North Face: A Novel

  “I stayed awake all night afterwards. I thought I must have been mad, to imagine I was important enough to be worth that. I thought I could make myself be in love with him somehow—I did love him—it shouldn’t be so different, I thought. I wrote a letter saying I’d marry him. But in the morning it didn’t look right, and I kept it back to write again. And then I thought I’d write a better one next day, when I wasn’t so tired. I put it off three days, and the fourth day I had it in my pocket, ready for the last post. And then the phone went. It was Jock’s mother. I knew as soon as the bell rang, before I answered it.

  “My mother went straight over, of course, so I was alone. This is the worst thing I’ve got to tell you. You won’t understand it; it’s outside your kind of life. That’s why I’m telling you, so that you’ll see what I meant when I said you couldn’t be in love with me.

  “It was a beautiful summer evening, all clear and still. And I had a wonderful exalted feeling, like one has after seeing a great tragedy on the stage. It seemed everything was resolved between us, that I’d always loved him, and that now it was perfect and spiritual and he must know it too. And then a sort of shrivelling light burst in on me, and I knew what all this ecstasy really was. It was relief.

  “You can’t look at a thing like that for more than a second at a time. I never have. It’s unbelievable I should be telling someone in words. I’ve never faced it for as long as it’s taken me to say it now. But it’s always there. There’s something I read a short time after, and I’ve never opened the book again.”

  She looked down at the twist of eiderdown in her fingers; her voice was clear, like grey glass.

  “The many men, so beautiful,

  And they all dead did lie;

  And a thousand thousand slimy things

  Lived on: and so did I.”

  As he looked past her shoulder, Neil saw that her hand had moved upward, and was fingering, unconsciously, the medal at her neck. A sudden illumination jerked his voice back to silence; his heart checked with a taut constricting pain. Not daring to move lest she felt it, he clenched his cut hand till he felt the blood break out against the dressing. This distraction saved him, and he made no sound.

  “Afterwards,” she said, accepting his silence with quiet submission, “I tried to prove to myself that it had been inevitable. If I couldn’t do this for Jock, I thought, it must be that I was different, that it wasn’t in me at all. They say some women are queer and don’t want to know about it. I thought perhaps I was, only one day a woman got sentimental about me and that was no good. So I must just be frigid, I thought. Presently I got quite convinced of it, and as I see it now, I suppose it made me feel safe, and I began to get rational about it, and pretend to myself that I must be sensible and take it in hand. That was why I took up with Eric. I know now why it really was. I must have known all the while that he’d be unendurable, and I could convince myself all over again. I hid that from myself, completely, till the morning after he’d gone, and I was having breakfast, and …” She turned her face away. “I was afraid of you. I suppose you knew that.”

  “Not now,” he said; and, drawing her back against his shoulder, began to caress her; but he knew he was only playing for time. He felt her trying to relax and yield to it, and knew that the fear of hurting him possessed her to a point where her own sensations were extinguished, she neither knew nor cared what they were. When she began to speak again, one effort cancelled the other; she grew tense again to the touch.

  “Not of you, now, but for you. It’s gone too deep; I think it’s become a part of me. I think perhaps …” With a movement that she herself seemed to be resisting, she took his hand between hers and held it away. “Perhaps if you were less kind. If you were going to take what you wanted and give me nothing, or if I could keep myself from …” She averted her face. Over the shadowed mass of her hair, the light picked out an intricate web of threadlike gold. “I think, and tell myself, and it makes no difference. I …” He felt her wrestling, bitterly, with the habit and strength of her own reticence. In a voice almost quenched with shame and struggle, she said, “I can’t feel any pleasure, now, without a sense of sin.”

  “Be quiet a moment,” he said. She grew slack against his shoulder; her hands folded themselves passively about his. She was taking this pause into herself, creating a memory for solitude. He let her rest.

