by Paul Watkins
But Pringle was old now and his days of climbing were over. He had instead become a curator of sorts. Throughout his life, the man had gathered thousands of pages of information about the Alps. He subscribed to every mountaineering journal and read every book on the subject of climbing. Few of these escaped his criticism. There was almost always some error which required a letter from him to the editor demanding a correction. For example, if a climber spoke of having been able to see Monte Rosa from the summit of the Breithorn on a certain day, Pringle would consult the weather bulletins, all of which he had saved, and if the bulletin had indicated cloud, he would be sure to send a scathing letter discrediting the climber’s claim.
Pringle’s appearance at a lecture on the subject of Alpinism would send a shudder of dismay through any unfortunate speaker walking out onstage. During the lecture, Pringle would take notes on a miniature chalkboard which he carried with him. The tapping and scratching of the chalk on the board was enough to ruin anybody’s concentration. At the end, when the floor was opened for questions, Pringle’s stubby arm would be the first to rise.
He was so nitpicky in his fact-checking, and so blunt in his delivery of the truth, that Pringle had managed to make enemies of almost everyone in the climbing community. Most people were too terrified to speak ill of him. He had made a business of ruining reputations, and it was with particular energy that he set about ruining Carton’s.
For Pringle, the disregarding of a fact was a personal insult. Facts were for him the most beautiful of all things, as hard and precious as diamonds. But for Carton, that diamond fact was a thing to be held up to the light, to be twisted and turned and examined for its angle of greatest interest. And if he believed that the fact might be of better use to him if it was held up in just such a way, or turned even slightly, to achieve that particular wide-eyed look of wonder—part horror, part fascination, part incredulity—he would make it so. Each summer he returned from the Alps with new and hair-raising stories for his audiences.
He also accumulated a collection of artifacts which had been expelled from glaciers. Anything which fell down a crevasse would, sooner or later, be tombed in ice and carried through to the glacier’s end. The movement of these glaciers had been studied enough that when something, or someone, disappeared down a crevasse, it could often be predicted to within a year or two when that thing or person would reappear.
Carton established contacts among the Society of Alpine Guides and quietly bought up the relics of mountaineering disasters. These included ice axes, clearly marked to men whose lives had ended decades before and whose bodies had never been found. He purchased the bones of Alpine cave bears, which had been extinct for thousands of years. There were shreds of clothing, spewed out in slow motion by the ice; their tattered edges seemed to prove the violent ends of those who had once worn them.
And then there was Archie.
One year, thirteen members of the Climbers’ Club were invited to a Saturday lunch in the club’s dining room. There was some uneasiness as to why Carton would have chosen thirteen people, when the superstition attached to the number still meant that hotels did not have a thirteenth room, that hunting parties never comprised thirteen people, and that you did not invite thirteen people to a luncheon.
The guests arrived to find fourteen places laid for dinner.
Who was the fourteenth guest? they asked.
Carton would not say.
Just as the meal was about to begin, Carton rang a small brass bell and the waiters wheeled in something that caused two people, both of them men, to faint.
It was a skeleton sitting in a chair. The bones had been wired together and then strapped to the chair, but not before it had been dressed in a gray suit with a red tie bearing a white skull-and-crossbones design. The skeleton had been wired in such a way that its arms were folded across its chest. This, combined with the grinning teeth, served to give Archie a cheerful and irreverent expression, much like Carton himself.
Carton never disclosed exactly where the skeleton had come from, saying only that he’d picked it up in the Alps and that it had been found near a glacier.
The skeleton bore no signs of identity and the clothes had been added later, so it was impossible to say who the person had been, although one guest, who was a doctor, did confirm that the skeleton belonged to a man.
Once again, rumors circulated. The most persistent of these was that the body had been stolen from the old morgue in the hospice of the Great St. Bernard Pass. There, the bodies of those who had become lost in the mountains were gathered to await identification. Because of the dry air and the fact that many of these bodies were never claimed, some had become mummified. Even though Carton had never seen the place, he described it in vivid detail to his audiences, based on stories he had himself been told.
Pringle wrote Carton a letter that began, “You Brute!” and listed the names of forty vanished mountaineers whose skeleton Archie might be. Carton had the letter framed and hung it in the men’s bathroom at the club.
Soon after, Archie was moved to the head of the table and the Saturday lunches developed into a regular event. At these lunches, Archie would be toasted by the guests, who always numbered thirteen. Carton drank to Archie from a battered pewter mug engraved with the initials E.B. This had emerged from a glacier near Trélatête and almost certainly belonged to the infamous guide Emil Boileau. Although it had never been proven, Boileau was said to have murdered several of the climbers who had hired him in the early 1800s. He would lead them high into the mountains, to places from which they would never be able to return without his help. Then he would demand money, which, if not paid out immediately, would result in the deaths and disappearance of the climbers. Boileau drank heavily, even when climbing. According to legend, he would throw the bodies of the climbers he had killed down bottomless crevasses and toast them with a tankard full of brandy. His own end came when he found himself unable to kill a particularly beautiful young woman. He became so deranged that he threw himself down the crevasse instead, tankard and all. The tankard, bruised by its journey through the shifting glacier ice, emerged almost a century after Boileau’s death, and was immediately acquired by Carton. How much truth there was in the story of Emil Boileau didn’t matter to Carton. What mattered was the legend.
