by Dan Simmons
T he suites in the Hotel Mount Everest are actual suites, which include sitting rooms with overstuffed Victorian furniture. Our corner suite has tall windows looking both southeast to the buildings of Darjeeling staggering down the hillside beneath the hotel, and when we part the drapes, glimpsed through ever-shifting clouds, high mountains with snowy, moonlit peaks rising like ramparts to the north and northeast. “Which one is Everest?” I ask the Deacon in reverent tones.
“That stubby low-looking little peak to the left center…the one you can’t really make out,” he says. “The closer giants like Kabr and Kanchenjunga block a good view of Everest from here.”
There is a bedroom for each of the three of us in this roomy suite, and…most wonderful of all…feather beds.
Jean-Claude and I would be happy to sleep late this next morning—when will be the next time we’ll be sleeping in feather beds?—but the Deacon, fully dressed down to the thumping lug soles of his alpine boots, ruins that plan by banging on both our doors, opening them, waking J.C., then stomping into my bedroom, throwing wide the heavy drapes to let in the high-altitude sunlight, and rousting me out just as the sun is rising.
“Can you believe it?” he snaps as I sit groggily on the edge of my wonderfully comfortable and warm bed.
“Believe what?”
“He wouldn’t let me in.”
“Who wouldn’t let you in where? And what time is it?” My tone is surly. I am surly.
“It’s almost seven,” says the Deacon and goes into J.C.’s room to make sure he’s also getting up and dressed. By the time he returns, I’ve splashed soapy water from a basin on my face and under my arms—I’d taken a long bath the previous night before going to bed, actually falling asleep in the hot water—and now get into a fresh shirt and trousers. I have no idea how one should dress for this surprisingly posh Hotel Mount Everest, but the Deacon is in twill trousers, mountain boots, a white shirt, and linen vest, so evidently one doesn’t have to dress formally to go to breakfast here. Still, I pull on a tweed jacket and knot a cloth tie. Even if the hotel is so informal as to tolerate the Deacon’s mountain-climbing attire, one has to doubt that Lord Bromley-Montfort will be.
“Who wouldn’t let you in where?” I repeat when we meet again in the hallway. When the Deacon is truly angry, his lips—already thin—become an even thinner line. This morning they have all but disappeared.
“Lord Bromley-Montfort. He has closed off the whole wing just down the hall from our suites, and he has that sirdar Pasang and two other oversized Sherpas standing in front of the doors, arms folded across their chests—guarding the doors, Jake, as if it were a bloody harem in there.”
The Deacon shakes his head in disgust. “Evidently Lord Bromley-Montfort is sleeping late this morning and does not wish to be disturbed. Even by the climbers who have come thousands of miles to risk their lives to find the body of his beloved cousin.”
“Was he beloved?” asks Jean-Claude as he joins us by falling into line on the surprisingly narrow stairway.
“Who?” snaps the Deacon, obviously still distracted by being turned away from Lord Reggie’s suite.
“Young Lord Percival,” says J.C. “Cousin Percy. Lady Bromley’s wastrel of a son. The fellow whose frozen corpse we’ve come to find. Was young Percy beloved by Darjeeling’s Lord Bromley-Montfort…by his cousin Reggie?”
“How the devil should I know?” barks the Deacon. He leads us downstairs to the large breakfast room.
“I suggest we get a good breakfast,” I say so there’ll be no more Deaconesque snarling. India has certainly brought out the dark, impatient side of our friend, one we’ve never seen before. It’s been my conviction during the months that I’ve known Richard Davis Deacon that he would choose his own beheading before allowing himself to commit an emotional scene in public.
I will very soon find out just how wrong I’ve been about that.
The long breakfast room is empty except for a table that has been set for seven. The same manager who’d greeted us in the middle of the night leads us to that table and sets five menus down. J.C. and I sit on one side of the table, the Deacon opposite us, and we leave the chair to my right at the head of the table and the one to the left of the Deacon empty. I’ve expected a British buffet, serve-yourself upper-class sort of breakfast, but evidently that’s not how the Hotel Mount Everest is going to feed us. The five menus set down suggest that Lord Bromley-Montfort and someone else—perhaps Lady Bromley-Montfort—may be joining us. This is not exactly a Sherlockian-level deduction, but then, I’m still groggy with sleep and without my morning coffee.
