Thin Air

by Michelle Paver

  I am quite startlingly reluctant to begin. Whatever these pages contain, it’s explosive enough to have been kept hidden for three decades.

  You will be wondering, the old man’s letter goes on, why I have waited twenty-nine years to tell the truth. In part, it was cowardice. Perhaps, too, I wanted to give Edmund Lyell every chance of making his own confession. But as you are doubtless aware, he died last year in his sleep, after a serene old age and a long, happy life. I hated him to the end, for he ruined mine.

  ‘Confession’? My stomach tightens. Can it be as bad as that?

  I take no comfort from any pious hope that Lyell will receive his punishment in the next life, if such exists. There is no justice in this world, so why should we expect it in the next? But I digress. Soon I too will be dead. The enclosed is yours to do with as you think fit. There is no copy.

  Yours, Charles Tennant.

  * * *

  No copy? Then why entrust it to a native mail-runner? What if it had been lost en route? Or did the old man half hope that it would be? That ‘the truth’, whatever it is, would never become known?

  His narrative is entitled simply: Memoir of Captain Charles Tennant, January 1935. I skim the introduction, a brief but devastating character assassination of Edmund Lyell, which accords pretty well with my own view of the man after re-reading Bloody But Unbowed, followed by Tennant’s blunt statement that he wishes to set the record straight.

  His account of the expedition completely ignores the trek to the mountain and the start of the climb, and plunges straight in at the point where, as he puts it, everything went wrong.

  The early part of that day was as Lyell describes in Bloody But Unbowed. We had left Camp Two before dawn. Having tackled the formidable ice crag that looms over it, we were resting at the top when Ward dropped his rück-sack and, in retrieving it, fell. He came to rest, as Lyell puts it, ‘with a sickening crunch a hundred feet below, on the edge of the crevasse.’ Lyell then climbed down, found Ward dead and climbed back to us. After sending word to the baggage coolies to retrieve the body, he led us in a brief prayer and we continued the ascent.

  All this happened as Lyell describes – with one significant difference, which I address in due course.

  To continue. Again as Lyell describes, we had not climbed far beyond the crag when a blizzard blew up, forcing us to return to Camp Two, where we remained ‘snowed in’ for three days. From this point on, Lyell’s version of events is complete fiction.

  In his book, he states that on returning to Camp Two, we learnt that the coolies had failed to retrieve Ward’s body. He states that we assumed it had disappeared in the snow, or been blown into the crevasse. These are lies. Ward’s body had not disappeared. As we were struggling through driving snow towards Camp Two, we were horrified to glimpse him, slumped and crusted over with ice, on top of the crag. I repeat, the body was atop the crag, a hundred feet above where he had fallen.

  The conclusion was inescapable. Ward had not been killed in the fall, but merely injured. Unwittingly, we had abandoned him.

  We were of course appalled. However, the body was at the far end of the crag and conditions were atrocious; it would have been madness to attempt to retrieve it. Indeed, it was all we could do to reach Camp Two ourselves.

  Stratton, Freemantle and Knight took shelter in one tent, Lyell, Dr Yates and I in another. Yates and I lost no time in confronting Lyell, but he seemed as horrified as we: ‘When I climbed down to him, I was convinced that he was dead!’

  Dr Yates took it the worst, no doubt feeling that he had derogated from his duty as a physician by not climbing down to assess Ward’s condition himself. And although we never spoke of it, the fact that Ward had managed to scale the crag, despite his injuries, begged the question: how close to death had he been when Lyell had climbed down to him after his fall?

  Lyell, however, remained adamant: Ward had shown no signs of life. ‘Besides,’ he added with brutal pragmatism, ‘he’s dead now.’ To that there seemed no answer. I would add that we were all exhausted, the light was failing and the weather unspeakable. So we did nothing to recover the body, then or thereafter. I continued to harbour uneasy suspicions about what Lyell had found on climbing down to Ward, but I made no further enquiry. Why? Because Lyell was the expedition leader and a general. I was a captain and I was frightened.

