The Last Ridge, Part 4: What the Notebook Said
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Part 4 of 5. By lamplight in a snowbound mountain hut, a grey-haired woman guide reads the last page of an old climbing notebook out loud and has to explain the one detail she kept from everyone for twenty years.
[Camp Three hut, close to midnight. The storm is still blowing.]
Elsa: "September 14th, 10.40. E. wants to turn back. She's right, but the top is so close."
Tomas: Keep going. There's more.
Elsa: "My axe has a crack in the shaft. E. says take hers, she'll manage with the rope on the way down."
Tomas: So he must have asked you for it.
Elsa: He didn't ask. I offered.
Tomas: Why would you do that?
Elsa: Because he was going up anyway. I thought it might keep him alive.
Tomas: It might have. Or without it, he couldn't have gone up at all.
Elsa: I know. I've known that for twenty years.
Tomas: Then why didn't you tell the inquiry?
Elsa: They would have asked why I let him go. I didn't have an answer I could say out loud.
Tomas: You should have told my mother, at least. She always thought you'd left him.
Elsa: I did leave him. I went down. That part is true.
Tomas: But he told you to. It's here, in his writing: "If I'm late, it's my fault, not hers."
Elsa: Look at the letters. They're shaking. That can't have been easy to write with frozen hands.
Tomas: He can't have known how bad the storm would get.
Elsa: He must have guessed. He was the best reader of weather I ever climbed with.
Tomas: Then he should have turned round.
Elsa: Yes. And I should have refused. We were both wrong in the same hour.
[Tomas closes the notebook. The wind drops for a moment, then rises again.]
Tomas: There's one more line underneath. Did you see it?
Elsa: "Tell Anna I'll be home for the..." It just stops.
Tomas: Anna is my mother.
Elsa: Then he must have been thinking about her, right at the end.
Tomas: He might have known about me. Maybe she told him before he left.
Elsa: Maybe. He'd been smiling all week and wouldn't tell me why.
Tomas: If the sky clears, I still want to go up tomorrow.
Elsa: Then we'll decide together at the top of the ridge. Out loud, this time.