‘We didn’t tell him at the time. We thought it might be a distraction. It wasn’t as if he was being celibate himself. And afterwards…’ He let the sentence die away.
‘He’s never mentioned it?’
‘No. Are you going to discuss it with him?’
‘No.’
Not that, not anything else either. We were long past the point of telling.
‘Don’t stay silent on my account. It doesn’t matter any more.’
We walked back and I took off his jacket and handed it to him. ‘I’ll catch a bus along here,’ I said. ‘Thanks, Greg.’
‘I’ve not done anything.’
Impulsively, I put my arms around his neck and kissed him on the mouth, feeling the prickle of his beard.
‘Take care of yourself,’ I said.
‘Adam’s a lucky man.’
‘I thought that
Thirty-three
It had sometimes felt to me as if when I was with Adam I was dazzled so that I couldn’t really see him, let alone analyse or make judgements about him. There was sex, sleep, fragmentary conversation, food and occasional attempts at arrangements, and even those took place in an atmosphere of emergency, as if we were doing what we could before the boat went down, before the fire consumed the house with us inside it. I had just given in helplessly, grateful at first to be free from thought, from chat, from responsibility. The only way of assessing him in any rational way was in the mediated form of what people said about him. This more distant Adam could be a relief, and useful too, like a photograph of the sun at which you could stare directly as a way of learning about that thing above, out of direct vision, burning down on you.
When I got back from seeing Greg, Adam was sitting watching TV. He was smoking and drinking whisky. ‘Where have you been?’ he asked.
‘Work,’ I said.
‘I rang. They said you were out of the office.’
‘A meeting,’ I said vaguely.
The important thing about lying is not to offer unnecessary information that can catch you out. Adam looked round at me, but didn’t reply. There was something wrong about the movement, as if it was just a bit too slow or too fast. He might have been a bit drunk. He was moving between channels, watching a programme for a few minutes, changing to another, watching for a few minutes, changing again.
I remembered the magazine I had borrowed from Bill Levenson.
‘Did you see this?’ I said, holding it up. ‘More stuff about you in it.’
He looked round briefly but didn’t speak. I knew the story of the Chungawat disaster intimately but I wanted to read about it in the light of what I had learned about Adam and Francoise and Greg to see if it was different, so I sat at the kitchen table and leafed impatiently through the ads for running shoes, cologne, fitness machines, Italian suits, pages and pages of male stuff. Then I came to it, a long prominent article called ‘The Death Zone: Dreams and Disaster at 28,000 feet’.
The article was longer and much more detailed than Joanna’s. The author, Anthony Kaplan, had talked to every surviving member of the expedition, including, I saw with a pang, Adam himself. Why did he never tell me these things? It must have been one of those long phone conversations or one of those bar-room meetings that had occupied so much of his time during the previous month or two.
‘I didn’t know you’d talked to this journalist,’ I said, in what I hoped was a light-hearted tone.
‘What’s his name?’ asked Adam, who was refilling his glass.
‘Anthony Kaplan.’
Adam took one sip and then another. He flinched slightly. ‘The guy was a jerk,’ he said.
I felt cheated. It was common enough to know the trivial, mundane details about the life of a friend or colleague, but nothing of their passionate inner life. With Adam that was all I knew. His imagination, his fantasy life, his dreams, but only accidental fragments of what he actually did during his days. So I was hungry for anything about Adam, about his capacity to carry other people’s equipment when they were slowed to a crawl by altitude sickness. Everybody talked about his carefulness, his prudence, his clear-headedness.
There was one new detail concerning Adam. Another expedition member, an interior designer called Laura Tipler, had told Kaplan that she had shared a tent for a few days with Adam on the way up to base camp. That was what Greg must have been referring to when he’d said Adam hadn’t been celibate after Francoise. Then, without any ado, Adam had moved out. To husband his resources, no doubt. I didn’t mind very much. It was all very adult and consensual, with no hard feelings on either side. Tipler told Kaplan that Adam’s mind was evidently elsewhere, on the arrangements for the move up the mountain, the assessment of various risks and the ability of the different expedition members to manage them, but his body had been enough for her. The bitch. She described the episode almost casually to Kaplan, as if it were an optional extra selected from the brochure. But had he slept with absolutely every woman he had ever met? I wondered what he would have thought if I had led a sex life like that.
‘Twenty questions,’ I said. ‘Who’s Laura Tipler?’
Adam thought for a moment then laughed harshly. ‘A bloody liability is what she was.’
‘You shared a tent with her. She says.’
‘What are you saying, Alice? What do you want me to say?’
‘Nothing. It’s just that I keep learning things about you from magazines.’
‘You won’t learn anything about me from that crap.’ He looked cross. ‘Why do you bother with it? Why are you poking around?’
‘I’m not poking around,’ I said warily. ‘I’m interested in your life.’
Adam took another drink. ‘I don’t want you to be interested in my life. I want you to be interested in
I looked sharply round. Did he know anything? But his attention was back on the television, moving from channel to channel, flick, flick, flick.
I carried on reading. I had hoped, or feared, that there would be some more detail about Adam’s break-up with Francoise and about the tensions there may have been between them on the mountain. But Kaplan only mentioned briefly that they had been a couple and apart from that she barely featured in the article at all until near the end when she had disappeared. The thought had been running in my mind that the two women who had rejected Adam had died. Could it be that he hadn’t made as much effort to rescue Francoise’s group as he had with the others? But it was speedily contradicted by Kaplan’s evocation of what it had been like on the mountain in the storm. Both Greg and Claude Bresson had been out of action. The remarkable thing was not that five of the party died but that anybody at all had survived and that was almost entirely down to the efforts of Adam, going out again and again into the storm. But it nagged away at me and I wondered if that accounted for the composure with which he had recalled that nightmare.
Adam hadn’t said very much, as usual, but at one point Kaplan had asked him if he was driven by the great romantic tradition of British explorers like Captain Scott: ‘Scott died,’ was Adam’s response. ‘And his men with him. My hero is Amundsen. He approached the South Pole as if he were a lawyer drawing up a legal document. It’s easy to gloriously kill the people in your charge. The difficult thing is to make sure the knots are tied properly and bring
