North Face: A Novel

  All these events reached Susan distantly, in the cottage outside the grounds. They seemed at first to concern her no more than the building of a new lab. Sometimes she would see the Americans walk past, together at first, later with the village girls. After a while, when the camp had settled in, appeared the semi-professionals from the towns, little-young-old harpies who saw no reason why the locals should get all the pickings. The village girls were few, and soon acquired “steadies”; the vivandières found it worth while to stay. Susan, considering these things with vague unhappiness, remarked to Neil at one of their meetings that she thought it was a shame.

  Neil, his mind reverting to Plautus and Juvenal, agreed a little wearily that since two thousand or so B.C. it had always been a shame. Susan’s eyes looked disappointed; he could feel her thinking that his mind was growing academic and dry, though it was his own boys in training about whom he was trying not to be foolish. Rousing himself, he said that the Americans must have precious few amusements, so far from a town; the staff ought to get up some sort of a do, and ask them over.

  In the end, however, it had been Sally who had set the wheels moving. During one of Susan’s frequent lapses of attention she had gone wobbling out of the open front door, down the path and into the road, where the driver of a jeep, scorching his brakes and narrowly missing death in the resulting skid, managed to avoid her by inches.

  The driver was a good deal more shaken than Sally. He picked her up and asked her where she lived.

  Sally had forgotten Neil, by now, as a human presence; he had passed into her pantheon, along with Gentle Jesus and Santa Claus. But, like many girl-babies, she adored men and could never have enough of them. She embraced the driver confidingly. When he asked her if she would like him to bring her a box of candy, she made sounds of pleasure and clung round his neck.

  The driver happened to be detailed for duty next day; but he had children of his own and wouldn’t for worlds have disappointed the kid. He combed the camp for someone to deliver the candy. His two delegates called the next afternoon. They were straight from college, the lean, boyish, gangling kind; very diffident, conscious of their ambassadorial function, courteous and sincere. They explained the candy carefully to Susan, calling her Ma’am. Their youth and their gravity moved her heart; she thought of the harpies dawdling round the camp gates, and asked them in to tea.

  Rigidly curbing their appetites (they knew about rationing) they told her how swell of her this was, and how good it felt to be inside a real home. They got out their wallets, and showed her the snapshots of their folks. Susan said that of course they must come again. Sally (to whom the news that candy meant sweets came as a delightful surprise) seconded the motion.

  One of them did come the following week, with a different friend. He was about Susan’s own age, and as charming as the others, though he knew a little more about it. He rang Susan up next day, and asked her to a dance at the camp. She went out with him several times, while the help from the village sat in with Sally. He was a good-hearted though not an inexperienced young man. Privately, he thought the girl had a tough break, married to some dusty old professor or something; but as she seemed fond of the guy, he wouldn’t be the one to bust it up. He told her so. He had a girl himself, back in Cleveland. A few friendly kisses would keep them both in training, and do no harm to anyone. He kept his word. It was only pardonable vanity which, when some of his friends formed a wrong impression, kept him from correcting it.

  The friends, unoccupied and intrigued, felt themselves challenged. If Pete’s find was as willing as she was pretty, they saw no sense in leaving him a monopoly. One of these, setting out in this spirit of light-hearted competition, fell very nearly in love with Susan; the thing became serious, for him, before long. Susan, for her part, was getting to appreciate the practised approach; the charming boys, with their snapshots of the back porch, began to seem a little insipid. She had been bored and unsatisfied since Neil went away; and, when she did see him, he appeared to be losing his sense of humour. She did not tell him about these developments in her social life, in case he should not understand. He was a little old-fashioned, she was beginning to think.

  Now, reconstructing it all as fairly as he could from his broken scraps of knowledge, he accepted a probability he had not admitted to his consciousness till now: that the man who had assisted at her first infidelity had not known he was the first. She liked to please, to avoid awkwardness, to be the kind of person her companion wished her to be; she always affected a little more sophistication than she had.

  Whoever the man had been, it would have been the same. She was one of those women to whom the first step is decisive, the rest as easy as a greased slide. If Neil had stayed with her she would never, perhaps, have found it out; habit, sentiment and convention would have reinforced her warm shallow love. Once these cables were cut, there was nothing in herself to hold her. He did not know, even now, how many men there had been later: perhaps three or four, perhaps half a dozen. He did not know if they had all been from the American camp. It made, in the essentials, little difference after the first.

  Matters had stood like this for more than a year when Germany surrendered, and Neil’s training depot became a surplus almost at once. The Head wrote that he was applying for his immediate release; the news brought him, now, nothing but pleasure and relief. He was out of the Army just in time for the start of the spring term.

