The Abominable: A Novel

Chapter 10

Ultramarine is a strange and rare color: beyond sea blue, even beyond the deeper blue artists call marine blue. When my mother included ultramarine in her paintings, which was rarely, she would use her thumb to crush small balls of pure lapis lazuli into powder, wet the powder with drops of water from a glass or with her own saliva, and then, using strong, sure jabs of her palette knife, mix tiny amounts of that overpoweringly strong tone—ultramarine—into the seascape or skyscape on which she was working. In the slightest excess, it’s disturbing, unbalancing. In just the right amount, it’s the most beautiful color in existence.

T he suites in the Hotel Mount Everest are actual suites, which include sitting rooms with overstuffed Victorian furniture. Our corner suite has tall windows looking both southeast to the buildings of Darjeeling staggering down the hillside beneath the hotel, and when we part the drapes, glimpsed through ever-shifting clouds, high mountains with snowy, moonlit peaks rising like ramparts to the north and northeast. “Which one is Everest?” I ask the Deacon in reverent tones.

“That stubby low-looking little peak to the left center…the one you can’t really make out,” he says. “The closer giants like Kabr and Kanchenjunga block a good view of Everest from here.”

There is a bedroom for each of the three of us in this roomy suite, and…most wonderful of all…feather beds.

Jean-Claude and I would be happy to sleep late this next morning—when will be the next time we’ll be sleeping in feather beds?—but the Deacon, fully dressed down to the thumping lug soles of his alpine boots, ruins that plan by banging on both our doors, opening them, waking J.C., then stomping into my bedroom, throwing wide the heavy drapes to let in the high-altitude sunlight, and rousting me out just as the sun is rising.

“Can you believe it?” he snaps as I sit groggily on the edge of my wonderfully comfortable and warm bed.

“Believe what?”

“He wouldn’t let me in.”

“Who wouldn’t let you in where? And what time is it?” My tone is surly. I am surly.

“It’s almost seven,” says the Deacon and goes into J.C.’s room to make sure he’s also getting up and dressed. By the time he returns, I’ve splashed soapy water from a basin on my face and under my arms—I’d taken a long bath the previous night before going to bed, actually falling asleep in the hot water—and now get into a fresh shirt and trousers. I have no idea how one should dress for this surprisingly posh Hotel Mount Everest, but the Deacon is in twill trousers, mountain boots, a white shirt, and linen vest, so evidently one doesn’t have to dress formally to go to breakfast here. Still, I pull on a tweed jacket and knot a cloth tie. Even if the hotel is so informal as to tolerate the Deacon’s mountain-climbing attire, one has to doubt that Lord Bromley-Montfort will be.

“Who wouldn’t let you in where?” I repeat when we meet again in the hallway. When the Deacon is truly angry, his lips—already thin—become an even thinner line. This morning they have all but disappeared.

“Lord Bromley-Montfort. He has closed off the whole wing just down the hall from our suites, and he has that sirdar Pasang and two other oversized Sherpas standing in front of the doors, arms folded across their chests—guarding the doors, Jake, as if it were a bloody harem in there.”

The Deacon shakes his head in disgust. “Evidently Lord Bromley-Montfort is sleeping late this morning and does not wish to be disturbed. Even by the climbers who have come thousands of miles to risk their lives to find the body of his beloved cousin.”

“Was he beloved?” asks Jean-Claude as he joins us by falling into line on the surprisingly narrow stairway.

“Who?” snaps the Deacon, obviously still distracted by being turned away from Lord Reggie’s suite.

“Young Lord Percival,” says J.C. “Cousin Percy. Lady Bromley’s wastrel of a son. The fellow whose frozen corpse we’ve come to find. Was young Percy beloved by Darjeeling’s Lord Bromley-Montfort…by his cousin Reggie?”

“How the devil should I know?” barks the Deacon. He leads us downstairs to the large breakfast room.

“I suggest we get a good breakfast,” I say so there’ll be no more Deaconesque snarling. India has certainly brought out the dark, impatient side of our friend, one we’ve never seen before. It’s been my conviction during the months that I’ve known Richard Davis Deacon that he would choose his own beheading before allowing himself to commit an emotional scene in public.

