George had woken him early, pulled him from the tent before the rest were up. There wasn’t much time for this. He would be taking Tsering down later, while George would be pushing back up the Col.
After the storm the light was high and bright even through his goggles. The sun would be painful today. It hadn’t been up
long enough yet to turn the snow basin of the Cwm into a heat-box, but it would by afternoon, and his face was already burned and torn. After the confines of the tent, though, the tight, cool air was refreshing.
He felt his limbs loosening, warming. He was enjoying this – the sweep of mountains around them, the brilliance of the sky. The total silence after yesterday’s wind. There was only the sound of his breath. The swish of his boots through the new snow, the crunch of ice below. He thought maybe now he understood why George loved mountains. He would go to more of them, he decided. Everything seemed impossibly perfect and far away. There was just him. And George. And the mountain. He felt the confidence of early morning. They could conquer this thing. They would.
He stopped behind George, who cast about, searching for something. Everest changed all the time, shifted constantly, the drifts and stones of it moving and swirling. He was learning to read his position from the angles of distant ridges, solid lines, like Pumori in front of them. George waved to him over his shoulder and moved down the slope.
There was a splash of colour, washed out, red and blue against the grey and white of the mountain.
Wilson’s body sat just as George had described, cross-legged and patient, facing the summit. His body and face relaxed, frozen in position. His skin marble white, bleached and burnished to porcelain refinement by the sun, the wind, the arid desert conditions of the mountain. A mummy. Wilson’s stomach had been hollowed out by the goraks, the huge, oversized ravens that floated over the lower camps, and his clothing, in tatters, flapped in the brief breaths of wind. The hands in his lap covered the groin, but Sandy could imagine the small, shrivelled organ frozen there.
George stood watching as Sandy dropped to his knees,
gasping into Wilson’s frozen face. Wilson’s eyes were open, milky, iced over.
The boy. Wilson. Sandy hadn’t expected to see so much death. In Spitsbergen there hadn’t been any deaths.
He reached out to touch Wilson’s placid face, his movements slow, measured. He stopped, touched the air around him instead. He didn’t want to wake him. He’d never imagined something so blatant as this, this kind of giving up, giving in, to death.
He gazed up at George, who was staring away, at the ribbon of spindrift that stretched out from the summit. A brushstroke of white on the blue sky.
“He looks so … calm.”
George nodded, pointed. “His tent was just there.”
There was a scrap of material, a stretch of green cloth maybe a hundred feet away from where they were. The storm must have uncovered it. “There was food,” George said. “Water. Some shelter.”
“And he just sat here and died?”
“He wrote in his diary,
This will be the last effort, and I feel successful. Off again, gorgeous day
.”
“Why?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it?”
He thought about George finding Wilson here. Finding his diary, reading it. Thought about being stripped down to this. A body. A few words.
WILL
1 O’CLOCK
A
fter stalking through the old streets, the narrow cart paths that have been here for centuries, shaking off the words, the face, of the woman by the river, I find myself at Will’s door. It’s cool here – the sun barely slipping into the slender passageways – and quiet, as though the buildings and their occupants are accustomed to keeping to themselves.
Of course I have come to Will’s. I’m shaking and I just need to be with someone. Someone who doesn’t need anything from me, want anything. I pound out the rhythm of my thumping heart on Will’s door, the heavy wood of it under my fist and my stinging palms.
The door opens and I collapse into the entryway, propelled by the force of my own desperate fists. I strike Will hard on the chest and he catches me, holds me tight a moment, then pushes me out to arm’s length. There is the flicker of panic – the fear of George’s death written all over his face – and I am already apologizing, pulling back, my hands to my hair, sweeping it back where I’m sure it’s run wild. I’m a selfish fool, coming here like this, sobs still in my throat. He reaches for me.
“What’s wrong? It isn’t …” He doesn’t say your name and
it’s a relief. I don’t want to hear your name right now. It only reminds me of everything I don’t know.
“No, no, no,” I’m saying, but this sounds panicked too.
