Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal and Other Stories (21 page)

With politeness and attention he wrote back: ‘There is such a choice of hotels here that it isn't easy to know what to recommend. I think the best thing for you and your husband to do is to come up here as far as Lauterbrunnen (you take the little train from Interlaken) and pick on something you like. You couldn't find a better spot; the scenery is magnificent. I shall probably be here or hereabouts until the end of July and if you let me know when you are coming I shall be only too pleased to do all I can to get you comfortably fixed up. I know the lie of the land pretty well.'

A little later he heard that they would be coming in July. All summer the weather had been very beautiful. From the time in May when children on Sundays came down from snow-freed upper pastures with bunches of canary-yellow primula and all the lower meadows were purple with wild salvia there had been a fragrance in the air of buttery, pine-steeped, clover-laden richness. Fresh crowds of crocus, like small white flames, had seemed to spring overnight from meadows of snow-pressed darkened grass, and after them the mauve bells of soldanella. But it was now not only very beautiful and very exhilarating but very much, after all this time, his own; and he began to look forward to showing it off to
the former Miss Shortland and her leather-manufacturing husband: the insular small-town couple who, he thought with some amusement, could not trust themselves to book a room in a foreign country.

Presently she wrote to say that they would be coming on the seventh. ‘We don't want to be caught up too much in the tourist season,' she wrote.

But on the evening of the sixth, as he came out of the hotel before dinner, he saw a vaguely familiar figure sitting at one of the terrace tables. In the woman stirring a lump of ice in a glass of vermouth he did not at first recognise the former Miss Shortland. She was plumper than he remembered her; her hips seemed wide and rather fleshy; and it was only the jet black hair, growing in the same strong and rather coarse way from her neck, that made him quiver with his first real start of recognition.

‘Well!' she said. ‘Do you recognise me? Do I look the same?'

‘I think so——'

‘You don't look a day older, Arthur. You look absolutely the same.'

‘I thought you were not coming until——'

She began to laugh, rather heavily, a little fleshily, and tapped the seat of the chair next to her.

‘Come and sit down. Oh! there was the most awful mess up. It was to have been the seventh and then the eighth and then we changed it to the tenth and then we very nearly didn't come at all.'

‘How tiresome.'

‘My husband was called away on business to Northern Ireland of all places and I even had the telegram written out to send to you to say that we couldn't come.'

‘And hasn't he come?'

‘He hopes to get here next week,' she said. ‘Even then he's not sure.'

He said once again how tiresome it was, how disappointing. She rang the bell for the waiter. A flush of excitement coloured the tiny veins of her pallid cheeks and when the waiter came she said: ‘I'm dying for another drink and I'm sure you are, Arthur. What will you have?'

‘Please,' he said. ‘I want you to have one with me.'

‘No,' she said. ‘No. I insist. I'm going to be firm. This is my party.'

He said it was very kind of her; she smiled and said that it was after all not every day that old friends met together. Down the valley, through black rifts of pines, there was no sun at that hour of the day, but a white tongue of snow-water, flashing through the rock-green gorge, seemed to light up all the central deep mountain shadow.

‘Isn't it absolutely wonderful up here? Cheers. Here's to us,' the former Miss Shortland said. For some reason Arthur could not bring himself to think of her as Mrs Sanderson. ‘It's marvellous. I don't wonder you always live here.' She talked quickly as she drank, eyes moistly excited. ‘I do envy you. Will you show it to me a little while I'm here?—I mean which mountains are which and so on? You know?'

In his attentive, woollen, almost formal way he began to say he would do his best about that; but she interrupted and said:

‘What about another drink? I might as well confess I had several before you came on the scene.'

‘No, really, I won't. Thanks all the same.'

‘Oh! heavens, Arthur, you must. After all it's a sort of celebration and one has to show something——' She giggled
weakly and he thought she suddenly looked middle-aged, confused and tired, her eyes slightly bagged by fatigue, her mouth loose and uncertain as if, he thought, she had been shaken up a little by the long journey alone. He felt awkward and sorry for her and said:

‘It must be so tiresome for you, your husband not being able to come. It must be frightfully disappointing. I'm sorry.'

