Dan Simmons - The Abominable - A Novel

“Oh, Dickie…Dickie…,” says Lady Bromley, taking the Deacon’s large, calloused hand in both of hers. “It’s so wonderful to see you back here. It seems like just yesterday that your mother was dropping you off here to play with Charles…and, oh, how irritated both of you older boys became at little Percy’s attempts to keep up with you!”

Jean-Claude and I risk a look and silent query to each other. Dickie?!

“It is wonderful to see you, Lady Bromley, but I am so deeply sorry about the circumstances which bring us together again,” says the Deacon.

Lady Bromley nods and looks down for a second as her eyes fill, but she smiles and lifts her head again. “Charles greatly regrets that he cannot greet you himself today—his health is very poor, as you know.”

The Deacon nods sympathetically.

“But you were also wounded during the War,” says Lady Bromley, still holding the Deacon’s hand with one of her hands above his, the other below.

“Mild wounds, long healed,” says the Deacon. “Nothing like the terrible gassing that Charles experienced. My thoughts have gone out to him a thousand times.”

“And your letter of condolence about Percival was beautiful, just beautiful,” Lady Bromley says very softly. “But I am being rude—please, Dickie, introduce me to your friends.”

The introductions and short conversations go smoothly. Lady Bromley speaks in fluent French to J.C., and I pick up enough of it to understand that she is expressing how impressed she is that such a young man should be known as such a fine Chamonix Guide, and Jean-Claude replies with his biggest, brightest grin.

“And Mr. Perry,” she says when it is time to turn to me, taking my clumsily outstretched hand gracefully in hers. A brief touch but somehow electrifying. “Even in my rural isolation, I’ve heard of the Perrys of Boston—a fine family.”

I stammer my thanks. I am from a well-known and fine old family, Boston Brahmins all down to the next-to-last generation, a family history traceable back to the 1630s, family members famous as merchants and Harvard professors, and a few brave ones who distinguished themselves in places like Bunker Hill and Gettysburg.

But alas, the Brahmin Perrys of Boston were now almost broke. Declining wealth had not kept my parents from calling the Harvard-Yale football game only “the Game,” or from doing their modest Christmas shopping downtown at the seven-story S. S. Pierce Company, which had been serving families like ours since 1831. Nor, initially, did our advancing poverty prevent me from experiencing the best private schools, the tennis courts and greens and formal dining areas of the Brookline Country Club (which, of course, we referred to only as “the Country Club,” as if no others existed in the world), and of having my parents pay my way through Harvard—which finally drained the last resources of the family. All so that I could spend every spare minute and all my college summers climbing rocks and mountains with friends, never worrying about the expenses. Even with the inheritance of my aunt’s $1,000 when I turned twenty-one, I never considered giving it to my parents to help them with some of their bills—or mine—but subsidized this year in Europe, climbing in the Alps.

“Please, sit down,” Lady Bromley is saying to us all. She’s moved to the other side of the low table and taken her place in the comfortable-looking high-backed chair. As if on cue, three maids—or servants of some kind—come in through another door with trays carrying a teapot, ancient porcelain cups and saucers, silver spoons, silver containers of sugar and cream, and a five-tiered silver serving dish with small pastries and biscuits on each layer.

One of the servants offers to pour the tea, but Lady Bromley says that she will do it, and she does, inquiring of each of us—except for “Dickie,” who, she remembers, takes his tea with a bit of cream, a bit of lemon, and two sugars—how we take our tea. I answer, idiotically, “Straight, ma’am,” and receive a smile and my saucer and a cup of tea only. I hate tea.

There are a few minutes of small talk, mostly between the Deacon and Lady Bromley, but then she leans forward and says briskly, “Let us discuss your other letter, Dickie. The one I received three weeks after the beautiful condolence card. The one about the three of you going to Everest to look for my Percival.”

The Deacon clears his throat. “Perhaps it was presumptuous, Lady Bromley, but there seem to be so many unanswered questions about Lord Percival’s disappearance that I thought I might offer my services in an attempt to clear up the mystery surrounding that accident or fall or avalanche…or whatever happened.”

“Whatever happened, indeed,” says Lady Bromley, her voice almost harsh. “Do you know, that German gentleman who was the only witness to that so-called ‘avalanche’ that he says carried away Percy and a German porter—that Herr Bruno Sigl—will not even answer my cables and letters? He sent one brutish note stating that he had no more to say on the matter, and he’s maintained that silence, despite the Alpine Club and Mount Everest Committee demanding more details from him.”

“That is not right,” Jean-Claude says quietly. “Families need to know the truth.”

“I am not fully convinced that Percival is dead,” says Lady Bromley. “He might be injured and lost on the mountain, barely surviving, or in some nearby Tibetan village awaiting help.”

Here it is, I think. The insane part of all this that the Deacon wants us to cash in on. I feel a little nauseated and set down my cup and saucer.

“I understand that the chances of that—of my Percy still being alive on the mountain—are very low, gentlemen. I still retain all my faculties. I live in the real world. But without a rescue or retrieval mission to the mountain, how will I ever be able to know for sure? Percival’s young life was so…so private…so complex…I have understood so little about him over the past years. I feel that I should, at the very least, understand the details of his death…or disappearance. Why was he in Tibet at all? Why on Mount Everest? And why with that Austrian man…Mr. Meyer…when he died?”

She stops, and I think of all the reports I’ve heard of young Lord Percival Bromley being a rake, a high-stakes gambler, someone who spent years in Germany and Austria, an endless rambler who rarely came home to England to visit and who stayed in the best suites in the best of Europe’s hotels, and, it was often whispered (although I’d not had the courage to ask the Deacon about it), was a sodomite specializing in German and Austrian brothels for men who like such things. Private, complex—yes, a life filled with such preferences and activities would be private and complex, wouldn’t it?

“Percy was such a wonderful athlete…you must remember that, Dickie.”

“I do,” says the Deacon. “Is it true that Percival was going to row for England in the nineteen twenty-eight Olympics?”

Lady Bromley smiles. “At his advanced age—out of his twenties—it sounds ridiculous, does it not? But that was precisely Percy’s plan, to go to the Ninth Olympiad in Amsterdam in four years and row with the British crew. You remember how he excelled at rowing when he was at Oxford. He has—had—kept in superb physical shape and trained with Olympic-class English rowing teams whenever he was here for a visit. He practiced in Holland, France, and Germany as well. But rowing was only one of the sports in which Percy excels…or excelled.”

“What was his climbing experience before going to Everest?” the Deacon asks. “I’d been out of touch with Percival for a long time.”

Lady Bromley smiles and pours more tea for each of us. “More than fifteen years of climbing in the Alps with the best guides and with his cousin,” she says proudly. “Since he was a young boy. All five summits of the Grandes Jurasses, including the highest and true summit—Point Walker, I believe it’s called—from the south side, by the time he was twenty. The Matterhorn, of course. The Piz Badille…”