North Face (32 page)

His first consecutive piece of feeling was to be angry with the animal’s idiotic resource. But for this, it would already be over, without apprehension or pain. Now, in an instant more, he would have time to be afraid; and, perhaps, not time to get beyond it, the most disgusting of all ways to go. Fear, he thought angrily, was futile. It would be pointless, inconsistent. Let him admit at once the truth concealed from himself but now manifest, that he had come to this place to die.

The strain on his fingers was becoming agony. Reduced by the pain to a scarcely perceptible sensation, he felt the warm spread of blood over his wrist and down his stretched arm. He wondered how long it would be before anyone found him: and heard in memory, like some thing external, his own voice saying, “It’s ten to one you’d lie here for days.”

Swiftly as his body had clutched the rock, his mind shot into an arrowy realisation which made nothing of time. He knew upon whom he was committing murder; a barbarous reprisal upon her helplessness, a massacre, a thousand times beyond the strength of her nature to bear. His dull resignation was stripped from him, like a smothering garment snatched away. The thought of dying in the act of this atrocity electrified him with a life whose force, spun out, would have kept him for a year. He did not think what he should do. It was merely inevitable that his left hand, groping among the scree, should encounter another outcrop, smaller than the first, but enough. Feeling the skin of his cut palm split again and tear with the contraction of the tendons, he began to pull.

When he was far enough up the slide to press downward against the jag, instead of hanging from it, he started with infinite care to sweep the scree away. It rattled down into the gully; the thunder, for which he had no attention to spare, resounded. At first it seemed that there was nothing but sliding grit below; then he found a projection, then another. Within two minutes, he had got to the crack.

The crack was to be climbed, so he climbed it. He could not recollect much about it afterwards, except that his red handprints had looked odd on the rock. He used jammed hand and foot pressure, he believed, for a good deal of the way; when he clenched his hand the fingers stuck to the palm, and pulled raw flesh when he opened them. After he had lain down in dry leaves at the top, he did not attempt to remember.

The first drops of the thunder-rain fell, with a heavy and deliberate kindness, on his upturned face.

H
E WAS SOAKED TO
the skin, and cold. The rain had been some time in penetrating the trees; now it brought down with it the aggregate from the leaves. A sound of falling water on the face below him changed to a steady pour. He had been thinking of nothing; getting to his feet, he discovered a ravenous hunger. After one or two false starts, he got to the cart-track which traversed the upper level of the woods; it led up to a farm, where they had once given him and Ellen tea.

He had not spent much thought on his appearance till the farmer’s wife, looking terrified, tried to shut the door in his face. He pulled himself together in time to call something out to her; she peered again, and let him in. Dripping beside the kitchen range he followed her mild slow gaze to the rent in his trouser-knee through which a raw graze showed, the earth-patches on his shirt dissolved to mud, the bloodied handkerchief wrapped round his hand. She lent him her dead father’s dressing-gown (he had been bed-ridden, she confided, for ten years before he was taken; the stuff smelled of old sickness and camphorballs) while she dried his clothes and dog-stitched the tear. Her husband, a huge, clean, softly moving man with deep Devon eyes, offered the awkward sympathy of the sane toward afflicted aberration, there had been a lad once fallen thereabouts, a wild-like sort of a lad, birds’-nesting they reckoned he must have been. As soon as they had got a fire going in the parlour they put Neil in there; he did not deprecate this, guessing that in the kitchen he was in their way. At a round mahogany table he ate fried bacon and chitterlings and drank mugs of thick dark tea. The fire of dry logs crackled, spurted and grew incandescent at the heart. His meal finished, he sat, his chin propped on his good hand, staring across the table at the flames.