I shake my head, lift my hands in some kind of apology. “I’m sorry, Will …” There’s a suitcase just inside the door. Its canvas cover is fraying and covered in worn travel stickers, the whole thing dark and stained, like something left too long in the rain. “Are you going somewhere?” My hand is pointing at the suitcase like an accusation. Everyone is leaving.
“What? No. No! It’s there for a friend to borrow.”
His arms are around me again and it’s hard not to want to stay there. It feels different, being in his arms. Will is solid, larger than George. It’s comforting to be held, to be touched. It’s been so long since anyone has touched me besides the children, their hands small and demanding. And then I’m conscious of my body, of it shuddering against him, of the feel of the softness of me against the solidness of him, and he pulls back, or I do. Maybe both of us back away.
“Come upstairs.”
He steps back against the heavy door and ushers me with one arm, up the stairs. At the top there is a mirror in the hallway and, vain creature that I am, I look at myself, and I’m surprised by what I see. My eyes are red, my face pale, my hair has indeed run riot. But it isn’t unattractive – this wild, panicked face. Still, I swallow it all down – the panic, this abandon.
Will doesn’t see me looking at him behind me in the mirror. He is softer than George, his features are easier. Pleasant. Where George’s features are honed to fine edges, can stop you in your tracks, Will’s are less confrontational. More forgiving. He is carrying a book, his finger stuck between the pages where he has been reading. His tie is loose and this intimacy makes me blush more than if he’d not been wearing one at all. He glances into the mirror then and catches my eye. “Tea,” he says. “I’ll make tea.”
Pressing my throbbing hands together, I move to the tidy sitting room he gestures to. “I’m glad you were home.” I try to joke. “Your neighbours might have summoned the police, thinking me a crazy woman.” My voice is too loud. Circling the room, I touch Will’s belongings – the covers of books, stacks of papers, the eyeglasses that he has only started wearing in recent years. There are photographs too. Him and his siblings. His father. They are smart in morning dress, some formal occasion. I admire his orderliness. I run my finger along the spines of books that all have their final pages intact.
I think of the mess in my bedroom at home – the things I allow to pile up the longer I am on my own. Scraps of paper, books, and letters in stacks around my bedroom. A way to make the space mine. I ask Vi to leave all of it be. Before George comes home I’ll tuck everything away. Everything in its place. A place for everything. It is becoming my mantra.
“Yes,” Will calls from the kitchen, startling me back to his sitting room. “It could have been quite the scandal.”
He brings me tea and we sit next to each other on the sofa. He drops two lumps of sugar in my cup and lets them dissolve before he stirs. George doesn’t have that patience; he grinds them instead against the side of the cup with the back of the spoon. An annoying habit. One that I wish I’d been able to gripe about this morning. “George, please. It sets my teeth on edge. Stir it like a reasonable human being.” And he would have ground them all the more, then reached for my cup and done the same.
“You don’t even need the sugar,” he’d say. “Too sweet already.”
The spoon makes a quiet clinking against the china, and when Will hands me my tea the warmth of it floods the whole of me, even though I didn’t know I was cold. It’s bitter and not quite hot enough. I recognize the china. Holding the teacup towards Will like a salute, I ask, “Is this because I’m here? You don’t use these to entertain, do you?”
“Of course. I don’t think I drink out of anything else.”
I had meant the tea set for George. A gift for when he returned from Everest the first time. Painting them was a task to keep me occupied during his months away. I started them the week he left and agonized over them, hoping for uniform perfection. On each piece there is the faintest line of a mountain in green against a grey-blue background. Somehow, after they’d been fired, they’d seemed too delicate for George. He sees the world in grand views, sweeping vistas. In bold archetypes where everything is clear. Right and wrong. Duty and disregard. Not me. I am always too distracted by tiny details – the warm pressure of Will’s hand on my back as he walked me up the stairs. The feel of a name in my mouth.
The restraint of the image on the cup made me think of Will, the consistency of the line my paintbrush made over and over. There is an anticipation to the line – it reads like a pause, a foot about to step into nothingness, above cold water.
