North Face (2 page)

Miss Searle had always considered boredom an intellectual defeat. She prepared to fall back on her inner resources, and got out her Chaucer (Skeat’s edition, which she would be reading with the second-year students next term) and a new paper on Old French metrical forms. She had them with her now, and her Trollope, in case Miss Fisher should go out; a diminishing hope, which Mrs Kearsey’s promise of an early tea had finally destroyed.

Failing to concentrate on
Dr Thorne,
she would have liked to look up; but Miss Fisher would treat it as an invitation, and might embark on another hospital anecdote. Nursing was a noble vocation, but, tragically, coarsening. In Miss Searle’s view, one made a sufficient contribution to realism by admitting that the Seamy Side existed. To dwell on it, if with feeling and intelligence, was morbid; if with humour, gross. Miss Fisher’s last story had been quite definitely tainted with grossness.

She could have borne Miss Fisher (she often told students to whom other encouragement could not truthfully be given that the world needed Martha as well as Mary) if the whole house had not been like an extension of her. Choosing a moment when she was counting stitches, Miss Searle looked at the Lounge. She would have preferred to its mean little parodies of functional simplicity even the jungle of Victoriana which must have gone originally with the Tower. That would have had character, at least. (Miss Searle delighted in character, if it was safely uncontemporary; if not she called it eccentricity, obtrusive-ness, or lack of proportion.) As for the bedrooms, “done” with shiny rayon taffeta in orange, pink or electric blue—hers was pink—their hideousness made it impossible even to read there. She wondered, passingly, how Mr Langton would like his room in the tower. The thought of this Beckfordian eyrie, enclosing a perfect Tottenham Court Road interior, made her fine colourless lips move in a faint smile.

Miss Fisher’s ball of wool rolled off her lap, and over to Miss Searle’s feet. She reached for it as Miss Searle stooped politely. For a moment their hands met on the ball: the hand of a scholar, meticulous, with fineness but no strength in the bone, taut veins blue under the thin skin at the back, the nails ribbed, brittle and flecked here and there with white; the other broad-palmed and short-fingered, with the aggressive smooth cleanliness that comes of much scrubbing with antiseptic followed by much compensating cream, the nails filed short and round, their holiday varnish spruce. Each woman was momentarily aware of the contrast.

When thanks and apologies had been exchanged, and Miss Searle had picked up her book again, Miss Fisher stole a look at her under sandy lashes which could not, like hair, be deepened with a henna rinse, and on which mascara would have been too obvious. It was a look which Miss Searle had once or twice intercepted with indefinable unease. It was more transparent than Miss Fisher knew; a compound of patronage with envy and respect. If she had been a Frenchwoman, Miss Fisher would have expressed the patronage in the words “Miss Anglaise.” What Miss Searle felt to be mental and conversational decency, Miss Fisher saw as an iron curtain of spinsterly repression. With sincere conviction, she thought it more unpleasant than crudeness. Her own standards had been shaped by her work, in which from the age of eighteen she had learned to regard prudery as a social crime: young medical students must be helped over their first awkwardness, shy patients must find their confidences aseptically eased. She took all this so much for granted that she could not have found words for what she felt, which was that for a mature adult to force evasion on others was selfish, discourteous, and a mark of moral cowardice besides.

“Inhibited,” said Miss Fisher to herself, looking with sad wistfulness at the plain, perfect handmade shoes, recalling the worn hide case with the foreign labels, trying unsuccessfully to recall elusive vocal cadences, the precision of vowels. In the presence of Miss Searle an old humiliation, like an irreparable bereavement, returned to haunt her: an occasion when walking back after a party a young resident, tender and sentimental and only a little drunk, had tried to talk to her about Housman. She had thought he said “houseman,” and had replied humourously. He had turned it off with a hurt clumsy joke; the evening’s promise had frosted in bud.
A Shropshire Lad,
which she had read next day against a return of opportunity that never came, remained with her like a scent with sorrowful associations, having no independent life.

