The Ice Soldier Read Online Free PDF Page B

lunch several times. We’ve had picnics in Hyde Park. She’s fascinating. Everything she says is just brilliant, and the photographs are pretty amazing, too. Some of them are on display at the club. You’ve just got to come and meet her.”
    I glanced out the window, hoping for some inspiration that would provide me with an excuse not to go. But there was only the brick facade of the bank on the opposite side of the road, and the space between sieved by gently falling rain. There was a grayness in the air, which made the moisture seem less like rain than a failing of my sight.
    â€œDon’t try and get out of it,” said Stanley, reading my mind. “I want to know what you think of her.”
    I heard a clock chime quietly in another room. After waiting out the count, I turned to him. “No, Stanley,” I said, “you don’t.”
    His eyebrows arched. “I don’t?”
    â€œNo,” I told him, doing my best to put aside the comfortable beehive hum of the wine inside my head, “you don’t want to know what I think of her. You want me to tell you what she thinks of you.”
    Stanley breathed out sharply through his nose. “I suppose you could say that.” Then he held open his hands and smiled as if to say, “So we are agreed.”
    â€œI didn’t say I’d come along. Besides, does this woman know you don’t climb anymore?”
    He brushed my words aside. “Once she’s got to know me a bit, the old charm will kick in and she won’t care if I do or not.”
    It occurred to me that the only person on whom Stanley’s old charm had worked was himself, and the only thing which had been charmed was his belief that he actually had any. With
women, anyway. I might have told him this, seeing as he had just spoiled our weekly booze-up, but it was at this moment that my entire world began, very slowly, to fall apart. It began when I heard the whispered name of a man I hadn’t seen in years.
    â€œIt’s Wally Sugden!” hissed a voice.
    â€œJust about to leave for Patagonia!” said another.
    â€œSugden’s at the Montague!”
    â€œI thought he’d given up his membership.”
    â€œWho cares? Let’s give it back to him.”
    The whole club filled with these admiring whispers, which echoed through the bar and through the sitting room, up the stairs, and into the guest rooms where no one ever stayed.
    At the mention of Sugden’s name, the breath caught in my throat and I felt sick. The memory of him was tied, as if by tiny threads, to all the other memories I had been trying so hard to forget. Now I sat with teeth clenched, trying to remain in control, and praying that those other nightmares did not come tumbling one after the other from every darkened corner of my brain.
    A member of the close-knit group of mountaineers at Oxford, which had included Stanley and me, Sugden was the only one who had continued to climb. Since the war, he had gone on expeditions to the Himalayas, the Rockies, the Jotunheimen mountains of Norway, and now was on his way to Patagonia. He had become a national hero; many believed he was Britain’s best shot since George Mallory and Sandy Irvine for reaching the summit of Everest.
    He had parlayed this hero status into a wildly successful car dealership.
    The Evening Tribune often carried ads which featured a picture of Sugden in his climbing gear, complete with goggles,
boots, and a coil of rope across his shoulders, standing alongside the latest model auto. Beneath this picture were the words “Trust in the Man. Trust in the Machine.”
    Now the sight of Wally Sugden, who once hung around the Montague but had not been seen here in years, astonished everyone. Everyone except Stanley, anyway.
    Despite the fact that he and Stanley had gone to the same school, once climbed together, and were members of the same club, each represented the polar opposite of the