Killing Me Softly (10 page)

Was I all right? A feeling of extraordinary joy rose up in me. I stood up and laughed and kissed him on the mouth, firmly: a pledge.

‘Is that a yes?’

‘Of course it is, you idiot. Yes. Yes yes yes.’

‘Look,’ he said. ‘Here she is.’

And there, indeed, I was, open-mouthed, wide-eyed, taking shape, colours deepening, outline hardening.

‘There we are,’ he said, handing it to me. ‘It’s a moment, but it’s also a promise. For ever.’

I took the picture and put it in my purse. ‘For ever,’ I said.

Adam seized my wrist with an urgency that startled me. ‘You mean it, don’t you, Alice? I’ve given myself before and I’ve been let down before. That’s why I brought you here, so that we could make this vow to each other.’ He looked at me fiercely, as if he were threatening me. ‘This vow is more important than any marriage.’ Then he softened. ‘I couldn’t bear to lose you. I could never bear to let you go.’

I took him in my arms. I held his head and I kissed his mouth, his eyes, the firm jaw and the hollow of his neck. I told him I was his, and he was mine. I felt his tears on my skin, hot and salty. My only love.

Twelve

I wrote to my mother. She was going to be very surprised. I had only told her that Jake and I had separated. I hadn’t even mentioned Adam before. I wrote to Jake, trying to find the right words. I didn’t want him to hear it from anyone else first. I met more of Adam’s friends and colleagues – people he had climbed with, people he’d shared tents with and crapped with and with whom he had risked his life – and everywhere we went I could feel Adam’s appraising eyes on me, making my skin prickle. I went to work and sat at my desk, loose with remembered and anticipated pleasure, and pushed paper around desks and sat in meetings. I meant to ring up Sylvie, and Clive, and even Pauline, but somehow I always put it off. Almost every day now we would receive silent phone calls. I got used to holding the receiver a bit away from my ear, hearing the raspy breathing and putting the phone back on its stand. One day wet leaves and earth were pushed through our letterbox, but we ignored that as well. If occasionally I felt anxious, the anxiety was drowned out by all the other turbulent emotions.

I learned that Adam cooked great curries. That television bored him. That he walked very fast. That he mended the few clothes he owned with meticulous care. That he loved single malt whisky and good red wine and wheat beer, and hated baked beans and bony fish and mashed potatoes. That his father was still alive. That he never read novels. That he was almost fluent in Spanish and French, the bastard. That he could tie knots with one hand. That he used to be scared of enclosed spaces, until he was cured by six days in a tent on a two-feet deep ledge on the side of Annapurna. That he didn’t need much sleep. That his frost-bitten foot still hurt him sometimes. That he liked cats and birds of prey. That his hands were always warm, however icy it was outside in the streets. That he hadn’t cried since he was twelve and his mother died, until the day I said I would marry him. That he hated lids to be left off jars and drawers to be left open. That he took showers at least twice a day, and clipped his nails several times a week. That he always carried tissues in his pockets. That he could hold me down with one hand. That he rarely smiled, laughed. I would wake up and he would be beside me, staring at me.

I let him take photographs of me. I let him watch me in the bath, on the lavatory, putting on makeup. I let him tie me down. I felt at last as if I had been turned inside out and all my private internal landscape, everything that had belonged only to me, was known. I think I was very, very happy, but if this was happiness, then I had never been happy before.

On Thursday, four days after Adam had asked me to marry him and three days after we had gone to the register office to post our banns, sign forms and pay money, Clive rang me at work. I had neither seen him nor spoken to him since the tenpin bowling, on the day I left Jake. He was polite and formal, but asked me if Adam and I would like to come to Gail’s thirtieth birthday party. It was tomorrow, Friday, nine o’clock, with food and dancing.

I hesitated. ‘Will Jake be there?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘And Pauline?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do they know that you’re asking me?’

‘I wouldn’t have rung you without talking to them first.’

I took a deep breath. ‘You’d better give me the address.’

I didn’t think Adam would want to go, but he surprised me. ‘Of course, if it’s important to you,’ he said casually.

