The Fall (56 page)

T
HE NURSING HOME
was a redbrick house with a solid, Victorian air about it. It had once been a private school, and the grounds that had once
seethed with careless children were now haunted by forgetful adults, figures that shuffled and wandered and repeated over
and over the little things they could remember.

“Mr. Dewar,” said the woman at the reception desk. “Of course.” She smiled, just to show that she knew who I was. “We’re doing
very well this morning,” she said, “very well indeed. We’ve been up and about all by ourself.” I hated the collective pronouns:
as though somehow she was sharing in the decline. But senility is like death — it’s something you experience alone.

“Is she in her room?”

“I’m sure,” she said. “I expect we’re having a rest after lunch.”

The corridor had an oilcloth floor and framed reproductions on the walls. Presumably the pictures had been chosen for their
restful and positive qualities: there were bunches of flowers, bowls of gleaming fruit, that kind of thing. Children played
quietly in a Delft courtyard. Cows grazed in a field near Flatford. There was a smell, of disinfectant and some kind of floral
air freshener, and beneath that the sullen scent of urine. Gaunt faces watched me pass by. One or two smiled as though in
recognition, but you could never be sure. When a nurse said, “Good morning, Mr. Dewar,” the certainty of recognition, the
assurance of sanity, was almost a shock.

I paused at the door that had a card with
Mrs. Dewar
printed on it. When I knocked, I heard her voice, surprisingly strong and firm: “Who is it?”

“It’s me,” I called through the wood, and turned the handle.

She was sitting with her back to the door, at the desk that we had brought all the way from the hotel, the desk where she
used to do the accounts and write her letters. She still sat at the desk with paper in front of her, although she no longer
knew what to write, or to whom.

“Hello,” I said. She turned around to look at me, and the expression of puzzled confusion was suddenly replaced by a smile
of recognition. It was like sunlight breaking through a pall of cloud. Sometimes she would frown when she saw me and say something
quite absurd like “I don’t want them today, thank you,” as though I was a tradesman who had come to the back entrance of the
hotel. Or — somehow this was better — she would merely look at me with a dead expression as if I wasn’t even there. Occasionally
she would take me for one of the staff; often she would merely talk to me, politely, distantly, as though I were a vague acquaintance
and she was happy to provide me with a few details of life in the home. But when there was real recognition in her face it
brought me something like joy, a moment’s connection with who I was and had been. It linked me back to a past that I only
dimly understood, a place in space and time that I had no wish to return to but which, being part of me, was somehow vital.

“Hello, Mum.”

That light in her face, the faint image of the young woman she had once been illuminating from within the aged person she
had become. But she wasn’t looking directly at me. Her gaze was aslant, as though glancing off me into the past. “Hello, Guy,”
she said.

“It’s not Guy,” I told her gently. “It’s Robert.”

“Hello, Guy,” she repeated.

I shrugged and took the letter from my pocket and unfolded it on her lap. “There you are,” I said. “At least it’s
from
Guy. You can’t read it, but there you are just the same. I’m afraid it’s about forty years too late.”

She smiled. I don’t think she had even noticed the sheet lying there on the floral cotton of her dress. Her hands were laid
carefully on her knees as though she were posing for a photographer, and her gaze was still directed past my face. “In God’s
name, why didn’t you ever tell me about him?” I asked her.

Diana darling,

I am writing this at camp 4, which is no more than a single tent in the ice and snow at present, but very safe. The country
we walked through to get to our mountain is a marvel — rhododendrons and magnolias almost in full bloom, more spectacular than

farther to the west. Do you remember the rhododendrons of Port Meirion? Multiply those by, oh, I don’t know, one hundred thousand
times! But now we are well up our mountain, and we are going to do great things. I feel almost literally on top of the world.

Which leads me to what I really want to say, which is this: I have just had a letter from Meg, brought up with the rest of
the expedition mail. We had a blazing row before I left, and now she tells me what I have always suspected: James might not
be my child. Might not, is not, I don’t know. Perhaps these things can be decided for sure these days. I know we two talked
and talked about this and many other things the last time we were together. You said that you wanted to leave Alan and take
Robert with you, and that I could not leave Meg and the child. And now there is this news. Although, heaven knows, it is not

James’s fault that his mother is as she is, my loyalties must now be to you and to our son. What exactly will happen between
Meg and me, I don’t know — divorce, I suppose — but I will make what arrangements I can for James. That is for the future. For
now all I can do is ask you this — will you accept me, Diana? In a month I will be back in England. Will you wait for me? Will
you then accept all of my love, divided only between you and our son, forever?

Guy

For much of the more recent climbing in this book, I only had to fall back on my own memories of the highs and lows shared
with my onetime climbing partner Les Littleford. Information about climbing in the 1940s came from various sources—from Jim
Perrin’s
Menlove
(1985) to Colin Kirkus’s
Let’s Go Climbing!
(1941). For the Eiger, I gained much help from
Eiger: The Vertical Arena,
edited by Daniel Anker (English edition 2000), and Harrer’s
The White Spider
(1959, 1965). There is also an impressive on-line account of a recent ascent of the Nordwand (1997) by Paul Harrington at:
http://www.climbing.ie/exped/eiger/eiger.html
.

For London during the Blitz, I used a number of published eyewitness accounts, such as
Post D
(1941) by John Strachey
Raiders Overhead
(1943, 1980) by Barbara Marion Nixon, and
Westminster in War
(1947) by William Sansom. There is also Angela Raby’s book
The Forgotten Service
(1999), which documents, in photograph and diary, the experiences of an ambulance unit during the Blitz.

