A Walking Guide

by Alan S. Cowell

  Multiply by ten and you are at 28,000 feet. Call it First Step, Second Step instead of Bad Step and you are on that other, higher ridge. Offset the weak limbs against the effects of altitude and you have a comparable climb rate. He set his poles awkwardly because the left arm was too weak to function perfectly. The rucksack weighed him down like old oxygen cylinders. Mallory and Irvine, in one way or another, created their own end, took the decisions that would lead to it whether they wanted it that way or not. But he wanted it his way. He wanted their single-mindedness and their drive and their focus on the overriding goal. He wanted their purity, their nobility. He wanted it to deny death, not hasten it. Joe Shelby was thirsty and his lips were dry. He was surprised to feel snow melting on them. Looking up from the worn path ahead of him that wound over the rocky knuckles of Crinkle Crags, he saw that the weather had closed further on him, isolating him in a world of his own strained breathing and thumping heartbeat, wrapping him in a cold, gray cocoon of cloud and ice. He had no photograph in his pocket, no bundle of letters or pack of Swan Vesta matches as George Mallory had done. And if he had been carrying a photograph, whose visage would it show: Eva, faithful Eva, or another more splintered image?

  “You’ve changed somehow. Not in a bad way.”

  “Maybe. I don’t take things for granted anymore.”

  “Things?” She had not lost that ironic twist of an eyebrow.

  “People. You.”

  Lunch was salads, mineral water, best behavior, taken in an almost empty dining room with only a solitary male traveler reading a book over a plate of trout and almonds, pausing occasionally mid-page to eavesdrop while pretending to be engrossed.

  “Maybe he’s a secret agent,” she whispered.

  “Or a lawyer.”

  “Yours or mine?”

  The same maid who had brought coffee now served at their table, a moonfaced girl from the hill country who blushed slightly when Jeremy Davenport smiled acknowledgment of her work before she returned to the kitchen, bearing soiled dishes and smutty news. It’s not her husband, said the cook—an interloper with a southern accent and no way with the girls. And it’s not her big brother, said the maid, not unless he’s a very naughty brother, the way he looks at her. The way he looks at her, the cook said, would burn your knickers off. The maid blushed deeper, scarlet, thinking it would take more than a look to burn off the school-issue doubloons that her mother made her wear for work. Not like the lady’s. Turning back the bed in Eva Kimberly’s suite, the maid had seen all kinds of finery spilling from her leather grip—flimsy stuff with little frills, tiny straps, translucent fabrics and silky delicacies. And the perfumes in the bathroom—fancy, French stuff that you only saw in the glossy magazines. And the whisky bottle, empty, discarded in the waste bin—casual debris, as if she did not care who knew of her weaknesses among the lower orders fated to attend her, wipe clean the slate of her excesses. A fast lady indeed, for all her London looks and smart clothes and posh tones. For all she pretended she was better than the rest of them. No way. She was no better than the local girls at the dance hall, out for a fumble with the farmhands and tour guides in the out-of-season chill. Her husband booked the room, the cook said. The governor told me. Said he’d be arriving in a day or two from the fells. So she’s just filling in time. Filling in something, said the maid, reddening again at her own vulgarity. Can’t blame her, though. He’s a fit enough bloke. And she’s not so bad herself, said the cook. Though he’s more my type.

  —

  “Wonder what they’re laughing at,” Jeremy Davenport said as the sound of half-suppressed giggling wafted through the door that led behind a silk screen into the sanctum of the kitchen.

  “Us, probably.”

  “Us?”

  “You and me. Two people having lunch. They probably think we’re having an affair.”

  “Well . . .” Jeremy Davenport did not finish what he had been going to say. What he had been going to say belonged to the past, the old devil-may-care Jeremy who thought through his gonads and harvested life’s opportunities with very little thought for their consequences. Once, he would have said: Well, let’s really give them something to talk about. But now he sensed he was on tracker’s ground, needing the wind to shift before moving in. Trackers were smart. Trackers concealed themselves. Trackers were patient if they wanted to achieve what they desired. In the old days in Africa, he had heard of military scouts who held station immobile for hours and days at observation points in tree branches or on rocky knolls, spying out their enemy’s ground in silence and stillness before calling in the cavalry, the air strikes for the kill.

  “How’s Joe? I heard he wasn’t well.” He had not used the name before, and it sounded strange and false on his lips, but he told himself this was part of the new tradecraft, the scouting, the feigned sympathy, the quest for the point of least defense.