I wore the dress he had bought for me, chocolate-brown velvet with long sleeves, deep neck and slashed, swirly skirt. It was the first time I had got dressed up for weeks. It occurred to me that, since Adam, I had, bizarrely, paid little attention to what I wore or how I looked. I was thinner than I had been, and pale. My hair needed cutting and there were dark smudges under my eyes. Yet I felt, examining myself in the mirror before we left that evening, that I looked beautiful in a way that was new. Or maybe I was just ill, or mad.

Gail’s flat was in a large, rickety house in Finsbury Park. When we arrived there, all the windows were lit up. Even from the pavement we could hear music and laughing voices, and see the shapes of people through the open curtains. I clutched Adam’s arm. ‘Is this a good idea? Maybe we shouldn’t have come.’

‘Let’s go in there for a bit. You can see everyone you need to see, and we can go and have a late meal afterwards.’

Gail opened the door. ‘Alice!’ She kissed me exuberantly on both cheeks, as if we were old friends, then turned inquiringly towards Adam, as if she had no idea who he was.

‘Adam, this is Gail. Gail, Adam.’

Adam said nothing but took her hand and held it for a moment. She looked at him. ‘Sylvie was right.’ She giggled. She was drunk already.

‘Happy birthday, Gail,’ I said drily, and she forced her attention back to me.

The room was full of people holding glasses of wine or cans of beer. There was a raggle-taggle band of musicians clutching their instruments in one corner, but they weren’t playing. Music was booming from the stereo instead. I took two glasses from the table and glugged some wine into them for Adam and me, and looked around. Jake was standing near the window, talking to a tall woman wearing a strikingly short leather skirt. He hadn’t noticed me come in, or he was pretending that he hadn’t.

‘Alice.’

I turned. ‘Pauline. Nice to see you.’ I moved forward and kissed her cheek, but she was unresponsive. I introduced Adam awkwardly.

‘I gathered,’ she said.

Adam took her by the elbow and said in a clear, carrying voice, ‘Pauline, life is too short to lose a friend.’

She looked taken aback but at least she managed to speak. I drifted away from them, towards Jake. I had to get this over with. He had seen me now. He was still talking to the woman in the skirt, but his glance kept turning towards me. I went over. ‘Hello, Jake,’ I said.

‘Hello, Alice.’

‘Did you get my letter?’

The woman turned and left us. Jake smiled at me, and said, ‘God, that was hard going. It’s difficult being single again. Yes, I got your letter. At least you didn’t say you hoped we could still be friends.’

At the other end of the room I saw Adam talking to Sylvie and Clive. Pauline was still beside him; and he was still holding her arm. I saw how all the women eyed him, drifted over towards him, and I felt a twinge of jealousy. But then he looked up, our eyes met, and he gave a funny twisted grin.

Jake saw the glance. ‘Now I know why you were suddenly so interested in climbing literature,’ he said, with a painful smile. I didn’t reply. ‘I feel so ridiculously stupid. All that happening under my nose and me not knowing. Oh, and congratulations.’

‘What?’

‘When is it going to be?’

‘Oh. In two and a half weeks’ time.’ He winced. ‘Yes, well, why wait… ?’ I stopped. My voice sounded too bright and cheery. ‘Are you all right, Jake?’

Now Adam was talking just to Sylvie. His back was to me, but she was staring up at him with a rapt expression I knew too well.

‘It’s no longer your concern,’ said Jake, in a voice that was trembling slightly. ‘Can you tell me something?’ I saw that his eyes had filled with tears. It was as if my going had released a new Jake – one who had lost his mellow cheerfulness and his irony; who wept easily.

‘What?’ I realized that Jake was a bit drunk. He bent closer to me, so I could feel his breath on my cheek.

‘If it hadn’t been for, you know, him, would you have stayed with me and –?’

‘Alice, it’s time to go.’ Adam put both arms round me from behind, and rested his head on my hair. He was holding me too tightly. I could hardly breathe.

‘Adam, this is Jake.’

The two men didn’t say anything. Adam let go of me and held out his hand. Jake didn’t move at first; then, with a puzzled expression, he put his hand into Adam’s. Adam nodded. Man to man. A desire to giggle rose in my throat, which I suppressed.

‘Goodbye, Jake,’ I said awkwardly. I was about to reach up and kiss him on the cheek, but Adam pulled me away.

‘Come on, my love,’ he said, leading me from the room. I sketched a half-wave at Pauline and left.