I will very soon find out just how wrong I’ve been about that.

The long breakfast room is empty except for a table that has been set for seven. The same manager who’d greeted us in the middle of the night leads us to that table and sets five menus down. J.C. and I sit on one side of the table, the Deacon opposite us, and we leave the chair to my right at the head of the table and the one to the left of the Deacon empty. I’ve expected a British buffet, serve-yourself upper-class sort of breakfast, but evidently that’s not how the Hotel Mount Everest is going to feed us. The five menus set down suggest that Lord Bromley-Montfort and someone else—perhaps Lady Bromley-Montfort—may be joining us. This is not exactly a Sherlockian-level deduction, but then, I’m still groggy with sleep and without my morning coffee.

After twenty minutes of waiting for them—mostly in silence save for the sounds of our stomachs rumbling—we decide to order. The breakfasts are very English. Jean-Claude orders only muffin-biscuits and black coffee—a large pot of black coffee. The clerk/waiter pouts. “No tea, Monsieur?”

“No tea,” grunts J.C. “Coffee, coffee, coffee.”

The clerk/waiter nods dolefully and shuffles closer, looming over me, pen poised again. “Mr. Perry?”

I should find it unusual that he remembers my name from our checking in during the night, but then again, other than Lord and Lady Bromley-Montfort and their retinue, we seem to be the only three people in the hotel. I’m hesitating because I’ve had trouble in England finding breakfasts I can really enjoy, and this menu is most definitely English.

The Deacon leans my way. “Try the Full Monty, Jake.”

I don’t see it on the menu. “The Full Monty?” I say to the Deacon. “What is that?”

The Deacon smiles. “Trust me.”

I order a Full Monty with coffee, the Deacon orders the same with tea, Jean-Claude again mumbles “Coffee,” and the three of us are alone in the long room again.

“Not much business these days in the ol’ Mount Everest Hotel,” I say as we wait.

“Don’t be naive, Jake,” says the Deacon. “It’s obvious that Lord Bromley-Montfort has rented the entire hotel so that our meeting here today can be private.”

“Oh,” I say, feeling stupid. But not so stupid that I don’t ask, “Why would he do that?”

The Deacon sighs and shakes his head. “There goes our attempt to keep a low profile and to pass through Darjeeling without really being noticed.”

“Well,” I persist, “if Lord Bromley-Montfort cleared the place out so that we could meet this morning…where is he? Why keep us waiting?”

The Deacon shrugs. J.C. says, “Evidently English lords in India prefer to sleep late.”

Our breakfasts arrive. The coffee tastes like slightly warmed ditchwater. My breakfast plate is heaped so high with fried foods that bits keep slopping off as if trying to escape; the heap includes half a dozen burned-black pieces of bacon, at least five fried eggs, two gigantic pieces of fried bread slathered in butter, some sort of semi-ambulatory black pudding, fried tomatoes crouching next to grilled tomatoes, a row of sausages bursting through their burnt-fried skins, fried onions dolloped here and there at random, and a heap of leftover vegetables and potatoes from the previous evening’s dinners now all shallow-fried and jumble-piled together: bubble and squeak, I know the jumbled part of this mess is called. I hate bubble and squeak.

I’ve had large English breakfasts before, but this is…ridiculous.

“All right,” I say to the Deacon. “Why is this called ‘the Full Monty’? What does ‘Full Monty’ mean?”

“It means, approximately—‘everything’ or ‘the whole thing.’” He is already busy forking the fried stuff into his mouth in that insufferable way the Brits do—fork upside down and held in his left hand, blob of food teetering impossibly on the fork’s backside, keeping the knife in his right hand to carve through the gelatinous mass.

“What does ‘Full Monty’ mean?” I persist. “Where’d the phrase come from? Who’s Monty?”

The Deacon sighs and sets down his fork. Jean-Claude, obviously more interested in the view of the mountains than in his food, is looking out through the window at the bright Darjeeling morning.

