Chapter Eighteen -Everest Dream 1924

When George returned, for a little while life resumed something of its old tenor. He had
whole weeks at home where there was nothing for him to do but write, and much of it was spent teaching his own children and visiting friends. He came to see us several times before he went on holiday to France early in October. He did no climbing, but spent the time walking with Ruth and looking at paintings. When he returned from France, there was the joint meeting of the RGS and Alpine Club on October 16th, and then his public lectures to all manner of societies and schools and climbing clubs began; from then, until the middle of April of 1923, he was all over the country, and the world. In January, he went to America, where he spent three months.

His letters from North America were extremely varied, from acerbic and candid in their observations of the people and their lifestyle, to lyrical while in the mountains of Canada and the vast grass prairie of America. At first, he wasn’t very keen on America or the Americans whom he met on his passage. I can’t understand a word they say, he complained. They talk through their noses. They have no conversation and the worst table manners of any people I ever saw. Even in Tibet.

In New York, he stayed at the Waldorf-Astoria, then and now a very swank hotel – this being the idea of the Everest Committee that they could not have their representative staying at anything third, or even second-rate –and astonished both guests and reporters by walking up the twenty flights of stairs to his room. He was also seen climbing the fire-escape for amusement, upside down and backwards.

The press there was largely positive – they certainly praised his modesty and personable lecture style – but it annoyed George that they focused on the superficial and the sensational, for instance, the fact that Norton had supplied his brandy flask at their high point near the North-east Ridge. Possibly this last complaint had a source nearer home: the country was then under the scourge of Prohibition and it was only in ‘clubs’ – speakeasies – where one could get a drink, and George was never abstemious since I had known him.

The most famous incident reported there he himself irritably denied: there was a quote, supposedly by him, in the New York Times on 18 March to the effect that he climbed Everest ‘because it is there.’ I never said any such damn-fool thing! He grumbled. Does that sound to you like anything I would say? It’s idiotic. In subsequent years, this pithy phrase came to be much associated with him and someone asked me when I was doing a radio programme if he actually said it. ‘If he did,’ I admitted, ‘it was because his patience was tried beyond its limit at the repetition of what he considered an obvious question.’ I know that he did say in his lectures that ‘we climb Mount Everest because we are mountaineers.’ I heard him say this myself several times.

He went to Canada several times for lectures – Toronto and Montreal – and there learnt to ski; and as far west as Iowa. But that was not far enough for him. I want so much to go out to the Pacific, he wrote in hope about this time, to see the Cascades and the Sierra Nevada and the far ocean. It wasn’t to be, but that romantic yearning for the adventure of far places and exotic scenes – I have no doubt he was influenced by John Muir and Ansel Adams, and by Paul Gauguin here – was terribly poignant.

When he returned, he landed a position at Cambridge – due the auspices of the most improbable of persons, Arthur Hinks, who was friends with the Secretary of the Board of extra-Mural Studies, Dr. Cranage. When Cranage asked Hinks for a candidate for this post, Hinks immediately suggested George. This was astonishing, as he had made no secret that he disliked him. George had to ace the interview, and ace it he did, over some better-qualified candidates, on the strength of his personal integrity. It was just the sort of job calculated to delight him: lecturing to adults through the University Extension programme.

It was such a happy situation, for so many friends were at Cambridge already: Benson, Elliot, David Pye. It would mean selling the Holt, and for Ruth moving a hundred miles away from her family, but to have a settled life, and for George to have a job that did not involve exhaustive lecture tours, seemed to make up for her sacrifice. I wasn’t any too keen on losing his near company myself, to put it mildly, but felt that I could hardly be so selfish as to make any kind of demands on his presence apart from a friendly expression of regret at losing it. He deserved this post, so very much, and was a better job and a better life not one of the reasons he had gone to Mount Everest in the first place? He went to Cambridge in June, while Ruth and the children remained behind in Godalming until new digs were found. Finally, in October, just as when they were married, they moved into Herschel House.

