Above All Things (2 page)

The first time, George thought, he’d been successful before he even left.

By the time he returned to England from the second Everest
expedition a year later, success was impossible to claim. The
Times
was already blaming him for the disaster that had put an abrupt end to the 1922 attempt. It wasn’t fair, but for good or ill it was his name that had become synonymous with Everest.

When he met Ruth in Paris on his return, he was certain he was done with the mountain. In the hotel room, he’d sworn to her he would never go back: “I promise I’m done with it. I don’t need it. I need to be with you.” He had believed it at the time. Continued to believe it the next year, even after Arthur Hinks, the chairman of the Everest Committee, asked him to consider returning a third time, in 1924, even as other names were put forward and a team began to form without him.

He had tried to push Everest out of his mind, but it remained – his first thought on waking, his last at night. She was there as he read the newspaper articles about who from the previous expedition was returning for the new attempt:
Colonel Edward (Teddy) Norton, Dr. Howard Somervell
. As he imagined that they might summit his mountain.

Then one day Ruth had said, “You’re thinking of going back.” It wasn’t a question. She looked past him to the rain-pocked window. He could hear the spatter of water against the glass, the gush in the downspouts. He should have denied it; he shouldn’t have said anything, but it was too late for that.

“Perhaps we should at least think about it. They need my experience. No one has been to Everest more often than I have. If they succeed this time and I’m not with them … Do you remember everything we dreamed about when they first asked me?”

“Teddy’s been to the mountain,” Ruth countered. “And Dr. Somervell, too. You only have one more season than them, George. They’re not your responsibility. You have responsibilities here. There’s your new teaching position at Cambridge. And I don’t think the children could bear for you to go away again.”

He tried not to remember how John had shied away from him when he came home in ’22. But John had been only a baby then. Now he’d had time with his father, knew him. This time would be different.

“You said you were done with it. You promised.” Her voice sounded tight. She breathed in deeply. “I know you, George. What you want is for me to give you leave to go.”

“No,” he started to protest, but she was right. They both knew it.

Eventually, Ruth had agreed they should think about it, and he promised they’d make the decision together. But when Hinks’s final invitation came, George had accepted without discussing it with her. He couldn’t help himself. For days after, he’d waited for the right moment to tell her what he’d done.

He’d returned from a meeting at the college determined to tell her. She was in the dining room – a perfect silhouette in the evening gloom, her features outlined by the dusk glow of the window behind her. Stepping into the room, he wanted to kiss her, to scoop her up, but something about how still she was, the sad line of her mouth, stopped him.

“I knew you’d never let anyone else climb it,” she said, not even looking at him. Her backlit profile was a cameo he wanted to carry with him. “As soon as the Committee decided they were going back, I knew you’d be going, despite all the protestations, all the promises. You should have just told me.”

She was right. He hadn’t meant her to find out this way. The telegram on the table in front of her was luminescent on the dark wood. He knew what it must say –
Glad to have you aboard again
. Damn Hinks.

“I’m sorry, Ruth,” he said. “But I have to do this. I have to. It’s my mountain. You have to understand.” She shook her head as if to say she didn’t, she wouldn’t. “This will be the last time. It has to be.”

“You’ve said that before, George. And I believed you. I’m not sure I can this time.”

“Ruth –”

“Don’t.” She stood and the movement sent the telegram wafting to the floor. When he looked up from where it had landed she was staring at him, her eyes shrouded by the dim light. Her hands fluttered near her mouth, her throat. “You’ll have to find a way to tell the children. Clare will be so disappointed,” she said as she stepped around him, moving towards the door.
Disappointed
. The word stung. He knew that’s what she felt more than anything. Disappointed, betrayed. He winced, tried to banish the word from his mind.

“When do you leave?” She stood in the doorway, her back to him.

“Ruth, you’ll see. It will all be all right. I’ll do it this time and then I’ll never have to leave again.”

“When do you leave?” she asked again.

The months that followed had been difficult. Ruth had been quiet, withdrawn, her words always politely supportive. He found himself missing her before he’d even left.

