Читать книгу White - Rosie Thomas - Страница 8

The Bell A-Star helicopter rattled along the river valley between the fir trees and rocked down to the landing pad beyond the lodges, as neatly as a foot slipping into a shoe. Finch’s eldest brother James stood at the window of the biggest lodge, watching the rotors darkening from a blur to whipping blades and then stopping altogether.

‘They’re back, Kitty,’ he remarked to his wife. She put aside her book, stood up and limped to join him at the window. One of her knees was tightly bandaged. The door of the chopper opened and the pilot jumped down, still wearing his helmet.

‘Ralf was flying.’

The man put out his hand and Finch took it as she emerged, shaking her head and laughing as she landed beside him. A second man wearing flying overalls scrambled out in her wake. He lifted two pairs of skis out of the basket mounted on the fuselage and handed them over in exchange for the pilot’s helmet. Then he climbed back into the machine. Once the couple were out of range the blades whirled into life again and the helicopter lifted and flew away.

Finch and Ralf came towards the lodge. His free arm was round her shoulders and she looked up into his face as they walked, and laughed again.

‘They look very happy,’ Kitty said. She raised her eyebrows smilingly at James.

‘They’re in love, aren’t they?’ James answered.

A minute later the door swept open and Finch and Ralf came in, bringing the outdoors scent of cold air. They were bright-eyed and rosy with the exhilaration of a day’s skiing, and they hopped and held on to each other as they eased off their ski boots and unzipped their outer clothes.

‘Tea’s here,’ James called from beside the log fire.

Finch came straight to Kitty. ‘How’s the knee? Have you been icing it, like I said?’

Kitty had fallen the previous day and twisted a ligament. James had stayed behind to keep her company, and Finch and Ralf had had the day and the helicopter with its pilot and the blue-white slopes of the Monashee mountains all to themselves. Kitty sat down with a little wince and hauled her leg up on to the sofa cushions for Finch to manipulate the swollen knee.

‘With a bag of frozen peas, just like you told me. Twenty minutes at a time. It’s much better.’

‘Good. Mm. I don’t think you’ve torn anything. But it might be worth getting an MRI scan, just the same.’

Ralf Hahn stood at Finch’s shoulder. The heli-ski operation was his and he had built it into a successful business catering for rich skiers from all over the world. He was Austrian, a big weather-beaten blond from Zell am See who had been skiing since he learned to walk. He and Finch had been lovers for nearly two years.

‘You are sure you are all right, Kitty? Frozen peas is all very well. But I can fly you down to the hospital, you know, twenty minutes only …’

Kitty laughed, basking in their concern. ‘What for? We’ve got the best doctor right here.’

‘Where?’ Finch demanded, looking around, protecting real modesty with an assumed version.

James put another log on the fire and they sat down in front of it. There was a basket of fresh-baked bread and three different kinds of cake; Ralf’s chef was well qualified and the lodge food was ambitious.

Finch stretched herself with pleasure and rested her feet in ski socks on the stone hearth. ‘The best moment of the day.’ She sighed.

‘Is that so?’ Ralf teased her.

‘Well, almost,’ she amended after a second. Kitty looked from one face to the other.

When tea was finished Ralf said he must spend an hour in his office. Finch walked between the lodges to his cabin. The light was fading and the fir trees were black cut-outs weighted with swathes of spring snow. The last helicopter, a big twelve-seater, had just brought in a cargo of skiers and their guides. They crossed to their rooms and the main lodge, calling out to each other and to Finch. Yellow lights were showing in the windows of the pretty log buildings.

In Ralf’s rooms Finch undressed and ran a bath. The place was almost as familiar as her own apartment down in Vancouver; she came up here to ski with Ralf as often as she could but this would be her last weekend of the season. In three days’ time she would fly to Kathmandu.

She lay back under the skin of hot water and thought about it, with a knot of nervous anticipation beneath her diaphragm.

She had never been to the Himalaya. Friends and climbers who had seen them warned her that she might be overwhelmed by the scale and the ferocity of the mountains. They were anxious for her, but because they knew her they were hardly surprised that she had chosen to start with Everest itself. For her own part Finch worried less about the climbing and the conditions than about her job as expedition doctor. If she just kept on upwards as far as she could go, she reasoned, that would be good enough. She thought she understood the fine, fascinating balance between barefaced risk and careful calculation that was at the heart of the best mountaineering. And she would never forget the triumph of reaching the top of McKinley, or any of the other peaks she had attempted. She had been expedition doctor on McKinley too and had felt the weight of that keenly, even though the worst emergency she had had to deal with was an abscessed molar. But on Everest they would be higher and further from help, and with less back-up, and the risks were infinitely greater.

