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‘What do you know?’ He smiled and settled himself in place. She had the book open on her lap.
‘I know something about the laws of probability,’ she answered coolly and returned to her reading. Sam saw a guy who looked like John Belushi making his way towards them, already frowning. He leaned down and scooped Finch’s flowers from where she had wedged them under the seat in front, and held them on the armrest between them. And he squirmed closer so their heads were almost touching.
‘Is this …?’ Belushi began tetchily.
Sam passed over his boarding card. ‘I’m really sorry. It’s your seat, I know. But look, it’s our wedding night. D’you mind changing so I can sit beside my wife? She’s a nervous flier.’
‘Well, okay,’ the man grunted and pushed onwards.
She didn’t laugh now. She didn’t look alarmed or disconcerted or angry – just severe. She took back the flowers and pushed them under the seat again, kicking them out of the way with the toe of her pretty shoe. ‘What is all this about?’
‘You think I’m a flake, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m not. I just wanted to sit here.’
‘Then sit,’ she said crisply. He did as he was told, through the last-minute de-icing and the taxi and the take-off, and the pilot’s announcement that in the wake of the storm severe turbulence was anticipated and they should keep their seat belts fastened. As the plane climbed through the cloud layers it pitched and shuddered, and the engines whined and changed key. Finch suddenly let her book drop and pushed her head back against the seat rest. Sam saw the pallor of her throat.
‘As a matter of fact there was one grain of accidental truth in that load of bullshit.’
‘What’s that?’ he asked.
‘I’m a lousy flier.’
‘Want to hold my hand?’
‘I want a drink.’
He peered around the seat in front. As far as he could see, the crew were still strapped in. ‘Not yet. Want to talk instead?’
She sighed and closed her eyes. The fuselage creaked and swayed giddily. ‘If you like.’
‘I had my fortune told by an old native Indian woman when I was a tiny boy. I remember to this day, her saying to me, “You are not going to die in an Air Canada 737 somewhere over the western seaboard.” Do you feel sick, by the way?’
‘If I vomit I can deal with it myself, thank you. I am a doctor.’
‘Dr Buchanan. Specialising in put-downs of pushy men and vomit.’
The plane hit a pocket of empty space. It pitched through the vacuum for what seemed like ten seconds before hitting solid air again. A child began screaming and a moan came from an old woman across the aisle. Finch snatched at Sam’s hand and dug her nails in. She had gone white to the lips.
‘It’s okay,’ he soothed her. Her hand was clammy; he rubbed the skin on the back of it gently with his thumb. ‘It’s just storm turbulence. Nothing’s going to happen to us. You’re safe.’ He reached to the seat pocket and laid the paper bag on her lap, just in case, on top of the book. He noticed now that it was Touching the Void, a classic account of a climbing catastrophe and its aftermath.
He nodded pleasantly at it. ‘I read that. Quite a story.’
She rolled her head. ‘I think I’d rather be down a crevasse than up here.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Look. Don’t expect me to be polite and kind. Just talk to me. Tell me about yourself, if you like.’
‘An invitation no male could refuse. Where should I begin?’
He told her about why he had been visiting his father and about running, and his work and its problems, trying to make it twice as interesting as it really was. He avoided mentioning Frannie, although once or twice he caught himself saying we and he knew she had registered it. The plane’s bucking and shuddering gradually eased, and in-flight service began. By the time he was putting a large vodka and tomato juice into her hand, Finch’s colour had improved. She drank half the measure down straight.
‘Thanks again.’
‘Steady.’
She had let go of his hand minutes ago. Now she picked up Joe Simpson’s book again. ‘I think I’ll read some more of this.’
It wasn’t until they had begun their descent into Vancouver that he broke in on her once more. ‘You know all about me, I don’t know anything about you. Is that a fair arrangement, do you think?’
She smiled briefly. ‘I shouldn’t think so. What do you want to know?’
In response to a series of direct questions he learned that she had been in Oregon for her best friend’s wedding. She practised in the city with a partner, she had four brothers all older than she was, her father was an architect he had vaguely heard of and her mother was a mother. She lived alone in a city apartment. And yes, she was seeing someone at the moment. Although she flashed a warning glance at him just for asking.
