North Face: A Novel Read online

  Miss Fisher, sipping her tea, wished that Miss Searle had thought to stir the pot; she had not liked to suggest it. Conversation faltered and died; she felt that it was her turn to revive it.

  “I wonder what we’ve got coming,” she essayed politely.

  Miss Searle, who perceived at once what was meant but did not feel equal to it, expressed silently a civil interrogation.

  “The new P.G., I mean.” Miss Fisher remembered Miss Searle’s cold; it was on herself that cheerfulness devolved. “This mysteryman that’s going up into Rookery Nook.”

  “Oh, yes, of course. I’m so sorry. Do have another scone, Mrs Kearsey really manages very well on the rations, don’t you think?”

  “Ta, after you. Well, hope springs eternal, they say, but I expect it’ll be a case of a castle in the air, more senses than one, don’t you?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t quite …?” Would even Rome and Florence, Miss Searle was wondering, make up for the weeks spent in this mental slum?

  “Well, I mean to say, with men in the short supply they are, if they’ve got anything to them they don’t need to go to boarding-houses on their own. Mind you, it was different before the war. I’ve started out once or twice not knowing a soul, and had the time of my life. But not now; not unless you go to these Butlin places, and goodness knows who you might pick up there. I’m afraid I’m too fussy who I go about with.”

  “Yes,” said Miss Searle. “Quite.” But the hot tea and her cold conspired together against her. She snatched at her handkerchief. Miss Fisher put down her terseness entirely to force of circumstances.

  “Must be this side of sixty, anyway. Mrs K’s pretty straight, she wouldn’t have poked him up there without giving him some sort of hint what he was in for. Nice if he turned out to be a Raf type, demob, leave or something. But what a hope.”

  “I don’t suppose”—Miss Searle tucked back her handkerchief—“that we shall see a great deal of him, in any case.”

  “I follow you there all right.” Miss Fisher felt she was getting a response at last; she warmed. “Not if that Winter girl sees him coming. Talk about a fast little bit—” With some presence of mind, she clipped off two consonants just in time.

  “Oh? Miss Winter goes out so much; I’m afraid I’ve noticed her very little.”

  This time, Miss Searle had managed a clear articulation. Miss Fisher bent over her plate; the scone she was crumbling made a film of margarine on her fingers. Her sunburned brow stung like fire. Miss Searle must have caught the word after all.

  Rolling, obviously, a greasy crumb, Miss Fisher relived, as rapidly as the drowning, the bad moments of a lifetime: the Housman disaster; the time when she had called a bishop Mister; the cocktail party to which she had gone in a backless evening gown. With it all, she felt an inarticulate sense of wrong. The Miss Searles got the last word so easily, by freezing explanation. She would have liked somehow to make clear that she had let slip a bit of occupational slang, whose specialised place she really knew quite well; that she wasn’t interested in Raf types only because they made good escorts, but because some of them, when she looked in with a hot drink just before the night staff came on, had unburdened themselves of things not known to their mothers or their girls. All this struggled within her, hopelessly; she groped for her handkerchief and wiped her fingers clean.

  “I see in this morning’s paper,” said Miss Searle, relenting in victory, “that we can expect some settled weather for the next few days.”

  A couple of hundred yards up the road, Neil was folding away his map. The scale was irritatingly small; inch-to-the-mile editions showed no sign of reappearing, and his pre-war collection had not covered this unfamiliar ground. Well, he could make his own. Why not? He had nothing better to do, or, certainly, to think about.

  Two inch to the mile; it was unlikely he would get squared paper at the local stationer’s. The nearest place … Disturbed by a vague feeling that there was something he had better do first, he realised that he was hungry. The sensation had become, lately, so unusual that he was slow to recognise it.

  Anyway, he thought, the air’s good here.

  As he disinterred his rucksack from the bracken he remembered that, having travelled down from the north overnight without a sleeper, he would probably be improved by a clean shirt. He swung the rucksack indecisively; but, like everything else nowadays, it didn’t seem worth the trouble. Shrugging himself into the straps, he made for the landmark of the tower.

