Above All Things

by Tanis Rideout

  They were in Paris. They had decided to meet there instead of in London or at home. I want you to myself, she’d written him in a letter. It was what he wanted, too. Her to himself. Time alone together was what they needed. What he needed. Before he left again for the lecture tour, for New York.

  They had met at a hotel just off the Seine, opulent and rich after the confines of tents, the rigours of expedition life. He sent his bags up and stood watching her from the doorway of the salon. She was perfect, waiting for him. He’d imagined her like this for months. She picked up one of the salon’s delicate miniature desserts and bit it in half, taking her time, savouring it. Her eyes were on a book but he knew she wasn’t reading; she was trying to look as if she wasn’t waiting.

  He imagined her in their room, the swelling curves of her on the still-made bed. He wanted to undress her, peel off the loose coat she wore, the lace gloves, find her underneath, the smell of her – a faint perfume of rosehips, of paper. His own body swelled in response. There was sweat on his lip.

  He walked over to the table and stood over her. She glanced up and barely had time to smile before he bent and kissed her. Her teeth scraped against his lips.

  When he stood back up she blushed, smiled wider and scanned the room, embarrassed yet hoping everyone had noticed.

  He sat down in the chair opposite her, and when he reached for her hand on the table, it was cool, but warmed quickly in his. He ate the remaining bite of her dessert, had a sip of her tea.

  “Let’s go upstairs,” she said.

  Afterwards she rolled herself in the plush coverlet and ran her fingers over him, drawing the leaner lines of muscles in his arms, his legs, the hollows beneath his cheekbones. She navigated bruises and scrapes.

  “You always come back so different,” she said. The bumps and bruises were part of any climb, and she would catalogue them when he returned, asking for stories – How did this one happen? Did it hurt? Most times he couldn’t remember. She jokingly counted his fingers, his toes. Her hands on his body were cool, soft. He could have stayed there forever.

  She marked each change on him, each fading bruise, each scrape, with her lips. “You’ll want to be careful,” he said, pinning her to him. “I’ll start to make a point of hurting myself.”

  “Let’s go for a walk,” she said. “I haven’t been here in so long and we’ve never been together.” She stood up from the bed, tossing the blanket over him, and stepped into her discarded dress before bending to pick up from the floor the page he’d torn from her book. He’d tucked the folded page into the back of his waistband, and she had found it as she undressed him, smiling quickly before dropping it to resume kissing him. He dressed slowly, then followed her out of the hotel.

  The streets were noisy and crowded, and he reached for her hand. She grasped it tight, but out in daylight now she seemed more distant from him, as if she didn’t know quite what to say or where to look. When she met his eyes, she smiled shyly and then glanced away. They walked through the Luxembourg Gardens and she talked about the children. “They miss you so much. Well, of course they do. That’s rather a foolish thing to say.”

  But after supper, after cocktails on terraces and the walk back to the hotel, she was bold and easy. In the darkness of their room, her body damp and heaving beside him, she said, “Oscar Wilde used to live here. I think he might have died here.” She paused a moment – “I almost forgot. The children sent these for you” – and slid down to hug him, first around his thighs and then his waist. The heights of the children.

  He pulled her up to him again, kissed each cheek, her forehead, and they fell asleep clasping each other.

  After two days everything felt normal again. She’d stopped telling him how he had changed, and she reached for him casually as they strolled the city, leaned against him when they stopped on bridges.

  They were sitting on the Pont Neuf. The sun was rising and it was already hot. They would be taking the train to the coast in the morning, be home by evening. He wanted to see his children.

  “Tell me the words, again,” she said. He could feel her voice vibrating through her back, into his chest, where she was pressed into his side. The small hum of her. Could feel her inhale and exhale. He didn’t want to move, didn’t want her to move. He remembered this, how easy she was against him. “Tell me all those foreign words.”

  The words had been slipping into his conversation for days – monsoon, coolie, yeti, bandobast, metchkangmi – Nepalese, Tibetan, Sherpa words.

