Deborah winked at me. ‘It’s going to be the most glamorous trash collection in history.’ She laughed.
I looked across. They wouldn’t be listening to what we were saying.
‘But his last er… girlfriend, Lily, she wasn’t involved with climbing, was she? Did you meet her?’
‘A few times. But she was nothing. That was just a transitional thing. She was all right, but she was a pain, whining after Adam all the time. When he woke up and saw what she was like he dumped her.’
‘What was Françoise like?’
‘Ambitious. Rich. A pretty good technical climber.’
‘Beautiful, as well.’
‘Beautiful?’ said Deborah ironically. ‘Only if you like long-legged, thin, suntanned women with long, fine black hair. Unfortunately most men do.’
‘It was a terrible thing for Adam.’
‘Worse for Françoise. Anyway,’ she pulled a face, ‘it was finished, wasn’t it? She was a climbing groupie. She liked the guys.’ She dropped her voice a little. ‘It may have taken Adam a little time to discover that, but he’s a grown-up man. He knows what happens when you sleep with climbing doctors.’
And then I knew.
‘So you and…’ and I nodded over at Adam.
Deborah leaned over and put her hand on mine. ‘Alice, it was nothing, for either of us. I just didn’t want to have a secret between us.’
‘Of course,’ I said. I didn’t mind. That much. ‘Then before Françoise there was the girl called Lisa,’ I said, prompting her.
‘You want to do this?’ asked Deborah, with amused suspicion. ‘Adam dumped Lisa when he fell for Françoise.’
‘Was she American?’
‘No. British. Welsh, Scottish, one of those things. Part-time climber, I think. They were A Couple,’ she pronounced the words as if they were inherently comic, ‘for years. But, Alice, you mustn’t get all of this wrong. They were A Couple,’ she made invisible quotation marks in the air with her fingers, ‘but they never lived together. Adam’s never been committed to anybody the way he has been to you. It’s just a different thing.’
I continued to press. ‘There was always someone in the background. Although he had other affairs that didn’t mean anything – as you say – there was always a permanent relationship. When one finished another started.’
Deborah lit another cigarette and frowned with thought. ‘Maybe. I can’t remember who he was connected with, as it were, before Lisa. Maybe I never met her. There was a girl a few years before that when I first knew him. What was she called? Penny. She married another old friend of mine, a climber called Bruce Maddern. They live in Sydney. I haven’t seen them in a decade.’ She looked round at me then snatched another glance across at Adam. ‘Jesus, what are we doing? You don’t want to bother about all of this. The only point of it is that Adam stayed committed to people he wasn’t really in love with.’ She smiled. ‘You can rely on him. He won’t let you down. And you mustn’t let him down. I’ve climbed with the guy. He doesn’t tolerate you failing to do what you’ve committed to do.’
‘That sounds alarming,’ I said cheerfully.
‘How about climbing, Alice? Any ambitions? Hey, Adam, are you going to take Alice along next year?’
Adam turned to me amiably. ‘Maybe you should ask her.’
‘Me?’ I said alarmed. ‘I get blisters. I get tired and bad-tempered. I’m unfit. And what I really like is being warm and wrapped up. My idea of happiness is a hot bath and a silk shirt.’
‘That’s why you should climb,’ said Daniel, coming over with two mugs of coffee and then sitting with us on the floor. ‘You know, Alice, I was on Annapurna a few years ago. There had been some fuck-up with the supplies. There are always fuck-ups of some kind or another. Usually it’s something like finding yourself at twenty thousand feet with two left mitts, but this time someone, instead of packing five pairs of socks, had ordered fifty. What it meant was that every time I got into the tent I could get an entirely fresh clean pair of socks and put it on and luxuriate in that. You’ve never been on the mountain so you can’t imagine what it was like to put my wet feet into those warm dry socks. But just picture every warm bath you’ve ever had mixed into one.’
‘Trees,’ I said.
‘What?’ said Daniel.
‘Why don’t you climb trees? Why does it have to be mountains?’
Daniel smiled broadly. ‘I think that I will leave that question for the famous buccaneering mountaineer Adam Tallis to deal with.’
Adam thought for a moment. ‘You can’t pose for photographs on top of a tree,’ he said finally. ‘That’s why most people climb mountains. To pose for photographs on the top.’
‘But not you, my darling,’ I said, and then was embarrassed by my own serious tone.
There was a silence as we all lay and looked in the fire. I sipped my coffee. Then, on an impulse, I leaned over, took Deborah’s cigarette, dragged on it and then returned it to her.
‘I could so easily start again,’ I said. ‘Especially on an evening like this, lying on the floor in front of the fire, a little drunk with friends after a lovely dinner.’ I looked across at Adam who was looking at me, the light from the fire shimmering on his face. ‘The real reason isn’t any of that. I think I might have wanted to do something like that before I met Adam. That’s the funny thing. It’s Adam who’s made me understand what a wonderful thing it is to climb a mountain and at the same time he’s made me not want to do it. If I were going to do it, I’d want to be looking out for other people. I wouldn’t want them to have to be looking out for me all the time.’ I looked around. ‘If we were climbing together, you’d all be dragging me up. Deborah would probably fall down a crevasse, Daniel would have to give me his gloves. I’d be all right. You are the ones who would pay for it.’
‘You looked beautiful this evening.’
‘Thanks,’ I said sleepily.
‘And what you said about trees was funny.’
‘Thanks.’
‘It almost made me forgive you for quizzing Debbie about my past.’
‘Ah.’
‘You know what I want? I want it to be as if our lives began at the moment we first saw each other. Do you think that’s possible?’
‘Yes,’ I said. Meaning, no.
Twenty-five
The history I had learned at school, but mostly forgotten now, fell into convenient categories: the Middle Ages, the Reformation, the Renaissance, the Tudors and Stuarts. For me, Adam’s earlier life now fell into similar categories: stripes of separated time, like coloured sand in a bottle. There was the Lily Age, the Françoise Age, the Lisa Age, the Penny Age. I never talked to Adam about his past now: it was a forbidden subject. But I thought about it. I picked up little details about the women he had loved, and slotted them into the larger picture. As I did so, I realized that there was a gap in the chronology – an empty space where a woman should have been but wasn’t. It might just have been a year or so without a committed relationship, but that didn’t seem to fit into what I had come to see as the pattern of Adam’s life.
It was as if I was watching a beloved figure walking across the landscape towards me, always getting closer, when it was suddenly swallowed up in mist. I calculated that it was about eight years ago, this hiatus. I didn’t want to interrogate anybody about it, but the sense of needing to fill in the gap grew stronger. I asked Adam if he had any photos of himself when he was younger, but apparently he had none. I tried to find out, from casual questions, what he was doing at that time, as if I would eventually be able to join the insignificant dots to reveal a significant answer. But while I discovered names of peaks and perilous routes, I never found a woman to fill in the space between Lisa and Penny. But I was the world expert on Adam. I needed to be sure.