Short Stories: Five Decades (89 page)

“Oh, I know you,” the man said as they started safely up the hill again, leaning against the pull of the bar, their skis bumping a little in the ruts. “You’re the grave young American.”

Constance looked at him for the first time. “And you,” she said, because everybody talked to everybody else on the hills, “you’re the gay young Englishman.”

“Half right,” he said. He smiled. His face was a skier’s brown, with an almost girlish flush of blood along the cheekbones. “At least, one-third right.” She knew his name was Pritchard, because she had heard people talking to him in the hotel. She remembered hearing one of the ski teachers say about him, “He is too reckless. He thinks he is better than he actually is. He does not have the technique for so much speed.” She glanced across at him and decided he
did
look reckless. He had a long nose—the kind that doesn’t photograph well but that looks all right just the same, especially in a long, thin face. Twenty-five, Constance thought, twenty-six. No more. He was leaning easily against the bar, not holding on with his hands. He took off his gloves and fished a package of cigarettes out of his pockets and offered them to Constance. “Players,” he said. “I hope you won’t hate me.”

“No, thank you,” Constance said. She was sure that if she tried to light a cigarette she would fall off the lift.

He lit his cigarette, bending over a little and squinting over his cupped hands as the smoke twisted up past his eyes. He had long, thin hands, and ordinarily you had the feeling that people with hands like that were nervous and easily upset. He was tall and slender, and his ski pants were very downhill, Constance noted, and he wore a red sweater and a checked scarf. He had the air of a dandy, but a dandy who was amused at himself. He moved easily on his skis, and you could tell he was one of the people who weren’t afraid of falling.

“I never see you in the bar,” he said, tossing the match into the snow and putting on his gloves.

“I don’t drink,” she said, not quite telling the truth.

“They have Coca-Cola,” he said. “Switzerland, the forty-ninth state.”

“I don’t like Coca-Cola.”

“Used to be one of the leading British colonies,” he said, grinning. “Switzerland. But we lost it, along with India. Before the war, in this town, the English covered the hills like the edelweiss. If you wanted to find a Swiss between January 1st and March 13th, you had to hunt with dogs.”

“Were you here before the war?” Constance asked, surprised.

“With my mother. She broke a leg a year.”

“Is she here now?”

“No,” he said. “She’s dead.”

I must be careful, Constance thought, avoiding looking at the man beside her, not to ask people in Europe about their relatives. So many of them turn out to be dead.

“It used to be very gay,” he said, “the hotels swarming, and dances every night, and everybody dressing for dinner, and singing ‘God Save the King’ on New Year’s. Did you know it was going to be this quiet?”

“Yes,” Constance said. “I asked the man at the travel bureau in Paris.”

“Oh. What did he say?”

“He said everybody was a serious skier here and went to bed by ten o’clock.”

The Englishman glanced at her momentarily. “You’re not a serious skier, are you?”

“No. I’ve only been two or three times before.”

“You’re not one of the delicate ones, are you?”

“Delicate?” Constance looked at him, puzzled. “What do you mean?”

“You know,” he said, “the advertisements. Schools for delicate children. Swiss for t.b.”

Constance laughed. “Do I look as though I have t.b.?”

He regarded her gravely, and she felt plump and unaustere and a little too bosomy in her tight clothes. “No,” he said. “But you never can tell. Did you ever read
The Magic Mountain?
”

“Yes,” she said, feeling proud that she could show she was not completely uncultured, although American and very young, and remembering that she had skipped the philosophic discussions and cried over the death of the cousin. “I read it. Why?”

“The sanitarium it was written about isn’t far from here,” Pritchard said. “I’ll show it to you someday when the snow’s bad. Do you think this place is sad?”

“No,” she said, surprised. “Why?”

“Some people do. The mixture. The pretty mountains and the healthy types walloping down the hills, risking their necks and feeling marvellous, and the people with the bad lungs hanging on, watching them and wondering if they’re ever going to leave here alive.”

“I guess I didn’t think about it,” Constance admitted honestly.

“It was worse right after the war,” he said. “There was a boom here right after the war. All the people who hadn’t eaten enough or had been living underground or in prison and who had been frightened so long—”

“Where’re they now?”

Pritchard shrugged. “Dead, discharged, or destitute,” he said. “Is it true that people refuse to die in America?”

“Yes,” she said. “It would be an admission of failure.”

He smiled and patted her gloved hand, which was clutching tightly onto the middle bar. “You mustn’t be angry that we’re jealous,” he said. “It’s the only way we can show our gratitude.” Gently, he loosened her fingers from the wood. “And you mustn’t be so tight when you ski. Not even with your fingers. You mustn’t even frown until you go in for tea. The drill is—loose, desperate, and supremely confident.”

“Is that how you are?”

“Mostly desperate,” he said.

“What are you doing on this little beginners’ slope, then?” Constance asked. “Why didn’t you take the
téléphérique
up to the top?”

“I twisted my ankle yesterday,” Pritchard said. “Overrated myself. The February disease. Out of control and into a gully, with a great deal of style. So today I can only do slow, majestic turns. But tomorrow we attack that one once more—” He gestured up toward the peak, half closed in by fog, with the sun a wet, pale ball above it, making it look forbidding and dangerous. “Come along?” He looked at her inquiringly.

