When Nights Were Cold

by Susanna Jones

  ‘Grace?’

  I turned. Catherine leaned against the door, wrapped her fingers around the doorknob. She seemed so young, not a woman of thirty-seven but a girl of eighteen or twenty. Our lives had gone back to front. I had given up on doing much with life, whereas Catherine was still waiting for it to begin.

  ‘Will you be all right?’ I asked.

  She nodded.

  ‘You’ve been steadier since Mother went, happier. What if such a change has a bad effect?’

  ‘It just – just seems as though I might as well. I think I could be better in a different house with new things around me.’

  ‘I suppose you can only find out by doing it. Then we must celebrate.’

  We dined that night on oysters in aspic and sirloin steak. We discussed Dr Sowerby Catherine would not agree that there was something sinister about him but did not claim to love him either. Nonetheless, we had a glass of sparkling wine and toasted the news.

  ‘Such good fortune.’ She made a pile of salt at the side of her plate and swirled a pattern in it with the prongs of her fork. ‘I want it to be a beautiful house with gardens and flowers. I want views of the city from the bedroom windows and space for me to have lots of gowns and hats.’

  ‘And George?’

  ‘He’ll play golf and go walking in the hills. We’ll get along.’

  Catherine lay on the settee reading a serialized story about a young woman and her romance with a cheerful, whistling Tommy. She had a bag of peppermint lumps on her lap and ate them one after another. I sat in Father’s chair and opened the newspaper. My eyes fell on a familiar name that immediately made me think of Father.

  ‘Good lord,’ I said. ‘The younger Peter Taugwalder is dead.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘From the Whymper expedition. The son of the older Peter Taugwalder, who was also there. He climbed the Matterhorn a hundred and twenty-six times in the end, according to this. And I never did it once.’

  ‘Do it now then. Why don’t you write to Cicely Parr and go together?’

  ‘No, no.’ I smiled. ‘You have no idea. It’s much too difficult for me. I’ve had no practice.’

  ‘Being married and living in Edinburgh is difficult and distant but I’m going to do it.’

  ‘Even the easy mountains seem distant now.’

  ‘In that case, climb the easier mountains, but do it. Go to the Alps again.’

  Parr’s reply arrived a few days later. She would come with me and it would be a delightful way to remember dear old Locke and Hooper. I showed the letter to Catherine at breakfast.

  ‘Look. I wish I hadn’t had the idea now. I haven’t spent time with her for years. I can’t imagine how we’ll get on. We still haven’t quite sorted out that business of her wall and the ice axe.’

  Catherine buttered her toast neatly, licked the knife.

  ‘If she’s unbearable you can always push her off the top. No one ever need know. Doesn’t that sort of thing go on all the time on expeditions? Everyone must hate each other after a few days, even if they didn’t to begin with. I say it’s best to be with someone you dislike in the first place. You have less to lose. Would you pass the treacle?’

  I tightened the lid, turned the tin onto its side and rolled it along the table to Catherine.

  ‘Good shot.’ She caught it without a blink, opened it and dropped a large pool of treacle onto her toast. ‘We’re orphans, so we can make our own adventures and nobody can stop us.’

  Catherine replaced the lid and sent the tin rolling back to me. She rested her elbows on the table and, from somewhere, my mother’s voice came to me.

  ‘What’s on the table gets carved, Catherine,’ I said.

  Catherine laughed. ‘But I’m going to be Mrs Sowerby, the doctor’s wife. You can’t tell me anything.’

  Peter leans towards me. ‘When I read through my notes and look at you now – I – well, all I can say is that it’s a huge honour to be sitting here with you. Of course, one can easily see why the trauma has affected you this way.’

  ‘I expect one can.’

  ‘To be involved in two Alpine deaths. Tragic.’

  ‘An awful coincidence, when you look at it that way.’

  ‘Too much misfortune for one climber.’

  ‘I have always felt that.’

  ‘Unless, of course, there was a connection between the two.’

  ‘I have explained so many times why that is nonsense. One accident and then another, separate accident. Among mountaineers, it’s not such a strange thing, as well you must know.’

