Above All Things (6 page)

What I don’t like is the loud tick of the mantel clock, demanding attention. I only hear its insistent beat if I’m still. I get up and
move to the pile of boxes by the door, haul one down with a resounding thud, and freeze a moment. Nothing. No sound from up the stairs. The children, at least, should be allowed to sleep, even if I can’t.

I sit cross-legged on the wood floor and pull the box to me, opening it, and lean in to begin pulling out books. Unpacking the books is easy, sorting them is taking some time. There are towers of them around me, arranged by topic, then by author. I sort and re-sort them.

“Why don’t you hire someone to do it?” Millie asked me when she visited and found me with my hair tucked under a kerchief, looking for all the world, she said, like a kitchen maid.

“You don’t say that when I’m painting,” I told her.

“Well, no. But that’s because painting is a sensible preoccupation for someone like you. This isn’t. This is hired help work.” She waved her hand around and brushed dust motes hanging in the air, sending them scurrying. If she’d noticed the dust there would no doubt have been a lecture about Vi and Edith not fulfilling their duties. A lecture about my not demanding it of them.

“I want to do it,” I said. “It’s comforting – rediscovering the things you packed away weeks ago, months. Like meeting old friends.”

I couldn’t tell her that with George away on expedition again we really couldn’t afford to pay someone to do the unpacking, even if I wanted to.

There are traps in these boxes too, though, to be avoided. The books are safe, but sometimes there are other things packed inside – photographs, letters, mementos from places we’ve been – that sneak up on me. Just yesterday I found the picture I painted in Venice. I was shocked to see it. I thought it had been lost long ago.

Yet there it was, pressed between two leather-bound tomes: the muddy view of the canal in murky colours that seemed
sullen and moody from my third-floor window. Not how I remember it now, but then it was painted in the days before George joined us on our family holiday and that changed my view of almost everything.

My father collected young, talented men, inviting them to join us, particularly if they were away from their families at the holidays, as George was that Easter in 1914, just before the start of the war. These men showed up at our dinner tables at home and all over Europe and Father would shake his head, “I thought for sure I’d mentioned it.” Helen would set another spot for dinner, and Millie and Marby and I would roll our eyes at one another.

But not when George walked in.

As usual, Marby was criticizing as I was painting in the parlour. “Your hand is too heavy, Ruth. All your light looks like dirty water, like you haven’t cleaned your brush in weeks. It’s too impetuous. You need more control.”

And then he was behind me, with Father close at hand. “I think it looks marvellous.”

“Mr. Mallory, these are my three daughters, Marby, Millie, and Ruth.”

Millie and I nodded politely. “Do you know art, Mr. Mallory?” Marby asked.

George was stunning. I’d never thought a man beautiful before, but he was. His features were sharp and specific, as though each bone had been deliberately chiselled to showcase an ideal. His eyes were a blue-grey mist, flecked with dark spots, tiny whirlpools of shadow. He gave off a sense of cold precision. Until he turned to me.

“I know what moves me,” he said and smiled, squinting his eyes, as if it was a private joke just between the two of us. As if he didn’t quite believe the painting was as good as he said, but he wanted us to be allies.

He reached for Marby’s hand first, then Millie’s, saving mine for last. He held my hand longer than he held my sisters’, or at least I told myself he did.

“Ruth,” he said, and it was a savouring pause. I imagined his breath against my cheek, his lips against my ear, and the feeling ricocheted all the way through my body – knocking against my ribs, swirling in my stomach, and settling finally between my legs. My father had entertained men before; I was used to them, liked them, even flirted with them, but this was wholly different and suddenly I was petrified.

George’s hands were calloused on the palms and his hair was long for a man, curled down over his collar, hung over his forehead.

“We’ve met before,” he said.

“I don’t think so.”

“Of course we have. At the Byrnes’ New Year’s supper.”

“I’m sure we haven’t,” I insisted. “I would remember.”

“But you don’t and we did.”

I couldn’t remember, not for the life of me. I had gone to the supper, but there had been dozens of people there. There’d even been a pantomime and I’d played a lady’s maid. “You wore a red dress,” he said. But I hadn’t.

