The Fall (53 page)

In the narrow seat beside me, Ruth stiffened. Her hand gripped mine.

“Death would have resulted from any one of these traumas,” the pathologist observed, as though inviting us to take our pick.

Then there was a pause and a shuffling of the cast and the offering of various testimonies: one of the mountain rescue team
and one of the walkers who had been witness to the whole thing, a schoolmasterly type with balding head and tweed jacket,
the kind of guy you’d find in the Pen-y-Gwryd Hotel reminiscing about Hillary and Tenzing. “He had no ropes,” this man said.
“Nothing at all. And then he just came off.”

“Did you see Mr. Matthewson begin this climb?”

“Not really, no. We noticed him when he was some way up. One of my group said the climb was called the Master’s Wall, one
of these extreme —”

The coroner peered over his spectacles at the mountain rescue man where he sat in the audience. “Is that correct? The Master’s
Wall?”

The rescue man half stood, feeling awkward at being called out of turn, as though the ritual was being disturbed. “I believe
it was the Great Wall. A different route, a little to the left. The Master’s Wall is considerably harder.”

“There are
harder
climbs than this one?” the coroner asked. “Is this wall not vertical and holdless?” The elaborate negative was a fine touch.
There followed a discussion over the terms
vertical
and
holdless,
as though these were conceptual and philosophical rather than purely physical. “The Master’s Wall is graded E7,” the mountain
rescue man explained. “Great Wall is E4.”

“E7, E4? They sound like food additives.” A mutter of amusement sounded around the room. Even Ruth smiled.

“E stands for Extremely Severe. Once upon a time it used to be called XS. E
7
is high in the class. Great Wall is E4; considerably more straightforward.”

“Easier?”

“None of these climbs are easy. To a nonclimber they would seem impossible.”

“To you?”

The rescue man smiled wryly. “They are all beyond me.”

“Then perhaps
excess
is the correct way to describe them?” the coroner suggested.

“Well, they can be protected,” the rescue man said. He suddenly seemed to realize that climbing was under some sort of criticism.
“These days you can use special equipment to protect yourself against a fall.”

“Ropes, you mean?”

“Ropes and a whole lot of other things. Nuts, friends, lots of different protection gear. Climbing can be very safe.”

“But Mr. Matthewson is dead. It seems he lacked whatever you said.
Friends”.'

“Jim Matthewson wasn’t using any protection. He was climbing solo.”

“And would he have expected to climb at that standard without any such…”—the coroner glanced down at his notes — “protection?”

There was silence in the courtroom, a silence made all the more intense by the fact that it was not silent, that people strained
forward in their chairs, that reporters’ pens scratched at their notepads, that someone whispered something.

“I really don’t know. He was a very experienced climber. I believe he used to climb at that standard —”

“Used to?”

“I don’t really know what standard he would be expected to climb at now.”

“Mr. Matthewson was fifty-two years old.”

The rescue man shrugged. “Extreme climbing is a young man’s sport.”

Ruth leaned toward me. I felt her breath in my ear, the subtle intimacy of breath and memory: “Is this some kind of trial?”
she whispered. “Can’t they just sign the papers or whatever and let us go?”

But the coroner had called Dominic Lewis to give his view of events, and she had to turn back to the intricacies of the inquiry,
the small rituals, the barbed comments with their hidden poisons.

Lewis looked uneasy sitting up there by the coroner’s desk. He fidgeted and fiddled, he moved his knees as though ready, at
a moment’s notice, to dash out of the courtroom. A callow youth in the guise of a man. I wondered about what Jamie had said
to me about this young man and Ruth. She didn’t move as Lewis talked, just sat there staring straight ahead with her expression
set against the blizzard.

“I can’t really say much,” Lewis said. “I wasn’t a direct witness.”

“But you were a friend of Mr. Matthewson. And both his climbing and his business partner.”

“Yes, I was that.”

