Chapter Sixteen - Fame 1922

George came for a flying visit at the weekend, the afternoon of the first Sunday he was home. I was terribly grateful, as there were so many people wanting to see him! Owen had gone off with Lily, so I had no reason to worry. It was a brilliant autumn day, of searing blue skies and a bracing breeze. When he arrived at the gate, emerging from his car in a grey tweed suit and trilby hat, he looked so brown and natty one would have taken him for a film star. But there was no mistaking that swinging walk, and the way he whistled up the path with his hands in his pockets. I watched from the dining-room window, breathless. It seemed he had been away ages, and here he was, larger than life somehow – by no means the same old George; so I thought.

Diana and Pat were playing in the hall and tumbled out to greet him, skipping about him with cries:
‘Uncle George! Uncle George!’
“Mummy says you’ve been to Mount Everest!’
‘She showed us where it was on the map!’
He smiled at them, ruffled Pat’s hair, kissed Diana and said, Yes, he had. I had gone to the door, and he looked up just then, and there was nothing so dear as the way his face lit up. He smiled his dazzling smile, and I felt a little giddy, and clutched the doorjamb.
‘Well, hello you,’ he murmured, and hurried up the step.
‘Hello,’ I could barely speak, and tears sprang to my eyes as he manoeuvred his way round the children and came inside. He kissed my cheeks as he had used to do Vanessa, his face all alight. He was brown as a chestnut, with wind-etched lines in his face. His hair was still long from the expedition, curling over his collar, and he wore a moustache. That ethereal beauty had been replaced by a more rugged, suave handsomeness.

‘It’s good to see you,’ he said.
I choked on tears. ‘ And you! Oh!’ I hugged him impulsively. ‘Welcome home!’
He laughed. ’Yes, I made it! And I still have all my toes.’
‘You fared better than Shackleton,’ I said, then realised how gruesome and idiotic that sounded.
‘I’m sorry!” I smiled in apology. ‘I’m a little overcome. Come in! Come in! And you can tell me everything –’
‘That would take some while,’ George teased. ‘You mean I didn’t write everything to you in my letters?’
‘I’ve only just stopped receiving them!’ I said. He was darting glances toward the parlour and dining room. ‘Owen isn’t here,’ I assured him. ‘He went off with Miss Carr this morning.’ He looked at me fully now.
‘Not him!’ he smiled, teasing. ‘Didn’t you have another addition to your household of late? It’s awfully quiet!’
I laughed, and took his hand. How dear he was! ‘Come,’ I said, moving towards the sunny parlour. He left his hat on the hall table and followed.

But Patrick and Diana had got there first.
‘This is Grania!’ Patrick announced, poking his fat little finger into the pram, which sat in the middle of the floor. ‘She’s our baby!’ he said, as if she were a new puppy. Then, ‘But she’s very small, so we mustn’t carry her about in the garden with the toys.’ This bit of three-year-old wisdom made George laugh.
‘I won’t, then,’ he assured Pat solemnly. At least I could be sure Pat had understood my warnings about the fragility of his new sister.
‘She came on Hallowe’en,’ Diana said knowledgably, with some scorn of Pat’s pronouncement. At seven, she was much more worldly. ‘When we were carving the jack o’lanterns.’
‘So I heard,’ George told her.

Now, he had never been much for babies, even his own, confessing to finding them not very interesting until they could talk, so I was very surprised when he not only went over to the pram to have a look at Grania, but picked her up like an offering, saying with real delight, ‘Well, well, look at you! If you aren’t the prettiest little thing!’ The baby, bewildered at this untoward position, stared at him with intense silver-blue eyes from within the froth of her bonnet. George was all smiles today, and it was very endearing, for his good cheer was entirely genuine. He was glad to be here, glad to be home, and I was so very grateful for his kind attentions.
‘Well done,’ he said to me. ‘I know it was not easy for you.’
I was moved to tears, and nodded, rather wistfully, at the picture of them; the soul and centre of all that I was, my little necessary circle.

