The Steady Running of the Hour: A Novel Read online

  I spend my last morning in London buying research books on Charing Cross Road: a fraying cloth-bound mountaineering history of Everest, a small paperback from the seventies titled Daily Life in the Trenches, 1914–1918 and an enormous copy of The Reckoning of Fortune: War on the Western Front. Then I send e-mails to my father and stepbrother. I can’t tell them about my research and I don’t want to lie, so the messages end up short and vague. I send them anyway.

  In the evening I go to the hotel to collect my bag. On my way out I try to give the doorman a five-pound note, but he won’t accept the tip. We shake hands.

  —Where are you off to?

  —Sweden.

  The doorman winks at me.

  —Be careful, he says. Europe isn’t like here. They’ve their own way of doing things.

  It is past ten when I arrive at Stansted Airport. The last planes have departed and the next ones don’t leave until morning. Sleeping travelers are strewn across the benches, their coats spread over them. On the terminal floor young backpackers doze on sheets of newspaper.

  I brush my teeth in the public bathroom and fill my water bottle under the tap. On a sheltered spot beneath a check-in counter I spread my sleeping bag. I lie in the bag chewing squares of chocolate from the hotel. All night they continue security announcements every half hour.

  19 August 1916

  The Regent’s Park

  Marylebone, Central London

  They walk out of the park onto Marylebone Road in the darkness. Most of the streetlamps are off for fear of air raids, a few with blue glass shades projecting murky light below. Beams of searchlights swarm across the sky, hunting zeppelins among the clouds and stars.

  Ashley hails a motorcab and Imogen talks excitedly in the shadowed backseat, her mind arcing from one subject to another with giddy pleasure. She tells Ashley about a village in Brittany she wishes to live in; she describes an Autographic Kodak camera that her father gave her last month. She reads mainly in French and she likes the Symbolist poets best, Verlaine and De Gourmont and Corbière, but she has never seen anything so lovely in her life as Nijinsky onstage in Le Sacre du Printemps.

  —They’ve interned him in Hungary now, can you believe it? A dancer in prison—

  Imogen looks at Ashley. She smiles.

  —You think I’m mad, don’t you? But I don’t mind.

  The motorcab rounds the fountain at Piccadilly Circus, strange and gloomy with the lights darkened and the curtains drawn in all the windows, the rooftop billboards like huge blank slates. Ashley watches the silhouette of the Anteros statue at the center of the fountain, the nude archer loosing his arrow into the blackness. The taxi halts beside a maroon awning. Ashley pays the driver and holds the door open for Imogen, offering his hand. The girl regards him skeptically, then smiles and steps out, as if granting him this moment as an indulgence.

  They are seated at a table in the café beside the mirrored wall, their bodies perching and sinking into gaudy stuffed chairs of scarlet velour. The fog of tobacco smoke is tremendous. A female waiter emerges from the haze to take their order, her paper collar soiled and yellowing, a starched napkin hung over the sleeve of her black jacket. She eyes them with weary indifference. Imogen orders a pair of brandies, winking at Ashley. He cranes his neck to look around the room.

  —Rather jolly in its own way. Isn’t it queer to see women waiters—

  The waitress returns bearing two short-stemmed snifters on her tray. The brandy twirls in the glasses as she sets them on the tablecloth. Imogen leans across the table.

  —I want you to tell me about your climbing. Once and for all.

  —What do you want to know?

  —Anything and everything. I’ve always been curious. We used to go to Switzerland when I was little, when we lived in Paris. I remember being terrified of the mountain guides. In the early morning they’d be waiting in front of the hotel for the guests. They’d never come in, they’d only stand outside smoking their pipes and talking in frightful dialect. I knew they lived high up, so I thought the mountains were a whole other country where ordinary people couldn’t go, not without guides. And the places had such mysterious names. The Mer de Glace—it’s near Mont Blanc, isn’t it?

  Ashley nods. —It’s part of the same massif.

