Killing Me Softly (22 page)

Thirty-two

I had obviously woken him up, even though it was past eleven o’clock: he was puffy and squint-eyed with sleep, and was wearing grubby pyjamas, wrongly buttoned up. His hair stood out from his head, making him look even hairier than I had remembered him.

‘Greg?’

‘Yes?’ He stared at me from the doorway, showing no sign of recognition.

‘It’s Alice. I’m sorry to disturb you.’

‘Alice?’

‘Alice, as in Alice-and-Adam Alice. We met at the book launch.’

‘I remember.’ There was a pause. ‘You’d better come in. As you can see, I wasn’t really expecting visitors this morning.’ And he smiled suddenly; baby-blue eyes very sweet in his crumpled, unwashed face.

I had been expecting Greg to live in a mess, but it was a neat little house, everything in its proper place, every surface wiped and clear. And there were pictures of mountains everywhere – great snowy peaks in black-and-white or colour on every white wall. It felt a bit strange, standing in this over-tidied house, to be surrounded by such epic vistas.

He didn’t ask me to sit down, but I did anyway. I had crossed London to see him, although I didn’t know why. Perhaps I had just remembered liking him when we had met briefly, and clung on to that. I cleared my throat and he looked suddenly amused. ‘Tell you what, Alice,’ he said. ‘You feel uncomfortable because you’ve just turned up on my doorstep uninvited, and you don’t know how to begin. And I feel uncomfortable too, because I’m not dressed when any respectable person would be, and I’ve a cracking hangover. So why don’t we go into the kitchen? I’ll show you where the eggs are and you can scramble some and make a pot of coffee while I put some clothes on. Then you can tell me why you’re here. This isn’t just a social call, I take it?’

I stood dumb.

‘And you don’t look as if you’ve eaten in weeks.’

‘Not very well,’ I confessed.

‘Eggs, then?’

‘Eggs would be great.’

I whisked four eggs in a saucepan and set them over a low heat, stirring all the while. Scrambled eggs should be cooked very slowly, and served soft rather than like rubber. Even I know that. I made the coffee – far too strong, but we could probably both do with a jolt of caffeine – and toasted four slices of stale bread. When Greg came back into the kitchen breakfast was on the table. I found that I was ravenous, and the salty, creamy eggs and buttery toast soothed and steadied me. The world ceased swimming in front of my eyes. I took gulps of bitter coffee between mouthfuls. Opposite me Greg ate with methodical pleasure, distributing the eggs evenly over the toast and pushing neat squares on to his fork. It felt strangely companionable. We did not speak.

When he had cleared his plate, he laid down his knife and fork and pushed his plate away from him. He looked at me expectantly. I took a deep breath, smiled at him, and to my consternation felt tears hot on my cheeks. Greg pushed a box of tissues at me and waited. ‘You must think I’m mad,’ I said, and blew my nose. ‘I thought perhaps you could help me understand.’

‘Understand what?’

‘Adam, I suppose.’

‘I see.’

He stood up abruptly. ‘Let’s go for a walk.’

‘I haven’t got my coat. I left it in the office.’

‘I’ll lend you a jacket.’

Outside, we set off at a lick along the busy road that led down to Shoreditch and, beyond that, the Thames. Suddenly Greg led us down some steps and we were on a canal towpath. The traffic was left behind and it was as quiet as the countryside. It seemed reassuring, but then I thought of Tara. Was it in this canal that her body had been found floating? I didn’t know. Greg walked as fast as Adam, with the same effortless stride. He stopped and looked at me. ‘Why ask me, of all people?’

‘It happened so fast,’ I said. ‘Me and Adam, I mean. I thought the past didn’t matter, that nothing mattered. But it doesn’t work like that.’ I stopped again. I couldn’t tell Greg all my fears. He was the man whose life Adam had saved. He was Adam’s friend, sort of. I looked at the water. Motionless. Canals don’t flow like rivers. I wanted to talk about Adele, or Françoise, or Tara. Instead, I said, ‘Do you mind the way everyone thinks he’s the hero and you’re the villain?’