If somebody fell. If there was an avalanche. If there was a case of sudden high-altitude cerebral oedema, coma and death … her responsibility to deal with it, quickly and correctly. With the limited medical resources at her disposal.

Finch stared at the silver breath of condensation on the bath taps. She knew that she was a competent doctor. She was interested in high-altitude medicine and had studied it for years. Eighteen months ago she had seen the details of the Mountain People’s expensive Everest expedition and the attached advertisement for an appropriately qualified doctor to accompany them, at a significantly reduced rate. When she flew down to Seattle to be interviewed by the expedition director, who had turned out to be the avuncular, laconic George Heywood, he had asked her in conclusion, ‘D’you think you can do it?’

‘Yes,’ she had answered, truthfully at that moment, meaning both the job and the climb.

‘So do I,’ he agreed.

She had got the job, and her name appeared on the expedition list and the climbing permit beneath those of the guides, Alyn Hood and Ken Kennedy.

Now she looked down at herself with critical attention. Her stomach was flat and taut with sheets of muscle, and her calves and thighs were firm from months of running and tough skiing. She worked out at a climbing gym for four hours every week so her arms and shoulders were strong too. She was fit enough, at least, for whatever lay ahead. She had made sure of that.

And this minute consideration of her body brought her obliquely to the last element of the conundrum: Alyn Hood.

Finch sat up so suddenly that a wave of water washed over the side of the bath. She climbed out quickly and attended to the mopping up, glad to have this focus for her attention. When the job was done she wrapped herself in a towel, wound another around her head, and walked through to the main room to stand by the window and look out into the dusk. She was still standing there, locked into her thoughts, when Ralf came in.

‘You are in the dark,’ he said, turning on a lamp and seeing her bare shoulders and the pale exposed skin of her neck.

‘I was thinking.’

He came to her and untucked the towel that covered her hair. He winnowed his fingers into the wet strands and kissed the droplets of water away from her shoulders. ‘About Everest?’

‘Yes.’

He wouldn’t say that he wished she weren’t going, because Ralf was too careful and generous for that. But she heard the words, just the same. Don’t go. Stay here with me and let me keep you safe. Logical and legible, secure.

Instead, he said, ‘Come to bed.’ He drew the curtains to shut out the dark and the trees and the glimmering snow, and unwrapped the second towel.

Lying in his arms, Finch closed her eyes and concentrated on making her body’s responses tip the scale against her mind’s. Ralf was a good lover and he was also a good man. She knew that he was ambitious, and hard-working and level-headed. On skis she followed his lead unhesitatingly, and elsewhere she valued his advice and opinions whenever he offered them. He spoke four languages and he made her laugh in the two she understood. In the most intimate moments, like this one, he whispered in German, tender endearments that she couldn’t decipher but which made the fine hairs rise at the nape of her neck. Ralf loved her, she knew that too.

For a thin, elastic shiver of time the scales balanced exactly, thought and unthinking. And then the body’s weight tipped them over. She exhaled a long breath that turned into a sigh. Ralf’s mouth moved against hers, and when the moment came she opened her eyes and looked into the hazed blueness of his, and although she knew him so well it was as if she were sharing her body with a stranger.

Afterwards, she lay with her head on his shoulder and his hand splayed over her hip. ‘We had a good day today, didn’t we?’ he murmured.

‘We did.’

Finch was a good skier, but she would never be as good as Ralf. He had taken her down through a steep gully with a line of trees sheltering within it. As they carved a path between the dark boles the colours of the world changed from blinding white and silver to black and graphite and pearl. Twigs cracked and laden branches shed a patter of snow as they ducked and jump-turned between them. Then the gully opened into a wide, sunlit ledge and there was a broad bowl full of unmarked, glittering snow. Way beneath them, where the slope ran out, the helicopter was already waiting.

They paused on the lip of the slope and then there was a sweet sssssccchhh as Ralf glided away. Finch watched the perfect linked Ss of his tracks. Ralf’s skiing always looked as if it cost him no physical effort whatsoever. Smiling, Finch flexed her knees and reached forward to plant her pole, unweighting and letting the edge of her ski carry her into a turn. Her tracks crossed and recrossed Ralf’s so the smooth arcs knitted into a chain of figure eights.

With the gathering speed whipping her cheeks she had given herself up to the rush and the rhythm. Powder crystals sprayed up and sparkled, catching the light like airborne diamonds. She was weightless, thoughtless, lost to everything but the snow and the slope. For now.

They reached the helicopter trailed by twin plumes of snow. Ralf planted his ski poles and slid forward to kiss her while they were still laughing with the exhilaration of the run.

