by Jane Arbor
But that, Juliet claimed to Wilhelm and the others, was her problem and she would beat it—or else! Armed with her list of prospects and a case of samples, she would take to the road as the School's traveller, and she was in the stockroom early one morning, deciding what to take from it, when there was a knock at the house door and her glance from the stockroom window showed Karl Adler's car standing outside.
So! What did he want this time? Surely not -?
Her thoughts had flown to Magda's insistence that he had really meant his invitation to her to ski, and a second peep at his car showed that his gear was indeed on board.
Really! As she went to open to him it was with mixed feelings of annoyance and a little prickle of excitement which she could not explain.
'Good morning.'
'Good morning.' He was so tall that he had to stoop to enter. 'We had a date. For a day's skiing. You'll remember?' he asked of her silence and her raised eyebrows as she stood aside for him.
'It wasn't a date,' she said. 'We made no arrangements.'
'Then, if you like, one of my manufactured opportunities for battle of which I warned you.'
'If it was that -! Anyway, I'm working.'
'On a Saturday? Well, I'm not. I'm on a pleasant errand of introducing Frau Use Krantz to the Baronin, to their common advantage, I hope. May I use your telephone?'
The question was so abrupt and matter of fact that she waved him to the instrument as she would have done any caller who needed to use it. With his finger on the dial he looked over his shoulder to remark, 'I'm ringing the Schloss to let the Baronin know we are as good as on our way '
Juliet darted forward. 'You can't do that! I !'
But he had got his connection and was giving his message to someone. He rang off and said, 'That's that, then. You're committed.' With a hand on her back he made to propel her to the door of what he knew to be her bedroom. But she resisted and faced round.
'I have no skiing things any longer. I sold them to the ski-master's shop, the last time I was up at Innsgort, the day we '
'The day I didn't make the grade because you prefer to picnic alone, and you had brought only food for one? Well, this time there's a lunch hamper for two in the car. And if it helps any generous conscience you may have, you can always tell yourself you are abetting me in spending a day in which I have nothing better to do with my time. So go and get kitted up. There's no problem about skiing gear. You can hire for the day. I'll give you ten minutes, and I'll wait for you in the car.'
Why did she obey him? To avoid an undignified contradiction of his message to the Schloss, she told herself. But her honesty knew there was more to it than that.
If she had sent him away there would be something lacking from her solitary day. Her hands and her surface mind would have been busy with her work. But there would have been undercurrents of regret for having missed the cut-and-thrust of contention at which, given the openings, she believed she could be as ready- tongued as he. Missed the staircase wit, as it was called —the retorts with which you might have confounded your enemy, if they hadn't occurred to you too late. Well, she wasn't going to be at the mercy of their nagging. If he provoked her—and he would! —they were coming out.
Besides, the snow scene called—diamond sparkle, blue shadows, sugar coating of snow upon roofs, infinite silence and contrasting burn of sun to bite of wind. Juliet pulled on a thick sweater, got into boots and an anorak and went out to the car.
Strangely and to her relief, easy conversation did not prove too difficult. They drew each other's attention to the scenery. Karl asked her how well she skied and how often during the season she had made the trip to the slopes. He didn't know Innsgort well himself, he said, but seemed to have visited most of the more famous resorts of the Alpine region.
During their silences and while he talked with his eyes on the road ahead, she covertly watched his hands on the wheel, admiring his effortless control of the car in the difficult terrain, and thinking how this might have been for them, if he hadn't been related to Gerhard Minden, or if anything about their involuntary connection had been other than it was.
They might have met and talked, have found a common interest in skiing. If Karl had invited her today she would have known he genuinely wanted her company, not because, as he had taunted, he had nothing better to do. And if she had accepted there would have been a tacit agreement between them that if they enjoyed the day's talk and action and togetherness, there could be other such occasions for them.
But there wouldn't be. There was no reward to indulging the fantasy that any thread of awareness of each other ran between them. For it didn't. Yet why should her gaze be fascinated by the sight of his hands, or her imagination want to toy with the thought of their touch upon her own in real friendship? Why, in his dry smile, did she wish she could glimpse a trace of warmth for her, or in his questions a genuine need to know her better? And why, in heaven's name, considering her avowed hostility to him, should she be harbouring any thought of him as a man she could be drawn to, if only--?
Within sight of the little village of Innsgort across the last valley, he drew the car off the road, saying, 'It's early for lunch, but we may as well get it over, so that we can go straight up to the slopes when we arrive.'
On his knees on the springy turf, he opened the hamper, spread a cloth and anchored it with stones. He handed Juliet cutlery and plates and glasses to set out, produced a jar of pate, unwrapped napkins containing sausage and rolled wafers of ham and hard-boiled eggs and sliced rye bread, took crisp sauerkraut and butter from insulated containers, and leaving her to arrange these, opened a bottle of Riesling.
He raised his glass.'Prosit—Juliet,' he said, making almost an afterthought of her name.
