Of course we fought sometimes; but even when he was a child, he never made the sort of generalised remark that pulls people down.

  “Most of his friends were older then he was, because he could do their things; but he sort of hypnotised them into taking me on trust. Of course I worked like a black to keep abreast, knowing he’d cover up for me if I didn’t. When he had to, I felt bad for the rest of the day.

  “I forget how old I was when I asked someone what getting married meant. They told me the kind of thing you do tell small children, about promising to stay together. So after I’d asked my father and he explained he was disqualified, of course I proposed to Jock. He said, ‘I will if you ride down Brick Hill on the step of my bike,’ so I did. I wasn’t really much frightened, because nothing ever happened to Jock, and he never expected it to.

  “He never went back on a promise, so he announced it publicly as soon as we got in. Our mothers went sort of misty—of course they must have-been praying for it since we were born—but they were too sensible to give us ideas, so it just became a family joke. After Jock went to his prep-school he must have got all the dirt about things, but he never let on a word of it to me. Later on when he got to the loutish age, of course he made silly cracks about us, but never unkind. Naturally I knew the facts of life by then, but I never connected them. I suppose in a dim way I did still think we should marry some time; but you feel being an adult will happen formally, on a birthday, and till it does there’s no need to worry.

  “One day when I was seventeen, I remembered Jock hadn’t made the joke for a long time now, and it dawned on me that it wasn’t good form any more because I was grown up. It was a solemn thought for five minutes, but when he showed up I forgot all about it and never bothered again. It was about then he got bitten with climbing, and started teaching me. The summer after that, there was the war.”

  She stopped, gathering herself together. Neil had been aware for some instants of the silence, before he could come out of himself to fill it. With a sense both of shame and of danger, he put aside a moment of deep and compassionate peace. It shocked him that he had almost said this was enough.

  “No one was ready,” he said. “Go on.”

  “Jock joined the R.A.F. a month before it started. The uniform suited him terribly well. He loved flying; he used to come home all shining from inside. It was because of him, of course, that I went to make planes. All those first months when nothing much happened, I used to wonder if it was wrong of me not to be afraid of his being killed. I couldn’t be. I always knew he was a charmed life. He wasn’t one of the Rupert Brooke kind, who flower early because they’re marked for death. He was alive steadily, like the earth is.

  “I suppose working in the factory ought to have altered me a lot; but it was a thing by itself, somehow outside me. I’m not good with many people at a time; I did the job and didn’t get across anyone. But when I went off the shift I left it all behind me. None of it prepared me for Jock growing up as he did, all in a moment. You’re a man, you’d take it for granted, I expect.

  “When things really began, in 1940, he only got short leaves, but he could get over because he was stationed quite near. He had to spend most of the time with his mother, of course; his father had to go away a lot. I used to tell her nothing could happen to Jock, and sometimes she believed it. When I did see him, I used to have stray moments of wondering what I was doing, talking to this rather magnificent type as if he were someone I’d always known; and then suddenly everything would be like home again, and I’d forget.

  “Then one day they had a dance at the hotel near his station, and he asked me to come. I’d never been before, and I felt like I did when we were children, that he’d got to be lived up to, only more so, because this was his own thing. You could still buy real clothes then, and I spent every penny I had. I felt sure the competition would be terrifying. Actually for some reason it wasn’t—I expect all the prettiest Waafs were on duty—and I made a sort of impression. It had never happened before, and it felt rather queer, but quite fun. Jock was in tremendous form. There was a warning at one point, which was rather exciting but didn’t come to anything, and afterwards Jock drove me home. This is the part that’s so impossible to explain.”

  “Never mind. Go on.”

  “You see, Jock had often kissed me coming and going, and put his arm round me, and things like that. It sounds imbecile, I know; but somehow it had never occurred to me that if he really made love to me, it would be so very different. I—” She broke off, twisting a corner of the eiderdown. Neil effaced himself behind her, sitting very still. “I suppose it can’t really have been so sudden, if I’d had any sense. It was like a nightmare, trying to keep him from knowing how terrible it was. He didn’t do anything I should have minded. He knew I’d always adored him. He couldn’t understand. I didn’t either, I never have.

  “I think perhaps if I could just have taken it as it came, it would all have blown over. As it was, it seemed to stir him up more. He’d always got me over being frightened of things and I’d been glad afterwards, and he wanted to get me over this one. The worst of it was, I thought he might be right and didn’t know what line to take. After a while he got all caught up in it, and then … And the more I felt it happening the more terrifying it was, and the more he seemed like a stranger; and yet it was Jock. I got to dread seeing him, and that by itself was terrible enough.

  “He tr
ied so hard, too, I couldn’t bear it. You see, he wasn’t a subtle kind of person, he didn’t go at things by thinking them out. It must have taken a lot out of him, trying to work out this one. He said we’d always got on, and it was only because I was shy, and a—and inexperienced, and it would be all right afterwards; and if I didn’t feel happy about it, would I go away with him somewhere, once, and give it a chance? That was a lot for him to say, because he knew if we were found out it would break up his mother and mine, and he’d have taken the blame for both of us like he always had. It wasn’t that he wanted to get me easily, quite the reverse.

  “We dragged on for weeks like that, and the war got worse, and he began to look different. Not warm and glowing, a sort of hard bright shine. Then he started drinking. Only off duty of course, and no more than some of the others who had to relax sometimes somehow. But he’d never needed it before. I kept asking for more time to think, and wondering if I ought to marry him anyway, and pretend. But he’d have known. It seemed intolerable for Jock and me to come to that.

  “Then, when I was out one evening, I saw him in the street with a Waaf. She was looking at him when he wasn’t at her; you know how sometimes women forget there are other people. I knew more in that couple of seconds than I did later when he told me about it. He saw I’d seen him, or perhaps he wouldn’t have, I don’t know. Anyway, he said there were times when you had to have somebody, and he’d been straight with her about it and she knew where they stood. He hadn’t needed to tell me that part. At first I couldn’t think of anything but what she must be going through, keeping a light touch all the time. She was one of those girls who put a sort of hard varnish on the surface; I don’t suppose she was often caught out like she was when I looked.

  “Then suddenly I stopped thinking about her and looked at Jock. I never saw him look better, as a man, than he did that day. Self-reliant and alert and upstanding. I forgot to tell you, he had a D.F.C. And all in a moment, I saw that something had happened. Something had gone, a sort of magic invulnerability. He wasn’t a charmed life any more. He was mortal, like anyone else.