He passed over another cigarette and we lit up. Duff’s diet is a dietician’s nightmare, I reflected. He seemed to live entirely on coffee, white sugar and cigarettes by day, and lager and cigarettes by night. He avoided fresh fruit and raw vegetables like the plague. And he had the nerve to be healthy! I glanced at him: leaning forward elbows on his knees, chin resting on clasped hands, frowning thoughtfully at nothing in particular – this was the way I’d always think of him.
‘Why did you really ask me on this trip?’ I asked casually.
He grinned and snapped out of his mood as I’d intended. ‘I’d never met one of you writer chappies before. I thought it might be interesting to see how you’d react if I actually put you on the spot.’
So that was it. I’m here and going to the Himalayas as the result of someone’s whimsical curiosity. Not just anyone’s – no one other than Duff would have come up with such a suggestion and carried it through. I laughed in delight at the absurdity of it all. Mal shook his head as if trying to shake the dust from his brains. ‘You showed you had the right stuff. The trouble is,’ and here he concluded the line of thought he’d been trudging down, ‘by the time you get to climbing in the Himalayas, you’ve forgotten why you started in the first place.’
I was to think often of this conversation in the coming months. We went on to chat casually about Rocky Moss on Mount McKinley, the sex life of butterflies, suitable film, the origin of the Jesuits – and of the intriguing ménage à trois of the other three Americans on the trip. Burt Greenspan, Donna and Sybil lived together in a big house in Chicago, Burt and Donna downstairs and Sybil upstairs. It all sounded very decadent and American, and we were curious to see how it worked out in practice. Burt and Donna were coming to climb, while Sybil was part of the trekking party. Finally stiffening muscles, growing thirst and wet snow drifting out of the greyness sent us off downhill towards the lights of the Clachaig.
I felt strong, ready and willing. Next stop Islamabad.
Only it’s never as simple as that.
I walked into the Clachaig the following Friday to find Mal leaning against the bar, looking pale and tired.
‘Here, read this.’ He thrust a newspaper at me.
British climber killed on Matterhorn, the paragraph was headed. I looked up, read on. It reported briefly that Mr Brian Sprunt had fallen to his death on the mountain, and his companions Charlie McLeod and Malcolm Duff had been taken off by helicopter. I glanced at Mal, he managed a rueful smile. ‘I seem to be in two places at once. Trouble is, the rest of it is true.’ Brian Sprunt … the name was familiar. Hadn’t I met him, the first time I came up here? ‘Yes, he was sitting at our table for a while.’ I could picture him now, a face among many, drinking and laughing and planning the new season. And now a face among the many dead, written off in a brief, inaccurate newspaper paragraph.
‘Did you know him well?’
‘Well enough. We were together on the Nuptse trip. You get close to somebody …’ He paused, looking into private memories. ‘Hell of a good bloke. Bit upsetting, really.’
And with this massive understatement, so typical of Mal and climbers and Scots, he turned back to the bar. ‘What you drinking, youth?’
But he was in low spirits all weekend, suddenly quiet and withdrawn, cracking a joke then forgetting to laugh and instead frowning into his lager, right knee jumping incessantly. His wife Liz was very protective, said nothing but quietly put her arm through his. Not for the first time I sensed how emotional he might be. Much of the joking, well-that’s-life attitude was part of the necessary protective mechanism, as are the endless death stories and prophecies of doom that climbers love to tell.
And as we finally stumbled over to our chalet in the dark, he said quietly, ‘Brian’s the second person I had pencilled in for the Mustagh trip who’s been blown away.’ Pause. ‘Makes you think.’
More typical of him and of mountaineers was the attitude he suddenly expressed a week later as we came off a route. ‘After all, when you get serious about climbing, you accept there’s a chance you’ll get blown away. There’s nothing tragic about getting killed doing what you want to do. Desperately sad, but not tragic.’ Then he hurried off down the hill and I followed more circumspectly, considering him with new interest and sympathy.
A letter came from Sandy Allan who’d been with Brian on the Matterhorn. It was full of Sandy’s och ayes and hey ho but that’s life, but the pain behind it was evident through the brittle gaiety. He briefly mentioned what had happened. Brian had been belaying him and Charlie as they prepared to leave their bivouac that morning, on a ledge near the top of the face. He was clipped to an old peg left from an earlier climb. Then for some reason – the little, fatal action that always eludes explanation – he untied himself from the rope. Then the peg pulled. ‘Oh God …’ And that was that.
It set Mal back for a time. For me it was a sobering reminder of the seriousness of this game, and of the importance of maintaining concentration at all times. It made Mal seem a little older. ‘It’s a wonderful way of life,’ he remarked once, ‘but every so often you look around and realize how many of your friends aren’t here any more.’
That’s what gave the edge to the good company, to all the fine nights we had, the foolery and laughter, the meetings and partings. It was all precious because so fragile, like an eggshell- thin bowl. One night at the end of a rumbustious after-hours ceilidh in the Clachaig Snug, a straggly-haired northerner with round glasses sang an unaccompanied lament for lost good company, and touched something deep in everyone there. It was in the quality of the silence afterwards, and the stillness while he sang. When he finished we all dispersed unusually quietly to our bedrooms and chalets and tents, for there was nothing left to be said or done that night, and none of us wanted to spill the emotions we each carried inside ourselves, privately, like water brimming at the lip of the bowl.
Then my father died on 24 April, six weeks before we were due to leave. It is still bewildering and strange to write these words sitting at his desk, and know he’ll never read them.
There are very real consolations. His life was as long, varied and productive as anyone’s could be; he thought and felt himself extraordinarily fortunate; he died before his illness became more pain-filled and humiliating, and he had long accepted death in the dry manner of a Scottish atheistic doctor.
As with Brian, there is nothing tragic here. The shock, the numbness, this physical wrenching I feel in my chest, is for the living, for us who live on. It is for the half-remembered yarns I’ll never be able to confirm, the humorous bloody-mindedness, the man himself.
There are more cells in the human brain than stars in our galaxy. When a person dies, a universe collapses into a black hole. I have no notion as to whether it reappears in another dimension. Personally, I doubt it. (I think this and smile, shake my head at my dad’s picture, realizing where my scepticism came from.)
So I’d never be able to come back from Mustagh and tell him about it, to show the photos, to in some oblique way say thank you for the life I’ve inherited.
There’s nothing to