by Steve Low
He emerged from his tent at ten to six, stumbling about the campsite, yawning and stretching. At first he was preoccupied tidying up the plates and utensils left lying about from the evening meal. He stacked them all near the fire place. After that he went to the edge of the campsite and stood there, peering down the slope in the direction I had fled the previous evening. He looked north and south along the range, perhaps looking for movement in the tussocks. He didn’t look upward. If he had of done so, he might have seen me, a dark silhouette, silent and still against a brightening sky. Eventually he walked off northward, along a contour not far above the bush-line. He didn’t call out or make any attempts to locate me and I soon realised he was gathering wood for a fire.
I clambered down the grassy slope, moving carefully so as to not dislodge any boulders or stones. I came down behind the tent and stopped. I could hear his heavy breathing as he broke up sticks and bracken to feed the fire. He had his back to me so I stopped behind him and cleared my throat. At first I thought he hadn’t heard me, but then slowly his head rotated my way. He scrutinised the dishevelled, red-eyed individual wordlessly. Then he smiled. He gestured up to the ridge line overhead. “We’d better get started,” he said, “While the weather is still good.” His face was impassive, his voice neutral, not rising or falling in pitch or volume. Despite the silence of the mountain arena, my head was buzzing noisily with its own traffic jam. He stood and pointed across to the western skyline. “It will pack up later by the look of it,” he said. I followed the direction of his arm. The sky there had taken on a hazy appearance, like ground glass. There were streaks of pink and a background of menacing grey. He was right, before the day was through, it was going to turn dirty. After all that had happened, it felt ridiculous standing with him amongst knee high tussocks talking about the weather. To escape the awkward grip of the conversation, I turned back to the tent, scooping up things to put into my backpack. I needed to be active to deal with the madness. “You want porridge?” he asked, and I said yes, my mind dogged by images of the crazed man hurling flaming timber into the night sky.
We set off for the summit at seven, leaving a pile of gear under the limited protection of the skeletal trees at the bush-line. With the sullen sky as the backdrop, there was an eerie feel to the landscape as we moved higher. Graham, whistling an ancient jazz standard, settled in behind me, apparently content to allow the son to do the route finding. Firstly we needed to cross to the other side of the range, to attack the mountain from the east.
It took an hour and a half to get to the low point of the range above. To the north, a long jagged ridge rose toward the summit, guarding it from direct attack. We hadn’t said a word on the climb, but Graham had continued to whistle and had moved along at good pace. As his breathing slowed, he spoke. “There’s quite alot of altitude to lose before we can get below those bluffs.” I nodded in agreement. We were going to have to descend below an enormous rock wall on the eastern flank of Cotterel. Beyond that, we knew there was a long scree slope ascending up the back of the mountain towards the summit.
In the summer of his first university year, Richard and I had found this route, too late on that particular day to have a tilt at the summit. We had stood at the base of the great rock wall, about five metres apart, the afternoon sun reflecting off the angular jumble of rocks that lay about us, gazing at the great length of scree slope that led towards a col on the east ridge of the mountain. Richard had turned towards me, a wan smile appearing on his face. “That’s the way to the summit, no doubt. But it’s too late for us.” Behind me I had heard rocks turning over. Graham and Isobel were catching us up. I had fixed my gaze on that distant col, dreaming of the day that I would be up there, poised for success.
Graham and I started off down the slope, a shallow upper basin of shingle. Below us, two deep green lakes fed a dark creek. The water gathered speed before diving over a rocky ledge to fall unseen into the valley below. We traversed above these mini lakes, the slope steepening as we tracked below the great hanging east wall of the mountain. “Richard would love to be here today,” I said, continuing my reminiscence aloud.
Graham’s eyebrows abutted together across the bridge of his nose. He halted momentarily, poised on top of a large boulder looking across at me. “Yes I suppose he would,” he said. “But you try and extract him from the outback.”
We carried on downward, the surface becoming increasingly unstable as our boots slipped and sank into the loose rubble. The mobile surface seemed to drift down with us, filling the air with dust and our boots with stones. Graham was having trouble keeping his balance. His hooting laugh suddenly rang out, echoing off the overhang above. “Whoa there boy,” he said, putting a hand out to arrest his fall.
