On the other walls were photographs of Carton on various mountaineering expeditions. In most of them, he wore a round-topped hat and moleskin breeches and leaned on a tall hiking staff. Across his chest, he carried a coil of rope. It was strange to see him looking so much younger, as I had not been able in my imagination to peel away the time which had splintered his face with gray stubble and creased the skin around his eyes like the tributaries of the Nile.
One picture in particular caught my attention. In this, Carton stood beside a fountain, in the center of which a statue of a horse reared up on two legs. The skin on his nose and cheeks was darkened and scabbed, his brow hidden beneath a shallow-crowned felt hat. His hands were wrapped in bandages. His eyes looked haunted, and his overall expression was one of disbelief. He stood there like a man about to be shot by a firing squad.
It was some time before Carton reappeared. He came into the study, walked over to the picture I'd been looking at earlier, and tapped his finger against the glass like someone tapping a barometer to check the pressure. It was as if he expected the figure in the picture to move and get on with whatever it had been doing before it posed for the photograph. “That was after I came down off the Dragon's Tongue,” he told me.
“Judging from that picture, I'd say you were lucky to have made it out alive.”
“I
was
lucky,” he said softly, but then he breathed in suddenly, a rasping hollow gasp, and announced in a much louder voice, “And so were you! You could have been the best mountaineer in Britain by now.”
“I'm quite happy with the way I am, sir.”
“Oh, save that for your friends who don't climb mountains!” he spluttered. “You aren't happy! How could you be? No more than I am now that I can't climb mountains anymore. But the difference between us is that my body is the thing that let me down. My bloody useless lungs! What's wrong with you,” he said, laying one stubby finger gently against my forehead, “is inside there.”
I stepped back, leaving his finger touching only the air, as if it were pressed against an invisible wall that separated us. “You know perfectly well why I stopped climbing,” I said.
“What's gone from me is gone for good,” said Carton. “But what you've lost can still be found again.” His voice was filled with frustration, as if his words, not just his lungs, were failing him.
I had no answer for him. His words were like a razor swiped across my face.
We returned to the top of the stairs.
By now, the lecture had ended. The doors of the lecture room swung open and the audience members once again swarmed around the food table, which had been restocked with sandwiches and urns of tea.
“I must attend to my guests,” said Carton. “I love them all, but sometimes I despise them, too.”
“Why is that?”
He glanced at me. “Because they are content among the borrowed revelations of their sheltered lives.”
“If it wasn't for that,” I said, “they'd have no use for you.”
He smiled then. “And that is why I love them, too.”
We made our way down.
Carton paused on the landing and we looked out over the sea of heads. Plumes of cigarette smoke rose like charmed snakes to the rafters, carrying with them the jumbled happy voices of the crowd.
Carton squared his shoulders. He seemed to be bracing for the ordeal of small talk that lay ahead. He slapped me on the back and strode down into the main room, a Cheshire cat smile bolted to his face.
Catching sight of Stanley among a cluster of men who had gathered around Miss Paradise, I made my way towards him.
“You spoke so well,” Stanley was saying. “I am certain you will be remembered among the ranks of mountaineers like Meta Brevoort, Mary Mummery, and Lily Bristow.”
The other men stared at Stanley.
By the time Stanley finished comparing Miss Paradise's career with those of half a dozen other female mountaineers, two of the four men had already departed. The remaining pair looked back and forth from Stanley to Miss Paradise as if following a tennis match.
“You do know a great deal!” said Miss Paradise. From the way she looked at him, it was clear they were already friends. The windburned creases which I'd noticed on her face before she'd begun her lecture had disappeared. A softness had entered her eyes. It was as if a mask had been removed and, amazingly, Stanley was the one who had removed it.
Now only one man remained, the other having drained
his glass, stared into the bottom as if he had no idea where his beverage had gone, then wandered off in search of more.
“I wanted you to meet a friend of mine,” said Stanley, turning towards me and neatly blocking out the last man, who took his cue and vanished.
Helen Paradise stared at me for a moment, her lips pressed together and her forehead lined with concentration. “You're William Bromley,” she said. “The climber!”
“That's right,” I replied.
“I thought ⦔ she began.
“Thought what?”
She blinked, as if I had breathed dust into her eyes. “Well, I thought you had died in the war.”
“No.” I tried to smile. “Still here.” I was confused as to why Stanley had not mentioned me before, especially since the topic of mountaineering must have come up between them.
“Still causing trouble!” exclaimed Stanley, determined to keep the mood upbeat.
“It's just that I heard a lot about you and your climbing before the war and then nothing afterwards.” She sipped at her champagne. “I just assumed.”
“No, well, I ⦔ I began, but had no idea what to say next. What she'd just said had derailed me completely. I stared down at my shoes. “I've just not really been around much. I mean ⦔ I glanced up.
She was no longer listening.
Instead, she and Stanley were staring at each other, lost in some happy, wordless conversation of their own.
Seeing that my reason-for-leaving excuse was not required, I made my way across the crowded room.
But then a voice called after me. It was Miss Paradise. “You're coming back?”
Stanley's eyes fixed upon mine, telling me I'd better stick around.
