The Steady Running of the Hour: A Novel (54 page)

—Something’s on your mind, Price says. You’ve hardly spoken since breakfast.

—Not worth the effort.

—Come now, Price insists, something’s grating on you. What is it?

Ashley swigs greedily from his flask. He corks the flask and wipes his brow, speaking in a dry whisper.

—You remember that first lecture at Kensington Gore? During the war.

Price looks at Ashley with surprise.

—Not very well.

—You were on leave. After the lecture you introduced me to a pair of sisters. Soames-Andersson. I spoke with the younger one. It was right before I went to France.

Ashley throws one leg over his knee and chips the ice from the sole of his boot, testing with bare fingertips the sharpness of his crampon spikes. He says nothing more. Price frowns and peers up the glacier, the summit pyramid looming above.

—Something happened with her? You never told me.

—It didn’t last. We had a week together and after I got to France we wrote every day. When I was wounded she came to see me in hospital in Albert. We had a row. She left England. One could say she left to get away from me. That was eight years ago.

Ashley blots his forehead with the sleeve of his wind suit.

—I’ve wondered what it’s like to have it with you every day. I wonder if you live with it, if it becomes familiar and you take it for granted until it isn’t love anymore.

Price shrugs. —It’s like this place. Some days it’s too damned familiar. Other days it’s strange and wonderful.

Ashley shakes his head.

—A fine bloody waste, isn’t it? Wanting something you can’t have. Not wanting what you’ve got.

—You’ll get past it.

The climbers rise and pick up their ice axes.

—Shall we rope up? Ashley asks.

—Probably no need—

—Then let’s not bother.

Price looks up the glacier.

—I never knew about the girl. What was her name?

—Imogen.

Price nods. —You never told me.

Once an hour I leave the hostel and walk to the pay phone in the middle of Rosenthaler Platz to call Mireille. My flight to Reykjavík leaves at eight in the morning, but I didn’t get her e-mail until after I’d bought the plane ticket.
Call me as soon as you get this, whenever you get this.
So I go on calling every hour all night, because if I didn’t call on the hour I’d call more often.

It’s always the same. I cross the street to the pay phone and lift the pink receiver, dropping a one-euro piece into the slot and resting a stack of coins on top of the phone. The phone hesitates, then connects with a faint ringing that goes on and on. I watch the people coming up and down Weinbergsweg with beer bottles in hand, talking in German or English or Spanish. Mireille never picks up.

By three in the morning everyone in Rosenthaler Platz knows me: the girl at the hostel’s front desk who gives me a drowsy smile when I walk out; the burly Turkish man who stands in the door of the kiosk smoking cigarettes; the Vietnamese cook at the all-night Asia Imbiss who has given up trying to wave me inside for a meal, but still grins every time he sees me. All of them know I’m going to the pay phone.

At four o’clock the sky is lightening and I’ll be leaving for the airport in two hours. This time Mireille picks up.

—I’m sorry, she answers breathlessly. I went out and my phone died. I just got home and plugged it in.

—You said to call right away.

—I know, but I was going crazy waiting. Claire came over and we went for a walk along the river—

—You’re back in Paris?

—Yes. Are you still in Berlin?

—I’m about to leave.

The Canadians from my hostel pass by on the sidewalk. They tap the glass casing of the phone and wave at me. I wave back. Mireille’s voice is quieter.

—Where are you going?

I grip the receiver with both hands.

—It doesn’t matter. It’ll be over in a couple weeks, I can go to Paris if you still want me to—

—So you’re still searching, she sighs. Tristan, I’m sorry how I acted at the station. I thought if you went away and I went back to Paris I could forget about all this, but it hasn’t worked. I need to tell you something. I should have said it while you were in France, but I was afraid to.

Mireille hesitates. I drop in more coins.

—I believe you about the English couple, she says. But all this about the lawyers and the money.
Ce n’est pas possible.
You need to see that. The first night when you told me about it in the bar, I told myself I shouldn’t go to Picardie with you. But when we got to the métro I invited you anyway. Maybe I thought that even if you were a little crazy it didn’t matter, because I was just happy to be with you. But now that I know you and I care about you, and I see what this is doing to you—

—It’s true. I’ve met the lawyers.

—But what do you really know about them? If there’s so much money involved, why don’t they find the evidence themselves, or hire someone to find it?

—The trust says they can’t hire anyone—

—And they give you only two months?
C’est fou
. And the letters, it was too simple, as if someone put them there for us to find. Tristan, I don’t trust the lawyers. I don’t trust their story. And I don’t like that you’re so far away when none of it makes sense. I wish you hadn’t left France—

—I can come back.

—That’s not the point. The point is I’m worried and I want you to forget about this search.
Cent millions de francs suisses? C’est une connerie
. You must know that, if you can admit it to yourself.