  In the nasty weeks and months after the betrayal, Jeremy Davenport had refused to use Joe Shelby’s name, calling him that hack or Captain so-called Wilderness or the northern loverboy. But, months later, when the gossip mill in Kenya began to turn with word of an ailment, a malady, possibly terminal, it had been Eva Kimberly’s father who called him to suggest that, perhaps, his daughter might need some support, a shoulder to cry on, because her partner might, well, not be long for this world if the quacks had got it right. And, at that point, Jeremy Davenport remembered the virtues of patience and stealth in the stalking of the most skittish and precious of prey.

  “No. He’s not well.” She was surprised he asked and surprised even more that he waited to listen. “He’s had a bit of a shock. A diagnosis. He’s not the kind of person who’s used to losing or being told he can’t have what he wants or do what he wants. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have put it that way. But you do know what I mean, don’t you.”

  “It’s OK. I know what kind of guy he is. I’ve met him. I know the story. It’s not as if I’m an outsider. I introduced you, and how much of a cliché is that? But I’m here for you if you want to talk about it. It doesn’t hurt the same way anymore. More of a permanent dull ache, really. You always were a pain. Sometimes.”

  He smiled to say he bore no malice, that his words were brave camouflage on a broken heart. In the past betrayal had been a simple matter of physical deceit. Now it was much more thrilling—an entire game of charades, of playacting, made all that much simpler by her assumption that he was a person from her own tribe, someone with the familiarity of small intimacies that have accumulated over the years: the first successful jump at the gymkhana, the first preteen dance and the countless unscheduled encounters at parental lunches and beach vacations; the first sense of moving in the same circles, on the same trajectory; the long, hot afternoons on the verandah, sipping lemonade and murmuring secrets; the first, fevered touchings that led to the first true sexual experience. Joe Shelby was a great, broad splash of bold, violent color that had swamped her life. Jeremy Davenport was a pointillist creation of a thousand small brush strokes. The welling in her eyes came easily. The lonely reader two tables away lowered his book and stared at his water carafe to listen the more closely. Jeremy Davenport took her hand across the table and behind the silk screen the maid said: he’s home and dry. Anything but dry, said the cook.

  “He’s so angry, Jeremy. So different. He’s furious with the illness and that makes him furious with everything else. With me. It’s as if it’s not just his body that’s crippled, it’s his soul. He doesn’t realize it but he’s let the illness take over his whole being, our whole relationship so that there’s no room for me anymore. It’s his obsession. He’s always been able to make things work for him. He’s always been a winner. People have always looked up to him. He was always a leader. In charge. You could see that when you went anywhere with him: where do we go today? What’s the story? Everyone asked him. He knew. And if things didn’t work out his way, he’d just move on. But this is something that he can’t escape by waving a credit card or jumping on an airplane or wr
iting for his beloved comic. Jeremy, it’s so difficult. He can’t understand why it’s him. He can’t work out why somebody like him—a doer, an achiever—suddenly gets relegated to the also-rans. That’s not really funny. It’s not the also-rans, it’s the never-runs. He can’t run. He can barely walk. He can’t understand why he’s been rewarded like this for everything he has tried to do: tell the truth about places, make the world notice. And it’s his ego. Captain Wilderness. Laugh in the face of danger. It’s all been made a nonsense. And I don’t know what to do, Jeremy.

  “I can handle sick Masai kids and AIDS in Muthare Valley and gangsters raiding my clinics. But I can’t handle this. It’s not what I signed up for—don’t be hurt. Please, just listen. I can tell you the truth. I know. You of all people. You know I’ve always coped pretty well, ran my business, ran the charities, looked after Pop and the farm. But I don’t know what to do now. He won’t let me in and he won’t send me away. I’m in limbo. Of course, I ran off with him. It wasn’t nice. It wasn’t done in a way I’m proud of. But he’s not the person I ran off with and I can’t just pretend he is. I think at the back of his mind he thinks that if he just fights it like he’s always fought to be first, to be on top, to be so bloody clever and different that he’ll beat it. You saw the TV, Jeremy. You saw that woman. It was the last bloody straw because he’s locking me out and inviting her in. And now there’s this stupid message from London that might change things and I can’t tell him.”

  She took the overnight fax from a pocket and showed it to Jeremy Davenport. It was crumpled now and had been written in a physician’s scrawl. Tears fell on it, making it all the less legible.

  He deciphered: “Hold the Mayo. Call me, Nigel.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “It means that he might be treatable. But I can’t get up there to tell him and he’s in such a stupid frame of mind that God knows what he’ll try.”

  “But at least it means you are off the hook.”

