Susan had always liked to please.
After this … But suddenly he realised that he had got to the end. Towards the last, his concentration had been so complete that he had not seen it coming. He was there. The smoke from his third cigarette curled in a thin scarf through the open door, catching a pale luminescence, from the hidden moon. Against an almost black sky scattered only with the brighter stars, the denser mass of a hill showed faintly a ragged crest of trees. A soft wind blew in, heather scented from the moors, with a tang of salt.
No, there was one thing he had left out; strange how the mind, pretending to give everything, will hide, like Ananias and Sapphira, the last pennyworth of shame away. That night, going up to bed, something had caught his eye as he passed a mirror. It was the stripe in his hair. He did not know when it had begun to turn; it stood out already, perceptibly grey. Everyone at the funeral must have seen it. Alone, with two sleepless nights behind him, this last little thing had hit him like the last axe-stroke to a toppling tree. The only thing that had been left to his pride was the fact that he had maintained, outwardly, some kind of self-control. Now even this was gone; it was as if he knew now that he had shed public tears. He had been able to go quietly in memory over all the rest; but this, six months after, he could not remember without finding he had crushed the end of his cigarette so that nothing would persuade it to draw again. It was quickly over; he had everything now. It wasn’t so sensational, after all. Walking about London, he had seen several heads, on men and women, much the same. If we haven’t learned in the last five years, he thought, not to be self-important, there’s not much hope for us.
Slowly his thoughts fell away from the scoured hollow he had cleaned; a beautiful emptiness gave way to the inconsequence that precedes sleep. He thought vaguely, Something must have started me off on this. What was I thinking about before? That new girl today; no connection there. Things happen when they’re ready, like birth. The girl’s got her night’s business over too, I suppose, by now; I hope it wasn’t too disappointing.
It was the smell of the sea that directed the beginning of his dreams. As he fell asleep he was in Skye with Sammy, marking out a route in Sgurr Alasdair.
5 Moderate Rock-Climb
A PATCH OF MORNING sunlight, strengthening as it moved, crept over Neil’s eyes; he woke, discovering with a pleasant surprise and sense of achievement that he had slept late. It was the first time, since he left the Army, that he had recovered the knack of compensating for a short night.
It was now nearly nine, he found; if he wanted breakfast (he certainly did) he had better waste no time. Still he lingered a few minutes more, reluctant to move, not from lack of energy but because his sleep had been deep and had left behind it, as deep sleep often does, an inexplicable sense of freedom, as if in one’s unremembered dreams wisdom has been liberated in oneself, or given from a source out of one’s waking reach. A pity it didn’t last. He got out of bed and dressed, feeling the past strengthen its hold on him again. Shorn of the indignations which last night he had painfully stripped from him, and of the remnants of self-pity unacknowledged but simultaneously destroyed, he felt lightened, but with a long hill of effort still before him, and little to beacon him up it but the solitary goal of self-respect. The wisdom of the horn gate receded; he took a more immediate comfort in thinking of that rock-face above the second gully. It could hardly be dignified by the name of a climb, which was all to the good perhaps; but it had looked tricky and interesting. There was no sense in not keeping one’s hand in.
Mrs Kearsey met him on the stairs and told him that she’d saved an egg with the rasher for his breakfast. Her voice was conspiratorial. Guiltily aware of favouritism, but glad about the egg, he thanked her with suitable emphasis and went into the dining-room. The sunny window looked cheerful; he walked across to it, and had been looking out for some moments before the clink of a cup informed him that he had not the room to himself. He turned, his eyes still blurred with coloured patterns of light; and saw, at the other end of the table, the girl who had arrived the day before. The remains of food, attempted but mostly uneaten, were in front of her; she had just poured herself out another cup of tea, and was drinking it with her eyes to her plate. She was alone.