And then the Everest Committee asked the fatal question: would George go to Everest yet again? An expedition was definitely planned for 1924, and George was appointed to the selection committee. But his heart and mind were very much divided on the subject. Not only was there the new job, which he really loved, and too much separation from his family, but he had severe misgivings on another front: in the six months between the vetting of Everest and his decision to go, George had nightmares and premonitions so acute that he went to see Hilt Young’s wife Katherine, who had been the widow of Robert Falcon Scott the Antarctic explorer – to ask her if Scott had likewise had premonitions of death before going out on his fatal voyage; her answer, in the affirmative, did nothing to quell the terribly dismay he felt at the prospect of going out, despite some fairly strong inducements, not least that the country expected it of him as one if its premier mountaineers.

For my part I was alarmed at his reports in letters of being unable to sleep, and, if he did sleep, nightmares. But more alarming were the Sunday telephone calls, which commonly were a pleasant exchange with us; they became a torment for me – though they were obviously a relief to him to be able to speak of things unspeakable to others. The raw tension in his voice, even though the words were quiet-spoken, was unbearable. I really feared that he was falling apart, beneath his happy façade – a circumstance I knew only too well myself. He insisted that he was not, but the tension continued, as did the nightmares and premonitions. Often when he was driving, he said, he would have flashes of ‘grey things’ – the upper slopes of the mountain with its loose shaley slabs; the cold interior of a church; telegrams. I found this unusual prescience in him very frightening. A romantic he always was, but never gothic in imagination.

Even worse was the telephone call I received from Geoffrey after he escorted George to his brother’s house. It did nothing to quell my alarm for the peace of George’s mind.
‘You must do something, my dear,’ Geoffrey charged me. ‘I have never seen Galahad so undone as on that drive home. He was white as a sheet, shaking almost uncontrollably. Not even a couple of whiskys would settle him. He cannot go up a mountain that way.’
‘Geoffrey, I don’t want him to go up that mountain at all!’ I exclaimed.
There was a long silence at the other end of the line. ‘I know, my dear,’ Geoffrey said with great sadness at last. ‘No more do I, and I tried to talk him out of it.’
‘I’ll do what I can.’

But no amount of talking – or cajoling or pleading – would sway George from his commitment to the expedition when he was in a determined mood. At the very least, he maintained, he, as the only one who had been on the previous two expeditions, was necessary, for he knew the mountain better than anybody. This was a very difficult point against which to argue, and in the end I gave up trying to convince him, for it only made him irritable and argumentative. I recognised that this determination was a way of coping with fear, itself an unusual experience for him concerning mountains. When he was feeling rattled, then I could say, with all truth, and he could hear it, that he did not have to go, even at the beginning of February. Then he would be calm again. But the calm, and the resolve to quit the expedition, never lasted –always his sense of duty to the team would well up, and the cycle would start again.

When I saw him last, at an Alpine Club-sponsored dinner with young Sandy Irvine and two other new members of the team, Bentley Beetham (who had climbed with Howard in the Alps) and John de Vere Hazard (who was replacing Graham Irving, rejected at the last moment because of his conscientious objector status during the war) George looked drawn. There was cheer amongst his fellows, but when their conversation was no longer directed at him, his face took on that old brooding quality I knew only too well. On this occasion I had very little chance to speak with him privately, a few words after dinner only.

