Above All Things

by Tanis Rideout

  This was the first time he’d been alone in months.

  Naked, George could see where his clothing had demarcated itself on his body in lines of pressure and dirt. He splashed water across his skin, cupped it to his face, watched it darken with dirt in the bowl.

  Lying on his pallet, he found the gloom of his cell a relief. Even the reek of scalded butter from spent ceremonial candles, the sharp, acrid tang of dung fires, was appealing, if only because it smelled of something other than rock or snow. His body felt unmoored from the yak-hair pallet beneath him.

  There were only two choices. Each of them inevitable.

  If Teddy decided to put an end to this bloody thing, they could all go home. He could go back to Ruth, thousands of miles away. Too far away. He wanted her beside him. To wake up in the middle of the night and feel her pressed, naked against him, her breasts against his back, the soft sureness of her. That was all. Just the simplicity of a shared bed, the litany of her day, her desires. Surely that would still be his, even if he returned empty-handed? Maybe Ruth wouldn’t care. Maybe she did just want him to come home. Hadn’t she said as much the last time he saw her?

  He conjured his last image of her – her face pale in the winter cold. She’d kissed him goodbye on the deck of the California, and he watched as she walked down the gangplank. But then she stopped, turned, and climbed back towards him. She lifted her gloved palms to his face, cupping it in her hands. There was her perfume – some spring flower – and the scent of the sea already clinging to her. She stared up at him, hard and earnest, the way she did when she needed him to believe her. “I only want you to make it,” she said, measuring every word, “because you want it. If you want it, then I want it. Your heart is mine. Mine is yours. But it really doesn’t matter to me, you know. Just you matter.”

  He wanted to believe her. Even then, on the gangplank. But she couldn’t have meant it. Not after everything he’d put her and the children through. “It feels as though we’ve spent more time apart than together, George,” she’d said as they battled about his return to Everest. “That’s not a marriage. I want to be with you. Isn’t that what you said you wanted?” If he came home empty-handed, all the sacrifice would have been for nothing.

  “It’s for something greater, Ruth. I promise you. If I do this, then I’ll never have to go away again. We’ll be able to have a real life together. We won’t have to worry.” He’d grasped at her hands, needed her to understand. “I want you to be proud of me. I want the children to be proud.”

  “But we already are,” she said, as if she couldn’t understand how he didn’t see that.

  If he left now, if they abandoned the summit, what then? Then it would be back to teaching. The day in, day out of it. Ruth had lived for the past five years on the promise that he would reach the summit and then everything would change for them. Disappointing her would break his heart. And Everest would still be there, between them. The great mass of it and the years it had consumed. For nothing. Only claiming the summit could make things right between them.

  The mattress rustled under him as he rolled over. It wasn’t only Ruth who would be disappointed in him.

  He could hear his father’s chiding tone already: “Time to put away childish things,” his father would say, as if giving a sermon. “It was about time, a long time ago.” He pictured his father’s shaggy head, shaking at him. “You’ll go back to teaching. That’s an honourable job. Trafford, all those boys, they didn’t die so you could gallivant around the world. We all make sacrifices. This one is yours. Show your boy how to be a man.”

  His father would add this to the catalogue of disappointments: his being evacuated from the front, while Trafford died; his drifting across careers; his resigning from Charterhouse; his leaving before he’d even given so much as a single lecture at Cambridge. All the maybes. Somedays. Whens and ifs.

  “He only wants to see you well situated,” his mother would say, yet again. “He doesn’t mean to sound so disparaging. Spend some time with him and you’ll see.”

  “What he wants is for me to be more like Will,” he’d replied the last time. “And he’s probably right.” Will, who was always there, with his steady job and his holiday climbing. It was Will who John had clung to last time he’d come home. They teased each other about it. “Somewhere between the two of us, George, there’s the perfect man.”

