by Paul Watkins
The last I saw of my father, he was standing at his front door, one hand raised to wave good-bye.
I knew he must be thinking about going back into that empty house, putting on the kettle for a cup of tea, and trying to get used to the silence once again.
FOUR
“THERE SHE IS,” whispered Stanley. He had been standing in the doorway of the Climbers’ Club, greeting people as they filed in to hear the lecture. But as soon as he saw me, he pulled me to one side and pointed out Miss Paradise.
The air seethed with cigar smoke and the beehive hum of talk from the thirty-odd people in the room. This smoke tinted the light a dusty blue, like the bloom on an unripe plum. The main room had high ceilings and a wide and darkly wooded staircase which rose to a landing. The landing was taken up mostly by a huge blue-and-white Chinese vase, which contained a number of short-handled and viciously pointed Zulu assegai spears. The staircase then turned right, climbing out of sight among the heads of trophy animals. Their big glass eyes looked down haughtily on the people in the room and the flared nostrils of their hard black noses made them seem like they were breathing in the smoke. It was as if, in their years of hanging on the walls, they had acquired the habit of tobacco.
“I can’t see her,” I told Stanley.
“The one in the woolen britches,” he hissed, jabbing his finger towards the far end of the room. “How can you miss her? She’s the only woman wearing trousers.”
I still couldn’t see her. My eyes had gone out of focus at the well-dressed muddle of people that had confronted me as I’d stepped through the huge double doors.
I had found, as time went by, that I did less and less well with busy places. Seeing this company of tuxedoed men and long-gowned women, my first reaction had been to turn around and walk back out into the dark. But Stanley was still tugging at my arm and pointing, and Carton, standing at the top of the landing with one hand in his pocket and the other clutching a cigar, had already fixed his nephew with a disapproving stare.
Unlike the more formally attired guests, Carton wore his trademark heavy suit made of brown-and-green-flecked keeper’s tweed. A few people filed past him on their way upstairs. Carton stood between them like a rock in a slow-running river, glaring at Stanley.
Now Carton’s gaze traveled from Stanley to me. His eyes narrowed slightly. He seemed to know my face, but not well enough to put a name to it.
We had not spoken since that day at Achnacarry.
Carton looked considerably grayer than when I’d seen him last. He now resembled a fierce old dog.
I’d hoped he might not recognize me after all this time.
But Carton had not forgotten. With a sudden, stabbing movement, he jammed the cigar in his mouth and began to make his way down the stairs. For a while, he disappeared among the little crowd of people, as he was not a tall man. Soon he reappeared, elbowing aside anyone foolish enough to remain in his way. He waved at me. His wave was not like the waves of other men, that open hand which shows no weapons in its grasp. Instead, Carton held his fingers outstretched and horizontal, as if he were casting a spell. Then he was standing in front of me, wheezing slightly. Jutting from his outside chest pocket was a line of fresh cigars, like bullets in a hunting vest. “Bromley! Is that you?” he asked, completely ignoring Stanley. He spoke as if he had gone blind. I half-expected him to stretch out his hand and begin patting his fingers against my face.
“Hello, sir.”
“Bromley! I heard some rubbish about how you’d given up climbing!” He barked all this out in one staccato tirade, and it was only because he paused to draw a breath that I could respond at all.
“Sir,” I said, “it is true.” The last person I wanted to talk to about this was Henry Carton. I wished I’d never come here. I should never have let Stanley talk me into it.
Carton’s mouth shut, teeth clacking together. It seemed only with difficulty that he forced his jaw open again. “What is true?” he asked.
“What you heard, sir. I don’t climb anymore.”
“Nonsense!” he barked and plugged the cigar back into his mouth. Then he turned to his nephew. “Aren’t you supposed to be greeting the guests?” he asked, lips curled around the damp stub of tobacco leaves.
“I am greeting them,” chirped Stanley. “Mr. Bromley here is a guest.”
