Above All Things

by Tanis Rideout

  He thought about George finding Wilson here. Finding his diary, reading it. Thought about being stripped down to this. A body. A few words.

  WILL

  1 O’CLOCK

  After stalking through the old streets, the narrow cart paths that have been here for centuries, shaking off the words, the face, of the woman by the river, I find myself at Will’s door. It’s cool here – the sun barely slipping into the slender passageways – and quiet, as though the buildings and their occupants are accustomed to keeping to themselves.

  Of course I have come to Will’s. I’m shaking and I just need to be with someone. Someone who doesn’t need anything from me, want anything. I pound out the rhythm of my thumping heart on Will’s door, the heavy wood of it under my fist and my stinging palms.

  The door opens and I collapse into the entryway, propelled by the force of my own desperate fists. I strike Will hard on the chest and he catches me, holds me tight a moment, then pushes me out to arm’s length. There is the flicker of panic – the fear of George’s death written all over his face – and I am already apologizing, pulling back, my hands to my hair, sweeping it back where I’m sure it’s run wild. I’m a selfish fool, coming here like this, sobs still in my throat. He reaches for me.

  “What’s wrong? It isn’t …” He doesn’t say your name and it’s a relief. I don’t want to hear your name right now. It only reminds me of everything I don’t know.

  “No, no, no,” I’m saying, but this sounds panicked too.

  I shake my head, lift my hands in some kind of apology. “I’m sorry, Will …” There’s a suitcase just inside the door. Its canvas cover is fraying and covered in worn travel stickers, the whole thing dark and stained, like something left too long in the rain. “Are you going somewhere?” My hand is pointing at the suitcase like an accusation. Everyone is leaving.

  “What? No. No! It’s there for a friend to borrow.”

  His arms are around me again and it’s hard not to want to stay there. It feels different, being in his arms. Will is solid, larger than George. It’s comforting to be held, to be touched. It’s been so long since anyone has touched me besides the children, their hands small and demanding. And then I’m conscious of my body, of it shuddering against him, of the feel of the softness of me against the solidness of him, and he pulls back, or I do. Maybe both of us back away.

  “Come upstairs.”

  He steps back against the heavy door and ushers me with one arm, up the stairs. At the top there is a mirror in the hallway and, vain creature that I am, I look at myself, and I’m surprised by what I see. My eyes are red, my face pale, my hair has indeed run riot. But it isn’t unattractive – this wild, panicked face. Still, I swallow it all down – the panic, this abandon.

  Will doesn’t see me looking at him behind me in the mirror. He is softer than George, his features are easier. Pleasant. Where George’s features are honed to fine edges, can stop you in your tracks, Will’s are less confrontational. More forgiving. He is carrying a book, his finger stuck between the pages where he has been reading. His tie is loose and this intimacy makes me blush more than if he’d not been wearing one at all. He glances into the mirror then and catches my eye. “Tea,” he says. “I’ll make tea.”

  Pressing my throbbing hands together, I move to the tidy sitting room he gestures to. “I’m glad you were home.” I try to joke. “Your neighbours might have summoned the police, thinking me a crazy woman.” My voice is too loud. Circling the room, I touch Will’s belongings – the covers of books, stacks of papers, the eyeglasses that he has only started wearing in recent years. There are photographs too. Him and his siblings. His father. They are smart in morning dress, some formal occasion. I admire his orderliness. I run my finger along the spines of books that all have their final pages intact.

  I think of the mess in my bedroom at home – the things I allow to pile up the longer I am on my own. Scraps of paper, books, and letters in stacks around my bedroom. A way to make the space mine. I ask Vi to leave all of it be. Before George comes home I’ll tuck everything away. Everything in its place. A place for everything. It is becoming my mantra.

  “Yes,” Will calls from the kitchen, startling me back to his sitting room. “It could have been quite the scandal.”

