Killing Me Softly

by Nicci French

  I read quickly through a couple of chapters that described expeditions in the late fifties and sixties in which Chungawat was first climbed and then climbed from various routes and using different climbing methods, which were meant to be purer or harder or more beautiful. This didn’t interest me much, except that my attention was caught by a statement that Klaus quoted from ‘an anonymous American climber in the sixties’: ‘A mountain is like a chick. First you just want to fuck her, then you want to fuck her in a few different ways and then you move on. By the early seventies Chungawat was fucked out and nobody was interested any more.’

  Apparently Chungawat didn’t present enough interesting technical challenges to élite mountaineers but it was beautiful and poems had been written about it, and a classic travel book, and in the early nineties that was what had given Greg McLaughlin his big idea. Klaus described a talk with Greg in a Seattle bar in which Greg had rhapsodized about package tours above eight thousand metres. People would pay thirty thousand dollars and Greg and a couple of other experts would lead them to the peak of one of the highest mountains in the Himalayas with a view into three countries. Greg thought he would be the Thomas Cook of the Himalayas and he had a plan for making it happen. It involved each guide laying a series of lines, fixed on pickets to which the climbers would be attached by carabiners. The lines would lead along a safe route from camp to camp. One guide wouldbe responsible for each line, designated by different colours, and it would be just a matter of making sure that the clients wore the correct equipment and that they were fastened securely to the line. ‘The only danger,’ he had told Klaus, ‘was dying of boredom.’ Klaus was an old friend and Greg asked him to come along on the first expedition and help him with some of the logistics in return for a discount. Klaus was unsparing about his own motives. He had had doubts from the first, he despised the idea of turning mountaineering into tourism, yet he accepted because he had never been to the Himalayas before and he wanted to go.

  Klaus was also pretty jaundiced about his fellow packagers, who included a Wall Street stockbroker and a Californian cosmetic surgeon. But about one person he wasn’t jaundiced. When Adam was first mentioned I felt a lurch:

  The dreamboat of the expedition was Greg’s second guide, Adam Tallis, a lanky, good-looking, taciturn Englishman. At thirty years of age, Tallis was already one of the most brilliant climbers of the younger generation. Most important for my own peace of mind, he had extensive experience in the Himalayan and Karakoram mountain ranges. Adam, a long-time friend, is not one for unnecessary talk but he obviously shared my doubts about the whole basis of the expedition. The difference was that if things went wrong, the guides would have to put their lives on the line.

  Then my stomach lurched again as Klaus described how Adam had suggested that his ex-girlfriend, Françoise Colet, who was desperate for a Himalayan climb, come along as the doctor. Greg was reluctant, but agreed to take her as a client with a huge discount.

  There was too much stuff (for me) about bureaucracy, sponsorship, rivalry with other climbers, the initial trek in Nepal through the foothills and then, like a revelation, the first sight of Chungawat with its notorious Gemini Ridge, leading down from the col just below the summit which divides into two, one side leading to a precipice (down which the English major and his comrades had slipped) and the other leading gently down the slope. I seemed to be living it as I read, experiencing the brightening of the light and the thinning of the air. At first there were elements of lightheartedness, with toasts, prayers to the presiding deity. Klaus described sex in one of the tents, which amused and shocked the Sherpas, but discreetly omitted to mention who had been involved. I wondered if it was Adam who had been in her sleeping bag with her, whoever she was – probably the cosmetic surgeon, Carrie Frank, I thought. I had come to assume that Adam had slept with virtually everybody who had crossed his path, almost as a matter of course. Deborah, for example, the climbing medic in Soho. There had been an expression in her eye that made me think they must have had a fling.