“There are different etymological theories on ‘the Full Monty,’ Jake,” intones the Deacon. “The one I think most likely to be true comes from the tailoring business of a certain Sir Montague Burton, begun, I believe, shortly after the turn of the century. Burton offered that most oxymoronic of things—well-tailored suits for the common bourgeois man.”

“I thought all you English fellows had tailored suits…what did you call it when you bought mine in London?” I said. “Bespoke.”

“That certainly applies to the upper classes,” said the Deacon. “But Sir Montague Burton sold such tailored suits to men who might wear a suit just a few times in their adult lives—one’s own wedding, one’s children’s weddings, friends’ funerals, one’s own funeral, that sort of thing. And Burton’s stores specialized in lifelong tailoring of the same suit, so as the bourgeois gent expanded, so did his suit. Nor was the cut ever of such a sort that it would, as you Bostonians would say, ‘go out of style.’ Burton started with one shop, in Derbyshire, I believe, and within a few years had a chain of stores all over England.”

“So asking for the Full Monty means…what? I want the whole suit? The whole thing?”

“Exactly, my dear chap. Coat, trousers, waistcoat…”

“Vest,” I correct.

The Deacon squints again. Actually, this time, I have squirted him with juice as I knifed into one of the sausages.

I start to say something sarcastic but stop with my mouth open as the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen—or would ever see—walks into the room.

I can’t adequately describe her. I realized that decades ago when I first attempted to write these memoirs without the death sentence of cancer hanging over me. I had to abandon the attempt then when I came to describing…her. Perhaps I can tell you a little bit about what she was by describing what she was not.

This is 1925: stylish women have a certain look. To be stylish in 1925 means the woman has to be flat-chested as a boy (I’d heard that there are breast bands and other such underwear sold to produce that effect for those ladies not lucky enough to come by flat-chestedness naturally), but this woman entering the room with Pasang by her side definitely has breasts, although she isn’t flaunting them. Actually, her shirt—and it really is more of a shirt than a lady’s blouse—is of a fine linen but otherwise cut much like a working man’s field shirt. It does not hide her curves.

A fashionable woman in 1925 will have her hair cut short, parts of it curled—the floozies in Boston and New York and London go in especially for spit curls—or, better yet, especially for the smart set, bobbed short. This woman with Pasang has long hair, dropping in rich natural curls below her shoulders.

The fashionable hair color for ladies in 1925 is blond bordering on platinum; this woman has hair so dark as to be both blue and black at the same time. The highlights on the ebony curls flicker and dance with the movement of sunlight on her long hair. The sophisticated sort of society women I’d met through Harvard and the whores I’d met in Boston speakeasies had mostly plucked their real eyebrows and then penciled in the skinny, high-arched fake brows that Jean Harlow would soon make so popular worldwide. This woman striding toward our table has rich black eyebrows that arch only slightly but which seem infinitely expressive.

And her eyes…

When she is at the base of the stairway twenty-five feet away, I think that her eyes are blue. At twenty feet, I realize that I’m wrong—the color of her eyes is ultramarine.

Ultramarine is a strange and rare color: beyond sea blue, even beyond the deeper blue artists call marine blue. When my mother included ultramarine in her paintings, which was rarely, she would use her thumb to crush small balls of pure lapis lazuli into powder, wet the powder with drops of water from a glass or with her own saliva, and then, using strong, sure jabs of her palette knife, mix tiny amounts of that overpoweringly strong tone—ultramarine—into the seascape or skyscape on which she was working. In the slightest excess, it’s disturbing, unbalancing. In just the right amount, it’s the most beautiful color in existence.

This woman’s eyes have just the right shade of ultramarine to complete and complement the rest of her beauty. Her eyes are perfect. She is perfect.

She strides across the room with Pasang to her right and only half a step behind her, and both stop behind the empty chair at the head of our table, the Deacon on her right and J.C. and me gawking from her left. The Deacon, J.C., and I stand to greet her, although I admit that my standing is more of a springing upward. Jean-Claude is smiling. The Deacon is not. Pasang is carrying a pile of books and what appear to be rolled maps, but my eyes have no time to linger on Pasang or my friends.

