Читать книгу White - Rosie Thomas - Страница 6

It was snowing in North Wales, too. It was a different small segment of the world’s weather envelope, but the local effects were the same as in Vancouver or Oregon.

Alyn Hood paid no attention either to the bitter wind or the blur of snowflakes flying into his face and weighting his eyelashes. He stood on his doorstep for a moment, gazing thoughtfully into the darkness as if it were the middle of a summer’s afternoon. Then he turned and locked the door of the cottage, dropping the heavy key into his pocket. He set off down the path, bareheaded with his coat hanging loose, at a steady pace that indicated no hurry, or any awareness of the climate.

It was a long descent, down a rutted track where the potholes were already deceptively smoothed out by the settling snow. The man was a sure-footed walker. His easy pace never varied.

The track joined a lane at a gatepost where the plastic letters of an old sign, their cracked curves and serifs having acquired an eyebrow of snow, announced the name of the one-storey slate and stone cottage to be Tyn-y-Caeau. He turned left into the muffled silence of the lane and continued to descend the hill. His footprints threaded a solitary one-way trail in his wake. Half a mile further on, a tiny cluster of yellow lights showed thinly between silver-furred stone walls. There were perhaps a dozen houses here and a whitewashed pub turned grey by the insistent whiteness. There were no cars in the car-park, but a regiment of wooden bench-and-table sets in the frozen garden to the side indicated that this might be a popular place in more forgiving weather.

Alyn Hood went straight to the low door and pushed it open, familiar with its movement. A heavy draught curtain, attached to a rod on the back of the door, swung with it. There was a bar framed by glasses and bottles, a man behind its rampart polishing a tankard, and two customers. All three faces turned to the new arrival.

‘Al,’ the barman greeted him. The other two men nodded. One was very old, with a flat tweed cap welded to his head, the younger had a sheepdog asleep at his feet.

‘Pint, Glyn,’ Alyn Hood said.

‘Right you are.’ The barman pulled it and stood the handle glass to dribble on a bar towel.

‘Bit dead tonight,’ the sheepdog man said wonderingly, as if this room with its ticking clock and smoky fire usually resounded with cheering and dancing on table-tops.

‘Blasted weather,’ Glyn judged. ‘You’d expect a sign of spring, this time of year.’

‘It’s only March,’ Alyn Hood said mildly. He took his pint to a round table near the fire and sat down.

‘When is it you’re off this time, then?’ Glyn pursued him.

‘Couple of days.’

‘Bad enough here,’ said the sheepdog man.

Alyn smiled and the room fell silent again. He sat for perhaps twenty minutes, nursing his pint and looking into the red coals. A couple came in and sat in a corner murmuring together, their hands entwined.

Five minutes later the door whirled open once more, admitting a blast of cold air and a young woman who stamped her feet energetically to shed a ruff of snow. She looked around the bar and saw Al. ‘Thought I might find you.’

‘Molly. What are you doing here?’

‘Duh. Looking for you, maybe? Went up to the house, car there but not you. Where else could you be but down the pub? Do I get a drink?’

‘Coke?’

‘Nn.’ Molly put her head on one side. Her wiry hair was spangled with melted snow. ‘I’ll have a whisky and ginger ale, thanks.’ She stared a challenge at her father.

‘You’re not old enough. You driving?’

‘Get real. I’m eighteen. Near enough. And how else d’you think I got here from Betws? Mum lent me.’

Al sighed. His only child was a grown woman now, almost. Because he had missed so many of the vital, infinitesimal shifts of growth that had delivered her from sweet babyhood to this point, he knew he didn’t have the right to tell her she was too young to drink whisky, or anything else for that matter.

‘Very small Scotch and plenty of ginger, please, Glyn. And I’ll have a half.’

They took their drinks and sat opposite each other at the table. Father and daughter were noticeably alike. Their heads and hands were the same shape, and they sat in the same position with their legs pointing towards the fire and their ankles lazily crossed.

‘How is your mother?’

Molly regarded him. ‘The same.’

‘Did she send you?’

‘No. Well. In a way, I suppose. I said I was coming over and she offered me the car.’

They lifted their glasses at the same moment and thoughtfully drank.

The man with the tweed cap levered himself off his stool and headed for the door. ‘Night all. See you again, I hope, Alyn. All the best.’

Molly’s face drew in. The contraction of her mouth and eyes made her look angry. When the door had closed once more and the eddies of cold air were dispersed she said, ‘Don’t go back there. Don’t. I don’t want you to.’

