The Steady Running of the Hour: A Novel

by Justin Go

  —Ashley, she whispers.

  He was, perhaps, not at all extraordinary. Nor was he the lover she had imagined her whole long girlhood. Could one even call him a romantic? Imogen doubts it. His passion was concealed beneath so many layers of opaque humor and roguishness that it was often impossible to detect. As a lover Ashley seemed too hesitant to Imogen, almost timid, until the point at which he forced himself to make the most foolhardy leaps. It was only this strange resolve that made Ashley extraordinary, but Imogen believed that however devoted he was to her, he had now given himself to the war at least as much, in a bargain he had made long before he could have any notion of its cost. Perhaps Ashley regretted this choice, but the bond felt too strong for Imogen to sever, for she sensed Ashley had lost something he could not get back—not so simple as the skin on his neck or the sound of his old voice, but something finer and dearer, a loss Imogen could probably never understand. There were countless men who returned to England unrecognizable to those who had loved them, but Imogen had never believed Ashley would become one of those men, just as she could not imagine herself under a dark veil, wearing a necklace of dull black beads. Those were for other women, the women who adhered to the rules. Imogen had thought that none of those rules applied to them, but now she feared that all of them did, for she finally accepted that Ashley was only a man and she was only a woman, and all the things they meant to each other could not protect them.

  And yet their love had been different. Together they had been more than their discrete selves, and the force and strength of that attraction had lent them something mythical, a week so ardent and vivid that they alone were privy to the world’s secret marvels. The colors and shapes, the sounds and scents of London and Sutton Courtenay, the hotel, the train station—it had all been sculpted by the gravity of their attraction, distorted as rays cast through a prism. Or had the prism only focused things, made her see them as they were, for one singular moment? Imogen cannot say. She knows only that it eclipsed all she had known before or ever would know.

  If only she had recognized this at the time—how she wishes she could have loved him even more. How she could have savored that perfect interlude, that shimmering gem of one week among the slag-heap of decades that would be her life. But that was youth, she thought, and that was love. It was blindness that made it so. She will not meet that blaze again, not with Ashley or anyone else, nor will she waste her life searching for its sequel. There was no sequel. That was what made it extraordinary. That intensity of feeling was locked in her past now, the same as her first teetering steps or first immersion in the dazzling ocean. If she looks for anything in her future, she will have to look for something else.

  Imogen reaches the trees now, taking a seat on a toppled pine and crossing her legs at the ankles. She rests her hands lightly upon her stomach. She has only five months to go, and then it will all be over. She must take solace in that, at least: it will be over then.

  She had tried to write him a proper letter. There had been leaves of foolscap everywhere to prove it, and though Eleanor said nothing, she must have seen those sheets with his name on the first page, also the later ones where Imogen omitted the name, resolving to add it only when the letter was completed. But the letters were never completed, no matter how long they went. Imogen found it impossible to explain the condition she was in, impossible to reconcile what she wished to say with the fact of their separation.

  She could say that to live life her own way was all she knew how to do, and it was unfair to demand that Ashley act any differently, whatever the consequences. She could explain that she was not surrendering any longer, that she had finally chosen her path and in five months she would be accountable only to herself, for she understood now that she could not bear the terrible responsibility of other people’s happiness.

  But Imogen could not send those sheets. To Ashley it would all be whitewash and she knew it. She had burned the pages this morning.

  They shall not meet again. That is the lone fact and there is nothing to say about it. It is beastly. Imogen refuses to parley with that fact, nor explain it, nor soften it or render some pitiful apology. She had tried to do all those things and failed, and the proof of these efforts were the ashes in the fireplace, the letters of grand intent and great affection that would have kindled Ashley’s every hope, only to collapse on the final page to the world as it was. The world distilled to the three sentences she had given Eleanor.

  My Ashley –

  I’ve lost the child. I’m going away and I cannot see you again. I’m so very sorry.

  I remain – your loving

  Imogen

  It is all he will hear from her. It is still a lie, but less of a lie than anything else she can say. Imogen shudders to think of this, but she reminds herself that the letter is not the cruelty, its consequences are. Once she had accepted those consequences, it had not been fair to hide them from Ashley, for he had asked for an honest reply and this is the best she can give.

  Still it hurt so much to think of Ashley reading the letter. It hurt enough that she had not written it for six days, even when the words were clear in her head, even when she knew she could not go back to him. The lie about the child is worst of all, but what is cruel to Ashley is the only decent thing for Eleanor and Charles, who could hardly be expected to raise a child whose parentage might one day be questioned. And perhaps they needed an ending to this, all of them, even Ashley, even Imogen herself. If they are to move forward, they must know they cannot go back.

  But what will come of all this? After the child is born the sisters will return to England. Eleanor will take the child and raise it as her own; Imogen will slip into the fog and shadow of London, the vivid chapter of her life already behind her. And Ashley—could he possibly survive the war? Might she have been wrong to think he had no chance, that only she could save him? Perhaps that had only been arrogance, the conceit that she could see things that he could not. Perhaps in leaving him she had only condemned herself to scanning the casualty lists in the newspaper every morning, never knowing if he lived or died until she saw him by chance across the room at a Mayfair party, or crossing Russell Square with another woman. No, Imogen cannot have that. Better to begin anew, to live among strange faces that would neither know nor judge her.