‘Villain?’ he said. ‘I thought I was just the coward, the weakling, the Elisha Cook Junior role.’

‘Who?’

‘He was an actor who played cowards and weaklings.’

‘Sorry, I didn’t mean…’

‘I don’t mind people thinking he was a hero, because he was. His courage, fortitude, coolness, all that, was extraordinary that day.’ He glanced sideways at me. ‘Is that what you want to hear? As for the rest of it, I’m not sure I want to talk over with you how I feel about my failure. Wife of the hero and all that.’

‘It’s not like that, Greg.’

‘It is, I think. Which is why you found me in my pyjamas this morning, nursing a hangover. But I don’t understand it, and that is what torments me. What does Adam say about it?’

I took a deep breath. ‘I think what Adam believes is that there were people in the expedition who didn’t belong on Chungawat.’

Greg gave a laugh that dissolved into a racking cough. ‘He can say that again,’ he said, when he was recovered. ‘Carrie Frank, the skin doctor, she was a fit hiker but she’d never climbed before. She didn’t know how to put her crampons on. And I remember screaming a warning to Tommy Benn when he had attached himself wrongly to the belay. He was about to fall off the mountain. He didn’t respond and I remembered he didn’t understand any English at all. Not a single word. God, what was he doing with us? I had to slide down and reattach his ‘biner. But I thought I’d handled that, that I’d created a foolproof system. It failed and the lives of five people under my protection were lost.’ I put a hand on his arm but he went on, ‘When it came to it, Adam was the hero and I wasn’t. You don’t understand things about your life. Join the club.’

‘But I’m scared.’

‘Join the club, Alice,’ he repeated, with a half-laugh.

Suddenly and incongruously, there was a small garden on the other side of the canal, with ranks of red and purple tulips.

‘Was it something in particular that’s scared you?’ he asked eventually.

‘It’s all of his past, I guess. It’s all so shadowy.’

‘And so full of women,’ Greg added.

‘Yes.’

‘Difficult for you.’

We sat on a bench together.

‘Does he talk about Françoise?’

‘No.’

‘I was having an affair with her, you know.’ He didn’t look at me as he said it, and I had the impression that he had never said it before. For me, it was like a blow, sharply unexpected.

‘An affair with Françoise? No. No, I didn’t know. God, Greg, did Adam know?’

Greg didn’t answer at once. Then he said, ‘It began on the expedition. She was very funny. Very beautiful.’

‘So they say.’

‘It was over between her and Adam. She told him when we all arrived in Nepal that it was ended. She was sick of all his infidelities.’

‘She
finished it?’

‘Didn’t Adam tell you?’

‘No,’ I said slowly. ‘He didn’t say anything about it.’

‘He doesn’t take kindly to rejection.’

‘Let me get this straight,’ I said. ‘Françoise ended her long-standing relationship with Adam, and a few days later you and she started having an affair?’

‘Yes. And then, if you want me to spell it out for you, a few weeks after that she died up in the mountains because I fucked up with the fixed lines, and Adam saved me, his friend who had usurped him.’

I tried to think of something to say that could be plausibly comforting and gave up.

‘I must be getting back.’

‘Listen, Greg, did Adam know about you and Françoise?’

‘We didn’t tell him at the time. We thought it might be a distraction. It wasn’t as if he was being celibate himself. And afterwards…’ He let the sentence die away.

‘He’s never mentioned it?’

‘No. Are you going to discuss it with him?’

‘No.’

Not that, not anything else either. We were long past the point of telling.

‘Don’t stay silent on my account. It doesn’t matter any more.’

We walked back and I took off his jacket and handed it to him. ‘I’ll catch a bus along here,’ I said. ‘Thanks, Greg.’

‘I’ve not done anything.’

Impulsively, I put my arms around his neck and kissed him on the mouth, feeling the prickle of his beard.

‘Take care of yourself,’ I said.

