North Face (11 page)

A long career of lawlessness had made them resourceful. They scaled the wall, smashed the window, which was locked, with their muffled fists, scrambled in bleeding, and caught up a rug. By then the curtains were alight as well. Marks singed off half his hair, and Canning’s hands were scarred for life. When the flames were out, they lifted the rug again and looked inside. Canning turned faint and had to lie on the floor; Marks, who did not feel well either, picked up the telephone quickly. He knew about the masters’ meeting; their expedition had been timed for it. He dialled the Head’s number.

Through the broken window the final screams must have carried further than the others; they penetrated to the spare room upstairs, at the other end of the house. There was a pause, a tension; Susan got out of bed and felt for her slippers. The American, who had seen service and knew the value of time, flung on his trousers and ran down barefoot and stripped to the waist. Marks and Canning were past astonishment; they were glad to see anyone. Susan was a little later. She opened the faintly whimpering bundle, screamed, and clung to the American’s neck. They were standing like this, with the green-faced boys behind them, when Neil and two other masters, who had run the quarter-mile from the Head’s house, came in at the door.

Sally lived for nearly twenty-four hours. Neil sat all night by her cot in the hospital; she had had morphia, and only moaned dully now and again. Beside the cot some contraption of glass and rubber tubing ran fluid into her through a needle. A grotesque mask of white lint, with holes cut for her mouth and for one eye, covered up her face. Around him, hidden by the screens, children cried and murmured and were fed and changed. In the morning the night-nurse brought him tea, and the convalescent children started noisy games. The day went on. At some point in the early evening, he saw through the mask Sally’s eye open. Half the iris was turned up into the drooping lid. He spoke to her, softly. The eye moved, and turned vaguely towards him. Something stirred in the other hole, the one for the mouth.

“Hiya, big boy.”

The eye moved again, upward. Nothing showed, now, but an arc of bluish-white, and the lid was still. After a while, Neil went and told the nurse.

He spent some hours walking, he could not afterwards remember where. He had told Susan by telephone, and hung up quickly. From now they must find the sight of one another intolerable; this was self-evident, like the fact that he must leave the school within the next few days. There was nothing to add to it, certainly not the littleness of reproach. At present she was his responsibility, and he blamed himself for being gone so long. A woman might be driven to anything after this, he thought, and he hurried the last part of the way.

Susan too had been preparing for this encounter. She began at once, giving him no chance to speak. None of this would have happened, she said, if he had been man enough to stay where he was needed, instead of bothering about what people would say. She didn’t suppose he had been a saint himself all that time; men always thought it was different for them. He listened silently (it had all seemed increasingly distant and unreal) while her voice mounted and sharpened. He had a blurred impression that she said the same thing several times. She seemed frightened; as he had said nothing, he could not see why.

Her concluding point was that she would have come downstairs sooner—she had thought she heard something—but Dan (or Mike, or whoever he was) had said it was nothing and held her down. Curiously, this wakened Neil to an active loathing which all the rest had left unstirred. He had seen the man. They had been a foot away from one another, bending together over Sally in the first moments when there had been room only for one thought. He remembered the swarthy, blunt-angled face, stripped of its protective hardness, simplified by emotion like a child’s. While Susan spoke, this face seemed closer to him than hers, and, though he hated it, more real. He went out, and left her talking.

He had a choice of two rooms to spend the night in; Sally’s night-nursery, and the spare room upstairs. He spent it in his study on a chair.

The story was complete now, except for the epilogue.

It was two days later, the day before the funeral, that the flowers began to arrive. Neil, who had kept mostly in his study after giving the Head his resignation, scarcely noticed them at first. There would of course be flowers; he could acknowledge them in the
Times.
But soon there seemed no interval in which the doorbell did not ring. Flowers poured in; wreaths, crosses, cushions, sheaves, flowers that would have been extravagant before the war. The room to which Sally had been brought back was so piled that he could scarcely reach her without crushing them; the cottage smelt like a hothouse. He looked at one wreath incuriously; it had no card and he could not trouble with the rest. When he reached the church next day he was still unprepared.

