White

‘How’s business?’

‘Not bad for the time of year. Three last night. Full over the weekend.’

Jen was a good cook, and she also had the sense to keep the bedrooms well heated and to make sure there was plenty of hot water for her visitors. Al admired her success in this enterprise. While they had been married she had seemed smaller and less decisive. His activities had constrained her.

He reflected, not for the first time, that she was better off without him and he was touched by a finger of regret.

Molly had gone upstairs. Jen slammed the door of the washing machine, peeled off the gloves and twisted the control knob decisively. She still wore her wedding ring and the minute diamond, which was all he had been able to afford twenty years ago. ‘You want some coffee?’

They went into the kitchen. The front parlour was mostly used by the guests; this was where Molly and Jen lived. There was a sofa here draped in a Welsh tapestry, and corn dollies and carved spoons and local water-colours pinned to the walls, and a big television, and a Rayburn festooned with drying socks, and a row of potted plants and on every surface, objects: shells and jugs and framed photographs and bowls of pot pourri. She was letting her natural inclinations back into the light. When they had lived together, Al had thought they shared a taste for minimal living. They had gone in for plain white walls, bare wooden floors, exposed beams.

He skirted three bowls of cat food placed on a sheet of newspaper by the back door and sat down on the sofa next to the ginger tom. Jen heated coffee and gave it to him in a mug that said ‘Croeso i Cymru’. Al frowned at it. Jen had been born in Aberystwyth. Al’s family came from Liverpool and even though he had fallen in love with the mountains on a school trip at the age of twelve, and had lived in North Wales for twenty-five years, he still felt like an outsider.

‘Thanks for keeping her last night. I didn’t want her to go, in all of that, but she would have it.’

‘You don’t have to thank me for looking out for her.’

‘Don’t I? But it’s not the norm, is it?’

There it was. The old stab of resentment, still fresh as the morning’s milk.

‘I do love her, Jen.’

And you, although that’s all dead and gone.

‘In absentia,’ Jen said coldly.

His wife: short-haired, thin-framed, boyish; mouth tucked in in anger, the same as Molly’s. Now a separate person, busy with breakfasts and VAT, and – for all he knew – another man.

‘Don’t let’s do all this again.’

‘Oh, no. Don’t let’s. It might make you feel bad.’

Her fingers were wrapped around her coffee mug as if she needed to draw warmth from it. They listened in their separate silences to the unspoken words. He had been away too many times, for too long. He had taken too many risks.

She had never understood what drew him. To go back, to a new peak or a new line. One more time.

‘So,’ Jen said at last. ‘When do you actually leave?’

‘Tomorrow, probably. I’ve got a couple of things to do in London.’

‘Ah.’

‘Have you made up your mind about the extension?’

‘I think I’m going to go ahead with it.’

They talked about Jen’s plans to put two more bedrooms in the loft and about Molly’s A levels, and Al asked if she needed more money.

‘No. I’m doing all right, I don’t need anything else.’

Even if she did, she wouldn’t take it off him.

They didn’t talk about Everest. He finished his coffee and leaned forward to put the empty mug on the corner of the Rayburn. The oversized cushioned sofa, the piles of women’s magazines on a stool and the crowded ornaments made him think he was going to knock something over.

Jen went to the door and called out, ‘Molly? Your dad’s going.’ He stood up at once, kicking the stool so the magazines slid to the floor.

‘I’ve got to get to the cash and carry,’ she said, unseeingly heaping them into a pile again.

Molly came down the stairs. She went straight to Al and clung on, her arms around his waist and her head against his chest.

He lifted one springy curl and let it wind around his little finger. ‘Okay,’ he murmured.

‘I’ll miss you.’

‘I’ll be back soon, you know that.’

He kissed the top of her head and held her close.

‘Promise?’

‘In June.’

Reluctantly she disengaged herself, reminding him again of her much younger self. ‘Phone me.’

‘Of course.’

It was Jen who walked with him to the front door. Molly had always been tactful about allowing them their private farewells. Jen turned her cheek up, allowed him to kiss it, then opened the door. Her eyes didn’t quite meet his. ‘Good luck,’ she said. He nodded and walked swiftly away to his car.

