The Steady Running of the Hour: A Novel Page 3

  Half an hour later they stand below a chimney of smooth rock, four feet across and nearly vertical. A film of water courses down its walls.

  —Looks slick, Ashley says.

  —It’ll go.

  Price steps into the narrow chute, putting his back against one wall and his boots against the other. He pushes upward with his legs and back, his hands touching the walls only for support. Ten minutes later he is on top, belaying the rope over a rock spike.

  —Your go.

  Ashley moves deep into the chimney and begins his way up, trying to keep his weight on his legs. But the handholds are minuscule, slick ridges smaller than a fingernail.

  —You’re too far in, Price calls. Get out to the edge!

  Ashley does not listen. He pushes upward, his arms growing tired, his bootnails skating against the wet stone. The chimney steepens until he reaches an outcropping of rock that blocks his way. Price is eight feet above him, holding the rope taut as he peers down at Ashley.

  —Foothold to the right.

  —Can’t get there.

  —Follow the crack! The left is too slick—

  Ashley’s left boot searches for the ledge, but he has overreached his right hand and he sinks his weight down on his foot before he notices the pebble on the ledge. His boot skates off and he slides down the chimney, skidding against the stone. Price braces himself and grips the rope, but before it catches Ashley jams his arms and legs hard and stops sliding.

  —Are you all right?

  Ashley’s elbows burn with pain. He puts his weight on his back and rests for a moment. Then he climbs the chimney on the right as Price instructed. He comes over the lip and looks down at his bloody knuckles, one of the fingernails cracked. His left elbow is skinned and his knees are wet and filthy.

  —Technically, I suppose, yours was the better route—

  Price shakes his head.

  —Bloody fool.

  They top out on the western ridge an hour later and descend the skyline quickly, reaching the hotel by mid-afternoon. A group of climbers are smoking pipes on a bench behind the building, its white gables sheathed in the gathering mist.

  —Was that you two on the girdle? I say Walsy, were you the one who floundered onto the ridge like a trout?

  The other climbers laugh.

  —We were coming up the west ridge and saw something flop over the top behind us and go flat on a slab. Like a trout coming out of the water. Hardly moved at all, just gazed up at the sky. I said it must be Walsy—

  —I consider myself, Ashley interrupts, more salmon than trout.

  Price points to a new Ford touring car parked in front of the hotel, its black enamel paint splattered with mud.

  —Someone expected today?

  —Only stopping by, the climber says. Chap from the Climbers’ Club and two sisters. What’s the chap’s name?

  —Grafton, another climber says.

  Price and Ashley enter the hotel. There is an odd silence in the foyer. The litter of boots is neatly arranged in rows now, the climbers sent back indoors by the mist. As they approach the door to the smoking room they hear the piano, a slower piece.

  —How queer, Price says. Certainly not in the songbook—

  Price pushes the door open but halts in the doorway, raising his right hand in a gesture of silence. Ashley cranes his neck over Price’s shoulder.

  A large group has arranged itself around the upright piano. Climbers sit cross-legged on the floor, a few reclining, others sucking on glowing pipes. The aroma of cheap shag tobacco hangs low. A row of spectators is seated on chairs at the back, among these a few women. Ashley sees only the back of the piano player. A cream blouse, a long dark skirt. Her hands are fair. A silver band is around her wrist.

  Ashley and Price stay in the door frame, watching. The piece returns to its theme again, a churning cascade of notes. The music slows, then ceases. The girl lifts her hands from the keys. There is cheering and applause.

  —Encore, encore!

  The girl swivels on the piano bench, startled by this enthusiasm. She is slender and her dark hair is tied up. There are faint freckles beneath her blue eyes.

  —It wasn’t anything, she says.

  —Marvelous, Price calls. Encore!

  The girl smiles and bows her head a little. She flips through the songbook, but her two companions stand up, another dark-haired woman and a man in a motoring duster. The room goes on applauding as the girl stands and makes a shy bow. Clapping on, Price leans toward Ashley.

  —She shan’t forget this hotel.

  The girl and her companions walk out amid cheers. A young man with a pipe in his mouth pulls out the piano bench, starting a lively tune whose lyrics were worked out last night. The audience joins in the chorus. Price clasps Ashley on the shoulder.

  —Look here Ashley, I’m only trying to set you on the right course. Plenty of climbers start as fire-eaters, forever biting what they aren’t fit to swallow. I daresay I’ve been as guilty as any fellow. But you must learn to profit from another man’s experience, otherwise you’re courting disaster. It doesn’t matter how skilled you are. I told you the safe route, and you went flailing over some mad path that dropped you.

  —I caught myself—

  —Barely. A true alpinist doesn’t depend on chance.

  Price lifts his hand from Ashley’s shoulder.

  —I’ve a question for you, Ashley. Which do you suppose takes a man furthest in life—talent, judgment or persistence?

  Ashley considers.

  —I’d say the salmon possesses all three. And after infinite labor comes to die in the same place he started.

  —Be serious.

  —Then I don’t know. Which is it?

  Price takes the rope from Ashley and throws the coil over his shoulder. He starts toward the stairs, shaking his head.