Thousands flocked to Carton’s lectures, hoping for a glimpse of Archie, who was sometimes sitting behind Carton on the stage, sometimes appeared after the intermission, and sometimes could be found in the front row of the audience.
Membership in the Climbers’ Club tripled.
Archie became, in the words of Carton, “the most popular man in London. And the thinnest.” People posed for pictures beside him. Carton took to swinging his arm around Archie in the middle of the meal, squinting out at the dinner guests and remarking, “Well, Archie, what do you think of the view?”
The greater Carton’s popularity became, the more he added to his shows. He brought in blond, blue-eyed “Alpine maidens” in traditional costume. The fact that these women never spoke but only smiled led to some speculation as to whether the maidens were actually from the Alps, although no one truly cared. Nor did they care when the Saint Bernard dogs Carton brought in turned out to be boxers, or even when the stuffed and tattered bird which he claimed was the last of the dreaded baby-snatching lammergeier vultures in the Alps turned out to be of a more common variety.
It was all about the show, and if the show was sometimes short on fact, Carton made up for it with the energy he put into his presentations. He reenacted not only his own ascent of the Dragon’s Teeth but also many other mountaineering epics, in particular those which involved some loss of life. These included the notorious Hamel expedition to Mont Blanc, which ended in the deaths of three men who were caught in an avalanche. He also gave his own interpretation of Whymper’s 1865 ascent of the Matterhorn and the subsequent deaths of four of its members. He would stand on his toes, grasping at imaginary rock holds, hauling up make-believe compan
ions at the end of invisible ropes, pausing only to wipe genuine sweat from his forehead.
Carton’s next venture, a plan to lead an expedition back to the Dragon’s Teeth, was cut short by a bout of pneumonia that ruined his already asthma-scarred lungs. After that, he had trouble even climbing the stairs of his club. Although the lecturing continued, his mountaineering days were over. The strain began to show on Carton’s face and in his voice. Carton’s talks were filled with awkward silences as he fought for breath.
By the time he hired Stanley, the Climbers’ Club had begun its slow decline.
Nowadays Carton usually invited other mountaineers, like Hell and Paradise, to do the speaking for him.
Stanley was still going on about her. “She gave me a look, and I looked right back!” He pointed a finger at his eyes, as if the force of her glance had left a gash across his pupils. “And I tell you something happened. Now she is all I can think about. We’ve been out to lunch several times. We’ve had picnics in Hyde Park. She’s fascinating. Everything she says is just brilliant, and the photographs are pretty amazing, too. Some of them are on display at the club. You’ve just got to come and meet her.”
I glanced out the window, hoping for some inspiration that would provide me with an excuse not to go. But there was only the brick facade of the bank on the opposite side of the road, and the space between sieved by gently falling rain. There was a grayness in the air, which made the moisture seem less like rain than a failing of my sight.
“Don’t try and get out of it,” said Stanley, reading my mind. “I want to know what you think of her.”
I heard a clock chime quietly in another room. After waiting out the count, I turned to him. “No, Stanley,” I said, “you don’t.”
His eyebrows arched. “I don’t?”
“No,” I told him, doing my best to put aside the comfortable beehive hum of the wine inside my head, “you don’t want to know what I think of her. You want me to tell you what she thinks of you.”
Stanley breathed out sharply through his nose. “I suppose you could say that.” Then he held open his hands and smiled as if to say, “So we are agreed.”
“I didn’t say I’d come along. Besides, does this woman know you don’t climb anymore?”
He brushed my words aside. “Once she’s got to know me a bit, the old charm will kick in and she won’t care if I do or not.”
It occurred to me that the only person on whom Stanley’s old charm had worked was himself, and the only thing which had been charmed was his belief that he actually had any. With women, anyway. I might have told him this, seeing as he had just spoiled our weekly booze-up, but it was at this moment that my entire world began, very slowly, to fall apart. It began when I heard the whispered name of a man I hadn’t seen in years.
“It’s Wally Sugden!” hissed a voice.
“Just about to leave for Patagonia!” said another.
“Sugden’s at the Montague!”
“I thought he’d given up his membership.”
“Who cares? Let’s give it back to him.”
The whole club filled with these admiring whispers, which echoed through the bar and through the sitting room, up the stairs, and into the guest rooms where no one ever stayed.
At the mention of Sugden’s name, the breath caught in my throat and I felt sick. The memory of him was tied, as if by tiny threads, to all the other memories I had been trying so hard to forget. Now I sat with teeth clenched, trying to remain in control, and praying that those other nightmares did not come tumbling one after the other from every darkened corner of my brain.
A member of the close-knit group of mountaineers at Oxford, which had included Stanley and me, Sugden was the only one who had continued to climb. Since the war, he had gone on expeditions to the Himalayas, the Rockies, the Jotunheimen mountains of Norway, and now was on his way to Patagonia. He had become a national hero; many believed he was Britain’s best shot since George Mallory and Sandy Irvine for reaching the summit of Everest.
