Above All Things

by Tanis Rideout

  He pressed Sandy’s hands down and leaned over his face, his gasping mouth. His breath smelled spoiled, thick. “Breathe, Sandy. Breathe.”

  He cradled Sandy while he coughed and sputtered, tried to find his breath. “Shhhh … Breathe. Be calm. Breathe.”

  It was like soothing Clare when she was having one of her nightmares. He loved when she awoke from dreams and burrowed into him, how just his being there could calm her. “What did you dream, love?”

  “You fell, Daddy.”

  “Shhhhh … It’s all right. I’m right here …”

  Sandy’s breathing steadied.

  Shhhhh …

  In the black of the tent George shivered.

  When was the last time he had been warm? He couldn’t remember the sweltering heatbox of the Cwm, the way the sun had reached into him. He tried to count the days backwards to when they’d been somewhere lush in Tibetan valleys.

  In a dream he conjured the feel of sweat dripping between his shoulder blades while sitting in the shadow of rhododendrons, the flowers like massive bloody fists weighting the stalks. He plunged into glacial pools, his skin tightening. The heavy heat of hidden forests sloughed off his skin as he dropped into the water. When he stepped out again, the water evaporated, the heat settling like a blanket across him.

  He couldn’t count the days. Could only count one day to the summit. A day to the summit. It was the rhythm of his breath.

  He couldn’t remember a time before cold.

  The mountain was leaching heat from his skin, his blood, his bones. He dreamed wind like ice picks.

  He drifted. He walked along a ridge, ice sharp on both sides. Then tripped. He jerked awake in the tent, his breath caught in his throat, and groped for matches. He was clumsy with them, breaking the head off one before striking another successfully against the box. It flared into a needle of light that hurt his eyes. He squinted and cupped his hands over the scant heat and thought of the candle in Sandy’s mother’s window.

  He lit the lantern and settled it on the tent floor.

  He watched the shadow outline of Sandy breathing as the match flickered out, and thought of Ruth in their bed at home. Crisp white sheets. The damp outline of her body where she had come in and lain down after bathing. He lay down next to her. It was warm.

  She moved to slip away from him and sit up.

  “No,” he said. “Stay.”

  “I can’t, George. The children will be up. They’ll want to see you.”

  “Yes, but not yet,” he said. “Stay.” She settled back into bed, her body pressed against the length of him. This close, her eyes were flecked with sparks, like gold.

  “Let’s pretend,” she said, “that’s it’s just you and me. That we’re on holiday and no one can find us.”

  “No,” he nuzzled her throat. “Let’s just be here.”

  “Yes. Let’s just be here.” She rolled over and pressed her back against him. He held her there, as close as he could, her head tucked under his chin, so that after a beat he couldn’t tell where she ended, where he began. She smelled nothing like rock or snow.

  The mountain below him was restless; ice cracked and tumbled in the glacier, echoed up to him. He wondered when the sun would rise. They should be away before it did. Sandy’s breath was rasping, shallow, but steady beside him. The boy’s arm across his chest was a dead weight, making it hard for him to breathe, but he didn’t want to wake Sandy yet. Wanted to allow him these last easy moments.

  There was a pounding in his head, the pain concentrated somewhere deep above his left ear. It throbbed with his quickened pulse. He imagined building a brick wall between the pain and the rest of his mind, but he couldn’t concentrate, kept losing his place. The wall crumbled.

  He pulled his journal out of his pack again and flipped through it for the sheet of paper he’d tucked inside. The page from Ruth’s book.

  “What are you doing?” Sandy asked, as he coaxed the lantern to a low light.

  “Just writing to Ruth.”

  “Now?”

  “It has to be now. There are things I want to say.” Things he needed to say.

  Sandy seemed to think about that, then sat up next to him, pulled his own notebook to his lap. “But what should I say? I’d really like to set things to rights. With Dick. Before we go.”

