The Fall (38 page)

We pulled him toward the door.

“Have you the adequate experience?” the man called. “That is what I want to know. You have no mountains in your country.”

“Experience?” Jamie yelled back. “The North Face is nothing more than Scottish winter Grade Five. Bloody hell, the hardest
rock pitches are no more than Severe. I’d like to see you on the Orion Face!”

We pushed him out. “Is he drunk?” the guide called.

“No, he’s English,” Ruth answered.

“Is that not the same thing?”

The main street was a sanctuary of trinkets and souvenirs and expensive outdoor clothing where Japanese tourist groups grazed
like herds of herbivores. Ruth asked Jamie why he couldn’t keep his mouth shut, but he just ignored her. “That fucking guide
probably spends all his time shepherding customers up the Mittellegi Ridge and thinking he’s at the forefront of climbing,”
he complained. “Probably never leaves this bloody valley. The nearest he gets to any other mountains is when he goes to the
supermarket at Interlaken.”

The cloud stayed down. We lay around the campsite and sorted out our gear and talked to a couple of climbers from Bradford
who wanted to know about the Mittellegi Ridge and where they could get some decent beer. “All this lager piss,” they complained.
“Gives us indigestion.”

They’d heard of Jamie, of course. “Jim Matthewson? Done a lot of new routes in Scotland, haven’t you? Didn’t you do that variation
of Orion Direct?”

“The pair of us,” said Jamie.

“And what are you planning to do here?”

“The North Face.”

They sniffed and looked slightly awkward, as you might at the funeral of someone you don’t really know. “What would that be?”
one of them asked. There was the careful use of the conditional tense. “The third British ascent?”

Jamie shrugged. “I don’t read record books.”

“Well, good luck,” they said.

There was a high wind and still the odd speck of sleet in the air. During the afternoon, the cloud parted to show some ragged
patches of the Face, but they were out of context, like parts of a room glimpsed through a keyhole. “What about that bastard’s
weather forecast?” Jamie complained.

We waited. We were bored and tightened by the tension of the coming climb and the foul weather. The mountain brooded up there
behind the clouds and waited for us like the spider waiting for her prey. We laughed, we argued, we told stories and lies.
We sat in the van and pored over the photos and climbed the various pitches in our minds yet again, and discussed the merits
and demerits of making an early start and bivouacking on the Flat-iron, or going up to the Swallow’s Nest the afternoon before
so that we could start up the ice fields as early in the morning as possible. We waited. There’s even a name for it, that
listless wait for the weather to settle, a wait made brittle and bad-tempered by anxiety: Eiger-watching. There’s a name for
everything: the Difficult Crack, Death Bivouac, the Traverse of the Gods, the Spider. The whole damn mountain is tied up with
names, the names of the features of the Face and the names of the dead.

In the evening, Ruth played her guitar — a plangent, mournful voice singing Celtic laments — and a few of the people in the campsite
came over to listen. Above us the mountain lay back beneath its blanket of cloud and slept. We went for a few beers with the
Bradford climbers — Jamie showed them where you could get Dunkel and Hefeweizen — and when we got back to the van, Ruth cooked
a meal of rice and beef and vegetables. We killed two bottles of overpriced Swiss wine to go on top of the beer.

“That was a great meal,” Jamie said. “What do you call it?”

“Chop suey.” She glanced in my direction. “There’s a painting called
Chop Suey,
do you know that, Rob? By Edward Hopper.”

“As a matter of fact — ”

“Why does he always say that?” Jamie interrupted.
“As a matter of fact.
As though he was a lawyer in court or something.”

I ignored him. “As a matter of fact, I do.”

“It shows a lonely lady in a Chinese restaurant.”

“I don’t think she’s on her own. I think she’s got someone with her. There are two women, one with her back to the viewer.”

Ruth smiled knowingly. We knew, that was the trouble. Ruth and I knew. That’s always the trouble with betrayal: the betrayers
know so much more than the betrayed. “Maybe they were discussing a man,” she suggested. “A man whom they both love.”

We laughed, but there was something beneath the laughter, undercurrents of knowledge and desire. She leaned across and kissed
me. Jamie didn’t seem to care. She turned and kissed him; then she kissed us both with a fine indifference. When I made a
move to go, she put out her hand to stop me. “Don’t.”

So I stayed. Perhaps the whole thing was inevitable. The alcohol had something to do with it, of course. There was the promiscuity
of shared tiredness and emotion, and the hot smell of our bodies. Our minds were clouded with alcohol and ideas of sexual
freedom, our bodies were craving, our nerves were shredded by the wait and by the certain knowledge that hanging over us,
invisible like all the best monsters, was the Eiger. Ruth laughed in the gaslight and put her arms around the two of us, accepting
kisses from either. Jamie laughed too, but I couldn’t read the tone of his amusement, whether there was complicity in it or
mere acquiescence.

She was wearing a T-shirt. You snatch minor things out of the swamp of memory: I remember that T-shirt, the design. It was
tie-dyed, a sunburst of white and orange across a black sky. I remember how she pushed us away and crossed her arms across
her belly and grabbed the hem of the shirt and dragged it over her head. “There,” she said, tossing it aside. From the waist
up she was naked.

