breakfast we watched as much as we could without being rebuked for staring. Square Bear opened the paper that had been lying beside his plate and read things out to Silver Stick, who gave the occasional little nod over his coffee, as if he’d known whatever it was all the time. It was the
Amanda whispered: “He eats.”
The waiter had brought a rack of toast and a stone jar of Oxford marmalade to their table instead of croissants. Silver Stick was eating toast like any normal person.
Father asked: “Who eats?”
We indicated with our eyes.
“Well, why shouldn’t he eat? You need a lot of energy for skiing.”
Mother, taking an interest for once, said they seemed old for skiing.
“You’d be surprised. Dr. Watson’s not bad, but as for the other one — well, he went past me like a bird in places so steep that even the guide didn’t want to try it. And stayed standing up at the end of it when most of us would have been just a big hole in the snow.
The man’s so rational he’s completely without fear. It’s fear that wrecks you when you’re skiing. You come to a steep place, you think you’re going to fall and nine times out of ten, you do fall. Holmes comes to the same steep place, doesn’t see any reason why he can’t do it — so he does it.”
My mother said that anybody really rational would have the sense not to go skiing in the first place. My ear had been caught by one word.
“Square Bear’s a doctor? Is Silver Stick ill?”
“Not that I know. Is there any more coffee in that pot?”
And there we left it for the while. You might say that Amanda and I should have known at once who they were, and I suppose nine out of ten children in Europe would have known. But we’d led an unusual life, mainly on account of Mother, and although we knew many things unknown to most girls of our age, we were ignorant of a lot of others that were common currency.
We waved off Father and his guide as they went wallowing up in the deep snow through the pine trees, skis on their shoulders, then turned back for our skates. We stopped at the driveway to let the sober black sleigh go past, the one that went down the valley to the railway. There was nobody in the back, but the rugs were ready and neatly folded.
“Somebody new coming,” Amanda said.
I knew Mother was looking at me, but she said nothing. Amanda and I were indoors doing our holiday reading when the sleigh came back, so we didn’t see who was in it, but when we went downstairs later there was a humming tension about the hotel, like the feeling you get when a violinist is holding his bow just above the string and the tingle of the note runs up and down your spine before you hear it. It was only mid-afternoon but dusk was already settling on the valley. We were allowed a last walk outside before it got dark, and made as usual for the skating rink. Colored electric lights were throwing patches of yellow, red, and blue on the dark surface. The lame man with the accordion was playing a Strauss waltz and a few couples were skating to it, though not very well.
More were clustered round the charcoal brazier at the edge of the rink where a waiter poured small glasses of mulled wine. Perhaps the man with the accordion knew the dancers were getting tired or wanted to go home himself, because when the waltz ended he changed to something wild and gypsy sounding, harder to dance to. The couples on the ice tried it for a few steps then gave up, laughing, to join the others round the brazier. For a while the ice was empty and the lame man played on to the dusk and the dark mountains.
Then a figure came gliding onto the ice. There was a decisiveness about the way she did it that marked her out at once from the other skaters. They’d come on staggering or swaggering, depending on whether they were beginners or thought them-selves expert, but staggerers and swaggerers alike had a self-conscious air, knowing that this was not their natural habitat. She took to the ice like a swan to the water or a swallow to the air. The laughter died away, the drinking stopped and we watched as she swooped and dipped and circled all alone to the gypsy music. There were no showy pirouettes like the girl from Paris, no folding of the arms and look-at-me smiles.
It’s quite likely that she was not a particularly expert skater, that what was so remarkable about it was her willingness to take the rink, the music, the attention as hers by right. She wasn’t even dressed for skating. The black skirt coming to within a few inches of the instep of her skate boots, the black mink jacket, the matching cap, were probably what she’d been wearing on the journey up from the station. But she’d been ready for this, had planned to announce her return exactly this way.
Her return. At first, absorbed by the performance, I hadn’t recognized her. I’d registered that she was not a young woman and that she was elegant. It was when a little of my attention came back to my mother that I knew. She was standing there as stiff and prickly as one of the pine trees, staring at the figure on the ice like everybody else, but it wasn’t admiration on her face, more a kind of horror.
They were all looking like that, all the adults, as if she were the messenger of something dangerous. Then a woman’s voice, not my mother’s, said, “How could she? Really, how could she?”
There was a murmuring of agreement and I could feel the horror changing to something more commonplace — social disapproval.
Once the first words had been said, others followed and there was a rustling of sharp little phrases like a sledge runner grating on gravel.
“Only a year…to come here again…no respect…lucky not to be…after what happened.”
My mother put a firm hand on each of our shoulders. “Time for your tea.”
Normally we’d have protested, begged for another few minutes, but we knew that this was serious. To get into the hotel from the ice rink you go up some steps to the back terrace and in at the big glass doors to the breakfast room. There were two men standing on the terrace. From there you could see the rink and they were staring down at what was happening. Silver Stick and Square Bear. I saw the thin man’s eyes in the light from the breakfast room. They were harder and more intent than anything I’d ever seen, harder than the ice itself. Normally, being properly brought up, we’d have said good evening to them as we went past, but Mother propeled us inside without speaking. As soon as she’d got us settled at the table she went to find Father, who’d be back from skiing by then. I knew they’d be talking about me and felt important, but concerned that I couldn’t live up to that importance. After all, what I’d seen had lasted only a few seconds and I hadn’t felt any of the things I was supposed to feel. I’d never known him before it happened, apart from seeing him across the dining room a few times, and I hadn’t even known he was dead until they told me afterward.
What happened at dinner that evening was like the ice rink, only without gypsy music. That holiday Amanda and I were allowed to come down to dinner with our parents for the soup course. After the soup we were supposed to say good night politely and go up and put ourselves to bed. People who’d been skating and skiing all day were hungry by evening so usually attention was concentrated discreetly on the swing doors to the kitchen and the procession of waiters with the silver tureens. That night was different. The focus of attention was one small table in the corner of the room beside the window. A table laid like the rest of them with white linen, silver cutlery, gold- bordered plates, and a little array of crystal glasses. A table for one. An empty table.
My father said: “Looks as if she’s funked it. Can’t say I blame her.”
My mother gave him one of her “be quiet” looks, announced that this was our evening for speaking French and asked me in that language to pass her some bread, if I pleased.
I had my back to the door and my hand on the breadbasket. All I knew was that the room went quiet.
“Don’t turn round,” my mother hissed in English.
I turned round and there she was, in black velvet and diamonds.
Her hair, with more streaks of gray than I remembered from the year before, was swept up and secured with a pearl-and-diamond comb. The previous year, before the thing happened, my mother had remarked that she was surprisingly slim for a retired opera singer. This year she was thin, cheek-bones and collarbones above the black velvet bodice sharp enough to cut paper. She was inclining her elegant head toward the headwaiter, probably listening to words of welcome. He was smiling, but then he smiled at everybody. Nobody else smiled as she followed him to the table in the far, the very far, corner. You could hear the creak of necks screwing themselves away from her.
No entrance she ever made in her stage career could have been as nerve-racking as that long walk across