‘You don’t look happy,’ I said in an undertone.
‘You know me too well!’ He laughed cynically. ‘Tell me about those dream interpretations again? What was it that Ellis said?’ He paused and ran a hand through his hair. ‘No, not happy. But this is the last time I shall have to do this, one way or another. That’s something.’
‘George –’ This bright, brittle cover was painful.
He looked at me sharply. A moment before he had been scanning the room with that old caged-animal expression.
‘I’m counting on you,’ he said suddenly, in a way that set me to shuddering, ‘to be my angel. You hear these things! I’ve heard your ghost stories. If I am in extremis I will come to you and you must help me. Will you promise me that?’ He was deadly serious.
I was stricken, and didn’t know how to respond to this macabre request. ‘George, my God ¬¬–’ I began, but was interrupted.
‘I don’t want to die, Cottie.’ The vehemence with which he said this, uttered in an undertone, brought me up short. ‘Please.’
I nodded, and fought back the tears that sprang to my eyes. He went back to his circulating then, the charming vivant once more. I could only pray that such a distress call would never come.

By the time George returned from Everest the last time, my own life had settled down from the pitched emotional intensity earlier in the year. I spent a lot of time reading psychology, especially Émile Coué, who used autosuggestion and other forms of affirmation in his work, which was based on the writing of Anton Mesmer. I had been so severely depressed – and remained so until about June of that year – that the positive effect of Coué’s affirmations were a miracle to me. It also helped greatly that in August, just before George returned, Miss Carr and Owen parted ways; the creature left my house and I could breathe again. When she left, Owen and I settled into a habit of mutual disregard for one another’s presence, which, if it wasn’t cordial, at least it was more peaceful. We couldn’t go on forever at one another’s throats. This is not to say that there weren’t rows – by no means! But in general life calmed down. And there was Grania.

When George saw her again at the end of August she was already walking, had a few words, and was perfectly adorable with a mass of dark curls and big pale blue eyes. She was precocious in many ways part from the physical milestones of babyhood, immensely curious and terribly clever; a delight. George had never stopped his enquiries about her, whether en route to Base Camp or on the mountain. Every letter ended or began with a request for reports of how she – we – did. I was not, as George had said, ‘fussy’ about babies, but more than Diana or Patrick I was attached to Grania, not simply because she was a baby and therefore more or less went everywhere with me, for the housemaids or Ursula were happy to mind her at all hours of the day.

No, I think I was more emotionally attached to her, because of her beguiling charm. Diana and Patrick were always much more forthright and stolid. She charmed George too, for all his disinterest in the nursery set. When he sat down with her on that first visit home, she endeared herself by investigating all his pockets, and asking continually about everything ‘Dis! Dis!’ He was very impressed when she managed to unscrew his pipe with her fat little hands, and laughed at the face she made when she put the screw end into her investigative mouth.
‘Have you been teaching her to smoke?’ George teased.
I smiled. ‘It’s a tradition.’

By the time George left for Everest on the California, I had resigned myself to his going, as I had resigned myself to his living in Cambridge, for the better good of all. It was a relief to know that he would never go again – he was determined on that and had stated so to the Everest Committee that this expedition would be his last. And, gradually, as the letters came from Bombay, then Darjeeling, then along the now-familiar march route, and were increasingly cheerful and enthusiastic, my sense of fear about his safety, and the awful portent of his own dreams, faded.

He was very busy on shipboard, mentally organizing the stores for the high camps, learning Hindi, and examining the oxygen equipment with Irvine. Oh, George had become quite the enthusiast about oxygen, in part I think because of that remarkable young man.

