North Face (24 page)

In such a night Stood Dido with a willow in her hand Upon the wild sea banks, and waft her love To come again to Carthage.

Extraordinary how frequently, even by the literate, the “in” was misquoted “on.” But it was getting chilly, and after aspirin one should keep warm. Besides, one had only oneself to blame for being unable to sleep, if one were foolish enough to take one’s work to bed with one.

“C
OULD WE—PLEASE—NOT
go so fast?”

“I’m so sorry. I don’t know why I have to walk at such a lick as soon as I start thinking.”

“I was afraid you were angry.”

“As a matter of fact, when I’m angry with women I always beat them to death. Just killing them with exhaustion strikes me as rather pansy.”

She laughed, stammered, and said, “You are a fool.”

“Try again. It isn’t difficult really.”

“I’m still out of breath.”

“Stop a minute. We’ll be on the main road when we cross that stile.”

They were on the last lap of the journey back, walking from the bus-stop to the house, across the high downland that overlooked the sea. On a spring mat of heather between the gorse-bushes they sat down. The humming of bees mingled with a distant bleating of sheep, and the Aeolian-harping of wind in the telegraph wires. It was a hot, bright, blowy morning.

“Now,” said Neil, “have another try.”

“What at?” She picked a bilberry from a clump beside her, tasted it, and made a face at its sharpness.

“The suppressed epithet you’d have come out with just now, if you hadn’t remembered you didn’t know me well enough.”

She was searching in the bilberry-clump and said, without looking up, “After all, we don’t know each other very well yet, do we?”

Poor child, thought Neil; of all the bloody-awkward ways to start the day … The only bus of the morning had left at nine. They had had just time to finish their separate breakfasts, meet in the lounge of the Wheatsheaf, and dash to the square. It would have been much better (as he had realised when it was too late) if they had not managed to sit together. They were a good way now from the phase of unconstrained silences; he had found the effort to maintain a flow of busworthy conversation pretty trying himself.

“To go back a bit,” he said, “is there really much sense in saying we’d better not start thinking about it yet? We have started, and we both know we shall go on, whether we talk or not.”

“I know. Only …” He waited, but she made no effort to continue.

“My solicitor’s taken it up as a service case, which means it’ll jump the queue. The legal time was up about a fortnight ago. I could hear any day, a few weeks at the outside. Should I have waited and sent you a letter? ‘Dear Miss Shorland, Circumstances beyond my control have forced me to dissemble; it may take you by surprise when I confess that the feelings I have entertained for you are not those of friendship alone …’”

“I can’t think,” she said brightly, “how you keep it up. Haven’t you got a headache or anything?”

“Now look here, my dear. I know this is all rather soon; but you know why. We were both a bit tight last night. I had to let you know that as far as I’m concerned it would have happened anyway. Well?”

“You see”—she was still poking in the bilberries, with averted face—“I don’t think you really …”

“I did before that, and I do now.”

“What I meant was, I—don’t think you remember.”

“No doubt you know best.”

She looked up. He saw that she was crimson; and, sorry for her distress though he didn’t quite understand it, took her hand. “For heaven’s sake come out with it, whatever it is. I shan’t eat you.”

After a considerable struggle, she said, “You know—there isn’t any reason why you ought to marry me. People get a bit mixed up sometimes. I wondered if you knew.”

“Good God. So
that’s
what … My dear girl, I was no more than a bit happy. I surely didn’t give you the impression I was completely blind?”

“No. No, of course you didn’t. I only …”

“Not a very experienced drinker, are you?”

“I suppose I’m not.”

“Well, I’m no expert either, but my father passed me on a fair head. I couldn’t afford to put myself under the table, the price it is now. Lord bless you. So you thought I was offering to make an honest woman of you. You wonderful child.”

“Don’t laugh at me. You make me feel a fool.”

“So you should. You’ve gravely insulted me. What are you going to do about it?”

“I’m very sorry. Please forgive me.”