  He lifts his napkin from the table, pulling off the silver ring and spreading the square of linen. He draws his fountain pen from his pocket and touches the nib twice on the linen to start the ink. This makes a pair of black dashes and from here Ashley begins to draw a crude map of the mountain range.

  —This is the Mont Blanc massif, he says. Here’s Mont Blanc itself, a little under sixteen thousand feet. Here’s Chamonix Valley and the town. You probably stayed there. The whole range is less than twenty miles long. Perhaps ten across.

  The pen’s nib glides across the linen, Ashley pressing down to thicken the ridgeline where peaks connect.

  —Here’s Maudit, about fourteen thousand six hundred. Damned good climb up the southern face.

  —You’ve climbed it?

  Ashley nods. —Here’s the Aiguille du Midi. So called because from Chamonix the sun hovers right above the needle of the peak at midday. Here’s the Grandes Jorasses. Brilliant north face. Haven’t climbed that. This is your Mer de Glace. Did you know it flows a hundred yards a year?

  Imogen shakes her head. —Have you been on it?

  —Once. It was very slick. We came down it at midnight without crampons. Rather unpleasant business.

  —It must have been beautiful.

  —I wasn’t paying attention.

  They order a second round from the waitress. Ashley takes another brandy, Imogen a crème de cassis.

  —I’m surprised at you, she says. You speak as though you’re only interested in the heights of the mountains, or their features. I imagined it was something different.

  —Talking about it doesn’t do any good. The best parts can’t be explained.

  —You might try. I’d like to understand.

  Ashley frowns, capping his pen. He takes a silver case from his tunic pocket and lights a cigarette, setting the case on the table. Imogen takes a cigarette for herself and Ashley raises his eyebrows.

  —You’re going to smoke here?

  She gives a coy nod in reply. Ashley lights her cigarette and stares down into the cut glass ashtray. He begins to speak, his words coming slowly and deliberately.

  It is impossible to live without danger, Ashley explains. The danger is always there, the hazard of wasted lives, of decades bent over a desk, of squalid and lonely deaths in hospital beds. Fools turned their faces away from danger and pretended at immunity, but others went to the fountainhead of life.

  —And what, Imogen wonders, is that?

  Ashley taps his cigarette on the ashtray.

  —I couldn’t say. It’s different for every man.

  —Or woman. But what is it to you?

  —There isn’t a name for it, Ashley says. One could call it endeavor, or struggle, or give it a name, but then it only sounds silly. It’s something one needs that isn’t essential. Something one wants for no good reason at all. Not an animal desire. A desire that comes not from one’s body, but from one’s soul.

  —But why do you want it?

  —I can’t explain it.

  —You have been explaining it. Please go on.

  Ashley looks at the tablecloth and shakes his head. He says that for one thing, lasting comfort becomes no comfort at all. All things in the world are perceptible only by contrast. For just as there is no heat without cold nor light without darkness, it is climbing that throws all of Ashley’s life into sharp relief. It is climbing that makes one feel. It is the driving mountain cold that makes the fire in an alpine hut so delicious; it is the sore and cramped muscles that transform an ordinary hot bath into a sensory revelation; it is the hours of grueling ascent that make a supper of sardines and biscuits and jam so much better than a thousand dinners at the Criterion.

  And it is
impossible to live without hardship. The hardship of daily trifles, Ashley explains, ever accumulating and impossible to ignore, is so much meaner than pain or cold or fatigue. These annoyances make one weak and petty and shallow, just as greater struggles make one brave and wise.

  —It’s the little things that bring one down. Delayed trains and burnt puddings and drafty rooms. I was never so miserably cold on a mountain as I was in a drafty room. One can rise to dire occasions, but most of the time one worries about one’s burnt pudding. It takes real struggle to see what life is. Then you realize you don’t give two straws if your pudding’s been burnt.

  Imogen watches Ashley across the table. Her gaze is steady and unblinking, her hand turning the silver band around her wrist.

  —Then you climb for what it does for your other life?

  Ashley nods. —Sometimes. But not always.

