Above All Things (31 page)

Clare officiates at teatime, directs the conversation. Today she is talking about the seaside. About the pier.

“Cottie said that perhaps we should all go to the seaside to distract ourselves from what is at hand.” The words are imperious.

“And what is at hand, Clare?” I ask.

Her brow furrows and she glares at me. I shouldn’t have said it, though it doesn’t matter, as Berry has taken up the refrain. “The seaside! We could have toffee.” She had toffee once and it is what she thinks of whenever any mention is made of the seaside. Not the smell or the roll of waves to the horizon. Only the toffee.

John gets up from the table and wanders a short distance away. Not too far, he wants the treats but doesn’t want to sit. Instead he turns himself in circles faster and faster until he falls over, giggling.

I’ve never understood how you could have been so disappointed when Clare was born
. Superfluous,
you told Geoffrey. Having a girl was superfluous when so many young men were dying. As though it were her fault. As though we should just breed replacements for the men killed in the trenches. As though they could be replaced
.

George wasn’t around for any of their births. Though he promised to be there for John’s, so certain the baby would be a boy after Clare and Berry.

“I’ll be there, Ruth, I swear,” he said as he packed his bags again for the Alps.

My stomach pressed out into the space between us. I refused to help him pack.

“You could just wait. Go with Will after the baby is born. It’s too close. He or she is going to be early.” My voice was a whine. I hated the sound of it.

“
He
,” George said and then, “Don’t be like this.”

I wanted to ask
like what
? It didn’t seem strange to me that he should want to be here when his child was born, that I should want him to.

I knew he would miss it. When he left, John was already so heavy in my belly it was as if I could almost taste him waiting to be born, as if he had looked out, through my eyes, to watch George leave.

“He’s on his way,” Marby said two weeks later, sponging my brow, and maybe she meant John or maybe she meant George. As I strained against John, trying to keep him in, trying to push him out, George was on a train travelling from the coast. When he walked in he still smelled of the mountains.

The bedroom reeked of blood, pungent afterbirth, the sea. Marby had wrapped John’s umbilical cord in a tea towel for me to plant under a new tree in the garden. It was wrapped next to the bed and the smell of it made me want to retch, my stomach still sensitive from exhaustion and giving birth.

George breezed in like spring. “It’s a boy!”

It wasn’t a question. Marby must have told him.

John was asleep on my chest, his small head nestled under my chin. He smelled like me. Like himself, specific and familiar and mine. There was nothing of George on him yet. In that moment he was mine. Only mine. George stared at him, cupped his head in his palm.

“John,” I said.

“John? What about Trafford?”

I knew George had wanted to name a son for his brother. I would have agreed if he’d been there. “John Trafford,” I allowed.

John mewed, opened his eyes and stared up at his father, unseeing, as George took him from me. “John Trafford,” he said, nodding.

In the garden John throws himself at the ground, rolling down the small incline in a tumble of somersaults, and then laughs maniacally. The girls I know I can take care of, raise properly. But John, he needs his father.

Vi steps out onto the porch. “Your dress is hanging, ma’am.”

It’s time then. “Clare, want to come with Mummy to dress?”

She nods as if it’s a solemn duty and leads me by the hand back into the house.

The dressing table is an array of small bottles, combs, brushes. For years, Clare has sat with me while I dress, and each time she removes every cosmetic from the small middle drawer and spreads them all out, lining them up across the silk runner that George brought back after the first expedition. It’s a patchwork of dark purples, shot through with silver and gold threads. Today she does it as if by rote, then rises and wanders around the room until she reaches for the silver frame beside the bed. A photograph of her father and me taken just before he left for France.

“You should try to smile,” George said. “Then I can see your smile every day when I look at it.”

“If you stayed here,” I told him, “you could see this smile every day.” I scrunched up my face into an exaggerated, crazy grin.

“If only. But it’s impossible.”

Except it wasn’t impossible. He hadn’t been conscripted. He had chosen to go. He could have made the choice to stay. I’ve tried to understand why it is that he goes away so often. I tell myself it is a matter of duty, of honour. But duty seems to be different for men than it is for women. Duty is something men
step inside and fasten around them, like uniforms. For women, duty is a cloak draped over us, that weighs us down.

