Killing Me Softly (23 page)

Thirty-four

‘It’s Bill Levenson for you.’ Claudia held out the phone with a sympathetic look on her face, as if she were handing me over to a hangman.

I took the phone from her with a grimace. ‘Hello, Alice here.’

‘Okay, Alice.’ He sounded jovial for a man who was about to downsize me. ‘You’re on.’

‘What?’ I raised my eyebrows to Claudia who was hovering by the door, waiting to see my face collapse.

‘You’re on,’ he repeated. ‘Do it. Drakloop mark IV, she’s your baby.’

‘But…’

‘You haven’t had second thoughts, have you, Alice?’

‘Not at all.’

I hadn’t had any thoughts at all. Drakloop had been the last thing on my mind in the previous couple of days. Even now, I could barely summon up the energy to sound interested.

‘Then you can do whatever you have to do. Make a list of your requirements and your schedule and e-mail them to me. I’ve banged heads together, and they’re ready. Now, I’ve given you the ball, Alice. Run with it.’

‘Fine,’ I said. If he wanted me to sound excited or grateful, he was going to be disappointed. ‘What’s happening to Mike and Giovanna and the others?’

‘Leave the fun stuff to me.’

‘Ah.’

‘Well done, Alice. I’m sure you are going to make a great success of Drakloop IV.’

I left work later than usual, so that I didn’t have to meet Mike. Later, I told myself, I would take him out and we would get drunk together and curse the senior management and their grubby machinations, as if we were both quite untainted by their ways. But not now. I had other things to worry about, and I could only care about Mike in a provisional sort of way. That side of my life was in abeyance. I brushed my hair and tied it in a knot at the back of my head, then I picked up my overflowing in-tray and dumped all of its contents in the bin.

Klaus was waiting by the revolving doors, eating a doughnut and reading yesterday’s paper, which he folded away when he saw me.

‘Alice!’ He kissed me on both cheeks, then looked at me searchingly. ‘You’re looking a bit tired. Are you all right?’

‘What are you doing here?’

To his credit, he looked slightly embarrassed. ‘Adam asked me if I would see you home. He was worried about you.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with me. It’s a waste of your time.’

He tucked my arm through his. ‘It’s a pleasure. I wasn’t doing anything anyway. You can give me a cup of tea at your flat.’

I hesitated, showing my obvious reluctance.

‘I promised Adam,’ said Klaus, and started to tow me towards the underground station.

‘I want to walk.’

‘Walk? From here?’

This was gelling irritating. ‘There’s nothing wrong with me, and I’m walking home. Coming?’

‘Adam always says that you’re stubborn.’

‘It’s spring. Look at the sky. We can walk through the West End and Hyde Park. Or you can fuck off and I can go alone.’

‘You win, as always.’

‘So what’s Adam doing that he couldn’t come himself to accompany me?’ I asked, after we had crossed the road, the very place I had first set eyes on Adam, and he on me.

‘I think he was going to meet up with some cameraman or other who might climb on the expedition.’

‘Have you seen the piece on Chungawat in
Guy
magazine?’

‘I talked to Kaplan on the phone. He sounded like a pro.’

‘He doesn’t say anything much new.’

‘That’s what he told me.’

‘Except for one thing. You said the man who survived overnight and was found dying and calling out for help was Pete Papworth, and Kaplan says it was actually Tomas Benn.’

‘The German guy?’ Klaus was frowning, as if trying to remember, then he smiled. ‘Kaplan must have got it right. I wasn’t exactly
compos mentis
at the time.’

‘And you didn’t mention Laura Tipler sharing Adam’s tent.’

He looked at me strangely, without breaking his stride. ‘It seemed like a violation of privacy.’

‘What was she like?’

Klaus’s expression became faintly disapproving, as if I were breaking some kind of unspoken rule. Then he said, ‘It was before he met you, Alice.’

‘I know. So I’m not allowed to know anything about her?’ He didn’t reply. ‘Or about Françoise? Or any of them?’ I stopped myself. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to go on about it like this.’

‘Debbie said you were dwelling on things a bit.’

‘Did she? She had a fling with him once, too.’ My voice sounded unnaturally high-pitched. I was beginning to alarm myself.

‘God, Alice.’

‘Maybe we shouldn’t walk. Maybe I’ll get a taxi home. I feel a bit tired.’

Without a word, Klaus stepped out into the road and hailed a passing black cab. He handed me in, then stepped in after me in spite of my protestations.

‘Sorry,’ I said again.

We sat in uncomfortable silence for a while, as the cab edged its way through the evening traffic.

‘You have no reason to be jealous,’ he said at last.

