Читать книгу Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: Other People’s Marriages, Every Woman Knows a Secret, If My Father Loved Me, A Simple Life - Rosie Thomas - Страница 18

All through this time, the work on the west front of the cathedral went on behind the contractors’ screens of scaffolding and tarpaulins.

One afternoon in February Nina stood at a corner of the green, where a gap in the coverings offered a narrow view of one column of saints and archangels. The stone figures in their niches were enveloped in dust or swathed in dingy protective coverings, and workmen passed in front of them with plaster-coated tools and buckets. Watching them, Nina could not imagine how the details of folded hands and serene stone faces could ever be recovered from this desecration.

The wind was cold. At length, wrapping her arms around herself, Nina turned away from the cathedral front and began slowly to cross the green. She would have liked to go on in through the west door, to look at the columns and arches of the interior, but she did not. Ever since Christmas she had avoided the cathedral, because it was associated with Gordon. She had been afraid to begin with that she might meet him there, and so be thought guilty of pursuing him. Lately she had simply preferred to keep away from the places that were most closely connected with him in her mind, because she missed him and it was easier to spare herself this much.

When she reached the opposite, sheltered side of the green she saw a woman sitting on one of the benches that bordered it. The woman was wearing a flamboyant long mackintosh made of some light, banana-coloured material. She was watching Nina coming towards her, and eating a sandwich. Nina recognized Star Rose.

‘Hello,’ Star said, in her cool voice. ‘I heard on the bush telegraph that you’d left and gone back to London.’

Nina hesitated. Of the Grafton couples, she had seen only Janice and Hannah since Christmas and those meetings had been accidental. The women had not been unfriendly, but just as it had been easier for Nina to avoid the places that were connected in her mind with Gordon, so it had also been her choice not to meet his friends, and Vicky’s.

‘I did go back for a time. But I’m here again now. This is where I live.’

She had spent almost three weeks staying in the Spitalfields house with Patrick, but it had become increasingly hard to ignore the truth that she had left London for Grafton to escape the memories of one man, and had then fled back to London for the same reason and a different man. Patrick had not tried to hide his concern.

‘You can’t flit to and fro for ever, you know, running away from yourself and imagining you can leave your losses behind you like last year’s overcoat.’

‘I know that,’ Nina said humbly. ‘I’ll go back to Grafton to confront myself, shall I, and wear the coat until the better weather comes?’

He took her hand, and she rested her head against his shoulder for a minute.

‘You know you can stay here as long as you like,’ Patrick said.

But in the end Nina had come home. In any case she had work to do, and needed her studio.

Star screwed up her sandwich paper. ‘I’d offer to share my lunch with you, but that was it. We could go and have a cup of coffee in the cloister, if you like. I am as free as air, it being half term.’

Surprised, and pleased by the suggestion, Nina said, ‘Yes. All right. Let’s do that.’

Star stood up, brushing the sandwich crumbs from her raincoat. A pair of pigeons swooped down on them. The two women began to walk towards the cathedral.

‘Where do you teach?’ Nina asked. She had met Star a number of times, but it had always been at dinners or at parties or with permutations of the Grafton couples.

‘Williamford. Modern languages.’

Williamford was the big mixed comprehensive that had been created after Nina’s time by an amalgamation of her girls’ grammar with the boys’ school where Andrew Frost had gone.

‘I went to the Dean’s School.’

‘Did you? Oh yes, Andrew said something about it. We still use the same buildings, you know. Very inconvenient they are, too.’

There had been red-brick classrooms with tall Victorian windows that let in thin coils of fog in the winters, and concentrated the sun’s heat in the short summers. Nina remembered the old-fashioned desks and blackboards and the sharp fins of the green-painted radiators.

‘I should think it’s very different now.’

‘Should you? You’d probably find it’s much the same. Who used to teach you French?’

‘Mr Jenkins. Gawaine Jenkins, that was his name.’

Filaments of memory unwound in her head. Mr Jenkins had been an awkward, unpopular teacher with a half-guessed at, unhappy private life.

‘He retired last year. I took over from him as head of the department.’

It was as if Star had tied a tiny, invisible knot, fixing Nina within Grafton again in a mesh of people and the rubbed, familiar places of her childhood. She had not thought of Mr Jenkins for more than fifteen years, but now she heard his thin, correct voice reading from Molière and saw the reddened wings of his nose and the ancient corduroy jacket he wore every day to face the ordeals of his classroom.

‘Just hearing his name makes me feel seventeen again.’

Star hunched her angular shoulders inside the yellow raincoat.

‘I feel seventeen most of the time. If some gang of kids runs in the corridor at school I start running too, then I have to rein myself in and make myself shout at them.’

