“How could you think that? No. It’s one of the things I love about climbing – sharing it with someone. There’s no point in going alone. You want a witness. No, a co-conspirator.”
I wonder sometimes if you have given Will instructions to take care of me. Maybe all of this is your doing – Will’s visits, the dinner party. “Please, Will,” you would have written, “don’t let her be too much alone.”
“It started out so wonderfully. And we stopped for lunch on that ledge – it was like a green carpet laid out for us, and the whole world was below. All we had was some bread and cheese and cold tea, but it seemed so ideal. Until the weather turned. It always seems to on mountains. Something always seems to go wrong, doesn’t it?”
“Maybe it seems that way. But no, not always,” Will reassures me. “Sometimes it’s perfect. It’s just that the bad turns make for better stories. No one wants to hear about the hike you took where nothing happened.” Will gives me a small smile and holds up his glass. “Let’s hope George won’t have many stories to tell this time.” I am a small reflection in his eyes, upside down, doubled, so I’m not sure who I am.
“But then it got cold and dark and the rain came down so hard I couldn’t see two feet in front of me. I wanted to shelter somewhere, but not George. He just plunged down the slope, dragging us along. His feet just seemed to know where to land. Until we got to that overhang.” I can still feel the wet on my skin, the cold all the way into my bones. I wrap my arms around myself. “George just wanted me to go over it, but I couldn’t see what was below it. It looked like an empty void, dropping away into mist. ‘There’s a ledge,’ he said. ‘Just there. Trust me.’ But I couldn’t. I was paralyzed with fear. He pulled me to him, hugged me, and kissed my face. And then he walked me backwards and pushed me off the edge.”
“He didn’t push you.”
“He did, Will! You know he did! He pushed me. At least that’s how it felt. And the ropes held, as he knew they would, and I was lowered to the ridge. And after that somehow we got below the storm and the two of you laughed and joked about it the whole way down.”
Somehow Will and I are giggling now. With relief, I suppose. The way that you do after a terrible fright, when you realize that everything is all right, that you’ve escaped unscathed.
“Our George,” Will says.
I imagine we will always talk of you this way.
The dining room shifts in the flickering light of the candles on the table, on the sideboard – long shadows are cast to far corners. With the wood panelling it feels as if we are on a ship, locked together for the evening, afloat, a long way from everything, everyone else. The table stretches out in front of me and steam rises from plates and serving bowls. The air is thick with the smell of the lamb and onions. The candles glint off the silver, off the crystal. Edith and Vi have done well and I feel a brief surge of pride. I will remind myself to tell them so tomorrow.
Next to me, Will casts reassuring glances in my direction, around the table, ready to jump in should it be required. He is like a watchdog.
Next to him are Marby and her husband, Major Morgan. Marby has been taking care of Millie and me since our mother died, staying home from school, and now coming to stay close to me whenever you are away. “I’ll be fine,” I told her when you were leaving again.
“Of course, you will,” she said. “It’s just I always thought it would be lovely to stay in Cambridge for a while.” And she had the Major rent a house just outside town so she can keep a close eye on us. I know she means well, but at times her concern is a little overbearing. In the candlelight her skin seems doughy, soft. It suits her, strips away some of her severity.
Her husband, the Major, is dashing in his elegant uniform, the black and red of it smart in the dim room. If this were a ship he would be the captain.
“Let’s pretend,” George used to say when the girls on occasion dined with us. “Let’s pretend we’re on a ship, sailing to South America. Look out the window – dolphins!”
“Pirates!” I’d add, and the girls would race to eat the fastest before the pirates boarded and made them walk the plank.
To my left is Cottie, her short hair swept into tiny curls at her temple. And next to her, Geoffrey and Eleanor. At the door Eleanor handed me flowers – gladioli from the market – and held her hand near Geoffrey’s elbow as he limped with his cane. Geoffrey seems worn. He has aged since last I saw him. He has taken care of you for so long, and it is wearing on him, I think.
