by Voss, Louise
‘I’ll be fine.’
It began to snow again during the journey back to the hotel. Thick white flakes batted the windscreen and the van tyres slipped on the road, several times. Karl didn’t say that he was concerned, but he leaned further forwards on his seat. Several times his hand twitched towards the windscreen as if he wanted to brush the snow away faster than the wipers were, but then remembered it was on the other side of the glass.
He seemed much tenser than he had done the other day when he brought me back down the mountain. Although he had the sort of ruddy complexion which never paled, his cheeks looked a little blotchy.
‘I will stop and put the chains on, if the snow worsens,’ he said in his precise voice.
‘Worsens’. That was an odd word. I remember Gordana getting stuck with it once. It was when Ivan and I were first together; probably one of the first times I’d ever met her. She’d been frowning at a tube of some kind of antiseptic cream – Germolene, or something similar. ‘“If rash occurs, or worsens, cease application”,’ she’d read out loud. ‘What are worsens?’
Ivan had laughed at her, and I saw rage flare briefly into her cheeks as she glanced at me and then away. Gordana hated anyone to think of her as a fool – not that I did, of course. It was a perfectly understandable mistake, especially if English was not your first language.
‘This is the second time you have rescued me,’ I said, trying to sound light-hearted when it felt as though someone had filled my chest cavity with lead. ‘Wish you’d been out on the mountain with us. Perhaps I wouldn’t have caused the collision then.’
‘Caused it?’ said Karl. ‘What do you mean?’
‘It was my fault,’ I said miserably, looking away from him out of the window. But I couldn’t see anything except snow swirling out of darkness and the occasional yellowy wobble of headlights from on-coming vehicles. ‘I fell over because there was a snowboarder coming up fast behind me, and he swerved to avoid me and crashed into Rachel.’
Karl shook his head. ‘Not your fault, then. On the mountain, you are only responsible for the person in front of you. The person behind you is their own responsibility. It was the snowboarder’s fault.’
‘Thanks,’ I said.
Karl shrugged. ‘No need to thank me. It’s the rules.’
I still felt wretched, however. Perhaps where Rachel was concerned, my default emotion was one of guilt and self-recrimination. What would a life coach advise for that? I had absolutely no clue.
We were silent for the rest of the journey. Karl kept glancing anxiously across at me, but I just couldn’t summon up the energy to make small talk. I wished I’d stayed at the hospital. I was a terrible, terrible mother.
Even if I didn’t cause the accident, I had abandoned Rachel – again! – when she needed me.
Chapter 24
Susie
We eventually made it back to the hotel at eight o’clock, and I hauled myself laboriously out of the minibus in my borrowed blue scrubs and undone ski boots, the only footwear available to me. I left them in the boot room and padded up the stairs to the elevator and bar area, feeling as if I’d aged about twenty years since the previous day. I could hear the laughter and chat of the rest of the group in the dining room; they didn’t have a care in the world. I felt a sudden, unwarranted resentment towards them. In fact, I never wanted to see any of them ever again, nor ever strap a ski to my foot again either. This holiday couldn’t have been more of a disaster.
‘Your group is having dinner. Do you want to join them?’
I’d rather saw my own arm off with a rusty breadknife, I thought. ‘No, I won’t, thanks. I’m going to hit my room and have a long bath and then I think I’m just going to bed. Thanks so much, Karl, for everything.’
As I waited for the interminably slow bath to fill, I bit the bullet and called Gordana to tell her what had happened. She was out, so I spoke to Ted, for which I was, afterwards, grateful. He was so calm, where Gordana would have been hysterical. He just got the facts and the information he needed, with no implied judgement or apportioning of blame. He sounded so sad, though, sort of weary and resigned. He said he and Gordana would ring Rachel at the hospital, thanked me for phoning, took my number at the hotel, and said how much he was looking forward to seeing me when I came over. We must both come and stay with them when we got back, he said.