Nina laughed. ‘You don’t sound like Mr Jenkins. The children must like you.’

‘Most of them do,’ Star answered in her dry fashion.

They had crossed to the side of the cathedral and went through an archway into the cloister. One side of it had been glassed in to make a combined bookshop and tearoom for visitors. Nina and Star passed by the stands of books on cathedral history and architecture, and the displays of teatowels and leather bookmarks with their pictures of the west front, and came to a long, glass-fronted counter displaying dishes of salads and quiche and flapjacks and wholemeal scones, and a row of refectory tables with bench seats. Most of the places were occupied by pairs and trios of women, eating salad and talking.

Star surveyed them. ‘We could have gone to the Eagle and had a drink amongst the menfolk of Grafton.’

‘This is fine,’ Nina said quickly.

She bought two cups of coffee in thick pottery mugs and carried them over to an empty table. Star sat down, swinging her coat out behind her. She lit a cigarette and stared out at the yew tree in the middle of the cloister garth. Nina covertly examined her face. Star had high cheekbones and a wide mouth, and she wore her hair pushed back behind her ears and no make-up, which emphasized her bones and revealed the clarity of her skin. She was not in any way beautiful, but her height and her faintly inimical manner made her interesting.

After a moment Star looked back at Nina. She picked up her coffee mug and tilted it towards her in acknow- ledgement.

‘Welcome home,’ she said. ‘I’m glad you haven’t abandoned us.’

Nina was surprised and pleased again. Unguardedly she asked, ‘What has everyone been saying?’

Star’s eyebrows lifted. ‘Everyone? I’ve no idea what everyone has been saying. I haven’t read any reports about your love affair in the national press, or even in the Grafton Advertiser. If that’s what you are asking about, of course.’

Nina felt her cheeks redden. She was irritated by the quick bite of sarcasm, but she also had to admit that she had probably deserved it. Solitude was making her focus too closely on her own concerns.

‘Not everyone in that sense. I meant the coterie of Grafton couples into which I’ve made such a disastrous intrusion.’

Star smiled at that. ‘Yes. I thought that was probably what you did mean. Was it disastrous?’

‘In the sense that it caused pain, yes, it was.’

‘Ah.’ Star spooned brown sugar crystals into her coffee and then meditatively stirred. There was a silence, and then she said quietly, ‘I’ve always thought that if I were going to have an affair with anyone else’s husband, it would have been with Gordon.’

Nina thought that this conversation was moving too rapidly for her, or that she had somehow missed some crucial intervening pieces of it.

She said uncertainly, ‘I didn’t know that. I … have this impression of history, shared history, stretching back behind you all. Do you remember when you changed that toast at Janice’s dinner party? You said, not just to friendship but to loving friendship. I was impressed, by that and by all of you so handsome and happy, and by the way that you seemed to affirm each other.’

Star shrugged, using what appeared to be a characteristic gesture.

‘I’m such a romantic with a few glasses of wine inside me. There isn’t any history stretching behind Gordon and me. Unfortunately.’

Nina remembered then, on that same evening while she had been talking to Darcy Clegg, that she had also covertly been watching Star and Gordon murmuring quietly together in a corner. She had thought at the time that perhaps Star was crying.

Star put out her cigarette and immediately lit another. It was after two o’clock and the pairs and groups of women were beginning to filter away, back to their offices and shops. A girl in a green overall was loading cups and plates on to a tray.

‘What was he like?’ Star asked.

Nina looked up, and their eyes met. It would have been easy to be affronted or disconcerted by the question, but this directness in Star and the simplicity of her manner appealed to Nina. It was as if she very much wanted to know the answer to her question, and trusted that Nina would understand why, and how.

Nina found that she did not even hesitate, but answered with the same simplicity.

‘I suppose the word to describe him would be wholehearted. He gave himself with great enthusiasm, and I found that very touching as well as erotic. He was also very straightforward. Not unimaginative, but not particularly poetic either. He used words like fuck and dick, and in turn that made me say things, and do things, that I’ve never done before. I felt … unleashed.’ After a moment she added, very softly, ‘I suppose it was the best sex I have ever had.’

It was an unexpected solace to talk about him, after two months of trying to suppress even her passing thoughts. She realized that she could easily go on, might suddenly spill out across the refectory table every remembered detail.

Star nodded her head. She said sadly, ‘Yes. I thought that was how he might be.’

They looked at each other again.

And then, unmistakably, Nina felt a thin, piercing shiver of some different awareness that was nothing to do with Gordon, but was directly between Star and herself.