There was only a handful of mourners, his nearest friends on the staff; but, out in the churchyard, it was impossible to see across. There must have been nearly two hundred of them; a mass of olive khaki, silent as a wall. They had done, and were doing now, all they could find to do. Many of them, to whom Susan was only hearsay, had known Sally; she had liked to play in the garden, to talk and show off a little to strangers over the wall. Some were there simply for her sake; some for the honour of their corps, in a groping effort to dissociate it by this gesture from what had happened; some in a vicarious remorse. The only man left on the camp’s strength who had a personal concern in the matter was miles away. Neil had been beyond knowing any of these things. He only guessed at them now, six months later, in a seaside boarding house at three in the morning. Then, as the first patter of gravel had sounded on wood, he had looked away at the rampart of flowers that made the grave look as little as the graves that children dig for a dead bird. He had seen only a crowd of sensation seekers, making banner-headlines of his suffering and his public shame. Like a gangster’s funeral, he had thought. All that money can buy.

When he got back to the house, Susan had gone.

She left a letter for him. She was sorry, she wrote, for everything that had happened, and for the unkind things she had said; but he had frightened her. She had not been herself for some time. Now that he didn’t love her any more, it was better to tell him the truth. She had not been sure when he first came back, and later she could not make up her mind what to do. Mike (or Dan) had said he would take her to town to have something done about it, if she wanted; but now he didn’t want that any more. He wanted to marry her, and as his last wife hadn’t had any children he would like to keep this one. She knew Neil would rather not see her again, so to go now seemed best for everybody.

Susan had always liked to please.

After this … But suddenly he realised that he had got to the end. Towards the last, his concentration had been so complete that he had not seen it coming. He was there. The smoke from his third cigarette curled in a thin scarf through the open door, catching a pale luminescence, from the hidden moon. Against an almost black sky scattered only with the brighter stars, the denser mass of a hill showed faintly a ragged crest of trees. A soft wind blew in, heather scented from the moors, with a tang of salt.

No, there was one thing he had left out; strange how the mind, pretending to give everything, will hide, like Ananias and Sapphira, the last pennyworth of shame away. That night, going up to bed, something had caught his eye as he passed a mirror. It was the stripe in his hair. He did not know when it had begun to turn; it stood out already, perceptibly grey. Everyone at the funeral must have seen it. Alone, with two sleepless nights behind him, this last little thing had hit him like the last axe-stroke to a toppling tree. The only thing that had been left to his pride was the fact that he had maintained, outwardly, some kind of self-control. Now even this was gone; it was as if he knew now that he had shed public tears. He had been able to go quietly in memory over all the rest; but this, six months after, he could not remember without finding he had crushed the end of his cigarette so that nothing would persuade it to draw again. It was quickly over; he had everything now. It wasn’t so sensational, after all. Walking about London, he had seen several heads, on men and women, much the same. If we haven’t learned in the last five years, he thought, not to be self-important, there’s not much hope for us.

Slowly his thoughts fell away from the scoured hollow he had cleaned; a beautiful emptiness gave way to the inconsequence that precedes sleep. He thought vaguely, Something must have started me off on this. What was I thinking about before? That new girl today; no connection there. Things happen when they’re ready, like birth. The girl’s got her night’s business over too, I suppose, by now; I hope it wasn’t too disappointing.

It was the smell of the sea that directed the beginning of his dreams. As he fell asleep he was in Skye with Sammy, marking out a route in Sgurr Alasdair.

A
PATCH OF MORNING
sunlight, strengthening as it moved, crept over Neil’s eyes; he woke, discovering with a pleasant surprise and sense of achievement that he had slept late. It was the first time, since he left the Army, that he had recovered the knack of compensating for a short night.