After twenty minutes of waiting for them—mostly in silence save for the sounds of our stomachs rumbling—we decide to order. The breakfasts are very English. Jean-Claude orders only muffin-biscuits and black coffee—a large pot of black coffee. The clerk/waiter pouts. “No tea, Monsieur?”
“No tea,” grunts J.C. “Coffee, coffee, coffee.”
The clerk/waiter nods dolefully and shuffles closer, looming over me, pen poised again. “Mr. Perry?”
I should find it unusual that he remembers my name from our checking in during the night, but then again, other than Lord and Lady Bromley-Montfort and their retinue, we seem to be the only three people in the hotel. I’m hesitating because I’ve had trouble in England finding breakfasts I can really enjoy, and this menu is most definitely English.
The Deacon leans my way. “Try the Full Monty, Jake.”
I don’t see it on the menu. “The Full Monty?” I say to the Deacon. “What is that?”
The Deacon smiles. “Trust me.”
I order a Full Monty with coffee, the Deacon orders the same with tea, Jean-Claude again mumbles “Coffee,” and the three of us are alone in the long room again.
“Not much business these days in the ol’ Mount Everest Hotel,” I say as we wait.
“Don’t be naive, Jake,” says the Deacon. “It’s obvious that Lord Bromley-Montfort has rented the entire hotel so that our meeting here today can be private.”
“Oh,” I say, feeling stupid. But not so stupid that I don’t ask, “Why would he do that?”
The Deacon sighs and shakes his head. “There goes our attempt to keep a low profile and to pass through Darjeeling without really being noticed.”
“Well,” I persist, “if Lord Bromley-Montfort cleared the place out so that we could meet this morning…where is he? Why keep us waiting?”
The Deacon shrugs. J.C. says, “Evidently English lords in India prefer to sleep late.”
Our breakfasts arrive. The coffee tastes like slightly warmed ditchwater. My breakfast plate is heaped so high with fried foods that bits keep slopping off as if trying to escape; the heap includes half a dozen burned-black pieces of bacon, at least five fried eggs, two gigantic pieces of fried bread slathered in butter, some sort of semi-ambulatory black pudding, fried tomatoes crouching next to grilled tomatoes, a row of sausages bursting through their burnt-fried skins, fried onions dolloped here and there at random, and a heap of leftover vegetables and potatoes from the previous evening’s dinners now all shallow-fried and jumble-piled together: bubble and squeak, I know the jumbled part of this mess is called. I hate bubble and squeak.
I’ve had large English breakfasts before, but this is…ridiculous.
“All right,” I say to the Deacon. “Why is this called ‘the Full Monty’? What does ‘Full Monty’ mean?”
“It means, approximately—‘everything’ or ‘the whole thing.’” He is already busy forking the fried stuff into his mouth in that insufferable way the Brits do—fork upside down and held in his left hand, blob of food teetering impossibly on the fork’s backside, keeping the knife in his right hand to carve through the gelatinous mass.
“What does ‘Full Monty’ mean?” I persist. “Where’d the phrase come from? Who’s Monty?”
The Deacon sighs and sets down his fork. Jean-Claude, obviously more interested in the view of the mountains than in his food, is looking
out through the window at the bright Darjeeling morning.
“There are different etymological theories on ‘the Full Monty,’ Jake,” intones the Deacon. “The one I think most likely to be true comes from the tailoring business of a certain Sir Montague Burton, begun, I believe, shortly after the turn of the century. Burton offered that most oxymoronic of things—well-tailored suits for the common bourgeois man.”
“I thought all you English fellows had tailored suits…what did you call it when you bought mine in London?” I said. “Bespoke.”