He had parlayed this hero status into a wildly successful car dealership.
The Evening Tribune often carried ads which featured a picture of Sugden in his climbing gear, complete with goggles, boots, and a coil of rope across his shoulders, standing alongside the latest model auto. Beneath this picture were the words “Trust in the Man. Trust in the Machine.”
Now the sight of Wally Sugden, who once hung around the Montague but had not been seen here in years, astonished everyone. Everyone except Stanley, anyway.
Despite the fact that he and Stanley had gone to the same school, once climbed together, and were members of the same club, each represented the polar opposite of the other.
Sugden was a square-faced, broad-shouldered man with slightly squinting eyes that told you he meant business and a perpetual smirk, which made you feel as if you had to choose your words carefully when speaking. He had been extremely popular at school. At Eton, he was captain of every team he played on, and he played on almost every team. He also possessed the kind of unshakable confidence that assured him of success. Sugden had been senior prefect in my house at Eton, where he’d developed the annoying habit of wandering into my room, whether I was there or not, and eating all the food in my cupboard. I often found him sitting with his feet up on my desk, shaking the last crumbs from a packet of chocolate-covered biscuits down his throat.
I more or less put up with this because Sugden seemed to have no idea he was doing anything objectionable and it would have been considerably more work trying to explain this to him than to go out and get a new packet of biscuits.
Stanley, by contrast, was captain of nothing. He had the intelligence to be top of every class but, as if on principal, never was. He was also athletic, but stubbornly refused to be a “team player” in soccer, rowing, or rugby, sports which occupied the majority of our school year. As a result, he was relegated to the lowest teams and regarded with suspicion by people like Wally Sugden
I recalled Stanley leaning against a goalpost on a soccer pitch reserved for teams made up entirely of people who either couldn’t or, like Stanley, wouldn’t play. This field was kept out of the public view, behind a thick bramble hedge down by the river. The masters who refereed the matches were kindred spirits to these players. They began the games late, finished them early, and allowed the halftime break to last forever. Sometimes the ball would get kicked into the hedge, at which point both teams would become embroiled in a philosophical discussion about who should go in and get it.
There were times I envied their lack of ambition, while out on fields with names like Agar’s Plough and Dutchman’s, people like Sugden and me engaged in ruthless competition, as if our very lives depended on the outcome.
There were several of Stanley’s former teammates at the Montague. Most of them were too intelligent for their own good, and the majority, unlike Sugden, had failed to make their way in society. It was most likely because of this that Sugden had stopped coming to the Montague. He considered himself to be in a different league.
But now Sugden stood with his arms outstretched and a huge grin on his face, waiting until he had attracted adequate attention before saying whatever he had come to say. From the glazed look in his eyes, it was clear he had been drinking heavily.
Long after the others in the room had stopped what they were doing, in anticipation of Sugden’s announcement, Stanley continued to chat, refusing to play the man’s game and despising the others for their shameless adulation of a man like Sugden.
At last Sugden spoke. “I,” he boomed, “have returned!”
The room burst into applause.
“And I just wanted to stop by and see the old crew before I head off to Patagonia.”
More applause. Some people even cheered.
“And I also wanted to tell you that I have, prior to my departure, fortified myself at that Greek restaurant across the road by eating an entire plate of testicles!”
These words produced the most prof
ound silence that I had ever heard descend upon the club. Even late at night, when the place was almost empty, and the last of the dozing members were snoozing in their chairs, you could hear more in the snuffling breaths and ticking of clocks than you heard after Sugden made his comment about the testicles.
Even Stanley fell silent. Then, with a defeated sigh, he turned to face the man, who still stood with his arms open, welcoming the astonishment of the masses. “Whose?” asked Stanley in a frosty voice.
Sugden lowered his arms. “Oh, it’s you,” he said, unable to hide his irritation.
Stanley gave him a cheeky little wave.
“I should have known I’d find you skulking about in here,” said Sugden.
“So are you going to tell us who these testicles belonged to or not?” demanded Stanley.
“A sheep, I suppose. How should I know?” Sugden already seemed to be regretting his appearance at the club.
“They were unlikely to have belonged to a sheep,” remarked Stanley.
“A goat perhaps,” said Sugden. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to the goat,” replied Stanley. “Were they fried? Or baked? Or pickled? Or did you just gnaw them off some unsuspecting member of the animal kingdom?”
Sugden forced a smile back onto his face. He turned away from Stanley and continued with his story, addressing the others in the room. “They were on the menu. The chef had them written down as ‘A Feast of the Gods.’ I asked what was in this feast of his, but he tried to fob me off on something made with cucumbers.”
“If they were in fact cucumbers,” said Stanley.
Sugden ignored this. “So I said to him, Look here, Themistocles, you’ve got this thing on the menu and I want to try it, so bring me out this Godly Feast and I’ll have a go at it. Well, after much babbling in the kitchen they bring me out a plate of these testicles. Fried and all sliced up.”