Scoundrels

by Victor Cornwall

  With less than a week to go the expedition was in tatters, and I had to make the difficult decision about whether I was going to allow alcohol on the ascent or not. As it turned out this was decided for me. The chaps were of one voice: “No alcohol, no expedition.”

  I allowed it. We were going to Nepal come hell or high water.

  Mount Everest, January 1948

  I was exhausted, but the happiest man alive. I stood atop the peak of Mount Everest with the Union Jack in my hand and drove it deep into the snow. We’d done it! We’d bloody well done it! Against all the odds, this little party of mountaineering novices had scaled the world’s highest peak and survived.

  We took photos and hugged each other, a rare moment of camaraderie to set against our strained relationships. Trevelyan looked genuinely happy. His hair, shining like a frozen standard lamp, was a solid block of ice. He shook my hand and said, “Well done, Sir Victor Montgomery Cornwall,” and then, with tears forming, which froze instantly inside his tear ducts causing him to grimace in pain, “you led us well. You deserve all the accolades that are going to come your way.”

  I had a lump in my throat and was feeling unexpectedly emotional. “Go on you big soppy dog,” I said, patting him on the back. We were all grinning like champions, our frozen beards had never looked more rugged. It felt like we’d earned it too, a surprising victory considering the last few days. The climb hadn’t gone to plan. We were almost out of rations and from day one the weather had been terrible. On the first morning we’d lost three Sherpas in an avalanche, a tragedy that I blamed on myself, partly because as expedition leader I was responsible for everyone’s well being, and partly because it was my fault. I now saw that shouting ‘echo’ just to create an echo is not advised when surrounded by mountains pregnant with snow. It was a learning experience for all of us.

  Disappointingly, later that afternoon we lost the rest of our support, as another four Sherpas and Gerald Meekins were killed after falling into a crevasse. To my shame I’d always believed the word crevasse to be the French word for bridge.

  The first few days were rough. The cold was our biggest enemy and the frostbite was taking its toll. As he packed away his tent, Jefferson, my stalwart tennis partner with the phenomenal drop shot, mislaid his right glove. Such was the cold that over the next few hours his hand turned progressively black until his fingers resembled twisted bits of licorice. He remained chirpy and in good spirits but he knew that he’d never play another game of tennis in his life. He even made a joke about it by pretending to serve, but as he did his hand simply sheered off at the wrist and fell onto the ice. It was a sad sight, but he wasn’t the only one who suffered.

  The tip of Dagg-Wallace’s nose had gone black and would need to be amputated. I’d lost both big toenails and Spriggenhorn, our guide, had succumbed to frostbite on his face. His white eyes now stared out through thick, black, prune-like skin. Soon his entire face would need to be amputated, but we’d cross that crevasse when we came to it.

  It had been an exhausting, and yet rewarding, journey. It had been over a week since we’d left the hut at basecamp and began marching perilously through the snow. It was tough going, the mountain fog coming down almost immediately, reducing our visibility to only a few feet. And yet we’d done it. We stood on top of the world, our flag in the snow, the first nation to make it to the summit.

  I cracked open my hip flask to sample the sweet, smoky hit of an exquisite Islay single malt that I’d brought for the occasion. On cue, the fog began to lift for the first time since we’d set out. It was a wonderful moment. I began thinking of how the club might celebrate in my honour. Perhaps a formal dinner, a portrait, or a clubroom named after me. I’d almost certainly bagged a knighthood. I’d done England proud. I was a bloody national hero and I’d be buggered if I wasn’t going to dine out on this for the rest of my life.

  The euphoria lasted for about fifteen seconds. As the fog lifted it revealed a shocking truth. Everest was not the highest mountain in the world. There was a higher one. Right next to it.

  I glanced over at Trevelyan, whose jaw hung open as the lifting fog revealed an ascending rock face next to ours. We were dumbfounded, shattered, too exhausted to be angry. What the hell was happening? The geography books had got it wrong. Then the mist cleared even further and the terrible reality was laid bare.

  We’d conquered the wrong mountain.