  Jeremy Davenport squeezed her hand and offered a napkin for her to wipe away the smudges under her eyes. He had not imagined she would be so trusting of him, so free in her assumption that the secrets could be shared with him. As she described the man who had ruined his life, he found he was thinking of one of his best-subscribed walking safaris among the mountain gorillas. High in the Virunga mountains, there was one beast—a great, 350 pound silverback the guides called Ndume—who had lost one of his mighty paws in a poacher’s snare. And as soon as other patriarchs became aware of his disability, they had no qualms at all in taking away the females who had once been his wives.

  —

  In the kitchen, cook was offering four-to-five on sin before supper but the rest of the staff thought the odds too much in his favor.

  GREAT END

  from Allen Crags

  Chapter Fourteen

  KESWICK, ENGLAND. SEPTEMBER 2000

  Lunch had been too intense by far. Eva Kimberly wanted a break from it, a lightening of the mood. She suggested they drive into the town of Keswick below Skiddaw mountain to get her car fixed, if a mechanic was to be found with the spare parts for the job. He concurred, sensing the wind shifting, moving slyly to keep the whiff of his true motives from her. She drove. He commented on her skills on this wet, rainswept road compared to the open bushlands where she had learned to wrestle an old Land Cruiser through ruts and drifts and mopane scrub, where the wait-a-bit thorn lay in permanent ambush. She smiled, recalling those days, restraining herself from falling into his poacher’s trap: do you remember when? Do you remember that day, when the Land Cruiser stalled and you came by on your big, red motorcycle to fix the winch cable to an acacia tree and pull the truck out and put your arms around me while the giraffe looked on? No, she resolved. No memory lane leading into a booby-trapped time warp.

  The mechanic thought he could bodge it in a couple of hours, at least good enough for the indicator light to flash orange and the brake light to flash red. They meandered and dawdled. They looked at storefronts full of boots and fleeces rather than look one another in the eye. Along the damp streets, the local mountain rescue team was out on a fund-raiser, men and women clad in hooded, red parkas, boots and gaiters, moving in pairs, rattling collection boxes. To show they were no ordinary walkers, they carried rucksacks festooned with climbing rope, crampons, ice axes. A flier across the main street proclaimed: Keswick Mountain Rescue.

  Eva took a twenty-pound note from her wallet and folded it into the lid of one of the boxes.

  “Very generous, madam. Thank you.”

  “Superstition, actually.” She smiled at the man in his red parka, a wiry rescuer who walked with the easy confidence of long days on the crags and mountains, and spoke with the authority of a leader used to calling the decisions.

  “How does it work?” Jeremy Davenport wanted to know. “I mean how do you know when someone needs your help?”

  “Funny, really. But a lot of it these days is with cell phones, specially in places like Skiddaw where you’ve still got a signal from the valley.”

  “And on Scafell Pike?” Eva Kimberly registered the rescuer’s surprise at her unlikely knowledge.

  “Not too worried about that today.”

  “How come?”

  “Because no one in their right mind would be up there for us to rescue. Most of the walkers took one look at the weather this morning and headed for the pub. Especially after the gale warning.”

  “Gale?”

  “Out in the Irish Sea. Gale warning. With the possibility of blizzards inland.” The rescuer caught her alarm. “Do you know someone up there?”

  Eva Kimberly glanced only briefly at Jeremy Davenport.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know the route?”

  “He’s supposed to camp at Esk something tonight and Scafell Pike tomorrow.”

  “Jesus. Does he know what he’s doing?”

  “He knows. It’s more a question of actually doing it.”

  Jeremy Davenport broke in. “What are the rescue arrangements, the actual rescue, normally? Not in this case. Just generally.”

  “Well, normally we’d use the chopper. And we’ve got prepositioned stretchers. One at Styhead, just down from Esk Hause. But obviously in this weather the chopper’s out. No visibility for it to maneuver, and those valley walls are pretty steep. So we’d go out by foot in a fairly large group to quarter the area we’ve been sent to. How’s his equipment?”

  “Good, I suppose. State of the art. Tent. Sleeping bag. Food. Stove. All that sort of thing.”

  “That’s one consolation. I’m wondering if we shouldn’t scramble now. Meet him at Esk Hause before he tries for Scafell Pike. Has he got ice gear? Crampons? Ice ax?”

  “No. Just walking sticks. Why?”

  “Just that this weather is a freak. The barometer’s gone barmy. And the thermometer. We wouldn’t normally see this weather until December, January. If the weather forecast is right, those lovely autumn mountains will change into mini-Alps overnight. It’ll be bitterly cold and very treacherous. Ice on all the rocks. Snow drifts. Cornices on the ridges so you’ll have to be careful not to get too close to the edge. And on Scafell there’s a lot of smooth boulders underfoot that’ll be very easy to slip on. I don’t mean to alarm you. I’m sure he’ll take the right decision. Even for us, it’d be dangerous and we’d think twice about mounting a search unless you absolutely insisted. At this hour. By the time we rounded everyone up and got going it’d be getting dark and we’d have to reckon with a bivvie somewhere. Has he got a whistle?”

