Just Another Mountain

by Sarah Jane Douglas

  The more walks we did, the deeper we delved in conversation, till it came to the point where I found myself trusting her and felt I could honestly open up to her. This had been a gigantic step, as I’d felt anxious that she might distance herself from my company. But when I told her of those bad times, when I had been so low I’d felt like ending it all, and of how pointless life seemed, she surprised me by confessing that she too had felt these same things. I remembered something Mum once said about having at least one good friend, and though it had taken many years, I felt with a growing certainty that Mel, at last, was that person.

  I was the most content I had been in over a decade. My work was fulfilling, I had my next big project to plan, my children seemed to be growing up happily. And then there was Paul.

  Paul had started to accompany me onto the hills, too. The more time we spent together, the closer we got. Slowly but surely I was falling in love with him. I knew he’d harboured feelings for me for some time too, but I didn’t want to tell him how I felt until I was absolutely certain. The relationship I’d had with Sam had been a disaster, I’d dived right in. I didn’t want a repeat of that, so I needed to take my time and be sure I wasn’t gravitating towards Paul’s love just because it was there. We’d known each other well for several years and I didn’t want to throw this valuable friendship away. And, importantly, I needed to know if my children would approve.

  ‘You like Paul, don’t you?’ I’d asked Leon one day.

  ‘Yes. I like him as your friend. But I don’t want him to be your boyfriend.’

  Surprised by his perspicacity, I asked, ‘What makes you think I want him for a boyfriend?’

  ‘I’ve seen the way he looks at you.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t you want him to be my boyfriend?’

  ‘I like things the way they are. It would be different.’ The shine of my happiness dulled.

  ‘You don’t have to worry,’ I said quickly. ‘We’re only friends.’

  ‘Yes, but one thing leads to another,’ my precocious but intuitive younger son commented.

  I’d already spent weeks agonising over whether or not I could trust my feelings and not screw things up, and now Leon’s opinion gave me further pause. But Paul made me feel happier than I had in years and so, finally throwing caution to the wind, I gave in to my feelings. On New Year’s Eve Paul and I took the plunge and became a couple. I decided to see how things went between us before telling my boys, though; while Marcus would be accepting I already knew how Leon would react, so I expected a challenge ahead. But, remembering my own experience of how I’d first reacted to Frank, and how much I had regretted that later, I had to trust that Leon would eventually come around to the idea of Paul and me as a couple.

  At the start of 2013 I set about finding out what I could about Gerry and his final climb. I returned to the little black case. A photograph of the memorial cairn, with the towering south face of Nuptse behind, and an airmail letter from Jon Fleming, the expedition’s leader, were all that I had to go on. But at the head of the letter Jon had written that he was then a member of the Parachute Regiment; with this snippet of information I sent an email to the Ministry of Defence asking for their help to locate Jon and anyone else who knew Gerry.

  At this time I also searched online for treks through the Khumbu Himal and found the ‘Three Peaks, Three Passes’ organised by Jagged Globe. The acclimatisation programme they were offering was ideal and, importantly, the main trail to Everest Base Camp would pass close to the valley that would lead me to Nuptse. I contacted Uncle Jimmy to tell him my plan.

  ‘I’m going to take Mum’s ashes to Nepal, to scatter her with Gerry; what do you think?’

  ‘I couldn’t have thought of anything better, Sarah.’ My uncle’s words were endorsement enough.

  Without further hesitation, I contacted Jagged Globe and booked my place on their 2014 trek. The ball was rolling. Two weeks and thirty-three emails later, I had established contact with Jon Fleming and Henry Day – Gerry’s climbing partner on Annapurna. Everything was coming together.

  Henry Day and I stayed in regular contact, and I was soon invited to meet him and his wife Sara. During May I spent a weekend at their Cambridge home, where I was welcomed warmly. While I was there, friends of Henry and Sara – John Peacock and his wife Sheila – arrived late on Saturday afternoon. I liked them immediately. They were both quite short in stature. John’s white hair was smartly coiffed, his crinkly blue eyes shone with generosity, and his kindly manner reminded me so much of my grandad. There was a motherly presence about Sheila that I felt instantly, and I almost wanted to hug both of them there and then. John had been with Gerry on Nuptse. He knew of my visit and had brought slides to show me. The four made me feel as if I was family, like I’d come home for the weekend and that I belonged.

