Snowfall Page 4

  By all the rules of civilized conversation, I should have offered these facts in return for the information Jon Becker gave me. This, after all, is how people begin to establish relationships, even if only on the most banal ‘Well-well-isn’t-it-a-small-world?’ level. It is this kind of exchange that can transform strangers into acquaintances, acquaintances into friends; that can sometimes, sooner or later – did, for Matt and me, and sooner rather than later – transform friends into lovers.

  And that was the trouble. I didn’t want to establish a relationship, of any kind, with anyone new. Stephen was different. He had been one of Matt’s friends. He knew about Matt’s death, knew that we had lived together, understood my grief. With Stephen, I felt a sense of companionship and security. I should be very happy, during the coming week, to spend as much time as he could spare under his wing. But I didn’t want any involvement at all with anyone else.

  Eventually my message of silence got through to Jon Becker. ‘I expect you’re tired,’ he said. It was the first time he’d shown a flicker of interest in me personally. He looked weary himself, as though his attempt at convivial conversation had been a burden.

  He stood up. There was no trace of lethargy in his movements, and it occurred to me that I might have misinterpreted his expression; an ingrained sadness, perhaps, rather than weariness.

  ‘I may see you tomorrow,’ he added. ‘I usually ski on Sundays, and there are some good runs above Kirchwald.’ He hesitated, as though he would have liked to add something else, then said an abrupt ‘Good night’, and went.

  All the other resident guests had left the alcove, and there was nothing to keep me there. After giving Jon Becker time to leave the hotel, because I didn’t need or want an escort as far as the annexe, I crossed the smoky Gäststube and went into the hall. Near the reception desk, Otto Hammerl and his wife and son stood in a huddle, engaged in what sounded like a heated argument. Toni looked up, saw me, bit off his words and immediately strode away down the hall.

  His father’s reaction to my presence was entirely different, and so completely out of character that I was taken by surprise. On seeing me he roared something in his incomprehensible dialect, displayed some gold-filled teeth and advanced, his arms outstretched.

  Alarmed, I tried to back away. To my astonishment and distaste I found myself pulled forward by the shoulders, clasped against Otto Hammerl’s stained and protruding waistcoat, and given a smacking, whiskery, tobacco-and-garlic-reeking kiss on either cheek.

  I coughed and spluttered, ditched all notion of politeness, pushed him off with all my strength and turned my head away; and in that moment I saw Frau Hammerl’s face.

  I would not have expected her to take kindly to the sight of her husband embarrassing and potentially offending a hotel guest. I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if she had looked angry or disgusted, or ashamed of the foolish old man. But the emotion on her face was stronger and more frightening than anything I could ever remember having seen before, in the whole of my life.

  It was hatred. And it was directed, incredibly, at me.

  I turned away, fumbling blindly among the heavy capes and overcoats hanging from the rack to find my sheepskin jacket. By the time I had pulled it on, the Hammerls had all disappeared.

  I pushed open the front door, and took a good deep breath of snow-laden air. I’d been imagining things, surely? Not necessarily imagining the terrifying intensity of Frau Hammerl’s look, but certainly imagining that it was directed at me. Perhaps she had good reason to hate the old man. For my part, I intended to steer well clear of him in future.

  A few more deep breaths to clear the garlic fumes from my nostrils, and then I walked round the corner and entered the narrow alley that led down to the annexe. I was so busy thinking about what had happened that I forgot Toni Hammerl’s warning about the slipperiness of the steep path.

  It was not so much the ice underfoot that made me lose my balance, as the sudden noise from overhead. Hearing it – an ominous crunching crack, like that of a tooth being pulled – I jumped instinctively. My smooth-soled boots slipped and I skidded, arms flailing wildly. My feet shot from under me, carrying me down the path a good deal faster than I had intended. When I hit the ground it was with a sliding thump on to one sheepskin elbow and the seat of my après-ski pants, while a huge icicle crashed down from the edge of the balcony and splintered into daggers on the spot where I had been walking seconds before.

