Above All Things (35 page)

I’ve had enough. He’s already decided on George’s failure. There is a flare of anger in my stomach, up through my lungs, and almost as if he must sense it, he begins to backpedal. “I only mean, Mrs. Mallory, if – if they should fail to make it this time. But I’m sure they won’t. They’ll be home safe and sound in no time. With the summit.”

Foolish of me to think he would bring me news. Even if he knew something, I’m not sure he would share it.

“That is what we all want, Mr. Hinks. Our dear brother-in-law to come home. To his wife. To his children. Safe and sound. Summit or no,” Marby says.

“He’ll be safe,” I say. I have to have hope enough for all of us. I have to believe it even when no one else will. “Has everyone had enough? Shall we have dessert?” I ask.

I try to be the perfect hostess.

CAMP VI
26,900 FEET

C
amp VI was more forbidding than George remembered. Had it really only been three days since he was last here with Odell? It seemed a lifetime ago.

One tiny tent perched on a fragile outcrop of snow, the world dropping away from them on two sides. The tent silhouetted against the sky, against the white. He stamped on the ledge to test it, almost expecting a giving way, a crumpling. The snow crunched under the hobnails of his boots, but the ledge held.

He tried not to imagine it dropping out from under him, collapsing and falling.

Once inside the cramped space, George unlaced his boot and pulled his foot onto his lap to massage it. It was numb. The boot had been tied too tight, cutting off the circulation. How had he failed to notice? He tried to remember the climb, but the memory of it was burned clean by the blaze of the sun, beating down in the high atmosphere. The heat had crawled in under his skin, searing him from the inside. He couldn’t have imagined frostbite.

An amateur mistake. Now his toes were tingling.

In all his years on mountains he’d never lost anything to
frostbite – not a toe, an earlobe, or a fingertip. Sandy reached over, took his foot, placed it in his own lap, and rubbed at the cold skin to aid the circulation. George’s foot burned and then shattered into pins and needles.

“There was a porter,” George said, cringing against the tingling in his foot. “In ’22. No, it was ’21. He lost both his hands. They had frozen solid. You hear people say that, but I couldn’t believe that a human body could actually freeze solid. He’d accidentally left the tent flap open overnight. In the morning his hands were white chunks.”

“Like Tsering.”

“Right, Tsering. He said they didn’t hurt. They were like ghosts. Something he could see, but couldn’t feel.”

He thought of Geoffrey.

“It itches,” Geoffrey had told him, scratching at his leg. “Like a sonofabitch.” It was the first time he’d seen Geoffrey after he was wounded, after they removed what remained of his leg, and his face was drawn, grey under a patchy growth of beard. His hands trembled on his lap. He was in a wheelchair. For some reason George hadn’t expected Geoffrey to be in a wheelchair.

At first George didn’t understand. “That blanket would make anyone itchy, Geoffrey.”

“No. My leg, George. My leg itches.” Geoffrey looked at him. “It’s not even there and it itches.”

He didn’t know what to say. Geoffrey tucked his hands under the blanket, tried not to scratch at the stump hidden underneath.

George pulled his foot back from Sandy.

“Then the coolie’s hands thawed,” he went on. “I don’t know which was worse. The freezing or the thawing.” Both were terrible reminders that the body was nothing but pulpy meat, easily ruptured, broken, frozen, thawed. That was the worst of it, knowing the myriad ways a body could be destroyed. “His
hands turned black. Purple. Swelled up like balloons. And the smell, of rot. Like in the trenches. You weren’t in the trenches. You can’t imagine them, Sandy. You shouldn’t.” He gagged a little at the memory. The smell hadn’t gone away, not for months after he returned home. The stench was in his sinuses, in his clothes, his hair. When he turned his head, it was always there. Even now he could conjure the smell. “Be glad for that,” he continued. “It was constant, the stench, from all the bits of bodies we never found.”