Andrew Irvine was then just twenty-one – he celebrated his twenty-second birthday along the march to Everest – and had been born in Birkenhead in 1902. His family lived just a stone’s throw from St. John’s where Herbert Mallory was rector, and Annie Mallory knew the family well. Sandy had gone to Shrewsbury, and then to Merton, where he read Engineering. Tall, blond, and outwardly affable, this young man was a mechanical genius of the first order. During the war he had sent designs for aeroplane propellers to the War Office – designs which they would have accepted had one of their own men not submitted similar ones just before him; this from a boy of fifteen. He was famous in his family for tinkering, taking everything apart and putting it back together again, with improvements – including the family car. Of his own volition and because of his own interest, after reading the 1922 expedition book, Sandy had got a copy of the design of the oxygen cylinders from Sliebe Gorman and Company’s London offices and redesigned both the frame and the valves to work better.
He was known for his inventiveness and daring, not only in the manner of mechanical things, but in physical challenges. He too was given to climbing buildings from the time he was a child, and spent a good part of his childhood in Wales. Sandy was an all-round athlete and at Oxford he was on his college eight, and was in the winning boat of the Regatta in 1923. He had once taken a motorbike up Tryfan, where he met, of all people, Noel Odell, the geologist for the present expedition. Odell remembered this when it came time to choose a couple of young men for an expedition to Spitsbergen in the winter of 1923. On that Arctic mission, Sandy proved himself an excellent and resourceful explorer, quickly mastering every task and nuance of life on snow and ice. He was, as Odell said, a natural. Later the two went to Wales for some rock climbing, and Odell watched with interest and great pride as Sandy made ‘a brilliant lead’ up the Great Gully on Craig yr Ysfa. So when the Everest Committee wanted a young man along on this expedition, Odell instantly recommended Sandy.

In person, according to George, who spent a lot of time with him on the California, he was rather quiet until one got to know him. But this reserve covered a vast intelligence, a keenly enquiring mind, and an impish sense of humour. He was a dreamer, but very much a hands-on one. He was terribly excited at the prospect of exploration – he had read all of the accounts of the various Antarctic expeditions – and would eventually make, as George said, a fine addition to the international community of intrepid scientists. Odell simply loved the boy, and by the time the expedition reached Darjeeling, so did George, for Sandy had so much of the qualities he had thought possible to foster in young men if they were taught right – and he possessed them naturally. He gives me great hope for the future, George wrote. And presently, he is fine company. He is my first choice in going up the mountain with, and not because of the oxygen, but because he wants it.

So I followed the news of the expedition, by the despatches and George’s letters, with more than the usual interest, because it looked at last that not only would George return, but he would do so having reached the summit with that remarkable boy.

7 June 1924

I had felt queer all day, restless in a fashion I had not felt in many years, the excitement I used to have before a climb, when the mind turns endlessly on handholds and route-finding up terrain glimpsed tantalisingly from below, on manoeuvres culled from climbs in similar places, on every detail of the contents of one’s rucksack, what the weather is doing, and what the day might bring. As I went upstairs to bed, I wondered why I should feel this taut-nerved sensation, but no answer came as I tucked up the children and turned down the hall lamp as part of a regular night’s routine. Comfortable shadows lurked in the dustless hall as I made my way wraithlike in the midnight calm. It was an extraordinarily still night, without a breath of wind stirring the sycamore outside my bedroom window. As I turned down the bed, I thought perhaps the absence of external life was why I felt so odd, but even when I had smoked a cigarette and settled into bed, the feeling did not leave me. I considered telling Owen; he was much better at ferreting out the truth of these situations than I. But I did not want to walk all the way down the hall to his room to wake him and chance on a bad mood at the disturbance. Instead, I pulled the blankets over my head and prayed for sleep. It came very quickly given my mental state. I had expected to toss and turn, but instead found myself at Herschel House, collecting Ruth to go and visit George and the Everest expedition.

I waited in the foyer of the ivy-covered entry for Ruth to put on her hat and kiss the children goodbye. Clare gave her a napkin-wrapped parcel of ‘squidgy cake with raisins in’ for Daddy, Berry a picture of them all in the garden that she had drawn, and John a spider. These treasures Ruth duly put into her bag, being extra-careful with the spider knotted into a handkerchief, and we were off.