Neil said “Good morning,” because to omit it would have been more noticeable than to speak; and, when she had replied, turned back to the window again, to show that he expected nothing more. There had been no need to hear her voice, or see her eyes which had moved, in a perfunctory and unwilling social gesture, vaguely upward without meeting his. Both had said, “Let me alone,” but he had known to do that as soon as he became aware of her; and he had, for his part, no wish to do anything else. His recognition of misery behind a slammed and bolted door had been immediate; but he was so hardly removed from this state himself that he could not see it objectively; it called forth the resistance he would have felt if it had been his own. He reacted instinctively against a pity which, if he admitted it towards her, would come back on him like a boomerang; besides, on the principle of do as you would be done by, he knew it for an unwanted commodity.
All this he felt as he stood at the window, while the outside of his mind registered only a general discomfort and a wish that he had come down ten minutes later. Presently Mrs Kearsey would be here with a good breakfast, which he wanted and would be a fool not to eat; and this living reminder of his own worst moments would preside over the board like the admonishing death’s-head at a mediaeval feast. He would feel a brute and be irritated with himself for feeling it. There was, obviously, nothing anybody could do.
Just then, with as much promptness as if he had turned round and put all these points before her, the girl got to her feet and went quickly out of the room. Neil looked at her cup, which was still half full, and regretted again that he hadn’t come down later; she probably needed it. He liked several cups himself after a bad night. I hope to God, he thought, I’ve never looked as obvious next morning as that.
His reflections were broken by Mrs Kearsey, with an extra rasher as well as the egg. Neil found himself unusually talkative. It did not strike him as odd that he should be working to deflect her attention from the littered plates she was collecting at the other end of the table. The reflexes of a long self-defence were still active in him; the situation called them forth so naturally that he was scarcely aware they had been transferred from himself.
He was a moment too late, however. “That sounds very nice, Mr Langton. I never seem to have time to walk that far … You would think, wouldn’t you, if people didn’t want breakfast they’d say, not let you cook good food just to waste it all over the plate.”
Besides the immediate disapproval in her voice, there was an overtone. Neil thought, She’s noticed something. With a fluency to which he himself listened in detached fascination, he remarked, “As a matter of fact, I rather think it was a bit of misdirected tact Miss—I don’t know her name—was saying she’d had some sort of bilious attack in the night, something she ate on the journey, but she was afraid you’d think she was blaming the food here if she mentioned it. Don’t tell her I passed it on, or my name will be mud.”
“Oh,” said Mrs Kearsey. “Oh, I see.” Her voice had an ascending note of enlightened relief. “Well, of course, that would account for it. I did think I heard someone moving about.”
Left with his bacon and egg, he found his mind reverting to the young man who, in retrospect, reminded him of a shaving-cream advertisement more forcibly than ever. Really, he thought, she’s not an unintelligent-looking girl, she should have had more sense. She seems to have learned the hard way … Of course, there may be a reconciliation later. A good job, I suppose; we shall have some cheerful evenings if they’re not on speaking terms.
At this point the post arrived, with a business letter for him which, having been delayed by forwarding, must be answered at once. It took him an hour of irritable semi-concentration, during which the bell rang again, a telegram this time. He went out into
the hall to look, with the reasonless dread of those who have once received sudden and disastrous news. The wire however was for one Phillips; this, he now remembered from something heard last night, was young Shavex’s name. Neil looked at his watch. There was a call-box just down the road, convenient for anyone anxious to send himself an early wire. So, whatever had happened, there was no doubt about it. Neil found himself unsurprised; the young woman had struck him as confused, but not irresolute.
He finished his letter, collected in his rucksack his lunch and the other oddments he needed, and started out.
Now that the sun was well up, it had turned out a sweltering day. He reached the cliff-top with his shirt sticking to him; even when he got down into the woods, the shade was warm and still, what slight breeze there was came from the land. He picked his way downward; the old track, since the day of smugglers and wreckers never repaired, was broken away here and there; roots had humped up into it, stones from its outer wall, fallen in remote years, were bedded deep and mossed over like the rest; here and there a fallen tree lay across. All the timber here lay where it fell at its natural death; the slope was too steep and overgrown to make retrieving it worth the labour. Often a bole hung precariously, its dead branches caught in those of a living neighbour or lashed to them with ivy; even a slight wind brought from somewhere the solitary, eerie creak of limb sawing on limb. He might have been a hundred miles from the next human being. He was too high up, on this calm day, to hear the sea; where the cliff below was steeply broken he caught sight of it, the waves turned by distance to faint creases that seemed not to move.