Sandy looked blanched – his scabbed skin pulled taut over his cheekbones. It had been so fair, Sandy’s skin. Not translucent, like Ruth’s, but more solidly pale. Not anymore. The mountain had ravaged him. He’d go home older. “It must have been agony to sit there and rot like that. He mewled. Constantly. At Base Camp, Bullock had to hold him down as they amputated his hands.”

There was a long silence.

“How high are we, George?” Sandy’s words were a slow staccato.

It took him some time to answer. His mind flitted, thoughts tapped against his skull. He hadn’t felt this foggy when he was here with Odell. Maybe he’d been too high for too long. His altimeter was somewhere.

“More than twenty-six thousand feet,” he guessed.

He fumbled in his pocket, his fingers too numb to identify any of the objects inside by feel. He pulled things from his pockets he didn’t remember placing there, spread them across his sleeping bag – scraps of paper, petroleum jelly, a small knife. He found the altimeter, the small round face of it sharply white in the darkening tent. He held it in both hands to keep it steady and squinted at the numbers that circled the face. Held it until the wavering stopped. He closed his eyes.

His father was speaking.

“I’d ask you all to indulge me a moment,” his father said, “and add an extra prayer for the young men who are undertaking the expedition to Mount Everest, on our King’s behalf. May they not be foolhardy and may God keep them safe.”

George dropped his head, embarrassed, and glanced sideways at Ruth sitting beside him, his mother and sister next to her. It was bad enough that his father continued to chastise him privately, accusing him of being self-indulgent – but now this? His father asking the congregation to pray for him?

“Your mother told me everyone has been calling on them, sending their congratulations, and good hopes for your safety. Your success,” Ruth whispered.

“Of course.”

“He means well. You know he does, George.”

“Just one moment more, please,” his father said now from the pulpit, “and then I’ll ask our choir to sing us out into this beautiful day. George? Will you come up here?”

Ruth’s hand was at his back. He rose, walked towards his father on the dais. “For you,” his father said, holding out a small box. Everyone was clapping. The choir began to sing.
Nearer, my God, to thee
. His father would have picked the hymn. It was just another argument, an attempt at conversion, at salvation.

“You’re looking for God, even if you won’t admit it.” That was what his father insisted, later that evening. “He is there. In the wilds. In the mountains. But He’s here, too.”

“Moses went to a mountain,” George said, pointing his fork at his father. Jabbing at the air between them.

“But he didn’t spend his life running off to them.” His father sliced at the roast on his plate, dipped his bread in gravy. It dribbled slightly on his beard. He wiped at it, smearing the gravy across his napkin. “Mountains won’t support your family, George. Neither will writing about them. The Mallorys have been rectors and reverends for centuries. You already have a calling.”

“The mountains have been there longer even than Mallorys have been in the Church, and they’re calling.”

“George, you aren’t going there to find God. If you were, you’d have found him already. God’s easy to find if you’re looking.”

“No, you’re right, sir. God isn’t there. Everest is proof enough against God.”

George inhaled deeply, opened his eyes. The dial on the altimeter was sharper.

“Twenty-six thousand, nine hundred and, ummm … three?” He handed it off to Sandy, so he could see for himself.

A slow smile spread across Sandy’s face. It took him a while to speak, their conversation delayed as though by a great distance. “Incredible.” Sandy peered at the altimeter, turned it in his hands to see the engraving on the reverse. “George, may this raise you up, Rev. HLM.”

He reached to take it back. “My father gave it to me in ’21. Before I first came here.”

He slid it into his pocket.

A little over two thousand feet to go.

“I USED TO
go to your father’s church sometimes,” Sandy said. His voice sounded strange – stripped down, weak. Everything was weak. But he wanted to talk, and so forced the sound out. “My father took me. Maybe I told you that?” Lengthy pauses dragged out between his sentences. Between his words. He was finding it harder and harder to tell what he was only thinking and what he was saying out loud. There was no way he’d pass any of Somervell’s memory tests now. He tried to add up numbers in his head, forgot which ones he’d picked. “Did I tell you?” he asked again.

