The Fall (5 page)

We sang a hymn, and the rector gave a little address about striving for the heights and seeing the Promised Land from the
top of the mountain, and things like that. And then it was the turn of others: Carrington to say something about Jim on Everest,
Jim as the selfless expedition member, the man whom you could rely on for help, or a joke, or a day’s hard slog at altitude
to set up the top camp; Philips to talk about Jim standing in awe on the summit of K
2
as they watched the sun set and steeled themselves to face the bivouac that would probably (but didn’t) kill them both. There
was someone else to talk about Jim the businessman, the man who helped the local economy, the Englishman who had found a home
in Wales; and Dominic Lewis mumbled a poem about Icarus falling from the sky. Auden, I suppose it was. Ruth had asked me to
add something. I didn’t really want to but I couldn’t refuse, so when all the others were done I made my way up to the lectern.
Looking out over the congregation, I wondered if they knew who the hell I was.

“I first knew Jamie when I was about twelve,” I told them, just to put them in the picture. “Later we climbed together. We
shared a great deal, as one does with a climbing partner: meals, climbs, tents, bivouac bags, jokes, all that kind of thing.
Occasionally we shared the lead. When he let me.”

They laughed at that. They were desperate to laugh. I stopped and looked down at them, and I wanted to say other things. I
wanted to tell them about the first climb ever. I wanted to tell them about winters in Scotland and summers in the Alps. I
wanted to tell them about Caroline — she looked up at me with a quizzical expression, as though she couldn’t quite recall my
name — and my own mother who now languished in a nursing home and wondered who I was when I came to visit her. I wanted to speak
about Jamie’s father. And I wanted to tell them about Ruth. Above all I wanted to tell them about Ruth.

There was a great silence in the gray church, a cold and expectant silence, almost as though they were waiting for me to tell
them these things. “Probably we shared more than most,” I said. Ruth was watching with the faintest of Welsh smiles. But I
didn’t tell them; instead I opened a book and read to them:

“‘The play is over, and the curtain is about to fall. Before we part, a word upon the graver teachings of the mountains.’”

I don’t know if they recognized the piece — they sat there as you do at funerals, in a no-man’s-land between misery and embarrassment,
and I couldn’t tell whether there was any recognition.
“‘Still, the last, sad memory hovers round, and sometimes drifts across like floating mist, cutting off sunshine and chilling
the remembrance of happier times. There have been joys too great to be described in words, and there have been griefs upon
which I have not dared to dwell; and with these in mind I say, Climb if you will, but remember that courage and strength are
naught without prudence, and that a momentary negligence may destroy the happiness of a lifetime. Do nothing in haste; look
well to each step; and from the beginning think what may be the end.’”

The curious thing is how often people ignore that advice, in climbing as in life. I closed the book and resumed my seat, and
we all sang “Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah.” It was a fine sound, no doubt.

After the funeral there was a sorry procession of cars to the crematorium. In the chapel I sat beside Ruth. She gripped my
hand as we watched his coffin roll silently through a red-velvet curtain to the sound of heavenly electronic choirs. Caroline
sat on the other side of her. Afterward we hung around in the rain outside looking at the sodden bouquets, reading the labels
on them before the rain came and dissolved the ink. “Who are these?” I asked once or twice, but I didn’t get much of an answer:
“Oh, just people he knew.” One of the cards said
From all of us at the City Climbing Club — keep going for the top, youth.
Ruth just looked away into the distance, across the acres of wet grass and the miniature memorial plaques.

Caroline came over to say good-bye. There was a detached quality about her manner, as if I hadn’t been to see her just two
days before. “I’m surprised you’re here, Robert,” she said. “I thought you’d quite broken with Jamie. What made you come?”

“He was my oldest friend,” I said. “Whatever happened after.”

“And Ruth?”

“And Ruth as well.”

She smiled. It was difficult to read her expression. Perhaps I was somehow to blame, was that it? I almost said something
to that effect; I almost lost my temper with the woman. “How’s Diana?” she asked.

“She’s fine physically. Like I said when I saw you.”

“Did you?” The smile was wry now. “Memory, you see. The second thing to go.”

“What’s the first?”

“Robert, dear, I’m sure you can guess what the first is.” She touched my arm. “Give Diana my love. Tell her…”

“Tell her what?”

“Tell her that it seems that she won.”

“I don’t think she’d understand. I’m not sure that I do.”

She shrugged and turned toward the big black car that waited for her. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Nothing matters.”

We watched her drive away. For Ruth and me there was the journey back to the hotel, where refreshments had been laid out.
The beer and the wine flowed. There was talk, there was laughter, there was reminiscence and the relating of absurd stories
and hair-raising exploits. There is so much about the climbing community that derives from the Celtic fringes of Britain,
and at a wake, climbers are as good as the Irish. Perhaps it’s because they have a lot of practice. I stood with Ruth and
smiled and nodded, and for a moment I felt as though I were part of all this.