“Darling, you’ll kill me before you’ve done. Come here.”

He had kissed her once already this morning, as soon as they were alone, and had been neither surprised nor discouraged to find her response so much more constrained than it had been last night. What with the bus, the time of day, and her natural shyness, he had expected nothing else. During the night (he had shared a room in a lodging-house with a young man on a cycling tour from Manchester, who had had a piercing, intermittent snore) he had reflected that a good deal would depend on how he managed things today.

He was careful, now, to begin gently and not to hurry her. She submitted to his touch with an immediate, instinctive trust, and in the first moment he felt them completely together. It would not have been strange if he had let things go a little, but something warned him against it; and though last night’s unsatisfied desire was still, he found, very close to the surface, he reminded himself not to alter the pace. Quiet as they were, there was an instant of unmistakable, electric communication; and then immediately, without resistance or withdrawal, she seemed to deaden; the current went off as if at the turn of a switch. She was only waiting now for him to let her go. He did so, easily and without haste as if nothing had been wrong. There was plenty of time, he thought.

Just now, in one of the long pauses while they sat in the bus (it had been taking a hill on bottom gear, making conversation mercifully impossible) he had made a summary of all the reasons against the step he was going to take. They were all very good ones, individually conclusive. He was in a phase, for instance, mental and physical, where such decisions ought to be avoided at all costs. He had made besides, a day or two ago, a radical and precarious change in his future plans, which he did not mean to cancel; he had no right to take on commitments in any case. This particular commitment would be a risky one in itself—a fact of which he had never been in doubt—exposing him to strain where he had become most vulnerable, and putting the test too soon. As if all this were not enough, she must be anything up to fifteen years younger than he was; and why this did not settle the matter out of hand, God alone knew if the psychiatrists didn’t. (It must be becoming a syndrome, he supposed; or some other expensive term which settled everything and solved nothing.) He imagined some other man coming to him with all these points and replied, “Don’t be a fool. You knew the answer before you started; why ask me?”

He had lost the trick of dealing softly with his own emotions. Considering them now, he observed that he not only wanted her, but found it fatally easy—what with her muddled innocences, her shyness, and her loneliness—to become sentimental about her. If one were looking for a combination of factors deadly to sound judgement, here it was.

All this added up to a large total of impossibility. Perhaps it was the mere mountainousness of its proportions which made him obstinate. He could only feel it as the price of what one must have, and can with management afford. Through her he was learning to discover himself; she was the answer, not to what he had been but to what he had become. Her uncertainty and candour, the blankness of her expectations, made her fears easier to him than another woman’s certainty. Quickly alarmed by little things, in the essentials she took him as she found him, afraid of everything, she was afraid of nothing in the last resort. Her trust once gained, she would not draw back at the dark corners; they would be one kind of strangeness among many, and as fit as any for love. She would accept the dark love with the bright, because for all her inexperience there was in her too a darkness which his instincts had found already, not an inbred morbidity but something imposed and resisted, like his own. For a little while they had shared it, and released one another. Now she was in flight from this meeting-place, to which he was determined that somehow they should return. In this there was twisted a strand of perversity, which he did not hide from himself. It was there, and would have to be taken and dealt with as it came; but he felt that the main strength and substance of the cord was truth, not only for him but for her also.

“Well,” he said, “now that we’ve cleared up this delicate misunderstanding, what about it? You’re not a believer in two-year engagements, are you?” He smiled at her.

“My last one went on for ten. I had the ring out of a cracker, on my ninth birthday.”

She had returned his smile; he could see that she had wanted to carry it off lightly. But, against her will, her smile had shadowed with a secret pain. She was leaning a little sideways, so that the gold chain had slipped into view across the opening at her neck.

“That was only meant to be a joke,” she said quickly. “Everyone laughed about it.”

“That’s all right.”

