The Steady Running of the Hour: A Novel (6 page)

Instead I sit in Trafalgar Square among the statues and stone lions, among the tourists and the pigeons. I take the lens cap off my camera and point it at Nelson’s Column, but the pillar is too tall to fit in the frame. I watch the tourists to see if they’ll do anything interesting, but all they do is snap photos of one another. So I walk around the corner to the National Portrait Gallery, a museum full of oil paintings of dead Britons. It suits my mood.

I begin with the Tudors: Holbein portraits I’ve seen only in tiny reproductions in history books. But here are the real paintings, imposing pictures hung in gold frames in the lofty gallery. Sir Thomas More, the golden collar of his high office around his neck, a paper missive in hand; Catherine of Aragon, her portrait in a round silver miniature I could hide in my palm; the portly Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex, seated before a background of blue damask, his eyes sunken in a sinister gaze.

I walk on. Now the Elizabethans, ladies with snowy complexions and domed foreheads; noblemen with ruff collars that cartwheel to their shoulders. I imagine a whole line of these strangers stretching toward me, father and son, mother and daughter, only to end with me, sole survivor and heir apparent. And the fortune. I try to picture its shape. A line of zeros on foreign bank statements. An ancient gated house I’ve never seen before, room after room of dusty riches that belong to me and yet don’t belong to me. A life apart from anything I’ve ever known. It seems impossible.

The next gallery is the Stuarts. Portraits of the English Civil War: men with flowing hair, steel breastplates. I try to focus on the pictures, but my mind jumps between Prichard and Khan, between Walsingham and Soames-Andersson, a story I can put together until I need the piece that connects it to me. Then it all falls apart.

Beside the staircase there’s a wall map of the museum. I’m with the Georgians now. Then the Regency, the Victorians, and finally the Edwardians, many rooms away.

All that matters is the evidence. A sheet of paper that proves Imogen Soames-Andersson is my great-grandmother. Everything else is a distraction. I walk on, trying to repeat this in my mind, but every row of pictures in the gallery points to the same thing, a riddle whose question I can’t even name.

You’re the only one for me
, my mother had said.

18 August 1916

Royal Geographical Society

Kensington, West London

Ashley sits beside Price toward the back of the lecture hall. The room is nearly full, only a few empty seats among the many rows of wooden chairs. Except for the gray-haired men almost everyone is in uniform. Two colonels, a smattering of captains and majors. Plenty of other lieutenants. A brigadier. Ashley holds the program in his hand.

ROYAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY

SEVENTH AFTERNOON MEETING, 18 AUGUST 1916

THE PRESIDENT IN THE CHAIR

PAPER: ‘A CONSIDERATION OF THE POSSIBILITY

OF ASCENDING THE LOFTIER HIMALAYA’

DR A. M. KELLAS

The society president steps to the podium and sets down his calfskin ledger. He fingers the edge of his white mustache, waiting for the audience to fall silent.

—Good afternoon. Before this afternoon’s speech, I have two brief announcements to make. The first is that the anniversary dinner and
conversazione
will not be held in the present year. The second is in regard to the society’s house. As you all know, a large part of the premises has been occupied by a special staff employed on the production of the map on the scale of one to one million—

Ashley stifles a yawn. He and Price are here as members of the Alpine Club, their first visit to the famous building on Kensington Gore. They both wear the uniforms of second lieutenants, but Price’s khaki is shabbier, for he has already been to the front with the Royal Garrison Artillery. Ashley is on a week of final leave before he crosses to France.

It was Price who had insisted on attending, claiming that to hear about Mount Everest was worth any number of visits to
The Bing Boys Are Here
. But Ashley had been indifferent. In three seasons in the Alps he had seen enough to know he would not exhaust those ranges in a lifetime. The Himalaya were an abstraction to him, pieces of geographic trivia in distant and unapproachable countries.

Then Price had shown him a photograph of Everest. That had changed everything. Everest was not a beautiful mountain, for she lacked proportion or airiness or symmetry, or any of the features that make peaks attractive. But what power she had. She was a brute, a colossal formation of rock and snow risen out of the tallest mountain range on earth, her broad-shouldered ridge running northeast and capped by a monumental summit pyramid. And she was an enigma. No European had ever reached Everest’s high approaches, and yet the Geographical Society was holding a lecture to consider whether the mountain could be climbed.

—It’s absurd, Ashley had said. The whole world’s at war, and they’re talking about climbing in the Himalaya?

—That’s precisely the point, Price said. It would take years to plan such an expedition. And piles of money. They’d be lucky to go within five years. And who do you imagine will be at the top of their form then?

Ashley shook his head. —If we’re alive at all.

—A man survives, Price insisted, by the strength of his conviction. You must believe you won’t be harmed, or you shan’t come back from France.

Ashley doubted that conviction would make any difference to a grenade or a trench mortar. But he had not been to France yet. He agreed to come to the lecture.

The president begins to introduce the afternoon’s speaker.

—The poles having both been reached, it is obvious that the next object of importance on the earth’s surface to be attacked by adventurers is the highest mountain in the world.

The president looks up to the audience. He makes a half-smile.

—There are, perhaps I should not say unfortunately, a good many difficulties in the way of reaching it. In the first place, you have to deal with a government which has up to the present time forbidden you to approach within one hundred miles of the mountain’s base. In the next place, the mountain itself is probably—though of this we have no sufficient evidence—of considerable difficulty. And there is thirdly the main obstacle, the effect of the rarity of the air at great heights on the human frame.

