The Pulse of Danger. Jon Cleary
out of the belly of a plain.
The opposite ridge was bathed in sunlight, the trees glittering like the plumage of some giant green bird, but this side of the valley had never seen the sun and was dank and cold. Strangers to the Himalayas were always surprised at the difference in temperature between a sunny slope and one where the sun never reached; he remembered Nancy Breck’s shock when she had taken a sun and shade reading and found a difference of 30 degrees centigrade. He shivered now as he trudged up beneath the trees. But this was where he would find the gooral; it did not like the sun. A Monal pheasant broke from a clump of rhododendron ahead of him and flashed like a huge jewel as it crossed to the opposite ridge, but he resisted the quick impulse to shoot at it. The .30 Double would just blow the bird to pieces, and he had never been able to bring himself to kill just for killing’s sake.
He breathed deeply as he walked, enjoying the thin sharp air in his nose and throat. Unlike other expedition leaders to remote places, he had never written a book on his experiences, had never tried to explain the mystique that brought him to these high mountains, took him to tropical jungles or, once, had taken him to the loneliness of the Australian Centre. He was a botanist by profession and it was his job to collect plant specimens; it was a job he enjoyed and one in which he knew he had a high reputation. But deep in his heart, and he was a man of more secrets than even Eve suspected, he knew that the botanical searches were now more of an excuse for an escape from civilisation. Not civilisation, in itself, although he had no deep love of it; no city could ever bring on the euphoria that the isolation of those mountains could give him. He wanted to escape from what civilisation meant: surrender to Eve and her money, a scarecrow man papered over with his wife’s cheques. During their brief engagement he had referred to her as his financée; it was a joke that had soon gone sour, like a penny on the tongue. She always contributed a major part of the finance of these expeditions, but he had now convinced himself that this was her money being spent in a good cause, not just in keeping a husband. Which was what would happen to him if he gave in to her and retired to pottering about on the family estate in Buckinghamshire. Civilisation had once meant something else again, a semidetached morgue in a drab suburb of Sydney where his mother and his two sisters had done their best to lay him out with cold looks of disapproval. Only his father, a rebel who couldn’t afford a flag, drunk every Saturday on republicanism and three bottles of Resch’s Pilsener, had never complained; but he had never really understood why any man should choose to leave the greatest bloody country in the world, Australia. His parents had worked their fingers bare of prints to put him through university; they had neither understood nor forgiven him when he had changed from law to botany at the end of his first year. In the end he had run away because he knew he was in their debt and he would never be able to repay them. They were dead now, but his conscience would give a free ride to their ghosts for the rest of his life.
Now Eve, not yet a ghost, had swung a leg over his conscience. And he felt the weight of her more than that of his parents. The time had come when he owed her a decision. He could not expect her to go on accompanying him forever to the ends of the earth and comfort; she was a woman who had been brought up in comfort and it had surprised him that she had borne so long the hardships of their trips without complaint. But maybe that was her heritage: English boarding schools, English plumbing, English cooking, bred pioneers. The Stoics of ancient Greece would have tossed in the towel, taken out life subscriptions to hedonism, if they had ever been exposed to life in some of the more benighted ancestral halls of England.
There was also the matter of children.
She had talked about having a family almost from the moment they had decided to marry. She had then been a girl of impulsive ideas and quick decisions; it had shocked him, a slow starter at romance, to learn how eager she had been, first, to have him make love to her, then, to have him marry her. He had never met anyone like her: she exploded love like a boxful of fireworks. They had met, become lovers, married and she had started talking about a family all within six weeks.
That had been in the autumn of 1954. He had taken a rare holiday and gone to Switzerland for some climbing. He had climbed the Mönch and in the late evening come back to the small hotel where he was staying. In those days English tourists were still limited in their travel allowance and at even the cheapest hotel one met a very mixed bag of visitors. When he had gone into the hotel’s small bar the only vacant seat had been beside hers. He had not been then, and still was not, a ladies’ man; but his easy-going, casual approach attracted a lot of women. It had attracted Eve and she had attracted him. Within forty-eight hours they had been lovers and were in love: it had been that sort of romance.
It had taken him the same time to discover whose daughter she was and how much money she had. ‘Sir Humphrey Aidan – you’re his daughter? You mean I’ve been to bed with the Bank of England?’
‘Da-ahling, he has nothing to do with the Bank of England.’ She sat up in bed and ran a hand through her tousled hair. In those days she wore it long, down to her shoulders. It was the way he still liked it, and he hated it when he had to chop it short for her when they were out on these field trips. ‘Da-ahling, we’re not going to waste our time talking about money, are we? I hate people who have a thing about money.’
‘A thing? What d’you mean? Oh, if only my dad was here—’
‘Thank God he’s not. Can I help the bed I was born in? Look at me, stark. Am I any different from the daughter of some man on the dole?’
‘Look, love—’
‘I absolutely adore it when you call me love. It’s such a divine change after da-ahling. In my set everyone—’
‘Set? You’re the sort who belongs to a set?’
‘Da-ahling, all right then, my crowd. The people I go around with.’ She shook her head, suddenly sober. ‘Somehow I don’t think you’re going to like them.’
He ignored that and walked to the window to look out at Jungfrau standing out like a mountain of glass against the brilliant sky. A party of four climbers was working its way up the lower slopes of the mountain; that was what he should have done, concentrated on climbing. She lay back on the bed and looked at him, already loving him with a depth of feeling that surprised even herself. ‘Have you ever been in love before?’
He looked back at her, then at last nodded. ‘Twice. With the same girl.’
‘I didn’t say how many times have you made love—’
‘I know you didn’t. I fell in love with this girl twice. Once when she was sixteen. Then she went off with another bloke, and I swore off love for life, took the pledge and a double dose of bromide. Then I met her again when she was twenty and by then the bromide had worn off, I fell in love with her again.’
‘You were still in love with her—’
He shook his head. ‘No, it was a new feeling. It can happen. Fall in love all over again, I mean.’
‘What was she like? She must have been something special, to make you fall in love with her twice.’
‘She was no raving beauty. She had a mouth like an armpit full of loose teeth, and though her eyes weren’t exactly crossed they had designs on each other—’ She threw a pillow at him. He caught it and came and sat back on the bed beside her. ‘Look, love, Aussies have no great reputation as lovers. The only time an Aussie ever compliments a woman, he’s asking for a loan or she’s got a gun at his head. But one thing we do know – never tell your current girl friend what the last one looked like. Always make out she was about as sexy as a porridge doll. One thing a woman can’t stand is to look in a mirror and see another woman’s face there.’
‘Who told you that?’
He grinned. ‘My last girl.’
‘I wish Mummy was still alive to meet you. She would have absolutely adored you. But you and Daddy should get on. You have something in common.’
‘You mean he has an overdraft, too?’
She laughed. ‘I wouldn’t know about that, da-ahling. No, he