‘When is it going to be?’
‘Oh. In two and a half weeks’ time.’ He winced. ‘Yes, well, why wait… ?’ I stopped. My voice sounded too bright and cheery. ‘Are you all right, Jake?’
Now Adam was talking just to Sylvie. His back was to me, but she was staring up at him with a rapt expression I knew too well.
‘It’s no longer your concern,’ said Jake, in a voice that was trembling slightly. ‘Can you tell me something?’ I saw that his eyes had filled with tears. It was as if my going had released a new Jake – one who had lost his mellow cheerfulness and his irony; who wept easily.
‘What?’ I realized that Jake was a bit drunk. He bent closer to me, so I could feel his breath on my cheek.
‘If it hadn’t been for, you know, him, would you have stayed with me and –?’
‘Alice, it’s time to go.’ Adam put both arms round me from behind, and rested his head on my hair. He was holding me too tightly. I could hardly breathe.
‘Adam, this is Jake.’
The two men didn’t say anything. Adam let go of me and held out his hand. Jake didn’t move at first; then, with a puzzled expression, he put his hand into Adam’s. Adam nodded. Man to man. A desire to giggle rose in my throat, which I suppressed.
‘Goodbye, Jake,’ I said awkwardly. I was about to reach up and kiss him on the cheek, but Adam pulled me away.
‘Come on, my love,’ he said, leading me from the room. I sketched a half-wave at Pauline and left.
Outside the house, Adam stopped and turned me towards him. ‘Satisfied?’ he said, and kissed me savagely. I slid my arms under his jacket and shirt and leaned into him. When I pulled away, I saw Jake, still standing at the window and looking out. Our eyes met but he made no gesture.
Thirteen
I tried to make the question seem casual, although I had been shaping it and rephrasing it in my mind for days. We were lying in bed, exhausted, long after midnight, coiled round each other in the dark, when I sensed an opportunity.
‘Your friend Klaus,’ I said. ‘Writing about what happened on Chunga-whatever-it-is. I can never remember the name.’
‘Chungawat,’ said Adam.
He didn’t say anything else. He would need more prompting.
‘He said you were pissed off with him for writing the book.’
‘Did he now?’ Adam said.
‘Are you? I don’t see why it’s a problem. Deborah told me what you did, what a hero you were.’
Adam sighed. ‘I wasn’t…’ He paused. ‘It wasn’t about heroism. They shouldn’t have been there, most of them. I…’ He tried again. ‘At that height, in those conditions, most people, even fit people who are experienced in other conditions, can’t survive on their own if things start to go wrong.’
‘Is that your fault, Adam?’
‘Greg shouldn’t have organized it, I shouldn’t have gone along. The rest of them shouldn’t have thought there was an easy way of climbing a mountain like that.’
‘Deborah said that Greg had worked out a foolproof way of getting them up the mountain.’
‘That was the idea. Then there was a storm and Greg and Claude got sick and the plan didn’t work out so well.’
‘Why?’
His tone turned irritable. He was impatient with me for pressing him, but I wasn’t going to stop.
‘We weren’t a team. Only one of the clients had ever been to the Himalayas before. They couldn’t communicate. I mean, for God’s sake, the German guy, Tomas, could hardly speak a single word of English.’
‘Aren’t you just curious to see what Klaus has to say in his book?’
‘I know what he has to say.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I’ve got a copy.’
‘What! Have you read it?’ I asked.
‘I’ve looked through it,’ he said, almost with contempt.
‘I thought the book hadn’t been published yet.’
‘It hasn’t. Klaus sent me one of those rough, early versions – what are they called?’
‘Proof copies. Have you got the book here?’
‘It’s in a bag somewhere.’
I kissed my way down his chest, his stomach and beyond, until I could taste myself on him.
‘I want to read it. You don’t mind, do you?’
I made a private rule for myself that I would never try to compare Adam with Jake. It seemed a last, feeble way of trying to be fair to Jake. But I couldn’t help it sometimes. Jake never just did something, never just went out. He was too considerate and attentive. He asked my permission or informed me or planned it in advance and probably asked me to come with him, or what I was doing. Adam was completely different. Much of the time he was utterly absorbed in me, wanting to touch, taste, penetrate or just look at me. At other times he would make a precise arrangement for where and when we would next meet, then he would throw on a jacket and go.
The next morning he was standing at the door when I remembered. ‘Klaus’s book,’ I said. He frowned. ‘You promised,’ I said.
He didn’t say anything but walked across to the spare room and I heard sounds of rummaging. He emerged with a book with a floppy light blue cover. He tossed it over to where I sat on the sofa. I looked at the cover:
‘It’s only one man’s view,’ he said. ‘So I’ll see you at the Pelican at seven.’
And he was gone, rattling down the stairs. I went to the window, as I always did when he went out, and watched him appear and cross the pavement. He halted, turned and looked up. I blew him a kiss and he smiled and turned away. I went back to the sofa. I had, I suppose, some idea of reading for a bit, making some coffee, having a bath, but I didn’t move for three hours. At first I flicked ahead, looking for his lovely name and finding it, and looking for photographs, and not finding them, because they wouldn’t be in until the final published version. Then I turned to the beginning, to the very first page.
The book was dedicated to the members of the 1997 Chungawat expedition. Beneath the dedication there was a quotation from an old mountaineering book of the thirties: ‘May we, who live our lives where the air is thick and minds are clear, pause before we judge men who venture into that wonderland, that looking-glass realm on the roof of the world.’
The phone rang and I listened to the silence for a few seconds before putting it down again. Sometimes I could persuade myself that I recognized the breathing; that it was someone I knew at the other end. Once I said, tentatively, ‘Jake?’ to see if there was any response, any sharp intake of breath. This time, I didn’t really care. I wanted to get on with
The book began more than twenty-five million years ago, when the Himalayan range (‘younger than the Brazilian rainforest’) was pushed up in folds by the northward drift of the Indian subcontinent. It leaped forward to a catastrophic British expedition up Chungawat just after the First World War. The attempt on the summit was abruptly halted when a British Army major lost his footing and pulled three of his comrades down with him, falling,