Later, George told me I was the reason he’d accepted my father’s invitation. “One wonders things, you know, when an ardent naturist invites you along on holiday. But I’d thought of you since that party. Your red dress and how you spat out the pips of grapes into an empty champagne flute.”

I wanted to ask more about that supper, about who he might have thought I was – he was right about the pips – but my father was already leading him from the room. George considered the three of us lined up like matryoshka dolls and I pulled myself away from my sisters slightly.

“I’ll see you at dinner then?” he asked.

One of them answered for me. When he left, I took the painting back to my room and set it up on the easel. Marby was right. The painting was impetuous. But that was what made it come alive, I thought, made it move. I felt proud of it now, tried to see it through George’s eyes.

Two weeks later, before he left to meet his climbing partners, I presented it to him. “Please, I want you to have it. It’s small, will fit easily enough in your pack,” I insisted, removing any objection he might have to carrying it.

“I’ll treasure it,” he said and bent to tuck it along the inside of his pack.

I’d wondered about it, but never asked. And now here it was a decade later amongst the belongings he’d moved. The paint had cracked somewhat on the board. I leaned it against the back of the bookshelf, across from the desk, where he would see it.

Today reveals no such treasures, just piles of dusty books, some left from the days when George attended Magdalene College here in Cambridge. For him they might hold all sorts of memories, but for me, it is all dust and mould. My nose begins to run and I scratch at my eyes.

Glancing to the window, I notice that the room is beginning to lighten and I let myself check the clock ticking away on the mantel. Half-six. The morning will start properly soon. Already, I can feel the house warming around me, waking. The post should be here in another hour. Two at the most.

Silly to wait for it, really.

But word should be arriving soon. According to the telegram I received yesterday from Arthur Hinks, the monsoon arrived on the continent a week ago. Which means George is running out of time. He says they count on the burst of good weather that comes before the monsoon brings the heavy snows. But then the expedition will soon have to retreat and George will have to return. Soon another telegram will arrive, confirming
he’s on his way home, but still I wait for the sound of the post, to flip through the bills and invitations and inquiries to find a word from him. Any word. I prefer letters.

It was by telegram that I found out he was leaving again.

There’d been a knock at the door and I had answered it. The house was empty – everyone gone about their business, even the children.

“Telegram for Mr. Mallory?”

“I’m Mrs. Mallory.” He tipped his hat and handed the paper to me. If the news had come by letter I wouldn’t have known until George told me, but there were the words of congratulations from Arthur Hinks and the Everest Committee.

I had thought we were talking it over. I thought we would come to some kind of agreement together.

I close the door on the memory now and stand in the hallway, try to think of what to do next. The hours stretch ahead of me, like a line on a map. I will get dressed and rouse the children. By then it will be close to seven, a respectable hour, the rest of the world awake.

I climb the stairs to the first floor, past the empty walls in need of photographs, paintings. I’ll add that to the list of things that need doing. Today, maybe. Or tomorrow. Perhaps I can find something in town. This place is not a home. Not yet.

The day after the telegram for George arrived I cried in the garden, dirt wet on my dress where I kneeled over the bulbs. We’d stood in the garden together when we bought the house and decided what to plant. George walked the perimeter of it, drawn to the small stream at the end, and promised me a fish pond.

“We’ll plant it all together. It’ll be perfect. And then we’ll sit here and drink gin every evening until we’re tight. Or the frost comes. Whichever comes last.”

The crocuses, I knew, would bloom and fade before he came
home. Already I was counting, measuring time and distance. He stood over me but I didn’t turn.

“Six months,” he said. “But then it will be done.

There was heat from his hand where he touched the air above my shoulder.

“And when do you leave?”

“It will be the last time.”

He kept saying that. For months. Over and over.

“This time is the last time. I owe it to myself. To you. That’s what Will says. Geoffrey, too. They’re right. I need to try. One last time. Will you understand that? You have to understand that.”

