Above All Things

by Tanis Rideout

  Today reveals no such treasures, just piles of dusty books, some left from the days when George attended Magdalene College here in Cambridge. For him they might hold all sorts of memories, but for me, it is all dust and mould. My nose begins to run and I scratch at my eyes.

  Glancing to the window, I notice that the room is beginning to lighten and I let myself check the clock ticking away on the mantel. Half-six. The morning will start properly soon. Already, I can feel the house warming around me, waking. The post should be here in another hour. Two at the most.

  Silly to wait for it, really.

  But word should be arriving soon. According to the telegram I received yesterday from Arthur Hinks, the monsoon arrived on the continent a week ago. Which means George is running out of time. He says they count on the burst of good weather that comes before the monsoon brings the heavy snows. But then the expedition will soon have to retreat and George will have to return. Soon another telegram will arrive, confirming he’s on his way home, but still I wait for the sound of the post, to flip through the bills and invitations and inquiries to find a word from him. Any word. I prefer letters.

  It was by telegram that I found out he was leaving again.

  There’d been a knock at the door and I had answered it. The house was empty – everyone gone about their business, even the children.

  “Telegram for Mr. Mallory?”

  “I’m Mrs. Mallory.” He tipped his hat and handed the paper to me. If the news had come by letter I wouldn’t have known until George told me, but there were the words of congratulations from Arthur Hinks and the Everest Committee.

  I had thought we were talking it over. I thought we would come to some kind of agreement together.

  I close the door on the memory now and stand in the hallway, try to think of what to do next. The hours stretch ahead of me, like a line on a map. I will get dressed and rouse the children. By then it will be close to seven, a respectable hour, the rest of the world awake.

  I climb the stairs to the first floor, past the empty walls in need of photographs, paintings. I’ll add that to the list of things that need doing. Today, maybe. Or tomorrow. Perhaps I can find something in town. This place is not a home. Not yet.

  The day after the telegram for George arrived I cried in the garden, dirt wet on my dress where I kneeled over the bulbs. We’d stood in the garden together when we bought the house and decided what to plant. George walked the perimeter of it, drawn to the small stream at the end, and promised me a fish pond.

  “We’ll plant it all together. It’ll be perfect. And then we’ll sit here and drink gin every evening until we’re tight. Or the frost comes. Whichever comes last.”

  The crocuses, I knew, would bloom and fade before he came home. Already I was counting, measuring time and distance. He stood over me but I didn’t turn.

  “Six months,” he said. “But then it will be done.

  There was heat from his hand where he touched the air above my shoulder.

  “And when do you leave?”

  “It will be the last time.”

  He kept saying that. For months. Over and over.

  “This time is the last time. I owe it to myself. To you. That’s what Will says. Geoffrey, too. They’re right. I need to try. One last time. Will you understand that? You have to understand that.”

  I didn’t. Nor did I know who he was trying to convince – me or himself. The garden air was damp on my face and I wouldn’t look at him. I’d decided that I wouldn’t let him see me cry.

  Now as I enter the bedroom, I catch sight of myself in the mirror above the dressing table. I am old, I think, a long way from the girl who painted that scene at Casa Biondetti, though that is partially the morning light, the swelling around my eyes from lack of sleep. I poke my tongue out at the woman in the glass and go to the wardrobe to dress. I don’t want a repeat of yesterday.

  Yesterday, the children found me still in my nightdress, returned to bed after my morning wanderings. I woke to hear them tramping down the stairs, then along the bare hallway, before they pushed open the bedroom door. Clare first, followed by Berry leading John by the hand. The wooden floor under their feet, like tiny cat paws, didn’t so much as creak from their fragile weight. They stopped at the edge of the bed.

  Outside the door was a heavier footstep. Vi, following the children. She paused and listened at the door before moving on down the hallway and then the stairs. I waited for the run of water, the clank of the kettle against the tap.

  Jumping up, I grabbed John and pulled him on top of me with a squeal. The room was so bright, the light reflected off his face, the vest pulled over his bulging tummy. My fingers moved automatically to his armpits to tickle him and I pressed my face to the sleepy, milky smell of his body, nuzzling him.

