Snowfall Page 9

  The Kirchwald ski school (proprietor, one of the Hammerls) was in session. Some complete beginners were stumping awkwardly round in a large circle, as I remembered doing initially at Aviemore, to get the feel of having slim six-foot planks attached to their boots. Others were teetering down the slope, shrieking, helplessly out of control, while a couple of Hammerls bellowed instructions: ‘Keep the knees asunder! Bend wiz the knees!’

  ‘I’m not very good at this, you know,’ I said apprehensively as we sat on a snow-cushioned tree stump and Stephen helped me to fix my skis. ‘What I remember most from Aviemore is that ski-ing isn’t an easy way of going downhill. And I don’t want to try any of the advanced stuff – if you can just remind me how to glide gently down this small slope without falling over too many times, that’ll suit me fine.’

  Inevitably, I made a mess of things at first. The skis seemed to have a life of their own and were hell-bent on leading it; they insisted on taking my feet downhill faster than the rest of me could follow. But Stephen was patient and encouraging, and after each fall I struggled upright, and herring-boned my way back up the slope to try again.

  It was hard, hot work, and presently I was glad to collapse on the tree stump again for a breather. ‘I’d forgotten that you have to abandon all logic when you’re on skis,’ I panted. ‘I mean, to turn left you have to put your left shoulder forward and your weight on your right foot – it’s completely unnatural!’

  Stephen chuckled. ‘Rubbish – it’s as natural as walking, once you get the hang of it. Child’s play! Look at this little lot, coming down now.’

  The far side of the slope formed a part of one of the downhill runs from the Kirchwalder Alm. Every now and then, experienced skiers would swoop out of some pine trees, cruise down the slope, leap over the single-track railway line and disappear rapidly in the direction of Innsbruck. There was nothing remarkable about their prowess, but what Stephen was pointing out was a group of Austrian children, led by a nun. She ski-ed serenely past us, her habit tucked up to mid-calf, her veil flying, a beatific smile on her face; laughing and shouting in her wake came a dozen children, of indeterminate sex and less than four feet in height, whipping over the snow on their miniature skis with infuriating nonchalance.

  ‘Little beasts,’ I complained enviously.

  ‘Maddening, isn’t it, when they’re so good at that age?’ Stephen agreed. ‘And not only that, they speak fluent German into the bargain … Still, you’re doing pretty well on skis, Kate – you’ve obviously been taught thoroughly, and. it’s just a matter of recapturing the knack. Try again – and remember what the instructors say: Bend with the knees!’

  His approval wasn’t important to me, but I was glad for Matt’s sake that Stephen noticed that I had been taught well. Matt had instructed me himself at Aviemore, and I had tried hard to win his praise. Now, as the knack began to return, my muscles got the hang of things and my skis consented to do what I wanted, I felt that Matt might even be quite proud of me.

  I was concentrating so hard on what I was attempting that for a few moments I forgot completely that this was Austria, and Matt was dead. I felt that I was at Aviemore again, that the man with me was Matt …

  He was ski-ing beside me as we worked back and forth across the slope, encouraging me: ‘That’s it, you’ve got it – round again to your left leaning out from the slope – that’s it, fine, keep those knees bent – now to your right again, weight on your left foot, don’t let your skis cross whatever you do – bend with the knees, watch that hummock – arrgh, help!’

  We had collided. We sprawled together, as I had once sprawled with Matt, breathless in the snow. After a few moments we sat up, sorted out our tangled sticks, kicked off our skis, pelted each other with snow and then collapsed again, laughing, in the dazzling whiteness that was as thick and comfortable as a goosefeather bed. I was elated by the fact that I had almost reached the bottom of the slope before falling, but too hot in my ski clothes and too wearied by my exertions to do more than lie back and smile breathlessly at the man who lay beside me. He was smiling too: teasing me, his eyes shining, his shoulders heaving, his lips parted as he tried to regain his breath.

  And then his smile faded. His eyelids narrowed, the movement of his shoulder stilled, his breathing became quicker, shallower. He bent over me with a tight, hungry look.