I didn’t. Nor did I know who he was trying to convince – me or himself. The garden air was damp on my face and I wouldn’t look at him. I’d decided that I wouldn’t let him see me cry.

Now as I enter the bedroom, I catch sight of myself in the mirror above the dressing table. I am old, I think, a long way from the girl who painted that scene at Casa Biondetti, though that is partially the morning light, the swelling around my eyes from lack of sleep. I poke my tongue out at the woman in the glass and go to the wardrobe to dress. I don’t want a repeat of yesterday.

Yesterday, the children found me still in my nightdress, returned to bed after my morning wanderings. I woke to hear them tramping down the stairs, then along the bare hallway, before they pushed open the bedroom door. Clare first, followed by Berry leading John by the hand. The wooden floor under their feet, like tiny cat paws, didn’t so much as creak from their fragile weight. They stopped at the edge of the bed.

Outside the door was a heavier footstep. Vi, following the children. She paused and listened at the door before moving on down the hallway and then the stairs. I waited for the run of water, the clank of the kettle against the tap.

Jumping up, I grabbed John and pulled him on top of me with a squeal. The room was so bright, the light reflected off his face, the vest pulled over his bulging tummy. My fingers moved automatically to his armpits to tickle him and I pressed my face to the sleepy, milky smell of his body, nuzzling him.

“Why are you still in bed, Mummy?” Clare wanted to know. “Are you ill?”

There was a note of hope in her voice. Poor Clare, always wanting to make things better. If I was ill she could be in charge, could bring me weak tea and toast in bed. She could lord over her brother and sister, chastise them for playing too loudly, not playing what she wanted. Illness she could do something about.

“No, pet, I’m fine.” I reached towards her and she backed away. “Mummy’s just a bit tired is all.”

She looked at me darkly.
You won’t believe how much she looks like you
, I had written to George when he was in France and she had just turned two.
She draws her eyebrows together and her face clouds and you are all I see. It makes me want to laugh and cry all at once. She is certainly your child
.

How is Clare?
George wrote from the
Sardinia
the first time he left for Everest.
She is brave for her siblings
, I answered. What I didn’t add was that she shouldn’t have to be. She should only have to be a child with her parents there to protect her.

I grabbed her then and pulled her to the bed too, even while she tried to resist. She thinks she is too big for roughhousing. Berry clambered up after her and I wrestled the three of them until we were piled, gasping, lungs heaving. Their weight pinned me down, stilled the jittery nerves that seem to run through my body all the time now, making sounds seem too loud, the light too bright.

Then Vi was back outside the door, come to claim them. Her weight shifted back and forth, back and forth. Like a cow, swaying slightly as it chews. Patient – always patient.

“Come in, Vi.”

“Good morning, Mrs. Mallory.”

“They’re ready for breakfast now. Can you take these rascals? Get them fed and watered?”

John and Berry collapsed in giggles again at being called rascals, and I crossed my eyes at them. Clare climbed down, her back straight, and went to stand at the door. “Come on, you two,” she ordered. She wouldn’t look at me.

This morning I won’t let that happen. I’ll wake them instead.

I finish dressing, examine myself in the mirror. Better now. I brush my long hair back, wrap it into a loose braid. Then dig in the wardrobe again. I need something to wear this evening. For the dinner party. I pull out the black cotton and hear George’s voice in my head –
too funereal –
and reach instead for the blue silk, hang it on the back of the door, and remind myself to tell Edith it is there and will need to be pressed. Carefully.

I check myself once more in the mirror. I look calm, my face is pale, my hands steady. I wipe them on the skirt of my dress to get rid of the sweat on my palms. Another day closer, I think, and nod to my reflection. It’s just past seven now. Time to wake the children.

BASE CAMP
17,000 FEET

“V
irgil, this isn’t my footlocker. Where’s my locker?” George kicked at the small crate on the broken ground outside his half-erected tent and stared expectantly at his porter.

The wiry Tibetan man stepped from behind the sagging canvas to look at the box at George’s feet. “Sahib Sandy say,” he offered, nodding, then crouched down again to tie the tent’s guy line around a small boulder.