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