“No.”

Sandy’s hands stroked the air near his face. It was agony. It felt as if the mountain had stripped the flesh from his cheeks. There couldn’t be any skin left. George reached across to him in the twilight, pushed Sandy’s hands away from his face, and smeared petroleum jelly carefully, gently on his skin. George traced the lines of his eyebrows, his cheekbones, his lips. The vulnerable spot at his temple. Sandy closed his eyes.

“I remember he took me. My dad,” Sandy continued. “No, that’s not true,” he said after a minute. “I don’t remember. But my dad, he bragged about it. Even before I was set to come here. ‘Sandy and I went to George Mallory’s church,’ he told people. Then, when I was invited to come, he said we were clearly meant to be together.” He flushed a little. Why had he said that? “I remember the smell,” he rushed on. “All waxed wood and polish.”

“He took me for an Easter sermon,” he told George. “The Harrowing.”

“One of my father’s favourites.”

“My dad smelled of sawdust. His pipe. There was a scar in the wood seat beside me. And a woman in front of me in a dark hat.”

“My father,” George said, “used to conjure heaven and hell for the congregation. He told Trafford and me, live a good life and you’ll never be cold.”

“I guess your father never thought any of us would be here.”

“No.” After a moment George asked, “Did you see the mandalas at the monastery?”

“I don’t think so.”

“They’re sand drawings that the monks make, on the floor. Intricate, tight. You’d know if you had.” George spoke into the air above them. “Teddy and I watched the monks for hours. There were four of them. Always four. And they sat at the cardinal points. Chanting and bending.” George pulled himself
to sitting to demonstrate. He crouched over his hands, one tapping the other as though parsing out invisible specks. “He smelled like grass, the monk I crouched next too. Used a long red tube to place each grain. Red and white – paisley swirls on demon costumes.”

“Demons?” There’d been so much talk of demons.

“With white lines around their black eyes. Red haired and fanged on green and blue backgrounds. When you watched them they seemed to move on their own, make you dizzy. The monks sat there for days. Weeks. Tapping. It was devotion itself.” George looked up at him from where he was still hunched over his tapping hands. They shook now from the cold, glowed blue in the dim tent. “He called it
samsara
. And told us to come back.”

“Who did?”

George glanced at him, aggravated at having to repeat himself. “The monk.”

Sandy nodded and George continued. “They called it the wheel of life.” George sat up straighter, reciting, his eyes closed. “The cause of all suffering is desire. Even if the only desire is not to suffer. But everything is moving. Everything changes, passes. Even suffering.”

It was a philosophy Sandy could understand. In crew they talked about rowing through the pain, when every muscle burned. The race was finite, but the feeling of winning or losing wasn’t. “You have to push through it,” he’d explained to Dick. “If you give up, you’ll hate yourself much longer than your muscles will ache.” But he hadn’t thought about applying it to anything else. To life. He liked that idea. It was a sophisticated thought. He sat up straighter with it.

What if, though? What if the monks were right and none of this was real? What if the tent, the mountain beneath him, was some kind of illusion, some kind of dream? It didn’t seem possible. Not with the pain, with the difficulty breathing. His body
reminded him over and over again how real this place was. How much it wanted to be anywhere else.

“This feels bloody real, George,” he said, trying to smile. He reached up and brushed the skin on his nose and the pain shot through him, radiating along his skin so that it was as if his whole body were a gaping wound. No, this certainly wasn’t an illusion. But he did believe it would pass. There was a time when he wasn’t in pain. There would be again.

Everything would pass.

George was fidgeting with his belongings, pulling things from his pack, a journal, a silk handkerchief, matches, a folded bundle of what looked like brightly coloured rags. He carried so much with him. George licked at the tip of his pencil, bent over the open book in his hand as if to write something, but he didn’t.