  He wasn’t the right person to ask. He had no advice for Sandy. He had none when the boy first told him about his affair, weeks ago. He felt even less able to offer advice now. He thought of Ruth. Poor Ruth. How to tell Sandy not to do what he did. Not to be absent. Lost.

  “I guess write that.”

  Sandy nodded, stared down at the paper in front of him for a few moments, then said, “Are you scared?”

  “It’s not an easy thing we’re about to do, Sandy.”

  “I’m scared.”

  “I know.” So was he. But he’d been scared before. It was impossible not to be in the trenches, and he’d talked men into other, much more terrifying situations. He talked them into standing up into machine-gun fire. He’d convinced them it was their duty, that fear was best swallowed down, if it had to be acknowledged at all. He couldn’t do that anymore. “So am I,” he said. “But we’ll be fine, Sandy. Remember?” He took Sandy’s notebook from his lap, flipped through for the drawing Sandy had made weeks ago at Advanced Base Camp, the whole summit ridge in clear etched lines.

  He drew his fingers along it, showed Sandy the route again. “Up through the Yellow Band, then onto the ridge, around here. Then along the steps – one, two, three steps.” He tapped each of the outcroppings Sandy had drawn, hoped they would be able to skirt them easily. “And then the final snow slope. We can make it.”

  He thought about what Teddy had said – that he was responsible for Sandy. That he had to make the decisions – when to push, when to turn back.

  “We need to be on the summit by three p.m. No later. If we’re later, we won’t get back down before dark and we’ll be stuck out there.”

  Sandy nodded. “Three o’clock.”

  “We’ll set benchmarks.” He tried to work backwards down the steps, into the Yellow Band. “If we get out early and move well we’ll be on the ridge by eight. That’s what I’ve told Noel. We’ll be at the Second Step by noon.” It was the Second Step that worried him. From below it looked impossible to skirt; they’d have to climb the rock wall of it. “All right, Sandy? You’ll know, if we’re not there by then, we’ll turn around. Then we’ll be fine. You’ll be safe.”

  Sandy retraced the route, murmuring the times. “Eight. Noon. Three.”

  Once they were up on the ridge, Sandy would want to press on. They both would.

  He turned back to the page from Ruth’s book. Before his attempt with Teddy, he’d written her that the odds were fifty to one against. And now? Were they really any better? There was the oxygen. And Sandy. Maybe.

  He wrote in the empty spaces of the margins, around the end of the story, then folded it into an envelope. Odell would be coming up from Camp V in the morning, to ensure nothing had gone awry. He’d leave the envelope with a note for Odell and ask him to deliver it to Ruth if something happened. Not that he would have to, but he needed Ruth to know the whole story.

  George could barely move, the cold slipping in under his clothing, into his veins, his muscles and bones. He held his boots over the weak heat of the cooker, the frozen leather immovable.

  The light from the flame was bright in the darkness of the tent. Sandy sipped his tea, hands in gloves, wrapped around the mug. In silence they ate chocolate and meat lozenges, their hands shaking from nerves and the cold. He couldn’t look at Sandy anymore.

  He emptied his pockets, lined up items to take to the summit. To leave behind.

  He turned away slightly so Sandy couldn’t see what he was choosing.

  On his sleeping bag he laid out all the things he would take with him. This was the sum total of the journey, then: matches in a swan-marked box, a tin of meat lozenges, a pencil, nail sc
issors in a leather holster, a safety pin. Scraps of paper, the bill for the windproofs he was wearing. A tube of petroleum jelly. Letters from home, wrapped in a blue and red handkerchief. He traced the monogram but couldn’t feel the rise of embroidery with his frozen thumb, the initials Ruth had stitched there. A blue glove. A pocket knife. His altimeter and watch. A bit of rope.

  A photograph. Him and Ruth. Taken during the war when he was home on leave. He is closer to the camera, sharp and in focus. That was him then, in uniform, with the fatness of youth in his cheeks, a slight moustache across his lip. He looked as if he was only playing at being a soldier. Ruth is farther back in the frame, facing the camera, far away. Slightly out of focus. She is haloed. Angelic. “I’ll leave it at the summit. The top of the world,” he had promised her.

