Above All Things (14 page)

“Parched. I can hear water. Sounds like it’s everywhere.”

“It is.” George nodded. “It’s all melting, dripping down
underneath the glacier. There’s a river under here. Enough to drive you crazy.”

Sandy thought of breaking off a piece of ice and dropping it in his mouth. The slow, cold drip down his throat, smoothing the edges of his cough. Heaven. It must have shown on his face.

“You can’t chew on the ice, Sandy. It’s tempting, I know, believe me, but it takes too much energy to melt it. It’s not worth it.”

I know that
, he thought but didn’t say out loud. He swallowed dryly. “We’re almost there, right?”

“That’s only the half of it. Then we have to get the camp set up or we’ll be sleeping in the snow. We need to unload the coolies and send them back down, at least to Camp One.” George gestured with a mittened hand. The line was fully stretched out below them now. He hadn’t realized how much height they’d gained. The porters were tiny, threading their way between ice spires on glacial roadways, making their way up to where he stood with George.

“It reminds me of Oxford,” Sandy said. “All the ice. The shapes of the towers.”

“Reminds me of Manhattan,” George said. “I climbed Manhattan once. Ever been?”

He shook his head, but George wasn’t looking at him. Maybe if things went well, if there was another film, maybe this time he could go to New York too. He’d love to go to America.

GEORGE IMAGINED SHAPES
in the ice. Outlines and memories.

The seracs towered over him like the Manhattan skyline – great jutting façades of ice and stone, canyons thrown up around him. He was exhausted and sweltering. They were almost there. He felt as if he were dragging the line behind him up the mountain, up the side of a skyscraper.

Climbing the side of a building had been easier.

After the last expedition, he’d been sent to New York to tell stories. In the blue-white spotlight of the film projector, he had narrated Noel’s photographs to raise money for a new expedition by reliving the second expedition on Broadway. Pointing to features in the filmed landscape, he told the audience the colour of the ribbons in the hair of the
dzongpen’
s wife – red, if he remembered correctly. But the truth didn’t really matter. Not then and there. Not anymore.
Remember, you’re there, Mr. Mallory, to give the audience what they want. To tell them a good story
. Hinks’s letter on the matter had been explicit.

He used the words that he knew they wanted to hear: ascent and angles, altitude, scree, degrees of frost, attempts. He tried to conjure up the cold, the desperation – everything the ridiculous poster plastered outside the theatre had promised. When he first saw it he had cringed, though later, when he described it to Ruth, he tried to laugh about the melodramatic image of two figures against a violent blue sky. “One of them – me, I suppose,” he told her, “was saving another man from falling, with just a single hand hold. Ridiculous!”

When he stumbled in his delivery, he knew he had to be disappointing the audience, and his usual enjoyment of being the centre of attention slipped. But the small group had applauded enthusiastically and swelled to their feet like the tide. When they finished, he walked backstage, threading through the darkness, around the pulleys and flats from the show in rehearsal, past a beach scene, a canal with Italian buildings.

In England, the Everest lectures had been a rousing success. They’d sold out over and over again, and he was feted at dinners and drinks before and after. He basked in his newfound celebrity, even as Ruth shied away from it, insisted he go alone. “I just can’t do it, George,” she’d said when he asked her to come with him to America. “You’ll be so busy you won’t even notice
I’m not there.” This was after George Finch, who had toured with him some in England, had complained loudly about the attention lavished on George and was dropped from all future speaking engagements. None of the others wanted the bother. Noel was happy to let his film speak for him. Teddy and Somes wanted nothing to do with the spotlight. George bathed in it.

The same could not be said of his experience in the New World.

George had collapsed into his chair in the star’s dressing room in New York. His name wasn’t on the door. For the first time, he noticed the flowers by the lit mirror, wilting slightly. The heat, he told himself, as he read the card. They weren’t for him. They’d been left there. His face in the mirror looked old.

“Come on, old chap.”

He tried to smile at the representative from the National Geographic Society, but couldn’t remember his name. Neil? The fake accent grated on his nerves more than it should have done.

“Time to celebrate.” Neil clapped his hands together emphatically.

“Yes, of course.”

At the reception there was an ice sculpture on the table, shaped like a mountain, though not at all like Everest. American ice, moulded and chipped. Misshapen. It looked more like the mountain logo of that film studio than any real summit. No one here was going for accuracy. The room was too warm, the lighting too soft. As Neil ushered him from guest to guest, someone handed him a cup filled with shaved ice, topped with red raspberry syrup. Like blood on snow.

“Straight from the summit.” A woman’s voice near his ear.

“The summit of what?” he asked.

“The mountain over there.”

There was a slight trace of an accent, carefully covered. She nodded towards the sculpted mountain, at the waiter standing
behind it in a sharp tuxedo who shaved ice into glasses. The mountain was melting in the warm room, the edges of it softening, pooling around the bottom. Cigarette smoke wreathed its flanks.

“Ah.” When they pulled him away for photographs a short while later, he still didn’t know her name.

“Gentlemen, please?”

And he thought of Noel taking photographs in other rooms just like this. There were always the official photographs. He handed off his melting red ice and settled into the routine of it: shaking hands or standing between older couples, smiling or serious – morphing into whatever it was they wanted him to be, whatever it was they were looking for. He desperately needed a drink. How did Americans get anything done being so bloody dry? The inevitable round of questions was coming. The
hows
, the
wheres
.

The
whys
.