  As they moved up the mountain, establishing camps, the book almost stopped being a book and turned into a feverish dream, a hallucination that I shared as I read. The members of the party were blinded by headaches, unable to eat, doubled over with stomach cramps, even dysentery. They debated and bickered. Greg McLaughlin was distracted by administration, divided between his concerns as a guide and his responsibilities as a tour operator. At over eight thousand metres everything was reduced and slowed. There was no actual climbing but even the shallowest slopes became a huge physical effort. Older members of the party slowed everybody up, causing resentment. Through it all, Greg was tormented by his need to get everybody to the top, to show that this form of tourism could work. Klaus described him not only as obsessed but babbling incoherently about the need to hurry, to get to the top in the window of fine weather at the end of May, before June brought storms and disaster. Then, at the camp before the summit, there was a lowering, cloudy day in which Klaus overheard arguments between Greg, Adam and Claude Bresson. The weather held that day and before dawn the party set off up Gemini Ridge along a fixed rope that had been prepared by Greg and two of the Sherpas. It was all done with, as Greg himself put it, a simplicity that might have been designed for kids at kindergarten. Greg’s fixed lines were red, Claude’s were blue, Adam’s were yellow. The clients were told a colour and told to follow it. After they had moved beyond the ridge and were just fifty – vertical – metres below the summit, Klaus, at the back of the group with Claude, saw clouds rolling in ominously from the north. He questioned Claude, who didn’t respond. In retrospect, Klaus didn’t know whether Claude was stubbornly determined to get to the summit, whether he was already ill, or whether he just hadn’t heard. They pressed on and perhaps half an hour later the weather broke and everything went dark.

  Much of the rest of the book was delirium as Klaus described the disaster the way he – sick, disoriented, terrified – had experienced it. He couldn’t see, he couldn’t hear; occasionally figures emerged from the blizzard and disappeared back into it. The climbers had made their way across the col to where Claude, theoretically, had laid the blue line that would lead them towards the summit but by that time nobody could see more than a few feet or hear anything unless it was shouted into their ear. The one figure who emerged with clarity out of the chaos, like a figure in a thunderstorm illuminated by flashes of lightning, was Adam. He appeared out of the storm moving down, disappeared, reappeared. He was everywhere, keeping up communication, leading the two parties of clients into a place of relative shelter on the col. The immediate priority was to save the lives of Greg and the acutely ill Claude. With Klaus’s help they almost carried Claude down the line to the highest camp. Klaus then returned with Adam and they helped Greg down.

  By this time Klaus himself was incoherent with fatigue, cold and thirst and collapsed in his tent, unconscious. Adam went back up the mountain to fetch the virtually helpless clients. He took the first group, which included Françoise and four others, to the beginning of the line: they would have to feel their way down to the camp. Adam left them and went back to the second group. But by the time he had brought them back, the fixed line was nowhere to be seen. It had evidently been blown away. It was now beginning to get dark and wind-chill had brought the temperature down to fifty degrees below zero. Adam took his second party back to the col. Then he went down the ridge alone, without a line, in order to fetch his own line and in search of possible help. Greg, Claude and Klaus were unconscious and there was no sign of the first group.

  Then Adam went back up the ridge, laid the yellow line and brought the second group down himself. Some of these needed urgent medical help, but once he had attended to them, he went out once more, alone and in the dark, to search for the missing group. It was hopeless. Late that night, Klaus woke and deliriously assumed that Adam, too, had been lost until he burst into the tent and collapsed.

  The first party was found the following day. What had h
appened was a tragically simple mistake. In the dark and the snow and the noise, with the fixed line unfixed and blown into the abyss, they had blundered down on the wrong side of the Gemini Ridge, which had taken them hopelessly and irrevocably astray on to an exposed ridge that tapered away, leaving steep drops on each side. The bodies of Françoise Colet and an American client, Alexis Hartounian, were never found. They must have gone over the edge, perhaps while struggling back up the ridge or pressing forward to the camp they thought was in front of them. The others huddled together in the dark storm and died slowly. The following morning they were found by the Sherpas searching for them. All dead, Klaus wrote, except for one: another American, Pete Papworth, who was just mumbling the single pathetic word, ‘Help,’ over and over again. Help. Help. Calling, Klaus wrote with the pain of a man who had been asleep through all of it, for help that nobody would bring to him.

