He shook his head. “You’re doing it again. Inventing things. Whole stories now. Making them up.”
She got to her feet. “But that’s what the world is all about, Jamie. Stories. Stories explain everything, bring everything together.”
Jamie walked towards the door. “How do you know that John Fraser ever went to Everest?”
“I don’t.”
“Well, it would have had to be somewhere like that,” he pointed out. “It wouldn’t be so dramatic in Scotland. If you left somebody, the mountain rescue people would be there within a couple of hours. Our mountains don’t have Death Zones, Isabel.”
“Yet people die on them,” she pointed out. “Every year. One or two—sometimes more.”
“That’s because they slip.” He paused. He was thinking of a boy he had known at school, a boy called Andrew —and he could not remember his surname. But he could picture him, and saw him now, with his untidy fair hair and his permanent smile. He had been a climber and had died in the Cairngorms when he tumbled headlong into a gully that had been disguised by a fall of snow.
She noticed his expression; he had told her about this. “Your friend? You were thinking about him?”
“Yes.”
“How often do you think about him?” she asked.
He looked surprised. “Why do you ask?”
Because she was interested, she said. Death was such a strange event—simple enough in its essentials, of course, and final enough for the person who dies; but human personality had its echoes.
“I sometimes think of him,” said Jamie. “We were quite close. In fact, we were very close.”
He stopped. She reached out for his hand.
“I think of him a lot,” said Jamie.
Isabel squeezed his hand. “Loved him?”
Jamie nodded. “I suppose so. You know how it is with boys. Those intense friendships you have when you’re young.”
“I think so.”
“I went to the place,” said Jamie. “I climbed up there a year or so later. Just by myself—in summer. It wasn’t a hard climb at all—more of a walk, even if the gully itself was quite deep. I looked over the edge and imagined what he had seen as he fell—he must have seen something, unless he was knocked out straightaway, which they thought had not happened. And then I just cried and cried. I went down the hill, cried all the way down.”
She pressed his hand. “Of course.”
“I think I understand why mountaineering involves such … such passion. Climbers do get passionate, you know. They’re very spiritual people.”
Isabel glanced at the Everest book. “Some of them. Maybe not so much now. I think our world has become harder, you know.”
She did not want that to be true, but she thought it probably was. What had happened? Had the human soul shrunk in some way, become meaner, like a garment that has been in the wash too long and become smaller, more constraining?
CHAPTER EIGHT
HAVE YOU EVER CLIMBED ANYTHING, Charlie?”
It was at a party, a rather noisy one, in the Scotch Malt Whisky Society in Queen Street that Isabel was addressing Charlie Maclean, Master of the Quaich, and Scotland’s greatest expert on whisky. Charlie wore his learning lightly, but everybody in the room knew that if there was one man who could identify a glass of anonymous amber liquid and attribute it to any one of the country’s distilleries, name the man who blended it, and talk at length about the history of the glen from which it came, then it was Charlie.
They were standing at the window of one of the upstairs rooms, and beyond them, swaying in the summer- evening breeze, were the tops of the trees lining Queen Street Gardens. That wind was mild, and had on its breath the scent of the Firth, the river, and of the hills beyond. And of newly cut grass, too, for the gardens had been attended to that day and the smell of the grass was strong.
While Isabel was talking to Charlie, a well-built man in a linen suit and sporting the only monocle still known to be worn in Scotland, Jamie was on the other side of the room, engaged in conversation with a tall man whom Isabel knew well. This was Roddy Martine, a well-liked recorder of social events who kept society, and its doings, in his head. Roddy knew who did what, with whom, and when. He knew, too, who knew what about whom, and why.
Charlie raised his glass to his lips and looked at Isabel across the rim. “Climbed?” he said. “When I was very young I was at school in Dumfriesshire. Until about eleven. Pretty odd place. They used to take us climbing the hills down there—Kirkudbrightshire and so on. Nothing very big. And I climbed a bit when I was at St. Andrews. The occasional Munro. And you?”
“Not really,” said Isabel.
Charlie remembered something about the school. “Funny, I never really think about that place. It’s closed now. It was a pretty dubious institution. One of the masters …”
Isabel imagined that she was about to hear some awful story of cruelty, of the sort that had been surfacing so much—ancient traumas exposed and scratched at, like sores. But no, Charlie’s memories were benign.
“He was called Mr. MacDavid,” Charlie went on. “He was the most unusual teacher. All he ever taught us—for years—was the Boer War. He knew a lot about that. So by the time I was eleven, I knew everything there was to know about the Boer War, but was pretty ignorant about everything else.”
