Above All Things

by Tanis Rideout

  He pulled up as he reached Somervell, who put down his pipe and newspaper and picked up his stethoscope. Sandy bent at the waist – his lungs heaved and sweat dripped from him onto the marble floor. The air was filled with the scent of the woman who had blessed him earlier, but now the smell was coming from him. He licked at the salt on his lips.

  “You really didn’t need to overdo it.” Somervell checked his watch as he pressed the stethoscope against Sandy’s chest.

  “You said. Run. Like it was. My last. Eight.”

  “All right, well, stand up straight. Breathe normally. I need a base reading. Sea level. Low stress.”

  Pressing against the stitch under his ribs, Sandy stood upright and tried to steady his breath, his pulse. Somervell listened and measured. Most of the tables in the courtyard were empty, except for a few men who sat drinking from highball glasses, ice cubes tinkling. Bright flowers overflowed from pots on the walls, releasing their evening perfume into the air. He’d never stayed in any place this luxurious, even with Marjory, who liked to splash out and meet him in fancy hotels in London.

  “Enjoy it now,” George had told him when they’d registered. “It’s all downhill from here.”

  “Isn’t it uphill?” he responded, and smiled at his own joke. George had just nodded.

  His pulse was dropping quickly. That was good. He’d known these tests were coming. “We want to see what happens to the body at altitude,” Somervell had explained one afternoon on board the California. “We’ll test all the way there, all the way back, track the changes. Physical, mental, emotional. All of us.”

  “Looks good,” Somervell said now as he pulled the stethoscope away from his ears and jotted something in a notebook. “Good resting rate, good under duress. Mind you, I’d be surprised to see anything different. Keep it up. But now to the real stuff – mental acuity.” Somervell pulled a sheet of paper from a leather portfolio on the table and handed it to him. “You’ve got three minutes.” Somervell hit his stopwatch, sat down, and picked up his newspaper and drink again.

  The problems weren’t difficult. Sandy finished them easily, even with the distracting sound of ice clinking in Somervell’s glass and a bird flitting about somewhere, unseen, in the courtyard. “You’ll have to make them tougher, Somes,” he joked, handing the sheet back to Somervell.

  “You say that now.” Somervell didn’t look at the answers, but set the sheet aside. “And now? The Bible passage I asked you to learn?”

  Sandy recited the passage without fumbling once.

  “Right. Thank you, Mr. Irvine.” Somes nodded formally. “That concludes our first round of testing. Congratulations.”

  “And? How did I do?”

  “It looks like you did just fine. Of course, I’ll have a better idea when I collate all of this data, but you’ve nothing to worry about. As a doctor, I’d say you’re fit for service.”

  “Well, not to be too boastful, but I did just come off a good rowing season. And Spitsbergen was a good test.”

  “I’ve no doubt it was. You’re a solid specimen.”

  “But how’d I do compared to, say, George?”

  “Ah. Sorry, Sandy. Doctor–patient confidentiality. Besides, even we old men are in pretty good shape here. But …”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, your working pulse rate is the lowest. That’s a good sign, I think. Still, it’s damn near impossible to tell how any individual will respond at altitude. Fitness doesn’t seem to have much to do with success up there.” Somervell handed him another sheet of paper, another Bible passage. “Learn this one. I’ll test you again when we get to Darjeeling.”

  Later, in his room, damp from the cool bath, the humid air, Sandy sat at the desk and took a break from his letter to Marjory to gaze out over the city. The air was heady with the heavy smell of the city, spiced with strange foods and night-blooming flowers. There was music coming from somewhere down on the docks, a clanging riot that he couldn’t find the rhythm in. For a moment he imagined Marjory had come with him, pictured her naked on the linen bed cover, her eyes closed so her other senses could take over. He almost wished she could have come, just to see her lying there, her skin freckled from the sun, the coverlet damp with her sweat.

