‘Why?’
His tone turned irritable. He was impatient with me for pressing him, but I wasn’t going to stop.
‘We weren’t a team. Only one of the clients had ever been to the Himalayas before. They couldn’t communicate. I mean, for God’s sake, the German guy, Tomas, could hardly speak a single word of English.’
‘Aren’t you just curious to see what Klaus has to say in his book?’
‘I know what he has to say.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I’ve got a copy.’
‘What! Have you read it?’ I asked.
‘I’ve looked through it,’ he said, almost with contempt.
‘I thought the book hadn’t been published yet.’
‘It hasn’t. Klaus sent me one of those rough, early versions – what are they called?’
‘Proof copies. Have you got the book here?’
‘It’s in a bag somewhere.’
I kissed my way down his chest, his stomach and beyond, until I could taste myself on him.
‘I want to read it. You don’t mind, do you?’
I made a private rule for myself that I would never try to compare Adam with Jake. It seemed a last, feeble way of trying to be fair to Jake. But I couldn’t help it sometimes. Jake never just did something, never just went out. He was too considerate and attentive. He asked my permission or informed me or planned it in advance and probably asked me to come with him, or what I was doing. Adam was completely different. Much of the time he was utterly absorbed in me, wanting to touch, taste, penetrate or just look at me. At other times he would make a precise arrangement for where and when we would next meet, then he would throw on a jacket and go.
The next morning he was standing at the door when I remembered. ‘Klaus’s book,’ I said. He frowned. ‘You promised,’ I said.
He didn’t say anything but walked across to the spare room and I heard sounds of rummaging. He emerged with a book with a floppy light blue cover. He tossed it over to where I sat on the sofa. I looked at the cover: Ridge of Sighs by Klaus Smith.
‘It’s only one man’s view,’ he said. ‘So I’ll see you at the Pelican at seven.’
And he was gone, rattling down the stairs. I went to the window, as I always did when he went out, and watched him appear and cross the pavement. He halted, turned and looked up. I blew him a kiss and he smiled and turned away. I went back to the sofa. I had, I suppose, some idea of reading for a bit, making some coffee, having a bath, but I didn’t move for three hours. At first I flicked ahead, looking for his lovely name and finding it, and looking for photographs, and not finding them, because they wouldn’t be in until the final published version. Then I turned to the beginning, to the very first page.
The book was dedicated to the members of the 1997 Chungawat expedition. Beneath the dedication there was a quotation from an old mountaineering book of the thirties: ‘May we, who live our lives where the air is thick and minds are clear, pause before we judge men who venture into that wonderland, that looking-glass realm on the roof of the world.’
The phone rang and I listened to the silence for a few seconds before putting it down again. Sometimes I could persuade myself that I recognized the breathing; that it was someone I knew at the other end. Once I said, tentatively, ‘Jake?’ to see if there was any response, any sharp intake of breath. This time, I didn’t really care. I wanted to get on with Ridge of Sighs.
The book began more than twenty-five million years ago, when the Himalayan range (‘younger than the Brazilian rainforest’) was pushed up in folds by the northward drift of the Indian subcontinent. It leaped forward to a catastrophic British expedition up Chungawat just after the First World War. The attempt on the summit was abruptly halted when a British Army major lost his footing and pulled three of his comrades down with him, falling, as Klaus put it drily, around three thousand metres from Nepal into China.
I read quickly through a couple of chapters that described expeditions in the late fifties and sixties in which Chungawat was first climbed and then climbed from various routes and using different climbing methods, which were meant to be purer or harder or more beautiful. This didn’t interest me much, except that my attention was caught by a statement that Klaus quoted from ‘an anonymous American climber in the sixties’: ‘A mountain is like a chick. First you just want to fuck her, then you want to fuck her in a few different ways and then you move on. By the early seventies Chungawat was fucked out and nobody was interested any more.’
Apparently Chungawat didn’t present enough interesting technical challenges to élite mountaineers but it was beautiful and poems had been written about it, and a classic travel book, and in the early nineties that was what had given Greg McLaughlin his big idea. Klaus described a talk with Greg in a Seattle bar in which Greg had rhapsodized about package tours above eight thousand metres. People would pay thirty thousand dollars and Greg and a couple of other experts would lead them to the peak of one of the highest mountains in the Himalayas with a view into three countries. Greg thought he would be the Thomas Cook of the Himalayas and he had a plan for making it happen. It involved each guide laying a series of lines, fixed on pickets to which the climbers would be attached by carabiners. The lines would lead along a safe route from camp to camp. One guide wouldbe responsible for each line, designated by different colours, and it would be just a matter of making sure that the clients wore the correct equipment and that they were fastened securely to the line. ‘The only danger,’ he had told Klaus, ‘was dying of boredom.’ Klaus was an old friend and Greg asked him to come along on the first expedition and help him with some of the logistics in return for a discount. Klaus was unsparing about his own motives. He had had doubts from the first, he despised the idea of turning mountaineering into tourism, yet he accepted because he had never been to the Himalayas before and he wanted to go.
Klaus was also pretty jaundiced about his fellow packagers, who included a Wall Street stockbroker and a Californian cosmetic surgeon. But about one person he wasn’t jaundiced. When Adam was first mentioned I felt a lurch:
The dreamboat of the expedition was Greg’s second guide, Adam Tallis, a lanky, good-looking, taciturn Englishman. At thirty years of age, Tallis was already one of the most brilliant climbers of the younger generation. Most important for my own peace of mind, he had extensive experience in the Himalayan and Karakoram mountain ranges. Adam, a long-time friend, is not one for unnecessary talk but he obviously shared my doubts about the whole basis of the expedition. The difference was that if things went wrong, the guides would have to put their lives on the line.
Then my stomach lurched again as Klaus described how Adam had suggested that his ex-girlfriend, Françoise Colet, who was desperate for a Himalayan climb, come along as the doctor. Greg was reluctant, but agreed to take her as a client with a huge discount.
There was too much stuff (for me) about bureaucracy, sponsorship, rivalry with other climbers, the initial trek in Nepal through the foothills and then, like a revelation, the first sight of Chungawat with its notorious Gemini Ridge, leading down from the col just below the summit which divides into two, one side leading to a precipice (down which the English major and his comrades had slipped) and the other leading gently down the slope. I seemed to be living it as I read, experiencing the brightening of the light and the thinning of the air. At first there were elements of lightheartedness, with toasts, prayers to the presiding deity. Klaus described sex in one of the tents, which amused and shocked the Sherpas, but discreetly omitted to mention who had been involved. I wondered if it was Adam who had been in her sleeping bag with her, whoever she was – probably the cosmetic surgeon, Carrie Frank, I thought. I had come to assume that Adam had slept with virtually everybody who had crossed his path, almost as a matter of course. Deborah, for example, the climbing medic in Soho. There had been an expression in her eye that made me think they must have had a fling.