‘He loved the mountains. So do I.’
She remembered the sunsets. The sun sliding down the sky and the way the snow peaks flushed pink and apricot. The Matterhorn made a hooked dark cut-out of itself against the luminous light. The sight of it always made her shiver, when everyone else exclaimed about its magnificence.
One evening Trevor had taken her on a walk, up zigzagging paths that led between the old stone and wood houses, to the church overlooking the old town. There were wildflowers, campion and cow-parsley and buttercups, in the long grass that brushed her bare legs as they climbed. The
little white church had a squat tower, and a shingled roof and spire. There was a small graveyard surrounding it and as Trevor led her around she was surprised to see from the inscriptions how many of the dead were English.
‘But they are
young
,’ she had said. She was affronted by the idea that death might claim anyone but ancient people. Yet these were men and women who had died in the prime of their lives, in rock falls and avalanches and glacier accidents. These mountains, so ethereally lovely in the evening sun, were clearly dangerous.
Inside the church, by the slanting light from high windows, they read the stone tablets on the walls: ‘Died in a fall on the Matterhorn, aged twenty-eight years, Member of the Alpine Club’; ‘Aged twenty-two. Erected by his friends of the Cambridge University Mountaineering Club, in Affectionate Memory’.
A troubling thought stirred in Alice as she gazed at the memorials. ‘You were at Cambridge University and you belong to the Alpine Club. I know that. I’ve seen the letters in your study.’
Trevor took her hand. In those days his fine hair was still sandy-blond and it covered most of his head. ‘You are right.’
‘
You
go climbing. I know you do. There are photographs of you. But I don’t want you to die.’
The cry came unthought, straight out of some dark place in her soul, and she was surprised and almost embarrassed to hear it.
‘I won’t die,’ Trevor said mildly. He didn’t let go of her hand as they walked out into the brightness again. ‘I used to climb mountains when I was young, long, long before you were born. But after we had you, Alice, I stopped doing it because I thought it was important for me to be here. In case you need me.’
‘I do need you. Every day, every minute.’
This was not a usual conversation for them to be having, but she knew it was important.
‘And so here I am and I always will be. I don’t need to climb mountains any more. I’ve got you and Margaret.’
This idea made Alice feel happy, as if there were a bird flying in her chest. Her father had given up something for her, something she sensed was important to him, because she herself was even more important.
From that moment in the graveyard at Zermatt a bond of trust grew.
Trevor loved her and had made a sacrifice for her. He considered his own safety and took steps to preserve it for her sake. He would always be here; she knew that because he had told her so. Margaret was unpredictable and often absent but Trevor was her rock. Geology and her father’s dependability knitted together in her mind, twin solid pillars that had stayed with her all her life.
‘But I’ll tell you what,’ Trevor had added. ‘I think we should go out and do some climbing together. You and me. Then you’ll understand that if you are careful, and if you never forget that it is often harder to turn back than go forward, climbing isn’t as dangerous as many other things in this world. Would you like that?’
‘I don’t know,’ Alice said doubtfully.
The next day they went to a shop in the main street and a man with a seamed face and two fingers missing from his right hand fitted a small harness round Alice’s chest and hips. She was surprised by how deft the remaining fingers were as he did up the buckles.
‘Why was his hand like that?’ she asked Trevor as they walked away with a rope, and Alice’s harness and a small pair of climbing shoes.
‘His hands got very cold and the fingers died and had to be removed. It’s called frostbite,’ Trevor said.
She looked up at the snows that cloaked the high mountains, even now, when it was so warm down here amongst the shops and cafés. ‘Will we get it?’
‘No,’ Trevor said.
She watched her father climb a slab of rock. He moved so smoothly that he looked almost as if he were dancing.
When he reached a ledge he stopped and after a moment the rope drew tight between them. ‘Now you,’ he called from fifteen feet above her head. Reluctantly, she put her hands on the warm granite. The rope and the harness tightened still further and at once she understood that she might slip, but she could not fall. Trevor held her safe. She climbed up to the place beside him and watched as he clipped and knotted the rope to make her fast. It wasn’t the rope and the slings she put her trust in but her father.