  Deserting Everest would follow him everywhere. He would be crucified, the failure pinned to him, attached to his name once again. The Times would love that. He could picture the headlines already: Two dead as Mallory fails again to reach Everest summit. And that was if they turned back now. If they pressed on, there was always the possibility of more injuries, that others could die. And then what?

  He’d heard it all before. When he and Ruth had disembarked from Paris, a wall of reporters had been waiting for them on the platform at St. Pancras Station. He’d feared he might suffocate from the crush of their flannel suits. Then Ruth seized on to him and he felt a flush of lust and excitement – that she could see him like this, sought after, desired. There hadn’t been this many reporters the first time; Hinks had discouraged them. But then the questions had started, innocuous and polite enough at the beginning.

  “How do you feel, Mr. Mallory?”

  “Exhausted, but glad to be home.” He wrapped his arm around Ruth’s shoulders. She was still smiling.

  “And you’re pleased with the way it all went?”

  “Would’ve been more so if we’d made it.”

  “And the avalanche? Can you tell us exactly what happened?”

  “It was an accident.”

  “But you were leading. The conditions were right, weren’t they? Shouldn’t you have known better?”

  He looked for where the question had come from, but all he could see was a wall of men, pressing in with notepads and pens. He pulled Ruth tighter to him.

  “You can’t understand what it’s like up there. We did everything we could.”

  “Do you think it was worth it, Mr. Mallory? Is Everest worth it?”

  And then his name in the papers. Reckless. Porters in danger. Everest at what cost?

  He’d cancelled their subscriptions, refused to talk any more about it with Ruth.

  Geoffrey had sat on his grey sofa, in his tailored suit with the leg turned up at the knee, and tried to comfort him. “I would have done the same thing, George. You know it.” But there was pity in Geoffrey’s voice. He might have done the same thing, but he hadn’t had to. He couldn’t do it again. The cost had been too high, the reward not high enough.

  He needed the summit. After everything, the want of it was still on him. It crept across his skin, slipped into his groin. He flushed with sweat in the cool room.

  Teddy had to say yes. Of course Teddy wanted the summit too, but only to a point.

  “How far would you go?” he had asked Teddy once, a long time ago. It was after the reconnaissance, when Teddy’s name was being tossed around for the ’22 expedition. They’d met at the Alpine Club on Savile Row, where they had drunk too much and their conversation had grown too honest.

  “For the summit?”

  “How far would you go?” he repeated, leaning forward, jabbing the air between them with his finger.

  “It would be remarkable,” Teddy said. “But –”

  “But,” he’d cut in. “But nothing. I don’t need to hear any more. I don’t think there is a but for me.”

  “That’s why you’ll need me, then.”

  He was right. If Teddy let them have another run at it, he didn’t know if he could turn back. At what point am I going to stop? he’d written to Geoffrey. It’s going to be a fearfully difficult decision … I almost hope I shall give out first.

  He wanted to sleep, but his thoughts continued to churn against one another. Forget it, then. George pulled himself from his pallet and stepped back into his filthy clothes. In his bare feet he walked back to the courtyard, reclined against the wall in the warming
sun, and lit another cigarette. Here the exhaustion pulled heavily on him. His head nodded.

  “Sahib?”

  He opened his eyes to Virgil, then patted the ground next to him.

  “You go again?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You want go.” Virgil sounded disappointed.

  He wouldn’t explain himself to his porter. Not now. “It’s the job,” he said. Virgil crouched down beside him, not sitting but leaning against the wall. He smelled slightly of incense, of rice wine. They’d already done the puja, then. Maybe he had slept some after all.

  “No. Better if you go home.” Virgil pinched some sand between his fingers, tossed it three times into the air, the way George had seen him do before with rice flour, an offering.

  “You don’t think I can do it?”

  “Maybe no. Maybe Chomolungma say no.”

  “I don’t believe in that, Virgil.”

  “She not care if you believe.”

  As the silence drew out between them, George sucked smoke into his lungs then exhaled it slowly through his nose. “It doesn’t matter,” he said finally.