  Mrs Kearsey received him at the door with instant misgiving. She had hoped against hope that he would be young enough to find it amusing. Forty-five, she thought, if a day; then subtracted a few years, for he looked very run-down, she thought, and shockingly thin for a man of his length and shoulders. Her spirits, which had sunk at the sight of him, were not raised by a Standard English accent which disposed at a blow of heather and outside stairs. Chattering with nervous brightness while she sought for comfort, she found some reassurance in the shirt. He couldn’t be fussy; it was doubtful if he had even shaved today. (Neil owed the benefit of the question to the fact that his beard grew lighter than his hair.) He had forbiddingly little to say; he must have seen the tower as he came up the road. Unable to bear it longer, she committed her fears to words.

  “That’s all right. I saw it coming along. It’ll be quiet up there.”

  “Oh, yes, beautifully quiet. You won’t know anyone else is in the house. And the bathroom’s only just at the foot of the steps, quite handy really. They look a bit flimsy, but the builder’s not long been over them and says they’ll be safe for fifty years. You’ll find there’s a lovely view.” She paused on this. “There’s just one thing, Mr Langton, and be sure to tell me, for I’d make arrangements somehow if it meant moving out myself …”

  “What is it?” asked Neil abruptly. The moment of suspense, the impending of a personal question, scraped like a rough thumb along his nerves. He had had an almost sleepless night in the train, besides.

  Taking alarm, Mrs Kearsey dithered, prolonging his discomfort. “It’s nothing, really, only I know some people find … I mean it’s the height. Now please be sure to tell me if you can stand looking down.”

  “Yes, thanks,” said Neil, speaking with rather more irony than he was aware. He had just spent some time on Ben Nevis, going into this question closely. Life had never been much disposed to hand him solutions ready-made.

  Sure that she had offended him beyond repair, Mrs Kearsey launched herself into a stream of palliative platitudes; she had seen, too late, the clinker-nailed boots slung outside the rucksack. It took Neil, who was pre-occupied, a few moments to realize what it was all about. Pulling himself together, he smiled at her.

  “Of course not. Nice of you to worry about it.”

  Mrs Kearsey underwent a relaxing process inconsequent to Neil, who was not given to mirrors. Becoming suddenly almost cosy, she showed him the bathroom and went off promising tea. The tapwater was hot; he quite wished he had taken his razor in with him. But never mind. It was after five; the dining-room would be clear by now, he would get a meal in peace.

  The door of the Lounge was neither really thick nor quite gimcrack. Incomplete, filtered sounds of arrival had come through it: the bell, Mrs Kearsey’s strained twitter, sliding down the register to an easier C natural; infrequent, low-pitched replies, feet, light and decisive on alternate stairs. The feet sounded young.

  A conversation, about the difficulty of understanding Russians, drifted rudderless and ran aground. Miss Searle tried to tug it back into the fairway, but broke off to give a careful pat to her nose. Afterwards, she pushed her handkerchief out of sight into the sleeve of her cardigan, and smoothed out the bulge. Miss Fisher stretched her stockings out sideways, looked for rubbed places over the ankle-bones, and, satisfied, crossed her legs at the knee. They were American nylon; Miss Searle noticed this for the first time. She herself had on woollen ones, because of her cold. Crossing her legs at the ankle, she tucked them under the ch
air: she was quite unaware, in any cerebral way, of doing this.

  Mrs Kearsey came in with tea, a large plate of bread and butter, and some more scones. She flicked at Miss Searle and Miss Fisher a concealed look which had something of conscience about it. Two minutes later she came in again, with a boiled egg.

  “One shouldn’t spoil them,” she said with guilty brightness. “I warned him not to expect it again! But you know what the food is, travelling nowadays. I always do think the rationing comes hard on these tall men.”

  Miss Searle said nothing. Years of comparison between the endowments of men’s and women’s colleges had left their mark. Miss Fisher gave a little smile, whether of irony or approval it would have been hard to say, and smoothed the hem of her dress over a stocking knee.

  “Now I shall have to hurry him up,” said Mrs Kearsey, rapidly filling-in Miss Searle’s rather palpable silence. It seemed, from the sound, that she had needed to go no further than the foot of the stairs.