—I know it’s real. Ashley and Imogen are real—

—They may have been real once, Mireille says, but they’re gone now. You and I, we’re the only part of this that matters. You’re worried you’ll lose the money if you stop looking, but if you keep going—

The phone makes a beeping sound. I drop in a few more coins.

—What’s that? Mireille asks.

—I’m at a pay phone. It takes a lot of coins to call a French cell phone. We don’t have long.

—Tell me where you’re going.

—Iceland.

Mireille says nothing. I press the receiver against my ear, the last coin in my other hand. The reverse has a picture of tree and the inscription
LIBERTÉ ÉGALITÉ FRATERNITÉ
.

—It doesn’t make sense, Mireille finally says. You know it doesn’t make sense.

—I can’t explain now, you just have to trust me. If you’d seen what I’ve seen—

The phone beeps again. I drop in the coin.

—This is terrible, Mireille says. Just come back. I don’t care how you get here.

I lean against the phone booth. I don’t know what to say.

—You’ll come, Tristan, won’t you?

The phone beeps again.

—Tell me if you’ll come, Mireille says. I need to know if I should wait.

The phone chimes and the line goes dead. Cursing, I slam the receiver down. I walk up the street and wander into a deserted park, circling a pond and trying to figure out what I can do. There doesn’t seem any choice.

I go back to the hostel and type Mireille an e-mail, promising I’ll come to Paris as soon as I can. The message doesn’t come out right, so I keep rewriting it over and over, knowing that I’ll miss my flight if I don’t leave soon. I click
SEND
and shoulder my backpack, dashing across the street and into the U-Bahn station.

At a bookstore at Tegel Airport I buy a thick copy of
The Icelandic Sagas
and I sit near the airplane gate, my backpack between my knees. The brooch is in my pocket. I open the book and try to concentrate.

10 May 1924

Camp III, 21,000 feet

East Rongbuk Glacier, Tibet

An inch of powdery snow covers every surface in the tent. Ashley and Price sit on the windward side, pushing their backs against the flapping canvas to anchor it in the gale. Their camp is a cluster of tents pitched below an ice cliff at 21,000 feet, only the thin sheet of weatherproofed canvas separating them from the blizzard. Ashley sits with his legs in his sleeping bag, the gabardine shell stiff and coated with ice.

The wind eases for moment, then rises to a scream, hammering the canvas until Ashley cannot believe only air and snow are striking the tent. The flapping is so hard that nothing but a yell can be heard between them.

—Shall I check the guylines? Ashley bellows.

—No, Price calls. We’d only get more snow.

Their eyes follow the sputtering lantern hung from the tent ceiling. It swings and pitches and the shadows in the tent shift with the wind. They are too exhausted to yell much, but it is too dangerous to sleep. The climbers wait, hoping it will pass.

Half an hour later the wind lowers enough to allow talking. Somervell’s face appears in their shelter’s door, his eyebrows and beard crusted with snowflakes. He squeezes inside, clawing the snow from his collar.

—What’s the verdict? A stroll up to Four in the morning?

Ashley coughs into a dirty handkerchief. He looks at Somervell, whispering hoarsely.

—Hugh’s sulking. He left his swimming togs at Phari.

No one laughs. The climbers have been battered by storms for five days, the winds too strong for travel, the nights too cold for sleep. The weather is worse than on any previous expedition and they do not know why. The porters believe the expedition is doomed, that it is being punished by the mountain gods as a warning. Even the British know they will have to retreat soon if the weather does not break.

Price pries open a tin of strawberry jam.

—We must eat something—

He gathers snow from the tent floor and drops it in a tin bowl, dumping the frozen jam on top. He stirs the icy reddish mixture with a large spoon and passes it Ashley. Ashley takes a tentative bite.

—Not half bad.

They pass the bowl around and Somervell picks a book off the floor.
Three Tragedies
. The leather binding is soft from use, the gilding nearly worn off the page ends.

—Surely it’s Walsingham’s turn?

Ashley shakes his head, touching his throat.

—Not over this racket.

Somervell flips to where they left off in
Hamlet
and begins to read, his voice rising and falling not for theatrical effect but to overcome the changing volume of the wind. Ashley watches Somervell’s hand tremble as he reads. They are all shivering.

The wind returns to its previous strength and they can no longer hear. The three men lean into the windward side of the tent, the wind lashing their backs as it rises to a deafening howl. The lamp blows
out. It is pitch-black inside, the canvas snapping and fluttering as the Sherpas call anxiously from the next tent. Price yells back in Nepali.

Something hard strikes Ashley’s shoulder through the canvas, stunning him. A rock or a piece of ice. He wonders if the tents will tear and he pictures the scene: huge flurries of snow pouring in, the swirling maelstrom of sleeping bags and foodstuffs and equipment, then the tent itself gone, carrying off the climbers or leaving them naked beneath the glow of the clouded moon. It would be death. They are so far from base camp, and base camp so far from civilization, that they might as well be the only men in Tibet, the only men in the world. Price bellows to the other climbers.