The Steady Running of the Hour: A Novel (4 page)

—For God’s sake, some slack, Ashley!

Ashley leads the next pitch and they go on alternating, one man belaying as the other edges westward across the cliff. The rock is freezing and the icy patches leach cold water in the sunlight. Both men climb with bare hands, stopping at times to rub blood into their pale fingers.

They rest on a nose of banded quartz and Price lights his pipe. The wind howls on, pulling swift curtains of mist across the spectacle of mountain and valley below. Suddenly the sun flares over Snowdon, sending a narrow beam of light across the peak. Both men let out a little gasp.

—There she goes, Price murmurs. Sometimes I wonder if we aren’t fools, forever chasing foreign peaks when we’ve hills like these. Are you hungry?

Price opens his rucksack. He takes out his pocketknife and spreads anchovy paste over a pair of biscuits.

—What would you call this view, Ashley? Beauty or sorrow?

—Foreboding.

Price hands Ashley a biscuit. —Oughtn’t say that on a climb.

—Sorrow then. With British hills it’s always sorrow.

—Why is that?

Ashley looks down at his boots.

—I don’t know. All the moors and dark rock and clouds. I expect they were made to suit us—

—Or they made us.

Price stands up, buckling his rucksack shut.

—I suppose you might lead this one—

Ashley edges his way along flakes of rock, his face brushing patches of snowy vegetation. The ledge narrows until he has only the toe of his boot on the rock, then a single nail scratching the flaky ledge. He looks down to the slope of jagged scree five hundred feet below, the calm opal waters of the lake. Ashley hooks the rope over a knob of outcropping rock and spiders along westward, Price belaying with his pipe still in his mouth.

Half an hour later they stand below a chimney of smooth rock, four feet across and nearly vertical. A film of water courses down its walls.

—Looks slick, Ashley says.

—It’ll go.

Price steps into the narrow chute, putting his back against one wall and his boots against the other. He pushes upward with his legs and back, his hands touching the walls only for support. Ten minutes later he is on top, belaying the rope over a rock spike.

—Your go.

Ashley moves deep into the chimney and begins his way up, trying to keep his weight on his legs. But the handholds are minuscule, slick ridges smaller than a fingernail.

—You’re too far in, Price calls. Get out to the edge!

Ashley does not listen. He pushes upward, his arms growing tired, his bootnails skating against the wet stone. The chimney steepens until
he reaches an outcropping of rock that blocks his way. Price is eight feet above him, holding the rope taut as he peers down at Ashley.

—Foothold to the right.

—Can’t get there.

—Follow the crack! The left is too slick—

Ashley’s left boot searches for the ledge, but he has overreached his right hand and he sinks his weight down on his foot before he notices the pebble on the ledge. His boot skates off and he slides down the chimney, skidding against the stone. Price braces himself and grips the rope, but before it catches Ashley jams his arms and legs hard and stops sliding.

—Are you all right?

Ashley’s elbows burn with pain. He puts his weight on his back and rests for a moment. Then he climbs the chimney on the right as Price instructed. He comes over the lip and looks down at his bloody knuckles, one of the fingernails cracked. His left elbow is skinned and his knees are wet and filthy.

—Technically, I suppose, yours was the better route—

Price shakes his head.

—Bloody fool.

They top out on the western ridge an hour later and descend the skyline quickly, reaching the hotel by mid-afternoon. A group of climbers are smoking pipes on a bench behind the building, its white gables sheathed in the gathering mist.

—Was that you two on the girdle? I say Walsy, were you the one who floundered onto the ridge like a trout?

The other climbers laugh.

—We were coming up the west ridge and saw something flop over the top behind us and go flat on a slab. Like a trout coming out of the water. Hardly moved at all, just gazed up at the sky. I said it must be Walsy—

—I consider myself, Ashley interrupts, more salmon than trout.

Price points to a new Ford touring car parked in front of the hotel, its black enamel paint splattered with mud.

—Someone expected today?

—Only stopping by, the climber says. Chap from the Climbers’ Club and two sisters. What’s the chap’s name?

—Grafton, another climber says.

Price and Ashley enter the hotel. There is an odd silence in the foyer. The litter of boots is neatly arranged in rows now, the climbers sent back indoors by the mist. As they approach the door to the smoking room they hear the piano, a slower piece.

—How queer, Price says. Certainly not in the songbook—

Price pushes the door open but halts in the doorway, raising his right hand in a gesture of silence. Ashley cranes his neck over Price’s shoulder.

A large group has arranged itself around the upright piano. Climbers sit cross-legged on the floor, a few reclining, others sucking on glowing pipes. The aroma of cheap shag tobacco hangs low. A row of spectators is seated on chairs at the back, among these a few women. Ashley sees only the back of the piano player. A cream blouse, a long dark skirt. Her hands are fair. A silver band is around her wrist.

Ashley and Price stay in the door frame, watching. The piece returns to its theme again, a churning cascade of notes. The music slows, then ceases. The girl lifts her hands from the keys. There is cheering and applause.

