White
BY ROSIE THOMAS

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in the United Kingdom in 2000 by William Heinemann

Copyright © Rosie Thomas 2000

Cover design © HarperCollins Publishers 2014

Cover images © Shutterstock.com

Rosie Thomas asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © FEB 2014 ISBN: 9780007560530

Version: 2018-06-20

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by Rosie Thomas

About the Publisher

One

So many weddings, Finch Buchanan thought.

Weddings under awnings in summer gardens. Weddings in Toronto or New York, out on the coast, in white-walled Presbyterian churches, in flower-decorated homes or smart hotels. One at a ski lodge up in the Cariboo mountains and another at sunset on a Caribbean beach. Long-planned or recklessly impromptu, wherever or however they happened they all seemed the same and this one was no different. Except more so.

This time it was her dearest friend Finch was watching, standing beside an urn of white lilies and stephanotis, and shape-changing from Suzy Shepherd into Mrs Jeffery Sutton of Medford, Oregon. Suzy was about the last of their group to be married, except for Finch herself.

The bride was wearing an ivory satin Donna Karan suit and the groom had been coaxed into navy-blue Armani. As bridesmaid, Finch was wearing a little suit too, hyacinth-blue, of a cut that made her stand with her ankles together and her hands meekly clasped.

I’m too old to be got up as a fucking bridesmaid, she was thinking.

Suzy and Finch were both thirty-two years old. They had been room-mates in their first year at med school at the University of British Columbia and they had gone all the way through training together. Now Suzy was in paediatrics and had moved down to Oregon to be with Jeff, while Finch had stayed on in Vancouver as a medical practitioner. They called each other often, and e-mailed gossip and jokes and medical titbits almost every day, and they met whenever they could. But still Finch missed her friend and ally, and Suzy’s marriage could only move her a further step out of reach.

They were exchanging rings. Watching and blinking away embarrassing tears, Finch was in no doubt that the two of them were happy. They were woozy with it, as dopey as a pair of Suzy’s neonates after a six-ounce feed. Finch didn’t feel envious, exactly; what she did feel was faintly baffled. She had never worked out the secret of connubiality herself. There had been men, of course there had. Both short-term and longer. But lately, not that many.

The short civil ceremony was over. Suzy and Jeff walked arm in arm between the rows of their beaming friends and out under an awning. Beyond it the March rain was ribbed with sleet. A photographer busied around with his Nikon.

After she had kissed her mother and her aunts and her new in-laws, Suzy opened an umbrella to exclude the rest of the audience and whispered to Finch, ‘Jesus, did you see that? I did it. I married someone.’

‘You married Jeff.’

‘Yeah. I love him.’

‘I know you do.’

Suzy laughed, showing the gap between her top front teeth. She didn’t come from orthodontically obsessive stock, which was one of the reasons why Finch had loved her right from the start – for her difference from and indifference to everything Finch herself was accustomed to and thought she valued. The first time they met, Suzy marched into their room on campus, dropped a duffel bag and an armful of supermarket carriers, and eyed the matching luggage and K2 ski bags that two of Finch’s three older brothers had carried up the stairs for her.

‘I suppose you’re some Vancouver princess?’

‘You can suppose whatever you like.’

‘Well, I’m po’ white trash. My mom lives in a rented two-room and I haven’t seen my dad for twelve years.’

It was true. And it was also true that Suzy was by far the cleverest student in their year.

She twirled her umbrella now, sending icy droplets centrifugally spinning. ‘Shit, I’m a married woman. You better lead me straight to the drink, help me get over the shock,’ Mrs Jeffery Sutton said.

The reception was in a new restaurant and bar that had been designed and fitted by Jeff’s company. ‘Like it?’ he asked Finch.

There were snug booths and wood floors and tricksy mirrors and halogen lighting. It wasn’t original but it was well done.

‘Very much,’ Finch said.

‘Well, I guess you don’t need me to introduce you to people,’ Jeff said. His silk tie was already loosened and his top button undone.

‘No.’ Finch smiled. Most of Suzy’s friends who had travelled to Oregon were hers too. ‘Go on, enjoy the party.’

She slid into the nearest booth with her glass of French champagne and found that Taylor Buckaby and his wife were already sitting there. Taylor had dated Suzy for a while, in the very early days, but in the end he had settled for the secretary to the Dean of Faculty who was a svelte blonde. She was a plump blonde now, but otherwise nothing had changed. Taylor was an orthopaedic surgeon. Finch could imagine just how happy he would be among his bone saws and glinting titanium joints.

‘Hello, Taylor, Maddie.’

‘Ah, Finch. Hello there.’

They chatted for a while, about friends and work and the Buckabys’ children.

‘No plans to settle down yourself, Finch?’ Maddie asked.

‘No, none.’

‘Finch goes in for bigger challenges than a husband and kids,’ Taylor explained jovially, puffing out his already rounded cheeks. ‘Last year she went up to Alaska and climbed McKinley.’

Maddie focused her pale-blue eyes. She looked as if she was used to putting away plenty of champagne, or whatever else might be going.

‘Why?’

There were a couple of beats of silence while Finch considered her answer. It was not quite the first time she had heard the question, it was just unusual to encounter such dazed incredulity in the asking. She remembered the temperatures on the mountain of forty below, and the avalanching ice, and the risk of cerebral or pulmonary oedema, and the blade-thin ridge that ran up from 16,000 feet with a drop of 2000 feet on either side of it.

‘Uh …’

She also remembered the easy comradeship and the gallows humour of the group of climbers she had done it with – only by the West Buttress route, ‘The Butt’, nothing fancy. Most sharply of all she recalled the hit of euphoria that had wiped everything else from her mind as she hauled herself to the summit.

‘Because I thought I would enjoy it,’ she said equably. ‘And I did.’

Maddie blinked and ran her tongue over her lipstick. ‘Each to her own, I guess.’

The dancing was starting up. Jeff and Suzy began by spinning slow circles in each other’s arms, to cheers and clapping. Finch sat with the Buckabys for five more minutes, so as not to look as if she wanted to get away from them, then eased herself out of the booth. She ate some sushi from the buffet and had a half-dozen more conversations with people she was pleased to see. After that she danced with Jeff, until Jeff’s father cut in on them. Jim Sutton was a spry seventy-year-old with hands like snow shovels and a seamed brown face from a lifetime’s work in the construction industry. Jeff and Suzy shared the distinction of having travelled a long way from their backgrounds without feeling the need to shake off any of the ties.

Jim did an enthusiastic lindy-hop that left Finch panting for breath. ‘You’re too much for me,’ she protested.

‘C’mon, doc. Gimme one more.’

Finch could see that it was past 6 p.m. and she had a plane to catch. Dennis Frame, her medical partner, was covering her busy clinics for her and she had already taken three days off.

‘Next time.’ She grinned. ‘If I’m lucky.’

She went in search of Suzy and found her in one of the back booths. She had dribbled what looked like mayo down one Donna lapel and seemed set in for a serious night.

‘Hey, you got out of Jim’s clutches with one leap.’

‘Baby, I’ve got to go.’

Suzy frowned. ‘It’s so early. Don’t miss my party.’ It was a routine protest, however. As soon as she had promised to come to the wedding, Finch had warned her that she couldn’t stay long afterwards because she had to work the next day. And Suzy knew of old how exasperatingly rigid her friend could be about time and her professional responsibilities. They were different, but they understood each other and their friendship had rarely faltered.

Finch said, ‘I know, I know. But I’ve got clinics tomorrow, remember? For Dennis’s sake I can’t take too many more days off before the expedition.’

Suzy launched herself out of the booth and locked her arms around her friend. Her face turned serious at the last word.

‘Listen. I want you to take care. I want you to be safe and to come back down from there in one piece. Who’ll be Sutton Junior’s godmother, if you’re not around?’

‘Suze. You’re not?’

Suzy winked. ‘Not quite yet. But I’m planning on it.’

‘Well. That’s great. And I’ll be fine. I’m only the expedition doctor, remember, dosing the d and v, not one of the summit glory boys.’

‘Okay, just so long as you remember that. C’mon, I’ll see you off.’

They weaved their way in and out of the crowd. Suzy stopped short and peeled away towards the bar. ‘Hey, almost forgot.’

She leaned over behind the counter, exposing the tops of her tanned thighs. Jeff caught her and ran his hands over her hips until Suzy straightened up with what she had been searching for grasped in one hand. ‘Later,’ she admonished him. And she held out her bridal bouquet and stuffed it firmly into Finch’s arms.

‘Not me,’ Finch protested. ‘Find someone more deserving. Someone eager for a husband.’

‘There is no one else, kid. You are the last remaining authentic unmarried woman. Pretty soon they’re going to slap a heritage order on you.’

‘You just want me to join the club. You want me to get married because you’ve gone and done it.’

Suzy smiled, a lovely hazy smile of pure happiness and contentment. ‘Sure I do.’

‘Forget it, pal.’

They eased their way through the crowd to the door. The party was hotting up, in the way that weddings could do.

‘Finch has got to fly home up to Vancouver tonight,’ Suzy explained to the last group.

‘Weather’s turned pretty nasty,’ one of Jim Sutton’s cronies observed.

‘Finch has seen worse,’ Suzy said proudly.

Finch put her arm around her. ‘Go on, go back to your guests. I’ll call you. Have a great honeymoon.’

The newlyweds were going to the Caribbean. Suzy liked beaches.

They kissed each other.

‘Remember what I said. About coming back.’

‘I will,’ Finch promised. ‘Be happy, Mrs Sutton.’