  He takes a clean sheet of paper from the bottom of the manuscript and notes down our conversation in scratchy pencil. An image flashes up and replaces him for less than a second, but it is vivid. It is the boy from the Monte Rosa Hotel, writing something at the desk in the lobby. The same forehead, eyes, mouth.

  ‘You should learn Pitman’s shorthand,’ I tell him. ‘Peter, have we met before?’

  He lifts his head and his glasses do a little bounce on his nose. ‘Do you think it is possible?’

  ‘Perhaps you have always been in the hotel business?’

  He raises an eyebrow. ‘You mean—’

  ‘The Monte Rosa Hotel in Zermatt. You were the young boy who comforted us when Hooper was dead, but we never knew your name.’ I am excited now and my voice sounds loud and high. ‘You were always in the lobby when we came and went. I know it.’

  ‘Yes.’ And he could be lying but I’m sure he is not. ‘Yes, you’re quite right. Well done. I worked there and I’ve never forgotten the tragedy, as you can imagine.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say so?’

  ‘I never expected you to remember me and, if you did, I thought you wouldn’t believe me.’ He blushes to the roots of his hair. ‘And – this will seem strange to you since I let myself into your house without invitation – I’m rather shy.’

  ‘You were shy then, too.’

  Oh, this is good. It is good to have Peter here with me.

  ‘Such old, old memories. Now, Miss Farringdon, I want to know more about Winifred Hooper. Do you have any photographs of her?’

  I pass him the box of pictures I have been saving for tonight. Winifred is at the top.

  Winifred Hooper. Your body was half-covered in snow when they found it. The men who carried you down were weeping tears through streams of sweat. You were all wrapped up in a blanket, the roundness of your head, like the end of a ninepin, not you now and that was what I couldn’t understand. The sky lowered and pressed me into a bubble that bounced and floated silently while, in a different world, people screamed. The horror is fresh. I thought I would never climb again or even see another mountain but, of course, in the end, one has no choice.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The Ladies’ Alpine Club had moved back to its premises at the Grand Central Hotel after the war. In 1922 the Club had hosted a dinner in honour of the first British Everest expedition and all the members of the expedition attended. Parr said that there were speeches of knights in the Age of Chivalry and it was a most convivial, romantic evening. Everyone hoped and believed that the party would triumph but they did not. Mallory was to make his third attempt the following year.

  We sat at a cosy table beneath paintings of mountains and carefully hung ice axes. It seemed wonderful to be a member of the club, to be able to walk in and out as a proper mountaineer, to greet people you knew from expeditions and to make great plans. A portrait of Queen Margherita of Italy, the club’s honorary president, hung on the wall and I glanced at her every now and again, as though I could somehow make her aware of me, earn her respect.

  Parr’s face was sunburnt. Her skin was red and in places beginning to peel and detach itself, like a carpet coming up at the edges. Her hair, now cut into a sharp bob, made her younger, somehow brighter.

  ‘How are you?’ she asked.

  ‘I have been well. And you?’

  ‘Yes, the same.’

  The waitress placed the te
a strainer over my cup and poured. Parr rubbed the skin under her right eye and tiny peelings balled on her cheek.

  I smiled. ‘You’ve been climbing recently.’

  ‘Mont Blanc. I was in the Alps just weeks ago and the weather was good so we decided to do it. I have a new guide, recommended to me by friends. He’s called Heinrich and we get along so well I wouldn’t consider anyone else now.’ She turned to the waitress, pushed her cup aside. ‘It’s too strong. Could you tip this away and bring me another? And we’ll have some cake. Now what do you want to do, Farringdon? What was your idea when you wrote to me?’

  ‘I’m not sure. You see, I may have been indoors too long to be any good now but—’

  ‘You’ve certainly put on some weight.’

  ‘I know. And yet I do want to climb again.’ I leaned towards her. ‘I want to do it for Locke and for Hooper and my friend Frank. Well, for all of us.’ My voice cracked and my nose felt hot. I grabbed my teacup, took a gulp but it all went wrong and I was coughing and crying at the same time.