“What about Mum?’ I said,” hell bent on making Graham feel uncomfortable.
Again, his eyebrows knitted, his breathing halted. He looked as though he was about to be shot. Of course he wasn’t used to questions of a personal nature like these ones. I expected him to fob off the inquiry, to dismiss the intrusion with a another non-committal answer. Instead to my surprise, he engaged me. Perhaps his fireside tantrum of the previous evening had been cathartic in some way - unlocking the demons inside.
“She couldn’t bear the isolation of it,” he said, taking off a boot and emptying out a collection of stones. “Your mother has to be surrounded by people . . . cities . . . shops.” He had his boot back on and was bent over lacing it up. “It hasn’t been easy you know . . .”
We moved onward, coursing around the base of the bluff. We were hard up against this great buttress, able if necessary to reach out and touch the vertical rock for support. Graham was leading for the first time on the mountain. He seemed to have found an abundance of energy. I followed along, a good twenty metres behind, mulling over his comments. ‘It hadn’t been easy,’ was his euphemism for years of accommodation. Of course he could only speculate on the amount of information I had on the Urquhart affair. I recalled the day he had overheard Isobel retelling Margo’s story in her room all those years before. How long had he hung outside the door listening, filling up with unease before charging in? That was the day Isobel had decided to quit the family home for good. And why wouldn’t she, after he had come in and acted out his Victorian patriarchal role.
We had almost turned the bluff by now. The steep scree that led up to the summit col was opening out before me. I caught up with Graham.
“This is where we got to last time,” he said, his face a flaming red colour.
Momentarily I revisited my memory of Richard, his face breaking into that wan smile of defeat. But my mind was dwelling on other things. Margo’s story. The affair. The flight of Francis Urquhart. And this man, standing just a few metres away from me, could tell me everything I needed to know. If only I could get into his head and find the answers.
“Well here we go,” he said,“ into uncharted territory.”
His face was a patchwork of crimson and yellow. He didn’t look in very good shape all of a sudden, and yet, there was a softness to his expression, a face I had seldom seen before. It carried the suggestion of benevolence. And as we set off on the ascent, negotiating a slope of giant boulders, I began to probe him in a way I would never have dared before. I had to broach it in a round about way, so as not to enrage him and close him down. I went back to the question I’d thrown at him the week before, when in stony silence we’d sat in the Nile Street sunroom, waiting for Julia to bring tea. “So you’re still doing some operating in private,” I said, as if continuing the thread of that aborted conversation.
“Yes,” he said sharply, seemingly irritated at having to answer the same question twice.
I carried on, asking about some of his colleagues, about the viability of the private operating facility, patient throughput - that sort of thing. He answered my questions in a guarded manner. After a while though, his tension eased a little. His answers became more animated, if somewhat pompous. I recalled the man I’d heard as a child, consu
lting over the telephone - the overbearing surgeon. He and I had rarely had an adult conversation like this before. It seemed almost surreal, as we walked up this narrowing canyon of rock walls and scree - Graham talking with me using his best professional voice. It couldn’t last for long. Soon, surely he would become aware that I was humouring him. I had to strike quickly.
“Was Margo’s husband a surgeon?” I asked, my words coming with a rush. At the time he was scrambling above me, over a particularly large and slippery boulder. I saw him lose his footing, one boot sliding off into the air above my head. He got down on his hands and knees, crabbing his way over the top. I followed him up in a rapid fluid movement.
“Of course not,” he said, his brow again furrowed. “He was a lawyer.”
“Where does he live now?” I continued, following right behind him, step for step, along an easy gravel bridge.
“No idea,” he said curtly. “Timbuktu? Nobody knows . . . Last thought to be in Australia.”
“You don’t like him then?” I said, exploiting his flippant tone.
He stopped dead. The gravel bridge was giving way to a steeper pitch of loose rock. “Of course I don’t like the man,” he said. His brow was hooded like an eagle. Then he took a deep breath, letting his features relax slightly.
“Cause he was a friend of Mums?”