Besides the beautiful linen shirt-blouse, this woman is wearing a broad belt and a riding skirt—breeches, really, but looking like a skirt—of what appears to be the softest, richest suede in the world. Suede well and evenly bleached to even subtler hue and greater softness by high Darjeeling sunlight. It’s almost as if she’s here in tea plantation work clothes (if work clothes were ever perfectly tailored). Her equestrian boots are such as those a lady would wear while riding in tall grass or snake country and look to be made of a leather so soft that I think it can only have been formed from the hides of newborn calves.

She stands at the head of the table, and Pasang nods to each of us in turn. “Mr. Richard Davis Deacon, Monsieur Jean-Claude Clairoux, Mr. Jacob Perry, it is my pleasure to introduce to you Lady Katherine Christina Regina Bromley-Montfort.”

Lady Bromley-Montfort nods to each of us as we are introduced, but she does not offer to shake hands. She is wearing thin leather gloves that match her boots.

“Mr. Perry and Monsieur Clairoux, a pleasure to meet you at long last,” she says and turns to the Deacon. “And you, Dickie, my cousins Charlie and Percy used to write to me about you all the time when we were all young. You were quite the wild child.”

“We were expecting Lord Bromley-Montfort,” the Deacon says coolly. “Is he nearby? We have expedition business to discuss.”

“Lord Montfort is at our plantation only a thirty-minute ride up into the hills,” says Lady Bromley-Montfort. “But I’m afraid he will not be available to you.”

“Why is that?” demands the Deacon.

“He is in a crypt at the tea plantation,” says the woman, her amazing eyes remaining clear and fixed on the Deacon’s face. She seems almost amused. “Lord Montfort and I were married in London in 1919, before we came back to India, to the plantation where I had been raised and which I had been running. I became Lady Bromley-Montfort, and eight months later Lord Montfort passed away from dengue fever. The climate in India never really agreed with him.”

“But I’ve been sending letters to Lord Bromley-Montfort…,” sputters the Deacon. He removes his pipe from his jacket pocket and clenches it between his teeth but makes no move to fill it or light it. “Lady Bromley mentioned a Cousin Reggie, so I naturally assumed…”

She smiles, and my legs go weaker. “Katherine Christina Regina Bromley-Montfort,” she says softly. “‘Reggie’ to my friends. Monsieur Clairoux, Mr. Perry, I sincerely hope that you will call me Reggie.”

“Jean-Claude, Reggie,” says my friend and bows low to her, taking her hand and kissing it even with the glove on.

“Jake,” I manage.

Reggie takes the seat at the head of the table while the tall, dignified form of Pasang stands behind her like a bodyguard. He hands her a map and she unscrolls it on our table, unceremoniously moving aside used plates and cups to make room. Jean-Claude and I look at each other and then also sit. The Deacon clamps down so hard on the stem of his pipe that it makes an audible clack, but eventually he sits.

Reggie is already speaking. “Your proposed route is the standard one, and I agree with most of it. The day after tomorrow we can take some of our plantation trucks to Sixth Mile Stone, do the final loading of packs and pack animals there, and proceed on foot with the Sherpas past the Tista Bridge and beyond to Kampong, where some of our other Sherpas will be waiting for us with more mules…”

“Us?” says the Deacon. “We?”

She looks up at him with a smile. “Of course, Dickie. Since my aunt agreed to fund your search for Cousin Percy’s body, it’s always been understood that I would accompany you. It’s an absolute condition for any further funding of the expedition.”

The Deacon must realize that he is going to bite through the stem of his favorite pipe, for he removes it with a violent motion that almost catches Reggie in the head. Rather than apologize, he says, “You on the expedition to Everest? A woman? Even to the Base Camp? Even into Tibet? Absurd. Ridiculous. Out of the question.”

“It was an absolute condition of the funding for this—my—expedition to recover Cousin Percival’s remains,” Reggie says, her smile still in place.

“We’ll go on without you,” says the Deacon. His face is very red.

“You’ll do so without a shilling more from the Bromley estate,” says Reggie.