“That certainly applies to the upper classes,” said the Deacon. “But Sir Montague Burton sold such tailored suits to men who might wear a suit just a few times in their adult lives—one’s own wedding, one’s children’s weddings, friends’ funerals, one’s own funeral, that sort of thing. And Burton’s stores specialized in lifelong tailoring of the same suit, so as the bourgeois gent expanded, so did his suit. Nor was the cut ever of such a sort that it would, as you Bostonians would say, ‘go out of style.’ Burton started with one shop, in Derbyshire, I believe, and within a few years had a chain of stores all over England.”
“So asking for the Full Monty means…what? I want the whole suit? The whole thing?”
“Exactly, my dear chap. Coat, trousers, waistcoat…”
“Vest,” I correct.
The Deacon squints again. Actually, this time, I have squirted him with juice as I knifed into one of the sausages.
I start to say something sarcastic but stop with my mouth open as the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen—or would ever see—walks into the room.
I can’t adequately describe her. I realized that decades ago when I first attempted to write these memoirs without the death sentence of cancer hanging over me. I had to abandon the attempt then when I came to describing…her. Perhaps I can tell you a little bit about what she was by describing what she was not.
This is 1925: stylish women have a certain look. To be stylish in 1925 means the woman has to be flat-chested as a boy (I’d heard that there are breast bands and other such underwear sold to produce that effect for those ladies not lucky enough to come by flat-chestedness naturally), but this woman entering the room with Pasang by her side definitely has breasts, although she isn’t flaunting them. Actually, her shirt—and it really is more of a shirt than a lady’s blouse—is of a fine linen but otherwise cut much like a working man’s field shirt. It does not hide her curves.
A fashionable woman in 1925 will have her hair cut short, parts of it curled—the floozies in Boston and New York and London go in especially for spit curls—or, better yet, especially for the smart set, bobbed short. This woman with Pasang has long hair, dropping in rich natural curls below her shoulders.
The fashionable hair color for ladies in 1925 is blond bordering on platinum; this woman has hair so dark as to be both blue and black at the same time. The highlights on the ebony curls flicker and dance with the movement of sunlight on her long hair. The sophisticated sort of society women I’d met through Harvard and the whores I’d met in Boston speakeasies had mostly plucked their real eyebrows and then penciled in the skinny, high-arched fake brows that Jean Harlow would soon make so popular worldwide. This woman striding toward our table has rich black eyebrows that arch only slightly but which seem infinitely expressive.
And her eyes…
When she is at the base of the stairway twenty-five feet away, I think that her eyes are blue. At twenty feet, I realize that I’m wrong—the color of her eyes is ultramarine.
Ultramarine is a strange and rare color: beyond sea blue, even beyond the deeper blue artists call marine blue. When my mother included ultramarine in her paintings, which was rarely, she would use her thumb to crush small balls of pure lapis lazuli into powder, wet the powder with drops of water from a glass or with her own saliva, and then, using strong, sure jabs of her palette knife, mix tiny amounts of that overpoweringly strong tone—ultramarine—into the seascape or skyscape on which she was working. In the slightest excess, it’s disturbing, unbalancing. In just the right amount, it’s the most beautiful color in existence.
This woman’s eyes have just the right shade of ultramarine to complete and complement the rest of her beauty. Her eyes are perfect. She is perfect.
She strides across the room with Pasang to her right and only half a step behind her, and both stop behind the empty chair at the head of our table, the Deacon on her right and J.C. and me gawking from her left. The Deacon, J.C., and I stand to greet her, although I admit that my standing is more of a springing upward. Jean-Claude is smiling. The Deacon is not. Pasang is carrying a pile of books and what appear to be rolled maps, but my eyes have no time to linger on Pasang or my friends.
Besides the beautiful linen shirt-blouse, this woman is wearing a broad belt and a riding skirt—breeches, really, but looking like a skirt—of what appears to be the softest, richest suede in the world. Suede well and evenly bleached to even subtler hue and greater softness by high Darjeeling sunlight. It’s almost as if she’s here in tea plantation work clothes (if work clothes were ever perfectly tailored). Her equestrian boots are such as those a lady would wear while riding in tall grass or snake country and look to be made of a leather so soft that I think it can only have been formed from the hides of newborn calves.
