The Fall (23 page)

Together we did the big, hard routes on Cloggy and on the Anglesey sea cliffs. There was the odd new route — Jupiter on Dinas
Mot, for one — and a raid in late autumn on Scotland, where we stole a choice line on Carn Dearg that Scottish climbers had
been looking at and falling off. Ambition burgeoned.

Eve and I still saw each other. It was a nervous relationship held together by mutual attraction, undermined by memories,
fragmented by my absences in the hills. She was part of some political group with a badly printed weekly news sheet called
Red Rag.
They were antibourgeois, anti-imperialist, anti-Communist, antiwar, antipeace. “What the fuck are you
for?”
I shouted at her during one argument. And she just smiled at me and turned the question around. “What are
you
for, Rob?”

I knew she had other boyfriends besides me; I could imagine exactly what she did with them, that was the trouble. “If you
are going to go off with Jamie Matthewson all the time,” she said, “why don’t you look for another girl — someone with hairy
legs and BO who enjoys slogging up mountains.”

I protested. What exactly I protested wasn’t clear — devotion, fondness, fascination, desire, all the components of love without
the thing itself, perhaps. She was a wonderful mess of contradictions, sometimes almost apologetic about her beauty, as though
to look like she did was a counterrevolutionary act. “Why don’t you come along with us?” I suggested.

“A ménage à trois? You’ve got to be joking.”

“Well, you used to fancy him.”

“And then I met you. Remember? And in my eternal stupidity I fell for you.”

“That’s a very bourgeois sentiment.”

“I know. I spend all my time fighting it.”

We used to laugh at things like that. They were careless days, bereft of the personal anxieties that accumulate over time
like those mutations that gather in your cells as you age. Her infidelities and my trips to the mountains seemed to pose little
threat. Eve and I could break up after a row, and then we could pick up again and apologize tearfully and carnally, and the
damage done never seemed terminal. Everything that happened was curable — time was the universal balm, and we had plenty of
it.

After the New Year, the Scottish winter settled in. Jamie and I began to commute between London and the far north. During
the week we saw little of each other — we lived in different parts of the city — but on Friday afternoons we would meet up for
the long drag up the highway. Memories are of the journey as much as of the climbing. Is there some mechanism in the brain
that achieves this? At the time, the climbing was what mattered; the journey was incidental, a tiresome interlude. But now
what I hear is the clattering of that air-cooled engine somewhere behind us and the radio hammering out pop music and the
road signs going past — Birmingham, Manchester, Penrith, Carlisle — Jamie at the wheel, his body leaning slightly forward so
that he could peer through the windshield down the shafts of light, his face underlit by the instrument panel.

The Borders were desolate spaces of black, the northern slopes streaked with snow; the city of Glasgow was some kind of haven
where we’d stop at the house of Jamie’s old climbing partner, David Cattenach, who’d have food ready for us, and whisky, and
news of whether the mountains were in condition and who had climbed what and what the latest unsolved problem was. “Here come
the bloody Sassenachs!” Davie would shout as we tumbled out of the van, stunned by noise and imperfect sleep. “Come to sully
the virgin Scottish hills with their greasy English hands.” And for an hour we’d be drawn into the subculture of Scottish
climbing, an underworld with its own cant, its own rituals, its own coteries and hierarchies.

After that it was back into the van, sometimes with Davie as well, and more hours to travel, past the black stretch of Loch
Lomond, past Crianlarich and the Bridge of Orchy, with the big hills looming out of the night. When the windows were down
you could feel the breath of snow on the air, and if you peered upward into the blackness, you could see the upper slopes
gleaming white beneath the moon. Where the road turned westward on the Moor of Rannoch, we’d stop the van and get out and
look at the jaws of Glencoe ahead of us, with the blunt mass of the Buchaille Etive Mor like a great broken molar beneath
the night sky. It was a monochrome world, a world in negative where the snow shone white and the rock was a deep absence of
light, an absorbing void. The winter climbs beckoned — the treacherous ridges and the desolate snowbound corries, the steep
snow gullies and the vertical ribbons of ice.

They found Jamie’s father in the spring. I think that Jamie had been expecting it to happen. The possibility, the
probability
of his father being found, loomed over his childhood and youth like the threat of congenital disease. He had always known
that his father was there somewhere, encased in a glacier possibly, but equally possibly just preserved by the cold, dry air.
Sooner or later some expedition would come across him.

He rang me early one morning. “Have you seen?”

“Have I seen what?”

“Go out and buy the
Times
.”
'

I did as I was told. I wandered blearily along to the nearest newsstand and bought the latest edition. It wasn’t on the front
page, of course, but it featured prominently in the international section. It seemed an appropriate story for the
Times
— British, slightly absurd, replete with heroism and failure.
From our correspondent in Kathmandu.
There was a grainy photo of a slope of snow and an outcrop of rock and a humped figure propped against it. Beside the figure
was a pole, bearing what looked like shreds of washing drying in the wind.
Americans plant Buddhist prayer flags as tribute,
the caption said. There was a diagram that showed where the body had been found: an approximate drawing of the Yalung Face
of Kangchenjunga and the height marked in —
26,500 feet.