The photograph had been my idea. “We could each have one. One for me to keep, next to our bed. One for you to take with you to France. You can carry it in your pocket. Over your heart.”

“Ruth, I won’t forget what you look like. It’s emblazoned here and here.” He put his hand to his heart, to his temple. But a small part of me worried that he would forget. Worse, I worried that I would forget him if something were to happen. I needed the physical token of him, like a talisman. As long as I could look at him, he would remain alive.

We sat for the photograph – him in his new uniform, which even I had to admit made him all the more handsome. We each thought the other looked better.

“But that’s how it should be,” I said when we received the prints. “I think you’re strikingly handsome, you think I’m pretty. We both think the other one is a fool. Perfect. Just how it should be when you’re in love.”

Darling
, he wrote,
I carry the picture in the small notebook in my pocket. It’s always on me, though it’s gotten wet and dirty, it is there
.

And it was easy to believe. When he was invalided home, it came with him, crumpled at the corners, soft. I didn’t ask if he ever pulled it out, just imagined it. When he felt alone. Scared. I needed to keep that.

“Put it away,” he said, of the photo I kept next to our bed, when he knew he wouldn’t be going back. Not after Trafford’s funeral, after Geoffrey’s leg. “It reminds me of going away and I don’t want to go away anymore.” So I did. I wrapped both of them in some folded paper and put them into a cupboard.

The first time he went to Everest I pulled the photograph out and placed it back on the nightstand. He didn’t say anything when he saw it.

I saw his copy scattered amongst the papers on his desk. “Are you taking this?”

“Of course. I always take it. Whenever I go away. Anywhere.”

“You don’t. I saw it in the linen drawer. It’s been there for years.”

“I take it and put it back. Every time.” I imagined him opening the drawer, unwrapping it, then wrapping it back up when he returned.

“I’ll leave it at the summit. That’s where you deserve to be, at the top of all things,” he said and kissed my forehead. “And I won’t need it anymore after that, I shan’t go anywhere. I’ll stay right here. You won’t need yours either. We’ll get rid of them both.”

But we didn’t. We just continued to fold them away.

Clare traces the lines of the photograph. “You look very pretty.”

I don’t know if she means then or now, but Clare has become an authority on what is pretty. Soon, I think, she’ll be too old for this. How long do little girls watch their mothers dress? Until they’re eleven? Twelve? I’ll have to let Berry come and join us soon, although I love this time alone with Clare. Berry I’ll have for a few more years. I imagine Clare as a young woman, dressing herself to impress someone. I touch Clare’s lips with colour. Her cheeks with rouge. I pin glittering butterflies in her hair.

“We should have waited to write to Daddy. I would tell him how pretty you look.”

Her face becomes a raincloud when she mentions you. There is this tug of war as she shifts from anger to protectiveness. Like me. There are moments when she lashes out, is angry that you are not here
.

Like she does sometimes with Will, I think. “Daddy should be here to do it,” she said when Will helped to tie up a swing in the garden. Her anger was sharp with the injustice.

“Maybe Will can be our daddy now,” Berry said, and Clare turned on her.

“Don’t be stupid, Berry. We have a daddy.”

Poor Berry hardly knew you when you returned from Everest the first time. Do you remember how John fussed when you tried to hold him? And your face, when you saw how comfortable they were with Will, asking him to lift them up. It was terrible
. There were repercussions none of us had expected.

Clare, though, has her memories of her father and holds fast to them. The other day she drew a square on a piece of paper. More squares inside it.

“What are you doing?” I asked her.

“Trying to remember.”

“What are you trying to remember?”

“You won’t know. Only Daddy knows.” She huffed, then showed me the paper. “It’s Daddy’s magic square. He made it and showed me how all the numbers added up to nine. I couldn’t find the one he made me. I want to make a new one.”

I left her alone so she wouldn’t see me cry. I could practically see George leaned over her, trying to help her with schoolwork. She was frustrated to tears and he pulled her to his lap, whispered to her, “I’ll show you some magic, Clare.”