‘We are a good match,’ he said now as he held on to her. She heard the vibration of his voice within the cage of his ribs and lay silent, listening. She said nothing, although he was waiting for her to agree with him.

Ralf slid away from her and walked naked into the kitchen. He came back with a bottle and two glasses, and she watched with her head back on the pillows as he twisted off the cork and poured froth and then champagne.

‘This is my send-off.’ She smiled. In the morning she would leave for Vancouver.

Ralf gave her a glass and lifted his to her. ‘Come back safely. And when you come back, will you marry me?’

Finch understood what today had been about. He had taken her out and shown her the beauty of the back country and the perfect skiing, and the helicopter waiting like a toy in the hollow of the mountains. Now there was the well-run resort with blazing fires and log cabins and champagne, and a fine dinner waiting.

All this, he could offer her all this freedom, with marriage and loyalty and habit wrapped up in it like a leg-iron hidden under the snow.

The injustice of the response shamed her into rapid words. ‘Ralf, thank you. I’m … only I can’t say yes.’

‘Does that mean you are not saying no?’

‘No. Yes … no, it doesn’t.’

‘Is it because of this voyage you are making, to Everest? If it is, tell me. I know that it must be harder to decide anything at all when you are going so far away.’

In the small silence that followed they lifted their glasses and drank, their movements unconsciously mimicking each other.

Carefully Finch began, ‘I have been very lucky all my life. You know that.’

He did know, of course. Ralf had met and liked all three of Finch’s older brothers, and their wives and children, and he had stayed with and been impressed by the Buchanan parents and their beautiful house in Vancouver. Finch’s was a remarkable, ambitious, wealthy family – held together by strong affection, as well as pride in their separate and mutual achievements. His own background could not have been more different and this solidity that Finch questioned was just one of the things he found attractive about her.

‘It sounds ungrateful, spoiled, to say that there can be too much ease. But it is what I feel. I have had it easy in the world, but climbing mountains scrapes away all the layers of expectation and assumption. It’s a challenge separate from the rest of my life.’

‘And separate from me.’

‘Yes, that’s true.’ She knew that she owed him the truth. At least a portion of it, the one she freely admitted to herself. ‘I know that it’s selfish, but it’s something that I need to do. I don’t find the same fixed determination or absolute satisfaction in anything else.’

Ralf inclined his head and she studied the sharp line of sun- and windburn on his cheekbones. They had discussed all this before. Finch had never been able to make him understand the force that impelled her to climb and tonight her urgency had made her speak too forcibly. She knew that she had hurt him, and she was sad and ashamed.

‘I understand,’ he said at length. He reached out to the champagne bottle and refilled their glasses. ‘Come back safely,’ he said, and he drank again.

‘I will,’ Finch promised, believing that she would and also understanding how much she would have to live through before that could happen. The knot of anticipation tightened again in her chest.

They finished the champagne as they dressed for dinner, then they went to the lodge dining-room and Ralf moved sociably around the tables and talked to the guests. After dinner he went to his daily meeting with the ski guides and the pilots, and Finch walked back to their cabin with James, and Kitty leaning on a stick. James was tired and went straight into the bedroom while the women wandered out on to the deck. It was a clear night, bright with stars.

With the end of her stick Kitty nudged a wooden lid to one side and a turquoise eye opened to the sky in a column of steam. ‘Hot tub?’ she asked.

‘Yes, definitely,’ Finch agreed.

Kitty pressed the button and the water boiled with bubbles. They discarded their clothes with little exclamations at the freezing air on their skin, then slid into the pine-scented heat. They sat back, submerged to their chins and sighing with satisfaction.

After a minute Kitty asked meaningfully. ‘So?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You know what I mean.’ Kitty was the family news-gatherer and lieutenant to Finch’s mother in the battle to persuade Finch to commit herself.

‘Okay. Ralf asked me to marry him. I said no.’

Kitty groaned. ‘Finch! Why not?’

‘I’m not in love with him.’

‘You gave a good impression of it. I thought you were nuts about him.’

‘No. Not nuts enough, evidently.’

Kitty tucked a tendril of damp hair into the knot on top of her head. ‘You could have all of this. All the things you like best, with a guy who adores you.’

‘Perverse, aren’t I?’

She wondered if James and Kitty had embarked on their partnership because they saw each other as offering all the things they liked best. There was no note of envy in Kitty’s all this, either. James was a successful investment analyst and well able to provide for his family. They even had two-year-old twin girls, who were staying for the weekend with one of their pairs of adoring grandparents. All three of Finch’s brothers were notably successful. Marcus, the eldest, was an architect like his distinguished father and Caleb, the youngest, was a marine ecologist and film maker. His most recent film, about the pygmy sea-horse, had sold around the world. All three were married, with good-looking wives and attractive children.

