Everest - The First Ascent: How a Champion of Science Helped to Conquer the Mountain (40 page)

Deep into her meditation program, Doey was horrified by the telegram which thrust her into a frenzy of worry about whether her husband was dead or dying or forever crippled or maimed. Having no means of communicating directly with home from Rishikesh, she and Hermione sought a special audience with “Maharishi,” as they called him, who perceptively reassured them that if Griffith’s life was really in danger, the telegram would have said so. Doey set off for home immediately, leaving Hermione to stay on for several more weeks.

I remember feeling immensely relieved when my mother came home. The house had seemed a bleak place without her warm presence. She was a wonderful homemaker, a brilliant cook, and always full of fun and laughter. But for all her natural warmth my mother was deeply resentful about the tactics that had been used to haul her home. She blamed them on my father, and it brought out the tougher side of her nature. She cared for him dutifully while his hip mended, but they had many angry rows, their shouts reverberating throughout the house. After he was better, the rows occasionally ended in her storming out and driving off in her car. When this happened, my father would boom melodramatically: “We shall have to go onto emergency rations!” and order me to climb into our loft to retrieve the dried-meat bars he had salvaged from the Silver Hut.

But my mother always came back, usually after only a few hours. They appeared to make up and continued to coexist reasonably peaceably for some of the time. It was coexistence, though, rather than fruitful partnership. They rarely showed any affection for one another.

In the past, my mother had never seemed to mind about my father’s late arrivals home from work, but they became a growing bone of contention after the Silver Hut. One day he would be shouting for his supper, demanding to know why it was late; the next, he would fail to show up until supper was ruined. A regular haunt in the early evenings was Donald Gomme’s flat in Hyde Park Gate, where he would drink several whiskies before driving home somewhat unsteadily in his replacement Austin-Healey.

Donald Gomme surrounded himself with beautiful young women, as I witnessed on the few occasions I happened to be with my father when he paid Gomme a visit. The millionaire’s exquisite lady friends lounged decoratively on the white-leather sofas and tiger-skin rugs adorning his ultramodern flat, nonchalantly waving their long black cigarette holders and blowing out elegant curls of smoke. They filled me with awe and, as my father quaffed his whiskey and flirted outrageously, I sat silently in teenage embarrassment, feeling exceedingly gauche and out of place. Perhaps not surprisingly my mother resented Gomme, who seldom included her in the many invitations he proffered my father.

Another of Griffith’s regular haunts after work was the Hampstead home of Edward and June Posey, whom he met by chance in Kathmandu on the way to the Silver Hut. Taking a break from his last-minute preparations one day, he was using the telephoto lens of his camera to inspect a famous Buddhist temple frieze depicting different positions of sexual intercourse when a pretty young English girl with an Irish complexion and dark hair asked if she could take a look. The Poseys were in Kathmandu to bring in Nepal’s first high-altitude helicopter. The three fell into conversation and subsequently became good friends. It was through Edward Posey that my father secured the helicopter link with Mingbo and the radio permit for the Silver Hut. The Poseys’ London home was a charming Georgian terraced house on a steep hill in Hampstead village, close to Griffith’s laboratory. Edward traveled a great deal and was frequently absent when Griffith dropped in after work to drink a few whiskies with the delightful June.

My father’s newfound propensity for arriving home not just late, but drunk as well, infuriated my mother. He used to laugh it off, declaring that when he was tipsy he took the precaution of driving home in third gear. If he was suffering from double vision, he used to say, he simply drove between the two white lines he could see in the center of the road. But it was his visits to June Posey that Doey found particularly galling. One evening, when he failed to appear, she telephoned June and ordered her to “stop making Griffith drunk,” but the twenty-five-year-old was most indignant at being held responsible for the behavior of a fifty-year-old man.

Less than a year after the Silver Hut, in the spring of 1962, my father came home from work one evening to find a note on the kitchen table announcing bluntly and without explanation, “Gone to India. Your dinner’s in the oven.” Doey had vanished.