  I met him without hesitation. For a moment my vision had so contracted that I could delude myself that this really was Matt, and I reached for his mouth with all the longing occasioned by months of abstinence.

  And knew, immediately, that this was someone else. There is no mistaking one man’s kiss for another’s.

  The shock made me recoil. I wrenched my mouth away and tried to draw back, but Stephen held me captive in the snow. His hair shone red against the brilliant blue of the sky. ‘What’s the matter?’ he muttered, his voice slurred as though he were drunk on the heady Alpine air.

  He didn’t realize, of course. He couldn’t know that I had kissed him only because I wanted Matt. He looked puzzled, and hurt. He raised himself from me reluctantly. ‘Am I repulsive?’ he said.

  I lifted my hand and touched his nice, blunt face. ‘Of course not,’ I reassured him sadly. ‘I’m sorry, it’s just that –’

  He stopped my words. It was not Matt’s mouth now, but unmistakably Stephen’s own.

  It was a strange sensation, to be kissed by someone other than Matt. I hadn’t expected it, or wanted it. After Matt had died, my senses had seemed to atrophy. I had assumed that they were dead, too. But now I began to realize that they weren’t.

  I found myself responding to his kiss. Warily at first, almost experimentally; but then with an eagerness that took me by surprise. I no longer knew who I was kissing, or cared. I wasn’t dead, I was alive! I needed someone to prove it to me conclusively, and any living breathing man would do. I clung to him fiercely, so blinkered by the intensity of my reawakening that nothing mattered except here and now.

  He was astonished, and enthusiastic. ‘Oh, Kate …’ I heard him murmur. ‘Kate darling –’

  That shook me back to reality. I pushed him aside and sat up, disturbed by the alarming impersonality of my fervour and ashamed that I had misled him. He was crouching beside me in the snow, holding my shoulders, telling me that he knew last night that he wanted to kiss me but that he hadn’t dared hope that I would be willing.

  I snatched my hands away. ‘No, Stephen,’ I said. ‘I’m not – I can’t –’

  I began to cry. It was difficult at first. I had trained myself for so long to hold back my tears that they came initially in dry, wrenching sobs. Just as, when the fingers have been numbed by intense cold, the sudden return of the circulation brings pain, so the thawing of my senses seemed to tear me apart.

  Stephen tried to put his arms around me. ‘Don’t cry,’ he said, ‘please. I won’t rush you, I promise. I know that you loved Matt, but you can’t mourn him for ever. You’ve got to live in the present. And you want to, you can’t deny that after the way you’ve just –’

  I shook my head and turned away from him. ‘No, you’ve got it all wrong. This isn’t what I want. Please leave me alone, Stephen.’

  His eyes were a little apprehensive, but his chin was determined. He took a deep breath. ‘All right. I understand, you don’t want a repetition of the way things were between you and Matt. Well, I wouldn’t dream of asking you just to live with me. I have every intention of getting married – not just yet, I couldn’t possibly afford it, but after I get my doctorate. If we both feel the same way about each other at the end of the week, I’ll come back to England as soon as I can and we can start making plans –’

  I think I shouted. It seemed the only way to make him understand. ‘No, Stephen! It was all a mistake. I didn’t mean to kiss you at all – I haven’t fallen for you and I wouldn’t dream of marrying you. I don’t ever want to see you again. Just go away and leave me alone …’

  I buried my face in my arms and my arms in th
e snow and let the hot tears fall. I wasn’t crying for Matt. As Stephen – and Jon Becker – had advised me to do, I had at last come to terms with the fact of Matt’s death. I’d woken, as if from a long sleep, and was prepared to start my life all over again.

  But this was no fairy-tale. I was grateful to Stephen for bringing me to life, but I didn’t love him for it; I didn’t even feel sufficiently strongly about him to hate him. What I was crying about was the meaninglessness of the kisses I had given him, and the emptiness of my newly-thawed heart.

  Chapter Nine

  If I wasn’t being followed before, I certainly was now.

  I stayed in the snow until I felt chilled, then picked myself up and trudged disconsolately back to the village. Stephen, carrying my skis and sticks as well as his own, was hanging about on the road looking confused and unhappy. I ignored him, and he trailed behind me all the way to the Alte Post.

