by Rosie Thomas
As if to prove his point they came down to the railway track where another fussy little train was waiting to climb on upwards. People leaned out of its windows and shouted, ‘Coo-eee! Josh, we heard you’d arrived. We’re going up to Black Rock, are you coming?’
He waved back, grinning. ‘No, I’m going to the nursery slopes.’
‘Ha ha ha. What’s the secret? Hiding yourself until Sunday?’
‘Wait and see.’
Julia plodded on, thoroughly disheartened. ‘I’m cramping your style,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t have come.’
He put his free arm round her shoulders. Julia managed to stop herself burying her head against his anorak. ‘I’m glad you’re here. We’ll have a good time, you’ll see. Sophia Bliss and the others are nice girls. Just not very much like you.’
‘Not much,’ Julia agreed, thinking Swann Ball indeed. Taffeta dress and all.
‘Why don’t you give them a chance? Watch them. You might even learn something.’
‘I might,’ she conceded, doubting whether it was anything she would want to know. Then she thought of Felix. They had been gentle with each other since the night of the funeral. Jessie’s death and their failure in bed had drawn them close. Felix had made her critical of her own clothes, taught her the difference between good food and bad food, made her aware of the existence of style. Felix was always telling her to use her eyes and ears. Perhaps Josh was right. Perhaps the Belindas could teach her something, even if it was only never to wear tight pants over thirty-eight-inch hips. And some breathless upper-class argot. Might come in useful some day, Julia thought philosophically.
They reached the ski-hire shop and Julia submitted herself to having boots strapped to her feet and poles thrust into her hands.
After that, everything was awful.
Josh came to the beginners’ slope but Julia soon begged him to go away and leave her to her humiliation. He went, bestowing her on the Swiss ski-school instructor and a gaggle of tiny Dutch and German children. For the first time in her adult life Julia discovered that her rangy height was a disadvantage. She had further to fall than the little children, and every puff of wind seemed enough to blow her over. She fell so often that it began to seem simpler just to lie in the snow, only Heini the instructor came and hauled her to her feet again.
Snow filled her mouth and ears and slid down her neck. Her hands froze to her poles and her legs ached so that she could hardly lift her skis. She wobbled and slithered and Heini yelled, ‘Bend your knees!’ and the children sliced cheekily past her.
At the end of the afternoon, when the snow had turned blue in the fading light, half a dozen skiers appeared at the top of the slope. They swooped down together, their immaculate pure christies carving a sinuous line down to the village. They were whooping and calling to each other, and Julia recognised Belinda and her friends. They were as graceful as swans on their skis. She ducked her head and shrank behind Heini and the children, impressed in spite of herself.
Julia didn’t see anything of Josh while there was enough light to ski by. She knew that he went across to Mürren and climbed the Schilthorn to ski the Inferno route, but when she asked him about it he shook his head and didn’t answer.
In the evenings they went out together, but never alone. They ate in candlelit restaurants and drank glühwein in tiny, cosy bars crowded round tables with the other skiers. As well as Joy and her girls and the other DHO regulars there were Inferno competitors who eyed Josh surreptitiously and tried to make him talk about his practice. Amongst them were the members of the military teams competing for the Montgomery Cup. Sophia and her friends found the British and American soldiers particularly fascinating, although Julia was secretly gratified to notice that they looked at her far oftener than they did at the other girls in their reindeer-patterned jumpers.
Josh saw it too. He winked and squeezed her hand.
The only other skier who Julia liked was a sandy-haired tough-looking Scot called Alex. She mentioned him to Sophia as they scrambled home through the silent, biting dark before Frau Uberl’s midnight curfew.
‘Oh no, not him. You can’t,’ Sophia shrieked. ‘He’s utterly non-sku. He wears his socks outside his ski-pants.’
Julia smiled in the blue dark. Felix would like that.
By Sunday morning, the day of the race, Julia was so stiff and bruised that she could hardly walk. She lowered herself out of bed and groaned on all fours on the shiny floorboards.