Jamie touched her. We were laughing. It was funny and shocking at the same time, seeing his hand on her breasts. There was
a sense of trespass, the breathless trespass of children stepping past the signs that said
PERYGL, CADWCH ALLAN
—
DANGER, KEEP OUT.
We tiptoed into the unknown — touching, laughing, pulling apart, wondering how far this would go and where it would end. There
was the pliant texture of her body and the hard edges of Jamie’s. And then the laughter died, and we were mere movement, a
triangle made of sinew and muscle and bone and nerve, flexing awkwardly in the narrow space; a scalene triangle, shifting,
flexing, the angles changing, but always with Ruth at the narrow point of convergence. “Yes,” I heard her say, very quietly
in my ear or Jamie’s, as though she were answering one of us alone: “Yes, yes, yes.”

The next morning no one said anything. It was the silence after the fall. We sat in the van and drank coffee and ate breakfast
and peered out of the windows to see what was going on up there above us, and said nothing. Clouds shifted and swirled around
the invisible mountain.

“What do we do?” I asked eventually. The question was there to be answered as anyone pleased. Ruth looked from me to Jamie.
He sipped his coffee and looked thoughtfully at the two of us. “Let’s go up to Eigergletscher Station and have a look at the
West Flank. Get a bit of exercise.”

“Okay,” I agreed. “Why not?”

Payment deferred, I think we knew that. We guessed there was something to pay. We had eaten the fruit of a particular species
of the tree of knowledge, a rare and exotic species, one that is almost certainly poisonous. We wouldn’t get away unscathed.
So we took the train up to Eigergletscher, and the momentary reprieve brought with it a certain lightheartedness. As the vehicle
crawled up through the meadows, there was a holiday mood among the three of us, a sense of relief.

Eigergletscher Station is a brutal place, a ferroconcrete blockhouse nestling below the West Ridge of the mountain. It is
the station before the tunnel, where the railway burrows into a black hole to climb up through the bowels of the mountain
on its journey up to the Jungfraujoch. Directly behind the station, above the tunnel entrance, the West Flank rises up in
great steps toward the summit five thousand feet above. To the left, deep in shadow, is the North Face.

That day, the cloud base was barely above the station buildings. We left the platform and went around the back of the buildings,
past official signs that warned us about the dangers of the mountains, onto the mountainside itself. Cliffs rose above in
a desolation of rubble and scree. The route zigzagged upward over sloping ledges and rock steps. There were cairns and a beaten
path in places. Assuming everything went well with our climb, this was the way Jamie and I would come down from the summit.
We paused at intervals to look around and try to get our bearings, but soon we were in cloud and bereft of all landmarks.
We climbed apart, cocooned in our own worlds. At a snowfield, we paused to put on crampons.

“How much higher do we go?” Ruth asked.

Jamie shrugged. The route slanted up the snow to the foot of an icy gully. Cairns marked the way, and in places there were
pitons that had been used for rappelling. The wind plucked at our sleeves as though reminding us of something. And then we
found ourselves on a knife-edge ridge, peering over into the ominous darkness of the North Face, where the wind keened and
no one moved. The cloud swirled past us, cold and silent, pouring into the shadows.

I looked at Ruth’s face, pinched with cold, huddled into her hood. She looked ugly like that, wasted and shriveled, like an
old woman wearing a head scarf. I smiled. She smiled back, but her smile lacked conviction. We went up a bit farther before
turning back and finding our way down through the murk until the roof of the station loomed out of the mist below us.

There was a feeling of relief to be off the mountain, out of the darkness of the cloud and back in a place where there were
people and lights. We got something to drink at the bar, and then we walked side by side down the path below the station.
The mood had changed. The Eiger has that quality. Civilization laps up to its very foot so that you can step from the desolation
of the mountain into the comforts of the human world in a few paces. We went on down the path below the mountain like innocent
friends out for a stroll. There was sunlight now, shafts of it breaking through the cloud. Where the path was wide enough,
Ruth walked between the two of us, linking her arms through ours as though holding us together, laughing and talking as though
nothing mattered. But someone was going to get damaged, perhaps all three of us. We sensed that, each in his own way. We had
trespassed. There was, beneath our casual manner, the darkness of a deep hurt.

That evening, we ate supper in near silence. Jamie and I talked of the weather, the prospects, the gear we should take, where
we should bivouac — all assuming that the cloud would clear and the mountain would allow us a few days of decent weather. Ruth
watched us and kept that dark Welsh expression of reserve and withdrawal, like the mountains looking down on the English castles
there on the coast.

“So what about
us?”
she asked when it seemed that we were finished, when the plates had been cleared away. “Where do we go from here?”

So we talked. It was a long, rambling, circuitous conversation, not the kind of thing you recall in clear detail, perhaps
because the detail was never clear at the time. In some ways it seemed unreal. We made assertions of eternal love; we made
accusations of betrayal. I remember that she wept. I had never imagined that this might be possible. A remarkable event, her
pallid face streaked with tears, her eyes and nose flushed. “I want you both,” she cried. “I want you both; I love you both,
and you both love me and you love each other. Can’t we leave it at that? We have something so special here. Can’t we just
do what the hell we like?” I think perhaps that in her mind we were playing Arthur and Lancelot to her Guinevere. Guinevere
is Welsh —
Gwynhwy-far.
The whole story of Arthur is Welsh, really, so I guess it suited her Celtic mysticism.

I sound cynical. Across the space of so many years it’s difficult not to be. We were children of our time, eager to draw our
lives against the background of a universal love that no one had really witnessed but everyone claimed. Eventually, with nothing
resolved, we dozed. When I was next aware of the world around me, the luminous hands of my watch told me that it was three
o’clock.