Rosie Thomas - White

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.