  I read the final pages in a daze, scarcely able to breathe, and then just lay on the sofa where I must have slept for hours.

  When I awoke, there was barely time. I showered and pulled on a dress. I caught a cab down to the Pelican in Holland Park although I would have been quicker walking, except that in my present frame of mind I wouldn’t have found my way anywhere. I paid the driver and went inside. Only a couple of tables were occupied. In one corner was Adam, with a man and a woman I didn’t recognize. I walked straight up to them. They looked round, startled.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said to the others. ‘Adam, could you come outside for a second?’

  He looked wary. ‘What?’

  ‘Just come. It’s very important. I’ll only take a second.’

  He shrugged and nodded an apology to the others at the table. I took him by the hand and led him out. As soon as we were out of view of his friends I turned to him and took his face in my hands so that I could look him right in the eyes. ‘I’ve read Klaus’s book,’ I said. His eyes gave a flicker of alarm. ‘I love you, Adam. I love you so much.’

  I started to cry and I couldn’t see, but I felt his arms around me.

  Fourteen

  ‘The lady has narrow feet, Mr Tallis.’ He held my foot as if it were a piece of clay, and turned it in his thin hands.

  ‘Yeah, well, make sure it’s secure around the ankle. She doesn’t want blisters, all right?’

  I had never been into this kind of shop before, although I had passed them by and peered into their dim, expensive depths. I wasn’t trying on shoes, I was being measured and fitted for them. My sock – violet and balding – looked shabby in this company.

  ‘And a high instep.’

  ‘Yeah, I’d noticed that.’ Adam took hold of my other foot and examined it. I felt like a horse being shod by a blacksmith.

  ‘What style of walking boot were you thinking of?’

  ‘Well, since I haven’t’

  ‘Basic trekking. Quite high, to support her ankle. Light,’ said Adam firmly.

  ‘Like the one I made for –?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Made for who?’ I asked. They both ignored me. I pulled my feet out of their grip and stood up.

  ‘I need to collect it by next Friday,’ said Adam.

  ‘That’s our wedding day.’

  ‘That’s why I need to collect it by then,’ he said, as if it were obvious. ‘Then we can go walking at the weekend.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. I’d figured on a two-day honeymoon in bed, with champagne and smoked salmon and hot baths between sex.

  Adam looked across at me. ‘I’m doing a demonstration climb in the Lake District that Sunday,’ he said briefly. ‘You can come with me.’

  ‘Very wifely,’ I said. ‘Do I get a say in all of this?’

  ‘Come on. We’re in a hurry.’

  ‘Where are we going now?’

  ‘I’ll tell you in the car.’

  ‘What car?’

  Adam seemed to exist on a barter system. His flat belonged to a friend. The car that was parked down the road belonged to a climbing acquaintance. Equipment was stashed away in various people’s attics and other places. I didn’t know how he kept track of it. He picked up odd jobs by word of mouth. Almost always they were doing him a favour in order to repay him for something he had done up one mountain or another. Some frostbite he had prevented, some arduous piece of guiding he had carried out, some calmness under duress, some kindness in a storm, some life he happened to have saved.

  I was trying now not to think of him as a hero. I didn’t want to be married to a hero. The thought of it frightened me, aroused me, and put a subtle and erotic distance between us. I knew I was looking at him differently since yesterday and reading the book. His body, which I had until twenty-four hours ago thought of as the body that fucked me, had become the body that endured when no one else could. His beauty, which had seduced me, now seemed miraculous. He had staggered through a thin soup of air in a cracking cold, blasted by wind and pain, and yet he seemed unblemished by it. Now that I knew, everything about Adam was charged with his reckless, calm courage. When he looked at me broodingly or touched me, I couldn’t help thinking that I was the object of desire he had to risk himself on and conquer. And I wanted to be conquered; I did. I wanted to be assaulted and won. I liked him to hurt me, and I liked to fight back and then yield. But what about afterwards, when I was mapped and claimed as victory? What would happen to me then? Walking through slushy grey snow to the borrowed car, just six days away from our wedding day, I wondered how I could ever live without Adam’s obsession.

