A Walking Guide

by Alan S. Cowell

  He had not for one moment thought of returning home to London, to Eva Kimberly. It had not occurred to him that his televised treachery had wounded her grievously and he should therefore fly forthwith to her side to bring comfort and reassurance, take the consequences of his actions like a man. No. He was far too cowardly for that, far too remote from any kind of nobility of feeling or birth. There was no hint of simple, ordinary kindness or compassion, just the mumbo jumbo worship of the French bitch he had once called crazy and now seemed to be restoring to her pedestal. Yes, he had kissed her in front of the whole world. Yes, he had lied brazenly on the telephone to London that same evening, thrice denying the impostor even as she sat at his side in their disgusting love nest, even as they wove their coy secrets. “And was there sex? I suppose there was.”

  He “supposed.”

  As if Judas Iscariot “supposed” he had received thirty pieces of silver but could not quite recall the details of the transaction.

  —

  At first light, Eva Kimberly pulled back the heavy, lined drapes. She saw a sky whose rage had gone, cauterized by the same storms as had made the final tapes so indistinct. Outside, the lake mirrored the foothills—indigo water, emerald slopes, sky losing dawn’s rose-glow to a hard azure. But there was nothing to stay for, least of all the view.

  She opened the small black notebook he had presented to her before he started, and, uncapping a gold-nibbed fountain pen, wrote a single line: “You made me a foolish wife.” She wanted to say more but did not trust her rage. She wanted to wake him and break him, pull at his hair and scratch at his body and shout at him: I was ready to screw Jeremy Davenport and would have if he had not failed, do you hear? But, looking at him, stubbled and pale, deep in sleep, she felt suddenly too drained, as if his betrayal had anesthetized her against passion. She wondered if a heart could be broken simply by being tugged hither and thither for too long.

  She placed the notebook and the tapes together with the fax from Joe Shelby’s neurologist, promising a new diagnosis. Mercifully, after hearing the tapes, that was no longer her problem. He had forfeited her concern. He had freed her of the burden of his illness. Let his crazy French bitch fret for him now. Let them all try to work out if anyone had emerged unscathed from the fission that began unheralded at Naivasha.

  She repacked her travel bag with all its vain finery and fripperies and closed the door on him gently so as not to wake him, no longer requiring or wishing for his witness. She switched off her mobile phone so that no man might reach her. As she drove away, she saw a parked car in the hotel forecourt. For a second Eva Kimberly thought the woman at the wheel, behind the misted windows, looked remarkably like a woman who had once gate-crashed her African party—her whole life, really. But she knew that was preposterous, impossible. Surely.

  Joe Shelby awoke close to lunchtime. He had slept for more than fifteen hours. His leg muscles ached excruciatingly. The effort of leaving his bed made him dizzy with the exertion. His body felt as though it had been passed involuntarily through gigantic steel rollers. He was enormously weary, drained of energy. He had memories of reaching a summit and then of sleeping. It seemed to him—although he could not confirm the veracity of his impressions—that he had achieved his goal and then readied himself to die, allowing the blackness without exit to fold its warm cloak over him. But an angel had come to him, dressed in fleece and Gore-Tex, a small, round, feisty angel who shook him back to life, chased the blackness away and said she was his walking guide.

  His boots had been removed and he was naked and washed. His chin was rough with new beard and his scalp itched. He was thirsty enough to drink a lake and hungry enough to devour an ox. The tips of his fingers felt tender, as if they had been plunged into hot coals, and he thought the paper might cut his skin when he raised a stained faxed message that said: hold the Mayo—a reprieve, surely. And he understood that the mystery worked both ways, in the offering of faith and in the receipt of its blessings—ineffable, but never completely unconditional: if he had not called, he would not have been answered.

  —

  It was the angel who had brought him back here, and, clearly, had made a mistake, bringing him back to this world from the cusp of the next, but to a location he did not quite recognize: where was Eva who had been there when the stretcher bumped the final feet over the bridge, who had helped him clamber into the warm, safe bed? He had returned to life from death’s frontier, but life had changed as if someone had rewritten his drama, without reason or explanation. He felt woozy and reached for support from a bedpost, as if he was caught up in one of those dreams where a swimmer struggles for the surface but cannot reach it.

  Then he saw his tapes, neatly stacked, and the notebook that contained only a one-line message in her handwriting. Part of the puzzle fell into place. He had not meant the tapes as a testimony, as evidence. She had misunderstood. She had not heard the full account. She had not heard that, high on the mountain, when he did not know whether he would live or die, he had pledged himself to her, forswearing the dark other who would always stalk his dreams. When he found her, having lunch, perhaps, or taking a stroll, or drinking coffee, he would tell her, set matters straight. But, when he called down to reception to inquire about her whereabouts, he was told by a clerk that Ms. Kimberly and the gentleman had both checked out.

  Both?

  Yes, both.

