As they moved up the mountain, establishing camps, the book almost stopped being a book and turned into a feverish dream, a hallucination that I shared as I read. The members of the party were blinded by headaches, unable to eat, doubled over with stomach cramps, even dysentery. They debated and bickered. Greg McLaughlin was distracted by administration, divided between his concerns as a guide and his responsibilities as a tour operator. At over eight thousand metres everything was reduced and slowed. There was no actual climbing but even the shallowest slopes became a huge physical effort. Older members of the party slowed everybody up, causing resentment. Through it all, Greg was tormented by his need to get everybody to the top, to show that this form of tourism could work. Klaus described him not only as obsessed but babbling incoherently about the need to hurry, to get to the top in the window of fine weather at the end of May, before June brought storms and disaster. Then, at the camp before the summit, there was a lowering, cloudy day in which Klaus overheard arguments between Greg, Adam and Claude Bresson. The weather held that day and before dawn the party set off up Gemini Ridge along a fixed rope that had been prepared by Greg and two of the Sherpas. It was all done with, as Greg himself put it, a simplicity that might have been designed for kids at kindergarten. Greg’s fixed lines were red, Claude’s were blue, Adam’s were yellow. The clients were told a colour and told to follow it. After they had moved beyond the ridge and were just fifty – vertical – metres below the summit, Klaus, at the back of the group with Claude, saw clouds rolling in ominously from the north. He questioned Claude, who didn’t respond. In retrospect, Klaus didn’t know whether Claude was stubbornly determined to get to the summit, whether he was already ill, or whether he just hadn’t heard. They pressed on and perhaps half an hour later the weather broke and everything went dark.
Much of the rest of the book was delirium as Klaus described the disaster the way he – sick, disoriented, terrified – had experienced it. He couldn’t see, he couldn’t hear; occasionally figures emerged from the blizzard and disappeared back into it. The climbers had made their way across the col to where Claude, theoretically, had laid the blue line that would lead them towards the summit but by that time nobody could see more than a few feet or hear anything unless it was shouted into their ear. The one figure who emerged with clarity out of the chaos, like a figure in a thunderstorm illuminated by flashes of lightning, was Adam. He appeared out of the storm moving down, disappeared, reappeared. He was everywhere, keeping up communication, leading the two parties of clients into a place of relative shelter on the col. The immediate priority was to save the lives of Greg and the acutely ill Claude. With Klaus’s help they almost carried Claude down the line to the highest camp. Klaus then returned with Adam and they helped Greg down.
By this time Klaus himself was incoherent with fatigue, cold and thirst and collapsed in his tent, unconscious. Adam went back up the mountain to fetch the virtually helpless clients. He took the first group, which included Françoise and four others, to the beginning of the line: they would have to feel their way down to the camp. Adam left them and went back to the second group. But by the time he had brought them back, the fixed line was nowhere to be seen. It had evidently been blown away. It was now beginning to get dark and wind-chill had brought the temperature down to fifty degrees below zero. Adam took his second party back to the col. Then he went down the ridge alone, without a line, in order to fetch his own line and in search of possible help. Greg, Claude and Klaus were unconscious and there was no sign of the first group.
Then Adam went back up the ridge, laid the yellow line and brought the second group down himself. Some of these needed urgent medical help, but once he had attended to them, he went out once more, alone and in the dark, to search for the missing group. It was hopeless. Late that night, Klaus woke and deliriously assumed that Adam, too, had been lost until he burst into the tent and collapsed.
The first party was found the following day. What had happened was a tragically simple mistake. In the dark and the snow and the noise, with the fixed line unfixed and blown into the abyss, they had blundered down on the wrong side of the Gemini Ridge, which had taken them hopelessly and irrevocably astray on to an exposed ridge that tapered away, leaving steep drops on each side. The bodies of Françoise Colet and an American client, Alexis Hartounian, were never found. They must have gone over the edge, perhaps while struggling back up the ridge or pressing forward to the camp they thought was in front of them. The others huddled together in the dark storm and died slowly. The following morning they were found by the Sherpas searching for them. All dead, Klaus wrote, except for one: another American, Pete Papworth, who was just mumbling the single pathetic word, ‘Help,’ over and over again. Help. Help. Calling, Klaus wrote with the pain of a man who had been asleep through all of it, for help that nobody would bring to him.
I read the final pages in a daze, scarcely able to breathe, and then just lay on the sofa where I must have slept for hours.
When I awoke, there was barely time. I showered and pulled on a dress. I caught a cab down to the Pelican in Holland Park although I would have been quicker walking, except that in my present frame of mind I wouldn’t have found my way anywhere. I paid the driver and went inside. Only a couple of tables were occupied. In one corner was Adam, with a man and a woman I didn’t recognize. I walked straight up to them. They looked round, startled.
‘Excuse me,’ I said to the others. ‘Adam, could you come outside for a second?’
He looked wary. ‘What?’
‘Just come. It’s very important. I’ll only take a second.’
He shrugged and nodded an apology to the others at the table. I took him by the hand and led him out. As soon as we were out of view of his friends I turned to him and took his face in my hands so that I could look him right in the eyes. ‘I’ve read Klaus’s book,’ I said. His eyes gave a flicker of alarm. ‘I love you, Adam. I love you so much.’
I started to cry and I couldn’t see, but I felt his arms around me.
Fourteen
‘The lady has narrow feet, Mr Tallis.’ He held my foot as if it were a piece of clay, and turned it in his thin hands.
‘Yeah, well, make sure it’s secure around the ankle. She doesn’t want blisters, all right?’
I had never been into this kind of shop before, although I had passed them by and peered into their dim, expensive depths. I wasn’t trying on shoes, I was being measured and fitted for them. My sock – violet and balding – looked shabby in this company.
‘And a high instep.’
‘Yeah, I’d noticed that.’ Adam took hold of my other foot and examined it. I felt like a horse being shod by a blacksmith.
‘What style of walking boot were you thinking of?’
‘Well, since I haven’t’
‘Basic trekking. Quite high, to support her ankle. Light,’ said Adam firmly.
‘Like the one I made for –?’
‘Yes.’
‘Made for who?’ I asked. They both ignored me. I pulled my feet out of their grip and stood up.