The Fall (28 page)

So I didn’t ask. There on the hard wood of the landing dock, we huddled together while I rubbed her flanks to get warmth into
her spare flesh. I touched my mouth against her shoulder; I touched her cold breasts; I felt the hardness of her nipples and
the chill of her thighs. Occasionally we kissed. And slowly the warmth came back into her body. And when my hand found the
rough patch of wet hair, she shifted herself against me and said, “Yes,” very softly into my ear. “Yes, do that. Yes.” And
after a while she came to some kind of climax, very mild, without anything but that whispered word in my ear:
yes, yes, yes,
repeated over and over.

We didn’t speak on the way back home — almost like one of those silences that you have after a quarrel, when you are each picking
over the ruins of the argument like survivors looking through rubble for something worth preserving. But there had been no
quarrel. There had been only compliance. Mrs. Jones, the woman who helped out at the reception desk, watched us suspiciously
as we came into the hotel.

“Where’s my mother?” I asked.

“She’s out, Mister Robert. And the boiler needs looking at. I didn’t know what to do.”

“I’ll ring the man later.” We climbed the stairs to Ruth’s room. Once there, we talked. Sitting side by side on the bed, we
had one of those absurd, intense conversations that you have when you are young: analytical, emotional, confessional, mendacious.
She had the power to destroy me and Jamie, we both knew that. Possibly herself as well. “What do you want, Ruth?” I asked
her.

“I don’t know,” she whispered. “I just don’t know. Jamie, you, I don’t know. Sometimes I think I want all the men in the world
and all the women too.”

“And what does Jamie want?”

She laughed at that but never answered the question.

Ruth at work in her studio at the back of the pub: she worked barefoot, wearing torn jeans and an old cotton smock. Her hair
was dusty with plaster. The studio was two rooms of an outbuilding knocked into one. It was whitewashed and slate-floored,
lit by wide windows that faced northward toward the Hebrides. There was an old stained sink, broken cupboards with sheets
of paper and cardboard, jugs and vases full of brushes. The air reeked of the organic smell of solvents. Piled against one
wall were canvases and in the center of the room was a block of slate on which she was working. She showed me the work, pointing
out the fractures, the designs she had etched. “It’s a bloody awful stone to work with,” she complained. “Tough, splintery,
and difficult. Like the Welsh. But look at the texture; look at the sheen!” She passed her fingers over the surface. “Like
a seal’s skin.”

Near one wall there was a canvas on a heavy easel. The canvas was large — five feet by four — primed with white and blocked in
with masses of color: hard edges of gray and slopes of moss green. Across the middle of the canvas was a great swath the color
of steel. This paint was laid on thick and smooth. It gleamed lucidly, like wet slate. In the midst of this gray, Ruth had
painted two black question marks. And then, on the bottom edge where there was green again, there was a tall, thin blade of
white, its arms raised up to form the letter
y.

Did she have a name for the work?

She smiled.
Why?

W
E DIDN’T TELL
Jamie. Our intimacy was our secret. We shared it in a look, through a touch, by a secret and treacherous smile. Perhaps we
were ashamed of what we had done, but shame is an emotion that can sit happily alongside others: desire, excitement, the palpitating
thrill of the forbidden and the unknown. Was Jamie the innocent dupe, the victim of our deceit? At times I felt that he knew
something. I would feel his eyes on me when we were all three together, and when I looked around, he would flush faintly and
look away, as though just to suspect me was to do me an injustice.

Ruth never moved into his flat in London, but whenever she was in the city, that is where she stayed. She was what he called
his migratory bird — a joke that had more than a grain of truth in it because there was something birdlike about her movements — but
a splendid bird, an eagle or an osprey: her sudden arrivals in London, having hitchhiked down from Wales with nothing more
than a leather bag thrown over one shoulder; her rapid, excited presence in our London life for a few days; her equally sudden
and mysterious departures. I often wondered whether there was another man, or maybe men, elsewhere in her life. I think now
that there may have been many, and some of them quite casual. Possibly the men she won lifts from on the A
5
that led the way to the mountains. Possibly as part of her pursuit of what she liked to call self-knowledge.

“She’s all right, isn’t she?” Jamie asked me.

“She’s great, Jamie,” I reassured him, although I wasn’t sure myself.

That winter, Jamie and Ruth spent much time in North Wales. His idea for a mountain center had taken off with a sudden and
surprising momentum. I remember the first sight of the place he finally bought. It was up a rough track behind Llanberis,
past rows of slate-workers’ cottages. There was an old sign that announced
BRYN DERW,
and a long, low house, and a building in the background that might once have been a miners’ bunkhouse. It was raining when
we got there, of course. The place was gray and dank, glistening in the wet. We climbed out of the van, and Ruth took Jamie’s
hand and the three of us stood there looking at it as one might look over some famous archaeological ruins. Ruth translated
the name: “Oak Hill.”

