‘But he was French?’
‘Possibly.’
‘Or Catalan?’
‘Might have been Catalan. Or Occitan, for all I know.’
‘He spoke French?’
‘If it was, he had such a strong accent and the line was so bad I couldn’t make any of it out.’
‘But how did he sound? What was his demeanour?’
‘His demeanour?’
‘Yes! His fucking demeanour! Was he agitated? Calm? Urgent?’
‘He didn’t seem agitated. But he didn’t sound calm either.’
Jake took the silver mobile telephone from her hands and examined it, willing it to yield more detail than it could.
They were in no mood for sleeping. They dressed again and went downstairs. Jake quizzed her over and over about the phone call. He’d not heard the phone ringing, only Zoe talking. She asked him how it was possible that he could not have heard the phone. She was almost angry with him that he hadn’t heard it. It was important to her. If only he’d heard it, then she couldn’t possibly have imagined it.
‘Do you think you might have imagined it?’
‘That is such a stupid question!’
‘No it isn’t. Look what happened earlier.’
She ignored the reference to the morning’s events. Or non-events. ‘I imagined the phone ringing, and then I imagined a voice on the end of it? No, it isn’t possible. If you say that again I’ll smash you in the face.’
They drank a beer at the bar. Jake served it from the
‘There’s so much in everything,’ she said. ‘When you take a moment to remember it.’
‘Remembering all of this life, or this life that was: it’s like trying to unpack an infinite box.’
‘Can you have an infinite box?’
‘Look,’ he said, ‘there’s only you and me here to say whether you can have an infinite box or not. There’s no one else to say we’re wrong.’
‘Now I think about everything like that. Every detail, every word, seems intense and packed with significance. I think I was asleep most of my life. If there is a hell, that’s the thing I’ll be punished for most.’
‘Come here. You’re on edge. You need to relax.’
They finished their beers and decided to take a sauna. They went down to the spa, where low lights illuminated the swimming pool. They undressed and had a swim while the sauna was heating. Jake had asked so many times where all this energy—the energy that warmed and lit the pool, fired the sauna, heated the hotel—was coming from; so many times that he didn’t like to ask the question again. But some part of him knew that it couldn’t arrive from a vacuum. With Nature there was always an account; and he said that ultimately they still inhabited a corner of that same infinite box that was Nature.
They made a few lengths of the pool and spent a few minutes floating before going into the sauna. After half an hour in the sauna they found a way out of the spa onto the moonlit snow.
‘I’ve always wanted to do this,’ Zoe said. ‘Naked in the snow.’
‘I still can’t feel the cold.’
‘It’s the effects of the sauna.’
‘No,’ Jake said firmly. ‘It’s the effects of being dead.’
‘Want me to flog you with birch twigs? You’d feel that.’
Under the flooding light of the moon, Jake did appear to her as a wraith, pale but shining with an inner life. His skin was white like a porcelain carving, but there was a radiance glowing under his skin, and a sheen in his eye that made him seem quick and alive compared to her.
He caught her staring. He smiled. ‘Do you think we can fly?’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Since we’re dead. Can we jump off the mountain and fly, if we think hard enough about it?’
‘I’m absolutely certain we can’t. So don’t try it.’
‘I think it might be possible here.’
She suddenly felt flushed with cold. The effects of the sauna were fading. She pulled a towel around her and stood up. ‘Promise me you won’t even try such a thing!’
‘I was just speculating—’
‘Promise me! Promise me you won’t dare risk something like that.’
‘Okay. I promise. Okay.’
She walked back into the spa. ‘Come on. I’m ready to go to bed.’
They left the spa and rode the lift back up to their room. The telephone call had not been mentioned again, but the incident had barely strayed from the forefront of either of their minds. Zoe laid the phone on the bedside table, plugged in, charging, still expecting it to ring again at any time.
Still wanting it to ring again.
It didn’t ring, but Zoe didn’t need it to keep her awake. With Jake snoring lightly beside her, she lay looking through the window at the ghostly winter landscape. They had taken to sleeping with the curtains open. Old habits were falling away. There was no need for privacy and the light now had become a property of value, a thing that traded in the currency of life rather than death. It seemed an affront to want to keep it out, so the curtains stayed open.
With no snow falling for a couple of days the snow on the ground had become shaped, wind-sculpted now, like a beast that had relaxed its great wings and shoulders and hunkered down. Its smooth edges took a curve, like the roll on white candle wax, and the moon above the trees seemed to make everything brittle, as if at any moment the entire landscape might craze like the paintings of an Old Master.
She had a sudden and dear wish that she could populate that landscape. She felt her belly, trying to detect the smallest sense of bloating or just a little swelling. She placed her fingers on her belly and looked at the moon in the dark sky. Perhaps she was going to have to say something to Jake.
She had lifted a number of tester kits, using them to check herself every day, and every day confirmed the same thing. Positive positive positive. She’d hidden the supply of tester kits at the foot of the wardrobe. She would tell him, she decided again, when the time was right. If they were still in this strange place in a few months’ time, her condition would announce itself. With the moon shining brilliantly outside, she fell asleep.
But then she woke and something made her sit up in bed. She felt she had only been asleep for a few minutes but the moon had radically shifted position in the sky, as if working on a different timescale from hers. Some movement, some change of pressure had woken her.
She looked outside and then looked back at the door to their room. The door was open.
Framed in the doorway was a tall man.
There was a moment when her own terror flashed at her and cut her inside like a cold, sharp blade. She made to scream but only a choking sound came out of her mouth. She kicked at her sleeping husband and the physical release made her scream come loud and clear; but now she was up off the bed and ready to fight the apparition in the doorway.
‘What? What? What?’ Jake was holding her shoulders.
‘There was a man! In the doorway.’
For sure the man had gone now, but the door was still open. Jake knew his wife well enough to trust her first report. He sprang to the door and looked up and down the corridor. There was no one, and no sound. He listened hard for doors closing, for footsteps, for elevators. The hotel was silent as the grave.
‘Are you all right?’
