Once we had climbed the mountain and set up the beacon, we would return to the road and proceed into neutral Switzerland. At the border, which had been closed since the beginning of the war, we would be met by members of the British Special Operations Executive, the SOE, and transported back to England.
“There's no report of enemy activity in the area, so you shouldn't run into anyone,” said Lindsay. “You should have the mountains to yourselves.”
We smiled and shifted nervously.
“When do we leave?” asked Sugden.
“Day after tomorrow,” answered Lindsay. “We are losing a couple of planes every week in those mountains, so there's no time to waste. Bromley has been appointed head of the team. You will answer to him as of now.”
Sugden breathed in suddenly. “Is that really wise, sir?”
Oh, God, I thought. Sugden's up to his old tricks again. And Stanley isn't even here to shut him up.
But it seemed as if Carton had as little patience for Sugden as his nephew. “I beg your pardon?” he asked, eyebrows raised with indignation.
Sugden stepped forward. “What I mean, sir, is that Bromley hasn't had combat experience.”
“With any luck,” said Lindsay, “there isn't going to be any combat.”
“But that's just it, sir,” replied Sugden, turning to face Lindsay. “I'd rather rely on experience than luck.”
“Who led you before?” demanded Carton.
It was Forbes who answered. “Auntie did, sir.”
“Auntie?” boomed Carton. “Who the hell is Auntie?”
“I am, sir,” I said quietly.
Carton's eyes narrowed. “Then it's Auntie who will lead you now.”
Lindsay stood and cleared his throat again, to show that the meeting was over. “Gentlemen, you can have the next twenty-four hours off. After that, you'll be going nonstop until you reach Switzerland.”
Following the briefing, Carton asked me to stay behind. When everyone else had left the room, he told me to shut the door. “Why do they call you Auntie?” he asked.
While I explained, he folded his arms and rocked back in his chair, a tight-lipped smile on his face.
When I had finished, he nodded approvingly and sat forward in his chair. “Well, Auntie, I've got a present for you.” Then, from a faded canvas kit bag, he brought out a wooden stick with a gray lump on the end of it about the size of a clenched fist. He set it down on the desk. “I was going to give this to Stanley, but I think you'd better have it instead.”
“What is it, sir?”
“It's a trench club,” he replied. “I carried it during the Great War. In the trenches, a rifle was not always the best weapon to have. It was too long and awkward in such a confined space, especially if you had another sixteen inches of Enfield bayonet on the end. A revolver was all right, except it might get jammed with mud on the way over.” Carton picked up the club and slapped the lead ball into his palm. “We called this a priest, and what we did with it we called the blessing. Like this.” He wrapped the leather cord around his wrist and grasped the club about halfway up. Then he stood back from me, holding the club down at his side. With a flick of his wrist, he brought the club up to connect with the imaginary man's jaw. With another flick, he brought the club around and swung it into the side of the man's head. The whole movement did look vaguely like the blessing of a priest. “We were reduced to fighting the way our ancestors fought, even back before the first of Caesar's barges scudded up the river Thames. Go on. Pick it up.”
The club was surprisingly heavy until I realized that a hole had been drilled down the middle and a lead pipe fitted inside.
With the addition of the lead ball at the end, even just rocking the stick back and forth in my hand allowed me to feel the force it would carry if swung hard. “Thank you, sir,” I told him, “but surely I won't need it.” I had so many questions for him, about everything to do with mountaineering. I wanted to tell him that he was the one who had gotten me started in climbing, then to sit down and have a conversation that lasted for hours, but I never got the chance.
“I need to make something absolutely clear to you,” he said. “Once you get there, you've got to push on no matter what. SOE says there are no hostiles in those mountains, but we don't know that for certain. You can't turn back, even if it doesn't look safe. Do you see? The beacon is what's important. More important than your friends. More important than you. God forbid you'll ever have to make that choice, but if you do, you'll know what decision to take.”
I held up the priest. “I wondered why you gave me this.”
“You're not a mountaineer anymore,” he told me. “You're an ice soldier, and the rules are different now.”
It had grown dark, and I made my way back to the barracks with the priest under my coat. I was determined to sleep for as long as I could before I left, but knew that any rest would be unlikely. The days of training and uncertainty about where we would be sent had left me with the kind of fatigue that could not be cured by a good night's sleep, or even two or three. During the past weeks, parts of my mind had begun to shut down, robbing me of things such as my sense of taste and my sense of humor and shortening the fuse of my temper. The result of this was a general feeling that the boundaries of my world were closing in around me. But within this claustrophobic bubble, other senses came to life in a way they'd never done before. My sense of hearing had improved. The colors of
this dreary world of mud and treeless hills and dirty khaki wool seemed to vibrate in the corner of my vision. In the canvas webbing of my belt and water bottle, each crossed thread came sharply, almost painfully into focus. My oiled mountain boots seemed to glow under the film of mud and ditch water which permanently coated them, as if the leather were alive.
I spent that night staring at the curved sheet-metal ribs of the Quonset hut's roof, which made me feel like Jonah trapped inside the belly of the whale.
Early the next morning, rather than go mad sitting around Achnacarry, the five of us loaded our packs and hiked back through the hills to the edge of Loch Amon. It took most of the day to get there, but by late afternoon we had made camp by the lake. After cooking up cans of beans in our mess tins, we lay out on our rain sheets, watching the wintry sun go down beside the inky water of the loch.