  ‘Farringdon, what on earth is happening to you?’

  I pointed at my throat and reached for my napkin.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  I nodded, caught my breath and wiped away the tears.

  ‘Farringdon, I want to say something. I’m awfully sorry about that business with Hooper and my article.’ She leaned forward and her hair swung about her chin, shrinking her face. She looked directly into my eyes. I felt embarrassed. ‘I apologize for writing about it so badly.’

  ‘I’m afraid that you did but, I must say, it’s a relief to hear you say so.’

  I found myself gazing at the nose of someone in the doorway. It seemed familiar but then it blurred.

  She nodded to herself. ‘I remember telling you once, I’m not good at knowing the best things to say sometimes but I’ve learned a bit. I was trying too hard to make a name for myself and needed to dispel the idea that we were naive schoolgirls, so when the journal asked me to write something—’

  ‘Never mind.’

  ‘But you hope to climb again and that’s good because I have a great plan.’

  ‘I just want to go back to the Alps and say goodbye to Hooper, make my peace with the mountains.’

  ‘Yes, yes, but you won’t say that when you get to the Alps. I’m not thinking of Mont Blanc, of course.’

  ‘Good, I was thinking of a quick visit to Zermatt and then head for Italy and perhaps the Dolomites—’

  I said this because Parr had taken over. I had not actually given much thought to specific peaks. Indeed, the mountains I had in mind belonged to some fantasy range based vaguely on what I had seen and climbed before.

  ‘If we have time, I suppose, but that’s not why we’re going.’

  ‘But I particularly hoped to climb in Italy. I’ve read that the scenery is beautiful and I’ve always wanted to visit Italy.’ I meant to stand up for myself.

  ‘No, no. I have something much better.’ Parr clapped her hands together in front of her mouth. ‘We’re going to climb the Matterhorn.’

  I was so surprised that for a moment I could not make any sense of the word. Matterhorn.

  ‘We always planned to do it, didn’t we? Heinrich and I have been talking about it for some time and when your letter came, it was perfect.’

  ‘Oh no, Parr. You overestimate my ability. You go up with Heinrich.’

  ‘But Heinrich won’t come with us to the summit. Plenty of women have climbed and traversed the Matterhorn but there has never been a manless ascent, so he’ll be our porter as far as the ridge. He’ll bivouac with us the night before and then you and I shall make the ascent by ourselves. Heinrich will watch us through his binoculars, if he can. It’s a very small piece of mountaineering history, the sort I thought you wanted.’

  ‘I did, but—’

  ‘It’s more than fifty years since Lucy Walker reached the summit and that was only six years after Whymper. Everyone has been going to the Alps since the war ended and they’re taking bigger risks than ever before. There’ll be nothing new for us to do soon. Even Everest is about to be taken. Start preparing now and we’ll go in June or July. We’ll have a few weeks there so you can take in some lower ascents first, find your feet.’ Parr tilted her head, scratched her nose and cleared her throat. ‘I’m trying to make amends. Do you see?’

  ‘I do and I’m more relieved than I can tell you.’

  I had an income now from my teaching, as well as the money from the lodgers. It wasn’t much, but there was also the possibility of selling the house and moving somewhere smaller when Catherine married.

  ‘Dig out your equipment, Farringdon, and go walking every day. Up and down the stairs with bricks in your knapsack. Grease your boots and wear them around the place so you don’t get blisters.’

  ‘Parr, wait . . . I might not be ready for Zermatt. The memories—’

  ‘This tea is much better. I can drink boiled string on the mountains, but in the club it’s really another matter. You still have your things?’

  ‘I do.’ I decided to purchase a new axe so that we would not have to mention the old one.

  My eye wandered again to the woman in the corner. The sight of her rigid black jacket and graceful posture pulled me back to the corridors at Candlin College, the murmur of young women’s voices and sweet floor-polish smell. I took in her silhouette, the sharp nose and drooping eyes.

  ‘I say, Parr, isn’t that Hobson?’

