Epilogue -Oxford 1973

I lay snug in bed in the stormy night, smoking, my mind drifting as if by an old well-worn channel, to climbing huts and waiting for the hour of departure in the dark of night. I thought of course of George in this context, inevitably. He was a part of my youth and my past, my lovely climbing past, and a very important part of it. But so much more! There would forever be Grania as a reminder to me of the real love and connection between us.

It was unfortunate that I had convinced myself at one point – before 1921! – that there had never been any emotional nexus on his side – but letters and my old diaries gave the lie; not that they would ever be seen. The truth was that when I was a girl he had been so much mixed up with the whole emotional and spiritual adventure of mountaineering that I had really never been able to disentangle my feelings, nor had I wanted to. I had been so young then, too! and my generation, educated young women of the first decade and a half of the century were singularly unemotional while they were young. There was none of the intellectual curiosity about sex which the films and the psychological novels had brought in immediately after the war, let alone the cheerful mixed discussion of it, over drinks, which was now so prevalent. A good thing or a bad thing? I didn’t know; the question was irrelevant. The point was that in my youth, emotion – how deliberately I could not at this distance of time be sure any more – had been kept out of the picture in one’s relations with serious men, as a rule; and indeed the avoidance of it had been quite as much on the men’s side as on the girls’, unless they decided to marry you.
No, with myself and George the thing between us had always been that we were acutely in sympathy about almost everything, but about mountains and the meaning of mountains above all. And since for me, for many many years, mountains had taken the place of religion, had satisfied my religious sense, my need for adoration and worship as no Cathedral, however sublime, had been able to do, he had taken an almost hieratical place in my mind. You could not call this love in the ordinary, everyday sense, and I did not now call it that – but looking back over other men with whom, awakened by marriage, I had been avowedly and specifically in love, like poor dear David, I realised … how much more important George had been to my interior life than any of those others. The intensity of the time with them had become dim in my mind. George had never become dim; the idea and the picture and the atmosphere of him had always remained vivid and potent to me.

This seems queer, and very interesting: it is a thing you couldn’t put into a book and get away with … because people wouldn’t believe it, the importance a man and a woman could have for one another, without any question of bolting entering. And yet it was true; and fascinating, the strange durability of such a relationship, lasting on and on through the years, through separation, through other most searching experiences, like marriage and children. It almost looked as if such a relationship were the most perdurable of all. One returned to it, as I and George had returned, to find it untouched, only enriched and deepened by our separate experience; one began again where one had left off, with no sense of the lapse of time, and no need to feel one’s way or pick up threads. When we were together, at once there we were.
It struck me as being immensely reassuring as I lay quiet waiting for sleep, listening to the soughing trees, thinking how rich and satisfying and strange life is, and how it goes on and on, always producing some new facet or aspect, some fresh revelation of an unguessed-at experience. I was aged eighty-five this year; that I could still feel so was to me nothing short of a miracle. I had no energy or patience for new books or other projects, but the past provided an endless source of wonder. I was lucky to have known George so young, for ever such a long time, even since he had died. He lived, not simply in the interest taken in him by climbers, in the inspiration he gave; he lived in the vital memory he evoked in everyone who knew him. We would pass away, but that would go on forever.

 Finit.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
1. How much of this is 'real'?
    About 90%. I used Mary Anne's unpublished biography of George and parts from her books which were drawn on him or referred to their relationship. It has been my object to make it difficult to know where Mary Anne's writing left off, and mine began, which required study of her style. The internal
evidence does point to the situation with Grania, (or Kate as she was later known) being George's. It was a stunning moment when I realised that Grania was in all probability George's, that there was more to this than simply Mary Anne's immature obsession with the man she had stupidly let get away.


2. What was George's intention about Mary Anne? Why didn't he leave Ruth?
    Mary Anne and George were lifelong friends - as were she and Ruth. This is well-attested and quite genuine. Such a response from him of keeping everything civil between himself, Mary Anne and Ruth is entirely in keeping with his Bloomsbury philosophy. I endeavoured to see him in the context of his time and judge him by his own standards.