  She’d joined him on the ship to Spitsbergen, paid her own fare, had her own cabin that he’d sneak into at night. “I want to see you off,” she’d said when he was packing for Spitsbergen. “Properly.” She was so happy and proud of him. “You’re not like my husband at all,” she said, lying on top of him, her small breasts solid against him. “He never tries anything. You – you’ll try anything.” And she gave him that look she had, the small twist of her mouth, the raising of her left eyebrow just a fraction. On anyone else it would look vulgar, or worse, ridiculous, but it suited her. She was the one who would try anything.

  It’s nice to have a familiar face in Odell. His role on this expedition is different than when I went with him to Spitsbergen. There, he seemed to have more input on leadership. But here, it’s George and Norton I need to impress. As the climbing and expedition leaders, they’ll decide who gets to take a shot at the prize, who gets left behind. I’m not their first choice, that much is certain, but I do want a shot. I know I could do it. I just need a chance to show them.

  All in all, things seem more ambitious too. Spitsbergen was surveying – this is a different end altogether. Conquering. Norton talks constantly about plans, about schedules. George writes things down. I wonder if he writes about me. But my tests are good, Somervell says. And I’m ready. You wouldn’t believe this city. Someday we’ll come here. You and me. I’ll show you this place.

  Did he mean that? He wasn’t sure. But the words were already written and there was no way to cross them out unless he started again, and he just wanted to be done with the letter and lie in the dark listening to the city. Already the sounds had shifted – the whine of motorcars had tapered off somewhat and the music of insects and nightbirds had added a chorus to it. He scanned the words again and stared back out the open window. What could it hurt? She would feel loved and that was important.

  The whole thing with Marjory had started out as a lark, but recently she had begun to talk about the future – while he hadn’t thought of much beyond her bed. He’d leave it for now and sort it out when he got home. When he got home everything would be different.

  Tomorrow we head out for Darjeeling, on the other side of the country, almost a week from here by train. It feels like this is where it all begins. I’ve been on ships before. But now there is all of India to cross. I hope I’ll do you proud.

  He didn’t sign it with love, just his name. He turned off the desk lamp, and then the room was blacker than the world outside. He watched the small skiffs flicker in the harbour and then lay on his bed, drifting to the distant music that echoed across the water.

  IT HAD BEEN ten days since they made landfall at Bombay and now, on the day they were to leave Darjeeling, heading northwards through the Mahabharat Range and into Tibet, George woke with a hangover. Hoping to burn off the worst of the headache, he forced himself out into the misty morning to run along the Teesta – the slow wide river that edged the hamlet and its terraced tea plantations.

  His head throbbed with each step, and he gritted his teeth against it. This was how it would feel to work at altitude – this painful and foggy. The muddy riverbank sucked at his feet, and his legs burned as he dragged them free. His body was loose and lazy, but eventually he found his stride, gulping at the clean, wet air. Musty and rich.

  The journey here had been a slow drift through the seasons – he could barely remember the damp, February weight of Cambridge, of London. Then they had slipped past the coast of France and into the humid spring of the Mediterranean. Now they were leaving the dry summer blaze of India and would soon enter the high Himalayan winter. There everything would be grey and white, the colour stripped from the landscape, tinted only by the rising or setting sun. For the moment, he basked in the lush gre
en of the tea plantations. He would miss the first burst of spring green back home. It would be late summer before he returned.

  Feeling the familiar twinge in his ankle, George lengthened his stride. His mouth was dry and pasty. If he’d been at home in Cambridge, there would have been a cool glass of water waiting for him when he finished his run. Ruth would leave it at the top of the stoop and it always seemed freshly run, droplets clinging to the inside of the glass. What was Ruth doing right now? He tried to calculate the time difference. She’d likely just be turning in, climbing alone into their bed.

  Don’t think it cruel, darling, he’d written her before dinner the previous night, but I think of you most as I climb into bed. I am so used to your presence beside me, that its absence is a palpable discomfort that makes sleep feel as far away as you are.