  —Which, indeed.

  THE BLOODLINE

  I come out of the building and walk south toward High Holborn, carrying a cardboard portfolio stamped Twyning & Hooper. Inside are the papers they’ve given me, the proof of what I’ve seen and heard: the solicitors exist. The fortune exists.

  High Holborn is not a beautiful street. Buildings of glass and stone. Throngs of pale businessmen in dark suits, their garish neckties bound in thick Windsor knots. They know nothing about the fortune. A woman staring at her cell phone collides with me, knocking shoulders.

  —I’m sorry, I say.

  The woman walks past and turns into Holborn Station, not seeming to hear me. I drag my hand against the polished surface of a building to steady myself.

  I’d wanted to go to London the moment Prichard suggested it. But I didn’t admit it over the phone. After that first call I spent the afternoon sitting in Dolores Park, watching the clouds close over the skyscrapers downtown. I thought about London and Rome and Paris, cities I’d read about that were still only names to me, dark spaces on a map. It was harder to think about the fortune and even harder to link it to my grandmother. The park turned windy and I walked back toward my apartment. Near the corner of 24th and Capp I passed another pay phone. I looked at it for a long time. Then I picked up the receiver and called Khan.

  —I want to come to London. I just need to look for the papers first.

  —Splendid, Khan said. Can you be here by Monday?

  He forwarded the itinerary an hour later. I went to my father’s house and tore apart the garage looking for anything related to my grandmother. My mother’s things were all in cardboard boxes stored high under the rafters and I hadn’t looked at them since the funeral. I got a ladder and took them all down. Soon there were papers everywhere: bank statements and photographs and old letters. I sat on the oil-stained concrete floor looking through everything. In one box I found my mother’s high school yearbook from 1968 and I read some of the autographs in the back, but that only made me feel worse. I shut the yearbook and went through box after box of old linens and polyester clothes. Everything smelled like mothballs. None of it was my
grandmother’s.

  On the highest shelf in the garage I found the jewelry box my mother had once used. It was upholstered in silk and opened with ivory clasps shaped like small tusks. Inside there was antique jewelry that may have been my grandmother’s—ancient brooches, long strings of imitation pearls—but there was nothing else. There were no documents of any kind.

  My father came into the garage. He looked at the mess on the floor and made a low whistle.

  —Looking in your mom’s stuff?

  I closed the jewelry box, but I didn’t answer.

  —Listen, he said. I’m the one who put that stuff up there, I know what’s where. So what are you looking for?

  —My grandmother’s stuff. Anything of hers. Do we have her birth certificate?

  —Birth certificate? Christ, I doubt it. What for?

  —I’m applying for this scholarship for grad school. You need British ancestry for it.

  My father shook his head. —I’ve never seen any of Charlotte’s stuff around here. Not any papers anyway. She didn’t have much to do with us.

  My father picked up one of the letters in the pile and looked at it. It was his handwriting on the envelope. He frowned and dropped it back in the pile.

  —Why was that? I asked.

  My father shrugged. —Would have been better to ask your mother. By the time I met her, she was one of those ladies who’ve been divorced for so long, they’re completely independent. She told her own daughter to call her Charlotte, which tells you something. I don’t think she cared for family obligations. Or any kind of obligation. Maybe in her own way she did love your mother. But they couldn’t stand to be around each other more than a few hours.

  —Did she go to your wedding?

  —She did. She flew out here alone. She wasn’t living in England at the time, somewhere else. Maybe Holland? We had some pretty good champagne at the reception and she drank quite a bit. It loosened her up. I remember her joking that the lapels on my tux were too wide. This was the seventies, you know, and she was from a very different generation.

  —Do you remember anything else?

  My father knelt beside the jewelry box. He opened the lid and looked at the pearls inside. He turned to me.

  —At the reception, I danced with Charlotte after I’d danced with your mom. I guess she was surprised that I knew what I was doing. She told me, ‘You’re the second best of any man I’ve danced with.’ Naturally, I asked who was the best. But she didn’t answer. She just said I was a good dancer and she knew we’d have a long and happy marriage. ‘Americans don’t believe in sorrow,’ she said. ‘That’s what makes you so charming.’

  —What does that mean?

  He shrugged. —I don’t know. I guess she had a pretty hard life. She moved around a lot. The guy she really wanted to marry was killed in the war, somewhere in North Africa. So she married an American instead, but of course that didn’t last. You done with these boxes? None of this stuff is Charlotte’s, I can tell you that.

  We started putting the papers back in the boxes and replacing the lids.

  —Listen, he said. You never told me anything about grad school, and now you’re taking off to Europe in a huff. What’s going on?

  I looked at my father. He was up on the ladder, putting the boxes back under the rafters. It was afternoon but he was still wearing his pajama pants.

  —Everything’s fine, I said.

  At least he hadn’t asked about my mother. It had been almost three years and whenever my father sensed something was wrong, he always assumed it was her. And she was the last thing I wanted to be reminded of. It had taken a long time to separate her life from her death so that I could think of the first without having to think of the second. Finally I learned to let the small and simple memories float to the surface, as they did sometimes, and I no longer tried to push them down.