  “Whistle?”

  “Handiest thing there is if you want to signal for help in bad weather.”

  “No. No whistle. I don’t think.”

  “Torch?”

  “Yes. A flashlight. On a headband.”

  “Can I just say something?” Jeremy Davenport looked at both of them. “If you ask for a search and they find him tonight and he’s fine and tucked up in his sleeping bag, waiting it out, he�
�ll never forgive you for doubting him, Evie. And if the weather hasn’t let up by tomorrow, then perhaps we could call the mountain rescue team then, if that’s all right with you, of course.”

  “That’s fine with us,” said the rescuer. He handed them a slip of paper with the contact numbers. “It’s your choice. You know him best. But it’s his life. Don’t forget that. These mountains may be small but they’re serious mountains. Call us. Anytime. Ask for me. You might need us. And thanks for the donation.”

  “It’s beginning to look more like an investment.” Eva Kimberly smiled and the rescuer seemed to take in her message. His eyes said: I don’t understand everything that’s going on, but count on us anyhow.

  Jeremy Davenport put his arm around her shoulders and they walked on. She shivered.

  “We never told him about Joe’s illness,” she said.

  “No. We never did. And we didn’t ask for a search, either. Look. I don’t know him that well, Evie, and, God knows, I have no reason at all to look out for his interests. But I know something about the male of the species. The male needs dignity. If you pulled him off his beloved mountain, he’d have his illness to cope with without dignity and that would be unbearable.”

  “I suppose you’re right.”

  So it’s best to leave him up there, beyond help, with the weather worsening.

  TAPE THREE, SEGMENT ONE

  SEPTEMBER 15, 2000, 4:00 P.M.

  MONITORED SEPTEMBER 17

  Esk Pike. Just below it, rather. Tea. Sugar. Tobacco. Matches. Solid fuel. Water from the last spring back above Red Tarn. Not easy one-handed. Not easy, period. Because dealing with this is Jekyll and Hyde. You pretend you’re hacking it: look, I brew tea: see Joe brew tea. You want people to think of you as courageous in adversity, the plucky soldier, putting on a brave face, laughing in the face of despair. Nobility on a Zimmer frame. Guts and grit with a limp and a laugh. Like a comedian on a seaside pier. Show must go on. You project this image. You lie. You say you’re OK. You even convince yourself sometimes. But, inside, when you’re alone with it, you know you are not OK. You get angry. You hate joggers and athletes and personal trainers and deadbeats who wreck their own lives but still command their own limbs. You hate the way they take their strength, their coordination for granted. You hate the symmetry of their walk. Left right left right. So easy until it’s taken away from you, bent and warped like Quasimodo. I did that, you think. It was me. Me out there jogging along, daring anyone to disrupt the perfect pace you’ve set for yourself, covering the ground as if you were a human metronome. Left right left right, lungs in tune, breathing steady, ground cushioned by the latest in fancy running shoes, the sunlight tanning your legs and a good sweat pushing out all the toxins. That was me and now this is me: foot dragging, lungs screaming, the sweat stinking of rage and fear. In the airport, they push you aside as they stride on with their little wheeled suitcases and their cell phones: yes, I’m at Heathrow and tell so-and-so I’ll make the 10:30. Once you rose above it. You were perfect. No one overtook you. At work or play. You sniffed at hospitals, you scorned medical care, you floated, cocooned in your self-confidence, tolerant, amused by the rest of them, vaguely sympathetic to the unfortunates who did not share your immunity to terminal threat. But now you hate. You hate the ones who can explain their illness, who’ve been given a cause, who can categorize their downfall by reference to a logical sequence of events. You rage at those bastards who go around infecting each other at their sero-positive parties: you want to say—how dare you make your self-pitying demands for cocktails of drugs and treatments and AZT when you’ve made yourself sick, for God’s sake, when you know precisely down to the last lesion and drop of rotten semen how you infected yourself. And all the while the rest of us with MND and MS and all the rest of the mysteries are crying out in the darkness and saying: why? Why did this happen? Explain it, doctor, please. And you know all about self-pity. You don’t just say why, you say: why me? Why not that prick in his gelled hair and punk clothes who has never striven for excellence, never fought for the summit, cruised through life thinking the world owes him a living? Strike him down, Lord, not me. Oh, yes. You have your dark nights of the soul, your inconsolable reach for despair and you remember that even He said: Lord, why hast thou forsaken me?