Mrs Caliban and other stories

by Rachel Ingalls

  ‘You were the one. You didn’t like mine. I’m sorry. I thought it was so nice. And I actually do like it better. But I want the one you chose for me. Don’t you understand?’

  He said yes, he did. And they gave back their scarves on the way out, so that instead of having what they liked and being unhappy about it, they were happy despite not liking what they had.

  After Christmas the whole village filled up fast. They’d been lucky to get in quickly and rent the skis. Every pair in the place had now been claimed by someone. There were people standing in line and looking at their watches for skis to become free. The night-life too speeded up. The frozen alleyways were full of partygoers on their way to and from the taverns. There was singing in the evenings; you could hear voices calling across the snow, laughter from all the doorways as people burst from lighted interiors into the cold night air and the whiteness of the snow that retained its shine even in the dark.

  The best hotel down in the village was the Adler. It also had a good restaurant, very large, and a beer cellar. A painted wooden eagle hung over the doorway and everything inside was cheerful and spotless. You could tell it was the kind of place that would have geraniums in windowboxes when the weather turned warmer. They went there twice for dinner. On the second evening, just as they were leaving, a voice called out in English, ‘Bev – hey, Bev-er-ley!’

  She turned around. She didn’t know for a moment which face to look at. Someone was waving at her. She stepped forward. And there was Angela, a friend from school, with five other American college kids all her age. It was unexpected; until that moment it had been unthinkable to Beverley that both her lives, one on either side of the Atlantic, should suddenly join up. She felt strongly that although she had always liked her fairly well, Angela should really have stayed in America.

  ‘Hi, Beverley.’

  ‘Hi, Ange. What a surprise.’

  Angela quickly introduced the other friends: Darell, Tom, Mimi, Liza and Rick.

  Beverley had to introduce Claus.

  ‘Sit down,’ Angela said. ‘Join us for a beer.’ She looked at Claus invitingly. Beverley spoke to him in German, saying that they had to meet friends: didn’t he remember?

  ‘Gee,’ Angela said, ‘you sure can rattle it off, can’t you?’

  ‘Sort of,’ she said. If you couldn’t speak another language after a year in bed with a foreigner, you might as well give up. ‘Where are you staying?’ she asked.

  ‘Here.’

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘Another week.’

  ‘I’ll be in touch,’ Beverley said. ‘Tonight I’m afraid we’ve got to meet some people.’ She headed towards the door again. Claus followed. When they were outside, he asked her why she hadn’t wanted to stay.

  She tried to explain: about the way it was back home, the gossip, everything. To run around on European vacations with your friends and probably – like rich Angela – be fooling around with all of them, was one thing; but to be falsely registered in a hotel as the wife of a foreign man ten years older than you were, was another. Nobody at home would understand. It wasn’t the way people behaved there.

  ‘I bet it is,’ he said. ‘I bet they do it all the time, like everywhere else.’

  ‘But certain things are illegal. In the state I come from it’s even illegal to buy a contraceptive if it’s for preventing pregnancy. You can only get them on the excuse that they’re to prevent venereal disease. It’s all to do with religion. It’s supposed to be a country with a secular government, but all the laws about sex assume it’s something bad. Unless it really is bad; if it’s rape, you need two independent witnesses to prove it. I just don’t know that I want to spend all our holiday drinking beer with those people, do you?’

  ‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘Why are you so upset?’

  She put her arm around him and said she wasn’t upset. But he was right, she realized. She hated it that the others had discovered her secret, happy life.

  *

  The next day, after lunch, he told her that he wanted to try one of the high slopes and get a good run down the mountainside.

  ‘I asked Lupus about the timing, but it depends on the snow. I may be a little late. You could go see your friends at the Adler, if you like.’

  ‘I’ll wait at the room for you,’ she said.

  ‘It was nearly dark when he came in. He was laughing. He stripped off his clothes, wrapped himself in a towel and went across the hall to the bathroom, where they had an enormous tub as big as a bed.

