A Walking Guide

by Alan S. Cowell

  She had changed. I had changed. The mystery of Room 5. All confession, intimacies, talk. Very late, sometimes drunken, or stoned. Sometimes with hugs.

  And was there sex? I suppose there was.

  —

  Joe Shelby paused for a long time, thinking back from tent to hotel room, from chill solitude to warm companionship. The tape recorder switched itself off as he had programmed it to do in response to silences and lacunae. But when he restarted his monologue, technology betrayed him for the machine did not reactivate itself as he had instructed it to, and his concluding words were lost to the wind that zinged in the guylines of his tent:

  Yes, there was sex only in the sense that we were two people of opposing gender who had shared a lot and survived a lot and could snuggle and feel the horniness stirring. And that was it. Really. It went no further because there was too much baggage on both sides for consummation. Just hugs, cuddles, babes in the wood stuff. But that’s infidelity, isn’t it, Johnnie? The breach of trust is partly in the intention and partly in the admission that you are looking beyond your one chosen person for something they offer you and you reject implicitly as inadequate. Betrayal is when you take the absolute core, the essence of the secret bestowed upon you by person A and give it to person B. Real treachery is when you take the soul with which you have been entrusted and expose it to an event or events that you know with 100 percent certainty would destroy it completely.

  So ask yourself two questions: did you betray—or have you ever betrayed—E in Jerusalem by any definition whatever? And, irrespective of the answer to that, you ask the second question: if you were given a reprieve, if Nigel Lampton called and said the Mayo was wrong, who would you call first to tell the news to? And the answer would be impossible because you were not biologically unfaithful and if you had to say who will I spend my life with you’d say Eva but if the question was: who will you hanker after for the rest of your days, whose will be the name on your lips when the Dutch doctor slides home the needle, whose face will be on your mind when you awake in any bed in any place in any gin joint in all the world then the answer to that you’ve known since the very first dawn in Gaza.

  She knew there would be a light tapping on the door. She knew she had not locked the door. She knew she would not sleep and despaired of thinking matters further through than that.

  TAPE THREE, SEGMENT THREE

  SEPTEMBER 16, 2000

  MONITORED SEPTEMBER 17

  . . . cking tape switch off? Weather foul. Johnnie gone. All gone.

  On the first Eurostar train before a new day’s dawn, there were no asylum seekers clinging to the axles, no sudden rush of Afghans or Kurds at Calais trying to hide in its crevices. In the absence of such hindrances, the train made good time, benefiting from the hour that accrued in its favor as it passed through the thirty-mile tunnel under the sloshing, gray wilderness of the Channel. The woman in black, curled in a first class seat, slept for most of the journey, clutching a worn canvas shoulder bag. When the train arrived at London’s Waterloo, she pulled on a down vest and a woolen hat—also in black—and walked resolutely through immigration control waving her French passport. The immigration officers took her for some minor celebrity or fashion model roughing it by traveling without an entourage. She had a clear route map in her mind and hurried to catch the morning West Coast express from Euston to a town she had never visited called Lancaster. She found it amusing to think that, though she had travelled in a burqa on a donkey across Afghanistan to seek out the mujahideen in the old days and had meandered across Africa from the Sudan to Rwanda to Zimbabwe, though she had been with the 101st Airborne Division in southern Iraq and with the rump Spesnatz in Grozny, she had never experienced quite the same quality of voyager’s apprehension as she did contemplating the markers of her day’s planned route—Kendal and Shap, Penrith, Keswick, Borrowdale. Was that not the name he had given? A village, where his journey would end? And the name of a hotel. Who could guess what situation she would find there, anymore than they had ever known for sure in Rwanda or Gaza what their destination for the day would bring?

  Chapter Eighteen

  THIRLMERE, ESK HAUSE, ENGLAND. SEPTEMBER 2000

  They awoke separated by distance, altitude, commissions, omissions.

