The Rich Man’s House

by Andrew McGahan

  The daylight grew, dawn hurrying forwards, hard and bright. Far below, deep in the swamp of gas that was the atmosphere, sunrise was a murkier affair. Likewise, from sea level, the stars at night were blurred and muddied. But up here, over ninety-five per cent of the atmosphere was beneath the climbers’ feet. There was no pollution, no vapour, no clouds, so the stars shone more fiercely and with deeper colours than could be dreamed of below; and when the sun cleared the horizon it leapt up white and blinding in what seemed an instant.

  As it did now. Light as harsh as a camera flash washed the peak above, turning it from red to white-gold, and then swept down the summit ridge like a silent avalanche. As it neared, the men lowered the alloy-tinted shades of their helmets. The world turned all to glare for a moment—and yet still freezing, for no warmth came with the sun—then their eyes adjusted, and the summit stood exposed in the morning, the rock a dull carmine now against a blue-black sky blasted clear of stars.

  Unspeaking, the men moved forwards and came quickly to the foot of the first sheer rise. A steel-rope ladder waited there, leading upwards, for in fact the lower two hundred metres of the final ascent had already been climbed. In the week preceding this day, three preparatory teams had already set out from Hut 122 to ready the way. First had gone a climbing team, breaking a new route up the ridge, and leaving lines and ladders behind them. Two supply teams had then followed, carrying and depositing, two hundred metres up, a stash of batteries and other supplies, ready for the summit team to employ.

  The four men, one by one, set their feet and hands to the ladder and began to climb. Nevertheless, even so assisted, they progressed only slowly, with the exaggerated care that had become the norm for climbers in bulky suits that could easily overbalance, and wearing helmets of glass that, for all that they had been specially toughened, would still break if smashed hard enough against stone.

  There were other reasons for caution as well. To those who have not been there, the higher altitudes of the stratosphere, free of winds and weather and ice, may sound like an easier place to climb, compared to the lower, windier, snow-bound regions of normal mountains, especially with a HTF suit to keep one warm, and to provide air.

  But those who have done it know differently. The lack of wind, for instance, is more disconcerting than comforting, for it reinforces the sense of thinness to the air, the sense of emptiness yawning all around, the sense that there is nothing to support you. The atmosphere, at sea level, is in fact a cushion, even if most people never notice it. The thick air supports, cradles, protects. If you fall from a cliff, it is dense enough to slow your plummet to a terminal velocity of only a few hundred kilometres per hour. Fast, yes, but sometimes, just sometimes, survivable.

  But at twenty-five kilometres up, all that protection and cushioning is gone. A climber is naked in the near vacuum. It feels somehow all the easier to trip and topple. And should one actually tumble over the edge of the mountain into the abyss, then for the first few thousand metres of your descent there will be virtually no air resistance to slow you down. Lacking any hindrance, a human body can—merely by falling unassisted—approach the speed of sound. And should frail flesh and blood, at that speed, graze against the sharp stone of a cliff, well …

  The silence, too, of high altitude is disturbing. The air is so thin in the stratosphere that it can barely transmit sound, so even a rock struck upon a rock is no more than a distant tapping. Oh, the shriek of a gale and the thunder of avalanches have their own terrors, but silence works blackly on the mind, reinforces the vast emptiness of the heights, waiting to ensnare the climber. It’s made worse by the suits, for they are noisy; they gurgle, hum and blare with static from the communications system. But that’s all interior sound. Nothing comes from outside.

  That, and the flat, stark light, can make the whole high-altitude world seem distant and faraway. Unreal. For a climber this is a perilous sensation: mountaineers need above all to be in contact with the mountain they are ascending. Not only physically, but emotionally. To feel detached from it, to be detached from it, only increases the likelihood of a mistake. Many have been the climbers on the Wheel who, even while walking along a level ridge in calm stillness, find themselves sweating terror in their suits, all but paralysed, so tenuous does their grip feel on the mountain and on the thin air surrounding them.

