The Steady Running of the Hour: A Novel Read online

  —I see you’re in the Artists Rifles, Eleanor says. Are you an artist?

  —Only a pretender, I’m afraid. I was with the Artists for OTC, but they’re putting me with the another regiment when I go out.

  Eleanor steps closer and lowers her voice.

  —I hope you’re not going to France.

  —On Thursday.

  —How frightful. Do be careful.

  —I’ll do my duty.

  —Of course you will.

  There is an awkward pause as the two sisters face Ashley, neither knowing what to say. Price is talking to Charles about the postimpressionists and he draws Eleanor into the conversation so that Ashley and Imogen are left alone. Imogen looks to the side and swings her handbag. She looks at Ashley.

  —What did you make of the lecture? You seemed to prefer the map room.

  Ashley shrugs. —The slides were rather impressive.

  —Aren’t you interested in the Himalaya? You are a climber, aren’t you?

  —Of sorts. But if you ask me, the lecture was a lot of bosh. They won’t know anything about climbing at those heights until someone actually does it. There must be some guinea pig. If they mean to climb Everest, that’s four thousand feet above what any man has done before. They haven’t the slightest notion what it would be like. It can’t be studied in a laboratory.

  —You’d like to try?

  Ashley grins, nodding toward Price. —Hugh would like to try.

  —And you wouldn’t?

  —I would too, Ashley admits. Though not so badly as Hugh, I expect. Are you interested in alpinism?

  —I’m interested in everything. And I do find climbing intriguing, but Charles acts as if it’s the same as playing rugger, a bunch of fellows competing on a mountain. He’ll never tell us anything about it. So when he mentioned there was a lecture on the Himalaya, I insisted he bring us here—

  —You wanted to come?

  Imogen smiles. —Naturally. Though I can’t say I learned much, except that men always want to try the one thing they oughtn’t to. But everyone already knows that. From the sound of it, these fellows spend so much time worrying how they’ll climb a mountain that they never consider why they do it. Surely there’s more to climbing than just boasting rights? Perhaps you could explain it, Mr. Walsingham?

  —I doubt it.

  —I’d be grateful if you tried. Tell me, when a fellow climbs a mountain, is it the danger he loves?

  Ashley grimaces. —God, no. It’s not so crass as that.

  —The adventure then?

  —Not at all. It isn’t so vulgar—

  —The sport? The competition?

  He shakes his head. —Certainly not.

  —The mountains then? Or what they hold?

  —That’s closer. But it’s not exactly that either.

  —Then you don’t know what it is, Imogen hazards. It isn’t something one knows, but something one feels.

  Ashley looks at the floor, the ceiling lamps reflecting bright on the waxed floorboards.

  —Yes, he agrees. That’s right.

  Imogen begins to rummage through her handbag. The slide operator has shut off the projector and is rolling up the long screen. Price is talking to Eleanor and Charles about Cézanne. Imogen takes a tattered handbill from the bag and gives it to Ashley.

  —Here it is. I was given three of these on the street today. Imagine it, three people giving one the same handbill. So I thought I ought to give you one. You see, there’s a splendid matinee tomorrow at the Queen’s Hall. They’re performing Mozart’s twenty-third piano concerto, one of the ones he kept to himself. It’s very lovely. And there are fewer decent concerts every month.

  Ashley thanks her and puts the leaflet in his pocket. He is about to speak when Charles announces that the trio is already late for an engagement. They say their good-byes hurriedly. Eleanor gives Ashley a sympathetic smile.

  —Do be careful. Do come back safely.

  Imogen touches Ashley’s hand as she passes.

  —It’s only au revoir.

  The three of them walk out of the hall. Price and Ashley exchange greetings with a few other members of the Alpine Club, then walk out onto Kensington Gore, pulling their caps on.

  —What about a stroll?

  They cross the road into Kensington Gardens. Price whistles as they follow a groomed path of soft brown dirt. A four-wheeler coasts past them, the horses snorting imperiously. Price stops whistling.

  —And what did you think?

  —Strange people. The older sister said she hoped I wasn’t going to France. Can you believe that?

  —I can.

  Price scratches his cheek. He smiles.

