a staff of some hundred ski instructors. Extra buildings had had to go up, to accommodate the two thousand students who were billeted at any one time. Jimmy offered Iris the opportunity to return to England if she wanted to, but she chose to stay on. Ruth was happily installed at her grandparents’, busy with her school and a best friend whom she evidently adored, to judge by how often she was mentioned in letters. It was rather a wrench, being away from her, but it was better for Ruth to have the continuity of her life in Malvern. Iris had learned to ski herself and found it exciting. Also, somewhat to her surprise, she realised how much she liked to work, to be of use. She was in no hurry to go back, uncertain as she remained about her future with Edward. She rather imagined she might end up alone, although the thought no longer troubled her.
But in the spring of 1944, the commanding officer called Iris into his office to tell her the school would be closing down at the end of the season. Half the staff would go on to Italy, to continue their work there; the remainder would be going elsewhere. He was not able to reveal their destination, he informed her rather pompously. The thing was, there would be no post for her as of early summer. Something could be found for her in London if she liked.
Jimmy already knew of course. He was going to miss the place, his dog especially: a local Alsatian had unofficially adopted him soon after he’d arrived, joining in on training exercises, knocking people over. The dog had become a sort of mascot to them all. The commanding officers came and went, but Jimmy had been here all along; the Cedars was really his thing altogether. He and Iris sat disconsolately in his office, smoking.
‘I don’t know what to do with myself quite,’ said Iris. ‘I’ve grown so used to being here, so fond of everyone.’
‘Mountains have a queer effect on people,’ said Jimmy. ‘I’ve noticed that in the mountains one can very easily come to love almost anybody.’
‘Well, I don’t know about anybody,’ said Iris. ‘I’m not sure if I’d have loved Dumpling, if I’d met him at home.’
They laughed. Dumpling was a thickset Italian who worked in the kitchens. He was notoriously bad-tempered. One breakfast, when someone had asked for an egg cooked for a shorter time, he’d made a fearful scene and shouted, ‘If you no like-a – go lumpy!’ It had become something of a catchphrase about the place.
People were leaving by degrees. Jimmy was the first to go. He was to stop in London before joining some of the others in Canada, he’d confided to Iris. Digby was due to leave the week after. On her final evening, after dinner, Digby knocked quietly on the door of her room.
‘These books belong to you,’ he said, handing them to her. ‘And I’ve brought us a nightcap.’ He produced a flask.
‘I don’t know that I’ve got anything we can drink out of. Will my tooth mug do? We’ll have to share it, unless you prefer to drink straight from that.’
‘No, let’s share your glass. So long as it doesn’t taste of toothpaste.’
Iris fetched it. He half filled it with clear liquid and handed her the glass.
‘Heavens! It’s strong. But delicious. It tastes of raspberries.’
‘That’s because it’s made of them. Chap down at the French club gave it to me. Good, isn’t it?’
She smiled. ‘Very good. It’s wonderful to taste raspberries again, reminds me of England. I’d quite forgotten what they were like. Here,’ and she held out the glass to him.
But instead of taking the glass, he took her wrist in his hand and pulled her gently towards him. Before she had time to protest, his face was against hers. She wondered how his nose would fit, whether it would jab her eye or cheek. Then she noticed the pleasing smell of his skin, like freshly sharpened pencils. As he kissed her, his eyes surprisingly open, she realised that she did not feel indignant or even embarrassed, that in fact she felt nothing but pleasure and did not want him to stop.
‘I didn’t think you …’ she said, as he took the glass from her hand and set it on a table and stepped across the room with her hand in his, pulling her down onto her bed next to him.
‘No, but I do. That is to say, I am,’ he told her, kissing her hair, her face.
They lay side by side in the dark room, their clothes forming puddles of deeper shadow on the floor. Iris could not stop grinning, and she sensed that Digby was doing the same. She felt very wide awake and very, very happy, and the happiness was not a precipice, she realised, but a veranda, somewhere she need not fall from, nor scrabble to hold on to, but a place where she might stay and make herself comfortable. It felt like a sort of homecoming, to be naked beneath the sheets with Digby.
‘Well, there we are,’ said Digby at last, turning towards her.
‘Yes. There we are,’ said Iris. And she took his hand in hers and kissed his knuckles, one by one.
The air in the house seemed to be heavy with steam and the sweet, rotting smell it carried. The only escape was to stay in the sitting room and open the French windows onto the narrow terrace, even if that did mean letting in the cold Northumbrian air.
‘Goodness, darling! Don’t have those windows open, you’ll make the whole house freeze,’ said Iris, sweeping into the room where Ruth was sitting at the piano. She was pressing single keys with one finger, before singing the eight notes up and then down each scale. She had already noticed, after only three days in the house, that Iris interrupted her whenever she sang or played. The given reason was that the sound might wake the baby, although Ruth wondered if there were not some other motive, as the baby’s room was surely too far for the music to carry. Iris shut the glass doors firmly and went to put a log on the dwindling fire.
‘It’s the smell of the nappies,’ said Ruth. ‘It’s like boiling beetroots mixed with cabbage. It’s worse than school.’
‘It is rather foul,’ Iris agreed, speaking as she always did, as though anything concerned with the practicalities of the baby had nothing to do with her. ‘But the draught’s not good for Birdle, is it, darling?’ she said, addressing the corner of the room, where a pale-grey parrot was watching her from a cage on a tall wooden stand. The bird was treading from foot to foot in agitation at the sight of Iris, who usually opened the cage directly she came into the room, allowing its occupant to clamber beak first out of its confines and about the room at will.
‘Do pipe down!’ said Birdle. The intonation was unmistakably Iris’s. She and Ruth both laughed.
Birdle had been Digby’s wedding present to Iris. The parrot had become extravagantly fond of her, sitting on her shoulder in the evenings, constantly attempting to feed her pieces of seed or nut, quite possibly regurgitated ones. When she played patience Birdle often sidled down her arm to the table and picked up single cards with his beak, one after another, before distributing them at random across the thick felt, spoiling the game. If Digby came near his wife, if he tried to sit beside her on the yellow sofa, Birdle scuttled along the back, head lowered, and bit him. He shrieked whenever Iris came into the room, but only looked slyly and in silence at everyone else. The sole words he spoke were imitations of her. Ruth was secretly rather afraid of Birdle. She had held him once or twice, at arm’s length in case he tried to bite, and been amazed by the lightness of him: it seemed remarkable that so forceful a personality could be contained within so light a frame. Digby found Birdle endlessly comic, despite having been given a bleeding ear lobe on more than one occasion.