Jen stood in the empty hallway. She walked five steps towards the kitchen and stopped, with the back of her hand pressed to her mouth. Then she swung round and ran back again, fumbling with the lock and pulling the door open so hard that it crashed on its hinges.

The step was slippery. Al had neatly closed the gate behind him. When she reached it she saw the Audi already 200 yards away. With her hands on the iron spears of the gate she called his name, but he was never going to hear. Within five seconds he was round the bend and out of sight.

Jen unclasped her hands. She wiped the wet palms on her jeans and walked slowly back into the kitchen. Molly was sitting on the sofa, her arms protectively around her knees, her eyes wide with alarm.

‘It was always waiting,’ Jen cried at her. ‘All I ever did was wait for him.’

Alyn drove westwards, towards Tyn-y-Caeau and the few last-minute arrangements that were still to be made before he flew to Nepal. For ten miles he sat with his shoulders stiff and his arms rigid, then he saw the bald head of Glyder Fawr against the gunmetal sky. He let his arms sag and he rounded his spine against the support of the seat to relieve the ache in his back.

He knew these mountains so well. Tryfan and Crib Goch and Snowdon. The Devil’s Kitchen and the Buttress, jagged black rock and scree slope. The sight and the thought of them never failed to promise liberation.

Al began to whistle. A low, tuneless note of anticipation. He was going to climb Everest. Once it was done, that would be the time to decide whether or not it had to be the last mountain. In the meantime there was a job to do, to take other people up there and bring them down safely. If Al had been given a choice, the thing he would have wished for above anything else, he would be doing it with Spider. Fast and light and free.

‘Yeah, we can do it,’ he heard Spider’s drawl in his head. ‘We can knock this one off, it’s only Everest.’

But Spider wasn’t here and this was now a job, the responsibility of it to be finely balanced against his own ambitions. He needed the money, just as he had told Molly. Everyone had to live and he wasn’t young enough any more to scrape by from hand to mouth, like in the old days. And thinking about it, setting it against the other possibilities, whether it might be selling local maps to tourists or helping Jen in her business or sitting in an office somewhere, Al knew that it was a job he was happy to do. Even proud to be doing.

He went on whistling as he drove.

Three

The Bell A-Star helicopter rattled along the river valley between the fir trees and rocked down to the landing pad beyond the lodges, as neatly as a foot slipping into a shoe. Finch’s eldest brother James stood at the window of the biggest lodge, watching the rotors darkening from a blur to whipping blades and then stopping altogether.

‘They’re back, Kitty,’ he remarked to his wife. She put aside her book, stood up and limped to join him at the window. One of her knees was tightly bandaged. The door of the chopper opened and the pilot jumped down, still wearing his helmet.

‘Ralf was flying.’

The man put out his hand and Finch took it as she emerged, shaking her head and laughing as she landed beside him. A second man wearing flying overalls scrambled out in her wake. He lifted two pairs of skis out of the basket mounted on the fuselage and handed them over in exchange for the pilot’s helmet. Then he climbed back into the machine. Once the couple were out of range the blades whirled into life again and the helicopter lifted and flew away.

Finch and Ralf came towards the lodge. His free arm was round her shoulders and she looked up into his face as they walked, and laughed again.

‘They look very happy,’ Kitty said. She raised her eyebrows smilingly at James.

‘They’re in love, aren’t they?’ James answered.

A minute later the door swept open and Finch and Ralf came in, bringing the outdoors scent of cold air. They were bright-eyed and rosy with the exhilaration of a day’s skiing, and they hopped and held on to each other as they eased off their ski boots and unzipped their outer clothes.

‘Tea’s here,’ James called from beside the log fire.

Finch came straight to Kitty. ‘How’s the knee? Have you been icing it, like I said?’

Kitty had fallen the previous day and twisted a ligament. James had stayed behind to keep her company, and Finch and Ralf had had the day and the helicopter with its pilot and the blue-white slopes of the Monashee mountains all to themselves. Kitty sat down with a little wince and hauled her leg up on to the sofa cushions for Finch to manipulate the swollen knee.

‘With a bag of frozen peas, just like you told me. Twenty minutes at a time. It’s much better.’

