Above All Things (7 page)

“Well, it isn’t mine. Take it back and find mine. I need my crampons so I can have a look at the glacier.”

It had been two years since George was last at Base Camp, and so much had changed. He’d already noticed new boulders at the edge of the moraine, how the snow lines on the nearby mountains looked different. The glacier would be different too. He had been brooding about the Icefall for the past week. Everest might seem solid, unchanging, but it wasn’t. The glacier churned down the mountain, shifting boulders, scraping out the terrain. He couldn’t wait to examine the ice beyond the treacherous tumble of jagged rocks that made up their camp.

“First tent,” Virgil said, continuing to tug at the line in his hands.

“Anyone can set up a damn tent. I need to get us through the Icefall and up the bloody mountain.” George waited impatiently for Virgil to do as he asked, but the man kept at the tent. “Fine, Virgil.” He bent to grab one of the guy ropes and pulled the peak of the tent taut.

“I send boy for locker,” Virgil said.

“Boy? What boy?”

Virgil pointed past him to a small figure coming towards them. What on earth was he doing here? The boy looked five, maybe six. Close to Berry’s age. It wasn’t unusual for some of the female coolies to bring their nursing infants with them, but they never brought children.

Picking his way easily over the broken moraine, the boy hurried towards Virgil, a wide grin on his face. Virgil didn’t speak to the boy, but instead pointed at the box and then to where Sandy and the two new team members, Shebbeare and Hazard, were directing crates and bundles in various directions around Base Camp. Virgil mimed picking up the crate and walking with it. The boy’s mouth moved soundlessly as he nodded, picked up the box, and moved off. Stopping every few steps, he set down the heavy weight of the box to glance over his shoulder at Virgil before continuing towards the centre of camp.

“What’s wrong with him?”

“He not …” Virgil pointed at his ear.

“He can’t hear?”

“Yes.” Virgil nodded. “He can’t hear.”

“Not sure this is the best place for him, then. Finish this?” George gestured to the tent and strode off. “Never mind,” he said, taking the box back from the boy, who smiled at him, lopsided and vague, then tagged after him as he walked to Sandy with the footlocker. Odell’s name was clearly stencilled on the sides of it.

“Sandy, where’s my footlocker?” He dropped Odell’s to the ground and the boy went to pick it up. Shaking his head no, he
grasped the child’s small shoulders and pointed him off towards a group of coolies, who all reached out to him, touching him, their hands on his head or his small shoulders. It was impossible to tell which one he belonged to.

“What?” Sandy continued to check off items on the manifest in his hand while delivering a final instruction to Shebbeare and Hazard, who went in the direction of the mess tent. It was Sandy’s responsibility to make sure everything ended up where it was supposed to.

“My footlocker. This is obviously Odell’s.”

“Then he probably has yours. The porters must have mixed them up.” Sandy glanced back and forth from the manifest to a large crate in front of him. The word
fragile
was stamped on the wood above its equivalent in a squiggle of Hindi script. “I can’t figure out what in the hell is in this one. I’ve checked everything off.”

It was a strange crate, larger than most of them. “We should take a look then.”

“Shouldn’t we check first?”

“Why? We’re all in this racket together, Sandy. No secrets here.” He picked up the crowbar at Sandy’s feet. “Besides,
we
carted the bloody thing all the way here.” He wrenched open the top of it and there was a spill of straw, the smell of splintered wood.

“Ha!” George laughed out loud. He pulled the crate apart, stripping down the straw packing, which was picked up and scattered by the wind. Mahogany wood gleamed warm and rich against the grey, cold desertscape of Base Camp.

“What on earth? It’s a Victrola.” Sandy’s confusion was clear.

“Ah! There it is! Is it in one piece?” Teddy was striding towards them, carrying another footlocker. “George, I believe this is yours. Seems it ended up in the wrong place. You’ll need to pay closer attention, Mr. Irvine,” said the expedition leader. “These mistakes can’t happen higher up.”

“Right, sir.” Sandy’s faced reddened.

George turned his attention back to the Victrola and ran his fingers across the small plaque on the side of it –
In memory of those who fell
. It was the one from the Alpine Club.

“It doesn’t look like it belongs here,” Sandy said.

