North Face (30 page)

It grew light soon after, and he could not sleep again. This was partly due to hunger; he had been awake more than half the night. His brain, made restless by his stomach’s emptiness, ran back and forth, recapitulating, deducing unknown quantities, adding them up to this total or that. The upshot was that things could not drift indefinitely, subject to emotional climate and to chance. What he had been passing off to himself as tact was, more simply, funking a difficult crux on which the whole route depended. The proposition once stated in these terms, nothing remained but to do something about it.

On the way up to the cliff-top they had scarcely spoken, except to grumble at the heat and encourage one another to push on. He had been as little in the mood for sentimental exchanges as she, and would have felt them irritatingly mistimed if they had been offered; yet, irrationally, while recognising his own mood he had been suspicious of hers, and had let it link itself with all her other withdrawals in his mind. Now, sheltered from the sun’s blaze and rested, he had swung back to a recollection of last night which was too vivid altogether; continuing in his reserve for altered reasons, he wanted the first sign to come from her, then began to demand it with the inner insistence of a suppressed cause. No sign had come. She had given herself up to the day’s lethargy with a facile completeness which, to his present mood, spoke of evasion as clearly as print.

The yellow dress was cut fairly high at the throat, and she had not opened it. Her raised arms had pulled up two wrinkles, converging at a point; it seemed to him that they followed the outline of the gold chain below, and met at the ring of the medal, itself too flat and close to show. As clearly as if nothing had intervened, he could see the disc lying between her breasts, the warmth and weight of the gold an accustomed pressure; he could see the enamelled wings. She seemed to lie abandoned to it, like Leda to the swan.

It would be better, he thought at this point, to have a conversation about something; but he felt angrily that to open some neutral topic would be a signal of defeat. Putting it off, he continued to look at her. Her breathing was quick and deep, labouring with the devitalised air; it rippled the muscles down the whole length of her body. Her lips were parted; she moistened them, just then, with a sliding point of tongue.

Suddenly, without a warning sign, her dropped lids lifted and her eyes met his. She gave a quick jerky twist, sat up, clasped her knees in her arms, and settled with her back to him, looking at the sea.

Unspoken dialogues of this kind did not make sense to Neil at any time, his view being that a little less false delicacy in the world would leave people more time to practise the essential kinds. His bad angel, assuming an honest straightforward air, put this precept speciously before him.

“Sorry,” he said. “Did I give you one of those looks as if I were undressing you?”

She turned half-round, then away; he could see her struggling, helplessly, for the right answer.

“I was, of course,” he added. “But the results were very nice.”

This turned out to be once too often. Ellen straightened, and faced him squarely. “Sometimes,” she said, “you just make me think of a schoolboy trying to see how far he can go.”

After the first shock, it quite pleased him to find her standing up for herself. If she had spoken with a little gentleness, or even a little humour, this effect would have lasted; as it was, his distrust returned at once to spoil it. He said with irony, “And it was too far, m-m?”

“Yes,” said Ellen firmly. “I think I have all I need for the moment, thank you.”

The effort required for this had left her taut and quivering all over; but she had turned back again, and in any case he was in no mood to notice it.

“I keep trying to remember,” he remarked, “which department of that factory you said you worked in. Welfare, perhaps?”

“You don’t know much about factories,” said Ellen over her shoulder. “The girls in my shop reported a man once for a lot less than that. He was transferred to the packing-room, too.” She kicked a pebble over the edge and added, “Everyone was very pleased.”

Neil listened to the pebble, making its way down the cliff-faces in accelerating bounds. Supplied with a new and highly legitimate grievance, he said, “You know a stone like that becomes lethal after about a hundred feet, don’t you? I thought you were supposed to have been taught to climb?”

It slipped out unprepared, leaving him afterwards with an unpleasant constriction in the chest, and a determination to face it out. There was, however, no need.

“I’m sorry,” she said at once. “What an awful thing to do. I can’t imagine what possessed me.”