A moment of reality, he thought, shows us how far we are straggled from our roots; exposing the false sensibility, thin efflorescence of talk and print, which presents the clumsy griefs we inflict on one another as wounds without cure. In the spirit, as in the flesh, the principle of life runs deeper; we leave it untapped, fidgeting with the surface of our self-esteem. Not in search of death, but of life, he had gone to the rock; to be measured in seconds perhaps, perhaps to be bought with death as soon as realised; life, and reality, none the less. Not for appeasement, or compensation, or forgetfulness, he had turned to a woman almost a stranger, and, after an acquaintance of days, sought a responsibility which might well have daunted him after a year. Desire, a condition inevitable but secondary, had fogged the issue. Her need, her conflict, her trapped and muted life, had drawn him like an unclimbed face which promises difficulty and exposure increasing at every pitch; but at the summit the realisation of oneself and of the mountain, union and release, a sky whose spaces humble, but no longer humiliate or appal.

He had chosen his climb and slipped at the crux of it, through impatience and bad judgement and blindness to the weather-signs; and, in a stupid artificially civilised negativism, had accepted the end. Now, illuminated by their physical counterparts, the shock of falling, the lacerations given and received, took their proportion against the central impulse, like the torn hand on which, at the imperative moment scarcely feeling its injury, he had raised his weight and climbed. The skin would be scarred, perhaps, but he would climb on it again. He had not the arrogance, nor the defeatism, to assume in her a vitality less than his own.

When he left the farm, he had a good deal of difficulty in persuading them to let him pay for his meal; they clearly thought him one of those helpless irresponsibles for whose protection cities exist, and were ashamed to exploit him.

While he ate, the storm had passed the zenith; its spent thunder was trundling to the east, the wind had steadied under its burden of rain. Soon he was soaked again; but he had started warm and fed, and he went briskly. His hand, however, was beginning to smart and throb; finding it burned more when it hung downward, he walked with it pushed into the front of his shirt.

It was just after ten when he reached Wier View. There were lights in the upper windows (Ellen’s, which faced away, he could not see) and one in the hall. He wished there were a separate way into the tower. He was getting tired; the thought of all the women clucking over his tatterdemalion entrance exhausted him in advance; they might say something to Ellen, besides. A car had just driven away from the door; he hung about for a minute or two before letting himself in quietly.

He had not, however, left it long enough. The nurse was at the hall-stand mirror, tidying her hair. She had not seen him; he half thought of going out again. The hall light seemed strong after the wet darkness. He had a moment’s fresh and detached view of her; her profile looked jaunty and dubious, resolute over a quelled dejection. He took a step backward, his hand on the door.

Too late; she had turned. To his unexpected relief, she did not gape. After her first start, she surveyed him carefully, as if he were something not much put of the way, but needing classification.

“Well, Mr Langton, what happened to
you?
I suppose you fell down one of those cliffs?”

A sudden, relaxed comfort crept over him. He had felt the same when at eight years old he had returned from some silly exploit, triumphant but a little shaky at the knees, to his mother’s resigned crossness and kind hands.

He said, meekly, “Not all the way.”

“I should hope not indeed. A good job I didn’t stay out any later. How much blood have you lost?”

“Only what’s here.” He held it out. She exclaimed, not in horror but in disapproval and disgust.

“Don’t tell me you’ve had that horrible dirty rag next to it all this time!”

“It was a handkerchief once,” he apologised. “I didn’t have anything else with me.”

“You ought to carry proper first aid, doing that sort of thing. Never mind, let’s get it cleaned up and have a look.”

Upstairs, Ellen’s door hung emptily open; no one was about. She took him to the bathroom, fetched a handful of paraphernalia, and ran the tap. “No, don’t pull it, it’ll be stuck by now.” When the handkerchief had been soaked off in warm water, she took him under the light and peered, silently, into the gritty, ragged-edged, ploughed-up wound. It made him feel rather sick himself.

“You’re in luck,” she remarked. “It’s missed the tendon all right!” He nearly said, “I know,” but this seemed presumptuous, so he refrained.

“I suppose, if you hadn’t run into someone, you’d have gone with all this muck ground into it all night. The way people ask for trouble! Now keep running the cold over it. I’ve got some tweezers boiling on the ring in my room.”

She fetched them and got to work. Setting his teeth silently, he felt thankful her attention was engaged. Without looking round as she poked and probed, she said, “I
know
it hurts. You’re being ever so good.”