  Chapter Four

  That night, I dreamed about fear. About trying to get away from someone, about floundering through deep snow, about slipping, about suffocating, about something clanging down on my head. I woke sweating, with a dry mouth and a hammering heart, to find myself embrangled in the duvet, while the Sunday bell from the church a few yards away made my room reverberate.

  I was so relieved to find that my fear had been nothing more than a bad dream, that for a few moments I was prepared to believe that the events after I left the Gäststube last night had been imaginary too. But then I felt the tenderness of my hip and elbow, and knew that my fall had been real enough. There were going to be bruises to prove it.

  The crashing icicle had been real, too. On my way to breakfast – dressed, for practicality rather than sport, in the gear I had bought for my trip with Matt to Aviemore the previous winter, ski boots and all – I passed the remains of the icicle. It made a sizeable heap of splintered ice, right in the centre of the alley between the church and the hotel. I glanced up apprehensively at the black gap in the glistening fangs above my head. I’d been very lucky. Some of the icicles were so large that it was hardly surprising if they occasionally broke off under their own weight.

  But if my fall was a fact, and the fallen icicle was a fact, at least it was clear that Frau Hammerl’s look of hatred could not have been directed at me. I entered the Alte Post a little nervously, wondering what kind of reception I should get. She was busy serving breakfast, but she gave me a cordial enough greeting as she hurried past, and hoped that I had slept well. Her husband was nowhere in sight. I put the incident from my mind, and sat down to enjoy my coffee and warm rolls.

  Skiers make early starts, and although the tables in the alcove were all occupied when I went in, the other guests soon swallowed their meal and clumped out. Only Phil Sloan was left, sitting alone and disconsolate.

  I spoke to him across the empty tables. ‘Good morning. How’s your wife’s cold?’

  ‘Thank you for asking, but it’s no better, I’m afraid,’ he said glumly, fingering his sparse moustache. ‘Fortunately she doesn’t seem feverish, so I think a day in bed will do her as much good as anything. Frau Hammerl is being very kind and has sent her up a hot drink. With luck, she’ll begin to feel brighter tomorrow.’

  ‘I hope so. Such a shame for your holiday to be spoiled.’

  He sighed. ‘I was so much looking forward to bringing Rosemary here. She’s never been to the Tyrol before. Not that I’ve been to Kirchwald myself, but I’ve had two or three holidays at other resorts near Innsbruck. Didn’t do too badly on skis, either.’ He peered wistfully out of the window at the sunlit slopes that reared high above the roofs of the houses opposite the hotel.

  ‘Shall you go ski-ing today?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know what to do …’ He tugged uncertainly at the hairs of his moustache, as though trying to decide whether it was worth bothering with or whether he might as well shave the thing off. ‘Rosemary did say that I wasn’t to stay in on her account. She knows how much I was looking forward to ski-ing again, and she said she’d stay in bed only if I promised to go out. But it seems so unfair …’ He looked at me anxiously. ‘What do you think? I mean, supposing you were in Rosemary’s situation –?’

  I tried to imagine how it might have been: supposing I’d come here with Matt, and had succumbed to a roaring cold …

  ‘I’d want you to go ski-ing,’ I said without hesitation. Matt had enjoyed that excessively irritating good health that inclines its lucky posse
ssors to believe that other people’s ailments are merely self-indulgent. If I’d felt ill, the last thing I’d have wanted would be to have Matt trying to buck me up. Not that Phil Sloan would be hearty with his wife, I was sure of that; but it might be even worse, for Rosemary, to have a husband who fidgeted and gloomed about the place.

  ‘If that’s what Rosemary said, and as long as she’s not feverish, and as long as Frau Hammerl is kind enough to keep an eye on her – then I think you should go ski-ing,’ I told him firmly. He cheered up immediately, thanked me, and hurried off to communicate my decision to his wife.

  I was glad to see Stephen Marsh coming to fetch me for our excursion. He was as large and healthy as Matt had been, but less assertive; Matt had been all dynamic personality, whereas Stephen was amiable. And amiability was exactly what I needed in an escort at the moment, nothing less and certainly nothing more.

