A Walking Guide

by Alan S. Cowell

  JERUSALEM. AUGUST 2000

  After the Gaza incident the talk was that they were a number again. Sightings were logged. Gossip built, swirled. The two were seen together exiting the grand Room 5 at the American Colony Hotel, once their known habitat, tryst and bolt-hole. Fact. They were laughing. Fact. Joe Shelby’s eyes were pinholes and the coke lines were thick as puff adders. Fact. He limped. He stumbled. He didn’t care. He laughed and, in the bar, Ibrahim poured him scotch while she burned like a light on the next barstool, his Florence Nightingale with a lamp bright in her bloodstream. Fact. If people asked who she thought she was to be running around with another woman’s husband, she replied: Nurse Diesel, and thought that hilarious. Du Plessis was on hand, too, his consigliere, always a sign of trouble, trawling for bloodshed among the faiths. Joe Shelby filed a dispatch and his byline appeared alongside one of her images showing him crouching and running under fire, an Editor’s Note to say: our guy was there. Fact.

  Only after he returned to London did Faria Duclos pause to ask the question: what did he really want? Only she could have told the secrets of Room 5 and she did not choose to do so. The secrets were hers, perhaps all that would remain now. Chancing upon Du Plessis over a late breakfast, she said: what do you think Joe wanted here? You’ve known him longer than any of us. And Du Plessis said: he wanted you to answer the question he doesn’t dare ask himself.

  NAIROBI. AUGUST 2000

  In Africa there were many who knew her and him and who saw the live television footage from Gaza. One of them was Eva Kimberly’s father, Neville Kimberly, who raged at the barefaced betrayal of his cherished daughter by his putative son-in-law and felt a sharp constriction of his chest that he preferred to ignore. Another was Jeremy Davenport who watched the footage on a portable satellite receiver at his bush camp in the Serengeti. He followed the drama in Gaza with cold and calculating eyes, then his mouth curled into a lopsided grimace that suggested he recognized this precise moment as one he had been awaiting, much as a tracker awaits the moment when the prey lowers its guard.

  BOWFELL

  from Lingmoor Fell

  Chapter Ten

  THIRLMERE, ENGLAND. SEPTEMBER 2000

  “Jeremy? It’s me. Eva.”

  “I didn’t think you’d call back. Thank you so much. Where are you?” His voice was almost contrite, as if he were the offender.

  “In the Lake District somewhere. And you?”

  “London. Sorry. I had to call. I hope you don’t mind.” He was hurrying, as if he feared she might ring off and had rehearsed his words. “It was just . . . after I saw that footage on CNN, I thought, well, my heart went out and I thought you didn’t deserve a spectacle like that and I just wanted you to know that, I suppose. That—”

  She broke in to say that, no, she did not mind, it was sweet of him to still think of her. But she did not really, right at this moment, want to revisit either the moment she had discovered Joe Shelby’s Big Lie or the moments when his illness had persuaded her to offer a second chance. Hearing Jeremy Davenport, after her tormented, wrong-footed day in the hills, she felt something like relief, or even joy, that someone preferred the sound of her voice to the bleat of a Lakeland sheep or the lash of English rain. And there could be no harm in a telephone call, not compared to the mysteries Joe Shelby had declined to explain in his accounts of his journeys to the Middle East and the Balkans. Morality was relative: physical presence ranked higher in the league of venality than phone chat, virtual romance.

  True, she and Joe Shelby had promised one another that they would try to come to grips with the curveballs, the pitfalls. True, she could accept that so much of what had happened—in Gaza in particular—resulted from his affliction. And, if she stretched gullibility to the breaking point, she could believe his protestations that, in Kosovo and Israel, he had kept the ultimate commandment sacred. Both of them knew that whatever it was that survived between them, whatever they might hope to rebuild, it would not withstand the buffeting of a third-party liaison. And anyway, there was something faintly pathetic about her agonizing over these men—one miles away on a mountain and the other hundreds of miles away at the end of a telephone line. That, surely, fell within the rubric of permissible misbehavior.