Finch raised one knee out of the bubbles. The air was bitterly cold and she hastily submerged it again.

No wonder her family thought she was different, difficult. But surely it was less of a contradiction than it seemed, to reject all the things you like best? By which, she supposed, Kitty meant mountains and unlimited skiing, and probable financial ease, and a man who loved her and didn’t threaten her.

Because by settling for them, and no more, you chose an ordinary life.

She was fearful of what might lie ahead of her out in Nepal. But she also tasted the fear with the savour of anticipation.

Kitty rolled her head against the pine walls of the tub. ‘Poor Ralf. Was he devastated?’

Finch considered. On the whole Ralf didn’t go in for devastation. ‘No.’

‘But he does love you, you know.’

‘Yes.’

Finch had been in love only once in her life and it was not with Ralf.

‘How does your knee feel?’

‘Don’t evade the issue with doctoring.’

‘I wouldn’t dream.’

Kitty laughed and reached out to touch Finch on the arm. ‘We all want you to be happy.’ All of us, the Buchanan clan.

‘I am happy,’ Finch said softly.

After Kitty had clambered out of the tub she sat for a few minutes alone, looking up and searching for the stars through the drifting curtain of steam.

The next afternoon Ralf flew the three of them in the helicopter down to Kamloops for their return flight to Vancouver. He walked with Finch to the departure gate, and when the flight was boarding James and Kitty tactfully went on ahead.

‘You know where I am.’

Finch hesitated, ashamed to find that at this last minute she was tempted to retract everything she had said in exchange for the promise of comfort and security. Ralf was large and strong and, in retrospect, reassuring. She squeezed down hard on the impulse. ‘Of course I do.’

He kissed her – not on the mouth but on the cheek, as affectionately as if he were James. ‘And call me, when you can.’

‘Of course I will.’

It was finished, both of them knew it.

Isn’t this what you wanted? Finch’s interior voice enquired impatiently.

He stood back to let her walk away. She turned round once to look at him, lifted her hand, then marched forward.

She took her seat in front of Kitty and James. Kitty made a small sad face, turning down the corners of her mouth, and James nodded calmly. The place next to Finch was empty and as the little plane climbed and disconcertingly rocked through the layers of cloud she thought about the man who had made himself her neighbour on the way up from Oregon. My wife is a nervous flier, he had said presumptuously. She had forgotten his name.

Breathing as evenly as she could, Finch rested her head against the seat back. This time the day after tomorrow she would be airborne again. All her expedition kit was double-checked, packed, labelled, waiting in her tidy apartment. The medical supplies she had ordered with George Heywood’s authorisation were already with the main body of expedition stores in Kathmandu. There remained only two more days and dinner with her family to negotiate.

‘Everything looks fine,’ Finch told her last patient of the day, as she peeled off her gloves. They chatted while the woman dressed and agreed that they would continue with the hormone replacement therapy for a further twelve months. A routine consultation, at the end of a routine afternoon surgery. At the door, the woman asked her, ‘When will you be back?’

‘Three months, give or take.’ Finch smiled. The knot under her diaphragm was so tight now that it threatened to impede her breathing. ‘Anything you need in that time, Dr Frame will be here to look after you, of course.’

‘Good luck,’ her patient said and Finch thanked her warmly.

She went to the bathroom and took a quick shower, then changed into a dark-blue dress with a deep V-front. She put on earrings and made up her face. It was time for her farewell dinner with the family. Marcus and Tanya would be there as well as James and Kitty, and to complete the party Caleb and Jessica were flying all the way up from San Diego where Caleb was working on a film about mother whales.

Finch locked up the surgery and drove herself to the North Vancouver shore, to the house in which Angus and Clare Buchanan had brought up their children. She parked her Honda in the driveway behind Marcus’s Lexus and let herself in through the back door. There was no front door, as such. The long, low, two-storey house had been designed for his family by Angus himself. The bedrooms and bathrooms and Angus’s study were on the lower level, and a dramatic open stairway led to the upper floor. Almost the whole of this space was taken up by one huge room with a wall of glass looking over a rocky inlet and southwards across a great sweep of water and sky towards Victoria. This early evening the room seemed to melt into an expanse of filmy cloud and sea spray.

Finch’s parents and James and Marcus and their wives were sitting with their drinks in an encampment of modern furniture near the middle of the room. Angus and Clare collected primitive art, and their native American figure carvings and huge painted masks from Papua New Guinea seemed to diminish the living occupants of the room. When Finch was small, the mask faces regularly appeared in her dreams.