  Virgil nodded. After a long beat he said, “You give money for Lapkha family.”

  After the avalanche, he had given Virgil the money he’d had on him to split amongst the dead coolies’ families. He’d felt compelled to do something. It had been an empty gesture, but the only thing he could think of to do. It had changed nothing then, and wouldn’t now. Not for him, but it might make a difference for Lapkha’s family.

  “I’ll see what I can do. Later. Yes?”

  “But if you not come back his family starve. They on other side of Khumbu. Not able to harvest.”

  “Jesus, Virgil. I will come back,” he snapped, his tone harsher than he’d intended. Virgil didn’t look at him but tossed another pinch of sand in the air. “I’ll talk to Teddy, all right?”

  “George?” Odell was standing in the shadowed cave of the doorway. “You should see this.” An escape.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” he said to the porter, and stood. He had to talk to Teddy about a lot of things.

  “Look at this,” Odell said, leading him farther inside.

  Whatever Odell was gesturing at was hard to make out in the shadowed gloom inside the monastery. George narrowed his eyes to focus. It was a painting on a back wall, far away from what little daylight infiltrated the room. Odell reached for a lantern and held it up before them.

  The light bounced off the paint as if it was still wet. Drippy was how Duncan Grant would have described it, as if that was a technical term. These lines were more savage, more primal, than the vague impressions of shapes and colours he had watched Duncan create at Cambridge – the wavery watercolours of so many English painters – and they were all the more powerful for that.

  In bold blocks of colour, the painting showed an Englishman lying at the base of a sharp outcrop of mountain, fallen, collapsed, ripped down from the summit. One demon stood over him, driving a spear into the man’s bloody gaping chest. Another was about to devour him or drag the man back into the frozen innards of the mountain.

  “Is that supposed to be one of us?” he asked.

  “One of the younger monks said it was dozens of years old. Well, seasons, actually. That’s the way they measure their time here. In seasons. So it can’t be us.” Odell looked at him sideways. “Can it?”

  “Of course not.” But there was no mistaking the paleness of the skin on the victim, the clothing he wore. He reached out to touch the open wound in the white man’s chest, then looked at his fingers, expecting to see a smudge of colour there. Nothing. The paint was dry. “Let’s not mention this to anyone else. If we start looking for portents now, we’ll start seeing them everywhere. And if the coolies see this …”

  “Right, none of them will go back up.” Odell cocked his head and looked at the painting again. “Still. It makes you think.”

  “Don’t. There are enough monsters up there already.”

  Next to him Odell fidgeted slightly; he could feel the man studying him before returning his gaze to the painting. “Do you think Teddy will let us back up?”

  “You want another crack at it? I’m surprised. After your last retreat, I thought you’d be done.”

  “That was Somervell’s call. He turned us around before we even made it to Six. I could have gone on. I would’ve made the attempt. Somes didn’t like the look of the weather, he said.” Odell turned away from the painting, moving into the long prayer room. He ran his hand along the wall of prayer wheels. They were supposed to keep the world turning. Odell spun one.

  In the gloom at the far end of the hall was a glitter of gold, the belly and massive shoulders of a Buddha rising up into the darkness that gathered below the eaves. It was surrounded by thousands of flickering butter candles, their smoke and incense curling up into the air, the statue wavering above them. At its feet a monk sat cross-legged, his robe gathered around his shoulders. He looked as if he hadn’t moved in a very long time. There was a plate of rice flour beside him, a dish of water. Every so often he reached in for a pinch of one or the other and tossed it in the air the way Virgil had tossed the pinches of sand outside.

  If only he could find whatever it was that this monk had found. Or his father. Or even Somervell. There was comfort in ritual, he could see that, even sense it here, but he was shut out of it somehow. “You expect too much,” Ruth had said to him after she’d persuaded him to accompany her to a church service. “Faith doesn’t come like that, crashing down on you. It’s an opening up. You just have to open yourself up to it.” But he couldn’t. Maybe if he had more faith in something he wouldn’t be here. Maybe that was what he was missing.

