the danger. It seemed as if there had always been another mountain, or an unclimbed line to attempt, or an expedition for him to lead. He would leave, and there would be the occasional crackling telephone call or scribbled letter, and the weeks would go by and at last he would reappear. Gaunt and weather-beaten, and apparently happy to be home. Then, almost within a week, he would be standing at the window, looking out at the sky, plotting his next departure.
Molly had loved him besottedly all through her childhood. Al was rich icing, balloons, celebrations. Jen was bread and butter, everyday, always there.
She sighed and withdrew her foot. The divorce had been grim, but she was old enough, now, to understand her mother’s reasons. She resumed her contemplation of the room, looking at the titles of the books, and the Mountain People’s letterhead sticking up from the fax tray and, something she hadn’t noticed before, a snapshot of herself Sellotaped to the wall beside the desk. She was sitting on a beach beside a lopsided sandcastle, aged maybe four or five, naked and with her hair matted in salty curls.
She didn’t visit her father up here very often. Tyn-y-Caeau was twenty miles from where she lived with Jen in Betws-y-Coed and Molly had only just learned to drive a car. But she had wanted to come tonight, to see Alyn and deliver her pointless entreaty. He would come over to say goodbye to Jen and her before he left, but those visits were never comfortable. No one ever said what they thought because – they all understood this now – saying things didn’t change any of them.
‘I love you, Dad,’ she said suddenly. Just in a straight voice, as if she were announcing what time it was, with no overlay of parodic sentimentality or swoop of melodrama to distance herself from the offering.
He looked at her and she saw two things.
One was the way he must appear to other people, women or clients or whatever, as a man. As someone you would trust with your life, because that was the responsibility he took. And the other was the way he looked at her, uniquely, because he was her father. These two were pulling in opposite directions, because the man you would trust with your life didn’t go with all the dues and small sacrifices that belonged to fathers and families.
It was the first time Molly had understood this clearly enough to be able to put it into words herself.
‘I love you too,’ he said.
It was the truth, of course, she knew. It was both too much and not enough for her. She had to bend her head to hide the tears in her eyes. Al didn’t see. He was watching the fire, seemingly.
‘And I don’t want you driving all the way home at this time of night. Call your mother and tell her you’re staying here with me.’
After a minute, Molly took the mobile phone he held out to her and prodded out the number. Jen answered at once and gave her response. With a precise finger Molly guided the phone’s little antenna back into its socket.
‘She wants the car back by nine tomorrow morning.’
‘Any other message?’
‘No.’
She drank the last of her tea, now gone cold.
‘I’ll sleep on here,’ Al told her, patting the sofa cushion. ‘You’d better get off to bed.’
When she was lying down, he went in to see her. She was curled on her side, with one hand flat under her cheek, just as she used to settle down when she was a little girl. He pulled the covers around her shoulders and touched her hair.
I am tucking her up, he thought. Just like … Only there hadn’t been all that many times, in her childhood. He had always been away.
‘Goodnight, Al.’
She didn’t often call him by his name.
‘Goodnight, baby.’
Nor did he call her that. She had never been a very babyish child.
Afterwards, he stood over the dying fire with his elbows resting on the mantelpiece and his head in his hands. My daughter is eighteen, he thought, all but. Grown up. Ready for whatever.
Silence seemed to stretch away from him, a great curve of it. It contained this house and the hillside, and the distance he had to travel, all the dimensions of it.
He thought of Spider, the memory catching him unawares as it often did and startling him with its vividness. His voice clearer than his face now, before the last trip to K2, all the years of expeditions fat with success or dim with failure, and the escapes and the drinking and the total reliance on one another that went with them. The absence of him no less punishing than it had been from the first day. And then, inevitably, came the thought of Finch Buchanan. He remembered her face.
Canadian,???? Ken Kennedy had written. Meaning, I don’t know anything about her. Meaning, we’ll find out in the fullness of time and that will be soon enough. To Ken she was only a name on an expedition list, whereas to Al she was a reality, twisted up with Spider in the past and even with Jen. But no one else in the world except Finch herself knew that and Al wondered if after all this time even she remembered what had happened between them.
The snow’s blanket thickened the silence, once the wind had dropped. It cost Al an effort to move, to open cupboards in search of a blanket and so to break the immense, smooth ellipse of it.
Jen’s house was square, double-fronted grey stone with a purple slate roof. It stood back a little from the main road, with a short path of Victorian encaustic tiles leading to the front door. The next morning Al parked his old Audi outside the gate and followed Molly past the iron railings. The snow had melted overnight and passing traffic churned grey slush into the gutter.
Molly turned her key in the lock. ‘We’re back,’ she called.
‘Kitchen,’ Jen answered. They found her at the rear of the house in the wash-house beyond the kitchen itself. She was wearing yellow rubber gloves and loading sheets from a plastic laundry basket into an industrial-capacity washing machine. After the divorce Jen had bought this too-big house with a loan from her father and had set up a bed-and-breakfast business. Plenty of climbers and walkers and fishermen came to Betws-y-Coed, even in March.
‘Can I do anything?’ Al asked.
Her mouth curled, briefly. ‘No. I’ll just get this lot in.’
‘How’s business?’
‘Not bad for the time of year. Three last night. Full over the weekend.’
Jen was a good cook, and she also had the sense to keep the bedrooms well heated and to make sure there was plenty of hot water for her visitors. Al admired her success in this enterprise. While they had been married she had seemed smaller and less decisive. His activities had constrained her.
He reflected, not for the first time, that she was better off without him and he was touched by a finger of regret.
Molly had gone upstairs. Jen slammed the door of the washing machine, peeled off the gloves and twisted the control knob decisively. She still wore her wedding ring and the minute diamond, which was all he had been able to afford twenty years ago. ‘You want some coffee?’
They went into the kitchen. The front parlour was mostly used by the guests; this was where Molly and Jen lived. There was a sofa here draped in a Welsh tapestry, and corn dollies and carved spoons and local water-colours pinned to the walls, and a big television, and a Rayburn festooned with drying socks, and a row of potted plants and on every surface, objects: shells and jugs and framed photographs and bowls of pot pourri. She was letting her natural inclinations back into the light. When they had lived together, Al had thought they shared a taste for minimal living. They had gone in for plain white walls, bare wooden floors, exposed beams.
He skirted three bowls of cat food placed on a sheet of newspaper by the back door and sat down on the sofa next to the ginger tom. Jen heated coffee and gave it to him in a mug that said ‘Croeso i Cymru’. Al frowned at it. Jen had been born in Aberystwyth. Al’s family came from Liverpool and even though he had fallen in love with the mountains