‘Adam’s a lucky man.’

‘I thought that
I
was supposed to be the lucky one.’

Thirty-three

It had sometimes felt to me as if when I was with Adam I was dazzled so that I couldn’t really see him, let alone analyse or make judgements about him. There was sex, sleep, fragmentary conversation, food and occasional attempts at arrangements, and even those took place in an atmosphere of emergency, as if we were doing what we could before the boat went down, before the fire consumed the house with us inside it. I had just given in helplessly, grateful at first to be free from thought, from chat, from responsibility. The only way of assessing him in any rational way was in the mediated form of what people said about him. This more distant Adam could be a relief, and useful too, like a photograph of the sun at which you could stare directly as a way of learning about that thing above, out of direct vision, burning down on you.

When I got back from seeing Greg, Adam was sitting watching TV. He was smoking and drinking whisky. ‘Where have you been?’ he asked.

‘Work,’ I said.

‘I rang. They said you were out of the office.’

‘A meeting,’ I said vaguely.

The important thing about lying is not to offer unnecessary information that can catch you out. Adam looked round at me, but didn’t reply. There was something wrong about the movement, as if it was just a bit too slow or too fast. He might have been a bit drunk. He was moving between channels, watching a programme for a few minutes, changing to another, watching for a few minutes, changing again.

I remembered the magazine I had borrowed from Bill Levenson.

‘Did you see this?’ I said, holding it up. ‘More stuff about you in it.’

He looked round briefly but didn’t speak. I knew the story of the Chungawat disaster intimately but I wanted to read about it in the light of what I had learned about Adam and Françoise and Greg to see if it was different, so I sat at the kitchen table and leafed impatiently through the ads for running shoes, cologne, fitness machines, Italian suits, pages and pages of male stuff. Then I came to it, a long prominent article called ‘The Death Zone: Dreams and Disaster at 28,000 feet’.

The article was longer and much more detailed than Joanna’s. The author, Anthony Kaplan, had talked to every surviving member of the expedition, including, I saw with a pang, Adam himself. Why did he never tell me these things? It must have been one of those long phone conversations or one of those bar-room meetings that had occupied so much of his time during the previous month or two.

‘I didn’t know you’d talked to this journalist,’ I said, in what I hoped was a light-hearted tone.

‘What’s his name?’ asked Adam, who was refilling his glass.

‘Anthony Kaplan.’

Adam took one sip and then another. He flinched slightly. ‘The guy was a jerk,’ he said.

I felt cheated. It was common enough to know the trivial, mundane details about the life of a friend or colleague, but nothing of their passionate inner life. With Adam that was all I knew. His imagination, his fantasy life, his dreams, but only accidental fragments of what he actually did during his days. So I was hungry for anything about Adam, about his capacity to carry other people’s equipment when they were slowed to a crawl by altitude sickness. Everybody talked about his carefulness, his prudence, his clear-headedness.

There was one new detail concerning Adam. Another expedition member, an interior designer called Laura Tipler, had told Kaplan that she had shared a tent for a few days with Adam on the way up to base camp. That was what Greg must have been referring to when he’d said Adam hadn’t been celibate after Françoise. Then, without any ado, Adam had moved out. To husband his resources, no doubt. I didn’t mind very much. It was all very adult and consensual, with no hard feelings on either side. Tipler told Kaplan that Adam’s mind was evidently elsewhere, on the arrangements for the move up the mountain, the assessment of various risks and the ability of the different expedition members to manage them, but his body had been enough for her. The bitch. She described the episode almost casually to Kaplan, as if it were an optional extra selected from the brochure. But had he slept with absolutely every woman he had ever met? I wondered what he would have thought if I had led a sex life like that.

‘Twenty questions,’ I said. ‘Who’s Laura Tipler?’

Adam thought for a moment then laughed harshly. ‘A bloody liability is what she was.’

‘You shared a tent with her. She says.’

‘What are you saying, Alice? What do you want me to say?’