He laughed - a ferocious bark that reverberated off the enclosing walls of the slope. “A friend of Mums! How is that for understatement - friend indeed!” He was struggling for breath on the steeper incline. We seemed to be down to a snail’s pace. “The man was very slippery. I don’t know what she saw in him.”
I moved up alongside him, scaling a large rock. Utilising the firmer position under my feet it only took a couple of steps and I was past him. “So how did you win her back? She left you for a while didn’t she - to be with him.”
“How the hell . . . ? Isobel! Is she the source of all this? . . . Isobel?” He said her name as if she were just living down the road. “Yes, they lived together for two months. Two whole months. And as I predicted - it wrecked his career. His clients left in droves. So the next thing was - he disappeared. He just didn’t come home one night. Years later I heard he was in Australia.. . . Yes, he was as slippery as an eel that one. So your mother arrived back to my door.”
We had stopped walking. We were both looking back down the slope, it being easier to talk to each other without eye contact. “Francis Urquhart dumped your mother, just as he’d dumped his wife. Don’t bother trying to romanticise the guy. There were conditions on which I took Julia back. One was that she would give up on any notion of future contact with Urquhart. His name was never to be mentioned again. I was damned if I was going to live in his shadow for the rest of my life.”
“I see,” I said. I didn’t know how to respond. He obviously considered himself the injured party. But it was Julia that I thought about. What kind of adjustment had she had to make to go back to Graham. Had she become happy again? Was she happy now? Had she sacrificed real happiness to give her children a conventional upbringing?
I began to climb furiously, scrambling up the remainder of the slope. Soon I had left Graham well behind. He became a slow moving dot, far below my feet. I didn’t stop to wait for him. I drove on until my lungs were screaming – until a sharp pleuritic pain lanced across my chest wall. It wasn’t news to me, all this. I’d heard it all before from Isobel in London. But there was infinite depth to the topic and I was eager to probe.
The scree slope terminated at a small col in the east ridge. I arrived there, indulging momentarily in the mini-triumph – to be so close to the summit. I could see the sandy-mount of the top, beyond the short reach of summit ridge. However an immediate problem was evident. The summit ridge appeared to be impassable
I put all this to the back of my mind as I returned to the near edge of the col and peered down the length of the scree. I could see him coming. He was still some twenty minutes away. I could imagine the heave in his chest, the temporal arteries pounding in his scalp, the pain in his calves. He was vulnerable below me. I could easily set a rock slide going - to make up for his fireworks of the previous evening. I imagined shouting out. ‘Sorry old boy, I’m just emulating your tanty from last night.’ But of course I didn’t. It was at that moment the light weakened. The cloud was palpably thicker, lower, darker - closing in on the serrated ridges and peaks. It looked ominous.
When Graham arrived he was smiling. He seemed to have put aside the anger over Francis Urquhart. “We’ve almost beaten it,” he said. He stopped just below me, hands on hips, breathing heavily. “Can you see a clear route to the summit? Can we make it.” His voice was unusually high, betraying excitement. Just then a wind gust arrived. It tore up the gully from below, lifting Graham’s jacket up so that it flogged like a collapsing spinnaker. There was an eerie whine as it roared across the col. In a second it was gone and the air was still.
“The actual ridge is impassable,” I said, as he arrived up beside me. “But there’s a possible route up that rock scramble to the right.” Preoccupied with the vagaries of the route and the menace of the weather, I too was able to postpone the discussion on Francis Urquhart. We decided the rock scramble was the correct way up. The sandy-mount of the summit was so close, I felt I could spit up to it.
I set off over the col, traversing northward to the base of the rock scramble. The blood was running fast now. I sensed the dilated pupils and the acuity of my vision, the power of my limbs and the efficiency of my lungs. I set off up the face, scrambling up like a spider escapes rising bath-water. It was quite steep and much of the rock was loose.