‘I will,’ she echoed. ‘Thanks for being here, Finch. And for everything else, all the times we’ve had. I love you, you know? Plus you were a ripper bridesmaid.’

‘I wouldn’t have missed it. I love you too.’

She blew a last kiss from the doorway. As soon as she stepped outside, the cold and wind hit Finch like an axe blow. She ducked her head and teetered on high heels to the parking lot where she had left the rental car. The moment she was inside it, with the radio tuned in to some rock station and the heater beginning to do its work, Finch pushed her head hard back against the seat rest and let out a yodel of relief.

One more wedding.

She put her foot down and hightailed it for the airport until a twitch from the rear wheels gave warning of how icy the road was. She slowed at once and watched for the glow of tail lamps ahead of her.

At the airport she nosed the car into one of the Alamo slots and dropped the keys and the paperwork into the box at the closed booth at the end of the lot. The wind had strengthened and there were airborne needles of ice in it. Her thin coat over the pale-blue suit was no protection and there was a long hike to the doors of the departure hall. She dropped her bag and crouched to rummage inside it. From the bottom she pulled out her Gore-tex ski parka and pulled it on with a grunt of relief. She’d brought it with her on her three-day trip to Oregon thinking there might be a chance of some hiking, if not cross-country skiing. As it turned out there had been no time at all, but at least the faithful Patagonia was good for something now. Insulated from her hood to the middle of her thighs, Finch put her head back and marched through the wind. She carried her bag hitched over one shoulder and from the other fist trailed Suzy’s wedding bouquet. She had almost left it in the car, but had decided that she could hardly abandon her best friend’s flowers to wither on the passenger seat of a rented Nova.

Inside the sliding doors the warmth was a blessing but the concourse was packed. One glance at the departures board told her the worst and the clerk at the Air Canada desk confirmed it.

‘I’m sorry, ma’am, the airport’s closed. No flights until the weather eases. Tomorrow morning, I’d say.’

Sam McGrath was out running. It was more than a habit, this daily pushing himself through the barriers of disinclination and fatigue to achieve a rhythm and finally the synchrony of muscle and breath and mind that made it all worthwhile. It was a mainstay of his existence. Sometimes, in the blacker moments, he feared it was the only one.

He was skirting the shores of a little lake, and there was ice crusting the dead reeds along the margins and skinning the deeper water. The track wound between trees and bushes with their spring buds blackened by the return of winter; the dirt underfoot was greasy with earlier sleet but Sam knew the route so well that his pace never slackened. He was warm, now, and going at full stretch, his steady breathing making clouds in the bitter air and his footfalls pounding a drumbeat in his head.

He liked this solitude. Mostly his daily running was hemmed in by the city and there were always people within sight.

His father used to bring him fishing for brook trout down here, Sam remembered. Once they had camped somewhere back up in the trees in the old green tent and had fried their catch over a smoky fire. He would have been about ten years old. It must have been some holiday weekend when Michael hadn’t swung it to go climbing.

Memories shivered and stirred in his head.

He was eight years old and standing with his father at the foot of a cliff. The face stretched up so high over Sam’s head that it blotted out the sun. He reached up his hands, palms flat and raised, and rested them against the sandstone. Mike had ceremoniously dusted them with chalk. Particles of grit scraped minutely against his skin. Slowly, tasting nausea in the back of his throat, he lifted his eyes and searched for holds. Then he bent one knee and pressed the tip and side of his sneaker into a crack.

Up.

His fingers bent and hooked. The crevices were too tiny, but still he forced himself to entrust his weight to them. Sweat burst through the skim of chalk dust.

Up.

The grass, sweet and sappy, was a long way beneath him. The rock was close to his face and the air behind and below hummed and expanded, and played tricks with gravity. One minute he was a feather, hardly anchored to the boulder, the next a sack of soaking clothes, too heavy to hold up.

Up one more foothold.

He couldn’t look up or down.

‘Sammy, you’re fine. I’m here to catch you.’

He couldn’t work out if his father’s hands were huge, a great cradle waiting for him, or a tiny cup that he would smash under his weight. He hung on for a moment longer, desperation knocking inside him, then his legs liquefied and his fingers slid from their holds.

He was falling through space. There was a white flash of relief, resignation, before his father’s arms caught him and lifted him at once in a great flourish of triumph and strength and pride, and then they were both laughing in delight, and Michael swung his son through a loop of blue infinity before setting his two feet back on the ground again. He kissed him on the nape of his neck, under the wet curl of his hair.

‘That’s my boy. You’ll climb the Cap before you’re twenty, just like your old man. And then some.’

Sam let him tug his ear and pummel his shoulder, after the kiss, but he knew that he wouldn’t do what his father expected. Wouldn’t, couldn’t, whatever the Cap might be.

Twenty years later, he made himself concentrate on the length of his stride and keeping his breathing even. Running was good for that, always. You could go for miles, lost in your thoughts and memories, if that was what you wanted. And if you didn’t want to think you could edit everything else out of your mind, everything except legs and lungs, and the way ahead.

The track brought him to the tip of the lake, then rose steeply through a belt of Douglas firs to meet the blacktop where it followed the crest of the ridge. With his head up and his breathing still steady even after the hill climb, Sam ran easily along the roadside. One pick-up truck came by, travelling in the opposite direction, but there was no other traffic. It was less than two miles to the turning to his father’s house.

The McGrath place lay back from the road, hunched up against the black trees as if it would disappear among them if it could. The white paint on the window frames was faded to grey and it was peeling in places, and the curtains at three of the four windows were drawn tight, with that dead look of never being opened whatever the time of day. Mike McGrath’s old station wagon stood on a patch of scrubby ground, with Sam’s rental car beside it. Sam had slowed to a walk as soon as he reached the mailbox on its splintered post and the cold wind immediately skewered between his ribs. The sleet had started up again. Sam pulled up the hood of his fleece jacket and skirted the two cars on his way to the door.

His mother used to grow flowers just here. Cosmos and marigolds and goldenrod, he remembered. She loved bright colours. In spite of the cold he loitered deliberately where the margin of her garden used to be, thinking of the way she used to come out here on summer evenings to snap off the heads of fading blooms or pull up tufty clumps of grass from between the clods of earth. The house faced west and the sun would still be colouring the front of it when the woods behind had turned dark.

Sam took one deeper breath. He couldn’t linger out here, he told himself. He would have to go in now and tell him.

He pushed open the front door, putting his shoulder to it because damp had warped it and given it a tendency to stick.

Mike was sitting in his chair, watching daytime TV. There was a pot of coffee on the stove and an unwrapped loaf of pre-sliced bread spilling like a soft pack of cards on the counter. Sam pushed back his hood again as his father looked up at him.

‘Good one?’ the old man asked, without much interest.

‘Yeah. I went along past the Bowmans’ place and round the lake.’

‘Quite a way, then.’

‘Not bad. It’s cold out there.’

‘Coffee’s made.’

‘Thanks.’

Sam poured himself a cup and drank a couple of mouthfuls, remembering not to wince at the taste.

‘Do you want to watch this?’ he asked pointedly. The yammering faces of some talk show filled the screen with stories of outrage, attended by resentment and rancour. Although it was appropriate enough, he thought. There was always disappointment here, in this house. A rich deposit of it, seamed with the ore of anger. So why not on the box as well? Maybe it was why Mike liked all these programmes. He felt at home with them.

‘I thought maybe we could talk,’ Sam added.

He moved his father’s stick from beside his chair so that he could pull his own seat closer, partly blocking out the TV screen. The result was that they sat almost knee to knee. Sam could have reached and taken Mike’s hand between his own, but he didn’t. They had never gone in for touching, not since Sam was a little boy.

Mike’s response was to aim the remote and lower the volume by a couple of decibels. Then he turned to look his son in the face.

‘I didn’t qualify,’ Sam said.

There were two, three beats of silence.

Mike rubbed the corner of his mouth with a horny thumb. ‘Huh?’

‘I ran in Pittsburgh last week. It was the 2000 Trials.’

Sam had been training for the City of Pittsburgh Marathon ever since the USA Track & Field international competition committee had announced that the Olympic men’s marathon team would once again be decided, as it had been for more than thirty years, by a single race. And for Sam it had been one of those days when the running machine had kept stalling and finally quit. He didn’t suffer many of them, but when the machinery did let him down it was usually to do with the weight of expectation binding and snagging. His father’s expectations, specifically. Sam was fully aware of the dynamic between them, but awareness didn’t change it or diminish the effects. Even now.

‘I didn’t know.’

The old man’s face didn’t give much away. He just went on looking at Sam, waiting for him to explain himself.

It was so characteristic, Sam thought, that he wouldn’t have known or found out about the run in advance even though his son was a contender for the US Olympic team. Mike lived a life that was defined by his own ever-narrowing interests. He watched TV, he read a little, mostly outdoors magazines, he saw a neighbour once in a while and drank a beer.

But it was equally characteristic, Sam acknowledged, that he hadn’t told his father about Pittsburgh. He had qualified for the Trials by running a time better than two hours twenty in a national championship race and he had called Mike immediately afterwards to tell him so.

‘That’s pretty good,’ had been the entire response.

In adulthood, Sam had trained himself not to resent or rise to his father’s lack of enthusiasm. It’s the way he is, he reasoned. He wanted me to do one thing and I did another.