A day or two ago he had seen hereabouts, through the funnel-like perspective of a gully, a narrow glimpse of stony beach. Since half the morning was gone, he decided to fill in the rest by trying to make his way down to it for a bathe; his little climb could wait till the afternoon. The fact that he had brought no costume wouldn’t matter in this almost inaccessible solitude, and it would be pleasanter without one.
The whole semi-precipitous slope was honeycombed with tracks. He worked along them to take in the gully; the excitement with which he had first discovered it had not worn off yet. When Miss Searle had mentioned Kubla Khan and he had incautiously answered, “I’ve been there,” it was this that he had meant. Discount the Oriental trimmings, the magnification of opium, and it was all here; the deep romantic chasm plunging down through immemorial trees; the brooding silence which only the noise of water broke; the cascade disappearing under the great boulder placed, heaven knew how or when, to form a monolithic bridge. Coleridge had lived only a mile or two off; his temperament, and the cult of the periods being what they were, he could scarcely have kept away. If anyone else had discovered this place, Neil hadn’t heard of it; his childish pleasure in his little secret had been a turning-point of recovery, since when he had made progress every day.
He stood for a little while listening to the water, and taking another look at the rock-face he had earmarked for the afternoon. He could trace two possible ways up; but that would keep. He found a promising track, and followed it down.
It took him so close to the edge of the gully that at one point he could see along it, under its cave-like roof of trees. It was rather like looking down a huge telescope from the wrong end; a round patch of sunlit pebbles ended the perspective, a glimpse of the beach. A mixed splash of pale colour among the stones puzzled him; he looked again. It was a pile of clothes, a woman’s.
Neil said, “Damn,” and then, suddenly, on an indrawn breath, “Oh, God.” The pale green of the dress had been familiar; he remembered now. The girl at the breakfast-table had worn that colour.
The path here was easy going. It was not till he had almost run himself over a straight drop, and checked himself with a tree, that he questioned his own impulse, and referred it to commonsense. This melodramatic surmise, he told himself savagely, would occur to no one but a neurotic drawing on his own experience. Whatever had been the matter with her (and it might really have been a bilious attack for all he knew) it was fantastic to assume …
The pile of clothes meant, of course, nothing either way. Even if one had not a friend or relative in the world, simple pride would prompt one to arrange an accident. Reaching another gap, he looked again. No towel. But that proved nothing either, he had none himself.
He was now only about seventy feet above sea-level, thinking as he went; the next glimpse he got showed him, as well as the beach, a patch of sea. There was a head in it, no great way out but moving away with a purposeful rhythm.
“This,” said Neil furiously to himself, “is too bloody ridiculous.” He had a scarifying vision of taking a dramatic plunge, in his clothes or stark naked, pursuing a young woman to whom he had said “Good morning” without the benefit of an introduction, and hauling her in from an innocuous bathe. She would probably take him for a sex-maniac and proceed to drown both of them in self-defence. Or one could bawl politely, from here, “Excuse me, but are you committing suicide? Sorry if I’m wrong, but I thought you looked like it at breakfast?”
The trees, at this level, were getting much thinner; they opened at a new point, giving him an extensive vista of beach and sea. The girl, who must have put her feet down on the bottom, suddenly stood up in the water. It only reached her waist. She was quite unclothed.
Faster than he had ever done it on an Army course, Neil dropped flat into cover. His embarrassment and self-exasperation were such that if she had had a fish’s torso instead of a woman’s, he could scarcely have sworn to the difference afterwards. He had lain there some minutes, telling himself that people went to psychiatrists with minds less disorganised than his, when a further thought struck him. The girl had shown every sign of being about to wade in; as soon as she came through the bushes that fringed the beach she could not fail to see him, lurking in the brake with a furtiveness that could only bear one interpretation. The situation, seen for the first time in this light, raised the hair on his neck. He was right on the path she must go up by; she would be certain to hear him if he went crashing about among the trees. All he could see for it was to get down into the gully till she had gone. He eased himself down through a patch of brambles, landing ankle-deep in the stream.