  The next three days passed in a blur, but I shall never forget the cold and the screaming wind buffeting our tents, shaking the very mountain like a thing demented. At times, there would be an eerie lull, although we could still hear the storm savaging the slopes below. At such times, I fancied that the wind called my name. This happened not once but thrice. I began to fear that I was losing my mind.

  To relieve the monotony during these lulls, we six ‘Sahibs’ often crammed together in one tent. On one such occasion, Stratton confessed to me that he had heard the wind calling his name. I was assailed by a dreadful thought: was it possible that it was not the wind?

  Then Knight asked me if I thought ravens flew at this altitude, for he had heard strange cries. During another lull, I peered out of the tent for a breath of air and I saw something I shall never forget. I saw Ward’s ice-crusted body up on the crag and I fancied that it moved its arms: awkwardly, struggling to clap its frozen fists. It only did so once or twice, and I told myself it was the wind, which still blew even in the lulls. But later, I wondered. I could not put that sight out of my mind.

  That night, when we were again huddled in one tent, Freemantle quietly asked Dr Yates whether it is possible for a dead body to make involuntary movements, such as waving its arms. Yates’ reply was curt: it is completely impossible. At that moment, I chanced to intercept an uneasy glance between Stratton and Knight. That was when I realised. We all knew. We knew that Ward was alive up there, and yet none of us spoke out. Perhaps we felt that it was easier to keep quiet, to let nature take its course.

  Also – and I do not know if I can convey what I mean to someone who has never spent days at twenty-two thousand feet, near the limits of human endurance – there was a peculiar sense that we were ‘out of the world’, in a place where there were no laws, no rules and no witnesses.

  Heretofore, I have made no mention of Lyell himself. That is because, up to this point, he had said nothing. Nothing, that is, until Freemantle asked Yates his question about dead bodies moving, whereupon Lyell bristled and tersely forbade any more ‘womanish displays of nerves’. I remember feeling relieved. I think we all did. The expedition leader had taken matters out of our hands.

  Finally, on the third day, the blizzard ended and we emerged to a dazzling world of pristine snow. Above us on the crag, the body was gone. Whether it had been blown into the crevasse or buried beneath a drift, we were in no position to determine, as we had no strength to mount a search. Our supplies were low and we were all suffering from varying degrees of mountain sickness. We had no choice but to abandon the ascent and return to Base Camp.

  None of this, of course, alters the truth. Ward had been alive up there during the blizzard. He had been alive. We had heard him crying out. We had seen him waving his arms and clapping his frozen fists. Then at some stage, perhaps as long as three days and three nights later, he had died, alone and in sight of his comrades. And we had not lifted a finger to help.

  The rest of the climb is well-known and swiftly told. During our descent, we were overtaken by an avalanche. Freemantle and Knight were killed outright, Stratton and Yates dreadfully injured. For a time, I almost forgot Ward, being bent on retrieving the fallen and easing the final hours of the wounded. All this is described accurately enough in Lyell’s book, albeit in nauseatingly overblown prose which accords him the lion’s share of heroics. What he omits is the fact that poor Dr Yates, who was the last to succumb, regarded his own death as just punishment for having failed to go to Ward’s aid. Typically, Lyell dismissed this as the ramblings of a weak mind on the verge of extinction.

  The death of Dr Yates left Lyell and m
e the only survivors: the only ones who knew the truth about Ward. (I say nothing of the coolies, who in due course were handsomely paid off and fled to their villages, too frightened to reveal what they may or may not have known.)

  On the trek back to Darjeeling, there were times when I envied my dead comrades, because for them, it was over. However, I must be clear: I did not mourn Ward. I had never cared for him. He wasn’t a likeable man and he was not one of us. But he did not deserve what happened.

  And always, I wondered. Had Lyell known that Ward was alive, when he climbed down to him after the fall? I wondered, but I did not ask.

