Season of Snows and Sins

by Patricia Moyes

  I saw it at once. Flying up the valley from the direction of Geneva came a jaunty, noisy little red helicopter, its blades spinning busily, its uplifted tail and clawlike undercarriage giving it the appearance of an aggressive insect.

  I reached for the rucksack. As well as the picnic ingredients, I had put in my binoculars, knowing that the Tibbetts were keen birdwatchers; I pulled out the glasses and focused them on the little red flying machine.

  Suddenly magnified, the helicopter looked less like an insect and more like a toy. In fact, I could distinctly see the heads of four people inside the cabin, as well as the pilot. The machine stopped in midair, hovering. Several hands waved from its open windows. Then it began to drop toward the ground. I followed it, fascinated, as it descended slowly and vertically, until its wheels touched the green grass. Then the whirring of the engine died away, the blur of the blades resolved itself into separate metal spokes, revolving ever more slowly. The pilot’s door opened, and he jumped down and went to let out his passengers. As they emerged, I realized for the first time just what I was looking at.

  The small visible portion of house was, in fact, a corner of the Chalet Perce-neige; the irregularly shaped piece of water beside it, which I had taken for a tiny mountain lake, was the swimming pool—now, of course, devoid of its protective glass; the area of green where the helicopter had landed was the chalet’s private lawn; and the tiny, dark-haired figure scrambling down the ladder from the cabin was Giselle Arnay.

  I suppose I should have felt like a Peeping Tom, but somehow I didn’t. It did cross my mind, though, to wonder whether Arnay and Veron knew that their house could be so overlooked. They had taken elaborate precautions to keep the chalet secluded from prying passersby, but in a vertical landscape like this, it was virtually impossible to guard against a bird’s-eye view. For their sakes, I hoped the journalists from Paris had not discovered our picnic glade. Meanwhile, I’m ashamed to confess that I watched the party with absorbed interest.

  Giselle was followed out of the helicopter by her husband, Michel Veron. At least, I presumed it must be him, for I recognized the tall, skeletal figure, the long hair, and the huge dark glasses from the published wedding photographs. After him, Mario jumped lightly and athletically down to the grass, ignoring the ladder, and then turned to help the fourth passenger down. This was a girl in a highly unsuitable dress—a long, flowing affair in flowered chiffon, apparently inspired by Botticelli; with it she wore a pair of chubby-heeled leather knee-boots, as favored in the pioneer days of the Wild West, which must have been killing her in that heat. She had quite a bit of difficulty with her dress as she climbed down the ladder, and it was lucky that Mario was on hand to disentangle her from various parts of the machinery. At last she made it to the ground, and turned toward the house. And I saw that it was Sylvie’s demure goddaughter, Chantal.

  Another man had come out of the chalet to greet the party, and he and Mario now proceeded to unload suitcases from the helicopter, while the pilot shook hands with his distinguished clients. Then the last case was lifted out, the door of the helicopter slammed shut, the pilot jumped into the cockpit, and once again the noise of the motor sliced the quiet air, as the blades began to whirl. This time, they woke Henry.

  “What on earth…?” he muttered, heaving himself into a sitting position.

  I handed him the binoculars. “Take a look,” I said. “That’s the Chalet Perce-neige down there. My model has arrived.”

  Henry gave me a sharpish look, and then took the glasses and directed them at the group in the garden below. I suppose he had detected a sour note in my voice; and no wonder. For I had recognized the man who had come out of the chalet, and who was now standing with the others, his arm around Chantal’s shoulder. It was Jean Bertrand, the son of the Bertrands from the Café de la Source, the ski instructor with whom Chantal had danced that night at Le Jockey Bar.

  Irrational anger flooded through me. First Robert Drivaz, now Jean Bertrand. What right had these rich, spoiled, selfish worldlings to come here to our village, to use our honest, simple people as playthings, to corrupt…

  “What’s the matter, Jane?” Henry had laid down the glasses and was looking at me.

  I told him.

  Henry said lightly, “Oh, come now, Jane. Surely you’re exaggerating.”