So sensitive now, was George, that he caught every nuance. Whatever had happened to him on the mountain – and I was sure there was something more to tell than his letters had divulged – it had opened up his compassion and real connection to others. With care, he handed Grania over from the precarious locale of holy offering, and sat with me on the fateful sofa.
‘You are quite all right?’ He asked.
I looked up at the children. ‘Danna, you and Pat go and see if Mary has the tea cakes out yet,’ I told her.
She nodded sharply. ‘Come along, Pat!’ she commanded her brother, who was playing now with his toy soldiers, which lay scattered about the floor. She dragged him up by the hand and marched him out, her long skinny legs as sure as any sergeant-major’s.
‘Physically, yes –’ I said once they were out of earshot. ‘I’ve only been up a week. I made sure to have a nice long rest –’ Grania was now three weeks old. ‘But....’
‘It’s been bad with Owen,’ he finished shortly.
‘Yes.’
George sighed and ran a hand through his hair. ‘I was afraid of this. What has he done?’

I took a breath and, glancing out towards the hall, said flatly, ‘He said he would never have anything to do with me again and insofar as the house or children were concerned I was on my own – that he was finished with it.’ I thought I could get through saying it if I told it bluntly, but I started shaking.
‘Wait a moment,’ George shook his head. ‘When was this? You didn’t write –’
‘It was the day after Grania was born, after I sent you the telegram.’ It was a tremendous effort not to cry.
‘The blighter!’ George swore. Then, ‘Why in God’s name didn’t you telephone when I was home?’ He demanded.
‘Oh, please don’t be angry with me!’ I begged, on the verge of hysterical tears. ‘I couldn’t bear it! It’s been everything I could do to keep myself pulled together in front of the children, and – and –’ I couldn’t go on. He put an arm about me.
‘Ah! Hush now, sweetheart,’ he murmured while I tried to get hold of myself again. ‘You’re safe. You’re safe.’ He repeated. ‘Come,’ he picked up the baby and put her safely back in the pram, as I was in no condition to cope with her, and came to sit again with me, holding my hands tightly.

‘You must look at the positive side of this, darling,’ he said strongly. ‘He is agreeing to leave you alone. You’re far better off than if he refused to do. Who cares if he’s off with his mistress? What’s that to you? You’re as free of him as you can be.’
‘But how am I to cope?’ I wailed. ‘This place can’t bring in enough to keep us!’
‘Something can be arranged with his solicitor. Surely he must see that it’s not to his benefit to abandon responsibility to the children.’
I could hardly take the rationality of this in. ‘But I’m not free of him!’ I protested. ‘Every day he’s here, he’s simply horrid – unnecessarily cruel, sniping, caustic. Never a civil word do I have from him! Only orders to do this or that, as if I were one of the servants, and beastliness.’
‘Oh dear dear –’ George murmured.

He’d have said more, but just then we heard Diana and Patrick coming back from the kitchen, and Mary behind them, rattling the teacart over the rough floorboards of the dining room, then the stone of the hall, and it was necessary to talk of other things. He began to tell me of a very interesting experience he had, when he was climbing one morning above the pinnacles at Camp III, on one of his photographic jaunts. The story proved so fascinating that I was very soon transported out of my own troubles, and into that fairy world of which he had written.

‘There is such a beauty in the mountains, early in the day,’ George mused, ‘even there.’ He looked at me with sudden vehemence. ‘Oh you know how the Aiguille Vert can be of a morning! It was just like that, Cottie!’ He went on, excitedly and I was transfixed by the feeling about him, a sort of otherworldly sense, much as Owen had but without the dark undertones.
‘I was above Camp Three at about 5 A.M.,’ he said, ‘and I felt such a siren's call to the wall above the glacier... a compulsion. I felt it like a woman, drawing me on... I looked up the wall, and there about ten feet above my head was the most astonishing crystal ice-cave. I climbed up. It was an extraordinary place. I went inside, and put down my ice-axe, and there was – I swear to you this is not a vision –there was a little dark woman, dressed in rich gaudy clothes of an ancient cast –’

