The Cruel Peak

by Gil Hogg

  “Hey, that’s a way different picture to the one Ernest paints in The Fateful Snows.”

  “Ernest had to dignify his climbing companion because he’s a snob. I bless my good luck that my father died, Tia. No old man to push me into hard labour on the land or an apprenticeship. An apprenticeship would have been about the limit of his vision, from what I know of him. Off I went to Timaru College, where they showed me the track to university. It didn’t matter a damn that I was Bill Stavely’s raggy-arsed kid, and never owned a tennis racket or a bicycle.”

  “You were brought up with Stu and Robyn. That can’t have been bad.”

  “Borrowing their bicycles and tennis rackets, you mean? After a while you don’t ask. You walk away.” He could have added, ‘How would you know, anyway?’ He had already told Alison, ‘I’ve learned from Stu that Tia is absolutely in the Ashton mould. She’s a privileged kid. Loving, well-off parents, the best of schooling and university. She’s never wanted or had to struggle for anything, and she’s gutsy.’

  “You’d have made it to university, Tom, surely, even if your father had lived,” Tia said.

  “Maybe. I doubt it. I pay homage to those who cut the track from farmhouse to university in earlier days. People like Savage and Fraser. A track for anybody, that was the point. Luckily for me. ”

  “Aren’t you too hard on your father?”

  “He was a crushing and depressing influence. And he used to beat the shit out of my mother. It’s hard to get your head around, Tia - why a strong man should ache so much inside that he has to beat a woman bloody to relieve himself. How it would have ended, I hate to think - if he had lived. It was a little like Ernest with Stuart. Ernest Ashton and Bill Stavely were very different, but a couple of monsters in strangely similar ways. Ernest beat his son and Bill Stavely beat my mother.”

  He had said more than he intended; it was the effect of standing in these ruins and refreshing his realisation of how damn lucky he had been to rise out of them.

  She didn’t speak again as they returned to the house, but he felt that there was a togetherness in the silence, and that his thoughtlessness of the day before had left little if any mark.

  When they were close to the house, she said, “It was good of you to talk to me, Tom. You and Stuart have a lot of shared history and it’s helpful to know some of it. And thanks for agreeing to go to Mt Vogel with Stuart. He needs you.”

  4

  He heard Robyn say, “Your dad’s in there,” and Petra came into the drawing room, laughing, laden with parcels, and preoccupied with the balancing act she had to perform to keep them from falling. She looked back at the tall young man, equally laden, who swayed his wide shoulders from the hips as he followed. It was a moment before they let the parcels down on the couch, the red couch, and she looked at her father.

  “Daddy! How lovely to see you.” She came close and gave him a quick hug, withdrawing immediately, leaving a fragrance from her hair which had brushed his face.

  He tried to add together the time that he had spent with her in her nineteen years; a month or two, perhaps. He could not expect an affectionate reunion, because there had never been a union. ‘Daddy’ seemed an impossibly intimate word from this young woman.

  “It’s good to see you so happy, Petra.” He was inarticulate in the swirl of youthful sighs around him.

  Petra backed away and turned to the tall young man. “Daddy, this is Darren.”

  “Hi, Mr Stavely,” Darren said, proffering a huge fist, without eye contact, instead looking round the princely room, his eyes shining and mouth slightly open, speechless at the fine things that were happening to him.

  “Call me Tom. I’ve been looking forward to meeting you, Darren.”

  The last person he was looking forward to meeting was not particularly Darren, but his daughter’s prospective husband.

  ‘She’s too young,’ he had said to Robyn, when she called him in London to tell him of the proposed marriage - Petra didn’t telephone herself.

  ‘I’m not calling to ask you, Tom,’ Robyn had said. ‘I’m telling you. You can’t play the stern father.’

  ‘I don’t want to. I want you to see sense, Robyn. You understand how we messed up our lives. You can give her some motherly advice. Petra needs to take a decade off from childbirth and have fun. She’ll be lumbered with twins at twenty, while her Darren is away screwing a rugby groupie.’

  ‘Don’t be so cynical and pessimistic.’