  Miss Fisher thrust her needle carefully through a stitch, a little further than one does when about to continue. Miss Searle picked up her cup, and had raised it to her lips before becoming aware of the cold dregs at the bottom. There was a tiny pause, like the moment in a darkening theatre when the rustle of programmes ceases to be heard.

  The door opened. They were exposed to the first reactions of a man tired, hungry, unkempt after rejecting the opportunity to be tidy, and not totally lacking in convention, who finds himself confronted with two strange women, to whom he must make conversation while eating alone.

  It was not a happy moment for anyone. Neil was awkwardly aware that his face had slipped. His social conditioning had returned with force after a single glance at Miss Searle; he knew he must look as if he had slept out. Miss Searle, who in her early twenties had suffered agonies (now almost hidden from memory) at the dances to which she had dutifully gone, felt the aura of male negativism like a cramp in the back of her neck. Miss Fisher came off best. She had had to encounter many disagreeable and defensive people, and was interested besides. Her first instincts were clinical; she wondered what he was convalescing from. His deep tan, combined with his spareness, had suggested tuberculosis until she noticed that his condition was too hard for this. Provisionally, she decided he might have been a prisoner with the Japanese. There was a certain look about the eyes; and beside … But, the occasion being a social one, she was as careful as Miss Searle not to take a second glance at his hair, in which, flattened by a hasty brushing, the dead yellow-white stripe across the forehead assaulted the eye as violently as a facial scar.

  Introductions were exchanged; the visitor acknowledged them with stiff little bows, and apologised for himself; he had been travelling all night, he explained. Miss Searle almost said they had heard as much, but changed her mind; he looked so guarded that even this seemed too personal an intrusion. Aloud, she said that travelling nowadays was nothing short of an ordeal, and that of course they quite understood.

  Miss Fisher, with one part of her mind, was thinking. The time he must have been repatriated, they ought to have put more flesh than that on him by now: nursed him in one of these makeshift temporary dumps, perhaps. He had no scarring from boils or jungle-sores, she noticed, and she left the diagnosis open; for her personality hung divided. The voice, the carriage, the travel-stained clothes which carried for her the stamp of a lordly indifference, pulled the secret cords of her imagination. Beyond its façade of washed tile and chromium, a casement opened in a mysteriously intact ivory tower.

  Seized by an adolescent shyness, she remembered with comfort her nylon stockings, anchors of self-confidence in an uncertain world. Flexing her ankles becomingly, she extended them a little. Unhappily, it was only Miss Searle’s eye which was caught by the movement. Mr Langton was looking, with an embarrassed formality, from the tea-table to Miss Searle.

  “No, no; we finished long ago. That’s yours.”

  Feeling uncomfortable and inhibited, Neil dissected one of the scones, which would have been an easy mouthful if he had been alone. He cheered himself by remembering that, except for breakfast and supper, this was the last meal to which he need ever be in. Meanwhile, since he looked like a tramp, he had better make some effort not to eat like one. He resented this social necessity, as he had come to resent most others. Conscientiously, he asked them what the weather had been like in this part of the world.

  Relieved, they informed him between them that he had just missed some terrible days, and that the local people predicted a fine spell now. Neil expressed pleasure; he was doing his best, and did not know that he sounded like someone receiving information about Patagonia. Discovering the egg, and at the same time losing all enthusiasm for food (this often happened now) he asked if the place were a good one for walking, just in time to avert an abysmal pause.

  They were both aware, before they had carried this topic far, that the question had only aimed at embarking them on something which would need the minimum of concentration and reply. Most of the running was made by Miss Searle, who tried, by an intelligent impersonal manner, to dissociate herself from Miss Fisher’s hosiery display. She was almost physically embarrassed by women whose manner altered in the presence of men. Owing to the bad weather and her cold, most of her information had been acquired at second-hand, and covered a radius of about three miles. It gradually emerged, from Mr Langton’s civil replies, that his notion of moderate exercise was in the region of twenty. Conversation flagged again.

  Suddenly finding her voice, Miss Fisher said, “Do for goodness’ sake make a proper tea. We had our turn making pigs of ourselves, before you came.”