  Epilogue

  She stood behind him, holding the handles to his wheelchair. His face was lopsided from the stroke he had suffered shortly before she returned home, but Neville Kimberly had not for one moment considered postponing or canceling his annual garden party. And so they were a reception line of two, stricken father and only child, back from what he had taken to referring to as her gap year, her year away. She was wearing a long-sleeved dress and brimmed straw hat to protect her pale skin from the unfamiliar sunlight. Her legs were bitten from a trip to the Rift Valley, to her schools and clinics where the young children lined up and clapped their small hands to welcome her home. Her father had insisted on his usual, tailored safari suit, refusing the blanket the nurse thought to throw over his weakened legs. Together, they surveyed the motley crowd, picking out the familiar guests, the cabinet ministers and business personalities, the doddery hunters and leather-skinned ranchers, the true bloods, as he called them.

  “No gate crashers this year, Evie.” His speech was slightly slurred but she caught the ironic, forgiving intonation.

  “Not this year, Pops. No surprises.”

  Neither of them made mention of the fact that, for the first time ever, the Davenports, their dynastic neighbors, were absent. The gossips, of course, knew why: Jeremy had, it was said, been wronged and spurned, not once, but twice—not simply when she left him but when he flew to England to be at her side after the humiliation of that television broadcast. So how on earth could anyone expect the Davenports to behave as if nothing had happened? How could the Davenports do anything but return their embossed invitation card?

  The reality was different, but Eva Kimberly had no energy or inclination to try to set the record straight. The Davenports were absent because there had been a conclave of the two families’ elders. Testimony had been given, facts established and it was deemed inappropriate that there should be further embarrassment, or—worse still—public recrimination. Jeremy Davenport, in any event, was considering his options. It was said he was somehow involved in a newly established and somewhat shady diamond trading venture in the Congo and Zimbabwe. But she made no further inquiries. She had been a foolish wife for two men—but spouse to neither—and she deserved better than that. Much better. And if she could not have better from a partner, a love, then, well, perhaps it was preferable to have no one at all.

  Faria Duclos accompanied Joe Shelby from the Lake District to the private clinic where Nigel Lampton, the neurologist, oversaw a treatment that would restore some of his strength but leave him dependent on regular infusions of medication for his mobility and vigo
r. A Faustian pact, Joe Shelby called it, with no clear term but one evident victory: three years tops was now extended indefinitely. He might even make it to a riper age.

  Together Faria and Joe witnessed the efficacy of the medication that made his dead left arm begin to move again—as mysterious a process as a snake charmer summoning a serpent from a wicker basket. He flexed his arm like Tarzan. He made the biceps jump. He felt strength ease back into his legs so that the limp became less pronounced. Strolling in a park, he tossed away his remaining walking pole from the mountains with his revived left arm. He laughed. He cried. He knew, again, that if he had not asked, he would not have been delivered. And she knew that her mission had been accomplished: she had brought him this far after his ordeal; she had been at his side to discover whether the treatment would succeed or fail. She had been available for the worst of tidings and rejoiced at the best of news that made her vigil redundant.

  Joe Shelby had spoken to Eva once directly and several times through lawyers who arranged an amicable division of their goods and chattels. She had been stunningly, graphically honest about events while he was on the hills. Her disclosures helped him understand her conclusion that their relationship was torn beyond repair.

  Sitting in his room at the clinic in London, he and Faria Duclos watched the television news bulletins offering the familiar diet of blood and cordite. He felt no great hankering to be there, in the thick of it, but sensed her restlessness. He said that, if the comic did not call, he would not call either and was far more interested in perhaps returning to the hills, to thank the rescuers, to spy out a cottage that might be purchased for half the revenue from the enforced sale of an apartment in Primrose Hill. He knew Faria Duclos would bend idiom to say she wanted to trot the last paddock once more. But he would need time before he heard that call so clearly again.

  ALAN S. COWELL, born in England, has been a foreign correspondent for Reuters and The New York Times for three decades. He has covered conflicts in the Middle East and Africa and, in 1985, was awarded the George Polk Award for his reportage from South Africa, whence he was expelled by the apartheid regime in 1987. He lives in London.

  authors.simonandschuster.com/Alan-S-Cowell

  ALSO BY ALAN S. COWELL

  Killing the Wizards: Wars of Power and Freedom from Zaire to South Africa

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  Copyright © 2003 by Alan S. Cowell All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

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  Designed by Kevin Hanek

  Jacket design by Beck Stvan

  Jacket image created from photographs by Kamil Vojnar/Photonica and Silvia Otte/Photonica

  Author photograph Mike St. Maur Sheil/Black Star

  Five illustrations from The Southern Fells by A. Wainwright (Michael Joseph, 1992). Copyright © 1960, 2000 by Betty Wainwright. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Cowell, Alan.

  A walking guide : a novel / Alan S. Cowell.

  p. cm.

  1. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis—Patients—Fiction. 2. Triangles (Interpersonal relations)—Fiction. 3. War correspondents—Fiction. 4. Mountaineering—Fiction. 5. Mountaineers—Fiction. 6. England—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6103.097W355 2003

  813’.6—dc21 2003040098

  ISBN 0-7432-4470-2

  ISBN 978-1-4767-9524-9 (eBook)