'Prosit? she toasted in return, but couldn't bring herself to the false familiarity of 'Karl'.
She found she was hungry enough to enjoy both the food and the wine, and she commented lightly on his expertise in picnic menus.
It proved dangerous ground. 'Hm. Calls for a modicum of experience,' he allowed. 'But unlike you, I believe in catering for at least two varying palates, and though some women need more persuasion than others, I don't often find myself left to eat alone.'
It was both a provocative assertion of his self- assurance and another tilt at her initial rebuff of him, and she was convinced he had deliberately evoked the embarrassed blush she couldn't control.
He parked the car at the Sport Hotel in the village and they went on foot to the ski-school and shop, where Juliet was kitted out with hired skis and boots and hand-poles. They took the cable-car to the medium slopes and sat outside the snack-restaurant to don their skis.
Juliet's were taken peremptorily from her and strapped and adjusted before Karl attended to his own. Watching him bent over both tasks, she was conscious again of a physical attraction which, if things were to be different between them, she wouldn't have wanted to resist.
Goggled and ready, they set out a few metres apart. But the paths they took soon diverged; presently Karl was a speeding figure, as much a stranger as all the other brightly clad human dots on the slopes and, speeding herself, she was thrilled as always by the essential 'aloneness' and self-reliance of the sport; to be one in competition with this delicious God-given element, warmed by sun and buffeted by wind, was achievement, she felt.
At the foot of the slopes Karl was waiting for her, circling to meet her near the drag-lift which would take them back up. When one was free they braced themselves against its T-bar, and he supported her with an arm about her waist, as closely linked as to a sweetheart, though she felt, with as little awareness of her body, necessarily pressed to his, as if he were toting an insensate parcel up the hill.
They went down the slopes several times, then he tried the marked-out slalom course while she rested. Rejoining her at the end of his run, he asked, 'Do you venture the high slopes at all? If so, should we make them our grand finale?'
Juliet nodded her agreement and w
ent with him to the car which would take them to the top run. She usually kept to these slopes but had occasionally used the higher ones, and guessed that he wouldn't execute his 'grand finale' if she didn't go too.
Up there it was like being on top of the world. At that late hour of the afternoon they had been the only passengers in the car and had watched the whole scene dwindle almost to nothing before them—human figures to pinpoints, cars to matchbox size and the village to a huddle of dolls' houses grouped round the pencil spire of the church.
Out on the piste with the long steep run before them, Juliet was seized with sudden panic. Supposing she couldn't do it? Made a fool of herself by falling, which for nuisance value had more threat to her pride than the dramatic risk of a broken limb? There was a prickle of apprehension at the base of her spine—no mood in which to set out, she knew, but in a spirit of bravado she went, croaking 'Ready!' to Karl before he called it to her.
He let her go first and did not overtake and pass her until she was smoothly running, her fears forgotten. This was the life! She found she was humming Edelweiss.
After a few hundred metres there was a slight upward gradient which broke her speed; then she was spinning down again ... then up, changing direction slightly ... then down, down, down, now and again seeing Karl ahead of her. He had suggested that as it was their last run, they should ski right down to the village, instead of taking the cable-car down from the medium slopes, arid it was with a sense of heady achievement that she took the last steep drop above the activity about the car-stand. She was going to bypass it, and after that it would all be easy...
Karl must have paused and waited for her at some point on the run, for now, at some distance away, he was level with her, and it was as he drew ahead again that things began to go wrong for her.
Watching him, she hadn't been concentrating. She had straightened her knees, made a mis-thrust with her poles and her skis were sliding ominously apart, out of control at the speed she was making. There were levels ahead, but she wasn't going to reach them with dignity or any kind of skill. She was going to crash, do an ignominious somersault if no worse—and then, suddenly she wasn't, as Karl, speeding at an angle into her path, was there to take her full weight against the hard unyielding mass of his body. Less skilled than he was, he could have brought them both down in a dangerous flailing of skis and limbs. But as it was, they both kept their feet as he steadied her with both arms so closely round her that as she pulled off her goggles to look up at him she could hardly bring his face into focus.
What she saw in the blue eyes was neither sympathy nor the derision she deserved, but anger. He almost shook her as he released her. 'Why, in pity's name, couldn't you admit you had never done the high run before?' he demanded. 'By the way you tackled that last slope, you might never have left the nursery!'
'I didn't lie! I have come down from the top before,' she blazed back at him. 'I managed the rest all right. It was just that I lost concentration for a moment, and— well, it could happen to anyone any time,' she finished lamely.
His grim nod agreed. 'As you say, any time—but could be once too often for the "anyone" of a tyro on a gradient like that.'
Almost choking with chagrin, 'I am not a tyro!' she denied.
'Well, you were acting like one when I came up with you—near to panic and without a clue.'
'And if you hadn't come up with me, I'd have taken a toss that would have been my own fault—and so what?'