  “You wouldn’t believe it, Ruth. Any of it. Me and six stinking men.” He pressed his nose into the space behind her ear to smell her, erase the memory of the camp. “You wouldn’t be able to stand me.”

  “What makes you think I can stand you now?” she teased and kissed him lightly. It felt as though he’d never left.

  She shifted away to look at something on the river. He watched her a minute, the line of her curved spine like an echo of the bridge. She kneeled on the bench to peer over the edge of the bridge at the faces carved along the length of it. “Did you know that all of these people were dinner guests?” she said. “One of the kings, Henry maybe, I don’t know. Weren’t they all Henrys? At any rate he wanted to remember them drunk and rowdy.”

  He reached for her on the bench and pulled her back to him. He was almost convinced by what he had told her about the long, lazy days reading in camp, almost believed in the boredom, the dull routine of it himself.

  “I missed you,” he said and she made a small mewing noise. “I don’t want to leave again. Let’s just stay here for good.”

  He’d almost believed it himself.

  And yet less than a year later he’d gone back on his word.

  “You’re considering it,” Ruth spat at him. “Don’t lie to me. Please. After everything, I know you’re considering it.”

  “Yes. Fine. I am considering it. It would be foolish not to.”

  “Foolish? If anyone is foolish, it’s me for believing anything you say.”

  “That’s not fair. I meant it. But I don’t know that I can let anyone else climb her. I started this, Ruth. I have a responsibility to go back. To finish it. For them. For us. You must see that.”

  “I don’t give a toss for your bloody mountain.”

  “Ruth, please –”

  “You say you love us, George. Me and the children. And I believe you. But every time you’re asked to choose, you choose the mountain. Do you know how that feels? And if you go again now, when does it end?” She gestured around the sitting room. Ruth’s book was spread open on the sofa where she’d left it, John’s blanket crumpled next to it. The photos of the children lit by the wash of light through the window. “Why can’t this be enough for you?” When he had no answer, she turned and walked out of the room. He hadn’t gone after her.

  He pulled a tin of condensed milk from a small packet of food rations. The tent was cramped, a littered mess of open tins, dirty cups, crimped playing cards. Something was jabbing into his right thigh from beneath his sleeping bag. Probably the pencil he had lost earlier, after he’d drawn, for Sandy, the route that he would take through the Yellow Band.

  “There should be fossils up there,” Odell interrupted, “in the Yellow Band. All those layers of limestone, laid down over millennia. Lifted up. Imagine what’s hidden up there.”

  “There’s no wandering in the Yellow Band,” he told Odell, then turned back to Sandy. “It’s like crumbling roof tiles. Dangerous territory. We’ll cut a diagonal line up to the ridge, I think. Straight up and along.”

  Sandy had made his own sketch in his notebook, clean lines, more precise than what George had drawn.

  Ignoring the jab in his thigh, he poked two holes into the top of the condensed milk with one of Odell’s crampons. His hands were stiff and cold, clumsy in his gloves. When he pulled them off, the flesh looked almost dead. So white. Gingerly, he poured the milk into the small pot of strawberry jam, swirled it with a small spoon. It blended – the cream i
nto the red to make a lumpy, fleshy pink. It looked alive. More so than they did. They were blue-grey in comparison, drawn and angled. All the soft flesh that used to pad their faces was already gone.

  Somes was talking again about faith. They’d run out of polite conversation days, weeks ago. He loved that about climbing. The small spaces, the long hours together gave them a freedom to talk about big things, important things. Being in the mountains seemed to demand an accounting from them. Each of them had to know where he stood, where the others stood. It wasn’t the first time he and Somes had had this conversation. It wouldn’t be the last.

  He’d been surprised last time by Somervell’s faith. He was a doctor, after all. “I expected you to be a man of science,” he’d said on another day they had found themselves pinned down by weather.

  “They don’t need to be mutually exclusive, George. Who knows, maybe someday science will prove God.”

  He doubted it and had told Somes so. And now, here they were again.