The excerpt quoted by Robert Dewar on
page 26
is from Edward Whymper’s classic work of mountaineering literature,
Scrambles Amongst the Alps
(1871).

S
IMON
M
AWER
has a degree from Oxford and lives in Rome. He is the author of
Mendel’s Dwarf, The Gospel of Judas,
and several other widely praised and prizewinning novels. He used to be an avid climber. After an apprenticeship on sea cliffs,
he climbed extensively in the British Isles but retired from serious mountaineering after surviving an avalanche in Scotland.

The Fall

A NOVEL BY

SIMON MAWER

A R
EADING
G
ROUP
G
UIDE

SIMON MAWER ON THE ORIGINS OF
The Fall

I fell. Literally, not metaphorically. Probably like everyone else, I have also fallen metaphorically—mankind is the product
of the Fall, after all; but this was a real fall. It was a blustery day of January, a quarter of a century ago, and I had
just completed the difficult section of an ice climb on the Northeast Face of Ben Nevis, in Scotland. After I had a struggle
with an iced-up chimney, it now looked as though the worst was over. Above there were just steep slopes of snow-ice, rising
up to where clouds hid the summit plateau. I teetered on the points of ice axes and crampons, and turned to look down onto
the top of my partner’s helmet some seventy feet below. I opened my mouth to call out.

“We’ve cracked it, Les!” That’s what I was going to say.

Hubris. As I turned to call to him, the avalanche began. At first it was a mere rivulet of ice crystals hushing down the snowfield
and sweeping round me. We’d been climbing through this kind of thing all morning and I clung on, waiting for it to pass. But
then the whole world went dark, and looking up I saw a great cloud of snow coming down on me. I remember praying. I think
I actually prayed to the avalanche itself. Please don’t knock me off, I pleaded. But the avalanche didn’t listen. First it
plucked one ice ax out of the ice, and then the other; then it flung me backwards.

Like Lucifer, I fell. I remember the vivid sense of release. All fear was gone. I went back over the ice chimney, down a short
snow slope that we had climbed, and finally back over the main icefall below. And then I stopped. Quite suddenly, I was hanging
upside down on the rope, one hundred and fifty feet below my partner. In the space of a few seconds triumph had become disaster.
Lucifer had become the Hanging Man.

If a book can be said to have a starting point, then I suppose that incident was the beginning of
The Fall.
Much was to happen and many years were to pass before writing started. I abandoned climbing (the most direct result of the
avalanche); I escaped Britain for the Mediterranean, where powder snow is unknown; I got married. In Italy I began to do seriously
what I had always done before in a fragmentary fashion: I began to write. My themes were fate and faith, memory and recall,
the past and its often-malign influence on the present. I wrote of Italy and Malta and Israel/Palestine. I wrote of the tyranny
of genetics and the freedom of the self, and at the back of my mind was always the possibility, probability even, that I would
one day write about climbing. So it was that, sometime in the first year of the new millennium, I took the road to North Wales,
where my family had come from and where Robert Dewar and Jamie Matthewson had started out on their own lives. And
The Fall
began…

1. Climbing is at the center of this novel, but human relationships present much larger obstacles for the central characters than do mountains. Can climbing be considered a simple metaphor in
   The Fall,
   or does its importance transcend its allusions to the difficulties of life?
   
2. The novel never really resolves the deaths of Guy and Jamie. Do you think either of them intended to die?
   
3. Did you expect that Guy would eventually be reunited with Diana? Would it have been possible for them to meet and not become involved again?
   
4. Did Caroline know about Diana and Guy’s reunion? Do you think her seduction of Rob was a form of revenge?
   
5. Rob and Jamie grow into adulthood in a more peaceful time, at least at home, than their parents did. How might their pursuit of climbing be considered a search for the meaning and urgency that their parents experienced during the war?
   
6. Discuss the similarities between Caroline and Ruth. How does each of them handle her desires in the face of commitment and aging?
   
7. In this novel the past seems to be both irrevocable and, in the light of constant revelations, ever-changing. Do you consider the past to be entirely fixed and concrete, or do you think it reflects the shared perceptions of those who experienced it?
   
8. Eve, Ruth, and James are all biblical names and the names of those Rob loves. What do you think Mawer is trying to reveal about Rob’s character by choosing these names?
   
9. At the end of the novel, we learn that both Rob and Jamie were trying to connect with men who weren’t actually their fathers. Do you think their pursuits were misguided, and would they have lived differently had they known about their paternity all along?
   
10. Did Jamie ever truly love Ruth? What role did Ruth play in allowing Jamie to deny his love for Rob? Would Rob and Jamie have been able to love each other had they had the chance?
    
11. What led Diana to break off her correspondence with Guy? Is it necessary for Guy ever to learn about her abortion?
    
12. Why was Rob able to settle down in a way that Jamie never could? Do you think he was ultimately happy with his decision?
    
13. Legend and myth play a central part in
    The Fall.
    Discuss how the characters’ consciousness of the Arthurian legends and the Norse gods play a part in shaping their experiences.
    
14. Discuss the way in which the characters’ ideas about duty and morals change during the London blitz in World War II. How are Diana’s decision to get an abortion and Guy’s decision to join the army affected by the realities of life during wartime?
    

T
HE
G
OSPEL OF
J
UDAS