The Fall (30 page)

“His father, for God’s sake,” said Ruth. “Why shouldn’t he go looking for him?”

“Because he’s a bastard, that’s why. Because the bastard abandoned his responsibilities, that’s why.”

“But he’s Rob’s own flesh and blood.”

“It’s not flesh and blood,” Eve retorted. “It’s just a teaspoonful of sperm.”

Later Ruth and Jamie went off to his bedroom, leaving Eve and me alone. She sprawled on the sofa, smoking and eyeing me through
the haze. “Why didn’t you say?” she demanded.

“Because I didn’t really want to talk about it.”

“But you told
her
.”
'

“I didn’t tell her. She just happened to be there.”

There was a pause. Eve inhaled some of her own personal opiate. “You fancy her don’t you? The way you were looking at her
this evening. I think — ”

“
What
do you think?” I snapped. “What the
hell
do you think?”

She smiled in quiet triumph. “I think you’ve slept with her, haven’t you?”

I tried to laugh the whole thing off, edge the conversation into neutral territory, but Eve was persistent. “Does Jamie know?
I’ll bet he doesn’t. Christ alive: first his mother and now his girlfriend. What kind of bastard are you, Rob?”

“Forget it, Eve. You’re talking nonsense.”

“Oh, no I’m not. I can read you like a book. She’s dangerous, that’s what Ruth is, and you’re a fool.”

“Why a fool?”

“Not to see the danger.”

I shrugged her fears away. Jamie and I never spoke about danger. Climbers don’t do that very much. There are two sorts of
danger: objective and subjective. Objective danger is the type you can’t control — avalanche, stone-fall, that kind of thing.
You try to minimize it: start early in the day when the loose rocks high up the cliff are still frozen into the ice; beware
of fresh snow on old snowfields; avoid places prone to stone-fall. But it’ll get you if your number is up. Subjective danger
is the type that you can do something about: you can minimize it by using protection and by not climbing above your standard;
you can eliminate it by not doing the climb in the first place. But then you might get hit by a bus on the way to the pub.
A bus is objective danger. The fact that you stepped off the sidewalk without looking is subjective.

Which kind of danger was Ruth?

An evening in some Highland pub — the Kingshouse? the Clachaig? I can’t remember. What I do recall, as so often, is the inconsequential
and the essential but nothing whatever in between: certainly not the mediocre matters of geography or topography. The noise,
certainly; I remember the noise. And the great press of damp bodies, figures reaching over shoulders to get their glasses
to the bar. Puddles of beer or meltwater on the floor. And outside, the complaints of a typical Scottish night: a belligerent
wind and the thrash of rain or sleet against the windows, like stones thrown by a gang of delinquent kids.

Ruth was there, but no Eve of course: just Jamie, Ruth, and me bivouacked around a tiny circular table, with people pressing
behind us and someone leaning over and asking: “What yer done, Jimmy?” and Jamie looking up and saying, “Point Five Gully.”
Which is internal evidence of a kind. Point Five Gully — a smear of ice one thousand feet high — is on Ben Nevis, so we must have
been in Fort William.

After he had exchanged a few words with the other climber, I remember Jamie leaning forward across his beer and saying softly,
“I think we ought to do the Eiger, Rob. What do you reckon?”

We had talked about getting over to the Bernese Oberland the previous summer, but we never made it. I ran my mind over the
standard routes on the mountain: the Mittellegi Ridge, maybe even the Lauper Route up the Northeast Flank. We’d got some good
Alpine routes behind us, and we could burn off any Scottish winter route. So why not the Lauper, which was one of the great
ice climbs of the Alps? “Why not? If I can get away next summer — ”

“I was thinking more like this spring,” Jamie said. “As long as there’s not too much snow. It’s colder; the mountain stays
in better condition. Less stone-fall.”

His concern about stone-fall was the first hint. “What route are you thinking about?”

He sniffed. Sniffing was one of the proletarian mannerisms he had adopted. He kept his voice low, although no one was too
likely to overhear in that scrum of bodies. “The North Face,” he said.

There was a silence. The noise of the pub was all around us but detached from the silent implications of what he had just
suggested. “The Eigerwand?” I whispered. “You’re joking.”

It wasn’t the kind of plan you broadcast around the place in those days. Not unless you wanted to be left looking like a bloody
fool. It was still the great threat, still one of those routes you dreamed about during the day and had nightmares about when
you slept. Not nowadays, I don’t suppose. Nowadays they climb the thing in a few hours; nowadays there are as many routes
up the thing as there are up a typical Welsh outcrop. They’ve even given them silly names — the Sanction, after the film; Yeti;
Symphony of Freedom, names like that. They’ve televised an ascent live. The face has been soloed and descended. It’s probably
even been skied down. Nowadays it’s probably climbed by Japanese tourists in sandals. But in those days it still possessed
weight. There were still only two routes up it: the classic 1938 route and the 1966 Direttissima, the one from which the American
John Harlin had plummeted five thousand feet before he hit the ground. Oh, yes, in those days the North Face was still something
that could get your name in the papers, alive or dead.

“Not joking at all, mate. I reckon it’s on.”

“But are we?”

He grinned. He had all the obsession that you needed, the focus, the artist’s determination and the politician’s conviction.
“Of course we are.”