‘Darling,’ Clare said in delight. ‘How pretty you look. Doesn’t she, Angus?’

It had always been her way to insist on her daughter’s prettiness. While she was still young enough to be docile, Clare had dressed her in floral blouses and tucked pinafores until Finch had clamoured for dungarees and plaid shirts like her brothers’.

‘But you were my only girl, darling, after three huge boys,’ Clare always protested to her recriminatory adolescent daughter. ‘Can you blame me for being mad for you in pink ribbons?’

There was never any blaming Clare for anything. She had been a devoted and loyal mother, a serious cook and gardener, a recreational painter and an assiduous PR for her husband’s business. She was small-boned and porcelain-skinned, and utterly intractable.

‘She does,’ her husband agreed. He kissed Finch on the top of her head. ‘Hello, Bunny.’ He always called her Bunny.

Bunny Wunnikins, Suzy would have mouthed, jabbing two fingers towards the back of her throat and rolling her eyes in disgust. Jesus, your family is just too much.

Angus was very tall and, in his early seventies, still handsome. His sons all resembled him. Finch had inherited her mother’s dark colouring, but not her petite build. She moved round, now, to her brothers and their wives and kissed them all, and took the glass of Chardonnay her father poured for her.

‘Good luck to you and God bless,’ Angus started to toast her, but Clare cut in.

‘Oh darling, wait until Caleb and Jessica get here for the speech, won’t you? I so want everything to be right tonight. It’s the last time we’ll all be together for … for …’ Her eyes went misty.

Suzy would have groaned – fucking speeches. We all love you so much. Christ! And Finch would have answered: It’s okay for you. You’re from a broken home.

Aloud, she said, ‘I’m going to be away – doing something I really want – for three months, tops. There’s no need to be sad about it, you know.’

Tanya pulled down the hem of her skirt to cover more of her legs. Everyone heard Caleb arriving and slamming the downstairs door.

‘Here they are.’

‘How wonderful it is to have all the family together.’

‘Let me get the glasses.’

‘So, Finch-bird. All ready for the off?’

The youngest brother and his wife appeared, straight from the airport. Their six-year-old was with Jessica’s sister and Jessica carried the sleepy two-year-old in her arms. Jessica was the best-looking of the three wives. She had worked as a catwalk model in her twenties and before motherhood she had had a brief film career, now on hold, as she put it.

‘Here at last.’

‘Sorry we’re late, guys. Stacked, would you believe? Hi, Mommy. You look great.’

‘Can I make him up a little drink, Clare? If I read him a story he might just settle. He wouldn’t sleep on the flight, or I’d let him stay up with his gran …’

‘Give me a kiss. There.’

‘Do you want to put him down here, with his head on this cushion, darling? Or straight into bed downstairs? Hello, sweet. Are you Granny’s boy?’

They’ve made the effort to come tonight, to give me a send-off, Finch reflected. It’s important for us, the way that birthdays and Christmases are in this family. It isn’t their fault that I would rather have slipped away quietly and held the reunion after I’ve done something worth remarking on instead of just having talked too much about it in advance.

On the other side of the sofa arrangement Angus had launched into his speech. ‘… and so God bless you, Finch, and keep you safe,’ he determinedly finished.

Everybody else made a show of raising their glasses and murmuring appropriately.

‘Wish I was going.’ Caleb grinned.

Caleb, the closest to her who now lived the furthest away, had always been her favourite brother. She put her arm round him and pulled gently at his hair. ‘You go to enough exotic places. It’s definitely my turn.’

Later, loosened up by the wine, they sat down to eat. The limed oak table made another small island in the big space. There was Scandinavian cutlery, and Italian glassware and French china, and outside the lights strung along the shoreline fractured the dark space of wind and water. As a little girl, Finch had always felt the stark contrast between the order and luxury within and the wilderness just inches beyond the glass. It had never felt like a comfortable house, for all its comforts. She was also aware that none of the others felt the same as she did. They all loved the family home. Marcus had even built himself one not dissimilar, a little further up the coast.

Over the compote of winter fruits, Marcus wondered what the next family celebration would be. ‘When shall we nine all meet again?’ he said jovially.

‘Finch’s engagement party, I hope,’ Clare said.

Finch put down her spoon. It made a clatter that she hadn’t intended. ‘Oh, please.’

‘I can wish to see my one girl safely married to a man who will make her happy, can’t I?’

From a glance at their faces, Finch realised that Kitty had told Clare about her turning down Ralf. And Clare was smiling to mask her disappointment, but couldn’t resist an oblique mention of it. The conversation at the opposite end of the table faded away and everyone listened uneasily.