Finally, Arthur Hinks. He is at the far end of the table, after arriving late and gruff and without apology. I was glad I’d chosen to seat him as far from me as possible. But I hadn’t thought about the fact that I would have to stare down the table at him all evening.
I haven’t seen him since the night before George sailed across oceans I have never swum, when we ate curry in honour of a continent I have never seen. Imagine Borough Market, George wrote, but full of gypsies and people of every colour and oxen being driven through the crowds. Imagine exotic birds and food that burns your tongue from the spice, not from the temperature. I couldn’t. I still can’t.
I may not have seen Hinks since then, but I hear from him all the time. Or rather, he wants to hear from me. Twice a week he sends me letters or wires. This man who took my husband from me and sent him to Everest again and again. He thinks we are on the same side, want the same things. I wait for him to ask me what I’ve heard, if he may read my letters. I have a standard reply. I’m sorry to say, Mr. Hinks, I have heard nothing that would be of interest to the Committee, only small sentiments from a husband to his wife.
It begins.
“Have you heard anything new, Mrs. Mallory?”
“I was hoping you could tell me some news, Mr. Hinks.”
He begins to bluster some words about Everest that I pay no attention to, distracted by the great walrus girth of him and his moustache, which catches food and liquid so it sparkles in the candlelight. It is lewd and unsettling, how he fingers his moustache constantly.
Cottie stops him mid-speech. “Oh, let’s not talk about the mountain. Not yet, unless you have specific news from George?” She looks from Hinks to me and back again. “Then let’s talk amongst ourselves. How is your father, Ruth?”
I turn to Marby because I don’t know. I should write to him. Plan a visit. “How is Papa?” I ask her.
“You know how Papa is, always the same.” Marby’s voice runs along on its own, her words tight together, like a train speeding away from her. “He wants to put in another toilet. Another one. There are almost more toilets than people who live in the house, isn’t that right, dear?” She looks to the Major. “He sent the sketches for you to look at. Maybe after dinner. Or I can leave them. But don’t let me forget. He wonders if you need another one.”
“I shouldn’t think so.” Dear Papa, always trying to change things, improve them.
“We’ll probably put a new one in after the baby,” says Eleanor, looking to Geoffrey.
“Oh no! So much better to do it before the little one’s here,” Cottie tells her and they begin to chat about renovations, the difficulties of working around an infant.
I’m glad for all this domestic talk. It’s soothing. But Hinks fumes, chomps at the meat on his plate, and waits for his opening.
I remember meeting Hinks, hearing the boom of his voice for the first time. I wanted to like him, I tried to.
“Ruth,” George said after, “you don’t always have to see the best in people.”
It was at the Royal Geographic Society. I loved the red façade of the Victorian building, the formal weight of the lounges and lecture rooms. The men wandering the hallways with their tans and lined faces, so one wanted to ask them where they’d travelled and what they had seen. Explorers, all of them. The first time George took me there, I stood transfixed in front of the tapestry map of the world, made when Elizabeth was queen. Incredible. And still so much bigger than my own world. I stared for so long that George finall
y came searching for me. We drifted to another map, stopping to examine trophies, the giant tusks from an elephant that bracketed the doorway.
“Where do you want to go?” George asked then.
“Anywhere. Everywhere.”
“Close your eyes.” His hands on my shoulders turned me around and around. “Now point.”
I stepped forward, blind and wobbling a little, until my fingers touched the cloth. Dry, dusty. “Here,” I said and opened my eyes.
“Pitcairn. A good choice. Lived on only by the descendants of the Bounty’s mutineers. Scandalous. Let’s go.”
“Now?”
“Why not?”
He kissed me again and pressed me back against the map of the world and I was dizzy. From the spinning, from the kiss.
It was some months after that, when we returned for a gala affair – George in his dinner jacket, me in my grey silk gown – that George made the introductions. “Ruth, I’d like you to meet Arthur Hinks, the chair of our Committee. Arthur, my wife.”