With the absurd inconsequence so frequent in dreams we took the train to Chur, in eastern Switzerland, and then drove in an open two-horse carriage through the streets of Zermatt, past high grey stone-built houses till we reached the expedition’s offices near the Eiger Nordwand. The streets of Zermatt were snowy and fresh, with all the shutters closed against the weather, but their bright-painted signs and awnings were cheery as ever. Below us, I could see the Monte Rosa Hotel where in old days we climbing folk had gathered. The path beside the garden was heaped in snow, but the bench was still there where in August I had first seen George lounging with a copy of Galsworthy balanced on his chest. The site gave me a pang, but Ruth, her arms full of parcels, nudged me with her elbow and I rang the bell at the expedition’s offices. There was no answer, and we went inside unbidden. I recognised the interior as the Royal Geographic Society’s rooms, but this did not seem in the least strange to me, no more than that Mount Everest should find itself in Switzerland.

The men were all out climbing yet and there was no fire, so we decided to make things nice and have a tea for them waiting when they returned. We lit a fire in the big inglenook in the front room, and then put on our coats again to go out and fetch milk and cakes. We stopped at a bakery first and I had to make all the arrangements with the shop woman as Ruth knew no German. We toted our purchases next to the edge of town where there was a farmer with a stand selling fresh milk; the Meierei, as I remember explaining to Ruth. ‘ It’s goat’s milk, Ziegemilch’, I explained of the milk, who was eyeing the yellow stuff the stout old fellow was ladling out for us with suspicion. I nodded to the goatherd as well, that he should not be insulted.

‘We are English,’ I said to him. ‘It is for the Everest men.’ ‘Ach, ja,’ he said me, grinning. He wished us good luck and we made our way precariously through the slick streets with our burden. It was fiercely cold, and the wind was howling now. I looked up at the Jungfrau in the distance and the Eiger beside. Beyond I could see Everest itself, towering above all like a monarch with a lofty plume streaming from the parapet. I wondered how the men were faring. Then, if I were fretting, how much the more was Ruth? But she gave no sign, patiently balancing the brown-paper wrapped cakes as she leaned into the wind.

I remembered suddenly how well she had done on their honeymoon, when George and David Pye had taken her climbing in Wales. She weathered all like a trooper. David told the tale that when she in her ignorance wheeled around on the rope on the ascent of the Crib y Ddysgl, nearly pulling them all off, to George’s sharp barking, ‘Damn it, darling, you mustn’t do that!’ she gave only a blinking nod, though she must have been dismayed at this evidence of dour humour from her Galahad. And later how when the only descent of the east face was an abseil off a precipitous cliff, she took George’s hearty shove over the side without a gasp. I would not have been so meek. But Ruth was always peaceful. It was what endeared her to George.

We went indoors, and by the time tea was set out and ready, the sounds of the men’s returning drifted up to us. They came stamping in, snow-covered, red-faced and cheerful, and unwound themselves from Shackleton waterproofs, puttees, gaiters, and assorted mufflers. George was brown as a chestnut, and laughing with Howard Somervell. He looked up toward the fire as he took off his flying helmet, and saw us. His face lit up like a child’s.
‘Hallo, darling!’ He cried to Ruth, and came hurrying over. When their greetings were made, he turned to me, laughing.
‘Cottie, dear, you got my telegram! You are as good as gold!’ To my astonishment, he embraced me. ‘It’s lovely to see you, darling.’ He had never been especially demonstrative in front of other people since his marriage; a shy clip on the arm was the best one got. What could have come over him? I did not have time to ponder, for we all sat down to a noisy, jolly tea, with the men talking over one another, laughing and shouting with all the exuberance of schoolboys.

The one real schoolboy there, the only member of the expedition I did not know, young Irvine, laughed with the others but did not add much to the conversation himself. He struck by George like a puppy, or like a Fourth Former to an adored Sixth Form idol, which was probably closer to the truth. George for his part made sallies in his direction, asked his opinion of all things, and especially for an explanation of the oxygen apparatus, which, George announced as proudly as a father, Sandy had rebuilt. Sandy. The only other members of the expedition with whom George was on Christian name terms were Howard and Geoffrey Bruce. I remembered Duncan Grant; the same look of unspoken understanding passed between George and Sandy as I recalled from that summer afternoon in Duncan’s Bloomsbury studio, except that now, Sandy was the beautiful mute adored one.