‘I’m not jealous. I’m sick and tired of secrets and mysteries, and finding out about Adam from articles I read in papers, or from little things people let slip when they’re not thinking. It’s like being ambushed all the time. I never know which direction the surprise is going to come from.’

‘From what I hear,’ said Klaus, ‘the surprises aren’t exactly springing out at you. It’s more like you are rooting around trying to find them.’ He laid a warm, callused hand over mine. ‘Trust him,’ he said. ‘Stop tormenting yourself.’

I laughed, and then the laugh turned into a hiccuping sob. ‘Sorry,’ I said again. ‘I’m not usually like this.’

‘Perhaps you should get some help,’ said Klaus.

I was aghast. ‘You think I’m going mad? Is that what you think?’

‘No, Alice, just that it might help to talk to an outsider about all of this. Look. Adam’s a buddy, but I know what a stubborn bastard he can be. If you’re having problems, get help to sort them out.’

‘Maybe you’re right.’ I sat back in the taxi and closed my stinging eyes. I felt bone-tired and horribly dreary. ‘Maybe I’ve been a fool.’

‘We’re all fools sometimes,’ he said. He looked relieved at my sudden acquiescence.

When the taxi stopped, I didn’t ask him in for the cup of tea he had promised himself, and I don’t think he minded at all. He hugged me at the front door and strode rapidly down the road, coat flapping. I trudged up the stairs, dispirited and somewhat ashamed of myself. I went to the bathroom, stared into the mirror and didn’t like what I saw there. Then I gazed around the flat, which was as I had left it that morning. There were dishes that had been in the sink for several days, drawers left open, jars of honey and jam with their lids off, bread going stale on the cutting board, a couple of filled bin-bags stacked by the door, crumbs and dirt on the linoleum floor. In the living room, there were old mugs everywhere, newspapers and magazines on the floor together with emptied bottles of whisky and wine. A bunch of daffodils were shrivelled and brown in a jam jar. The carpet looked as if it had not been vacuumed for weeks. Come to think of it, we hadn’t changed the sheets or done the laundry for weeks either.

‘Shit,’ I said in disgust. ‘I look like shit and this place looks like shit. Right.’

I rolled up my sleeves and started in the kitchen. I was going to get my life under control. With every surface I cleaned, I felt better. I washed the dishes, threw away all the stale or rotting food, all the candle stubs, all the junk mail, and I scrubbed the floor with hot soapy water. I gathered all the bottles and the old papers and threw them away, not even stopping to read last week’s news. I threw away Sherpa’s bowl, trying not to remember the last sight I had had of him. I stripped the bed and put the sheets in the corner of the room, ready to go to the laundry. I put shoes into pairs, books into neat piles. I cleaned the tidemark from the bath and the limescale from the shower. I added the towels to the laundry pile.

Then I made myself a cup of tea and started on the cardboard boxes under our high bed, where Adam and I had got into the habit of tossing anything we weren’t actually going to deal with but didn’t want to throw away just yet. For a second, I considered simply putting them outside by the dustbins without even going through them. But then I saw a scrap of paper with Pauline’s work number scribbled on it. I mustn’t throw that away. I started to plough through the old bills, the new bills, the postcards, the scientific journals I hadn’t yet read, the photostats of Drakloop material, the scraps of paper with messages I had left for Adam, or Adam had left for me. ‘Back at midnight; don’t go to sleep,’ I read, and tears pricked my eyelids again. Empty envelopes. Unopened envelopes addressed to the owner of the flat. I took them over to the writing desk in the corner of the bedroom and began to sort them into three piles. One to discard, one to deal with at once, and one to put back in the box. One of the piles slipped over and several of the papers fell down behind the desk. I tried to reach down after them but the gap was too narrow. I was tempted to leave them there but, no, I was going to clear up everything in the flat. Even the invisible bits. So, with an immense effort, I pulled the desk out from the wall. I retrieved the papers and, of course, there was the other stuff that gets stuck behind desks: a shrivelled apple-core, a paper clip, a pen top, an old scrap of envelope. I looked at the envelope to see if it could just be thrown away. It was addressed to Adam. Then I turned it round and all at once I felt I had been punched so hard in the stomach that I could only breathe with difficulty.

‘Had a bad day?’ I read. It was Adam’s scrawl, in thick black ink. Then, again, on the next line down, ‘Had a hard day, Adam?’ Then: ‘Hard day, Adam? Take a bath.’ Finally, underneath was written in familiar capital letters:

HARD DAY
.