She put her hand on his, but before he could take it, moved it away again. “What I was really meaning to say is that I don’t think I should be any good to you. I’m not good with people in bulk; I tried in the factory and I was hopeless. I could talk to them one at a time, but I never managed to be social. I know I’d be the most deadly failure as a schoolmaster’s wife.”

“You never will be a schoolmaster’s wife, if I can help it. Not unless it’s that or starvation.”

“But …”

“No, that’s nothing to do with this. I’d decided already. For one thing, I should be reminded of a good deal I’d rather forget; but it’s more than that. I’ve been long enough in teaching. It’s had what I’ve got to give it, and I’ve had what it’s got to give me. I’ve seen this happen to other men. Either you get out while you’re still young enough to make good at something else, or you stay in and wait for the dry-rot.”

“What do you want to do?”

Neil, who had dashed into this explanation without much thought, found himself swamped by a diffidence exceeding anything he had felt as an undergraduate in his first year.

“As a matter of fact, I should rather like to have a shot at writing.”

“Why didn’t you tell me you wrote?”

She sounded quite cross about it. It made him feel better at once. He had been keyed up for the note of nervous kindness which this admission is apt to evoke, as if one had confessed to one of the more esoteric religions, or to a very peculiar kind of love-affair.

“I don’t,” he said, “yet.”

“Oh, nonsense. You’re not the kind of man who decided to write because he thinks it must be nice to be a writer.”

She had become, in these few seconds, entirely adult. She even looked different. All at once he was talking easily, without tentativeness or uncertainty.

“Yes, you’ve a right to know this, of course. I know you’ll keep it under your hat. Sammy told quite a few people himself, I believe, but that’s different. Besides, it was all quite simple if you knew him. What happened was that he brought his first thing along to me when he was giving it a final lickover; partly because I’d been with him on a lot of the climbs. Well, you know how it is, you talk till two and then you can’t remember which idea was whose. The place was littered with notes on scraps of paper, and he said the very thought of getting down to it all again made him spew, so I just threw the results together, having the time. We worked like that on the next two as well. The last one was a bit different. Sammy didn’t write that to amuse himself, he needed the money. Not for himself; to finance a Himalayan expedition he was planning. In 1940, it was to have been. This was in ’38, of course.”

“Yes, I know. I had it for Christmas—the book, I mean. I’ve got it still.”

“Have you! … He had quite a responsible job with a firm of architects, I expect you know. One of the partners went sick about then, and they started piling one thing after another on Sammy. He never wrote fast, at the best of times. The thing had been promised the publisher by a given date, and he was getting in rather a state about it. The upshot was he turned over his notes to me. The stuff was all there, just as he’d scribbled it down in pencil at the end of the day; a bit like a series of telegrams from Mr Jingle, but, as I say, the actual material was—”

“Yes, of course. You didn’t do anything, except write the book. I can’t imagine, now, how I didn’t know it the first day I talked to you.”

“You see,” he said quickly, “it was all right if you knew Sammy. It wasn’t that he hadn’t the ethics of an artist, but he couldn’t spread them. He was a climber first and last. He’d as soon have drawn diagrams as written, if that would have given as full a record. He told me so, in those words, when we were working on the first one. About the last thing that would ever have occurred to him was that there could be anything in his own personality worth recording. When it came to this last one, he said, ‘Shove in anything you think of that seems likely to make it sell.’ He meant funny stories, I think. He thought about it as one of the chores of the expedition, like ordering the stores: if you’re prevented from doing it, you hand over to whichever of the party you think can cope. He loathed lecturing, too. I often wished the audience could have plugged in to some of his language afterwards.”

“And what about you?”

“Oh, I was all for the money too. I was hoping then to go with him. Only, when I got down to it, it turned into something different … Looking back, I don’t think I ever did believe he’d live to grow old. I always imagined him finishing somewhere like Irvine and Mallory—oh, well, war hasn’t very much sense of design. It was rather amusing, just as a problem, trying to slip him across between the lines without affronting his essential lack of exhibitionism. I was grateful to him for giving me the chance.”