The Steady Running of the Hour: A Novel (45 page)

—The spymaster himself, they said, clapping him upon the shoulder. Haven’t seen you about lately. Where have you been lurking?

It seemed unfair to Ashley that the city could go on so forgetfully without him, so forgetful of all the people it had lost. He knew this sentiment was absurd, but he could not help it. The lawns of Regent’s Park looked no different than they had in 1916, and yet they could not feel more different. At once Ashley recalled all the bitterness from five years before: that they should go on serving pineapple ices at Gunter’s; that magazines should print reverential pictures of the wedding of Lady Diana Manners; that
Chu Chin Chow
should attract huge crowds at
His Majesty’s Theatre—while Jeffries and Ismay and Bradley and a million others lay in bone-heaps beneath the mud of France, their rotting corpses wrapped in rubberized sheets. In 1919 stonemasons all over Europe were amassing fortunes from the obelisks they erected in every village square, and Ashley supposed that the more obelisks they erected and the more hymns they sang, the faster they transformed the dead into the faceless mass they were fast becoming.

For nothing had obliterated Ismay so much as merging him with the Glorious Dead—a man whose chief quality had been resistance to all such cant, a vulgar and brave creature whom Ashley had never understood. Only later had it come to Ashley, in flashes while riding in a motorcar on the edge of the Nefud Desert, the driver chanting a cyclic tune in Arabic; or in a mountain hut in the Bernese Oberland, tossing the cover of his eiderdown and lying sleepless upon the wooden bunk. Ashley would think he had forgotten Ismay’s face and then it would come to him all at once—the cocked smile, the unfocused gaze with one green eye and the other brown, Ismay swigging rum from a battered pewter mug as they stood in a vestibule watching the snow fall over the army camp.

Spymaster, do you know what makes us different from them?

No.

The difference is we’re going to survive this war. And do you know why?

No.

Because we’re too damned hopeless. It’s a crime to kick a man when he’s down, and even if God is dead he shan’t allow it. We’re not soldiers, you and I. This isn’t how it ends for us.

Ashley had made little of this at the time, but he understood it more with every passing year. How much Ismay had feared death, so much more than the others, perhaps because he had seen enough of life to know what it was worth. And how deeply Ismay had pitied Ashley, and seen him for what he was, even as Ashley had been blind to it himself. And how all of them—Ismay and Jeffries and all the young officers in France—had been mere children, pantomiming roles in a production
whose significance they hardly grasped, pushing on through an irreversible game of courage and death, puffing their chests or raving in waking or sleeping nightmares, but never once speaking earnestly to one another.

Only Ismay had been different, and Ashley could not say why, not even today. They had scarcely known each other, and yet lately Ashley found himself thinking of Ismay more and more, posing questions to him and apologizing for the mildest transgression—a military necktie borrowed and never returned. Or the day Ismay had left the camp, the day the pipes had frozen and burst and Ashley had not come to say good-bye. He never saw Ismay again.

It was these sentiments that had soured London in 1919, and the sourness was still there five years later, in spite of everything Ashley had done in between. What friends he had in the city seemed to find Ashley strange and distant. They did not understand his life and he did not understand theirs, and it could not have been the war, for they had all been in the war together.

Ashley left London the next week. He went to Sutton Courtenay and saw his mother, aged dramatically in the past five years, mellowed but also grown very frail. She left the house only on Sundays now, the housekeeper warned Ashley, and only if the weather was mild. That first night at dinner Ashley told his mother what he had done abroad, sometimes the truth and sometimes pure fantasy, saying always what he thought she wished to hear, for he could not have told her the whole truth even if he had been able to articulate it. Ashley spoke of Everest, carefully avoiding any suggestion that the mountain was dangerous. His mother received all this charitably.

—You’ve done wonderful things, she said. It’s being a soldier that made you so strong.

The next day Ashley rowed his single scull on the Thames, starting in the afternoon and rowing on until he was alone in the blackness, not even seeing the oars dipping into the water. Only the swish of his stroke, the starlight above, the lantern of a passing barge swinging on its lonely prow.
He stayed a fortnight at Sutton Courtenay, and the more distant he felt from his own country and his own people, the more important his training became. He had become stateless, no longer an Englishman, hardly an expert on Africa or Arabia or any foreign land. The only thing he was good at was climbing, and it also seemed the only thing he could control.

Ashley bought an Austin Seven saloon and drove to Snowdonia, staying in small inns and double-timing the same paths where he had first learned of mountains. He walked all the daylight hours and sometimes longer, finding that he could overcome fatigue simply by going on, that he could recuperate even while moving. He developed special techniques for breathing that he intended to use at altitude, drawing rhythmic and nourishing breaths that kept pace with his steps. He craved any and every advantage. He wished to know the secret strengths of wild creatures, the raw musculature of animals he had seen in his travels through field glasses or silhouetted in the moonlight beside a glassy mere: the Swiss ibex, the fringe-eared oryx, the Arabian gazelle.

At the new year Ashley drove south and took a cottage on the Pembrokeshire coast. He spent dawn and dusk in fevered sprints along the shore, striding on sand and water and glimmering sea foam, racing the seagulls spiraling above him. He would lift his head as he dashed in ever-longer strides, the birds above wheeling and diving, then soaring with one flap of their wings ten yards beyond him, always just beyond, Ashley chasing with deeper gasping breaths until he had to stop, wheezing, a thousand yards down the strand. He sucked in the air. The cold waves broke over his shins, the gulls floating above him.

Ashley would race anything. He raced the sailboats half a league offshore; he raced the breeze and his own shadow. He raced against Price and Somervell and all of the strongest climbers in Europe, chasing them in a dead heat up some imagined alpine ridge, or picturing with fury how Price would overtake him on Everest’s North Col, were he to betray an inch of slackness. Later Ashley decided none of these men was fast enough, so he sprinted against Paavo Nurmi or Eric Liddell, or any runner he heard accounts of on the wireless.

