Above All Things

by Tanis Rideout

“Right. Don’t make things worse.”

  Norton squeezed Sandy’s arm and then handed him a tangle of ribbons and garters. “Put one of these on each of the loads.”

  “These are the porters’,” Sandy said, taking them.

  “They’ll recognize which ones are theirs tomorrow and they’ll take that load when it’s time to go. No squabbling, no complaining. It’s the fairest way. You, George, and Odell, you’ll take the lighter loads. If the coolies rundown, that’s one thing. There are only a few of us who can climb. You need to take care of yourself.”

  “And the oxygen?” Sandy asked.

  “It’ll go up soon. The food and tents first. If those aren’t up there, people die,” Norton explained. “Oxygen we’ll take up later.”

  Sandy nodded.

  “You’ll be fine, Sandy.” Norton stared hard at him. “Just do as you’re told.”

  “And don’t make things worse,” Sandy repeated.

  “Right. I have to check in with Noel, see how he’s coming along.”

  Noel had his own miniature expedition arranged and would be heading off after they’d established Camp III to set up his own high camp across from the Col on the flanks of Pumori. From there he’d have a clear view of the summit ridge. He’d wait and film them from there. Noel documented everything. Sandy was surprised he hadn’t taken pictures of the boy’s body. Or the parents. No, maybe that wasn’t fair. Noel just wanted a record of what happened. He’d make his movie and secure his own fame. That’s what he was there to do.

  Each member of the expedition had his role to perform. Sandy had somehow forgotten in the sweep of the journey, the exotic locales, that he had a job to do. There was so much more at stake than just their lives. They couldn’t get waylaid. By anything. He’d thought he understood that. After watching the boy’s body brought back to camp, though, he was unsure. But Norton had made it clear: no matter what, they were going up the mountain tomorrow. He was going up the mountain tomorrow. That’s what he’d come here to do.

  BREAKFAST

  7 O’CLOCK

  When I enter the nursery the children are still tousled in their beds, the room under the eaves stale from having been closed up all night. I open the window onto the long back garden. The colour of the willow tree is deepening and I am reminded of how George always comments on the tender green of spring growth. He hasn’t seen this garden in spring yet, missed the press of shoots up through the black soil.

  Sliding into bed behind John, I pull his body to me, damp with sweat and sleep. He mewls like a small animal and pulls away from me. On his shoulder I trace landscapes, the great bulges of mountains and vast troughs of seas. He calms under these images, my touch.

  The three of them are just beginning to wake; there is the slightest shift of breath as they climb slowly from the depths of sleep into daylight. Part of me wants to hurry them along, pull them towards wakefulness so I can hear the chirp and cry of them, for the distraction of them. They are always wanting something, their insistent demands giving shape to the long days, creating the comfort of routine. Hours can be filled attending to their needs: meals and naps and lessons and playing.

  John rolls over in my arms and smiles widely when he sees me. Pure joy. He puts his small, sticky hand to my cheek, pushing at it. Then he is holding his arms out over my shoulder, past me, to Vi, the same smile turned to her. Vi has been with us since Clare was born, and she is as familiar to them as I am. Maybe more so than their own father. I keep my back to the nurse, facing my son. Our son.

  Sometimes I wonder what he thinks of George, if he does at all. He knows his father is gone, that much is obvious. When I finally returned home after seeing you off, I wrote to George, John wandered from room to room, stood at the bottom of the stairs and called up them: Papa? Papa? It was enough to break my heart. But in the last few weeks he hasn’t done that. I worry he is more accustomed to his father’s absence than his presence, though if Berry or Clare ask about Daddy, he will ask too.

  When it feels as though Vi has turned away, I roll over and watch as she touches the shoulders of the girls and shifts John to her hip. They rise silent from their beds and I am struck anew by the height of them, tall and thin. Their nightgowns were new when you left, too long on them; now the gowns brush their shins. Clare will need a new one, Berry will take her sister’s hand-me-down. Another task for the list that is filling up in my head.

  I sit up and the creaking of the bed stops the girls, who look at me. Berry smiles automatically, as John did. Clare doesn’t.