He knew perfectly well his defects as a husband, and was making great efforts to remedy those  when he died, insofar as he was constitutionally able. He was never the paper and slippers by the fire, discussing nappies and croup sort; that was not his nature and never had been, and he tried to make that
clear to Ruth beforehand. His restless mind  was incandescent. His genuine friendships with other people - Geoffrey Young, Mary Anne, Will Forster, Geoffrey Keanes, Howard Somervel, in that order - would always be as important to him as his relationship with Ruth, and I think that not unfair on her. He loved his children, but the daily discipline matters drove him spare.

Our present society today has a view of one's spouse being one's best friend and all other relationships being far secondary, even for men; this was not the case in his time. Likewise, his early  Bloomsbury
friendships deeply affected him. He really believed, I do think, that he and Mary Anne could continue being friends, having been 'friends with benefits'; the lives of Katherine Cox and Will Arnold-Forster
bear witness that this was a fairly common experience. He had tried being totally frank with Mary Anne, and that worked out disastrously; it did not seem inconsistent to me that he should 'let Ruth know as much as she could guess, otherwise not burden her with unwanted knowledge'. But he never at any time considered leaving Ruth. He did love Mary Anne, as a friend and person, but he was not in love with her.

Once both were married, this lapse of conventional fidelity only happened once, so far as I am able to see, in a state of emotional extremis for both. People make mistakes in extremis. Should they have done? Probably not. Was it a kind of denouement for them to admit their still-strong feelings? Yes.
Should they have admitted them? That is not for me to say. That they had strong feelings from the outset is clear; if anything, this was a rather mythic, archetypal relationship, without the bounds of 'normal life' , from the start. (I am thinking of the work of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell here.) Perhaps this is why readers have responded to this story so extremely.

Ruth was much more conventional in this regard even than Mary Anne, so I perhaps his caution was warranted. Clearly Ruth did know and accept their closeness - as instanced by her request to Mary Anne to write the biography. That Ruth remained lifelong friends with Mary Anne says much about Ruth, as Mary Anne was a troubled and a difficult person to get on with at best; I would say that she was histrionic, emotionally immature, vain, and waspish. She was also brilliantly intelligent, witty, deeply gifted in noting and recreating details in her writing, and fiercely loyal once her attachment had been firmly made. She came to love Ruth dearly, and not simply for George's sake; that Ruth 'knew what she knew' and loved her anyway - despite all the above as well - is a testament to Ruth's character.

3. Did George stay with Ruth for the sake of money?
    George never gave a toss about money, even when forced to by the circumstance of being a
paterfamilias. Had Turner not bequeathed Ruth an allowance and got them The Holt, George and she would have lived rather more differently on the grounds at Charterhouse, indeed as he did before he married, the common experience of married schoolmasters.  He was not in the least about 'getting ahead'. He agreed to Everest because it would give him the freedom to do other things than teach little boys, not for fame and certainly not for money. He wanted to write more. He and several others had drawn up a plan for a school very much like Gordonstoun; it was his idea. His best work was in social reform, his writings about the education of boys, his pamphlets written during the war, are brilliant. He stayed with Ruth because he loved her and was in love with her.

4.  Isn't dancing with another woman tantamount to infidelity?
     This question has come up several times. I am puzzled by modern people's notion that dancing with someone else than your spouse at a houseparty constitutes infidelity; this is a huge misunderstanding of conventions of the time. Just as one was not seated next to one's spouse at dinner, but partnered with or by someone else, to dance with one's spouse only was considered quite rude and insular. Today the equivalent would be going to a party and only talking to the person(s) you came with.



5. Why couldn't Mary Anne just break off her engagement to Owen?
    This came from my very young London editor. The short answer is that there were legal contracts binding  them together at the time of the engagement. It wasn't like a registry office marriage. At the time either party could sue the other for breach of contract and publish the results in the Times. This would have been ruinous for both.

6. You must really hate George Mallory to write such things.
    This expressed view is most shocking to me. I love and admire him deeply, in fact. But I am quite willing to take in everyone's opinions of him as their own direct or received view,  and come to my own conclusions. I do not regard him as a plaster saint, nor as a sort of brilliant but bumbling climber. In my view he is a fascinating, complex, deep person who is undervalued for having been fit into soundbites to suit our modern sensibilities.