North Face (5 page)

“Nice evening, isn’t it? I hope I didn’t disturb you.”

“Not at all,” said Miss Searle. She was aware that she had given a startled little jump, and felt the half-conscious resentment of people surprised in what they have believed to be solitude, a resentment so much deeper than vanity that its origins are probably to be found in the jungle and the cave. However, this was the first voluntary approach that Mr Langton had made to anyone since his arrival three days ago. She smiled, and wished she had not ignored a vague prompting to tidy herself before tea.

“You’ve been very fortunate with the weather today.”

“Yes. Very.” His tone was flat: she took it as a comment on her triteness (he was, she thought, that kind of man) and it annoyed her; she was sensitive to criticism of this kind. Still, if he were bored there was no need for him to sit down, as he was doing, in the chair left by Miss Fisher a few minutes before. She decided, since he was so contemptuous of one’s conversational gambits, to leave the next to him. This resulted in a perceptible pause.

Neil was in fact racking his brains. Their common ground was, obviously, shop; but this must lead either to personal details, or to the acute awkwardness of refusing them. In desperation, he began a long and detailed account of his day’s walking. As scarcely any of his reactions to what he had seen were repeatable, the effect was a little colourless. Miss Searle, however, perceived in it a willing spirit. She asked him whether he had yet visited the Doone Valley. He had; they agreed that Blackmore had grossly romanticised this not very impressive coombe. At the back of her mind was the thought that Miss Fisher, when she went indoors, had said she would be back in a few minutes, and that Mr Langton was occupying her chair. One could hardly tell him so with civility, and no doubt if she came out he would vacate it. It was, of course, also possible that she would see him from indoors and stay away.

“But of course,” she said, “this part of the country is soaked in literature. Not only
Lorna Doone,
but
Kubla Khan.”

“Yes,” said Neil absently, “I’ve been there too.”

“I beg your pardon? Oh, you mean to Coleridge’s cottage, of course.”

Hastily closing a door which he had not meant to open, Neil accepted the correction. To forestall further details (since he had never seen the building and did not know where it was) he talked on quickly. “I don’t know whether you feel as sorry as I do for the Person from Porlock. It’s a little hard, after all, to make an innocent call on legitimate business, and find you’ve walked into immortal infamy along with the lunatic who smashed the Portland Vase.”

“I’m afraid I’ve shared in the injustice,” said Miss Searle smiling. “It’s the kind of story children and students can be relied on to remember.”

“Yes. And they don’t stop to think that if Coleridge hadn’t rotted his will-power with opium besides giving himself spectacular dreams, he’d just have locked himself in and finished the job.” As soon as he had said it, he reflected that denunciations of this kind are characteristic of men who distrust their own strength.

Miss Searle’s experience of men, though necessarily wide, was not deep. It had been conditioned (like much of her other experience) by the fact that she had been a very plain child, and had been encouraged to over-compensate for it by prowess at school. Since then the plainness had lessened a good deal; but she had got used to the idea of it, and sought no other remedy. So, now, she did not perceive, through Neil’s overemphasis, the underlying sense of failure. She took it at face-value, as an arrogant statement of virility; and somewhere within her a romantic schoolgirl, whom no one had encouraged to grow up, thrilled with admiration. The adult part of her reacted promptly with feminism.

“When people point out—quite truly, of course—that all the great masterpieces are the work of men, one can’t help wondering what might have happened, if women who resented trivial interruptions weren’t regarded as a species of monster.”

Neil found he had still the capacity to be irritated by this kind of thing. During term-time, there had not been one clear hour in twelve when he could call his study his own; by comparison, this woman’s life must have been a cloistral peace. But he was not sure how his temper would behave in argument; and, besides, he remembered in time that as he hadn’t produced a masterpiece, he could be held to support her point. Still, he did not feel like conceding it tamely.

“There’s a good deal of force in what you say. But would you be hurt if I suggested that even with favourable conditions, women have—well, a natural tendency to diffuse their energies? Even within the subject itself, I mean?” Becoming momentarily interested, he was about to make the physiological analogy, but remembered in time that it would shock her to death.