  But then Somes had faith, and he’d turned back. What if Odell was telling the truth? Odell himself had looked good on the way down to the monastery. He’d kept pace with George the whole way. And it wouldn’t have been the first time that Somes had turned back. Last time he’d managed the height record but had pulled back when he still had good hours of daylight ahead of him. He’d said he just couldn’t see his way to finishing. Maybe Somes’s faith was in the wrong place.

  “I guess we’ll know soon enough, though,” Odell said, moving past him towards the main hall. “But it would be damn nice to knock it off.”

  “What are you thinking, Teddy? Which way are you leaning?”

  “Maybe it can’t be done, George.”

  “Come on, Teddy, I’m supposed to be the cynical one.”

  “No. You’re supposed to be the hero. I’m the one who will take the blame.”

  “That’s not fair. It was me last time. It will be me again this time.”

  “Just because it’s your name on everyone’s lips doesn’t mean I don’t pay a price for what happens up here. I’m the expedition leader, George. I’m the one who’s accountable.” Teddy picked up a telegram from the table in front of him, put it down again, shuffled his papers. “All you have to do is climb the mountain. That’s all anyone wants of you.”

  “That’s all they want from any of us.”

  “No, they want me to bring everyone home. Safe. With all their fingers and toes. They want better maps and new species of plants. They want Somervell’s groundbreaking research on the effects of high altitude on human physiology. They want Odell’s goddamn fossils. They don’t want to hear about drowned boys or dead porters.”

  “They want us to make it all worth it.”

  “What?”

  “The bloody war. They want this last crowning jewel, don’t they? Isn’t that what this is all about? The sun never setting on the glory that is the British Empire?”

  “I don’t know, George. But maybe we’ve gone far enough.”

  “So you’re turning us around?”

  “Virgil came to me. About money for the dead porter’s family. You said it was a good idea?” Teddy put down the cup of tea he was nursing, the thick yak’s milk curdled across the top of it. It smelled slightly off
. “Are we just buying our way out of our responsibilities?”

  “That’s not it.” Was it? He had told Virgil he’d look into it. Virgil shouldn’t have gone to Teddy.

  “Do you really think we can do it, George?”

  “I don’t think we have a choice.”

  GOD. SANDY JUST wanted to be left alone. Just for a little while. Granted, the place to do that would have been his cell, but the dark air in there felt solid and heavy after the nights at the higher camps, where the snowfields brightened everything. Even though he’d been daydreaming of sleep the whole way down from Base Camp, thought he wouldn’t be able to get enough of it, when he finally lay down in the quiet, on his own, he couldn’t. His eyes felt as though they were swelling, pressing out until he had to open them to the dim room.

  Out here in the courtyard the sun was gentle, lulling. More benign than it had felt higher up, where it glared down on them, close and hard. He wanted to stretch out under it, hat pulled over his eyes, and doze.

  “Couldn’t sleep, eh?” Somervell was standing over him, blocking the sun. He shielded his eyes to look up at Somes, a black shadow against the stark white sky.

  He didn’t want to talk to anyone, least of all Somervell, who moved to sit beside him on the ground. The sun beat down on Sandy again.

  “I think Teddy and George are in there deciding our fate,” Somes said. Sandy didn’t respond. There was a long silence between them. “You did well, Sandy, you should know that.” He hoped Somervell wasn’t talking about Lapkha. He really didn’t want to talk about that. Somervell went on, “I’m not sure anyone else could have done any better.”

  “You weren’t there.”

  “I know. But I know what it’s like.”

  “How can you? You can’t know what it’s like for someone like me. You’re a doctor. You know how to cope with things like that.” He couldn’t stop now. “You told me you were going to check on the porters before you went. You should have seen he was sick. You should have sent him down days earlier. Then he’d still be alive. I shouldn’t have had to see him like that.”