A Walking Guide

by Alan S. Cowell

  The weather forecast was uniformly grim, without promise of bright periods later. At the summit of the pass, the temperature had fallen. Even in her jaundiced view of British meteorology, the clouds had taken on a heavy, menacing look and the sheep in the enclosed fields huddled for warmth.

  Eva Kimberly turned into the narrow lane that led to advanced base. The tones were somber: dark rhododendrons dripping fresh rain and a breath of mist on the air, leached from an unbearably oppressive sky, so distant from Africa’s great openness and light and high clouds that formed and reformed in fantastic sequence. The gravel crunched beneath the tires. As she parked and clambered from the car, the branch of a pine tree chose that precise moment to disburden itself of accumulated raindrops, spilling gouts of cold water onto her. She did not mind. Her head had cleared and she had a purpose: Joe Shelby had proved his point, now she would prove hers. She would oblige him to respond A.S.A.P. to Nigel Lampton’s missive. She would oblige him to soak in a deep bath and recognize that, in one day, he had achieved as much as he would in three. He had scaled a summit, an important summit. He had achieved his benchmark. He had survived and delivered his own redemption. He had made camp in his beloved mountains, communed with them, lain with them in exclusive tryst, embracing the earth, the rock. Now he would embrace her and the physician would restore hope.

  She gathered up the fax message and made for the hotel entrance. She would locate him, bearing good tidings: enter breathless messenger, stage left.

  The place he had chosen as advanced base was a comfortable country auberge, a converted mansion, not a glittery five-star establishment. Painted white with black window frames, it stood out sharply from the green and dark olive and gray of the lake and mountains. There was no formal reception, simply a small, antique desk in a hallway where the owner or one of his staff might be summoned by a tingling handbell. The two big lounges led right and left off the hall, comfortable spaces with deep armchairs and long sofas arranged around oak coffee tables where the hotelier served morning coffee and afternoon teas made up of scones and butter and jam and cream. Both rooms commanded views out over the lake, through pines that had been planted to frame a jagged ridgeline on the opposite shore. Just inside the hotel’s front door, a wall mirror reflected her disarray. The makeup applied at Wrynose Pass had run disastrously. Her hair was plastered to her head. The dark stains had reemerged beneath her eyes. She smelt coffee and cigarette smoke on the air, from the lounge on the right. She contemplated fleeing to their sanctum to spruce and rebuild, but there was no way of passing the entrance to the lounge without being seen. She ran a hand through her hair, grabbed a tissue from her bag to wipe away the most obvious damage. In any event, he had seen her worse than this. He had seen her hair wet from the oceans, from hotel shower rooms. He had seen her face naked of all embellishment on many mornings when he brought her coffee and reveled in her warm disarray in the secret world beneath the down comforter where waking dreams and real touching mingled juicily. It did not matter today—at this moment—that Eva Kimberly was not gilt-edged, manicured, polished, shiny for Joe Shelby. It mattered only that she should see him, hold him, anchor herself again after the unraveling that twenty-four hours could bring—from her flirtation to her straying on the pass to her conversation with a man she had no right or qualification to talk to. And, anyhow, after a night in a tent and a day in the rain, Joe Shelby himself would hardly look his best.

  Words would not be necessary. A big smile, a congratulatory smile, a big you’re-my-hero-hug; then the production of the message—hey presto! A miracle, rise up and walk. The clouds have lifted. The end is not nigh. We can start again, and you can gather your strength to return to these mountains, not in the fall, but in spring, in the time of buds and lambs and blossoms. We will not live under this sentence. As in her dreams, he would be whole. He would not limp or stumble or be awkward and hopeless. Let’s bathe together, wash away the despair, snuggle and cuddle and giggle in a big bed, with the curtains closed on those dark hostile mountains and chill lake, and the gas fire hissing in the rose-glow.

