The Ice Soldier (2 page)
Now and then, as I traveled on the train to my father's home in Gloucestershire, I would be fixing myself a cigarette and sense that someone was watching me. I'd raise my head and come eye to eye with some old soldier, who knew exactly what the box was, and what it meant to carry one.
Having been with us in those moments when we stood on the verge of oblivion, these talismans served to remind us that we were still alive. Sometimes the only way to avoid being overwhelmed by what we had seen was to cling to those symbols of the days when we had taken life for granted, which none of us could ever do again.
I could have told Stanley all this, but I doubted he would understand. For the same reason, I'd never spoken to him in any detail about what had happened on the mountaineering expedition which had closed that chapter of my life for good.
I carried on rolling my smoke.
By now, Stanley was stretched out in his chair, feet up on a cushioned stool and joined heels making a V with his outward-pointing toes. He puffed his cheeks and noisily exhaled.
“What's the matter?” I asked.
“I'm in love,” he sighed, the way a person might confess to having lost too much money at the races.
I made a vague attempt to sit up. “Sounds serious,” I said.
“Oh, it is,” he replied.
“Well, who's the lucky girl?” I asked. I wasn't completely sure I wanted to know. One didn't normally discuss one's romances at the club. You could talk about almost anything else, but not about love.
“Her name,” said Stanley, “is Helen Paradise.”
“Hell and Paradise?”
“Helen,” he said slowly. “Hel-en. You've got the Paradise part right, though.”
“You're kidding,” I told him. “What kind of name is that?”
“French, I think. The name used to be Paradis.” He pronounced it
Paradee.
“But then they came over here and changed it.”
Paradee.
“But then they came over here and changed it.”
“Paradise,” I said. “You're bloody joking.”
“Paradise,” he sighed again. “It's true.”
“God.”
“She's giving a lecture series at my uncle's club.”
I gritted my teeth in anticipation of the tirade which usually followed the mention of Stanley's uncle.
The man's name was Henry Carton and he was president of the London Climbers' Club. Many years ago, Carton had made a name for himself as a mountaineer. He was best known for having scaled a previously unclimbed peak in the Alps and for nearly dying in the process.
It was Carton who had first drawn me and Stanley to climbing, and we were not the only ones. Few people had done as much as Carton to ensure the popularity of mountaineering,
not only with those who climbed but also with those who had never, and would never, set foot in the mountains.
not only with those who climbed but also with those who had never, and would never, set foot in the mountains.
In Carton's day the act of climbing, particularly in the Alps, had been considered a rich man's sport. At the turn of the century, the cost of getting to the Alps, of purchasing climbing gear, of hiring porters and guides, and of securing membership in various mountaineering societies had kept it that way. The mountains were the province of the climbing elite. Above all, this elite was an English elite, and even if they were grudgingly forced to accept the French, Swiss, German, Austrian, and Italian climbers who made their way into the hills, and whose countries owned those mountains in the first place, one thing they would not tolerate was what they saw as the lower classes of their own society. Women, too, were frowned upon. Mountaineering clubs either barred them from membership or obliged them to wear full-length dresses when they were climbing.
By the 1930s, when Stanley and I started climbing, all that was changing fast. Women had discovered that they could scale mountains just as well as men, and had long ago discarded the recommended dresses for trousers instead. Travel to the Alps was no longer as costly as it had been, and mountaineering societies had dropped the requirement that only those who had been above twelve thousand feet could apply for membership.
Henry Carton had no use for the old elitism of the mountaineering establishment. “Social Climbers Climbing Socially,” he called them. Climbing was for everyone, he maintained, and anyone who didn't climb had missed out on one of the greatest joys on this earth.
For a man who preached this sort of doctrine it was a
particular disappointment that his own nephew, who had once showed such promise as a mountaineer, should have given it up. Now these two men, who had once been mentor and protégé, regarded each other only with disgust.
particular disappointment that his own nephew, who had once showed such promise as a mountaineer, should have given it up. Now these two men, who had once been mentor and protégé, regarded each other only with disgust.
