“What girl could resist? Sod off.”
I do an urbane as-you-wish bow, stand, and slip The Art of Warinto my ski jacket. “Sorry for embarrassing you.” I head out.
“Oy.” It’s a lightening more than a softening. “Who says you’recapable of embarrassing me?”
I knock-knock my forehead. “Would ‘Sorry for finding you interesting’ go down any better?”
“A certain type of girl after a holiday romance would lap it up. Those of us who work here get a bit jaded.”
Machinery clanks and a big engine whines as the down-bound cable-car begins its journey. “I understand that you need armor, working in a bar where Europe’s Chetwynd-Pitts come to play. But jadedness runs through you, Holly, like a second nervous system.”
An incredulous little laugh. “You don’t know me.”
“ That’sthe weird part: I know I don’t know you. So how come I feel like I do?”
She does an exasperated grunt. “There’s rules … You don’t talk to someone you’ve known five minutes like you’ve known them for years. Bloody stop it.”
I hold up my palms. “Holly, if I am an arrogant twat, I’m a harmless arrogant twat.” I think of Penhaligon. “Virtually harmless. Look, would you let me share your ski lift up to the next station? It’s, what, seven, eight minutes? If I turn into a date from hell, it’ll soon be over—no no no, I know, nota date, it’s a shared ski chair. Then we’ll arrive and, with one expert thrust of your ski poles, I’m history. Please. Please?”
THE SKI LIFT guy clicks our rail into place, and I resist a joke about being swept off my feet as Holly and I are swept off our feet. December 30 has lost its earlier clarity and the summit of the Palanche de la Cretta is hidden in cloud. I follow the ski lift cable from pylon to pylon up the mountainside. The ravine opens up below us and, as I’m mugged by vertigo and grip the bar, my testicles run and hide next to my liver. Forcing myself to look down at the distant ground, I wonder about Penhaligon’s final seconds. Regret? Relief? Blank terror? Or did his head suddenly fill with “Babooshka” by Kate Bush? Two crows fly beneath our feet. They mate for life, my cousin Jason once told me. I ask Holly, “Do you ever have flying dreams?”
Holly looks dead ahead. Her goggles hide her eyes. “No.”
We’ve cleared the ravine again and pass sedately over a wide swath of the piste we’ll be skiing down later. Skiers curve, speed, and amble downhill to Chemeville station.
“Conditions look better after last night’s snow,” I say.
“Yeah. This mist’s getting thicker by the minute, though.”
That is true; the mountain peak is blurry and gray now. “Do you work at Sainte-Agnиs every winter?”
“What is this? A job interview?”
“No, but my telepathy’s a bit rusty.”
Holly explains: “I used to work at Mйribel over in the French Alps for a guy who knew Gьnter from his tennis days. When Gьnter needed a discreet employee, I got offered a transfer, a pay hike, and a ski pass.”
“Why ever would Gьnter need a discreet employee?”
“Not a clue—and, no, I don’t touch drugs. The world’s unstable enough without scrambling your brain for kicks.”
I think of Madam Constantin. “You’re not wrong.”
Empty ski chairs migrate from the mist ahead. Behind us, Chemeville is fading from view, and nobody’s following us up. “Wouldn’t it be freaky,” I think aloud, “if we saw the dead in the chairs opposite?”
Holly gives me a weird look. “Not dead as in undead, with bits dropping off,” I hear myself trying to explain. “Dead as in your own dead. People you knew, who mattered to you. Dogs, even.” Or Cornishmen.
The steel-tube-and-plastic chair squeaks. Holly’s chosen to ignore my frankly bizarre question, and to my surprise asks this: “Are you from one of those army-officer families?”
“God, no. My dad’s an accountant and Mum works at Richmond Theatre. Why do you ask?”
“ ’Cause you’re reading a book called The Art of War.”
“Oh, that. I’m reading Sun Tzu because it’s three thousand years old, and every CIA agent since Vietnam has studied it. Do you read?”
“My sister’s the big reader, really, and sends me books.”
“How often do you go back to England?”
“Not so often.” She fiddles with a Velcro glove strap. “I’m not one of those people who’ll spill their guts in the first ten minutes. Okay?”
“Okay. Don’t worry, that just means you’re sane.”
“I knowI’m sane, and I wasn’t worried.”
Awkward silence. Something makes me look over my shoulder; five ski chairs behind sits a solo passenger in a silver parka with a black hood. He sits with his arms folded, his skis making a casual X. I look ahead again, and try to think of something intelligent to say, but I seem to have left all my witty insights at the ski-lift station below.
AT THE PALANCHE de la Cretta station, Holly slides off the chairlift like a gymnast, and I slide off like a sack of hammers. The ski-lift guy greets Holly in French, and I slope off out of earshot. I find I’m waiting for the skier in the silver parka to appear from the fast-flowing mist; I count a twenty-second gap between each ski chair, so he’ll be here in a couple of minutes, at most. Odd thing is, he never arrives. With mild but rising alarm, I watch the fifth, sixth, seventh chairs after us arrive without a passenger … By the tenth, I’m worried—not so much that he’s fallen off the ski chair, but that he wasn’t there in the first place. The Yeti and Madam Constantin have shaken my faith in my own senses, and I don’t like it. Finally a pair of jolly bear-sized Americans appear, thumping to earth with gusts of laughter and needing the ski-lift guy’s help. I tell myself the skier behind us was a false memory. Or I dreamt him. Holly joins me at the lip of the run, marked by flags disappearing into cloud. In a perfect world, she’ll say, Look, why don’t we ski down together?“Okay,” she says, “this is where I say goodbye. Take care, stay between the poles, and no heroics.”
“Will do. Thanks for letting me hitch a ride up.”
She shrugs. “You must be disappointed.”
I lift my goggles so she can see my eyes, even if she won’t show me hers. “No. Not in the least. Thank you.” I’m wondering if she’d tell me her surname if I asked. I don’t even know that.
She looks downhill. “I must seem unfriendly.”
“Only guarded. Which is fair enough.”
“Sykes,” she says.
“I’m sorry?”
“Holly Sykes, if you were wondering.”
“It … suits you.”
Her goggles hide her face but I’m guessing she’s puzzled.
“I don’t quite know what I meant by that,” I admit.
She pushes off and is swallowed by the whiteness.
THE PALANCHE DE la Cretta’s middle flank isn’t a notorious descent, but stray more than a hundred meters off-piste to the right and you’ll need near-vertical skiing skills or a parachute, and the fog’s so dense that I take my own sweet time and stop every couple of minutes to wipe my goggles. About fifteen minutes down, a boulder shaped like a melting gnome rears from the freezing fog by the edge of the piste. I huddle in its leeward side to smoke a cigarette. It’s quiet. Very quiet. I consider how you don’t get to choose whom you’re attracted to, you only get to wonder about it, retrospectively. Racial differences I’ve always found to have an aphrodisiac effect on me, but class difference is sexuality’s Berlin Wall. Certainly, I can’t read Holly Sykes as well as I can girls from my own incometax tribe, but you never know. God made the whole Earth in six days, and I’m in Switzerland for nine or ten.
A group of skiers weave past the granite gnome, like a school of fluorescent fish. None notices me. I drop my cigarette butt and follow in their wake. The jolly Texans either decided they’d bitten off more than they could chew and went back down on the ski lift, or they’re following at an even more cautious pace than mine. No skier in a silver parka, either. Soon the fog thins, crags, ridges, and contours sketch and shade themselves in, and by the time I reach Chemeville station I’m under the cloud rafters again. I line my innards with a hot chocolate, then take the gentler blue piste down to La Fontaine Sainte-Agnиs.