  It was to no avail; he was to be a spectator at the starting line of an accelerated race for unhappiness.

  “How’s the great game?” he asked Darren.

  He was always respectful about rugby when in New Zealand; it wasn’t so much a national passion as a sensitivity. Kiwis were miffed if you didn’t show respect and somehow you were a lesser man. Years ago, at lunch with his fellow clerks at Gottleys, they sat around a restaurant table every lunch hour and argued about the selection of the team for Saturday. He had been bored by the game - which he had never had the opportunity to play; it was soccer at state schools in his day - and was slightly repelled by the violence, but too mindful of appearances to show his feelings, or refuse to lunch.

  “I’m training hard, Mr Stavely - Tom - and I’ll get back to it after the honeymoon,” Darren said enthusiastically, running his fingers over the close-cut sportsman’s bristle on his head.

  “Darren’s going to be an All Black, aren’t you darling?”

  “I think I’ve got a fair chance,” Darren said, opening his mouth wide, as though the credibility of this admission was a heavy weight indeed.

  “Uncle Stu could have been an All Black,” Petra said.

  “I know,” Tom said. “He was an impressive sportsman at university.”

  “Were you, Daddy?”

  “No. I got lost in my books.”

  ‘Hell, Alison,’ he’d be saying to her, ‘We got on to this sporting thing as though it was the only thing in life worth doing, and Petra was looking at me as if I only had one leg, comparing me to Uncle Stu.’

  “What else are you doing, Darren?” he asked earnestly, wanting to show Petra that he was interested in her man.

  Darren placed his muscular arm around Petra’s shoulders. “Haaa. Chilling out, I guess.” He had a yearning, affectionate look, like a golden retriever greeting its mistress.

  Petra laughed and wriggled. Their exclusivity shut him out.

  “I meant, are you studying or working?”

  “Oh yeah…”

  These seemed to be tasks Darren had to call to mind.

  “Darren’s a representative for Wright Stephenson.”

  “You’re interested in stock agency?” Here was a subject he could chat about.

  “Naah, but I’ve got a great car from the company and as much time off as I need to train and play. I’m in a group hoping to join the All Black squad.”

  “It’s a three litre Mercedes coupe, Daddy. Really cool,” Petra said.

  “Three litres? Very nice.”

  “Yeah, she really goes,” Darren added, his eyes lighting up.

  He’d be saying to Alison, ‘First it was sport, and then it was bloody cars! Clanking hunks of metal!’

  ‘They’re just kids. They don’t have to be serious about the manifesto of the Labour Party,’ she’d say.

  He hadn’t the heart to bring a shrug of confusion to Darren’s big frame by asking whether he had any interests outside rugby and cars.

  Petra was composed; the curves of womanhood now outlined her slight figure. She was more like her mother than him; long mahogany hair and brown, protuberant eyes. Yet she was not too different in appearance from a hundred girls of her age that he might pass in the street. She had all the untried softness of youth.

  “What about you, Petra? Are you going to go on working?”

  “No, Daddy. I gave them notice. I didn’t like the bank much.”

  “So what comes next?”

  She laughed. “I am getting married, Daddy. We
’ll be buying a house, and it’ll take me a while to set that up. All the furnishing and decorating and that.”

  “You’re buying?”

  “Mummy’s arranged it… trust funds…”

  “Of course…” What the hell did Robyn think she was doing?

  “You’ll do some decorating?”

  “Ha, ha! I’ll choose the colours and materials.”

  “Choose the colours and the materials. Sure,” he said, giving up.

  Buying a house. It would be a palace. He would say to Alison, ‘You’d think Petra would be up a ladder with a paintbrush. Her idea of decorating and furnishing is to go to a store and say ‘I’ll have this, that, and the other, and please deliver and install it.’

  “What about a baby?” he asked carelessly, a throwaway line for an anodyne answer.

  The bridal couple looked at each other and sniggered, holding hands now. “That would be very nice,” Petra said, two dimples showing in her cheeks. She was glowing.

  He didn’t think his surprise showed. A baby already? And why should he be surprised? He of all people!