But even so, this time Mike had seemed particularly grudging. And so he had not told him anything more about the big race beforehand, or called him with the bad news once it was over. Instead, he had waited a week and then come down to visit the old man. He had played various versions of this scene in his head, giving Mike lines to express commiseration, or encouragement for next time, or plain sympathy – but the most cheerless scenario had been closest to reality. Mike was neither surprised nor sympathetic, he was just disappointed. As he had been plenty of times before. The pattern was set now.

‘So what happened?’ Mike asked at last.

Sam caught himself shrugging and tried to stop it. ‘I was fit enough and I felt good on the start. I don’t know. I just couldn’t make it work.’

‘What time did you do?’

‘Not good. Two twenty-eight. I’ve done plenty better than that, beat all the other guys who came in ahead of me – Petersen, Okwezi, Lund. But not on the day it counted.’

Mike went on looking at him, saying nothing.

‘There’s always 2004.’ Sam smiled, thinking within himself: It should be the other way round. You should be saying that to me.

‘You’re twenty-eight, twenty-nine, aren’t you?’

You know how old I am. ‘Long-distance running isn’t a kids’ game, luckily. You can stay in the front rank over long-distance well into your thirties.’

‘I was looking forward to you bringing home that gold.’ Mike nodded to the mantel, as if there were a space there, among the pictures of mountains and bearded men, that was bereaved of his son’s Olympic medal.

‘I’d have been happy enough just to go to Sydney and represent my country. It never was just about winning, Dad,’ Sam said patiently.

‘No.’

The monosyllable was a taunt, expertly flicked, that dug into Sam like the barb of a fish-hook.

It’s the way he is, Sam reminded himself. It’s because he’s bitter about his own life. And he’s entitled to a grouse this time. He would have been proud of me if I’d made it, so it’s understandable that he should feel the opposite way now.

‘I’m sorry I didn’t make it this time. It was tough for me as well. But I won’t stop running. It means a lot to me.’

‘Keep at it while you still can,’ Mike agreed. ‘You’re lucky.’

Do you want me to say I’m sorry for that, as well? Sam wondered.

Mike had already turned his gaze over his son’s shoulder, back towards the jeering audience on the television. The volume went up again.

Sitting in this house, with its fading wallpaper and the same old sofa and chairs, and the blandishing blue-sky covers of his father’s magazines – he still subscribed to Climber and Outside and the rest – it was hard for Sam to head off the memories. They lined up in the kitchen space and in the closets, and behind the curtains, waiting to ambush him. Where he lived now, up in Seattle with work to do, and Frannie and friends for company and distraction, he could keep out of their way. But not here, not even most of the time. He supposed it was the same for everyone going home. Whether or not you enjoyed your visit depended on the quality of the memories.

They had moved to this house when Sam was six. Before that, Mike and Mary McGrath had lived on the Oregon coast near Newport, but then Mike had started up a rental cabin and backwoods vacation tour business, with a partner, and had brought his family to the little town of Wilding. The business had only survived a year or two, and the partner had made off with most of the liquid assets and none of the burden of debt, but the McGraths had stayed on. They had put money into this house, a couple of miles out of town, and Mary had dug a garden out front and started to make some friends. Sam was in school and seemed happy enough, and in any case Mike was as willing to stay where he was as to move on. He took a job as a transport manager with a logging company. Mike didn’t reckon much on where he lived or what he did for a living, just so long as he could feed and house his wife and child, and get to Yosemite and the Tetons whenever possible, and to plenty of big boulders for climbing when his budget didn’t stretch to proper expeditions.

Other kids had plenty worse things to deal with, Sam knew, but he found the climbing hard.

He went on the camping trips, and while his father solo-climbed he played softball with the other boys and swam in icy streams, and hiked and rode his bike, always in fear of the moment when his father would call him.

‘Come on, Sammy. It’s your turn.’

‘No.’ Trying to climb with his father watching, with the hammering of blood in his ears and the shivering of his joints, and the sipping for breath with the top inch of his lungs because to breathe more deeply might be to dislodge himself from his precarious hold – all of these were too familiar to Sam.

‘Watch me, then.’ Mike sighed.

His movements were so smooth as he climbed, his body seemed like water flowing over the rock. But Sam’s arms wound tight around his knees as he sat watching and his breath came unevenly.

Don’t fall, he prayed. Don’t fall, Dad.

A moment or two later the man reached the crest of the boulder and disappeared, then his broad grinning face looked down over the edge. ‘See? Easy as pie.’

Sam felt his cheeks turning hotter, not from the sun’s brightness. His father was already down-climbing, smooth and steady. And then midway he suddenly stopped.

‘Now what can I do?’ he demanded, flinging the words back over his shoulder into the still air. ‘I’m stuck. Tell me what to do.’

The boy raked the reddish cliff with his eyes, searching the sandstone for a crack or a bulge. There were no ropes, nothing held his father safe except his own fingers or toes and now he was stuck and he would surely fall … he would fall and fall, and he would die.

‘See anything?’ Mike McGrath called more loudly. ‘Any foothold?’

Sam gazed until his eyes burned.

The red rock was flat and hard, and there wasn’t a dimple in it, even to save his father’s life. Terror froze the sunny afternoon and silenced the birdsong, and stretched the moment into an hour.

‘Wait. Maybe if you go that way …’ He rocked up on to his knees, so that he knelt at the rock face, and took tufts of long grass in his clenched fists to hold himself tethered to the earth. There was a little nubbin below where his father’s feet rested.

Too late.

‘I’m falling,’ the man cried suddenly. And as he did so he peeled away from the rock and his body turned once in the air, black, and as helpless as a dropped puppet.

Out of Sam’s mouth a scream forced itself.

Even after Mike had executed a gymnast’s neat backflip and landed upright, knees together and arms at his sides in the exact centre of the old bath towel that he left at the foot of the boulder to keep the soles of his rock shoes from contact with the ground, Sam went on screaming. The sound brought his mother running. He buried himself in her arms.

‘Michael,’ she remonstrated, ‘what are you doing?’

She was holding the boy pressed against her as she spoke and Sam could feel her voice vibrate in the cage of her chest.

‘I didn’t mean to frighten him. I was just showing him it’s safe, for Chrissakes. Sammy, I’m okay. I came off deliberately.’

‘He’s eight years old, Mike.’

‘I want him to know what climbing means.’

Sam McGrath already knew. He knew it was what his father loved. Without knowing how to form the words he understood that Michael cared about him and his mother in his own way, but climbing was what gave everything else a meaning. Every dollar that he had to spare, every possible weekend and any vacation, were devoted to it. That was all. It was so overwhelming that in a way it was perfectly simple. And for himself, Sam also knew that it scared him speechless.

‘Let him alone. He’ll learn when he’s ready.’

There was something here, some tension like a fine wire drawn tight between the two of them that was more uncomfortable even than his own fear, and to discharge it Sam scrambled away from his mother and stood up.

‘It’s okay. I’ll do it now,’ he said.

‘That’s it, fella. You see?’ Michael laughed and the woman frowned.

Once Sam asked his father, ‘You use ropes when I’m climbing with you. Why don’t you use them when you’re on your own? Wouldn’t it be safer?’

He always remembered the answer.

‘It’s not about safety. It’s about purity.’

Mike told him that a climber could make himself as safe as he chose. By knowing what he was doing and where he was going, by calculating and planning. And above all by concentrating.

‘It’s like a problem in math. The rock sets you a problem and you solve it. Ropes and bolts and all the other climbing aids only make muddle and add up to more danger. Real climbing is the same as making love. There’s only the two of you, you and the rock, and naked is best. You’re too young to know anything about that yet.’

Sam felt embarrassed and he mumbled, ‘Most people except you climb with a partner.’

‘I’m waiting for you to grow up. By then I’ll have taught you everything I know. After you’ve been to college and trained to be a lawyer, you’ll be rich enough to go to Alaska and the Himalaya, and climb the big hills, all the places your old daddy’ll never get to see.’

Sam lifted his chin and gazed back at him, containing the defiance that he felt within himself like a stone at the bottom of a cup.

‘Can I get you another?’ Sam asked, nodding across at the coffee pot. He heeled his chair back to its accustomed place and stood up. It wasn’t breaking a connection between them, because there hadn’t been one in the first place. Mike’s attention, apparently, had barely twitched away from the television and now he held out his empty cup without comment.

Sam filled it for him, and began to make preparations for a meal. He had taken a trip into town, and bought a heap of supplies to stock the empty cupboards and the old chest freezer that wheezed in the outhouse. He didn’t think Mike was taking care of himself properly and he wanted to be sure before he left that there was at least food to hand for him, even if he chose not to eat it.

‘Steak and salad okay for you?’

Simple food was what Mike always liked. Sometimes he reminisced about Mary’s chicken pot pie or dumpling stew, and Sam would realise how much he still missed his wife and felt guilty that he didn’t live closer or make the effort to see his father more often.

‘If it’s what you’re making.’

When the food was prepared Sam laid knives and forks on the old yellow laminate table and put the plates out. ‘It’s ready.’

Mike fumbled for his stick, but it still lay where Sam had pushed it aside. The old man gave a grunt of irritation and stretched awkwardly but Sam was there first. He put it into his father’s hand and helped him to his feet, then guided him the few feet to the table.

‘I can manage. How d’you think I get by when you aren’t paying one of your visits, eh?’

‘Sure you can manage. But when I’m here, I like to be able to help you.’

They ate in silence after that, the only sound the clink of their knives and forks, and the wind driving darts of ice against the windows.

‘Not going to be a great night for travelling,’ Mike remarked.

I could stay over, just until tomorrow, Sam thought. But he didn’t want to and the realisation twisted yet another strand of guilt in him. He wanted to get out of here, back to his own place, away from the mute cohorts of their memories.