  “Good morning, Clare-Bear,” I say, their collective nickname.

  “Say good morning to your mother, girls,” Vi instructs them.

  “Good morning, maman,” they chorus.

  They have taken to calling me by the French term since Cottie began her lessons with them, and I love it. It warms me, even when prompted, like this.

  “I think, Vi, I’ll have breakfast with them this morning. Have their things ready for their French lesson. We’ll leave by ten.”

  Berry smiles. John is curled into Vi’s neck. Clare stares at me. I don’t wait for a response from Vi. She considers me silly, I think, as I step past her and make my way back down the stairs. That I suffer George’s absence poorly. That I spend too much time “wandering like a little lost lamb,” she says. Drifting from room to room, piling and unpiling books, papers, linens.

  It isn’t hard to understand why. She lost her husband in the war. As did so many others, of course, God rest them. But his body was destroyed and never found.

  “Where was he?” George asked when he was evacuated home. I hadn’t told him in the hospital, but George had asked after him during his weeks at home, before his return to duty. Not to France as he wished, but to train recruits not far away. He wasn’t glad to be home. His safe return was all I had been praying for, for months, and he wanted to be somewhere else.

  How could he feel that he should be away from us, I wrote to Marby, forgetting she had just recently married a career military man. It’s his duty, Ruth, she wrote back. It isn’t a want, it’s a duty. And you have a duty as well. It’s time for you to grow up.

  “Ypres, I think,” I told him. I should have remembered. It was important to remember, wasn’t it?

  George looked grim. “I’m not surprised they didn’t find anything. She wouldn’t have wanted to see what they would have found.” He had forgotten he was talking to me. His usual indomitable calm had vanished. When he saw my face, though, he shook his head. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean …”

  “Let’s not talk about it.”

  But the idea of those smashed bodies stayed with me. More so when word came only a few days later about Trafford. There was no body to bury, only the empty coffin at the front of Reverend Mallory’s church. For days George’s mother and sister were silent, and we sat in Mrs. Mallory’s over-warm kitchen, the light outside bright and sharp. She drew the curtains. In the next room George and his father argued. “I wish they’d stop,” his mother said. “If Trafford was here, he’d make them stop.”

  “What’s the use of being home,” George told me, sitting outside the rectory, his red-rimmed eyes squinted against the sun, “if I can’t even make my father care.”

  I was stung by his wanting to be away from us. “He does care. Of course he does. But he knows that the rest of his congregation need him too. He has to care enough for all of them.” For my part I was glad George was home. Glad I could see him, touch him. Glad he was far from what had killed Trafford and had almost killed Geoffrey.

  Maybe Vi is right. I should be more stoic. It’s not as if I haven’t been through this before – there was the war and Everest twice already, then the long trip to America. There have been seemingly countless lonely mornings.

  During the war, though, there was a different sensibility – it was something we were all in together. There were the church knitting circles, and Marby, when she came to stay with me in Godalming, insisted on hosting weekly first-aid classes,
showing us how to wrap bandages, how to dress wounds. She would give us – me, Millie, Mrs. Graham, and Mrs. Parker from down the road – the same instructions every time. “Idle minds dwell,” she’d say, before making us repeat the directions she’d given the week before for treating burns or head wounds.

  “This makes me dwell,” I protested at first, cutting and then rolling the long strips of cloth into workable bandages. And it did – made me think about how many ways a body could be injured, destroyed, and how insufficient our homemade bandages would be for patching it up.

  “No, it doesn’t,” Marby insisted. “It gives you a sense of control.”

  We didn’t talk about where our husbands were, or what they were doing. After Mrs. Parker’s husband died, she continued to join our first-aid drills, but her face was grey all the time. Millie would bring the newspaper and she’d sit by the window reading out loud from the casualty lists, all of us listening for names we knew. I couldn’t bear reading the columns of names myself. There were so many familiar names there: Vi’s husband, Captain Parker, Trafford.

  I’m startled by the noise of the children tramping down the stairs, the small parade of them, their footsteps a chaotic beat. There is a chatter of questions from Berry and then the kitchen door opening, closing.