“I don’t suppose anyone’s down there,” he said with grudging reassurance, “but you can never be sure.” Her penitence made him, for obscure reasons, angrier than a retort. Perhaps it was only her still-averted face which gave the illusion that the apology had been offered not to him, but elsewhere. Neither of them had, at present, any more to say; and there was silence for several minutes.

Ellen’s back relaxed; she turned round to him, propped on one arm. “There’s going to be a storm tonight. The air’s too thick to breathe. Please don’t let’s be cross with each other.”

He moved over to her, pulled her backward into his arms, and kissed her. Between one reason and another, he was not as gentle as he had meant to be. She did not quite resist him, but her response stopped quickly and he could feel her tense, wary, and ready to slip away at the first chance he gave her. He let her go. She made an unhappy little movement towards him, hesitated and stopped.

“Let’s have lunch,” she said.

It was too hot to be hungry, but he saw sense in her suggestion. It is difficult to feel intensely while dividing up food and rearranging it under a system of barter. As usual she slipped him a sandwich too many in exchange for the cake; but the routine argument fell flat, for neither could finish a full half-share.

“They say,” said Ellen, looking at the remaining slices whose edges had already begun to curl, “that if we had to eat an eighteenth-century breakfast for dinner, our stomachs would burst and we’d drop dead.”

“All the same,” said Neil, who had been chiefly defeated by the liquescent margarine, “I wouldn’t mind working through one gradually, say over a week.”

After a pause Ellen said shyly, “You might not think it to look at me, but I don’t cook too badly—I mean, with what one can get.”

For a moment his mood lifted, and their eyes met in a smile. But all this came a little late; ready to detect flight in anything, he saw her preparing another bolt-hole, the labyrinthine warren of domesticity. Even when they talked about plans, this image had never presented itself to him; it carried too many associations with the past, from which he still shied away. Like most people who married nowadays, they would have nowhere in particular to live; with all its discomforts, this vagrant and irresponsible prospect had had an unconfessed charm for him. Sometime, inevitably, they would gather a home about them as a stone gathers moss. Meantime, the picture at the back of his mind had been of camping here and there, making a secret world in strange rooms and love in strange beds, subduing casual environment as illicit lovers do. He had not thought the thing out so clearly as to know that the picture had grown on him with her elusiveness, that he wanted her in a kind of vacuum, in order without interference to explore and possess her. Aloud, he asked her how good she was at cooking on a gas-ring.

“Quite good. I hate these house-proud types.”

She might have read his thoughts in order to meet them halfway. It was like all her other promises, he thought, notes of hand upon securities that failed when she called them in. Desire stamped its impatience on his mind; things could not go on forever like this, and had already gone on longer than enough. Echoing what seemed, just then, the complaint of the whole visible world, he decided that the air must be cleared. A little later, when the strain still palpable between them had settled down, but certainly today.

They had drifted, all this while, into another long silence. Ellen had got out a comb and smoothed her hair; she had managed to buy, on the way up, an imitation tortoiseshell slide, heavier than the grips she was used to wearing, which kept worrying her and needing adjustment. She put the comb away, and fidgeted with something in the collar of her dress. At the movement his anger concentrated, without warning, as if under a burning-glass, to a single point. He never saw the small prickly leaf she tracked down and threw away.

“You know,” she said, turning round, “I think the more one gives in to this weather, the worse it gets. We’d probably feel much better if we ignored it and did something. What about that face you were talking about yesterday, the big one? It will be in the shade, by now. Let’s go and climb.”

Neil said slowly, “It’s as near vertical as makes no matter.” This unattached statement committed him to nothing. The quiet world stood poised on its knife-edge, not yet moving.

“I don’t blame you.” She spoke quite humbly and without reproach. “But, truly, Neil, that was the only time I lost my nerve on rock; and it couldn’t happen when you were there.”

“Good lord,” he said quickly, “I didn’t mean that.” And with this phrase of simple instinctive decency, the poised bowl heaved, irrevocably. She was waiting now to know what he did mean.
Ruat coelum.