‘Good. Mm. I don’t think you’ve torn anything. But it might be worth getting an MRI scan, just the same.’

Ralf Hahn stood at Finch’s shoulder. The heli-ski operation was his and he had built it into a successful business catering for rich skiers from all over the world. He was Austrian, a big weather-beaten blond from Zell am See who had been skiing since he learned to walk. He and Finch had been lovers for nearly two years.

‘You are sure you are all right, Kitty? Frozen peas is all very well. But I can fly you down to the hospital, you know, twenty minutes only …’

Kitty laughed, basking in their concern. ‘What for? We’ve got the best doctor right here.’

‘Where?’ Finch demanded, looking around, protecting real modesty with an assumed version.

James put another log on the fire and they sat down in front of it. There was a basket of fresh-baked bread and three different kinds of cake; Ralf’s chef was well qualified and the lodge food was ambitious.

Finch stretched herself with pleasure and rested her feet in ski socks on the stone hearth. ‘The best moment of the day.’ She sighed.

‘Is that so?’ Ralf teased her.

‘Well, almost,’ she amended after a second. Kitty looked from one face to the other.

When tea was finished Ralf said he must spend an hour in his office. Finch walked between the lodges to his cabin. The light was fading and the fir trees were black cut-outs weighted with swathes of spring snow. The last helicopter, a big twelve-seater, had just brought in a cargo of skiers and their guides. They crossed to their rooms and the main lodge, calling out to each other and to Finch. Yellow lights were showing in the windows of the pretty log buildings.

In Ralf’s rooms Finch undressed and ran a bath. The place was almost as familiar as her own apartment down in Vancouver; she came up here to ski with Ralf as often as she could but this would be her last weekend of the season. In three days’ time she would fly to Kathmandu.

She lay back under the skin of hot water and thought about it, with a knot of nervous anticipation beneath her diaphragm.

She had never been to the Himalaya. Friends and climbers who had seen them warned her that she might be overwhelmed by the scale and the ferocity of the mountains. They were anxious for her, but because they knew her they were hardly surprised that she had chosen to start with Everest itself. For her own part Finch worried less about the climbing and the conditions than about her job as expedition doctor. If she just kept on upwards as far as she could go, she reasoned, that would be good enough. She thought she understood the fine, fascinating balance between barefaced risk and careful calculation that was at the heart of the best mountaineering. And she would never forget the triumph of reaching the top of McKinley, or any of the other peaks she had attempted. She had been expedition doctor on McKinley too and had felt the weight of that keenly, even though the worst emergency she had had to deal with was an abscessed molar. But on Everest they would be higher and further from help, and with less back-up, and the risks were infinitely greater.

If somebody fell. If there was an avalanche. If there was a case of sudden high-altitude cerebral oedema, coma and death … her responsibility to deal with it, quickly and correctly. With the limited medical resources at her disposal.

Finch stared at the silver breath of condensation on the bath taps. She knew that she was a competent doctor. She was interested in high-altitude medicine and had studied it for years. Eighteen months ago she had seen the details of the Mountain People’s expensive Everest expedition and the attached advertisement for an appropriately qualified doctor to accompany them, at a significantly reduced rate. When she flew down to Seattle to be interviewed by the expedition director, who had turned out to be the avuncular, laconic George Heywood, he had asked her in conclusion, ‘D’you think you can do it?’

‘Yes,’ she had answered, truthfully at that moment, meaning both the job and the climb.

‘So do I,’ he agreed.

She had got the job, and her name appeared on the expedition list and the climbing permit beneath those of the guides, Alyn Hood and Ken Kennedy.

Now she looked down at herself with critical attention. Her stomach was flat and taut with sheets of muscle, and her calves and thighs were firm from months of running and tough skiing. She worked out at a climbing gym for four hours every week so her arms and shoulders were strong too. She was fit enough, at least, for whatever lay ahead. She had made sure of that.

And this minute consideration of her body brought her obliquely to the last element of the conundrum: Alyn Hood.

