Killing Me Softly

by Nicci French

  ‘I don’t know what he would say.’

  ‘I don’t mean what would he say. What would he do?’

  I didn’t reply.

  ‘I wouldn’t like to be in your shoes.’ Then, suddenly, she gave a violent shudder and leaned across the table until her face was close to mine. There was a bit of chocolate on one of her perfect white teeth. ‘Except I also would, of course.’ She closed her eyes, and I had a horrible sensation that I was watching her re-enact in her imagination some fetishistic act with Adam.

  ‘I’m going now,’ I said.

  ‘Do you want a word of advice?’

  ‘No,’ I said, too quickly.

  ‘Don’t try and get in his way, or change him. It won’t work. Go with him.’

  She got up and left. I paid.

  Twenty

  I went straight up to Klaus and gave him a hug. He wrapped his arms around me. ‘Congratulations,’ I said.

  ‘Good party, yes?’ He beamed. Then his smile turned ironic. ‘So, those people didn’t die on the mountain entirely in vain. Some good has come out of it in the form of my book. Let it not be said that I have failed to profit from the misfortunes of other people.’

  ‘That’s what other people are there for, I suppose,’ I said, and we let each other go.

  ‘Where is your husband, the hero?’ Klaus asked, looking around.

  ‘Hiding in the crowd somewhere, fighting off admirers. Is anybody else from the expedition here?’

  Klaus looked around. The party for his book was in the library of the Alpinists’ Society in South Kensington. It was a cavernous space lined with shelves of leatherbound volumes, of course, but there were also ancient, crusty-looking walking boots in glass cases and ice axes like trophies on the wall and photographs of stiff men in tweeds, and mountains, lots and lots of mountains.

  ‘Greg is somewhere in the room.’

  I was astonished. ‘Greg? Where is he?’

  ‘Over there, talking to that old man in the corner. Go over and introduce yourself. That’s Lord Montrose. He is a man from the great early days of Himalayan climbing when they considered it unnecessary to issue their porters with crampons.’

  I pushed my way through the crowd. Deborah was in one corner. There were lots of tall, fantastically healthy women dotted around. I couldn’t help imagining to myself which of them Adam had slept with. Stupid. Stupid. Greg was bent over Lord Montrose, shouting in his ear, when I approached them. I stood there for a minute until Greg looked round at me suspiciously. Perhaps he thought I was a reporter. Greg looked like the old idea I would have had of a climber, before I met people like Adam and Klaus. He wasn’t tall, like them. He had an unfeasibly large beard, like the man in the Edward Lear limerick who found two larks and a wren in it. His hair was long and unkempt. He must still have been in his thirties but thin lines were engraved on his forehead and around his eyes. Lord Montrose looked at me and then backed away surreally into the crowd, as if I were a magnet repelling him.

  ‘My name’s Alice Loudon,’ I said to Greg. ‘I’ve just got married to Adam Tallis.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, with a crinkle of acknowledgement. ‘Congratulations.’

  There was a silence. Greg turned to look at the photograph next to us on the wall. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘On one of the first expeditions up here, a Victorian vicar stepped back to admire the view and pulled four of his colleagues off with him. They landed among their own tents which, unfortunately, were nine thousand feet beneath them.’ He moved along to the next photograph. ‘K2. Beautiful, isn’t it? Just under fifty people have died on it.’

  ‘Where’s K one?’

  Greg laughed.

  ‘It doesn’t exist any more. In 1856 a British lieutenant who was working on the great Trigonometric Survey of India climbed a mountain and saw two peaks in the Karakoram range a hundred and thirty miles away. So he jotted them down as KI and K2. They later discovered that KI already had a name, Masherbrum. But K2 stuck.’

  ‘You’ve climbed it,’ I said. Greg didn’t reply. I knew what I had to say. I blurted it all out in one go. ‘Have you talked to Adam this evening? You have to. He feels very bad about what’s appeared in the press about Chungawat. Can I take you over to him now? Then you’ll be doing me a favour as well, and rescuing him from all those gorgeous and adoring women.’