  On my return to England, I heard that Lyell was writing an account of the expedition, and I naïvely hoped that he would set matters straight. His book was published and he was acclaimed a hero. I was shocked. His account completely ignored the fact that Ward had survived his fall, only to perish in the blizzard. Lyell had simply omitted the entire episode.

  Two years after Bloody But Unbowed was published, on a dismal, fog-bound Friday at the end of November, I finally mustered my courage and bearded Lyell at his Club. I asked him what he had really found when he’d climbed down to Ward on the edge of that crevasse.

  His reply was measured and cool; he made no attempt to dissimulate. He had found Ward conscious and in shock, with a broken thigh. Lyell told me calmly that he had assessed the situation thus: to have rescued the injured man and helped him down the mountain would have caused such delay that, with the Monsoon imminent, we would have lost our chance at the summit. Besides, Ward would have died anyway – or so Lyell asserted. Accordingly, he said (and I found his use of that word peculiarly appalling), he abandoned the injured man and climbed back to us. Having declared that Ward was dead, he then led us in a perfunctory prayer and we continued our ascent.

  What struck me most forcibly, as we sat in our wing chairs beside the fire, was that Lyell plainly saw nothing wrong in what he had done. ‘I made a command decision,’ he declared. ‘Besides, the man was dying.’ He seemed to have told himself this so many times that he had taught himself to believe it. Or perhaps he simply did not care. I shall never know. However, the truth remains. Ward was suffering from no more than shock and a broken leg, and he recovered sufficiently to climb the crag. He could have been saved.

  At that point in our tête-à-tête, Lyell poked the fire and rang for whisky and soda. It was bizarre. We might have been speaking of billiards, not the protracted and agonising death of a companion.

  When we were settled with our drinks and once again alone, I brought the talk round to those three days when Ward had been on the crag and we were down in Camp Two, sheltering from the blizzard. Finally, I mustered the courage to admit that we had all known that Ward remained alive. At this, Lyell became impatient. ‘Well, and what of it? The man was dying! And I didn’t see you climbing up there to bring him down, or Knight, or Freemantle, or Stratton, or Yates!’

  ‘Be that as it may,’ I replied, ‘will you make a clean breast of things now?’

  At that, he opened his eyes wide and gave me a condescending smile. ‘My dear fellow, what on earth would be the point?’

  ‘Then I will,’ I retorted.

  Still smiling, he regarded me askance. ‘They won’t believe you, you know. A man who has been in and out of rest homes and consulted alienists for his nerves? They will say that you’re deranged – and jealous of my success. They will say that if there had been a shred of truth to your story, you wouldn’t have waited all this time to tell it.’

  He was right. Or so I chose to believe at the time, because it suited me to keep quiet. Because I am a coward.

  So there we have it. I have kept my silence for twenty-nine years. During that time, I have often thought of speaking out – indeed, it feels as if I have thought of little else. That has been my punishment.

  As for Edmund Lyell, in the course of his long, happy life, I do not believe that he ever experienced a moment’s disquiet.

  19

  Slowly, I re-fold Tennant’s memoir, and replace it with his letter in the envelope. I put the envelope in my kitbag on the empty bunk. I find my match-tin and my cigarettes, and after a few attempts, I light one and suck on it hard.

  People used to have ways of protecting themselves from the dead. ‘It’s not out of respect that folk wear black,’ Nurse used to say. ‘Oh no, it’s to fool the dead, so they can’t come after you. And don’t you speak ill of ’em, neither. And never keep nothing that was theirs, that’s sure to draw them.’ Anything to avoid attracting the angry dead.

  And it is angry, no doubt of that. And now I know why.

  Three days in a blizzard with a broken femur. Knowing you’ve been abandoned, within sight of camp. And I’m fairly sure that he did survive for the full three days, because of those three jagged lines scratched on his match-tin.

  For twenty-nine years, Tennant has lived with the guilt. Hunched in his study with its view of the mountain, and that thigh-bone trumpet on his desk, a reminder hidden in plain sight. ‘Every night, do you understand, I see them … Yes, I shall always see them.’ But he’d been talking about Ward.