'Perhaps,' he said carefully, 'it would be better if we didn't go too closely into "what". And no'—as she pulled down her raised goggles—'if you don't mind, we'll get out of our gear here and go down to the village by the car. Unless of course you are bent on doing an exhibition run, though I'd rather you didn't, on the whole.'
Juliet was tempted to defy him and refuse to go down by the car. But that meant discussing a meeting- time at the hotel, and for the moment she found parley with him about anything quite impossible.
They were separated in the cable-car which was full. Juliet returned her hired things to the shop. At the snack-bar above, Karl had suggested soup, and at the hotel, tea. But she had refused both, and it was not until they had taken to the road again in almost complete silence that she began to see her dudgeon as slightly ridiculous.
She had reacted to his scathing criticism as if she really cared about his opinion of her. But how could it matter that, on this one day which wouldn't be repeated, he had dubbed her roundly as foolhardy and a rotten skier? It didn't, of course. They had a great deal weightier issues at stake between them in the tomorrows ahead. Added to which, the hag of knowing that he had saved her from a disaster which she might not have been able to dismiss with an airy 'So what?' and the prospect of their having to share two hours more of icy withdrawal brought her first to a casual comment on the scenery, and then to the admission,
'You were right. I was being careless, and I was beginning to panic at the prospect of crashing.' But if she expected him to acknowledge her amend with grace, she was disappointed.
He said, 'Just as well to admit it. Six weeks or so of a limb in plaster for the sake of showing off can hardly be anyone's idea of hilarious fun.'
'I was not showing off!'
'Would you rather I suspected you were playing for a dramatic rescue by some knight-errant of the ice?'
'Don't be absurd. There was no one near me!'
‘I was near you,' he observed mildly. 'Used you to ski with Gerhard?'
'At first. Later he wasn't fit enough.'
'You would have come up here to Innsgort for the day?'
'It's too far for a small car, there and back, in a day. We usually stayed overnight, at the weekend.'
'Where?'
'At the hotel.'
'Chastely in separate rooms, one trusts?'
The irony in his tone enraged her. Indignantly she matched it with, 'No! We always booked the honeymoon suite and laid on an orgy until dawn!'
For a split second his silence allowed her to think he believed her. Then he commented, 'That's a pretty acid sense of humour you have, Juliet Harmon. Doesn't it ever land you in trouble with your friends?'
'Only,' she raged, 'when trouble has been made for me. Traps laid, doubt of my word, biting sarcasm! You know perfectly well,-for I've told you, that Gerhard and I were never lovers; that there was nothing of —of that sort between us; that I had no idea he cared for me until '
'Until you couldn't shut your eyes any longer to his need of you? You worked with him, played, drove, talked—but you didn't want to know, did you? Or if it's true that you didn't, what kind of ice are you made of? Do you ask me to believe that a girl can't sense a man's feelings about her, long before he spells them out?'
'Of some men she can know them. Of others, not.'
'Gerhard, you claim, being one of the "others"?'
'Yes. He was reserved, withdrawn... close.'
'And the "some men" who are so many open books —how many have you known?'
'One or two.'
'Interesting. And into which category would you put me, for example? Does the pricking of your intuitive thumbs tell you all that I think about you?'
Looking fixedly ahead, 'I hardly need to use my intuition on that, do I?' Juliet queried. You've made your opinion of me very clear.'
He greeted that with a short laugh. 'As if I couldn't guess you would count me among your transparent "one or two"! Predictable, overbearing, tasteless '
'Not always predictable.''
'Come, that's something!' he mocked.
'But always consistent in your measurement of me as someone you feel you should despise—and do, most of the time.'
'And when I'm not actively expressing my contempt—what then?'
She turned her head slowly. 'That's where I don't understand you. Why, having judged me for what you think I am, you don't leave me severely alone. Today, for instance—this masquerade of our being friends. It was ridiculously artificial, and we're as much at odds now
as we were before. So why?'
'You appeared to accept the reason I gave you—that it seemed a good way of spending an empty day.'
'Mine needn't have been empty.'
'But you came along.'
'You gave me no chance to refuse before you were ringing the Schloss to tell Magda it was settled that we were going.'
'Big Bad Wolf carrying off reluctant Maiden? You know perfectly well you'd have regretted refusing, if you had.'
'I should not.’ But remembering her moment of truth while she had been changing, she felt her colour rise as she made the denial and knew that his swift glance along his shoulder had noted it.
He said calmly, 'You lie about as ineptly as you attempt feeble jokes. You know you'd have hated missing the chance to wither me with argument. A whole day in my company from which you'd let me emerge unscathed by your tongue? Perish the thought!'
Juliet gave up. Her dignity demanded it. 'If you've decided that this is why I came, then there's nothing more to be said,' she stated.
'And if that wasn't your reason for coming, what was? I'll do my best to believe you—if I can.'
But she scorned to answer that, and left him to conclude what he would from her silence which, as the powerful car ate up the miles, was only broken by either of them later with a cursory remark or two on the state of the road or the distance yet to be covered.