  His teeth ached. A persistent stabbing in a right molar, his jaw tensed against anxiety and cold. He dished out dessert to the others. The altitude played tricks with their taste buds, making things too sweet or causing flavours to disappear altogether. Eating was done for survival. There was no pleasure in it. He missed dinner parties, the service of food – hot and cold, a range of flavours, vegetables, anything fresh.

  “With God’s help, and not the oxygen’s, we’ll make it.” Somervell’s tone was affirming, emphatic.

  “Somes, the only thing that’s going to tame this thing, this …” He wanted to say bitch. He wanted to curse the mountain, but held his tongue. “The only thing that matters here is us.”

  “Exactly, George. Us! We’re the instrument designed for climbing. You pretend to be a skeptic, but you have faith. You believe you’re destined for it, for the top. Don’t pretend you don’t. That’s faith, George. That’s a plan.” Somervell turned to Sandy. “And you? Do you share his skepticism? His humanism?”

  George watched Sandy as he glanced from him to Somes and back again.

  “I don’t know.” Sandy’s tone was slow and measured, or perhaps it was the altitude. George leaned towards him and Sandy’s voice picked up. “All that religion seems an excuse. I’ll keep God to myself, I think. I want to climb Everest for the achievement of it, not because it’s for or against someone’s idea of God.”

  George leaned back. Somervell was about to cut in when Teddy piped up, looking up from a letter he was writing. “He sounds like you, George.”

  “Hardly,” Odell interjected. “That’s far too moderate a tone.”

  “You’re right,” George agreed. “And God knows being moderate won’t get us anywhere near the summit.” He thrust his hand skyward. “It’s going to take a damn sight more than faith to get us up there. Moderation has never led to greatness. Robert Scott was hardly a moderate kind of man. He couldn’t have made the South Pole if he was. No, give me a wild temperament and the summit.”

  “There’s no need to be melodramatic.” Somes shook his head. “And besides, Scott died.”

  The five of them settled into an uneasy lull.

  Melodrama. He’d been accused of that before.

  In his room at Magdalene Will had asked him, “Don’t you think you’re overreacting just a bit?” passing him a long shot of whisky in one of George’s chipped teacups. “You must have known how all this would end.”

  George took down the photograph of James that was pinned above his desk. Ripped it in quarters and dropped it in the wastebasket before pacing the length of his room to the ivied window that overlooked the courtyard. He leaned his forehead on the leaded pane. “He said I was a bore. In front of everyone.”

  “You’re not a bore. James Strachey is a bully. He always will be.” Will paused while George tossed back the shot and passed his cup back to have it refilled. “I think you’re well served to be done with that whole lot. So blooming smug.” There was satisfaction in Will’s voice. He’d never been partial to James and his whole Cambridge School of Friendship. “The Cambridge School of Snobs, more like. Only the vainest and most dramatic need apply.”

  But Will had never understood the allure, the glamour of the Stracheys, of Maynard Keynes, of Rupert Brooke, while George had plunged headlong into the group and embraced their ideals of examining every emotion and motive over carousing evenings in James’s rooms. “Welcome to our little salon,” James had said with a bow, when he first joined at Rupert’s invitation. James had focused on him. And George had been determined to impress them. To try anything they did. For James, every breath was meant to be savoured, every interaction scrutinized and embraced. As if each decision was sharp, could cut either way. There wasn’t a moral judgement on anything. At least there wasn’t supposed to be. Pleasure and experience were the endgame. It was libertarianism at its finest. Until it had fallen apart.

  “You don’t understand, Will. You can’t.”

  Will looked taken aback, hurt. “Fine,” he said. “Then I’ll leave you here to revel in your own heartbreak.” He gulped down his own pour of whisky and moved towards the door. “I forgot, George, just how much more capable of feeling you are than I am.”

  “No, Will. Please. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.” Why did Will always have to be so much more measured than he was? “Let me explain?”

  Will left his hand on the doorknob. “Why?”

  “God. Because we’ve been mates forever. Because I just need you to sit here and get drunk with me.”