  Imogen drags her finger in the snow and makes a few tentative shapes. A circle. Half the curve of a heart. She finds her hand dragged by a light but inexorable gravity, perhaps her own, and it draws across the crystals to mark her own initials, then the tall letter A. Imogen stops here, embarrassed by this childish gesture, even among the solitude of trees and snow. As a girl she had often drawn shapes in the sand of Sussex beaches, and now she considers how that sand felt similar and yet was different, resting for years upon the same shore rather than disappearing with the first thaw of spring. But surely ice melted into streams and waterfalls will return again as snow, the very same droplets? She hardly knows. It frustrates her, for Imogen had expected that by this age she would understand so much more than she does.

  She glances back toward the house, but she has come far enough that the forest obscures all. It is very cold here. Could it be so cold in France? It is not so far north as here, Imogen considers, but it must feel so much colder, shivering in clammy garments at dawn stand-to, sleeping rough each night upon the frozen ground. How little she understands of all this. She is weeping now and perhaps a little feverish.

  —I shan’t ever change, she whispers, reveling in the completeness of this lie.

  Imogen draws her boot across the snow, smoothing away all her marks. I shan’t grow older or love you any less, she thinks. I shan’t love another or ever disappoint you, and we shall never be parted, not for one moment, from this world to the next.

  A figure is coming through the trees. Eleanor in a long cloak, bearing a mug of something steaming. She draws beside Imogen and hands her the tea.

  —You’ve had your walk, Eleanor says. Now for God’s sake darling, come in
side before you freeze.

  BOOK THREE

  NORTH COL

  Exploration is the physical expression of the Intellectual Passion. And I tell you, if you have the desire for knowledge and the power to give it physical expression, go out and explore. If you are a brave man you will do nothing: if you are fearful you may do much, for none but cowards have need to prove their bravery.

  —Apsley Cherry-Garrard,

  The Worst Journey in the World

  22 February 1924

  Russell Square

  Bloomsbury, Central London

  Ashley comes out of the Underground station and buys the evening newspaper from a hawker, folding it under his arm and continuing eastward. It is six o’clock and all the city is traveling homeward, hordes in dark suits swarming the pavement and tube entrances. Ashley rounds the corner onto Lamb’s Conduit Street. He arrives at the public house half an hour early.

  It is a charming pub. There are large frosted windows facing the street, and beneath these a wall of green porcelain tile. Ashley enters the saloon bar and orders a pint of bitter, watching the barman’s hands pump the ebony lever in three smooth strokes, the swoosh of foaming ale into the tulip glass. The barman’s face is hidden behind a screen of paneled glass hung at eye level above the whole length of the saloon bar, blocking the view of the poorer classes in the public bar opposite. All the panels in the screen are shut.

  Ashley brings his glass to a small round table. He takes a sip of beer, his first taste of English ale in five years. He imagined that it would make him remember something, but it does not. The flavor is at once familiar and unremarkable. At the first drink, it is as if he had never been away.

  It is over now. Ashley had trained hard and whether the training was sufficient or not, it is over. The expedition leaves on Friday. Ashley will face the Himalaya as he is, stronger certainly than he has ever been, though whether he is equal to the mountain he cannot say. There had been no rubric to judge this, so he had simply trained as much as he could bear.

  It had begun in the summer, before he had even known for certain that he would be accepted on the expedition. He had heard conflicting rumors from the start, but it was fine enough to be back in the Alps again, away from the aimless asceticism of his Arabian wanderings, returned to solid granite where he thought only of the rockface before him. And Ashley was good at it and he liked it. It had not been like the wretched coffee plantation in Kenya, which he had been good at and hated, or like Arabia, which he had liked at times but had never been good at. At twenty-nine Ashley had been climbing for thirteen years and was probably at the peak of his powers. This last season in the Alps had proven it. It had been grueling but also dazzling, and it had ended in August with the news of his place on the expedition: a telegram waiting for him on the front desk of the Hotel du Mont-Collon, Ashley tearing open the envelope, his face coloring as he laughed and passed the message to the desk clerk, fumbling in giddy French to translate its significance.

  —Je vais monter, Ashley had explained, le plus haut montagne du monde.

  And when at last the clerk was made to understand, all he could say, all anyone could say were the same two words.—Bon courage.

  That telegram, twelve words taped onto a slip of paper, had changed everything. At first Ashley intended to winter in the Alps, training on snow until the expedition sailed in February. He stayed at an auberge outside Les Haudères and began to condition himself in earnest, climbing the mountain paths at daybreak, hewing and hauling timber for a fortnight until his hands blistered over and the innkeeper said there was no room left to store the logs. But with the first snow of autumn, Ashley found himself longing for the one place he had thought was behind him—England.