  “Wars,”, he said at last, groping his way, “are a flaw in time. We’re half evolved beyond them. We’re pitched off our individual points of balance, and our own rhythm of growing, and told they no longer exist except as utilities for the herd. We know it’s a lie, but we’re ashamed to value our souls because cowards are valuing comfort, and the coward in ourselves values it too. So we slither about between two different kinds of being, trying to find a stance. The wonder isn’t that delicate adjustments are destroyed; it’s a miracle that any survive at all. If I wasn’t ready for it at thirty-four, what do you expect me to say about two children who weren’t ready at twenty and eighteen?”

  He knew, before she spoke, that this had got nowhere.

  “Age doesn’t mean anything. One’s there, one’s responsible, and one takes the results.”

  “We all do. I’ve never talked to you as I should. Pure egotism … I worked out an adjustment I thought would do for me. So, good enough. I left a woman who wasn’t yet fit to look after herself, with a child she wasn’t yet fit to take care of. The woman became—what she need never have known she could be. And the child died as I wouldn’t see a murderer die. Like you, I don’t look on myself as a stainless martyr.”

  She turned to him, silently. He submitted himself to her compassion, moved by it, and willing in any case to accept with grace what he had asked for. But, as he perceived, its ultimate message was still defeat.

  “You did something positive, because you decided it was right. I did nothing, and decided nothing. I was just invertebrate; a total loss.”

  He felt as he sometimes did when the route seemed to come to a dead stop, below an overhang. And then, he wiped his mind clear, and tried to see it all as if for the first time. As then, on one of those days when he was in luck and form, something came; he felt suddenly that the impasse could be turned. He had only been silent for a few seconds.

  “What do you mean,” he said, “that you decided nothing? Do you believe yourself that you took the line of least resistance? It isn’t indecision that one clings to through punishment like that.”

  He had begun, not sure where it was leading him. Now his view cleared; the truth stretched, unbroken, before him to the finish.

  She had not answered; but he felt her weight lighten, as it does when the mind ceases to be listless, and draws together.

  He asked, “Have you any brothers?”

  “No,” she said, separating herself to look at him. “I’m an only child. I should have had one, but he was born dead.”

  He said, quietly, “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m—” Her face took on a look of surprise and fear, as if some frail-looking hold, long considered and dismissed, were pointed out to her as a thing to which she might entrust her weight.

  “When I was little,” she said slowly, “very little I mean, I used to pretend he was. To other people, who didn’t know. I used to get told off for being untruthful. I’d forgotten about it for years.”

  “Don’t you think,” said Neil, “it’s time you remembered?”

  “But, my dear, do you suppose I’ve never thought this kind of thing? It’s the oldest alibi in the world. It’s a line in a farce. It’s what Victorian girls used to say sitting under potted palms.”

  “What the hell does it matter who’s said it? You little fool, don’t you realise it’s true?”

  She sat up and he let her go. The eiderdown, which had slipped away long since, was tangled under her in a churned-up heap. She wrapped her arms round her breast and shoulders.

  “You don’t trust things you’d like to believe too much.”
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  “You’re sentimental,” said Neil unsympathetically. He gave this a moment, recovering a knock of timing he had had at school. “This isn’t done up in lavender. It’s a taboo that was real when we were savages living in caves. He’d been shaken out of it; for him, what was left of it was just a longing to perpetuate something stable, when everything was rushing over the edge. It wasn’t his fault, or anyone’s fault, that it was love to him and incest to you.”

  There was a long silence.

  “Do you know now?” he said.

  “Yes.” She did not move. He let her be; it was a moment at which he himself would have demanded to be alone.

  “How helpless I was,” she said at last, “what a fool, not to have seen it in time. If I could have told him, he’d have understood. He understood all the natural things.”

  “At eighteen? Try and remember how it feels.”

  “I don’t need to. I wonder, now, if I’ve ever grown beyond it.”

  “Oh, yes, for a long time. As Plato says in the Phaedrus, growing that’s held in always hurts.”

  “And yet … innocent or guilty, one’s still a cause.”