Neil had been a schoolmaster too long to enjoy making himself more than reasonably ridiculous; as a doctor would put it, he had a low threshold to indignity. He had also a scratched hand and a torn shirt. Climbing out of the water on to a wobbling stone, he cursed the young woman with silent concentration; recognised, unwillingly, the injustice of this; cursed himself; and suddenly started to laugh. It overtook him so unexpectedly that he only smothered it just in time. His recent tension, though brief, had been acute, and he was feeling the reaction.
The cover, if highly uncomfortable, was good; he could just see part of the path, and would have to wait till she crossed it. Since his Actaeon-like situation carried none of Actaeon’s privileges, there was no saying when this would be. She would probably decide to eat her lunch.
Evidently she did, for he was there twenty minutes; ample time, if he had known beforehand, to have got comfortably away. He did not enjoy his vigil. Besides having humiliated himself by a panic which now looked hysterical, he had time to reflect on the loss of his private wilderness. This wretched girl, who was clearly in a state to seek solitude, would probably haunt it for the rest of her stay; a stranger, to whom he need not speak, wouldn’t have been so bad. He knew the tracks and could no doubt avoid her; but the fine edge of enjoyment would be gone.
With relief he heard her, at last, on the path below. Presently she came into his line of vision at the steady plod of one with a long climb ahead. Her profile was turned to him; it was, he saw, clear and good, with a short straight nose. Her mouth and jaw, set in some private resolution, had a firmness which much improved their line. The pleasure of getting rid of her made him feel more kindly disposed; her methods of exorcism had his sympathy. He might as well get down to the beach himself now, and have his own lunch
in the sun.
It was pleasant there, with an interesting miscellany of bleached driftwood to poke about in; he quite forgot her, till the heat again reminded him that he had meant to bathe, when it occurred to him that she might still be about somewhere. So what? he thought, pulling his shirt off. Let her do the worrying, for a change.
He had his swim, his lunch, and a cigarette in leisured peace; dressed again; and, feeling much better, recalled his plan for the afternoon. The climber’s approach to a climb, even a short one; is nearly automatic; he made his way up the tracks to the steep part of the gully at a leisurely, energy-saving slouch. There was plenty of time. The sun was still high when he reached the cascade.
He had brought a pair of binoculars with him, to look for small holds near the top where he knew them to be scarce. As he unslung his rucksack for them, something caught his eye; another rucksack, loosely filled like his own but smaller, was lying on the path. He looked up. Half-way up the face, poised motionless in a pause of her progress, was the girl.
It was with some effort that Neil refrained from swearing audibly. This time he did not rebuke himself; it would have been, he felt, too much for anyone.
Clinging close to an almost vertical slab, she had not seen him. He gazed up at her, nursing his resentment. Of course she had taken the specious-looking route, so inviting from the bottom, which he had rejected in advance; she had just got to the point where he was pretty sure it petered out. When she found that it wouldn’t go, perhaps she would clear out and leave it to people who knew what they were doing. But he was sick of standing second in the queue for all the local attractions; besides, if he were here when she came down, he would have to talk to her. He might as well write it off.
He picked up his rucksack again, taking another look at her. Why the hell doesn’t she get on with it, he thought. You can’t dawdle about on a pitch like that. She had not moved hand or foot for nearly a minute. He saw her head turn, first to the left, then to the right. A new thought struck him. He fished quickly in his rucksack for the binoculars and focussed them. He wanted detail. With them he could see her as well as if she had been a few yards away. Her feet were badly stanced, on little more than toe-holds, and her hands looked as if they had nothing very adequate either. They were cramped, and the knuckles showed white in the clear eye of the lens.