Above All Things (17 page)

“I haven’t even been introduced to the Woods. It isn’t appropriate.”

“Nonsense. They’d love to have you.”

“What you mean is they’d love to quiz me about George.” I leaned over the just-blooming tulips, their red heads vivid against all the lush green.

“No. I didn’t …” Will tugged at the leaves of one of the rose bushes. I lightly slapped his hand away.

“It’s all right, Will. I know you didn’t mean it like that. But they” – I gestured over the garden wall, at all of Cambridge, all of England – “do.”

“Still, it would be good for you to get out.”

“I’m fine.” I stepped away from him, deeper into the garden. “We’re fine.”

“Then what say we have a dinner party here?”

I thought about the mess in the house – boxes still piled in corners, the drapes mismatched while I decide on a colour. I shook my head. “The place is a mess.”

“It’ll be a good reason to get everything cleared away. And what we don’t, we’ll put into George’s study. No one needs to go in there. And you’ll just invite the people you like. Your sisters. Me?” He cocked his head in a question.

“Of course.” I tried not to smile.

“Geoffrey and Eleanor.”

“Yes. All right.”

“And Arthur Hinks.”

“No.” I shook my head. “No, Will.”

“Hear me out.”

“No.”

“If you invite Hinks, we can both deal with him and his questions head on.” He could see me listening. “And, aside from that – he might know something we don’t. That you don’t. It’s almost time.”

Will was right. It was almost time. The monsoon, unpredictable as it was, has arrived in India. It will sweep the snow up onto the mountains and shut them off completely. We would have to receive word soon. “Fine.” I spread my hands, bobbed a little in a mock curtsey. “A dinner party. But nothing too fancy. And you have to come early.”

“Of course.”

Ahead of me the pedestrian promenade widens into Bridge Street. Up ahead is Magdalene, George’s old college. I’ll walk through, pace his steps. It will be something to tell George – I will see what roses are blooming, what the fellows are discussing. Small things collected up to fill the letters, the hours. I have some time still before I need to be home and right now the narrow streets seem warmer than the empty house.

I’ve almost forgotten the man in the fedora, the grey flannel suit. I shake my head at my own foolish thoughts. Will is right, I need some distraction, some company. But when has Will not been right? I’ve known Will for almost as long as I’ve known George. He introduced us in the days before we married, when the two of them returned from Wales – “my last jab at bachelorhood!” George had proclaimed, and I had sent him packing. How easy it was then to say goodbye, when it felt like our lives were just beginning. He came home with Will, who would stand up for him at the wedding. “At anything really,” George told me.

Will had found me alone at breakfast, my last, I’d hoped, in my father’s house. George and I had already bought our own house across the valley – the Holt – which I could see from my father’s veranda. I was staring out at the Holt when Will came to sit across from me.

“Can I show you something, Ruth?” Will asked, accepting a cup of tea. Early risers both of us.

“Of course.”

“George is very happy. It seems you both are.”

“Yes. Very. Thank you.”

“I’ve known he was in love since he first met you. What I mean …” Will stuttered a little, flushed. “George isn’t the most … restrained person.”

“That’s part of what I love most about him.”

“Me too. When I met him in the Alps in the spring, after he’d been to Venice with you, he was already saying he would marry you. I’d never seen him quite so swept up.” Will laughed a little. “To tell the truth, I worried his mind wasn’t on the climb. He wrote this and gave it to me to keep for him. Until you married him.”

Will handed me a folded piece of paper.

Now I am lost in listening

That the same lark winging the universal blue

Wakes the same trembling ecstasy in you
.

“He said if you’d already agreed to marry him, then his poetry probably wouldn’t scare you off.”

I stop on the bridge just before Magdalene. Cambridge is becoming my home. I am beginning to love the shape of it, the sounds. To love the silent college courtyards and the formality of the buildings pushed right up to the road. To love the river that lazes its way through the town.

Below me, the punts are out, the fellows in their robes resembling great hulking birds, the flapping black cloth like great wings. Because it’s Saturday there are fleets of the small boats, drifting the length of the river and back. Their calls echo along the water, under the bridge.

“I want to show you something,” George said when we first moved here. We’d held hands all the way to this bridge and I
could feel his excitement, how much he wanted to share. As we walked past the colleges, their Gothic spires catching the sky, he pointed out routes and angles, loose mortar and deep cracks in the stone.

