pounds—that was pretty much all we carried on the push for the summit. No fancy backpacks, no space for emergency rations. Even our ice axes weighed far more than they do now. Here—” she pointed over to the corner of the room. “Pass me mine, will you, darling?”
Eve got up and retrieved the old-fashioned steel and wood axe that had been resting against the wall. It felt solid and heavy in her palm.
“Hello, Socius, old friend.” Her grandmother caressed the worn handle lovingly. “My partner—for that’s what it was. I’d be long dead without it. It saved me from hurtling into a crevasse, never to be seen again, on more than one occasion. I wasn’t certain I’d ever make old bones.”
“Weren’t you ever terrified, Grams?” Eve asked.
“Almost always,” she said brusquely. “But most of the time I didn’t have the luxury of being able to think about it. My old boots are somewhere in the house as well, aren’t they? Fortitudo—courage, for that’s what they gave me when I laced them up. We didn’t even have proper harnesses—just a rope around our waists. If one of us were to fall there was nothing to take the strain and you’d be lucky not to fracture a rib, or worse.”
“Did you ever fall?”
“Of course,” she said. “But I was lucky never to break anything. A bit of frostbite is the worst I’ve had to put up with. I suppose,” she said, suddenly pensive, “anyone would say that I was extremely lucky.” She shifted in her seat and Eve half-rose to see if she could make her more comfortable, but her grandmother plowed on. “We wore wool underwear, a down jacket and pants, and then a windbreaker. We tied twelve-point crampons to our boots with string and our canvas tents were a darn sight heavier than today’s lightweight ones. I remember one storm where the wind tore a hole in my tent. Now when was that . . . ?” She leaned back, lost in the memories. Eve checked that the voice recorder was still working and waited.
“Did I ever tell you about the time I was stalked by a snow leopard in Nepal? I think that was on the same expedition,” she said with a wink. If Grams had been any other old lady, she would have sworn she was making it up, but she’d heard even taller stories over the years and didn’t doubt the veracity of them, however outlandish, for a minute.
Her grandmother sighed. “I’m getting ahead of myself . . . Back to the beginning. Now, not long after Wales, we spent a few weeks one summer in the Lake District, left your mother and uncle, who were only small, with a local woman while we went off tramping about. It was the first time either of us had ever done anything more than a scramble, and we were faced with a slab of sheer rock. Well, your grandfather didn’t think I’d manage it and had even arranged for me to be escorted back to the cottage where we were staying by a chum of his. He made the mistake of telling me this before we roped up, so of course I wasn’t going to back down, no matter how terrifying it might have been. After that first proper climb, I was hooked. I even learned to belay rather well actually, though I could scarcely flex my hands for days afterward and my palms had no skin left on them.” Her grandmother glanced ruefully at her knotted, arthritic fingers. “We used to try and get away for as many weekends as we could. In fact, I think our love of climbing helped mend the holes in our marriage. Especially after everything that happened . . .” A look of regret swam across her grandmother’s lined face, making her seem suddenly tired and vulnerable.
Eve blinked. She’d always assumed Grams and Gramps had a rock-solid partnership, right up until her gramps’s death nearly fifteen years ago, though at the time she wouldn’t have been old enough to be aware of much if anything had been awry. It was disconcerting to discover this hadn’t always been the case. What had happened?
Before she could probe further, Grams continued. “We’d meet outside the Park Lane Hotel on a Friday night for the bus to North Wales and stay in farmhouses in the valleys. Sometimes one of the other wives and I had to stay in the barn, as the men were all inside. We