  So I let myself remember. My mother dropping me off at summer school early in the morning. My mother giving me hardcover books wrapped in gold paper for Christmas, books that I’d pretend I’d never read before. My mother meeting my high school girlfriend and worrying what she ought to wear to dinner, then both of them being too polite and shy as they talked across the table.

  There was no use for the other memories. My mother at the hospital, the trays of food that sat uneaten for hours, both of us looking out the window. Before she was sick we used to talk about anything, but in the hospital I never knew what to say. I’d sit by the window overlooking Divisadero Street and talk as long as I could, stopping when the nurse came to empty the bag attached to my mother’s body.

  The nurse would leave and my mother would turn to me.

  —You don’t need to stop every time she comes in. Just keep talking.

  —About what?

  —Anything at all. I just like to hear you.

  I’d talk about the new apartment where I was living; about a trip I’d taken across the Mojave Desert during winter break. My mother’s eyes would close as I spoke, but if I stopped they would spring open, green and bright. So I’d go on with my story. And my mother would turn her head on her pillow and shut her eyes again.

  In the hospital there was only one thing that made her smile, a simple phrase she spoke like a confession.

  You’re the only one for me, my mother would say.

  Because I was her only child and maybe the only thing that would bind her to this world once she was gone. I don’t know what dreams she had for me. She never told me. When I was younger she imagined I would make a good doctor, but in the end she hated her doctors and might have changed her mind.

  The two of us were night and day. My mother had no use for the arts or history, and she believed it was easiest to be happy in a practical profession, which was probably true. She had spent her whole life in California and loved it as much as her own mother had hated it. My mother wasn’t interested in cold places. She didn’t care about stone castles or distant battlefields or cracked oil paintings hung in old palaces. She found it quaint that I loved these things without ever having seen them.

  And she almost never talked about my grandmother. I can only remember one time. It was spring break and we were driving up Highway 1 to visit my mother’s friend in Mendocino. Suddenly my mother felt sick from the winding road. This was two months before we knew what was wrong with her. The sun had just set and my mother pulled over at a gas station and went inside to use the bathroom. I got out and took a picture of the lit-up Texaco sign while I waited. When she came back she looked tired.

  —Tris, do you mind driving?

  I started the car and we pulled back onto the road. My mother turned to me.

  —How’s school going? Your father said you’re taking an architecture class.

  —Yeah, medieval architecture. It’s a good class. We went to Grace Cathedral on Monday. They’ve got a labyrinth on the floor, just like the one at Chartres. They say medieval pilgrims went through it on their knees, it symbolized the path to the Holy City.

  My mother turned to me.

  —Chartres, she repeated. I haven’t heard that word in years. Charlotte used to talk about it all the time, she’d go on for hours about the stained glass. The round windows, what do you call them—

  —Rose windows.

  My mother nodded. We drove around a peninsula and we could see the headlights of the cars ahead making yellow tracks all the way up the coast. She looked down at the dark water below.

  —You know it was her idea to name you Tristan. I wanted to name you Michael. But Charlotte always loved the name, and she never had a boy of her own—

  —Was she much like me?

  My mother pulled her seat back and shut her eyes.

  —No. She wasn’t like you at all.

  My flight for London was leaving early in the morning, but my father insisted on driving me to the airport. I got up before dawn and repacked my bag to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything. I was taking my old camping backpack, the nylon faded and worn from trips in the Sie
rra Nevada. I wanted to travel light in case I went anywhere after London.

  In the main compartment there was a down sleeping bag that kept me warm in the snow and stuffed down to the size of a loaf of bread. My clothes were rolled up to save space. I took a black hardcover notebook kept dry in a quart-size freezer bag along with my passport. In the lid pocket of the backpack I put an LED headlamp that ran on three small batteries, and a pocket book of London street maps.

  My father tapped on the door and came in. He looked at the backpack.

  —That’s all you’re bringing? What about a coat?

  —It’ll be seventy-five all week. The lows are in the fifties—

  —You know your stuff. Let’s go.

  We got into the car and by the time we crossed the Bay Bridge the sun was coming up. My father turned down the radio as we merged onto the freeway.

  —Did you see Adam yesterday?

  I hesitated. —I didn’t know he was back.

  —He got back on Friday, he’s just been at Lizzie’s. I told him you were leaving town, he said he’d try to get ahold of you. One day you’ll explain to me how a young guy manages a social life without a cell phone—

  —How did you?

  My father looked at me and grinned.

  —Fair enough. But times have changed. You know how old I was the first time I went to Europe? Twenty-nine, a lot older than you. Seems like you’ve been pining to go since the day you were born. How’s it feel to be finally going?

  —A little surreal.

  My father nodded.

  —Well don’t let it pass you by. You’ve earned a break. Don’t worry too much about the grad school stuff. Just soak it in, you only get one first time over there.

  When we reached the airport my father turned in to the international terminal and pulled the car up to the curb. There was a strange expression on his face. He glanced in the rearview mirror and pulled the lever to pop the trunk.

  —Hold on, he said. Take a look in the trunk.