He broke off suddenly, startling me, for by now I was transported to the glacier above Camp Three, peering into the cave at the strange figure.
George exclaimed, ‘I have a photo of the cave, I can show you!’
‘I believe you that it was no illusion,’ I hastened. His story gave me gooseflesh. Whatever it was, it was genuinely arcane; I had heard enough of such stories to know that.
‘I asked the monks about it afterward, in Shekar Dzong on our return,’ George continued, ‘and the Abbot told me it was a khandro, or, as some call it, a dakini.’
‘What is that?’
‘A–’ he frowned and sought a concise explanation. ‘He said it was broadly an emanation of Enlightened Mind, but they are also the... divine beings of a place... the word means "space-goer," or "celestial woman," or "cloud fairy." The Hindu Kali is one of these – but he called her something else, which I can’t remember just now.’ He looked at me again, with an intense expression.
‘So, she was the Goddess Mother?’ I ascertained. ‘Chomolun –’
‘Chomolungma, yes,’ George finished nodding. He grinned suddenly. ‘The abbot was very disturbed and impressed! She’s not supposed to appear to Britishers! She hardly appears to Tibetans!’
‘Did she speak to you?’
He shook his head. ‘No, she did not speak outright but I heard her voice in my mind. She smiled and told me an old name – and I did have the eeriest sense of having been there before, though it is hardly possible!’ He looked at me again, with that intense look. Something profound had happened to him indeed, which he could hardly put into words.

‘She said too that it was my fate to come back there – I thought of that when I got Younghusband’s letter in Marseilles -’
‘You’ve been asked to go out again?!’ The news, so casually imparted, was stunning, breath-taking. Over the last ten days he had grown used to the idea, but to me it was a shock.
‘When?’
‘February,’ he said shortly. His mind was on more mysterious circumstances than the next expedition. In this, he had not changed. ‘But Cottie, Cottie darling, that’s not what matters here!’ He exclaimed. ‘ It was the strangest thing – there was nothing soft about her, nor her invitation – she was as direct and frightening as a succubus, but she haunts me, and – she is like a mistress one cannot let go of...’
He smiled a little here seeking my understanding of this overwhelming incident. ‘You, I thought,’ he insisted, shaking my hands, ‘you would understand... oh, how can I say it, but that
I am of that place in a way that words can scarce describe? I love it, I hate it. It is, somehow, what I am.’

He paused and drank some tea, practically quivering with energy. ‘Since I left Tibet, I have been assailed with the most curious force. It comes on sometimes late at night, and then I cannot sleep, but mostly it is when I’m writing, or running, or in the bath!’ He laughed.
I frowned in puzzlement. I’d never heard of any such thing. ‘What is it?’
George shook his head. ‘I don’t know! But it is not unpleasant. It is a sort of vibrating sensation, warm, and ha! It makes my head itch. But that’s not what matters about it, rather what it does... I understand things – life, people – it’s very peaceful, and joyous.’ He smiled at me. ‘And then I want it to go on forever, to share it with everyone I love.’

I was grateful for the confidence, but this experience was beyond my ken. I could imagine it, I knew that I had been close that level of transcendence, but whatever had happened to George in that cave was outside my reckoning, profoundly life-changing, it was plain to see.... I thought of Younghusband, in Lhasa, and I understood that whatever had happened to them each, the experience was in essence the same. The idea was startling.
‘George! Do you think this is what happened to Sir Francis in Lhasa?’
His eyes gleamed. ‘Oh yes,’ he murmured. ‘Very probably! I shall have to talk with him. There is a Committee meeting in London on Monday.’ He paused.

‘On that head, are you well enough to come down to the Holt? I need your help.’
‘With what?’
He tossed his hair out of his eyes. ‘I have to give a lecture to the Alpine Club and RGS next month, and to the boys at Charterhouse before that.’ He had left Charterhouse as a master when he went out to Tibet, and was now unemployed, except by the Mount Everest Committee. ‘And a whole raft of them between now and February! And I’m a little nervous. I’m not used to public speaking. Will you come and be my audience? You’ve given lectures!’ I had, for the Ladies Alpine Club, and various Garden clubs. But I was amazed, given his enlightenment experience, that George could be nervous about anything!
‘I will,’ I promised.
‘It’s not too much for you, with Grania, when you’re feeling rotten?’ He ascertained.
‘No,’ I admitted. ‘It will give me something to think about and look forward to, rather than my own problems. Yes,’ I held his hand in both of mine, ‘I will. Oh! And I shall be so proud of you before the AC! Where is it to be?’
‘The Queen’s Hall.’ This was in Langham Place. In the Second War, it was destroyed in the Blitz, which was a pity, for it was a beautiful concert hall with gorgeous acoustics.
‘You’ve certainly made it!’ I said.
‘Not yet,’ he murmured, ‘but nearly.’