I heard a wheezy voice behind me. “Steady on, I’m not so agile as I used to be.” I stopped and waited, looking out to the east, across the vista of parallel mountain ranges filling the land between where I stood and the Kaikoura Coast. I noticed a very fine drizzle was beginning to fall. When Graham reached my position we surveyed what lay ahead Immediately above us, a small bluff impeded our path. There was a narrow chimney through the middle of it, the only option for a successful climb. It looked safe enough to me but Graham announced that he’d reached his limit and that he would return to the col and wait for me there. He turned away and begun to descend the mountain. The sound of loose rock dislodging under his feet mingled with the hiss of the thickening drizzle and the slow deceleration of my breathing. I turned my back on his diminishing figure and tried to ignore the inclement weather above. Mechanically I returned to the problem of the climb. I went at it with speed, wedging my way up, keeping my weight well into the slope. My lungs were stretching and contracting, the cool air burning in the upper reaches of my airways. Soon I was out of the chimney and an easy shingle slope lead to the summit. I whooped and hollered as I ran on to the sandy-mount, feeling a perverse guilt that Graham had missed out - although I knew he’d never have made it through the chimney. I thought of Joanna and Isobel, getting to know each other again in Vancouver, and how pleased they would be for me. I felt lucky.
The Travers valley would normally have been visible from the summit, but it was now obscured by mist. On a clear day, I would have been able to see our meadow, thousands of feet below.
There came a gust of wind and a heavy shower of rain drops. It flayed the exposed side of my face. I untied my rain jacket from around my waist, hauling it on, aware now of our precarious position. I raced off the summit, down the slight shingle slope to the top of the chimney. It looked much steeper from above and I was forced to lower myself into it backwards. My feet scrambled to find footholds, much of the weight of my body being taken by my arms. Once passed this obstacle I raced off down-hill, an angling traverse down and across to the col where Graham was waiting.
Gusting winds were testing the col also, it being a natural vent from south to north. We stood there, looking down the length of the scree slope, noting the looming curtains of rain, the scudding shards of mist that hurried and died in length of the gulley. It was a relief
to leave the col, to drop onto the descending expanse of scree slope. Although the periodic wind gusts came to tear at our loose clothing, our limbs, and our hair - overall, within the confines of the falling canyon, the savagery of the weather was more remote. These spasms of weather did serve to remind me, there was a long way to go and I still had to help get a seventy year old man off a stormy mountain.
At first we both moved quite quickly, encouraged by the relative shelter of our enclosure and the feeling of safety it induced. After fifteen minutes of stepping and slipping down the multitude of boulders, I became aware of a leaching of drive, and I stopped, turning to check on Graham. I was alarmed to find that he had covered only half my distance. I watched his progress with consternation. He was gingerly negotiating each step one at a time, checking his slide by assuming a crouch position, one leg extended, the other tucked underneath. Sometimes, on steeper parts, he was turning 180 degrees to slip down backwards. As I stood there a squall came, splattering my back with heavy drops - a soaking and demoralizing rain. I ducked down beside an overhanging rock, an illusory shelter, no more than a metre high. The water cascaded off the tip of my nose as I twisted my face away from the onslaught. I waited in miserable meditation, my visual field bounded by the surfaces of interlocking rocks and a descending spout of water - a link between nose and earth.
I watched his slow progress and thought about his life and the philosophies that he lived by and how different they were from his children – even Richard. He’d never really adapted to life in the smaller city. He still had the air of a big city surgeon who placed himself high on a pedestal. I thought about our town – the sound of cicadas in its exotic trees, distant blue mountains across an expansive bay, and the sparkling blue sea lapping against the golden sandy beaches. Yes it was small; some 35,000 inhabitants, and there perhaps lay the problem. Graham; a Wellingtonian; had been forced to escape the bigger city – the hidden face of his marriage a private humiliation – and in doing so, had perhaps left behind the fruits of the major centre – the chance of an academic position, a place in the surgical college hierarchy, and the revenue of a metropolitan private practice.
He arrived at my position and I spoke. “I was just thinking . . . You’ve disliked having to work in Nelson, haven’t you.” His face was incredulity itself, but I pressed on anyway. “You wanted a career in the big smoke . . . But the Francis and Julia episode – they forced you out and sidelined you to the provinces.” I carried on, battering him with my provincial theory, before trailing off as I watched his face become the colour of ivory and drawn, his two day stubble erect and soaked in dew.