  Parr craned her neck, gasped and turned back. ‘I think it is. And those are the Dalton sisters, who are going to climb in the Dolomites this summer. I’ve met them. Well, that does it. You can’t think of going to Italy now. She might be going with them.’

  ‘We’d never bump into her.’

  ‘Of course we would. We’d be crossing a glacier and she’d pop up out of a crevasse in her black coat. She’d have us processing up the mountain in a line behind her, ringing a bell and saying grace before cocoa.’

  I laughed and bowed my head lest Miss Hobson should see us. ‘I’m still scared of talking to her. Who knew that she was a mountaineer?’

  Miss Hobson left without noticing us and Parr waved to the Dalton sisters, Anna and Elizabeth, who were aged between twenty-five and thirty and reminded me a little of Catherine and myself. They resembled each other in appearance – dark hair, long fine-boned faces – but the older one had a distant, mystical quality, as if she might walk off into the broom cupboard and not notice, were her sister not there to watch her. They came and spoke to us for a few minutes and Parr told them our plans. They shook my hand and wished me the best of luck.

  I marched up and down the stairs that evening, with a knapsack of coal on my back and my old boots on my feet. Catherine played Telemann fantasias and the music followed me up and down until I was dizzy.

  Some mountaineers are peak-baggers and some are wanderers. The great mountaineers fall out, get on each other’s nerves, send unsatisfactory companions packing or storm off home themselves. They sometimes give accounts that their fellow climbers will dispute. The truth, like bones in a glacier, may fall out one day or in hundreds of years, or never. Parr and I had no reasons to argue any more. We knew what we wanted and with us we carried the young ambitions of our two friends. Precisely because we knew already what it was to hate each other, we understood that we would be good climbing partners.

  Peter sorts the pictures into piles and begins referencing and cross-referencing in a small notebook. He is absorbed in this work that seems to focus on Winifred Hooper. I don’t know why he cares so much. What is there to lose if I trust him? I am already a recluse and people who know anything about me assume the worst. I could use him to clear my name. As I watch him write, I wonder why I did not see it sooner. Under the papery layers of the adult Peter, there is the brown-haired boy, around him the gentle glow of the Monte Rosa Hotel lobby.

  ‘Did you work at the hotel for many years?’

  ‘No. I left a year or two after t
he accident and went to work in a bank in Geneva. I saved up enough money to buy a small hotel in the countryside, but I didn’t want to return to Zermatt so I moved to France. Accidents happen everywhere, of course, and I have lost guests to the mountains around Chamonix. It’s always terrible but, as an adult, I can accept that it is inevitable. I was too young when the first tragedy occurred and it haunts me in a strange way. It has a heaviness that has never lifted.’

  Peter writes and writes, sometimes stopping to suck the top of his pen, scratch an arm or leg. I have slept for an hour or so and am refreshed. No dreams about the Matterhorn tonight.

  I take a candle from the mantelpiece and light it for Cicely Parr. I place it just beside the globe.

  ‘What’s that for?’

  ‘Nothing. Just a candle.’

  When Catherine comes, I’ll make sure that everything is just right so that she will want to stay the night. I’ll put silver candlesticks on the piano top and pour glasses of wine, dark as black vanilla orchids. Once we are squiffy we shall begin to forget the years.

  Dear Catherine

  I can’t wait until you are here! Everything is so much better than I thought it would be. I am recovering from the past and I long yes, long, to tell you all about it.

  Hurry up! We shall have fun.

  Your Grace

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  We got along well in Zermatt. That is not to say that we spoke very much to each other beyond simple conversations about what we needed to do, but that we walked together without much need for words. We had a comfortable familiarity and required nothing more. We stayed at the Riffelalp Hotel, in pine forests high above the village, so were away from the Monte Rosa Hotel and people who might remember us. When we went into Zermatt and had to pass the old hotel, we fell quiet or found some interesting new topic to distract us. The Breithorn was visible on clear days, but the sight was not as painful as I had feared it would be. The peak was white and pretty. I could imagine Hooper wandering up there by herself, listening for ice cracking in the night and descending to lower ground where forests might keep her warm and safe.