The Fall (54 page)

“Yes, of course.”

“Give Eve my love. She never liked me, did she? But give her my love just the same.”

“Of course I will.”

“And your mother,” she added as we climbed into the car. “You must give her my love too. I liked your mother.”

“You only met her that one time.”

“But I got to know her well. So give her my love.”

“She doesn’t always remember, but I’ll try.”

“Try your best.” She sat there in the passenger seat staring ahead through the windshield. There was something in her expression
that made me wait, some quality of uncertainty or expectancy.

“Shall we go?” I asked, with my hand on the ignition key.

She took a deep breath, then exhaled slowly. “There’s this,” she said. She reached inside her jacket and took out an airmail
envelope. “I found it yesterday among his things.” It was battered and crumpled, and the flap was carefully slit open. For
a moment I thought she had found the very thing that the coroner had been hinting at, a suicide note or something like it,
but somehow it seemed too old to have been anything that Jamie might have just written. I took it from her and turned it over
to see how it was addressed. To Ruth, I assumed. Or to Caroline, perhaps. Or maybe even to me.

There was no address, just the name written in smudged ballpoint pen:
Mrs. Diana Dewar.

“What the hell’s this? This is my
mother,
for God’s sake.”

“Have a look,” Ruth said.

I pulled out two sheets of flimsy airmail paper. There was no sender address. The first line was simply
Camp 4—23,000 feet, 15th April.
And then,
Diana darling.

They talk about your heart stopping. It’s a cliché, but like all clichés it is grounded in experience. My heart stopped — seemed
to stop, really stopped? I don’t know. I felt a moment’s suspension of time and emotion, a moment’s void that was filled abruptly
with a hurrying beat and something akin to anger. “What in God’s name
is
this?” I asked.

She shook her head helplessly. “I told you. I found it when I was going through his things. I didn’t really know what to do
with it, Rob. Perhaps I should have just torn it up.”

I glanced over the writing and turned the page. The script ran halfway down the second page and ended with the looped signature:
Guy.

“What is it?” My mind stumbled clumsily over the words. I felt a kind of panic, a feeling that things were running out of
control. Like falling. “I mean, what’s this all about?”

Guy.
A letter from the grave. It had been found on his body, of course. I measured the time, in decades — two? three? Who had opened
it? Jamie, of course. But when? I tried to read the words, but it was difficult. My eyes had lost their focus; so had my mind.
I looked across at Ruth and saw nothing but anguish there, no help and no comfort. I looked back at the pages of writing,
and I understood only that I had understood nothing — nothing about my mother, nothing about Jamie and Caroline, nothing about
me. Nothing about who I was or who I might have been.

I
T WAS ONE OF
those climbing hotels: all low beams and wood paneling and an open log fire that was often burning well into spring. Sometimes
they even had it lit during the summer. She sat over by the window, nursing a half pint of beer and feeling rather self-conscious
because these places were still male-dominated even though things had changed in that way since the war. There had been women
heroes in the forces, women in the ambulances, women fighting in the occupied countries, women keeping the factories going.
Fat lot that mattered now, mind, what with rationing still going on and unemployment so high and the Labour Government, which
everyone had put so much faith in, having such a difficult time. Somehow she couldn’t bear the thought of Churchill getting
back into power. It felt like taking a step backward into the Blitz.

She sipped her beer and took a bite of her sandwich — Spam, of course — and glanced out of the window: a slope of grass and heather
slanting up into the cloud, gray rocks like tombstones.

Rain flecked the glass. The clouds were sagging with water, like a ceiling when the bath upstairs has overflowed. Will there
be a sudden rupture? she wondered. The simile made her smile.

“Diana? Diana Sheridan?”

She looked around. Momentarily her eyes were dazzled from looking at the approximate daylight outside: she saw just a shape
standing over her, a silhouette.

“Yes, I —”

“It’s Guy.”

Panic, or something very near panic. Panic’s little sister. As a girl she used to drink Peardrax and think herself ever so
grown up.
Cider’s little sister,
it was called. She looked past him toward the group at the bar, toward a shifting haze of cigarette smoke. “Oh, goodness…”

“Do you mind…”

“What?”

He laughed softly. The sound of that laughter — faintly mocking, slightly self-deprecating — was so familiar. “I just wondered
if I might join you for a moment…”

Panic. Sweat on her forehead and breaking out in her armpits. She tried to smile at the shadow. “Yes.”

Another little breath of amusement. “Yes, you do, or yes, I may?”

“I’m sorry?” Was he laughing at her?

“Yes, you do mind, or yes, I may sit down?”

“Oh goodness, yes, of course. Sit down. I’m sorry. You gave me quite a…” What did he give her? Quite a shock? Quite a surprise?
Quite a turn? whatever that meant. It was the sort of thing her mother was always saying. Quite a turn. Turn for the worse,
presumably. Or turning over of the heart, an unpleasant feeling, a reminder that the organic was only just there below the
skin and quite beyond one’s control. “Start,” she said. She moved over as though to make room for him on the banquette beside
her, but he took the chair on the other side of her table, thus saving her the embarrassment of proximity. “You gave me quite
a start. I was daydreaming.”

“A penny for your thoughts. But sixpence for your dreams.”

She smiled. The panic subsided. Absence of panic was something positive, a strange welling up of contentment. “How strange
to see you after all this time, Guy. Is Meg…?”