“I only meant that I can’t take you up rock at that angle with loose jewellery dangling about. It only needs to catch on something when you’re shifting balance. Sorry, but it’s up to you.”

“Jewellery?” She looked at him in perfectly blank bewilderment. “But you know I don’t wear it. You can see I’ve got none on.”

“I can’t remember ever having seen you without it. I thought it was a fixture, perhaps. If I’m wrong, never mind.”

Her face altered; he saw the movement, quickly checked, of her hand up to her throat. She was watching him, but he could not read what was in her eyes, defiance or fear. She said, almost stupidly, “You don’t mean my medal, do you?”

He made no answer, wondering if he looked to her as he felt, and ceasing to care.

She said at last, “I always climbed in it. It never caught on anything. It’s too short.”

“Playing about’s one thing, and climbing’s another. Do the thing properly, or let it alone.”

The conflict in her face had stopped. It was impenetrable, and as hard as his own.

“I may not be much good myself. I don’t say I am. But I was taught properly, if that’s what you mean.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” he said.

“You can do as you like.”

Again he did not answer, but for a different cause. He was watching the change which was transforming her into someone he did not know, a quiet fanatic, with a fanatic’s uncommunicating eyes.

“You said something like this a few minutes ago.” Her voice seemed curiously dissociated from her still face. “I didn’t say anything, I couldn’t believe you meant it.”

“It would probably have been better unsaid.”

“It would have been much better unthought.”

“Perhaps.”

Things moved quickly, as they do between peoples whom propaganda has wrought up into a state of furious self-defence. At the sound of the first shot, mobilisation was complete.

“If this was what you wanted,” she said, “you should have told me before. Perhaps I ought to have known. But I thought—”

“Yes?”

“I thought truth meant something to you, and that you wouldn’t want anything that came from selling it out.”

“Truth’s a large loose word, If you mean fidelity, why not say so?”

“Very well. Then that’s what I mean.”

“So long as we know.” In a moment’s clarity, he compared the reality on which they had embarked with the delicate lines of his blue-print, the brutalities of the field with the staff college map. Noble abstractions usher in the war; human animals, wounded, threatened, insulted and bereaved, tread the bright banners in the indistinguishable rubble underfoot, careless with pain. “You’re telling me that short of a sell-out, there’s nothing left, is that it? I should call that being honest rather late in the day.”

“That isn’t true.” But she spoke in anger, so that she seemed to offer nothing, simply to throw off an accusation. She paused for a moment, looking at him, not in the hesitation of remorse but of one who chooses a weapon. “I’ve tried to be straight with you. It’s you who make it impossible. I could have been—very fond of you. You must have seen that, but it wasn’t enough.” Her face, so often blurred with uncertainties, had a terrifying, abstract purity of line: the skin looked clear and bright, her eyes shone at a point beyond him. “You want what shouldn’t be given, as—as a sort of scalp. You have to have everything, and be everything. Not because you love me, to stand right with yourself.”

The abuse of an angry child, he thought; feeling the slight external pain, the deep uncomprehended injury, that signals a mortal thrust. He felt himself to be very cool and indifferent, even causal, at the moment of abandoning himself to revenge.

“I don’t want the past,” he said. “I don’t even want to hear about it. All I need to know is where you’re living now. You talk about truth. Lying’s like charity, it begins at home. You’ve decided you’re being fair to everyone, I gather, if you step into a living man’s bed with a dead man round your neck.”

She drew herself back slowly on to her heels, then to her feet. Her clenched hand was pressed against her heart; seeing her knuckles whiten, he seemed to see the thing they covered stamping its circle on her flesh.

“I can understand now,” she said clearly, “why your wife ran away.”

There was silence. The words hung in the air with a curious unreality, as when a child brings out some obscenity it had picked up parrot-wise, and tries over for the sake of the sound.

“You’ve saved this up for a long time, haven’t you?” she said, as if groping her way back to language she understood. “Now I’ll tell you the truth, if you want it so much. I’d unlive my whole life, if it would bring Jock back again. Every moment of it, and forget it as if it had never been. And now you know.”