  “I don’t think so. Up until a few years ago most of these people had never even traveled outside their own valley. Life was simple and hard-working, and moral codes were strict. Now, suddenly, they’re exposed to—”

  Henry interrupted me. “You don’t seem to think much of the moral fiber of your beloved mountain people,” he said. “Ignoble savages, is that it?”

  That stung me into anger, as he knew it would. “I think a great deal of them,” I said hotly. “They are fine people, with integrity and courage and a sense of values.”

  “Then,” said Henry, “they can surely stand up to the very superficial blandishments of a few trendy imbeciles with more money than sense?”

  “Robert Drivaz—” I began.

  “There you go again. Guilt complex. All right, Robert Drivaz was weak and foolish. There are individuals like that in any community, anywhere. It doesn’t mean that the whole population of Montarraz is about to be corrupted.” He smiled at me. “Be sensible, Jane.”

  I found myself smiling back, a little ruefully. “I’m sorry, Henry. I’ve been so distressed about Anne-Marie, I suppose I’m not thinking straight.”

  Henry didn’t answer me. He had picked up the binoculars again and was training them on the garden of the Chalet Perce-neige, which was now—as far as I could see—empty. The party must have gone indoors.

  “In any case,” I added, “I can hardly wait to get going on Giselle Arnay’s head. Those bones…I can feel them under my fingers…”

  “How very bloodthirsty that sounds,” Henry remarked, without removing the binoculars from his eyes.

  I laughed, delighted to find that the tension had been smoothed out of my thoughts. “Idiot…you know what I mean…” I rolled over onto my face again, and before I knew it, I was asleep.

  I woke an hour later, feeling stiff and a bit sunburned. The sun was already beginning to slide downhill toward the western mountains, and a fresh little breeze was taking the edge off the afternoon heat. The fire had died down to a mass of soft gray ash. Beside me, Emmy was stirring and stretching herself into wakefulness; Henry was kneeling a few yards away beside the stream, washing up the plates and glasses. Far below us, the Chalet Perce-neige appeared deserted. We packed up the rucksack and walked slowly back to Montarraz, down through the cool aisles of pine trees.

  I must say that it was a delight to go back to the Claudets’ elegant apartment and hot, scented baths, instead of having to hump up fuel for Herbert and fill the tin bathtub from kettles. All the same, I felt a remorseful pang as I walked past the shuttered windows of Les Sapins. It was, after all, my home. The sight of the padlocked double doors of the studio also caused me a stab of guilt, but I told myself firmly that I would be back at work tomorrow. All that was needed was to make an appointment with Giselle Arnay.

  I bathed and changed, and came into the Louis Quinze living room to find Henry looking very spruce, and smelling of Pierre’s expensive after-shave lotion. He was sitting on the sofa, riffling appreciatively through the pages of a beautifully illustrated book on Byzantine art. I fixed drinks for us both, and Henry explained that Emmy would join us shortly—he had left her up to her neck in the bath. Then, after a little silence, he said, “I think perhaps I owe you an apology, Jane.”

  “An apology? Whatever for?”

  Henry answered with another question. “How well do you know these people—these Arnays or Verons or whatever their real name is?”

  “Not at all. Well, no more than you do—you were there that evening. I haven’t seen Giselle since, and I’ve never met Michel Veron. I…” I hesitated. “I feel that I know Giselle quite well, but that’s only because I’ve seen al
l her films, and Sylvie talks so much about her. I’m hoping I’ll really get to know her when she sits for me. You can’t make a good head of somebody you don’t know. The first few sessions are really more for talking than modeling. At least, that’s the way I work.”

  “H’m,” said Henry. He began to fill his pipe. “Rather a curious thing happened this afternoon, Jane.”

  “Curious? You mean the helicopter?”

  “Later on. While you were asleep.”

  “I thought they’d all gone into the house,” I said.

  “Yes, they had,” said Henry. “But later on, they came out again.” He laughed, a little embarrassed. “This sounds very silly, put bluntly. The fact is, they were all naked.”

  “I don’t blame them, frankly,” I said. “It was terribly hot. The poor things couldn’t know they had a Peeping Tom with binoculars sitting up the mountain spying on them.”