  The fax message was the governor’s reprieve, the release from Death Row. Eva Kimberly threw her shoulders back and arranged her face into the best smile she could muster.

  “Hello, Evie. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Oh my God!”

  Chapter Thirteen

  RED TARN, ENGLAND. SEPTEMBER 2000

  He was above them all now. Offering a cue or an omen, the clouds parted briefly to expose the broad, broken flanks of Crinkle Crags leading across to Bowfell. The small, blustery patch of water was named for the rust-colored, rough grass fringing its modest shores, bent to the prevailing wind. Even here, the gusts were strong enough to sculpt the wavelets into infant whitecaps. The ground around—black with peat—had become marshy, the trail rocky and perilous for him to negotiate. Without his walking poles, the balancing from one uneven stone to another would have been harder to accomplish—and this so early in the expedition, so far from the real challenge of Scafell Pike’s summit ridge where the boulders were notorious for their awkwardness. In the cleavage of mountain between Crinkle Crags and Pike o’Blisco—a name that always seemed alluring and mysterious—he paused, pulling thermal clothing tighter around him.

  From this high ground—suddenly, tantalizingly—he could see the path that led down to Langdale, to tarred roads and telephones, meals on plates of bone china that arrived from hot, busy kitchens, newspapers, normalcy, ordered fields and toy figures moving about in farmyards. Here, again, was the option—to abandon the project or stay with it, a decision to be taken alone because the fells were deserted, quite unlike the mountains of his memories where there was always someone to hail and greet, close by or in the distance or across a valley. On the climb up from Wrynose Pass he had encountered no one to wish him good day or inquire about his route and objective that day. The day before, too, the mountains had been curiously quiet. And perhaps the emptiness was its own message to him: why venture here where no others venture? What did they know that he did not?

  But there was no real choice. In reality, there had never been a choice. The illness did not permit alternatives.

  From the Mayo Clinic onward, he had been told he could only weaken. The dream of recovery or even treatment could only recede. The path back to his youth could only become narrower, less distinct until the sickly, diseased underbrush and cloying blind mists swallowed it for eternity. If he did not make the summit of the highest mountain now, he never would because he would never be cured. With every day he would weaken and, no matter how strong his will, his body would simply refuse to obey the order to place one foot in front of the other on the treacherous trails.

  They had told him as much at the Mayo, and when you got that kind of news you did not ignore it: you made your dispositions, like a doomed general setting the field for the final defeat, standing firm with the banner that you would defend until the necessarily bloody end. You made your arrangements. You prepared for the heroic ignominy of the last stand. You told yourself to display neither fear nor self-pity. You sold your stock, rearranged your portfolio, transferred assets, made provision for the partition of the estate. You shortened your schedule, paring away the irrelevant, the unnecessary so that only the most pressing priorities remained to be achieved in an ever-shortening time span. You took your cue from the very old who saw the end approaching with ever greater acuity. You threw away your long-term planner because the long term was no longer a concept: long-term was a mockery, a luxury reserved for people who did not even realize it was a luxury. And if you had set yourself the target of climbing England’s highest mountain while you still could, then you did not shirk from the squalls, the gusts, the sudden, unforecast snow flurries that would persuade a walker at any other time to seek the refuge of the valleys. You took imprudent decisions because the essential element of time had played tricks on you so you did not have all the usual considerations to take into account. And, in Joe Shelby�
�s mind, there was another thought he tried to ignore because it would not help him get where he wanted to go: if they were right, at the Mayo Clinic, if there was no appeal against their sentence, if it was all simply a matter of procedures to be gone through, stations of degeneration and immobility to observe—from cane to frame to wheelchair to the final gurney into the mortuary—then it did not really make any difference whether the inevitable happened in some sanitized, whispering hospice with a blessing of morphine in the still last moments, or up here in a roaring icy blizzard where, at least, he was still under his own power to set the altar and sing the final requiem into his tape recorder: if nothing else—his legend would survive where he had not. And, when they found him, they would know that he had departed for the parallel world with his preposterous comparisons to Mallory and Irvine intact, vainglorious to the end, never submitting to the netherworld of shadows and sickliness, but striding towards his destiny in the company of his true heroes, laughing in the face of danger.