  I had brought the green notebook, some letters, a few photos and the only surviving wedding invitation intimating the details of Mum and Gerry’s marriage.

  ‘I hadn’t realised that the relationship between your mum and Gerry had got so far; in fact I had no idea that they were to be married at all, let alone so soon after Nuptse,’ said Henry.

  ‘Did you know about my mum’s relationship with Gerry?’ I asked John.

  ‘It was only at Gerry’s memorial service that I was first introduced to her,’ he answered.

  ‘I remember meeting your mum,’ Sheila said. ‘John and I weren’t even married at the time so I felt quite honoured that I was asked to go to Gerry’s memorial. Your mum attended the service with Major Ian Leigh, and afterwards we all stayed overnight at John’s sister’s house. I told your mum that I’d met Gerry just the once, the night before he and John left for the Nuptse expedition. I’d been planning a cosy night for just myself and John at the opera to see Cavalleria rusticana, but John had asked if Gerry could go along too. It was the first opera Gerry had ever been to. Your mum told me that he had written to her, telling her all about it and that it had made a big impression on him. I was so happy to have given him that experience.’

  I liked to hear Mum being talked about in conversation, but it struck me as more than a little odd that neither John nor Henry was privy to my mum and Gerry’s wedding plans. The three men were good friends, so what was it with the secrecy? A host of nasties started whirling around my head as I puzzled over why Gerry had been a dark horse. I wanted to know why he’d kept the news of his marriage quiet – I was suddenly paranoid it had been because of me, because he was ashamed of Mum having an illegitimate child – but neither John nor Henry could tell me.

  After the delicious dinner that Sara had cooked for us, Henry, Sheila and I settled down to listen to John recount with slides the expedition’s journey to Nepal, the days preceding the tragedy on Nuptse, and the terrible unfolding of the accident that led to Gerry’s death. I was sitting next to Sheila, and she asked me:

  ‘Why now, after all these years?’

  Her directness caught me off guard, but I tried to explain.

  ‘Because I have been so utterly miserable since Mum died. I don’t really feel I’ve ever got over it, in a way. Then I discovered Gerry’s journal. I read it and suddenly realised how little I really knew about him, about them. He was a great love of my mum’s life. Now I need to know more about the kind of man he was and the relationship they had.’

  Sheila nodded.

  Whisky’s nostalgic aroma scented the room as Sara brought in a dram for Henry and John. I let its warm memories of Christmases past fill my lungs as John began his story. He spoke and we listened without interruption.

  ‘Directed right around the airfield at Heathrow, five of us arrived at a discreet little lounge, out of sight of the public view, and waited for the Comet to appear. We were the advance party on our way to Nepal and scheduled to fly, hitch-hiking by courtesy of the RAF, as supernumeraries with HRH Prince Charles, on his way to represent Her Majesty, his mother, at the Coronation of King Birendra in Kathmandu. HRH was our Expedition Patron and seemed more tha
n happy to help. The few days we spent in Kathmandu were fascinating, as was the coronation procession itself. But we left all that behind and suddenly found ourselves camped above a native village, not a light in sight, in stark contrast with the city still celebrating miles behind us.

  ‘Ahead lay nearly two weeks of steady tramping, across the grain of the country, over and down ridge after ridge. Crops in the valleys, and rhododendrons scarlet on the hillsides, formed an ever-changing backdrop to the human activities. Gerry was in seventh heaven as he could really indulge his interest in birds. He would set off every morning a good two hours ahead of the rest of us so he had time to study them. Long before we reached Namche Bazaar, the main Sherpa centre, he had spotted and identified more than 300 different indigenous species. Even so, it was not until we had established our base camp, close to the Nuptse Glacier, that he finally caught sight of the huge Himalayan vulture that so fascinated him, the lammergeier. It has an enormous two-and-a-half-metre wingspan; it dwarfs all other species.