There was a flicker in her father’s eyes, a shift in his glance that acknowledged and at the same time evaded her demand. Molly saw it and Al knew that she saw it. ‘I have to go, Molly. It’s what I do.’

‘You don’t have to. That’s a lie.’

‘I don’t lie to you, Moll. I try not to. Did your mother tell you to come here and say this to me?’

It was weary, over-trodden ground to Alyn. And the careful neutrality that Molly assumed in answering was a reminder that she had had to intercede for too long in the disputes between her mother and father.

‘No,’ she repeated. ‘I came to say it myself. Dad, please don’t go. I’ve got a bad feeling about this time.’

He smiled then, briefly, and put his hands over hers. ‘You always have a bad feeling. Remember? And I always come home, don’t I?’

She would not meet his eyes. He turned her hands over, looking at the smooth palms, remembering these fingers when they were baby-sized and the way they curled to grip his adult forefinger. Holding on to him hard, even then.

‘Listen. I have to do this trip.’ For all kinds of reasons he was drawn back to the mountain. They were not, he acknowledged to himself, reasons he would care to analyse with his daughter. ‘I have to do this one and after I’ve done it I’ll hang up my boots.’

‘Do you mean that?’

From her mother, over the years, Molly had heard enough about her father’s faults. She knew well enough what he was bad at and deficient in, and out of her own sense of fair play she had privately reckoned up his strengths. In order to compensate.

One of them, perhaps the foremost, was that he was so strong. Not just physically, although he was that too, like iron – or one of his own smooth coils of rope, that was better. Iron was too rigid, where Al was supple. It was that he never gave way or compromised or stepped down. You were always certain of what he would do and the way he would do it, and that gave him a kind of … serenity, if that was the word. Like a rock face, too. The weather kept on changing over and around it, but the rock stayed there, solid as.

She couldn’t think of anyone else she knew who held so unwaveringly to what he believed in and wanted, the way Al did.

If you looked at it from one side it was selfishness, that’s what her mother would claim. But if you took another perspective it was clarity and a sense of purpose. He held on to what he believed in and he kept on going until he was where he wanted to be. Whatever the obstacles were. That was why he was a fine mountaineer. And why she was wasting her breath now.

Love felt weighty inside her, with the nauseous edge lent by fear for his safety. It was a helpless sensation that Molly was used to. ‘Do you mean that?’ she repeated.

‘Yes.’

It was true. He did mean to make this the last one. Or to wish it, with part of himself. And with another part he rejected the impulse entirely. It was the old, insoluble dilemma of climbing.

When you were there, doing it, you had the shot of adrenalin in your veins. This, this balance of focus and fear, was the crystallisation of reality. The brilliance of perception and nerve and concentration made you think you could pass straight into another dimension. And the mind’s reaction to that very intensity, like a dull serum to counteract climbing’s snakebite madness, was to make you long perversely to be comfortable and languid, and safe.

Al looked around the motionless room and listened to the clock’s steady ticking. What he had seen and done made all of this peripheral. Even his daughter’s drooping head. Almost as soon as you were home, safety was colourless and suffocating.

It made you turn back to the mountains. Once more and yet once more.

But he was forty-five now. Realistically, he couldn’t expect to lead too many more major commercial expeditions like this one.

Alyn realised that Molly was waiting for him to say something further. ‘Okay. You know I’m going to lead a group of clients up Everest for an American company called the Mountain People. These are rich men, with big ideas and they pay a lot of money for the chance to go up there. The owner of the company, George Heywood, believes that I am a good guide and he pays me well for the job. And I certainly need the money. As you also know.

‘Obviously, it means I get one more chance at the summit myself. I’ve never climbed the big E and I want to, very much. I’ve done most of the other major peaks.’

‘K2,’ Molly said bleakly.

It was after what happened on K2, five years ago, that Jen Hood decided she had had enough. Either Alyn stopped climbing, or they stopped being married. Two and a half years later they were divorced.

Al nodded, understanding the reminder, heading off for now the memories that went with it. ‘Yes.’

‘Is it that important?’

After a moment Al said absently, almost as if he hadn’t been listening to the question, ‘Yes. It is.’

Glyn put down his polished tankard and briskly rang a brass bell that hung behind the bar. ‘Last ones, please.’

‘I’ll have another whisky and ginger, thanks.’

‘No, you won’t. You can come home and have a cup of tea with me, if you want.’

‘Oh, cheers.’

But they went outside together and found that the snow had stopped falling. A glimmering blanket lay over the dry-stone walls and etched the trees, and the rock faces were black holes traced with edges of pearl.

