Bright Air - Barry Maitland [85]
I got up and walked unsteadily to Anna and looked over her shoulder as she prised the thing open and drew out a slip of paper. She read it and then handed it to me. There were tears brimming in her eyes.
I recognised the handwriting, but not the quotation.
For with earth do we see earth,
with water water,
with air bright air,
with fire consuming fire,
with Love do we see Love,
Death with dread Death.
I wasn’t sure what the poem meant, but it seemed pretty obvious what Luce had intended. I just stood there for a long time without speaking, without really thinking, just surrendering to the earth, the water, and the bright air, to love and death.
A spatter of rain slapped my cheek. I turned and saw a grey mass of cloud advancing on us across the ocean from the south. Anna was sitting at my feet, hands tucked up into her armpits, absorbed in some private meditation of her own.
‘I think we’re in for a storm,’ I said.
She looked up at me, eyes puffy with tears, then out to sea. To the north Lord Howe was rapidly disappearing into grey cloud, the sun was gone and the wind was picking up, cold and harsh. She roused herself and I helped her to her feet, scooping Luce’s chalk bag into my pack.
‘Sure there’s nothing else?’
She shook her head, and I piled the rocks back into the semblance of a cairn.
We abseiled down the pinnacle a great deal faster than we’d gone up, then worked our way back along the Cheval Ridge, the wind now ripping alarmingly at us on our exposed perch. By the time we reached the Black Tower the southerly change had reached full force, scouring us with driving rain. Refreshing at first, it rapidly chilled us through and we decided we’d better find somewhere to shelter. We chose what seemed the least exposed flank and I began to lower myself down, cautiously now. I knew that more climbers are killed abseiling downwards than climbing up, and the rock was streaming with water. About twenty metres down I came to an overhang, beneath which was a relatively dry ledge. I called up to tell Anna, and a few minutes later we were both down there, huddled against the wind and gusting rain. I tried with limited success to rig up a water collection scoop with my nylon coat, and after a while managed to get us a drink and begin to fill our water bottles. Soaked and freezing, I sank back against the unyielding rock, feeling that this was certainly the most miserable situation I’d ever found myself in. I sneezed and shivered and began to laugh.
‘What’s funny?’ Anna said, through teeth clenched against the cold.
‘I was just thinking that my specialty was risk management.’
She gave a snort. ‘That was with the bank, was it?’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t like banks.’
‘Nobody does.’
‘But you left Luce to go and work for one.’
There was no real answer to that. Put so bluntly, it seemed preposterous.
‘Yes. I did a stupid thing.’ I’d never spoken about this to anyone, but what did it matter now, marooned on a crag in the middle of the ocean? ‘I slept with someone else, one weekend when Luce was away. It didn’t mean anything and I didn’t think it mattered, but it did. I couldn’t stand the thought of her finding out. So I left.’
It was more complicated of course—my restlessness, my doubts about us. But I felt a tremendous relief to tell someone this simple, shameful fact at last. The wind howled around us, and Anna said nothing for a while.
‘She was a first-year student of Marcus’s.’
I thought I’d misheard. ‘What?’
She repeated it, and I said, ‘You knew? I didn’t think anyone knew. How …?’
‘Marcus told us.’
‘Us?’
‘Well, Damien certainly, probably Curtis and Owen.’
‘My God … And Luce?’
‘I don’t know. I didn’t say anything. She never mentioned it.’
I was astounded. ‘How did Marcus know? He wasn’t even there.’
‘He arranged it, Josh. He never forgave you for having Luce fall in love with you. He got the girl to do it.’
I think if I hadn’t been tied in I’d have slipped off