For as long as it lasted she became acutely conscious of the contours of her hand resting against the wood grain of the table, the curl of smoke in the air over Star’s head, the insistent rattle of cutlery and crockery behind them.

Star put out her hand and touched the tips of her fingers to Nina’s hand.

‘I’m sorry for you that it was painful.’

‘It was. It is, but I deserved it. I should have known better,’ Nina said.

‘One never does know better.’ Star lifted her hand again. ‘It’s like really being seventeen for ever.’

The tearoom, the table and cups and everything else slowly resumed their normal density. Nina said, ‘I regret it more for Vicky’s sake.’

‘Do you? Do you think Vicky is blameless?’

Star did not wait for Nina’s answer. She gazed round at the almost deserted tearoom and impatiently pulled the folds of her mackintosh closer as if to insulate herself from it.

‘Shall we have a walk somewhere?’

Nina had planned to spend the afternoon working, but even as she began her refusal she changed her mind. Since coming back to Grafton she had resumed her solitary country walks, but now she discovered that she minded her solitude more. Sometimes she felt almost disabled by it as she followed the paths and lanes that wound around Grafton. But this afternoon Star had unexpectedly arrived in the middle of the empty landscape.

Nina wanted their talk to continue, because she wanted to see where it would lead. An intimacy had sprung up between them so quickly that it made her aware of how much she needed a woman friend in Grafton. She suspected Star needed a friend also.

They went out on to the green and walked away in the opposite direction from Dean’s Row. Star walked briskly, with her head up and her hands in her pockets.

Their route took them along Southgate, the best street in Grafton. It was lined with the bow-fronted façades of eighteenth-century shops, Hannah Clegg’s La Couture amongst them. There were no cars in Southgate. Shiny, black-painted bollards closed off either end of the street, and the city council in its civic pride had placed dark green and gold litter bins along the pavements and hung flower baskets from the arms of the Victorian lamp posts. The baskets had been planted for the winter with universal pansies and variegated ivies, and the trailing leaves were browned by the wind and lack of water.

Nina and Star walked down the middle of the cobbled street. Pedestrians with plastic shopping bags crossed between the bollards and fanned out towards the shops, and Nina scanned the people as they passed her. Every one of them looked respectable, even the youngest ones. They were dressed in muted colours and serviceable shapes as if they had been outfitted by the same civic department that was responsible for the tasteful liveries of the Southgate shopfronts. Not one of them looked as if a deviation from the routine path would be welcomed.

There was a prosperous, provincial solidity in Grafton that sometimes reassured her, and at other times did not.

Star was laughing.

‘What’s funny?’ Nina asked.

‘The tidiness of it. Tidy lives. That’s what you were thinking, wasn’t it?’

They came out into Bridge Street, where traffic flattened the polystyrene litter blown outside McDonald’s.

‘Something like that.’

‘Grafton is tidy. Socially and emotionally tidy. Pain and passion are mostly kept well out of sight, especially by people like us. It’s easy to sneer at it, but I rather like it. It’s dignified.’

Darcy had tried to recruit her into a conspiracy of urban superiority against Grafton, Nina remembered.

‘Why should you think that I would sneer at it? I came back to live here, so I must like it too.’

She was thinking about the handsome couples, who had at first seemed so smilingly enviable and secure in their comfortable houses, and the contradictions that wove around them now. Into her head at the same time came an image of the stone figures of the west front, blackened and pitted by the centuries, but still enduring.

‘Not you, I didn’t mean you,’ Star said.

They were walking towards the river. Ahead of them, as they rounded a curve in the street, they could see the old bridge and a pewter-coloured expanse of water. On the far bank were the playing fields and dim red-brick blocks of the Dean’s School, now part of Williamford.

‘What did you mean when you asked me if I thought Vicky was blameless?’

Star flicked a glance at her, a look that was speculative and amused and faintly malicious.

‘Just that.’

‘Oh. So, do I think that Vicky is to blame because I blithely started a hot affair with her husband while she was in hospital delivering their third baby by an emergency Caesarean?’

Nina saw the tiny contraction of the muscles around Star’s mouth that gave away her hurt, and wondered for how long she had loved Gordon. No wonder Star liked Grafton for its bloodless dignity. She possessed exactly the same quality herself. Star would be good at suppressing her own pain and passion.

Nina said more sharply than she had intended, ‘No, I don’t think Vicky is to blame.’

‘That’s not what I asked you.’

Nina followed the thread of Star’s insinuation.

‘I see,’ she said at last, unwillingly. And afterwards, ‘Who is he, then?’

Star nodded, as if Nina were a slow pupil who had at last grasped something.

‘Darcy.’