‘It’ll be fine. I’ve got to get back to work.’

That was another aspect of disappointment. He hadn’t even made it to law school. Sam’s business was computers, designing and managing websites, and it wasn’t an outstandingly successful one.

At least the silence was broken. Mike chewed thoughtfully on his steak, then wiped his mouth. ‘So you reckon that’s it, is it? No chance of a rethink?’

He was talking about the running again.

Sam must have been twelve because Mary was still there, although she had begun to seem sick. Their last summer vacation, then. Sam couldn’t recall exactly where the climb had been, but he remembered every crease and corner of it. There was a narrow chimney and then an awkward overhang. Mike had led the way and he negotiated the underside of the shelf as if it were a mere optical illusion.

‘Climb when you’re ready,’ Sam heard him call from the invisible secure point above it.

The rock waited, bearing down on him. ‘I don’t think I can do this one.’

No answer came, and Sam sighed and began to climb. Even as he was hanging off the first hold, beginning the calculation that would achieve the next, his mind and his will disengaged themselves. It wasn’t simply that he couldn’t do it. It was much more that he had no wish to. At once he down-climbed the short way he had come and called again. He told Mike that he was going down and he wouldn’t be climbing any more that day. He felt a start of rebellious happiness. A moment or two later Mike reappeared on the ledge beside him. The space felt too small to contain them both.

Mike said, ‘Do you want to think about that again?’

It wasn’t a question, but Sam boldly treated it as if it were. ‘Uh, no, thanks. I’ll head back.’

‘I think you should climb it.’

‘I think I should go down.’

‘Do what I tell you, son.’

The rock seemed to press down on their heads.

‘I don’t want to.’

It was self-discipline that restrained Mike. He wouldn’t let anger master him out on the mountain, because anger was a loss of control and loss of control meant danger. Instead, he lowered his son safely to the ground and watched until he was unclipped from the rope. Then he turned and climbed solo up the overhang.

Sam ran the path through the woods. He made himself run faster and faster to contain his shock at what he had done. When he reached the campsite he found Mary sitting tiredly in her chair under the shade of a tree. Mary defended her son against his father. That was the year Sam took up track sports.

‘Not for 2000, I’m afraid.’

The two of them had cleared their plates. The talk show finished and a soup commercial began.

Sam took them to the sink. ‘Would you like some dessert? There’s a pie. Apple.’ A bought one.

‘Sure, if it’s there.’

He brought the helpings to the table and they ate, in silence again. That was how it was. Afterwards he washed up, and dried the cutlery and placed the dish towel – without knowing he did so – in the way that Mary always left it to dry. Mike had never bought a dishwasher.

Only then did Sam allow himself to look at his watch. ‘Time for the airport.’

‘You really going, in this?’

Sam tilted his head, pretending to listen to the wind. He wanted to switch off the TV in case the local weather report came on and closed off his escape route.

‘Oh, it’s not so bad.’ He collected his zipper bag from the bedroom that still had his college sports posters on the walls and made a show of checking for his keys. ‘Do you need anything else, Dad?’ There was food in the cupboard, fuel in storage, current magazines on the chair. Spring would be here soon.

‘Not a thing.’

‘So, I’d better be going. I’ll call you in the morning.’ From the apartment or the office, in Seattle.

‘Sure.’ The old man pinched his nose and rubbed it with the back of his hand. Then he levered himself to his feet and rested his weight on his stick. From opposite directions they reached the door at the same time. Sam looked down on him.

Michael had survived a broken back, but the terrible injury and the years of fighting back from it had robbed his father of height, as well as other things. Sam thought that the way the old man lived now was truly little more than survival. Awareness of his father’s loss depressed him as well as filling him with unwieldy sympathy. It also increased his own sense of being able-bodied and surrounded by opportunity, and still having locked himself into a life that didn’t satisfy him, or offer any immediate chance of improvement. Mike’s estimation of him as a failure only confirmed his own.

‘I’m really sorry about the Trials.’

‘Maybe next time, like you said,’ Mike answered. They made an awkward connection, a little more than a handshake but less than a clasp. Then they stood apart. ‘Thanks for buying all those supplies. I didn’t need them.’

‘Take care of yourself.’

‘You know me.’

Well enough, Sam thought. He hoisted his bag, rested his hand for a moment on Mike’s shoulder, then opened the door and closed it behind him. It was snowing hard now, and the wind rounded it into the creases of steps and walls. Sam drove through Wilding and, at last, on to the freeway. He punched the buttons on the radio, stretched in his seat and headed through the storm for the airport with unconsidered heavy metal crashing in his ears.

*

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ the American ticket desk clerk told him. ‘The weather’s closed right in. Maybe in an hour, if it eases.’

‘I’ll wait,’ Sam said, as if he had a choice. From the newsstand he bought a copy of Forbes and from the coffee shop a latte that might take away the taste of his father’s brew. Under the stalled departures board he found a seat and wedged himself between a boy with a snowboard and a woman holding a baby on her lap. He sipped his coffee and watched the refugees from the weather as they pushed in past the barrier of the glass doors. The concourse was filling up, a steady wash of people jostled in front of him and the boy with the snowboard sullenly left it jutting in their path.

Sam had been sitting with the empty styrofoam cup in his hands for perhaps fifteen minutes when he saw her.

The doors parted yet again and a flurry of windborne ice crystals spun across a triangle of the murky concourse floor. A woman blew in in their wake but she wasn’t hunched over to defend herself from the weather like every one of the other arrivals. Her head was back and she was wide-eyed with exhilaration. And she appeared to be wearing nothing but a pair of slender high-heeled shoes and a faded ski parka. Her legs were very long and splashed with muddy sleet.

As well as a small overnight bag, she was negligently carrying a bridal bouquet.

Sam swore, fluently, under his breath. Some fuckwit had already married her.

He followed her with his eyes to the Air Canada desk. She went through the same exchange as he had done, then turned away. Sam was almost on his feet, on his way to intercept her, when he remembered that he didn’t know her. Not yet. Instead, he watched as she bought a cup of coffee and drank it standing, her attention on the departures board. The bouquet lay at her feet, with her bag. There was no bridegroom in sight, no smirking triumphalist ready to propel her away to a honeymoon hotel. She was apparently all alone.

He stood up and placed his coat on his seat, making it the only unoccupied one in sight. He walked between the clumps of travellers until he reached her side. ‘Would you like to sit down?’

Her gaze travelled over his face, level, considering, touched with amusement. ‘There are three pregnant women and several geriatrics standing around here. Why me?’

Jesus, he thought. She’s really something. ‘Good question.’

‘Thanks for the offer, anyway.’ She was smiling. She wasn’t beautiful, her eyes were too wide-set and her jaw too prominent for that. She was better than beautiful; she was intriguing.

‘Where are you heading?’

‘Home to Vancouver. And you?’

‘Uh, yup. Me too.’ Seattle, BC, what did it matter? Tomorrow’s work waiting, Frannie – Sam folded them up and put them all on hold. It was a very long time since he had felt himself do anything so perfectly unconsidered.

‘You live in Vancouver?’

‘Uh, not exactly. Visiting, you know. Looks like we might have a long wait. Maybe until tomorrow.’

‘I’m not giving up hope. I need to get away tonight,’ she said, checking her watch. ‘And I have to make some calls. Nice talking to you.’ She was dismissing him.

‘Sam McGrath.’

Although she hadn’t invited the introduction she nodded politely enough. ‘Finch Buchanan.’

He bent down and picked up the flowers, putting them into her hands. They were some kind of creamy white scented ones, spiked with glossy evergreen. Conventional, in a way that didn’t quite go with her. And her fingers were ringless.

‘Congratulations, by the way. Mrs Buchanan, is it?’

She laughed now, a great uninhibited snort of merriment that showed her teeth and her tongue. Jesus, he thought again.

‘Actually, it was. But I only married him for his money. I shot him on the drive from the reception.’

‘Wise move.’

‘Thank you.’

‘So now you’ll be looking for a replacement?’

One try too many, he realised, as soon as he said it. Finch gave a delicate shrug. The parka crinkled around her and she pulled impatiently at the velcro fastenings to undo it. She wasn’t, unfortunately, naked beneath it. She was wearing a little buttoned-up blue skirt suit that made her look disappointingly like Ally McBeal. She rolled up the parka and stuffed it into her bag.

‘See you.’ She smiled and strolled away towards the bank of payphones at the end of the hall.

As soon as she was busy with her call, Sam went straight to the Air Canada desk and transferred his ticket. After Finch finished her animated conversation she found a place to sit a long way off next to a group of Mexican nuns, took a book out of her bag and immersed herself in it.

Slowly, the snowstorm moved away south-westwards. The Vancouver flight was nearly three hours late departing, but on the other hand it was one of the few that left at all that night. It was full. Sam saw her as soon as he boarded, in a window seat halfway down the main cabin. He strode up the aisle to the as yet miraculously unoccupied seat beside her.

‘What do you know?’ He smiled and settled himself in place. She had the book open on her lap.

‘I know something about the laws of probability,’ she answered coolly and returned to her reading. Sam saw a guy who looked like John Belushi making his way towards them, already frowning. He leaned down and scooped Finch’s flowers from where she had wedged them under the seat in front, and held them on the armrest between them. And he squirmed closer so their heads were almost touching.

‘Is this …?’ Belushi began tetchily.

Sam passed over his boarding card. ‘I’m really sorry. It’s your seat, I know. But look, it’s our wedding night. D’you mind changing so I can sit beside my wife? She’s a nervous flier.’