‘He never did let me fall,’ Alice told Richard. ‘What was your father like?’
‘He was a serving army officer.’
‘Yes,’ she said gently. ‘Did you see much of him?’
‘No. I went to boarding school; holidays were mostly with my mother’s parents in Suffolk because my father and mother were always overseas.’
‘That must have been hard.’
‘What? No, not really. Most of us children at school were in the same boat. At least I had the name. People – boys – were impressed, as if it made me someone. I knew it didn’t, though.’
She could imagine the housemaster reading aloud from
South
or
The Worst Journey
, and Richard in the row of small boys with upturned faces, worrying that he might never match up to his father, let alone his famous grandfather.
‘And now here you are,’ she said, letting her thoughts run on.
‘Here we both are, in fact.’
Alice studied his wind-reddened face again. Richard’s eyes met hers. ‘Did you know your grandfather?’
‘I don’t have many memories of him. I was only eight when he died. There was his house near Cambridge, my father and mother took me there just a few times. I remember brown-panelled rooms and a clock ticking, and a certainty that I mustn’t speak too loudly or knock anything over. My grandmother tiptoed and the rest of us followed suit. There were photographs everywhere: Grandfather receiving his polar medal from the King, Grandfather with Scott’s widow. There was one that terrified me. It stood on a table in front of the french windows, and when the light outside was bright enough the glass reflected and you couldn’t see the picture itself. I was always glad of a sunny day at Grandfather’s. The picture was taken by Ponting, who was the expedition’s photographer – you know that, of course, I’m sorry – and it was of a killer whale. The creature’s blunt head was rearing up out of a narrow crack between the ice floes and its mouth was wide open, a huge trap lined with terrible teeth. You could see the thing’s tiny eyes, and if I closed mine to shut it out I was right in the water and the jaws were closing round me. It used to give me nightmares. I’d wake up screaming and I couldn’t tell my mother why.’ Richard collected himself. ‘It’s strange, the things that frighten children.’
‘I don’t think that’s strange. It gives me a shiver just to hear you describe it.’
‘Yet your mother went diving amongst them.’
‘The thought of Antarctica scared me too. I liked the stories, I just never wanted to come here myself.’
‘And yet?’
Alice didn’t feel caught out, as she might have done before they had come to Wheeler’s Bluff. Richard and she were
confiding in each other now. ‘My mother wanted me to come because she couldn’t travel herself. I agreed because of her, but I feel differently now.’
Richard was smiling. ‘Better, or worse?’
Alice lifted her hand and made a wide gesture that took in the tent’s shelter, the height of the Bluff in one direction and the frozen desert in the other. ‘I imagined what it would be like, but this is beyond imagination. I wouldn’t have missed it, this, here and now, for anything else in the world.’
She felt it passionately but the words’ comparative poverty made her blush. She could feel the colour creeping up her face.
‘I’m happy to hear that,’ Richard said.
His voice and the look in his eyes told her: he’s going to kiss me. He had leaned closer to her in the cramped space and their mouths were only inches apart.
Do I want him to? Alice asked herself. The answer was yes. The wind and the silence that always lay beneath it drummed in her ears.
But he didn’t kiss her.
Their cheeks almost brushed. Richard picked up his tin mug and drained the last of his cold tea. Alice hooked her arms round her knees, feeling like the awkward girl at a party.
You are a scientist out in the field with a colleague, she reminded herself. And at the same time she thought of Becky, who wouldn’t have waited for Richard or anyone else to take the initiative.
‘What’s funny?’ Richard asked.
‘Nothing, really. Um, do you have children yourself?’
‘No. I was married but I’ve been divorced for two years. Helena was never happy with the amount of time I have to spend away from home. In the end she found herself a marketing consultant who comes back for dinner every night.’
‘I’m sorry.’ She could almost feel the layers of diffidence and loneliness in him, like her own sedimentary rocks, except that Richard’s layers were the accretions of British upper-middle-class reserve, and stiff-upper-lipness and fear of showing your feelings.
‘I’ve got the advantage over you. I know from your CV that you’re single and childless.’