Outside the house, Adam stopped and turned me towards him. ‘Satisfied?’ he said, and kissed me savagely. I slid my arms under his jacket and shirt and leaned into him. When I pulled away, I saw Jake, still standing at the window and looking out. Our eyes met but he made no gesture.

Thirteen

I tried to make the question seem casual, although I had been shaping it and rephrasing it in my mind for days. We were lying in bed, exhausted, long after midnight, coiled round each other in the dark, when I sensed an opportunity.

‘Your friend Klaus,’ I said. ‘Writing about what happened on Chunga-whatever-it-is. I can never remember the name.’

‘Chungawat,’ said Adam.

He didn’t say anything else. He would need more prompting.

‘He said you were pissed off with him for writing the book.’

‘Did he now?’ Adam said.

‘Are you? I don’t see why it’s a problem. Deborah told me what you did, what a hero you were.’

Adam sighed. ‘I wasn’t…’ He paused. ‘It wasn’t about heroism. They shouldn’t have been there, most of them. I…’ He tried again. ‘At that height, in those conditions, most people, even fit people who are experienced in other conditions, can’t survive on their own if things start to go wrong.’

‘Is that your fault, Adam?’

‘Greg shouldn’t have organized it, I shouldn’t have gone along. The rest of them shouldn’t have thought there was an easy way of climbing a mountain like that.’

‘Deborah said that Greg had worked out a foolproof way of getting them up the mountain.’

‘That was the idea. Then there was a storm and Greg and Claude got sick and the plan didn’t work out so well.’

‘Why?’

His tone turned irritable. He was impatient with me for pressing him, but I wasn’t going to stop.

‘We weren’t a team. Only one of the clients had ever been to the Himalayas before. They couldn’t communicate. I mean, for God’s sake, the German guy, Tomas, could hardly speak a single word of English.’

‘Aren’t you just curious to see what Klaus has to say in his book?’

‘I know what he has to say.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I’ve got a copy.’

‘What! Have you read it?’ I asked.

‘I’ve looked through it,’ he said, almost with contempt.

‘I thought the book hadn’t been published yet.’

‘It hasn’t. Klaus sent me one of those rough, early versions – what are they called?’

‘Proof copies. Have you got the book here?’

‘It’s in a bag somewhere.’

I kissed my way down his chest, his stomach and beyond, until I could taste myself on him.

‘I want to read it. You don’t mind, do you?’

I made a private rule for myself that I would never try to compare Adam with Jake. It seemed a last, feeble way of trying to be fair to Jake. But I couldn’t help it sometimes. Jake never just did something, never just went out. He was too considerate and attentive. He asked my permission or informed me or planned it in advance and probably asked me to come with him, or what I was doing. Adam was completely different. Much of the time he was utterly absorbed in me, wanting to touch, taste, penetrate or just look at me. At other times he would make a precise arrangement for where and when we would next meet, then he would throw on a jacket and go.

The next morning he was standing at the door when I remembered. ‘Klaus’s book,’ I said. He frowned. ‘You promised,’ I said.

He didn’t say anything but walked across to the spare room and I heard sounds of rummaging. He emerged with a book with a floppy light blue cover. He tossed it over to where I sat on the sofa. I looked at the cover:
Ridge of Sighs
by Klaus Smith.

‘It’s only one man’s view,’ he said. ‘So I’ll see you at the Pelican at seven.’

And he was gone, rattling down the stairs. I went to the window, as I always did when he went out, and watched him appear and cross the pavement. He halted, turned and looked up. I blew him a kiss and he smiled and turned away. I went back to the sofa. I had, I suppose, some idea of reading for a bit, making some coffee, having a bath, but I didn’t move for three hours. At first I flicked ahead, looking for his lovely name and finding it, and looking for photographs, and not finding them, because they wouldn’t be in until the final published version. Then I turned to the beginning, to the very first page.

The book was dedicated to the members of the 1997 Chungawat expedition. Beneath the dedication there was a quotation from an old mountaineering book of the thirties: ‘May we, who live our lives where the air is thick and minds are clear, pause before we judge men who venture into that wonderland, that looking-glass realm on the roof of the world.’