‘I must have a snap,’ George insisted to Ruth, startling me out of my bemusement, ‘of you together.’ He dug in his upper coat pocket for a moment, then looked about the dregs of the table. ‘Oh blast,’ he muttered, ‘I’ve left my camera at the high camp. Howard!’ he called to Somervell.
‘Eh?’
‘Give us your camera, old man, I want a snap of Sandy and the ladies to send to his mother.’ There was great laughter at this, for, as Norton drawled ironically, Sandy was a great ladies’ man at Oxford. The small camera was produced, and we three stood hastily for the photograph, Irvine in the centre and myself and Ruth on either side. George, gleeful as an elf, happily and absently pocked the camera until Somervell protested.
‘It’ll be the first Kodak on the summit of Everest, at this rate,’ he complained good-naturedly.
‘Don’t be sure that it won’t,’ George smiled.
When the party had broken up, George asked if I would like to see the route he and Sandy would take to the summit tomorrow. Of course I leapt at the offer, and he led me into what he called the map room, which had a huge table in the centre dominated by an immensely enlarged photograph of Everest. With a thing like a billiard cue, he pointed out all the high camps. Camp Six was at 26800 feet, and they had a small bivouac planned – it could not properly be called Camp Seven – on the North Ridge.
‘We considered traversing the band here,’ he said, pointing to a striation in the rock about a thousand feet below the summit, ‘but when Howard and Norton tried it yesterday they found it awfully steep going toward the end, and I’d rather not have to climb up and down the same way with one of Sandy’s experience. It’s fairly clear of snow as you can see, and the rocks are very friable, so it will be a long slow climb.’ He regarded me closely. ‘Do you remember when we tried the northeast face of the Eiger with Geoffrey?’
I nodded. Every step was an effort gained by hard work at a slope of near 60 degrees, and the rock crumbled under half the footholds. ‘Imagine that at 28000, if you will,’ he said, ‘with fifty pounds on your back, breathing through wet sacking, and you’ll have some idea of the challenge. Not my idea of rock climbing.’ He smiled self-deprecatingly.
‘So what shall you do?’ I enquired.

His pale grey eyes were gleaming. ‘We shall take the skyline,’ he murmured, his glance straying to the photograph. He went leaping suddenly, jabbing the North Ridge with a finger. ‘Do you see here,’ he cried, ‘above this arête? It’s a clear path from there to the summit, only slogging, much less work than mucking about on a traverse.’ He followed the line with his finger. ‘The only real challenge is this outcrop here,’ the bump he indicated was hardly 500 feet from the top, ‘and I expect we shall be able to go around much of it if we come down here.’ He was almost vibrating with excitement. This was the boy I had first known in Zermatt. He tossed back his hair in the old way and I smiled. ‘That was why Norton and Howard tried out their route yesterday, to avoid a hundred-foot vertical climb, but I think I’ve found the way to get round most of it – I know I have. And then, and then, darling, we shall have done it!’ He was speaking very quickly, in the old way, words tumbling over one another, his eyes dancing and his whole being alive. He grasped my hands, springing catlike onto the table excitedly as a child, where I scrambled after him intently.

‘Only you understand what this is to me, what it means,’ George insisted, ‘only you and Geoffrey, of everyone I have ever climbed with. Oh Cottie!’ He swung his legs like a child. ‘I’ve tried so to find the words, but what cannot be spoken must be lived, and I have done…. Being up there I have found myself – I am myself, more than ever anywhere else. It isn’t only being away from people or civilisation, it’s something between the mountain and me, an understanding, a sameness, almost as if I am the mountain, or it me.’ He shook his head, his hair falling across his forehead, and his beautiful voice, sonorous and musical, filled the room.

