The Cruel Peak Read online

  Robyn took his thoughtful reception of her proposal as encouragement and sounded enthusiastic. “I want our finances in the hands of the family. I trust you as a businessman, Tom. And you and your family will be set up for life. So it’s not a big ask, is it?”

  “No.” It was in fact, to him, a monstrous ask.

  She put her other hand on his. Both his hands were now pinned down by hers. She looked at him, unblinking. Her eyes had rich, brown irises in nets of blood. “We have had some wonderful times, Tom.”

  “Valuable memories… I agree.” But he would say to Alison, ‘She began practicing her skills on me, playing the tender, somewhat lost, ex-wife.’

  “Don’t give all this up, Tom - Tamaki Downs, the Ashtons,” Robyn pleaded.

  For him, there would always be this dichotomy: part of him here, part of him in England. It didn’t make a lot of sense to yearn for this place, to have paintings of Ruapehu and the Clutha River on the walls of his home in London, and read W.H. Oliver and Keith Sinclair and John Mulgan from twelve thousand miles away, but that was the way it was; it was the way it would probably continue to be as his commitment in London deepened, with the roots put down by the children, and eventually their children.

  “Well, what do you think, Tom? New Zealand could be a remote province of England to the south of Cornwall.”

  “It isn’t. Not even conceptually. It’s a long way away.”

  “People call it ‘Little England’.”

  “Maybe it is, climatically, ethnically and politically, but it’s a long way away.”

  “Does distance matter when you can fly it in thirty hours, and see and talk to people any day on a video link?”

  “Yes. There’s a sense of remoteness; four million people sailing alone in a lifeboat on the cold southern seas.”

  “Oh, Tom, what a disappointing and fanciful thought.” She withdrew her hands from his.

  “It’s a very complicated situation emotionally, Robyn, but I can’t settle down here.”

  “You could fly to London or New York whenever you like.”

  “I know. I’m trying to say that it doesn’t quite work like that.”

  “What do you mean, Tom?”

  “You get stuck here.”

  16

  He returned to London and the familiar rhythm of work, and weekends with Alison and the boys. He felt he’d escaped, but the notebook and what to do with it still troubled him. It was a few months later that he broached the subject to Alison on a sunny afternoon as they sat reading the Sunday papers in the new conservatory they had added to their home.

  “I don’t follow you, Tom; what should you do with it? You don’t have to do anything, but you speak as though you do.”

  “I mean, I just have to make a personal decision. Maybe it’s to do nothing, but I haven’t made that decision - yet.”

  “What could you do?”

  “Release the notebook to the media.”

  “It would look vindictive to the Ashtons. How would Petra feel?”

  “She should face facts,” he said sharply.

  “I don’t think she would see it that way. I would guess her grandfather’s achievements don’t mean much to her, but the family name does.”

  “That old bastard is still on his pedestal, with a bit of mud sticking to him, Alison. He committed a monstrous fraud and it ought to be exposed.”

  “Vogel was climbed that day. The record books are right on that. Does it matter precisely who did it?” She managed to make this sound distant and unimportant.

  “Yes, if you’ve sung your achievement all over the world. I think Ernest wrote The Fatal Snows to psyche himself into an imaginary world where he had climbed the mountain.”

  “Is Ernest’s fading fame very important now, Tom?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you really want to give your father his due? After all, he was a courageous mountaineer.”

  “A mad one, more like. No, I honestly don’t want to justify him. What set him off up the mountain against Ernest’s arguably correct judgment that they ought to turn back, we’ll never know.”

  “You held off releasing the truth to protect Stuart. Doesn’t that apply now that he’s dead?”

  “I don’t think so. His view of his own celebrity was swollen, but it was extensive in fact in New Zealand. I could accept that and keep quiet, but now that he’s dead, it will shrink to family-size. Ernest is different.”

  Her face had a grim seriousness which he saw only rarely. “So you’re going to…”

  “What do you think I should do?”

  “Nothing, Tom,” she replied without hesitation.

  A restless month later he wrote the following letter:

  Dear Robyn,

  One thing that I believe only Ernest, Stuart and I knew definitely was that there was a notebook of my father’s which clearly establishes that he alone climbed Mt Vogel. The Swiss claimed to have seen it; their phone video showed a document but no conclusive text. The Mountaineer Magazine story and photos, and speculation by others, cast a lot of grave doubt, but couldn’t be definitive without the actual notebook. You may remember our conversation in the library before Petra’s wedding, when you asked why Ernest couldn’t sue for libel. He couldn’t sue, because the rumours were true. His failure to sue in turn emboldened the media in their speculation.

  I have the notebook and out of consideration for Stuart’s career I would not have revealed it had he lived. Much that he had worked for was in a sense dependent upon his father’s achievements and reputation - misguided as that may have been - and to that extent his own reputation would have suffered. At about the time of his death, I was thinking of handing the notebook to him, but these thoughts do not apply now.

  I have considered it carefully, and I have no loyalty to Ernest. I don’t see why, now that the issues around the conquest have been lulled for want of further evidence, that Ernest should remain in the record books as one of our foremost mountaineers, and why The Fatal Snows should continue to be regarded as an outstanding factual narrative when it is, in truth, fiction.

  I don’t have any anxious thoughts of justifying my father, but it seems right that he should have the credit for what he did.

  All those things being said, and I feel them strongly, these events have blighted the Ashton family and I have no wish to add to that. I am therefore enclosing the original notebook which you may keep or destroy, pass around the family or publish as you wish.

  Yours sincerely,

  Tom