  By the time we left the Alte Post, with Stephen carrying his skis on his shoulder, the sun had climbed over the flank of the mountain and was shining brilliantly out of a sky as blue as gentian. I stood blinking, dazzled by light and colour; light reflected from the fresh snow that overlay the village square, and colour from the frescoes that had been painted on the plaster walls of every building round it.

  The frescoes were magnificent, their colours as splendid as they must have been when they were first laid on the walls of the buildings before the plaster was dry. Some were trompe l’oeil paintings, in brown, designed to give the impression that a flat upper window was really an oriel, or that a modest doorway was set deep in a carved stone embrasure. Others were pictures, boldly executed in singing reds and blues and greens and yellows, with themes either of religious devotion or of seasonal work on the mountainside. One side of the white church tower was entirely covered with a four-times lifesize painting of Christ in majesty, with angels attendant. Above the painting, on top of the slim tower, the bronze-coloured tiles of the onion-shaped dome stood clear against the blue of the sky and glistened as they caught the sun.

  Stephen listened indulgently to my exclamations of pleasure and then took me on a conducted tour of the village. He pointed out more frescoes, and the old public wells, each watched over by a statue of a saint or of the Virgin; and, more prosaically, such useful places as the ski shop, the cafés and the Apotheke.

  As we walked, with our ski boots crunching firmly into the snow, I realized that the smells of the village were every bit as characteristic as the sights. This morning, the crisp air was scented not only with trodden snow and wood smoke, but with coffee and a hint of the pine trees that formed a dark mass on the mountainside just above the village. And in the narrow road that led out of the village and up towards the summer pastures there was an olfactory extra: a distinctively rural smell. Along this road were several farmhouses, each with two separate sides under the same roof: one side, the dwelling part, was windowed and plastered and frescoed; from the other side, the timber byre, came the warm reek of wintering cows.

  The centre of the village was quiet, but the road that led up from Innsbruck, past the cemetery and the Apotheke, was crowded with cars and walkers, all carrying skis and all going one way.

  ‘They haven’t walked all the way up from Innsbruck, surely?’ I asked Stephen, as a family party humped their skis past at a brisk rate.

  ‘No – there’s a little narrow-gauge electric railway that comes from the city on its way up the valley. There’s a halt just outside Kirchwald, and a lot of Innsbruckers come up by rail for a day’s ski-ing. That’s how I came this morning. If we follow everyone else, we’ll get to the foot of the chair lift.’

  As we passed the turning that led into the square, Phil Sloan appeared from the direction of the hotel wearing dark blue ski clothes. He had skis on his shoulder, and the look of someone who feels guilty because he is playing truant, but is determined to make the most of it. He called a greeting. I introduced the men, and saw from Stephen’s frown that he was not enthusiastic about having anyone else’s company.

  Phil looked uncertainly from one of us to the other. ‘Er –’ he said diffidently. I felt that it was just as well that his hands were occupied with his skis and ski sticks, or he would have been tugging at his moustache again. ‘Er – do you mind if I come along with you? I mean, I don’t know the ropes here, and as my wife isn’t well enough to come out I’d be glad of some company. That is, as long as I’m not intruding? I mean,’ he elaborated unnecessarily, embarrassing us and himself by his clumsy attempt not to embarrass, ‘I don’t want to get in the way –’

  I went to his rescue. Stephen had lost some of his amiable air; he looked as though he was quite capable of telling the poor man to push off, and that would be unnecessary as well as unkind. I had no reason for wanting to be alone with Stephen.

  ‘Of course you’re not intruding,’ I said warmly, and Phil gave me a grateful smile.

  At the foot of the chair lift, just outside the old part of the village, were a number of new hotels. The presence of the resident holidaymakers, added to the influx of Innsbruckers, meant a long wait for the lift. The three of us stood patiently in line, and Phil Sloan took it upon himself to enliven the wait with bright conversation. Stephen glowered. When he suddenly muttered something on the theme of, ‘Might as well be in the middle of Charing Cross station’, I followed the direction of his look and saw his university colleague, tall and thin in a dark green ski suit, striding up to join the queue.

  I smiled at Stephen’s antipathetic expression. ‘Why the dislike?’ I asked.