Not since she was twenty-five (and far too nervous to take advantage of it) had Miss Searle felt her essential femininity thus underlined and appealed to. Neil had been anxious not to undermine his own confidence by impatience or rudeness; he had imposed on his naturally firm voice a careful courtesy and, unconsciously, something approaching charm. While Miss Searle’s intellect sought a telling rejoinder, her cheeks became faintly pink, and her frame underwent an indefinable softening of its angles. A few minutes ago one would have described her as a thin woman: now, the spontaneous word would be slim.

“I’m afraid I do know what you mean. The trickle of print meandering over huge boulders of footnote.” His face was quite transformed when he smiled. She went on with decision, “But I refuse to take that as typical. Think, for example—”

Neil thought, obediently, of her examples. Having asserted himself to his satisfaction, he continued to say anything which would keep the conversation pleasant, and a going concern. He was enjoying it as people who have been some time in bed enjoy a first walk in the air, attaching little importance to the destination. Miss Searle thought him delightfully reasonable, even generous, in discussion, and reflected on the folly of judging by first impressions.

Neil, meanwhile, was forming an inward picture of Miss Searle as an undergraduate: the busy bicycle, its basket sagging with note-books, shuttling from lecture to lecture; the leather jacket and tweed skirt which, in his day and no doubt hers, had been almost a uniform; the glasses which were lying now on the open book on her knee. He could have sworn to the exact place where a wispy bun would have bulged the black quadrangular cap, and to the kind of jug in which she would have brewed cocoa at ten-thirty. He felt a sudden sympathy for all her sisterhood about whom he and his friends had made the standard jokes; he could not find in himself, now, the Olympian perspective of twenty-one. Aware at this point that he had been gazing at her in silence for much longer than convention allowed, he sought for something to say, and bridged the interval with a smile.

The external part of all this, as it reached Miss Searle, added up to a long, intimate look of understanding. When he started to talk again, she found that she had lost the thread twice, and had to concentrate urgently in order to have a reply ready in time.

The conversation lasted another five minutes. Then, with what in such weather always seems startling abruptness, a bank of evening cloud swallowed the sun. Everywhere—in the bricks of the house which had seemed to reflect warmth along with the light, in the grass and the ragged late flowers—the golds changed to a tired sullen grey. The sea, lying lowest and extinguished first, looked like cold lead; the breeze, which had ingratiated itself till now, like Jove to Danae, with a seductive glitter, began to strike chill. Neil’s nerves, which had recently been nearer to breakdown than he chose to recognise, made him vulnerable to such transitions. He found himself emptied of his unreal animation, as suddenly as a tilted glass. The woman in the chair beside him had shared in the sea change; her pale-grey eyes no longer looked blue, her neutral-tinted hair had lost a gleam of gold. Everything had dissolved into a uniform flatness. Helplessly void of resource, he wondered whatever they had found all this while to talk about. At least he had done what he had set himself to do, and could decently make his excuses now. He did so, and went indoors.

Miss Searle remained for some minutes longer. It was really a very pleasant garden, not over-trimmed as it would certainly have been with labour available. She must come here another day.

Miss Fisher, meanwhile, had decided to change a little earlier this evening, and had done so with some care. It took her twenty minutes; considering, indecisively, a return to the garden, she saw that her deckchair was no longer available, and retired to the Lounge. It was empty. She did not feel in the mood for knitting, and had nothing to read. Her library book was finished; she had concealed this fact from Miss Searle, who had already pressed upon her, once, an old-fashioned novel as long as
Gone with the Wind,
but much more difficult to get into. Now, glimpsing from the bay window Neil Langton’s face lit for the first time with an impersonal kind of enjoyment, she wished she had taken the offer after all. She could have skipped the first few chapters, and there was no doubt that a good book did make something to talk about. The chance was gone, however; and, without wasting time in fruitless regret, she went to the sofa and began turning over the cushions. She had noticed, the evening before, that this was where Miss Lettice Winter put her copy of
No Orchids for Miss Blandish
when her mother came into the room. Miss Fisher had heard interesting accounts of it, and it might still be there.