  ‘What happened next remains a mystery to us all. Two days earlier we’d last seen Gerry and Richard, his climbing partner, around mid-morning, climbing steadily towards the top of the couloir, the steep ravine, and the start of the relatively short rocky ridge leading to the summit. So we watched and waited, hoping against hope they were still climbing but somehow hidden from our view. But they seemed to have simply disappeared.

  ‘The following morning, with no radio call from the summit or elsewhere, we were forced to accept the worst. We sent a signal via the Embassy in Kathmandu to the Royal Nepalese Army, and they immediately offered to send a helicopter to help search the following day. The Alouette helicopter whisked two of us up the glacier and into a huge amphitheatre of rock walls, to land on the ice just a few hundred yards below the crevasse between the glacier and the rock. Above reared a huge, shallow rock face, almost vertical in the lower hundred feet before leaning back at a slightly shallower angle towards the similarly steep mixed slopes above: an unremitting and more or less continuous line leading eventually to the final couloir and the route to the summit. Anything falling from the couloir would probably continue down this chute. Finally we discovered Richard’s boot on the glacier surface some distance short of the bergschrund, confirming that we had come to the right place. A few more yards enabled us to peer over the edge to confirm our worst fears.

  ‘Nigel and I found them, Gerry and Richard, lying quite close to each other on an icy shelf some 40 feet down. Below the shelf the crevasse continued into the depths. Both bodies were cocooned in coils of rope, suggesting that, whatever had caused their fall, they must have rolled for some distance down the steep slope of the snow-filled ravine.

  ‘Some yards to the left there appeared to be a relatively straightforward means of climbing into the crevasse, on a level and connecting with the shelf on which Gerry and Richard lay. While one of us organised a belay, securing a rope to an anchor to enable us to get back up and out of the crevasse, the other set off to climb down and along but had barely started before Pierre, our French pilot, ‘buzzed’ us, the prearranged signal that he was running short of fuel. Scrambling quickly out onto the glacier surface, we made our way across to the aircraft and climbed aboard. Wasting no time, Pierre took off back to Base Camp, asking no questions: our nods and the looks on our faces were doubtless enough.

  ‘With most of the expedition engaged well up the route, there were only a few people left at Base Camp. In any case, the trauma of our recent discovery perhaps obliterated all but the most significant details, including Pierre’s gentle courtesy as he left us alone immediately after we landed, and again that same consideration as we made our farewells and very grateful thanks before he left to fly back to Kathmandu. For a little while I busied myself with routine things, trying the while to come to terms with events, before realising that Nigel was no longer in the camp.

  ‘Even at 17,000 feet it was a very hot morning, but I found Nigel just a few hundred yards along the gently sloping valley leading to Pokalde. He was sitting on a boulder, his chin in his hands and obviously distressed. Neither of us spoke; there was no need. How do you reconcile such a perfect day in such magnificent surroundings with what we had both witnessed just a few hours earlier? Then a lammergeier appeared, almost it seemed from nowhere, to fly majestically past us on the same level and barely twenty yards away, its huge wings stretched out to bear it effortlessly past until, gently turning, it came back to us, a little higher now, only to continue its turn, complete the circle and commence another, higher still. We gazed, fascinated by this magnificent bird, as slowly it spiralled up and up and still up for minutes on end. Losing track of time, neither of us could follow it further as it grew smaller and ever smaller. One moment it was still there, the next it had simply disappeared into the heavens.

  ‘We sat there, speechless. Both of us knew that Gerry had been more than enthusiastic about birds of all kinds; even more significant was the fact that he had said only a week earlier that the bird he most admired was the great bearded vulture, the lammergeier. He had added that, if there was such a thing as reincarnation, he would like to come back as, yes, a lammergeier.’