  But for all that, the four men ascended now without incident for two hours, slow and cautious but untroubled on the ladders, and so reached the storage cache two hundred metres up.

  They were now at twenty-four thousand seven hundred and ninety-five metres—leaving two hundred and thirty metres to the summit. Two hundred and thirty metres of virgin, unclimbed territory, most of it sheer and difficult. It would be slower going from here.

  The men took a last assessment. All their suits were functioning nominally, and amid the cache of supplies all the batteries were fully charged. Effectively, keeping safety margins intact, they had twelve hours to reach the summit, with as much time again to descend. Hopefully it would take less time than that, but even if they must climb or descend in darkness, they had flashlights enough to do so.

  All was as ready as could be. The four men were hand-picked, the best climbers from among the six-hundred-strong assault team. They would take turns breaking a new route up the final pitches, leaving behind lines and ladders as they went. Barring unforeseen problems, the entire four-man team should stand upon the Hand of God before sunset. And in the days to come others would follow, team after team ascending to the summit, in reward for the years of labour they had put in.

  The four set off again, hopes high.

  But as it would prove, only one man alone would gain the summit that day. And he would be the last to set foot there to this day.

  1

  A FUNERAL

  Death is the great in vigorator. It awakens and stirs those left behind—the deceased’s family, their colleagues, their dependants, whomever is bound to them in any way—like a slap across the face of a sleeper. Everything that has seemed fixed up to that point, loves, grievances, financial affairs, breaks loose the instant that the individual in question dies, and a thousand eventualities that were impossible before—whether to be dreaded, or desired—suddenly come into play.

  So it was for Rita Gausse upon the death of her father, even though they had barely spoken in years. Aged forty-five, she had, in the previous decade, fought the storm of her life to the point where she had wrested out a small haven of calm for herself, a port amid the whirl, and was finally catching her breath a little. But the news of her father’s passing, little though it meant to her at first, would break her lashings and hurl her bodily out to sea again—literally.

  She learned of that death only a few hours before it appeared in headlines around the world, the dateline April 17, 2016. Not front-page headlines, but headlines all the same.

  Acclaimed architect dies in home of Walter Richman—or words to that effect, always mentioning the name of the famous client, of course, followed by the minimal details. Influential architect Richard Gausse has been found dead at age 78 in the newly completed home of billionaire Walter Richman. Gausse designed the controversial, multi-hundred-million dollar residence on Theodolite Isle in the Southern Ocean, and had been overseeing the final stages of construction. He was known to be suffering ill health and Tasmanian police who attended the scene report no suspicious circumstances. Gausse leaves behind his second wife Amanda and their three adult children, George, Jerome and Erica, and Rita, daughter from his first marriage to Candice, predeceased. Richard Jerome Gausse was born in 1938 in Rose Hill, Sydney, to Belgian migrant parents and studied architecture at the University of Melbourne. Most famous for his ‘buried’ style of design, he first rose to fame in the 1960s with …

  And so on.

  It was Amanda, second wife, estranged but not divorced, who had called Rita with the news.

  ‘The old bastard has croaked it, luv,’ were her first words over the phone, pronounced in
what sounded like an exhalation of nicotine. Amanda was Sydney high society, but her speech patterns were pure fish-and-chips. ‘His heart again, they’re telling me. As if he had one, right, luv? You and me know, god help us.’ She was crying through the cigarette drags, and laughing too, in a fond, bewildered way.

  ‘Amanda, are you okay?’ Rita asked. ‘Have you got someone there?’

  They had always got along, stepdaughter and stepmother. Better in most ways than either of them got on with father and husband.

  ‘Oh, I’m fine. Erica’s here, and the boys are coming over. It’s you I’m worried about. All alone down there. What are you going to do?’