  He needed to finish the letter so he could get it in the post before they left Darjeeling. The letters he’d send from this point on – from remote settlements such as Kyishong or Khamba Dzong, even Everest itself – would take much longer to reach home. From here our letters will travel more slowly. But they are coming, I promise. Watch for them. He still wanted to describe for Ruth the tiny toy train they had taken from Rangtong – like something we’d see at the Brighton Pier – and the endless bickering with Teddy about plans and oxygen. It was almost impossible to remember every thought and sight he wanted to share. He had written his way to the Himalayan foothills – first across the ocean, then the Indian subcontinent, its cities opening out into yellow plains, turning first to forest, then to lush jungles, and finally the dark heavy green of these foothills.

  On their arrival in Darjeeling, they’d been welcomed by Richards, the local consul, who had insisted, as the last bastion of the Empire before the great wilds, on sending them off in style. “I don’t get much cause for hosting the Empire’s celebrities,” Richards said. “Not out here. I need to splash out where I can. The locals expect it. They want to be awed by English pomp.” And so each time they passed through Darjeeling, either on the way to or from Everest, Richards threw a dinner party in his perfectly manicured English gardens. They always ate and drank to excess. Last night had been no exception.

  His legs were warming up now, and the sweat was beginning to spring up along his hairline, down his spine. He could smell the alcohol evaporating off his body. He shouldn’t have drunk so much last night. Though he wasn’t the only one. They’d all gone a little overboard.

  As the meal started, Richards had turned to Teddy, the great length of him stretched out in his chair, and gestured in George’s direction. “George Mallory! I can’t believe you convinced him to come back, Teddy. I thought I’d seen the last of him.”

  Teddy laughed. “Did you? Really? I knew George would never let anyone else climb her. He thinks it’s his mountain. I always knew he wouldn’t abandon us.”

  George panted into his second mile. The rest of the evening hadn’t been so good-natured. As the dinner had ground on and the drinks became stronger, the expedition members had grown louder, more aggressive – the weeks of close contact on the ship and on the train edged their conversation.

  “Sandy,” Somervell had smirked at one point “You won’t believe it, but last time, do you remember, Teddy? Last time, George put the film in his camera wrong. What was it, George? A week’s worth of shooting that we lost? Poor Noel. I thought he might murder you.”

  “It wasn’t a week. It was one roll of film.” Everyone else laughed. The gin had slipped into his brain and fizzled there. He tried to laugh with them, but couldn’t. “Besides, Noel took enough photos for all of us,” George said, glancing over to where the photographer sat with his camera on the table in front of him.

  Somervell ignored him and turned to Sandy, Hazard, and Shebbeare – the three novices. “That’s why you always have to follow up on George. He’s forever losing things, forgetting them. His mind gets ahead of him. He’s always a little farther up the mountain than the rest of us.”

  As usual Teddy, calm as new snow, had interjected, smoothing things over before George even had a chance to respond. “But the man can climb.”

  Today they would leave their dinner jackets behind, shedding them along with all the other niceties of civilized society, for the three-week trek to Everest Base Camp. Their dinner jackets would be cleaned and pressed, waiting for their return. With luck, they’d need them for celebratory dinners on the way home. By then the suits would hang loose on their thinned frames. But for now they all appeared healthy, ambitious, strong.

  As George rounded a long bend in the river, he slowed, and the churning froth of water spread out in front of him, a dream-scape in the weak, wavering light. Above the surface, mist and smoke clung to the current, dragged along as the river coursed south. His pulse pounded at his temples, heat radiated from his face, but at least his hangover was finally easing away. To hell with Somervell, he thought, as he looked across the river and let the air slip out of his lungs.

  On the far bank, pale flames flickered through the mist on built-up platforms, the flames stretching out in either direction to where the river bent away in the haze. Some of the platforms burned brightly, others were only smouldering ashes that scattered in the bare breeze. White shapes hovered above a few of the flames. Spirits, it seemed. No. Men. Stained white with the ash. They fanned the fires that were still burning or swept dying embers into the rivers. A keening, ceremonial chanting filled the air.