Between the popping of flashbulbs he had looked for her, the woman who had spoken of the summit, craning for her neat blonde bob in the darkened room, electric lights turned low to match the candles. He could hear her mid-Atlantic accent somewhere. It was something between here and home. She had smelled of the city, a little acrid, sharp, but somehow there was also a fading scent of green. From a greenhouse maybe, New York being too cold in February to dream of anything growing.

Someone handed him a cup of tea; it looked weak, already cooling, but he sipped it anyway. Then she was beside him again.

“Take mine,” she said.

“No, I couldn’t. Thank you.”

“I insist. You’ll need it. For the reporters. Oooooh.” She shivered exaggeratedly and the cap shoulder of her dress slipped down, revealing a sharp angle of bone, the ribbon strap of a silk slip. She pulled it back up and exchanged her cup for his. It was warmer and smelled of whisky and lipstick.

He tried to remember the taste of whisky on Ruth’s lips, of alcohol radiating from her skin in the morning. How would this woman taste?

He turned to face the reporters.

Why. That was what everyone wanted to know. Or at least the ones who had never been on a mountain before. He’d never been able to explain it properly. What was there to explain? It was the aesthetics of the climb, the pull and lure of what lies just over that oh-so-close horizon. It was the pure pleasure of turning a route, a wall, of having your body do exactly what you need it to, when you need it to. But it was more than that, too. There was a supremacy he felt when he stood on a summit. An ascendency.

His limbs were tired and tight. He’d been still for too long. He wanted to climb something. Anything. Or go for a run through the park that was only a couple of blocks north. Maybe no one would miss him. He was exhausted. He wanted to flirt with that blonde. He wanted to sleep.

But
why
? He had waited for it all evening. Dreaded it.

“Why, Mr. Mallory?” began one. “What exactly is the point of climbing this mountain?”

“It seems like an awful great risk, don’t you think? Is it worth risking your life for?”

“Or the lives of others,” another man cut in.

“How many people have died so far?”

“Mr. Mallory, what exactly do you hope to prove?”

The voices and questions merged together. They were beginning to sound like accusations. He took a long pull from his teacup, wondered if any of the reporters were drinking too.

He wished Ruth was there with him.

The weight of the climb was in his legs, but George had no choice but to continue breaking the new trail. No one else could take
over. Sandy, the closest behind him, was too inexperienced, too weak. Besides, they were almost through the glacier, and the pleasure and anxiety of a new route kicked up adrenaline in him, eroded his exhaustion. His body made the decisions for him, carried him around weak spots in the ice and crevasses covered with a rime of snow. George leaned his forehead against the ice wall he was scaling, so cool after the glaring sun reflecting all around him. It melted against his skin, water running down his face. He licked his lips.

He wished there were stone under his bare fingers instead of this ice under his gloves. He dropped all his weight onto his right foot and the toe of his crampon dug into the ice. There was pressure on his ankle, a familiar ache, as he pulled his ice axe from the wall and slammed it back in a few feet higher. Ice chips rained down and melted on his cheeks and lips. He pulled himself up on the axe and pressed his forehead to the ice again. Just a moment, then the next placement.

He could see into the ice, only inches from his face. There was a boulder in the ice in front of him, petrified, frozen in place for a millennium. More, maybe. Sliding slowly down the mountain in the river of ice.

His wrists, his elbows, his shoulders – they ached from the stuttered impact of his axe into ice. How many times had he wielded the axe today? In his lifetime? His fingers were tight and swollen from dehydration. No matter how much he drank, the dry air leeched all the moisture from his breath, his body. There was too much tension in every one of his joints. He exhaled and pulled up again, wrestled himself over the lip of the wall.

His body had forgotten grace.

From the top of the wall he could see the rest of the trail ahead, as clear as a line on the white of the Icefall, leading off the glacier, onto the flank of the mountain. Ruth’s words circled in his head –
I really did behave terribly
. George dug himself in at the
top of the wall and waited to feel the pull of the rope at his waist and in the grip of his hands as Sandy climbed up behind him.

“Why climb Mt. Everest?”

He always wanted to be witty – like James or Vanessa – quick with the perfect retort. But he couldn’t find it. Exhausted, resigned, he exhaled.

There was a furious scribbling and he knew the reporters liked what he’d said, though some of them looked confused by it. There was a knowing nod from Neil, as if what he’d just said was incredibly wise, but he’d forgotten it already. What did they like so much? He still wouldn’t remember when he read his own quote in the
New York Times
the next day:
Because it’s there
. Had he really said that?

He was slightly drunk. Well, more than slightly. Throughout the evening, the blonde had continued to materialize and pour more whisky into his tea. His head was foggy, the way it was at altitude. The way it would be at the summit. His body kept itself balanced without his telling it to. He stepped out of the room onto the winter balcony. The wind whipped northward along the skyline to the black rectangle of Central Park. That’s where he wanted to be. He glanced at his watch. It wasn’t too late. He ducked inside to find his host and make his excuses. Early morning, another lecture to prepare for.

“Are you going?” She was beside him again.

He smiled involuntarily and covered the dregs in his teacup. “No more,” he pleaded. And then, “Yes. I need to be on my way. But thank you. For this. Miss …?” He left the question open and waited for her name.

She waited longer, watching him. He waited her out.

“Stella.” Her name was a breath. She extended her hand, her short blonde hair shaking around her jaw. She was so American. “Stella Jones.”

“A Welsh girl? I knew it.” He shouldn’t be flirting. He should go back to his hotel room and write to Ruth. She should have come to New York with him.

“Something like that,” she said.

He followed her to the door.

Out on the street she turned to him. “I want to see you climb. Everyone says that’s the only way to really see the beautiful George Mallory.” She shivered exaggeratedly yet again, and pushed up against him.