The phone rang and I listened to the silence for a few seconds before putting it down again. Sometimes I could persuade myself that I recognized the breathing; that it was someone I knew at the other end. Once I said, tentatively, ‘Jake?’ to see if there was any response, any sharp intake of breath. This time, I didn’t really care. I wanted to get on with
Ridge of Sighs.

The book began more than twenty-five million years ago, when the Himalayan range (‘younger than the Brazilian rainforest’) was pushed up in folds by the northward drift of the Indian subcontinent. It leaped forward to a catastrophic British expedition up Chungawat just after the First World War. The attempt on the summit was abruptly halted when a British Army major lost his footing and pulled three of his comrades down with him, falling, as Klaus put it drily, around three thousand metres from Nepal into China.

I read quickly through a couple of chapters that described expeditions in the late fifties and sixties in which Chungawat was first climbed and then climbed from various routes and using different climbing methods, which were meant to be purer or harder or more beautiful. This didn’t interest me much, except that my attention was caught by a statement that Klaus quoted from ‘an anonymous American climber in the sixties’: ‘A mountain is like a chick. First you just want to fuck her, then you want to fuck her in a few different ways and then you move on. By the early seventies Chungawat was fucked out and nobody was interested any more.’

Apparently Chungawat didn’t present enough interesting technical challenges to élite mountaineers but it was beautiful and poems had been written about it, and a classic travel book, and in the early nineties that was what had given Greg McLaughlin his big idea. Klaus described a talk with Greg in a Seattle bar in which Greg had rhapsodized about package tours above eight thousand metres. People would pay thirty thousand dollars and Greg and a couple of other experts would lead them to the peak of one of the highest mountains in the Himalayas with a view into three countries. Greg thought he would be the Thomas Cook of the Himalayas and he had a plan for making it happen. It involved each guide laying a series of lines, fixed on pickets to which the climbers would be attached by carabiners. The lines would lead along a safe route from camp to camp. One guide wouldbe responsible for each line, designated by different colours, and it would be just a matter of making sure that the clients wore the correct equipment and that they were fastened securely to the line. ‘The only danger,’ he had told Klaus, ‘was dying of boredom.’ Klaus was an old friend and Greg asked him to come along on the first expedition and help him with some of the logistics in return for a discount. Klaus was unsparing about his own motives. He had had doubts from the first, he despised the idea of turning mountaineering into tourism, yet he accepted because he had never been to the Himalayas before and he wanted to go.

Klaus was also pretty jaundiced about his fellow packagers, who included a Wall Street stockbroker and a Californian cosmetic surgeon. But about one person he wasn’t jaundiced. When Adam was first mentioned I felt a lurch:

The dreamboat of the expedition was Greg’s second guide, Adam Tallis, a lanky, good-looking, taciturn Englishman. At thirty years of age, Tallis was already one of the most brilliant climbers of the younger generation. Most important for my own peace of mind, he had extensive experience in the Himalayan and Karakoram mountain ranges. Adam, a long-time friend, is not one for unnecessary talk but he obviously shared my doubts about the whole basis of the expedition. The difference was that if things went wrong, the guides would have to put their lives on the line.

Then my stomach lurched again as Klaus described how Adam had suggested that his ex-girlfriend, Françoise Colet, who was desperate for a Himalayan climb, come along as the doctor. Greg was reluctant, but agreed to take her as a client with a huge discount.

There was too much stuff (for me) about bureaucracy, sponsorship, rivalry with other climbers, the initial trek in Nepal through the foothills and then, like a revelation, the first sight of Chungawat with its notorious Gemini Ridge, leading down from the col just below the summit which divides into two, one side leading to a precipice (down which the English major and his comrades had slipped) and the other leading gently down the slope. I seemed to be living it as I read, experiencing the brightening of the light and the thinning of the air. At first there were elements of lightheartedness, with toasts, prayers to the presiding deity. Klaus described sex in one of the tents, which amused and shocked the Sherpas, but discreetly omitted to mention who had been involved. I wondered if it was Adam who had been in her sleeping bag with her, whoever she was – probably the cosmetic surgeon, Carrie Frank, I thought. I had come to assume that Adam had slept with virtually everybody who had crossed his path, almost as a matter of course. Deborah, for example, the climbing medic in Soho. There had been an expression in her eye that made me think they must have had a fling.

