The Fall (4 page)

Before opening the gate, I got Eve on the mobile phone. I didn’t
know
when I’d be back. I’d have to stay for the funeral. Of course I would. And there would be a coroner’s inquiry, apparently.
And then, when everything was over…

“Everything was over years ago, wasn’t it?” she said.

“Yes, but…” But what? I tried to explain and felt the inadequacy of words at the very moment I spoke them. There was a silence
on the line.

“I rescued you from them once, Rob,” she said eventually. Her voice was quiet. “I don’t think I could manage it again. Not
after all this time.” And then she hung up.

I waited a moment with the phone dead in my hand. Sounds: the barking of a dog and the bleating of sheep. The sound of sheep
was the constant undercurrent to the landscape, an old crone’s griping or a child’s whining, a Welsh complaint. “Bloody sheep,”
Jamie’s mother had said. Coming from her mouth, the word
bloody
had shocked. It was
language.
“Bloody sheep. God, how can we live
here?”

I had gone with them to look, a long and stuffy journey in the back of a hired car. She had lost the way, and we had to stop
in a village to ask an old man how to get there. “Gilead?” he repeated. “Gilead House? That’ll be up Gwytherin way. Not far,
mind, not far.”

And sure enough it was not far, just up the hill above the town, on the side of the valley among the trees, a gray place,
the woodwork in blistered white, with the lawns run to rack and ruin and the field at the front full of sheep.

“Bloody sheep,” she had said, standing there holding Jamie’s hand (he struggled to let go, but she gripped him hard). “However
will we live here?”

But she did live there, off and on. Forty years and more.

I drove the car through and went back to close the gate, then drove slowly up the gravel to the space in front of the house.
There was no one around, but when I rang the doorbell I heard shuffling footsteps inside. Someone fiddled at the lock on the
other side of the door, and it was only then that I realized I hadn’t really asked Ruth about Caroline’s health. “Very much
alive” was what she’d said. But what did that mean when you were what, eighty? I tried to work it out. Seventy? Seventy-five?
I wasn’t certain, not because I didn’t know how long ago it was but because, I understood with a sudden shock, I hadn’t really
known her age even then. I had nothing definite to add to the forty years that separated then from now, this hillside on the
edge of summer from that same hillside so many summers ago. Listening to the scrabbling on the far side of the door, I thought
about the epithets of decline and decay — arthritis? Parkinson’s? Alzheimer’s? — and was filled with sudden dread at the prospect
of seeing her again.

The door opened. The face that appeared in the gap was lined and toothless. It contained within its features all the closed
suspicion of the Welsh hill people.
“A chi sy o’r Bwrdd Dwr?”
it said.

I felt an absurd and irrational relief at the sight. It was a woman from the village, a woman who
cleaned.
“I’m sorry. I’ve no Welsh I’m afraid. Not really.
Bore da
is my limit.”

She looked peeved. “Are you the man from the
Water?”
she asked with exaggerated emphasis.

“I’m a man from England,” I said. “An old friend.”

The woman faced this disappointment stoically. “We’re expecting a man from the Water.”

“I’m afraid I can’t oblige. I just want to see Mrs. Matthewson if she’s in.”

“Well, she’s not
receiving people
.”
'

“I think she’ll receive me. Tell her it’s Robert. Tell her that.”

The maid considered the matter carefully, her wrinkled lips mulling over the problem as though it were a taste.

“You aren’t Mary, are you?” I asked.

“I’m Alice.”

“I remember Mary.”

There was a smile there among the suspicion. “Mary was my sister, God bless her.”

“I remember her well.”

“Do you now? Do you?” Memory was a kind of password. “Well, you’d best come in. I’ll find if Mrs. Matthewson can see you.
Mr. Robert, you say?”

“Robert. Just Robert.”