Throughout their married life Griffith had left the management of the home and the children entirely to my mother. So busy was he with his work and his expeditions that he completely failed to notice what a raw deal he had given her. She gave him unstinting support, while he seemed oblivious to her needs. For years she had quietly sustained herself with the thought that, one day, she would break out and do something entirely for herself. The trip to India had been the consummation of that wish. Forced by my father’s accident to come home before she was ready, she was determined to go back and finish her trip properly. So it was to Rishikesh that she fled, telling no one in advance, lest they try to dissuade her. Before leaving, she made all the necessary arrangements for the housekeeping and the children to be looked after, taking on a pretty French au pair girl to help care for Oliver.

She had suppressed her own needs and desires for far too long. As I discovered long afterward from the suitcase of letters that turned up unexpectedly at the Royal Geographical Society, my mother had grown up with such a low opinion of herself and was so insecure about Griffith’s love for her that she had allowed herself to be browbeaten by a husband whose world revolved round satisfying his own needs. Doey married Griffith at the beginning of the war despite knowing that right up to the last minute he had been two-timing her with a girl called Carmen MacGlashan in London. Carmen was far more sophisticated and much better educated than my mother, but was most unlikely to marry a young man as socially undistinguished and poor as Griffith.

Doey suffered the first steely-cold blow of disillusionment about her marriage when she found out that Griffith, departing for his tour of duty to the Middle East in June 1940, had said good-bye to his pregnant wife in Luton and then gone secretly to London for a last fling with Carmen before joining his unit.

This shattering discovery had a disastrous impact on Doey’s fragile self-esteem. However, recognizing that her husband was extremely fond of Carmen—if not in love with her—she shrank from challenging him directly about his behavior, fearing she would be treading on fire.

A year later, Doey read in a glossy social magazine, the
Tatler,
that Carmen had become engaged to another man. Unable to contain herself, she wrote to tell Griffith in a tone that illustrated her insecure state of mind all too clearly. Sparing him no details of the
Tatler
article with its “wonderful write up” about Carmen and the “lovely and glamorous” photograph of her and her handsome fiancé, Doey’s letter was shot through with strained apologetic comments. “I hope it won’t make you too sad,” she said. And again and again she repeated, “I hope you won’t mind too much. I do hope that she will be very happy & that you will not be too unhappy.”

Half-triumphant and half-pleading, her letter revealed a desperate need for reassurance from her husband:

It makes it harder [for you] because one is always brought up to expect a lion’s share of all the happiness in the world . . . Truth to tell Pug I am rather baffled by hearing of C[armen]M[acGlashan]’s wedding. I always imagined if you couldn’t stick it any more with me you would marry her in the end. This complicates things, perhaps you can work it out for yourself.
³

No sooner had she sent it than she regretted it, apologizing abjectly in her next letter: “I hope the last letter I wrote you has gone to the bottom, as it was stupid, unkind and selfish.”

Not realizing that his wife had found him out, Griffith’s reply was curt and minimal rather than warm and reassuring. “You rather lectured me about Carmen, darling. Honestly I have scarcely thought of her for months. Before we were married when I saw a good deal of her in London I was very fond of her too, but since then she has gone right out of my life.”
⁴

Only rarely did Griffith indulge Doey in the emotional reassurance she appealed for again and again in her letters. “Are you still my amour? You are very dark about your feelings!” she asked hopefully at one point. Provoking no reaction, she tried another tack: “I have decided to give up this racket of telling you that you are not in love with me, it is very bad propaganda . . . Also I have decided to stop saying that I am stupid, ugly & inefficient. All these things you can see for yourself if you need to . . . To boast about being ugly & stupid is really the worst form of conceit.”
⁵

Heavily self-deprecating passages like this intruded into her otherwise witty, humorous—if occasionally slightly brittle—letters, revealing the agonizing sense of insecurity and lack of self-confidence that was always near the surface. Yet this did not prevent Griffith from writing home from Tehran in 1942, telling his wife without a trace of guilt, “I wish you were here, darling; I have quite a nice girlfriend at present, but you are incomparably nicer and will always be my true love.” Her name was Ruth Lyall, and he had been wining and dining her on champagne and beef stroganoff at significant expense in all the best restaurants in Tehran. There can be few women, least of all deeply insecure women, who would be happy to hear that their absent husband has “quite a nice a girlfriend” with whom he is probably being unfaithful. Failing to respond adequately to Doey’s need for reassurance from him, he expected her to be delighted that he was having such a wonderful time.

