the hearth with her own snifter. She kissed him lightly, teasing his
lips with her tongue. “I bet we could play Nick and Nora.”
“I don’t know. It’s such a strain making love and being witty at the
same time.”
She sat in his lap. She put her arms around his neck and kissed him
more fully this time and drew back and smiled when he slid a hand
beneath her sweater.
“Nora?” he said.
“Yes, Nicky?”
“Where’s Asta?”
“I put him to bed.”
“We wouldn’t want him interrupting.”
“He’s asleep.”
“Might traumatize the little fella if he saw-”
“I made sure he’d be asleep.”
“Oh?”
“I drugged his Alpo.”
“Such a smart girl.”
“And now we belong in bed.”
“Such a very smart girl.”
“With a lovely body,” she said.
“Yes, you’re ravishing.”
“Am I?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Ravish me, then.”
“With pleasure.”
“I would hope so.”
An hour later he was asleep, but Connie was not.
She lay on her side, studying his face in the soft glow of the bedside
lamp.
His experience and attitudes were stamped on his features. His
toughness shone through clearly, yet there was the boyish quality too.
Kindness. Intelligence. Humor. Sensitivity. He was a deep-down good
man. But the fear shone through as well, the fear of falling, and all
of the ugly things that had grown from it.
During his twenties and early thirties, Graham had been one of the best
mountain climbers in the world. He lived for the vertical trek, for the
risk and the triumph. Nothing else in his life mattered half so much as
that. He had been an active climber from the age of thirteen, year by
year setting higher and more difficult goals for himself. At twenty-six
he was organizing parties to scale the most taxing peaks in Europe, Asia
and South America. When he was thirty he led an expedition up the South
Col route of Everest, climbed the West Ridge to traverse the mountain,
and returned down the South Col.
At thirty-one he tackled the Eiger Direct with an Alpine-style single
push up the hideously sheer face without using fixed ropes.
Accomplishments such as these, his good looks, his wit, and his
reputation as a Casanova (exaggerated by both his friends and the press)
made him the most colorful and popular figure in mountaineering at that
time.
Five years ago, with only a few challenging climbs remaining, he put
together a team to assault the most dangerous wall of rock known to man,
the Southwest Face of Everest, a route that had never been taken to the
top. Two-thirds of the way through the climb, he fell, breaking sixteen
bones and suffering internal injuries. He was given first aid in Nepal,
then flown to Europe with a doctor and two friends at his side in what
everyone assumed would conclude as a death watch. Instead of adding one
more outstanding achievement to his record, he spent seven months in a
private Swiss clinic. However, the ordeal was not at an end when he
left the hospital. This Goliath had not been beaten, and had left this
David with a warning: Graham limped.
The doctors told him he could still scale easy cliffs and ridges as a
weekend sport if he wished. With sufficient practice he might even
learn to compensate for his partially game right leg and move on to more
ambitious climbs. Not Eiger. Not Everest, by any route. But there
were hundreds of lesser palisades that should interest him.
At first he was convinced that he would be back on Everest within a
year. Three times he tried to climb, and three times he was reduced to
panic in the first hundred feet of the ascent.
Forced to retreat from even the simplest climbs, he quickly saw that
Everest or anything remotely like it would most likely scare him to
death.
Over the years, that fear had undergone a metamorphosis- had grown and
spread like a fungus. His fear of climbing had become a generalized
fear that affected every aspect of his life. He was convinced that his
inheritance would be lost in bad investments, and he began following the
stock market with a nervous interest that made him the bane of his