  “How’s Kenya?” She was reaching for a bright, conversational tone. She had checked into the hotel at the end of a long, somber driveway arched by dark firs, fringed with rhododendron. She had bathed and ordered a sandwich for delivery on room service, but had not felt hungry when it arrived on an oval steel platter, overwhelmed by a mountain of fries and a forest of salad. She had thought she would not call, then checked her cell phone message again and heard a voice so full of memories that she thought: what the hell? First a stranger at lunchtime, now an ex with supper. She was becoming quite promiscuous and toasted the idea in single malt from a bottle that must have sprung a leak.

  “Good. Good. Lots of high-end types, despite all the publicity in the press about corruption and crime and so forth. Need to scare them up a bit. That’s why I’m over here, then going on to New York to talk to the A&C people. Eva, can I see you?”

  “Perhaps that wouldn’t be such a good idea, Jeremy.”

  “But where are you?”

  “That’s for me to know.”

  “And me to find out.” They laughed and then there was silence.

  “But you are alone.”

  “How did you know that?” she said. The admission slipped out before she realized that he did not know, was merely sounding, scouting. He was thinking: yes! He was thinking the prey was exposed.

  “You rat,” she said, but there was no real malice. “How’s Pop and the farm and everybody?”

  “All missing you. Enormously. Me especially. Now the short rains are over and the bush is sparkling and full of exotic creatures. But none, of course, as beautiful as you.”

  “Jeremy . . .”

  “But I have to tell you, Evie. I’m sorry. I know it’s pathetic.”

  “It’s not pathetic.” The whisky had molded her voice to a soft burr that she tried to clear away with a cough in case he mistook it for the kind of intimacy that people sometimes develop during phone calls that stray into forbidden territory.

  “Eva, you know I’ll find you.”

  “Jeremy, you mustn’t. Really. I’m fine. OK, the TV thing was a bit of a shock, but there was an explanation for it. Really. It was just a coincidence. And it did save his life.” Even as she spoke, she wondered why she was shying from calling Joe Shelby by his name. Or referring to her as anything other than it. As if schoolgirl tantrums could make a difference.

  “Is he with you?”

  “No, Jeremy. He’s . . . You shouldn’t ask. Really. It was nice of you to call but everything’s fine. Honestly.”

  “I just don’t want you to be alone. Please let me see you, Evie.”

  “Not just yet, Jeremy. It wouldn’t be right. You know that.”

  “No, I don’t know that.”

  After the phone call, she felt suddenly hungry and found a cold steak sandwich surprisingly tasty. Far to the south, in London, Jeremy Davenport called the dialer trace number that allows British telephone subscribers to ascertain the number of the last person to call them. A metallic voice provided the information he needed. After a few seconds’ hesitation, he called it, hanging up after a receptionist answered with the name of a hotel and its location. Then he was calling reception at his own hotel to ask if someone could please provide him with a road atlas, specifically one covering the Lake District. The clerk was more than happy to oblige. And would the concierge help arrange a rental car, a fast reliable model with good legs? Of course, Sir.

  In her voice he sensed what he had most hoped to hear after the television broadcast from Gaza: the self-confidence had been breached. Like a wounded animal she left a blood spoor of vulnerability and hurt. He knew those feelings from her abandonment of him. He knew the pain of slinking away, licking a wound until it callused into the rude scar tis
sue of survival. And, of course, he was intimately attuned to the hunter’s code of cunning and dissimulation that led to the coup de grace. Ever since the day, one year earlier, that Jeremy Davenport had discovered Eva Kimberly’s betrayal, he had been sidling towards this moment, wearing the cuckold’s mask of resignation to hide a stalker’s resolve.

  Chapter Eleven

  TAPE TWO, SEGMENT THREE

  SEPTEMBER 15, 2000, 6:00 A.M.