  —

  With no device to chart time’s crawl through the cold and dark, he was aware of a barely perceptible lightening of the sky and an inexplicable weight on the nylon walls of the tent. It was very cold, far below zero. Condensation had frozen into the inner lining of the tent above his head, as if he were looking at the chill sails of some ghostly vessel on icy seas. He was wearing gloves, socks, a woolen hat, fleece and trousers—all inside the down sleeping bag—but he shivered nonetheless. Whether it was the half-felt shift in the light or the predawn swoon of the temperature he was not sure.

  —

  She awoke behind the dark, lined drapes of her room. The tangled sheets wrapped around her like hot towels in an old-fashioned barber shop. She was surprised to find herself alone. Casting aside the curtains and sliding open the sash window, she saw the ground transformed into a white, frozen landscape where snow was still falling. She reached for her cellular phone and the number of the mountain rescue team. She switched on the kettle in her room to make coffee. The mountain rescue number did not respond. It was 5:00 A.M.

  —

  Without the stove, he had only water in his aluminum water bottle, which rattled like a drinks mixer with the ice that had formed overnight. His headlight torch cast light and shadow around the mess of the tent. He figured that the walls bellied in because snow had fallen on them—a conclusion confirmed when he opened the door zipper and a cascade of cold white powder fell onto his sleeping bag. The wind moaned then ceased. In the stillness, he tried to recall what the experts said about such conditions: did you stay put and keep warm, or did you move out before your shelter collapsed onto you? Did you sit it out or look for help, fire flares, send messages? He had no flares, no messaging device, no means of creating heat. He thought the wise move would be to shovel away the snow and await the light of day. But his left arm had no strength and he had no shovel. He had no stove to melt ice, brew tea. He was shivering. The lighter he used to fire up a clumsily rolled cigarette guttered and went out.

  —

  The kettle boiled and she busied herself with two sachets of instant coffee, sugar and cream. There was still no answer from the mountain rescue number. She cast around in case he had left a note and wondered why he had stolen away like a thief in the night. Unless he was a thief in the night.

  —

  If there had been a view, it would have been magnificent, one of those vistas that people treasure. Somewhere, in his stored or half-unpacked belongings, he had a tinted photograph entitled Great Gable from Esk Hause. It showed the crossing of the pathways located deceptively short of the watershed between the valleys. The terrain was furrowed with streams, crevices, gullies, treachery. It led the eye on to the blunt flank of Great Gable with the impossibly steep rocky path that scarred it—the wall of mountain that gave the peak its name. To the right, the north, of Great Gable was the lesser summit of Green Gable and another steep cleft that ran to the col between them. The colors were washed green and blushed pink, giving way to the gray granite of the Gable Crags with their renowned landmark of Nape’s Needle. He knew it all intimately but could not see it now and did not trust memory as a guide. Without the GPS device, he figured he would need his compass and maps and thanked his deity that he had brought such old fashioned devices. From Esk Hause the pathway lay almost exactly due west to the 2,600 foot line, where it turned 15 or 20 degrees south towards Broad Crag, following the summit ridge with its celebrated obstacle course of boulder fields. It was possible—easy—to err here, to stray onto the steep, broken ramparts and fissured gullies of Great End where people had died, or across the ridge, descending by mistake into the jaws of Greta Gill or Piers Gill, the twin ravines that cut jagged grooves through
the mountain’s breast. Yet, many others had come this way, left their imprints, their cairns of piled rocks, their scratchings and gougings on the trail that drew a pale ribbon running to the summit of England’s highest mountain. No giant. No monster. No Everest. The distance was risible, barely more than a mile. But in this half-light, in the stillness, balancing uncertainly on his walking poles outside the half-buried tent, the prospect was unsettling, nerve-wracking. There was an option, of course. There were always options, but they seemed to narrow as you advanced. And his option, now, was defeat, retreat, failure. He could simply cast around for the trail that led down, not up, towards Styhead Pass to the northwest, at around 1,500 feet, then, on a heading north-northeast, the slow descent alongside the stream called Styhead Gill to the valley, and safety, and Eva, of course. Eva who was waiting. Eva to whom his tape pledged loyalty whatever the secrets of Room 5. Eva to whom he owed a duty to stay alive for long enough to put things in order, provide the decent exit.