  For there is also the beauty. Ashley sweeps his cigarette across the room and says that to him all of human architecture is little but a screen, an elaborate facade of iron and glass erected to hide the majesties beyond. There is nothing in the untamed earth that is not beautiful. Of tamer beauties, Ashley swears that if one follows their streams up to the headwaters, the source of their fineness is very wild indeed. To walk the Mer de Glace at midnight is not only to be witness to the exquisite mystery of the natural world. It is to step away from the metropolis, from mankind’s hall of mirrors, and to assume one’s place among the wild.

  —One doesn’t see beautiful things in the mountains, Ashley says. One becomes them.

  Imogen smiles. She draws a little from her cigarette.

  —It was a wonderful speech. And I’m glad to have dug it out of you. But I wonder if it’s another joke of yours. Do you really mean all this, or is it only what you think I wish to hear?

  —You give me too much credit. I’m not so good a liar.

  —I bet you’re a very good liar, Imogen says. But I also think you’re afraid to be serious, because somehow you are so very serious.

  Ashley does not answer. He is looking at something beyond Imogen’s shoulder. He closes his cigarette case and puts it back in his pocket, leaning across the table until he is very close to her.

  —That couple across from us, he whispers. They’ve been watching us.

  Imogen turns around discreetly. A few tables away, a man with a Van Dyke beard is reclined deep into his chair. He wears a white dinner jacket and his bow tie hangs unknotted around his neck. The woman beside him is laughing, her hand draped over the man’s lapel. The man’s eyes meet Imogen’s and he raises his glass in a salute. He rises and comes to their table, towing the woman in hand.

  —I wonder, he addresses them, if you could settle a wager for my companion and me. We couldn’t help but notice such a lovely pair of young people.

  The man’s voice is hoarse, his accent difficult to place.

  —With pleasure, Ashley says.

  The man fans his arm toward the giggling woman.

  —My companion swears you are blood relations.

  —Siblings, the woman adds, or at least first cousins. One can see it about the eyes.

  The man shakes his head.

  —But I say that you are lovers.

  Ashley turns in awkward embarrassment, looking at Imogen, but she only laughs and takes a drink. Ashley puffs from his cigarette.

  —You’re both correct, he says. This is in fact my first cousin. And this very evening we’ve become engaged to be married.

  The man raises his glass again in a salute. His drink is milky green and it swishes over the rim.

  —I knew as much. I wish you joy.

  The couple slinks back to their seats.

  —What sort of people are these? Ashley wonders.

  —Drunk people, Imogen says. I thought he was rather charming.

  Imogen excuses herself to the powder room and Ashley lights another cigarette to pass the time. There is no band to watch here, nor any kind of entertainment. He glances back at the drunk couple. The woman is kissing the man’s wrist and tugging at his bow tie. Ashley looks down at his wristwatch, flipping back the metal cover that protects the crystal. He had bought it yesterday and the salesman had said the hands were luminous, but in the half-lit room it is hard to tell.

  Suddenly Imogen returns with a radiant smile, leaning toward him with her hands on her chair.

  —I had a revelation in the washroom.

  —Really?

  —We’ll go to the Alps. Switzerland, perhaps, because they’re neutral. We’ll hole up in a chalet in one of those steep valleys that hasn’t any roads and is reachable only on foot. Surely there are such places?

  Ashley feels a flush of warmth. He worries it will show on his face and he takes a drag of his cigarette.

  —Certainly.

  Imogen beams. —No one shall ever find us.

  —That was the revelation?

  —One of them.

  —What was the other?

  —I’ve lost my latchkey. I shan’t be able to get inside my own house.

  —Lost it?

  Imogen pulls out her chair and sits down.

  —Really, she remarks, it isn’t so shocking as that. The wonder is that I didn’t lose it sooner.

  —Isn’t anyone home?

  She shakes her head. —That’s the punch line. They all went down to Sussex today, even the housekeeper. She shan’t return till morning.

  They search among Imogen’s possessions. Ashley scans the patterned carpet around the table, nearly bending to all fours. A few of the waitstaff assist in the search, circling the table without enthusiasm. They do not find the key.