She rang the bell for the waiter. ‘Do you know the Sandersons? My husband is the middle one: George. Did you ever meet him?'

‘I think I knew Tom,' he said, ‘that's all. Wasn't there Freddy too?'

‘Yes,' she said. She stared down at the flashing tongue of snow-water far below. ‘Freddy, Tom, Bill, George—when you've met one you've met them all.'

That evening they sat together at the same table for dinner; afterwards they had coffee on the terrace outside and the former Miss Shortland—out of sheer habit he kept thinking of her like that—drank brandy with her coffee and talked a great deal.

‘Oh! I do envy you this. You know what it's like back home, don't you? You don't need
me
to tell you that. Oh! that town!'

‘Little towns are all much the same, aren't they?'

‘Oh! Are they? You think so?' She laughed heavily, her plump body creaking in the wicker chair. ‘Anyway what do we have to talk about towns for? Let's talk about us.'

‘Us?'

‘You, then,' she said. ‘Tell me about you.'

It did not seem to him that there was very much he had to tell her about himself.

‘You must have had the most awfully exciting things happen to you,' she said. ‘I mean this rescue and that sort of thing.'

‘Nothing much happens to me.'

‘I don't believe it. You're so
modest,'
she said. ‘You're so
quiet
. Just like you always were. You haven't changed a bit.'

He did not know what to say; she had put on a rather full open-necked dinner dress of mauve silk, floppy and fussy about the sleeves and bust: the sort of dress she would wear, he thought, to go with George Sanderson to Rotarian dances. It was quite out of place, he felt, in the little hotel. Out of its low cut shoulders her chest and neck bulged plumply, in rolls of flesh that quivered when she laughed. And whenever she laughed that evening, as she drank her brandy, he would smile politely and awkwardly in return.

‘Tell me about your
friends,'
she said. ‘You can't think how I've been dying to ask you all this. I keep talking away but really I can't help it, I've got so much I want to ask you. What about your friends now?'

‘I haven't made any friends.'

‘Oh! that's awful, that's bad. You mean none? I imagined you gaily gallivanting about with Swiss and German women and that sort of thing.'

‘I make my friends mostly among the guides.'

‘How dull! No affairs?' She laughed loudly and her voice, cracking a little on a forced high note, split away down the rock-strewn valley. ‘Even at home everybody has affairs.'

‘Yes?' He sounded so astonished that once again she gave one of her loud, yapping laughs, her bust heaving as she lay back in the creaking wicker chair.

‘I mean one has to,' she said. ‘It's a sort of thing. One
would go off one's head if one didn't break out a little bit now and then. In a town like that——'

She suddenly jumped up, holding out her hand.

‘Let's walk,' she said, ‘eh? Take me down the valley for a walk?'

She held his hand; her fingers were plump and moist; and as he touched them he felt a prickling in his spine.

‘It's getting awfully late and I ought to be thinking about bed——'

‘Bed can wait. Take me for a walk first, eh?' she said. ‘Think about bed later. Think as much as you like about bed——'

She laughed again, pulling at his hand, trying to raise him up from his chair. After he had made a few clumsy and embarrassed efforts to resist she staggered and fell forward. She fell with her arms against him, leaning over him, her bust pressing down like a crinkled silk cushion on his chest.

‘Take me for a walk, Arthur. Come on. It's been a long time since I walked with you.'

‘I'd really rather not.' He had begun to be embarrassed by her to a point, almost, of being frightened; and now as she leaned over him, breathing heavily, with tipsy excitement, he sought desperately for excuses and said:

‘If I'm going to show you the mountains tomorrow you ought to get some rest.'

‘Oh! tomorrow?' she said. ‘You're going to show me them tomorrow? Which ones? Where? You didn't tell me that. It's awfully sweet of you and I didn't expect you to give up your time——'

‘Of course I'll take you. I promised. But if you're going you ought——'

‘You mean I can climb?'

‘If you'd like, yes,' he said. ‘A little way.'

‘You mean ropes and axes and that sort of thing? And those big boots? I haven't got any.'