“But what about all the others? And what about the guest lecturer? Has she shown up yet?”
“She has indeed,” said Stanley. “I was just on my way to”—he paused, choosing his words like a man choosing food from a menu—“to make sure she has everything she needs.”
“You stay away from Miss Paradise,” snapped Carton. “The last thing she needs is you traipsing around after her.”
But Stanley was no longer listening. His eyes were fixed on the far side of the room.
I followed his gaze, and then at last I saw her.
Helen Paradise was of medium height, with broad shoulders and a suntanned face which made her blue eyes seem to glow. Her brown hair was streaked with blond and gathered at the back. She looked as if she had done her best to hide all femininity under heavy woolen britches and a short jacket, both of which were khaki overlaid with a green windowpane plaid. They were proper mountaineering clothes but looked slightly ridiculous among the formally attired people who made up the rest of the room. She gripped the stem of her champagne glass as a person might do if preparing to use it as a weapon.
Miss Paradise was so different from the willowy and doomed-by-beauty ladies who had previously caught Stanley’s attention that I began to wonder if he really had gone and fallen in love. Properly this time. As yet, however, I could not grasp what Stanley saw in her.
The doors of the lecture room had been opened. People were making their way inside. I noticed that not all of the chairs would be filled. At the far end of the room I could see a podium, on which a glass of water rested, covered by a white handkerchief. On either side of the podium were large pictures of mountains. I recognized one of them as the rounded peak of Mont Blanc, and the other as the crooked witch’s hat of the Matterhorn.
“Well, you’d better start showing people into the hall,” Carton told Stanley, his voice heavy with exasperation. “The talk’s just about to start. And you stand at the back. I don’t want you nabbing seats from any of our paying guests.”
“I’m looking forward to the lecture, Uncle,” said Stanley, mocking him with the formality in his voice.
“And let’s not pretend,” replied Carton, “that your enjoyment has a damned thing to do with mountaineering.”
Despite the harshness of Carton’s words, it seemed to me that there was no real anger in them. There was something else, too, about the way he dealt with Stanley. It was something which defied the words he spoke and showed itself more in the language of his body. This was a kind of distant melancholy, mixed with a gentle pride in the willfulness of his nephew. The source of these emotions, whether they brought to life in Carton some memory of his dead brother or even of himself, lay so deep beneath Carton’s barricade of gruffness that I wondered if even he knew where they came from.
“Right, then!” said Carton, terminating the conversation with Stanley as if he were hanging up a telephone. Then he turned to me. “Bromley, you come find me in a little bit. I want to talk to you about something.” He screwed the cigar back into his mouth and, without another word to Stanley, did an about-face and ploughed back into the crowd.
“Who the hell does he think he is?” muttered Stanley.
“He knows exactly who he is,” I said. “That’s why people either love him or they hate him.”
“Well anyway,” said Stanley. “What’s your opinion?”
I looked at him questioningly.
“Of her!” He jerked his head in the direction of Miss Paradise.
I thought of all the times I had played along, not wanting to hurt his feelings. But now I found myself thinking of something I had never considered before. It was not the feel
ings of Stanley, nor my own, but the feelings of Helen Paradise. “I am your friend, Stanley,” I began.
“Of course you are!” he snorted.
“And I would never do anything to hurt you,” I continued.
“I know that! What are you babbling about?”
“And so you will believe me when I tell you that you haven’t got a hope in hell with that woman.” It gave me a shock even to say it, and I saw the same jolt pass from me to Stanley as the words made their mark.
“You can’t say that,” he stammered. “You haven’t even met her.”
“I don’t need to. Let’s go over to the Montague and have a bite to eat.” I turned to leave, feeling as if I’d already stayed too long. Running into Carton again had rattled me more than I’d expected.
“Oh, can’t you just hang on until the end of the talk?” pleaded Stanley. “It’s only an hour. That’s all I’m asking.”
I was just about to tell him no when Carton’s booming voice summoned me up the stairs.