The words were written repeatedly like an infant’s writing exercise:
HARD DAY HARD DAY HARD DAY HARD DAY HARD DAY

Then:
ADAM ADAM ADAM ADAM ADAM ADAM ADAM

And then, finally:
HARD DAY ADAM? TAKE A BATH
.

I mustn’t be mad. I mustn’t be obsessive. I tried and tried to think of the sensible, reassuring explanation. Adam might have been doodling, thinking about the note, writing its words over and over. But that wasn’t what was on the paper. This wasn’t doodling. It was Adam imitating the handwriting of the previous notes – of Tara’s notes – until he got it right, so that the link between Tara and the harassment would be broken. Now I knew. I knew about Sherpa and I knew about everything. I knew what I had known for a long time. The one truth I couldn’t stand.

I picked up the envelope. My hands were steady. I hid it in my knicker drawer, with the letter from Adele, and then went back to the bedside and put everything I had taken out and sorted back into the boxes. I pushed the boxes back under the bed, and even rubbed away the depressions they had made on the carpet.

I heard the footsteps coming up the stairs and went, unhurriedly, into the kitchen. He came in and stood over me. I kissed him on the lips and put my arms tightly around him. ‘I’ve spring-cleaned,’ I said, and my voice sounded perfectly ordinary.

He kissed me back and looked into my eyes and I didn’t flinch or turn away.

Thirty-five

Adam knew. Or he knew something. Because he was always around, always had his eye on me. A detached observer might have thought it the same as the beginning of our relationship when neither of us could physically bear to be apart from the other. Now it was more like a very conscientious doctor who couldn’t let an unstable patient out of his sight for a moment because of the suspicion that she might do herself harm.

It wouldn’t be accurate to say that Adam followed me everywhere I went. He didn’t accompany me to work every single day, nor was he there to meet me every day. He wasn’t phoning me there all the time. But it happened enough so that I knew that any more of my private investigations would be risky. He was around, and I was sure that there were times when he was near and I didn’t notice. Once or twice, walking along the street, I would look round feeling that I was being watched or that I had glimpsed someone, but I never saw him. But he could still have been there. It didn’t matter anyway. I had the feeling that I knew everything I needed to know. It was all there in my head. I just had to think about it all. I had to get the events straight.

Greg was going to fly out to the States for a few months and, on the Saturday before he left, a couple of friends arranged a party to give him a send-off. It rained almost the whole day and Adam and I didn’t get out of bed until almost noon. Then Adam suddenly got dressed, briskly, and said he had to go out for a couple of hours. He left me with a cup of tea and a hard kiss on the mouth. I lay in bed and I made myself think about it all – clearly, point by point, as if Adam was a problem I had to solve. All the elements were there, I just needed to get them in the right order. I lay under the duvet, hearing the rain pattering on the roof, the sound of cars accelerating through puddles, and I thought about everything until my head hurt.

In my mind I was going over and over the events on Chungawat, the storm, the altitude sickness of Greg and Claude Bresson, the extraordinary achievement of Adam in directing the climbers down the Gemini Ridge, the failure of the guiding line and the consequent disastrous wrong turning of the five climbers: Françoise Colet, Pete Papworth, Caroline Frank, Alexis Hartounian and Tomas Benn. Françoise Colet, who had just broken off with Adam, and who had been conducting an affair with Greg.

Adele Blanchard had broken off with Adam. How would the Adam I knew respond to being left? He would have wanted her to die and she disappeared. Françoise Colet broke off with Adam. He would have wanted her to die and she died on the mountain. That didn’t mean he killed her. If you wanted someone to die and they died, did that mean you bore some responsibility, even if you hadn’t caused it? I went over and over it. What if he didn’t try hard enough to rescue her? But, then, as everybody else said, he had already done more than anybody else could have done in the same circumstances. What if he put her group last on the list of priorities while he saved the lives of other people? Did that make him just a bit responsible for her death and the deaths of the other members of the expedition? But somebody had had to assess priorities. Klaus, for example, couldn’t be blamed for the deaths because he hadn’t been in a condition even to rescue himself, let alone decide the order in which other people were rescued. It was all stupid. Adam couldn’t have known about the storm anyway.

Yet there was something, like a little itch that is so tiny you can’t even locate it exactly, you can’t decide whether it is on the surface of the skin or somewhere underneath but it won’t let you relax. Maybe there was some technical mountaineering detail, but none of the experts had mentioned anything like that. The only relevant technical detail was that Greg’s fixed line had come loose at the crucial point, but that had affected all the descending groups equally. It was just a matter of chance that it was Françoise’s group who took the wrong route down. Something wouldn’t leave me alone. Why couldn’t I stop thinking about it?