‘We can probably borrow some boots for you in the hotel,' he said.

‘Oh! Good. I want to climb a real mountain. Seriously.'

As she stood there looking down at him, heavy, panting, over-eager, he experienced a moment of fresh and acute embarrassment. He thought he caught a gleam of moisture in her eyes. For a horrible moment he thought she was going to cry. Instead her lips made a series of floppy trembling bites in the darkness as if trying to find the words she wanted to say; and then she dribbled:

‘You've been frightfully sweet to me, Arthur. Really one doesn't know what kindness is until one needs it most, does one? You know what I mean?'

He did not, at that moment, know what she could possibly mean. A second later she gave a curious almost ugly cry of frustrated pain and rushed away.

In the morning, when he met her at breakfast she was, to his surprise and relief, extraordinarily sensible and cheerful.

‘I'm looking forward so much to this, Arthur,' she said. ‘I do value it very much.' And after breakfast:

‘I see you've brought a rope, after all. Don't you trust me?'

‘You get into the habit of carrying one.'

‘But no axe?'

‘No axe,' he said. ‘We shan't be going very high. We shall be underneath the snow-line.'

Through the morning and early afternoon they climbed gently. It was mostly an affair, at first, of rock and grass. A few gentians were flowering on the slopes of upper
meadows, with occasional tufts of late alpenrose. Crags of rock, the colour of grey lava, began to rise more sheerly from scarred slopes of shale, and gradually the starch-blue cols of ice, the great shoulders of the permanent snow-line, began to swing away above them, foreshortened, finally to disappear.

‘It's queer how deceiving it all is,' she said.

He smiled. That, of course, was the way with beginners. The inability to estimate mountain distances, the strange illusions of height and size, the disappointment and fatigue of looking for the shoulder, the col and the peak that never seemed to resolve: he had been through it all; they were the things one had to learn or conquer.

‘How far do we go?' she said.

‘We'll do the crag there. It's quite high. Are you tired? Do you want to go back? Please say.'

‘Oh! no, not a bit. I'm absolutely——'

‘From there you will see right across to the Neiderhorn and the two lakes. Everywhere.'

The familiar name of that first mountain of his brought back to her a recollection of the hot night in Frau Roth's hotel; it recalled for her the hated garlic sausage, the lunatics in their straw hats, Arthur's voice as he said ‘The Neiderhorn? It's a mountain,' and how, loving and hating him, she had writhed on her bed in an agony of wanting him to come to her.

‘Arthur, there was something I wanted to say,' she said. ‘You remember up there?—at the little hotel, the first time we were here. It was awfully wrong of me to go off like that.'

He could not think of anything to say.

‘It was one of those stupid things one does without thinking
and then afterwards you'd give anything to change it back.'

He said ‘Yes' vaguely and she went on:

‘Still, everybody gets what they deserve.'

She paused and what she said afterwards seemed to hit him violently in the nape of the neck, giving him the cold creeping sensation of horror he had known when looking at her hair.

‘I suppose I ought to tell you my husband was never coming here. We've sort of split up. We had an awful row and I walked out. That's why I came to you.'

He was so stunned that he began to climb on alone. By now they were nearly at the summit of the crag. In a few moments he would be able to show her the great view of the valleys, the peaks, and the lakes below. Dully, horrified, he heard her say:

‘Of course there'll be awful talk and all that sort of thing but I couldn't care. If they want to say I ran away with you let them say it. After all it wouldn't be so hard——'

The rest of what she said became simply a series of cold hammer strokes on the back of his neck. They drove him forward for some time before he was suddenly stopped by her pleading shout:

‘You're going without me. Can't you wait a bit?'

To his astonishment he found he had climbed thirty or forty feet alone. Behind him, small, inexpert, rather pathetic, she was clinging to a flat deep step of crag-face, paralysed by a rush of nausea. Yet it did not seem for a moment to matter very much. He was less horrified by her sickened face, white now but always rather colourless, than by what she had said and by his own lack of conscious attention. That was a terrible thing—he who had been brought up by his mother to attend so scrupulously—and he himself called back, flustered and conscience-stricken: