The Fall (21 page)

As she turned from the picture she caught sight of herself in the mirror. “Diana Sheridan, what on earth are you
doing
here?” she asked her reflection. The face in the mirror gave a little grimace but offered no reply. It didn’t really have
a reply, that was the truth of the matter. She was here on a whim. Nothing more, but that was plenty. Never before had caprice
so ruled her life. Perhaps war, or the threat of war, did that to you. What would her parents think about this? Would they
ever know? Anxiety as a counterpoise to anticipation. Anxiety is to fear as anticipation is to excitement. Had someone said
that? Perhaps it was original. Was it clever? she wondered.

She unpacked her paltry things, laying out her only skirt on the bed, and above it the blouse that she had been saving to
wear on the journey home. They’d have to do. She picked up the blouse and held it against her to see how it looked. It was
pale blue and had a pleasing frill down the front, and she thought it suited her. Among the rest of her things there was a
cardigan that wasn’t entirely disgraceful. But she hadn’t brought any stockings with her. Stockings were too precious now
that there was talk of clothes being rationed. All she had was a pair of ankle socks. And she didn’t even have a decent pair
of high-heel shoes, just lace-up walking shoes that might have been part of a school uniform. But then she could hardly have
worn ankle socks with heels. She dressed and then tried to see herself in the mirror. No
Looking-Glass
world there: just the selfsame one that she inhabited, ordinary and dull except for the remarkable fact of the war and the
curious fact of Mr. Guy Matthewson. She leaned toward the glass to examine her face. No Alice, either; just plain Diana Sheridan.
Oh, people were always complimentary, always saying things like “What lovely eyes you’ve got” and “There’s character in that
mouth.” Meg was a great one for reassuring her like that. But Diana knew well enough that praising the parts was merely damning
the whole. She was, she thought, plain — honest, decent, and plain. The Americans had a term for it:
homely.
She had heard it in the cinema. She was homely. It had a fine, old-fashioned sound to it. Nothing to be ashamed of, she told
herself.

She wished she had some makeup with her. She rubbed her cheeks to bring a bit of blood to them and licked her lips to make
them shine. Temporary measures. She loosened her hair and shook it out in an attempt to shake it into life, then brushed it
through twenty times each side, turning her head to change sides, brushing it back from her forehead. She tried a smile, that
awkward smile that never showed the humor that she felt; then she grimaced at her reflection and went downstairs to find Guy.

There were people in the bar. She was afraid of them. One of them rose and came over to her, and it was Guy, changed into
gray flannels and a blazer. “What’ll you have?” he asked, and she was afraid of that too, having never been in a bar, having
never really drunk alcohol except the occasional glass of wine at weddings and Christmas and things. “Mine’s a gin and tonic,”
he said helpfully, so hers was too and she held it carefully in her hand in case it should escape and fall giggling to the
floor.

Did she smoke?

She didn’t.

Did she mind if he did?

She didn’t.

“And here’s the menu.” He presented her with a large leather folder that looked like something you might find in a lawyer’s
office.

“How grand,” she remarked. But the page inside was small and badly typed, and it told a sorry tale of brown Windsor soup and
potatoes and carrots and something called brisket. They carried the menu through into the dining room and sat opposite each
other at a small table by the window. Struthwick nodded and smiled at them from a table nearby. Diana blushed. She ordered
a small glass of beer with her food, and Guy asked for a pint, there being, he had explained, little chance of wine these
days. He raised his glass to her and proposed a toast that was almost a question: “To us?”

“If you like,” she said with a shrug. “To us.”

They talked about the day they had had, about what they might do tomorrow. They talked about where she had been to school
and where he had been to university and whether she should have taken up her place at Liverpool or not. They talked about
where they lived and had lived, of their parents and their families. They even talked a bit about Lotty, but nothing about
Guy’s wife. And when they had finished their meal and had their coffee he suggested that they go out for a stroll — “if it’s
not too chilly” — and so they went out into the gardens, down to the edge of the lake, which was black and gleaming like obsidian.
They were scrupulous about the blackout even here, and there wasn’t a glimmer of light from the hotel, but the sky still glowed
with a backwash of light from the sun. A crescent moon was held in the frame of the Gwynant Valley. Farther west, above the
black pyramid that was Snowdon, hung a single brilliant star.

“Arcturus,” Guy said when she pointed. Did he know these things? Perhaps mountaineers needed to know the stars. Perhaps they
navigated by them. She looked for Orion: the familiar shape of the constellation somehow made up for the terrifying coldness
and distance of the stars. Sometimes she hated the stars, beautiful though they might be. But Orion wasn’t there; nothing
that she could recognize was there. It was as though she found herself in a foreign country without any familiar points of
reference. Guy laughed when she explained.

“Look, there’s the Plough,” he said, turning to her and pointing upward. “You’ll always see the Plough. But I’m afraid that
Orion’s below the horizon now. We’re probably standing directly on top of him.”

“Standing on Orion?” The thought chilled her, that the constellation of Orion could be below their feet; that the universe
was all around them, below them as well as above them; that they were suspended in its vastness; that the stars, the planets,
the nebulae, all were all around them. For a moment she was dizzy with the thought. “That’s frightening, isn’t it?”

He took her by the hand. “You mustn’t be frightened. You were brave enough on the mountain today not to be frightened by anything.”

For a moment they stood like that, close together, with her hand in his, and then he moved a step toward her and kissed her.

She had been expecting it, of course. She wasn’t a fool, or naive or anything like that. And it certainly wasn’t the first
time she’d been kissed. There had been a couple of boys already, one only the month before who had gone off to join the army
and was now somewhere in Scotland and still wrote letters to her. Andy, his name was. She’d met him at a Ramblers gathering
in the Lake District. But this was the first time that she had ever been kissed by a
man.
That was how she thought of it. Andy and the others had been her own age, more or less, but Guy Matthew-son was a man, with
a man’s confidence, a man’s strength, a man’s fragile self-sufficiency. When he kissed her he held her firmly in the small
of her back, just like they did it in the films, and his mouth was open for a moment. Hesitantly, his tongue touched her closed
lips.

He let her go. “Didn’t you want that?” he said.

She didn’t quite know what to say. “It’s fine.”

“I’m sorry if I took advantage…”

“No, not at all.”

“I don’t really understand what’s happened.”

“I’ll tell you if you like.”

He laughed softly. “Tell me, then.”

“You’ve met a nice young girl in the mountains who’s shown a bit of sympathy toward you…”

“Is that all?”

“And she’s got a bit of a crush on you, I suppose. And given those two things, we both might make fools of ourselves if we’re
not careful.”

He took up her hand and held it in both of his. “If you want it all to end here, then I’ll honor that.”

The word
honor
sounded very grand, rather loud, the kind of thing one said shortly before acting most dishonorably. Adolf Hitler used the
word
honor
rather a lot. “Forget about honor,” she said. “I don’t think honor has done very well recently.”

He laughed again. There was enough light to see the gleam of his teeth. “You really are a most remarkable girl, Diana Sheridan.
Is that what you think?”

“It’s not what I
think.
It’s the fact of the matter.”

“This sounds like
Through the Looking-Glass
again. So: if that’s the fact of the matter, what do you
think?”

She turned away from him, putting up a hand to straighten her hair, making little gestures of anxiety. For God’s sake, what
did
she think? “I don’t really know what I think, Guy. I think that we might never see each other again. I’m off to London shortly
and goodness knows what’ll happen there. And you’ve got your blessed tribunal to face.”

She felt him grow tense beside her. She suddenly understood that he had forgotten all about the tribunal, as though their
being together like this had achieved what climbing also seemed to bring: forgetfulness. She looked around at him. “I think
perhaps I’m quite happy to make a fool of myself,” she said.

“That sounds very calculating.”

“Oh, I can calculate. I’m quite a mathematician.”

“Does that reduce me to the level of a problem?”

“A conundrum, maybe.”

“What’s the answer then?”

“Oh, there’s no
answer.
If there were, it wouldn’t be a conundrum.”

Once in her room, Diana changed into her nightdress. She pulled back the bedclothes and placed a clean handkerchief on the
bedside table. It felt as though she was preparing for something medical, something that she might have done in her nurse’s
training. Then she cleaned her teeth and climbed into bed and lay on her back staring at the slope of the ceiling, at the
cracks in the plaster and the irregular stain where damp must have seeped in. She could taste the mint in her mouth and feel
the grit of the toothpaste when she ran her tongue across her teeth. She felt like a child again, waiting in bed for something
to happen — an illness to leave her, her father to come back from working late, some family crisis to reach its head.

The sounds of the hotel — the banging of air in the water pipes, the closing of doors, people talking to one another in muffled
tones — settled down. It must have been about half an hour later that she heard footsteps on the stairs and the creak of a floorboard
in the corridor outside. There was a fingernail tap on her door, a tiny mouselike sound. It might almost have been that, an
animal in the wainscot.

She turned the bedside light off and called softly, “Come in.” The door opened. For a moment pale light spilled into the room,
and she could see the silhouette of his figure. Then the door closed, and there was just his presence in the blackness and
his footsteps crossing the floorboards. His voice was just above her. “Where are you?”

“Here.”

A hand reached through the darkness and touched her face. She took hold of it, felt the sinew and the bone and the hard edge
of his nails. There was the same physical sensation that she had experienced while climbing, the same sense of fear and excitement
so mingled together that neither could be distinguished from the other. She pushed the bedclothes aside and made what room
she could for him. He was shaking as he lay alongside her. “You’re cold,” she said softly.

“Not cold, no. Afraid maybe.” She could feel his breath against her neck, as though words had a weight, a substance to them.

“Not of me.” She laughed at the idea. “Surely not of me.”

“I’m afraid for both of us, I think. Of what might happen.”

“Does it matter, if it’s what we both want?”

He laughed and kissed her face very softly, as though tasting the different textures — her eyelids, her cheekbones, her nose,
the faint down on her upper lip, the soft membranes of the lips themselves — as though trying to understand her by touch alone.
He had drawn her nightdress up. It was around her waist now, and his hand was on her belly, stroking her.

“Guy.” There was a hint of uncertainty in her tone. His name was still strange to her, still new and foreign. “Guy?”

“Diana,” he whispered, and again, “Diana,” and the mere exchange of their names seemed an intimacy as great as anything that
was happening now, as great as the shameless opening of her legs and the sudden, startling presence of his hand there. She
arched herself against him. Delight flooded the basin of her body like a flash of light in the darkness. “Guy,” she whispered,
as though there was some kind of danger and she was trying to warn him, “Guy, be careful.” But then it was too late to do
anything about it, for they were falling. She cried out with the shock of it, the feeling of release and the thrill of fear.
It would stop, she knew that — a fall must always come to a stop eventually — but for the moment she didn’t care, there was just
the sensation of falling, and the shock, and Guy clinging to her.