expedition. Sam scrolled more impatiently now. There were pictures of previous years’ teams, smiling faces and Sherpas in padded jackets. Then individual mugshots of the expedition director and his Base Camp manager, and two tough-looking men posing on mountains with racks of climbing hardware cinched round their waists and ice axes in their hands. This year’s guides, he noted, accompanied by impressive accounts of their previous experience that he didn’t bother to read.
Here. Here was what he was searching for.
Dr Finch Buchanan, medical officer and climber.
Her picture had been taken against a plain blue background, not some conquered peak. She was wearing a white shirt that showed a V of suntanned throat and she was looking slightly aside from the camera, straight-faced and pensive. She was thirty-two, an expert skier and regular mountaineer. She had trained at UBC, worked in Baluchistan for UNESCO, now lived in Vancouver where she was a general medical practitioner. Previous experience included ascents of Aconcagua in Argentina and McKinley, where she had also been medical officer. In the course of her climbing career she had developed a strong interest in high-altitude medicine.
That was all. Sam read and reread the brief details, as if the extra attention might extract some more subtle and satisfying information. He even touched the tip of his finger to the screen, to the strands of dark hair, but encountered only the glass, faintly gritty with dust. The dates of the trip blinked at him, with the invitation to follow the progress of the climb over the following weeks via daily reports and regular updates from Base Camp. She must already be on her way to Nepal, Sam calculated.
There had been a total of perhaps five hours from the moment she had blown with the storm into one airport, then disappeared into the press of another. He had been thinking about her for another fifty. Sam swivelled in his chair, eyeing the over-familiar clutter on his desk and trying to reason why. Not just because of the way she looked, or her cool manner, or the glimpse of her vulnerability in her fear of flying, although all of these had played their part. It was more that there had been a sense of purpose about her. He saw it and envied it. She looked through him to a bigger view and the vista put light in her face and tightened the strings that held her body together. The effect wasn’t just to do with sex, although it was also the sexiest encounter he had ever had with a total stranger.
Sam sighed. Everything about Finch Buchanan was the opposite of the way he felt about himself. His life seemed to have narrowed and lost its force, and finally dried out like a stream in a drought. Work yawned around him with its diminishing satisfactions. His father was disappointed in him and vice versa. The energy and effort he had put into competitive running now seemed futile. And the woman he shared his life with was asleep in another room, separate from him, and he couldn’t even make himself care properly about that.
I wish I were going to Everest too, he thought.
The wildness of the idea even made him smile.
And then it was so unthinkable that he let himself think about it.
The climbing he had done as a child with Michael had frightened him. He knew his father had pushed him too hard; the terror still sometimes surfaced in his dreams. And yet this woman did it and it – or something related to it – gave her a force field that sucked him towards her. He was drawn closer and now the fear had transferred from himself to Finch. Even before she vanished at Vancouver airport, even as he sat down beside her on the plane, he had known he would find her again. He had imagined that he would wait until she came back, then track her down in Vancouver. But the aridity of his life made a sudden desert flower of an idea swell and burst into iridescent colour in his mind. He didn’t have to wait for her to come back. He had been prescient enough to ask where she was staying.
He could go out there.
Maybe just by being close enough inside her orbit he could make sure that she was safe.
Ever the optimist, McGrath, he thought. The woman’s a serious mountaineer and you flunked out of it at the age of fourteen. And you still imagine you can look after her? She’ll just think you’re some weird stalker.
He’d have to deal with that. Optimism was good; it was too long since he had felt it about anything. Seize the moment.
Sam sat for a few more minutes in front of his screen, reading the rest of the Mountain People’s seductive sell.
When he slipped into their bedroom he found to his surprise that Frannie was still awake, propped up on her side of the bed reading a gardening book. The angle of a fire escape outside a city apartment wasn’t enough growing space for her. She wanted a house and a garden for her plants, and Sam couldn’t blame her for that. He sat down beside her on the edge of the bed and she lowered the book to look at him.
‘Working?’
‘Yeah.’ He undid the laces of his sneakers and eased them off his feet, then unbuttoned the cuffs of his shirt. Frannie lay back, watching him, waiting for him to climb in beside her. They had lived together for three years, and the sediment of their joint existence was spread around them on the shelves and in the drawers. A blanket from Mexico, their last holiday together, covered the bed. There were invitations in their joint names on the dresser. Even in the fluff of pocket linings and trouser turn-ups there would be the forensic evidence of their inter-related lives: sand from walks on the beach; dust from cinemas; carpet fibres from the homes of their shared friends. The extent of their separation within this unit was too apparent to Sam.
‘Switch the light off,’ Frannie murmured as he lay down. She turned on her side to face him and her breath warmed his face as she slid closer. ‘Mm?’
Sam lay still, contemplating the redoubt of betrayal.
‘What’s wrong?’ she whispered.
He lifted his weighty hand and rested it on the naked curve of her hip where the T-shirt she wore in bed had ridden up.
‘I don’t know,’ he lied. Could you say, I feel trapped by this life, I don’t want to stay here, you deserve a man who will treat you better than I do? How did you do that, instead of making love like he proceeded to do now, with a flare of guilty optimism battened down inside you?
Afterwards Frannie fell asleep with her back curved against his belly and Sam lay awake, thinking out how he would make the next moves and trying to plan the gentlest words he could use to tell her.
Frannie was a teacher and always woke up early to prepare properly for the day at school. When her alarm went off at 6.50 a.m. she got out of bed at once, and padded around between bed and bathroom while Sam lay with the covers hiding his head. He heard her taking a shower, rummaging for clothes, peering in the mirror while she applied a slick of mascara. When she went into the kitchen to make coffee he sat up abruptly and followed her.
‘Toast?’ she asked, with a knife slicing the air. They didn’t usually have breakfast together. Evenings were their time, when they drank wine and talked and collaborated over the cooking. Or used to.
‘Just coffee.’
He sat at the table, looking into the cup. ‘Fran. I want to go away for a bit.’
As soon as the words were out he knew she had been anticipating, probably fearing them. The tension of it had been in the air between them. Her face creased now and her mouth drew in sharply. ‘Where to?’
‘I want to go … to Nepal. Maybe to see Everest.’
She gazed at him. ‘Oh, of course. When?’
‘Now. I suppose.’
Fran shook her head. There were red marks like thumbprints on each cheekbone. ‘Why?’
Because I need to get away from here? Because my work isn’t satisfying and because I can’t run as fast as I want to, and because you and I don’t make each other happy? Because I’ve just been to see my father and we can’t talk to each other, and I know I have disappointed him? Or just because I saw a woman at an airport and thought, I want her?
Sam mumbled, ‘I can’t tell you why. I want to go because I had