  “Why are you still in bed, Mummy?” Clare wanted to know. “Are you ill?”

  There was a note of hope in her voice. Poor Clare, always wanting to make things better. If I was ill she could be in charge, could bring me weak tea and toast in bed. She could lord over her brother and sister, chastise them for playing too loudly, not playing what she wanted. Illness she could do something about.

  “No, pet, I’m fine.” I reached towards her and she backed away. “Mummy’s just a bit tired is all.”

  She looked at me darkly. You won’t believe how much she looks like you, I had written to George when he was in France and she had just turned two. She draws her eyebrows together and her face clouds and you are all I see. It makes me want to laugh and cry all at once. She is certainly your child.

  How is Clare? George wrote from the Sardinia the first time he left for Everest. She is brave for her siblings, I answered. What I didn’t add was that she shouldn’t have to be. She should only have to be a child with her parents there to protect her.

  I grabbed her then and pulled her to the bed too, even while she tried to resist. She thinks she is too big for roughhousing. Berry clambered up after her and I wrestled the three of them until we were piled, gasping, lungs heaving. Their weight pinned me down, stilled the jittery nerves that seem to run through my body all the time now, making sounds seem too loud, the light too bright.

  Then Vi was back outside the door, come to claim them. Her weight shifted back and forth, back and forth. Like a cow, swaying slightly as it chews. Patient – always patient.

  “Come in, Vi.”

  “Good morning, Mrs. Mallory.”

  “They’re ready for breakfast now. Can you take these rascals? Get them fed and watered?”

  John and Berry collapsed in giggles again at being called rascals, and I crossed my eyes at them. Clare climbed down, her back straight, and went to stand at the door. “Come on, you two,” she ordered. She wouldn’t look at me.

  This morning I won’t let that happen. I’ll wake them instead.

  I finish dressing, examine myself in the mirror. Better now. I brush my long hair back, wrap it into a loose braid. Then dig in the wardrobe again. I need something to wear this evening. For the dinner party. I pull out the black cotton and hear George’s voice in my head – too funereal – and reach instead for the blue silk, hang it on the back of the door, and remind myself to tell Edith it is there and will need to be pressed. Carefully.

  I check myself once more in the mirror. I look calm, my face is pale, my hands steady. I wipe them on the skirt of my dress to get rid of the sweat on my palms. Another day closer, I think, and nod to my reflection. It’s just past seven now. Time to wake the children.

  BASE CAMP

  17,000 FEET

  “Virgil, this isn’t my footlocker. Where’s my locker?” George kicked at the small crate on the broken ground outside his half-erected tent and stared expectantly at his porter.

  The wiry Tibetan man stepped from behind the sagging canvas to look at the box at George’s feet. “Sahib Sandy say,” he offered, nodding, then crouched down again to tie the tent’s guy line around a small boulder.

  “Well, it isn’t mine. Take
it back and find mine. I need my crampons so I can have a look at the glacier.”

  It had been two years since George was last at Base Camp, and so much had changed. He’d already noticed new boulders at the edge of the moraine, how the snow lines on the nearby mountains looked different. The glacier would be different too. He had been brooding about the Icefall for the past week. Everest might seem solid, unchanging, but it wasn’t. The glacier churned down the mountain, shifting boulders, scraping out the terrain. He couldn’t wait to examine the ice beyond the treacherous tumble of jagged rocks that made up their camp.

  “First tent,” Virgil said, continuing to tug at the line in his hands.

  “Anyone can set up a damn tent. I need to get us through the Icefall and up the bloody mountain.” George waited impatiently for Virgil to do as he asked, but the man kept at the tent. “Fine, Virgil.” He bent to grab one of the guy ropes and pulled the peak of the tent taut.

  “I send boy for locker,” Virgil said.

  “Boy? What boy?”