  Ashley had not set foot in England since 1919. It was only now, encircled by snowy peaks in every direction, that he began to wish for a fantastical version of his homeland, a sleepy kingdom draped in rain and foliage. He longed for the sea, for the wreaths of fog that swathed the coast, for the curtains of water rolling up and down the shoreline. And he knew he did not need to train for Everest. The other climbers had told him the mountain was a question of force rather than finesse, a problem of sheer endurance.

  Within a week Ashley was in London. He took a temporary flat near Coram’s Fields and wandered among the places he had once known, feeling himself a ghost returned to dwell with the living. In the evenings he skipped rope in his flat on a Moroccan rug beside the desk, the raindrops pattering the window and soaking the pavement outside. He made tentative steps toward polite society: meetings at the Alpine Club; a show in the West End; drinks at the Café Royal. He prepared for a barrage of questions about the past few years. Where had he gone and what had he been doing? What were his plans for the future? And yet, as it happened, the whole city seemed hardly to have noticed his absence.

  —The spymaster himself, they said, clapping him upon the shoulder. Haven’t seen you about lately. Where have you been lurking?

  It seemed unfair to Ashley that the city could go on so forgetfully without him, so forgetful of all the people it had lost. He knew this sentiment was absurd, but he could not help it. The lawns of Regent’s Park looked no different than they had in 1916, and yet they could not feel more different. At once Ashley recalled all the bitterness from five years before: that they should go on serving pineapple ices at Gunter’s; that magazines should print reverential pictures of the wedding of Lady Diana Manners; that Chu Chin Chow should attract huge crowds at His Majesty’s Theatre—while Jeffries and Ismay and Bradley and a million others lay in bone-heaps beneath the mud of France, their rotting corpses wrapped in rubberized sheets. In 1919 stonemasons all over Europe were amassing fortunes from the obelisks they erected in every village square, and Ashley supposed that the more obelisks they erected and the more hymns they sang, the faster they transformed the dead into the faceless mass they were fast becoming.

  For nothing had obliterated Ismay so much as merging him with the Glorious Dead—a man whose chief quality had been resistance to all such cant, a vulgar and brave creature whom Ashley had never understood. Only later had it come to Ashley, in flashes while riding in a motorcar on the edge of the Nefud Desert, the driver chanting a cyclic tune in Arabic; or in a mountain hut in the Bernese Oberland, tossing the cover of his eiderdown and lying sleepless upon the wooden bunk. Ashley would think he had forgotten Ismay’s face and then it would come to him all at once—the cocked smile, the unfocused gaze with one green eye and the other brown, Ismay swigging rum from a battered pewter mug as they stood in a vestibule watching the snow fall over the army camp.

  Spymaster, do you know what makes us different from them?

  No.

  The difference is we’re going to survive this war. And do you know why?

  No.

  Because we’re too damned hopeless. It’s a crime to kick a man when he’s down, and even if God is dead he shan’t allow it. We’re not soldiers, you and I. This isn’t how it ends for us.

  Ashley had made little of this at the time, but he understood it more with every passing year. How much Ismay had feared death, so much more than the others, perhaps because he had seen enough of life to know what it was worth. And how deeply Ismay had pitied Ashley, and seen him for what he was, even as Ashley had been blind to it himself. And how all of them—Ismay and Jeffries and all the young officers in France—had been mere children, pantomiming roles in a production whose significance they hardly grasped, pushing on through an irreversible game of courage and death, puffing their chests or raving in waking or sleeping nightmares, but never once speaking earnestly to one another.

  Only Ismay had been different, and Ashley could not say why, not even today. They had scarcely known each other, and yet lately Ashley found himself thinking of Ismay more and more, posing questions to him and apologizing for the mildest transgression—a military necktie borrowed and never returned. Or the day Ismay had left the camp, the day the pipes had frozen and burst and Ashley had not co
me to say good-bye. He never saw Ismay again.

  It was these sentiments that had soured London in 1919, and the sourness was still there five years later, in spite of everything Ashley had done in between. What friends he had in the city seemed to find Ashley strange and distant. They did not understand his life and he did not understand theirs, and it could not have been the war, for they had all been in the war together.

  Ashley left London the next week. He went to Sutton Courtenay and saw his mother, aged dramatically in the past five years, mellowed but also grown very frail. She left the house only on Sundays now, the housekeeper warned Ashley, and only if the weather was mild. That first night at dinner Ashley told his mother what he had done abroad, sometimes the truth and sometimes pure fantasy, saying always what he thought she wished to hear, for he could not have told her the whole truth even if he had been able to articulate it. Ashley spoke of Everest, carefully avoiding any suggestion that the mountain was dangerous. His mother received all this charitably.

  —You’ve done wonderful things, she said. It’s being a soldier that made you so strong.

  The next day Ashley rowed his single scull on the Thames, starting in the afternoon and rowing on until he was alone in the blackness, not even seeing the oars dipping into the water. Only the swish of his stroke, the starlight above, the lantern of a passing barge swinging on its lonely prow. He stayed a fortnight at Sutton Courtenay, and the more distant he felt from his own country and his own people, the more important his training became. He had become stateless, no longer an Englishman, hardly an expert on Africa or Arabia or any foreign land. The only thing he was good at was climbing, and it also seemed the only thing he could control.