—Encore, encore!

The girl swivels on the piano bench, startled by this enthusiasm. She is slender and her dark hair is tied up. There are faint freckles beneath her blue eyes.

—It wasn’t anything, she says.

—Marvelous, Price calls. Encore!

The girl smiles and bows her head a little. She flips through the songbook, but her two companions stand up, another dark-haired woman and a man in a motoring duster. The room goes on applauding
as the girl stands and makes a shy bow. Clapping on, Price leans toward Ashley.

—She shan’t forget this hotel.

The girl and her companions walk out amid cheers. A young man with a pipe in his mouth pulls out the piano bench, starting a lively tune whose lyrics were worked out last night. The audience joins in the chorus. Price clasps Ashley on the shoulder.

—Look here Ashley, I’m only trying to set you on the right course. Plenty of climbers start as fire-eaters, forever biting what they aren’t fit to swallow. I daresay I’ve been as guilty as any fellow. But you must learn to profit from another man’s experience, otherwise you’re courting disaster. It doesn’t matter how skilled you are. I told you the safe route, and you went flailing over some mad path that dropped you.

—I caught myself—

—Barely. A true alpinist doesn’t depend on chance.

Price lifts his hand from Ashley’s shoulder.

—I’ve a question for you, Ashley. Which do you suppose takes a man furthest in life—talent, judgment or persistence?

Ashley considers.

—I’d say the salmon possesses all three. And after infinite labor comes to die in the same place he started.

—Be serious.

—Then I don’t know. Which is it?

Price takes the rope from Ashley and throws the coil over his shoulder. He starts toward the stairs, shaking his head.

—Which, indeed.

I come out of the building and walk south toward High Holborn, carrying a cardboard portfolio stamped
Twyning & Hooper.
Inside are the papers they’ve given me, the proof of what I’ve seen and heard: the solicitors exist. The fortune exists.

High Holborn is not a beautiful street. Buildings of glass and stone. Throngs of pale businessmen in dark suits, their garish neckties bound in thick Windsor knots. They know nothing about the fortune. A woman staring at her cell phone collides with me, knocking shoulders.

—I’m sorry, I say.

The woman walks past and turns into Holborn Station, not seeming to hear me. I drag my hand against the polished surface of a building to steady myself.

I’d wanted to go to London the moment Prichard suggested it. But I didn’t admit it over the phone. After that first call I spent the afternoon sitting in Dolores Park, watching the clouds close over the skyscrapers downtown. I thought about London and Rome and Paris, cities
I’d read about that were still only names to me, dark spaces on a map. It was harder to think about the fortune and even harder to link it to
my grandmother. The park turned windy and I walked back toward my apartment. Near the corner of 24th and Capp I passed another pay phone. I looked at it for a long time. Then I picked up the receiver and called Khan.

—I want to come to London. I just need to look for the papers first.

—Splendid, Khan said. Can you be here by Monday?

He forwarded the itinerary an hour later. I went to my father’s house and tore apart the garage looking for anything related to my grandmother. My mother’s things were all in cardboard boxes stored high under the rafters and I hadn’t looked at them since the funeral. I got a ladder and took them all down. Soon there were papers everywhere: bank statements and photographs and old letters. I sat on the oil-stained concrete floor looking through everything. In one box I found my mother’s high school yearbook from 1968 and I read some of the autographs in the back, but that only made me feel worse. I shut the yearbook and went through box after box of old linens and polyester clothes. Everything smelled like mothballs. None of it was my grandmother’s.

On the highest shelf in the garage I found the jewelry box my mother had once used. It was upholstered in silk and opened with ivory clasps shaped like small tusks. Inside there was antique jewelry that may have been my grandmother’s—ancient brooches, long strings of imitation pearls—but there was nothing else. There were no documents of any kind.

My father came into the garage. He looked at the mess on the floor and made a low whistle.

—Looking in your mom’s stuff?

I closed the jewelry box, but I didn’t answer.

—Listen, he said. I’m the one who put that stuff up there, I know what’s where. So what are you looking for?

—My grandmother’s stuff. Anything of hers. Do we have her birth certificate?

—Birth certificate? Christ, I doubt it. What for?

—I’m applying for this scholarship for grad school. You need British ancestry for it.

My father shook his head. —I’ve never seen any of Charlotte’s stuff around here. Not any papers anyway. She didn’t have much to do with us.

My father picked up one of the letters in the pile and looked at it. It was his handwriting on the envelope. He frowned and dropped it back in the pile.

—Why was that? I asked.

My father shrugged. —Would have been better to ask your mother. By the time I met her, she was one of those ladies who’ve been divorced for so long, they’re completely independent. She told her own daughter to call her Charlotte, which tells you something. I don’t think she cared for family obligations. Or any kind of obligation. Maybe in her own way she did love your mother. But they couldn’t stand to be around each other more than a few hours.