It did look foreign, George thought. Too delicate, its turned legs unsteady on the rough terrain. “None of us belong here, Sandy.”

“I brought it for you, George,” Teddy said, putting his arm around him. “I thought you might like it. There’s another crate around here too.”

“Of course, Teddy, for me. Seems to me last time you were the one missing music.” He turned to Sandy, “He would sing. All the time. What was it, Teddy?”

The team leader burst into song. “I’m
forever blowing bubbles, pretty bubbles
–”

“Exactly. Let’s not have a repeat of that. We should find the records.”

While Teddy hummed, they found the crate filled with now mostly broken shellac records. “At least a couple survived,” Teddy said, handing one over. “Let’s give it a go.” Sandy wiped the dust and straw off the record and placed it delicately on the turntable, then cranked the machine.

A fast tumble of notes from a high wailing trumpet filled the air. Jazz. The sound took George straight back to the speakeasies of New York. It was his record, the one Stella had bought for him. He kept it at the Alpine Club, worried what Ruth would hear in its cascading notes, wild and abandoned. No, it had been better to put the record, and Stella, away, he thought. Another mistake, best forgotten.

He inhaled the music wafting on the wind.

Later, as the sun set behind the peak of Pumori, they gathered around the Victrola. The coolies, the climbers, all of them
crowded together, sitting on camp chairs and boulders – the English in Burberry tweeds and sweaters, the coolies in red and yellow yak-wool coats, dusted with black soot. The deaf boy careered among the coolies, who put their palms to his cheeks and forced him to look them in the eyes. He calmed briefly before he tore away again.

John was like that, never sitting still. Really, all three of the children were, but George expected it more from John. That’s what boys were like.

The night before he left he’d gone to visit his son in the nursery. “John,” he whispered, “there are things you should know.” He had stood over his son’s small bed and tried to think of something to say to him. Across the room, Clare and Berry slept as soundly as their brother. The girls had confounded him at first.
She seems so superfluous
, he’d written to Geoffrey when Clare was born during the height of the war,
in light of all the men that have gone and need replacing
. Now he cringed at the thought that he’d ever called Clare or Berry superfluous. The girls had taken time, a getting-to-know-you period, but they’d grown into his little imps and he loved them. Clare was braver than he could ever have hoped – a bold tomboy.

But John he understood from the first. He’d missed his birth, but that hadn’t mattered at all. It was as if he already knew John. “I’ll take him climbing,” he told Ruth, sweeping John up in the crook of one arm, drawing vistas with the other.

“George, he can’t even hold his head up yet,” Ruth laughed from her bed. “He doesn’t have teeth.”

“First the Lake District and then the Alps. Maybe someday a faraway adventure. That village – in the Andes.”

“Machu Picchu?”

“Yes! We’ll go there and bring back gold.”

“But not yet.” Ruth took John back, cradled him against her. “Don’t take him away just yet.”

John would take to climbing. The boy already tried to climb everything in sight. His crib, the tables, the back wall of the garden. George knew he should rebuke him for it, but couldn’t. He wanted his boy to be fearless.

“Don’t let them get you down, John,” he whispered above the bed, stroking his son’s wispy hair. So blond, not like either him or Ruth. “You show them who you are. Don’t wait for them to tell you.”

“Gentlemen.” As Teddy stood, Sandy reached for the Victrola, lifting the needle with a long scratch. George sipped at his enamel mug of champagne. Behind him, Shebbeare murmured, translating for the coolies, who sat empty handed. “Sip slowly,” Teddy said, holding up his mug. “There will be no more of this until we’ve finished this show. Then we’ll be celebrating.” Around him the men laughed a little, indulgently. “We’ve made it this far in one piece. And God knows it’s a long way already. But there is still a long way to go.” Teddy pointed dramatically over George’s shoulder to the pyramid summit of Everest, its white peak glowing against the night sky. George didn’t turn to follow Teddy’s hand. He didn’t need to. He could feel her looming behind him.

“Tomorrow,” Teddy continued, “George will break the route up the moraine and onto the Icefall. And then, well, then we climb this bloody mountain.”