  —Strange or not, you fancy that Jeanne d’Arc. Ashley, I never knew you went in for these bohemian types—

  —A man can fancy nothing in six days.

  —A man can live a lifetime—

  —Spare me.

  They sit on a bench beside the path. Ashley leans his swagger cane against the bench and stretches his legs. Price shakes his head.

  —Grafton. Of all the fellows to see at Kensington Gore. He hasn’t the slightest interest in the Himalaya, and the Climbers’ Club—

  —The girl wanted to go. That’s why they came.

  Price looks at Ashley.

  —The girl?

  —She wants to know about alpinism. Grafton won’t tell her anything, so she dragged them all to the lecture. She asked me why a fellow climbs mountains.

  —What on earth did you tell her?

  —I told her I didn’t know. Do you know?

  —Certainly I do.

  —Would you care to explain it?

  Price grins. —Certainly not.

  THE WORLD’S KNOWLEDGE

  Fluorescent light floods the Underground carriage. I listen to the recorded woman’s voice announcing each station. Warren Street. Euston. King’s Cross St. Pancras. I rise.

  Sheets of rain lash Euston Road as I run west, holding a copy of the Guardian over my head. The newspaper curls with moisture. Black taxis sail by at twenty miles an hour, measured out in fleets by the switching traffic lights. I walk through a red-brick gatehouse, the sandstone lintel above inscribed THE BRITISH LIBRARY. A huge bronze statue of Newton sits in the courtyard, the scientist mining the secrets of the universe by some obscure instrument.

  I enter the cavernous building and put my belongings in a locker downstairs. In the admissions office a clerk gives me a number and tells me to wait. When my number comes, I plead my case for several minutes. The clerk grants me a plastic reader’s card with a photograph of myself, my gaze directed slightly off-camera.

  The library is much bigger than my university library and I have no idea where to start. So I take brochures from a display and sit before the glass tower of King’s Library, scanning the leaflets quickly. The British Library is a legal deposit library, which means it has a copy of every book printed in the UK and many printed elsewhere. It holds 150 million items and there are eleven reading rooms at this site, each specializing in a subject.

  I begin in the two-level humanities room. Everything is in rows: scholars seated shoulder-to-shoulder, scores of computer terminals, neat queues of patrons waiting to collect their books from the circulation desk. I follow the perimeter of the massive room, scanning the reference works that line the shelves. The National Union Catalog, ten bookcases wide. Huge and ancient leather-bound dictionaries in Latin and French. I pull the 1922 to 1930 supplement of the Dictionary of National Biography and look for Walsingham. No entry.

  Walking along the shelves, I reach the geographic reference section. At last I find an entry in a volume of the Encyclopedia of Exploration.

  Walsingham, ASHLEY EDMUND (1895–1924), mountaineer, was born at Sutton Courtenay, Berkshire, 16 April 1895, the only child of Henry Franklin Walsingham (1865–1909), a textile merchant, and his wife, Emily Symons Fitzgerald (1869–1933). Walsingham was educated at Abingdon School, Charterhouse, and Magdalene College, Cam
bridge, where he matriculated in 1914. He left Cambridge after a single term and took a commission as a 2nd lieutenant in the Royal Berkshire Regiment. Posted to the Western Front in August 1916, Walsingham survived two years of dangerous front line service, taking part in both the Somme and Third Ypres actions. In the British attack on Empress Redoubt on 5 November 1916, Walsingham was so badly wounded that his commanding officer mistakenly reported him dead. He was later decorated with the Military Cross for his actions in taking a German trench.

  From the age of 16 Walsingham was an avid mountaineer, climbing on rock and ice in the Alps to a high standard. He was demobilized from the army at the age of 23, but the war had left an indelible impression on Walsingham, and his failure to readjust to civil life made mountaineering ever more important. An inheritance from a wealthy relative in 1913 enabled Walsingham to live without the need to earn his own income. In 1919, Walsingham attempted to return to his studies at Cambridge, but left within a month and spent the summer climbing in the Dolomites. In October, Walsingham sailed to Mombasa to manage a coffee plantation in Kenya, and although the business was profitable, he found it morally distasteful.