The team is bringing down certain items found on Mr. Matthewson’s body,
the story explained
. These are believed to include a final note addressed to his wife.

Later that morning, I phoned my mother. “Did you see about Jamie’s father?”

“Of course I saw.”

“Apparently he was just sitting,” I said.

“Yes…”

“Covered in snow, of course, but just sitting against a rock. Frozen.”

“Yes, I saw…” Her voice faded away. She made a little sound on the other end of the line, a small catlike sound, a mewing.
She was shivering: it suddenly dawned on me that my mother was
shivering
there on the end of the telephone line, shivering with fear or misery or plain, imagined cold. “Poor Guy,” she whispered.
“He would have hated all this attention.”

That evening, Eve and I met Jamie for a drink. He’d been dealing with the press all day, and now he seemed nervous, as though
he was uncertain how to behave, as though a tragedy were being staged and he wasn’t sure of his lines.

“Are they bringing him down?” I asked.

“It’s too dangerous. Apparently they sort of buried him. Covered him with some rocks, conducted a ceremony. Prayers and things.
A kind of funeral.” He hesitated, sipping from his beer and looking around the bar as if someone might be watching. “You know
I’ve always felt that he was kind of alive, looking over my shoulder. You know what I mean? I could discuss things with him,
ask him things and get some kind of answer. It was a comfort.” He smiled, as if at the absurdity of the idea. “But now, suddenly,
he’s really dead.”

Eve took his hand. I remember feeling a small thrill of jealousy at the sight of her pale, almost translucent fingers gripping
his. She was solicitous and comforting with him, but after we left him her sympathy vanished. She seemed angry at the pair
of us, as if somehow we were responsible for a distant death on a Himalayan mountain. “Climbers have some kind of death wish,”
she said accusingly. “They court it. Climbing is the ultimate escapism. I mean, you don’t want to die like my grandmother
did, going gaga in an old people’s home. But who the hell wants to be freeze-dried at the age of forty-five?”

To my surprise I saw that there were tears in her eyes. “No one,” I assured her. “No one wants that.”

“Then why do you pursue such a fucking silly pastime?” I put out a hand to touch her cheek, but she brushed it away. “I don’t
want to be the brave widow fending off the press when you get killed,” she said. “Are you so stupid that you can’t see that?”

“Is that a marriage proposal?” I asked, but she wasn’t amused.

Weeks later the things that the American climbers brought down from the mountain were duly delivered to the Matthewson household.
Caroline had fled to North Wales to escape further attention from the press. Jamie rang me. “Do you want to come and see,
Rob?”

I hesitated. “Isn’t it a bit ghoulish?”

“I’d like you to see.”

So I went around, and we stood in the sitting room in front of a little pile of personal effects that might have come from
the pockets of a road-accident victim. Jamie picked through them vaguely. There was a cigarette lighter inscribed
with love, M,
an old leather wallet, a bunch of keys, even two tickets for a London theater, relics of a life snapped off without warning.
“I guess they were the keys to Gilead House,” Jamie said, holding up the key ring. He seemed distracted, as though these traces
of his father had awoken old, blurred memories and he was trying to sort through them without success. “I hardly remember
him. Just as though I had seen snapshots of him. In black and white. Isn’t that strange? I don’t remember him in color.”

Along with the relics, there were some photographs that the American climbers had taken. One just showed mountains, peaks
that I recognized from books and magazines — Jannu like a fang in the foreground, and beyond, in the pearl-blue distance, Makalu
and Everest. Below the peaks, clouds floated like scum on a pool. Someone had written on the back of the photo:
view from the last bivouac.
Then there was the same picture that had appeared in monochrome in the newspaper: a shot of a hunched figure at the top of
a slope of white. The figure had its back to a brownish rock. Beside it was that stick, with prayer flags flying in the Himalayan
gale like scraps of tattered underwear on a clothesline.

The final photo showed a mask. It looked like a tribal mask, designed to frighten away demons. It appeared to be made of ivory,
with two ebony disks for eyes and a roughly cut triangular nose with two holes for nostrils. There was a crudely carved mouth
with shrunken lips and long teeth like a herbivore’s. Distinct moments after Jamie had shown it to me, I realized I was looking
at Guy Matthewson’s face.

“Not very pretty, is it?” Jamie said. He gave a small and unconvincing laugh, then made an ineffectual movement with his lips,
as if trying to formulate words and finding that he had lost the knack. There was a glaze of emotion in his eyes. “And there’s
this,” he said, unfolding a battered scrap of paper that had been torn out of a notebook.