‘It isn’t what I want,’ Finch snapped.

In the silence that followed she could have kicked herself for her touchiness, tonight of all nights. She should just have smiled and let it pass.

Suzy would have advised: Say nothing, you dope. It’s way easier. Don’t you ever learn?

Caleb put his hand over his sister’s. ‘Hey. Lighten up.’

Finch collected herself. ‘I’m sorry. Really, I’m sorry. I know what you want for me and why you want it. I’m so pleased that we’re all together tonight. And seeing you all … maybe it makes me feel I should be settling down.’

There was a little chorus of disbelief. After she qualified Finch had worked for a year in Asia and had travelled like a nomad. And once she had come back to live in Vancouver there had been the regular mountaineering expeditions. Except for Clare, they accepted that that was the way Finch lived.

Angus said, ‘We all liked Ralf, you know. We’d have been glad if you had chosen him, but as you didn’t – well, that’s fine too.’

From down the table Kitty silently signalled her apology to Finch for unleashing all this.

‘You’ve got plenty of time, darling,’ Clare said. ‘You go and climb Everest …’

‘I’m not going all the way. I’m only supporting the serious mountaineers.’

‘Do you think we believe that?’ Caleb laughed.

‘… and then come home. And after that, maybe you’ll be ready.’

Suzy: For the serious business of life.

And Finch thought she heard her friend saying that straight.

Maybe, she silently rejoined. Maybe I can only find that out by going.

There was, after all, some buried instinct stirring in her, making her dream at the deepest level of something that the rest of her life appeared to deny. If there had not been, then she would not have chosen to join this expedition, this particular one of so many.

‘Who is taking you to the airport tomorrow?’ Angus was asking. ‘Your mother and I would like to, you know that.’

‘Dennis is,’ Finch said firmly. ‘We will have some last-minute things to settle. Patients, management, bits of business.’

Dennis Frame was Finch’s medical partner. She had known him since high school and after Suzy he was her closest friend.

‘I was, in fact, the very last child in the world to be named Dennis,’ he said, but he refused to answer to Den or Denny. He was tolerant, slightly introspective, and gay. Finch greatly admired him. With the help of two other physicians, he would look after Finch’s patients in her absence.

The evening was coming to an end. Caleb’s and Jessy’s son had slept through the dinner but now he had woken up and was starting to cry. Tanya said she had an early start in the morning and James was flying to Toronto. They moved from their seats and crossed the spaces of the room to embrace and exchange the shorthand assurances of families. Write. Phone. All the news. Mail me.

This was Finch’s matrix. She felt restricted by it when it was tight around her, like tonight, but she knew when she stood back she would see the firm knitted strands of it and value it in theory.

All eight of them came out to the driveway to wave her off. The air smelled of rain and salt.

‘I shouldn’t have said anything. Will you forgive me?’ Kitty whispered.

‘I’m pleased you did. It saved me having to bring it up.’

Each of the boys hugged her and warned her to be careful. Their concern made her feel like the little girl again, trying to demonstrate that she could run as far and jump as high as they could.

Tanya and Jessica kissed her, wishing her luck in clear incomprehension of why she would want to go at all.

Clare and Angus took her hands and wrapped her in their arms, and tried not to repeat all the things they had said already.

At last, Finch climbed into her car. Her family stood solid against the yellow lights of the house, waving her off. She drove back to the city, to the apartment that already seemed unaired and deserted. There were a few books, some cushions and candles that had mostly been given to her as presents, but otherwise the rooms were almost featureless, as if she were just staying a night or two on her way to somewhere else. Finch didn’t want to copy the grand architectural effects of her parents’ home, and if she had given her own taste free rein she would probably have cosied her rooms with knitted afghans and pot plants and patchwork quilts. She left them altogether unadorned for simplicity’s sake.

It was after midnight. She stepped past the neat pyramid of her expedition baggage and stopped with her back to the hallway. Her shoulders drooped and she pushed out her clenched fists in a long cat-stretch of relief and abandonment. The boats were burned, completely incinerated, and she was actually going.

She had a job to do, a team to fit in with and the biggest challenge of her life waiting to be met. Now that it was happening she felt relieved and ready for it. What would come, would come. She clicked off the lights and went into her bedroom.

Sam sat at his computer in his apartment in Seattle. It was late, gone midnight, and the enclosing pool of light from his desk lamp and the broad darkness beyond it heightened his sense of isolation. From beyond the window he could just hear the city night sounds – a distant police or ambulance siren and the steady beat of rain. A humdrum March evening, seeming to contain his whole life in its lustreless boundaries.