  Henry laughed. “I asked for that,” he said. “You’re perfectly right, of course. I had no business to be snooping, and heaven knows there’s nothing wrong with a swim in the nude. No, it wasn’t just that. The manservant, Mario, came out of the house after they’d had their swim. He was fully and rather elaborately dressed, which was a bit—well, it looked strange. He was carrying a tray.”

  “Honestly, Henry,” I said. “I thought you lived in Chelsea. What’s so very odd about having a dip and then a drink? I admit, some people might insist on the formality of a two-inch bikini, but thank God young people these days aren’t ashamed of their bodies.”

  “That’s just, the point,” said Henry.

  “What is?”

  “Your remark about having a drink. The tray which Mario passed around didn’t have drinks on it.”

  “Then what did it have?”

  “As far as I could see—cigarettes.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I see what you mean. Reefers. Pot.”

  “I can’t prove it, of course,” said Henry, “but it looked very much like that to me. And your young ski-instructor friend didn’t refuse one. Nor did that young girl—what did you say her name was?—Chantal. Then, after a while, they…” He broke off, and sat looking down into his glass, swilling the golden whiskey around and around.

  “Oh, well,” I said, “who are we to criticize? We drink alcohol, which is just another drug.”

  “It’s not quite the same,” said Henry with a sort of sad stubbornness. “I just don’t like it, that’s all. I think you may have been right when you said that these people are a bad influence on the village.”

  It’s a funny thing, with me. I suppose I’m a natural arguer. Anyhow, as soon as somebody agrees with a point of view I’ve expressed, I immediately begin to see the flaws in my own argument; whereas if anybody disagrees with me, I get more and more convinced that I’m right. Be that as it may, I now found myself taking precisely the opposite line with Henry than the sanctimonious sentiments I had voiced earlier.

  People like Giselle Arnay and Michel Veron, I heard myself saying, represented the new, exciting, talented generation. It was young people like them who gave one hope for the future. Here we were—I said “we,” but I really meant “you, Henry Tibbett”—with our prudish Victorianism, our inherited and irrational prejudices, our essential small-mindedness. No wonder we had succeeded in getting the world into such a mess. The new generation had thrown off the whole shackling weight of traditional behavior. All right; maybe it meant smoking pot and sexual permissiveness. What was wrong with that? Pot was no worse than alcohol, and sex was nothing to be ashamed of—on the contrary. Young people now had a vision of a different world, of a wider, broader…

  Henry said quietly, “And what about Anne-Marie?”

  “That was below the belt,” I said crossly. “Anne-Marie was…is a natural victim, poor child. Robert, as you said yourself, was weak and silly. It wasn’t Giselle Arnay’s fault—”

  “Are you sure of that?”

  “Of course I’m sure. It’s people like you—”

  It was at this moment that Emmy came in, looking fresh and attractive in blue silk trousers and a flowered shirt. She was not unnaturally surprised to find Henry and me glaring at each other from opposite ends of the sofa, obviously in the middle of an argument, but Emmy is tact personified. After a split-second reaction, she began talking naturally and pleasantly about our plans for the evening—I had suggested driving down to the valley for dinner at a restaurant famous for its excellent local wines. In a matter of moments the heat had gone out of the atmosphere, and I was feeling more than a little ashamed of my outburst, and of the way I had allowed my so-called opinions to swing from one extreme to another. I was reassured when Henry grinned at me in an almost conspiratorial way as we left the apartment, but all the same, I noticed that he was unusually quiet during the evening, and looked grave.

  The next morning I telephoned the Chalet Perce-neige just before eleven o’clock. The number was not, of course, listed in the telephone directory, but Sylvie had written it down for me on a scrap of paper torn from her diary, with the words TOP SECRET scribbled beside it.

  The phone was answered by Mario—I recognized his voice at once. He began by saying that Mlle. Arnay was not available to talk to anybody and would not be so all day. I told him who I was, threw in Sylvie’s name, assured him that Mlle. Arnay was expecting me to call, and begged him at least to go and tell her that I was on the line. At last he agreed, and went away. I held on for what seemed an eternity, and was about to give up and try again later on when a new masculine voice came onto the line, speaking French and demanding to be told exactly who I was and what I wanted.