  In May 1921, Walsingham again returned to the Alps for an admirable season of climbing, but rather than returning to Kenya that autumn, Walsingham sailed to Aden. He travelled the length of the Arabian Peninsula, often on foot, collecting material for a treatise on the ‘lost cities’ of the Arabian Desert. In 1922, Walsingham briefly assisted the excavation at Ur under Sir Charles Leonard Woolley, and later at Kish under Stephen Langdon. However, the majority of Walsingham’s two years in Arabia were spent searching for the so-called ‘Iram of the Pillars’ in the vicinity of the Rub’ al Khali desert. These efforts were hampered by his weak command of Arabic and other Semitic languages, and in April 1923 Walsingham telegraphed Hugh Price, IRAM VANISHED MEET ST MORITZ JUNE ASHLEY.

  Walsingham reached Switzerland by June, and in the following three months he would achieve the most impressive season of any British alpinist to date. In a series of spectacular climbs Walsingham scaled obscure peaks and pioneered new or difficult routes, including a first ascent of Piz Badile by the Badilekante route on 9 July 1923, and a harrowing first ascent of the North Face of the Dent d’Hérens on 2 August 1923. Geoffrey Winthrop Young estimated that among his peers Walsingham was ‘the least naturally gifted, the least graceful; also the most driven, most relentless and most indestructible climber I ever saw on a mountain’.

  Walsingham had always been a staunch advocate of guideless climbing, but his later ascents were notable for their daring, particularly his perseverance in the face of deteriorating weather; he developed a reputation as an insular, mercurial climber, his keen mountain sense governed by instinct rather than intellect. Hugh Price later wrote that Walsingham ‘was introspective to a fault, except while climbing, where he compensated by never thinking at all’. On several occasions Walsingham is said to have saved his climbing party from disaster, avoiding rockfalls and avalanches, and navigating safe routes under harrowing conditions. On 20 August 1922 he famously arrested the fall of two climbing partners on the Grandes Jorasses, anchoring his rope around the head of his ice axe barely in time to secure the belay.

  The initial 1921 expedition to Mount Everest was little more than a reconnaissance, and the climbing party led by Hugh Price struggled to find a feasible route towards the summit. Walsingham applied for a place on the 1922 Everest expedition, but was not accepted despite Price’s endorsement, possibly because the committee judged Walsingham’s temperament unreliable – he was known as an irreverent, even impertinent climber whose inherent mistrust of authority had been cemented by the war. Walsingham contributed money to the expedition in spite of this rejection, a gesture that impressed the committee and may have won him his place upon the third Everest expedition in 1924. He trained rigorously through the winter of 1923–4, conditioning himself according to the latest athletic principles, and even consulting a professional coach. But the British climbing community, committed to genteel amateurism, regarded such methods with suspicion, with the predictable result that although inexperienced at high altitude, Walsingham was probably the strongest member of the 1924 expedition.

  From its arrival at the Rongbuk Glacier in April 1924, the third Everest expedition was plagued by bad weather, and the climbers established their high camps on the North Col only at great cost to their physical fitness. Walsingham suffered particularly from a throat injury, acquired in the war and exacerbated by the altitude. On 4 June Walsingham wrote to Young that he felt ‘weaker than a child, sicker than an invalid, and madder than any fiend who ever chopped steps in ice. But certain, terribly certain, that I must and shall make it to the top’. On 7 June Price and Walsingham made an attempt on the summit without supplemental oxygen. Traversing the north face of the mountain, Price was pushed back by snowblindness, but Walsingham insisted on continuing towards the summit alone.

  The circumstances of Walsingham’s death remain unknown. The onset of a storm in the late afternoon suggests he may have died from exposure, or he may have fallen down Everest’s north face, a drop of thousands of feet.

  Walsingham was commemorated in a cairn erected near the expedition’s Rongbuk Valley base camp, and a memorial was installed in 1926 in the chapel of Magdalene College.

