next day.
On previous holidays the families had taken in their various permutations, there had never been such determined concentration on skiing. There had been longer lunches, and more hours spent sitting in the blade-bright sun. But this year, after the first evening, they were wary of each other although Andrew and Janice cheerfully acted as if nothing was different. Marcelle was quiet except when she was with her children, and Darcy was irritable. To gloss over the feeling of discord the four of them skied longer hours, and talked about it all evening.
By unspoken agreement the children were allowed to stay up later, and the extra exercise meant earlier nights for everyone. The threatening intimacy of the snowy chalet was dispelled.
Michael and Hannah were left out of this determined nucleus of the party because they could not ski so well. They took lessons every day with a private teacher, a lean-hipped French boy called Thierry who smoked Marlboro cigarettes on the chair lifts and wore his mirror-lensed sunglasses even inside the mountain restaurants.
Michael found that he looked forward to the moment every morning when Hannah appeared in her silvery suit, and they waited outside together for Thierry to ski down to them in a flurry of exhibitionist turns. Hannah was good-humoured and courageous throughout their lessons, and while Thierry flirted routinely with her it was Michael she turned to to share their small triumphs and the comedy of their failures. He was flattered, and pleased, and felt himself thawing out in her warmth. Even his joints seemed to loosen. His stiff knees flexed and to his surprise his turns became fluid and confident.
The two of them met up with the group of children for lunch, and Michael liked the easy way Hannah dealt with them. She let them order French fries and Cokes, found their missing belongings for them and marshalled them efficiently for the afternoon without making a difficulty of it, as Marcelle would have done.
‘Do you know, I’ve even enjoyed having lunch every day with the bloody kids?’ Michael said to her when they set off on the Friday afternoon. They were standing in a queue for a chair lift, with Thierry a little behind them because he had lingered to talk to a likely-looking girl. Hannah’s face was framed in the silvery fur of her hood. She smiled, pausing in the act of rubbing some kind of cream into her lips. He could smell the fragrance of it.
‘Why not? They’re fun, aren’t they? And think of the brownie points we’ve earned.’
She tipped her forefinger with a tiny extra peak of cream and then reached out and dabbed it on Michael’s mouth. He was encumbered with his ski poles whereas Hannah had looped hers neatly over her forearm. She rubbed the cream in for him, following the lines of his mouth. Her face within the rim of fur was serious, concentrating. He had seen her perform the same service for Freddie.
Michael wanted to kiss her, but he transferred one ski pole to the other hand instead and in an awkward gesture put his arm around her. The skiers shuffled forward as the chairs scooped them away from the front of the queue. Hannah put her suncream away and zipped the pocket securely. She slid forward, holding her poles ready for the lift and he reluctantly lifted his arm to let her move freely.
Michael had not admitted as much, but he did not enjoy these lift rides. The empty space seemed to yawn nauseatingly under his encumbered feet and he was always relieved at the point at the opposite end when the chair sailed over the safety net and the bar lifted to allow him to slither forward and stand upright.
This was a three-seater chair but as the columns formed in the throat of the installation Michael saw that there were two trios ahead of them and no one on Hannah’s other side. He was thinking, Good, we’ll be on our own, as they stood at the barrier and then the little gates opened to admit them. They slid forward shoulder to shoulder, readying themselves and looking back at the chair as it rotated towards them.
Then there was some laughter and scuffling behind, and someone crashed through the third gate just as it was closing. A skier slithered hastily forward to the third position, almost falling as the chair swept behind them and caught all three of them off balance.
‘Careful,’ Hannah warned, her voice sounding sharp. There was more laughter following them and some jeering in French.
The three of them collapsed awkwardly into the chair and as it swept fast upwards Michael had to struggle to reach and pull down the safety bar. He managed to sit upright and place his skis on the footrests and saw that Hannah had worked herself into the right position too.
The chair sailed upwards over the snow-covered tops of some conifers and then a rocky gully. There was a pylon on the other side of the gully and the chair juddered as the cable passed over the rollers. They were swinging uncomfortably and Michael suddenly realized as he craned forward to see past Hannah that the third skier was rocking the chair because she was trying to rotate her legs from the side to the front. She had fallen into the seat sideways with her upper body twisted and her legs hanging out sideways. He caught a glimpse of a scared face, very young. She was a girl of perhaps fourteen, in a red and black ski suit.
‘Sit still,’ Hannah cried as the thin dark legs flailed wildly.
The girl’s skis looked very long and heavy as they swung over the treetops.
‘For God’s sake,’ Michael heard himself call out.
‘She’s slipping!’ Hannah screamed. The chair lurched wildly.
It seemed that the girl was being dragged under the safety bar by some cruel invisible hand. Her mittened fists caught at the armrest and at Hannah’s leg.
‘Je vais tomber,’ she cried. Her legs flailed again; Michael saw how the skis made arcs against the white slope.
They were over open ground now, a white piste a long way beneath them spiked with marker poles. It was steep, a black run.
Hannah threw herself sideways to try to catch at the girl. Her ski poles fell away as the chair bounced on the cable and confused voices shouted in French. There was a scream as the girl lost her precarious hold and Hannah clumsily fought to catch her wrist.
Then there was a terrible instant when the girl was sliding downwards, a blur of red and black and skis like scything blades, and after that a jolt that set their chair violently oscillating. Michael’s head jerked backwards and his teeth snapped on his tongue; for an instant he was blinded by the pain.
When he could see and hear again there was more screaming and he saw that the girl had indeed fallen, but as she fell the hood of her suit had caught on the end of the opposite footrest.
Now she hung suspended by the neck over the empty windy space. Her head lolled forward and her slack body rotated a little, to the side and then back again. The lift had stopped.
Hannah had edged along the seat and was leaning down to her, her own body almost beneath the safety bar. Michael was swept by a suffocating wave of vertigo. His mouth was full of blood from his bitten tongue. His hand shot out involuntarily and clamped on Hannah’s arm. The ground forty feet beneath them seemed to swing dizzily up into his face.
‘Don’t,’ he choked. ‘You’ll fall. Sit up.’
‘I’ve got to help her.’
Hannah knocked his hand away. Through the confusion of his fear Michael felt a kind of wondering admiration for her bravery. He looked upwards in order not to have to see the drop beneath them. In each of the chairs suspended ahead there were three white faces gazing back down at them. In the chair immediately behind there were three boys, the girl’s companions. They were motionless,