They had reached the point where the road turned parallel with the river. Iron railings separated the road from a path that ran beside the water under the naked branches of willow trees. The river was swollen and little crusts of yellowish foam eddied in the current and were caught in the twiggy debris beside the bank.

‘How do you know?’ Nina asked automatically.

‘I know because I’ve heard. Small towns don’t keep secrets for long. As you discovered.’

‘Yes. I did, didn’t I?’

They had crossed the bridge, and as if they were acknowledging that they had left Grafton behind they stopped to stand shoulder to shoulder, looking back at it. The cathed-ral’s twin towers rose over the steps of rooftops, sombre against the graphite sky.

‘Does Hannah know?’

‘Oh, I should think so. I’m sure she’s reeling in his line. Hannah may never have read a book in her life and she may also think Wittgenstein’s a ski resort, but she’s not a fool. She has Darcy placed exactly where she wants him, whatever the old poseur may imagine to the contrary.’

‘And Gordon?’

‘I don’t think Gordon knows.’

To assimilate this information Nina leaned against the limestone pillar that marked the end of the bridge.

As her cold fingers rubbed the gritty stone she remembered that it was exactly here that she had been kissed for the first time. There was a triple-globed ornamental lamp mounted on the pillar, one of four put up by the people of Grafton to commemorate the Coronation, and when the boy had put his arms around her and begun to rub his mouth against hers she had been afraid that they were too clearly visible in the pallid circle of light. She had also been afraid that he would rub away the coat of white lipstick she had applied in the school cloakroom and expose the babyish rosebud of her real mouth. They had been on the way home from the third-year Christmas party in the Williamford hall, but Nina couldn’t recall anything about the boy except his name, and the amalgamated taste and smell of Clearasil.

The realization that more than twenty years had elapsed since that night, the conviction that nothing in Grafton had changed, and the news that Star had just given her, combined as a tremor in the back of Nina’s throat that forced its way forward and emerged between her teeth as a spurt of laughter.

She saw Star’s expression, the mixture of amusement and malice and cleverness in it, and then Star began to laugh too.

‘It’s funny,’ Nina explained.

‘You’re right. It’s so funny that it hurts.’

They leant against the limestone pillar, oblivious to the passing traffic, until they stopped laughing. And then they turned their backs to Grafton and walked on, newly comfortable with one another.

‘I don’t know why I’ve marched us out here,’ Star remarked. ‘Force of habit, I suppose.’

They had come to the school gates. They were locked, but there was an old man in an overall beyond them, dispiritedly brushing long-dead leaves from the tarmac drive.

‘Hello, Ted,’ Star called to him.

‘Afternoon, Mrs Rose. Can’t you keep away from the bloody place, then?’

Nina stood with her fists locked on the railings, like a convict, gazing into the grounds. The line of trees that had marked the far boundary were gone; she supposed that they must have been elms. There was a new housing estate on the slope beyond where there had once been farmland. Threads and snippets of unimportant memories swam and merged in her head.

‘Mrs Cort’s an old girl of the school, Ted. Can we slip inside so she can have a look around?’

This was so much what Nina wanted without even having expressed it to herself that she stared at Star in surprise.

‘Can’t let you in the building, Mrs Rose, it’d be more than my job’s worth. But I’ll open these gates for you, if your friend wants a stroll round.’

Star and Nina walked up the driveway to the Victorian red-brick slabs of the building. At the nearest window Nina leaned on the sill, shading her eyes to look in at the rows of desks. As soon as she saw the shape of the room she immediately became the fomenting schoolgirl she had once been, full of dreams and illusions, unwillingly hunched over her work. The exercise books they used had had stiff grey covers and Nina had drawn all over them, obsessively creating derivative op-art designs and then filling in the divisions and subdivisions with her black pen, as if she could reduce the confusions of adolescence to mosaic patterns.

‘It’s all different, furniture, colours, everything, but it’s still exactly the same. This was the geography room.’

It had smelt of hot dust from the radiators, and chalk, like the other classrooms, but also of the sticky, oiled canvas of the big old-fashioned maps that hung on the walls. The room had had a soporific hum that made it difficult to stay awake in there on warm afternoons.

These shreds of recollection knitted together. Their coalescence was painful because the life that had contained them was gone, but the revival of so many tiny memories made Nina feel suddenly that she had her place here in Grafton more securely than anywhere else she had ever lived, even with Richard. She knew that her instinct to return had been the right one, even to this mutating city of car parks and micro-industries and modern couples.

‘My theory is that the essence of a place never changes,’ Star said. ‘Because it is to do with the layers of time and experience variously contained within it, not the colour of the walls or the style of the furnishings.’