  I flip to the front of the encyclopedia and check the publication date: 1951. Then I take a pencil from the reference desk and copy the information into my notebook. Walsingham’s name gives no results in the electronic catalogue, so I call up a half-dozen books relating to the 1924 expedition. This is only the beginning; I spend all day in these sunless rooms. In the morning I read of the Everest expedition in the South Asian room, under portraits of turbaned Mughal emperors, resplendent with their swords and jewels. By noon I’m in the microfilm room, paging through newspaper indices for references to Walsingham and Soames-Andersson. There are many newspaper articles from 1924 on the expedition and Ashley’s death, but they all parrot the same information with no mention of his private life. In the afternoon I’m in the manuscript room, begging a librarian to let me see the letters of the artist Eleanor Grafton, née Soames-Andersson.

  —It’s a special allocation, he says. You’d need a letter from your university and then you would have to receive approval from the library.

  —But I’m not affiliated with a university.

  —Then you’ve no chance.

  I plead further with the librarian, explaining that I’m related to the author of these letters. The clerk listens impassively.

  —Even if I wanted to, he says, I couldn’t give you the letters. There are procedures here.

  I return to my seat and stare at the desk in frustration, twirling the pencil in my hand. The pencil is dark purple and engraved in white capitals: THE WORLD’S KNOWLEDGE. Piled before me are five books on the expedition, two books on the war, and a photocopy of the only relevant clipping I’d found in two hours of microfilm research. It is from The Times of London, dated October 13, 1924.

  EVEREST CLIMBER’S ESTATE IN LIMBO

  HEIR TO SHIPPING FORTUNE MISSING

  The Times has learned that part of the estate of Mr. Ashley Walsingham, who died on Mount Everest in June, has been placed in trust after a failure to locate the principal beneficiary.

  Mr. Walsingham was heir to the estate of his great-uncle George H. Risley, the famed shipping magnate who made his fortune as founder and managing director of Moor Line Ltd. The value of Mr. Walsingham’s estate is unknown, but sources in the City say that Mr. Risley’s estate must have been ‘considerable.’

  The missing beneficiary’s name has not been revealed. The law firm handling the case, Messrs. Twyning & Hooper, has declined to comment on the matter.

  Mr. Walsingham perished on Mount Everest in an attempt on the mountain’s summit. The King paid tribute to the explorer, saying ‘he will ever be remembered as a fine example of a mountaineer – ready to risk his life for his companions and to face dang
ers on behalf of science and discovery.’

  The small display on my desk illuminates. A message glows in green letters: PLEASE CONTACT ISSUE DESK.

  I show my reader’s card at the issue desk and a woman hands me a green cardboard box labeled Grafton, Eleanor S.A.: Personal Correspondence 1915–1931. On the way back to my desk I pass by the reference counter, but the librarian I spoke to is gone.

  The box holds seven envelopes, all addressed to Eleanor’s husband Charles, who seems to have been stationed with the army in Palestine from late 1916 onward. The letters discuss Eleanor’s art career and various financial matters, with frequent references to specific individuals, but I can make little sense of these. Many people are referred to only by a surname or first initial, and the difficulty is aggravated by the unfamiliar handwriting.

  I study the letters, learning that Eleanor went to Sweden in late 1916 and my grandmother Charlotte was born there. I read on. On the second page of a letter from December 1916, something catches my attention and I read it again until I feel sure of its meaning. I copy the passage into my notebook.

  It seems certain now that we shall need to send at least an additional 2,000 kronor to refit the Ejen house in haste. Apparently Mrs. Hasslo consulted several joiners & workmen, and as the house was never intended as a winter residence, and the season is bitterly cold there, it will require substantial refitting. At a minimum this includes a new WC and stove upstairs, new double-glazed windows, new doors to the outside, the addition of insulating materials to the attic, &c. The remoteness of the location also accounts for this sum, as the workmen shall have to stay on the island until the labour is complete, and this incurs a surcharge.

  The winter stores & building materials have already arrived on site; with luck much will be done before we arrive. Mrs. Hasslo confirms the doctor in Leksand is highly regarded. As for the nurse, I believe even if we don’t engage one from England we shall have to bring one up from Stockholm or a similar distance to get someone worthwhile. All things considered, I think we should feel more comfortable with an English nurse – the sensible thing is to hire someone soon & have her arrive by the end of January. If we begin advertising now in London, I imagine we can secure someone both experienced and capable, and hope she is willing to travel.