When he had cleared his plate, he laid down his knife and fork and pushed his plate away from him. He looked at me expectantly. I took a deep breath, smiled at him, and to my consternation felt tears hot on my cheeks. Greg pushed a box of tissues at me and waited. ‘You must think I’m mad,’ I said, and blew my nose. ‘I thought perhaps you could help me understand.’
‘Understand what?’
‘Adam, I suppose.’
‘I see.’
He stood up abruptly. ‘Let’s go for a walk.’
‘I haven’t got my coat. I left it in the office.’
‘I’ll lend you a jacket.’
Outside, we set off at a lick along the busy road that led down to Shoreditch and, beyond that, the Thames. Suddenly Greg led us down some steps and we were on a canal towpath. The traffic was left behind and it was as quiet as the countryside. It seemed reassuring, but then I thought of Tara. Was it in this canal that her body had been found floating? I didn’t know. Greg walked as fast as Adam, with the same effortless stride. He stopped and looked at me. ‘Why ask me, of all people?’
‘It happened so fast,’ I said. ‘Me and Adam, I mean. I thought the past didn’t matter, that nothing mattered. But it doesn’t work like that.’ I stopped again. I couldn’t tell Greg all my fears. He was the man whose life Adam had saved. He was Adam’s friend, sort of. I looked at the water. Motionless. Canals don’t flow like rivers. I wanted to talk about Adele, or Françoise, or Tara. Instead, I said, ‘Do you mind the way everyone thinks he’s the hero and you’re the villain?’
‘Villain?’ he said. ‘I thought I was just the coward, the weakling, the Elisha Cook Junior role.’
‘Who?’
‘He was an actor who played cowards and weaklings.’
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean…’
‘I don’t mind people thinking he was a hero, because he was. His courage, fortitude, coolness, all that, was extraordinary that day.’ He glanced sideways at me. ‘Is that what you want to hear? As for the rest of it, I’m not sure I want to talk over with you how I feel about my failure. Wife of the hero and all that.’
‘It’s not like that, Greg.’
‘It is, I think. Which is why you found me in my pyjamas this morning, nursing a hangover. But I don’t understand it, and that is what torments me. What does Adam say about it?’
I took a deep breath. ‘I think what Adam believes is that there were people in the expedition who didn’t belong on Chungawat.’
Greg gave a laugh that dissolved into a racking cough. ‘He can say that again,’ he said, when he was recovered. ‘Carrie Frank, the skin doctor, she was a fit hiker but she’d never climbed before. She didn’t know how to put her crampons on. And I remember screaming a warning to Tommy Benn when he had attached himself wrongly to the belay. He was about to fall off the mountain. He didn’t respond and I remembered he didn’t understand any English at all. Not a single word. God, what was he doing with us? I had to slide down and reattach his ‘biner. But I thought I’d handled that, that I’d created a foolproof system. It failed and the lives of five people under my protection were lost.’ I put a hand on his arm but he went on, ‘When it came to it, Adam was the hero and I wasn’t. You don’t understand things about your life. Join the club.’
‘But I’m scared.’
‘Join the club, Alice,’ he repeated, with a half-laugh.
Suddenly and incongruously, there was a small garden on the other side of the canal, with ranks of red and purple tulips.
‘Was it something in particular that’s scared you?’ he asked eventually.
‘It’s all of his past, I guess. It’s all so shadowy.’
‘And so full of women,’ Greg added.
‘Yes.’
‘Difficult for you.’
We sat on a bench together.
‘Does he talk about Françoise?’
‘No.’
‘I was having an affair with her, you know.’ He didn’t look at me as he said it, and I had the impression that he had never said it before. For me, it was like a blow, sharply unexpected.
‘An affair with Françoise? No. No, I didn’t know. God, Greg, did Adam know?’
Greg didn’t answer at once. Then he said, ‘It began on the expedition. She was very funny. Very beautiful.’
‘So they say.’
‘It was over between her and Adam. She told him when we all arrived in Nepal that it was ended. She was sick of all his infidelities.’
‘She finished it?’
‘Didn’t Adam tell you?’
‘No,’ I said slowly. ‘He didn’t say anything about it.’
‘He doesn’t take kindly to rejection.’
‘Let me get this straight,’ I said. ‘Françoise ended her long-standing relationship with Adam, and a few days later you and she started having an affair?’
‘Yes. And then, if you want me to spell it out for you, a few weeks after that she died up in the mountains because I fucked up with the fixed lines, and Adam saved me, his friend who had usurped him.’
I tried to think of something to say that could be plausibly comforting and gave up.
‘I must be getting back.’
‘Listen, Greg, did Adam know about you and Françoise?’
‘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 I was supposed to be the lucky one.’
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.