Finch sat up so suddenly that a wave of water washed over the side of the bath. She climbed out quickly and attended to the mopping up, glad to have this focus for her attention. When the job was done she wrapped herself in a towel, wound another around her head, and walked through to the main room to stand by the window and look out into the dusk. She was still standing there, locked into her thoughts, when Ralf came in.

‘You are in the dark,’ he said, turning on a lamp and seeing her bare shoulders and the pale exposed skin of her neck.

‘I was thinking.’

He came to her and untucked the towel that covered her hair. He winnowed his fingers into the wet strands and kissed the droplets of water away from her shoulders. ‘About Everest?’

‘Yes.’

He wouldn’t say that he wished she weren’t going, because Ralf was too careful and generous for that. But she heard the words, just the same. Don’t go. Stay here with me and let me keep you safe. Logical and legible, secure.

Instead, he said, ‘Come to bed.’ He drew the curtains to shut out the dark and the trees and the glimmering snow, and unwrapped the second towel.

*

Lying in his arms, Finch closed her eyes and concentrated on making her body’s responses tip the scale against her mind’s. Ralf was a good lover and he was also a good man. She knew that he was ambitious, and hard-working and level-headed. On skis she followed his lead unhesitatingly, and elsewhere she valued his advice and opinions whenever he offered them. He spoke four languages and he made her laugh in the two she understood. In the most intimate moments, like this one, he whispered in German, tender endearments that she couldn’t decipher but which made the fine hairs rise at the nape of her neck. Ralf loved her, she knew that too.

For a thin, elastic shiver of time the scales balanced exactly, thought and unthinking. And then the body’s weight tipped them over. She exhaled a long breath that turned into a sigh. Ralf’s mouth moved against hers, and when the moment came she opened her eyes and looked into the hazed blueness of his, and although she knew him so well it was as if she were sharing her body with a stranger.

Afterwards, she lay with her head on his shoulder and his hand splayed over her hip. ‘We had a good day today, didn’t we?’ he murmured.

‘We did.’

Finch was a good skier, but she would never be as good as Ralf. He had taken her down through a steep gully with a line of trees sheltering within it. As they carved a path between the dark boles the colours of the world changed from blinding white and silver to black and graphite and pearl. Twigs cracked and laden branches shed a patter of snow as they ducked and jump-turned between them. Then the gully opened into a wide, sunlit ledge and there was a broad bowl full of unmarked, glittering snow. Way beneath them, where the slope ran out, the helicopter was already waiting.

They paused on the lip of the slope and then there was a sweet sssssccchhh as Ralf glided away. Finch watched the perfect linked Ss of his tracks. Ralf’s skiing always looked as if it cost him no physical effort whatsoever. Smiling, Finch flexed her knees and reached forward to plant her pole, unweighting and letting the edge of her ski carry her into a turn. Her tracks crossed and recrossed Ralf’s so the smooth arcs knitted into a chain of figure eights.

With the gathering speed whipping her cheeks she had given herself up to the rush and the rhythm. Powder crystals sprayed up and sparkled, catching the light like airborne diamonds. She was weightless, thoughtless, lost to everything but the snow and the slope. For now.

They reached the helicopter trailed by twin plumes of snow. Ralf planted his ski poles and slid forward to kiss her while they were still laughing with the exhilaration of the run.

‘We are a good match,’ he said now as he held on to her. She heard the vibration of his voice within the cage of his ribs and lay silent, listening. She said nothing, although he was waiting for her to agree with him.

Ralf slid away from her and walked naked into the kitchen. He came back with a bottle and two glasses, and she watched with her head back on the pillows as he twisted off the cork and poured froth and then champagne.

‘This is my send-off.’ She smiled. In the morning she would leave for Vancouver.

Ralf gave her a glass and lifted his to her. ‘Come back safely. And when you come back, will you marry me?’

Finch understood what today had been about. He had taken her out and shown her the beauty of the back country and the perfect skiing, and the helicopter waiting like a toy in the hollow of the mountains. Now there was the well-run resort with blazing fires and log cabins and champagne, and a fine dinner waiting.

All this, he could offer her all this freedom, with marriage and loyalty and habit wrapped up in it like a leg-iron hidden under the snow.

The injustice of the response shamed her into rapid words. ‘Ralf, thank you. I’m … only I can’t say yes.’