  Stephen shrugged. ‘Oh, the man’s so typically English –’

  I laughed. ‘He spoke to me after you’d gone last night, and told me that his father was Austrian and his mother’s a Scot!’

  ‘Well … he sounds English, anyway. And he’s so formal about everything, so unrelaxed – no sense of humour at all. The students don’t much like him – they respect him, because apparently he knows his stuff, but he works them a sight harder than most of the other lecturers.’

  ‘Does he?’ I watched Jon Becker, skis on shoulder, join the end of the line; head high, aloof, noticing no one. ‘That wasn’t the impression he gave me last night. He offered to cancel some lectures tomorrow so that he could show me Innsbruck.’

  Stephen bristled. ‘He did, did he? And what did you tell him?’

  He had begun to sound possessive, so I gave him a pleasant smile and a circumspect answer: ‘I said that I wouldn’t want him to do that on my account …’

  ‘Hm,’ Stephen’s hackles fell. Unexpectedly, he grinned. ‘Shows Becker’s got some life in him, anyway,’ he conceded.

  Phil Sloan had been listening with polite interest. ‘What subject does he teach?’ he asked.

  ‘European history,’ I said. ‘He told me that he’s going to write a book about mediaeval trade routes.’ Stephen groaned.

  ‘That’s very interesting,’ said Phil seriously. He looked reproachfully at Stephen. ‘History is a very interesting subject. I’d like to talk to him about it.’

  Stephen brightened. ‘You would?’ His plan was transparent, but if Phil noticed he took no offence. ‘Well, that’s fine – when we reach the top I’ll introduce you. I’m sure you’ll get on well together.’

  We shuffled our way through the ski-lift terminus, handing over an alarming quantity of precious schillings in return for our tickets to the top of the local summer pasture area, known as the Kirchwalder Alm. Stephen and I shared one of the double chairs. As it rose, swaying from the cable, higher and higher up the side of the mountain, the view expanded magnificently. Kirchwald dwindled to a toy village perched on a ledge of mountainside, its buildings and surrounding pine trees dark against the snow. On other white ledges were other villages, catching the sun on the onion domes or the slim green spires of their churches. Away beyond and below, in the valley of the river Inn, lay the city that took its name from a bridge over the river; and on the far side of the valley, forming a massive snowclad wall behind Innsbruck, re
ared the mountain range of the Nordkette.

  We reached the top of the cable, our chair clanging into the station, and hopped off quickly so that the attendant could swing the chair round and send it down again. Stephen led me through a pine-panelled restaurant and out on to a terrace, and I had to lift my hand to ward off the sudden dazzling glare of sun on snow.

  Here, four thousand feet up on the Kirchwalder Alm, the air was crisper, the snow deeper, the sun hotter. The terrace was crowded with holidaymakers, skiers and non-skiers, most of them lying back in their chairs and lifting their faces to the sun.

  Stephen and I joined them, and Phil Sloan joined us. Stephen muttered something under his breath. I guessed that it would be indelicate to ask him to repeat it, so I concentrated on putting a protective film of sun cream on my face.

  As soon as Jon Becker appeared on the terrace Stephen fetched him, and did his best to off-load our companion by shamelessly introducing Phil as a man with an obsessional interest in mediaeval trade routes. He also made a point, presumably to impress Phil, of using his colleague’s academic title.

  Becker declined to co-operate. ‘Jon,’ he said briefly, shaking hands with Phil. ‘Always glad to meet another mediaevalist – but it’s a pity to waste good ski-ing weather, isn’t it? Perhaps we can have a discussion over a drink one evening.’

  He made the suggestion with politeness rather than enthusiasm. To Stephen he said frostily, ‘You’ll find, when you’ve got your doctorate, that you won’t want to use it outside the university. People always assume that you’re a medical man, and sidle up on social occasions to tell you about their operations or to ask for an on-the-spot diagnosis.’ His light green eyes flicked towards me. ‘And it’s not the pretty girls who do it either,’ he added, with what sounded like a forced attempt at gallantry.

  Phil interrupted. ‘Isn’t that Toni Hammerl? The man in the black ski suit – oh yes, he’s seen us. It looks as though he’s coming to join us.’