Killing Me Softly

Eighteen

A few days later I went down to get the post and found another brown envelope. It had no stamp but on it was written: TO MRS ADAM TALLIS.

I opened it immediately, down there in the common passage, feeling the doormat prickle the soles of my feet. The paper was the same, the writing was the same, though a bit smaller because the message was longer:

CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR WEDDING MRS TALLIS.

WATCH YOUR BACK

P.S. WHY DON’T YOU MAKE YOUR HUSBAND

SOME TEA IN BED?

I took the note up to Adam and put it on the bed by his face. He read it with a sombre expression.

‘Our correspondent doesn’t know that I’ve kept my own name,’ I said, with an attempt at a light tone.

‘Knows I’m in bed, though,’ said Adam.

‘What does that mean? Tea?’

I went to the kitchen and opened the cupboard. There were only two packets of tea-bags, Kenyan for Adam, poncy lapsang souchong for me. I tipped them out on to the counter. They looked normal enough. I noticed that Adam was behind me.

‘Why should I make you tea in bed, Adam? Could it be something about the bed? Or the sugar?’

Adam opened the fridge. There were two milk bottles in the door, one half full, one unopened. He took them both out. I looked in the cupboard under the sink and found a large red plastic bowl. I took the bottles from Adam.

‘What are you doing?’ he asked.

I emptied the first bottle into the bowl.

‘Looks like milk to me,’ I said. I opened the other bottle and started to pour.

‘This is… oh, Jesus.’

There were little shadows in the milk and they bobbed to the surface of the bowl. Insects, flies, spiders, lots of them. I very carefully put the bottle down and then emptied the milk down the sink. I had to concentrate very hard in order to stop myself vomiting. First I was frightened, then I was angry. ‘Somebody’s been in here,’ I shouted. ‘They’ve fucking been in this flat.’

‘Hmm?’ said Adam absently, as if he had been thinking hard about something else.

‘Somebody broke in.’

‘No, they didn’t. It’s the milk. They put that bottle on the step after the milk was delivered.’

‘What shall we do?’ I asked.

‘Mrs Tallis,’ said Adam thoughtfully. ‘It’s aimed at you. Shall we call the police?’

‘No,’ I said aloud. ‘Not yet.’

I accosted him as he came out of the front door, briefcase in hand.

‘Why are you doing this to me? Why?’

He stepped back from me as if I were a mugger. ‘What on earth are –?’

‘Don’t give me that crap, Jake. I know it’s you now. For ages I tried to pretend it was someone else, but I know it was you. Who else knows I’m scared of insects?’

‘Alice.’ He tried to put a hand on my shoulder but I shook him off. ‘Calm down, people will think you’re mad.’

‘Just tell me why the fuck you put spiders in my milk, dammit. Revenge?’

‘Now I think you’re mad.’

‘Come on, tell me. What else have you got up your sleeve? Are you trying to send me slowly off my head?’

He looked at me and that stony look made me feel ill. ‘If you ask me,’ he said, ‘you’re already off your head.’ And he turned on his heel and walked steadily up the road, away from me.

Adam showed no interest at all, but over the next few days whenever I passed a newsagent I checked to see if they had printed the story. On the next Saturday it was there. I saw it straight away, a little photograph of a mountain in a box on the front page: ‘Social Climbing: Mountains and Money. See Section Two.’ I quickly pulled the other bit of the paper out to see what Joanna had written. There seemed to be pages of the story, too much to read in the shop. I bought it and took it back home.

Adam had already gone out. I was pleased, for once. I made myself a pot of coffee. I wanted to settle down and give this the time it deserved. The cover of the second section of the Participant consisted of a sublime photograph of Chungawat in bright sunshine across a blue sky. Beneath it was a caption as if it was being displayed in an estate agent’s window: ‘One Himalayan peak for rent, £30,000. No previous experience required.’ I was captivated once more by the lonely beauty of the mountain. Had Adam been to the top of that? Well, not quite to the top. I opened the paper and checked. Four pages. There were photographs: Greg, Klaus, Françoise, beautiful in big boots, I noted with a stab of jealousy. There were a couple of the other climbers who had died. Adam, of course, but I was used to seeing pictures of him by now. There was a map, a couple of diagrams. I took a sip of coffee and started to read.

In fact, at first I didn’t exactly read it. I just flicked my eyes over the text seeing which names were mentioned and how often. Adam came mainly at the end. I read that to see that there was nothing startlingly new. There wasn’t. Reassured, I went back to the beginning and read carefully. Joanna had told the story I already knew from Klaus’s book, but from a different perspective. Klaus’s version of the Chungawat disaster was complicated by his own feelings of excitement, failure, admiration, disillusion, fear, all mixed together. I respected him because he had owned up to all the confusion of what it had been like to be there in the storm with people dying and to his own inability to behave as he would have liked.