  In fact we’d not even conquered the one we were on. We’d only made it about three hundred metres from the hut that we’d left a week ago. As we gazed back down the slope, a Sherpa appeared at the doorway and waved. He seemed to be offering us coffee.

  “How’s this happened?” I asked Spriggenhorn, who was studying his map. I angrily pulled out the Union Jack from the snow and smacked him across the goggles with the flagshaft.

  Belter strolled part of the way back to the hut and returned to confirm that the Sherpa was indeed offering us coffee. With little other option we trudged back down, our confidence shot. At least we knew now why none of us had suffered any altitude sickness.

  We sat around the rough wooden table in silence while the Sherpa bustled around us, preparing a pemmican supper. Inevitably, the accusations soon began to fly. Spriggenhorn was the first to put the boot in. “Zis expedeetion haz had poor leedersheep from ze begeening. Cornwall, ziz iz all of your doing.”

  I snapped. “Shut it Spriggenhorn you incompetent mountain bastard. You’re an embarrassment. I don’t remember you complaining when you thought we’d summited.”

  Then Belter Dagg-Wallace waded in. “Spriggenhorn’s right. You’d already knocked off two of your men before you even got here.”

  I rounded on him. “Nobody asked for your opinion. And for the record, I didn’t kill them. They were run over by a milk float.”

  “Bloody hell.” Dagg-Wallace stared at me, shaking his head in derision. In fact, everyone was staring. If I didn’t take control of the situation quickly I’d be made a scapegoat. It was like being surrounded by a pack of dogs ready to tear me apart. “Milk floats have near silent electric motors,” I added desperately, “They’re lethal.”

  “Heez crazy!”

  “Back me up here Trevelyan,” I said urgently. In the corner of my eye I could see Spriggenhorn reaching into his rucksack. Trevelyan was keeping his own council.

  There was a knife-edge of tension in the air. I had the feeling all hell was about to break loose. Then Spriggenhorn pulled out a revolver and tried to shoot me. “This eez for Hendricks!” he screamed as he loosed round after round in my direction. I dived for cover behind the Sherpa who was making us coffee, his body acting like a bulletproof vest as he took three bullets for me in the chest. I picked up the boiling hot pan of water and threw it at Spriggenhorn, catching him full in the face. He screamed in pain and staggered backwards giving me an opportunity to seize the gun. I grabbed his wrist and we crashed onto the floor as we wrestled for control. The squat little Swiss was stronger than I expected, and as we both tried to gain an advantage, the gun went off again twice, this time catching Jefferson a fatal one in the temple and shooting off the rest of Belter Dagg-Wallace’s frostbitten nose. Finally Trevelyan roused himself, grabbing the heavy iron pan and smashing it hard into the base of Spriggenhorn’s skull, knocking him out very cold indeed.

  I stood up and dusted myself off, slipping the pistol in the waistband of my trousers. “Thank you,” I said to Trevelyan, getting back my bearings. “That was all rather unseemly. Anyone else having murderous thoughts?”

  The expedition had been a complete disaster. For the time being Everest would remain unconquered. Bloody shame. I stood over the dead bodies of my colleagues and finished making the coffee, which was actually very good as it had been freeze-dried.

  __________

  When we arrived back in the UK there was no bunting, no television cameras, no crowds of cheering people. T
here was just Trevelyan and I, a noseless Dagg-Wallace and a desolate Ravenscroft, still reeling from the death of his lover Meekins. He’d only agreed to come on the trip on condition they were allowed to share a sleeping bag. We disembarked from the aircraft, the only consolation was that the ground was flat.

  As word got out the press had a field day, declaring the mission a terrible failure and revealing an alarming piece of information about Spriggenhorn. He wasn’t a mountain guide at all. He was the proprietor of a failing theme restaurant in Swiss Cottage. This was a stroke of luck, as I was able to foist most of the blame onto him. Trevelyan’s blow with the pan had been rather too effective, and Spriggenhorn’s body was crumpled up in an ice hole back in the Himalayas. Dead men can’t argue. It was his fault that we had gone up the wrong mountain. It made sense to pin all the other deaths on him too.