‘Nothing. It’s just that I keep learning things about you from magazines.’

‘You won’t learn anything about me from that crap.’ He looked cross. ‘Why do you bother with it? Why are you poking around?’

‘I’m not poking around,’ I said warily. ‘I’m interested in your life.’

Adam took another drink. ‘I don’t want you to be interested in my life. I want you to be interested in
me.’

I looked sharply round. Did he know anything? But his attention was back on the television, moving from channel to channel, flick, flick, flick.

I carried on reading. I had hoped, or feared, that there would be some more detail about Adam’s break-up with Françoise and about the tensions there may have been between them on the mountain. But Kaplan only mentioned briefly that they had been a couple and apart from that she barely featured in the article at all until near the end when she had disappeared. The thought had been running in my mind that the two women who had rejected Adam had died. Could it be that he hadn’t made as much effort to rescue Françoise’s group as he had with the others? But it was speedily contradicted by Kaplan’s evocation of what it had been like on the mountain in the storm. Both Greg and Claude Bresson had been out of action. The remarkable thing was not that five of the party died but that anybody at all had survived and that was almost entirely down to the efforts of Adam, going out again and again into the storm. But it nagged away at me and I wondered if that accounted for the composure with which he had recalled that nightmare.

Adam hadn’t said very much, as usual, but at one point Kaplan had asked him if he was driven by the great romantic tradition of British explorers like Captain Scott: ‘Scott died,’ was Adam’s response. ‘And his men with him. My hero is Amundsen. He approached the South Pole as if he were a lawyer drawing up a legal document. It’s easy to gloriously kill the people in your charge. The difficult thing is to make sure the knots are tied properly and bring the people back.’

Kaplan went from that quotation to the problem of the knots that hadn’t stayed tied. As he pointed out, the cruel paradox of the disaster was that, through Greg McLaughlin’s own innovation, there had been no way of dodging responsibility in the aftermath of the expedition. Claude Bresson had been in charge of the red line, Adam had been in charge of the yellow line and Greg had given himself the ultimate responsibility of securing his blue line, the line that would take the expedition up the Gemini Ridge to the col just below the summit.

It was so horribly simple, but just to make it simpler still, a detailed diagram showed the disposition of the blue line on the west ridge and where it had gone astray at the apex so that one group of climbers had missed the line and blundered down the east ridge to their deaths. Poor Greg. I wondered if he had heard of this latest eruption of publicity.

‘Poor Greg,’ I said aloud.

‘Eh?’

‘I said, "Poor Greg." Back in the spotlight again.’

‘Vultures,’ said Adam bitterly.

There was virtually nothing in Kaplan’s article that differed even in emphasis from what I had read in Joanna’s article and, from a more personal perspective, in Klaus’s book. I read through the article a second time looking for anything at all that was different. All I could find was a trivial correction. In Klaus’s book, the climber found barely alive the following morning, mumbling, ‘Help,’ had been Pete Papworth. Kaplan had collated the accounts of everybody involved and had established, for what it was worth, that Papworth had died overnight and it was the German, Tomas Benn, who had been found dying. Big deal. Apart from that, the accounts agreed completely.

I went over and sat on the arm of Adam’s chair, ruffled his hair. He passed his drink to me and I took a sip, passed it back.

‘Do you dwell on it, Adam?’

‘What?’

‘Chungawat. Do you go over and over it in your mind? Think how it might have worked out differently, how the dead people might have been saved or that you might have died?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘I do.’

Adam leaned forward and snapped off the television. The room was suddenly very quiet and I could hear noises from the street, a plane going over. ‘What the fuck for?’

‘The woman you loved died on the mountain. It haunts me.’

Adam’s eyes narrowed. He put his glass down. He raised himself up and took my face in his hands. They were big, very strong. I felt he could snap my head off, if he wanted to. He was looking hard into my eyes. Was he trying to see in?

‘You’re the woman I love,’ he said, without taking his eyes off me. ‘You’re the woman I trust.’