If only it were that simple. George pictured it in his head – the push up the moraine, uneven but easy. He’d make an interim camp on the glacier’s shoreline, a scant Camp I that he and Virgil would inhabit during the week they’d spend searching for a route through the Icefall. Next would be traversing the Western Cwm – the long bowl-shaped valley that ran up to the base of the North Col. George had named the Cwm when he first saw it, after the Welsh word for
valley
, as if to conjure something green this far above the treeline. After that they’d scale the ice
cliff of the Col, and then – then he’d be within striking distance. Then he could climb the bloody thing. With perseverance. With good weather. With a willingness to suffer through whatever obstacles she threw in their way.

“That’s the job,” Teddy said, wavering unsteadily on his feet. “Get up and back down.” He was drunk, not surprising in the thin air. George’s own head buzzed slightly.

“Gentlemen,” Teddy continued, planting his feet wide to keep his balance. “We are the best that have ever been assembled. We were handpicked to come here together. Some might even call it destiny. That’s it up there. To Everest,” Teddy declared, lifting his mug.

“To the King,” the Englishmen replied and raised their own glasses. Sandy was rapt, staring at Teddy, his face flushed with excitement and champagne.

“Virgil,” Somervell slurred slightly as Teddy lowered himself back into his camp chair. “Tell us the story again. Of the mountain.”

Virgil stood behind Sandy, halfway between the English and the coolies, before making his way to the Victrola in the centre of the gathering. Virgil had been with George on the previous expeditions, where he’d proved himself brave, strong, and competent at altitude. George wouldn’t have blamed Virgil if he hadn’t come back this time, and he had been surprised by his relief at seeing Virgil in the line-up of porters Teddy had hired at Tingri. At least Virgil didn’t seem to hold him responsible for what had happened the last time.

His presence gave George a new swell of confidence. If the mountain belonged to anyone, it belonged to him and Virgil. They’d seen Everest at her best and worst. They knew what the mountain could do. And still Virgil had come back a third time, like him, to try again. Virgil wanted it too.

“Chomolungma,” Virgil said. “Mother Goddess of the Earth.”

George shaped the name in his mouth. It was heavy on his English tongue, with too many syllables, too many consonants. But it was the right name for the mountain. She demanded something complicated.

“She not live here. She
is
here. She here now, but someday she go. Like everything. Not even gods stay always.” Virgil laughed, long and bubbling, like water. George loved Virgil’s broken English. Was proud of it every time, imagined it was better because of him.

“This her lap we sit on, we sleep on. Higher up, on her shoulders – demons. We hear them. In wind. The howling. You must go careful. Respectful –”

George cut him off. “Thank you, Virgil.” He wished Somes hadn’t asked for this. None of them needed their heads filled with this nonsense. There would be enough demons up there.

“Yes,” Teddy chimed in. “A ghost story. Always good for a campfire.”

But Virgil continued. “You must honour her on her flanks. Be clean. No drink. No lie together.” Virgil turned his gaze to the deaf boy. Was that what Virgil had been getting at? Had the boy been conceived at the base of the mountain? Maybe by one of them, even? He’d never had relationships with the women here, but he knew others had. He eyed the boy again.

Virgil turned to George now. “We must do
puja
in the morning. Before we go. Show respect.”

“Yes,” Teddy said, standing again. “We’ll do the
puja
first thing. Noel can film the blessing.” Teddy raised his glass and restarted the Victrola.

The music beat against the mountain.

For hours their voices bounced around the camp, echoing across the glacier and the face of the mountains all around them. Louis Armstrong’s piercing trumpet was amplified and repeated by the wind that whistled down from the North Col.
There was no way to tell where the song began or ended; the wind looped it over and over.

Green bottles were scattered around the campfire and piled up beside the Victrola. Such fires were a luxury. They had brought only a small amount of wood with them, had a few crates to burn, but they would run out soon. The deaf boy leaned against the Victrola, absorbing its vibrations, feeling the music. He stared at the Englishmen, mouth wide.

Near the Victrola, Teddy and Somervell danced, stumbling on the uneven terrain. Teddy pinwheeled his arms, and Somes turned himself in circles, doing some kind of box step. George glanced over at Sandy and smiled, then heaved himself up from his camp chair. “Come on.” He reached for Sandy. “It’s good exercise. Helps with the acclimatization.”