She stands at the head of the table, and Pasang nods to each of us in turn. “Mr. Richard Davis Deacon, Monsieur Jean-Claude Clairoux, Mr. Jacob Perry, it is my pleasure to introduce to you Lady Katherine Christina Regina Bromley-Montfort.”
Lady Bromley-Montfort nods to each of us as we are introduced, but she does not offer to shake hands. She is wearing thin leather gloves that match her boots.
“Mr. Perry and Monsieur Clairoux, a pleasure to meet you at long last,” she says and turns to the Deacon. “And you, Dickie, my cousins Charlie and Percy used to write to me about you all the time when we were all young. You were quite the wild child.”
“We were expecting Lord Bromley-Montfort,” the Deacon says coolly. “Is he nearby? We have expedition business to discuss.”
“Lord Montfort is at our plantation only a thirty-minute ride up into the hills,” says Lady Bromley-Montfort. “But I’m afraid he will not be available to you.”
“Why is that?” demands the Deacon.
“He is in a crypt at the tea plantation,” says the woman, her amazing eyes remaining clear and fixed on the Deacon’s face. She seems almost amused. “Lord Montfort and I were married in London in 1919, before we came back to India, to the plantation where I had been raised and which I had been running. I became Lady Bromley-Montfort, and eight months later Lord Montfort passed away from dengue fever. The climate in India never really agreed with him.”
“But I’ve been sending letters to Lord Bromley-Montfort…,” sputters the Deacon. He removes his pipe from his jacket pocket and clenches it between his teeth but makes no move to fill it or light it. “Lady Bromley mentioned a Cousin Reggie, so I naturally assumed…”
She smiles, and my legs go weaker. “Katherine Christina Regina Bromley-Montfort,” she says softly. “‘Reggie’ to my friends. Monsieur Clairoux, Mr. Perry, I sincerely hope that you will call me Reggie.”
“Jean-Claude, Reggie,” says my friend and bows low to her, taking her hand and kissing it even with the glove on.
“Jake,” I manage.
Reggie takes the seat at the head of the table while the tall, dignified form of Pasang stands behind her like a bodyguard. He hands her a map and she unscrolls it on our table, unceremoniously moving aside used plates and cups to make room. Jean-Claude and I look at each other and then also sit. The Deacon clamps down so hard on the stem of his pipe that it makes an audible clack, but eventually he sits.
Reggie is already speaking. “Your proposed route is the standard one, and I agree with most of it. The day after tomorrow we can take some of our plantation trucks to Sixth Mile Stone, do the final loading of packs and pack animals there, and proceed on foot with the Sh
erpas past the Tista Bridge and beyond to Kampong, where some of our other Sherpas will be waiting for us with more mules…”
“Us?” says the Deacon. “We?”
She looks up at him with a smile. “Of course, Dickie. Since my aunt agreed to fund your search for Cousin Percy’s body, it’s always been understood that I would accompany you. It’s an absolute condition for any further funding of the expedition.”
The Deacon must realize that he is going to bite through the stem of his favorite pipe, for he removes it with a violent motion that almost catches Reggie in the head. Rather than apologize, he says, “You on the expedition to Everest? A woman? Even to the Base Camp? Even into Tibet? Absurd. Ridiculous. Out of the question.”
“It was an absolute condition of the funding for this—my—expedition to recover Cousin Percival’s remains,” Reggie says, her smile still in place.
“We’ll go on without you,” says the Deacon. His face is very red.
“You’ll do so without a shilling more from the Bromley estate,” says Reggie.
“Very well, then, we’ll forge ahead on the funds we have,” barks the Deacon.
What funds? is my thought. Even the tickets from Liverpool to Calcutta have been paid for by Lady Bromley…evidently out of the money earned by Reggie’s tea plantation.
“I’ll give you two reasons for my going on this expedition besides the absolute necessity of my funding,” Reggie says calmly. “Will you be so kind as to listen, or will you continue to interrupt me with those barnyard noises?”