—
Joe Shelby switched off the tape recorder and eased it carefully into a pocket of his rucksack from which he withdrew his GPS navigation device only to find the screen blank and refusing to register the coordinates of his position. He rose awkwardly, knocking his lightweight stove into a deep cleft between the rocks from which there was no retrieval.
Chapter Fifteen
THIRLMERE, ENGLAND. SEPTEMBER 2000
Eva Kimberly told herself that teetering on a brink did not imply tumbling over it. She scolded herself for successive days of mild dalliance, then reminded herself sharply that there had been no physical betrayal of any kind and that she had instigated none of these episodes. And even if she had, would that have been so unusual for a woman of sufficient years to know her mind, and of sufficient youth to do as she wished? Bathing and dressing in clothes she had planned to wear for another reunion, she told herself she was nervous not simply because she had crossed into unfamiliar terrain by entertaining a jilted lover, but because the tryst was set in a hotel booked by another man, where all the waiters and maids seemed to know she was receiving a stranger and disapproved mightily. But what harm really was there in all that? Dinner was not infidelity. The eyes of the kitchen staff did not constitute a global television audience on CNN. People should not throw first stones, leap to conclusions. The wind and the snow flurries at her window reminded her of the other man wherever he was now, who might for all she knew stumble across the stormy threshold, midway through dinner, encrusted with ice—or be marooned somewhere, doomed by her decision to leave the Mountain Rescue call for another day. She reminded herself of the preparations he had undertaken—the no-expense-spared quest for the most perfect sleeping bag, the lightest, most impermeable tent, the stove and the supplies of high-protein diet. Assuming only that he still had the physical power to use his equipment, there was no reason to suppose that gear designed for the Himalayas should not perform its function on these modest hills, whatever the weather. But the presumption of bodily strength nagged at her: even if Nigel Lampton was offering a different diagnosis, he was not guaranteeing different symptoms without some kind of treatment. The progression of the disease had gathered pace. Every worsening had been detected after rigorous physical exercise, and the project he had embarked upon was by far the most strenuous he had attempted since the onset of his condition. The assumption, therefore, had to be that he might not have the physical power, that he might not be ensconced in his Everest-grade sleeping bag and expedition tent. And what presumption followed from that? That he might perish, immobilized by hypothermia as the storm gathered while she cavorted at his advanced base with another man intent on a different project altogether.
She closed the heavy drapes, denying the dark, contorted pines where she would have preferred to see still palms above a white coral beach. She imagined the lake beyond her vision whipped into angry, churning whitecaps where there should have been the evening swell of turquoise water caressing pale sand. She poured a very small bracer from a half-bottle of vodka—purchased after telling Jeremy Davenport she needed to refresh her supply of cigarettes—to blank out the thoughts of the weather worsening with every foot of altitude until, up there, it must surely be a maelstrom. But how could she be made guilty by the weather? How could sleet and gales be her accusers? Of course guilt does not need a physical act in order to make its introductions. The mere fact that she had allowed herself to think of tonight’s dinner as a prelude was already a kind of betrayal. And treachery took many different guises. She recalled an older friend, a settler’s wife, who discovered that for fifteen years her husband had entertained a clandestine relationship with an old college flame, seeking her out for intellectual companionship and mental stimulation, companionship but never sex. “I’d rather he had just screwed her and be done with it. I could have at least understood that,” her friend said. What hurt was not just that the relationship had been deliberately hidden from her, making her into a dupe—that much was true of all adultery. Far more, the woman said, it was that despite their shared, well-tended home, their tanned and boisterous children, their vacations in Mauritius, their dogs and cats and choices of wallpaper, their intimate, bedtime togetherness, she had been found wanting in the most fundamental way as the true soul mate she had considered herself to be. She had been judged and found lacking without even knowing she was on trial, still less on what charges. What hurt, her friend said, was discovering that her husband maintained a complete, separate life from which she had been excluded, a deep secret kept hidden by all the tawdry mechanics of deception—the coded phone calls and the separate room bookings in out-of-the-way hostelries, the flimsy excuses made credible only by her trust, which now seemed the most painful gullibility.