He looked at his watch and leaned and kissed me. ‘I must go, dear. I’m so sorry! But Geoffrey and Len are coming down and I just have time to get home before they arrive.’ He stood, with such a tender look. ‘You will phone me, won’t you, if you’re in trouble? I won’t allow you to go through this alone.’
I nodded, hardly able to speak.
‘Good girl.’ He pressed my hand, hugged or kissed the children, looked in at Grania, and went out, picking up his hat from the console, whistling as he went out the door, as blithe and free and lovely as when he had come. I did feel better that evening than I had since Grania was born.

In the event it was he who phoned, on the Wednesday, to see how I was, which was very dear. We had only got the phone in while he was away – this new contraption, however expensive to run, was a great improvement in convenience over telegrams, though I still used those and liked constructing them. I put it to Owen in the guise of making it easier for him to keep in touch with the office, and he bought it. I hadn’t spoken to George on the phone before; it did strange things to his voice – the resonance of it was completely gone.
‘You sound like a wire recording,’ I told him. I wondered if I did as well.
‘Is that anything to say?’ He laughed. ‘You must be doing well.’
‘Tolerably,’ I admitted. I felt dull, but I wasn’t in despair, and said so.
‘Well, that’s the best we can hope for,’ He said kindly. ‘Look, would it be awfully inconvenient for you to come round tomorrow? I’ve got the better part of my speech written and I’d like to work on it with you. Are you feeling up to that?’
‘Of course I will!’ It was an excuse to get out, which I hadn’t done in ever so long, and I did want to help him with his speeches.
Accordingly, the next evening after the children were put to bed, I deposited Grania in a drawer from my dressing table, kitted out with eiderdown, and put her into the sidecar of the Triumph and sped off to Godalming. This rather daring adventure for a baby not yet a month old was necessary, as Owen would not let me use the car and I couldn’t leave her for so long as the visit would entail, so the motorbike it was. But it did cause rather a stir in the Hindhead Road when I showed up as full dark was settling in, leather helmet and all, extracting the baby from the bowels of the sidecar. The neighbours, twitching their curtains at the noise, continued to stare at the spectacle. Even Ruth was boggled.
‘Good heavens, Mary Anne! You’ve brought your baby!’ she exclaimed as I came down the steps. But George, who was standing behind her in the doorway, only laughed.
‘That’s our girl,’ he said, delighted.

Ruth took up Grania, whom she had not seen, and made much of her before taking her upstairs to the nursery and snugging her up in John’s pram. She was so very fond of babies, and really at her best with them, no matter what George felt about it. And I was happy enough to let her coo over Grania, letting all be normal and calm. I was, I confess, a little nervous that she should notice any too marked a resemblance in the child. George meanwhile asked Vi, their housekeeper, for coffee and we climbed the stairs to the study.

‘Would you like a drink?’ He asked in passing, pouring one. The study was awash in notes and papers... and photographs of Tibet and Everest. He was no more tidy than ever, but the inclusion of that rarefied world here had somehow changed everything.
‘Thank you.’
‘Here you are,’ he gave me a brandy and squinted for a moment at the photo I held from the top of a jumbled pile. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘wait a moment, there’s a better one.’ He sorted through the pile until he came to one simply breathtaking view of the mountain, plastered in snow, with the North Ridge arcing off to the left, and the sweep of the North Col just visible. Only a wisp of cloud showed on the North Ridge, and none on the summit.