  From the first he had known that things were wrong; but for a length of time he found it hard later to believe in, he had not guessed the cause. The truth was that for three years his frustration had been mounting, to a pitch of inferiority where he found for every doubt and uneasiness an explanation in himself. When colleagues were constrained in his presence, or treated him with an awkward excess of consideration, he thought they were pitying the slowness of his adjustments; as, indeed, in a different sense they were. Even when he made love to Susan he did not guess. She had acquired in this language a vocabulary of clichés and vulgarisms which physically shocked him; but he thought she was trying by nervous improvisation to bridge the gulf of absence. His previous experience of women, which had never been commercial, did nothing to enlighten him. He had missed her very much, which made him uncritical.

  It was Sally who, if he had not been armoured in self-distrust, would have been the first to tell him the truth. When he came back, still in uniform, she had looked from him to Susan with a sidelong glance that was almost sly. “Hullo, Sally,” he had said, much shyer with her than with Susan, “Do you remember me?” She considered him and seemed, with unknown reservations, to approve him; but her smile, little more than a baby as she was, had a kind of affected babyishness, an air of playing to the gallery. “Hiya,” she answered. He took it for a childish slurring; as he soon discovered, she was very backward in her speech. She had spent increasing time with the village help, who was the leavings of the call-up; kind by her lights, but little more than a high-grade defective. More disquieting facts emerged one by one. The child’s clothes were unmended and half-washed; “She gets through them so quickly,” Susan irritably explained. Before long he could see the reason for this. “Surely,” he asked, still made uncertain by his own loss of confidence, “a child of her age ought to be house-trained?” Susan said he had better get in touch with life again, and find out what running a house was like. He could not bear to see the child’s dinginess; she had always been so crisp and fresh. When Susan was out (she often was) he washed Sally’s things himself.

  After he got back into mufti, Sally changed. She seemed suddenly to re-discover him. In dim memory or uncertain trust, she began to claim him again. When he was at work in his study, she used to slip quietly in, making few demands or none; in her sensitiveness to his concentration, and her patience, she was more like an old dog than a young child. With him she dropped her edgy cuteness and her affected lisp; natural talk was almost like a secret between them. She never spoke of anything that had happened when he was away; her memor
y was too short perhaps, or perhaps she had the child’s sixth sense of something wrong. Her favourite game was to be hoisted to the top of a bookcase or of the garden wall, then she would say that she was climbing mountains like Daddy; it was always the highest mountain in the world.

  With her he had the only complete happiness he had experienced since his return; but, before long, he saw that Susan was as ready as ever to leave her entirely to him. At this age, he saw more risk than ever to the child’s emotional balance. At last he forced himself to speak to Susan about it. She flared up quickly; the boredom she had been suppressing was close to the surface. After that, the real quarrel was a matter of days.

  He realised, after, that it had supplied Susan’s conscience with some kind of sanction or permit. She persuaded herself, probably, that he no longer loved her, or, possibly, that he had got even with her while he had been away. At all events on the following evening, when a masters’ meeting guaranteed his absence (the Head’s meetings were never brief) she rang up the latest of her men and asked him over.

  From this point of the story, there were no more gaps for Neil to fill in with imagination or inference. He knew the rest. If he could get through it clearly and sanely, and somehow without re-living it, he would have done.

  The American camp had sent much of its strength home, or to Germany, since the European armistice, but a reduced force was still there. Susan had met this most recent man only a month or two before. That evening, having made it clear to him that Neil deserved no more consideration, she took him up to the small guest room at the top of the house. They were there some time.

  Before this, Sally had been put to bed. She must have wakened, and been frightened by silence or by sound. When no one answered (the cottage was an old one, the walls and doors thick) she fumbled her way downstairs, in her nightgown, to Neil’s study. It was empty; but there were warmth, interest and company in the fire, banked to last and burning brightly in the grate.

  That night Marks and Canning, seniors by now but unregenerate, were breaking bounds. The novelty of the camp had worn off, their special friends had left, and they had gone back to poaching again. They were on their way tonight to set snares for the rabbits which, tomorrow, they would skin and cook in the furnace-room under the labs, a useful supplement to tea. They went carefully, for they had been cautioned last term, and a threat of expulsion hung over both their heads. When they passed the cottage, therefore, they kept well down behind the wall, concerned not to be seen rather than to see.

  The screams from inside had not held their attention at first; they assumed a fit of temper, and crept on their way. After the first few yards, something in the sound made them feel uncomfortable; they stopped in their tracks. No answering voice was audible; the shrieking mounted, intolerably. They looked over the wall, and saw through a window a flame running about a room.

  A long career of lawlessness had made them resourceful. They scaled the wall, smashed the window, which was locked, with their muffled fists, scrambled in bleeding, and caught up a rug. By then the curtains were alight as well. Marks singed off half his hair, and Canning’s hands were scarred for life. When the flames were out, they lifted the rug again and looked inside. Canning turned faint and had to lie on the floor; Marks, who did not feel well either, picked up the telephone quickly. He knew about the masters’ meeting; their expedition had been timed for it. He dialled the Head’s number.