“Very well, then, we’ll forge ahead on the funds we have,” barks the Deacon.

What funds? is my thought. Even the tickets from Liverpool to Calcutta have been paid for by Lady Bromley…evidently out of the money earned by Reggie’s tea plantation.

“I’ll give you two reasons for my going on this expedition besides the absolute necessity of my funding,” Reggie says calmly. “Will you be so kind as to listen, or will you continue to interrupt me with those barnyard noises?”

The Deacon folds his arms and says nothing. Everything about his expression and posture says that nothing will convince him.

“First…or, rather, second, after the funding,” says Reggie, “is the appalling fact that you’ve provided no doctor for your expedition. All three of the previous British expeditions had at least two physicians, one of them a surgeon, and usually they had more than two medical men along with them.”

“I learned some important first aid during the War,” says the Deacon through gritted teeth.

“I’m sure you did,” says Reggie with a smile. “And if any of us were to receive a shrapnel wound or be shot by a machine gun during this expedition, I have no doubt that you could prolong our lives for entire minutes. But there are no Aid Stations behind the battle lines in Tibet, Mr. Deacon.”

“You’re going to tell us that you’re a competent nurse?” says the Deacon.

“Yes, I am,” says Reggie. “With more than thirteen thousand local people working on our two plantations, I’ve had to learn some nursing skills. But that’s not the point I was going to make. I intend for us to have an excellent doctor and surgeon on our team.”

“We can’t afford to add people…,” begins the Deacon.

Reggie stops him with a gracefully raised palm. “Dr. Pasang,” she says to her sirdar. “Would you like to tell these gentlemen your medical credentials?”

Dr. Pasang? I thought. I confess—and it is a confession, a shameful one—that vague images of Indian fakirs and holy men, not to mention Haitian voodoo witch doctors, dance through my brain in the few seconds before Pasang speaks in that smooth and cultured English accent.

“I attended one year at Oxford and one at Cambridge,” says the tall Sherpa. “But I then trained a year at Edinburgh Medical Centre, three years at the Middlesex Hospital Medical School, eighteen months studying surgery with the famous thoracic surgeon Herr Doctor Claus Wolheim in Heidelberg…that’s Heidelberg, Germany, gentlemen…then, after returning to India, I served another year of residency in the Karras Convent Hospital in Lahore.”

“Cambridge and Oxford would never allow…,” begins the Deacon and then bites down on what he was about to say.

“A wog in their midst?” asks Dr. Pasang without rancor. He shows the first broad, bright smile we’ve seen from him to date. There is no malice in it. “For some strange reason,” he continues, “both worthy institutions were under the odd illusion that I was the eldest son of the Maharaja of Aidapur, as were the medical schools in Edinburgh and Middlesex I mentioned. This was a short while before your days at Cambridge, Mr. Deacon, and the maintenance of friendly relations with the royalty of India was very important to England then.”

We are silent for a long moment, and then Jean-Claude asks in a very small voice, “Dr. Pasang, if you don’t find it impertinent of me to ask, why—after such excellent medical training and after becoming a licensed physician—did you return to work as a…sirdar…here at Reggie’s…at Lady Bromley-Montfort’s tea plantations?”

Again the white smile. “Sirdar will be my title only on this expedition to the Tibetan sacred mountain Chomolungma,” he says. “As Lady Bromley-Montfort has explained, there are more than thirteen thousand men and women in her direct employ. Those employees have extended families. My skills as a physician here in the hills between Darjeeling and the southern Himalayas do not go unpracticed. We have two plantation infirmaries, one for each large tea plantation, which are…if I may be so bold…somewhat superior in both equipment and medicines to the small British hospital in Darjeeling.”

“How can the people do without you while you’re on expedition, Dr. Pasang?” I hear myself asking.

“Lady Bromley-Montfort has, most graciously, sent younger men than I for medical training in England and New Delhi. And several of our Sherpa women have completed comprehensive nurse’s training in both Calcutta and Bombay and, to honor their benefactress as I did, returned to the plantation to offer their services.”

