He grinned. ‘And climbing makes it easy to impress girls, of course.’
‘Really?’
‘Not really. In fact, I have yet to encounter any lady climbers, and most members of the fairer sex tend to regard our obsession with tall, pointed objects as being rather unhealthy and something Doctor Freud would have some thoughts about.’
Peter laughed.
‘What about you?’ Noel asked. ‘Why did you climb up here? I’m sorry to be forward, but a person who takes such meticulous notes as you does not strike me as someone who suddenly has an urge to sit on a rooftop.’
‘You wouldn’t understand.’
‘Try me.’
‘It’s silly. I was at this lecture earlier today and something Doctor Unschlicht said upset me.’
‘Really? I usually have trouble even staying awake at lectures, let alone getting upset.’
‘It’s just that…’ Peter waved his hands in the air in frustration, looking for words. ‘He was saying that mathematics does not mean anything, that it’s just a language game, that there is no truth behind it. I thought he was wrong, but it was so hard to argue with him. I wanted to be a mathematician, but now I don’t know what to believe.’
Noel looked at him curiously. ‘A mathematician? You know, a lot of the climbers are doing the Tripos. I think you lot use your brain so hard that night air does you good. Why don’t you try it?’
‘Climbing?’
‘Yes, why not? You definitely have what it takes. We’ve written a manual of sorts—I’ll bring it to you tomorrow and you can have a look.’
Noel’s teeth flashed in the dark.
‘Of course, there is one thing that every beginner has to do for themselves. An initiation ritual, if you like.’
‘What is that?’
Noel got up, gathered the rope and tied it around his waist. Then he walked to the roof edge, leaned over, grabbed a drainpipe and started climbing down as nimbly as a monkey. He paused and peeked over the edge, eyes full of mischief.
‘Getting down,’ he said. ‘Good luck!’
And then he was gone.
* * *
Sitting in Noel’s office seven years later, Peter remembered that feeling, being left on the roof all by himself. It had been a test, of course. He had got down, in the end, after crawling around the pitch-back roof on all fours for a while.
Noel liked tests. But if this was one, passing it required more than shimmying down ornamental stonework and a broken fingernail.
‘One of us playing both sides?’ Peter said finally. ‘That sounds unlikely to me. Are you sure that was not just some Russian ploy?’
‘That’s what the Winter Court bigwigs are saying, too. I just wanted to know what you think.’
‘Why me?’
‘You were always the clever one, old boy. And Spain is where we’ve been having the most trouble of late. Anybody in your Section we should be worried about?’
Peter looked at Noel. He had that same confident, carefree look as when he was making his way up the Old Library chimney all those years ago. That meant he did not entirely know what he was doing but thought he was on the right track.
‘This source was sure that the mole is in the Summer Court?’
‘I think so—why do you ask?’
‘Well, to be honest, I have been wondering about BRIAR. There is a strong NKVD presence in Madrid, and he is in a Communist volunteer unit. The Winter Court could be wanting to put the blame on us when the fox is in their own henhouse.’
‘Good point. I am going to press my source on that. Anybody else?’
‘Not that I can think of.’
‘All right, then. I just thought you should know, in case a witch hunt is imminent. We have been in this together for so long that I wanted to come to you first.’
Noel’s face was unreadable. It would be very like him to give a warning even if he suspected Peter. Or was he offering Peter a chance to come clean?
‘Does C know?’ he asked.
‘Not yet. I want to keep it that way until I have something more solid. It may turn out to be nothing.’
When their Director of Studies, Mr Jepson, had recruited Noel for the Service in their third year at Cambridge, Noel had finally found something more thrilling than night-climbing. Peter had followed him soon after.
Not for the first time, he wished things had been otherwise. Noel’s friendship was the one thing he had not wanted to sacrifice on the altar of the Presence. George had advised him to continue the camaraderie, keep as close to Noel as possible, as if nothing had changed. He had been unable to do it. Noel had felt some unspoken thing between them, a stone in the current of their friendship, and it had pushed them apart.
The irony was that it had been the night-climbing and their friend Cedric that set Peter on the path that finally led him to the Presence.
* * *
The day after their first meeting, true to his word, Noel came to see Peter and brought him the Climbers’ Guidebook, a stack of typewritten pages, handwritten notes and photographs. Try as Peter might, he could not be angry with Noel for abandoning him on the roof: the shared nocturnal activity made him feel part of something special.
Peter met Noel’s friends, James, Bunny and Cedric, who also spent their nights hanging off Cambridge’s architecture. They exuded a potent mixture of enthusiasm and sheer insanity. The climber community was small and secretive. Noel claimed that there were often climbers in the same college who never knew each other.
Under Noel’s tutelage, Peter practised on the roof of the Old Library. Noel called it the nursery for climbers: a jumbled confusion of slopes, leaded walks and iron ladders.
A month later, Noel deemed him ready to attempt the Library’s Tottering Tower. It was a twenty-five foot high structure, a thin stone needle with a collar of gargoyles and a sharp cone on top.
Peter gasped when he saw it, but it was more of a mental challenge. You had to leap across a chasm to start, but once you did so, the tower itself had miniature carvings that made the rest of the climb easy, like going up a stepladder.
Then they were both at the top of the tower, standing on carvings and holding on to the spike at the top.
‘Look at this view,’ Noel said. ‘It was worth the effort, wasn’t it?’
The massive edifice of King’s College Chapel loomed ahead, so gigantic that even at their height of sixty or seventy feet, Peter felt like he was still looking at it from the ground. To the north, St John’s Chapel rose above a sea of rooftops. Directly below was Trinity Hall, with the speck of a porter walking across the quad. Peter felt like a bird, soaring.
Maybe Unschlicht had done him a favour. If you were rooted in something solid, you could never truly fly.
After that, he embraced climbing wholeheartedly. It took his mind away from doubting mathematics. It was good to feel red brick against his body, and to solve one problem at a time—hand here, foot here—and see how far up he could get. His studies suffered. The days became blurry, sand-eyed intervals between climbs, and he spent more time adding entries to the Guidebook than he did with his homework.
And that was the way it was until September, when Cedric died.
* * *
After Noel, Cedric was the climber Peter came to know best. He was a tall Trinity boy who dressed in ridiculously high-waisted trousers and braces and smoked a pipe. In tutorials, he was completely silent, folded his lanky frame into his bench with great difficulty, and squeezed his pencil nub so hard it looked as if his long, flexible fingers might snap like twigs at any moment. During climbs, he became alive and talkative, telling Peter about growing up with his six rugby-playing brothers and his plans to open a store selling American comics.