It was now nearly nine, he found; if he wanted breakfast (he certainly did) he had better waste no time. Still he lingered a few minutes more, reluctant to move, not from lack of energy but because his sleep had been deep and had left behind it, as deep sleep often does, an inexplicable sense of freedom, as if in one’s unremembered dreams wisdom has been liberated in oneself, or given from a source out of one’s waking reach. A pity it didn’t last. He got out of bed and dressed, feeling the past strengthen its hold on him again. Shorn of the indignations which last night he had painfully stripped from him, and of the remnants of self-pity unacknowledged but simultaneously destroyed, he felt lightened, but with a long hill of effort still before him, and little to beacon him up it but the solitary goal of self-respect. The wisdom of the horn gate receded; he took a more immediate comfort in thinking of that rock-face above the second gully. It could hardly be dignified by the name of a climb, which was all to the good perhaps; but it had looked tricky and interesting. There was no sense in not keeping one’s hand in.

Mrs Kearsey met him on the stairs and told him that she’d saved an egg with the rasher for his breakfast. Her voice was conspiratorial. Guiltily aware of favouritism, but glad about the egg, he thanked her with suitable emphasis and went into the dining-room. The sunny window looked cheerful; he walked across to it, and had been looking out for some moments before the clink of a cup informed him that he had not the room to himself. He turned, his eyes still blurred with coloured patterns of light; and saw, at the other end of the table, the girl who had arrived the day before. The remains of food, attempted but mostly uneaten, were in front of her; she had just poured herself out another cup of tea, and was drinking it with her eyes to her plate. She was alone.

Neil said “Good morning,” because to omit it would have been more noticeable than to speak; and, when she had replied, turned back to the window again, to show that he expected nothing more. There had been no need to hear her voice, or see her eyes which had moved, in a perfunctory and unwilling social gesture, vaguely upward without meeting his. Both had said, “Let me alone,” but he had known to do that as soon as he became aware of her; and he had, for his part, no wish to do anything else. His recognition of misery behind a slammed and bolted door had been immediate; but he was so hardly removed from this state himself that he could not see it objectively; it called forth the resistance he would have felt if it had been his own. He reacted instinctively against a pity which, if he admitted it towards her, would come back on him like a boomerang; besides, on the principle of do as you would be done by, he knew it for an unwanted commodity.

All this he felt as he stood at the window, while the outside of his mind registered only a general discomfort and a wish that he had come down ten minutes later. Presently Mrs Kearsey would be here with a good breakfast, which he wanted and would be a fool not to eat; and this living reminder of his own worst moments would preside over the board like the admonishing death’s-head at a mediaeval feast. He would feel a brute and be irritated with himself for feeling it. There was, obviously, nothing anybody could do.

Just then, with as much promptness as if he had turned round and put all these points before her, the girl got to her feet and went quickly out of the room. Neil looked at her cup, which was still half full, and regretted again that he hadn’t come down later; she probably needed it. He liked several cups himself after a bad night. I hope to God, he thought, I’ve never looked as obvious next morning as that.

His reflections were broken by Mrs Kearsey, with an extra rasher as well as the egg. Neil found himself unusually talkative. It did not strike him as odd that he should be working to deflect her attention from the littered plates she was collecting at the other end of the table. The reflexes of a long self-defence were still active in him; the situation called them forth so naturally that he was scarcely aware they had been transferred from himself.

He was a moment too late, however. “That sounds very nice, Mr Langton. I never seem to have time to walk that far … You would think, wouldn’t you, if people didn’t want breakfast they’d say, not let you cook good food just to waste it all over the plate.”

Besides the immediate disapproval in her voice, there was an overtone. Neil thought, She’s noticed something. With a fluency to which he himself listened in detached fascination, he remarked, “As a matter of fact, I rather think it was a bit of misdirected tact Miss—I don’t know her name—was saying she’d had some sort of bilious attack in the night, something she ate on the journey, but she was afraid you’d think she was blaming the food here if she mentioned it. Don’t tell her I passed it on, or my name will be mud.”