At least no one could accuse Eva Kimberly of such furtive conspiracy in the way she had treated Jeremy Davenport: she had abandoned him in the full glare of gossip and malice, magnified a million times over in the retelling throughout their incestuous, fishbowl, settler society where word of white mischief traveled faster than the bush telegraph, relayed through the way stations of hairdressing salons and afternoon tea parties, cocktail chatter and illicit pillow talk. Jeremy Davenport’s shame was hidden from no one. There was no pretense on her part of a platonic relationship: this was raw lust, all the more shocking for the presumption of demure fidelity that people attached to her. He may as well have walked around Nairobi with one of those “end-of-the-world-is-nigh” billboards proclaiming: cuckold, fool. And yet he had come now to seek her out, while Joe Shelby had repaid her in kind, broadcasting his liaison with the Frenchwoman on global television. When she first saw the two of them together at Naivasha—Mata Hari and Captain Wilderness—she had cast the Frenchwoman as the loose cannon, the spoiler. But, in fact, it was Joe Shelby who had entered their settled, settler lives like a free radical, bouncing around an entire organism, spreading infection, wreaking havoc. And in return for what? He had not offered marriage, or even a ring, let alone children or permanency. Barely had they established a home together than he resumed his travels, chronicled in the publication which he called the comic—and which she no longer read—alongside photographs bearing the Frenchwoman’s byline. There had been no gentle honeymoon, only the assumption that his work came first. And when his work ceased to come first, it was purely because his condition came first, forcing itself on both of them, an ugly, brutal gate-crasher refusing all entreaties to leave. In the end, all he had offered was a wild, crazy throw of the dice, a lurching switchback ride. She had loved him and betrayed for him and might now be on the point of completing the cycle of treachery—with complete justification considering his behavior. But how could she be even thinking this way? What had changed since he left for the mountains? Only the arrival of the other man, only the offer of a safety line, thrown to a foundering vessel. Yet how could you justify betraying a cripple, no matter how much he had wronged you?
She had said it now, if only to herself. Cripple. Disabled. Handicapped. She felt as if she had released a genie, and could no longer be sure where it might lead.
On the writing desk in the sitting room of the suite he had booked for them as advanced base, she caught sight of the telephone number given to her by the leader of the Keswick Mountain Rescue, and resolved to program it into her mobile. In case. Even betrayal did not have to imply abandoning a weakened man to a cruel fate on a mountain. And, helping a man in trouble might just assuage the guilt of treachery, especially if the man turned out to be less afflicted than initially assumed. Had not the message from his specialist—hold the Mayo!—suggested that the curse was not as dire as first thought, that she would not be abandoning a dying man in his very moment of need? If, after all, Joe Shelby could be helped, then, surely, he could help himself.
She thought the bracer a pathetic idea, a token of all the modern definitions of loser—sad, naff—but she topped it up to a decent level and drank anyway, wishing she had not as soon as the unchilled spirit burned in the
back of her throat.
He showered and wrapped a towel around his waist. He pulled back the drapes, opening a sash window to allow the fierce cold to rush into the stuffiness of his centrally heated room, scouring trails of goosebump flesh across his tanned chest and upper arms. He lit a cigarette from a gold lighter, cupping the flame against the buffeting wind that howled from a wilderness he did not understand. In his own lands, in the far-flung emptinesses of scrub and savanna, he could read the signs as clearly as if they had been spelled out in giant letters: a poacher passed this way, an elephant too; a hyena killed; a kite swooped and snatched its prey. But these lakes and mountains were a volume in a foreign language written in some indecipherable script. He was playing away, on alien ground.
He was not used to thinking in terms of fairness and justice. He had been raised to believe that the only true denominator was power—the power of the chief, the big man, proven through guile and ruthlessness, to dominate the lesser beings, the drones; the inherited power of people from his tribe, expressed in estates and mansions and stables and safaris, extending over all those who craved work and shelter for their families; the power of the young predators, forever testing the resolve of the patriarchs until the balance shifted and the mantle of supremacy slipped over them, leaving the old guard to fade or be hounded away.
Yet, contemplating the brute weather, he asked himself: was it fair, this uneven battle to reclaim what had been lost, when his adversary was so disadvantaged and distant, locked away in his own fantasies and illness, placed in physical peril by his dreams? Was there justice or chivalry, fighting in a theater of cozy rooms and mock log fires and decanted, heady wine while his enemy shivered and struggled somewhere out there, chilled and tossed by the storm, unaware of the challenger’s gauntlet? The questions lingered only briefly before he dismissed them. Had it been fair or just to return from the bush with the crazy Frenchwoman to find his Eva stolen? Had it been fair of his enemy to make off with his bride-to-be without so much as a chance to offer his case, press his suit? His memory had already filtered out his dishonorable intentions towards the Frenchwoman, relegated the entire episode to the recycle bin of moments that bore no imprint of guilt. However numerous or furtive, they were undertaken lightly, physical moments responding to simple signals, like sneezing or eating a burger. If one-night dalliance was betrayal, then so was self-stimulation, for they answered the same need, one with more satisfaction and triumph than the other.
If he needed further justification, was it not embedded in the instincts of the male of any species to broadcast his seed, to stalk and hunt and use all available weapons to win the rights of coverage of the female? And it was impossible to avoid the hatred. He had hated her for the betrayal, for the intense hurt of rejection, for the sleepless nights stalked by the image of her impaled on him, for the implication of his inferiority, his inadequacy as a male.