‘I don’t know if your theory would stand much analysis. But I know exactly what you mean. It’s rather comforting, isn’t it?’

They began to walk around the outside of the building, stopping to look in through the tall windows.

Now Nina could recall the shiny tiles of the corridors and the submerged green of the cloakrooms and the beams and arches and echoes of voices as vividly as if she had left them behind only yesterday. She felt that she was linked to Star by their separate paths through the same high classrooms, and as they reached their starting point again she put her arm through Star’s so that they walked in step.

‘Enough?’ Star asked.

‘Yes. I liked seeing the place again. Thanks.’

‘It wasn’t difficult to arrange.’

Ted let them out into the road again, and morosely locked the gates behind them. Nina and Star turned back towards the bridge. The sky was already darkening, leaving a faint outline of phosphorescent green around the roofs and chimneys and the cathedral towers.

Nina gazed ahead of her, measuring the familiarity of what she saw, the unfamiliar comfort of Star’s arm linked through hers, and noticing how the thin, cold wind made her eyes smart. It came to her in that moment that she was content, not happy but content, as she had not been since the day of Richard’s death.

As if their thoughts were common to each other, perhaps because as they came back into Grafton they remembered the couples, Star abruptly asked,

‘Were you and your husband happy?’

‘Yes, we were very happy.’

‘Tell me what it was like.’

Just as she had asked about Gordon. Nina suddenly felt such a plaintive, bewildered need in Star Rose that she wanted to stop and hold her, to comfort her. She held her arm closer, as if that would do.

‘What can I tell you? It was a marriage. A friendship, a contract, good and bad, like any other.’

They were on the bridge now, midway between the two pairs of commemorative lamps.

Star nodded, staring away over the parapet at the water.

‘None of us can look into other people’s marriages, can we? There is only our own, and the continual mystery of the rest.’

‘Yes,’ Nina said, knowing that was the truth. They walked on quietly together.

When they reached the Dean’s Row house Nina asked Star if she would like to come in, but Star shook her head.

‘I have to go. But can I see you again?’

The form of the question did not strike Nina as odd.

‘Of course.’

‘I’ll call you, then.’

Star stepped forward, and they put their arms around each other and hugged. Then Star turned away and recrossed the green, walking briskly so that her long yellow coat flared out behind her.

In Méribel, as soon as it stopped snowing, the families zipped up their padded suits and clumped out into the white world to ski.

The children went to ski school, while the Frosts with Darcy and Marcelle set out every morning to conquer new and more distant peaks and steeper gullies. They came back each evening with pale circles printed by their sunglasses across their reddened faces, to sit around the dinner table and talk about how high and how far they had been, and how much farther and higher they planned to venture the next day.

On previous holidays the families had taken in their various permutations, there had never been such determined concentration on skiing. There had been longer lunches, and more hours spent sitting in the blade-bright sun. But this year, after the first evening, they were wary of each other although Andrew and Janice cheerfully acted as if nothing was different. Marcelle was quiet except when she was with her children, and Darcy was irritable. To gloss over the feeling of discord the four of them skied longer hours, and talked about it all evening.

By unspoken agreement the children were allowed to stay up later, and the extra exercise meant earlier nights for everyone. The threatening intimacy of the snowy chalet was dispelled.

Michael and Hannah were left out of this determined nucleus of the party because they could not ski so well. They took lessons every day with a private teacher, a lean-hipped French boy called Thierry who smoked Marlboro cigarettes on the chair lifts and wore his mirror-lensed sunglasses even inside the mountain restaurants.

Michael found that he looked forward to the moment every morning when Hannah appeared in her silvery suit, and they waited outside together for Thierry to ski down to them in a flurry of exhibitionist turns. Hannah was good-humoured and courageous throughout their lessons, and while Thierry flirted routinely with her it was Michael she turned to to share their small triumphs and the comedy of their failures. He was flattered, and pleased, and felt himself thawing out in her warmth. Even his joints seemed to loosen. His stiff knees flexed and to his surprise his turns became fluid and confident.

The two of them met up with the group of children for lunch, and Michael liked the easy way Hannah dealt with them. She let them order French fries and Cokes, found their missing belongings for them and marshalled them efficiently for the afternoon without making a difficulty of it, as Marcelle would have done.

‘Do you know, I’ve even enjoyed having lunch every day with the bloody kids?’ Michael said to her when they set off on the Friday afternoon. They were standing in a queue for a chair lift, with Thierry a little behind them because he had lingered to talk to a likely-looking girl. Hannah’s face was framed in the silvery fur of her hood. She smiled, pausing in the act of rubbing some kind of cream into her lips. He could smell the fragrance of it.

