lowered her head as close as she could to the girl’s.
‘They’ll come quickly,’ Michael heard her say. ‘Can you hear me? They’ll come soon, I know they will.’
The red and black bundle stirred. The skis swung lazily, first one and then the other, up and down.
‘Don’t look down,’ Hannah ordered. ‘Look at me.’
Michael was amazed that the girl was alive. He had been imagining the cervical vertebrae, the functional purity of the bluish-white bone laid bare of skin and muscle tissue as he might have exposed it on the operating table; he was sure that her neck would have been broken. But she had slid rather than fallen, he recalled.
A group of skiers had collected on the piste below. Their upturned faces were like discoloured blotches on the snow. Two pisteurs in orange jackets arrived in the centre of the huddle. One of them held a short-wave radio to his mouth. Hannah looked back over her shoulder to Michael.
‘How will they reach her?’ she whispered.
‘I don’t know.’
Vertigo made him afraid that he would vomit or faint.
‘What can we do?’
‘Keep still. Nothing else.’
It was very quiet. A moment ago the air had been full of shouting.
Hannah turned away from him again. She was talking to the girl in a low, steady voice. He couldn’t catch all the words.
‘… can’t speak French … all right … get your skis off …’
Amazingly, the girl responded. Her head lifted. They could see her face, grey-white, and black eyes sunken in their sockets. Her lips moved, but they couldn’t hear what she said. Her eyes darted to one side, and they knew she was looking in her terror to see what was holding her suspended.
Hannah went on talking in her low, soothing voice. She told the girl that she couldn’t fall, that she was securely held, that all she needed to do was wait until the rescuers came. The girl’s eyes fixed on Hannah’s face, and never moved.
A long time passed. Michael knew that it was a long time because he began to feel cold, and then the cold seeped into his bones. The group on the piste below swelled into a crowd. There was a flurry of coming and going but none of it seemed to relate to the three of them suspended in terrible isolation high above the snow. Michael tried to work out how long it would take for a helicopter to reach them, but he had no idea where rescue helicopters came from. He couldn’t think why they didn’t winch the chair slowly along to the next pylon, about fifteen yards ahead. Then he saw a man in a pisteur’s jacket climbing like a monkey up the ladder at the side of the pylon.
The girl began to swing her legs. The chair picked up the movement at once and began to swing too. Michael realized that she was trying to kick off her skis and nausea gripped at him again.
‘Non, non, attend,’ he heard Hannah’s urgent murmur.
The climbing pisteur had reached the cable. He was wearing a webbing harness, and they saw him attach the harness to the cable and launch himself forward. He was winching himself slowly down towards them, swinging awkwardly past the two intervening chairs.
‘He’s coming, you’ll be all right now,’ Hannah’s incantation continued. The girl was too numb and terrified even to turn her head.
With a sliding rattle down the length of the cable the man reached them. He had a brown face seamed like a walnut. At the sound of his French voice the girl detached her eyes from Hannah’s at last and stiffly turned her head.
Michael could not work out how the girl could be freed and lifted to safety. There was a bag of tools suspended from the man’s waist, but no second harness, and his own could not have accommodated two people. Then he saw something that made the ground begin to spin again.
The group of rescue workers below had been cutting free the big orange plastic-coated mattresses that padded the base of every pylon along the piste. They were heaping them into a pile directly below the chair.
Hannah saw it at the same time, and her head swivelled so that her eyes met Michael’s. He snatched at her hand and imprisoned it under his arm as if it were Hannah the mattresses were waiting for.
The rescuer was calling out in rapid French to the people below. A stretcher on ski runners had materialized at the side of the piste. Then the man reached forward and down to the girl. He caught one of her legs and with a deft twist he freed the boot from the binding. One ski and then the other looped downwards to the snow.
Michael closed his eyes against his dizziness and in that instant the man had cut the girl free.
He heard Hannah gasp, and looked, and saw a blur of red and black falling and then not falling; the girl hit the heap of mattresses and they saw her roll, and her arms came up to cradle her head before she lay still again. Immediately she was surrounded by the rescuers.
Michael pulled at Hannah’s arm. He knew that the force of his grip must be hurting her, but he could not release it. Very slowly she sat upright, and he held her as best he could.
The rescuer hauled himself up the cable in his harness and dropped into the empty place in the chair. He muttered in French and when he saw they didn’t understand him he shrugged and looked away.
They didn’t speak. They sat in the frozen silence of shock, watching the activity below them. At last the stretcher was brought across and made ready.
Then Michael said, ‘She must be okay. If it was bad they’d be waiting for a helicopter to take her off.’
Hannah was visibly shuddering now. ‘It was such a fall. She’s only a young girl.’
‘The mattresses broke the fall for her. Did you see her roll and cover her head? That’s a good sign. She was conscious and probably her legs and back are all right.’
He heard himself offering this wisdom and good sense after the event, whilst in the crisis he had been hopeless and Hannah had bravely done everything she could. He was swamped with admiration for her.
‘I think she is good.’ The Frenchman stabbed his finger downwards.
The loaded stretcher was finally sped away. Michael and Hannah were both shaking with cold and reaction before the chair lift jolted again and their seat began to rise upwards on its mechanical progression.
At the top they stood to one side and watched the three boys who had been with the girl ski shakily away towards the point where she had fallen. Hannah’s poles had gone, and they could do nothing themselves but wait for Thierry to reach them. Michael put his hands on Hannah’s shoulders so he could look into her face.
‘You were wonderful. Amazing.’
Hannah smiled, denying her white face and blue lips. ‘I couldn’t remember a single word of French. Nothing. I thought she was going to be killed.’
Michael drew her closer to him, rubbing her arms in an effort to warm her.
‘All I could think of was that we were going