  So, by the skin of my teeth, I knew that I’d dodged a blackballing. I couldn’t be slung out of Scoundrels because the expedition had had noble intent. Nevertheless, the fact that we failed so embarrassingly loomed over me like a sword of Damocles. Periford would attack as soon as he sensed any weakness, and I knew there’d be retribution from Hendricks Snr for the death of his idiot brother. My card was marked.

  As you know it’s always been a great source of regret and shame that the mission was deemed a failure. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and so it’s easy to say now that we were under-prepared and foolhardy.

  Was it worth the death of those Sherpas? No. But they knew the risks and made the greatest mistake of trusting me with their lives. That displays remarkably poor judgement considering I had no climbing experience whatsoever. Not exactly the kind of guys I want with me on an ascent of the world’s highest mountain.

  And anyway what is failure? Not reaching the top? Or not trying in the first place? Think on that.

  Respectfully yours,

  Major Victor Montgomery Cornwall

  Nimbu Towers

  Pullen-under-Lyme

  Gloucestershire

  27th November 2016

  Dear Major,

  I’d forgotten I’d saved your life with my pan-wielding. Your frozen corpse would still be up on the nursery slopes scaring fat American tourists if it weren’t for me. I can only assume you are still, on some level, angry about your very significant failure to lead. For years afterwards I had to defend you from chaps at Scoundrels who thought you hadn’t tried hard enough, or that you should have dragged yourself to the summit by your fingertips, rather than coming back beaten with nearly every member of your expedition dead or maimed.

  But what the hell do they know? It’s easy to carp from one of those splendid armchairs in front of the fire in the Mountbatten Library, but several metres above sea level, with a parky wind whistling around you, having had to organise a massive team of Sherpas to transport all your expedition kit and haul you up on your own sleigh, well, it’s a different matter.

  Let’s draw a line under this painful episode, and move onto something a little more fun. Please find an account of the greatest sexual odyssey since Errol went off to Hollywood. I dashed off a few notes about it that came to mind when my new scullery maid, Conchita, was bent over in my study, re-blacking the fireplace.

  __________

  CHAPTER 19

  Around the World

  Scoundrels Club, 1948

  The gunmetal clouds over Piccadilly were stripped away by a scrabbling gale that whipped around me like a Tunisian seaside restaurateur. It only stiffened my resolve. I had a job to do.

  As I walked, I realised that, done well, the next three hours could cement my reputation as a legendary philanderer and swordsman at the most infamous Gentleman’s Club in London, and therefore the World. Done badly, I’d struggle to get a table at a Lyons Corner House.

  I knew that the past fortnight of transcendental meditation, protein-rich food and sexual abstinence had focused me as I had never focused before. My personal yogi, Ratapandosafantaman, had brutalised me with four hours of stretching, massage and chanting each day, in a room kept at ninety-five degrees. Edward Klovacs, a Royal Marine Physical Training Instructor of my acquaintance, had pushed me to my absolute limits at six each morning with punishing eight-mile runs around Hyde Park. I had instructed him to attack me without warning during the runs, using whatever weapons were to hand: logs, gravel, squirrels. As a result, I had reactions like a Shenzhu sword warrior.

  All I had eaten for the past fourteen days was medjool dates, calves liver and ostrich eggs. I had only drunk milky tea with five sugars per mug. I had abstained from alcohol. I had given up snuff. I had locked all of my cocaine away. I had refrained from all sexual activity, even ogling breasts. I had slapped away the erotic overtures of all the women I had paid to make erotic overtures. I weighed one hundred and seventy pounds, and most of that was my own overprimed balls.

  Then, the day before, I’d teed myself up to an astonishing level of tension by hanging around the ladies riding boots department at Harrods, as a ceaseless parade of fillies tried things on.