“So you can tell us whether his behavior was normal, the kind of thing you might expect of him?”

Lewis shrugged. “It’s the kind of thing I’d have done.”

“But you’re not Mr. Matthewson.”

“No.”

The coroner thought for a moment. “And have you done it, Mr. Lewis? Have you soloed the climb called Great Wall?”

Lewis sniffed. “As a matter of fact, yeah. Summer before last.”

“So you would consider it a normal thing to do?”

“For someone with the right ability, with a lot of psychological preparation.”

“Does that include Mr. Matthewson?”

“The other fellow just said it. Extreme climbing is a young man’s sport.”

“And Mr. Matthewson was not a young man.”

“It was above his standard. Quite frankly, for someone like him, it was suicidal.”

The word sounded loudly in the stuffy courtroom. Beside me, Ruth winced. Her nails dug into my hand. The coroner looked up
from what he had been writing. “To what standard did Mr. Matthewson climb?” he asked.

“Oh, extreme, yeah. E2, E
3
maybe, but roped. You know what I mean? Roped, not solo. HVS solo, maybe, but not Great Wall.”

“HVS?”

“Hard Very Severe.”

“But he tried Great Wall.”

“Yes.” Lewis shrugged. “Who knows why? I can’t explain it.”

The coroner pondered. The people in the audience shifted in their seats, uncertain where the inquiry was going. “The business
in which you and Mr. Matthewson were partners,” he said. He never made a mistake, never used the present tense when referring
to the dead man, never slipped on the treacherous slope of solecism. “The…ah…Matthewson Mountain Center. Has it been a success?”

“We’ve had our ups and downs. What business hasn’t?”

“But recently?”

“It’s okay. We’ve introduced a new line in plastic mountain boots, and there’s the guiding business. It’s been going all right.
I mean, everyone seems to want to climb Everest these days.”

The coroner nodded, looking at Lewis, glancing at Ruth sitting in the front row beside me. Abruptly he asked Lewis, “Do you
have any reason to think that Mr. Matthewson might have done this climb deliberately? I mean deliberately chosen to climb
something that he knew he would fail on?”

The fidgeting in the room stopped. There was traffic noise from outside. Ruth whispered something. It must have been “Oh my
God.” God came into it, of that much I was certain.

“I don’t get you,” Lewis said. “Jim take the chop deliberately? You’re joking.”

“I don’t think this is the place for jokes, Mr. Lewis.”

The court waited. Lewis flushed slightly. “No,” he said. “It would not have been in character for Jim to risk something like
that.”

“And you don’t see any grounds for his acting out of character on that occasion?”

“No. No, I don’t.”

The coroner nodded. He thanked Lewis for his testimony. He looked around the assembled company — the journalists, the climbers,
the curious public, and the incurious officials — and he decided that he had heard enough. “I commiserate with Mrs. Matthewson
for the stress that all this has brought to her at a time when doubtless she needs to be left with the comfort of those close
to her,” he said. And then he wrote something on a form in front of him. “I return a verdict of death by misadventure.”

Wasn’t it a foregone conclusion? What did anyone really expect? Jim Matthewson, climber, mountaineer, had come to the same
sticky end as so many of his kind. You die frozen on some Himalayan ridge, starved of oxygen, starved of warmth, or you die
in a crumpled mass of bone and muscle at the foot of some ridiculous lump of rock in the green and pleasant British countryside.
You could think of it as a terminal illness, climbing.

We walked out into a thin drizzle, and flashes fired like magnesium flares in our faces. Lewis and I had Ruth between us,
covered in a raincoat like the victim’s mother in a child abduction case. We hurried her through the small crowd and into
the refuge of my car. “I’ll get back to the Center, then,” Lewis said.