“Geoffrey taught me to climb them. Look.” He pointed up to the spires of Trinity. “That’s the most dangerous one. We’d go in the night, in the dark, and try not to get caught. There’s even a book. Everyone knows Geoffrey wrote it when he was a fellow, but he denies it. Still.
The Nightclimber’s Guide to Trinity
. I wanted to climb every one of them. I did, too.”

I took in all the towers and spires and sloping roofs, wondered what it would be like to scale them. The freedom of it. The terror.

With one hand George reached to show me the best routes, the worst – while his other clasped me about the waist, held me fast. “But this,” he said, ushering me down a walkway beside Magdalene, “was one of my favourite places.”

The garden in front of me now is just the same – only more lush with its spring growth. The willow hangs low over the wall of the river, washing the couple who sit on it, leaning against each other, in an underwater green. There’s a hush here; with the bustle of Bridge Street left behind there is an almost sacred air.

“Oh, it’s lovely,” I said. And we lay on the grass, my head against George’s chest.

I glance at the couple on the wall and think about us. They’re so young.
Oh, George, when did we get so old?
I don’t feel old, but thirty-two.
Thirty-two!

Suddenly I’m exhausted. Insomnia has left my eyes dry and my head thuds slightly. I sit on a bench, lean against the rough bark of the tree, and wish someone was here to hold me, to stroke my hair and my back and send me to sleep. Instead I pull Cottie’s letter from my breast. Out of habit I sniff it again briefly before I read, but catch only the scent of my own perfume.

Dear Cottie – These mountains here are unlike anything we’ve ever seen and only you would know what to call that colour, that blue, that snow and ice turn when the sun disappears
.

I try to picture it, think of the paints I have lined up in front of the easel at home, wonder if I could mix it for him. But it would only be guessing.

The climbing here isn’t real climbing. Not like you and I have done
.

“When did you first climb?” We are on our honeymoon, curled naked together under the blankets.

“Once when my father grounded me to my room.”

“You told me he used to make you write out his sermons as punishment.”

“Yes! But that was later. Probably the climbing changed the punishment. Clearly I couldn’t be left to my own devices. I certainly don’t think I deserved to be punished, at any rate.

“Avie dared me that I couldn’t lie between the train tracks while a train went over. I said I could and tried to prove it, and when I wouldn’t get up again, she ran home to tattle on me. I was locked up for scaring my sister. But as I sulked at my window, I realized I could probably get from there to the roof of the rectory.”

“You didn’t!”

“I did. I lifted the sash and started to climb out. Just then, of course, Avie came in and screamed. She grabbed hold of my ankle and begged me to come back in. I’m sure that was the only dangerous moment of the whole thing – Avie clinging to my ankle, trying to drag me back in.

“So I kicked her. Not hard. Just enough to get her to let me go. I kicked her and took off like the devil for the roof. I wasn’t even thinking about climbing, just about showing them they
couldn’t punish me for something that wasn’t my fault. I stayed up there until they apologized to me. Then climbed down the bell tower. I must have been seven or so. That’s how it started. As an escape, I guess.”

“Is that what it still is? An escape?”

George Mallory. I am startled by the sound of his name. Everest.

I must have drifted off, and I cast around briefly to get my bearings. The light under the tree, dancing off the river, is sharper. The couple by the river have pulled apart somewhat and I notice now that he is in uniform. Perhaps I didn’t hear those words, didn’t hear his name. Rubbing my eyes, I turn my attention back to Cottie’s letter.

Then there it is again. Clearer. “Can you imagine what it would be like on Everest?” It is the woman sitting on the wall. Her blonde hair is pulled back tight into a low bun, her profile is elegant, but weighed down by too strong a jawline. “So cold. So uncivilized. Everything is against them. Oh! How brave!” Her face is rapturous as she looks up to the man next to her. His face, though, is stricken. That’s the only word for it.

He’s not as young as I thought – there is grey in his hair, lines around his mouth. I assume he served in the war. The girl next to him doesn’t see his stricken expression or how she has hurt him with the word
brave
. Cruel, foolish girl.

“Didn’t you say you knew him?” she asks now.