  John retold the tale with composure and clarity, but now his voice wavered, overcome with emotion as he remembered the sadness – we all felt it. A heavy silence bore down on our small group as we sat around the open fire. Seeing slides of the journey that the expedition had taken gave me a good idea of what to expect on my trek the following year, but I couldn’t shake off the concoction of distress, horror and anger as I stared at the final slide of Nuptse’s forbidding and hostile south face. After Gerry and his climbing partner died, a second summit bid had been made. Two more men perished, this time lower down the mountain. It was only then that the pursuit of victory over Nuptse was abandoned.

  ‘I have a painting at home that was done by the expedition’s leader, Jon Fleming. It’s of a bird of prey flying in front of a mountain,’ I said, breaking the stony silence.

  ‘How interesting, it would be fascinating to see it,’ said Henry. When I showed him a photograph of the painting he exclaimed, ‘That’s Annapurna!’

  ‘And the bird is undoubtedly a lammergeier,’ John added. ‘I remember Gerry talking about having met a father-and-son team in Kathmandu before the expedition set off for Nuptse. Yes, it’s coming back to me now.’ The surname Fleming was mere coincidence and the painting was not done, as I had previously assumed, by the expedition’s leader. ‘Gerry and I had supper with two delightful Americans – natural historians who were producing a definitive bird book on Nepal. Gerry had first met them in 1970 and had corresponded with them since; they had struck up a bond of friendship cemented by a mutual enthusiasm for ornithology. Gerry introduced the Flemings to me in February 1975. R. L. Fleming and his son of the same name lived and worked together in Nepal; their base was in Kathmandu.’

  After a little further research on my part I learnt that Robert Fleming had been studying birds for twenty-five years and, at the time of his meeting Gerry, he was in the process of having a publication entitled Birds of Nepal put into print. He himself was also the subject of a book, The Fabulous Flemings of Kathmandu, which told the story of how he founded the first modern hospital in Nepal in 1956. Hem Poudyal, the second signature on the painting, was the artist; he had devoted three years to Robert Fleming’s project, persevering with the meticulous depiction of approximately 800 species of birds. Gerry had commissioned the painting, now in my possession, and had instructed that on completion it be sent to my mother.

  Discovering its story gave me a new sense of appreciation for the painting. It was no longer some kind of bird against a gaudy-coloured background; it was the magnificent lammergeier flying triumphantly before Gerry’s prized and conquered Annapurna.

  Everyone went to bed. I sent a text to Paul, sharing my day’s news before switching off my phone. I wished I could switch off the thoughts in my head too, but as I lay there I couldn’t seem to stop
my mind from returning to the question of why Gerry had kept quiet about marrying Mum.

  After breakfast Sara and Henry showed Sheila around the garden, which gave John and me the opportunity to talk some more about Gerry.

  ‘How do you think they came to fall?’ I asked.

  ‘That will always remain a mystery. We can never know, but Gerry died doing something he loved.’

  ‘He loved my mum too though.’ I told John about my mum dying and about how she had asked for the bangle. Tears flowed from my eyes as I opened up. ‘I’m sorry for crying.’

  ‘Crying is nothing to be sorry for. It means you have been loved and you love,’ John said gently. Pulling myself together, we went outside to take a photograph of us all before John and Sheila left for home.

  Sara and Henry went to church, leaving me to root through a couple of boxes of papers and photographs that Henry had dug out for me – I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, but perhaps there might be something that would tell me more about Gerry. It felt a nice kind of weird being left in their house on my own; a privilege to be trusted because, up till now, I had been a perfect stranger.

  There was such a lot to sift through, many duplicates and endless lists of equipment. Scanning over a couple of pages from the expedition newsletter, I saw it contained information that could be useful to photocopy in preparation for my own trek the following year – stuff like the types of flora and fauna that are found locally, species of birds and names of settlements.

  An airmail letter from Jon Fleming to Henry caught my eye. It had been sent from Nuptse Base Camp and simply correlated with everything else I’d heard and read, while also expressing condolences and a request not to intimate its contents to the press – ‘to protect the feelings of next of kins’. I continued to flick through papers such as a copy of the Memorial Service Distribution List, which named all the relatives and military personnel who attended it at Worcester Cathedral. There was a postcard of Mount Ama Dablam and, turning it over, I instantly recognised Gerry’s handwriting.