The Fall (51 page)

After lunch she drove her van around to the back of the gallery, to the unloading bay. I could sense the tension in her. It
was like the moment when the jury has filed back into court after a long deliberation, and the foreman is standing to deliver
the verdict. Only here I was judge and prosecution as well as jury. She opened the doors of the van, and I helped her out
with a couple of carefully wrapped canvases. We carried them inside. I knew. I guessed from the faint smile on her face as
I untied the string and unwrapped the sheet that covered the first canvas. I stood back and looked at the painting that I
hadn’t seen in over two decades, the painting that was, in some way, part of me. Questing cormorants cruising the pewter surface
of the lake; the exclamation of her own body, as naked as a blade, poised to pierce the water.

She stood back, looking at me, trying to gauge my reaction.

I nodded.

The next canvas was a work I had not seen: the same scene a second or two later, the cormorants arching down and a white flesh
arrow stabbing through the surface — a Welsh
Big Splash,

the Californian sunshine modulated to a smudged and watery light the color of pearl.

“What do you think?”

I tried not to laugh. “How do you expect me to judge them? In God’s name, Ruth, how do you expect me to be objective about
those?”

“Then try these. They’re recent ones.” They were abstracts that, on closer inspection, proved to be figurative — intricate and
exact paintings of slabs of rock, of cracks and chimneys, ribs and walls and narrow, insidious ledges. One was called
Cap,
another
Dome.
“Yosemite,” she said. “Jamie was climbing, and I painted.” Her tone was almost apologetic, but there was nothing to apologize
for. The paintings were intriguing, suspended between the purely abstract and the exactly figurative, things of texture and
shade and subtle gradations of hue and tone, just like rock itself — rock architecture. There was another called
Pen-dragon,
a composition in pink and gray and lead white, a thing of flesh and bone and tendon, cut up the middle by an irregular dotted
line. The line of our climb.

I laughed with pleasure.

“And this is what I’m doing now.” Smaller and more curious, they were what she called her slates, reliefs constructed in various
shades and colors of rock, abstract compositions of texture and form that seemed like the mountains and hills that the stone
came from.

I felt her watching me for some hint of what I thought. “Have you been selling locally?” I asked.

“A bit. My bread and butter is landscapes. You know the kind of thing.”

I smiled. “They’re our bread and butter too.” We talked a bit more, about the art market, about the chances and the possibilities.
I wondered what she really wanted, and what I wanted, come to that. One of the larger canvases showed three human figures
on what looked like a stage. They seemed naked, androgynous, devoid of face or feature. Behind them loomed a great black triangle,
as threatening as a vulture, as overwhelming as a mountain. The painting was entitled
Trinity.

“It was dangerous, wasn’t it?” I said, looking at this work. “The three of us, I mean.”

She shrugged. “It’s happened before.”

“Will it happen again?”

She looked around at me with that smile and shook her head. “I don’t think so, Rob. Do you?”

“Why not?”

“Because after all this time the stakes are too high — children, homes, husbands and wives, all that. You don’t just toss a
coin for all that, do you?”

“You know about that?”

She gave a wry smile. “When he told me I almost rang you up to tell you that you were the winner after all.”

“When was that?”

“A few months after.”

“And why didn’t you?”

She shrugged. “Because of Eve, I suppose. Perhaps it was the only time I’ve acted selflessly. But I left Jamie just the same
—”

“You
left
him?”

“Told him he was a male bastard and walked out on him.” She laughed. “We were apart for over a year.”

“I never realized…”

“There were a lot of things you didn’t realize…”

“About?”

She turned back to the painting, picking up the canvas as though to take it back to the van. “About Jamie. And me. We’re pretty
lousy together, but we’re worse apart. It’s that kind of relationship.”

“Leave it,” I said.

She stopped, the canvas held across her chest like a shield. “Leave it?”

“The canvas,” I said. “Leave the canvas. You want to try and sell the thing, don’t you?”

And she looked down at the picture that she was holding and laughed, perhaps with relief.

“Guess what?” I asked Eve when I got home that evening.

She didn’t look around from whatever it was she was doing, something on the computer, some case that one of her pressure groups
was pursuing. “That’s
my
line,” she said.

“Guess who came to the gallery today.”

“Picasso?”

“He’s dead.”

“How sad. Matisse then. How do
I
know, for God’s sake?”

“Ruth. Jamie Matthewson’s Ruth. Ruth Phoenix.”

“I thought she was dead too.”

“Phoenix risen from the ashes. She wants us to represent her. Brought some of her work for me to look at. It’s good.” I explained
too quickly, I know I did.

“The ashes of what?” she said sourly, looking around at me for the first time.

