Above All Things (19 page)

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“How many hands is that you’ve lost, George?” Teddy tallied numbers in the air, licking at the lead of an imaginary pencil. “You must owe me your first-born by now.”

“Maybe if you’d quit looking over my shoulder at my cards.” George tried to sit up straighter.

With all five of them now gathered in the largest tent, they were able to fend off the cold, taking shifts sitting near the barely closed flap. They were relatively warm, easy, lounging against one another, leaning on elbows.

“Let’s play something else.” George put down his cards and lit a cigarette before handing his lighter on to Somervell.

“We’ve already played whist, rummy. What else is there?” Odell sounded hoarse. They all did. It was easier to hear each other talk now that the wind had let up some after the long hours they’d spent sitting there. At one-hour intervals George fumbled from the tent into the buffeting wind and snow to check on the coolies. To get away.

Somervell tended the small cooker in the corner. He’d coaxed it all day, methodically melting snow for tea, water to make their weak lunch of bully beef, tinned berries, and chocolate, which Sandy had hidden away in his pack.

“Careful you don’t use all the fuel up, Somes,” Teddy warned.

“There’s plenty.”

“We don’t know how long we’ll be here.”

Somes turned down the flame a little.

They didn’t talk directly about the mountain, about the delay.

“No point really,” Teddy said. “Not until we know how long we’ll be pinned down. We can hold out a good while yet. A good few days. We’ll make a plan when we can make a plan.”

George drifted in and out of the conversations, in and out of half-sleep.

Somervell talked about his family, his daughter’s upcoming
wedding, his new position at the hospital in London. Teddy about heading back to the military Staff College at Quetta to welcome in the latest batch of recruits. “Don’t want them getting too lax before I get to them,” he said, laughing.

“Tsering’s foot should be fine,” Somes said when he came back from checking on him, “but I’d really like to get him down tomorrow at the latest.”

George lolled in the late afternoon, exhausted and bored. Through the dull silence, he stared lifelessly at nothing. Odell held a notebook in his hands, open to a sketch he had been drawing of a plant he had seen weeks ago. The lines were shaky and weak. He talked about rocks and animals, about the vast diversity of the subcontinent. He droned on about insects and flowers, about a recently translated work he’d read by Alfred Wegner, who proposed something called “continental drift” that could explain why the Yellow Band looked for all the world like deposits of seabeds. Odell might as well have been speaking to himself.

Sandy sat silent. Like an acolyte. Still and quiet. Not how George was used to seeing the boy. He was reminded of the lamas meditating far below them at the Rongbuk Monastery, the ones who took food to the old monk in his stone cave. The anchorite who hadn’t left his dark cell since retreating into it twenty-three years ago. He had lived there since before Sandy was born. Amazing. The lama had walked into the cave as a young man and given up everything. He meditated while others sealed up the mouth of the cave and left only the smallest opening through which to pass a daily ration of rice, of water, for the anchorite to pass out his buckets of waste. George couldn’t imagine a world that narrow. Nothing but his own thoughts. No one to speak to. Or touch. Twenty-three years of silence.

He leaned back and closed his eyes. Everest enforced this, this isolation and enclosed intimacy, both at once. They were
gathered together here, separate from everyone else in the world. They were crammed together in this tent, but the roaring wind, the thin air kept them speechless for long stretches of time. He climbed into the cave of his head and sat silent in a stupor, leaned against Teddy and Sandy for warmth.

He envied the anchorite, his choosing to be still. Choosing to stay. He wished he could make that choice.

He wished for that kind of commitment.

His father had always known that making George sit still was the worst punishment he could inflict.

“Copy these out. Neatly.” His father believed in medieval punishment. He handed George a draft of his Sunday sermon to be copied out: eight pages, each covered in his father’s tight writing. “And don’t just copy them out. Make sure you understand what they say. We’ll be discussing it before supper.”

“Yes, Father.”