Belinda was infuriatingly doing kneebends by the window. She came round the end of Julia’s bed and peered down at her. Then she held out her hand. Julia glared at it, but she needed help. She took the hand and Belinda pulled her upright.
‘Ouch. Oh, God. I can’t walk. I’m crippled.’
Belinda giggled. ‘It’ll get better after today. Promise. You’ll start to loosen up. You know, I saw you with Heini yesterday.’ ‘How embarrassing.’
‘Not a bit. You’re doing really well. Isn’t she, Felicity?’
‘Brilliantly.’
To her surprise, Julia felt herself turning crimson with pleasure. Their praise was unexpected and welcome, but it was also a gesture of friendship. She had turned into enough of a skier for a truce to be called.
She smiled at them. ‘Thanks.’
‘Are you going to watch the race?’ Belinda asked.
‘I don’t know where to go,’ Julia admitted. Josh had told her airily to go with the girls. She did know how desperately she wanted to see him compete.
‘Come with us. We’re going up the Alibubble.’
‘I will, then. Thanks again.’
Josh had set out while it was still dark.
He reached the top of the Allmendhubel funicular at eight thirty, and with his skis over his shoulder he started to climb. He set himself a careful, steady pace. There were almost four hours of climbing ahead of him. The race would begin at midday, and the thirty-two competitors would be started at thirty-second intervals. Josh knew from experience that it required perfect timing not to arrive hurried and winded, and not to have to wait for too long on the summit of the freezing mountain.
He frowned at the snow as he climbed steadily beside the downhill route. It had been unseasonably warm and wet at the beginning of February, but fresh heavy snow had fallen on the slippery base in the last week. He prodded his long pole into the glistening powder as he tramped upwards. When he glanced towards the heights above he could pick out the figures of other competitors, black and grey specks against the snow.
Julia and the others clambered out of the funicular just before midday. A handful of spectators was already clustered in the lee of the station hut, cheerfully passing flasks amongst them. Belinda produced the provisions Frau Uberl had sent and they gulped thankfully at hot chocolate laced with plum brandy.
Sophia looked at her watch. ‘Exactly twelve.’
Josh was number fifteen. In seven minutes, he would be on his way down. Julia felt her heart knocking painfully in her chest.
Josh was waiting in a silent line of skiers. He knew most of them, although they were barely recognisable beneath their caps and yellow-lensed goggles. No one spoke. The Swiss official at the head of the line raised his arm and then dropped it. The first competitor plunged away. Josh heard the thrilling swish of skis through the powder, but he didn’t look. He was breathing slowly and evenly. His fingers flexed in the loops of his poles. He was following the course in his head, every twist and dive of the endless, treacherous fourteen kilometres.
Swish. Swish. Starter after starter.
Josh moved forward in the line. Swish. Two people ahead of him. He eased his goggles over his eyes. In a little more than thirty minutes, with luck, he would be at Lauterbrunnen, nearly three thousand feet below.
Next but one. The Scot, Alex Mackintosh, was just ahead at number fourteen. The raised arm fell again and Josh was at the head of the line. He had taught himself never to feel nerves, Fear was one thing, it was a safeguard, but nerves were simply des
tructive. The seconds ticked off. In the last two or three, as he crouched ready for the arm signal, he wondered where Julia would be watching.
Swish.
Josh didn’t hear the rasp of his own skis. He was off, traversing the opening slope that was as steep as a roof. Down, and down, with the powder spurting up behind him. So fast that it was gone while the starter’s arm still flickered in his head. At the bottom, a sweeping left turn and into the Engetal, the Happy Valley. Ahead lay a great schuss, a huge S-shaped sweep that dropped more than a thousand feet.
Josh was travelling like a bullet. The speed pinned the flesh of his face to the bones, carving a white smile beneath the blank goggles. But behind the yellow shields his eyes were like an eagle’s. They saw every bump and turn and carved out a path for him before his skis sliced over it. He had become a machine, as he always did when he skied at his best. His blood froze and his body fused to the skis.
Down. The wind and the snow plumes and the sweet slicing turns.