The cushions concealed nothing but the art-damask upholstery of the sofa which missed their shade (something between puce and rust) by several tones. Footsteps in the hall informed her that her chair outside was again at her disposal; she half thought of going out, but she and Miss Searle had come this evening to the end of their conversation, and, though it was possible Miss Searle had been supplied with fresh material in the meantime, Miss Fisher felt no pressing wish to hear it. She sat down with a cigarette on the sofa. The seat, subsiding under her weight, presented her with a smaller book which had half slid into the crack at the other end. It did not look promising; indeed, she wondered at first if she could have dropped it herself. It was an obvious technical handbook with rounded corners to fit a pocket, had a brown paper cover, and generally resembled a work known briefly to nurses as
Honor Morton;
but it was not Miss Fisher’s habit to take her
Morton
on holiday with her, nor was its cover nearly as dirty as this. She opened it at random, her habituated eye still expecting something like “
GALL BLADDER
: A reservoir attached to the Common Bile Duct.” What she read, however, was: “(4) Ascend the sixth pitch of Route I to the ledge and small belay immediately above the top mantelshelf.” She blinked for some time at this cabalistic formula before trying another page. Here the subject was somewhat clarified by a passage beginning: “265 feet. Very severe and exposed. For an expert party only and in dry weather.”

The fly-leaf, to which she now turned without delay, bore the erased name of a man unknown to her, and, below it, “
N.W.L
. from
S.R
., Hadrian’s Wall, 23.4.30.” There were also dim traces of a limerick, which had been rubbed out but retained the indentations of the pencil; she studied these hopefully in various lights, but (since the language was dog-latin) without reward.

Miss Fisher gazed for some minutes, fascinated, at this mysteriously masculine trophy, before settling down in earnest to read it. Mainly incomprehensible to her as it was, the terseness of its factual detail pleased her. Her mental picture of climbing had comprised, till now, a line of alpinists strung together on a glacier. On one page she found a passage starred, and a note in the margin, “Hand traverse variation.” Below the note, very finely drawn, was a little diagram. She was still trying to make something of this when the door opened and Neil Langton came in.

Before she had time to think, she had made an instinctive movement to stuff back the book where she had found it. Suppressing this, since it was too late, she said politely, “I expect you’re looking for this, aren’t you? I do hope you’ll excuse me taking a glance at it.”

“Of course,” said Neil with awkward civility. He had been relieved for a moment to find he hadn’t lost it out of doors; but, immediately after, he had recognised with disgust his own lack of surprise. At the back of his mind, he must have known where he had had it last. It had never been a habit of his to lose things, in particular things like this. One did not need very much psychology to trace this kind of amnesia to its source. Why, for that matter, had he been carrying it about with him at all? It was bad enough that he should have felt the need to dig up this reinforcement from the past. It was unspeakable that his subconscious should have contrived somehow to plant it here, in the seat occupied every evening by that predatory little blonde. From their first moment of impact he had felt his revulsion to be psychopathic: he had had no wish to repeat the sensation, and for the last two days had had breakfast early, and dinner out, in order to avoid her. That this relatively harmless woman should have found the thing was embarrassment enough.

“I’m afraid,” he said, “the
F.R.C.C
. guides don’t make very imaginative reading. Are you stranded without a book? I’ve got some odd weeklies upstairs. Just a moment, I’ll see what there is.”

He unearthed the salvage of his journey, and brought it down. Miss Fisher found it nearly as intimidating as the book she had declined, tactfully, from Miss Searle; but perhaps boredom had made her less exigent, for it failed to depress her.

“These will see me right through tomorrow. They’ll make a nice change; you get a bit sick of all this happy-ever-after stuff. Not a bit true to life, really, is it?”

“I wouldn’t know. They’ll be a bit less arid going than the Guide, anyway. D’you mind if I take it with me, before I forget?”

“Yes, do, of course,” said Miss Fisher, keeping it, however, in her hand and turning a page or two. “But I thought it was rather fascinating, in a way. All worked out step by step; almost like surgery, really. Of course bits of it are rather puzzling if you haven’t the experience. All that I mean about not getting caught in the rain. I suppose, high up like that, you catch cold more easily?”