‘Well, okay,’ the man grunted and pushed onwards.

She didn’t laugh now. She didn’t look alarmed or disconcerted or angry – just severe. She took back the flowers and pushed them under the seat again, kicking them out of the way with the toe of her pretty shoe. ‘What is all this about?’

‘You think I’m a flake, don’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m not. I just wanted to sit here.’

‘Then sit,’ she said crisply. He did as he was told, through the last-minute de-icing and the taxi and the take-off, and the pilot’s announcement that in the wake of the storm severe turbulence was anticipated and they should keep their seat belts fastened. As the plane climbed through the cloud layers it pitched and shuddered, and the engines whined and changed key. Finch suddenly let her book drop and pushed her head back against the seat rest. Sam saw the pallor of her throat.

‘As a matter of fact there was one grain of accidental truth in that load of bullshit.’

‘What’s that?’ he asked.

‘I’m a lousy flier.’

‘Want to hold my hand?’

‘I want a drink.’

He peered around the seat in front. As far as he could see, the crew were still strapped in. ‘Not yet. Want to talk instead?’

She sighed and closed her eyes. The fuselage creaked and swayed giddily. ‘If you like.’

‘I had my fortune told by an old native Indian woman when I was a tiny boy. I remember to this day, her saying to me, “You are not going to die in an Air Canada 737 somewhere over the western seaboard.” Do you feel sick, by the way?’

‘If I vomit I can deal with it myself, thank you. I am a doctor.’

‘Dr Buchanan. Specialising in put-downs of pushy men and vomit.’

The plane hit a pocket of empty space. It pitched through the vacuum for what seemed like ten seconds before hitting solid air again. A child began screaming and a moan came from an old woman across the aisle. Finch snatched at Sam’s hand and dug her nails in. She had gone white to the lips.

‘It’s okay,’ he soothed her. Her hand was clammy; he rubbed the skin on the back of it gently with his thumb. ‘It’s just storm turbulence. Nothing’s going to happen to us. You’re safe.’ He reached to the seat pocket and laid the paper bag on her lap, just in case, on top of the book. He noticed now that it was Touching the Void, a classic account of a climbing catastrophe and its aftermath.

He nodded pleasantly at it. ‘I read that. Quite a story.’

She rolled her head. ‘I think I’d rather be down a crevasse than up here.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Look. Don’t expect me to be polite and kind. Just talk to me. Tell me about yourself, if you like.’

‘An invitation no male could refuse. Where should I begin?’

He told her about why he had been visiting his father and about running, and his work and its problems, trying to make it twice as interesting as it really was. He avoided mentioning Frannie, although once or twice he caught himself saying we and he knew she had registered it. The plane’s bucking and shuddering gradually eased, and in-flight service began. By the time he was putting a large vodka and tomato juice into her hand, Finch’s colour had improved. She drank half the measure down straight.

‘Thanks again.’

‘Steady.’

She had let go of his hand minutes ago. Now she picked up Joe Simpson’s book again. ‘I think I’ll read some more of this.’

It wasn’t until they had begun their descent into Vancouver that he broke in on her once more. ‘You know all about me, I don’t know anything about you. Is that a fair arrangement, do you think?’

She smiled briefly. ‘I shouldn’t think so. What do you want to know?’

In response to a series of direct questions he learned that she had been in Oregon for her best friend’s wedding. She practised in the city with a partner, she had four brothers all older than she was, her father was an architect he had vaguely heard of and her mother was a mother. She lived alone in a city apartment. And yes, she was seeing someone at the moment. Although she flashed a warning glance at him just for asking.

They had landed and were taxiing towards the stand when he put the final, inevitable, schlocky question he couldn’t think of any way around. ‘Can I call you some time? Maybe we could have dinner.’

Finch sighed. She had gathered up the flowers again and they made her look as if she was headed for the altar. ‘I don’t think so, Sam.’

‘Why not? I’m harmless, maybe even quite amusing. What have you got to lose?’

‘Nothing.’ They were stationary at last. Raindrops glittered on the window beyond her shoulder. ‘I’m not going to be here. I’m going away for a while.’

‘When?’ he asked grimly. Somehow he would see her again, whatever it might take.

‘In a couple of weeks. And I’m really busy before then, getting ready for it.’

‘Where?’

She hesitated. Then a so-what smile crimped the corners of her mouth. ‘Out to Nepal. Kathmandu. Then on to Everest. I’m joining an expedition to climb it. Medical officer.’

‘You’re a climber. You don’t just read about it? That’s extraordinary.’ Shaking his head, he reached out mentally to all the curtains of denial with which he had shrouded his adolescence and pulled them down with one breezy sentence. ‘Because I climb too. Mad about it, ever since I was a kid.’

Her eyes narrowed. ‘I thought you said you were a marathon runner. A failed Olympic one.’

‘That too. Where will you be staying in Kathmandu?’

‘Why do you want to know?’

‘I’ve been there. Some of the hotels are pretty dire, in my experience. Just want to be sure you’ve picked a decent one.’

In fact, he had never been further west than Hong Kong. He tried hard to remember anything he had ever read about the Nepali capital. Ancient. It was really ancient and seriously polluted. Would that do?

Finch sighed. ‘It’s the Buddha’s Garden. I’m not planning to change it. And that information is of no conceivable use to you.’

The forward doors were open. The passengers ahead of them had shuffled their way out and Finch was already on her feet, bending her head under the overhead lockers.

‘All information has value,’ Sam said. ‘Let me help you with your bag. Or at least carry your bouquet for you.’

‘I can manage.’

They were in the chilly corridors. She was slipping away from him, but it didn’t matter. He could deal with that.

Immigration was about to separate them. Sam was still counting himself lucky that he had had his passport on him.

‘Goodbye,’ Finch said seriously. ‘Someone’s here to meet me, or I’d offer you a lift. Thanks for your company.’

‘So long, Finch.’

Then she was gone. Sam was left alone in the arrivals hall at Vancouver airport at one in the morning, with his car and his girlfriend and his stalled life waiting for him in Seattle. From the taxi line, John Belushi was glaring reproachfully at him.

Two

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.

Three

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.

Four

‘You coming?’ Adam Vries asked Finch.

A group of seven men were standing outside the dining-room of the Buddha’s Garden Hotel. In their plaid shirts, combat pants and cheery slogan T-shirts they might have been any group of tourists, although a closer inspection would have revealed that they seemed noticeably fitter than the average. They had just eaten an excellent dinner and they had the rosy, expansive look of people intent on enjoying themselves for much of the rest of the night.

‘Yeah, come on. We’re going to Rumdoodle.’

‘What the hell’s that?’ Finch grinned.

‘She’s a newcomer, isn’t she?’ a big, grizzled man teased in a broad Yorkshire accent. His name was Hugh Rix; the front of his T-shirt proclaimed ‘Rix Trucking. Here Today, There Tomorrow’.

‘Bar,’ Ken Kennedy said briefly. He was in his early forties, short but broad-built. His colourless hair was shaved close to his scalp and his rolled shirtsleeve showed a scorpion tattoo on his left bicep.

‘Uh, I don’t think so,’ Finch demurred. ‘I’m going to sleep. In a bed. While I still have the chance.’

‘Coward.’

‘Leave her be, Rix. She’ll be seeing more than enough of you before the trip ends,’ Ken said.

‘Night,’ they all said to her and in a solid phalanx moved towards the door. Of the ten-strong Western contingent that made up the Mountain People expedition, George Heywood had eaten a quick dinner and gone off to a meeting with the climbing Sherpas and Alyn Hood had not yet arrived. The word was that he had taken a two-day stopover in Karachi.

Finch went upstairs to her small single room and switched on her PowerBook to send an e-mail to Suzy.

Hey, married woman.

Good honeymoon?

Here I am. Flights not too bad, hotel plain but reasonably clean (as my mother would say). Dinner tonight with the rest of the group except lead guide who isn’t here yet. They’re okay!!! George Heywood I already met, Adam Vries is communications manager, pretty face (but your type, not mine), poses a bit. Ken Kennedy’s the second guide, acts tough, sports a tattoo, probably has a heart of gold. Clients are Hugh Rix and Mark Mason, both Brits, know each other from back home. Rix (as he calls himself) is the self-made-man type, probably won’t stand any nonsense unless he’s generating it. Mark is quieter and more sensitive, although not by a long way. There’s a longhair Aussie rock jock named Sandy Jackson and two determined Americans, Vern Ecker and Ted Koplicki, who were here last year and turned back from Camp Four. Now they’ve all gone out for a beer.

For me, bed. If I can sleep, with excitement.

I wouldn’t be anywhere else in the world, or be doing anything different. You know that. Give Big J a kiss from me xxx

Before she climbed into bed, Finch stood at her window. She opened the shutter and looked out over the trees of the garden and a carved statue of the Buddha to a corner of the busy street just visible beyond the gate. The traffic rolled and hooted through the haze of pollution. Kathmandu lay in a hollow ringed by high hills, and the smoke and exhaust fumes hung in the air like a grey veil. As she stood absently watching, a man walked in the darkness across the grass and through the gate into the roadway. He lifted his hand to a bicycle rickshaw man hopefully lingering near the hotel entrance and hopped into the hooded seat. The old man stood up on the pedals, his lean legs tensing with the effort, and the rickshaw trundled away. Finch stood for a moment longer, resting her shoulder against the window frame and breathing in the scent of woodsmoke and joss and curry that drifted up to her. Then she pulled the shutter to and finished her preparations for bed.