  He ripped himself from the photograph and wrapped her image in another handkerchief, slipped it into his pocket. He was ready.

  He went to haul in the oxygen canisters so that Sandy could check them one more time. But as he did so, he stumbled over the cooker set just outside the flap of the tent, knocking it out onto the icy snow and sending it skittering down the steep incline. He watched it ricochet off the mountain, travelling faster and faster until it disappeared from sight. Damn. When they got back, they wouldn’t have anything to heat food or melt snow for drinking water. He shook his head. It didn’t matter. They’d push down to Five anyway. Maybe even Four. As he imagined returning to Six and then descending, the wind fingered the forgotten fragment of his own image, still in his hand, lifted it from his grasp, and wafted it towards the summit.

  The sun would be coming up soon.

  He climbed back into the tent, pushing the canisters in ahead of him. He checked his watch before extinguishing the lamp. Four a.m.

  The landscape began to glow blue dawn.

  PORT AND WHISKY

  10 O’CLOCK

  In the dining room there is the clatter of dishes and the remnants of dinner being cleared away. We can all hear it because the sitting room is so quiet. I open the window to let in the fresh air, the chirps of crickets, which improves the mood a little. Will and the Major are at the drinks cart, Hinks sits with Geoffrey, Eleanor hovering at his side as they murmur quietly. Maybe about Everest. Maybe something else. Marby stands between Cottie and me; she touches my elbow.

  “You should come volunteer with me,” she says. “It will do you good to get out and think of someone else.” She turns slightly to include Cottie in the invitation. “I go into the local veterans’ hospital. My neighbour and I. We go in and chat to them.”

  I’m not sure how that helps them. “Do you know,” I interrupt her, “that when a body starts to freeze to death one actually feels as though one is warming up? Mountaineers who have died like that are often found without their clothes. It’s the confusion, doctors think.”

  For years I didn’t read a word about hypothermia. I didn’t want to know about the cold, the minute details, the myriad ways to die. This time I couldn’t stop myself. This time I devoured it all, and I imagine every detail of it happening to you. Your blood vessels constricting, the blood retreating as your hands and feet grow numb. I think of your fingers undoing my laces, brushing my cheek. See your blood turn to slush. Hear your nerve endings freeze and snap.

  I shouldn’t have read those words. There is no way to take them back.

  Marby’s face is blanched white and I’m sorry I said anything. Her eyes flash past my shoulder to her husband and Will, who are bringing glasses to us. Port for Marby, whisky for me. I need the heat of it.

  “Thank you, dear.” Her voice shakes.

  The Major doesn’t notice. I suspect there are a number of things he doesn’t notice.

  “When did you last hear from George?” the Major asks. “Have you had a letter recently?”

  He is only curious, but even from him there is some recrimination. The implication that you haven’t written. That if you truly loved me you would have written more. If you loved me you might not have gone at all.

  Marby takes the Major’s hand, squeezes it so he glances at her, and she shakes her head ever so slightly, but it’s too late.

  “I have. A few days ago.” It’s been almost a week, but I don’t tell him that.

  Somehow I still believe that absence makes the heart grow fonder.

  I swallow down a gulp of whisky and clear my throat. “He says they are doing well. He’s still optimistic. The weather is holding. He is certain they still have a chance.”

  “But that would have been from weeks ago, now, wouldn’t it?”

  “Of course, Major,” I say. And it is the cheery tone I use for the children. I worry that with all of this pretending to be cheerful, my voice will stay this way permanently. “But we can’t dwell on the weeks that haven’t passed here yet.”

  “Maybe we could hear something from it?” Hinks asks.

  “Oh yes,” Marby says. “As we used to.”

  We did used to. During George’s previous trips to Everest, I would read his letters aloud every chance I got. These days I have been finding myself less and less inclined to share. I’ve shared enough. But it will please them all.