  He brings me tea and we sit next to each other on the sofa. He drops two lumps of sugar in my cup and lets them dissolve before he stirs. George doesn’t have that patience; he grinds them instead against the side of the cup with the back of the spoon. An annoying habit. One that I wish I’d been able to gripe about this morning. “George, please. It sets my teeth on edge. Stir it like a reasonable human being.” And he would have ground them all the more, then reached for my cup and done the same.

  “You don’t even need the sugar,” he’d say. “Too sweet already.”

  The spoon makes a quiet clinking against the china, and when Will hands me my tea the warmth of it floods the whole of me, even though I didn’t know I was cold. It’s bitter and not quite hot enough. I recognize the china. Holding the teacup towards Will like a salute, I ask, “Is this because I’m here? You don’t use these to entertain, do you?”

  “Of course. I don’t think I drink out of anything else.”

  I had meant the tea set for George. A gift for when he returned from Everest the first time. Painting them was a task to keep me occupied during his months away. I started them the week he left and agonized over them, hoping for uniform perfection. On each piece there is the faintest line of a mountain in green against a grey-blue background. Somehow, after they’d been fired, they’d seemed too delicate for George. He sees the world in grand views, sweeping vistas. In bold archetypes where everything is clear. Right and wrong. Duty and disregard. Not me. I am always too distracted by tiny details – the warm pressure of Will’s hand on my back as he walked me up the stairs. The feel of a name in my mouth.

  The restraint of the image on the cup made me think of Will, the consistency of the line my paintbrush made over and over. There is an anticipation to the line – it reads like a pause, a foot about to step into nothingness, above cold water.

  “George?” Will pulls me from my thoughts. “He’s all right, then?”

  “I assume so.” I laugh, nervous and high. “It’s all so stupid, Will. I just keep hoping, thinking. Today. Maybe it will be today. It’s as if the words are running through my head on a ticker tape.”

  “I know.” He lets the lull stretch out between us. There is a rattling, like a storm tapping at the window, and Will is taking the cup and saucer from my hands. “Do you want to tell me what happened?”

  “No. Not yet. It’s all too embarrassing.” The woman, sitting on the wall, her bared teeth flashing at me. Her laugh. Beside her the soldier and his yellowed skin, papery, dry. The way he’d looked at both of us as though we were exotic creatures from somewhere far away. But it was he who was from a different world altogether. I could see the alienation in his eyes. How he’d never really come back. The woman next to him didn’t see any of this at all. “Tell me what you’ve been doing,” I insist to Will.

  “Oh, not so much. A letter to my father, well, a report really. And staring at the painting I’ve been working on.”

  “And is it going?” I don’t ask to see it. Will keeps his paintings to himself until he’s ready to unveil them, which he does with a small ceremony – a certain type of Spanish wine, a particular dark cloth over the painting. First we drink and then he reveals it to us. It is always us. Sometimes there may be one or two others, but George and I are always there.

  “It is. But slowly.” He doesn’t want to talk about it, so I don’t push. “How about you? You hadn’t even unpacked your paints when we last talked about it. Tell me you have by now.”

  I shrug my shoulders, an apology, an explanation. “I’ll unpack them as soon as I get home.”

  “You should. It might do you good before this evening.” Will’s dark eyes are wet with concern. His hair is close cropped. Neat.
Everything in its place.

  “Shall we make a battle plan, then?”

  “For Hinks?” His name is a hiss, conjures someone long and thin, tapering fingers that could dig into anything. The exact opposite of how he is.

  Since I first heard of Everest, Hinks has been a stone in my shoe. A constant irritation. He is all accusations and demands – accusing me of withholding information from him and demanding copies of George’s letters in case there is something of import written there. You must understand, Mrs. Mallory, your husband is on official Crown business. We have the right to know everything he has written. Though he feels no such obligation to share anything with me. In all likelihood, the Times will have news before I do.

  Will talks and fills the space between us – talks about Hinks and how he will handle him this evening. I get up and wander around the room. When I linger too long in front of a book on birds, he tells me it’s the guide he will take with him the next time he goes to France. When he goes climbing again. “Don’t worry,” he is saying. “I won’t go until George gets home.”

  George’s name hangs between us.