‘There you are! That’s from the Rongbuk glacier, on the western side. I took it at about five in the morning,’ he smiled. ‘It was a perfect day, as you can see from the lack of cloud,’ he stood behind me, and indicated the summit clear summit with his left hand. ‘That’s the time to be up there, early... I have another, which I took later and should like to have made into a map size, but I’ll show you that presently.’
I turned to look at him. ‘You could make a bomb as a photographer, you know,’ I said seriously.
He laughed. ‘Me!’ He laughed again and ruffled his hair. ‘I didn’t tell you, I think – ha! – I’d got a whole batch of plates in the wrong way round – I was following the instructions I was given to the letter! – and had to go back and shoot them again. It’s laughable now, but wasn’t funny at the time, believe me.; it took me nearly a week, and I never was able to replace some of the better shots. But thank you. Another career opportunity for me to look up!’
‘But you’ve got a fine eye, and there’s no denying it.’ I insisted, and drank some brandy to fortify myself against his unnerving nearness.
He went still and pensive. ‘Thank you,’ he said again, very seriously. He could have done so many things, and I was quite sure that he knew it.

There was a rattle of crockery on the stair, some huffing, and the sound of voices. Ruth was just coming down from the nursery and Vi was on the last pitch of the stairs.
‘Let me take that,’ we heard Ruth say, and she did, emerging into the study with her hands full of the laden tray.
‘Here, darling!’ George took it and put it on the ottoman in front of the sofa. Ruth looked at us, rather candidly, I thought.
‘He’s been showing me his travel photos,’ I said to her merrily, and the deep expression vanished. She laughed.
‘There are hundreds! I don’t know how we shall ever sort them all. These are just the ones for the expedition,’ she said.
‘Come have a drink, darling,’ George said, smiling, ‘and sit with Cottie and we can get on with the entertainment.’ To my surprise, for she rarely took anything stronger than wine, Ruth did sit and have a brandy with her coffee.

George began his opening remarks:
I left you boys merely as your master, known well to some and less so by others, known to all on the playing fields, but it is my hope that I return to you as a friend and not a figure of authority, to whose words you are obliged to attend.
Alas, I, then Ruth, were taken with a fit of the giggles at this sober pronouncement, more fitted to a eulogy than a friendly chat from Uncle George, as the Carthusians habitually called him also.
‘Very portentous,’ I whispered to Ruth.
‘Well, he has given the Morning prayers,’ she returned.
‘Are we obliged to attend?’ I whispered back.
‘I think so.’
Poor George! It was very difficult to get us to pay attention properly or take anything seriously.
‘Come now,’ he chided us. ‘You’re worse than the boys! They won’t be half so difficult as the pair of you.’
‘Does this mean we’re doing our jobs?’ I asked in bright impishness.
His answer was a look of amused exasperation.
‘Oh dear,’ said Ruth, with exaggerated solemnity. ‘Don’t be cross, darling. We promise to be very very good now,’ and she sat up very straight and primly, holding the pose for a moment before glancing at me sidelong and bursting into giggles. George shook his head, invoking heaven’s patience. We did eventually settle down and attend to what he was beginning to say, which was on the theme of mutual co-operation, teamwork, and loyalty to a greater common cause. But the most important outcome of that evening was, I think, the smoothing over of what could have been a rather uncomfortable little scene at least, or a breach in the cordial relations between us all at worst, for it was very evident that Ruth had felt something in our nearness over the photographs, which had not been there before; she was very canny.

The crux of what he said was this: as with our endeavours in life, it might be possible for two men to struggle somehow to the summit, disregarding every other consideration. It is a different matter to climb the mountain as mountaineers would climb it. The principles of prudence and concern for the whole party must be respected in the ascent of Mount Everest. The party must keep a margin of safety. It is not to be a mad enterprise rashly pushed on regardless of danger. The ill-considered acceptance of any and every risk has no part in the essence of preserving courage. A mountaineering enterprise, as any in which we enter into with other, may keep sanity and sound judgement and remain an adventure.
And of all the principles we hold, the first is that of mutual helpfulness. What is to be done is a man who is sick or abnormally exhausted at such high altitudes? His companions must see to it that he is taken down at the first opportunity and with adequate escort; and the obligation is the name whether he be a Sahib or coolie; so too with you boys. For if we ask a man to carry our loads up a mountain, or a younger boy of a different class to do our dirty work, we must care for his welfare at need. It may be taken for granted that such need will arise and will interfere very seriously with any organisation however ingeniously and carefully it may be arranged.