  He’d fallen several times. She gathered that it had actually been very dangerous, and there wouldn’t have been anybody else around if he’d been seriously injured.

  ‘Look,’ he said, picking his ski pants up off the chair. ‘They’re all ripped. That’s my only pair, too. I’ll have to ski in my suit.’

  ‘I’ll sew them,’ she offered. She got out the pocket sewing kit she’d bought because it looked pretty. The only things in it she’d ever used were the safety pins, although everything was there: needles, thread, a few buttons and a thimble. She sat on the chair and sewed up the long tear in the material while he changed his clothes.

  ‘It isn’t very straight,’ she said. The stitches were large, the sewing like that of a child. The mend resembled a badly healed wound. But Claus was delighted. ‘As long as it holds together,’ he told her, and she felt proud of herself.

  At supper he said he thought that the next day he’d try the neighbouring run.

  ‘Are you sure it’s OK?’ she asked. ‘If it’s so risky, and there isn’t anybody else around? You could break a leg.’

  ‘Doctors don’t break things. It’s like lawyers – they never go to law.’

  ‘Lawyers can choose. They don’t do it, because they know what it costs. Anybody can break a leg.’

  ‘Will you mind being alone down here?’

  ‘No, that’s all right.’

  ‘You could go up the mountain to the other hotels.’

  ‘I could even go to the really fancy place, couldn’t I? They probably don’t let anyone in that isn’t a guest.’

  ‘They’d let you into everything except the hotel, I think. That’s a good idea. I wouldn’t mind going up there, too. You can tell me what it’s like. I just want to get some real exercise first. You never know what the weather might do.’

  She said all right: she’d go up to the big hotel the next day.

  *

  A man who worked one of the ski lifts pointed out the right road to her. She was glad of her good German, which was perfectly understood even where the populace spoke more Italian and had grown up with a local language that hadn’t mixed with other European tongues since shortly after Roman times. She had heard fellow Americans asking directions in English and having a spate of the home-grown dialect loosed off at them.

  She bought a chocolate bar to eat later, instead of lunch, with a cup of coffee. She’d become almost addicted to a particular kind of milk chocolate that had pieces of nougat baked into it. The bar was triangle-shaped and each wedge a triangle when broken off.

  She had a quiet ride up. The cable car was large, painted a dark green. There were three other people travelling with her – a young boy who carried a pair of skates, and an old couple, very well-dressed. The woman was carefully made-up, her fur coat looked soft and bushy, her fur-trimmed boots were the kind you wore for sitting down on the observation platform rather than trudging through the snow. Her husband’s coat had an astrakhan collar that matched the hat he wore. The cane he held between his knees was topped by a silver knob worked to resemble a piece of wood with knots in it. Both man and woman looked as if they belonged up at the top of the mountain, at the luxury hotel: Beverley wondered why they had gone down to the valley at all. They began to speak quickly in a language she couldn’t place.

  She looked out of the windows at the blazing white plains and fields, the long swoop of drifts that ran from the crests to a point where the line of the mountainside shot out int
o infinity. The boy started to whistle and kicked the wall near his seat.

  When they arrived at the top, there was a delay. They hung where they had stopped, the doors remaining shut. The old couple stood up to look. Beverley and the boy were already on their feet.

  They could see two stretchers being carried by, the bodies each covered with a white sheet and red blanket; then a third, and the person being carried was fighting to throw the covers off. As the stretcher-bearers hurried past a hand flung away the blanket and Beverley caught a glimpse of a head entirely red, the crown looking as if it had been cut by an axe, and the mouth open but not producing a sound. She shut her eyes and put her head down. She could hear the old couple murmuring to each other in their own language; they sounded strangely casual, as if the vision hadn’t caused them much concern. Perhaps they hadn’t seen so much; perhaps their eyesight wasn’t very good any more.