The strain between them was made worse by the fact that, after the death of Stanley's father in September of 1945, only weeks after the end of the war, Stanley had quit the family meat-canning company and was looking forward to a leisurely existence of living off his inheritance. Unfortunately for Stanley, his father had anticipated this and, being a man of solid work ethics, had placed his brother Henry in charge of the inheritance. With this came the discretionary power to distribute the money to Stanley in whatever amounts Carton saw fit.
The result of this was that Stanley soon found himself employed as his uncle's assistant at the club. Here, Carton had calculated, he could not only keep an eye on his nephew but could also ensure that he earned an honest living.
“Is your uncle still making you miserable?” I asked Stanley, remembering the days when they had not hated each other quite so much.
“I should say he is,” Stanley growled. “I'm not his assistant. I'm his bloody servant. He tells people I'm his Nitty Gritty Man and has me doing all the boring paperwork. Whenever I stick my head up from the accounts books, he starts making suggestions as to how I could better myself. I know that nothing would please him more than to hear I'd taken up mountaineering again. But he'd better not hold his breath, what little he's got of it. He may have talked me into climbing once, but I'm damned if he'll do it again.”
Both Stanley and his uncle were equally obstinate. That was why I had no hope for any reconciliation between them.
“Why don't you just get another job?” I had asked him this question before, and he never liked answering it.
“I can't be bothered,” he said.
But the truth was, and we both knew it, that his uncle did not work him very hard, and to earn as much as Carton paid him Stanley would have had to find a real job, with real hours and slim holidays. As it was, Stanley's efforts at the club were slack at best, no matter how hard Carton tried to push him. He kept irregular hours, took endless lunch breaks, and seemed to be under the impression that the Christmas holiday lasted until February. More than this, it seemed to me that the two men had grown so accustomed to being at each other's throats that they had, in a way, forgotten how to exist any differently.
“Look, you really haven't heard of her?” demanded Stanley, returning to the topic of his latest romance.
“What's her name again?” I asked.
“Helen Paradise. I told you.”
I shrugged myself a little deeper into my chair. “I'd remember a name like that.”
“You'd remember if you saw her, too.” He held a wine bottle upside down over his glass, shaking the last drops from its dark green mouth. “I first spotted her when she came in to hear a lecture in the last series we had at the club. Well, then we happened to get talkingâ”
“You mean you threw yourself at her feet.”
He ignored me. “âand then it turned out she was also a mountaineer and then she got invited to give the next lecture series.”
“You mean you begged your uncle to let her give a talk.”
“I didn't beg,” he sniffed. “I just mentioned it to him as a possibility.”
“How many times did you mention it?”
“As many as it took,” he said exasperatedly. “Anyway, she's exactly my type.”
“I don't know about your taste in women,” I muttered. By this, I meant that I knew all too much about it. There had been several dismal and expensive failures. Many times I had accompanied Stanley and whatever woman had currently captured his heart to the fanciest restaurants in London: the Ash Grove, Tamesin's, and La Borsa. There were moments in those evenings when the sweat of witty banter was glistening on Stanley's forehead and I would catch the eye of these sad and beautiful womenâthey were always beautiful and always sadâand we would tell each other with a glance that this was not going to work. And while these glances were exchanged, Stanley would continue to ramble through his usual jokes, Adam's apple quivering in his throat like a bobber on a fishing line. It wasn't Stanley who made these women sad. They were sad before they met him and for reasons that had nothing to do with his feverish charm. Stanley and I referred to them as “Melancholy Angels,” and often debated whether they were sad because they were so beautiful or whether their sadness was, in some twisted way, the very source of their loveliness.
Whatever the answer, Stanley was drawn helplessly to this sadness just as the women were drawn to his laughter and precariously punch-lined anecdotes, and his money, of which he had more than most people, despite his uncle's choke hold on the trust fund. The difference was that these women were drawn to him only in a transitory way, as a diversion from their sadness, and when they no longer found him diverting, they would leave. Stanley, on the other hand, lived in a world of perpetual hope in which true love was not a thing to be ridiculed and, if found, would last forever.