It was, quite literally, sobering, and very beautiful. George had managed to work in all of his Fabian principles, all of his hopes for how schools should function, all his war experience and mountaineering expertise, in a few well-chosen words. All that lay behind what he said, and we felt it, palpably.
‘Oh, it’s lovely, darling!’ Ruth said, leaning back on the leather sofa. She had been, at the last, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees.
‘It’s not too long?’
‘No,’ I said, smiling. ‘It’s everything you are, and it will put the spirit and conscience in them.’
‘Thank you, dears.’ George tossed his hair out of his eyes.
‘But–’ I paused.
‘Yes?’
‘You do need to speak up rather – we could hear you fine here, but it may be more difficult for them in chapel... and don’t look at your notes so much. Speak to us, look at us. It will engage them. And every boy in the place will be in tears and proud as anything to be a leader, and British. I promise you.’ I looked up at him, feeling very squidgy.
‘Oh, Mary Anne!’ Ruth cried, and hugged me. ‘That’s so beautiful.’
‘It’s just the truth,’ was the only thing I could think of to say.

After another go at it, which was much better, and another which was perfect, George was satisfied with our response, and I crept into the spare bedroom to see to Grania before I left. When I came out, Ruth had already gone to bed, and George leaned over in his chair at the desk as I passed the study door.
‘Have you a moment?’
I nodded and went inside, and he came round the desk.
‘Thank you for your help, tonight,’ he said. ‘Thank you for everything,’ he took my hand. ‘I’ve rarely seen Ruth so gay. That was a great work you did.’ I opened my mouth to speak but he held up a hand. ‘I know. I saw it too.’
‘Will you speak to her?’
That raised the ghost of smile from him. ‘Not unless she brings it up,’ he said. ‘But I think not. She knows what she knows and that is enough. The Lord knows I’ve not told her anything else.’
That startled me. ‘Do you mean –’
‘That’s right,’ he said easily. ‘Nothing of Bloomsbury. She would not understand it. And I have learnt the better of forcing truths on those unprepared to cope with them.’ He looked over my face. ‘Can you forgive me for that?’
‘Anything.’
He waggled a finger at me. ‘None of your passionate avowals now! Do you mean it?’
I was suddenly awash in tears. ‘Never more.’
‘Thank you,’ he kissed my forehead. ‘Are you quite all right? Do you need a hand down to that machine of yours? Lord, when you drove up! What a wondrous sight!’
‘That would be nice,’ I said, too happy from the praise.

We went downstairs and he made sure that everything was snug with the sidecar and waved us off. The evening seemed to me as I rode home a kind of watershed, that we were settling a good many old concerns at once, and embarking on a different sort of relation altogether. We had drawn closer, but also had more ease between us; the highly charged drama of the past subsiding into something gentler, more sure, and more forgiving. This had begun with Grania, with our splendid afternoon, and I wondered how it would unfold as he stepped out upon the world stage, as he surely would now do.

I saw very little of George before he went to Everest again. In the three months I only was with him half a dozen times; but neither did his family see him often, for he was very busy with lectures all across the country – making thirty in the ten weeks – and with finishing his part of the 1921 Expedition book. There was the superb report he gave in the Queen’s Hall on 20 December; I did go into town for that! He and Col. Howard-Bury were two main speakers, and of the two, I think George gave the better talk. Certainly the papers thought so! It rather got up the nose of some members of the Mount Everest Committee, namely Arthur Hinks, that there was one name and one alone associated with Mount Everest in the public mind, and that name was Mallory.


George himself disliked the moniker of ‘Hero of Everest’ that the American papers had laid on him, calling it ‘disgusting’ and ‘glaxo’, but there was no denying that the world now knew who he was. Even in the climbing community – not known to overly laud the young and daring – he was held as an icon. When a discussion came up in the Mount Everest equipment subcommittee of the matter of oxygen usage to forestall the problems associated with trying to breathe at extremely low air pressure, no less a person than the great P. J. H. Unna himself asked of George’s difficulties on the North Col, ‘Where Mallory blows, what chance is there for others?’