  When the doors finally opened, she’d forgotten about coffee and the hotel and everything. She thought she’d like to sit down and drink a beer and try to wipe away the memory of the man who’d been hurt. It might even have been a woman – you couldn’t tell much from a head and face so badly injured. But she had a feeling it had been a man. And she was sure that he wasn’t going to live.

  She began to plod along the snow-packed lanes to the centre of the village. Just as she was thinking of going into one of the taverns ahead, she came in view of the Hotel Miramar above and beyond her, shining like a castle at the top of the hill. She stood admiring it for a few seconds, then turned into a side street.

  She almost skidded on a patch of ice around the corner. Opposite her was a restaurant. She went in and sat down. The waiter was an old man with white hair and a white moustache. He didn’t think it unusual that she should order just a beer, alone, in the middle of the morning. A group of men in suits were seated around a table at the back; the place was obviously for locals, not for the foreign skiers. When the waiter brought the beer, she said, ‘As I came up, in the cable car, I saw a man. Has there been an accident? They were carrying people. Blood.’

  ‘Ah, the ice wall,’ he said. ‘We warn everybody, but they still have to try it, to prove how good they are.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s a wall of ice in the middle of the toboggan run. If you haven’t been braking and using your skill to turn at the corners, you go over the bank and into the wall. It’s solid ice.’

  ‘They were bleeding all over.’

  ‘Ice is very hard. Hard as stone. Hard as steel. The speeds you can achieve going downhill – fantastic.’

  ‘Does it happen a lot?’

  ‘Quite often, yes. We try to discourage people from going, but you can’t.’

  She began to drink her beer. He told her that there was another attraction, an ice maze, which was also popular but considerably less dangerous, as the walls were only about a metre high and the gradient not too steep; people used special puffy cushions to slide through it. Children loved it. It was one of the Miramar entertainments that was open to the public.

  She asked directions to the ice maze and the skating rink. When she was ready to leave, he came outside the door with her and pointed up the hillside.

  It was a long way up. She was out of breath by the time she started to climb the steps. And they were slippery, too. The handrail was coated with ice. She wondered what everything would look like in the summer, how different it would be. There were lakes in the neighbouring valleys; people would probably be lolling around in deck-chairs and trying to pick up a suntan. And the famous skating rink, she suddenly remembered, could be turned into a swimming pool. If Claus ever wanted to come back to the place in warmer weather, she’d be able to join him then up on the mountainside – not that she was an expert at hiking or rock-climbing either, but at least she could go for a long walk. Not knowing how to ski meant that their time was going to be divided. She hadn’t thought about that before they’d arrived.

  She bought a visitor’s ticket and stood by the side of the rink until she felt cold. She was too self-conscious to put on a pair of skates herself. It was all right to watch, but to get out and slide around all on your own would be futile. She couldn’t see anyone who was without a friend or relative. Claus was out on the slopes alone, but skiing was different. And he was a man; that made a difference, too.

  She managed to find a perfect place in the after-ski lounge, a small table next to the vast plate-glass window that overlooked the rink. She brought two cups of coffee to it, drank one, started on the first section of her chocolate bar and was about to break off another piece when she heard a voice saying, ‘Well, here you are again.’

  It was Angela. She sat down in the second chair. She was wearing a top-to-toe outfit made of some silvery, shiny material that looked as if it might have been designed for an astronaut. She pushed her dark glasses to the top of her head, undid the earphones of her Walkman and said it was great running into each other again.

  Civilization, Beverley thought, was what stopped people from telling someone like Angela to shove her earphones up her nose and get lost. ‘Been skiing?’ she asked.

  ‘Till I fell on my duff,’ Angela said.

  ‘Alone?’

  ‘No, the whole gang’s here. What about you? Got your Mr Gorgeous with you? Who is he?’

  ‘A friend,’ she said.

  ‘Some friend. He looks – you know. All those cheekbones and everything. Really European.’

  ‘He is European.’

  ‘I mean, like he looks. He looks European. You know?’

  ‘Sure,’ Beverley said. ‘Who-all are you with?’

  ‘Oh, just that bunch you saw the other night.’