His response is muffled, carried off down the river.

“George Mallory,” she sighs and leans her head back against him. “Imagine what it would be like to be married to a man like that. I bet she’s beautiful. Glamorous. It’s all so romantic.” Her voice is a sigh and I feel my stomach rise.

Not a foolish girl then, a stupid one. Anger flashes hot across my body. There is some power in this feeling. Then I am on my feet, Cottie’s letter tight in my hand, and I’m walking towards them.

“How glorious it would be if they succeeded. Think what it would mean.”

“What would it mean?” I am standing close to them now. Did I say it out loud? I check their faces for a response. I must have. They’re staring at me. He swallows and looks away, makes to stand up. Her face is haughty, her chin thrown back.

“What could it possibly mean?” I say, more clearly now, because I do really want to know. I need to. What could it mean? To this woman. To anyone. Whether someone they have never met climbs some damned mountain. She pulls back from me as if I’ve spit at her. My voice tightens. I barely sound like me, but I can’t stop. “You don’t know anything. Certainly not what it means to be brave. What is important.”

There is a pounding, a wash of noise in my ears, as though I am back by the seaside. The taste of adrenaline, like cloves in my mouth, tinny at the back of my throat. It tastes like betrayal.

Her soldier is panicked. He pulls her from the wall and navigates her down the walk, the click of her heels like the ticking of a clock, speeding up and then slowing, slowing and fading.

I don’t want to cry, but it comes in sobs, full wracking shudders across my body. I haven’t cried like this since before George left.

I was in our room. I’d gone to dress for dinner and it was like a sudden wave crashing over me. I wanted to call for him. I wanted to be comforted, but I couldn’t let him see me like that. I rubbed at the tears on my face as he came to me.

“Ruth, it will be all right. It will. I’ll be back before you know it.”

“You don’t know that.”

“But I do. I have to.”

He sat beside me in front of my vanity, pulled me to him, and dropped my head to the hollow below his collarbone, his chin on my head. We stayed like that and he let me cry. Let me shake against his body, solid and holding me.

I would give anything for him to be here now. So much so that I won’t allow myself to name the things that I would do without. I’m appalled by my own selfishness. My whole body hurts with crying. Burns with it. I don’t bother to collect myself. There’s no point. The garden is empty; I am entirely alone.

ADVANCED BASE CAMP
21,200 FEET

H
e was finally getting used to this.

Sandy leaned over the cooker, placing chunks of snow inside the tin pot. After a week of climbing up and down from Advanced Base Camp, of bringing up supplies from the lower camps, putting the necessary pieces in place for a summit push that would hopefully come in the next few days, he was finally getting used to the hour it took to make one bloody cup of lukewarm tea. If he had to make a cup quickly or for more than one person, he needed to coddle more than one cooker to life at a time.

There was no one else to do it, though, since the rest of the porters had been sent back down. If he couldn’t be climbing, then at least he had the camp to himself, which was more than could be said for poor Hazard, stuck at Base Camp, coordinating loads and supervising the porters. George and Somervell had left yesterday, as had Noel with his own miniature expedition to set up his Eagle’s Nest. Everyone, save Noel’s team, was due back at ABC any time.

“Climb high, sleep low,” George had told him, explaining the plan of attack.

Sandy repeated the refrain in his head, a mantra that marked his footsteps when he was feeling slow.
Climb high, sleep low
. It was the key to acclimatizing – press up and then drop back down. He was adjusting well, he thought, and Somervell seemed to think so too. “Looks like Hinks was right,” he’d said after his last check-in, patting Sandy on the arm. “Our best bet at a superman.” He was more than ready to push ahead. Maybe tomorrow. Or the next day, if he wasn’t sent instead to bring up more supplies like Shebbeare and Hazard. Those two were little more than glorified porters. Pack mules. Of course, the two of them were still retrieving loads that the porters had dropped short of Advanced Base Camp when they could no longer carry them any higher. Sandy hadn’t realized before how much work it was to make sure the higher camps were all properly stocked, or how enormous the undertaking. But if gear or supplies were inadequate or not where they needed to be, it could derail an attempt. Or worse. He couldn’t imagine being snowed in above the Col without enough fuel or food to eat. With a spoon Sandy poked at the melting snow.