  Joe Shelby turned northwest towards Crinkle Crags and the weather laughed back in his face. A sharp blast of cold, horizontal rain stung his cheeks and he fumbled to draw on waterproof gloves and an alpinist’s fleece balaclava, gaiters to keep the rain and mud from spilling into his boots. The process took forever, constantly thwarted by the difficulties of maneuvering his disobedient fingers. Pulling a glove onto his left hand, his fingers buckled under the strain, refusing to separate so that two of them lodged in the space designed for one. He took the glove for his right hand and clamped it between his jaws because his left hand had no power to pull it over his outstretched hand. The velcro and straps and zips of the gaiters almost defeated him and he cursed into the wind, on the verge of his tears because the decision to go on had been challenged so soon and by such trivia. With his good hand he checked his GPS location and heading. After the moment of visibility, the clouds had closed, but the track was well marked and the ghosts of climbers past accompanied him, guiding his steps. He walked bowed and tilted. The muscles in his thighs, so far unaffected by the illness, performed the functions abandoned by his debilitated calf and ankle muscles, but they ached as they bore the unaccustomed strain.

  The disease lurked on the peripheries, then moved in closer as the cells in the central nervous system decayed, behaving like drunken signalers, refusing to accept messages, refusing to open up the cable lines, the circuits. The muscles in his upper left arm, his lower legs, his wrist and fingers were all there still, sleeping, flaccid, because the signals did not come through to summon them to activity. Each step was a campaign, a conscious computation of deliberate acts, devoid of the automatic, unconscious spring of his youth. Where the track had eroded into slabs of smooth, worn granite, he placed his feet as ponderously as a climber on the highest Himalayan slope, manipulating his walking poles as if they were ice axes on a perilous traverse in the dead zone where the body entropies. His progress was painstaking. He had resolved to rest for fifteen minutes every forty-five minutes, but, in truth, the pauses between each step were their own miniature rest periods. Still, it was progress. That was what he told himself. It was progress because every step, however slow and however clumsy, took him a fraction closer to his goal and after he attained that goal, he did not care to think what would happen. The systems were closing down, like a very sick child in fitful slumber, shutting out extraneous stimuli to focus on the single, overriding goal of survival.

  THIRLMERE. SEPTEMBER 2000

  “Jeremy?”

  He had changed in obvious ways but not so much as to be unrecognizable. Short hair made him seem more boyish, less haughty than the loose, flowing mane he had cultivated in the past. But the same old deep tan contrasted sharply with the pale Britons flitting through her life, evoking memories of bush and woodsmoke. Something about the diamond clarity of his eyes said he had cleaned up after the drunken bawlings of their severance. Something about the hardness in those eyes said he still bore scars and uncertainties. He sprang to his feet from a deep sofa in a single flowing movement, lithe and expectant. There was no limp, no hanging arm, no awkward struggle for balance. In slender blue jeans and a down vest he looked slightly out of place in this stuffy, old-fashioned hotel, like a caged animal brought in from the wild, wary and constantly poised for flight. And, my God, he was good-looking. She had somehow forgotten that part when her thoughts strayed back through the veils of guilt to their time together.

  “Can I bring you coffee, madam?”

  The maid broke the spell. Mercifully.

  “Yes. Please. Jeremy?”

  “Yes. Another pot, please.”

  Smoke curled from a cigarette half-smoked in an ash-tray on the coffee table where he had been sitting when she entered the lounge. An early edition of The Financial Times lay half-read on a sofa, next to a set of car keys bearing the tag of a rental company. She remembered his worn leather briefcase from many journeys, stuffed with client lists and supply inventories and, sometimes, with gifts for her from remote places—Parisian perfume or Italian silk, silver from Zanzibar, and, once, a diamond from South Africa, destined for a ring that was never made. There was no suitcase, no overnight bag at his feet. Next to the car keys, though, was a room key from here, from this hotel, from advanced base, from Joe Shelby’s chosen refuge.