It was surprisingly snug in the rickshaw seat, with the hood framing the view of haphazard streets and ancient wooden houses leaning out over the cobbles. Piles of rotting debris carelessly swept into the angles of walls gave out a pungent vegetable smell. Sam leaned forward to the driver. ‘Very far?’

A triangle of brown face briefly presented itself over the hunched shoulder. ‘No, sir. Near enough.’

Sam had landed at Kathmandu six hours earlier. He had found himself an acceptable hotel close to the Buddha’s Garden, changed his clothes, eaten a meal that he didn’t taste and couldn’t remember, and shaved and showered with close attention. The unfamiliar feeling in his gut was nothing to do with the soupy dal bhaat he had eaten – it was anticipation. It was a very long time since anything in his life had given him the same sensation. Even running didn’t do it for him any more. He had tried to summon it up before he competed at Pittsburgh and had failed. There was a part of himself that warned the rest that it had been a long way to travel from Seattle to catch up with a woman he had spent barely five hours with. But Sam told himself that in any case it wasn’t just to do with Finch. He was in Kathmandu, he was doing something other than withering away at home.

When he finally reached Finch’s hotel the obliging receptionist told him that yes, Miss Buchanan was resident there. But he believed that all the climbers had gone out – just gone, sir, five minutes only – to a bar in the Thamel district.

Armed with the name and directions, Sam set out again. The quickest way through the steaming traffic looked as though it might be this bicycle-propelled pram. He sat even further forward on the sagging seat, as if he could urge the driver to pedal faster. His eyes were gritty with travel and he blinked at the waves of people and cars with a yawn trapped in the back of his throat. Maybe he should have gone to bed and waited until tomorrow to find her. But the thought of being so close, and the fear that she would somehow disappear into the mountains before he could reach her, was too much for him.

At last the old man sank back on his saddle and the rickshaw wavered to a halt. They had come to a doorway wedged in a row of open-fronted shops, where multicoloured T-shirts and cotton trousers hung like flags overhead, and a press of wandering shoppers threaded through narrow alleyways. There was a thick smell of spicy food, and patchouli and marijuana. Two dogs lay asleep on a littered doorstep.

The bar was up a flight of wooden stairs. Sam found a big room, noisy with muzzily amplified music and loud talk. Most of the customers were very young Westerners with the suntans, bleached hair and ripped shorts of backpackers, although there were a few Thais and Japanese among them. He edged his way through the babble of American, British and indeterminate accents to the bar, and positioned himself in front of it. He searched the crowd with his eyes, looking for her.

Finch wasn’t there. Within a minute he knew it for certain but he still examined each of the groups more carefully and drank some weak beer while he waited in case she had gone outside for five minutes. It took him much less than five minutes to identify the group of Everest mountaineers. They were older than most of the other drinkers and were gathered in a tight group around two rickety little tables. One of them had a goatee and wore his long hair tied back in a lank ponytail, another had an effete blond fringe, the rest had brutally short crops. They all had worked-out, hard-looking rather than muscular physiques. The look was familiar enough to Sam: for years he had seen men with similar bodies high on the pillars in Yosemite, or drinking beers with his father and exchanging the arcane details of routes and lines and remote peaks.

There was an empty chair at the far side of their group, next to the blond man. Sam strolled casually across the room and hesitated beside it. ‘Mind if I take this?’

‘Sure. Help yourself.’

He sat down, carefully placing his drink on the table. He relaxed for a minute, gazing into the room with unfocused eyes and letting their conversation drift around him.

‘The man’s an asshole. Forget the hills. I wouldn’t go as far as the Bronx with him leading …’

‘… into a heap of shit. So I say to the guy, this place is a latrine …’

‘A brand new camera, a Nikon AX.’

‘I’m ready for it. But if I don’t make it this year I’ll be back. And I’ll keep on coming back until I do make it.’

‘You’ll do it, man. George Heywood’s put thirty-five clients up there already. Why not you? And Al Hood’s a fine leader.’

‘He’s never climbed it.’

‘He’s climbed every other fucker in the known world.’

Meditatively, Sam drained his glass. These men were going to be Finch’s companions for two months. ‘You heading up for some climbing?’ he asked the blond in a friendly voice.

‘Yeah, man.’

‘What’re you planning?’

‘The big one. Everest.’

Sam gave a soundless, admiring whistle. ‘Is that right? I envy you. You all going?’

‘It’s a commercial expedition. Six clients, or five if you don’t count the chick medic. Two guides, Ken here and another guy. The boss is out here this trip as Base Camp manager. He’s climbed the hill twice himself. I work for the company, supplies and communications manager, but I’m kind of hoping to get a shot at the summit. Have to see how things pan out, though.’

‘Ahuh. Sounds good.’

‘You climbing? My name’s Adam Vries, by the way.’

‘Sam McGrath. Not this time,’ Sam said cautiously. He didn’t want to exclude himself from the company that included Finch.

‘Pity. Want some of this?’ He held up a jug of beer and Sam nudged his glass across. Adam filled it up for him.

‘Thanks. So, where’re you from?’

Adam named a little town in Connecticut but said that he spent most of his teenage years in Geneva. Under the careful pressure of Sam’s questions he hitched his boot on the rung of a chair, locked his hands behind his head and talked about climbing in the Alps. His fine, slightly girlish features lit up with passion as he reminisced about the big faces of the Eiger and Mont Blanc, and Sam found his initial antipathy melting away. Even though he had dismissed Finch as the chick medic, this was a nice guy. For a climber, he was an exceptionally nice guy.

In turn, Adam extracted from Sam the details of his own mountain history. He shook his head disparagingly. ‘Man, that’s tough. But you can still climb, can’t you? Without your old man, I mean.’

‘I suppose I could.’

He had merged into the group now. The two British expedition members had introduced themselves as Mark Mason and Hugh Rix – ‘Just call me Rix,’ the blunt-faced man insisted – and Ken Kennedy stretched out a hand and shook Sam’s. His grip was like a juice presser.

The jug of beer was filled and refilled, and the level of noise and laughter rose.

‘What are you doing in Kathmandu?’ Rix demanded in his loud voice.

‘Just travelling. Taking a break from the world.’

‘Sounds like a waste of good climbing time to me.’

Sam laughed. ‘Could be. Do you reckon you’re going to get to the top?’ With Finch to treat your frostnip and your constipation, and monitor you for oedema on the way, you bullet-headed bastard?

Rix leaned forward. He was red-faced with beer and the drink made his Yorkshire accent even more pronounced. He put his big, meaty hands flat on the table. ‘Listen up. I know what people say. The old brigade of professional climbers who had bugger all in their back pockets and that mountain in their dreams, who clawed their way to the summit or died in the doing. I know they say the South Col route is a yak track and that any fat fucker with fifty grand to spare can get himself hauled up there if he can be bothered to go to the gym twice a week for a couple of months beforehand. They claim that Everest’s been turned into an adventure playground for software salesmen by the commercial companies dragging along anyone who can pay the money.

‘And that may well be true, mate. All I know is that I’ve dreamed of standing on that peak since I was a snotty kid at home in Halifax. I’ve climbed Makalu and Cho Oyu and Aconcagua, and enough peaks in the Alps, and I’m still as hungry for Everest as I was when I was a lad. I was out here this time last year and I got turned back by the weather at 25,000 feet. But I’ve made my money and this is the way I choose to spend it, and no bugger’s going to stop me. I’ll climb the hill. It’s not a question for me.’

‘No,’ Sam said thoughtfully.

Adam was three-quarters drunk now. He propped his blond head against the wall. ‘Rix’s right. I know it. I know that feeling. Ever since I started, from the first climb, it’s what I’ve existed to do. It’s been the focus of my life. Every time I reach the summit of a new mountain I know no one can take that away from me. It’s concrete. Like, there it is. Mine. And you know’ – he waved his hand along the group around the two tables – ‘there’s this family. If you’re some Yank kid lost in a Swiss school where you can’t even talk to the class losers let alone the cool kids, and your old man’s always travelling and your mom goes shopping, you can go climbing and you find people who’ll be with you. You’re in the mountains and you’re not lonely any more. It’s …’ His head rolled and his eyes drifted shut. ‘Hey, I am wasted … it’s everything you need in the world.’

There was a small silence, then Adam’s eyes snapped open again. ‘You know what I’m saying, man. You climb yourself.’

Seven pairs of eyes looked at the newcomer.

‘Yes,’ Sam said.

Much later, by the time the bar was closing, everyone except Ken Kennedy was drunk. ‘Come on, the lot of you. Get to your beds,’ he ordered.

Adam and Sam made their way unsteadily down the stairs together, Adam’s arm looped over Sam’s shoulder.

When the thick-scented air hit them they staggered a little and Adam coughed with laughter. ‘Need a scotch to settle my gut after all that beer. You coming back to the hotel for one more?’

Even with his head spinning, and his ears and tongue clogged with the dull wadding of jet lag, Sam was just able to work out that it wouldn’t be clever to present himself at the Buddha’s Garden in this condition and risk bumping into Finch.

‘Nope. But I’ll come by tomorrow and see you.’

‘Don’t make it too early,’ Adam groaned.

It was past noon when he strolled back through the leafy garden. The strong sunlight laid wedges of indigo-blue shadow under the trees. Sam had slept for ten hours, then dressed in a clean white shirt and pressed chinos. He was not going anywhere or doing anything else until he had tracked down Finch Buchanan and made her promise to have dinner with him.

