‘Now
‘Come on, tell me. What else have you got up your sleeve? Are you trying to send me slowly off my head?’
He looked at me and that stony look made me feel ill. ‘If you ask me,’ he said, ‘you’re already off your head.’ And he turned on his heel and walked steadily up the road, away from me.
Adam showed no interest at all, but over the next few days whenever I passed a newsagent I checked to see if they had printed the story. On the next Saturday it was there. I saw it straight away, a little photograph of a mountain in a box on the front page: ‘Social Climbing: Mountains and Money. See Section Two.’ I quickly pulled the other bit of the paper out to see what Joanna had written. There seemed to be pages of the story, too much to read in the shop. I bought it and took it back home.
Adam had already gone out. I was pleased, for once. I made myself a pot of coffee. I wanted to settle down and give this the time it deserved. The cover of the second section of the
In fact, at first I didn’t exactly read it. I just flicked my eyes over the text seeing which names were mentioned and how often. Adam came mainly at the end. I read that to see that there was nothing startlingly new. There wasn’t. Reassured, I went back to the beginning and read carefully. Joanna had told the story I already knew from Klaus’s book, but from a different perspective. Klaus’s version of the Chungawat disaster was complicated by his own feelings of excitement, failure, admiration, disillusion, fear, all mixed together. I respected him because he had owned up to all the confusion of what it had been like to be there in the storm with people dying and to his own inability to behave as he would have liked.
Joanna saw it as a morality tale about the corrupting effects of money and a cult of heroism. On the one hand there were heroic characters who needed money; on the other hand there were rich people who wanted to climb difficult mountains, or, rather, wanted to say that they had climbed difficult mountains, since it was a matter of debate whether in a strict sense they had actually climbed them. None of this was big news to me. The tragic victim in all of this, needless to say, was Greg, whom she had not managed to talk to. After beginning her article with the terrible events on Chungawat, which still made me shiver however melodramatically they were described, Joanna went back to talk about Greg’s earlier career. His achievements really were startling. It wasn’t just the peaks he had climbed – Everest, K2, McKinley, Annapurna – but the way he had climbed them: in winter, without oxygen, blasting for the summit with a minimum of equipment.
Joanna had obviously been through the press cuttings. In the eighties Greg had been a climbing mystic. A major peak was a privilege to be earned through years of apprenticeship. By the early nineties he had apparently been converted: ‘I used to be a mountaineering elitist,’ he was quoted as saying. ‘Now I’m a democrat. Climbing is a great experience. I want to make it available to everybody.’ Everybody, Joanna commented drily, who could stump up $50,000. Greg had met an entrepreneur called Paul Molinson and together they had set up their company, Peak Experiences. For three years they had been taking doctors, lawyers, arbitrageurs, heiresses up to peaks that, until recently, had been beyond all but a select group of advanced climbers.
Joanna focused on one of the Chungawat party who had died, Alexis Hartounian, a Wall Street broker. A scornful (and anonymous) climber was quoted as saying: ‘This man achieved some of the world’s great climbs. By no stretch of the imagination was he a climber yet he was telling people that he’d done Everest as if it were a bus stop. Well, he learned the hard way.’
Joanna’s account of what had happened on the mountain was simply a distilled version of Klaus’s narrative accompanied by a diagram showing the fixed rope up the west side of the ridge. She portrayed a chaotic situation with incompetent climbers, people who were ill, one of them not able to speak a word of English. She quoted anonymous climbing experts, who said that the conditions above eight thousand metres were just too extreme for climbers who couldn’t take care of themselves. It wasn’t just that they were risking their own lives but those of everybody with them. Klaus had told her that he agreed with some of that, but a couple of the anonymous commentators went further. A peak like Chungawat requires absolute commitment and concentration, especially if the weather turns. They suggested that Greg had been so preoccupied with business complications and the special requirements of his unqualified clients that it had affected his judgement and, worst of all, his performance. ‘When you’ve expended your energy on all the wrong things,’ one person said, ‘then things go wrong at the wrong time, fixed lines come loose, people go in wrong directions.’
It was a cynical story of corruption and disillusion, and Adam appeared towards the end as the symbol of lost idealism. He was known for having been critical of the expedition, not least of his own participation in it, but when it came down to it, he was the man who had gone up and down the mountain saving people who couldn’t save themselves. Joanna had managed to contact a couple of survivors who said that they owed their lives to him. Obviously he appeared all the more attractive for his refusal to blame anybody – indeed, his reluctance to make any comment at all. There was also the pathos of his own girlfriend having been among the fatalities. Adam had said little about this to her but she had found somebody else who described him as going out again and again in search of her before collapsing unconscious in his tent.
When Adam came back, he showed no interest in the article beyond a contemptuous frown at the cover: ‘What the fuck does
He took the paper from my hands and tossed it on to the floor. ‘I think it’s crap,’ he said.
‘You mean it’s an inaccurate description of what happened?’
‘I forgot,’ he said, laughing. ‘You’re a scientist. You’re interested in the truth.’ He sounded derisive.
It was like being married to Lawrence of Arabia or Captain Scott or the boy on the burning deck or somebody. Almost everybody I knew found a reason to ring me up in the next couple of days for a chat. People who had been disapproving of the indecent haste with which I had got married suddenly got the point. My dad rang up and chatted about nothing in particular, then casually mentioned having seen the article and suggested we come round some time. In the office on Monday morning, everybody suddenly had something urgent they needed to run by me. Mike came in with his coffee and handed me an unimportant piece of paper. ‘We’re never really tested, are we?’ he said, with a musing gleam in his eyes. ‘It means that we never really know ourselves because we don’t know how we would react in an emergency. It must be wonderful for your… er, husband, to have been at the centre of a disaster and to have come through as he did.’
‘What do you mean my
‘I didn’t mean anything like that, Alice. It just takes some getting used to. How long have you known him?’
‘A couple of months, I suppose.’
‘Amazing. I must say that when I first heard about it, I thought you’d gone off your rocker. It didn’t seem like the Alice Loudon I knew. Now I can see that we were all wrong.’
‘Everybody in the office.’
I was aghast. ‘You all thought I’d gone mad?’
‘We were all surprised. But now I can see that you were right and we were wrong. It’s just like in the article. It’s all about the ability to think clearly under pressure. Your husband has it.’ Mike had been looking into his coffee cup, out of the window, anywhere but at me. Now he turned and looked at me. ‘You’ve got it too.’
I tried to stop myself giggling at the compliment, if that’s what it was. ‘Well, thank you, kind sir. Back to business.’
By Tuesday I felt I had talked to everybody in the world who had my phone number in their book, except Jake. Even so I was surprised when Claudia told me there was a Joanna Noble on the phone for me. Yes, it was