  “How did you—”

  “Jungle cunning. Juju. Bush rules. I shouldn’t have. I know.”

  —

  Leaving London before first light, nudging the powerful Mercedes saloon through the grim, grimy reaches of Camden, losing his way briefly at Kentish Town, he had told himself not to dissect his motives or allow any vestigial chivalry to corrupt his mission. Concentrate, he told himself. Concentrate on avoiding the billows of spray from the roaring trucks on the highway. Concentrate on the spoor, not like in Africa where a broken blade of grass, a smear of blood or a mound of warm droppings provided clues, but here in this alien world of artificial signs: M1, M6; so different from the open, dirt roads, the bouncing, half-seen trails through the high grass of the savanna. Concentrate on keeping speed down within the limits proscribed by this nation of fatuous, restrictive rules: do not drive too fast, do not live too fast; drink when they tell you, do not eat using your fingers, do not shit in the bushes or shoot the fauna. Above all, do not be distracted by memories of the fireside at Main Camp, with the soft light flickering across her sunburned face, or of riding together across the broad plains above the Rift Valley where the Thomson’s gazelles scattered before the thundering hooves and she rode effortless and straight-backed as if part of her bay stallion. Do not allow these memories to divert you from the mission. Do not forget the simple overriding fact that you deserved far better from her and were wronged. Focus on the trail, the route map, the unfamiliar names at the roadside, joke names from the slapstick of a forgotten mother nation. Wigan and Manchester, Liverpool—The Bea-tles!—Preston and Kendal and Shap and finally Penrith and the turn to Keswick on a narrow, twistier Judas-road that would betray you with a hidden curve, the unsuspected appearance of a blind farm tractor. Concentrate, now, on miming delight as she walks into the room. Ignore the disarray and note her face scrubbed clean and bright by wind and rain and her eyes glistening with shock and—yes—happiness to see him.

  —

  He reached for her hands and took both of them in his large, tanned paws, scanning surreptitiously to ensure no ring on her left hand blocked off the pathways of his planning.

  “I had to come.”

  “But you shouldn’t have,” Eva Kimberly said without seeming to him to mean it.

  —

  She showered quickly and changed into light-colored slacks and a very pale brown silk blouse that brought out the glow in her russet hair and hinted at but did not overstate the voluptuousness of her contours. She reconstructed her face with only the lightest touch of makeup. She regarded these preparations as her Kevlar, her defense against the waves of guilt, confusion and half-forgotten excitement that welled in successive formations,
as relentless as the ocean itself. Of course she should have told Jeremy to leave. But she had not. She had agreed to have lunch with him, and would break the news then. Of course she had not planned this encounter and so did not bear responsibility for its happening. Except that she had returned his call only hours earlier, lighting a beacon, sending a rescue flare that he had seen and responded to. Of course it was disgraceful that she should be primping and priming herself when her disadvantaged lover was lost and alone on the high mountains. But there would be no harm because this dalliance would go no further than a light lunch and a coffee and, simply, a little boost to her self-esteem. When you had loved someone as she had once loved Jeremy Davenport—a first love, an innocent love that built without threat toward unskilled consummation—then of course you could not simply erase that section of your life. It was part of you. The past had meaning, but did not imply resurrection. If the new arrival in the lounge had been an old girlfriend from the tennis courts and cocktail receptions of the Muthaiga Club, she would simply have rejoiced in this renewal of intimacy. Why, then, feel guilty simply because the old friend was male—a male predator whose diamond eyes offered, with one bold, hunter’s sally, to wipe out the sadnesses that had befallen her, to take her back where she did not expect to be taken?