Free The Steady Running of the Hour: A Novel by Justin Go Page A

is. And what difference in the world would it make if you stayed and he stayed, and none of us had to say good-bye?
    —It’s a lovely thought. But I don’t believe it could ever happen—
    —Things happen, Imogen counters, because people believe in them. One can’t worry what the rest of the world does or thinks. All that matters is that you’re here and I’m here, and we can do anything we like.
    Ashley nods. Across the field the sun has vanished and the sky is turning purple. Imogen takes her hand back, remarking that it is nearly seven and she is meant to be in Mayfair for dinner. Ashley grins.
    —I believe you won’t make it to dinner.
    Imogen turns her face away, trying to hide her smile.
    —No, she says. I don’t think I will.

SIGNS AND WONDERS

    After three days in London I still can’t sleep straight through the night. All day I feel dead tired and all night I lie awake in my hotel room, my eyes open to the darkness, listening to the hum of the air conditioner. The English climber leaving a fortune to a woman he knew for one week. The summer house near Leksand refitted in the winter of 1916. And the single connecting piece, my grandmother, a woman I saw maybe three times in my life and only when I was very young.
    Images linger on the edge of my memory. A visit to the seaside—it must have been California, but it doesn’t feel like California. The old woman’s slow walk, her thick ankles sinking into the sand with each step, my mother holding her arm. The wind tossing our hair. My grandmother’s scent of musky perfume, her strange accent and stranger manner of speech. Some ancient sticky candies she put in my hand. A peculiar piece of advice she had given, now long forgotten; an embarrassment I’d suffered but never really understood.
    The clock flashes 3:13 a.m. I throw back the sheets and get dressed. The doorman downstairs winks at me as he pulls open the door. He saw me around the same time last night.
    —Still jet-lagged, sir?
    The doorman wears a frock coat and necktie. A top hat is perched over his gray hair.
    —I’ve got it pretty bad.
    —Best to go for a walk, get yourself nice and tired.
    I walk up Albemarle Street, zigzagging my way up to Marble Arch. On the way back I sit on a bench at the edge of Grosvenor Square and take my notebook from my jacket pocket. In large caps I write down two columns of research, ASHLEY and IMOGEN . Under these I make a list of subjects: Great War. Everest Expedition. London. Sweden . I draw arrows and connect the subjects to libraries. Alpine Club . War Archive. Recheck British Library. Newspapers. Most of these subjects lead to Ashley. I circle Imogen’s name twice and connect it to Charlotte . Then I add Eleanor .
    I put the notebook in my pocket and walk back to the hotel. Hopefully I can get some sleep now.

    I start with Ashley in the morning. In the dim basement of the Alpine Club in Shoreditch the archivist lets me hold Hugh Price’s ice axe, brought back from Everest in 1924. It is heavier than it looks. A well-balanced tool of wood and steel, its handle bears the double notches that Price carved to mark it as his own. I lift the axe to the light of the barred window. The steel head is engraved with the manufacturer’s name: CHR SCHENK, GRINDELWALD .
    —What about Walsingham’s axe?
    The archivist shrugs. —They never found it.
    But this is only the beginning. I spend four straight days in archives from morning until closing time, allowing myself an hour break for lunch. I visit the reading rooms of the Imperial War Museum in Southwark; I page through the typewritten catalogs of the Royal Geographical Society on Kensington Gore, filing requests to see every surviving scrap of paper from the 1924 expedition. The librarian warns me that some documents might take days or weeks to be brought up from storage facilities, but I request them anyway. In hushed chambers I study yellowed letters andbattered diaries, collecting stacks of memoirs as I