In sharp contrast, she herself did her utmost to boost his spirits whenever she sensed that he was feeling low—as when he was in trouble with the army authorities over his escape from Greece in 1941. Her reaction was to comfort him: “I do, & always shall, believe in you as a person, apart from anything between us, I believe in your courage & endurance & humour, your strength & ability to see the true value of things & your generosity & even your red hair.”
⁶

This was particularly generous since the accusations of desertion leveled at Griffith caused excruciating embarrassment to Doey’s family. Her father, Felix, having for many years held the office of Judge Advocate General, was horrified that his own son-in-law might be facing a court-martial.

It was poor compensation for Doey to know that Griffith had no intention of ever leaving her. The problem was that he did not appear to be truly in love with her, nor did he feel bound to be faithful. In Tehran in the war he had a conversation with a friend who confided that he was falling in love with his mistress. Griffith wrote in his diary, “I told him he should stick to his wife for the sake of his two children & if necessary love outside.” The concept of “loving outside” was widely accepted among men of Griffith’s generation, but it was hardly calculated to meet the emotional needs of his romantic young wife.

During the war—long before Doey came into her inheritance—my father also revealed an overwhelmingly self-centered attitude toward money, spending freely on himself but showing remarkably little inclination to make any contribution to the maintenance of his wife and young son. “I’m afraid I spent over £120 in India . . . India is terribly expensive,” he admitted to Doey, after splashing out on a trekking holiday in Sikkim during his leave in 1941, and went on to declare: “If you can get on all right on your money, I would send occasional cheques for any sum you need in addition, but you must let me know how much you want. I think we should save money as far as possible, for we may have to live on our savings for a time after I am demobilised.”
⁷

Having just spent the equivalent of seven months of his salary as a junior doctor—or approximately £4,200 in today’s money—on a twelve-day holiday for himself, this showed an astonishing blindness. Doey did not criticize him, but this and similar episodes did not go unnoticed. Later, when she inherited her money, she flatly refused to give her husband access to it, which he, in turn, would find exceedingly frustrating. It would become the subject of many rows between them.

When in the late spring of 1962 Doey disappeared to India for a second time to rejoin the Maharishi, my father commented to me: “It would be better if your mother had a lover!” Her having a lover was something he might comprehend and come to terms with. The attractions of the Maharishi were much harder for him to understand. His own response to Doey’s disappearance was to embark on a full-blooded affair with our au pair girl, who was thirty years his junior. As ever, he was not the man to turn his back on an opportunity when it presented itself.

Tall, with feathery blonde hair, she was about twenty years old. The early summer sunshine tanned her skin a dusky, golden color, emphasizing her light-gray eyes and clear complexion, giving her an aura of wholesome health and fitness.

I remember her one night at supper in the kitchen at home, about a month after my mother left. Throwing back her head with abandon to reveal a smoothly tanned neck and bosom, she gazed at the ceiling and declared in her thick French accent, “I want my body to be attractive to zee mens.” Though I was now fifteen, I found her behavior eccentric rather than provocative, and completely failed to appreciate the effect it was having on my father.

Griffith and the au pair girl took to listening to music together after supper. One night I went into the drawing room to look for them. They weren’t there. The record had reached its end and was scratching around and around on the turntable. The French windows to the garden were wide open, but there was no sign of them in the warm dusk of the summer evening.

When Doey returned in mid-July, just before the start of the school holidays, bringing with her a box of fresh mangoes, Griffith’s behavior was reported to her by a neighbor who had spotted him in flagrante. The unfortunate girl was immediately bundled out of the house. On discovering later that Griffith was continuing to see her in London, Doey attempted to get her deported back to France. The affair ended but the damage was done. The betrayal was too much for her. She did not leave, but removed herself from his bedroom and went to sleep in a small room at the opposite end of our large house, never to return to my father’s bed. From then on they lived parallel lives, occasionally rocking the house with their rows.