‘From the first time I was ever on a mountain, a real mountain, with Irving at Winchester, I felt it; even when we were so mountain-sick that we had to turn back a hundred yards from the summit, I was turned inside out being there. It was the sort of experience I looked for so diligently in church and never found. One may call it God, I suppose, but it’s deeper and broader than Father God, less person, more elemental. My mind is clear, and I am free, I can think, and every thought is fresh and brilliant like the stars on a frosty night. There is a communion with the mountain. I understand it, not in an intellectual way, although there is that too from experience, but an illative capacity, unearthly and numinous. I know the way to go, and feel the holds beneath me because the mountain is telling me, because it and I are one in the way that we are supposed to be one with God.

‘It is this that moves me upwards and onwards, through wretched or miserable experiences, for there is complete dissolution of ego. It is not my personal triumph, nor King and Country’s, it is nothing less than essential being at one with itself. If it were possible, I would dissolve into mountain, I think, or expand into being with the stars.’ He looked at me, and there were tears glinting in his eyes. ‘And how much more, this mountain, than any other? She who is the nearest to heaven we may come. Ah, the Sherpas understand her there. She is a holy mountain.... She is my Grail,’ he smiled a little self-deprecatingly. ‘And when I return from this Grail quest, my dear old friend,’ he kissed my cheek hastily here, ‘then we shall climb mountains together again. Olympus in Elysium.... but not Everest, for there shall be no need.’ We sat for a long moment looking at one another, full of love. He was so beautiful, shining and pure and ageless. There was no need to say anything, for all was understood.

I woke with a start.

The light of morning filtered dimly through the edges of the draperies, grey and gold and pink. Shaking and crying, I stumbled over and pulled them open, gazing out onto the eastern morning. George. My heart ached, and I was tormented. I should have been glad, glad that today he would make his way to the very top of the world – I had no doubt that he would – but I was frightened because the dream seemed so terribly real. He was saying goodbye. I knew it. He would not come back. George. O George! He might be gone already.... I leaned against the windowsill for my legs would hardly support me at the thought. I couldn’t bear it…. I must write to Ruth—No. If nothing had happened, the suggestion might alarm her.... What was I to do? George. O George! He had been so real!

The thin curtain stirred from a gust of wind that came through the closed window.
‘Cottie.’
It was George. I turned, startled, but there was no one in the room. The voice came again.
‘Cottie, don’t be afraid. It’s all right. Everything is all right.’ He was not there, but the room was filled with him, a warm, sweet presence that made my heart ache.
‘Listen, my girl. Don’t be afraid. I’m right here.’

Only the dead paid visits to the living in this way. I was not afraid of the spirit, but of the truth of the mortal man. What a fraud I was! We had so often talked of immortality, and now when faced with it, I was as grieved for the absence of the mortal as anyone else.
I paced the floor and fixed my mind on the last time I had seen him at Herschel House, at the Alpine Club dinner, sitting next to his father and Irvine…. Panic rose. No that would never do…
I had a letter from him from Darjeeling in the desk. Fetching it quickly, the sight of his angular handwriting was a comfort. ‘Dear Cottie- It is a dewy morning here, not raining, and I have just come back from a run with Irvine--’ Oh, the letter was full of details of the flora for me, and the weather and an assessment of the expedition team. I couldn’t read it now, not having seen them all so recently, and George so very much alive. I don’t think I even tried to comfort myself with the absurd setting of the dream, like the Everest Expedition’s headquarters being in a stone-built-house in a Swiss town. I was accustomed to the dottiness of dreams, but this was just too real in all its felt components.

I sat down on the bed and lit a cigarette with a shaking hand. He was smiling now, a visible, if rather translucent presence; I could see and hear him clear as anything.
‘Do you remember the first time I gave you a cigarette?’
Shaken as I was, I had to smile; it one of the strong nasty black French brands that he had picked up in Zermatt. How he laughed at me! My feelings bubbled over and I laughed and cried all at once. Oh God, if you are really gone... George, how I shall miss you!

