I rolled up my sleeves and started in the kitchen. I was going to get my life under control. With every surface I cleaned, I felt better. I washed the dishes, threw away all the stale or rotting food, all the candle stubs, all the junk mail, and I scrubbed the floor with hot soapy water. I gathered all the bottles and the old papers and threw them away, not even stopping to read last week’s news. I threw away Sherpa’s bowl, trying not to remember the last sight I had had of him. I stripped the bed and put the sheets in the corner of the room, ready to go to the laundry. I put shoes into pairs, books into neat piles. I cleaned the tidemark from the bath and the limescale from the shower. I added the towels to the laundry pile.
Then I made myself a cup of tea and started on the cardboard boxes under our high bed, where Adam and I had got into the habit of tossing anything we weren’t actually going to deal with but didn’t want to throw away just yet. For a second, I considered simply putting them outside by the dustbins without even going through them. But then I saw a scrap of paper with Pauline’s work number scribbled on it. I mustn’t throw that away. I started to plough through the old bills, the new bills, the postcards, the scientific journals I hadn’t yet read, the photostats of Drakloop material, the scraps of paper with messages I had left for Adam, or Adam had left for me. ‘Back at midnight; don’t go to sleep,’ I read, and tears pricked my eyelids again. Empty envelopes. Unopened envelopes addressed to the owner of the flat. I took them over to the writing desk in the corner of the bedroom and began to sort them into three piles. One to discard, one to deal with at once, and one to put back in the box. One of the piles slipped over and several of the papers fell down behind the desk. I tried to reach down after them but the gap was too narrow. I was tempted to leave them there but, no, I was going to clear up everything in the flat. Even the invisible bits. So, with an immense effort, I pulled the desk out from the wall. I retrieved the papers and, of course, there was the other stuff that gets stuck behind desks: a shrivelled apple-core, a paper clip, a pen top, an old scrap of envelope. I looked at the envelope to see if it could just be thrown away. It was addressed to Adam. Then I turned it round and all at once I felt I had been punched so hard in the stomach that I could only breathe with difficulty.
‘Had a bad day?’ I read. It was Adam’s scrawl, in thick black ink. Then, again, on the next line down, ‘Had a hard day, Adam?’ Then: ‘Hard day, Adam? Take a bath.’ Finally, underneath was written in familiar capital letters:
HARD DAY.
The words were written repeatedly like an infant’s writing exercise: HARD DAY HARD DAY HARD DAY HARD DAY HARD DAY
Then: ADAM ADAM ADAM ADAM ADAM ADAM ADAM
And then, finally: HARD DAY ADAM? TAKE A BATH.
I mustn’t be mad. I mustn’t be obsessive. I tried and tried to think of the sensible, reassuring explanation. Adam might have been doodling, thinking about the note, writing its words over and over. But that wasn’t what was on the paper. This wasn’t doodling. It was Adam imitating the handwriting of the previous notes – of Tara’s notes – until he got it right, so that the link between Tara and the harassment would be broken. Now I knew. I knew about Sherpa and I knew about everything. I knew what I had known for a long time. The one truth I couldn’t stand.
I picked up the envelope. My hands were steady. I hid it in my knicker drawer, with the letter from Adele, and then went back to the bedside and put everything I had taken out and sorted back into the boxes. I pushed the boxes back under the bed, and even rubbed away the depressions they had made on the carpet.
I heard the footsteps coming up the stairs and went, unhurriedly, into the kitchen. He came in and stood over me. I kissed him on the lips and put my arms tightly around him. ‘I’ve spring-cleaned,’ I said, and my voice sounded perfectly ordinary.
He kissed me back and looked into my eyes and I didn’t flinch or turn away.
Thirty-five
Adam knew. Or he knew something. Because he was always around, always had his eye on me. A detached observer might have thought it the same as the beginning of our relationship when neither of us could physically bear to be apart from the other. Now it was more like a very conscientious doctor who couldn’t let an unstable patient out of his sight for a moment because of the suspicion that she might do herself harm.
It wouldn’t be accurate to say that Adam followed me everywhere I went. He didn’t accompany me to work every single day, nor was he there to meet me every day. He wasn’t phoning me there all the time. But it happened enough so that I knew that any more of my private investigations would be risky. He was around, and I was sure that there were times when he was near and I didn’t notice. Once or twice, walking along the street, I would look round feeling that I was being watched or that I had glimpsed someone, but I never saw him. But he could still have been there. It didn’t matter anyway. I had the feeling that I knew everything I needed to know. It was all there in my head. I just had to think about it all. I had to get the events straight.
Greg was going to fly out to the States for a few months and, on the Saturday before he left, a couple of friends arranged a party to give him a send-off. It rained almost the whole day and Adam and I didn’t get out of bed until almost noon. Then Adam suddenly got dressed, briskly, and said he had to go out for a couple of hours. He left me with a cup of tea and a hard kiss on the mouth. I lay in bed and I made myself think about it all – clearly, point by point, as if Adam was a problem I had to solve. All the elements were there, I just needed to get them in the right order. I lay under the duvet, hearing the rain pattering on the roof, the sound of cars accelerating through puddles, and I thought about everything until my head hurt.
In my mind I was going over and over the events on Chungawat, the storm, the altitude sickness of Greg and Claude Bresson, the extraordinary achievement of Adam in directing the climbers down the Gemini Ridge, the failure of the guiding line and the consequent disastrous wrong turning of the five climbers: Françoise Colet, Pete Papworth, Caroline Frank, Alexis Hartounian and Tomas Benn. Françoise Colet, who had just broken off with Adam, and who had been conducting an affair with Greg.
Adele Blanchard had broken off with Adam. How would the Adam I knew respond to being left? He would have wanted her to die and she disappeared. Françoise Colet broke off with Adam. He would have wanted her to die and she died on the mountain. That didn’t mean he killed her. If you wanted someone to die and they died, did that mean you bore some responsibility, even if you hadn’t caused it? I went over and over it. What if he didn’t try hard enough to rescue her? But, then, as everybody else said, he had already done more than anybody else could have done in the same circumstances. What if he put her group last on the list of priorities while he saved the lives of other people? Did that make him just a bit responsible for her death and the deaths of the other members of the expedition? But somebody had had to assess priorities. Klaus, for example, couldn’t be blamed for the deaths because he hadn’t been in a condition even to rescue himself, let alone decide the order in which other people were rescued. It was all stupid. Adam couldn’t have known about the storm anyway.
Yet there was something, like a little itch that is so tiny you can’t even locate it exactly, you can’t decide whether it is on the surface of the skin or somewhere underneath but it won’t let you relax. Maybe there was some technical mountaineering detail, but none of the experts had mentioned anything like that. The only relevant technical detail was that Greg’s fixed line had come loose at the crucial point, but that had affected all the descending groups equally. It was just a matter of chance that it was Françoise’s group who took the wrong route down. Something wouldn’t leave me alone. Why couldn’t I stop thinking about it?