  “All right.” Will sat back down and George threw himself on his bed. “But only if you’ll stop being so bloody melodramatic.”

  “But that’s the point. With James everything mattered. What I said, what James said about me. Every word, every action had the potential to change things – even the future. Anything was possible.” And it was true. He felt raw, hyper-aware of every word, its myriad meanings, every tiny insinuation. “It’s a bit like being on a climb. You know that feeling – when you’re pushing yourself and pushing yourself and then you leap for that hold you think is just out of reach. You know you’re going to fall. Then you don’t. And for just that moment, the world sharpens. Comes into focus.” He threw back the shot in his hand, then tossed the teacup to Will for a refill. “That’s how every moment felt with James. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”

  “Don’t you hear how ridiculous that is?”

  “But it isn’t. Not at all. Isn’t that part of why we go out there? The fear, the possibility of it all ending? To really feel alive. And when you come back down, the world is different. For an hour, a day, it’s so vivid it hurts.”

  “Still, one can’t live like that.”

  But he had lived like that. For the few months that James had courted him, seduced him, taken him along to lavish parties. Maybe Will was right. Maybe this was the only way a relationship like that could end – with him cast aside and heartbroken. That he might have been able to bear. It was the humiliation that hurt most. He’d seen the letters between Lytton and James Strachey, how toying with his affections had just been a game to them. Still, he’d do it all again. He’d throw himself in body, soul, and mind the next time around, too. “What’s the point in going halfway? If you’re only going to go halfway, why even bother?” How could he make Will understand? Will was too cautious for anything as messy as love, was cautious even in the mountains. “You know, Will, you might be a better climber if you risked a little more.”

  “Jesus, and you might be a better friend if you’d temper yourself a little. I watched you throw yourself into this. And it was as though it took you over. Maybe that kind of obsession is best left to mountains. Not to people. They aren’t problems you can solve like a climb.”

  “Maybe I should be more like you, but I don’t know if I can be. I don’t want to hold anything back. Not ever.”

  “All right then, George.” Will held up his teacup. “Here’s to living life to the hilt.”

&nbs
p; “To the hilt.” He knocked his teacup against Will’s and relished the burn of the whisky down his throat. Will followed suit, grimacing against it.

  He supposed now that Will had been right. He hadn’t held anything back from Ruth. Nothing. From the first moment she’d slipped into his thoughts, he declared it. He’d wanted to sweep her away. He still wanted to. Perhaps Everest had stolen too much of his focus for too long. But when he got back, everything would be different. He’d be different. There would be no mountain to come between them anymore. There would be just her.

  In the gathering gloom he glanced around the tent. There was maybe an hour before dark.

  Odell was doing it again, taking seconds, taking more than his share. Someone had to watch him. The rations only went so far. Not having enough would derail an attempt. Odell wiped strawberry jam from his mouth.

  “Did you enjoy that?”

  Odell looked over at him, eyes narrowed. “I did, George. Thanks.” Odell moved to stick the dishes outside in the snow, now that there was nothing left to eat.

  It was the stillness that drove him mad. He had sat here for nine hours. For nine hours the storm tore at the camp, at the mountain. They had lapsed from conversation to silence. The wind was finally still. Suddenly everything was still. The only sound was ragged breathing. In. Out. In. Out. Long and painful. A dying metronome.

  George fell back and stared at the canvas overhead. It lifted and fell with his breathing, as if he lay inside a great flexing lung. It was pressing down on him, suctioning to his face, over his nose and mouth.

  He couldn’t breathe.

  He screamed into the almost silence and the tent receded. He screamed again to push it off him.

  The others jolted and tensed with panic. He pressed his fist to his temples, his eyes squeezed closed.

  “I hate this bloody mountain!” he yelled. And then, “Goddamn it!” Refilling his lungs, he screamed again into the air, the scream trailing off into laughter. Somervell punched him in the shoulder and the rest of them began to laugh too. Relieved. He wasn’t dying. His brain hadn’t haemorrhaged. He could smell their relief.