  —

  She hated instant coffee but there was no option. The kitchen staff had not yet arrived, the way they do in fancier hotels that, in the very early hours, sound like ocean liners making ready to cast off, slowly filling with indistinct clatters and offstage clutter of pans and cutlery. The coffee, at least, was hot and sweet. There were digestive biscuits in bright packaging. She was tired, though she must have slept. But before she slept, she recalled, there had been a struggle, a wrestle—not so much physical, although there was something of that—but more with conscience. She should not have had the nightcap, not on top of the pre-dinner vodka, the wine. She should not have allowed him into her room—this very room where she was supposedly awaiting her crazy man of the mountains. As if she were some virgin bride, bedecked and bespangled with jewels and geegaws, in some remote yurt or hut or apartment filled with quarter-tones and incense. She was none of that. None. Neither virgin nor bride. Unless she had said differently to Jeremy Davenport in the close time they had spent, clinched and squirming.

  —

  The snow left only the bright ridge of the tent exposed as if it were a miniature replica of the real thing. As he had been taught, he had pitched it with its entrance door facing downwind. Otherwise he would not have been able to clamber out. As it was, the snow had gusted and drifted to form a cozy hollow around the tent’s round door so that he could exit from it. But there was no way he could break camp. This option, at least, was clear. The tent would be abandoned along with just about everything else. Apart from his water bottle and compass—and the Vestpocket camera, of course, and the tape recorder, naturally, for a reporter—there was no point at all in even attempting to load his gear onto his back. The dehydrated food could not be rehydrated because he had no stove to make water. The GPS was broken. The tent was snowed in. He had come to the last page of the walking guide and must now find his own way, down or up. The page itself was blank, as featureless as the snowfield in which he now found himself.

  The early train from London’s Euston station was pulling out of the platform and the attendant was asking whether she required English or continental and Faria Duclos was thinking: both.

  TAPE FOUR, SEGMENT ONE

  SEPTEMBER 16, 2000

  MONITORED SEPTEMBER 17

  Snow came in by stealth, layer upon layer in the night, followed by a dense freezing mist that cuts the visibility to a matter of yards. From here I should be getting that great view of Great Gable and the gullies on Great End where we used to do the winter climbs and pretend we were in the Alps or the Himalayas, with crampon points biting into frozen waterfalls and temperatures low enough to do serious damage. But none of that today. Just a wall. I left my headlight on because it’s still not light and I want to follow a westbound heading on the compass because the problem is that you can’t really see the trails at all under the snow and it’s treacherous with the rocks and little streams and stuff. What I have to do is head west without descending because if I start descending it’ll mean I’m too far south towards Eskdale and I’ll miss the way. The headlight battles. It cuts a vague tunnel into the fog so that you can see the beginnings of wind stirring the mist around like a witch’s brew. But the beam isn’t strong enough to go too far so it seems to create a gray impenetrable wall about ten yards ahead and that’s what you get for visibility. They say Mallory and Irvine started late and that was their mistake because they ran out of time somewhere up there on the ridge, but early starts don’t seem to be all that great either because you can’t see. It looks as if I have about five hundred yards to go on this heading and then I should reach the col at Calf Cove and turn a few degrees south to get on the summit ridge. But at least Esk Hause is behind me and if I turn round now and shine my beam back I can’t see the tent at all and even my footsteps are lost in this white-out. Gray-out really. So I suppose I’m committed. More than ever. Going with some clumsiness for the summit.

