Above All Things (39 page)

“Mr. Odell,” his mum interjected, “we appreciate what it is you’re trying to do for Sandy. But he needs to finish his studies. That should be his first priority. He’s too young. It’s too dangerous.”

“I understand your reluctance, Mrs. Irvine, Mr. Irvine.” Odell set down his tea.

His mum had used the good china and they were sitting in the front room, not in the kitchen, where everyday visitors such as Mrs. Walker, the widow next door, were entertained. Sandy had known his mum would be resistant, but he’d hoped Odell could smooth the way.

“But surely Sandy proved himself in Spitsbergen. The expedition needs a man like him. The Empire needs men like him.”

“Mr. Odell, the Empire used up all the men like him.” Her voice was quiet, and he could hear Odell shift on the stuffed settee.

He wished they’d stop referring to him in the third person. It made him feel as though he wasn’t even there, a ghost.

“The college said I could go, Mum. I’ll only miss one term. Maybe a bit of another one. I’ll make it up. I’ll still get my first.”

“And think of the opportunities,” Odell said. “He’ll see the world. Adventure. Discipline. Leadership. When he comes back, he’ll be in demand for lectures, for future expeditions. We’re a proud nation of explorers, Mrs. Irvine. You know that.”

“And what if something happens to him? Can you promise me he’ll come back? Safe and whole?”

“I can promise I’ll do my best. After all, I’ve already brought him back to you once before.”

When Sandy returned to the sitting room after seeing Odell out, his mother was piling the tea things on the tray. The tray shook in her hands as she lifted it, the teacups rattling. She
stopped in the doorway and spoke without turning around to look at him. “I don’t think you should go. I don’t want you to. That’s all I’ll say. You’ll make your own choice, but I don’t want you to go. It won’t be on me.”

But now, now she’d be so proud. He hadn’t just come to Everest, he was going to the top of it.

Sandy bent down and picked up a handful of crumbling stone. He’d find the fossils Odell had been hoping for. The stones in his hands slipped through his gloved fingers, bounced off the mountain, fractured, and disappeared. There were no fossils. Not here. Odell was wrong. The mountain had been here forever.

There were tugs at his waist, sharp and staccato. He grasped the rope and turned up the slope to where George stood forty feet above him. The rope played out between the two of them. George motioned at him, waving him up the slope. He started to move again.

He should check the time. They’d set checkpoints yesterday – the ridge by eight. The Second Step by noon. The summit by three. Setting one foot in front of the other, he followed George’s narrow diagonal path. The world dropped away to his right, and he stretched his left arm out so his hand grazed the face of the mountain rising up beside him. He placed each foot carefully, feeling the slip of the hobnails. It would take only one misstep and he would be hurtling down the slope, turtled on the oxygen pack. We could race, he thought, laughing, all the way to the bottom. Maybe they could just descend that way. Be back in no time at all. He’d have to tell George that. He’d think it was funny.

Out of the corner of his eye there was a flicker of green, the same colour as Marjory’s dressing gown. But when he turned his head there was nothing, just the vertical drop of the rock face. Nothing green. Not anywhere.

WHEN HE MADE
the ridge, George could see in all directions – for the first time he looked down the south side of the mountain, tried to see what the route would have been like from there. Ahead of him the thin line of the ridge stretched out to the first of the three stone steps.

“It’s practically … ten o’clock, George,” Sandy said. His mask dangled from one side of his fur-lined cap as he drank from his canteen. They’d been climbing for more than four hours. “You said … we should … be here by eight.”

“Got off late. Making up time. We’re fine. Still fine.” It was much too soon to give in. They’d barely even started. From here it would be easy to follow the clean line of the ridge to the summit. There was no finding the route from here. There was only the Second Step ahead. “We’ll make it,” he said.

George stood and climbed from where they had been resting, almost hidden from the wind. At a height of more than 28,000 feet, the ridge was a knife blade that plunged away on either side of him. Out ahead were the snow cornices, whipped and moulded by the wind that swept along the ridge. It was impossible to tell where the mountain ended, where the sky began. Sandy followed. George was confident he had made the right choice. Sandy had been moving well to here. If he kept him moving, he’d be fine.

He started up; Sandy would follow.

“Well done, Georgie-boy. I was never able to get up this high.”

“I know. I’m sorry, Traf.”

It had been his brother’s great joke, how George had to climb to get to these heights. Trafford just hopped into a plane.

“I mean, if you want to take the hard road …” Trafford had said the last time he saw him. They’d been talking of the Alps, the Pyrenees. Trafford wondered what it would be like to fly
low over them. Joked he would meet him at the top of Mont Blanc someday, much less winded than George would be.

George reached out to touch the wings pinned on the khaki wool of Trafford’s lapels. “Yes, well, any old fool can take the easy way up.”

“Easy?” Trafford laughed. God, how he missed his laugh. “George, you would lose your lunch before we’d been up a quarter-hour. Easy!”

“Is that so? Shall we make it interesting?”

“A wager? Yes. I’ll take you and your mechanically narrow little brain up, and I’ll let you take me climbing. See who takes to what better, shall we?”

