neck.
‘I was thinking.’
He came to her and untucked the towel that covered her hair. He winnowed his fingers into the wet strands and kissed the droplets of water away from her shoulders. ‘About Everest?’
‘Yes.’
He wouldn’t say that he wished she weren’t going, because Ralf was too careful and generous for that. But she heard the words, just the same. Don’t go. Stay here with me and let me keep you safe. Logical and legible, secure.
Instead, he said, ‘Come to bed.’ He drew the curtains to shut out the dark and the trees and the glimmering snow, and unwrapped the second towel.
Lying in his arms, Finch closed her eyes and concentrated on making her body’s responses tip the scale against her mind’s. Ralf was a good lover and he was also a good man. She knew that he was ambitious, and hard-working and level-headed. On skis she followed his lead unhesitatingly, and elsewhere she valued his advice and opinions whenever he offered them. He spoke four languages and he made her laugh in the two she understood. In the most intimate moments, like this one, he whispered in German, tender endearments that she couldn’t decipher but which made the fine hairs rise at the nape of her neck. Ralf loved her, she knew that too.
For a thin, elastic shiver of time the scales balanced exactly, thought and unthinking. And then the body’s weight tipped them over. She exhaled a long breath that turned into a sigh. Ralf’s mouth moved against hers, and when the moment came she opened her eyes and looked into the hazed blueness of his, and although she knew him so well it was as if she were sharing her body with a stranger.
Afterwards, she lay with her head on his shoulder and his hand splayed over her hip. ‘We had a good day today, didn’t we?’ he murmured.
‘We did.’
Finch was a good skier, but she would never be as good as Ralf. He had taken her down through a steep gully with a line of trees sheltering within it. As they carved a path between the dark boles the colours of the world changed from blinding white and silver to black and graphite and pearl. Twigs cracked and laden branches shed a patter of snow as they ducked and jump-turned between them. Then the gully opened into a wide, sunlit ledge and there was a broad bowl full of unmarked, glittering snow. Way beneath them, where the slope ran out, the helicopter was already waiting.
They paused on the lip of the slope and then there was a sweet sssssccchhh as Ralf glided away. Finch watched the perfect linked Ss of his tracks. Ralf’s skiing always looked as if it cost him no physical effort whatsoever. Smiling, Finch flexed her knees and reached forward to plant her pole, unweighting and letting the edge of her ski carry her into a turn. Her tracks crossed and recrossed Ralf’s so the smooth arcs knitted into a chain of figure eights.
With the gathering speed whipping her cheeks she had given herself up to the rush and the rhythm. Powder crystals sprayed up and sparkled, catching the light like airborne diamonds. She was weightless, thoughtless, lost to everything but the snow and the slope. For now.
They reached the helicopter trailed by twin plumes of snow. Ralf planted his ski poles and slid forward to kiss her while they were still laughing with the exhilaration of the run.
‘We are a good match,’ he said now as he held on to her. She heard the vibration of his voice within the cage of his ribs and lay silent, listening. She said nothing, although he was waiting for her to agree with him.
Ralf slid away from her and walked naked into the kitchen. He came back with a bottle and two glasses, and she watched with her head back on the pillows as he twisted off the cork and poured froth and then champagne.
‘This is my send-off.’ She smiled. In the morning she would leave for Vancouver.
Ralf gave her a glass and lifted his to her. ‘Come back safely. And when you come back, will you marry me?’
Finch understood what today had been about. He had taken her out and shown her the beauty of the back country and the perfect skiing, and the helicopter waiting like a toy in the hollow of the mountains. Now there was the well-run resort with blazing fires and log cabins and champagne, and a fine dinner waiting.
All this, he could offer her all this freedom, with marriage and loyalty and habit wrapped up in it like a leg-iron hidden under the snow.
The injustice of the response shamed her into rapid words. ‘Ralf, thank you. I’m … only I can’t say yes.’
‘Does that mean you are not saying no?’
‘No. Yes … no, it doesn’t.’
‘Is it because of this voyage you are making, to Everest? If it is, tell me. I know that it must be harder to decide anything at all when you are going so far away.’
In the small silence that followed they lifted their glasses and drank, their movements unconsciously mimicking each other.
Carefully Finch began, ‘I have been very lucky all my life. You know that.’
He did know, of course. Ralf had met and liked all three of Finch’s older brothers, and their wives and children, and he had stayed with and been impressed by the Buchanan parents and their beautiful house in Vancouver. Finch’s was a remarkable, ambitious, wealthy family – held together by strong affection, as well as pride in their separate and mutual achievements. His own background could not have been more different and this solidity that Finch questioned was just one of the things he found attractive about her.
‘It sounds ungrateful, spoiled, to say that there can be too much ease. But it is what I feel. I have had it easy in the world, but climbing mountains scrapes away all the layers of expectation and assumption. It’s a challenge separate from the rest of my life.’
‘And separate from me.’
‘Yes, that’s true.’ She knew that she owed him the truth. At least a portion of it, the one she freely admitted to herself. ‘I know that it’s selfish, but it’s something that I need to do. I don’t find the same fixed determination or absolute satisfaction in anything else.’
Ralf inclined his head and she studied the sharp line of sun- and windburn on his cheekbones. They had discussed all this before. Finch had never been able to make him understand the force that impelled her to climb and tonight her urgency had made her speak too forcibly. She knew that she had hurt him, and she was sad and ashamed.
‘I understand,’ he said at length. He reached out to the champagne bottle and refilled their glasses. ‘Come back safely,’ he said, and he drank again.
‘I will,’ Finch promised, believing that she would and also understanding how much she would have to live through before that could happen. The knot of anticipation tightened again in her chest.
They finished the champagne as they dressed for dinner, then they went to the lodge dining-room and Ralf moved sociably around the tables and talked to the guests. After dinner he went to his daily meeting with the ski guides and the pilots, and Finch walked back to their cabin with James, and Kitty leaning on a stick. James was tired and went straight into the bedroom while the women wandered out on to the deck. It was a clear night, bright with stars.
With the end of her stick Kitty nudged a wooden lid to one side and a turquoise eye opened to the sky in a column of steam. ‘Hot tub?’ she asked.
‘Yes,