  The two women were a thousand kilometres apart. Amanda, propped up no doubt on her overstuffed couch in her Elizabeth Bay apartment with its harbour views, and Rita standing in her pyjamas staring out over her living room balcony to the dim valley of the Maribyrnong and the orange night-glow of the Melbourne skyline beyond. It was three in the morning, but Rita had not been asleep. Even in this second and far more respectable career—a veterinarian now five years graduated and specialising in emergency care—she was as nocturnal as she had ever been, working night shifts at an animal hospital across the river in Kensington. ‘What is there to do, really?’ she replied. ‘I mean, for now. I know there’ll be the funeral, later, I suppose. Are you going to … ?’

  ‘Oh, yes, I’ll see him buried nice and proper, course I will. At least, when we get him back from that god-awful rock. Did you know about that job, luv? When did you talk to him last?’

  ‘Not since before he started there, I think. I’d heard about it though, it was always in the news.’ And how the old Rita would have railed against him for being involved in such a project: by all the gods, he couldn’t have picked anything worse. But the new Rita, thankfully, had remained indifferent.

  They talked details for a few minutes, then, after further protestations of concern, and offers of accommodation in Sydney from Amanda, the two women hung up on each other.

  Leaving Rita to gaze out at the night. And to think—So, he’s dead. Dad is dead. I have no father.

  How did that make her feel?

  In truth, other than a mild sense of surprise, the news had so far roused little emotion in her at all. Unless, of course, she was in denial, and masking a deeper grief or rage within.

  But she didn’t think so. There was no call for any consuming grief or shock: his death hardly came out of nowhere. He had never been in good health since his first heart attack in his late sixties, and then the cancer scare at seventy-two. He ate all wrong, drank too much …

  As for rage, well, there wasn’t much anger left. She no longer blamed him for the way things had gone. Not since her own … well, fall from grace. They had made up in their fashion, after not speaking all the way from Rita’s twenty-first birthday to her fortieth. And during the lunches and dinners of their rapprochement they had got along amiably enough. If they hadn’t kept in close contact since, well, it didn’t signify any great hatred, or any great issue unresolved. It just was.

  She searched herself again. No, there was no repressed wail of emotion hiding inside her. Her father was dead now. Her mother, long before. There was nothing else to be said. Certainly, she could see no reason why it should change anything in her life.

  She poured herself a glass of white wine and drank it in his honour while sitting on the balcony, watching the river; the cat, Simon—a rescue from the clinic—on her lap. Then she went to bed.

  ▲

  The funeral, a fortnight later, was an event, as of course it would be, given Richard Gausse’s fame within the architectural world and the long list of his rich clients, and given Amanda’s love of a party.

  The grand Centennial Hall at the Sydney Town Hall was host to the formal ceremony and eulogies. A confirmed atheist (one trait Rita had always shared with him), there would be no farewelling of Richard Gausse in a church. The following wake was a gorgeously catered affair for three hundred of his closest friends and clients, hosted in a huge marquee in the grounds of Richard’s own cavernous mansion in Rose Bay. The place had sat empty of late, but proved useful now.

  Rita attended both. She did not speak at the funeral, only watched all the eulogists up on the stage, and at the wake she felt slightly apart from it all, the one orphan of the family now, compared to her stepsiblings, an out-of-towner, lost among the glamour of the Sydney elite. True, she had been born and partly raised in Sydney, and she knew many of the faces, and some even remembered her. But she had never truly thought of Sydney as home: the family had been away so much when she was a child, travelling about the world for Richard’s work, and at eighteen Rita had officially fled the city in the process of fleeing her father.

  Meanwhile, she got thoroughly, if genteelly, drunk at the wake. Yes, her drug-taking days were behind her now, but alcohol remained a lifeline, as necessary as it had ever been. So her recollections the next morning were hazy, no more really than a disjointed assortment of moments from the whole day.