Miss Fisher was not, in the ordinary social sense, a snob. During a spell of private nursing she had slid bedpans under a representative section of the British upper classes, encountering the usual averages of cheerful pluck and querulous selfishness. Their pre-occupations had often differed from those of her own circles only in scale; they had soon ceased to have any mystery for her. Bound to a routine of uncompromising realism, Miss Fisher craved for strangeness, for otherness, for all that eluded tables of measurement, more deeply than she knew. Hence the spell that intellectuals still worked for her; they had to be very disagreeable before she stopped making allowances for them. Ideally, she liked them unconventional and unpractical, but fairly clean in their persons and with a sense of humour; when she would describe them as Bohemian, her most distinguished term of praise. She had had initial hopes, soon dashed, of Miss Searle.

Miss Searle put a marker in her Trollope and said, “I do hope your sunburn won’t give you a painful night.” It was impossible to read; she remembered Miss Fisher’s kindness about the cold-tablets; besides, tea would be here at any moment now.

“It was more the headache, really, thanks. I took some
A.P.C.
and it’s nearly gone.” Here, Miss Fisher felt obscurely, was an inheritor of the invisible key who let it rust on a nail. She thought, If
I’d
had her advantages … The tea came in; there was a polite contest of withdrawals from pouring-out; Miss Searle, who hated strong tea, allowed herself to be persuaded. A third cup was on the tray; it stood, a bland blank question-mark, midway between them.

Miss Fisher, sipping her tea, wished that Miss Searle had thought to stir the pot; she had not liked to suggest it. Conversation faltered and died; she felt that it was her turn to revive it.

“I wonder what we’ve got coming,” she essayed politely.

Miss Searle, who perceived at once what was meant but did not feel equal to it, expressed silently a civil interrogation.

“The new
P.G
., I mean.” Miss Fisher remembered Miss Searle’s cold; it was on herself that cheerfulness devolved. “This mysteryman that’s going up into Rookery Nook.”

“Oh, yes, of course. I’m so sorry. Do have another scone, Mrs Kearsey really manages very well on the rations, don’t you think?”

“Ta, after you. Well, hope springs eternal, they say, but I expect it’ll be a case of a castle in the air, more senses than one, don’t you?”

“I’m afraid I don’t quite …?” Would even Rome and Florence, Miss Searle was wondering, make up for the weeks spent in this mental slum?

“Well, I mean to say, with men in the short supply they are, if they’ve got anything
to
them they don’t need to go to boarding-houses on their own. Mind you, it was different before the war. I’ve started out once or twice not knowing a soul, and had the time of my life. But not now; not unless you go to these Butlin places, and goodness knows
who
you might pick up there. I’m afraid I’m too fussy who I go about with.”

“Yes,” said Miss Searle. “Quite.” But the hot tea and her cold conspired together against her. She snatched at her handkerchief. Miss Fisher put down her terseness entirely to force of circumstances.

“Must be this side of sixty, anyway. Mrs K’s pretty straight, she wouldn’t have poked him up there without giving him some sort of hint what he was in for. Nice if he turned out to be a Raf type, demob, leave or something. But what a hope.”

“I don’t suppose”—Miss Searle tucked back her handkerchief—“that we shall see a great deal of him, in any case.”

“I follow you there all right.” Miss Fisher felt she was getting a response at last; she warmed. “Not if that Winter girl sees him coming. Talk about a fast little bit—” With some presence of mind, she clipped off two consonants just in time.

“Oh? Miss Winter goes out so much; I’m afraid I’ve noticed her very little.”

This time, Miss Searle had managed a clear articulation. Miss Fisher bent over her plate; the scone she was crumbling made a film of margarine on her fingers. Her sunburned brow stung like fire. Miss Searle must have caught the word after all.

Rolling, obviously, a greasy crumb, Miss Fisher relived, as rapidly as the drowning, the bad moments of a lifetime: the Housman disaster; the time when she had called a bishop Mister; the cocktail party to which she had gone in a backless evening gown. With it all, she felt an inarticulate sense of wrong. The Miss Searles got the last word so easily, by freezing explanation. She would have liked somehow to make clear that she had let slip a bit of occupational slang, whose specialised place she really knew quite well; that she wasn’t interested in Raf types only because they made good escorts, but because some of them, when she looked in with a hot drink just before the night staff came on, had unburdened themselves of things not known to their mothers or their girls. All this struggled within her, hopelessly; she groped for her handkerchief and wiped her fingers clean.

“I see in this morning’s paper,” said Miss Searle, relenting in victory, “that we can expect some settled weather for the next few days.”