  They were burning bodies.

  Bile rose at the back of his throat. He bent and vomited the small contents of his stomach, then spat, and watched the smoke rising, the sputter of flames. Flesh burning, incense, the acrid smell of it thick in his nostrils. It was repulsive, savage. But the ritual was consoling, somehow, too. A release – of the body, the spirit – into the river, the air.

  After his brother, Trafford, had been shot down during the war, their father had performed the funeral rites at their church at Mobberley. His father, the reverend at the altar, surrounded by the caskets of the three fallen soldiers and airmen. All of them empty. George knew what happened to bodies in the war, had seen the bloody pulp of them outside the trenches, the white gleam of skulls and bones in the moonlight when they were ploughed back up, over and over again, by shelling and rain. Rarely were bodies ever sent home. But the families wanted – needed – something to mourn over. The coffins wouldn’t be buried. They’d be used again and again, standing in for the bodies of other dead men.

  His father had insisted on eulogizing all of the fallen together.

  Fallen. Even the word glossed over the bloodiness and the unfairness of it.

  “Trafford deserves his own service,” George protested. “It’s not right. And not fair to Mum. She deserves to mourn her son properly.”

  “And the others don’t?” his father had shot back.

  “That’s not what I mean. Of course that’s not what I mean. But Trafford –”

  “He died the same way those other boys did. For his country. Do you think our loss is any greater than anyone else’s?”

  “No. It’s just –”

  His father cut him off. “Don’t you see what it means to the Barkers? The Clarkes? To know we share their grief? We’re all in this together and this is our sacrifice to make. Mine, your mother’s, your sister’s, yours.” His father sat down, opened his Bible in front of him. “Your brother would have understood that.”

  “My brother? You won’t even say his name. You can’t. As long as it’s not Trafford, as long as he’s unnamed, you can bury him like everyone else. Say it.” His father wouldn’t look up at him. “Say his name. Please.”

  “They all died bravely.”

  “You don’t know that. You have no idea what it’s like over there. In those trenches, those skies. Your God isn’t there.”

  “Stop it,” his father said, “you sound like a whinging child.”

  “None of them died bravely. Not if bravery means not screaming, or crying, or pissing themselves.�
� Even as he said it he tried not to think of how painful Trafford’s death must have been. Tried not to think of him screaming, crying. Tried not to think of the rest of his friends, his students, still in France. Still cold and wet and frightened, waiting for gas attacks and for the whistle of shells, the snipe of bullets. He couldn’t think of them while he was home in a warm bed with Ruth, waking up to his baby girl. Safe. Invalided out because of an old climbing injury.

  He’d wanted to go back. Had to. He would have settled for Le Havre if he couldn’t go all the way back to Armentières. But his blasted ankle was too much trouble, the doctors said. You can help in other ways, they told him. So he’d written pamphlets on how to conserve food, fuel, and electricity, instruction manuals for children on how they could help defeat the Hun. While Jack Sanders, Gilbert Bell, and Rupert Brooke had been killed.

  His brother’s name was on his lips. In time to the keening, George chanted his brother’s name.

  His father had never cried for Trafford. He never cried for any of the men he buried, just sat in his rectory and praised God, and quietly went on doing His bidding. George hated his father for that, for his calm faith that the war was right and just.

  Did his father think Everest was worth dying for? Did he even? Already it had cost them so much. Eleven dead so far. Seven in the avalanche. Others to frostbite and malaria, mountain sickness. Maybe there wasn’t any way to measure the value of a life. But wasn’t it important to risk something if you believed in the end goal?

  The fires burned lower, bluer, devouring the heavy insides, the bones.

  This was all there was. Maybe nothing was worth dying for. It was all foolishness, vain quests, and ambitions of glory – for themselves, for King and Country. But if there was nothing worth dying for, neither could there be anything worth living for.

  He recited their names. All of his loved ones. He could go on with the losses.