‘Why not? They’re fun, aren’t they? And think of the brownie points we’ve earned.’

She tipped her forefinger with a tiny extra peak of cream and then reached out and dabbed it on Michael’s mouth. He was encumbered with his ski poles whereas Hannah had looped hers neatly over her forearm. She rubbed the cream in for him, following the lines of his mouth. Her face within the rim of fur was serious, concentrating. He had seen her perform the same service for Freddie.

Michael wanted to kiss her, but he transferred one ski pole to the other hand instead and in an awkward gesture put his arm around her. The skiers shuffled forward as the chairs scooped them away from the front of the queue. Hannah put her suncream away and zipped the pocket securely. She slid forward, holding her poles ready for the lift and he reluctantly lifted his arm to let her move freely.

Michael had not admitted as much, but he did not enjoy these lift rides. The empty space seemed to yawn nauseatingly under his encumbered feet and he was always relieved at the point at the opposite end when the chair sailed over the safety net and the bar lifted to allow him to slither forward and stand upright.

This was a three-seater chair but as the columns formed in the throat of the installation Michael saw that there were two trios ahead of them and no one on Hannah’s other side. He was thinking, Good, we’ll be on our own, as they stood at the barrier and then the little gates opened to admit them. They slid forward shoulder to shoulder, readying themselves and looking back at the chair as it rotated towards them.

Then there was some laughter and scuffling behind, and someone crashed through the third gate just as it was closing. A skier slithered hastily forward to the third position, almost falling as the chair swept behind them and caught all three of them off balance.

‘Careful,’ Hannah warned, her voice sounding sharp. There was more laughter following them and some jeering in French.

The three of them collapsed awkwardly into the chair and as it swept fast upwards Michael had to struggle to reach and pull down the safety bar. He managed to sit upright and place his skis on the footrests and saw that Hannah had worked herself into the right position too.

The chair sailed upwards over the snow-covered tops of some conifers and then a rocky gully. There was a pylon on the other side of the gully and the chair juddered as the cable passed over the rollers. They were swinging uncomfortably and Michael suddenly realized as he craned forward to see past Hannah that the third skier was rocking the chair because she was trying to rotate her legs from the side to the front. She had fallen into the seat sideways with her upper body twisted and her legs hanging out sideways. He caught a glimpse of a scared face, very young. She was a girl of perhaps fourteen, in a red and black ski suit.

‘Sit still,’ Hannah cried as the thin dark legs flailed wildly.

The girl’s skis looked very long and heavy as they swung over the treetops.

‘For God’s sake,’ Michael heard himself call out.

‘She’s slipping!’ Hannah screamed. The chair lurched wildly.

It seemed that the girl was being dragged under the safety bar by some cruel invisible hand. Her mittened fists caught at the armrest and at Hannah’s leg.

‘Je vais tomber,’ she cried. Her legs flailed again; Michael saw how the skis made arcs against the white slope.

They were over open ground now, a white piste a long way beneath them spiked with marker poles. It was steep, a black run.

Hannah threw herself sideways to try to catch at the girl. Her ski poles fell away as the chair bounced on the cable and confused voices shouted in French. There was a scream as the girl lost her precarious hold and Hannah clumsily fought to catch her wrist.

Then there was a terrible instant when the girl was sliding downwards, a blur of red and black and skis like scything blades, and after that a jolt that set their chair violently oscillating. Michael’s head jerked backwards and his teeth snapped on his tongue; for an instant he was blinded by the pain.

When he could see and hear again there was more screaming and he saw that the girl had indeed fallen, but as she fell the hood of her suit had caught on the end of the opposite footrest.

Now she hung suspended by the neck over the empty windy space. Her head lolled forward and her slack body rotated a little, to the side and then back again. The lift had stopped.

Hannah had edged along the seat and was leaning down to her, her own body almost beneath the safety bar. Michael was swept by a suffocating wave of vertigo. His mouth was full of blood from his bitten tongue. His hand shot out involuntarily and clamped on Hannah’s arm. The ground forty feet beneath them seemed to swing dizzily up into his face.

‘Don’t,’ he choked. ‘You’ll fall. Sit up.’

‘I’ve got to help her.’

Hannah knocked his hand away. Through the confusion of his fear Michael felt a kind of wondering admiration for her bravery. He looked upwards in order not to have to see the drop beneath them. In each of the chairs suspended ahead there were three white faces gazing back down at them. In the chair immediately behind there were three boys, the girl’s companions. They were motionless, transfixed with fear. A long way down, still over the gully, Michael could see Thierry’s red moniteur’s suit.

Hannah lowered her head as close as she could to the girl’s.