  “I’m doing fine,” said Neil, much relieved by her comfortable commonness; he had hoped that all his fellow-guests would be of this unexacting kind. It was past the season for well-to-do holidays. He had placed Miss Searle at once as a schoolmistress, and wondered what she was doing here at the beginning of term.

  Miss Searle, who had failed to detect the signs of an even unconventional donnishness, was making the same speculation. She noticed his hands, long, bony, and, she thought, scholarly; failing to notice their rigidly controlled flexibility, and a tensile strength which reflected experience alone does not impart. Pleasantly conscious of the contrast between Miss Fisher’s voice and her own, she said, “One’s really very fortunate if one can get away at this time of year. I was teaching in schools before I came back to Oxford, and I used always to feel very ill-used at being fetched back at the beginning of the September weather. It’s so often the loveliest of the year.”

  “Yes,” said Mr. Langton. There was an awkward silence; he stirred his tea. In the manner of a man keeping himself up with difficulty to a resolution, he added flatly, “I’m a schoolmaster myself.”

  “Indeed?” Perhaps he was taking a grace-term. “What is your subject?”

  “Classics.”

  His taciturnity, she thought, verged on the brusque. Having volunteered so much, he must surely expect some kind of comment; perhaps he was merely shy. She checked herself on the verge of asking whether he had been at Oxford; this would lead, inevitably, to dates, and Miss Searle often thought she had aged a good deal less than some of her contemporaries. She waited, expecting him to name his present school; but this he showed no sign of doing.

  “I can’t, I suppose, possibly have seen you at Winchester?” she asked, to remind him of this omission. “I’ve a nephew there I visit now and again.”

  “No. I think not.”

  His face, and his voice, were simply a full-stop.

  Not since her own schooldays had Miss Searle felt such a helpless sense of mortification. She opened her bag, and aimlessly looked inside it.

  Suddenly he looked up, as if, by some delayed process, he had only just heard himself. With a difficult, painstaking smile he added, “Perhaps I’ve got a double there.”

  Forced as the smile had been, it had held something more than recollected manners; an instinctive kindness seemed to move in
it faintly, like old habit overlaid. It restored to his mouth for a moment a guarded humour, and still more guarded idealism, which had, perhaps, once been characteristic. But it came too late for Miss Searle, whom the preceding snub had unnerved past all perception. She murmured something, without looking up, about her memory for faces being very poor.

  “You won’t have time for much of a holiday, will you, before the schools go back again?”

  It was Miss Fisher, rushing blithely in past the warning signs. Her voice, however, had not the note of enquiry so much as of an instinctive solicitude. Perhaps for this reason, it sounded commoner than ever; when she said “the schools,” asphalt playgrounds labelled “Boys” and “Girls” leaped to the mind. Miss Searle, waiting, felt quite sorry for her in advance.

  Mr Langton turned round. Relief showed in his face, relaxing the hard downward lines which were like, and unlike, the prematurely ageing lines of work and worry in the very poor.

  “Are you in the profession too, Miss—er—I’m sorry …?

  “Fisher’s the name.” Her evident pleasure in the question, so clearly a red-herring, faintly amused Miss Searle. “No, I’m not that brainy. I’m a nurse—a ward sister, matter of fact.”

  He proceeded, promptly, to draw her out about hospital nationalisation. While he talked, a different personality emerged, like the reviving stuff of routine. He could be imagined dealing competently, but not without some genuine feeling, with the awkwardness of boys at Sunday tea-parties, the fuss of parents, the recurrent feuds of the staff. Even now, when the manner was quite clearly self-protective, it somehow failed to suggest an uncaring exploitation. Miss Fisher gave of her best. She had forgotten her stockings, and had crossed her legs indifferently, at the calf.

  Miss Searle’s cold, which had only begun last night, began to advance into its second stage with the quickened tempo often observed in the evening hours. Her skin crept and winced, her back ached, a feeling of sodden thickness spread from her face to her brain. She had to get out her handkerchief, whose size embarrassed her. It was chilly upstairs, and her hurt pride flinched from open retreat. If she had been staying with Muriel, she would have had a bedroom fire and tray.