‘Pretty,’ Molly commented. She unlocked the doors of her mother’s rusting Metro and nodded Al inside. The interior smelled of plastic and Obsession, Jen’s favoured perfume. The climb back up the hill to Tyn-y-Caeau was tricky, with the car’s rear wheels skidding in the tractionless snow.

‘I can do it,’ Molly said angrily when her father tried to intervene, and she negotiated the rutted track right up to his front door.

The cottage’s one main room smelled of damp and woodsmoke.

While her father went into the kitchenette to make tea, Molly dropped her coat on a chair and nosed around among his sparse possessions. There was a laptop computer on an untidy desk and a fax machine with a couple of faxes poking out of it. She read the top one; it was from the Mountain People. The message was uninteresting, to do with porters and supplies of bottled oxygen. The second one was a typed list of names with question marks and comments scribbled by hand next to them. Hugh Rix, she read. British. Aged 54, experienced. Bullshitter, though. Mark Mason, British, writer, 36. Moderately experienced. Dr Finch Buchanan. Canadian, ???? The message concluded, All will be revealed in time, mate. See you in Kathmandu. Ken. This was only slightly less uninteresting.

The rest of Al’s furniture consisted of a worn sofa and an unmatching armchair, a small shelf of books, mostly biographies and modern history, a round table and chairs, and a couple of lamps, one of them with a badly scorched shade. There was no television, no picture on the bare walls. It was the room of a man unconcerned with physical comfort and apparently indifferent to the reassurance provided by material possessions. It was cold. Molly knelt down on the stone hearth and tried to stir some life into the fire. A small flame licked up from a bed of ash.

‘Thanks, Moll,’ Al said when he came back with two mugs and a plate of toast and Marmite.

‘Haven’t you had dinner?’ Molly asked when they sat together on the sofa and she watched him devouring the food.

‘No. Had a couple of other things to do.’

She remonstrated, ‘Dad.’ As a response he took her foot that was curled underneath her and pulled it towards him. Affectionately he massaged it, kneading the arch and stretching the toes. They were both reminded of all the other separations, over the years, the times when Molly had begged him to stay with her and Al had protested, making light for her of the distance and the danger. It seemed as if there had always been another mountain, or an unclimbed line to attempt, or an expedition for him to lead. He would leave, and there would be the occasional crackling telephone call or scribbled letter, and the weeks would go by and at last he would reappear. Gaunt and weather-beaten, and apparently happy to be home. Then, almost within a week, he would be standing at the window, looking out at the sky, plotting his next departure.

Molly had loved him besottedly all through her childhood. Al was rich icing, balloons, celebrations. Jen was bread and butter, everyday, always there.

She sighed and withdrew her foot. The divorce had been grim, but she was old enough, now, to understand her mother’s reasons. She resumed her contemplation of the room, looking at the titles of the books, and the Mountain People’s letterhead sticking up from the fax tray and, something she hadn’t noticed before, a snapshot of herself Sellotaped to the wall beside the desk. She was sitting on a beach beside a lopsided sandcastle, aged maybe four or five, naked and with her hair matted in salty curls.

She didn’t visit her father up here very often. Tyn-y-Caeau was twenty miles from where she lived with Jen in Betws-y-Coed and Molly had only just learned to drive a car. But she had wanted to come tonight, to see Alyn and deliver her pointless entreaty. He would come over to say goodbye to Jen and her before he left, but those visits were never comfortable. No one ever said what they thought because – they all understood this now – saying things didn’t change any of them.

‘I love you, Dad,’ she said suddenly. Just in a straight voice, as if she were announcing what time it was, with no overlay of parodic sentimentality or swoop of melodrama to distance herself from the offering.

He looked at her and she saw two things.

One was the way he must appear to other people, women or clients or whatever, as a man. As someone you would trust with your life, because that was the responsibility he took. And the other was the way he looked at her, uniquely, because he was her father. These two were pulling in opposite directions, because the man you would trust with your life didn’t go with all the dues and small sacrifices that belonged to fathers and families.

It was the first time Molly had understood this clearly enough to be able to put it into words herself.

‘I love you too,’ he said.

It was the truth, of course, she knew. It was both too much and not enough for her. She had to bend her head to hide the tears in her eyes. Al didn’t see. He was watching the fire, seemingly.

‘And I don’t want you driving all the way home at this time of night. Call your mother and tell her you’re staying here with me.’

After a minute, Molly took the mobile phone he held out to her and prodded out the number. Jen answered at once and gave her response. With a precise finger Molly guided the phone’s little antenna back into its socket.

