The Pulse of Danger. Jon Cleary

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      That was two days’ walk: four days there and back. Jack would consider it a waste of time and two men. If she played her stores carefully, she might have them all out of here within a week.

      She smiled to herself, like a schoolgirl who was about to bring the holidays forward by burning down the school.

      2

      Marquis was secretly pleased when Eve told him they needed more meat and would he try for the gooral. There were still some botanical specimens that had to be gathered to make the collection complete, and time was running out; snow was already beginning to fall heavily on the high peaks, and any day now the winds would swing to the north to bring blizzards. On top of that he had been more disturbed than he had shown by this morning’s news on the radio. He was not a fool, and he knew that the Chinese Reds had long regarded Ladakh, Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan and the North-East Frontier Agency as only extensions of Tibet. But he wanted at least another week; he wanted to complete the collection, his best ever. He had fought against the idea, was still fighting it, but this might be his last expedition. He wanted it to be one that botanists at least would remember.

      But now only the gooral was on his mind; or so he told himself. He always welcomed the opportunity to hunt game, and it eased his conscience when the hunt was for food and not just for sport. He would go out again this afternoon and collect the swertia racemosa he had seen yesterday in the ravine farther up the valley.

      He was now a mile above the camp, moving up a narrow track through a stand of evergreen oak. The valley here was almost narrow enough to be called a gorge, a cleft between two steep wooded ridges; the river raced down the floor of the valley, twisting and turning like a rusted knife cutting its way out of the mountains. He knew that the river sped on to join other mountain streams, became a slower-moving river that merged into the Brahmaputra, a procession of waters that wended their majestic way, carrying the prayers, dreams and excreta of men, down to the Bay of Bengal over a thousand miles away. Rivers, as well as mountains, had always fascinated him; he had a voice like a bookmaker’s lament, but his heart always rang with a Caruso-note when he came for the first time on a river. Heaven was a high mountain peak somewhere and he would reach it by way of a river that flowed uphill. It thrilled him to walk beside such a stream as this one, to look at the water tearing its way over the rocks and to see it as the birth pangs of a giant river that, a thousand miles away, carried ships to the sea. He was passionately interested in everything that grew in nature: plants, trees, rivers. And once, in South America, he had seen the birth of a mountain as a volcano had exploded out of the belly of a plain.

      The opposite ridge was bathed in sunlight, the trees glittering like the plumage of some giant green bird, but this side of the valley had never seen the sun and was dank and cold. Strangers to the Himalayas were always surprised at the difference in temperature between a sunny slope and one where the sun never reached; he remembered Nancy Breck’s shock when she had taken a sun and shade reading and found a difference of 30 degrees centigrade. He shivered now as he trudged up beneath the trees. But this was where he would find the gooral; it did not like the sun. A Monal pheasant broke from a clump of rhododendron ahead of him and flashed like a huge jewel as it crossed to the opposite ridge, but he resisted the quick impulse to shoot at it. The .30 Double would just blow the bird to pieces, and he had never been able to bring himself to kill just for killing’s sake.

      He breathed deeply as he walked, enjoying the thin sharp air in his nose and throat. Unlike other expedition leaders to remote places, he had never written a book on his experiences, had never tried to explain the mystique that brought him to these high mountains, took him to tropical jungles or, once, had taken him to the loneliness of the Australian Centre. He was a botanist by profession and it was his job to collect plant specimens; it was a job he enjoyed and one in which he knew he had a high reputation. But deep in his heart, and he was a man of more secrets than even Eve suspected, he knew that the botanical searches were now more of an excuse for an escape from civilisation. Not civilisation, in itself, although he had no deep love of it; no city could ever bring on the euphoria that the isolation of those mountains could give him. He wanted to escape from what civilisation meant: surrender to Eve and her money, a scarecrow man papered over with his wife’s cheques. During their brief engagement he had referred to her as his financée; it was a joke that had soon gone sour, like a penny on the tongue. She always contributed a major part of the finance of these expeditions, but he had now convinced himself that this was her money being spent in a good cause, not just in keeping a husband. Which was what would happen to him if he gave in to her and retired to pottering about on the family estate in Buckinghamshire. Civilisation had once meant something else again, a semidetached morgue in a drab suburb of Sydney where his mother and his two sisters had done their best to lay him out with cold looks of disapproval. Only his father, a rebel who couldn’t afford a flag, drunk every Saturday on republicanism and three bottles of Resch’s Pilsener, had never complained; but he had never really understood why any man should choose to leave the greatest bloody country in the world, Australia. His parents had worked their fingers bare of prints to put him through university; they had neither understood nor forgiven him when he had changed from law to botany at the end of his first year. In the end he had run away because he knew he was in their debt and he would never be able to repay them. They were dead now, but his conscience would give a free ride to their ghosts for the rest of his life.

      Now Eve, not yet a ghost, had swung a leg over his conscience. And he felt the weight of her more than that of his parents. The time had come when he owed her a decision. He could not expect her to go on accompanying him forever to the ends of the earth and comfort; she was a woman who had been brought up in comfort and it had surprised him that she had borne so long the hardships of their trips without complaint. But maybe that was her heritage: English boarding schools, English plumbing, English cooking, bred pioneers. The Stoics of ancient Greece would have tossed in the towel, taken out life subscriptions to hedonism, if they had ever been exposed to life in some of the more benighted ancestral halls of England.

      There was also the matter of children.

      She had talked about having a family almost from the moment they had decided to marry. She had then been a girl of impulsive ideas and quick decisions; it had shocked him, a slow starter at romance, to learn how eager she had been, first, to have him make love to her, then, to have him marry her. He had never met anyone like her: she exploded love like a boxful of fireworks. They had met, become lovers, married and she had started talking about a family all within six weeks.

      That had been in the autumn of 1954. He had taken a rare holiday and gone to Switzerland for some climbing. He had climbed the Mönch and in the late evening come back to the small hotel where he was staying. In those days English tourists were still limited in their travel allowance and at even the cheapest hotel one met a very mixed bag of visitors. When he had gone into the hotel’s small bar the only vacant seat had been beside hers. He had not been then, and still was not, a ladies’ man; but his easy-going, casual approach attracted a lot of women. It had attracted Eve and she had attracted him. Within forty-eight hours they had been lovers and were in love: it had been that sort of romance.

      It had taken him the same time to discover whose daughter she was and how much money she had. ‘Sir Humphrey Aidan – you’re his daughter? You mean I’ve been to bed with the Bank of England?’

      ‘Da-ahling, he has nothing to do with the Bank of England.’ She sat up in bed and ran a hand through her tousled hair. In those days she wore it long, down to her shoulders. It was the way he still liked it, and he hated it when he had to chop it short for her when they were out on these field trips. ‘Da-ahling, we’re not going to waste our time talking about money, are we? I hate people who have a thing about money.’

      ‘A thing? What d’you mean? Oh, if only my dad was here—’

      ‘Thank God he’s not. Can I help the bed I was born in? Look at me, stark. Am I any СКАЧАТЬ