  “Am I speaking to M. Veron?” I asked.

  There was a little hesitation, and then he said. “Yes, madame. Now, please explain what you want with…with my wife.” He sounded cold and bored.

  I explained the whole thing all over again. When I had finished, Michel Veron said, with an unamused little laugh, “I am sorry, madame. I realize it is not your fault. Sylvie Claudet is really quite irresponsible. If you know her, as you say you do, you will understand what I mean. She had no right to promise anything on Giselle’s behalf. My wife would not dream of posing for you. We are here for a holiday, and a little privacy from people like you.” You’d have thought I was a gossip columnist from the tone of his voice—although, on second thoughts, he might have dealt more politely with the press. After all, journalists are a necessary evil to entertainers, however famous. “I am sorry to disappoint you, madame, but it is out of the question. Good-bye.” And he rang off before I could say a word.

  I don’t deny that I was bitterly disappointed, but I was not really very surprised. Michel Veron had been right about Sylvie, of course. Warm, impulsive, friendly as a kitten, Sylvie would make the most extravagant promises to her friends, just to see them happy. Where it was within her own powers to fulfill those promises, she would do so, but I could see only too well how she might blithely commit other people to courses of action on the strength of some chance remark made and forgotten. I had been a fool to believe that Giselle Arnay would sit for me. I decided to put the whole thing out of my head, and to concentrate on enjoying the company of the Tibbetts. When they went back to London, I told myself, I would open up the studio and start on a completely new project. A series of abstracts to be cast in bronze, perhaps.

  Meanwhile, the sun was shining, and we decided to spend the morning climbing to a high mountain pasture which was renowned for its gentians and wild orchids. It was not a very arduous expedition, but a long one, and exhausting enough for a middle-aged trio like ourselves. We were all glad to stop for an assiette Valaisanne —a plate of local smoked and dried meats—and a flask of white wine at a mountain restaurant on the way down; and after this, we took things easy, getting back to the apartment about four o’clock.

  It was the day when Lucia, the new Italian concierge, came in to clean the apartment. She was a big, strapping, black-haired girl who sang melancholy Neapolitan love songs in the most ch
eerful possible way as she worked. The Tibbetts had gone to their room for a rest and to change, and I was steeping myself in Sylvie’s pink bathtub when I heard the front doorbell ring—a short, nervous buzz, quite unlike the postman’s imperious peal or the baker’s pert tattoo. I heard Lucia go to answer the door, and the sound of quiet voices. Then the clatter of Lucia’s sandals on the parquet, and a rap on the bathroom door.

  “Yes?” I called. “What is it?”

  Lucia’s voice came penetratingly from the corridor outside. “Pardon, signora. It is a girl, signora.” She used the Italian word ragazza, which does not exactly imply respect. Some village schoolchild, I supposed.

  “What does she want, Lucia?”

  “She wants to see you, signora.”

  “Well, she can’t. I’m in my bath. Go and ask her what it’s all about, will you?”

  Lucia clattered away again. A few moments later she was back at the bathroom door. “She asks if she may wait to see the signora.”

  By this time I was becoming a little irritated. I said, “Who is she, anyway, Lucia?”

  “I don’t know, signora. I asked her name, but she just said might she wait until the signora could see her.”

  “Tell her, if she won’t leave a name or a message, I certainly won’t see her,” I said.

  Once again Lucia departed, and again returned. “Please, signora, she says that it is about Anne-Marie.”

  Of course, this changed everything. It must mean that the baby was imminent, or had already arrived. I grabbed the hand rail and pulled myself to my feet, reaching for a towel. “All right,” I called. “Take her into the kitchen and give her a biscuit and I’ll see her as soon as I’m dressed.”

  “Si, signora.”

  I dried myself quickly and put on a pair of slacks and a cotton shirt. Then I ran a comb through my hair, treated my face to a dab of powder and lipstick, and came out of Sylvie’s beautiful bedroom, walked across the sitting room, and into the hallway. The kitchen door was open. In the kitchen, sitting on a stool and nibbling a ginger biscuit, was Giselle Arnay.