The Fall (46 page)

I didn’t want to. After they had gone, an English television camera crew came into my room. They peered at me through a blank,
black lens and asked fatuous questions about fear and death. The journalist held out the carrot of a documentary film that
might involve some climbing.

“I really couldn’t give a fuck about a climbing film,” I told him. “God knows whether I’ll be able to climb again. God knows
whether I’ll want to.”

“Your mate is interested,” the man said.

“I’ll bet he is.”

It was some time after they had gone that the phone beside my bed burbled. Or maybe it was the next day. Or the next. Time
had little meaning in the context of that sterile prison cell. I reached over for the receiver, and a distant voice sounded
in my ear: “Christ, I’ve had trouble getting hold of you,” it said. “Are you there? How are you? You’ve been all over the
papers, you know.”

The ridiculous thing was that I wept. I wept just to hear her voice.

“Are you there, Rob? Christ, has the bloody line gone? Robert, are you
there?”

“I’m here,” I said. “I’m all right, more or less.”

“And Jamie? Is he there? And Ruth?”

“I think they’ve gone home.”

“I’ll bet they have. When are they going to let you out?”

“I don’t know yet. Frostbite. I might lose toes.” I laughed bitterly: “Nothing disfiguring, except when I take my clothes
off.”

She laughed on the far end of the line, in London where I wanted to be. “Don’t worry about that. By that stage it’s usually
too late.” I loved the sound of her voice, even through the constricting wires of the telephone. I never realized until that
moment how much I loved the sound. It had a roughness to it, as though she had borrowed it from an old drunk.

“Eve,” I whispered. “Eve?”

“What’s happened? Can’t you speak up a bit? Christ, these bloody phone lines…”

“Eve, I love you,” I said.

There was a pause. “We’ll see about that later,” she said eventually. “For the moment…” She stalled. Or the line went or something.

“Eve?”

“Just get better,” she said. “For the moment, just get better. Then we’ll see.”

After that she rang once or twice a week. I suppose she was calling from her parents’ house. She wasn’t so stupid as to run
up her own phone bill on international calls.

I recall those hospital days as a kind of purgatory, underwritten with nagging pain and watched over by indifferent demons.
Over and over again I climbed that final pitch. I climbed it in my thoughts and in my dreams. Perhaps I was trying to purge
it from memory, but remembering it only stored it in there, engraved it into the circuits of recall so that I could no longer
tell the experience from the remembering, the facts of waking from the fantasies of dream. Sometimes I fell under the cold
deluge of snow crystals; sometimes Jamie pulled on the rope and it was he who brought me down rather than the avalanche, a
Jamie who laughed as I plummeted, a Jamie who was Ruth, who was Caroline, who was one thing and the other, male and female,
friend and foe.

“You’ll just have to be patient,” the medics told me when I asked how long I would be stuck there. Time was the great healer,
they assured me: time to reestablish the circulation and reduce the edema, time to recover lost tissue. “I am much afraid
that you need patience,” they told me.

I don’t think patience is much of a virtue. For most virtues you have to do something, but for patience you only need to wait.
I waited six weeks before they agreed that I could go, and even then I was confined to a wheelchair like a geriatric case.
They shuttled me through the airport on an electric golf cart and, despite my insistence that I could manage by myself, hoisted
me up into the aircraft on a lift.

Waiting for me at the door was a blond stewardess, as plastic as the food they served. “Did you do it skiing?” she asked as
they maneuvered me in.

“Not exactly. Actually, I fell off the North Face of the Eiger.”

She laughed. She thought I was joking.

The flight took a couple of hours, and we flew high above any mountains, and at the other end, at Heathrow Airport, among
the waiting relatives and the tourists returning from the Maldives and the Seychelles, Eve was waiting.

They made the film later that summer on the Pendragon cliff, with a couple of cameramen hanging on ropes and Jamie drifting
up the route in that derisory manner of his and talking climbing at the same time. He even paused at the crux to light a cigarette.
“The man who challenged and surmounted the Eiger’s dreaded North Face now takes on a different challenge,” the voice-over
said.

“Did you see it?” people asked. “Did you see Jim on Pen-dragon?”

Yes, I saw it. I was sitting in the wheelchair once more, back in hospital after having three toes amputated from my left
foot. I saw it all right. Eve was with me, watching the film with a tense expression, her lips tightly pursed, as though she
found it offensive and if it continued like this, she was going to write to her member of Parliament about it.