‘She wants the car back by nine tomorrow morning.’

‘Any other message?’

‘No.’

She drank the last of her tea, now gone cold.

‘I’ll sleep on here,’ Al told her, patting the sofa cushion. ‘You’d better get off to bed.’

When she was lying down, he went in to see her. She was curled on her side, with one hand flat under her cheek, just as she used to settle down when she was a little girl. He pulled the covers around her shoulders and touched her hair.

I am tucking her up, he thought. Just like … Only there hadn’t been all that many times, in her childhood. He had always been away.

‘Goodnight, Al.’

She didn’t often call him by his name.

‘Goodnight, baby.’

Nor did he call her that. She had never been a very babyish child.

Afterwards, he stood over the dying fire with his elbows resting on the mantelpiece and his head in his hands. My daughter is eighteen, he thought, all but. Grown up. Ready for whatever.

Silence seemed to stretch away from him, a great curve of it. It contained this house and the hillside, and the distance he had to travel, all the dimensions of it.

He thought of Spider, the memory catching him unawares as it often did and startling him with its vividness. His voice clearer than his face now, before the last trip to K2, all the years of expeditions fat with success or dim with failure, and the escapes and the drinking and the total reliance on one another that went with them. The absence of him no less punishing than it had been from the first day. And then, inevitably, came the thought of Finch Buchanan. He remembered her face.

Canadian, ???? Ken Kennedy had written. Meaning, I don’t know anything about her. Meaning, we’ll find out in the fullness of time and that will be soon enough. To Ken she was only a name on an expedition list, whereas to Al she was a reality, twisted up with Spider in the past and even with Jen. But no one else in the world except Finch herself knew that and Al wondered if after all this time even she remembered what had happened between them.

The snow’s blanket thickened the silence, once the wind had dropped. It cost Al an effort to move, to open cupboards in search of a blanket and so to break the immense, smooth ellipse of it.

Jen’s house was square, double-fronted grey stone with a purple slate roof. It stood back a little from the main road, with a short path of Victorian encaustic tiles leading to the front door. The next morning Al parked his old Audi outside the gate and followed Molly past the iron railings. The snow had melted overnight and passing traffic churned grey slush into the gutter.

Molly turned her key in the lock. ‘We’re back,’ she called.

‘Kitchen,’ Jen answered. They found her at the rear of the house in the wash-house beyond the kitchen itself. She was wearing yellow rubber gloves and loading sheets from a plastic laundry basket into an industrial-capacity washing machine. After the divorce Jen had bought this too-big house with a loan from her father and had set up a bed-and-breakfast business. Plenty of climbers and walkers and fishermen came to Betws-y-Coed, even in March.

‘Can I do anything?’ Al asked.

Her mouth curled, briefly. ‘No. I’ll just get this lot in.’

‘How’s business?’

‘Not bad for the time of year. Three last night. Full over the weekend.’

Jen was a good cook, and she also had the sense to keep the bedrooms well heated and to make sure there was plenty of hot water for her visitors. Al admired her success in this enterprise. While they had been married she had seemed smaller and less decisive. His activities had constrained her.

He reflected, not for the first time, that she was better off without him and he was touched by a finger of regret.

Molly had gone upstairs. Jen slammed the door of the washing machine, peeled off the gloves and twisted the control knob decisively. She still wore her wedding ring and the minute diamond, which was all he had been able to afford twenty years ago. ‘You want some coffee?’

They went into the kitchen. The front parlour was mostly used by the guests; this was where Molly and Jen lived. There was a sofa here draped in a Welsh tapestry, and corn dollies and carved spoons and local water-colours pinned to the walls, and a big television, and a Rayburn festooned with drying socks, and a row of potted plants and on every surface, objects: shells and jugs and framed photographs and bowls of pot pourri. She was letting her natural inclinations back into the light. When they had lived together, Al had thought they shared a taste for minimal living. They had gone in for plain white walls, bare wooden floors, exposed beams.

He skirted three bowls of cat food placed on a sheet of newspaper by the back door and sat down on the sofa next to the ginger tom. Jen heated coffee and gave it to him in a mug that said ‘Croeso i Cymru’. Al frowned at it. Jen had been born in Aberystwyth. Al’s family came from Liverpool and even though he had fallen in love with the mountains on a school trip at the age of twelve, and had lived in North Wales for twenty-five years, he still felt like an outsider.

‘Thanks for keeping her last night. I didn’t want her to go, in all of that, but she would have it.’

‘You don’t have to thank me for looking out for her.’

‘Don’t I? But it’s not the norm, is it?’