“You’re really a surgeon?” asks the Deacon.

Pasang shows a different, sharper sort of smile. “Allow me time to fetch a scalpel and lancet from my bag and I will show you, Mr. Deacon.”

The Deacon turns back to Reggie. “You said there were three reasons we’d have to accept your company. We could take Dr. Pasang along—with our gratitude—but having a woman on an Everest expedition…”

“I imagine you’ll find it very difficult traveling through Tibet without official Tibetan permission,” Reggie says.

“I…we…,” begins the Deacon. He hits the table with his fist. “Lady Bromley promised that she would obtain such permission and that we should receive the documents here in Darjeeling.”

“And so you shall,” says Reggie. She lifts her hand over her right shoulder and Pasang puts another rolled-up document into it. She smooths the thick parchment out over the map of our planned five-week trek from Darjeeling to Rongbuk and then Mount Everest. “Would you all care to read it?” she asks, turning the document.

All three of us half-stand to lean over the table to read. It is a handwritten document, in beautiful script, and affixed with half a dozen stamped and waxed seals.

TO THE JONGPENS AND HEADMEN OF PHARIJONG, TING-KE, KAMBA, AND KHARTA:

You are to bear in mind that a party of Sahibs are coming to see the Cho-mo-lung-ma mountain, even though the Dalai Lama has set a temporary ban on such travels by foreigners due to bad manners after the 1924 so-called “Mt. Everest Expedition.” This exception is given by the Sacred Dalai Lama only because this party’s leader, Lady Bromley-Montfort, has long been a friend of the Tibetans and of the many jongpens and we wish her to be able to travel with her associates to and onto Cho-mo-lung-ma in an attempt to retrieve the body of her deceased cousin, British Lord Percival Bromley, whom many of you have met. He died on the sacred mountain in 1924 and our friends the Bromleys would like to see him properly buried. We trust that Lady Bromley-Montfort’s group will, in the tradition she has long established at her Darjeeling plantation, continue to evince great friendship and generosity towards the Tibetans. Therefore, on the request of the Great Minister Bell, and by the express wish of His Holiness the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, a letter of passage has been issued requiring you and all officials and subjects of the Tibetan government to supply transport, e.g., riding ponies, pack animals, and coolies as required by Lady Bromley-Montfort and her Sahib helpers, the rates for which should be fixed to mutual satisfaction. Any other assistance Lady Bromley-Montfort may require, either by day or by night, on the march or during the halts, in or near their encampments or in our villages, should be faithfully given, and their requirements about transport or anything else should be promptly attended to. All the people of the country, wherever Lady Bromley-Montfort and her Sahib helpers may happen to come, should render all necessary assistance in the best possible way, not merely to re-establish friendly relations between the British and Tibetan Governments, but to continue the long amity between Lady Bromley-Montfort’s tea plantation—long famed for its hospitality to our travelers—and all the people of Tibet.

Dispatched during the Water Dog Year

Seal of the Prime Minister

The Deacon has nothing to say. His expression is as blank as I’ve ever seen it, even blanker than on the day nine months earlier atop the Matterhorn when we learned of Mallory’s and Irvine’s deaths.

Reggie—I take the liberty of thinking of her with that name almost immediately—rolls up both the prime minister’s document and the large map, hands them to Pasang, and says, “I’ve told the valets to have your clothes packed. We should leave now for the plantation so that we can have the rest of the day to discuss your proposed route, the climbing details, food for the trip, plans for our dealings with the Tibetan jongpens, and all the rest. Then tomorrow morning you shall choose your personal Sherpas and your ponies. I have enough good men waiting that we should be able to choose the sixty or so porters we need by teatime tomorrow, and they’ll have the gear loaded on pack animals before nightfall.”

She stands and strides out of the room, Pasang—Dr. Pasang, I remind myself—keeping a step behind her and not falling farther behind only because of his liquid, giant strides. After a moment, J.C. and I stand, stare at each other a second, manage not to grin outright in front of the silent Deacon, and go up to supervise the final packing of our luggage.

Eventually the Deacon follows us up the stairs.