Lulled by her cosy realism, his pride succumbed without a struggle: next time he felt like drawing a sharp breath he did so, and was much relieved.

“Now don’t watch this part, it’ll set your teeth on edge.” He looked obediently at the wall while she snipped off the loose skin. “There. That’s all the nasty part finished. It just goes to show—I never go on holiday without some flavine cream. Keep it in my spongebag; the mess it makes if it leaks you’d never believe.” A slimy emulsion of a violent orange went on to the lint; its first contact brought smoothness and ease. She padded it over with wool and wound on a firm intricate bandage. “Well,” she remarked, “that ought to keep
you
quiet for a bit. Would you like a couple of tablets, just to sleep on tonight?”

“No,” he said quickly; and then, “No, thanks, it’s very good of you, but I always sleep.”

“One of the independent ones, aren’t you? Now don’t forget …” And she gave him a number of instructions which, for quite five minutes afterwards, he remembered to the letter. “And I wouldn’t waste time getting to bed; you look all in, and who’d wonder. Have you had a meal?”

He explained that he had, and started to thank her. She was cleaning the blood from the basin with a swab of clean wool; his handkerchief, rinsed already, hung on the edge. A silly headband, earrings, the forgotten trappings of coquetry, framed her plain preoccupied face as she cleaned, scrupulously, round the base of one of the taps. He had been much at strain today: suddenly he had to swallow, his pretty speech stuck in the midst of a phrase. “Goodnight,” he said, “and God bless you.” He thought she turned as he got to the door; but he was feeling embarrassed, and did not look round. As he went, it occurred to him that he could still not remember her name.

In the corridor, Miss Searle passed him in her dressing-gown. She gave one glance, and went by with rigidly averted face. It was odd, he thought, that in these all-concealing garments women should feel undressed.

The rain was finished. He lay for a long time with the door open, watching the stars skim between still-seeming clouds in the washed sky. The drowsiness he had felt by the farmhouse fire had left him. He ought to take some medinal, he supposed; he had had none for a week now, so that would be all right. He would need to be clear in the head tomorrow; before he considered what to say to Ellen, it would need some resource merely to get a word with her alone. Should he write a note, perhaps, and leave it under her door early? If so what should he write? He could think of nothing. A slow, blank certainty possessed him that there was nothing. He could apologise, retract, explain for himself; it would be decent, but unmeaning. He could not retract on her behalf the position into which he had forced her. She herself might not be able to retract it; it had become, perhaps, unalterably true.

As he faced this possibility, memory suddenly presented him with the picture, two hours old now, of her open door. A new thought, insanely overlooked till this moment, struck him with a force that jerked him up sitting on the bed. She might have gone already. She might never have returned.

He remembered the morning after the Phillips episode; her bathe on the wickedly unsafe beach, her stupid climb (he was hardly the one to reproach her with that). Vainly he tried to remember if he had seen anything inside the room; clothes on a chair, a pair of shoes. The light had been off; he had seen nothing. He argued with himself: if she were gone he would be helpless till morning; it would be far better not to find out. All this was useless. He had to know.

Everyone made some degree of sound in sleeping; he need only open the door a crack, listen a moment, and go. His footsteps in the passage, if anyone heard him, could be simply accounted for by walking on to the lavatory further down.

He paused on the roof steps, his dressing-gown tugged by the cool wind, looking at the sliding stars and thinking that when he came back they would be different for him, but in themselves the same.

The passage was close after the roof, very dark, and tinged with soapy, powdery female smells, all foreign to his remembrance. He found the door. It was shut. Anyone might have shut it. He could hear nothing through it, but, with instant conviction, knew that she was there. With this knowledge came the realisation that to open it was out of the question. He imagined her waking; her horrified, tense indrawn breath; his own attempts at explanation sounding more sordid with each fresh start. When he had gone he would question his certainty of her presence, and have no peace; but that couldn’t be helped.

He was turning away when something arrested him; he came back, and listened again. He had not been mistaken. It was a thin, exhausted sound, like a reflex which is wearily resisted; it must have worn itself almost out, and would shortly cease. All his thinking came to a standstill. He opened the door, and went in.