He tapped the keys and gave a sniff of satisfaction as the links led him to the site he was searching for. He tapped again and leaned back to wait for the information to download. The teeming other-world of netborne data no longer fascinated him as it had once done. And as he stared at the screen he asked himself bleakly, what does interest you, truly and deeply? Name one thing. Was it this he was searching the Net for?

An hour ago Frannie had come to look in on him, standing in the doorway in her kimono with her fingers knitted around a cup of herbal tea. ‘Are you coming to bed?’

He had glanced at her over the monitor. ‘Not yet.’

She had shrugged and drifted away.

The website home page was titled ‘The Mountain People’, the logo outlined against a snow peak and a blazing blue sky. Quite well designed, he noted automatically, and clicked on one of the options, ‘Everest and Himalaya’. And there, within a minute, it was. Details of the imminent Everest expedition. Sam scrolled more impatiently now. There were pictures of previous years’ teams, smiling faces and Sherpas in padded jackets. Then individual mugshots of the expedition director and his Base Camp manager, and two tough-looking men posing on mountains with racks of climbing hardware cinched round their waists and ice axes in their hands. This year’s guides, he noted, accompanied by impressive accounts of their previous experience that he didn’t bother to read.

Here. Here was what he was searching for.

Dr Finch Buchanan, medical officer and climber.

Her picture had been taken against a plain blue background, not some conquered peak. She was wearing a white shirt that showed a V of suntanned throat and she was looking slightly aside from the camera, straight-faced and pensive. She was thirty-two, an expert skier and regular mountaineer. She had trained at UBC, worked in Baluchistan for UNESCO, now lived in Vancouver where she was a general medical practitioner. Previous experience included ascents of Aconcagua in Argentina and McKinley, where she had also been medical officer. In the course of her climbing career she had developed a strong interest in high-altitude medicine.

That was all. Sam read and reread the brief details, as if the extra attention might extract some more subtle and satisfying information. He even touched the tip of his finger to the screen, to the strands of dark hair, but encountered only the glass, faintly gritty with dust. The dates of the trip blinked at him, with the invitation to follow the progress of the climb over the following weeks via daily reports and regular updates from Base Camp. She must already be on her way to Nepal, Sam calculated.

There had been a total of perhaps five hours from the moment she had blown with the storm into one airport, then disappeared into the press of another. He had been thinking about her for another fifty. Sam swivelled in his chair, eyeing the over-familiar clutter on his desk and trying to reason why. Not just because of the way she looked, or her cool manner, or the glimpse of her vulnerability in her fear of flying, although all of these had played their part. It was more that there had been a sense of purpose about her. He saw it and envied it. She looked through him to a bigger view and the vista put light in her face and tightened the strings that held her body together. The effect wasn’t just to do with sex, although it was also the sexiest encounter he had ever had with a total stranger.

Sam sighed. Everything about Finch Buchanan was the opposite of the way he felt about himself. His life seemed to have narrowed and lost its force, and finally dried out like a stream in a drought. Work yawned around him with its diminishing satisfactions. His father was disappointed in him and vice versa. The energy and effort he had put into competitive running now seemed futile. And the woman he shared his life with was asleep in another room, separate from him, and he couldn’t even make himself care properly about that.

I wish I were going to Everest too, he thought.

The wildness of the idea even made him smile.

And then it was so unthinkable that he let himself think about it.

The climbing he had done as a child with Michael had frightened him. He knew his father had pushed him too hard; the terror still sometimes surfaced in his dreams. And yet this woman did it and it – or something related to it – gave her a force field that sucked him towards her. He was drawn closer and now the fear had transferred from himself to Finch. Even before she vanished at Vancouver airport, even as he sat down beside her on the plane, he had known he would find her again. He had imagined that he would wait until she came back, then track her down in Vancouver. But the aridity of his life made a sudden desert flower of an idea swell and burst into iridescent colour in his mind. He didn’t have to wait for her to come back. He had been prescient enough to ask where she was staying.

He could go out there.

Maybe just by being close enough inside her orbit he could make sure that she was safe.

Ever the optimist, McGrath, he thought. The woman’s a serious mountaineer and you flunked out of it at the age of fourteen. And you still imagine you can look after her? She’ll just think you’re some weird stalker.

He’d have to deal with that. Optimism was good; it was too long since he had felt it about anything. Seize the moment.

Sam sat for a few more minutes in front of his screen, reading the rest of the Mountain People’s seductive sell.

