Free The Fall by Simon Mawer

orifices, their smooth and endless surfaces. The message
     was signed
James,
and I wasn’t even sure who James was until I deciphered the scrawled question
See you in Wales?
at the end. The picture on the card showed mountains quite different from those low-slung Welsh ones that we had admired
     as kids: they were the towering, snow-crusted peaks of the Bernese Oberland: Jungfrau, Mönch, Eiger. The Young Woman, the
     Monk, and the Ogre, a trio of curious eroticism.
We climbed the Jungfrau,
Jamie had written; but who
we
signified was never explained.
    I felt a small tug of envy. Whoever Jamie was now, wherever he was, whoever that collective
we
signified, he had achieved something of that ambition we had casually discussed years earlier: to climb mountains. I had
     only slogged up Snowdon in mist and rain, and spent a miserable weekend camped in the Lake District with a school group. But
     Jamie had done the real thing: the Jungfrau.
    When I went home for the holidays, I searched in vain through my mother’s address book for the Matthewson’s telephone number.
     “I don’t think I ever wrote it down,” she said. “Anyway, why do you want to go chasing around to find him?”
    “He was good fun. And he wrote to me. I mean, Christ, Mum, he was a
mate
.”
    But the name Matthewson did not even appear in the telephone book. Matthews, yes, many of them. But no Matthewson. “Ex-directory,
     I suppose,” Mother said, her tone suggesting that being listed in the telephone book went with moral purity while deliberately
     keeping oneself out was a sure sign of turpitude. “Typical of Meg.”
    So I went to find him. I took the train to Llanbedr once again, and at the station I had to wait half an hour for a bus, and
     even then I wasn’t sure that it was the right one.
Gwytherin,
I remembered. The bus crawled through the town, past a church and a cinema and the cattle market, and soon the road was climbing
     up, winding past drystone walls, past fields of luminous green where sheep grazed, past woods of a green so dark that it was
     almost black. A fox sloped across a hillside. And there, suddenly and surprisingly, was the place that I more or less recalled
     but with a new sign now, the name engraved on a slab of slate:
Gilead House
    In the drive, incongruous on the Welsh hillside, was a large white Mercedes.
    As I pushed open the gate and walked up to the house, it began to rain, a mere drizzle out of the slate-gray sky. I rang the
     doorbell. There was a long pause before I heard noises on the far side. The door opened, and a face peered out at me, a suspicious
     female Welsh face with dark eyes and dark hair. “Yes?”
    “Is James in?”
    “James?” A lilt of surprise. “No.” The vowel drawn out, exaggerated, given a short life of meaning: disappointment, amusement,
     faint ridicule. I almost apologized and went away; I almost turned tail.
    “Mrs. Matthewson then?”
    “Who shall I say it is wants her?”
    A voice came from behind, from out of sight in the shadows of the hallway. “Who is it, Mary?”
    Mary looked over her shoulder. “It’s a young man wants Master James, ma’am.” Master James. A good, servile touch, that.
    “Well, what’s his name?” said the voice from behind. She came forward, stepping out of memory just as Mary stepped aside.
     She was smaller than I recalled. The relativity of age. Of course she was exactly the same height, but I had grown taller;
     taller than her by a head now, looking down at her standing there in the doorway in her tight white-cotton trousers and pink
     denim shirt. But it was she who seemed to have grown smaller and somehow — but I was uncertain of such things — younger. She had
     done her hair differently, the spirit of the times catching even the adults now. It no longer had that shiny nylon look, but
     appeared darker and more natural. Wheat colored: the same streaks, the same darks and lights, as a field of wheat. I blushed.
     “I was looking for