In the moment that the sun dipped below the horizon, the air filled with a strange and pinkish light. It sifted through the atmosphere, until everything was tinted with the softness of its shimmering. I had seen light similar to this in Switzerland, where it was known as alpenglow. But this was no ordinary alpenglow. We stared around us in amazement, at the dull gray rocks which now were smoldering like molten glass, at our faces, in which the ghostly white of our skin had been replaced by the burnishing of a vanished sun. It was as if a supernatural spark had ignited the dust from which the universe had been born. Even the blackness of the lake began to pulse with this fiery shimmer. Suffused into this poppy red was a strange paleness, which seemed to be a second kind of light existing in the same dimension as the first. It was a diamond light. A white light. Crystalline and clean. All around us, this miracle sky blazed and glittered. Gradually it faded, as the
embers of the fire simmered out. The flickering whiteness also died away.
And then it was night. Stars blinked out of the blue. Still too stunned to speak of what had happened, we lit a fire with gnarly scraps of wood scrounged from the mostly treeless hills. The dew settled heavily, like glassy beads upon our woolen clothes. Fog slithered out of the reeds beside the lake and we huddled for warmth, wrapped in our rain sheets, while the mist took human shape and wandered among us.
The morning after, we woke up in a world of grounded clouds and Sunday morning calm. The only sound came from the trickling of water from the streams which fed the lake.
Only then did we talk of the strange glow and its meaning.
Edward Whymper had undergone a similar experience on his way down from the summit of the Matterhorn in 1865. With the team members roped together for safety, one man slipped and would have dragged the others to their deaths if, as had happened to Carton, the rope had not snapped. Four of the men fell four thousand feet onto the Matterhorn glacier below, leaving Whymper and the two Swiss guides, a father-and-son team named Taugwalder, precariously balanced on the mountain. Immediately following the accident, three huge crosses appeared in the sky. Even though this could be scientifically explained as a solar fogbow, the men saw it as a sign of hope that they would survive.
For us, too, the fire of the alpenglow could mean only one thing. We had been lucky so far. Even with one of us missing, we felt sure that our luck would hold.
Â
Â
NOW, BEHIND THE MOUNTAINS of Wales, just where the sun had gone down, the sky was banded red and whiteâa distant,
fragile echo of that same mysterious thing I'd witnessed years ago.
Suddenly, I wished I had not come up here on this walk. I should have stayed home with my father. Better yet, I should have never left the city. A terrible anxiety swarmed around me.
I wanted to leave but could not move. It was as if my legs had sunk into the ground.
That same light was burning through clouds, but now it had transformed into something nightmarish and cruel. The air began to smolder in my lungs. I could not breathe. My clothes were catching fire. My skin fell away in blazing shreds.
I opened my mouth to scream and flames poured out.
The world began to tilt, mountains slamming into mountains, cascading over like a vast lineup of granite dominoes. The gory streaks of sunset slid vertically into the sky.
Â
Â
I WOKE UP WITH dew on my face.
My first thought was that someone had covered me with a ratty old blanket. Through hundreds of tiny pinprick holes in the cloth, I could see daylight. Then I realized it was night, and I was looking at the stars.
I sat up and peered around, gently massaging a bruise where my head had hit the ground.
A fox was standing by my feet. He stared at me for a moment, then vanished without a sound.
I made my way home in the dark, barely needing my sight as the way was so well known to me.
My father had already eaten, but the pot of lamb stew he had prepared was still warm on the stove.
We sat by the fire while I ate, washing down the stew with
a mug of murky greenish-brown cider bought from a farmer down the road.
My father had taken off his shoes and socks, rolled his trousers up to his knees, and propped his heels up on wooden stool to warm his toes by the fire. The rest of him was hidden behind a copy of the weekend paper. “Look,” he said, folding the paper and handing it across. “Didn't you go to school with that chap?”
I found myself looking at a photo of Wally Sugden. He was standing with the other members of the Patagonia expedition, just as they were boarding a BOAC plane bound for South America. Their clothing was emblazoned with the names of their sponsors. Tucker's Jam. Benzo Motor Oil. Falconer Athletic Clothing. The team members were all giving the thumbs-up and doing their best to imitate Sugden's trademark smirk. “Yes,” I said. “We were at school together.”
“He's that car-dealer chap!” My father's face lit up. “Trust in the Man!” he announced in a deep voice. “Trust in the Machine!”
“That's him.” I chewed my lip for a moment before continuing. “Actually, I'm going to a mountaineering club next week.”
The paper rustled as he lowered it. “Are you starting all that up again?” He did not look happy.
I shook my head as I swallowed a piece of potato, noticing that my father's toes wiggled when he spoke.
“Then why on earth are you going?” he asked.
“It's a favor for Stanley. He's got his sights set on another girl, and she happens to be a member of the London Climbers' Club.”
“That's the one run by his uncle, isn't it? He's the one who got you your medal.”
“That's him, Dad. Yes.”
My father rose to his feet and walked towards the kitchen, where the dregs of some overbrewed tea still lingered in his chipped Brown Betty pot. Before he left the room, he paused. “Have you given any thought to joining one of the clubs in the city?”
“I'm already in a club.”
“Yes, but I mean ⦔ He paused while he hunted for the right words. “Well, the Montague ⦔
“I like it at the Montague. Why should I change?”
He gestured at the Military Cross in its box on the mantelpiece. “After all you went through to get that thing, and the schools I paid for you to go to, I don't understand why you didn't take the opportunity to advance yourself, William.” The way he spoke, his words sounded rehearsed, as if he had been waiting a long time for the right moment to say what he was saying now. “God knows I would have.”