“She’s in London. With the baby…”

“Oh, yes, the baby. She sent me a snap. He looks lovely. You must be very proud.”

“Yes, of course.” He looked around. “Your husband?”

“He’s coming,” she said, as though Alan might literally be walking in through the door, heavy and dependable, with that Scottish
reserve of his that so often made you wonder what he was really thinking. “Later. He gets here later.”

“Well, what a surprise this is. How many years ago —?”

“Seven,” she replied, too quickly.

He seemed amazed. “Seven. And you’ve been married now, for…?”

“Two.”

“Any children?”

“Not yet, but we’re hoping.” She sipped her beer, feeling herself blush. “You and Meg have put us to shame. Why have you abandoned
the new mother?”

“Preparation for an expedition. We’ve got our sights on Everest. There’s quite a race on to get there first. Us. The Swiss.
I think the Germans and the Italians are out of it for the moment.”

“Good luck.”

“Thanks.” He hesitated, as though he might be looking for a way to go.

“I’m sorry about Greta and Lotty,” she said. “Meg told me in a letter.”

“Yes,” he said, as though mere affirmation was sufficient. “It was a difficult time, but Meg was wonderful…”

“She’s a great help when things are difficult.”

“Yes, she is.” He seemed to cast around for something further to say. “Your husband…I’m sorry, it’s awful of me but I’ve forgotten
his name…”

“Alan.”

“Of course. Alan. Does Alan know? About us, I mean. Does he know about us?”

She turned away, almost as though he had struck her. “Us?” She looked at the gloomy hillside and the spitting Welsh rain,
at the rock, gray and shining in the wet like pewter. “No, he doesn’t,” she said to the window.

“No regrets?”

“What about you?”

“You haven’t told me about
you
yet. And I asked first.”

He doesn’t know, she thought. He doesn’t know about the baby, about the abortion, about the awful weight of guilt. He wouldn’t
be acting like this if he did. Meg hasn’t told him. It must be the only secret she has ever kept in her whole life. She tried
to laugh. “Let’s talk about other things, shall we? What are you doing now? Other than climbing, of course. How is Meg and
the baby? And the family business — wasn’t it shoes? Tell me all those things.”

So he told her: the neutral things, although precious little was neutral when you came to think about it. He told her about
the shoe factory, which was struggling with a depressed market and difficulties in getting trained staff, and he told her
about the baby and Meg’s failed attempts at breast feeding and things like that. “Meg insists on staying in London, but I’m
trying to persuade her that it’s much better to bring up a child in the country. She has” — he hesitated — “her own friends in
town. In fact, I’ve hatched a plot. Do you want to hear about it?”

Of course she wanted to hear. All these things were fragments she could cling to, like someone clinging to the wreckage long
after the ship has gone down.

“Well, we’re going to buy a house here.”

“Here in Wales? Oh, how wonderful.”

“I say,
going to,
but actually I already have. That’s part of the reason for my coming here, to see the solicitor about the conveyancing. Got
it all tied up only yesterday.”

“Where? Where is it? What’s it like?” For a moment she toyed with the fantasy of owning a cottage somewhere here, in the Nant
Gwynant Valley, perhaps. Among the trees, with a view of Snowdon rising in the background. There’d be a baby, of course, and
the father coming in from the hills in the evening, clumping up the path and pushing open the low cottage door and ducking
his head as he stepped inside, and calling out a greeting. He was a silhouette against the light, so she couldn’t see his
face…“Oh, what a marvelous idea, to have a house here…”

He laughed at her enthusiasm. “But who knows if it will tempt Meg? We’re renting a flat in London, and that seems to be all
she wants. ‘Buy something in Town,’ she tells me. She doesn’t seem to have any idea of the cost in London. But here things
are different…” He paused. “I tell you what…”

“What?”

“When does Alan get here? How’d you both like to come and have a look?”

“At what?”

“The house, Porpoise. The house.” He said that.
Porpoise.
Quite without thinking. He’d called her Porpoise that weekend and used it in his letters to her and that was it. And yet
now he used it almost as though he had been using it habitually, over and over for all those seven years.

She blushed and looked away again, out of the window. “It’ll have to be another day. He’s not joining me until the day after
tomorrow. He’s got some conference up in Edinburgh, and I couldn’t bear being stuck in the house all on my own and so I came
on ahead of him…”

“Oh.” There was a pause. His sipped his beer. “That’s that, then. I’ve got to get back to London by then.”

“Shame.”

There was another pause. She was expecting him to go. There was no reason for this awkward little conversation to continue,
and she was expecting him to end it, almost hoping really. It would be so much easier. She smiled at him and put the last
piece of her sandwich in her mouth and looked back out of the window.

“Look, why don’t you come anyway?” Guy asked. “This afternoon’s a washout. Why don’t we drive over and you can have a look?
There are one or two things I have to do…”

“I’d love to.” She spoke softly, more to the window and the view of the sodden hillside than to him.

“I mean, if you’ve got any other plans, then fine…”

“I’d love to.”

“But it wouldn’t take more than half an hour to get there. Well, forty minutes perhaps —”

She turned her head and looked at him. “Guy, I’d love to,” she repeated.

They drove beneath the drab slopes of the Glyders. There were the twin lakes, lying along the valley floor like a smear of
quicksilver in the palm of someone’s hand. There was the Royal Hotel, looking drab and run-down, as though it too had just
been through a war. Guy seemed to read her thoughts. “The Canadian Army used it,” he said. “Arduous training center.”