  This morning I had come straight from Claridges where Al-Khazirm, proprietor of the on-site hamman, had scrubbed every cell of dead skin away. Now my muscles twitched with energy. My mind was alive with every possible contingency, synapses firing like a Sten gun. This. That. The other. I was ready for anything. Second-by-second planning had gone into every moment of my skit, and yet a thousand questions tumbled through my mind. Would I best both Hong-Kongese twins within the time I’d allowed? Would Rupinder be too fulsome for me to handle at pace? Would Bernard-Bernard have time to hand-grind the garam masala?

  I swept these details aside and made my mind still. I’d taken the advice of Cornwall: “Hope for the best, plan for the worst,” he’d said. I’d done exactly that. And so, loose-shouldered and powerful, ready for anything, I walked up the granite steps of Scoundrels.

  Two weeks before

  The tradition at Scoundrels of skitting had gained new popularity after the war. Members were clamouring for their chance to make a name for themselves. Mahatma Blaze did well to cover the Disraeli Room floor with fifty tonnes of Saharan sand, so that the club could be the inaugural venue for the Ladies World Beach Volleyball Championships of 1947. Batty Bratwurst had funded a full Roman orgy complete with vomitorium, slave girls and a roasted tiger. He received a silver trophy for his efforts that night. They don’t make them like Batty anymore. Amongst the triumphs were a few disasters, but I can’t remember much about them.

  I’d been struggling to find a skit that was worthy of the attention of the chaps. I’d not put anything of note on since my well-received Thanking You Nursey evening of the previous year, when I’d brought in two hundred war nurses to be pampered and perfumed, serenaded and seduced as a thank you for all their efforts, 1939-45. I’d received a fair few feathers in my cap for that, and the chaps were looking to me for something pretty spicy this time around. I would not let them down.

  I was alone in the High Library late one rainy Tuesday evening. I’d elected to stay at Scoundrels rather than bomb home to Nimbu on my Royal Enfield motorcycle, as I had a tricky business meeting in town the next morning. An accountant of my late father’s had misinvested quite a large sum, so I’d gone up to the library to read up on usury law and medieval torturing implements. But nothing was sticking. My brain couldn’t quite take in anything from these fusty old texts. My mind was wandering like a flâneur in Montmartre.

  I picked up the oil-lamp, my only source of light, and mooched listlessly around the shelves. This was the most secluded, least lively place in Scoundrels. A game of bread-roll cricket had been starting up in the Long Room. I should have got involved in that, but I wasn’t really in the mood. I turned and moved along the shelves. I picked books up and put them down again. I was just on the point of leaving when a slim volume on the second lowest shelf in a dark corner caught my attention. It was jutting out
at an odd angle, and seemed to chirrup for my attention. Read me! Read me!

  I eased it from the shelf. It was little more than a collection of scrap papers held together with a dark green ribbon. I opened it up:

  Around The World In Eighty Lays

  by

  Mr. Julian Verne

  of

  The Scoundrels Club

  Piccadilly, London.

  Well, well, well.

  This is not the text I remember reading in the dorm by torchlight. I slipped the book into my pocket, and retired to a bedroom for a couple of brandies and a good read.

  Four hours later, I was pacing around in a state of feverish excitement. I had just finished the book, and it had enthralled me from beginning to end. I hadn’t even known that Verne was a Scoundrel, but I’d raced down to the ancient Club Ledger and found his name under the year 1849, when he’d been proposed by his father, and seconded by one Alexandre Dumas, no less.

  I’d found an early manuscript of what became the acclaimed novel Around The World In Eighty Days, but there were significant differences from the version the world knows so well. There were some eye-popping scenes in it, and let me tell you, the nights in the dorm at Winstowe would have been a little more bearable if I’d had this early draft stashed under my pillow.

  I silently thanked Julian Verne, dead these past forty years. He’d solved a big problem for me. My skit was going to be something special.

  Scoundrels Club, 1948

  Aram-Atsi, the slab-faced Armenian bouncer, placed a crisp-gloved hand on the brass handle of the Scoundrels door. He had heard something special was afoot and a slim smile stole across his thuggish face. “Good luck, Major Trevelyan,” he murmured as he flung the club door wide.