  “Do you think I’ve been a good wife, Will?”

  It feels as though someone else is making me ask the question, as if I’m watching myself from afar.

  “Of course,” Will begins automatically.

  “It’s just that I’ve never been good at anything.” I turn away to the window, look towards the shops down the road where it widens. Women scurry from the shops, all of them, I suppose, with families to attend to, husbands at home. I wonder if Edith has finished the shopping for dinner. What she has bought. How much it will cost me. She knows all the vendors, takes it as a point of pride to haggle and get the best bargain. Behind me Will is beginning to object – to list my qualities: kindness, honesty, and so on.

  “I was terrible in school. My papers wandered everywhere. Geography and poetry mixed up with Latin conjugations.” I glance at the papers on Will’s desk, hoping for a letter. I don’t see anything and I know if there was one Will would have shown me. The clock in the hallway strikes. “Once, one of the mistresses returned my French paper to me with a rebuke. The middle of it was a muddle of Italian. Italian! Not even the right language. I couldn’t keep anything straight.

  “It should have been me that was kept home from school after Mother died. Instead of Marby. I would have loved to take care of Papa and not have to worry about school. Taking care of people I was good at. That’s why I thought I could be a good wife. I thought I would be good at taking care of George.”

  “You do. You are,” he protests.

  “I was so terrible, before he left. It was so hard.” My throat aches and the room dissolves through my tears.

  “No, Ruth.” Will stands, comes towards me, but I back away. He stands in the centre of the room, unmoored for a moment, then returns to the sofa.

  “I said terrible things. Called him selfish. And cruel. There are so many things I need to take back. Worse than that, there are so many things I wish I’d said. I’d done.”

  I lean against the window; the cool glass is soothing against my forehead. I want this day to end. All these days, until he comes home.

  “Did you know he’d asked me to go to America with him? He so desperately wanted me to go. Over and over in his letters he writes how he wishes he could share with me everything he sees; that’s the regret. ‘Come with me to New York,’ he said. ‘It’ll be our adventure.’ ”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  I want to tell Will I should have, because that’s the truth. I did want to go, I should have gone, and yet I couldn’t. I wanted to punish him for leaving again. I couldn’t just go with him and be there when he wanted me to be, then disappear when he didn’t.

  “A million reasons, and no good one. The children had already had one parent gone for so long, it didn’t seem fair to leave them with none. And because I would have been extraneous. All those people crowing for a bit of him, for his attention. I didn’t want to compete with it. None of it seemed appealing, the parties where I’d stand off to the side, the dinners talking about how wonderfully proud I must feel. And frankly, because I wanted George on my own terms for a while. Not someone else’s.”

  “That’s all right, Ruth. George understands that, I do. We all do. Besides, there will be time enough for that.”

  “But what if there isn’t?” Will doesn’t understand. It would have been so easy for me to go with George, and yet I chose to stay here, without him. “What if he doesn’t know how much I love him? I should have told him how sorry I was for all the arguing. For not going. For not being supportive. There are so many things I want to tell him.

  “I’m sick to death of saving up things to share with him. The stupid little things like the mouse I found in the wardrobe, or that Berry has taught John to stand on his head. Things too small and stupid to share in letters, where everything should be important. But you build a life together by sharing the insignificant things, the things you don’t bother telling anyone else. George and I don’t have those anymore. It can’t be done in letters over days and weeks and months apart. It just can’t.”

  It is Will who has these things now. He’s the one I tell these things to. Maybe that’s what George wanted – a way to ease his guilt, his responsibility. And so he gave me Will. Or maybe that’s just more foolishness.

  “He will come back, Ruth.”

  I turn on him. “And what if he does, Will? And what if he isn’t done with it yet?” My voice is an ugly sneer. Every word, every sound is a betrayal. “Then what? It will keep eating at him and it will blind him. It’s what happened last time. It’s humiliating, to come second to a mountain. Don’t I deserve that kind of loyalty?”

  I collapse back onto the sofa and Will’s arms are around me.

  “George loves you. More than anything. You know that. That’s why you wait for him. Why you save up those things to tell him.”