  Phil was back from his ski run, and he and Rosemary were in the hall, just about to go into the Gäststube for lunch. Rosemary smiled as I came in, then hurried towards me with a frown of concern.

  ‘Don’t say something else has happened to you? You look – oh, Kate, you look absolutely wretched. Doesn’t she, Phil? What’s the matter? Where’s Stephen?’

  ‘Outside,’ I said bleakly.

  ‘Oh dear …’ Rosemary understood immediately. She put a sympathetic arm round my shoulders. ‘If you want to talk about it, I’ll listen, and if you don’t I won’t ask questions. Poor Kate – you’re really going through it, aren’t you? Come in with us and have some hot soup, you’ll feel better after you’ve warmed up.’

  I shook my head. I liked the idea of soup, but I couldn’t face the company of the newly-weds. ‘No thanks, I don’t want anything. But there is something you could do for me, if you don’t mind. I’ve told Stephen to go away, but I think he doesn’t believe that I mean it, so I’ll have to give him the slip. He’ll expect me to come here to lunch, but actually I’m going down to Innsbruck – I feel that I want to get away from Kirchwald, and I need the distraction of shops and busy-ness. So I’d be awfully grateful if you could keep him out of my way – give him the idea that I’m just going to the annexe to change, and that you’re expecting me to return.’

  Phil Sloan squared his shoulders and brushed up the ends of his moustache. ‘Certainly, Kate. We’ll be glad to help. From what Rosemary’s been telling me, you’ve had enough trouble on this trip without a so-called friend giving you more! But are you sure you want to go down to Innsbruck on your own? We were thinking of going there later –’

  I was grateful for all their kindness, but there are limits to the help one can reasonably expect from a honeymoon couple. I asked Phil to accompany me just as far as the front door of the Alte Post. Stephen stood hunched in a doorway on the opposite side of the square, looking thoroughly miserable; I went down the alleyway towards the annexe, and saw from the corner of my eye that as Stephen began to come across the square after me, Phil neatly intercepted him.

  And that, I thought, was that. I’d hurt Stephen’s pride, but he would get over it quickly enough; from what Jon Becker had said, he didn’t lack girl-friends in Innsbruck. As for me, it was a matter now of salvaging what I could from the remains of my Austrian holiday, on my own. And then, when I got back to London, I would have to do something positive about making new friends: take up an evening class in yoga or pottery, audition for a choir or a drama group, get out my golf clubs again …

  I changed, checked my watch and set out for the railway halt. The trains left at ten minutes past each hour. I took the footpath, and I was so preoccupied with determined plans for my future social life that I completely forgot the terror I had experienced when I ran up the same path the previous evening.

  And then I noticed, among the other passengers waiting at the halt, the man with the monkey face. As soon as he realized that I had seen him, he pretended to be looking elsewhere.

  Aloneness, it appeared, was going to be the least of my problems during the remainder of my stay. It suddenly seemed superfluous for me to worry about how I was going to pass my leisure time after I returned to London, when there were people here in Austria who, for some inexplicable reason, were taking an uncomfortably close interest in my more immediate future.

  But at least the man didn’t get into the same carriage. I began to relax. Coincidences do happen; Austria is a free country, and the man had a perfect right to travel between Kirchwald and Innsbruck, and to use the inn near the university, if he wanted to. It was stupid of me to sit in the little train being gloomy and introspective, when the sun was reflected in dazzling light from the snow and the splendours of Innsbruck were spread before me. Now I was here, the sensible thing was to forget everything else and concentrate on sightseeing.

  Innsbruck is magnificently baroque. Yesterday evening, wandering round the old city with Stephen after nightfall, I had thought that the vaulted arcades and narrow streets that we saw by floodlight were typically mediaeval. Now, in daylight, I could see the full extent of the eighteenth-century redevelopment of the city. The Empress Maria Theresia may not have used Innsbruck as her capital city, as her Hapsburg predecessors had done, but fortunately for posterity she had given it a face-lift at a period of notable architectural elegance.