“I’m not sure we can get your lazy buttocks up that high without an airplane.”

“So you won’t take the wager? See who can get higher? See who’s better?” It was an old competition, one they’d fought regularly.

“No. It’s a deal. After the war.”

“After the war.”

They shook hands.

And then Trafford was killed during the war. “You would have been a terrible flyer,” Trafford told him now. “But you are good at this.” There was a pause. “Of course you would be. All the time you spent off on your adventures. You always did whatever you wanted.”

“That’s not fair, Traf. You had your own adventures.”

“But none of mine resulted in my getting sent home from the battlefield, did they? You didn’t even have to shoot yourself in the foot. You just tumbled from a sandstone wall that you shouldn’t have been climbing in the first place. No, you left the real fighting, the dying, to the rest of us. To me.”

George stopped on the ridge. His blood itched, cold in his veins, in his throat and lungs. All around him were lower peaks,
their white caps spreading out to the horizon in every direction. As he climbed, he belayed the rope around rock outcroppings, looping over boulders and stones in the hope that it would stop a fall. Behind him, Sandy untangled it and followed him. They negotiated the space between them, the ridge at their feet. Small cascades of rock and ice rained down with each footstep.

When he looked around, he was struck by the high contrast of the peaks around him against the deep blue of the sky, everything cast in sharp relief. No one had seen this before. No one had ever been this high. Only him. And Sandy. He had to take a photograph. The entire world was below him, bright and sharp.

As he dug into his windproofs for the camera, his body was pulled down against the ridge, landing badly, his left arm caught under him. He scrambled to hold the rope against gravity and the angle of the mountain. Thirty feet down, Sandy had slipped, was scrambling for his feet on snow. George could see that he wasn’t in any immediate danger, but his movements were panicked.

Finally Sandy righted himself and George collapsed back onto the ridge. His wrist throbbed where he’d landed on it. His watch was broken, the glass covering on its face shattered and pressed into his skin. He took it off, slipped it into his pocket. On his exposed skin, the blood was a dark sludge, almost black. It moved slowly, oozed.

He watched it clot in the thin air.

HE COULD HAVE
died.

He could have bloody died. Sandy stared down the mountain but couldn’t see past his mask, past his goggles. It looked as though he were standing on nothing.

He tugged at the rope and after a beat there was a reassuring
tug back. He turned carefully, to see George slumped on the ridge ahead of him, maybe thirty feet away. That was it. That was all that held him to the mountain. George and their gentleman’s belay. His heart pounded at his temples. He cursed into his mask.

“Just don’t take a tumble off that mountain,” Marjory had said with a wink. “What would I ever do, if you didn’t come back?”

It had all seemed such a lark then. Such an impossibility. How could he just go back to his regular life, to the way things had been?
I’ve seen a man die
, he’d written to Dick after Lapkha’s death. He’d meant to send it, but it sounded so melodramatic. Dick wouldn’t understand. How could he? And now he’d almost died himself. He tried to move but couldn’t. His skin buzzed all over him. He wanted to vomit.

“You’ll have to make your own decision, Sandy.” Somervell’s voice was in his head. “What it’s worth to you.”

He moved his feet upward, each step an effort. One, then the other.

He tried to keep his eye on George, who was standing now, stamping his feet, his arms hugged to his chest. But just past him on the snow slope there was someone else. A woman, tangled in the snow as if in bed linens. He tried to point to her, but his arms felt as heavy as his legs. She rolled away from him, her white shoulders disappearing into snow.

George pulled off his mask as he neared. “You’re all right,” he said. It was an instruction. An order. For the first time Sandy imagined George in his officer’s uniform, cajoling frightened soldiers, bullying them up over the top. He must have done that. Sandy nodded.

“No one’s ever made it this high, Sandy. No one. We’re the first.”

Around him the world seemed to move, the peaks and clouds drifting on some kind of current. He was at sea. He turned back
to George, who stepped backwards, surefooted, took a photograph of him, then folded the camera away. He was favouring his left hand. “Are you all right?” There was blood on George’s cuff.

“No. I’m fine. The cold’s good for it.”

Sandy checked his watch. “I think it’s time, George.”

“No.” George sounded genuinely surprised. “We can still make it.”

“Of course. But the gas.” Sandy said, gesturing over his shoulder. “The canister will be almost empty. Time to switch them.”

George checked his own, empty wrist. It was bruising slightly. “Right. Right.”

They stood looking at each other until George turned him around by the shoulders. Sandy tried to focus on his feet, on the ridge of snow and ice, through the long beat of suffocation, his lungs gulping for air. Then a release on his shoulders before the gas flowed again. His vision cleared and he inhaled long and deep. George dropped the tank beside him. The tank slid; slowly at first, and then picked up speed as it plunged down the south side of the mountain, into Nepal. They weren’t supposed to go there.

The border seemed so arbitrary now. What could it possibly matter which side of the ridge they stood on? No, this place was theirs. His and George’s. They could claim it. Like a new continent. He turned back around. George already stood with his back to him, waiting for Sandy to remove his oxygen tank. He unhooked the canister, placed it carefully on the ridge.

They were lighter now, but still the mountain dragged at him.