  “I know part of him belongs to the mountain, just as there’s a part that belongs to Geoffrey, to you. I used to content myself with knowing there was a part of him that was just mine alone. But it’s not enough. Not anymore.”

  What I want to do is tell Will I won’t wait. That I’ve waited long enough. That it’s too much to have your life swept away from you, your choices made for you. It’s gone on long enough. I’d like to make him recoil, to shock him out of his insistence about who I’m supposed to be. I want him to see me. Who I actually am. Maybe I’m not an artist like him or Cottie – but I have my own needs and desires. Once I thought I might have my own adventures. Once I thought maybe I’d go to America on my own. But I was young and even more foolish then.

  Leaning against Will is like falling, being pushed from a ledge. Hovering. Waiting. His clavicle is hard against my cheekbone, his hands clasp mine. Just below his chin is a spot that he missed when he was shaving. A tiny scrape of stubble, tender near his pulse.

  “I’m a horrible wife. A horrid person.”

  “No.” His lips move near my temple and the touch radiates across my skin.

  “Has George ever told you that story about our honeymoon? The one about our being arrested?” I pull back slightly from Will, can feel my temple cool where his breath warmed me. “It isn’t true. It never happened. None of it. He made up that other version of me. I’ve always wondered if he preferred her. She seemed braver than me, bolder.”

  “It’s what he does, Ruth. We all know that. George tells us stories. And all of us are better in his stories.”

  “But I’m only me.”

  “I know. And he knows. And we both love you for it.”

  I can feel his breath on my skin, his lips. I want to feel them on my cheek. On my closed eyelids. For a moment I imagine staying here with Will. A life with Will. Going with him to look for his birds.

  I stand. “I should go. I still have flowers to pick out. And the children will be back soon. But you’ll come early this evening, yes? You promised.”

>   “I’ll be there.” He stands too, more slowly than me, as if hoping I’ll change my mind.

  I gather my handbag and Will follows me down the stairs. At the door he blocks my way, steps close to me. He smells of tea. For a brief flash I imagine what it would be like if he leaned down and kissed me. Imagine the taste of him. What would I do? What would change? Maybe everything. Maybe nothing. Once, things could have been so different. I try to envision another life, another me. And what I would have done. Will has smaller ambitions. He would come home every evening at the end of the day, smelling of paper and ink, and tell me about the report he’d compiled for his politician father. And I would tell him, every day, of the ordinary little things that made me smile or frown, that aren’t worth noting in a letter.

  I rise up slightly on my toes and there is a rush of relief when he kisses my cheek. But it’s just another reminder that George isn’t here to kiss me. It will be weeks still before he reaches for me, before it is his lips I rise up to meet. The thought is a sharp pain behind my ribs.

  When I was small I imagined love as something safe, something without sharp edges, only the sweeping, enveloping curves of romance and happiness. But it isn’t. Not now anyway. There are edges and they cut.

  THE NORTH COL

  23,200 FEET

  Sandy crawled out of the tent at Advanced Base Camp in a quick, clumsy manoeuvre that made his head pound against his skull. For days now, any movement had increased its tempo, as if the throbbing was connected to his pulse, thudding harder every time he exerted himself doing something as simple as climbing out of the tent. He stood as still as possible, hoping the ache would subside, and finally felt the pain well up and crest, then break, and ease. Even with the discomfort receding, the world continued to swim around him. Snow came at him almost sideways in fat, heavy flakes. Everything was softened and furred, so different from the storm that had kept them pinned down at Advanced Base Camp almost two weeks ago. Still, a bad day for climbing. It was bitingly cold. Already the tip of his nose stung. He rubbed at it, then tugged at his hat, the pain in his head rising up to meet it, bringing a wave of nausea too. Swallowing the queasiness down, he turned in the direction of what he hoped was the North Col. On a clear day he could see all the way up the ridge, watch the climbers, microscopic figures, moving up or down, for hours. Today, aside from the tent behind him, he could see no recognizable landmarks through the heavy curtain of snow.