‘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.
‘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