But most of all he would run for the idea of her, or the agony it drove him to, for pride and pain were equally ruthless horsemen. He raced against imagined rivals for her affection, faceless specters always faster than he, tall and lean athletes supple of limb and muscle. These Ashley could beat only through sheer force of will, for he knew his will was stronger even as his body was weaker, and on his better days Ashley let himself triumph. For he wanted her more than they did. He wanted the mountain nearly as much.

—So it is you.

Price taps Ashley on the shoulder and pulls out the opposite chair. He hangs his attaché case from a hook beneath the table.

—Sorry I’m late, Price adds. Had another row with Hinks.

—What about?

—Money, as usual. The man imagines I can use all the same kit from two years ago, and risk my neck with it. What are you having? Bitter?

Price goes to the bar and returns with two glasses of ale.

—It’s strange to see you in England, Ashley. You do look well. Where are you staying?

—I’ve taken some rooms just around the corner.

—Then you’re finally settling here?

—No. Ashley smiles. Not quite.

—Too much to hope, I suppose. How was Wales? I heard about your training. You’ve grown serious in your old age. Is it true you hired a coach? Farrar told me—

—It’s not true, Ashley interrupts. But I’m fitter than ever.

—Grand. You’ll need everything you’ve got.

—I know.

Price claps Ashley on the back.

—I say, it is good to see you in Blighty. How’s it been treating you?

—Not bad. Feel a bit out of sorts.

—That’s to be expected. You’ve been away a long time. But the
committee’s certainly confident about you. In fact, this year’s climbing party is leagues ahead of the last show. All the old fools agree Everest’s a sure bet this time.

—What do you think?

Price hesitates. He takes a long draft of beer.

—You know, I was hoping they wouldn’t let me go. The syndicate, the committee, I wished for any damned thing that would get in the way of going back.

—You could have refused.

—I could have, Price admits. But Everest is not so easy to give up, once she’s taken hold of you.

Price frowns, scratching the woodgrain of the table with his fingernail. He looks up at Ashley.

—You must see the mountain for yourself. Then you’ll understand. The Himalaya are not the Alps. It isn’t as if Everest is Mont Blanc, only thirteen thousand feet taller. That’s what chaps like Hinks will never understand. We shan’t be starting off from a comfortable hotel, fat as schoolchildren with pink cheeks. The march across Tibet is horrid. Half of us will be poorly by the time we reach the base camp. And the altitude. It’s impossible to say precisely how ill one will be, but it’s generally somewhere between nausea and death. Finally the climbing. The colonel has one notion of how we ought to get up, I’ve another. We’re meant to work it out as we cross the plateau. But neither of us really knows what’s at the top.

Price pauses, his face clouded with misgiving.

—I’m telling you things you already know.

—I know enough to be scared.

Price raises his eyebrows. —Scared? You’re scared? Half the reason the committee didn’t want you last time was they thought you’d lead your party into some catastrophe. They say you’re too fearless to have any judgment—

—I know what they say, Ashley breaks in. But I’m scared anyway. As you say, it’s not the Alps, I’ve never been there. No matter how much
I read about Everest or the Himalaya, it’s all a great mystery to me. It’s not only the height. Everything’s different up there. The way the glaciers run—

—You’ll work it out. You’ve always had the instinct for it.

—There’s something else, Ashley adds. I’ve been having dreams about the mountain.

Price waves his hand dismissively.

—Everyone has those dreams.

—Perhaps they do. Only tell me something, Hugh. I know why I’m going, but why are you? Why go back if you don’t want to? Why go back if it’s so ghastly?

Price takes another drink. He shrugs.

—Wait until you’ve been there. Then you’ll know.

They have a second round of beer, then Price says he must be going. The two men shake hands on the pavement. When Price’s taxi has left, Ashley goes back into the saloon and orders a double measure of Vat 69. Although the barman cannot see Ashley’s face, he has recognized his voice or clothing, for as he pours the whisky he says, —Couldn’t stay away, sir?

—I suppose not.

Ashley unfolds his newspaper on the bar. As the barman sets the drink before him, Ashley pushes a panel in the screen above the bar; a square is opened and Ashley looks the barman in the eye. He is an older man, bald with a bushy gray mustache and a stout red neck. The barman’s collar has been unfastened, his necktie loosened.

—You know, Ashley says, tonight was the first I’d been to a public house in five years.

—Then I’d say you’re entitled to make up for lost time.

The barman is polishing glasses with a white cloth. Through the open square Ashley glimpses the customers in the public bar, men in flat caps or bareheaded, their backs turned to him. There is a woman’s voice coming from the other end, but Ashley cannot see her face. He turns the page of his newspaper, noticing an article in a boxed column.

POST FROM THE PEAK OF EVEREST HOW TO RECEIVE LETTERS FROM THE SUMMITSPECIAL STAMPS

An avalanche of an entirely new character threatens members of the Mount Everest Expedition which leaves England next Friday. They have a beautiful stamp of special design printed, and I am authorized to announce that anyone desiring to possess one from the top of Mount Everest may do so for a couple of pennies. The postal avalanche has already begun. Capt J.B.L. Noel, the special photographer of the expedition, gives the following details of the plan –

Ashley taps the newspaper triumphantly, pushing it toward the barman with an impish smile.

—Let me ask you something. Have you heard of these expeditions to Mount Everest in the Himalaya?

—Of course. They’re all over the papers.

—Then it might interest you to know the fellow who was sitting with me a moment ago was Hugh Price, the alpinist. The best in England, in fact. He’s the one who found a route up Everest, and he’s climbing leader for the next expedition.