They had landed and were taxiing towards the stand when he put the final, inevitable, schlocky question he couldn’t think of any way around. ‘Can I call you some time? Maybe we could have dinner.’
Finch sighed. She had gathered up the flowers again and they made her look as if she was headed for the altar. ‘I don’t think so, Sam.’
‘Why not? I’m harmless, maybe even quite amusing. What have you got to lose?’
‘Nothing.’ They were stationary at last. Raindrops glittered on the window beyond her shoulder. ‘I’m not going to be here. I’m going away for a while.’
‘When?’ he asked grimly. Somehow he would see her again, whatever it might take.
‘In a couple of weeks. And I’m really busy before then, getting ready for it.’
‘Where?’
She hesitated. Then a so-what smile crimped the corners of her mouth. ‘Out to Nepal. Kathmandu. Then on to Everest. I’m joining an expedition to climb it. Medical officer.’
‘You’re a climber. You don’t just read about it? That’s extraordinary.’ Shaking his head, he reached out mentally to all the curtains of denial with which he had shrouded his adolescence and pulled them down with one breezy sentence. ‘Because I climb too. Mad about it, ever since I was a kid.’
Her eyes narrowed. ‘I thought you said you were a marathon runner. A failed Olympic one.’
‘That too. Where will you be staying in Kathmandu?’
‘Why do you want to know?’
‘I’ve been there. Some of the hotels are pretty dire, in my experience. Just want to be sure you’ve picked a decent one.’
In fact, he had never been further west than Hong Kong. He tried hard to remember anything he had ever read about the Nepali capital. Ancient. It was really ancient and seriously polluted. Would that do?
Finch sighed. ‘It’s the Buddha’s Garden. I’m not planning to change it. And that information is of no conceivable use to you.’
The forward doors were open. The passengers ahead of them had shuffled their way out and Finch was already on her feet, bending her head under the overhead lockers.
‘All information has value,’ Sam said. ‘Let me help you with your bag. Or at least carry your bouquet for you.’
‘I can manage.’
They were in the chilly corridors. She was slipping away from him, but it didn’t matter. He could deal with that.
Immigration was about to separate them. Sam was still counting himself lucky that he had had his passport on him.
‘Goodbye,’ Finch said seriously. ‘Someone’s here to meet me, or I’d offer you a lift. Thanks for your company.’
‘So long, Finch.’
Then she was gone. Sam was left alone in the arrivals hall at Vancouver airport at one in the morning, with his car and his girlfriend and his stalled life waiting for him in Seattle. From the taxi line, John Belushi was glaring reproachfully at him.
Two (#ub6dcaaf9-063d-5232-8208-a396ee615d1e)
It was snowing in North Wales, too. It was a different small segment of the world’s weather envelope, but the local effects were the same as in Vancouver or Oregon.
Alyn Hood paid no attention either to the bitter wind or the blur of snowflakes flying into his face and weighting his eyelashes. He stood on his doorstep for a moment, gazing thoughtfully into the darkness as if it were the middle of a summer’s afternoon. Then he turned and locked the door of the cottage, dropping the heavy key into his pocket. He set off down the path, bareheaded with his coat hanging loose, at a steady pace that indicated no hurry, or any awareness of the climate.
It was a long descent, down a rutted track where the potholes were already deceptively smoothed out by the settling snow. The man was a sure-footed walker. His easy pace never varied.
The track joined a lane at a gatepost where the plastic letters of an old sign, their cracked curves and serifs having acquired an eyebrow of snow, announced the name of the one-storey slate and stone cottage to be Tyn-y-Caeau. He turned left into the muffled silence of the lane and continued to descend the hill. His footprints threaded a solitary one-way trail in his wake. Half a mile further on, a tiny cluster of yellow lights showed thinly between silver-furred stone walls. There were perhaps a dozen houses here and a whitewashed pub turned grey by the insistent whiteness. There were no cars in the car-park, but a regiment of wooden bench-and-table sets in the frozen garden to the side indicated that this might be a popular place in more forgiving weather.
Alyn Hood went straight to the low door and pushed it open, familiar with its movement. A heavy draught curtain, attached to a rod on the back of the door, swung with it. There was a bar framed by glasses and bottles, a man behind its rampart polishing a tankard, and two customers. All three faces turned to the new arrival.