“George?” Will pulls me from my thoughts. “He’s all right, then?”
“I assume so.” I laugh, nervous and high. “It’s all so stupid, Will. I just keep hoping, thinking.
Today. Maybe it will be today
. It’s as if the words are running through my head on a ticker tape.”
“I know.” He lets the lull stretch out between us. There is a rattling, like a storm tapping at the window, and Will is taking the cup and saucer from my hands. “Do you want to tell me what happened?”
“No. Not yet. It’s all too embarrassing.” The woman, sitting on the wall, her bared teeth flashing at me. Her laugh. Beside her the soldier and his yellowed skin, papery, dry. The way he’d looked at both of us as though we were exotic creatures from somewhere far away. But it was he who was from a different world altogether. I could see the alienation in his eyes. How he’d never really come back. The woman next to him didn’t
see any of this at all. “Tell me what you’ve been doing,” I insist to Will.
“Oh, not so much. A letter to my father, well, a report really. And staring at the painting I’ve been working on.”
“And is it going?” I don’t ask to see it. Will keeps his paintings to himself until he’s ready to unveil them, which he does with a small ceremony – a certain type of Spanish wine, a particular dark cloth over the painting. First we drink and then he reveals it to us. It is always us. Sometimes there may be one or two others, but George and I are always there.
“It is. But slowly.” He doesn’t want to talk about it, so I don’t push. “How about you? You hadn’t even unpacked your paints when we last talked about it. Tell me you have by now.”
I shrug my shoulders, an apology, an explanation. “I’ll unpack them as soon as I get home.”
“You should. It might do you good before this evening.” Will’s dark eyes are wet with concern. His hair is close cropped. Neat. Everything in its place.
“Shall we make a battle plan, then?”
“For Hinks?” His name is a hiss, conjures someone long and thin, tapering fingers that could dig into anything. The exact opposite of how he is.
Since I first heard of Everest, Hinks has been a stone in my shoe. A constant irritation. He is all accusations and demands – accusing me of
withholding information
from him and demanding copies of George’s letters in case there is something of import written there.
You must understand, Mrs. Mallory, your husband is on official Crown business. We have the right to know everything he has written
. Though he feels no such obligation to share anything with me. In all likelihood, the
Times
will have news before I do.
Will talks and fills the space between us – talks about Hinks and how he will handle him this evening. I get up and wander around the room. When I linger too long in front of a book on
birds, he tells me it’s the guide he will take with him the next time he goes to France. When he goes climbing again. “Don’t worry,” he is saying. “I won’t go until George gets home.”
George’s name hangs between us.
“Do you think I’ve been a good wife, Will?”
It feels as though someone else is making me ask the question, as if I’m watching myself from afar.
“Of course,” Will begins automatically.
“It’s just that I’ve never been good at anything.” I turn away to the window, look towards the shops down the road where it widens. Women scurry from the shops, all of them, I suppose, with families to attend to, husbands at home. I wonder if Edith has finished the shopping for dinner. What she has bought. How much it will cost me. She knows all the vendors, takes it as a point of pride to haggle and get the best bargain. Behind me Will is beginning to object – to list my qualities: kindness, honesty, and so on.
“I was terrible in school. My papers wandered everywhere. Geography and poetry mixed up with Latin conjugations.” I glance at the papers on Will’s desk, hoping for a letter. I don’t see anything and I know if there was one Will would have shown me. The clock in the hallway strikes. “Once, one of the mistresses returned my French paper to me with a rebuke. The middle of it was a muddle of Italian. Italian! Not even the right language. I couldn’t keep anything straight.
“It should have been me that was kept home from school after Mother died. Instead of Marby. I would have loved to take care of Papa and not have to worry about school. Taking care of people I was good at. That’s why I thought I could be a good wife. I thought I would be good at taking care of George.”
“You do. You are,” he protests.
“I was so terrible, before he left. It was so hard.” My throat aches and the room dissolves through my tears.
“No, Ruth.” Will stands, comes towards me, but I back away. He stands in the centre of the room, unmoored for a moment, then returns to the sofa.