In the lobby Ken Kennedy was sitting under a ceiling fan with a balding man Sam didn’t recognise. They were frowning over a sheaf of papers and Sam passed by without interrupting them. The desk clerk gave Sam Adam’s room number and pointed to the stairs. Sam ran up two shallow flights and found the number he was looking for. He knocked on the door and was greeted by a wordless mumble that he took as an invitation to come in.

Adam was lying on a disordered bed, naked except for a pair of shorts. One limp arm hung over the mattress edge, the other shaded his eyes from the dim light filtering through the closed shutters. ‘Uh, it’s you.’

‘What’s up?’

‘God knows. I’ve never puked or shat so much in my life. Can’t just be the beer.’

‘That’s rough. Can I get you anything?’

‘How about a gun to put to my head? Jesus.’

Adam hauled himself half upright and vomited a couple of greenish mouthfuls into an enamel basin. Sam grimaced and tried to look in the other direction while Adam spat and then sank back on the pillow. ‘You could go down to the bar and get me a couple of bottles of water. Room service doesn’t do much in this place.’

‘Sure,’ Sam said.

It took ten minutes to locate a barman, pay for the mineral water and make his way back to Adam’s room. This time he opened the door without bothering to knock.

Finch was standing with her back to him, staring at her watch and holding Adam’s wrist loosely in her hand. After another five seconds she finished counting and turned her head to see the intruder. She was wearing a sleeveless khaki body-warmer with pockets and a white T-shirt with the Mountain People’s logo on the front. She looked less tense and therefore younger than she had done on the Vancouver flight.

‘I brought him some mineral water.’ Sam smiled. ‘It’s nothing serious, I hope?’

‘This is the doc,’ Adam said.

She was looking at Sam, the total surprise in her face distinctly shaded with irritation.

‘What are you doing here?’ Finch asked coldly.

‘I told you. Bringing the sick man some water.’

‘Do you mind leaving us alone while I examine my patient?’

‘It’s okay. He doesn’t have to go on my account. Do you two know each other?’

‘Yes.’

‘No. Now then, how long ago did the vomiting start?’

‘Twelve hours.’

‘Right.’ Finch took a phial out of her medical bag and shook out a large capsule. ‘I’m going to give you something that should stop it.’

Adam held out his hand and gestured for the bottle of water.

‘Not orally, you’ll vomit it straight up again. It’s a suppository. To be inserted in your rectum. I can do it for you, or you can deal with it yourself, whichever you prefer?’

‘I’ll manage.’

‘Good. Try to drink some water over the next few hours, don’t eat anything.’

Even the mention of eating started up another bout of retching. There were dark sweat streaks in Adam’s blond hair. Finch watched him with her fingers resting lightly on his shoulder, then she took the bowl from him and rinsed it in the bathroom.

She’s an angel, Sam thought. If I were ill, would she look after me like this? Put her hand on my shoulder?

‘Okay, Adam. It’s food poisoning. You should start feeling better soon. Try and rest, and I’ll be back to see you at about six. Your friend will stay and keep you company I expect.’ Finch smiled sweetly.

‘Actually, I was hoping …’ Sam tried.

She snapped her bag shut. ‘See you later, Adam. Goodbye … um …’

‘Come on, you know my name.’

Finch was already halfway out of the door.

‘Wait a minute. Look, I’ll be back,’ he called over his shoulder to the wan figure in the bed.

Adam had covered his eyes again with one arm. ‘Don’t mind me,’ he muttered.

Sam ran down the corridor after Finch. Realising that she wasn’t going to shake him off so easily she turned with a flicker of anger and confronted him. ‘Right. So here you are in Kathmandu. What do you want, exactly? I’m busy, I’ve got a job to do.’

‘I want to take you out to dinner. Is that too much to ask?’

‘Did you follow me all the way out here?’

‘Yes. I got here twenty-four hours ago.’

‘Why?’

‘That was how the plane times worked out.’

‘Don’t try to be more of an asshole than you are already. Why did you follow me?’

Sam hesitated. ‘Look, I know it seems flaky. I met you, we talked, I wanted to see you again. But it isn’t as weird as that makes it sound. You talked about Everest and I loved the way it lit you up. My life is at a kind of static point right now, so taking off out of it for a while seemed a good idea and I thought, why not here? I’ve never seen Kathmandu before.’

‘That’s not what you told me.’ She did look faintly mollified now.

‘Why would you have told me where you were staying, if I hadn’t claimed some familiarity with the place?’ Candour, he thought, was probably the best defence.

They were standing in an angle of the main stairway. Rix, Mark Mason and Sandy Jackson came up the stairs from the lobby, and each of them gave Sam a friendly greeting as they passed.

‘Hey doc, how’s the patient?’ Sandy enquired over his shoulder.

‘He’ll live.’ She returned her full attention to Sam. ‘You know everyone.’

He shrugged. ‘Well, sort of. How about tonight?’

Finch sighed. Her hair was tied with what looked like a bootlace and he wanted to slide his finger underneath and hook it off.

‘Listen …’

‘Sam.’

‘Yes. I do remember. Listen carefully, Sam, and save yourself from any more impulses to do with me. One, I am responsible for the health care of a total of twenty people on this expedition. Two, I am here to climb as high as I can go on Everest. I don’t expect to make the summit, necessarily, but I want to do myself justice. I can’t afford it, but I have saved up the money to pay for this. I’ve made a lot of physical and mental preparations. I don’t have room for anything else in my life right now. Nothing.’

She’s saying the same things as those guys last night, Sam thought. Climbers. Peak pervs. Monofocal mountain morons. But even so his longing to untie Finch’s bootlace, to put his fingertip to the corner of her mouth, to hear her voice in his ear, never even wavered. Her steeliness only impressed him and made him want to be with her even more than before. He held up his hands and smiled. ‘It’s only dinner. Two glasses of wine and a curry, dessert optional. It’s not an addition to your workload or an emotional commitment.’

She studied him briefly, working out whether he was threatening or harmless, then put her hand briefly on his arm. ‘No. No thanks, Sam.’

She smiled in a finite way and removed her hand again. Sam was not especially pleased with his way with women, but it did strike him that even in circumstances as unusual as these he had never been turned down with quite such cool certainty. There was more here, he thought, than immediately met the eye.

‘Wait. Do you want to do something genuinely helpful?’ she added.

‘Yes.’

‘Then sit down for a while with Adam Vries. I have to check over my supplies because they’ve just come in from the airport.’

‘I’ll make sure he’s okay.’

‘Thank you.’ She inclined her head and walked away down the stairs. Sam followed her with his eyes, remembering her long legs under the ski parka.

Adam had shifted his position. ‘Huh. I shoved the thing up my butthole. How does she know I’m not going to shit before I puke?’

‘Brilliant medical judgement.’

‘Mh. I wasn’t going to have her sticking her index finger up there.’

‘No. Although, I don’t know …’

Adam managed the ghost of a smile. ‘You too? Forget it. Used to know a brutal med student like that at college. The Fridge, we used to call her.’

‘Is that so?’

Sam settled himself in a chair and rested his feet on another. He could see through a chink between the shutters to the top of a tree and the side walls of some houses. On a balcony level with his sightline an old woman was peeling vegetables over a plastic bowl. A plump baby played at her feet until a young woman, hardly more than a girl, came out and swept him up in her arms. The baby’s thumb plugged into his mouth at once and his head settled on her shoulder. The mother cupped the back of it with her hand, stroking his hair. Sam watched until she had carried the infant inside, then sat for a while with unfocused eyes, wondering what Finch would look like with a baby.

Whatever Adam might think she wasn’t a fridge. Something in her eyes, the turn of her head and hips, made him certain of that. When he looked again he saw that Adam had drifted into a doze. He would have liked to slip away and maybe go out for a beer with Rix and the others, but he was afraid that if he moved he would wake him up. He leaned his head against the chair back and let his own eyes fall shut.

Last night had made him think of his father.

Michael would talk about mountains in the same way, using the very same words. He remembered conversations overheard.

Michael and Mary outside the tent on summer nights when he was supposed to be asleep, and the timbre of his father’s voice in response to Mary’s questions why, and what for – and the always unspoken but equally ever-present words within his own head, danger and falling and dead –

‘I need that reality. If I don’t climb, my grip on reality fades and I feel like nothing exists.’

‘Not me? Or your boy?’

‘Of course. But not in the same way, Mary. Nothing’s the same as the way you feel up there with the rock and space. I’m no good with words, you know that. I can’t explain the need for it, the being more alive than alive. But it’s always there, once you’ve tasted it.’

‘So am I always here, so is Sammy. We don’t want anything to happen to you.’

Sam remembered that he would squirm in his sleeping bag, trying to bury his head, to bring his shoulders up around his ears so that he couldn’t hear any more. But the voices came anyway, as much from within his head as outside it.

Michael would give his warm, reassuring laugh. ‘Nothing will happen. It’s concentration. If you keep your mind on it you don’t make mistakes.’

Sam thought of Michael as he was now, moving painfully around the old house, all alone, with only the television freak shows for company. When I get back, he promised the dim room, I’ll see more of him. Maybe it’s time to move the business a bit closer to home. If there still is a business when I’m through with this caper.

An hour later Adam woke up again. ‘I’ve got a thirst like the desert,’ he whispered.

Sam passed him the water, but held it so that he could only take a sip or two at a time. ‘Otherwise you’ll spew it straight up again.’

‘Thanks, nurse.’ He rubbed his cracked mouth with the back of his hand.

Sam went into the bathroom and found his face-cloth, rinsed it in cool water and handed it to him.

‘Nice. But I’d still rather have the doc to hold my hand.’