A couple of hundred yards up the road, Neil was folding away his map. The scale was irritatingly small; inch-to-the-mile editions showed no sign of reappearing, and his pre-war collection had not covered this unfamiliar ground. Well, he could make his own. Why not? He had nothing better to do, or, certainly, to think about.

Two inch to the mile; it was unlikely he would get squared paper at the local stationer’s. The nearest place … Disturbed by a vague feeling that there was something he had better do first, he realised that he was hungry. The sensation had become, lately, so unusual that he was slow to recognise it.

Anyway, he thought, the air’s good here.

As he disinterred his rucksack from the bracken he remembered that, having travelled down from the north overnight without a sleeper, he would probably be improved by a clean shirt. He swung the rucksack indecisively; but, like everything else nowadays, it didn’t seem worth the trouble. Shrugging himself into the straps, he made for the landmark of the tower.

Mrs Kearsey received him at the door with instant misgiving. She had hoped against hope that he would be young enough to find it amusing. Forty-five, she thought, if a day; then subtracted a few years, for he looked very run-down, she thought, and shockingly thin for a man of his length and shoulders. Her spirits, which had sunk at the sight of him, were not raised by a Standard English accent which disposed at a blow of heather and outside stairs. Chattering with nervous brightness while she sought for comfort, she found some reassurance in the shirt. He couldn’t be fussy; it was doubtful if he had even shaved today. (Neil owed the benefit of the question to the fact that his beard grew lighter than his hair.) He had forbiddingly little to say; he must have seen the tower as he came up the road. Unable to bear it longer, she committed her fears to words.

“That’s all right. I saw it coming along. It’ll be quiet up there.”

“Oh, yes, beautifully quiet. You won’t know anyone else is in the house. And the bathroom’s only just at the foot of the steps, quite handy really. They
look
a bit flimsy, but the builder’s not long been over them and says they’ll be safe for fifty years. You’ll find there’s a lovely view.” She paused on this. “There’s just
one
thing, Mr Langton, and be
sure
to tell me, for I’d make arrangements somehow if it meant moving out myself …”

“What is it?” asked Neil abruptly. The moment of suspense, the impending of a personal question, scraped like a rough thumb along his nerves. He had had an almost sleepless night in the train, besides.

Taking alarm, Mrs Kearsey dithered, prolonging his discomfort. “It’s nothing, really, only I know some people find … I mean it’s the
height.
Now please be sure to tell me if you can stand looking
down.”

“Yes, thanks,” said Neil, speaking with rather more irony than he was aware. He had just spent some time on Ben Nevis, going into this question closely. Life had never been much disposed to hand him solutions ready-made.

Sure that she had offended him beyond repair, Mrs Kearsey launched herself into a stream of palliative platitudes; she had seen, too late, the clinker-nailed boots slung outside the rucksack. It took Neil, who was pre-occupied, a few moments to realize what it was all about. Pulling himself together, he smiled at her.

“Of course not. Nice of you to worry about it.”

Mrs Kearsey underwent a relaxing process inconsequent to Neil, who was not given to mirrors. Becoming suddenly almost cosy, she showed him the bathroom and went off promising tea. The tapwater was hot; he quite wished he had taken his razor in with him. But never mind. It was after five; the dining-room would be clear by now, he would get a meal in peace.

The door of the Lounge was neither really thick nor quite gimcrack. Incomplete, filtered sounds of arrival had come through it: the bell, Mrs Kearsey’s strained twitter, sliding down the register to an easier
C
natural; infrequent, low-pitched replies, feet, light and decisive on alternate stairs. The feet sounded young.

A conversation, about the difficulty of understanding Russians, drifted rudderless and ran aground. Miss Searle tried to tug it back into the fairway, but broke off to give a careful pat to her nose. Afterwards, she pushed her handkerchief out of sight into the sleeve of her cardigan, and smoothed out the bulge. Miss Fisher stretched her stockings out sideways, looked for rubbed places over the ankle-bones, and, satisfied, crossed her legs at the knee. They were American nylon; Miss Searle noticed this for the first time. She herself had on woollen ones, because of her cold. Crossing her legs at the ankle, she tucked them under the chair: she was quite unaware, in any cerebral way, of doing this.