  One instant was an encounter in the Town Hall just after the ceremony, memorable purely for its awkwardness. Rita had been momentarily stranded with a duchess-like acquaintance of Amanda’s, who, in a stab at conversation, made three faux pas in a row. The first, mistaking Rita for one of Amanda’s own children, was the urgent inquiry, I’m told his first family was rather unstable; wife and daughter both. Is the daughter here, do you know? The second, forging on bravely in the face of Rita’s admission that she in fact was the daughter, was the breezy observation, Oh, well, I so wanted to meet you. You’re the one who wrote that strange book, the one that had you prancing around naked in the hills, or something similar, aren’t you? Can we expect another one soon? And the third, flailing after Rita’s frosty reply in the negative, was the tentative, And you’re married, you have children of your own now … ? Oh, no wait, that’s right … At which point Amanda had returned to drag the fool woman away.

  Another image—from much later in the night, as the party was winding up, with Rita well in the pleasant grip of red wine—was of a very svelte couple, younger than her, in their thirties maybe, whom she had found herself talking with, discretely but unmistakably inviting her back to their place for a threesome, an offer she had pretended not to understand. At her father’s wake, for heaven’s sake!

  But two other memories loomed larger, and both of them, strangely, involved her father’s client—his last—Walter Richman.

  The billionaire himself had not attended the funeral—considerately, in Amanda’s view, as she told Rita, for if he had shown up, then the ceremony would have gone from an A-list-but-tastefully-restrained party to a full-blown media circus. Instead he had sent a video message to be played in the hall during the orations.

  It was the last of several such recorded testimonials from famous clients based overseas. Rita had ignored the others, for from her seat in the front row alongside Amanda and her stepsiblings, the big screen, hanging almost directly above, was hard to see. In her abstraction, she hadn’t cared anyway about what strangers had to say regarding the no-doubt hideously beautiful mansions and office blocks her father had designed for them. But when Richman came on, something about his voice, booming through the hall, made her crane her neck and actually look at him, looming giant overhead, and listen.

  She knew his face, of course, lean and wry and somehow battered, hair cut long and still lusciously black, even though he must be in his seventies by now. Who in the world didn’t know that face? Still, it was different to see it like this, not in a news broadcast or on a front page, but in a privately filmed clip, shot—where? In the house her father had built for him? It was impossible to say. Richman was sitting forward on a couch in a dimly lit room, the background in soft focus, anonymous.

  ‘Richard Gausse was my friend,’ rolled the voice, rich and low, with its effortlessly confident American accent, New York–genteel. ‘And I say that at a time in life when men don’t easily make friends. But in th
e short while that we worked together, on one of the most difficult projects imaginable, we truly formed a bond. Indeed, in the last years of his life, I was perhaps his only intimate companion, and learned much of his heart. And so to Amanda and to all of his children, George and Jerome and Erica, and Rita, I say this: though he was separate from you physically, you were all very much in his thoughts—increasingly so, as his health failed. And he was haunted by sadness and regrets of which he can never now speak to you. But I hope that you can remember him well, as I do.’

  For a moment more Walter Richman stared earnestly, compellingly, at the camera. Then the image faded, and he was gone.

  What a strange thing to say, Rita thought, as the ceremony moved on. To claim, in such a public forum, to be in possession of the final intimacies of a dead man, in front of his own family. Weird. But no one else remarked on it throughout the day.

  And the last, and strangest memory of all, also involved the billionaire. Very late in the night, not long after Rita had escaped the lure of the threesome couple and was gathering her things before calling a taxi to take her to the hotel, a woman approached.

  ‘Ms Gausse?’

  Caught unawares, Rita threw back her head somewhat dizzily to get a look at the woman. She was no one Rita recognised, no one she had noticed throughout the day, even though she was quite striking; of middle age, perhaps, but trim and fit, her poise graceful in some indefinable way, her dress impeccably black, her legs clad in supple knee-length leather boots, her hair a bright dyed-blonde cropped very short.

  ‘Yes?’ said Rita.

  ‘If I might introduce myself, my name is Clara Lang, and I work for Walter Richman.’

  Rita stared in surprise. The woman’s accent was international, mostly US but mixed with a trace of European, German maybe, or Dutch. And on closer inspection there was something strange about her face: her nose was shaped as if it should be one of Nordic fineness, but there was a sudden bluntness to its tip, a marring of some kind.