  On the side table under the window is a copy of the Times. I should just cancel the subscription. I try to read it and try not to at the same time. I used to read the newspaper over breakfast – scanning for interesting news to write to George, things that made me feel connected to the wider world. But now the whole of England seems to be caught up in Everest fever. There have been stories about everything: what the expedition members wear, what they eat, how these details find their way to the most esteemed editors.

  I do want to know. But I want only good news. Briefly, I allow myself the luxury of imagining George’s success. He’s done it, I think. He’s done it. And the certainty of his success wells up in me so that there are tears in my eyes and I can’t help but smile. It’s as true as anything, as the newspaper in my hand that I won’t read. When he comes home, he will be ecstatic and tell me it’s over, all of the leaving, the absences. And we will celebrate.

  It might have happened already. Perhaps Hinks knows something.

  Without reading the headline, I fold the paper over and drop it in the woodbox. If it is cool this evening we might build a fire after dinner. It can serve as kindling. The feeling of his success calms me. I wipe the newsprint from my hands, straighten the clock on the mantel.

  Under the clatter of breakfast in the kitchen, I keep one ear cocked for steps on the front stairs, for the drop of the post through the door. I check the time. Nearing nine. But the clock here is always fast. Edith likes it that way. “I can cook properly for the table then, mum,” she says. She says mum instead of ma’am. As if I’m a lady. As if she’s a lady’s maid.

  I love this kitchen with its old oak table that used to belong to my mother. It is pocked and scratched across the surface from chopping and spills and burning pots. The whitewashed cupboards make the room bright and welcoming, big enough for all of us, yet still small enough to feel cozy. There is toast and jams, soft-boiled eggs, milk and tea, all of it laid out on the china I painted when George and I were first married. Pieces of it have been lost and broken, so it’s relegated to the kitchen now, to the children’s breakfast. John dips his toast into the yolk of his egg, misses his mouth slightly as he bites down.

  “Why is there a party without Daddy?” Clare asks, as I lean over to wipe at John’s face. He squirms away and I give up and refill Berry’s milk.

  “Pardon?”

  “I think,” Clare goes on, “and Berry thinks that Daddy will be very sad if he misses the party. He might be very angry at you if you have a party without him.”

  A smile, reassuring. It’s a balancing act, I wrote to George after he left for Everest the second time. I try to make the children feel that everything is normal, as if you’ve just gone out for the evening, or climbing with Will for the weekend. But they also know that isn’t true. They know you’re gone a long time, somewhere far away, and while we say it is an adventure, they sense the risk. I have to take some care with that – respect that they might be apprehensive.

  “I shouldn’t think he’ll mind terribly,” I tell her. “He wants us to enjoy ourselves. Mummy thought it might be fun.”

  Clare nods. “Berry would like to have a party.”

  “Would she now?”

  Clare has taken to using Berry as her excuse to ask for things. Conveniently, what she wants, Berry wants. Berry wants biscuits. Berry wants a party. Berry wants to know when Daddy is coming home.

  But Berry isn’t listening. She and John are bickering over something, snapping at each other like little sparrows, small hands grasping hair, pinching. I press Berry’s hands to the table and John lets out a piercing shriek, part victory, part complaint.

  “What kind of party would you like, Berry?”

  Her nose wrinkles up as she thinks a minute. “A tea party. Like Daddy promised.”

  “That would be fun, wouldn’t it? Perhaps this afternoon. In the back garden.” Clare looks triumphant and for a brief moment I want to recant, to take it away so she won’t use her sister or her father’s absence to get what she wants. “After your lessons,” I say directly to Clare. “French and then maths.” Pouting now, she slouches back in her chair. “Sit up straight.”

  She does and then tries to make amends. “Berry likes to go to French lessons.”

  “Do you, Berr?”

  “Oui.” Her voice is a small cheep.

  “Oui!” John echoes, yelling it at the top of his lungs and kicking at the underside of the table. His glass wobbles and then tips, milk spreading across the scored surface. I reach for the tea towel near the stove and John rubs his hands in the milk, then sticks tight fists in his mouth.