‘Fuck you.’

‘Is that what all this is about? You should see me when I’m really looking my best.’

‘She told me to keep an eye on you.’

‘Ah. I see.’ Adam lay back again. ‘I appreciate it. I think I may go back to sleep. Don’t need you to watch me any more. Honestly.’

Sam stood up. ‘I’ll catch you later.’

‘Ahuh.’

There was no one to be seen downstairs. Sam hung around for a minute or two, hoping that Finch might appear again, but in the end he gave up. He found a bar a hundred yards from the hotel gates and sat at a rickety iron table under a bamboo awning, keeping watch.

He didn’t have much of an idea about what he was going to do next.

Al was in a taxi on his way in from the airport. He had been to Kathmandu a dozen times before, so did not have much attention to spare for the congested road and the scrubby concrete housing that lined it. He sat motionless in the back of the worn-out Mercedes, his eyes apparently fixed on the grime-marked collar of the driver’s blue shirt.

Karachi had been a last-minute diversion, a visit to an old climbing friend. They had sat for a long time over too many glasses of whisky, not talking very much, merely pursuing their memories in one another’s company. When it was time for Al to leave again Stuart had come to see him off.

‘Drop in and see me on the way back, when you’ve got the big hill in your pocket.’

‘I might just do that.’

Stuart stood watching Al’s back as he moved in the line of veiled women and men in loose shalwar kameez towards the barrier. He stood a full head taller than anyone else, and he looked fit and relaxed. Just before he disappeared Al glanced round and nodded a last goodbye. Stuart lifted his hand and held it up long after Al had gone. They had known each other for many years and had said casual goodbyes before a score of expeditions. That was what happened and this was no different. History made no difference. It was the present and the future tenses that counted for climbers.

As his taxi approached the Buddha’s Garden Al was acknowledging to himself that the stopoff to see Stuart Frost had been a delaying tactic. He hadn’t wanted to get to Kathmandu, to join this group, until the last moment. But now that he was here he focused his mind on what was to be done. It was a job, like any other, as well as a climb.

As he was checking in, with his weather-beaten packs piled beside him, George Heywood came out of the bar. He shook Al’s hand, enclosing it warmly in both of his. George was bald, with a seamed face and sharp grey eyes.

‘Good to see you, Al. Thought you might be going AWOL at the last minute.’

‘Why?’

George laughed. ‘Now I see you I realise I was worrying about nothing. You look good.’

‘Everyone here?’

‘Yup. You’re the last.’

‘Good.’

‘Ken’s in the bar, with Pemba and Mingma. You want to go and change or something, or will you come and join us?’

‘I’ll come,’ Al said.

The three men stood up when they saw Al’s tall frame following George to the table. Pemba Chhotta and Mingma Nawang were the climbing sirdars – experienced Sherpa mountaineers who would be sharing the guiding duties with Al and Ken. They had worked with Al in the past and they showed their liking for him in broad smiles of greeting.

‘Namaste, Alyn,’ Pemba said formally.

Ken was more laconic. He clasped Al’s hand very briefly. ‘Yeah, mate. Here we are.’

‘Ken. I saw Stu in Karachi. Sends you his best.’

Their eyes met briefly. Everyone sat down and George ordered more drinks. There was the business of supplies and logistics and porters and yaks to be discussed, then George briefly described their six clients, mostly for the benefit of the two Sherpas who would act as second guides to Ken and Al. The two Britons had been on Everest the year before, but with a different company who they believed had let them down. Now they had come to George and his US-based Mountain People to make one more attempt. The two Americans were experienced mountaineers too; the Australian was a less well-known quantity but he had been recommended by previous clients.

The Canadian doctor, George explained, had climbed McKinley in a group led by Ed Vansittart. Everyone at the table nodded. Ed had written to him to say that Dr Buchanan was an excellent medic, who really understood the demands of high-altitude climbing. She was in a unique position in the group because she had a staff role, but she was also a client who hoped to reach the summit with the rest of them. Although not highly experienced herself, she was physically strong and as tough-minded as any mountaineer he had ever met. She was also good company, he had added.

‘I think we’re lucky to have her with us,’ George concluded. ‘Al agreed with me.’

‘Seems A-okay to me,’ Ken said.

Al listened impassively to all of this, with the edge of his thumbnail minutely chafing the corner of his mouth.

George was folding up his lists. ‘And Adam Vries is sick.’

Ken clicked his tongue.

‘What’s the problem?’ asked Al.

‘Just a gut thing. A day or two, the doc says. We leave the day after tomorrow, as planned.’

Once the last pieces of equipment and batches of food supplies had been assembled, there was nothing more for the expedition members to do in Kathmandu but enjoy what would almost certainly be their last hot baths and clean sheets for two months.

‘Another beer?’ George asked them all, by way of a conclusion.

Ken had glanced up. ‘Speak of the devil,’ he said in a warmer voice than he had used before. The rest of them looked in the same direction.

Finch was hesitating in the doorway. Filling most of the wall behind the little group of climbers was a huge colour photograph. Against a hyper-real blue sky stood the huge bracket ridge and summit of Nuptse. Everest stood to the left, farther back and seeming smaller than its neighbour, and in the foreground was the monstrous spillage of the icefall and the dirty grey rubble of the Khumbu glacier.

George beckoned cheerfully, his head bobbing up to obliterate the South Col. ‘Here’s our doc. Come and join us, Finch.’ She stood at the edge of the group. Ken levered himself out of his wicker chair and offered it, but she only smiled at him. ‘I’ve just been to see Adam again.’

‘And?’

‘It’s a bad bout. But he should be okay to leave as planned.’

‘Finch, this is Pemba, and Mingma.’ She shook hands with each of them. ‘And Alyn Hood.’

Al had risen to his feet. He was much taller than Finch but when their eyes met they seemed on a level.

‘Hello,’ Finch said quietly.

Al said nothing at all. He held on to her hand for one second, then carefully released it. In the confusion of introductions no one else noticed the way that their eyes briefly locked and the flash of acknowledgement that passed between them. No one could have guessed that they knew each other already, or deduced a single episode of their history from the way they moved quietly apart again.

Five

The helicopter ride was nothing like flying the trim A-Star with Ralf across the serene silvery expanses of the Canadian mountains. The Asian Airlines flight from Kathmandu to Lukla was a pensioned-off ex-Russian machine that lifted off the runway abruptly, without pre-take-off formalities, and juddered over the grey haze of the valley towards the mountains.

Finch sat in her metal seat and tightened the webbing strap across her lap, trying not to think about crashing into the fields beneath them. Her knees were wedged against a mountain of expedition baggage secured under netting that filled the centre of the cabin. She had checked them on board already, but she searched out the barrels in which her medical supplies were packed and kept her eye on them as if they might jump up and roll away. Anything was better than looking out of the porthole behind her head, either at the view down to steep ridges striped with different coloured crops or upwards to the blanket of mist that blotted out the peaks. Bundled up beside her with his chin on his chest was Adam Vries. The noise of the engines made conversation difficult, but she nudged him and raised her eyebrows, you okay?

He nodded wearily. Two days of sickness had left him grey and listless.

The helicopter tilted sharply and changed direction, climbing steadily. Finch closed her eyes and swallowed hard to equalise the pressure in her ears. When she looked up she saw that Sam McGrath was grinning at her from his seat on the other side of the netting. She gave him what she intended as a glare in return. He had seen her abject fear on the bad flight up to Vancouver and she wasn’t pleased to have him watching this fresh ordeal.

She wasn’t quite sure yet how he had insinuated himself, but he was here for the ride and maybe a couple of days’ trekking with the expedition on the walk-in towards Base Camp at the foot of the Everest icefall. She hadn’t seen him for the whole of the last day in Kathmandu and had concluded that after all he had been easy enough to shake off. Her relief at this had, she was certain, been entirely untinged by regret. And then, in this morning’s bleary dawn at the airport, there he was again. Standing joking with Rix and Mark Mason at the check-in for Lukla, towering over the packs of Japanese tourists who were waiting to see if the weather would lift and allow them to embark on sightseeing flights around the Everest massif.

‘What’s he doing here?’ she had murmured to George.

‘They went out on the beer again and Rix and Sandy just asked me if he could come along for part of the walk. All the guys seem to have really taken to him.’ George shrugged. ‘Makes no difference to me, so long as he pays his way. Might even be helpful. He looks in good shape. You know him anyway, don’t you?’

‘No. I just met him once, on a flight into Vancouver.’

‘Coincidence.’

Finch noticed that Sam fitted easily into the group. He wore well-trodden hiking boots and similar clothes to the other men, and he looked just as fit and testosteronically confident. But of course, she remembered, he was an almost-Olympic marathon runner. He was probably stronger than any of them.

‘Good morning,’ he said cheerfully to her. And then, ‘You’re not happy about this, are you?’

‘Is my happiness or otherwise particularly relevant?’

‘Of course it is.’ He had mobile eyebrows and they flattened now in a straight, sincere line. There was a puppyishness about him that irritated her.

She made an effort to sound neutral. ‘It doesn’t make any difference to me if you walk in with the expedition. It’s just a few days’ hiking.’

He smiled at her. ‘I’m looking forward to it. Magnificent scenery, I believe.’

Thin veils of mist blurred the blue view through the portholes and the helicopter rocked through the bumpy air. The mist thinned into streaks, and above and beyond puffed great towers of cumulonimbus. Warm, moist air was sucked up from the valleys to funnel upwards. The weather up here was usually changeable, often threatening, always unpredictable.

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