‘Does that mean you are not saying no?’

‘No. Yes … no, it doesn’t.’

‘Is it because of this voyage you are making, to Everest? If it is, tell me. I know that it must be harder to decide anything at all when you are going so far away.’

In the small silence that followed they lifted their glasses and drank, their movements unconsciously mimicking each other.

Carefully Finch began, ‘I have been very lucky all my life. You know that.’

He did know, of course. Ralf had met and liked all three of Finch’s older brothers, and their wives and children, and he had stayed with and been impressed by the Buchanan parents and their beautiful house in Vancouver. Finch’s was a remarkable, ambitious, wealthy family – held together by strong affection, as well as pride in their separate and mutual achievements. His own background could not have been more different and this solidity that Finch questioned was just one of the things he found attractive about her.

‘It sounds ungrateful, spoiled, to say that there can be too much ease. But it is what I feel. I have had it easy in the world, but climbing mountains scrapes away all the layers of expectation and assumption. It’s a challenge separate from the rest of my life.’

‘And separate from me.’

‘Yes, that’s true.’ She knew that she owed him the truth. At least a portion of it, the one she freely admitted to herself. ‘I know that it’s selfish, but it’s something that I need to do. I don’t find the same fixed determination or absolute satisfaction in anything else.’

Ralf inclined his head and she studied the sharp line of sun- and windburn on his cheekbones. They had discussed all this before. Finch had never been able to make him understand the force that impelled her to climb and tonight her urgency had made her speak too forcibly. She knew that she had hurt him, and she was sad and ashamed.

‘I understand,’ he said at length. He reached out to the champagne bottle and refilled their glasses. ‘Come back safely,’ he said, and he drank again.

‘I will,’ Finch promised, believing that she would and also understanding how much she would have to live through before that could happen. The knot of anticipation tightened again in her chest.

They finished the champagne as they dressed for dinner, then they went to the lodge dining-room and Ralf moved sociably around the tables and talked to the guests. After dinner he went to his daily meeting with the ski guides and the pilots, and Finch walked back to their cabin with James, and Kitty leaning on a stick. James was tired and went straight into the bedroom while the women wandered out on to the deck. It was a clear night, bright with stars.

With the end of her stick Kitty nudged a wooden lid to one side and a turquoise eye opened to the sky in a column of steam. ‘Hot tub?’ she asked.

‘Yes, definitely,’ Finch agreed.

Kitty pressed the button and the water boiled with bubbles. They discarded their clothes with little exclamations at the freezing air on their skin, then slid into the pine-scented heat. They sat back, submerged to their chins and sighing with satisfaction.

After a minute Kitty asked meaningfully. ‘So?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You know what I mean.’ Kitty was the family news-gatherer and lieutenant to Finch’s mother in the battle to persuade Finch to commit herself.

‘Okay. Ralf asked me to marry him. I said no.’

Kitty groaned. ‘Finch! Why not?’

‘I’m not in love with him.’

‘You gave a good impression of it. I thought you were nuts about him.’

‘No. Not nuts enough, evidently.’

Kitty tucked a tendril of damp hair into the knot on top of her head. ‘You could have all of this. All the things you like best, with a guy who adores you.’

‘Perverse, aren’t I?’

She wondered if James and Kitty had embarked on their partnership because they saw each other as offering all the things they liked best. There was no note of envy in Kitty’s all this, either. James was a successful investment analyst and well able to provide for his family. They even had two-year-old twin girls, who were staying for the weekend with one of their pairs of adoring grandparents. All three of Finch’s brothers were notably successful. Marcus, the eldest, was an architect like his distinguished father and Caleb, the youngest, was a marine ecologist and film maker. His most recent film, about the pygmy sea-horse, had sold around the world. All three were married, with good-looking wives and attractive children.

Finch raised one knee out of the bubbles. The air was bitterly cold and she hastily submerged it again.

No wonder her family thought she was different, difficult. But surely it was less of a contradiction than it seemed, to reject all the things you like best? By which, she supposed, Kitty meant mountains and unlimited skiing, and probable financial ease, and a man who loved her and didn’t threaten her.