  Disconcertingly, Greg didn’t catch my eye but looked around the room, the way people do at parties if they are half listening to you and half checking if there is somebody more interesting to talk to. He must have known I wasn’t a mountaineer and he can’t have had much interest in anything I had to say, so I felt embarrassed.

  ‘He feels bad, does he?’ Greg said softly, still not looking at me. ‘And why is that?’

  Why was I doing this? I took a deep breath. ‘Because it’s being portrayed in terms that have nothing to do with what it was really like on the mountain, in the storm and everything.’

  At this Greg did look round at me, and allowed himself a tired laugh. When he spoke it was with an obvious effort, as if it was still freshly painful for him. ‘I think,’ he said slowly, ‘that the person who leads an expedition has to take responsibility for it.’

  ‘It wasn’t a funfair ride,’ I said. ‘Everybody on the expedition knew that they were going into a very dangerous place. You can’t make guarantees about the weather on a mountain like that as if it were just a package holiday.’

  The lines in his face crinkled up. It was somehow as if all his time in the Himalayas, in that unprotected sunlight and oxygen-depleted air, had given him the aura of an ancient Buddhist monk. In the midst of that messy, sunburned face, there were the beautiful clear blue eyes of a baby. I felt he had taken the entire burden of what had happened on himself. I liked him enormously.

  ‘Yes, Alice,’ he replied. ‘That’s right.’

  The way it came out it sounded less like a form of exoneration than a further example of his misjudgement.

  ‘I wish you’d talk to Adam about all this,’ I said desperately.

  ‘Why should I talk to him, Alice? What would he tell me?’

  I thought for a moment, trying to get it clear in my mind. ‘He would tell you,’ I said finally, ‘that it’s a different world up there about eight thousand metres and it is wrong to moralize about what happened.’

  ‘The problem,’ Greg said, almost in bafflement, ‘is that I don’t agree with that. I know that…’ He stopped for a moment. ‘I know that Adam feels it’s something different up there, different from everything else. But I think you can moralize about behaviour at the top of mountains like anywhere else. The only problem is getting it right.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He sighed and looked around to see if anybody was eavesdropping on our conversation. Fortunately they weren’t. He took a sip of his drink, then another sip. I was drinking white wine, he was drinking whisky.

  ‘Do I have to punish myself all over again? Maybe it was irresponsible of me to take relatively inexperienced climbers up Chungawat. I thought I was properly prepared.’ He looked hard at me, with a new steeliness in his gaze. ‘Maybe I still do. I got sick on the mountain, really sick, and I had to be half dragged down to base camp. It was a very bad storm, one of the worst I’ve ever seen in May. But I thought I had created a system of fixed lines and support, using the porters and the professional guides, that was foolproof.’ We looked at each other and then I saw his face relax until he just looked very, very sad. ‘But – you will say, or people will say – five people died. And then it seems… well, inappropriate to start making protests about whether this rope gave way or that fastening or that pole and whether my mind was on other things.’ He gave a little shrug.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t know about that sort of technical stuff.’

  ‘No,’ Greg said. ‘People don’t.’

  ‘But I know about emotions, the aftermath. It was terrible for everybody else too. I’ve read Klaus’s book. He feels bad that he was so powerless u
p there. And Adam. He’s still tortured because he failed to save his girlfriend, Françoise.’

  ‘Ex-girlfriend,’ said Greg distantly. He didn’t seem consoled. Suddenly a young woman came up to us.

  ‘Hello,’ she said brightly. ‘I’m Kate from Klaus’s publishers.’

  There was a pause while Greg and I looked at each other, conspirators suddenly.

  ‘My name is Alice,’ I said.

  ‘I’m Greg.’

  The woman’s face lit up in recognition.

  ‘Oh, you were…’

  Then she stopped in confusion and went red.

  ‘It was terribly embarrassing,’ I said. ‘There was this black hole of a pause. Obviously Greg couldn’t break in and finish her sentence identifying himself as the one who was to blame for the whole disaster and I didn’t think it was for me to step in and help her out. So she just went redder and redder and then drifted away. It was… oh, that’s cold.’