Trafford rarely got these punishments, but then Trafford rarely did anything that required them. Even when his brother was caught out doing something wrong, Trafford would be sent outside to tend the grounds, to pile leaves. Trafford was never made to sit still inside while the world went by without him. Maybe it was because, unlike him, his brother was happy to sit still with their father in the study anyway. Sitting still, thought George, was for old men. He’d have plenty of time for that later.

He leaned over his father’s desk and wrote out the words. He jiggled his legs, swung his feet. His handwriting trailed off into blots and smudges. It would never do. If he took this to his father now, he would only make him start again from the beginning. He’d likely give him extra work just for good measure.

He hated it even more for the fact that Trafford never took his side. Despite being the older brother, the first-born, George was always in his shadow.

“He never does it to you,” he complained to Trafford.

“I’ve had mine, George.”

“Not hardly.”

“You’re impetuous. He wants to calm you.”

“You don’t even know what that means. And calming is for girls. Calming is for old men. And goody-goodies.”

“That’s not fair, George. He only needs you to listen. Only slow down and listen to him. If you did, then maybe he wouldn’t have to be so hard on you.”

“I do listen, I just don’t like what he has to say.”

“You can’t just always listen to yourself. Sometimes other people do actually know what’s best.”

He crumpled up the pages and started again. Everything would have to be perfect. He forced his legs to stay still and copied the lines.

His father’s study was dark. Reverend Mallory hated the distractions of the outside world, and so the windows were shuttered against the churchyard, against the flowers that bloomed just outside the windows. “It keeps the mind clear,” his father said.

It made George angry. He hated the dark room, knowing that there was a world outside that he wasn’t allowed to be a part of. How could his father not love it, want to keep it out? It made no sense to him.

He went to the window and opened it, and stood there dazed by the light. Until his father cuffed him on the back of his head, he might as well have been out in the world.

Now he fidgeted in the cramped space of the tent; his hip ached from sitting cross-legged, hunched on the cold tarp.

“What do you want most?” Odell asked. “Right now.”

It was a game they played, conjuring the luxuries of home.

“A hot bath.”

“Perfect, yes.”

“My wife to draw it,” George added.

There was laughing, in gusts, with the wind.

“Hot tea.”

“Mmmmm.”

“Hot soup.”

“Hot anything.” Sandy poured insinuation into the words. They paused and the silence hung in the air, blown about by the wind. He was surprised by Sandy’s joke, enjoyed the blush that spread up Sandy’s cheek. He could imagine the heat there. The moment ended and laughter exploded again.

“A flush toilet,” he said.

“Clean clothes.”

Their voices rushed together.

Somes said, “A soft bed to sleep in.”

“Any bed to sleep in.”

“New books to read,” from Teddy.

“Fresh food.”

“God, yes,” agreed Somes. “Anything green and crisp.”

“The summit,” he said.

That stopped them. Maybe he shouldn’t have said it. Maybe they needed a break from it. But the summit was there, behind every word and thought, even if they didn’t say it out loud.

“The summit,” Teddy repeated quietly. He might have been the only one who heard him.

“I should go check on Tsering.” Somervell put his hand on George’s shoulder as he passed, squeezed it a little.

He lay back, stared at the roof of the tent and imagined the shape of the mountain leaning down on him. It was what they all wanted.

Most days it’s sitting and waiting. That’s what he had told Ruth.

“That’s what you said about the trenches in the war,” she said, rolling her eyes slightly. But it was indulgent, a look she gave him when he repeated a story she’d heard before, or told
her something that she had originally told him, as though it was his own thought. There was a swell of something in his throat. He swallowed against it. “You tell me that so I won’t worry.”

She was right. It
was
something he told her so she wouldn’t worry, but it was also true. The waiting was interminable. He used to hope for something to happen and then curse himself for the hope. But even in the sitting still there was danger. During the war. On Everest. At any moment the world could fall down on him. The dirt of exploded trenches. The tumbled avalanche of snow.

“Does it work?”

He’d only just returned from his second trip to Everest, in ’22. Less than a year after his first. How did she put up with it? All this picking her up and putting her down. In the past few years he’d spent more time with Everest – travelling to or from the mountain, planning for it, thinking about it – than he had with his wife. What kind of a husband did that make him?