  Virgil pointed past him to a small figure coming towards them. What on earth was he doing here? The boy looked five, maybe six. Close to Berry’s age. It wasn’t unusual for some of the female coolies to bring their nursing infants with them, but they never brought children.

  Picking his way easily over the broken moraine, the boy hurried towards Virgil, a wide grin on his face. Virgil didn’t speak to the boy, but instead pointed at the box and then to where Sandy and the two new team members, Shebbeare and Hazard, were directing crates and bundles in various directions around Base Camp. Virgil mimed picking up the crate and walking with it. The boy’s mouth moved soundlessly as he nodded, picked up the box, and moved off. Stopping every few steps, he set down the heavy weight of the box to glance over his shoulder at Virgil before continuing towards the centre of camp.

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “He not …” Virgil pointed at his ear.

  “He can’t hear?”

  “Yes.” Virgil nodded. “He can’t hear.”

  “Not sure this is the best place for him, then. Finish this?” George gestured to the tent and strode off. “Never mind,” he said, taking the box back from the boy, who smiled at him, lopsided and vague, then tagged after him as he walked to Sandy with the footlocker. Odell’s name was clearly stencilled on the sides of it.

  “Sandy, where’s my footlocker?” He dropped Odell’s to the ground and the boy went to pick it up. Shaking his head no, he grasped the child’s small shoulders and pointed him off towards a group of coolies, who all reached out to him, touching him, their hands on his head or his small shoulders. It was impossible to tell which one he belonged to.

  “What?” Sandy continued to check off items on the manifest in his hand while delivering a final instruction to Shebbeare and Hazard, who went in the direction of the mess tent. It was Sandy’s responsibility to make sure everything ended up where it was supposed to.

  “My footlocker. This is obviously Odell’s.”

  “Then he probably has yours. The porters must have mixed them up.” Sandy glanced back and forth from the manifest to a large crate in front of him. The word fragile was stamped on the wood above its equivalent in a squiggle of Hindi script. “I can’t figure out what in the hell is in this one. I’ve checked everything off.”

  It was a strange crate, larger than most of them. “We should take a look then.”

  “Shouldn’t we check first?”

  “Why? We’re all in this racket together, Sandy. No secrets here.” He picked up the crowbar at Sandy’s feet. “Besides, we carted the bloody thing all the way here.” He wrenched open the top of it and there was a spill of straw, the smell of splintered wood.

  “Ha!” George laughed out loud. He pulled the crate apart, stripping down the straw packing, which was picked up and scattered by the wind. Mahogany wood gleamed warm and rich against the grey, cold desertscape of Base Camp.

  “What on earth? It’s a Victrola.” Sandy’s confusion was clear.

  “Ah! There it is! Is it in one piece?” Teddy was striding towards them, carrying another footlocker. “George, I believe this is yours. Seems it ended up in the wrong place. You’ll need to pay closer attention, Mr. Irvine,” said the expedition leader. “These mistakes can’t happen higher up.”

  “Right, sir.” Sandy’s faced reddened.

  George turned his attention back to the Victrola and ran his fingers across the small plaque on the side of it – In memory of those who fell. It was the one from the Alpine Club.

  “It doesn’t look like it belongs here,” Sandy said.

  It did look foreign, George thought. Too delicate, its turned legs unsteady on the rough terrain. “None of us belong here, Sandy.”

  “I brought it for you, George,” Teddy said, putting his arm around him. “I thought you might like it. There’s another crate around here too.”

  “Of course, Teddy, for me. Seems to me last time you were the one missing music.” He turned to Sandy, “He would sing. All the time. What was it, Teddy?”

  The team leader burst into song. “I’m forever blowing bubbles, pretty bubbles –”

  “Exactly. Let’s not have a repeat of that. We should find the records.”

  While Teddy hummed, they found the crate filled with now mostly broken shellac records. “At least a couple survived,” Teddy said, handing one over. “Let’s give it a go.” Sandy wiped the dust and straw off the record and placed it delicately on the turntable, then cranked the machine.