  ‘Can you believe it, Alison?’ he would say when he spoke to her. This couple have everything from day one. A home. No saving, no waiting, no working. And the usual old hurdy-gurdy has started to turn already. Pregnancy! Then we grind on to marriage, children, parties, adultery, and divorce.’

  ‘It doesn’t have to be that way, Tom,’ Alison was certain to say.

  ‘The guy is just a thick kid,’ he would counter.

  ‘You have law books between your ears. How thick is that?’ She would be flippant.

  ‘And why didn’t Robyn tell me about this?’ he’d ask.

  Alison would reply, ‘Probably to avoid hearing you yelling, ‘Children, children, children!’

  After dinner, he and Stuart settled in the study with a bottle of whisky. Tia declined to join them, and was pleased to let them talk. Stuart explained that he was seeking a manager for the Downs.

  “Tia could do it. She’d like to, but I like to have her with me up at the Sounds, and when I’m travelling. And I think, why should I make any personal sacrifices for this place? Tamaki Downs is like a ton weight on my head.”

  He mentioned his television work, but Tom found him unfocussed and depressed, wanting to steer the conversation back to Mt Vogel.

  “Do you remember that time a few years ago when we went fishing with John in Cook Straight?” Stuart asked.

  He remembered. John was John Ashton, Stuart’s cousin, an executive at the Ashton Group. “That was a good day.”

  “I always think about it because we had a row,” Stuart said.

  “Merely a tiff.”

  It wasn’t an event which rattled their friendship, but he still had in his mind the picture Stuart painted of his - Tom’s - future then, and wondered, when he recalled it later, whether year by year he was moving toward it.

  He remembered that it was still dark when they climbed into the car at John Ashton’s home in Kelburn, Wellington and began the drive to collect the rest of the crew from a variety of street corners. He was squeezed inside the car, shaking hands with people whose names he hardly heard and whose faces he couldn’t see clearly. A befuddled crew of six they were at this hour. He and Stuart had come to Wellington, intending to tramp in the Tararuas for four days. They stayed with John and, as a preliminary outing, were invited for a day’s fishing in Cook Straight on the Ashton Group’s launch, which John skippered.

  It was a Wellington day in March; chilly, cloudy and windy, with a weather report promise of sunshine. When they arrived at the boat harbour at Oriental Bay, a few men and women were on the footpath, setting up their easels in the best place to paint the sunrise. Hills fringed the harbour beyond a foreground of moored yachts and launches, a classic tourist view.

  The crew were ferried out to board a forty-foot cabin cruiser with their supply of food and drink. John Ashton declared that they had forgotten the milk. Tom volunteered to go back and try to buy some. On returning to the jetty after his errand, the sun had shown its rim above the hills. The artists, their faces screwed up against the glare, were completing their outlines and applying washes to paper.

  The milk quest was futile. He couldn’t find a shop that was open. Rowing back to the launch in the dinghy, he unintentionally dug one of the copper-capped oars into the ribs of a pristine cruiser, leaving a black scar. He tied the dinghy at the stern of the boat in a cloud of exhaust smoke. John Ashton was warming the twin diesel engines. Tom announced his failure. The rest of the crew agreed that with so many liquids on board, the absence of milk was really a blessing; they could avoid tea and coffee.

  As the craft passed through the Wellington Heads, they were having breakfast which Stuart - the only person whom he really knew on the trip apart from John - produced from the galley in a haze of blue frying smoke. They wolfed down bacon, tomatoes, sausages, eggs and fried bread, served on bright-coloured plastic plates with brown sauce.

  The jerky chop of the harbour changed to the swell of the Straight where the Tasman and the Pacific met. The cruiser rose high and fell deeply, keeping a taste of salty sausages in the throat. Miles from the shore John Ashton heaved to. They were alone. Cape Palliser was an uncertain charcoal line on the horizon. Here, wedged between sea and sky, he had the same sense that he had when he was alone on snow at times, of being an irritant in the gleaming void of nature.