I gave up. I had a long shower, put on some jeans and one of Adam’s shirts, and made myself a piece of toast. I didn’t have time to eat it because the doorbell rang. I wasn’t expecting anybody and I certainly didn’t want to see anybody, so at first I didn’t answer. But it rang again – longer this time – and I ran down the stairs.

A middle-aged woman was standing outside under a large black umbrella. She was quite stout, with short, greying hair, wrinkles around her eyes, and running down from her nose to the corners of her mouth. I thought at once that she looked unhappy. I had never seen her before.

‘Yes?’ I said.

‘Adam Tallis?’ she said. She had a thick accent.

‘I’m sorry, he’s not here at the moment.’

She looked puzzled.

‘Not here,’ I repeated, slowly, watching her stricken expression and the slump of her shoulders. ‘Can I help you?’

She shook her head, then laid her hand on her mackintoshed chest. ‘Ingrid Benn,’ she said. ‘I am the wife of Tomas Benn.’ I had to strain to understand her, and talking seemed to require an immense effort. ‘Sorry, my English not…’ She made a helpless gesture. ‘I want to speak with Adam Tallis.’

I opened the door wide, then. ‘Come in,’ I said. ‘Please come in.’ I took the umbrella from her and closed it, shaking off the drops of water. She stepped inside and I shut the door firmly behind her.

I remembered now that several weeks ago she had written to Adam and to Greg, asking if she could come and see them to talk about her husband’s death. She sat at the kitchen table, in her smart, sensible suit, with her neat brogues, holding a cup of tea but not drinking it, and gazed at me helplessly, as if I might be able to provide some kind of answer, although like Tomas she spoke almost no English, and I knew no German at all.

‘I’m so sorry,’ I said. ‘About your husband. I really am sorry.’

She nodded at me and started to cry. Tears streamed down her cheeks and she didn’t wipe them away but sat patiently, a waterfall of sorrow. There was something rather impressive about her mute, unresisting grief. She put no obstacles in its way but let it flow over her. I handed her a tissue and she held it in her hand as if she didn’t know its function. ‘Why?’ she said eventually. ‘Why? Tommy say…’ She searched for the word then gave up.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, very slowly. ‘Adam is not here.’

It didn’t seem to matter all that much. She took out a cigarette and I fetched a saucer for her and she smoked and cried and talked in fragments of English but also in German. I just sat and looked into her large sad brown eyes, shrugging, nodding. Then gradually she subsided and we sat for a few moments in silence. Had she been to see Greg yet? The image of them together was not appealing. The article on the disaster in
Guy
magazine was open on the table and Ingrid caught sight of it and pulled it across. She looked at the group photograph of the expedition and she touched the face of her dead husband. She looked at me with the hint of a smile. ‘Tomas,’ she said, almost inaudibly.

She turned the page and looked at the drawing of the mountain, which showed the arrangement of fixed lines. She started jabbing at it. ‘Tommy say
fine,
he say. No problem.’

Then she switched to German again and I was lost, until I heard a familiar word, repeated several times. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Help.’ Ingrid looked puzzled. I sighed. ‘Help,’ I said slowly. ‘Tomas’s last word. Help.’

‘No, no,’ she said insistently.
‘Gelb.’

‘Help.’

‘No, no.
Gelb.’
She pointed at the magazine.
‘Rot.
Here.
Blau.
Here.
Und gelb.’

I looked blank.
‘Rot
is, er, red, yes? And
blau
is…’

‘Blue.’

‘And
gelb
…’

She looked around the flat, pointed to a cushion on the sofa.

‘Yellow,’ I said.

‘Yes, yellow.’

I couldn’t help laughing at the mix-up and Ingrid smiled sadly as well. And then it was as if a dial had been turned in my head; the last number in a combination lock ratcheting into place. The doors swung open. Yellow.
Gelb.
Yes. He wouldn’t have called out in English as he lay dying, would he? Of course not. Not the man who had hampered the expedition by not knowing a word of English. His last word had been a colour. Why? What had he been trying to say? Outside, the rain fell steadily. Then I smiled again. How could I have been so stupid?

‘Please?’ She was staring at me.

‘Mrs Benn,’ I said. ‘Ingrid. I am so sorry.’

‘Yes.’

‘I think you should go now.’

‘Go?’

‘Yes.’

‘But…’

‘Adam cannot help.’

‘But…’

‘Go home to your children,’ I said. I had no idea if she had any, but she looked like a mother to me, a bit like my own mother in fact.

She stood up obediently and gathered her mackintosh.

‘I’m so sorry,’ I said again, thrust her umbrella into her hand, and she left.