And as I watched he lined up numbers in a square and made her add them up. He held up his fingers for her to count on.

“Nine!” She gasped and giggled in surprise.

I didn’t tell her I could show her how it worked. She wouldn’t have wanted that.

“I’ll ask him when he gets home,” she said. “How many more days?”

“I don’t know exactly, love. But we shall, very soon.”

I turn to her now as she examines herself in the mirror. “You look lovely too,” I tell her. “We’ll write Daddy again, don’t worry. We can write him every day if you like.”

“We don’t need to do that.”

“No?”

“He doesn’t write us every day. He’s busy. We’re busy.” It is a simple declaration.

She is quiet a while, staring at our reflections side by side in the mirror. She is so much like her father, but I doubt she can see that.

What would she ever do without you?
I wonder so much what I would do that sometimes I forget how hurt they must be. But I know she counts the days, marks them off on the calendar she asked for.

“I think John and Berry miss Daddy,” she says, as if she can read my mind. I try to smile. “They’re sad, I think. And you miss him too, right?”

“Of course, darling.”

“So why do you want to look pretty when he’s not here?”

I don’t know what to say to her. What could I say that she would understand? That it feels good to put on one’s best. But also that it is part of my duty. To behave the way that I am expected to behave. We have roles, all of us, and maybe sometimes that looks like betrayal, but it isn’t. What she wants is for me to mourn so that she doesn’t have to. So that she doesn’t have to be sad that her father is gone. And I will do that for her. Willingly. But not tonight. Tonight I need to feel as though everything will be all right, that everything is how it should be.

And it is also a kind of armour – the makeup, the dress. One that Clare is already learning. I must be properly armed to get through this evening. To manage with Arthur Hinks. I imagine what he might say to me:

They are still making the attempt
.

I had word this afternoon, they’re on their way home
.

I’m sorry, but I wanted to tell you this in person
.

I tie a silk scarf around Clare’s pale throat. She cocks her head in the mirror and then takes it off, drops it to the floor.

“Because it’s a dinner party,” I say, bending to pick it up, and
my voice sounds like a sigh. “And Auntie Marby is coming. And Cottie and Eleanor. And they always look so pretty, don’t you think? And Uncle Will.”

“He isn’t really an uncle. Not like Uncle Trafford was.” She doesn’t remember Trafford, was only a baby when he died. But her grandfather talks about him as though he were still alive.

“No, he isn’t. But he’s a good friend, almost like a brother to your daddy. And a good friend to me, too. And to you. So we call him Uncle. To make him part of the family.”

“Oh.”

“And don’t you like that you’re pretty?”

She looks in the mirror again. Her eyes are huge with the slight gloss of tears that I ignore. She nods. “Can I come to the dinner party?”

“No, sweet. You’re too young. Soon enough, though. How about we have a dinner party with Daddy when he comes home? You and me and Daddy. Just the three of us. We’ll dress our best and use the fine china.”

“But what if I break it?”

“It’s only china.”

She smiles. “Daddy will be sorry he missed this.”

“I’m sure he’s sorry to miss a lot of things.”

THE ASSAULT
27,000 FEET

N
o one had yet been this high up on the expedition.

After a cold night at Camp VI, George had left with Odell just before dawn. If they kept up a good pace, George wagered it would take them ten hours or so to reach the summit and make it back to camp. Ten hours of straight climbing. He’d had longer days in the Alps, but never at this kind of altitude. And the cold here was unbearable. He couldn’t even begin to imagine what it would be like to be caught out here, unmoving, at night. Still, their progress had been slower than he would have liked in the pre-dawn glow. Yesterday, on the way up, Odell had challenged him all the way to VI. He liked being pushed and found himself feeling certain they would make it. Him and Odell. He never thought it would be him with Odell, and now, here they were. Teddy was right about leaving yourself open to other possibilities.

But this morning Odell was already waning, slowing before the sun had even crested the peaks to the east. Maybe he’d pushed too hard yesterday, trying to prove himself. He stopped after every step, staring at his feet, inhaling three, four breaths for each step upwards. George was at least making
two, even three steps before he had to stop and catch his breath.