  The man answered the phone with the slow thickness of disturbed sleep. She cajoled, begged. Do you remember me? In the street yesterday? Well, he’s still not back. No sign. And this weather. He’s not equipped. He’s ill. Weak. He has a neurological condition that makes him that way. Of course, I know he should not have gone. But he’s stubborn, headstrong. He felt he had to do it. And nobody forecast weather like this did they?

  She read from the copy of his route card that he had left with her. Camp Two at Esk Hause, she said. She pronounced it: Esk House? OK, the man said, we’ll scramble. We’ll head for Esk Hause. It sounded like: Esk Hawse. But it’s a vile day for it. No chance of a chopper. And we might have to wait out the weather once we’re assembled.

  Joe Shelby found it hard to pinpoint his mood at that moment when, by his calculations and his sense of terrain, he arrived panting and tiring on the col that brought him to the summit ridge. His feelings reminded him a little of the very early days of his life of danger when he would propel himself in a rental car or on foot towards the start of a particularly exposed section of crackling, fired-up, bullet-zipped urban war zone and have to make the call of advance or retreat. As he reached the summit ridge and turned 15 degrees south he felt that same elation—the excitement of survival, the false summit of hope that came when you passed one obstacle only to realize that you faced another, even greater hurdle and had cut off easy retreat by overcoming the first one. It was fear but not simply fear. It was fear with a rictus of thrilling danger. It was the sense of burned bridges and a long haul to reach safety and rest. It was, of course, ultimately the fear that this time there would be no second chance, no guardian angel, no zephyr of wind to nudge the sniper’s bullet the merest fraction off course. But he was here, he told himself. And if he had to go, where would he rather that be? Here, of course. At this point of fusion between dream and history, along this rumpled spine of granite in the land that bore him, where his ancestors’ spirits rested in their urns and caskets, captured in framed photographs in black and white that showed them reclining against a Ford Popular or Riley Nine, with Blackpool tower or the flat, endless beach and donkey rides of Southport in the fuzzy background. In the end, for all his journeyings and visas and wars, he was no different from those he chronicled, who played out their lives on less-traveled stages, held to the ancestral soil by forces they understood as their destiny. So he would fall and be mummified in this bitter cold and come spring they might find him if the winter was particularly harsh and there would be no need for awkward farewells. Those he cared about would interpret his passing kindly, saying it was how he would have wished, though they would be wrong. He would not be called upon to explain himself, or make decisions, or draw up his testament. Or he would not fail. He would reach the summit and achieve the descent and take it from there. He would kneel in chapels and cathedrals and pray to his God for mercy and deliverance and rescue from his blighted limbs, his exhausted nerves. Putting one aluminum pole before the other, swinging his body to compensate for the weakness on his left side, he advanced and crabbed forward and upward, with a pur
e pain burning in his thighs as the muscles there took unfamiliar strain and the going underfoot became deceitful because, under the snow, there were boulders cloaked in ice.

  He wore gloves over his hands and two fleeces over his silk vest and thermal shirt. He covered himself in an expensive parka made of a scientific material that people used in the Himalayas. He wore snow gaiters over the waterproof overtrousers that covered his jeans and long underwear and thick socks. He had pulled his fleece helmet so that it covered most of his face under the hood of his parka. He was still cold. His breath came in white clouds. When he paused, he heard nothing at all. No voices. No whistles. No evidence that anyone else was on the mountain on a day like that. anymore than Mallory and Irvine expected company on the North Ridge. But they had each other and they were climbing Everest. Joe Shelby was alone on Scafell Pike, a mountain conquered by parties of schoolchildren and pensioners, droves of them, caravans of walkers who traipsed in great gaggles across these mountains in the summer and on bright days, but did not see them like this in their most barren and heartless moments when all life seemed denied. A radio might have helped. A radio might have told him whether the forecast said it would get better or worse. But he had run out of options now. Retreat would be as difficult as advance, without the faint lure of triumph to sustain him.