Last night, awake with Stephen at around four a.m., he had been showing off about some mountain or other he had climbed when he was a young man. She had then invented an even bigger mountain she had climbed—“without a single Sherpa, darling”—and he then upped the ante and was climbing Everest without Sherpas or oxygen, and then she was climbing Everest carrying a grand piano, and the two of them were in fits of giggles. It was love, of course, but it was also friendship. Stephen was the first person she had ever met who refused to take her seriously.