  ‘Here we are.’

  The car was an ancient black Rover with squashy leather seats and a lovely walnut dashboard. It smelt of cigarettes. Adam opened the door for me, then stepped into the driver’s seat as if he owned it. He turned the ignition, then eased into the Saturday-morning traffic.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Just west of Sheffield, the Peak District.’

  ‘What is this, a magical mystery tour?’

  ‘To see my father.’

  The house was grand, and also rather bleak, in its flat situation, exposed to winds from all sides. It was, I suppose, beautiful in an uncompromising way, but today I was looking for comfort, not austerity. Adam parked to one side of the house beside a series of ramshackle outhouses. Large feathery flakes of snow were falling slowly through the air. I expected a dog to run out barking at us, or an old-fashioned retainer to meet us at the door. But no one greeted us, and I had the uneasy impression that no one was there at all.

  ‘Is he expecting us?’ I asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Does he actually know about us, Adam?’

  ‘No, that’s why we’re here.’

  He walked up to the double front door, gave a perfunctory knock, then opened it.

  It was freezing inside, and rather dark. The hall was a chilly square of polished floorboards, with a grandfather clock in the corner. Adam took my elbow and led me into a living room full of aged sofas and armchairs. At the end of the room, a large fireplace looked as if it had been many years since it had seen a fire. I pulled my coat round me. Adam took off his scarf and wrapped it round my neck.

  ‘We won’t be here long, my sweetheart,’ he said.

  The kitchen, with its cold quarry tiles and wooden surfaces, was empty as well, although a crumb-scattered plate and knife lay on the kitchen table. The dining room was one of those rooms used only once a year. There were unused candles on the round, polished table and on the stern mahogany sideboard.

  ‘Did you grow up here?’ I asked, for I couldn’t imagine children ever playing in this house. Adam nodded, and pointed to a black-and-white photograph on the mantelpiece. A man in uniform, a woman in a frock, and, between them, a child, posed outside the house. They all looked very grave and formal. The parents looked much older than I had expected.

  ‘Is that you?’ I picked up the photograph and held it to the light to see better. He must have been about nine, with dark hair and scowling brows. His mother’s hands were rested on his recal
citrant shoulders. ‘You look just the same, Adam, I would have recognized you anywhere. How beautiful your mother was.’

  ‘Yes. She was.’

  Upstairs, in all the separate rooms, all the single beds were made, pillows fluffed up. There were ancient dried flower arrangements on each window-sill.

  ‘Which was your room?’ I asked Adam.

  ‘This one.’

  I looked around, at the white walls, the yellow flocked bedspread, the empty wardrobe, the boring landscape picture, the small, sensible mirror.

  ‘But you’re not here at all,’ I said. ‘There’s not a trace of you.’ Adam looked impatient. ‘When did you leave?’

  ‘Completely, you mean? Fifteen, I suppose, although I was sent away to school when I was six.’

  ‘Where did you go when you were fifteen?’

  ‘Here and there.’

  I was beginning to learn that direct questions were not a good method of eliciting information from Adam.

  We went into a room that he said had been his mother’s. Her portrait hung on the wall and – a weird touch, this – a pair of silk gloves was folded by the side of the dried flowers.

  ‘Did your father love her very much?’ I said to Adam.

  He looked at me a bit strangely. ‘No, I don’t think so. Look, there he is.’ I joined him at the window. A very old man was walking up the garden towards the house. There was a frost of snow on his white hair, and his shoulders were touched with snow too. He wore no overcoat. He looked so thin as to be almost transparent, but was quite upright. He carried a stick, but seemed to be using it to swipe at squirrels, which were corkscrewing up the old beech trees.