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘Well, Liza went to school with me those last two years. Tom and Rick are in my class: economics and government studies. Then, Mimi and Darell – how can I describe them?’

  ‘Lovers?’

  ‘No, silly.’ She gave Beverley’s arm a coy little push. ‘Mimi and Darell are sort of in the group, except they actually didn’t quite make it. First of all they were too late, and then she started to have all these doubts. So they aren’t officially registered with the organization.’

  ‘What organization?’

  ‘The Fountain of Light.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘It’s our Christian fellowship foundation. We bring the culture and hope of the free world to–’

  Beverley removed the saucer covering her second cup of coffee.

  Angela’s expression became fixed and devout. She gabbled about ‘the word’, the need for real estate, ‘the light’ and the building of training centres; ‘the fountain’; the establishing of weekly lectures in notable beauty spots, the investment of cash in long-term plans for truth, light, love and a whole lot else, including medical research. Very few people outside the movement knew, she said, that vitamin intake was directly related to disorders of the personality. But some day there would be ‘detoxification clinics’ all over the world, where people could go to profit from the word.

  ‘To read?’

  ‘To resolve their vitamin imbalance, Bev. To reach God. We’d like to start up an education programme right here.’

  Beverley stopped listening and drank. For Angela to have turned out to be a run-of-the-mill brainless co-ed was bad enough. For her to be part of a maverick cult bringing fountains of light anywhere was worse, though possibly slightly more interesting. She said, ‘I don’t know how much luck you’ll have trying to give away culture and hope around here. I think they’re all Catholic going back centuries.’

  ‘But we all believe in God,’ Angela said.

  ‘Uh-huh. Did you see the accident? On the toboggan run?’

  ‘I heard about it. It sounded terrible.’

  ‘From après-ski to après-vie in two seconds flat.’

  ‘Beverley, don’t joke.’

  ‘I’m not joking. I saw them. It shook me up so much I had to go get myself a drink.’
>
  ‘You saw them? What was it like?’

  ‘Red. Red and trying to scream.’

  ‘I don’t want to hear.’

  You just want to ask about it, Beverley thought. She put down her coffee cup and said, ‘Have you ever seen the ice maze?’

  ‘Of course. It’s fun, if you can get into it. All the kids want to play there. It’s considered a children’s thing.’

  ‘But it must be dangerous, if it’s ice.’

  ‘They have these big pillows they ride on. About the size of a rubber raft. I haven’t heard it’s so dangerous. Want to try it?’

  ‘OK,’ Beverley said. ‘Just let me go to the ladies’ room.’

  The ladies’ room, only one of several in the building, was as full as an airline lavatory of free gift-wrapped soaps, bottles of cream and eau-de-cologne. Beverley took one of everything.

  They put on their outdoor clothes again and stepped out on to the long porch that ran the length of the lodge. Spectators sat in deck-chairs all along the railings. On the level above, indoors, there was an enclosed verandah for sunbathers, who lay basking behind glass walls and windows that let through the ultra-violet rays. There had been one year when the visitors had read magazine articles claiming that the ultra-violet was just the part of sunlight that caused skin cancers; and the numbers of sunbathers dropped dramatically. But the next year everyone had forgotten the scare. They wanted to be tanned again.

  Beverley followed Angela. As she walked, she thought about how strange it was to be up where all the swish hotels were and the moneyed people who went to places like that only because they wanted to have rooms with a specific look, or a certain kind of food in the dining-room and dry martinis at the bar. She passed one woman, an American, who was shouting, ‘Hector, Hector,’ at someone; the woman wore dark glasses and a large mink coat. On her hands she displayed an array of massive gold rings set with stones bigger than eyes. Her fingernails were painted red and in her right hand she held a plastic coca-cola cup. Why leave America, Beverley wondered, if that was what you wanted? Why had Angela left? Maybe they were people who just didn’t believe the places where you took your vacation were part of the real world, especially if the native inhabitants spoke a different language.