  MONITORED SEPTEMBER 17

  Day two. Dawn, pre-dawn. Great time for a hangover. Condensation lines the condom and my breath is like ectoplasm. Almost set fire to the whole damn thing starting up the Gaz stove. But Earl Grey redeems all. That and rehydrated breakfast mulch. And a somewhat complicated roll of paper and tobacco. Legs felt like stilts when I got up for the morning call, stumbling in the rain and a punishing wind. And I’d forgotten the indignity of the morning constitutional, crouching behind a boulder with the wind whistling around the zone of paramount privacy. How the hell did they cope with that on Everest without total refrigeration? The novelty now is the difficulty of rising again, squatting there paralyzed, legs too feeble to push me upright. So you lean forward, tilt ’til your good arm can provide assistance. The Wrynose moon.

  Sometimes you wake up and say, or pray: today it will be better; today the evil will have departed as mysteriously as it arrived. You awake with the fantasy of recovery: it has all been a dream; you are in a hotel room somewhere, panicky and sweaty but whole. My God, it was so realistic—I actually dreamed I was disabled. You imagine that some shaman, some nganga, far away, has withdrawn the pins from a crude clay doll, thrown bones, lifted spells, muttered magic, chanted charms. You will feel the weakness drain away like pus from a lanced boil. And then—as at this very moment—it is not like that at all and you maneuver to get out of bed, prop yourself up to clean your teeth, hold the toothbrush with two hands. Your leg feels that little bit weaker so you are unsteady like a drunk and there’s one more thing you can’t do—change a lightbulb, climb a stepladder, wipe your arse, hold a tennis racket, climb onto a motorcycle. You pray.

  I pray.

  I pray most of all that I’m heard. And I know now that if I do not ask now I will not be answered.

  I know there’s a God and I know God is telling me something, and I’m working on the code to understand the message. I know that some day in some form these prayers will be answered, maybe not in the way I’d anticipate or prefer, but in some way. Or not. Because there’s the other voice, the one that says: who do you think you are fooling?

  They say you go home to die, so maybe I’m propelled to some point that is a spiritual home, like an elephant’s graveyard, and I’ll just sit down there and say: OK, take me, Lord, and thanks for the ride. These days, I imagine life as a spring in a green, grassy mountainside, gushing, bright, sparkly, pure. And every day you can drink of it, even as the power of its issuing is diminished, even as the flow weakens, falters and in the end it’s just a trickle. But it’s a trickle of life, the essence, the great gift, and you’d be a fucking idiot not to try and drink to the last drop, the lees. The point, I think, is that you are tempted to say: oh, I’ll wait for X to be right before I do Y. But what this illness teaches you is that X will never, ever be right again, so you’d better get on with Y while you still can. It’s the lesson of old age, foreshortened. If you don’t do it now you may never do it, whatever it is—a project, a mission, a vocation. And the word “never” has a kind of finality that you never—there we go—understood before. Never means what it says: not ever again in the whole span of the universe—time or space. So if I don’t get up the mountain this time, I never will.

  WRYNOSE PASS, ENGLAND. SEPTEMBER 2000

  What she had taken for a symmetrical boulder was in reality a small, carved obelisk marking the confluence of three old counties at the summit of Wrynose Pass. The day before it had seemed like one gray rock among others. With the improved visibility of the morning, Eva Kimberly recognized her mistake—surely a forgivable error for an outsider, an offcomer used to rather more dramatic landmarks: the cone of Kilimanjaro, say, or the Serengeti migration. If she had known what to look for just a few hours earlier, her life might have taken a different turn. She would have persuaded him to call off his folly and she would not have encouraged Jeremy Davenport by responding to his message. So blame the fog, blame the mist and the rain. Or blame Joe Shelby for being who he was and what he had become. Blame Joe Shelby for mesmerizing her, then forgetting the spell.

  She parked the car and pulled her coat closer. Her hair whipped in the wind. Her skin felt faintly prickly and the roof of her mouth was furred. She had left the hotel in haste, without showering, without coffee, pulling on yesterday’s clothes, raking a brush through her hair. In the rearview mirror, when she adjusted it, she looked a wreck: eyes tinged with red, the dark stains spreading below them. Who’d want her like this? Not Joe. Not Jeremy. And what a relief that would be for all of them.