On down. Like flying, but rawer. Like diving, but faster and fiercer. Like sex. Like death itself.
Almost the bottom of the Happy Valley. A right-hand turn and ahead a flat traverse, then a rise to the Mürren ski hut, and the control point.
Josh’s head jerked up.
He heard the roll of thunder before he saw anything. But he knew that it wasn’t thunder. It was a crack and a spreading roar that came from the Schwarzgrat, high overhead. The noise rose up to choke him, indistinguishable from his own fear. Then he saw the snow falling off the cliffs. Only it wasn’t snow any more. It was vast white monuments that dropped and sent up billowing clouds and brought rocks and trees and churning debris racing towards him.
Josh turned with such violence that spraying snow lashed his face. He shot away at an angle with the avalanche clawing at him like a nightmare. And out of the corner of his eye, in one split second, Josh saw Alex Mackintosh. The ragged white wall swept him up and threw him over and over like a twig, and then he was gone.
The leading edge of the avalanche caught Josh at the same instant. It smashed him down and punched the breath out of his body. He folded his arms helplessly around his head as the snow gagged him, blinded him and sucked him down. His skis were torn off and he was pitched into blackness, uselessly clawing and fighting against its brutal strength.
Then, after what seemed like an eternity of suffocating terror, it was suddenly quiet. Josh opened his eyes, very slowly, as if his eyelids were weighted. There was blue sky above him.
He was gasping for breath and whimpering like an animal, but even as he lay there he knew that he had never seen anything so beautiful as that pure, ice-blue sky.
He stared at it, fighting for his breath, with the euphoric realisation Pm not buried singing in his head. For a long moment he couldn’t move, and he looked up into the wonderful space above him as content as a baby. And then he remembered Mackintosh. He sucked more air into his burning lungs and tried to struggle on to all fours. Pain throbbed down his left side and Josh swung his head from side to side, trying to clear the mist of it. He saw then that the snow had engulfed him up to his thighs. He kicked and writhed, hauling at the debris with his hands to pull himself free. At last he lurched to his feet and saw his skis sticking out of the snow behind him. Josh lunged towards them, one hand pressed to his side, jerking like a clumsy marionette over the snow blocks.
It seemed to take hours.
With each step Josh was trying to work out where in the hideously changed landscape he had last seen Mackintosh.
At last the skis were within his grasp. He wrenched them out of the snow and jammed his boots into the bindings. The way ahead looked almost impassable but he pushed forward, staring into the hollows for any sign of the other skier.
He fell and fell again as he plunged down the slope, and then as he scrambled up again he saw the aluminium basket of a Tonkin pole identical to his own sticking up out of the tumbled mass. Josh hurled himself down next to it, kicking off his skis. He scrabbled at the snow, cursing his hands that seemed so ineffectual against the avalanche debris. He began to gasp with the effort as he worked and sweat ran down behind his goggles, almost blinding him. He glanced up once in desperation and saw black figures bouncing and sprawling over the snow. Help was on the way from the control point at the Mürren hut. He bent down again, working faster, and the ice tore through his knitted gloves.
Then, suddenly, his hand broke through into space. His bare, frozen fingers felt the smooth canvas of a ski-jacket. Josh hauled at the snow, dragging it in chunks away from the man’s body. He was shouting, without knowing what he said, ‘It’s all right. You’re clear. You’re okay.’
And then, like’ a miracle, the body was moving too. It shuddered convulsively and one shoulder appeared. Mackintosh was lying curled on his side, his arms raised in front of his face to make an air pocket, and his Tonkin pole thrust vertically over him.
Josh stuck his hands under the man’s armpits and hauled at him. The Scotsman’s head broke out of the snow and ice as the first of the rescuers reached them. His face was grey and ridges of snow and ice clung to his hair and eyebrows. His blue lips hung open, and he was breathing.
‘He’s alive,’ Josh yelled. His shout rolled over their heads, echoing briefly and then swallowed up by the heights. The rescuers flung themselves forward. There were shovels and ropes now, in place of Josh’s hands. He stood back, shivering a little, looking at Mackintosh’s face.
