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.