  “Yes, one may have to face that, if it’s true. If. I knew a lot of boys, you know, who were twenty when the war began.”

  “He was bound to change. I know that. It’s a more concrete thing. Flying a Spitfire, everything’s in split seconds. You can’t afford anything on your mind, when it comes to the pinch.”

  “My dear,” he said, “if you’ll forgive me, I’ll take from you one of woman’s pet illusions. When it comes to the pinch, a man doesn’t have anything on his mind.”

  “You should know,” she said slowly. “What do you think about?”

  “About what to do next, as long as there is anything. After that, it’s everyone’s own business. Perhaps the man who’s most alone, then, is the best off.”

  She reached round, and took his hand. It was the bandaged one; he tried to give her the other; but she had known what she was looking for. She turned it over; there was a dark-brown patch, he discovered, staining the dressing across the palm. He knew now, as a hard dry fact about which there was no time to think, that she would have killed herself if he had died. Some part of him, working by itself like the reflex which had gripped the rock, had known it at the time.

  “Something nearly happened today,” she said, “didn’t it?”

  “It seemed to, for a minute. But it was all done with mirrors.”

  Turning round, she looked up at him; but he had seen this coming. He returned the look, straight in the eyes.

  “No,” he said. “Sorry, darling, but there it is. There simply isn’t time. Till it was over, I didn’t remember you were alive.”

  She looked down at his hand again, and smoothed out a crease in the bandage.

  “It’s always like that,” he told her. “Something to do with the glands. Adrenalin, I think.”

  This improvement seemed to fail, somehow, of its hoped impression. She simply looked at the bandage, tracing the pattern where it crossed with her finger-ends.

  “I love you,” she said, speaking down to it. “I love you. I—”

  “S-sh.” He brought her over. “Don’t carry on so.”

  Clear and precise in the quiet, the chiming clock downstairs struck one of the little hours. Stroking her hair, he felt beneath it a harder strand entangled. She felt it too; their eyes met in a moment of question and assent.

  The clasp had slid from the centre, and took a little while to find; but, found, it was quite easy. The gold disc, smooth and warm like a part of her body, dropped into his hand. Turning it over, he saw on the reverse the white span of wings. He put it down in the ring of light on the bedside table, and said, steadily,

  “The albatross fell off, and sank Like lead into the sea.”

  She looked at him, without wonder or surprise. “Yes. That’s true, too. After I knew how you felt about it, just for one moment I knew what it really was, and why I wore it. But I couldn’t face it. They say, don’t they, there’s nothing so cruel as a coward.”

  “I could say the same,” he said, with the peace of a long perspective. “But it’s all over now.” For a while he consoled her in silence. Presently she recovered enough to look, rather blankly, from the chaos of the room to that of the bed. He laughed, and helped her to fish up the eiderdown and spread it out. While they were doing this, it occurred to him that, from a standpoint which it was hard to take seriously at the moment, he had been very indiscreet.

  “I’m going in a minute,” he said. “God knows what time it is. You’d better get some sleep.”

  “So should you.” She turned to smile at him.

  The light had begun to feel hard and strident; unconsciously he had narrowed his eyes. The pulled muscles ached draggingly in his arm and side; his hand throbbed; a variety of small strains and bruises seemed to have stiffened up. One had taken these minor mishaps in one’s stride, a few years ago. Still, it had been a long day after a short night; there wasn’t much in it.

  “Oh, my darling,” she said, her voice suddenly changing, “what have I been thinking of?”

  “What’s the matter?” This, he remembered with dim amusement, was where he had come in.

  “You’re dead tired. Why haven’t I looked after you?”

  He had begun telling her not to make a fuss about nothing; but her arms felt warm, her breast soft; it was much more comfortable lying down, and there seemed no need to protest for a minute or two. A little of this laissez-faire revealed an overstatement: he was tired, certainly, but he wasn’t dead. That this fact had communicated itself appeared in the changed rhythm of her tenderness, deep and shy. There was a critical little pause.