One of the Swiss officials was shouting something at Josh. He waved, and pointed on down the slope. Josh gaped at him, understanding at last that the man was telling him to go on. He had forgotten all about the Inferno. He shook his head impatiently. Mackintosh was all but free now. They were reaching gently, to lift him on to a canvas stretcher. Somehow, on their backs or on a sledge, they would carry him up to the hut. They had done it often enough before.
‘He is gut,’ one of the officials said. Josh lifted his head then. Racing away, out of his control, his imagination swept to the route down, beyond the avalanche. Mackintosh’s face had been hidden by the backs of the rescuers, but as they moved him Josh saw it again. His eyes were open, incongruously as blue as the sky. He was looking at Josh, and his lips moved.
Go on.
‘Ja, ja.’ They were shouting and pointing again. They were telling Josh that he was to climb back up and walk along the flat to the control point, in order to restart his race from there.
Suddenly, Josh was moving. He snatched up his poles and hoisted his skis over his shoulder. He glanced at Mackintosh for the last time, and saw the flicker of a painful smile.
‘I’ll have to finish for us both, Alex,’ he shouted. ‘You do the same for me some other time.’
He was already on his way when one of the rescuers grabbed his arm. He was holding out his own gloves. Josh tore off his ruined pair and waved the good ones in a salute. Then he was off, up over the debris, his legs pumping like pistons.
At the control hut a DHO regular, Tuffy Brockway, had materialised. He clapped Josh on the back and Josh staggered.
‘They’ll credit you with the time you’ve lost,’ Tuffy roared. ‘It’s happened before. Esme Mackinnon stopped down at Grütsch to let a funeral go by. Took off his cap and stood to attention, of course. They gave him the time back.’
Josh barely heard him. He leaned on his poles for a second, gulping air and trying to steady his shaking legs. He looked down and was amazed to see other skiers skirting the worst of the avalanche. They were sliding and falling, but the race was still in progress.
A stopwatch clicked decisively beside him. Josh’s grip tightened on his poles and he flashed away. Ahead lay a steep drop, a rise up to Castle ridge, and then the hideous Inferno slope itself. Josh tried to shut off the pain that wrenched at his side, the memory of the thundering snow and Mackintosh’s deathly grey face. Alex was alive, and he wanted to stay alive himself. That was all there was room to know now. He was skiing again. A second later ther
e was nothing in Josh’s mind but the way down, unfurling like a treacherous ribbon ahead of him.
At the Allmendhubel, Sophia looked at her wristwatch again. She was frowning. ‘He should have come through by now. And the man before him. If he’s going to stand any chance, he should be here by now.’
They stared up at the route until their eyes stung, searching for another of the black specks that would fly down to them and grow, faster and closer, until it became a man who swooped past them in a glittering plume of speed and ice.
The mountain was empty.
They stood in a huddle, not speaking. Julia’s hands and feet were numb, but she was watching too intently to stamp and clap to try to warm them.
Another minute went by, and stretched into five. No one came, and the other spectators began to mutter at one another, eyebrows raised.
Sophia murmured, ‘Something has happened.’
Looking up, Julia suddenly saw that the mountains were hostile. Josh was somewhere up in that high, white space. She was afraid, and she shivered. Without taking her eyes off the route Belinda put her arm around her. Gratefully, Julia huddled closer. The four girls drew together, waiting.
Then Felicity shouted, ‘Look!’
At last, a black speck appeared on the lip of a col high above them. The skier seemed to hang there motionless for a second, and then he came twisting down the huge slope.
No one spoke. ‘Is it him?’ Julia almost screamed.
Sophia shook her head. ‘Josh doesn’t ski like that.’
Another skier appeared over the col, and then another. The leader came closer, and Julia heard that he was shouting something at them. They crowded forward and she saw his mouth open, a black shape under his blank goggles.
‘Av—a—lanche!’
He was French and the syllables of the word sounded too soft for the images that exploded with it. He lifted his pole and waved it backwards at the white walls. And then he hurtled past them, on and down towards Winteregg below.