  They baited the lines with squid and threw them out. The boat lurched nauseatingly. He drank a little beer. Nothing happened; there were no bites. The cruiser creaked and threatened to throw the beer cans on the deck. He had a headache and jammed himself into a space by the radio mast on the top of the cabin. He closed his eyes in the sun, letting the line which trailed carelessly across the deck and over the rail, go limp in his hand. Stuart, on the contrary, soldierly neat in his woollen jacket, bent expectantly over the rail. He had told the others that Tom wasn’t a fisherman, and not much of a sailor.

  After half an hour, the skipper announced that he knew a groper trench and would reposition the boat. The crew began to bait more lines, tying on the nylon traces for the hooks, and selecting different hooks and weights. Tom was half asleep. His head sagged back against a coil of rope, his legs lodged firmly behind the mast. There was a softness in this repose. He rubbed a smelly hand over his face and looked across at Stuart. Stuart’s hair had threads of grey; the smooth, almost characterlessly handsome face was being replaced by a more bony structure. The skull was emerging. The skipper shifted the boat without success. The weather calmed.

  Stuart too gave up and settled down beside him in the sun. “It was hell up there, Tom,” he breathed, without any preliminaries.

  They hadn’t had an opportunity to talk much about Stuart’s recent attempt on Mt Vogel. Tom knew he had several long monologues on the subject to come. But Stuart was, at least, a skilful raconteur.

  “You can have another go, Stu.” He cleared his head. “Why let Vogel bother you when you’re out here in paradise?”

  Stuart ignored him. Vogel couldn’t be pushed aside that easily. “It’s not just failing to complete the climb -”

  “I wouldn’t use the word failure,” Tom interrupted. “The weather on Mt Vogel can be hellish. It must have become mission impossible.”

  “The old man did it, but I can’t do it. I can’t fucking well do it. This was my second attempt.” He spoke strongly but quietly to avoid the others overhearing, with his lips taut.

  “You and your team got a lot of nice publicity. You pushed your luck as far as you could.”

  The climb had been reported briefly in London and described as a gallant attempt, but there was mention of the father-son rivalry.

  “Read more carefully. The newspapers over here were full of it. They gloated over it as much as the old man. Son fails - they used the word - to beat father’s record. I could have thrown up!”

  “Why bother trying? You’ve proved yourself. The Eiger, Mt Blanc, McKinl
ey, Everest, K2.”

  “You don’t get it, do you?” Stuart said, looking at him bitterly.

  “I think I do. Everybody trots up Everest now, but only a select two have ever climbed Vogel. Vogel is like K2 - for experts only. And because Ernest did it, above all peaks, you have to do it too. It’s a crucial battle in your war with your father.”

  “OK, you do get it. But you can’t feel the way I do. You say, ‘Have another try’, or ‘Why bother?’ as though it’s trifling either way. Every big climb I’ve made elsewhere in the world has shrunk in importance each time I’ve failed on Mt Vogel. Every time I fail, Sir Ernest Ashton’s reputation swells, and he exalts. ‘You can’t do it, can you boy?’ he says with his death’s-head grin. I’d sooner take a good leathering with the belt from him than defeat on Mt Vogel. Then, all I felt was pain and rage. Now I have to suffer ignominy, crushing ignominy from the old man and the newspapers!”

  He realised his friend sought endorsement of this passion. Stuart wanted to be stroked and comforted; he wanted a friend who licked his wounds, but Tom couldn’t do that, not even for Stuart Ashton. And if he told the truth, and said that Mt Vogel had become a mania with Stuart, it would only make Stuart reject him. He tempered his words, as he had always done.

  “Maybe I’m too close to this to really say anything helpful, Stu. But I’ll tell you that my inclination is that you should divorce yourself from Ernest and go your own way. Drop Vogel. There’s a world of other things to do in mountaineering. You don’t need him. He is Mt Vogel. You have your journalism…”

  “That shows me that you really don’t understand the difference between us - I mean you and me. You want me to potter on with a dull little career in journalism, while you have your head down too, quietly lost in your lawyering. We’ll both end up, when we retire, according to your view, in our own cottages in the same leafy lane in Springvale or Brighton, growing roses and playing backgammon. That’s your view, Tom. Well, you can have it for yourself by all means, but don’t foist it on me!”