His words set up a shiver at the base of Alice’s spine. She didn’t know why and the lack of a reason was like the whirling blank spot at the centre of her field of vision that heralded a migraine. ‘Yes.’
‘Who was that in the photograph?’
For Richard, this was a seriously personal question. She had to think for a second. Of course, he had caught a glimpse of the Polaroid. ‘That’s Pete. My ex-boyfriend. He’s an artist.’
Obviously Richard didn’t know any artists. For an instant he looked as baffled as if she had said trapeze artist or fortune teller – but then, neither of these sounded as outlandish as fossil hunter.
‘Is he a good one?’
Alice hesitated. ‘I can’t tell.’
‘That’s it exactly. I can never tell. One of the reasons why I’m a scientist, I suppose.’
‘Not all that good. Probably. Does that sound disloyal?’
It was getting cold in the tent without the Primus burning. Alice was beginning to think of the warm layers of her sleeping bag. Tomorrow, if the weather held, they planned to move ten kilometres further east along the Bluff and set up a new campsite. It promised to be a long day.
‘I don’t think you would ever be disloyal, Alice.’
He touched her wrist then, with just the tip of his forefinger. In their profound isolation, where there would have been no one to see or care if they had cavorted naked and
rampant in the snow, it managed to be the most intimate gesture she had ever known.
‘Do you miss him?’ Richard asked.
‘No,’ Alice said. They didn’t look at each other.
There didn’t seem to be anything to add, for tonight.
Richard began to gather up his windproofs. His insulated boots lay beside the door and he pulled them on, careful not to turn round and accidentally trample on her belongings. Finally he unzipped the flap and thin flakes of snow gusted around him. She watched him crawl out backwards, like a rabbit disappearing the wrong way down a hole. They agreed, before he withdrew his head, on a 6 a.m. start.
Alice brushed her teeth with the last of the water and spat out in her tin mug. She undressed to the two layers of thermals that she slept in and crawled into her sleeping bag. Left alone, she did miss Pete. Or not Pete himself but the warmth and reassurance of another familiar body. She turned on to her side and tried to imagine the pressure of his chest against her spine, the way his knees fitted into the crook of hers, the moisture of his breath against the nape of her neck. Within seconds the body she was imagining was not Pete’s but Richard Shoesmith’s.
At once she turned over and lay flat on her back. The tilley lamp was still burning so she reached an arm out of her cocoon to extinguish it. Sleep had begun to flutter like moths’ wings at the margins of her consciousness, but now in the tent’s twilight it flew away out of her reach. Her eyes widened and her thoughts quickened.
She was cold, even in her layers of insulation, and the chill reminded her of the shiver that had touched her earlier.
What had he said?
There was the nauseating blank spot again, in the middle of her mind’s eye, while her thoughts spun faster and faster.
I know from your CV
. Was that it? Yes.
You are single and childless
.
The spot contracted to a single blinding point of light. Alice felt a pain like hot wire in her elbows, across her shins, round her ribs. She stopped breathing and stared up at the yellow planes of the tent’s inner skin. The wind’s drumming seemed to grow louder until it took on the rhythm of her racing heart.
Very slowly she flexed her fingers. She lifted her hands from her sides and laid them over her stomach.
How long? Oh God, how long, and why had she only just thought about it?
She forced herself to reckon up. Not regular, no. She never had been. The Pill hadn’t suited her and she had had a coil fitted after she met Pete. Dr Davey had done it for her.
Think.
So much else to fill her mind in the last weeks.
It was now – what? – the end of the third week in November. Her last period had been at the beginning of October, when Margaret was ill and there had been the flurry of decisions to make about Kandahar.
That was it. She remembered now, she had bled more heavily than usual and felt tired and cramped, but she had taken some painkillers and paid no more attention. Since then, nothing. Alice’s scalp tightened. She had to remember to breathe. Nothing, that is, except the night of the farewell party at Jo’s house. Going home with Pete, opening the door of the house they had shared. The bare shelves and empty drawers, the bulky shapes of her polar kitbags on the bedroom floor.