The night before his departure, they had made love in the unfamiliar hotel room and she had clung to him, desperately, like the wind on the mountain, bucking against him until he was gasping, drained. They were both different when he was leaving; the imminent separation changed them, made them bolder.

The next morning, on board the
RMS California
, she’d kissed him goodbye, nodded emphatically, and then turned to walk down the gangplank, her hips switching under her long skirt. God. How could she not believe him when he said she was beautiful? She’d shake her head and cover her mouth with her hands – even more beautiful for her denial. There was the hot prick of tears in his eyes, a dull ache in his throat. He swallowed
and watched her go. He counted in his head. It would be six months, maybe more, before he saw her again.

That was weeks ago. Now, standing on the deck of the
California
, George cast his gaze back across the Indian Ocean to where he imagined the horizon must be, where it had disappeared when the sun set an hour ago. There was no way to make things right between them except to do what he’d been promising Ruth for years: succeed and put Everest behind him once and for all. He had tried to explain again in the letter he’d started earlier, just why he had to go, how it had nothing to do with his love for her, but the right words never ended up on the page.
My Dearest Ruth, I know this has been hard for you, but you must know how very much you mean to me, how much knowing you are waiting for my success and return drives me forward so that every day farther away is also a day closer to my returning to you again
.

The ship rolled slightly under him, raising a chorus of metallic clangs and creaks from nearby lifeboats and chains. Ignoring the clamour, he pulled out his diary from the pocket of his dinner jacket. The bold dates at the top of the pages were barely visible in the gathering darkness. He leaned farther over the railing to catch some of the light reflecting off the water. He counted down the days. Two more nights. Then the Indian subcontinent, the baked heat of it, the blaze of exotic chaos before they disappeared off the map. He wanted it to burn the salt, the smell of fish and algae from his nostrils. The ocean air was too thick and heavy. It clung to him, clogged up his lungs.

“Am I interrupting?”

George glanced up. “Not at all,” he said, as Sandy Irvine stepped to the railing beside him. George closed up his diary, trying to remember what he had written about Sandy in his letter to Ruth. Probably some remark about the boy’s bulk, the sheer size of him.
Our attempt at a superman
, he remembered. He
slipped the diary back into his pocket, removed his cigarettes, and offered one to Sandy, who shook his head and leaned forward against the rail. Behind them, the dining room was ablaze with light as waiters cleared tables and joked with one another, louder than when there were diners present.

“Missed you at the shuffleboard contest this afternoon,” Sandy said.

“Not really my game.”

“I won.”

Of course you did, George thought as Sandy described the closeness of the match. He suspected physical challenges came easily to the boy. Sandy was the largest member of the entire team – not the tallest, but he seemed stronger than any of the other climbers.

“Sandy’s the Committee’s attempt to inject some young blood into the expedition,” Teddy Norton, the expedition leader, had explained months ago when George questioned the boy’s inclusion. “To balance out our, shall we say,
experience
.” Teddy had raised an eyebrow as he said the word.

“They think brute strength is the way to go, then?” George had responded. “You and I both know it takes more than muscle to get to the summit. And he doesn’t look like much of a climber. He’s too big. With too much weight to carry up an incline.”

“You imagined someone more like you, I suspect,” Teddy had teased.

But the best climbers
were
built like him. And Teddy, George thought. Long and thin, with a good reach.

Now, next to Sandy on the deck, George pulled himself up to his full height and ran a hand through his hair, stretched out the muscles in his back. Still, if the boy could continue to sharpen his skills, he might be of some use higher up on the mountain.

“Have you been practising the knots I showed you?” he asked now.

“I know those knots already.”

“You’ll want the practise, believe me. When your fingers are frozen and your brain is fizzing away and suffocating, you’ll pray your body remembers what it needs to all on its own. Practise.”

“I have climbed before. In Spitsbergen with Odell. I wasn’t bad at it. Quite good, even.”