  After all, he thought, why this obstinacy on a point of order? It looked, in the light of the moment, merely silly, and it had become factually pointless besides. If a long arm of mischance caught up with him, perjury no longer came into it. The evidence as it stood was final; as well, then, a sheep as a lamb. He felt her hand move over his head, tentative and trusting. They were beyond the awkward intrusions of the spoken word. She was saying that it was inconceivable he should be wrong, tonight, about any of their concerns. So far he had brought her; if it seemed well to him that she should part with her virginity as a casual epilogue, after an exhausting emotional crisis, in the abrupt and flickering desire of weariness—a satisfaction as brief and trivial as the biscuit which, wakeful, one reaches from the bedside tin—then this must be the perfect, the only possible thing, and she would embrace it gladly. He had been trained for a good many years in another kind of technique which sets high premiums on tactful cooperation and the finer points of style: one did not ask a spent companion to haul one, needlessly, up the last difficult bit on a tight rope. There was a time for all things; they could, and would, do better.

  Without ambiguity or misunderstanding, they settled the question between them in a wordless way; and, too tired for sharp gestures of abnegation, declined into a gentle physical sentimentality. In some late and lethargic phase of this, he felt the eiderdown wrapped tenderly round his shoulders; he had been a little cold, lying outside, and had nothing against it. Closing his eyes again, he made a mental note to be out in five minutes; it would be quite easy for someone who didn’t keep his wits about him to go to sleep.

  He must nearly have dropped off, he realised presently, recalled by a twinge in his arm with a sudden start. She, poor child, had gone flat out in these few minutes; from her profound relaxation and slow quiet breathing, one would think she had been asleep for hours. Careful not to disturb her, he reached for her wrist-watch which lay near the medal under the lamp. He blinked at it, the light in his eyes. Perhaps he had it upside down. The hands stayed, however, with firm persistence, at five forty-five.

  After all, he was too drowsy to work up a panic about it. Mrs Kearsey, whose piercing alarum reached him sometimes through the roof, got up at six-thirty; and, by. now, insomniacs of the earlier hours would
have dropped off. He returned Ellen her eiderdown, indulged a moment of unashamed emotionalism by kissing her hair on the pillow, and put out the light as he went. The wind had got up again; somewhere a window clicked, or a door. But the passage was soaked in slumber. He went up to the roof and the iron stairs.

  The cold clearness of the dawn air woke him, and he paused just below his door. After the warmth he had left, the wind struck sharply; but he was used to shelving discomfort when there was a good sky to see. This one, he thought, would be worth waiting for. Already the grey translucence in the east was paling; the moon had set; between thin bars of cloud, shadows on an upper twilight, the star of morning waited alone. It hung low, and trembled to itself in a remote soliloquy, meditating compassion or awe. As he watched, the first cloud caught the sun; its dim wreath of mist changed, slowly, to a clear and fervent profile, a pure cold incandescence growing from red to intense gold. The next cloud lit; the grey void between them was flooded with a pale, immaculate and ethereal green. Deep in this sea, Lucifer, son of the morning, faded like a liberated spirit, and died into light.

  Sitting on the iron stairs, small and still among these presences, he recalled the day when he had come to Ellen on the beach with the lump of clinkered meteor in his hand. The pattern of the future, like that of the constellations, stood unchanged; but its threat of nothingness passed through him without a wound, for he was nothing, and everything, already. He was happy with the sky in its solitude, free from him and from time, and with the hills no longer troubled by his aspiration. In the remoter-seeming present, decision would be as heavy and effort as hard: but he hated nobody, he would do what he could and would face what was beyond his limit; the readiness was all. A picture came back to him of Sammy, his young ugly face tranquil in the light of a not so different morning, resting a sandwich on his knee to summarise.

  We will fall into the hands of God and not into the hands of men. (The rest of the clouds were lit now, but beyond them the air, not yet bounded by its reflected blue, was transparent to the last height of space.) For as his majesty is, so is his mercy.