What did we do the next day? Probably something on the Orion Face again, some mixed route or other that took the line of a
summer VS. Orion Direct, maybe, with a variant line out of the Basin halfway up. I have only the vaguest memory: his climbing
above me, the little showers of splintered ice coming down, the impact of his ice ax and the scrape and grab of his crampons,
and all the time his voice muttering silly things like “Brittle Edges” or “Traverse of the Sods” or “The White Cockroach” — all
of them jokey Eigerwand references. I recognized the symptoms, the growing obsession, the sense that, like an inmate of a
mental hospital, he was going to be muttering about the Eiger all the time, contemplating it, mulling it over in his mind,
staring at photos, doing all those repetitive-obsessive things of the mentally disturbed.

Back in London we leafed through a book he had borrowed from the library — Heinrich Harrer’s
The White Spider.
It was full of overblown prose and heroics on a mythic scale, but it was the pictures that Jamie wanted, especially the photograph
that unfolded from the center to show the Face in more detail than any other picture, with little labels against all the famous
features: the Shattered Pillar, the Difficult Crack, the Flatiron, the Death Bivouac, the Ramp, the Traverse of the Gods.
Then there were shots of the original ascent in 1938, huddled figures plastered against the ice-encrusted rock trying to find
shelter from the blizzard.

“Looks like a Scottish winter route,” he said.

“It’s over five thousand feet,” I retorted. “That’s not like anything in Scotland.”

At the end of the book there was a full route description. We went over and over it, consigning it to memory, imagining ourselves
in the midst of the tilting plane of the second ice field, working our way up toward the rotting cliffs that shut off the
upper part of the Face. We struggled up the Ramp and teetered across the Traverse of the Gods with three thousand feet of
space beneath us. “It’s nothing technical, Rob,” he insisted. “There’s nothing as hard as what we did last weekend in Scotland.”

“But it’s over five thousand feet,” I repeated.

And there was something else — a hand reaching out from the past to tap him on the shoulder. “Look at this.” He held out a school
exercise book, a thing with a faded gray cover and stapled pages. “Just have a
look”'

The pages inside were brown with age. I glanced at the lines of faded ink in that vaguely familiar hand that had once written
my mother’s name against some rock climbs in Wales. “Where did you find it?”

“In an old trunk at Gilead House. It’s a log of his alpine climbs.”

Grindelwald, summer 1939

June 12th
Mittellegi ridge, 4 hours from the hut. Fine weather and views. Descent by West Flank. Eigergletscher 5 pm.

June 16th
The Northeast Face (Lauper’s route). 16 hours. Descent to Mittellegi Hut. Pretty fine!

June 19th
Inspected N face (N for Nazi?) to Stollenloch. Looks plausible (pace Alpine Club!), need better weather. Next yr?

Jamie was watching for my reaction. He was like someone who has given a present and wants to see joy and gratitude in the
recipient’s face. “See?” he said, in case I hadn’t. “My old man practically did the North Face just a year after the first
ascent. When all the old farts in England were calling it unjustifiable.”

I smiled at his enthusiasm. “He only got as far as the Stollenloch. That’s the railway window, isn’t it? About a third of
the way up and before the real difficulties. Plenty of people must have done that, even then.”

“But look” — he pointed —
“next year,
it says,
next year.”

“And look what had happened by next year.”

“Exactly. But what if, eh?
What if?”

I laughed. I knew that the only way to drive the demons from his mind would be to climb the thing, to beat his father in this
at least. And then set his sights on Kangchenjunga.

It was Jamie’s birthday a few weeks later. I gave him a book:
Devils of Loudun
— a book about madness and possession.

London 1940

D
IANA WAS BILLETED
in Kentish Town, in a town-house belonging to a Mr. and Mrs. Warren. Mrs. Warren was vast and pallid. She looked as though
she had been assembled out of suet by the Ministry of Food to advertise an arcane aspect of austerity or rationing: Mrs. Lard
the Greedy-Guts or something. Her husband was a narrow, mean man with the reek of stale clothes about him. He lived off some
kind of indemnity and passed most of his time at home in the kitchen, working at the kitchen table. He was always repairing
things — bits of greasy machinery, cogs and cams and sprockets, parts of bicycles or motorcycles. Grease was ingrained in the
surface of the table, giving it a dark patina of age and filth. “’Course, ’e knows what ’e’s doin’,” Mrs. Warren would say
proudly as he worked. “An engineer, ’e was. In the mines.”

“The mines?”

“Coal mines, dearie.”

Diana hadn’t associated coal mines with London. Mines were South Wales, or Nottingham, or places farther north and even more
foreign to her.
“Kent,
darling,” said Mrs. Warren with heavy sarcasm. “Coal mines in
Kent.
Where you bin livin’ all this time? It’s not just hop fields and thatch cottages them planes are fightin’ over; it’s bloody
coal mines an’ all.”

Mr. Warren’s lungs were bad from the mines, so he said. He coughed and wheezed to prove it. And he complained. Complaint seemed
to be his natural state. He complained about the war; he complained about the rationing; he complained about the inconveniences;
he complained about the regulations, particularly the regulation that had planted Diana Sheridan on him. His wife shivered
and wobbled around her husband and applauded his complaints. “Isn’t he a caution?” she would say. “’Course, he fought in the
last war, so he knows what it’s all about, don’t you, dearie?”

Diana occupied the back room upstairs, the room that had belonged to the Warrens’ son, who was in North Africa with the army — “sittin’
on ’is arse and playin’ wiv ’imself” was how Mr. Warren put it. The room looked out over the exiguous garden with its Anderson
shelter and its rows of vegetables and, beyond that, other gardens and the backs of the neighboring terrace. Two of those
houses had been hit in one of the early raids, so there was a surprising gap in the row, with a view through to a tiny park
where an antiaircraft gun was hunkered down behind sandbags.