‘I am not gone. I shall never pass into nothingness. My beauty endures from age to age....’ He was laughing at me now, paraphrasing Keats and Shelley, and I couldn’t help laughing too. The warm softness engulfed me again and I felt calmer. I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand and finished the cigarette, memories filling my mind of the Alps and London and Wales, all the times we had known. I hadn’t the least idea of how I should get through the day, but for the moment it was enough to sit remembering our stormy and happy days of giddy ignorant youth. George, my true love, my first friend; my best friend. If he were gone from the realm of mortals, I could be sure he would never be gone from my heart.

He remained the next several days, a presence in the house, always by my side, whispering in my ear, fluttering the curtains, disturbing the cats, once knocking a pile of linens from the top of the stairs. Full of merry mischief. My mind was full of memories, and the strongest and most poignant were of our afternoon here in the parlour, and of the climbing hut on Snowdon. We had been through much together, but we had never been so attuned again as then, until the night of my dream. My heart ached because I knew he was gone and I passed the days crying in fits and starts – in the linen press, into the soup, in the loo, anywhere I could hide when the fit came on me.

I did not write to Ruth. I couldn’t bear to hurt her. I did write to her sister Marjorie, enquiring after news because I had had a dream. She sent me a tart note in return, for she was impatient with such nonsense as dreams, saying ‘Ruth heard from him three days ago and everything was fine.’ But it took three weeks for news to travel from Tibet to England, even by wire. I also asked her, urgently, to keep my letter and the envelope, with the post-mark – she didn’t.

I told Owen I had had a dream of George. I had to, as he rather nastily remarked that I was particularly moody. ‘What in hell’s wrong with you now?’ was the way he put it, as he came on me standing in the upper hall staring at the carpet in despair. I looked up distractedly. At another time, we would have had a row about it, but I was feeling too vulnerable and lonely to defend myself.

‘I had a visit from George the other night... Or rather, I paid a visit to him. Owen, I’m so afraid something awful has happened!’ I surely wasn’t going to tell him that George’s spirit had been about the house. Owen was too clever by half for that. He would bring up Wales, and Grania again, and I would throw something at him if he did. I would not let him sully my memories. They were all I had, now.
‘Well, I’m sorry,’ Owen said shortly, startling me. He went past rather quickly and slammed the door to his room. Perhaps he had picked up the mental drift anyway, but at least he left me alone about it.

Then on a Saturday morning nearly a fortnight later the news which I had been dreading finally arrived. It was a beautiful warm summer’s day. The children were outdoors playing, and I was in the laundry room folding sheets to be pressed. I stood in front of the big table in the centre of the room. Owen came in from his office, his face ashen, and I knew before I saw the paper in his hand or he spoke the words.
‘I have bad news for you,’ he said, kindly for once. I stared at him from across the room, the sheet dropped onto the table, willing him not to say the awful words: ‘George and Irvine have been killed on Everest.’
Though I had known for a fortnight, I went numb and had to lean on the table for support. ‘...When?’ I could barely get the word out.
Owen didn’t answer and went even paler.
‘When!’ I shouted at him, becoming hysterical.
‘...The 8th,’ he muttered grimly.
The next day. The day after I had my dream, when George said they would be making their summit attempt. O my God! O my God! He did it! He really did it! He told me how they would go and they did it, and now he’s dead. I knew he was dead! O George –

I didn’t know that I had spoken the words until I came to myself again and saw Owen staring at me balefully from across the room. Despite everything, despite his own affairs, my honest confession about Grania, and my genuine endeavour to preserve the façade of happy respectable married life, he had never got over or forgiven my steadfast love for George, even though Owen professed long and loudly not to love me himself. His face was twisted, hateful and painful all at once, and some part of my mind took in that we were in for a hell of a row, but all I cared for then was that my dear beloved George was really dead.