“Mr. Hinks,” I smiled, “a pleasure to meet the man who is stealing my husband away.”
“I trust, Mrs. Mallory, you’re in full support of this expedition. They’ll need all our support for what they have to do. What a chance for King and Country, eh? The third Pole. Lost the other two to the Yanks and the Norwegians. We need this one. We must all rally to do our bit.”
“Of course.”
Hinks leaned in close to me, his hand on my elbow, trying to draw me into his conspiracy. “In that vein, I hope I can count on you to keep me abreast of anything you hear from our good man, then. Any bits and pieces that he might write to you but forget to tell me? We need all the details. It might be best if you just send on copies of his letters, then you needn’t trouble yourself with what is important and what is not. Let me sort that out.”
“Mr. Hinks, I’m sure you’re not asking me to share everything my husband sends to me. A wife’s letters from her husband, well, that’s almost sacred, don’t you think? You wouldn’t want anyone reading your billets-doux, I’m sure. Think how embarrassing.”
“No. No, of course not.” I’d taken him aback. He expected me to be more compliant. “Your husband and I will have to discuss the best way to move forward. But for now, let’s celebrate. Come sit by me.”
Hinks gave speeches that night about God and King and Country. All the propaganda he could dredge up from the war. It all sounded so familiar, but so hollow now. George fairly glowed under it. “A chance to make it up to all those in the war,” he said.
I’ve never really understood what you meant. What is it that you’re trying to make up for? How can you feel responsible?
When Geoffrey lost his leg, George said he wished it had been him.
“How can you say that?” I asked, even though I didn’t really believe he meant it. Not then, not now. It was an easy thing to say. He was still in the hospital then, invalided home because of an old climbing injury, and he was humiliated, wanted to prove he wasn’t a coward, wasn’t weak. That he would do his part if they would let him. “No one wants that for you.”
“Geoffrey will never climb again. I’ve always climbed with him. He taught me everything I know. If I can’t climb with him anymore, I’m not sure I want to.”
“That’s not about Geoffrey,” I said. “That’s about you. About what you’ve lost.”
“It isn’t.”
“You’re mourning the Geoffrey you lost when he lost his leg.”
“I’ll miss him,” George said, as if Geoffrey were dead.
“I know.”
But here is Geoffrey, at my table, and he has proven to be as much a guide to us as he ever was on the mountains.
“But you have heard from him, have you not, Mrs. Mallory?” Hinks’s voice rises above the chatter of renovations and advice. And as everyone falls silent, he’s conscious now that he has an audience and I fear he’s about to start some speech about duty, remind us all of the roles we have to play. I won’t have it.
“I have,” I admit. I am maybe slightly tipsy on the wine Papa sent with Marby. The light over the candles is a soft blur that sparkles into drawn-out stars at the corners of my eyes. I focus on the plate in front of me. Our wedding china. The roast lamb smears across the snowfield white of the plates, the stained potatoes. The air steams, thick, succulent. I eat by rote, set my fork down after each bite, just as one’s supposed to. But I would like to fly across the table at Hinks. He is still talking.
“They’re doing well so far. From what we gather from the reports. That’s what Norton tells us.” His voice is louder now and everyone else has gone quiet. “It’s hard to really know, though, what the others are thinking and feeling. Norton’s in charge; sometimes you want to hear from the men in the trenches. Really in the trenches. What they might stake their chances at.” He pretends it is a general statement, but it is pointed at me. It’s a rebuke.
“Mr. Hinks, do you really think if George had made it to the summit that he’d keep it a secret? Tell only me? Truly? What do you think I could know that you don’t? You probably know more than I do. My husband sends his love, he asks after me and our children. He says he is healthy.”
My voice shakes some and I curse myself. I inhale slowly, steadily. Under the table, Will takes my hand. His is dry, mine moist with sweat. I squeeze his lightly and then pull away, reach again for my wine.