—As you know, the greatest heights reached at present are twenty-four thousand six hundred feet by the Duke of the Abruzzi’s party and twenty-four thousand feet by some young Norwegians on Kabru, one of the mountains nearest Darjeeling. Dr. Kellas, who is going to lecture to us this afternoon, will deal with this question of the effect on the human frame of high altitudes, and there is no one in Europe who can deal with it with greater authority or greater practical knowledge.

Kellas sits beside the president, a small man in a Royal Army Medical Corps uniform making a final appraisal of the notes on his lap. The president welcomes him to the podium and Kellas begins his address, speaking with a strong Scottish accent.

—Under certain conditions, mountaineering can be regarded as a branch of geographical exploration—

Ashley has heard Kellas spoken of as an intrepid Himalayan climber, but he hardly looks the part. He has narrow, sloping shoulders and his mustache is waxed to neat points. His round spectacles glitter like tiny mirrors under the electric lights.

—If these reasons were deemed insufficient, one might bring forward the primeval axiom which subconsciously, at least, is in the soul of every geographical explorer: man must conquer and investigate every spot on the earth’s surface. If the difficulties are carefully considered, the conquest should be peaceful, but nature in some of her aspects is adamantine, and even the most cautious explorer may suffer.

Ashley’s gaze wanders to a pair of women two rows ahead, the only women in the audience. One of them wears her dark hair unusually short, cut to just below the ears. Ashley can see her slender neck and the lace collar of her dress.

—From the general point of view, the chief difficulties of Himalayan exploration might be summarized as due, firstly, to transport, and, secondly, to intrinsic difficulties of the mountain region. As all tents, equipment, foodstuffs, et cetera, have generally to be carried one hundred to two hundred miles—

Ashley thinks of the six days until he crosses to France. He wonders what the troopship will look like and if the sea will be rough in the Channel, and if they will wear lifebelts in case of U-boat attacks. He wonders if anyone will come to Victoria Station to see him off from England. He had always imagined that someone would see him off.

Kellas directs his voice toward the back of the hall.

—May we dim the lights, please.

The slide operator rouses himself from his chair and the lights are switched off, the long velvet curtains drawn. The operator switches on the projector’s bulb and the lantern slide is illuminated. An image of Kanchenjunga appears on the screen, the five snowcapped peaks soaring above a field of jagged scree. Ashley looks toward the girl again. She is seated to the left of him and with his
face turned he knows that the others in the room can see that he is looking at her.

—After these preliminary notes, we now come to the consideration of the possibility of ascending the loftier peaks of the Himalaya, mountains over twenty-five thousand feet in altitude, none of which have so far been climbed. We will consider the limiting case as a rule, and the problem might be stated as follows.

Kellas cranes his neck to the screen behind him. He frowns. Finally the operator drops in the new slide. A bleak range of mountains of incomparable scale, a great pyramidal peak towering above them. Ashley leans forward in his chair. He looks at the jet of clouds flowing over the mountain’s summit.

—Could a man in first-rate training, Kellas asks, ascend to the summit of Mount Everest, twenty-nine thousand one hundred and forty-one feet above sea level, without adventitious aids?

Two rows ahead, the girl’s silhouette shifts. Her head dips as if she is looking toward the floor and her profile appears black against the image on the screen, the fine delicate nose, the small mouth. The girl rises and passes down the aisle, then goes through a doorway that leads to the map room.

—The difficulties of ascending the higher Himalaya must be considered from two points of view: the first physiological, the second physical. The physiological difficulties are indubitably of a very high order, and depend upon deficiency of oxygen.

A new slide appears: a graph with a swooping curve labeled
Percentage Saturation Oxygen
. Ashley looks back to the doorway, a faint light emanating from the end of the corridor.

—How absolutely fundamental respiration is in maintaining life may be grasped—

Ashley rises and bows his head, making for the doorway. The aisle is wide and he passes easily between the rows of seats, going out through the dimmed hallway.

The map room is immense. A vaulted ceiling. Bookcases running
floor to ceiling cradling leather-bound atlases. A pair of massive globes upon wooden stands. Rows of oaken map cabinets with wide drawers holding charts on paper and parchment. A map of Tibet is spread atop one of the cabinets, a banker’s lamp switched on above to complete the display. Ashley stops here, pretending to study the map. He can still hear Kellas.

—Physical obstructions might be classed as those due first of all to weather conditions, and secondly to the intrinsic rock and snow difficulties of the mountains.

There are footfalls coming from the hallway. Ashley looks up and sees the young woman, the silhouette of her bobbed hair, the tiered skirt cut well above the ankle. He looks back at the map, but the girl comes up beside him and leans against the cabinet. She is close enough that he can hear her breathe.

—You’re not interested, the girl whispers, in the problem of oxygen?

Ashley turns to the girl, her face half lit above the green glass shade of the lamp. She has almond-shaped eyes and her hair is cut flush with her jawline. She looks down at the map of Tibet. Then she smiles at him and continues down the hallway. Ashley stays beside the cabinet, waiting to leave an interval between the girl’s return and his own. When Ashley goes back to his seat, Price eyes him with curiosity, but Ashley looks straight at the speaker.