“You do that,” I told him. Ruth was weeping. Sitting in the passenger’s seat, she was weeping silently, tears streaking her
cheeks. She had made up that morning to look good in front of the cameras — she didn’t often wear makeup — and now that the stuff
was smearing her cheeks like dirt, she looked dreadful. I climbed in beside her and slammed the door shut. “You know what
he thought?” she whispered as we pulled away from the reporters and photographers. “He thought that Jamie might have done
it deliberately. Climbed a route he knew he couldn’t manage until he fell off. Suicide, that’s what he thought.”

The windshield wipers swept back and forth, clearing a space in the chaos of rain. “Why on earth would Jamie do a thing like
that?”

I glanced across and saw Ruth’s face set in pale stone. I knew. I knew it in my bones or however it is you know such things.
Guts. I felt it in my guts. How did people ever make the mistake of thinking that the heart is what rules the emotions, when
it is so obviously the guts? I suppose I should have felt angry on his behalf or something. Can you do that, feel emotion
for someone else?

We left the town and crossed over the bridge to the island. “He loved you, you know that?” she said.

“I know. We talked about it. That time we met in London. He seemed confused.”

She said nothing, just stared through the windshield at the familiar landscape. New highways were being built on the island
to take the extra tourist traffic, but we found the familiar road, winding between small fields. There was the sense that
you were climbing out of the villages, out of the settlements, up to the edge of something strange and wild. Nestled against
a hillside was the pub that her father had owned. Ruth made a small sound when the building came into sight — it may have been
a sigh, may have been a small ironic laugh.

“Who runs it now?” I asked.

“No idea. I think it belongs to one of the big breweries. There’s a manager, I think.”

Beyond the pub, up toward the cliffs, there was now a proper car park. A notice signed by the Countryside Council for Wales
explained what animals and plants you might see along the cliff path, species that you wouldn’t see any longer if you didn’t
respect the environment. There were pictures of puffins, guillemots, and razorbills.

After I had parked the car, Ruth sat still for a while as though gathering strength for the task to come. Then she reached
over the seat and lifted the container out of the back. It was an urn made of a heavy gray plastic that was designed to look
like ceramic. She held it with both hands, as though it was a great weight. “Come on, let’s get it over with.”

We left the car and went through a gate and along the cliff path. Over to our left, the sea was as dull as lead, stretching
away toward a pearly gray horizon. Gulls heaved their wings and cried at the sight of us, afraid that we would interfere with
their lives. There were flecks of drizzle in the air, but it was no longer raining as it had been inland. That had always
been one of the advantages of the place: often you could climb in sunshine when it was raining in the mountains.

The path was fenced in where it ran near the edge. A sign issued its statutory warning:
DANGEROUS CLIFFS.
“Ruth, be careful,” I called out. “The grass is wet.” But she had already climbed the fence and was walking down the slope
on inadequate town shoes.

Panic welled up inside me. “Ruth! Be careful!” What did I think? That she might throw herself off? But she just stood as though
she had not heard me, as though she had not registered the anxiety in my voice. I slithered down to her and took her elbow.
“I can’t think of anything to say,” she murmured, more to herself than out loud to me. “A poem or a prayer or something. I
should say something.”

Abruptly she opened the lid, inverted the urn, and shook the contents out into the air. There seemed to be a great deal of
the stuff, a cloud of white and gray, a ghostly presence above the cliff, dispersing quickly into the breeze. “Oh God, how
awful,” I heard her cry. The grass at her feet was smudged with gray. She replaced the lid and turned to me, weeping, the
tears running down her cheeks like rain, her small body shaken by sobs. I held her against me.

“Do you remember that first climb?” she said when she had calmed down. “Here. Do you remember?”

“Of course I do.”

She nodded, as though the fact of remembering was good enough. “I don’t think we did very well by him, did we?”

I didn’t reply. I didn’t think it was the kind of comment that required a reply, and anyway a full reply would have taken
too long. I held her steady, and together we climbed back up the slope to the path. Holding each other’s hands tightly, we
walked away from the cliffs toward the car park. “Will you be going back home, Rob?”