Gordana was so lucky to have him, I thought later as I lay in the bath, bubbles up to my drooping eyelids, the scent of cheap hotel bath foam in my nostrils (not particularly nice, but better than the smell of the hospital). Bet Ted would never run off with a PhD student. He was devoted to Gordana, even though she could be difficult at times…
Tears of self-pity and exhaustion slid down my cheeks into the bath and I cried until all the bubbles had subsided around me. At least crying was better than the alternative though, which would be to make some ill-advised and extortionately expensive telephone call to Kansas, in the hope of a few nuggets of sympathy from my cheating son-of-a-bitch fiancé …I had to retain at least some pride. Plus, if I rang him now, he’d know what a disaster the holiday was, thus defeating the object.
In the end, as the water chilled around me and the hot tap refused to yield anything warmer than tepid, I told myself not to be so self-pitying. The holiday could, actually, have been far more disastrous.
Rachel could have been permanently paralysed, or even killed, but she would – eventually – be fine. Ted had been lovely on the phone, and I’d got away with not having to speak to Ivan, or even Gordana. I hated the thought of upsetting Gordana. Everyone here had been so nice, especially that Karl.
I fell asleep. When I awoke, some time later, so disoriented by the sound of the extractor fan in the bathroom that I thought I was still on the aeroplane, my fingers had turned into prunes and I was covered in gooseflesh. I let out the bath, dried myself perfunctorily, staggered over to the bed, and climbed into the cold sheets, shivering violently before falling back asleep again. Sleeping was the easiest way to resist the temptation to call Billy.
I had hoped to sleep until the next morning, but hunger woke me a second time, at almost half past midnight. I tried to ignore it, but it was like trying to ignore my grief at Billy’s affair – impossible. I realized I hadn’t eaten anything not out of a vending machine since the bowl of pasta e fagioli soup Rachel and I had shared at noon thirty-six hours ago, in one of the restaurants by the side of the nursery slope.
I couldn’t do anything about Billy leaving me, but at least there was an easy solution to the problem of my stomach rumbling. I got up and searched my room for something to eat, but there was nothing, not even the half-finished fruit bar I’d thought I had in my carry-on bag from the flight. I pulled on a sweatshirt, jogging bottoms and ski socks and made my way cautiously downstairs, thinking that if anyone was still in the bar, I might have to run back up to my room and put on some make-up.
Ridiculous, but there it was. I was so hungry that I could puke, and yet I still balked at being observed, by a bunch of semi-strangers I’d never see again, without my mascara and foundation on? I berated myself for my vain foolishness.
Luckily, when I got downstairs, the hotel bar was dark and quiet, with just a soft yellow landing light burning in the reception area. I hoped they didn’t lock the kitchen at night. I was just heading towards the dining room to find out when a voice called my name.
I jumped guiltily. It was Karl, standing in the darkened doorway of the bar, smiling at me.
‘I was just about to go to bed. Your group are the lightweights,’ he said. ‘Usually the groups stay up drinking till quite late. Are you all right?’
‘I’m really hungry,’ I said, looking apologetically at him with my bare, un-made-up face. But to my relief, I found I didn’t care as much as I’d thought I would. In fact, I didn’t care at all. ‘Are there any peanuts or snacks behind the bar? Or could I make myself a sandwich in the kitchen?’
Karl slapped his head in an exaggerated way. ‘
Of course, I should have thought,’ he said. ‘You must be starving. I will get you something. Please wait. Sit in here.’
He ushered me through to the bar, which was in darkness except for embers glowing in the huge fireplace. I appreciated the fact that he didn’t switch on the overhead lights. After the artifice of the hospital, the fake air, unnatural chemical smells and harsh strip lights – it was relaxing to sit in the soft darkness of an empty bar, so recently inhabited by the gossip and chatter of people who’d put their cares behind them for a week of escape in the mountains. It seemed strange that Rach and I had, up until today, been two of those people.
‘I will give you a brandy to drink while I get you some food,’ Karl announced, slipping behind the bar and pushing a large glass hard up against an optic. I didn’t argue. I leaned back into the squashy leather cube armchair nearest the fire, feeling it envelop me like a hug.
‘Thanks,’ I said as Karl brought over the glass and I took a mouthful, calmed by the bronze burning in my throat. I leaned back and put my feet up on the stone hearth.
The fireplace was vast; able to accommodate five or six crouching men. The grate had wrought-iron dragon heads at each corner, which I hadn’t noticed the night I’d been in there before, even though I’d been gazing into the flames then. It was a very medieval-looking fireplace, but somehow fitted with the seventies appearance of the rest of the bar. I closed my eyes, although the brandy had cleared the sleep out of my head, rather than further befuddling it.
When I opened them again, Karl had left the room and I was alone. The only movement around me was the snow, still falling thick and steady against the windows, and the occasional faint crash of burned logs in the grate as they collapsed into ashes. I was still tired, but not sleepy. It was twelve-forty-five, so what would that be in Kansas? About dinnertime, I calculated. I hoped Audrey had remembered to feed the cats. Billy would probably know by now that I’d gone away. I’d hoped that I’d swan back again – assuming I decided to go back – full of confidence and rediscovered joie de vivre, a tanned face with white goggles marks and newly-taut thighs, and casually drop into the conversation that I’d just been skiing in Italy.
I hadn’t wanted him offering to keep an eye on things. I’d changed the locks, anyway, so that when he found out I was in Europe, he and Eva wouldn’t be able to sneak in and use the sauna or sleep in our bed.
Not that I really thought he’d be that mean. I hated hating him. It felt so alien to me. How can you suddenly hate somebody for whom you’ve had nothing but love for nine whole years? It was easier to hate Eva – although, rationally, I doubted that it was any less her fault than his.
I wondered how it had started between them. She was an academic. He most definitely wasn’t. Perhaps she’d brought her car into his garage to be fixed.
Perhaps all he was to her was a bit of rough, a minor distraction from the stress of writing papers on existentialism or whatever. Had Audrey said she was doing a PhD in philosophy? I couldn’t remember. Maybe it was geology, or anthropology.
She’d get bored of him, I thought, as I’d thought on many occasions. The novelty would wear off …
But what if I was wrong; what if she didn’t? Worse – what if he asked her to marry him, and they didn’t wait like we had, but plunged right on in there?
Perhaps that was all he’d ever wanted: a bride-to-be who wasn’t afraid to set the date? I felt a terrible lurch of anguish. Perhaps he’d been trying to tell me this, and I hadn’t been listening.
‘Are you all right? What are you thinking about?’
Karl reappeared, bearing a large plate of ham and cheese, three bread rolls, and some pickled beetroot in a bowl.
‘I am not sure how brandy and beetroot will mix together,’ he added, ‘but it is the only salad I could find left in the kitchen. It seems your group dislikes late nights and beetroot.’
I smiled. ‘Thanks, um, Karl. That looks great.’ I had planned to ignore his previous question, but something about the way he was looking at me, with those sandy eyebrows and kind face, made me want to talk.
And eat, of course, but I could do both. Multi-tasking, didn’t they call it?
‘I was just thinking about my partner. My soon-to-be ex-partner, I suppose. He met another woman. They’re living together – well, I think they are. At the moment I hate them. Or at least I’m really trying to, because it seems like the easiest thing to do. I didn’t even see it coming.’
I blushed, but now I’d started, I couldn’t stop. In between mouthfuls of the rolls I filled with cheese and beetroot, I carried on. It was easier to talk about Billy than it was to talk about Rachel. (Funny, I thought, how when Rach was here, it was easier to talk about anything else except Billy …) Karl uncapped a beer and swigged thoughtfully at it, coming over to perch himself on the low stone hearth, while he watched me eat and listened to me talk. He didn’t say anything, but every time I stopped to draw breath or chew – once, I made the mistake of doing both simultaneously, and had to take a big swig of brandy. Karl got me a refill immediately – he’d nod and frown sympathetically, urging me to continue with subtle encouragement. His legs were long and solid, chunky like a lumberjack’s. He wore rumpled cords and a baggy sweater, and I half expected him to extract a pipe from his trouser pocket. But he just propped one leg up on to the hearth and continued to listen.