  The short wide main street, the Maria-Theresien-Strasse, is breathtaking. At the southern end it is spanned by a great triumphal arch, built by the Empress to commemorate the dynastic marriage of her son to a Spanish princess. The square-topped arch is handsome enough, but what stops you in your tracks is the fact that it is set against what must be one of the most magnificent backdrops in the world, the Nordkette mountain range. As I saw it that morning, the great wall of snow and ice reared up above the urns and statuary that decorate the arch, and drew a line almost as straight as that of the top of the arch itself against a winter sky of unbelievably cloudless blue.

  I wandered through the arch, clutching my guidebook and feeling dwarfed to complete insignificance. The Maria-Theresien-Strasse is a street of processional width, apparently stopped off at the northern end by the mountains. On either side of the street are tall patrician houses, built with an eighteenth-century eye for dignity and symmetry; at ground level there are now shops, and above the shops the facades are stuccoed in creams and buffs and pinks and pale blues and greens. On one side of the street is a baroque palace, on the other a church, both handsomely symmetrical, both topped by slender domes. In the centre is a white marble column erected to commemorate the successful defence of Innsbruck against an early eighteenth-century Bavarian invasion. On top of the column stands a starry-haloed statue of the Madonna; far more than lifesize, and as tall as the domes of the neighbouring church, but miniaturized by the mountain wall.

  The street led me on past the statue, and then narrowed abruptly. Ahead was the traffic-free Altstadt, with its twisting lanes and mediaeval buildings and deep arcades. At the far end, as it were just under the mountain, the main street widened into a small square overlooked by the architectural feature that seems to be one of the symbols of Innsbruck, the ‘golden roof’. It is an ornate stone balcony which looks like – and was apparently used as, by the Emperor Maximilian – the royal box at a street theatre. Protecting the balcony from the weather is a long down-sweep of roof, tiled with gilded copper, from which the snow had been carefully cleared. I joined a crowd of tourists, and stood gaping. As I blinked at the shimmer of the sun on those tiles I felt that it was churlish to disbelieve the legend that they really were made of gold.

  I turned back towards the Maria-Theresien-Strasse, stopping to marvel at a pink-plastered house front that was baroque in symmetry but covered with a wedding cake effervescence of white ornamentation; baroque run riot. I consulted my guidebook again … hmm, rococo.

  Either I was getting a touch of architectural indigestion, or I was very hungry. It was long past lunch time. I still had to see the Hofburg palace and the Imperial church and the tomb of Emperor Maximili
an, but I didn’t feel able to face them without some nourishment. I was wary of the expensive tourist-orientated eating places in the Altstadt, and I had no intention of returning to Stephen’s haunt and risking a meeting, but I thought that I might find somewhere small and relatively inexpensive in one of the side streets leading off the Maria-Theresien-Strasse.

  I left the Altstadt and walked back down the pavement of the main street. Most of the other pedestrians were walking on the inner side of the pavement, looking at the shop windows; I kept closer to the edge, to give me a better view of the side turnings. Seeing a likely-looking street, on the other side of the Maria-Theresien-Strasse, I stopped and waited for a few moments on the edge of the pavement until the traffic cleared.

  And then it happened, so quickly that I hardly had time to yelp. The road was clear. I took two steps on to it, and a big white Mercedes that was parked a few yards away suddenly began to move. I dithered for a second. The car accelerated. I caught one glimpse of the driver, saw him turn the wheel deliberately over towards me, and jumped backwards for my life. The car’s brakes squealed, my boots slipped in the slushy gutter. Next minute we were going in different directions, the Mercedes hell-for-leather along the Maria-Theresien-Strasse, and me down with an undignified thump on to the pavement of the most elegant street in the whole of baroque Innsbruck.

  If you go on a winter sports holiday, you must expect a few falls. I had hit the snow so many times during the past few days that the shock was less than it might have been. It was my dignity that was hurt as much as anything. I might, perhaps, now that the sight of the driver of the car had confirmed some of my suspicions, have felt afraid; but as I sat and got my breath back preparatory to scrambling to my feet, it was not fear I felt so much as anger.