Greg was drunk when we arrived. He hugged me a little too boisterously and then hugged Adam as well. It was the same old crowd: Daniel, Deborah, Klaus, other climbers. It struck me that they were like soldiers home on leave, meeting each other at selected refuges because they knew that civilians would never really understand what they had gone through. It was an in-between place and an in-between time, just to be got through until they returned to the real life of extremity and danger. I wondered, not for the first time, what they thought of me. Was I just a folly to them, like one of those mad flings soldiers had on weekend leave in the Second World War?

The atmosphere was fairly jovial. If Adam looked a little distracted, then maybe that was just my over-sensitivity and he was soon caught up in the conversation. But there was no doubt about Greg: he looked dreadful. He drifted from group to group, but didn’t say very much. He constantly refilled his glass. After a bit I found myself alone with him.

‘I don’t feel I really belong,’ I said uneasily.

‘Nor do I,’ said Greg. ‘Look. It’s stopped raining. Let me show you Phil and Marjorie’s garden.’

The party was at the house of an old climbing friend who had given it up after college and gone into the City. While his friends were still vagrants, drifting around the world, raising money here and there, snuffling out sponsorship, Phil had this large beautiful house just off Ladbroke Grove. We walked outside. The grass was damp and I felt my feet getting cold and wet but it was good to be outside. We walked to the low wall at the far end of the garden and looked over at the house on the other side. I turned back. I could see Adam through the window on the first floor in a group of people. Once or twice he glanced at us. Greg and I raised our glasses to him. He raised his own glass back at us.

‘I like this,’ I said. ‘I like it when I know that this evening is lighter than yesterday evening and tomorrow evening will be lighter than today.’

‘If Adam weren’t standing there looking, I’d feel like kissing you, Alice,’ Greg said. ‘I mean, I feel like kissing you, but if Adam weren’t looking then I
would kiss
you.’

‘Then I’m glad he’s standing there, Greg.’ I said. ‘Look.’ I fluttered my hand in front of his face displaying my wedding ring. ‘Trust, eternal fidelity, that sort of thing.’

‘Sorry, I know that.’ Greg looked morose again. ‘You know the
Titanic?’

‘I’ve heard of it,’ I said, with a thin smile, aware that I was stuck with a very drunk Greg.

‘Do you know… ?’ Then he stopped. ‘Do you know that no officer who survived the
Titanic
ever rose to command a ship?’

‘No, I didn’t know that.’

‘Bad luck, you see. Bad on the C V. As for the captain, he was lucky that he went down with it. Which is what captains are supposed to do. You know why I’m going to the States?’

‘A climb?’

‘No, Alice,’ he said, too vigorously. ‘No. I’m going to wind up the company. That’s it.
Finito.
A line drawn in the sand. I shall be searching for a different line of work. At least Captain Ahab went down with the whale. People under my care died and it was my fault and I’m finished.’

‘Greg,’ I said, ‘you’re not. I mean it wasn’t.’

‘What do you mean?’ he asked.

I looked around. Adam was still up there. Mad as it might be, drunk as he was now, I had to tell Greg before he went away. Whatever else I did or didn’t do, I owed this to him. I’d probably never have the chance again. Perhaps I thought, too, that with Greg I would have an ally, that I wouldn’t be so alone if I told him. I had the crazy hope that he would snap out of his drunken, maudlin state and come to my rescue.

‘Did you read Klaus’s book?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he said, raising his glass of vodka.

‘Don’t,’ I said, stopping him. ‘Don’t drink any more. I want you to concentrate on what I’m saying. You must know that when the missing party on Chungawat were brought down to the camp, one of them was just about alive. Do you remember which one?’

Greg’s face had an expression of stony gloom. ‘I wasn’t exactly conscious at the time. It was Peter Papworth, wasn’t it? Calling for help, the poor bastard. The help that I failed to give him.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘That was Klaus’s mistake. It wasn’t Papworth. It was Tomas Benn.’

‘Oh, well,’ said Greg. ‘We were none of us at our best. Down the hatch.’

‘And what was Benn’s principal characteristic?’

‘He was a crap climber.’

‘No, you told me yourself. He didn’t speak a word of English.’

‘So?’

‘Help. Help. Help. That’s what they heard him say as he was dying, slipping into a coma. A funny time to start speaking English.’

Greg shrugged. ‘Perhaps he said it in German.’

‘The German for help is
hilfe.
That doesn’t sound very similar.’

‘Perhaps it was somebody else.’

‘It wasn’t somebody else. The magazine article quotes three different people who reported his final words. Two Americans and an Australian.’

‘So why did they report hearing that?’

‘They reported it because that’s what they expected him to say. But I don’t think it’s what he said.’