at last he put his hand on my arm, my skin jumped. We got undressed separately, watching each other. We sat cross-legged and naked opposite each other and looked into the other’s face. I felt oddly shy, self-conscious. He lifted my hand, with its new band of gold on the third finger, brought it to his mouth and kissed it.
‘Do you trust me?’ he said.
‘Yes.’ Or: no no no no.
He handed me the bottle of whisky and I took a swig, feeling it burn as it went down.
‘I want to do something to you that no one has ever done before.’
I didn’t reply. I felt as if I were in some kind of dream. Some kind of nightmare. We kissed, but very gently. He ran his fingers over my breasts and trailed them down on to my stomach. I tracked his vertebrae down his spine. We held each other very carefully. One side of my body was too hot from the fire, the other chilly. He told me to lie on my back and I did. Maybe I had drunk too much whisky and eaten too little salami. I felt as if I were suspended above an abyss, somewhere in the cold, cold darkness. I closed my eyes but he turned my face towards him and said, ‘Look at me.’
Shadows fell across his face; I could only make out parts of his body. It started out so tender, and only gradually became so savage; notch by notch to pain. I remembered Lily and her ridged back. In my mind, I saw Adam up in his high mountains, among all that fear and death. How was it that I was here, in this terrible silence? Why was I letting him do this to me and who had I become that I would let him? I shut my eyes again and this time he didn’t tell me to open them. He put his hands around my neck and said, ‘Don’t move now, don’t worry.’ Then he began to squeeze. I wanted to tell him to stop but somehow I didn’t, couldn’t. I lay on the sleeping bags by the fire, in the dark, and he pressed down. I kept my eyes closed and my hands still: my wedding present to him, my trust. The flames danced on my closed lids, and my body writhed under his, as if I had no control over it. I felt the blood roaring round my body; my heart hammering; my head thundering. This was neither pleasure nor pain any longer. I was somewhere else, in some other world where all boundaries had disintegrated. Oh, Christ. He must stop now. He must stop. Darkness rolled in behind the bright lines of pure sensation.
‘It’s all right, Alice.’ He was calling me back. His thumbs eased off my windpipe. He bent forward and kissed my neck. I opened my eyes. I felt sick and tired and sad and defeated. He pulled me upright and held me to him. My nausea ebbed away, but my throat ached badly and I wanted to cry. I wanted to go home. He picked up the whisky bottle, took a swig, then held it to my mouth and tipped it down my throat as if I were a baby. I sank down on the sleeping bags, he covered me over and I lay there for a while gazing into the flames, while he sat there beside me, stroking my hair. I slipped very slowly towards sleep, while Adam fed the dying fire beside me.
At some point in the night I woke, and he was lying by me, full of heat and strength. Someone to depend on. The fire had gone out, though the embers still glowed. My left hand was cold where it had slipped from under the sleeping bag.
Seventeen
‘No,’ said Adam, and brought his fist heavily down on the table, making the glasses on it jump. Everyone in the pub looked round. Adam didn’t seem to notice; he lacked all sense of what my mother would call social decorum. ‘I don’t want to give an interview to any crappy journalist.’
‘Look, Adam,’ began Klaus soothingly, ‘I know that you –’
‘I don’t want to talk about what happened up on the mountain. It’s past, over, finished. I’m not interested in going over the whole messy fuck-up, not even to help you sell your book.’ He turned to me. ‘Tell him.’
I shrugged at Klaus. ‘He doesn’t want to, Klaus.’
Adam took my hand and pressed it against his face and closed his eyes.
‘If you gave just one, then –’
‘He doesn’t want to, Klaus,’ I repeated. ‘Can’t you hear the man?’
‘OK, OK.’ He put his hands in the air in mock surrender. ‘Anyway, I’ve got a wedding present for you two.’ He leaned down and took a bottle of champagne out of a canvas bag at his feet. ‘I, urn, wish you luck and great happiness. Drink this in bed sometime.’
I kissed his cheek. Adam gave a half-laugh and sat back in his chair.
‘All right, you win, one interview.’ He stood up and held out his hand for me.
‘Are you going already? Daniel said he might turn up later.’
‘We’re going to drink the champagne in bed,’ I said. ‘It can’t wait.’
When I got back from work the next day, the journalist was there. She was sitting opposite Adam, their knees almost touching, and on the table beside her a taperecorder was running. She had a notebook on her lap, but she wasn’t writing anything. Instead, she was gazing intently at Adam, nodding when he spoke.
‘Ignore me,’ I said, when she made to stand up. ‘I’m going to make myself a cup of tea then disappear. Do you want anything to drink?’ I took off my coat and gloves.
‘Whisky,’ said Adam. ‘This is Joanna, from the
‘Pleased to meet you, Alice,’ said Joanna. ‘None of the cuttings said you were married.’
Shrewd eyes, behind heavy frames, peered at me.
‘None of the cuttings knew,’ said Adam.
‘Do you climb too?’ asked Joanna.
I laughed. ‘Not at all, not even stairs when there’s a lift available.’
‘It must be strange for you, waiting behind,’ she went on. ‘Worrying about him.’
‘I haven’t done the waiting yet,’ I said vaguely, moving off to put the kettle on. ‘And I have my own life,’ I added, wondering if that was a lie now.
I thought again about our honeymoon weekend in the Lake District. What had happened between us in that cabin – the violence he had done to me, with my permission – bothered me still. I tried not to think of it too much; it had become a dark zone in my mind. I had put myself into his hands and for a few moments, as I lay beneath him, I had thought he would kill me and I had still not struggled against him. Part of me was aghast at that, and part of me stirred.
As I stood by the kettle, half listening to the interview, I noticed a scrumpled-up sheet of paper with heavy black writing on it. I opened it up, knowing in advance what to expect. ‘I WON’T LET YOU REST,’ it said. They made my skin crawl, these letters. I didn’t know why we hadn’t gone to the police long ago. It was as if we had let ourselves become accustomed to them, so that their threats were like storm clouds in our life, which we simply took for granted. I looked up and saw that Adam was watching me, so I gave him a grin, tore the paper up into small shreds and dropped them disdainfully into the bin. He gave me a small nod of approval and turned his attention back to Joanna.
‘You were telling me about the last few hours.’ Joanna turned back to Adam. ‘Did you have any intimations of disaster?’
‘If you mean, did I think all those people would die up there, no, of course not.’
‘So when did you realize it was all going wrong?’
‘When it all went wrong. Can I have that whisky, Alice?’
Joanna looked down at her notebook and tried another tack. ‘What about the fixed ropes?’ she asked. ‘From what I understand, Greg McLaughlin and other expedition leaders fixed the different-coloured ropes that led up the ridge to the summit. But at some point the last bit of rope became untied, which might have made all the difference to the climbers.’
Adam stared at her. I brought him over a large shot of whisky. ‘Do you want some, Joanna?’ I said. She