  —I might have lost it in the park, Imogen says.

  Ashley laughs.

  —You don’t mean—we’d never find it there now.

  —We might.

  A GATHERING

  An airport security guard taps my shoulder to wake me. I sit up in my sleeping bag. It’s 5:21 a.m. and the check-in line has snaked around my encampment.

  I sleep through my whole flight and on the bus from Skavsta Airport into Stockholm central station. On the train to Uppsala I take out my printouts to review, but I spend the short ride looking out the window, wishing I could see more of Sweden.

  The Uppsala Landsarkivet is in a tall brick building, a twenty-minute walk from the train station between the university’s botanical gardens and hospital. The young woman at the reception looks up my appointment, addressing me in fluent English.

  —Campbell, she says. Here it is. I’ll bring the material into the reading room. Put your bag in the lockers and take anything you need in the clear carrier bags.

  —Can I bring a camera?

  —Yes, but please no flash.

  A few minutes later the woman brings three volumes to my table along with a pair of cotton archival gloves. The books are all leather-bound, a few hundred pages per volume. The spines read Församlingsbok—LEKSANDS Församling. I start with these registers, a kind of census recorded by the parish. The sisters would have been in Sweden during the winter of 1916–17, so I’ve ordered two volumes, 1910–1916 and 1917–1931. The sloped handwriting is sharp and fairly clear, but the books are still almost impossible to decipher. The names are entered in numbered horizontal rows, but there are eighteen vertical columns whose categories are all printed in tiny Swedish. In some cases a whole block of the names is crossed out and I can’t figure out why. Finally I get the young woman to help me.

  —What does this word torp mean?

  —It’s like a farm. The records are listed by area. So these people are all living in the same farm, you see? Here is the person’s job, the birth date, the birth parish, the place they moved from—

  The woman helps me for a few minutes, but another patron has a question and she moves on. I decide to ignore the columns. Unless I find the right family it makes no difference what they mean. I look through through the end of the 1910–1916 book and the beginning of the 1917 book. Nothing, unless the sisters’ na
mes and dates were entered completely wrong. There are several women with the name Charlotta or Eleanora—Gunborg Eleanora, Aldy Erika Charlotta, Anna Eleanora—but all these seem to be middle names, and in any case they are listed among households filled with completely unfamiliar names. There’s no Imogen anywhere.

  I go to the bathroom and splash water on my face, looking at myself in the mirror. It could still turn out all right. Maybe they weren’t around when the parish was surveyed in 1917. Or maybe they just didn’t show up to be counted. I go back into the reading room and start the other book, the ledger of birth records. Födelse-och Dopbok för Leksands församling. The entries run from 1906 to 1920. They’re largely chronological and easier to follow than the parish registers. I scan down the names with my gloved finger.

  April 20 Anders Johan. April 14 Tora Margareta. Maj 13 Lars Ove. Maj 17 Charlotte Vivian. Maj 30 Sven August.

  I pull my finger back.

  Maj 17 Charlotte Vivian. Fader: Charles Francis Grafton 879/10 Moder: Eleanor Soames Andersson Grafton 9121/3

  I turn away, shaking my head. But when I look back it’s the same thing. I’d come nine hundred miles just to see this, the proof of how foolish I’d been. I take a photograph of the page and stare at it for a final moment. The entry has a few other columns with dashes or the number 1 in them, but I don’t bother to figure out what they mean.

  A few minutes later I walk out into the afternoon sun, heading back toward the train station. It was beyond stupid. I’d stacked guesses on top of guesses because I wanted to believe in them, because I wanted to believe I could find something other people couldn’t. The answer was on that page.

  Maybe it didn’t matter how clever I was. Maybe there was nothing to find, because Eleanor was the mother, and even if she wasn’t they’d all been careful enough not to leave a single piece of clear evidence behind, so that all the experts with all the time in the world wouldn’t find anything. Much less an amateur with seven weeks. I walk quickly, overtaking people on the sidewalk as I pass the red facade of Uppsala castle, the tiered garden spilling down toward the city.