Joanna saw it as a morality tale about the corrupting effects of money and a cult of heroism. On the one hand there were heroic characters who needed money; on the other hand there were rich people who wanted to climb difficult mountains, or, rather, wanted to say that they had climbed difficult mountains, since it was a matter of debate whether in a strict sense they had actually climbed them. None of this was big news to me. The tragic victim in all of this, needless to say, was Greg, whom she had not managed to talk to. After beginning her article with the terrible events on Chungawat, which still made me shiver however melodramatically they were described, Joanna went back to talk about Greg’s earlier career. His achievements really were startling. It wasn’t just the peaks he had climbed – Everest, K2, McKinley, Annapurna – but the way he had climbed them: in winter, without oxygen, blasting for the summit with a minimum of equipment.

Joanna had obviously been through the press cuttings. In the eighties Greg had been a climbing mystic. A major peak was a privilege to be earned through years of apprenticeship. By the early nineties he had apparently been converted: ‘I used to be a mountaineering élitist,’ he was quoted as saying. ‘Now I’m a democrat. Climbing is a great experience. I want to make it available to everybody.’ Everybody, Joanna commented drily, who could stump up $50,000. Greg had met an entrepreneur called Paul Molinson and together they had set up their company, Peak Experiences. For three years they had been taking doctors, lawyers, arbitrageurs, heiresses up to peaks that, until recently, had been beyond all but a select group of advanced climbers.

Joanna focused on one of the Chungawat party who had died, Alexis Hartounian, a Wall Street broker. A scornful (and anonymous) climber was quoted as saying: ‘This man achieved some of the world’s great climbs. By no stretch of the imagination was he a climber yet he was telling people that he’d done Everest as if it were a bus stop. Well, he learned the hard way.’

Joanna’s account of what had happened on the mountain was simply a distilled version of Klaus’s narrative accompanied by a diagram showing the fixed rope up the west side of the ridge. She portrayed a chaotic situation with incompetent climbers, people who were ill, one of them not able to speak a word of English. She quoted anonymous climbing experts, who said that the conditions above eight thousand metres were just too extreme for climbers who couldn’t take care of themselves. It wasn’t just that they were risking their own lives but those of everybody with them. Klaus had told her that he agreed with some of that, but a couple of the anonymous commentators went further. A peak like Chungawat requires absolute commitment and concentration, especially if the weather turns. They suggested that Greg had been so preoccupied with business complications and the special requirements of his unqualified clients that it had affected his judgement and, worst of all, his performance. ‘When you’ve expended your energy on all the wrong things,’ one person said, ‘then things go wrong at the wrong time, fixed lines come loose, people go in wrong directions.’

It was a cynical story of corruption and disillusion, and Adam appeared towards the end as the symbol of lost idealism. He was known for having been critical of the expedition, not least of his own participation in it, but when it came down to it, he was the man who had gone up and down the mountain saving people who couldn’t save themselves. Joanna had managed to contact a couple of survivors who said that they owed their lives to him. Obviously he appeared all the more attractive for his refusal to blame anybody – indeed, his reluctance to make any comment at all. There was also the pathos of his own girlfriend having been among the fatalities. Adam had said little about this to her but she had found somebody else who described him as going out again and again in search of her before collapsing unconscious in his tent.

When Adam came back, he showed no interest in the article beyond a contemptuous frown at the cover: ‘What the fuck does she know?’ was his only comment. Later, in bed, I read the anonymous criticisms of Greg out to him. ‘What do you think of that, my love?’ I asked.

He took the paper from my hands and tossed it on to the floor. ‘I think it’s crap,’ he said.

‘You mean it’s an inaccurate description of what happened?’

‘I forgot,’ he said, laughing. ‘You’re a scientist. You’re interested in the truth.’ He sounded derisive.

It was like being married to Lawrence of Arabia or Captain Scott or the boy on the burning deck or somebody. Almost everybody I knew found a reason to ring me up in the next couple of days for a chat. People who had been disapproving of the indecent haste with which I had got married suddenly got the point. My dad rang up and chatted about nothing in particular, then casually mentioned having seen the article and suggested we come round some time. In the office on Monday morning, everybody suddenly had something urgent they needed to run by me. Mike came in with his coffee and handed me an unimportant piece of paper. ‘We’re never really tested, are we?’ he said, with a musing gleam in his eyes. ‘It means that we never really know ourselves because we don’t know how we would react in an emergency. It must be wonderful for your… er, husband, to have been at the centre of a disaster and to have come through as he did.’

‘What do you mean my er husband, Mike? He’s my husband. I can show you the piece of paper if you like.’

‘I didn’t mean anything like that, Alice. It just takes some getting used to. How long have you known him?’

‘A couple of months, I suppose.’