  A fast tumble of notes from a high wailing trumpet filled the air. Jazz. The sound took George straight back to the speakeasies of New York. It was his record, the one Stella had bought for him. He kept it at the Alpine Club, worried what Ruth would hear in its cascading notes, wild and abandoned. No, it had been better to put the record, and Stella, away, he thought. Another mistake, best forgotten.

  He inhaled the music wafting on the wind.

  Later, as the sun set behind the peak of Pumori, they gathered around the Victrola. The coolies, the climbers, all of them crowded together, sitting on camp chairs and boulders – the English in Burberry tweeds and sweaters, the coolies in red and yellow yak-wool coats, dusted with black soot. The deaf boy careered among the coolies, who put their palms to his cheeks and forced him to look them in the eyes. He calmed briefly before he tore away again.

  John was like that, never sitting still. Really, all three of the children were, but George expected it more from John. That’s what boys were like.

  The night before he left he’d gone to visit his son in the nursery. “John,” he whispered, “there are things you should know.” He had stood over his son’s small bed and tried to think of something to say to him. Across the room, Clare and Berry slept as soundly as their brother. The girls had confounded him at first. She seems so superfluous, he’d written to Geoffrey when Clare was born during the height of the war, in light of all the men that have gone and need replacing. Now he cringed at the thought that he’d ever called Clare or Berry superfluous. The girls had taken time, a getting-to-know-you period, but they’d grown into his little imps and he loved them. Clare was braver than he could ever have hoped – a bold tomboy.

  But John he understood from the first. He’d missed his birth, but that hadn’t mattered at all. It was as if he already knew John. “I’ll take him climbing,” he told Ruth, sweeping John up in the crook of one arm, drawing vistas with the other.

  “George, he can’t even hold his head up yet,” Ruth laughed from her bed. “He doesn’t have teeth.”

  “First the Lake District and then the Alps. Maybe someday a faraway adventure. That village – in the Andes.”

  “Machu Picchu?”

  “Yes! We’ll go there and bring back gold.”

  “But not yet.” Ruth took John back, cradled him against her. “Don’t take him away just yet.”

  John would take to climbing. The boy already tried to climb everything in sight. His crib, the tables,
the back wall of the garden. George knew he should rebuke him for it, but couldn’t. He wanted his boy to be fearless.

  “Don’t let them get you down, John,” he whispered above the bed, stroking his son’s wispy hair. So blond, not like either him or Ruth. “You show them who you are. Don’t wait for them to tell you.”

  “Gentlemen.” As Teddy stood, Sandy reached for the Victrola, lifting the needle with a long scratch. George sipped at his enamel mug of champagne. Behind him, Shebbeare murmured, translating for the coolies, who sat empty handed. “Sip slowly,” Teddy said, holding up his mug. “There will be no more of this until we’ve finished this show. Then we’ll be celebrating.” Around him the men laughed a little, indulgently. “We’ve made it this far in one piece. And God knows it’s a long way already. But there is still a long way to go.” Teddy pointed dramatically over George’s shoulder to the pyramid summit of Everest, its white peak glowing against the night sky. George didn’t turn to follow Teddy’s hand. He didn’t need to. He could feel her looming behind him.

  “Tomorrow,” Teddy continued, “George will break the route up the moraine and onto the Icefall. And then, well, then we climb this bloody mountain.”

  If only it were that simple. George pictured it in his head – the push up the moraine, uneven but easy. He’d make an interim camp on the glacier’s shoreline, a scant Camp I that he and Virgil would inhabit during the week they’d spend searching for a route through the Icefall. Next would be traversing the Western Cwm – the long bowl-shaped valley that ran up to the base of the North Col. George had named the Cwm when he first saw it, after the Welsh word for valley, as if to conjure something green this far above the treeline. After that they’d scale the ice cliff of the Col, and then – then he’d be within striking distance. Then he could climb the bloody thing. With perseverance. With good weather. With a willingness to suffer through whatever obstacles she threw in their way.

  “That’s the job,” Teddy said, wavering unsteadily on his feet. “Get up and back down.” He was drunk, not surprising in the thin air. George’s own head buzzed slightly.