She was there a lot in those days. She had an appealing matter-of-factness about her. She was unfazed by the sight of the
two ruined, discolored toes that were all that remained on my left foot. She even seemed happy about things, content with
my anger and my bitterness. She helped me up with the crutches, pushed me around the corridors of the hospital in the wheelchair,
and brought me books to read, things to do — cards, jigsaw puzzles, a silly game with blocks of wood that you had to build into
the tallest possible tower. We played that game against each other for hours. The person who collapsed the tower was the loser.
“Rather like climbing,” Eve remarked dryly. “You don’t really have winners, just losers.”

Jamie dropped in just once to see me. The pressure of work, he said in excuse. He was full of the television climb. “They’re
talking bigger things. An alpine route, perhaps. Or even something in South America. And there’s this international expedition
to do the Southwest Face of Everest. They want me to go along. I reckon this is it, youth. This could be the breakthrough.”

“How’s Ruth?” I asked.

Ruth was fine. She sent her love. Something told me that all was not well between the two of them.

“She might have come to see me.”

He nodded. He was looking at me carefully, as though weighing up my possible reaction to what he might say. What would it
be? Was it that they were no longer together? Was that it? But when he did speak, it was just anodyne, something about being
sorry, sorry about how it had panned out, sorry about the foot, sorry about everything.

“It’s not your fault, Jamie.”

“Maybe not. But it’s bloody awful luck, the whole thing. Still, you’ll soon be back to normal.”

“The doctors say…”

“What do they say?”

I shrugged. What did I care any longer? “The circulation will never fully recover. Apparently it never really does. It’ll
always give me problems, always be sensitive to cold. That kind of thing.”

He looked concerned. “It’s tough, isn’t it?”

Was it? I couldn’t separate what had happened from what I wanted, that was the problem. I wouldn’t be able to climb again,
not properly; on the other hand, I didn’t really want to climb, not any longer. The fall had driven something out of me. I’d
lost my sense of invulnerability, I suppose. And when you lose that, something else always takes its place: a disturbing sense
of your own mortality.

So Jamie went away — to be a star, to be a hero, to be what his father had been — while I remained with Eve. She appeared happy
to be with me when it didn’t seem that I was really worth being with at all. I had no work, no degree, no toes worth the name
on one foot, and no desire to follow the only thing that I seemed to have any talent for, which was the idiotic pursuit of
picking out the most difficult line up a piece of cliff and then climbing it. And there Eve was, showing some kind of devotion
when all around were losing theirs and blaming it on me. So I moved into her flat when I was discharged from hospital. She
was working for some left-wing magazine at the time. She was always working for a cause, always with the hard edge of cynicism
about her, always with a deep-seated sense of real conviction. In those days it was the Vietnam War and the campaign for nuclear
disarmament; later it would be ecology and animal rights and anti-fox hunting. Maybe I became just one of her causes.

“Of course, I could always go back home. My mother wants me to.”

“And run a guest house?”

“Private hotel,” I corrected her.

“You’d be mad. I can just see you by the time you’re forty — fat and greasy and boring all the guests in the bar with stories
of how you used to climb, how you were almost a hero —”

“There’s no bar. We don’t have a license for a bar.”

“You’d soon get one. If I’m really going to save you, you’ve got to get a job here in London. But what can a guy like you
do? Other than fuck his best friend’s mother, I mean.” I remember the glare of her eyes, the kind of blue that you see painted
on water taps to show which one is cold. “Don’t pretend,” she said. “I know perfectly well. Okay. She was probably a good
lay — I’m certain she’s had enough practice — but that kind of thing stops now, do you understand?”

“Or?”

“Or I do.” She smiled. It was a smile entirely without humor.

“Look, my father’s got a friend who may be able to help you with a job…” She said
father.
If she’d said
daddy,
I’d probably have told her to get lost. “It might be up your street…”

So I went for an interview.
Went
sounds as though there was speed and efficiency about it. I hobbled around, took a taxi, and hobbled out of the cab and into
the place that had once been a warehouse down the far end of King’s Road. Nowadays it said
PORTEUS FINE ART
over the doorway, and the high, mean windows had been replaced by plateglass that gave the passerby a privileged sight of
expensive white space and large abstract canvases. As we went in, a girl in a short geometric dress — something by Courrèges,
no doubt — and cropped hair and ridiculous false eyelashes, clipped across the parquet flooring toward us.

“I have an appointment with Mr. Porteus,” I said.

“Then you must be Mr. Dewar.” She pronounced it
Due-are.
She was that kind of girl. “Would you walk this way please?” she asked.

Eve said it. I thought it, or something like it, but Eve said it: “If he could walk that way, he wouldn’t need toes,” she
said.

London 1945