‘They’ll come quickly,’ Michael heard her say. ‘Can you hear me? They’ll come soon, I know they will.’

The red and black bundle stirred. The skis swung lazily, first one and then the other, up and down.

‘Don’t look down,’ Hannah ordered. ‘Look at me.’

Michael was amazed that the girl was alive. He had been imagining the cervical vertebrae, the functional purity of the bluish-white bone laid bare of skin and muscle tissue as he might have exposed it on the operating table; he was sure that her neck would have been broken. But she had slid rather than fallen, he recalled.

A group of skiers had collected on the piste below. Their upturned faces were like discoloured blotches on the snow. Two pisteurs in orange jackets arrived in the centre of the huddle. One of them held a short-wave radio to his mouth. Hannah looked back over her shoulder to Michael.

‘How will they reach her?’ she whispered.

‘I don’t know.’

Vertigo made him afraid that he would vomit or faint.

‘What can we do?’

‘Keep still. Nothing else.’

It was very quiet. A moment ago the air had been full of shouting.

Hannah turned away from him again. She was talking to the girl in a low, steady voice. He couldn’t catch all the words.

‘… can’t speak French … all right … get your skis off …’

Amazingly, the girl responded. Her head lifted. They could see her face, grey-white, and black eyes sunken in their sockets. Her lips moved, but they couldn’t hear what she said. Her eyes darted to one side, and they knew she was looking in her terror to see what was holding her suspended.

Hannah went on talking in her low, soothing voice. She told the girl that she couldn’t fall, that she was securely held, that all she needed to do was wait until the rescuers came. The girl’s eyes fixed on Hannah’s face, and never moved.

A long time passed. Michael knew that it was a long time because he began to feel cold, and then the cold seeped into his bones. The group on the piste below swelled into a crowd. There was a flurry of coming and going but none of it seemed to relate to the three of them suspended in terrible isolation high above the snow. Michael tried to work out how long it would take for a helicopter to reach them, but he had no idea where rescue helicopters came from. He couldn’t think why they didn’t winch the chair slowly along to the next pylon, about fifteen yards ahead. Then he saw a man in a pisteur’s jacket climbing like a monkey up the ladder at the side of the pylon.

The girl began to swing her legs. The chair picked up the movement at once and began to swing too. Michael realized that she was trying to kick off her skis and nausea gripped at him again.

‘Non, non, attend,’ he heard Hannah’s urgent murmur.

The climbing pisteur had reached the cable. He was wearing a webbing harness, and they saw him attach the harness to the cable and launch himself forward. He was winching himself slowly down towards them, swinging awkwardly past the two intervening chairs.

‘He’s coming, you’ll be all right now,’ Hannah’s incantation continued. The girl was too numb and terrified even to turn her head.

With a sliding rattle down the length of the cable the man reached them. He had a brown face seamed like a walnut. At the sound of his French voice the girl detached her eyes from Hannah’s at last and stiffly turned her head.

Michael could not work out how the girl could be freed and lifted to safety. There was a bag of tools suspended from the man’s waist, but no second harness, and his own could not have accommodated two people. Then he saw something that made the ground begin to spin again.

The group of rescue workers below had been cutting free the big orange plastic-coated mattresses that padded the base of every pylon along the piste. They were heaping them into a pile directly below the chair.

Hannah saw it at the same time, and her head swivelled so that her eyes met Michael’s. He snatched at her hand and imprisoned it under his arm as if it were Hannah the mattresses were waiting for.

The rescuer was calling out in rapid French to the people below. A stretcher on ski runners had materialized at the side of the piste. Then the man reached forward and down to the girl. He caught one of her legs and with a deft twist he freed the boot from the binding. One ski and then the other looped downwards to the snow.

Michael closed his eyes against his dizziness and in that instant the man had cut the girl free.

He heard Hannah gasp, and looked, and saw a blur of red and black falling and then not falling; the girl hit the heap of mattresses and they saw her roll, and her arms came up to cradle her head before she lay still again. Immediately she was surrounded by the rescuers.

Michael pulled at Hannah’s arm. He knew that the force of his grip must be hurting her, but he could not release it. Very slowly she sat upright, and he held her as best he could.

The rescuer hauled himself up the cable in his harness and dropped into the empty place in the chair. He muttered in French and when he saw they didn’t understand him he shrugged and looked away.

They didn’t speak. They sat in the frozen silence of shock, watching the activity below them. At last the stretcher was brought across and made ready.

Then Michael said, ‘She must be okay. If it was bad they’d be waiting for a helicopter to take her off.’

Hannah was visibly shuddering now. ‘It was such a fall. She’s only a young girl.’