  Climbing the stairs, I think about saying goodbye to him. How I climbed back up the gangplank. I had to put things to rights. I had to let him know that it would all be all right. No matter what happened.

  Things had been strange in the cabin before the ship horn sounded all ashore. We had orbited around each other, pulling forward and back, moving in and then away. Neither of us still until he weighed me down on his bunk and kissed me. There was a part of him already gone. I could feel it. He’d been drifting away for weeks. And a clock ticked in my head – this is the last touch, the last kiss. Be happy. Make it count.

  I tried again on the gangway. Told him I only wanted what he wanted. It wasn’t the whole truth, but I wanted him to think it was. To know it was. I don’t know if he believed me. But he has to believe I love him, and that has to be enough.

  The letters sent from Everest are stacked under George’s pillow. There are too many to keep under mine. But when I sleep I reach for them, worry the edges of the envelopes. They are worn and soft from travelling, from being passed from hand to hand. They are in no particular order. I used to do that, read back over the news in the order they arrived, but it hardly seems to matter now. Instead I scan the drift of handwriting, examine the weight and the heft of the lines, or where he has traced my name over and over.

  I don’t tie them together with a ribbon. I don’t carry them in my breast pocket. But I do press them to my face in the hope that there is still some trace of scent there. Sometimes I think there is, other times I know it is only my wishful imagination.

  The most recent letter is easy to find in the stack of them – the cleanest, the clearest. The one that has not been handled over and over again.

  George once wrote that he kissed my name where he had written it and he wanted me to kiss it too and think of him. I still do – kiss his name at the end, mine at the salutation. I haven’t asked if he still does that. I don’t know what I would do if he said no.

  Before I descend, I cock my head and listen for any sounds from the children up the stairs. Nothing. Just the murmur of conversation from below. I try not to imagine what they’re saying.

  In the sitting room everyone is hushed, even Hinks. Will gives me an encouraging nod. I read aloud and feel his words in my mouth, hear them in my head.

  My dearest Ruth –

  The mail has come tumbling in – in rapid succession. A lovely poem from Clare with which I am proud and delighted. It is a great joy to hear from you especially, but also anyone who will write a good letter …

  I shall be with the other party. Still, the conquest of the mountain is the great thing and the whole plan is mine and my part will be a sufficiently interesting one and will perhaps give me the best chance of all of getting to the top. It is almost unthinkable with this plan in place that I shan’t get to the top.
I can’t see myself coming down defeated.

  We shall be going up again the day after tomorrow – six days to the top from this camp.

  My candle is burning out. I must stop.

  Darling, I wish you the best I can – that your anxiety will be at an end before you get this – with the best news, which will also be the quickest. It is 50 to 1 against us, but we’ll have a whack yet and do ourselves proud.

  But the anxiety isn’t at an end, and as I read the letter again, I wonder why. Why aren’t you on your way home?

  There is silence, even from Hinks, though I can see he wants more and is trying not to reach for the letter, to take it from my hands. I fold the pages and slip them back into their envelope. It’s all I’m prepared to share. He wants to read between the lines but wouldn’t be able to. It’s true. I do know more than he does.

  I know George so well I can read his mind. I know what every look means. I can read the intent in the angle of a leg crossed at the knee – defensive and turned away, or open and relaxed. There is a shorthand between us. A staccato rhythm of glances and gestures, half-words and shared jokes. An intimacy that cannot be forced but has to grow over time and space.

  I can read him every time he tries to keep a secret, and he hates it. Hates how I know every gift that he plans on giving, every surprise he tries to spring.

  “I know you’re taking me on a picnic.”

  It was my birthday. He’d sent the girls to his parents. John hadn’t been born.

  “How can you know that?”

  “I just do.”

  “You’re so clever. Where? And what are we eating?”

  “Hmmm … the river where all the canal boats are, with that pub next to it. And the wine we had at Geoffrey’s wedding, along with that cold salad that I like and Vi hates to make.”