As they moved up the mountain, establishing camps, the book almost stopped being a book and turned into a feverish dream, a hallucination that I shared as I read. The members of the party were blinded by headaches, unable to eat, doubled over with stomach cramps, even dysentery. They debated and bickered. Greg McLaughlin was distracted by administration, divided between his concerns as a guide and his responsibilities as a tour operator. At over eight thousand metres everything was reduced and slowed. There was no actual climbing but even the shallowest slopes became a huge physical effort. Older members of the party slowed everybody up, causing resentment. Through it all, Greg was tormented by his need to get everybody to the top, to show that this form of tourism could work. Klaus described him not only as obsessed but babbling incoherently about the need to hurry, to get to the top in the window of fine weather at the end of May, before June brought storms and disaster. Then, at the camp before the summit, there was a lowering, cloudy day in which Klaus overheard arguments between Greg, Adam and Claude Bresson. The weather held that day and before dawn the party set off up Gemini Ridge along a fixed rope that had been prepared by Greg and two of the Sherpas. It was all done with, as Greg himself put it, a simplicity that might have been designed for kids at kindergarten. Greg’s fixed lines were red, Claude’s were blue, Adam’s were yellow. The clients were told a colour and told to follow it. After they had moved beyond the ridge and were just fifty – vertical – metres below the summit, Klaus, at the back of the group with Claude, saw clouds rolling in ominously from the north. He questioned Claude, who didn’t respond. In retrospect, Klaus didn’t know whether Claude was stubbornly determined to get to the summit, whether he was already ill, or whether he just hadn’t heard. They pressed on and perhaps half an hour later the weather broke and everything went dark.

Much of the rest of the book was delirium as Klaus described the disaster the way he – sick, disoriented, terrified – had experienced it. He couldn’t see, he couldn’t hear; occasionally figures emerged from the blizzard and disappeared back into it. The climbers had made their way across the col to where Claude, theoretically, had laid the blue line that would lead them towards the summit but by that time nobody could see more than a few feet or hear anything unless it was shouted into their ear. The one figure who emerged with clarity out of the chaos, like a figure in a thunderstorm illuminated by flashes of lightning, was Adam. He appeared out of the storm moving down, disappeared, reappeared. He was everywhere, keeping up communication, leading the two parties of clients into a place of relative shelter on the col. The immediate priority was to save the lives of Greg and the acutely ill Claude. With Klaus’s help they almost carried Claude down the line to the highest camp. Klaus then returned with Adam and they helped Greg down.

By this time Klaus himself was incoherent with fatigue, cold and thirst and collapsed in his tent, unconscious. Adam went back up the mountain to fetch the virtually helpless clients. He took the first group, which included Françoise and four others, to the beginning of the line: they would have to feel their way down to the camp. Adam left them and went back to the second group. But by the time he had brought them back, the fixed line was nowhere to be seen. It had evidently been blown away. It was now beginning to get dark and wind-chill had brought the temperature down to fifty degrees below zero. Adam took his second party back to the col. Then he went down the ridge alone, without a line, in order to fetch his own line and in search of possible help. Greg, Claude and Klaus were unconscious and there was no sign of the first group.

Then Adam went back up the ridge, laid the yellow line and brought the second group down himself. Some of these needed urgent medical help, but once he had attended to them, he went out once more, alone and in the dark, to search for the missing group. It was hopeless. Late that night, Klaus woke and deliriously assumed that Adam, too, had been lost until he burst into the tent and collapsed.

The first party was found the following day. What had happened was a tragically simple mistake. In the dark and the snow and the noise, with the fixed line unfixed and blown into the abyss, they had blundered down on the wrong side of the Gemini Ridge, which had taken them hopelessly and irrevocably astray on to an exposed ridge that tapered away, leaving steep drops on each side. The bodies of Françoise Colet and an American client, Alexis Hartounian, were never found. They must have gone over the edge, perhaps while struggling back up the ridge or pressing forward to the camp they thought was in front of them. The others huddled together in the dark storm and died slowly. The following morning they were found by the Sherpas searching for them. All dead, Klaus wrote, except for one: another American, Pete Papworth, who was just mumbling the single pathetic word, ‘Help,’ over and over again. Help. Help. Calling, Klaus wrote with the pain of a man who had been asleep through all of it, for help that nobody would bring to him.