Of course he was. “Sandy, this won’t be like anything you’ve ever done before. God, we could all die a dozen times before we even get to the mountain – malaria, wild animals, a fall down a cliff face. And then there’s the mountain itself.” He sounded as if he was back in front of the classroom at Charterhouse, the bored faces of his students glaring up at him.

He inhaled and tried again. “There’s just no way to know how you’ll respond. Not at those altitudes. Twenty-nine thousand feet. That’s much higher than even the Camels fly. And those pilots, they’d pass out without their oxygen masks. My brother, Trafford, was a pilot. He loved flying. But he told me he thought he was going to die the first few times he went up. From the vertigo and nausea. That’s what it’s like on Everest all the time. Like the most terrible influenza you’ve ever had. Like something horrible is sitting on your chest, ripping at it. Everything just hurts. Your joints, your bones, your skin even. And the only way to end it is to climb the bloody mountain.”

“So.” Sandy turned to stare at him dead in the eye. His were striking, a flat blue colour. Almost too pale, like light reflecting off stagnant water. “Tell me again why we’re going?” He reached over and punched George lightly in the shoulder, more a push than a punch. Then he smiled and his face opened with it and his eyes weren’t flat anymore; they deepened, the colour shifting. “Just joking,” he said. “I wouldn’t be anywhere else.” He turned back to the expanse of water before them.

Behind them, through the open window of the captain’s salon, George could hear the clink of glasses, the laughter and
chatter of their other teammates – the expedition leader, Edward “Teddy” Norton, along with the team doctor, Howard Somervell, and the naturalist Noel Odell. The three of them, along with George and Sandy, would make up the climbing team. There were two more men awaiting them in Bombay – Shebbeare and Hazard – soldiers attached to the local Gurkha regiments who knew the Tibetan languages and customs (more so even than Teddy) and would serve as their translators and guides.

Every so often, the pop and flash of John Noel’s camera strobed across the deck, punctuating the distant murmur of conversation. George couldn’t make out any of the words but he could imagine easily enough what was being said. He was already tired of the same old conversations – provisions, oxygen, strategy. And Teddy’s waffling. Somervell’s condescension. Odell’s insistence that he knew what was best.

“Look at that,” Sandy said, pointing to the black water roiling in the wake. A green phosphorescence bloomed just beneath the surface of the water where the
California
had passed.

“It’s algae,” George said, watching the glowing trail stretch out behind the ship.

“Incredible.” Sandy’s voice, hushed now, slipped in with the murmur of the engines deep inside the ship. “Odell told me about this green glow once, on the way to Spitsbergen. We went out on deck every night, but I never saw anything. So strange. Reminds me of the Northern Lights we saw once we arrived in Greenland.”

“Mmmm.” George leaned over the railing to get a closer look. Cool air rose up from the ocean eighty feet below. He’d never seen the Northern Lights, but this colour was too heavy, too viscous to be thought of as light. It reminded him of the seeping gases in the trenches, in the shell-holes of no-man’s-land. It moved the same way, wet and congealing as it rolled and gathered in pockets, thicker, heavier than the medium it
travelled in. He remembered how the gas crept towards you, like it knew where you were. Stalked you. His throat tightened; he could smell the rubber of the gas masks. George straightened up and inhaled deeply into his lungs: salt, oil, the tobacco burning in his hand.

He shook his head free of the memory and took another drag from his cigarette. Sandy would be too young to remember much of the war. “How old did you say you were, Sandy?”

Sandy bristled next to him. “Twenty-one. I know what you’re thinking, but I’m ready for this. Maybe, as you’ve said, Everest is different, but Spitsbergen wasn’t easy. God, the cold there. The snow would melt inside our boots, down our collars, so it was impossible to stay dry. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. But it was incredible – to feel like what I was doing mattered, that people were counting on it. Like this does. Don’t you feel that too? We have to succeed. We have to. Everyone’s counting on us.”

There was a sharp laugh from down the deck. A woman, her laugh too forced. Clearly her companion wasn’t the least bit funny, though she wanted him to think he was. George flicked his cigarette out to sea.