“Where are the oaks?” I asked.

“We’ll plant them,” Jamie said. His tone was sharp, as though I had been offering a criticism. “Can’t you imagine it? Done
up, I mean. Matthewson Trekking and Climbing. Cottage industry sort of thing. Just imagine bringing a bit of economic life
back to this area.”

He had some money, and it cost nothing to buy the cottages. The slate mines were dead or dying; the owners were desperate
to sell and no one was desperate to buy. So Bryn Derw passed into the ownership of Jamie Matthewson, or maybe the family firm
itself, and he set about converting the property. Ruth was often there. Once, Eve came up with me from London, and all four
of us had a ridiculous and drunken weekend camping in one of the outbuildings while builders were at work on the roof of the
main house. The path to Cloggy was nearby, and when the weather was dry — which wasn’t often — we could make our way up to that
gloomy and atmospheric cliff and climb one of the easier routes in the damp cold.

And one day Caroline came up to look things over. She drove over from Gilead House on a raw December morning when all the
colors were tones of gray and the mountains skulked beneath a bruised sky. Beyond the roofs of the town, Llyn Padarn was like
an ingot of polished pewter pressed into the valley floor. When I discovered that Caroline was expected, I had suggested that
it might be better for me to go, but Jamie turned on me as though I had insulted him. “You’ll bloody stay,” he insisted. Perhaps
my being present would amount to some kind of penance, a retribution for the damage I had done. Or perhaps it would be an
exorcism of adolescent jealousies. So, feeling vulnerable and foolish, like a child caught out in some shameful wrongdoing,
I hung back in the doorway to the main building as the white Mercedes turned in at the gate.

I hadn’t seen Caroline for a couple of years, and I had wondered how she would be. I wasn’t disappointed. She had gained some
of the lineaments of age, but she still wore her beauty and her sexuality in that explicit and defiant way, as someone might
wear a fine but slightly out-of-date dress. “Robert,” she said with a faint and complicit smile after she had greeted Jamie
and Ruth. “I haven’t seen you in ages.” She placed her hands on my shoulders and rested her cheek against mine and then, as
though confirming that her memories and mine were indeed all true, whispered my name again. “Robert.” Over her shoulder I
saw Jamie’s expression. It was a look of mingled pain and satisfaction, as if all this were necessary in order to extirpate
some malignant growth in the body of our friendship. Ruth watched us thoughtfully, perhaps conscious of the power of this
emissary from an older generation.

We went around the property, Caroline picking over it as though looking for bargains. She was a great cynic. I hadn’t understood
this when I had first known her, but I saw it now — cynicism sliding beneath the surface of her beauty like a treacherous current
in a placid lake. “But darling, who’s going to spend
money
on climbing?” she asked when he outlined the project. “People spend money on things that are sensual. Clothes, food, that
kind of thing. Sex. But who the hell’s going to spend money on slogging up mountains in the rain? Your father invested a small
fortune in climbing, and he didn’t earn a penny.” She laughed. I remember her laughter; I remember her smiling at me to see
if I was still stirred by her presence. I remember the disturbing sensation of seeing the two women together in the same room — Ruth
and Caroline, both of whom I had loved. Ruth knew it; that was the disturbing thing. Neither Jamie nor Caroline knew the whole,
but Ruth did. Ruth and I held the whole delicate construct of my betrayal in our hands.

When the Scottish mountains came into winter condition, plans for Bryn Derw were shelved. Once again we began to commute between
London and Scotland, Ruth often coming with us, taking her turn at the wheel. And once, just once, I stopped off in Glasgow
to visit my father. When I asked my mother for the address, I was surprised that she even knew it. “I suppose I can’t stop
you,” she said.

“Why should you wish to?”

She only shook her head, as if shaking the question away and with it the whole matter of her failed marriage. So I wrote him
a letter, a cautious, impersonal letter explaining that I was often in his part of the world and would like to meet him. I
mulled over how to address him and settled for
Dear Father.
Somehow I was faintly surprised even to receive a reply.

I will be willing to see you,
he wrote,
as long as you come on Saturday afternoon.
He was quite specific about the timing. “You’ll lose a whole day on the hill,” Jamie protested.

“You go ahead and do a route with Ruth,” I told him. “Get her wielding an ice ax. I’ll see you in the evening.”