“What on earth is bothering you at the moment,” he said, shuffling up beside me. His hair was plastered flat, hanging off an oval skull in soaking adherent strands, rivulets of water streaming off each clump. “You seem hell bent on digging up all the families skeletons.” he said. ‘Why don’t we talk about this later when we’re off the mountain. Right now I’ve only got enough energy for putting one foot in front of the other.”
I had to admit he didn’t look too energetic. I could motor off the mountain in quick time, despite my aches and pains. I was prime of life material; a fizzing frame of aerobic muscle. “You go first then” I said. “So we don’t get too far apart.”
We negotiated our way past the bluffs of Cotterel’s east wall and began the climb to the low point of the range above, from where we could descend to the Travers Valley below. Graham’s progress was laborious but resolute. I guessed he would be glad when it was all over - although he did seem more animated out in the hills than he’d been back at home. I had done the trip for Julia more than anything else. What she had hoped to achieve, I didn’t know. To help get Graham out of his depression? For the father and son to do some bonding? To give herself a break?
The top of the range was palpable now. A roar of wind signalled its proximity. I visualised our descent, down through steep snow-grass to find the protective cover of bush. And then the river crossing to the meadow.
Thinking of the meadow brought to mind Isobel. Yes, she too had remembered the meadow. There was nostalgia in the peaty smell of mossy emerald grass for both of us as I’d found out at Kew gardens. Who was responsible for her descent into drug addiction? Was it him up ahead, a figure going over the ridge top, his first encounter with the wind partially turning him, grabbing at his jacket, extracting the collar and flying it skyward. I followed him into this icy blast, my thoughts about Isobel not distracted by the physical assault. I paused on the ridge line, one foot on the east side, the other on the west side. The subject of my conjecture was dropping away below me, gingerly lowering into a swirling mist. I let him get a distance ahead. I wanted to have the illusion of being alone. I kept his shadowy figure just in view. With visibility poor, it would have been crazy to allow a separation to occur. As I dropped altitude, the drenching rains returned. I was now below the stratum of scudding clouds from which diagonal curtains of rain squalls hung, filling the river and its tributaries. I came over a knoll of grass and rubble to see below me the position of our campsite. And beyond that, the very depth of the valley filled with cloud – its anatomy concealed. Even so, my gaze was centred on the meadow, where I imagined it might be. I visualised once again the brother and sister, lying upon flattened grass, engulfed by a peaty fragrance, the brother watching the rise and fall of the sister’s chest.
I came upon Graham at the bush-line, sheltering under the umbrella of leaves. “We’re basically off the mountain now,” I said.
He looked at me, a smile playing across his lips. He was probably thinking that I was going to start grilling him again. “Not quite,” he said. “This is the soul destroying bit - all that banging and crashing through the bush.”
He was right. A descent through steep bush was uncomfortable, a bone jarring exercise of weight transfer, with the added hazard of slippery ground underfoot - dead wood and loose earth. “OK let’s get it over” he said. He shouldered the load and began to move off.
I got into step behind him, following down the undulating terrain, stepping on the same dead wood and earth broken by his footfalls. I spoke to the back of his neck
“Have you ever wondered why Isobel arrested in adolescence - why she changed from being a nice plump teenager to a cynical wastrel?” I stopped - an arm around a narrow beech trunk. Through a horizontal gash in the leaf canopy, I stared absently at a flight of mist.
H sighed “She was just impressionable that’s all,” he said. “She got caught up in your generations love affair with drugs.”
We recommenced our descent without haste. We began descending a spur with steep drop offs on each side. “You don’t think it was because of emotional trauma when she was very young – when your marriage was in disarray?”
He groaned. “What’s all this psychology clap-trap you are pushing?” he said. “I know many perfectly stable families where one of the children has gone off the rails.”
The rains came roaring down again, saving Graham from further inquisition. The bush hummed in the rain, it almost seemed to sing. The deluge roared on the canopy, while below, the filtered droplets played a backbeat, a hypnotic percussion - a multitude of rhythms coming in and out of focus as we carried on our way. And there it was again, that peaty, mossy smell. We were closing in on it again - the riverside meadow. I was closing in on her, Isobel and her adolescent charm. I stopped again to take her in. To close my eyes and see the face, a dash of freckles and an impish smile.
Chapter 6