‘The mattresses broke the fall for her. Did you see her roll and cover her head? That’s a good sign. She was conscious and probably her legs and back are all right.’

He heard himself offering this wisdom and good sense after the event, whilst in the crisis he had been hopeless and Hannah had bravely done everything she could. He was swamped with admiration for her.

‘I think she is good.’ The Frenchman stabbed his finger downwards.

The loaded stretcher was finally sped away. Michael and Hannah were both shaking with cold and reaction before the chair lift jolted again and their seat began to rise upwards on its mechanical progression.

At the top they stood to one side and watched the three boys who had been with the girl ski shakily away towards the point where she had fallen. Hannah’s poles had gone, and they could do nothing themselves but wait for Thierry to reach them. Michael put his hands on Hannah’s shoulders so he could look into her face.

‘You were wonderful. Amazing.’

Hannah smiled, denying her white face and blue lips. ‘I couldn’t remember a single word of French. Nothing. I thought she was going to be killed.’

Michael drew her closer to him, rubbing her arms in an effort to warm her.

‘All I could think of was that we were going to be killed along with her. And I’m supposed to be the doctor.’

‘I know you don’t like heights.’

He was amazed again. He didn’t think he had given any sign, but somehow she had seen it, and understood it, and excused him. He felt safe and protected, like Freddie, and filled with love for her.

Thierry skied away from the chair and stopped beside them without any flashy display of his skills. He had even removed his sunglasses.

‘That was bad, I think. I never have seen it happen before. How is my ’Annah? And Michael? Perhaps we have a drink in the bar and then go home for today?’

‘I think a drink would be a good idea,’ Hannah said.

In the chalet they were the heroes of the evening. The news of the accident had already travelled around the bars and ski rooms, and the children and adults alike were entranced to come home and discover that Michael and Hannah had been so closely involved.

‘Tell us all the details,’ the Frost boys demanded. ‘Was there any blood?’

‘For God’s sake,’ Michael protested, but Hannah only laughed. She had bathed and changed, and either the colour had properly come back into her face or else she had skilfully applied some.

‘None. I couldn’t have handled that. Remember Barney’s friend on Christmas Eve?’

Michael telephoned the Securité des Pistes, and managed to establish that the girl was in hospital in Moutiers, not badly hurt. He made a plan with Hannah to visit her the next day.

This good news was taken as reason for a celebration. Andrew went out and bought bottles of champagne, and even the chalet girl found herself able to smile as she served the dinner. Michael drank two glasses of whisky and two more of champagne and, as he had intended, became rapidly and pleasantly drunk. He embroidered Hannah’s role and his own as a comic pantomime of bravery contrasted with abject terror. Everyone laughed, egging him on as he sprawled at the foot of the table. It pleased him to be the failure of the story, and to make Hannah even more the heroine. He looked at her, shaking her head at the opposite end of the table, and knew that nothing could be more pleasurable or desirable than to undress her, and hold her, and have her for himself.

He saw that Darcy was proud of Hannah, and that his own wife, his Marcelle, was looking at him for once without disapproval or anxiety. Michael sat up straighter and focused his eyes on the golden nimbus of the candle flames, and on Hannah’s bright hair beyond them.

It was a good evening. The tensions of the first night seemed to have been forgotten, and Andrew and Janice laughed and nodded their relief and approval. The couples sat up later than usual, basking in the unexpected glow of shared happiness.

There was only a moment, when everyone was on the way to bed, when Michael wandered into the kitchen and found Hannah searching for mineral water in the fridge.

He went to her and put his arms around her waist as she stood with her back to him, feeling the breadth of her hips and the roundness of her backside against him.

‘I’m a bit drunk,’ he told her, with his mouth against her neck.

‘I know.’ She eased herself away, but smiling, indulgent with him.

He lifted her hand and turned it so that he kissed the pulse point inside her wrist.

‘There,’ he said tenderly. ‘That’s all.’

He stumbled to the door, and up the stairs to his bedroom and Marcelle’s.

Marcelle was in bed, but with the bedside light on.

Watching him undress she said, ‘You were nice tonight.’

‘I am nice.’

‘I know that.’

He groped his way across to her, and half fell on to the bed. Then he switched off the light before turning to her. He tried, but the buttons of her nightdress defeated him.

‘Take that thing off.’

He heard the whisper of the sheets and flowered cotton and his wife’s skin before she pressed herself into his arms.

He made love to her, feeling the familiar hollows and ridges of her. And all the time, as he did it, he was aware as if he was contemplating some magical photographic negative, guiltily and delightedly, of Hannah’s silvery curves above and beneath and all around him.