‘Al,’ the barman greeted him. The other two men nodded. One was very old, with a flat tweed cap welded to his head, the younger had a sheepdog asleep at his feet.
‘Pint, Glyn,’ Alyn Hood said.
‘Right you are.’ The barman pulled it and stood the handle glass to dribble on a bar towel.
‘Bit dead tonight,’ the sheepdog man said wonderingly, as if this room with its ticking clock and smoky fire usually resounded with cheering and dancing on table-tops.
‘Blasted weather,’ Glyn judged. ‘You’d expect a sign of spring, this time of year.’
‘It’s only March,’ Alyn Hood said mildly. He took his pint to a round table near the fire and sat down.
‘When is it you’re off this time, then?’ Glyn pursued him.
‘Couple of days.’
‘Bad enough here,’ said the sheepdog man.
Alyn smiled and the room fell silent again. He sat for perhaps twenty minutes, nursing his pint and looking into the red coals. A couple came in and sat in a corner murmuring together, their hands entwined.
Five minutes later the door whirled open once more, admitting a blast of cold air and a young woman who stamped her feet energetically to shed a ruff of snow. She looked around the bar and saw Al. ‘Thought I might find you.’
‘Molly. What are you doing here?’
‘Duh. Looking for you, maybe? Went up to the house, car there but not you. Where else could you be but down the pub? Do I get a drink?’
‘Coke?’
‘Nn.’ Molly put her head on one side. Her wiry hair was spangled with melted snow. ‘I’ll have a whisky and ginger ale, thanks.’ She stared a challenge at her father.
‘You’re not old enough. You driving?’
‘Get real. I’m eighteen. Near enough. And how else d’you think I got here from Betws? Mum lent me.’
Al sighed. His only child was a grown woman now, almost. Because he had missed so many of the vital, infinitesimal shifts of growth that had delivered her from sweet babyhood to this point, he knew he didn’t have the right to tell her she was too young to drink whisky, or anything else for that matter.
‘Very small Scotch and plenty of ginger, please, Glyn. And I’ll have a half.’
They took their drinks and sat opposite each other at the table. Father and daughter were noticeably alike. Their heads and hands were the same shape, and they sat in the same position with their legs pointing towards the fire and their ankles lazily crossed.
‘How is your mother?’
Molly regarded him. ‘The same.’
‘Did she send you?’
‘No. Well. In a way, I suppose. I said I was coming over and she offered me the car.’
They lifted their glasses at the same moment and thoughtfully drank.
The man with the tweed cap levered himself off his stool and headed for the door. ‘Night all. See you again, I hope, Alyn. All the best.’
Molly’s face drew in. The contraction of her mouth and eyes made her look angry. When the door had closed once more and the eddies of cold air were dispersed she said, ‘Don’t go back there. Don’t. I don’t want you to.’
There was a flicker in her father’s eyes, a shift in his glance that acknowledged and at the same time evaded her demand. Molly saw it and Al knew that she saw it. ‘I have to go, Molly. It’s what I do.’
‘You don’t have to. That’s a lie.’
‘I don’t lie to you, Moll. I try not to. Did your mother tell you to come here and say this to me?’
It was weary, over-trodden ground to Alyn. And the careful neutrality that Molly assumed in answering was a reminder that she had had to intercede for too long in the disputes between her mother and father.
‘No,’ she repeated. ‘I came to say it myself. Dad, please don’t go. I’ve got a bad feeling about this time.’
He smiled then, briefly, and put his hands over hers. ‘You always have a bad feeling. Remember? And I always come home, don’t I?’
She would not meet his eyes. He turned her hands over, looking at the smooth palms, remembering these fingers when they were baby-sized and the way they curled to grip his adult forefinger. Holding on to him hard, even then.
‘Listen. I have to do this trip.’ For all kinds of reasons he was drawn back to the mountain. They were not, he acknowledged to himself, reasons he would care to analyse with his daughter. ‘I have to do this one and after I’ve done it I’ll hang up my boots.’
‘Do you mean that?’
From her mother, over the years, Molly had heard enough about her father’s faults. She knew well enough what he was bad at and deficient in, and out of her own sense of fair play she had privately reckoned up his strengths. In order to compensate.