“Of course!” I smiled. “I've just got to sort something out. I'll be back in a minute.” I strode away, as if I knew where I was going. In truth, I had no idea. Two minutes later, having wandered down some passageway near the kitchens, I ended up in the men's bathroom, where I found myself a quiet stall and sat down to have a smoke. I'd go back out in a minute. After making a silent promise to myself that this was the last time I'd let Stanley talk me into anything, I rolled myself a cigarette. I had just fished out the box of matches when the door swung open and I heard the voice of Henry Carton.
“I told you to leave her alone!”
Then I heard Stanley. “It's none of your business.”
My lips pressed down on the cigarette. I breathed in the heavy, sweet smell of unlit tobacco.
“It doesn't look right.” Every time Carton spoke, he sounded like a train announcer. “You're a host here at the club. You're supposed to be looking after the guests. After
all
of them. Not just traipsing around after one of them and ignoring the rest.”
“Uncle Henry, what does it matter how it looks? I love her.”
Carton clicked his tongue, then launched into something else. “Why the hell aren't there any new magazines out on the tables?”
“The subscriptions have expired, Uncle Henry.”
“Well, renew them, for God's sake, why don't you?”
There was silence, but even in that quiet, I could hear the air being drawn into Stanley's lungs.
Then Stanley exploded. “Because one month from now, the club won't even exist! Didn't you see the empty seats in the
lecture room tonight? Why don't you just face it, Uncle? The board of trustees has got it in for us. Every week they make you sign away a little more of the place.”
I had never heard Stanley mention any of this before. I knew that the club was not the same grand place it had once been, but I'd had no idea they were in such trouble. I sat very still, the cigarette balanced between my lips, box of matches resting in the palm of my right hand, and one blue-tipped match pinched between the thumb and index finger of my left hand, ready to strike.
“What the hell am I going to do?” asked Carton, punctuating his words with the splash of peeing in the urinal. “Without this place, I'm nothing.” There was a rustle as Carton did up the buttons on his fly. “Come on then,” he said. “Let's go and get this over with.” His heels clacked out over the tiles. The door opened and a sound of chatter rose and fell as the door closed again.
I imagined Stanley following him, eyes cast down and loping like a scolded dog. Believing they had gone, I touched the head of the match to the box, ready to strike. But then I heard a sigh.
Stanley was still in the room. “You've got it the wrong way round, you old fool,” he mumbled. “It's without you that the place is nothing.”
Those were the first compassionate words I'd heard him say about his uncle in a very long time.
The door thumped shut a second time, and then I knew I was alone. But in the quiet of that room, his words lingered like the fluttering of tiny wings.
After smoking half the cigarette, I stood and flicked the butt into the toilet, where it fizzed and floated, turning circles.
I didn't have it in me to go back into the room and make conversation. Stanley was doing fine on his own and Carton did not need me to tell him good-bye. Out in the hallway, I turned right and exited the building through a side door, which deposited me in an alleyway. A streetlamp threw a harsh glare down the alley, which was slick and black, as if the bricks and cobblestones had all been sprayed with oil.
As soon as I stepped into the alley, I saw a figure kneeling on the cobblestones. It was a man. He wasn't exactly kneeling. He was resting on one knee, right arm steadying himself against the ground. His head hung down. A trickle of saliva stretched from his mouth, as silver as the strand of a spider's web.
Then I heard a voice, which I recognized immediately as Carton's.
“Get up, damn you!” he said. “Get up or get it over with!”
Even though I couldn't see Carton, I had no doubt it was Stanley he'd been cursing and that Stanley was the one down there on the cobblestones. Carton was standing over him, hidden in the dark. My face went hot with anger. All that talk he had given me about his bloody lungs and how weak he was now and he still had the strength to knock his own flesh and blood to the ground. I stepped towards them, ready to help Stanley to his feet. And if I didn't have my temper back by then, I decided, I might just knock Carton about a bit and give him some of his own bloody medicine.
I looked into the shadows, trying to spot Carton, but he wasn't there. Then I realized that the man on the ground
was
Carton. Stanley was nowhere in sight. Carton had been swearing at himself.
The anger evaporated. Now all I felt was confused. “Sir?” I said, and touched Carton on the shoulder. “Do you need some help?”
Slowly, the old man raised his head and looked me in the eye. “Damn it,” he said. “Damn everything.”
“Are you all right?” I asked.
He nodded, turned his head, and spat. “Help me up,” he said, his voice gone faint and hoarse.
I helped him to his feet, noticing as I lifted him by the arm that he had laid down a handkerchief on which to rest his knee.
The cigars which he kept in his breast pocket had fallen to the ground. I gathered them up and handed them over.
Carefully, he put them back where they belonged and tapped them into place with his finger.
Then I picked up his handkerchief and gave it to him.
He touched the cloth against his mouth before putting it away in his trouser pocket.
“Do you need a doctor, sir?” I asked.
Carton shook his head and at the same time gave a great rumbling cough, which ended with a rattle from his throat. “Nothing to be done. The show's over.”
We were both looking down the alleyway towards the street, where the silhouettes of departing guests flitted beneath the lamplight.
“Heading home, were you?” he asked hoarsely.
“Well, I've got to teach tomorrow, and there are some papers I haven't marked yet.”
He grunted. “I suppose I must have sounded a bit daft, cursing myself like that.”
“No, sir. Not really.” I felt sorry for him. For the first time I understood how hard his life had become.
“I can't help it,” he said. “I get so frustrated that I can't do things anymore. I want to go back to climbing mountains. I want to undo all that mess I got you into back in the war.”