His opinion was sought too by the physiologists, who wished to know his thoughts on the use of oxygen in hyperbaric chambers in preparation for Everest. ‘I told Sir Walter,’ George said of Professor Raleigh, who questioned him at Merton College, ‘that the physiologists might explode themselves in their diabolical chamber, but that we would do our best to explode their damnable heresy. It’s no good putting mountaineers in vacuum chambers. It may work for airmen, but gives no clue how the muscles may perform for the mountaineer at great altitudes, and leaves out the all-important factor of acclimatisation.’

When I saw George last, it was on the 26th of February, at a house party at the Holt, one of their noisy, crowded, jolly affairs that went on until past midnight. Lights were strung in the loggia and the garden, the gramophone played from near the open French doors of the parlour, and conversations proceeded in small groups all over the house. It was very gay. Several members of the expedition who were sailing on the Caledonia were there, including John Noel, who was photographing the expedition with his cine-camera. The Royal Geographical Society and its members on the Everest Committee were completely off any publicity concerning the expedition, but they had agreed, for the sake of cash, to have Noel film the adventure, in both still and moving pictures, as he was ‘merely’ an avocational photographer. Captain Noel is a charming man, of quiet humour and gracious manners that belie his phenomenal grit, inventiveness and daring. On that evening as the sun was setting I had a lovely conversation with him about his adventures in the Caspian Sea in the loggia before George came up with a bottle of bubbly to refill our glasses.

‘You’re meant to christen the ship before its departure, not the inhabitants,’ I teased him, but allowed him to fill it anyway.
‘On the contrary, Mrs. O’Malley,’ Noel smiled, ‘it goes with the caviar.’ On the Caspian, Noel had, by means of his filming, promoted the Persian caviar industry almost single-handedly. He held up his glass to George’s querying look. ‘Yes please.’
‘Pardon me, Noel,’ George said to him, putting down the bottle on the stone ledge. ‘I don’t mean to interrupt your conversation, but I should like to have a word with this lady before she scurries back to her poultry.’ His glance was as sparkling as the wine. From the parlour gramophone came the twinkling sounds of Irving Berlin. I could guess what was coming:
‘May I have this dance, Mrs. O’Malley?’
No one else was dancing to the jazzy rag, but I accepted anyway. ‘With pleasure,’ I put down the champagne and twirled away in a foxtrot to the centre of the loggia with him.

‘I’ve hardly had a chance to talk with you since you arrived, and I didn’t want you to go without really saying goodbye.’
‘Thank you, but...’ I stole a glance about, ‘isn’t this just a little conspicuous?’
George laughed. ‘It’s always best to hide in the open. I will miss you, you know.’ I suspected that the champagne was the cause of all his merriment, but I would not object.
‘I hope so.’
He smiled. ‘At least you didn’t say of course! I promise to write, and tell you all the news, or at least all the gossip and complaints.’
‘And send me flowers? I liked that! But send cuttings instead, for the garden.’
‘Full of demands, as always,’ he teased, with an affectionate look. ‘You will be all right?’
I could be blithe just now. ‘I’ll try. There is Grania to distract me... and the poultry.’
‘Ah, yes! I want reports,’ he said with mock-sternness.
‘Of the poultry?’
He shook his head, laughing. ‘Silly thing!’

He sighed, happily, turning for one last ‘on the spot’ go in the dance. ‘Oh dear dear dear,’ he said suddenly, ’what a time we have had! Who’d have thought in Zermatt we’d be where we are right now?’
I couldn’t bear such reminiscence just then; it was too much. I felt painfully exposed, dancing alone with him in a purple satin frock, every word and glance and emotion on display. Somehow, I felt, I had to steer the conversation off the shoals.
‘I always thought you’d be famous,’ I murmured candidly after a moment.
‘Did you?’ he smiled affectionately.
‘Yes I did.’
‘Well, when I come back we can retire and write books about it.’ He cocked his head, but I could see he wasn’t teasing at all. I had caught his attention, and anchored it to a serious subject, if not one of his favourites. ‘What do you think of that?’

It was a thrilling idea. But striving to keep the light mood, I smiled. ‘It sounds like a bargain to me.’ There we left it. He continued on his rounds as host after depositing me again with Noel, and the rest of our conversations were in mere passing until I left. The next time I heard from him, it was in a letter sent from Bombay.