  No wonder he collapsed when I asked him what it sounded like. I meant the trumpet, but he was thinking of something else; and he knows what it sounds like because he heard it: the cries, the muffled thud of frozen fists.

  Poor cowardly, self-hating, self-deluding Tennant. Even now, when he purports to ‘set the record straight’, he can’t quite bring himself to face the whole truth. He has to depict Lyell as the chief offender – when in fact they were all equally guilty. They knew Ward was alive. Why didn’t they climb up to the ‘body’ during one of those lulls? Why does Tennant keep referring to it as ‘it’?

  He gives himself away when he says that Ward ‘was not one of us’. That’s the real reason they didn’t rescue him. It wasn’t fatigue or mountain sickness, or ‘atrocious conditions’, but the oldest reason of all: Ward wasn’t one of them.

  If he had been – if it had been Freemantle or Knight dying on the Crag, or Stratton or Yates or Tennant, or Lyell himself – they would have risked life and limb to save him; as indeed they did after the avalanche.

  I’ve just realised something else. I’ve been asking myself why it haunts. I’ve assumed that it must have a reason – to right some wrong, or be avenged – and that once I know why, I can fix it, and this will be over.

  But how can you right this wrong? Ward died a lonely, agonising death that could have been prevented. Nothing can atone for that. Nothing can right that wrong.

  If McLellan were here now, he would no doubt pray for Ward’s repose. But I’m as certain as I can be that what haunts this mountain can’t be ‘laid to rest’, and it can’t be appeased. It exists to terrify and appal. It doesn’t matter that I’m innocent and I’ve done it no harm. I’m alive. That’s enough.

  And perhaps this won’t even be over when I’m dead, no not even then, when what remains of me lingers on in this dreadful place, conscious and without hope of release …

  The candle-lantern flickers and goes out.

  I cower on my stomach, fighting panic. The darkness is a wall, pressing on my face.

  The lantern went out because I forgot to replace the candle, that is all. My headlamp and my electric torch are readily to hand on the empty bunk.

  Except that they’re not, because I forgot to put them there, I forgot all about them. Are they in my kitbag? My rucksack? They might as well be at the bottom of the crevasse. Nothing will make me plunge my hands into canvas in the dark.

  At my feet, I make out a charcoal glimmer around the cave mouth. That can’t still be twilight, can it? Moonlight? Snow glow? I’ve no idea what time it is, and my watch isn’t on my wrist, although I don’t remember taking it off.

  Groping for the lantern niche, I find a spare candle. I extract my match-tin from my pocket and unscrew the lid … I drop the bloody thing, scattering matches.

  As I’m scrabbling for them, the glimmer at the cav
e mouth briefly cuts off.

  I freeze like a trapped animal. Something has just passed my door.

  The wind has died. The silence is appalling. My mind scurries in ancient, deep-buried channels of thought. Nothing exists but the menace outside.

  The ‘door’ slaps, joltingly loud. The wind moans. It’s gone.

  I force myself to grope in the dark for a match. At last I find one, and strike a light. Shadows leap as the blessed blessed flame flares to life.

  ‘There, now,’ I whisper, setting the lantern in its niche. ‘There.’

  At the back of the cave, my shirt has come loose from the ‘window’, releasing a chill breath from the nothingness beyond. Hastily, I stuff it back in.

  The ‘window’ is gone. I’m lying half over the crevasse, with the Crag looming over me. There’s something dreadfully wrong with my leg. An extra bend at mid-thigh, like a broken doll.

  Far above, I make out the others, peering over the edge of the Crag. Now a man on a rope is climbing down to me. Thank God. They’ll find a way to rescue me. I’m going to be all right.

  ‘Thank God,’ I whisper as he bends over me.

  Through his snow glasses, his eyes meet mine. No emotion. I might as well be a lump of ice.

  Raising his head, he shouts to the others: ‘He’s dead! I’m coming up!’

  What? What does he mean? He can’t – he can’t be leaving me? He knows I’m alive, he heard me speak. His eyes met mine.