W
E SHOWED ONE
or two of Ruth’s paintings in the London gallery and a few more in the new Birmingham one. It wasn’t difficult to move them.
The landscapes—reminiscent of Stanley Spencer, all slate fencing and barbed wire and sere bracken—were snapped up with some
regularity. They allowed the purchaser to have a landscape on the sitting room wall that was something better than pretty
rolling hills and cows chewing the rural English cud. And then someone made an offer for the large canvas that I called the
Welsh Big Splash,
and he asked to see some other work by the same artist and then to meet her. He was an American with Welsh ancestry, and
he was just what Ruth needed, a collector with a desire to be a patron. “He revolts me,” she said.

“But he loves your accent,” I told her.

So she found herself crossing the Atlantic in first class and being met at Logan Airport by a limousine sent by the Howell
Jones Foundation. She was photographed for an American art journal, standing in open white spaces like a Giacometti figure
in a gallery. A one-woman exhibition was set up in a SoHo gallery. The media came, eager for novelty. She had, quite suddenly,
arrived.

Jamie was no more than a figure in the background of all this. Ruth mentioned him occasionally when we met, told me what he
was planning, where he was going, when he was returning. “What does he think about all this?” I asked her, meaning her success
as an artist.

She shrugged. “He’s hardly aware of it. He doesn’t understand it, so it doesn’t really interest him. He thinks it’s good for
me, like exercise or a healthy diet or something.”

“And me? What does he think about your working with me?”

She gave that small laugh—part ironic, part bewildered. “I’m not sure what he feels, Rob. I never have been. I don’t think
he knows either. I think…”

“What?”

“I think climbing is a substitute for feeling. It’s an evasion. That’s what I think.”

Perhaps she was right. Perhaps that was what climbing did for you, like cocaine for an addict: a snort of Technicolor excitement
to take the place of the chiaroscuro of ordinary life. “Anyway, give him my regards,” I told her.

“Of course.” But something in her tone told me that she wouldn’t.

And then one day I saw posters somewhere in London, in a bookshop. They might even have been in the Tube.
In the Death Zone,
was the title.
A life above 26,000 feet
was the subtitle, and behind it was the face of James Matthewson superimposed on a pyramid of ice and snow that might have
been the Mustagh Tower, might have been Jannu. Somehow the picture gave the illusion that he was trapped inside the mountain,
peering out like a caged animal.
Jim Matthewson at the Royal Geographical Society
was written along the bottom of the poster, along with times and dates and even a price.

I wondered whether to go. I wondered whether to suggest it to Eve. But in the end I went along by myself and lined up with
a motley collection of city-bound climbers to buy a ticket for what was billed as a multimedia presentation to take you beyond
the surface of things and into the real experience of climbing at altitude. Something like that. We filed into the hushed
and reverential lecture theater like worshipers into a modern church, to find ourselves confronted, from the screen above
the lecture bench, with the same mountain as on the poster and the same face staring out at us. To one side was a table with
Jamie’s book piled high, the glossy cover with the same photomontage and the same title:
In the Death Zone.

“He’s amazing,” someone was saying beside me. “The only British climber who ranks alongside Messner and Kukuczka.”

I’d heard of Messner, but I didn’t even know who Kukuczka was.

We took our seats. The lights dimmed and hushed us to silence, and a voice came over the speakers explaining what we already
knew, that the guest this evening had become a household word for daring and determination, that he had climbed in every continent
in the world and stood on the top of six of the world’s eight-thousand-meter peaks, that he had been described as the leading
British climber of his generation. And then Jamie stepped up to the microphone, pinned in the spotlight like a circus performer.

Applause exploded around the theater, a sudden, concerted rockfall of sound. He looked up at the audience with a faint and
cynical smile that reminded me powerfully of Caroline. His face appeared ragged and worn, as though it had been abraded too
long by the wind and the sun, desiccated too often by altitude. He didn’t notice me among the hundreds there. Probably he
was just enclosed in his globe of light, and we were nothing but an anonymous mass beyond the limits of his small, circumscribed
world on the stage.

“Climbing above twenty-six thousand feet,” he said, pausing to look at us, “you are working in the death zone.”

Pictures of climbers appeared behind him. Color seemed dominant. The climbers wore brightly colored down clothing—blue and
red and orange. They struggled up slopes of white snow trailing brightly colored rope, wielding brightly colored axes and
hammers, clipping brightly colored carabiners into the only things that were not brightly colored: steel-gray pitons, silver-gray
ice screws. The sky was the hard blue of altitude.

“Over half the people who have ever been over twenty-six thousand feet have died doing it,” Jamie said. A monochrome photograph
of a climber appeared on the screen, a shot of a man sitting on a boulder in the sun and smoking a cigarette. He wore tattered
britches and a collarless shirt. The mountain that formed the backdrop was the Eiger, the North Face. “My own father was among
them,” Jamie said, and the monochrome photo faded into a color one: a figure hunched at the top of a snow slope with its back
against brownish rock and beside it a stick with prayer flags that fluttered in the Himalayan gale.