She shuffled off. I waited in the hall, the dark-brown hall with the longcase clock that paced out the silence. Stairs led
upward into shadow. There was a stained-glass window at the turn of the stairs: an Arthurian knight looking toward his lady,
a piece of vapid Burne-Jonesery. I remembered that. I remembered laughing at it because she had laughed. There were pictures
on the walls: watercolors of Welsh hillsides and an oil painting of an urban street — one of the slate towns, the slate cliffs
laid on with a palette knife that brought to them the very texture of the rock itself: lucid slabs, slick with rain. I knew
that style well enough, even without seeing the signature at the bottom:

Ruth Phoenix, 1979

Then there was the jawbone of a shark, fished — I recalled the story — off Nantucket. That was what Caroline had told me, laughing
at the memory of it. “I caught it myself, while the men jeered and told me I could never do it and all that sort of crap.
But I did it. And there it is.”

How much had changed? I couldn’t be sure. The illusion of memory gave me everything, all the artifacts, all the
objets d’art
(I could hear her enunciate the French phrase): a tortured glass bottle — Lalique? — that was like some intimate female organ;
a porcelain shepherdess — Meissen? — that laughed at the onlooker as though flaunting her recently lost virginity; another oil
painting that may have been (but she had never dared subject it to the expert’s curious gaze) by Marie Laurencin. I peered
at the thing with new eyes now and knew just the man to examine it and value it. On the opposite wall there was even a photograph
showing Jamie: a crouched figure in silhouette, his bandaged face looking out from under a helmet, with plunging cliffs behind
him and bright alpine meadows far below. Jamie at Death Bivouac. I knew that photo well: I had taken it myself.

From upstairs there was the noise of talking, but I couldn’t make out any words. Then a light footfall at the top of the stairs.
“Yes?”

I turned from the photo. Someone was coming down. She turned at the landing and paused in front of the stained glass, looking
down at me. “Yes?”

There was a shock at seeing her, of course. Something physical like a fist, a child’s fist perhaps, swung playfully into the
stomach when you weren’t expecting it. A convulsion of heart and diaphragm. The blow had been intended as a joke, so you had
to smile.

“It’s Robert,” I said.

“Robert, yes.” She smiled vaguely. For a moment I wondered whether she even remembered.

“I came to see how you were. I’ve been over at Jamie’s place. With Ruth. I’ve come to say how sorry I am.” Paltry words. Maybe
that was what made her smile. Paltriness had always amused her. She was wearing trousers (she’d have called them
slacks)
and a white shirt (she’d have called it a
blouse),
and her hands were clasped in front of her as though she had to do that to stop a tremor. As she came down the final flight
of stairs, she moved cautiously, with one hand on the banister and the other still clasped in front of her. “Have you been
to see him?” she asked.

For an awful moment I thought that she hadn’t understood. I imagined — it was a fleeting moment of horror, like the sudden perception
of a death — that her mind had gone. “Caroline, Jamie’s
dead,”
I told her gently.

She came up close to me, as though it was necessary to bring my face into focus. It was like looking at someone through a
screen, a Japanese screen of some kind, rice paper or whatever: the woman I had known peering out through the layers of time.
“I know what Jamie is,” she said softly. “I know exactly what Jamie is. I have had practice in this, don’t forget.” Her left
hand, which had gripped the banister, which had gripped many things in its time, gripped my arm. The other hand remained where
it was, slack and idle across the base of her belly. She leaned forward and presented her cheek for me to kiss. Her skin was
soft and smooth.

“You’re looking very well,” I said.

She shook her head. “Forget the compliments. The only thing about age is the surprise it brings. Death is no surprise, of
course, but you never know
who
is going to die. I’ll bet he put his money on me first. And I bet you did too. You probably thought that I was already dead
and buried, didn’t you?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Caroline.” The name seemed absurd on her aged body, a young woman’s name given in error.

“Oh, yes you did.” Another of her traits, to brook no argument. She walked away into the drawing room, where there were other
photos — Jamie’s father looking youthful, like a corpse preserved — other artifacts, other memories enshrined. An old, polished
gramophone from the time when they still made them like pieces of furniture. And on the wall another of Ruth’s paintings,
a nude, this one, a woman standing beside a bed, her flesh blurred by sunlight from a window: white limbs and a smudge of
pubic hair.