  The cloud seemed to have regrouped rather than dispersed, taking up position high on the flank of the hills above her—an army in ambush position, poised to rush down on its prey. On the ground, just above the marshy patch at the summit of the pass she began to discern the telltale signs of careless residence: an unsightly tuft of tissue not quite buried, a flattening of the wet grass, the discarded butt of a handrolled cigarette. In the bush, he would not have lasted five seconds without detection. But this, of course, was not the bush and Joe Shelby was not trying to disguise his progress: he was saying I was here and you were not. You drove by and left me on this damp patch of land.

  From the top of the pass, a rough narrow trail curled and zigzagged steeply to the north—back in the same direction as the hotel she had fled, seized by a pressing wish to see him, to hold him as a talisman against the other man who had spoken from London the evening before with a siren-call across time. Jeremy Davenport was a hunter and must have sensed her weakness. And she was seeking cover with Joe Shelby, who had departed and left her with none, even as she offered salvation.

  Underneath the door of her hotel room, an early morning fax message had arrived while she slept a fitful sleep interspersed with moments of semi-wakefulness when she could not gauge where dreams ended and realities began. She cast about on her pillow to reassure herself that she was alone, then tried to recall who, in her dream, had been at her side. She did not hear or see the fax arrive. She knew only, as she read it, her nightgown crumpled and her hair awry, that it was far too important to be left until Joe Shelby’s scheduled arrival one long day later. The message arrived on the letterhead of Nigel Lampton in London. It was addressed to both of them. It said, in doctor’s scrawl: “Hold the Mayo! I may have good news. Call when you can—Nigel.” Immediately, she called the neurologist in London despite the early hour, hearing the practiced modulation of his reassurance, rehearsed through many discussions of terrible news. She scrawled what he said on a notepad but a lot of the technical jargon was jumbled, incoherent. When she read back his message, the words that leaped from the page were “probably not MND” and “treatable, if not at present curable.” At another point in her jangled script she had written “little known condition” and “full three score and ten.” She did not need to make a note when he said, sternly: he should not delay the attempted treatment. There could still be unpredictable deterioration, from one moment to the next.

  In the hotel room, she thrilled and hurried. She must tell Joe Shelby before he sought his Valhalla on the hostile uplands. She must tell him there was some hope—a commodity he had thought to have exhausted. She must tell him that the progression of his illness might accelerate without warning.

  Now, at the summit of the pass, she called out, praying that Joe Shelby would not be too far away, would be playing games, anticipating her remorse, her panic to reappear somehow from a wraith of mist or a cluster of rock. Higher up the fellside, the cloud opened and closed, tantalizingly, like a veil drawn back then abruptly shut. Eva Kimb
erly thought she saw him, moving slowly in the cleavage of a valley between two rounded expanses of mountainside. She called again and ran forward, the sodden earth sucking at her suede loafers—what a stupid choice, but she had been rushing, not thinking or planning when she left the hotel—spattering mud on her tailored trousers. The water from the ground spilled over and froze her feet, and she tried to ignore it. If only she could see him—one positive, definite sighting—she would ignore the cold, the wet, and follow. The track was rough, treacherous, and her feet gained little purchase. Her shoes were designed for the topsides of sleek yachts or the cobbles of Rome, not for the worn trails of these lands. Again the mist parted and she saw slight movement, a dark shadow against a hillside stained in flat, neutral tones of olive and gray where all brightness had been leached by the clouds. She thought she recognized his backpack, his parka, his awkward, ungainly gait, his twin poles seeking anchorage on the untrusted ground below him. She thought it might be him but could not be sure. She thought it could be any lunatic out in atrocious weather, pursuing some inscrutable agenda. She shouted his name at the top of her lungs, but the damp air seemed to swallow her words, robbing them even of an echo. She thought that anyone who knew them both would think her a fool—a fool to have believed his explanation of the ridiculous television spectacle from Gaza that she and all her friends had seen, a fool to have believed the way he insisted that his life had been saved by a coincidence, no more than that: there was no debt of gratitude to the Frenchwoman, no requirement to undo his betrayal of her at Jadini and Cape Town and many other places; there was no hangover of passion, no hankering for their hotel-room life. She believed and did not believe, believed because she wanted to, because the alternative was uncharted, frightening territory.