I told him everything, right back to when Billy and I first got together, and further: I told him about Ivan, and how screwed up he was, and impossible to live with. I even confessed that our sex life had dwindled into nothing by the time Rachel was at school …something I hadn’t ever admitted to anyone before, because it always somehow felt like a failing on my part. Billy and I had been fine in that department; right up to when Eva came on the scene. And I told him how I’d never really been able to settle, because I didn’t feel I belonged wholly either in England or Kansas.
I talked a lot about Gordana, and how she could be difficult, prickly and too strong-minded, but that she loved Rachel and Ivan so deeply. Their success was largely down to her ambition for them, some of which they had inherited from her, some of which was manifest in the way she’d pushed them. I had so much respect for her.
I did end up telling him about Rachel, too; how her career was successful – but not successful enough for any of them, neither for her, nor for Ivan, nor Gordana.
‘If I was the eighth best tennis player in the country,’ I said, trying to wipe beetroot stains off my fingers on to a paper napkin, ‘I really think I’d be so pleased. I mean – out of all the millions of people in the world! I think that’s awesome. But then that’s probably why I don’t do anything competitive. I just don’t have that drive, not like they do. Rach isn’t as…hard about it as Ivan and Gordana are, but she still wants it, so badly. She was so close to her big break, I know she was. But not this sort of a break….’
I had to stop and turn away, so Karl couldn’t see the emotion on my face. Snow was still brushing fatly against the windows. It looked beige and benign, so far from cold that I’d have been surprised to go outside and feel its chill against my face.
‘She’s on the verge of real success, we’re all sure she is,’ I said, reverting to the present tense because telling Karl that Rachel ‘was’ so close to success just seemed so defeatist. ‘It’s all she’s ever wanted, since she was tiny. She’s worked so hard for it, for years and years and years. And now, one split second’s bad timing on a mountain, it could all be over…’
I gritted my back teeth, willing myself not to cry. I really didn’t want Karl to see me cry.
‘Is it really what she has always wanted? Or is it what her father and her grandmother wanted?’ Karl asked, diplomatically ignoring my battle with composure. I was grateful for that – the slightest hint of solicitude and I’d have collapsed in a weeping, dribbling heap on the floor.
‘Both,’ I said. I wished I could have blamed Ivan, claimed that he pushed her to want it and work for it the way she had,
but I couldn’t. Rachel wanted it just as much. If anything, Ivan was threatened by Rachel’s success. He couldn’t bear the thought that she might get further than he had. I told Karl this, and he smiled faintly.
‘Men have much pride,’ he commented, leaning back against the side of the fireplace. ‘My brother-in-law cannot stand it when my sister beats him at Monopoly.’
Good grief, I thought, how rude of me. I’ve been banging on for hours about my life, and I haven’t asked him anything about his. I so hated it when people did that to me.
‘So how come you ended up here living with your sister and her husband?’ I asked, rather too bluntly. I’d hardly seen anything of them, actually, only when we’d checked in, and when his sister had changed a dead lightbulb in our room. She looked like Karl: tall and blonde and pleasant.
Karl merely smiled and rolled himself a cigarette. He lit it, and the sweet smell of the smoke reminded me of Billy. ‘I would like to tell you about that another time,’ he said. ‘If you don’t mind, of course. For now, I am interested in Billy and Ivan and Gordana. Tell me some more.’
So I continued to talk, and Karl continued to listen, his head on one side, his eyes half closed although I could tell he was taking it all in. I kept thinking of Rachel on her own in a strange hospital, but I let my words brush away the image. I told him about our life in Kansas; and about why I’d moved back there a second time – as far as I could even articulate it. I told him about my idea of training to be life coach – ‘if they’ll have me,’ I said miserably. ‘I’m not exactly a good example, am I?’
Karl waved his beer bottle at me reproachfully. ‘You must not say that. In fact, to be a good life coach you must be sympathetic with the experiences of others. You have had many life-changing experiences lately. These will benefit you, not hinder you.’
He was so nice. Not that I wanted to compare, but neither Ivan nor Billy would ever have said anything like that. Ivan was too self-obsessed and Billy too oblivious.