  “John, no!” I grab his hand and he yells again.

  The milk runs onto the floor as I reach for the bell to summon Vi.

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “Please take them and get them cleaned up. We need to leave in half an hour. This afternoon, if they’re good, there will be a tea party in the back garden.”

  Vi surveys the mess and I bristle, feeling reprimanded. She only obeys me because it is her job. There is no affection there. Not for me. Perhaps there is for George; he is at ease with the servants. I am not good with them. When I was small, I would go out of my way to clean up after Millie and Marby so as to not have to talk to my father’s maids. Somehow they make me feel a stranger in my own home. If there was a way to join Vi and Edith – for a chat, a cup of tea – I would. But it isn’t done and they wouldn’t have it. When I sit in the parlour and try to read, I can hear them chattering to each other, their small bursts of laughter. There is a creep of fear along my spine that they are talking about me. Laughing at me.

  Usually Vi would take the children to their lesson, but I’m restless, my nerves taut from lack of sleep. It would do me good to get out of the house and get some fresh air. “I’ll take the children to Cottie’s – I mean, Mrs. O’Malley’s – this morning. You’ll have enough to do for dinner. Please ask Edith to join me here and then you can get the children dressed.”

  I begin to gather the dirty plates, piling them and then the saucers, toss the wet tea towel in the sink.

  “Mum?”

  Edith is flushed red from some exertion or other in the pantry. There is sweat on her lip and I wipe at my own face. She doesn’t notice. She huffs and stares past me, a spot over my shoulder. There’s nothing there. Like Vi, she is stocky, thick legs in slouching stockings. They’re like squat bookends.

  Vi and Edith are all the things I am not. Solid and reliable. There is a kind of physical power to them that I cannot really imagine. They would be rough in bed with their husbands and lovers. I can almost picture them, shuddering against their partners.

  Edith folds her hands in front of her. She is holdin
g this morning’s post.

  I cross the kitchen to the window, to distance myself from the mess, from the letters that I want to snatch from her sweaty hands. We are awkward with each other; she’s only been with us since just before George left. I know so little about her and feel she knows everything about me.

  “We need to … I mean, I would like to discuss this evening’s menu.”

  She nods but doesn’t say anything. Looks from me to the spill of milk on the floor and back, then puts the letters on the sideboard and begins clearing up.

  “I think lamb,” my mouth is saying. I crane my head to see the handwriting on the topmost envelope. “Spring lamb. Fresh butchered. Potatoes. Some sort of green vegetable.” How did I not hear the post arrive? Were they from yesterday? Would she have kept them from me? No. It must have come while John was screaming or when he and Berry were fighting. “A dinner that George, Mr. Mallory, would enjoy if he were home. You take care of the other courses. Nothing extravagant. Simple.”

  The writing on the top envelope isn’t his, but it could contain news of him.

  “The good china is still packed.” A pause and then, “Mum.”

  “Oh. Of course. Have Vi unpack it while you go to market. She’ll have the time. I’m taking the children to their lesson.” A flush across my face. Don’t explain yourself, Marby’s voice hisses.

  She bobs her head but is still waiting.

  “What is it, Edith?”

  “The seating, mum? And candles? Flowers?”

  “No need,” I say. My hand is reaching for the letters. “The seating we will discuss later. I’ll buy the flowers while I’m out.”

  ——

  I wait to flip through the envelopes until I am back in the sitting room and the door is closed. Outside the bells at one of the colleges toll. If George was here he would say, “Ah, King’s.” Or “That’s the alma mater.” And I would hum – Oranges and lemons say the bells …

  There is nothing from George. A bill for his boots still to be paid. A request for an interview from the Evening Standard; they’ve heard something about the climbers’ diet being one of sweets and want to know more. Absurd. And a letter from the Reverend Mallory, which I don’t want to read. Not now. It will be full of the usual self-serving pity for me. He uses George’s absence, or my situation as he calls it, to further pontificate on his son’s failings. I’ve become a convenient tool for him. A blunt one. It was better when he thought me strange and unsettling.