  Adam had pulled the duvet off me.

  ‘What did you talk to Greg about?’

  As he spoke he began to arrange my limbs and turn me around as if I were a mannequin.

  ‘Careful. I felt I had to meet somebody who was so important in your life. And I wanted to tell him how badly you felt about all the coverage.’ I tried to twist myself around to look Adam in the face. ‘Do you mind?’

  I felt his hands on the back of my head, then he seized my hair tightly and pushed my face really hard into the mattress. I couldn’t help crying out.

  ‘Yeah, I do mind. It’s nothing to do with you. What do you know about it?’ I had tears in my eyes. I tried to twist around but Adam was holding me down on the bed with an elbow and a knee and running his fingers over my body at the same time. ‘Your body is so inexhaustibly lovely,’ he said tenderly, his lips brushing against my ear. ‘I am completely in love with every bit of it and I am in love with you.’

  ‘Yes,’ I groaned.

  ‘But,’ and now his tone hardened but it was still little more than a whisper, ‘I don’t want you interfering in things that have nothing to do with you because it makes me very angry. Do you understand?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t really understand at all. I don’t agree.’

  ‘Alice, Alice,’ he said reproachfully, running his fingers from my hair down my spine, ‘we’re not interested in each other’s worlds, each other’s past life. All that matters is us here, in this bed.’

  Suddenly, I flinched. ‘Ow, that hurts,’ I cried.

  ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Wait, all you have to do is relax.’ ‘No, no, I can’t,’ I said, twisting around, but he pushed me back down so that I could hardly breathe. ‘Relax and trust me,’ he said, ‘trust me.’ Suddenly there was this jolt of pain right through my body, like a flash of light that I could see as well as feel, and it ran through me and through me and wouldn’t stop and I heard a scream that seemed to come from somewhere else and it was me.

  My GP, Caroline Vaughan, is only about four or five years older than I am and when I see her, usually just about a prescription or a vaccination, I always feel we are the sort of people who would be friends if we had met under other circumstances. Which made it a bit awkward on this occasion. I’d rung and pleaded with her to give me an emergency appointment on my way to work. Yes, it was essential. No, I couldn’t wait until tomorrow. The internal examination was agonizing and I lay on the table biting my knuckles to stop myself crying out. Caroline had been chatting with me and then she fell silent. After a while she took off her gloves and I felt her warm fingers on the top of my back. She told me I could get dressed and I heard the sound of her washing her hands. When I came back out from behind the screen she was sitting at her desk writing notes. She looked up. ‘Can you sit down?’

  ‘Just about.’

  ‘I’m surprised.’ Her expression was serious, almost sombre. ‘You won’t be surprised to learn that you have an acute anal fissure.’

  I tried to look at Caroline with a composed expression as if this were just flu. ‘So what happens?’

  ‘It will probably heal by itself but you should eat plenty of fruit and fibre over the next week or so to avoid damaging it any more. I’m going to prescribe a mild laxative as well.’

  ‘Is that it?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It hurts so much.’

  Caroline thought for a moment and then wrote something more on her prescription. ‘This is for an anaesthetic gel which should be a help. Come and see me next week. If it hasn’t healed then we’ll need to consider anal dilatation.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Don’t worry. It’s a simple procedure but it has to be done under general anaesthetic.’

  ‘God.’

  ‘Don’t worry.’

  ‘Right.’

  She put her pen down and handed me the prescriptions. ‘Alice, I’m not going to give you some moral lecture. But, for God’s sake, treat your body with respect.’

  I nodded. I couldn’t think of what to say.

  ‘You’ve got bruises on your inner thigh area,’ she continued. ‘On your buttocks, on your back and even on the left side of your neck.’

  ‘You’ll have noticed I’m wearing a high-collared shirt.’

  ‘Is there anything you want to talk about with me?’

  ‘It looks worse than it is, Caroline. I’ve just got married. We got carried away.’

  ‘I suppose I should offer my congratulations,’ said Caroline, but she didn’t smile when she said it.

