I ordered a cappuccino for me, and another muffin. I stared at her over the rim of my cup and didn’t know where to begin. Clearly Lily didn’t mind the silence, or my discomfort. She ate hungrily, smearing chocolate over her chin. She was a bit like a little child, I thought.
‘We didn’t really finish our conversation,’ I said lamely.
‘What do you want to know?’ she asked sharply. ‘Mrs Tallis,’ she added.
I felt a ripple of alarm.
‘I’m not Airs Tallis. Why do you call me that?’
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake.’
I let it go. After all, there had been no more phone calls or letters for several days now. Not since I had confronted Jake.
‘Was Adam ever really violent with you?’
She gave a yelp of laughter.
‘I mean,
She wiped her mouth. She was enjoying this.
‘I mean, were you ever unconsenting?’
‘What’s that supposed to mean? How do I know? It wasn’t like that. You know what he’s like.’ She smiled at me. ‘By the way, what do you think he’d make of you seeing me like this? Of you checking up on his credentials?’ Again, she gave her quick, spooky giggle.
‘I don’t know what he would say.’
‘I don’t mean what would he say. What would he do?’
I didn’t reply.
‘I wouldn’t like to be in your shoes.’ Then, suddenly, she gave a violent shudder and leaned across the table until her face was close to mine. There was a bit of chocolate on one of her perfect white teeth. ‘Except I also would, of course.’ She closed her eyes, and I had a horrible sensation that I was watching her re-enact in her imagination some fetishistic act with Adam.
‘I’m going now,’ I said.
‘Do you want a word of advice?’
‘No,’ I said, too quickly.
‘Don’t try and get in his way, or change him. It won’t work. Go with him.’
She got up and left. I paid.
Twenty
I went straight up to Klaus and gave him a hug. He wrapped his arms around me. ‘Congratulations,’ I said.
‘Good party, yes?’ He beamed. Then his smile turned ironic. ‘So, those people didn’t die on the mountain entirely in vain. Some good has come out of it in the form of my book. Let it not be said that I have failed to profit from the misfortunes of other people.’
‘That’s what other people are there for, I suppose,’ I said, and we let each other go.
‘Where is your husband, the hero?’ Klaus asked, looking around.
‘Hiding in the crowd somewhere, fighting off admirers. Is anybody else from the expedition here?’
Klaus looked around. The party for his book was in the library of the Alpinists’ Society in South Kensington. It was a cavernous space lined with shelves of leatherbound volumes, of course, but there were also ancient, crusty- looking walking boots in glass cases and ice axes like trophies on the wall and photographs of stiff men in tweeds, and mountains, lots and lots of mountains.
‘Greg is somewhere in the room.’
I was astonished. ‘Greg? Where is he?’
‘Over there, talking to that old man in the corner. Go over and introduce yourself. That’s Lord Montrose. He is a man from the great early days of Himalayan climbing when they considered it unnecessary to issue their porters with crampons.’
I pushed my way through the crowd. Deborah was in one corner. There were lots of tall, fantastically healthy women dotted around. I couldn’t help imagining to myself which of them Adam had slept with. Stupid. Stupid. Greg was bent over Lord Montrose, shouting in his ear, when I approached them. I stood there for a minute until Greg looked round at me suspiciously. Perhaps he thought I was a reporter. Greg looked like the old idea I would have had of a climber, before I met people like Adam and Klaus. He wasn’t tall, like them. He had an unfeasibly large beard, like the man in the Edward Lear limerick who found two larks and a wren in it. His hair was long and unkempt. He must still have been in his thirties but thin lines were engraved on his forehead and around his eyes. Lord Montrose looked at me and then backed away surreally into the crowd, as if I were a magnet repelling him.
‘My name’s Alice Loudon,’ I said to Greg. ‘I’ve just got married to Adam Tallis.’
‘Oh,’ he said, with a crinkle of acknowledgement. ‘Congratulations.’
There was a silence. Greg turned to look at the photograph next to us on the wall. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘On one of the first expeditions up here, a Victorian vicar stepped back to admire the view and pulled four of his colleagues off with him. They landed among their own tents which, unfortunately, were nine thousand feet beneath them.’ He moved along to the next photograph. ‘K2. Beautiful, isn’t it? Just under fifty people have died on it.’
‘Where’s K
Greg laughed.
‘It doesn’t exist any more. In 1856 a British lieutenant who was working on the great Trigonometric Survey of India climbed a mountain and saw two peaks in the Karakoram range a hundred and thirty miles away. So he jotted them down as KI and K2. They later discovered that KI already had a name, Masherbrum. But K2 stuck.’
‘You’ve climbed it,’ I said. Greg didn’t reply. I knew what I had to say. I blurted it all out in one go. ‘Have you talked to Adam this evening? You have to. He feels very bad about what’s appeared in the press about Chungawat. Can I take you over to him now? Then you’ll be doing me a favour as well, and rescuing him from all those gorgeous and adoring women.’
Disconcertingly, Greg didn’t catch my eye but looked around the room, the way people do at parties if they are half listening to you and half checking if there is somebody more interesting to talk to. He must have known I wasn’t a mountaineer and he can’t have had much interest in anything I had to say, so I felt embarrassed.
‘He feels bad, does he?’ Greg said softly, still not looking at me. ‘And why is that?’
Why was I doing this? I took a deep breath. ‘Because it’s being portrayed in terms that have nothing to do with what it was really like on the mountain, in the storm and everything.’
At this Greg did look round at me, and allowed himself a tired laugh. When he spoke it was with an obvious effort, as if it was still freshly painful for him. ‘I think,’ he said slowly, ‘that the person who leads an expedition has to take responsibility for it.’
‘It wasn’t a funfair ride,’ I said. ‘Everybody on the expedition knew that they were going into a very dangerous place. You can’t make guarantees about the weather on a mountain like that as if it were just a package holiday.’
The lines in his face crinkled up. It was somehow as if all his time in the Himalayas, in that unprotected sunlight and oxygen-depleted air, had given him the aura of an ancient Buddhist monk. In the midst of that messy, sunburned face, there were the beautiful clear blue eyes of a baby. I felt he had taken the entire burden of what had happened on himself. I liked him enormously.
‘Yes, Alice,’ he replied. ‘That’s right.’
