hand, half-hoping that he would wake, half-hoping that he would not. She decided to leave it to the Fates. If he woke she would tell him about the horse outside. If not, she wouldn’t. She had to ask herself why she was not allowing herself to tell him about some of the events that were happening around them. Why she was staying quiet about these things was also a mystery to her. It was as if some primal part of her was terrified that no event in this place could be good for them. She felt—irrationally but with a conviction that came from deep in her bones—that with each new development, something was trying to insert itself between them. Only absolute stasis would leave them alone.
She held on to his hand. One of the first things she had noticed about him when they met was his hands. They were large and manly, but also elegant and descriptive. He used them a great deal in conversation. She wanted to be able to hold his hand for ever.
She fell asleep beside him.
12
The following evening the power failed again. They were in the lobby of the hotel when the lights flickered and went out. The lights went out over the entire village.
It had happened before, and the power had come back on after a short while. They had some candles which they lit and set on the reception desk, and waited. After an hour the power hadn’t resumed so they went outside, where they could see better by the snow-charged moonlight.
The shops and restaurants were now in universal darkness. As they passed them, the individual stores had a different, sullen look to them. Snow and moonlight reflected from the dark plate glass of the shopfronts in an eerie soft blue glow.
‘The power has never been off this long. What do you think it means?’ Zoe asked.
Jake didn’t reply and the unanswered question congealed in the cold air, following them as they trudged down the deserted main street. Their boots squeaked on the compacted snow. They had no plan: they had walked out with the expectation of the power returning at any moment. But when they reached the other end of the village, where the buildings stopped and gave way to an open tract of land that itself was swallowed up by dark woodland, the lights still hadn’t come back on.
‘A letter to the mayor of the village required,’ Jake said, but Zoe had lost her humour. They turned and retraced their steps in silence.
Halfway back the lights flickered on all over the village and they both released an involuntary cheer. There also came the sound of generators and turbines powering up somewhere, maybe for the ski lifts they’d left switched on.
They found a wine bar and raided the banks of bottles and turned up the music system. Zoe put on ‘Winter’ by Tori Amos because Jake had once said that it made him want to cry but he would never allow himself to; and she asked him if he remembered where they’d first heard it.
‘No,’ he said, ‘I can’t remember.’
‘Think.’
‘Nope. Nothin’ coming.’
So she told him. It was on one of their first ski holidays together. They’d heard it in a bar and Jake had walked up to the barman and demanded to know who had recorded the song.
‘I don’t remember that either.’
So she told him which holiday it was, and where, and who they were with, and who they had met.
‘No, it’s all a blank.’
‘You must remember! Surely you do! You have to! How can you not?’
‘No, I don’t.’
So she described the rooms they had stayed in, where there was an old woman who had to get wood from the outhouse to feed the stove that heated the water for a bath; and how every evening she pressed her hand into her back and grimaced and shuffled out to get more wood as if the request to take a shower or a bath after a day’s skiing was an unreasonable one. And she told him about how their dour martinet of a ski instructor had taken them down sheets of polished ice.
He just couldn’t recall any of that.
It was true that they had taken many skiing holidays together and after so many it did become difficult to distinguish some of them; but it disturbed her that he couldn’t remember any of it.
‘Where has it gone, that holiday?’ he said. ‘How come I can remember others but not that one? I mean, it’s not like my memory is a DVD that fell behind the cupboard. It’s just gone.’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ she said.
‘It damn well does matter. What are we if we’re not the sum of our memories?’
‘You’re forgetting about what we might become. Isn’t that more important?’
He grimaced and ran a couple of fingers through his hair, as if he were trying to locate and massage the lost holiday snaps somewhere under his skull.
‘Well, you haven’t forgotten this song,’ she pointed out.
‘No. There are certain songs, and books, and films that are like points of high ground in the memory. Like they are even larger than your own experiences. They never go away.’
‘And a lot you forget.’
‘Oh yes. A lot you forget.’
They stayed in the bar a while, playing music and chasing memories. Neither felt like eating so they wound their way back to their hotel, arm in arm. When they entered the reception Jake noticed something had changed.
‘The candles we lit have burned down. While we were out.’
‘Are they still burning down?’
‘I’m not going to stand here and watch them to find out, but I wonder if they are. I mean, that would be strange, wouldn’t it? If the candles were only burning down when the power was out? That would be odd, wouldn’t it?’
‘You know what?’ she said. ‘I just can’t try to figure out the answer to it any more. It’s driving me mad. We just have to go with the flow sometimes.’
‘That would be too easy.’
‘Come on. Bed,’ she said.
Zoe woke up in the night feeling cold. The rooms tended to overheat, so they always left a window ajar, even though Zoe was the only one who experienced fluctuations in the temperature. She got out of bed and closed it, but as she looked out she saw that the power had gone off yet again. The lights were off all over the village. She shivered and crawled back under the duvet.
She couldn’t get back to sleep. She thought about waking Jake to tell him the power had gone off again, but decided to let him sleep on. After all, there was nothing he could to do about the situation. She lay awake, her eyes open, looking up into the darkness. Maybe her restlessness pulled him out of his sleep, because she heard him whisper.
‘You awake?’
She turned to look at him. His eyes were oily black pools in the darkness. ‘Yes. The power is out again.’
‘How long?’
‘Don’t know. At least an hour. I was cold. I had to close the window. Are you cold?’
‘Come here. Snuggle up. Try to go back to sleep.’
In the morning they woke to learn that the power had not returned during the night. Zoe said she felt a difference in temperature: that the normally overheated hotel had cooled in the night. Jake said he couldn’t feel any difference, but they were forced to discuss what might happen if the lack of power became permanent. They called it the ‘energy crisis’. They discussed food supplies. The freezers in their own hotel and the super market and