The hate had corroded him. A walking tour in the Mara had to be canceled because he was too drunk to leave his tent. But one morning, he awoke, rough and disheveled, to discover that the hate had burned off, the way the sun cauterized the morning mist on the high, Kenyan uplands, over the far-flung cattle ranches and emerald tea estates, revealing a bright crystalline sky, showing him that, beyond the hurt lay an equally bright and obvious solution—revenge.
The idea did not at first come easily. From his teenage years onwards, his life had been built and guided on the premise that she would be at his side, that, in the fullness of time, they would raise a new generation on the ancestral lands, as the survival of their tribe dictated. Every time he attended a settler wedding at Naivasha, he imagined the moment coming when the pews made of straw bales, the ceremonial boat ride across the lake, the champagne and marquees and spit-roasts and women in crinoline would all be feting them. Visiting the grand Kimberly farmhouse with its long, shaded verandahs and lawns of kikuyu grass encircling stands of bamboo fronds and bougainvillea, he imagined the natural course of progression when her father would move into a well-appointed thatched cottage in the grounds, an old monarch in exile, ceding the master suite to them—the same succession as had always been used to pass the generational baton. They shared the secret codes of their people, the unspoken passwords. You could see it in their breeding: a way of dealing with the staff, of positioning yourself in a land where a cruel history had delivered disproportionate privilege that you learned to handle with grace and a certain style. You could see it in acquired and inherited skills: the ability to play decent tennis, ride a horse with grace, fire a rifle with a degree of accuracy, host a dinner party, show no fear in the face of great adversity. For their kind, some things need never be said out loud, some aspects of privilege need never be challenged. They hailed from an aristocracy that had survived its guillotines and tumbrils to prosper under a new order. They shared a common platform bequeathed by their forebears and on it they would play out their lives from a common script. To avenge himself on Eva would cement the rift within the clan, between two of its great families. But she had initiated the break, and on that bright African morning when he awoke to clarity, those considerations fell away completely. What had been a matter of emotional entanglement became, simply, a question of tactics.
ESK HAUSE, ENGLAND. SEPTEMBER 2000
The tent fought back. Joe Shelby was not exactly sure where he was, but he had arrived wherever he had arrived and could go no further. The descent from his bouldery shelter below the summit of Esk Pike had taken far longer than it should have. He had stumbled, found it hard to balance. On the rougher parts of the trail, he needed to plan his progress, working out where his poles would best counterbalance his infirmity. He paused frequently for breath and to scan the compass, anxious not to stray off course. Without the GPS, the process took longer and the laminated map whipped so furiously in the wind that it tore asunder at precisely the fold where his destination was charted in hairline contour markings. By the time he called a halt, shucking off his rucksack as if shedding a millstone, teetering, as if drunk, on weak legs, the light had gone but the wind and sleet had not. He used a torch on a headband to scan this unfamiliar terrain for a patch of ground that was approximately level, not yet saturated. He unpacked the tent and it immediately unfurled like a crazy banner, lashing and crackling in the horizontal wind, refusing to be pinned down on the ground until he wrestled it there. Kneeling, he shoved the skewer-like pegs into the ground to hold down the built-in ground sheet, but the wind came around unexpectedly and filled the body of the tent like an inflating hot-air balloon and tried to tear the pegs from the damp ground. He fought it, rolled on it, flattened it, wept on it, positioned it with the entrance facing downwind, as he had been taught many years back. Using only his right hand, he took the aluminum poles and inserted them in their moorings, then used more pegs to hold down the guylines, but, in this pugilistic weather, they would not be enough. He rose with difficulty, leaning heavily on a walking pole. With his headlamp showing the way he scouted for rocks to weight the lines against the most fierce winds and almost lost the way back to the tent. The headlamp beam picked out the oncoming white rush of snow, the glisten of its wetness against the darkness, a narrow tunnel of light that scanned frantically back and forth over the uneven, tufted fellside until it picked out the alien, blue and yellow beacon: home for this night and no more. He held each rock with an almost-strong right hand and a hanging, swinging left hand that could only just curl fingers around the damp, mossy boulders he found. Twice he returned to find the tent loose and flapping and on the point of takeoff, and cursed, pushing the pegs back into the ground and tightening the lines and lashing them to rocks while the wind and cold crept through all the wrappings of clothing, locating clammy skin. He had water in one bottle from a thin spring. In another, he had whisky, and craved it. He had tobacco and papers, but, at his last halt, where he had brewed tea, the stove had been lost. He had bars of mint-cake and chocolate, but no means of boiling water for hot drinks to nurture and warm him. He had his sle
eping bag and tape recorder and self-inflating mattress. He had a night ahead of him where the only solace and shelter was provided by the thin nylon wall of the tent that held back the probing wind and retained whatever heat his body allowed to escape from his balaclava hat and thick, downy sleeping bag. He prayed that the cramps that were part of his condition would ease their grip on his residual calf muscles. He prayed that his shelter would survive the night and dawn would bring bright skies and what passed for a spring to his step.
A Walking Guide Page 19