He had returned to his perch on the landing, at the place where the staircase changed direction. He seemed to like the confines of the space and paced back and forth like a captain on the bridge of his ship.
“You’d better do as he says, Auntie.” Stanley flashed me a smile. “He is my uncle, after all.”
Knowing there was no escape, I made my way wearily towards him, conscious of the old man’s eyes boring into the top of my head as I plodded up each red-carpeted stair.
Before I reached the landing, he was already heading for the top of the stairs. “Come on!” he commanded. He led me down a green-walled corridor, which was lined with watercolor prints of the Alps, to a door which he unlocked using a large brass key.
“You’re not going to hear the lecture, sir?” I asked, in a hopeless gesture to fend off the other lecture I knew was coming my way.
“Don’t need to hear the talk,” he replied, struggling to catch his breath. “Talk’s not for me. Talk’s for them downstairs.” Then he flung the door open and marched inside.
The apartment was smaller than I had imagined. The robin’s egg–blue walls seemed to soak up the light. A tiny bedroom looked out over the street, and a crow-footed bath filled up the bathroom, which was floored with black and white tiles the size of sugar cubes. The sitting room had a small couch in front of a fireplace, and various pieces of rock took the place of clocks and Staffordshire china dogs on the mantelpiece. The rocks, obviously souvenirs from his climbs, were each about the size of a grapefruit and all roughly the same shape. What set them apart were the colors. One rock was pink like boiled salmon. Another was arsenic green. Another black like coal but smooth, as if it had been tumbled in a river. One rock was white, but lined with tiny threads of gold. At the far end, I recognized the coarse red granite of Mont Blanc. Behind the rocks lay his ax-headed climbing stick. Its polished wood seemed to breathe in the dim light.
His small bookshelf was lined with mountaineering classics dating back to the 1700s, including Cox’s Travels in Switzerland, Barde’s 1785 edition of Nouvelle Description des Alpes, and Pinkerton’s Voyages and Travels.
With his back to us, in a chair in front of the empty fireplace, sat a man in a heavy tweed coat and matching trousers. He even had on a matching hat, and it was not until I came a little closer than I realized it was Archie.
I stood in front of the well-dressed skeleton, looking at the hollow eye sockets and the folded arms, whose hands were wrapped in gray doeskin gloves.
“Had to get gloves on him,” said Carton. “Some of the guests complained that the sight of the fingers made them lose their appetites. The face never bothered them, though. Don’t know why.”
“You honestly don’t know whose skeleton this is?” I asked.
Carton shrugged, to show that not only did he have no idea but not knowing didn’t bother him. “He is whoever they want him to be. Sherlock Holmes. Jack the Ripper. Hannibal. I’ve heard them all. The only rumor that ever actually offended me was when I heard someone say it was the skeleton of my guide. It bothered me so much that I had to hire someone to prove that it wasn’t.”
“But how did you do that?”
“Got some scientist to calculate when his body would be coming out of the glacier, and that’s not for another twenty years.” Carton took off his jacket and hung it on a peg made from an antler bone. “Make yourself comfortable for a few minutes. I’ve got to sign some documents for the club’s board of trustees.” He nodded to a small room, no bigger than a closet, where a desk was piled with ledgers and pieces of paper stabbed onto long nails, and torn-open envelopes littered the floor. “The bastards are drowning me in bureaucracy. I won’t be long. And then I want to talk to you.”
While Carton sorted out his papers, I wandered into his study. On its wall above a little fireplace hung his old climbing ax. It was of a type known as the Kennedy style; its tempered-steel head double-screwed at the top and triple-screwed into the wooden shaft at the sides. The metal of the ice-ax head glowed with a bluish patina. Stamped into the iron was the manufacturer’s logo: Herder/St. Gall, the best maker in the world. The spike at the other end had been blunted by use. The wood itself was dark from sweat and beeswax polish. I brought my face close to it and smelled the distant honeyed fragrance.
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 atten
d 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.