‘Amazing. I must say that when I first heard about it, I thought you’d gone off your rocker. It didn’t seem like the Alice Loudon I knew. Now I can see that we were all wrong.’

‘We?’

‘Everybody in the office.’

I was aghast. ‘You all thought I’d gone mad?’

‘We were all surprised. But now I can see that you were right and we were wrong. It’s just like in the article. It’s all about the ability to think clearly under pressure. Your husband has it.’ Mike had been looking into his coffee cup, out of the window, anywhere but at me. Now he turned and looked at me. ‘You’ve got it too.’

I tried to stop myself giggling at the compliment, if that’s what it was. ‘Well, thank you, kind sir. Back to business.’

By Tuesday I felt I had talked to everybody in the world who had my phone number in their book, except Jake. Even so I was surprised when Claudia told me there was a Joanna Noble on the phone for me. Yes, it was really me she wanted to talk to and not just as a way of getting to Adam. And, yes, it was important and she wanted to meet face to face. That very day, if possible. She would come to somewhere near my office, right now if I had the time. It would only be for a few minutes. What could I say? I told her to come to Reception and an hour later we were sitting in an almost empty sandwich bar round the corner. She hadn’t spoken except to shake my hand.

‘Your story has given me a sort of reflected glory,’ I said. ‘At least I’m the wife of a hero.’

She looked uncomfortable and lit a cigarette. ‘He is a hero,’ she said. ‘Between ourselves, I had qualms about some of the piece, dishing out blame the way I did. But what Adam did up there was incredible.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He is, isn’t he?’ Joanna didn’t respond. ‘I assumed you would be on to another story by now,’ I said.

‘Several,’ she said.

I saw she had a piece of paper which she was fingering. ‘What’s that?’

She looked down, almost as if it had arrived in her hands without her knowing and she was startled by it.

‘This arrived in the mail this morning.’ She handed me the paper. ‘Read it,’ she said.

It was a very short letter.

Dear Joanna Noble,

What you wrote about Adam Tallis made me sick. I could tell you the truth about him if you were interested. If you are interested, look up in newspapers for 20 October 1989. If you want you can talk to me and I’ll tell what he’s like. The girl in the story is me.

Yours sincerely,

Michelle Stowe

I looked up at Joanna, puzzled. ‘Sounds deranged,’ I said.

Joanna nodded. ‘I get plenty of letters like that. But I went to the library – I mean the archive of newspapers and cuttings at the office – and found this.’ She handed me another piece of paper. ‘It’s not a very big story. It was on an inside page, but I thought… Well, see what you think.’

It was a photocopy of a small news item headed: ‘Judge Raps Rape Girl’. A name in the first paragraph was underlined. Adam’s:

A young man walked free on the first day of his trial for rape at Winchester Crown Court yesterday when Judge Michael Clark instructed the jury to find him not guilty. ‘You leave this courtroom without a stain on your character,’ Judge Clark told Adam Tallis, 25. ‘I can only regret that you were ever brought here to answer such a flimsy and unsubstantiated charge.’

Mr Tallis had been charged with raping Miss X, a young woman who cannot be named for legal reasons, after what was described as ‘a drunken party’ in the Gloucester area. After a brief cross-examination of Miss X, which focused on her sexual history and her state of mind during the party, the counsel for the defence, Jeremy McEwan QC, moved for a dismissal, which was immediately accepted by Judge Clark.

Judge Clark said that he regretted ‘that Miss X had the benefit of the cloak of anonymity while Mr Tallis’s name and reputation were dragged through the mire’. On the court steps, Mr Tallis’s solicitor, Richard Vine, said that his client was delighted with the judge’s verdict and just wanted to get on with his life.

When I had finished, I picked up my coffee cup with a steady hand and took a sip. ‘So?’ I said. Joanna said nothing. ‘What is this? Are you planning to write something about it?’

‘Write what?’ said Joanna.

‘You’ve built Adam up,’ I said. ‘Maybe it’s time to knock him down.’

Joanna lit another cigarette. ‘I don’t think I deserve that,’ she said coolly. ‘I’ve said everything I have to say about mountaineering. I have no intention of contacting this woman. But…’ Now she paused and looked uncertain. ‘It was more about you than anything else. I didn’t know what was the right thing to do. In the end, I decided it was my responsibility to show you it. Maybe I’m being pompous and interfering. Just forget about it now, if you want.’

I took a deep breath and made myself speak calmly. ‘I’m sorry I said that.’

Joanna gave a thin smile and blew out a cloud of smoke. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘I’ll go now.’

‘Can I keep these?’

‘Sure. They’re only photocopies.’ Her curiosity visibly got the better of her. ‘What are you going to do?’

I shook my head. ‘Nothing. He was found innocent, wasn’t he?’

‘Yes.’

‘Without a stain on his character, right?’

‘Right.’

‘So I’m going to do nothing at all.’