They were in Paris. They had decided to meet there instead of in London or at home.
I want you to myself
, she’d written him in a letter. It was what he wanted, too. Her to himself. Time alone together was what they needed. What he needed. Before he left again for the lecture tour, for New York.

They had met at a hotel just off the Seine, opulent and rich after the confines of tents, the rigours of expedition life. He sent his bags up and stood watching her from the doorway of the salon. She was perfect, waiting for him. He’d imagined her like this for months. She picked up one of the salon’s delicate miniature desserts and bit it in half, taking her time, savouring it. Her eyes were on a book but he knew she wasn’t reading; she was trying to look as if she wasn’t waiting.

He imagined her in their room, the swelling curves of her on the still-made bed. He wanted to undress her, peel off the loose coat she wore, the lace gloves, find her underneath, the smell of
her – a faint perfume of rosehips, of paper. His own body swelled in response. There was sweat on his lip.

He walked over to the table and stood over her. She glanced up and barely had time to smile before he bent and kissed her. Her teeth scraped against his lips.

When he stood back up she blushed, smiled wider and scanned the room, embarrassed yet hoping everyone had noticed.

He sat down in the chair opposite her, and when he reached for her hand on the table, it was cool, but warmed quickly in his. He ate the remaining bite of her dessert, had a sip of her tea.

“Let’s go upstairs,” she said.

Afterwards she rolled herself in the plush coverlet and ran her fingers over him, drawing the leaner lines of muscles in his arms, his legs, the hollows beneath his cheekbones. She navigated bruises and scrapes.

“You always come back so different,” she said. The bumps and bruises were part of any climb, and she would catalogue them when he returned, asking for stories –
How did this one happen? Did it hurt?
Most times he couldn’t remember. She jokingly counted his fingers, his toes. Her hands on his body were cool, soft. He could have stayed there forever.

She marked each change on him, each fading bruise, each scrape, with her lips. “You’ll want to be careful,” he said, pinning her to him. “I’ll start to make a point of hurting myself.”

“Let’s go for a walk,” she said. “I haven’t been here in so long and we’ve never been together.” She stood up from the bed, tossing the blanket over him, and stepped into her discarded dress before bending to pick up from the floor the page he’d torn from her book. He’d tucked the folded page into the back of his waistband, and she had found it as she undressed him, smiling quickly before dropping it to resume kissing him. He dressed slowly, then followed her out of the hotel.

The streets were noisy and crowded, and he reached for her
hand. She grasped it tight, but out in daylight now she seemed more distant from him, as if she didn’t know quite what to say or where to look. When she met his eyes, she smiled shyly and then glanced away. They walked through the Luxembourg Gardens and she talked about the children. “They miss you so much. Well, of course they do. That’s rather a foolish thing to say.”

But after supper, after cocktails on terraces and the walk back to the hotel, she was bold and easy. In the darkness of their room, her body damp and heaving beside him, she said, “Oscar Wilde used to live here. I think he might have died here.” She paused a moment – “I almost forgot. The children sent these for you” – and slid down to hug him, first around his thighs and then his waist. The heights of the children.

He pulled her up to him again, kissed each cheek, her forehead, and they fell asleep clasping each other.

After two days everything felt normal again. She’d stopped telling him how he had changed, and she reached for him casually as they strolled the city, leaned against him when they stopped on bridges.

They were sitting on the Pont Neuf. The sun was rising and it was already hot. They would be taking the train to the coast in the morning, be home by evening. He wanted to see his children.

“Tell me the words, again,” she said. He could feel her voice vibrating through her back, into his chest, where she was pressed into his side. The small hum of her. Could feel her inhale and exhale. He didn’t want to move, didn’t want her to move. He remembered this, how easy she was against him. “Tell me all those foreign words.”

The words had been slipping into his conversation for days –
monsoon, coolie, yeti, bandobast, metchkangmi –
Nepalese, Tibetan, Sherpa words.