“Of course.” Hinks wipes at specks of food in his moustache with his napkin, then drops it beside his plate. His fork falls to the floor. When Vi scuttles over to collect it, he doesn’t even notice her. For a moment Vi and I are on the same side, both of us revolted by this man. Hinks continues on. “Of course, it’s just – we’re all anxious. We had hoped they would have already succeeded. Our George. Knocked it off already. Then we’d be celebrating, what?”
“Yes,” Will says. “We’d be celebrating that George would be on his way home. Safe. And isn’t that what we all really want?”
“I mean to say, we certainly can’t afford to send them out again next year.” Hinks is warming to this talk, to politics and money. “We’ve sent them three times already! Well, Mallory at any rate. But someone will pony up for it. Everest is the new Pole. Someone will rally an expedition if we can’t. The French! Or the damn Germans, of course. They all want it. And then what? We lose out to them? It may be our only hope that they will fail to get the Dalai Lama’s permission. But who knows where his allegiances truly lie?”
I’ve had enough. He’s already decided on George’s failure. There is a flare of anger in my stomach, up through my lungs, and almost as if he must sense it, he begins to backpedal. “I only mean, Mrs. Mallory, if – if they should fail to make it this time. But I’m sure they won’t. They’ll be home safe and sound in no time. With the summit.”
Foolish of me to think he would bring me news. Even if he knew something, I’m not sure he would share it.
“That is what we all want, Mr. Hinks. Our dear brother-in-law to come home. To his wife. To his children. Safe and sound. Summit or no,” Marby says.
“He’ll be safe,” I say. I have to have hope enough for all of us. I have to believe it even when no one else will. “Has everyone had enough? Shall we have dessert?” I ask.
I try to be the perfect hostess.
CAMP VI
26,900 FEET
Camp VI was more forbidding than George remembered. Had it really only been three days since he was last here with Odell? It seemed a lifetime ago.
One tiny tent perched on a fragile outcrop of snow, the world dropping away from them on two sides. The tent silhouetted against the sky, against the white. He stamped on the ledge to test it, almost expecting a giving way, a crumpling. The snow crunched under the hobnails of his boots, but the ledge held.
He tried not to imagine it dropping out from under him, collapsing and falling.
Once inside the cramped space, George unlaced his boot and pulled his foot onto his lap to massage it. It was numb. The
boot had been tied too tight, cutting off the circulation. How had he failed to notice? He tried to remember the climb, but the memory of it was burned clean by the blaze of the sun, beating down in the high atmosphere. The heat had crawled in under his skin, searing him from the inside. He couldn’t have imagined frostbite.
An amateur mistake. Now his toes were tingling.
In all his years on mountains he’d never lost anything to frostbite – not a toe, an earlobe, or a fingertip. Sandy reached over, took his foot, placed it in his own lap, and rubbed at the cold skin to aid the circulation. George’s foot burned and then shattered into pins and needles.
“There was a porter,” George said, cringing against the tingling in his foot. “In ’22. No, it was ’21. He lost both his hands. They had frozen solid. You hear people say that, but I couldn’t believe that a human body could actually freeze solid. He’d accidentally left the tent flap open overnight. In the morning his hands were white chunks.”
“Like Tsering.”
“Right, Tsering. He said they didn’t hurt. They were like ghosts. Something he could see, but couldn’t feel.”
He thought of Geoffrey.
“It itches,” Geoffrey had told him, scratching at his leg. “Like a sonofabitch.” It was the first time he’d seen Geoffrey after he was wounded, after they removed what remained of his leg, and his face was drawn, grey under a patchy growth of beard. His hands trembled on his lap. He was in a wheelchair. For some reason George hadn’t expected Geoffrey to be in a wheelchair.
At first George didn’t understand. “That blanket would make anyone itchy, Geoffrey.”
“No. My leg, George. My leg itches.” Geoffrey looked at him. “It’s not even there and it itches.”
Above All Things Page 26