  Through the broken window the final screams must have carried further than the others; they penetrated to the spare room upstairs, at the other end of the house. There was a pause, a tension; Susan got out of bed and felt for her slippers. The American, who had seen service and knew the value of time, flung on his trousers and ran down barefoot and stripped to the waist. Marks and Canning were past astonishment; they were glad to see anyone. Susan was a little later. She opened the faintly whimpering bundle, screamed, and clung to the American’s neck. They were standing like this, with the green-faced boys behind them, when Neil and two other masters, who had run the quarter-mile from the Head’s house, came in at the door.

  Sally lived for nearly twenty-four hours. Neil sat all night by her cot in the hospital; she had had morphia, and only moaned dully now and again. Beside the cot some contraption of glass and rubber tubing ran fluid into her through a needle. A grotesque mask of white lint, with holes cut for her mouth and for one eye, covered up her face. Around him, hidden by the screens, children cried and murmured and were fed and changed. In the morning the night-nurse brought him tea, and the convalescent children started noisy games. The day went on. At some point in the early evening, he saw through the mask Sally’s eye open. Half the iris was turned up into the drooping lid. He spoke to her, softly. The eye moved, and turned vaguely towards him. Something stirred in the other hole, the one for the mouth.

  “Hiya, big boy.”

  The eye moved again, upward. Nothing showed, now, but an arc of bluish-white, and the lid was still. After a while, Neil went and told the nurse.

  He spent some hours walking, he could not afterwards remember where. He had told Susan by telephone, and hung up quickly. From now they must find the sight of one another intolerable; this was self-evident, like the fact that he must leave the school within the next few days. There was nothing to add to it, certainly not the littleness of reproach. At present she was his responsibility, and he blamed himself for being gone so long. A woman might be driven to anything after this, he thought, and he hurried the last part of the way.

  Susan too had been preparing for this encounter. She began at once, giving him no chance to speak. None of this would have happened, she said, if he had been man enough to stay where he was needed, instead of bothering about what people would say. She didn’t suppose he had been a saint himself all that time; men always thought it was different for them. He listened silently (it had all seemed increasingly distant and unreal) while her voice mounted and sharpened. He had a blurred impression that she said the same thing several times. She seemed frightened; as he had said nothing, he could not see why.

  Her concluding point was that she would have come downstairs sooner—she had thought she heard something—but Dan (or Mike, or whoever he was) had said it was nothing and held her down. Curiously, this wakened Neil to an active loathing which all the rest had left unstirred. He had seen the man. They had been a foot away from one another, bending together over Sally in the first moments when there had been room only for one thought. He remembered the swarthy, blunt-angled face, stripped of its protective hardness, simplified by emotion like a child’s. While Susan spoke, this face seemed closer to him than hers, and, though he hated it, more real. He went out, and left her talking.

  He had a choice of two rooms to spend the night in; Sally’s night-nursery, and the spare room upstairs. He spent it in his study on a chair.

  The story was complete now, except for the epilogue.

  It was two days later, the day before the funeral, that the flowers began to arrive. Neil, who had kept mostly in his study after giving the Head his resignation, scarcely noticed them at first. There would of course be flowers; he could acknowledge them in the Times. But soon there seemed no interval in which the doorbell did not ring. Flowers poured in; wreaths, crosses, cushions, sheaves, flowers that would have been extravagant before the war. The room to which Sally had been brought back was so piled that he could scarcely reach her without crushing them; the cottage smelt like a hothouse. He looked at one wreath incuriously; it had no card and he could not trouble with the rest. When he reached the church next day he was still unprepared.

  There was only a handful of mourners, his nearest friends on the staff; but, out in the churchyard, it was impossible to see across. There must have been nearly two hundred of them; a mass of olive khaki, silent as a wall. They had done, and were doing now, all they could find to do. Many of them, to whom Susan was only hearsay, had known Sally; she had liked to play in the garden, to talk and show off a little to strangers over the wa
ll. Some were there simply for her sake; some for the honour of their corps, in a groping effort to dissociate it by this gesture from what had happened; some in a vicarious remorse. The only man left on the camp’s strength who had a personal concern in the matter was miles away. Neil had been beyond knowing any of these things. He only guessed at them now, six months later, in a seaside boarding house at three in the morning. Then, as the first patter of gravel had sounded on wood, he had looked away at the rampart of flowers that made the grave look as little as the graves that children dig for a dead bird. He had seen only a crowd of sensation seekers, making banner-headlines of his suffering and his public shame. Like a gangster’s funeral, he had thought. All that money can buy.

  When he got back to the house, Susan had gone.

  She left a letter for him. She was sorry, she wrote, for everything that had happened, and for the unkind things she had said; but he had frightened her. She had not been herself for some time. Now that he didn’t love her any more, it was better to tell him the truth. She had not been sure when he first came back, and later she could not make up her mind what to do. Mike (or Dan) had said he would take her to town to have something done about it, if she wanted; but now he didn’t want that any more. He wanted to marry her, and as his last wife hadn’t had any children he would like to keep this one. She knew Neil would rather not see her again, so to go now seemed best for everybody.