We got back late in the afternoon. It was already dark. Someone had turned lights on in the main building, but the place was
deserted. We went to the kitchen as the natural focal point of the house. Ruth put a kettle on to boil. “He wanted his ashes
scattered. Did I tell you that?”

“Yes, you did.” She’d even shown me the will.
If my body can be recovered, I wish to be cremated and the ashes scattered…
I liked that practical touch,
if my body can be recovered.
At least he hadn’t asked to be freeze-dried and left on Kangchenjunga.

“Will you do that for me?” she asked.

“If you’ll come with me.”

“I’ll come with you.” When the tea had brewed she poured two mugs and came and sat beside me at the table. She seemed smaller,
somehow shrunken, as though she had aged two decades in the last twenty-four hours. She sipped tea and stared into the shadows
that had collected in the corners of the room. We began to talk.

G
O BACK.
Go back a long way. Forty years, for God’s sake, so far away that the world seems a different place and the people populating
it different beings altogether. My mother standing with me in the hallway of the hotel, her hand around my shoulders in a
gesture that was almost protective, and the other woman coming in through the door with her own son in tow and a look of artificial
surprise painted across her face. “Diana,
darling!”
she exclaimed. “How
wonderful
to see you after all this time!”

But there had been no matching intonation of surprise from my mother: no exclamation, no excitement. Mere statements of fact:
“Meg. How long it’s been.” They embraced. It was a curious embrace, designed to avoid intimacy rather than welcome it: no
part of body or soul actually came into contact except two cheeks, one finely powdered, the other naked. You notice these
things as a child. You stand and watch, and things lodge in the memory like splinters in the eye. The woman was colored pink
and cream and gold, and she had the air of someone from another world, an ambassador to a foreign and decidedly barbarous
place. Gold jewelry at her neck (the neck showing the tendons, showing the first small fault lines of age), a narrow linen
suit, and in the vee of the jacket, the smooth curves of her breasts.

“Actually I use
Caroline
now, not Meg,” this newcomer said.

“Caroline?
Why on earth
Caroline?”

“I prefer it, that’s all. And Caroline was always my name, after all. Margaret Caroline.”

“But you’ll still be Meg to me.”

“Darling, I’d rather not. Meg sounds like a sheepdog.” The woman with two names looked around the lounge
(GUESTS ARE REQUESTED TO RESPECT THE PRESENCE OF OTHERS AND REFRAIN FROM TURNING UP THE VOLUME OF THE TELEVISION
) with an expression of faint distaste. I saw the expression and felt ashamed. “So this is what you do now?”

“We survive.”

And then she paused in front of a photograph, the photograph of my father that hung there on the wall like an admonishment,
like a reproach. “Alan,” she said. “How determined he looks.” She glanced around. “I did write when I heard about your breakup,
but to your old home address. It was the only one I had.”

My mother smiled. At the time I wasn’t sure why, but now I understand. She was smiling at the lies. The woman turned her eyes
on me. “And this is your son? What’s your name, young man?”

I told her I was Robert.

“Well, I’m
Caroline.
And that’s what you can call me: Caroline. None of that Mrs. Matthewson nonsense. And certainly” — she turned her mouth down — “not
Meg
.” We shook hands on the fact. Her grip was firm and soft at the same time, a strange sensation. “And this is Jamie.”

He stood there beside his mother with the sullen look of a child who has grasped what adulthood means and resents not having
yet achieved it. “Jamie is just thirteen.” I was still a mere eleven, far below him in the precise hierarchy of childhood,
further from him then than ever again.

There was an awkward pause while the adults wondered what to do with this incongruent pair of children. “Perhaps Robert can
take you out and show you round,” Mother suggested.

Jamie hesitated.

“Go on,” said his own mother with just a hint of impatience. “Robert’s mother and I have so many things to talk about.”

We both stood there in our uniform of the times — blue Aer-tex shirts, gray shorts, gym shoes, the one pair black, the other
white — and waited.

“Well go
on,
then.”

So Jamie and I walked out into the garden, side by side but not together, walked idly down the lawn kicking at things that
presented themselves for kicking, and when we looked back we could see the two women talking in the sitting room, their images
latticed by the leads of the window: the one with her mouse-colored hair, and the other a perfect blonde. I wondered whether
I could read the movement of their lips — my mother’s thin and hard, his mother’s perfectly carved out of coral lipstick.
Lips.
The word buzzed in my imagination.

“My father has another family,” I announced. I suppose I felt the need to explain. “That’s why he’s not here.”

Jamie reckoned this piece of information for a moment and then played a winning move. “Mine’s dead,” he retorted.

“Dead?”

“Dead. He died in the mountains.”

“You can see the mountains from the hill up there.”

“Those aren’t
real
mountains. They’re just
Welsh
mountains. My father died in the Himalaya.” He pronounced the name
Him-ah-lya.
“On Kangchenjunga.”

I had never heard of Kangchenjunga. “How did he do that?”

“A storm. He died of cold.”

I thought about this. Dying of cold was the death of heroes, the death of Scott and his companions. “What’s it like to have
a dead father?”

He thought about it a bit. “It’s okay,” he said.