“What would you like? Tea?” She rang for the maid, and I remembered the box of little mechanical flags on the kitchen wall,
one for each room in the house, to signal which room had rung. There was even a green baize door dividing off the servants’
quarters. Caroline had laughed when she had shown me that. It was one of those things that accumulated, like parts of an argument,
to convince her that this isolated house on an isolated hillside was a place where she might live.

“The other thing about age,” she said, “is that it’s only once you are old that you realize that things are for keeps. What
seemed an interesting experiment is actually the only existence that you have or are going to have. Why did you leave it so
long to come back?”

“It doesn’t seem long,” I replied evasively. “It seems like yesterday.”

She laughed. “That’s another trouble with age,” she said. “Thirty years ago seems like yesterday.”

Alice came into the drawing room with a tray. While Caroline poured the tea with her left hand, her right remained couched
in her lap like a small, helpless pet. It was only then that I understood that something was wrong with it, wrong with the
mechanism of nerve and muscle that was meant to move the thing. She saw my glance. “A stroke, my dear,” she said. “Just a
little one. My doctor assures me that I could go on for years yet.” She crossed her legs. Her ankles were still narrow, but
they had a wasted look to them, as though slenderness had given way to fragility.

“So tell me,” she said. “How is your mother?”

I shrugged. “She’s in a nursing home. Oh, she’s well enough physically, but…her mind wanders.”

Was there sympathy in her expression? It wasn’t happening to her, that was clear enough. Her mind was there, all right. “And
tell me about you,” she said. “Married? Of course. I remember Jamie telling me. Are you happy?”

“I’m content.”

“That’s a very equivocal response. Children?”

“Two. Girls. Twenty-one and seventeen. University and A levels.”

“And what does Daddy do?”

“Don’t you know?”

“Should I?”

“I thought Ruth might have said. I’m in the art business. Contemporary art. A gallery in London, another in Birmingham of
all places. An associate gallery in New York.”

“Bisected cows in formaldehyde, that kind of thing?”

“Not often.”

She looked thoughtful. Somehow I could see the younger woman behind the mask of age. “But happy?” she asked again. “Is Rob
happy?”

I shrugged. Don’t you grow out of happiness? Isn’t happiness what kids hope for? Wasn’t adulthood the understanding that there
is no real happiness, not long, sustained, and unequivocal happiness? “I told you. I’m content.”

Caroline smiled as I knew she would. Blurred by age, it was her familiar smile nevertheless. “Equivocal,” she said. She had
taught me the word, like so much else. “Dear Robert, as equivocal as ever.”

T
HERE WAS SOME KIND
of religious service for Jamie. It was Ruth’s idea, Ruth’s insistence, even though Jamie had not been a churchgoer, hadn’t
believed in anything as far as I knew. “What alternative is there?” she asked when I protested. “Just a dreadful crematorium
thing?”

I rang home and suggested that Eve come, but she declined. “They were your friends,” she said. “Not mine. And look how they
treated you…”

The service was held in the local church. The place was full, of course. There were names I knew, a few faces that I recognized,
all of them hard-edged and weathered, one or two of them bearded. The survivors. One in eight Himalayan climbers fails to
return; if you are talking about going high, then the statistics get worse: less than half of those who go above seven and
a half thousand meters survive to tell the tale. Oh, yes, there were as many ghosts at Jamie Matthewson’s funeral as live
mourners.

I sat in the front row between Caroline and Ruth. Caroline was in gray silk — the gray of ashes, the gray of slate, a gray that
set off her still-bright complexion; Ruth wore black, a sharp black linen suit that made her look tough and vulnerable at
the same time, the kind of trick she was always capable of pulling off. She had no makeup on, and her hair was pulled back
and gathered up to emphasize the line of her jaw. Her expression was tightly pegged down — like a tent in a storm. Beyond her
was Dominic Lewis, looking uneasy in something resembling a jacket and tie.