There it was. The old stab of resentment, still fresh as the morning’s milk.

‘I do love her, Jen.’

And you, although that’s all dead and gone.

‘In absentia,’ Jen said coldly.

His wife: short-haired, thin-framed, boyish; mouth tucked in in anger, the same as Molly’s. Now a separate person, busy with breakfasts and VAT, and – for all he knew – another man.

‘Don’t let’s do all this again.’

‘Oh, no. Don’t let’s. It might make you feel bad.’

Her fingers were wrapped around her coffee mug as if she needed to draw warmth from it. They listened in their separate silences to the unspoken words. He had been away too many times, for too long. He had taken too many risks.

She had never understood what drew him. To go back, to a new peak or a new line. One more time.

‘So,’ Jen said at last. ‘When do you actually leave?’

‘Tomorrow, probably. I’ve got a couple of things to do in London.’

‘Ah.’

‘Have you made up your mind about the extension?’

‘I think I’m going to go ahead with it.’

They talked about Jen’s plans to put two more bedrooms in the loft and about Molly’s A levels, and Al asked if she needed more money.

‘No. I’m doing all right, I don’t need anything else.’

Even if she did, she wouldn’t take it off him.

They didn’t talk about Everest. He finished his coffee and leaned forward to put the empty mug on the corner of the Rayburn. The oversized cushioned sofa, the piles of women’s magazines on a stool and the crowded ornaments made him think he was going to knock something over.

Jen went to the door and called out, ‘Molly? Your dad’s going.’ He stood up at once, kicking the stool so the magazines slid to the floor.

‘I’ve got to get to the cash and carry,’ she said, unseeingly heaping them into a pile again.

Molly came down the stairs. She went straight to Al and clung on, her arms around his waist and her head against his chest.

He lifted one springy curl and let it wind around his little finger. ‘Okay,’ he murmured.

‘I’ll miss you.’

‘I’ll be back soon, you know that.’

He kissed the top of her head and held her close.

‘Promise?’

‘In June.’

Reluctantly she disengaged herself, reminding him again of her much younger self. ‘Phone me.’

‘Of course.’

It was Jen who walked with him to the front door. Molly had always been tactful about allowing them their private farewells. Jen turned her cheek up, allowed him to kiss it, then opened the door. Her eyes didn’t quite meet his. ‘Good luck,’ she said. He nodded and walked swiftly away to his car.

Jen stood in the empty hallway. She walked five steps towards the kitchen and stopped, with the back of her hand pressed to her mouth. Then she swung round and ran back again, fumbling with the lock and pulling the door open so hard that it crashed on its hinges.

The step was slippery. Al had neatly closed the gate behind him. When she reached it she saw the Audi already 200 yards away. With her hands on the iron spears of the gate she called his name, but he was never going to hear. Within five seconds he was round the bend and out of sight.

Jen unclasped her hands. She wiped the wet palms on her jeans and walked slowly back into the kitchen. Molly was sitting on the sofa, her arms protectively around her knees, her eyes wide with alarm.

‘It was always waiting,’ Jen cried at her. ‘All I ever did was wait for him.’

Alyn drove westwards, towards Tyn-y-Caeau and the few last-minute arrangements that were still to be made before he flew to Nepal. For ten miles he sat with his shoulders stiff and his arms rigid, then he saw the bald head of Glyder Fawr against the gunmetal sky. He let his arms sag and he rounded his spine against the support of the seat to relieve the ache in his back.

He knew these mountains so well. Tryfan and Crib Goch and Snowdon. The Devil’s Kitchen and the Buttress, jagged black rock and scree slope. The sight and the thought of them never failed to promise liberation.

Al began to whistle. A low, tuneless note of anticipation. He was going to climb Everest. Once it was done, that would be the time to decide whether or not it had to be the last mountain. In the meantime there was a job to do, to take other people up there and bring them down safely. If Al had been given a choice, the thing he would have wished for above anything else, he would be doing it with Spider. Fast and light and free.

‘Yeah, we can do it,’ he heard Spider’s drawl in his head. ‘We can knock this one off, it’s only Everest.’

But Spider wasn’t here and this was now a job, the responsibility of it to be finely balanced against his own ambitions. He needed the money, just as he had told Molly. Everyone had to live and he wasn’t young enough any more to scrape by from hand to mouth, like in the old days. And thinking about it, setting it against the other possibilities, whether it might be selling local maps to tourists or helping Jen in her business or sitting in an office somewhere, Al knew that it was a job he was happy to do. Even proud to be doing.

He went on whistling as he drove.