When he slipped into their bedroom he found to his surprise that Frannie was still awake, propped up on her side of the bed reading a gardening book. The angle of a fire escape outside a city apartment wasn’t enough growing space for her. She wanted a house and a garden for her plants, and Sam couldn’t blame her for that. He sat down beside her on the edge of the bed and she lowered the book to look at him.

‘Working?’

‘Yeah.’ He undid the laces of his sneakers and eased them off his feet, then unbuttoned the cuffs of his shirt. Frannie lay back, watching him, waiting for him to climb in beside her. They had lived together for three years, and the sediment of their joint existence was spread around them on the shelves and in the drawers. A blanket from Mexico, their last holiday together, covered the bed. There were invitations in their joint names on the dresser. Even in the fluff of pocket linings and trouser turn-ups there would be the forensic evidence of their inter-related lives: sand from walks on the beach; dust from cinemas; carpet fibres from the homes of their shared friends. The extent of their separation within this unit was too apparent to Sam.

‘Switch the light off,’ Frannie murmured as he lay down. She turned on her side to face him and her breath warmed his face as she slid closer. ‘Mm?’

Sam lay still, contemplating the redoubt of betrayal.

‘What’s wrong?’ she whispered.

He lifted his weighty hand and rested it on the naked curve of her hip where the T-shirt she wore in bed had ridden up.

‘I don’t know,’ he lied. Could you say, I feel trapped by this life, I don’t want to stay here, you deserve a man who will treat you better than I do? How did you do that, instead of making love like he proceeded to do now, with a flare of guilty optimism battened down inside you?

Afterwards Frannie fell asleep with her back curved against his belly and Sam lay awake, thinking out how he would make the next moves and trying to plan the gentlest words he could use to tell her.

Frannie was a teacher and always woke up early to prepare properly for the day at school. When her alarm went off at 6.50 a.m. she got out of bed at once, and padded around between bed and bathroom while Sam lay with the covers hiding his head. He heard her taking a shower, rummaging for clothes, peering in the mirror while she applied a slick of mascara. When she went into the kitchen to make coffee he sat up abruptly and followed her.

‘Toast?’ she asked, with a knife slicing the air. They didn’t usually have breakfast together. Evenings were their time, when they drank wine and talked and collaborated over the cooking. Or used to.

‘Just coffee.’

He sat at the table, looking into the cup. ‘Fran. I want to go away for a bit.’

As soon as the words were out he knew she had been anticipating, probably fearing them. The tension of it had been in the air between them. Her face creased now and her mouth drew in sharply. ‘Where to?’

‘I want to go … to Nepal. Maybe to see Everest.’

She gazed at him. ‘Oh, of course. When?’

‘Now. I suppose.’

Fran shook her head. There were red marks like thumbprints on each cheekbone. ‘Why?’

Because I need to get away from here? Because my work isn’t satisfying and because I can’t run as fast as I want to, and because you and I don’t make each other happy? Because I’ve just been to see my father and we can’t talk to each other, and I know I have disappointed him? Or just because I saw a woman at an airport and thought, I want her?

Sam mumbled, ‘I can’t tell you why. I want to go because I had the idea.’ This was cowardly. But would the truth be kinder?

There were tears in Frannie’s eyes but she stood up and turned away. She rinsed her breakfast plate, an angry plume of water splashing up from the sink. ‘You always do what you want.’

He was surprised at that. Sam generally felt that he spent his life approximately conforming to what other people wanted – clients, friends, Frannie. Maybe as an ineffectual compensation for not doing it for Michael. He had been feeling ineffectual for too long. ‘Do I?’

‘Yes.’ She began to shout at him. ‘You keep it quiet, but you do. And you evade everything you don’t want to do. You’re never full on. It’s like you’re always looking out of the window at some view the rest of us can’t see. I hate it.’

‘I’m sorry, Fran.’ His inability to please her was just part of the scratchy disorder that his life had become. He was profoundly tired of it, he knew that much. His resolve hardened.

She flung some cutlery into the sink. ‘What happens if I’m not here when you come back?’

Their eyes met.

‘I will have to deal with that when it happens.’

There was a silence. Through the wall hummed their neighbour’s choice of morning radio programme.

Fran jerked away from the sink. ‘I’ve got to get to school. We’ll have to talk later.’

‘It isn’t a whim,’ he said quietly.

‘I don’t care what it is,’ Frannie shouted.

After she had gone Sam walked to his desk. His jacket was creased on the back of his chair, where he had shrugged it off last night. He picked it up and absently smoothed the lapels.

He had to get to work too, to a meeting with a travel agent who wanted a website to sell last-minute budget ski packages.

Go, Sam advised himself. Maybe the reasons for it were shaky, but he couldn’t come up with a single one against going.