  I stood up to go, wincing. ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  ‘Alice.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Violent sex –’

  ‘It’s not like that…’

  ‘As I was saying, violent sex can be a spiral that’s difficult to get out of. Like being battered.’

  ‘No. You’re wrong.’ I felt hot all over, furious and humiliated. ‘Sex is often about pain as well, isn’t it? And power and submission and stuff like that.’

  ‘Of course. But not about anal fissures.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Be careful, OK?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Twenty-one

  She was easy to track down. There was the letter that I had stared at until my eyes ached. I knew her name; her address was on the headed notepaper in curlicued lettering. I simply rang directory inquiries from work one morning and got her telephone number. I spent a few minutes staring at the digits I had written down on the back of a used envelope, and wondering if I was actually going to call her. Who should I pretend to be? What if someone else answered? I went down the corridor to the drink dispenser, fetched myself a polystyrene mug of orange tea, and settled down in my office with the door firmly pulled shut. I pushed a soft cushion under me, but still felt sore.

  The phone rang for a quite a long time. She must be out; probably at work. Part of me was relieved.

  ‘Hello.’

  She was there, after all. I cleared my throat. ‘Hello, is that Michelle Stowe?’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  Her voice was high and quite thin, with a West Country burr to it. ‘My name is Sylvie Bushnell. I’m a colleague of Joanna Noble’s at the Participant.’

  ‘Yes?’ The voice was cautious now, tentative.

  ‘She passed your note on to me, and I wondered if I could talk to you about it.’

  ‘I dunno,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t have written it. I was angry.’

  ‘We wanted to get your side of the story, that’s all.’

  There was a silence.

  ‘Michelle?’ I said. ‘You would only need to tell me what you felt able to.’

  ‘I dunno.’

  ‘I could come and see you.’

  ‘I don’t want you publishing anything in the paper, not unless I agree to it.’

  ‘There’s no question of that,’ I said, accurately enough.

  She was reluctant, but I pressed and she agreed and I said I would come to see her the following morning. She lived only five minu
tes from the station. It was all so easy.

  I didn’t read on the train. I sat still, wincing with the jolting of the carriage, and stared out of the window as the houses of London petered out, and countryside took over. It was a dank grey day. The previous evening Adam had rubbed me all over with massage oil. He’d been very gentle round the bruising, stroking the swollen purple abrasions tenderly as if they were glorious battle scars. He had bathed me and wrapped me in two towels, and laid his hand on my forehead. He had been so solicitous, so proud of me for my suffering.

  The train went through a long tunnel and I saw my face in the window: thin, swollen lips, shadows under my eyes, hair awry. I pulled a brush and an elastic band out of my bag and tied my hair back severely. I remembered I hadn’t even brought a notebook or a pen. I’d get them when I arrived at the station.

  Michelle Stowe answered the door with a baby clutched to her breast. It was feeding. Its eyes were screwed shut in its wrinkled, reddened face. Its mouth was working voraciously. As I stepped in through the front door, it lost its grip for a second and I saw it make a blind instinctual movement, mouth gaping, tiny fists uncurling and scrabbling at air. Then it found the nipple once more and settled back to its rhythmic suckling.

  ‘I’ll just finish feeding him,’ she said.

  She took me through to a small room filled with a brown sofa. A bar fire glowed. I sat on the sofa and waited. I could hear her cooing softly, the baby whimpering. There was a sweet smell of talcum powder. There were photographs of the baby on the mantelpiece, sometimes with Michelle, sometimes with a thin, bald-headed man.

  Michelle came in, without the baby now, and sat down at the other end of the sofa.

  ‘Do you want tea or anything?’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  She looked younger than me. She had dark curly hair, and full pale lips in a round, watchful face. Everything about her seemed soft: the glossy curls in her hair, her small white hands, her milky breasts, her plump post-natal tummy. She looked both voluptuous and comfortable, wrapped in a shabby cream cardigan, feet in red slippers, a trace of milk on her black T-shirt. For the first time in my life I felt the tug of maternal instinct. I took the spiral-bound notebook out of my bag and put it on my lap. I picked up the pen.