There were nights when Stan and I walked back to the club, having said good night to the woman, and I would dread the moment when he'd ask how I thought it had gone. We both knew exactly how it had gone, and Stanley would be in the process of what seemed to be one long exhaling of breath, as he slowly returned to himself. With me, he had no reason to be anything other than who he was, and if he had been this same person when he was with the ladies, they might have liked him better for it. Or perhaps the Melancholy Angels would have steered clear of him to begin with. But something clicked in him when he was trying to impress these ladies, and he became like a dancing bear, lumbering about on the stage, without reward, without dignity, without a chance.
I would never tell him it was useless. It was important to let Stanley decide that for himself. I would always say, “There are possibilities.”
And so, for a while at least, he would bask in the glow of potential. It was what the French call
l'extase langoureuse.
An ecstasy of languishing.
l'extase langoureuse.
An ecstasy of languishing.
The next day, or the day after, we would be talking about something completely different and Stanley would suddenly exclaim, “No, it's pointless.”
Then I would know he had put away his dreams, at least with this particular woman. And as for the woman, we might see her again at some party, on the arm of some other languishing and grinning man. She was also languishing, but it had nothing to do with the men whose hearts she broke. What she languished for, no joke could mend, no bottle of champagne, no warmth of adoration.
“You must meet her,” he said.
“I'd be happy to,” I lied, because it was understood that I would lie.
“She's doing another lecture at the Climbers' Club tonight,” he continued. “You could come along. I'll introduce you.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “Your uncle and I haven't spoken in years.”
“All the more reason for you to come! Besides, I don't need you to meet him. I need you to meet her.”
“What sort of climbing has she done, anyway?”
“Well, she's just returned from photographing a lot of the mountains down in the Alps, including that one which is named after my uncle.”
Carton's Rock, as it had been named, was a jagged pinnacle of stone and ice which rose almost sheer out of a glacier called La Lingua del Dragone, the Dragon's Tongue. It lay in a section of the Italian Alps known as the Val Antigorio, north of Turin, and jutting up towards the St. Gotthard Pass. The Dragone glacier covered a large area in the mountains west of the town of Formazza. It was here that Carton had found himself, in the summer of 1905, having taken a wrong turn at the village of Crevoladossola on his way down from Switzerland to Milan.
By the time he realized his mistake, he had traveled a considerable distance north along the only road which ran through the Antigorio Valley and stopped to spend the night in Formazza before retracing his steps towards Milan.
At a guesthouse in Formazza, Carton met another Englishman, whose intention had been to travel out across the Dragone glacier. Until that time, the glacier, and in fact the whole area around it, had received very few visitors. Bigger mountains and less dangerous glaciers could be found just across the border in Switzerland.
It had never been Carton's intention to go out on the ice. Until he met the Englishman, he had not even known of the
glacier's existence. He had not intended to do any mountaineering on his trip, and had come to the Alps only on the advice of his doctor, as a cure for the asthma he'd had since childhood. After hearing the Englishman's description of the wild and barren landscape of the glacier, Carton grew curious. He would have remained merely interested if the Englishman had not revealed that he was suffering from gout and would not be able to make use of the guide he had hired. The Englishman kindly offered to let the guide take Carton instead, and even offered him the use of his mountaineering equipment.
glacier's existence. He had not intended to do any mountaineering on his trip, and had come to the Alps only on the advice of his doctor, as a cure for the asthma he'd had since childhood. After hearing the Englishman's description of the wild and barren landscape of the glacier, Carton grew curious. He would have remained merely interested if the Englishman had not revealed that he was suffering from gout and would not be able to make use of the guide he had hired. The Englishman kindly offered to let the guide take Carton instead, and even offered him the use of his mountaineering equipment.
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