“I haven’t been up there yet,” Constance said, regarding the mountain respectfully. “I’m afraid it’s a little too much for me so far.”

“You must always do things that are a little too much for you,” he said. “On skis. Otherwise, where’s the fun?”

They were silent for several moments, moving slowly up the hill, feeling the wind cut across their faces, noticing the quiet and the queer, fogged mountain light. Twenty yards ahead of them, on the preceding bar, a girl in a yellow parka moved evenly upward like a bright, patient doll.

“Paris?” Pritchard said.

“What’s that?” He jumps around entirely too much, Constance thought, feeling heavy.

“You said you came from Paris. Are you one of those nice people who come here to give us your government’s money?”

“No,” said Constance. “I just came over on a—well, on a vacation. I live in New York, really. And French food makes me break out.”

He looked at her critically. “You look completely unbroken out now,” he said. “You look like the girls who advertise soap and beer in American magazines.” Then he added hastily. “If that’s considered insulting in your country, I take it back.”

“And the men in Paris,” she said.

“Oh. Are there men in Paris?”

“Even in the museums. They follow you. With homburg hats. Looking at you as though they’re weighing you by the pound. In front of religious pictures and everything.”

“Girl I knew, English girl,” Pritchard said, “was followed from Prestwick, Scotland, to the tip of Cornwall by an American gunner in 1944. Three months. No religious pictures, though, as far as I know.”

“You know what I mean. It’s an impolite atmosphere,” she said primly, knowing he was making fun of her in that straight-faced English way but not knowing whether to be offended or not.

“Were you brought up in a convent?”

“No.”

“It’s amazing how many American girls sound as though they were brought up in a convent. Then it turns out they drink gin and roar in bars. What do you do at night?”

“Where? At home?”

“No. I know what people do at night in America. They look at television,” he said. “I mean here.”

“I—I wash my hair,” she said defensively, feeling foolish. “And I write letters.”

“How long are you staying up here?”

“Six weeks.”

“Six weeks.” He nodded, and swung his poles to his outside hand, because they were nearing the top. “Six weeks of shining hair and correspondence.”

“I made a promise,” she said, thinking, I might as well let him know now, just in case he’s getting any ideas. “I promised someone I’d write him a letter a day while I was gone.”

Pritchard nodded soberly, as though sympathizing with her. “Americans,” he said as they came to the top and slid out from the T bar onto the flat place. “Americans baffle me.”

Then he waved his poles at her and went straight down the hill, his red sweater a swift, diminishing gay speck against the blue-shadowed snow.

The sun slipped between the peaks, like a gold coin in a gigantic slot, and the light got flat and dangerous, making it almost impossible to see the bumps. Constance made her last descent, falling twice and feeling superstitious, because it was always when you said, “Well, this is the last one,” that you got hurt.

Running out and coming to a stop on the packed snow between two farmhouses at the outskirts of the town, she kicked off her skis with a sense of accomplishment and relief. Her toes and fingers were frozen, but she was warm everywhere else and her cheeks were bright red and she breathed the thin, cold air with a mountain sense of tasting something delicious. She felt vigorous and friendly, and smiled at the other skiers clattering to a stop around her. She was brushing the snow of the last two falls off her clothes, so that she would look like a good skier as she walked through the town, when Pritchard came down over the last ridge and flicked to a stop beside her.

“I see you,” he said, bending to unlock his bindings, “but I won’t tell a soul.”

Constance gave a final, self-conscious pat to the icy crystals on her parka. “I only fell four times all afternoon,” she said.

“Up there, tomorrow”—he made a gesture of his head toward the mountain—“you’ll crash all day.”

“I didn’t say I was going up there.” Constance buckled her skis together and started to swing them up to her shoulder. Pritchard reached over and took them from her. “I can carry my own skis,” she said.

“Don’t be sturdy. American girls are always being sturdy about inessential points.” He made a big V out of the two pairs of skis on his shoulders, and they started walking, their boots crunching on the stained, hard snow of the road. The lights came on in the town, pale in the fading light. The postman passed them, pulling his sled with his big dog yoked beside him. Six children in snowsuits on a linked whip of sleds came sliding down out of a steep side street and overturned in front of them in a fountain of laughter. A big brown horse with his belly clipped to keep the ice from forming there slowly pulled three huge logs toward the station. Old men in pale-blue parkas passed them and said “
Grüezi
,” and a maid from one of the houses up the hill shot out on a little sled, holding a milk can between her knees as she rocketed around the turns. They were playing a French waltz over at the skating rink, and the music mingled with the laughter of the children and the bells on the horse’s bridle and the distant, old-fashioned clanging of the gong at the railroad station, announcing a train’s departure.

“Departure,” the station bell said, insistent among the other sounds.

There was a booming noise far off in the hills, and Constance looked up, puzzled. “What’s that?” she asked.

“Mortars,” said Pritchard. “It snowed last night, and the patrols have been out all day firing at the overhangs. For the avalanches.”

There was another shot, low and echoing, and they stopped and listened. “Like old times,” Pritchard said as they started walking again. “Like the good old war.”

“Oh,” said Constance, feeling delicate, because she had never heard guns before. “The war. Were you in it?”

“A little.” He grinned. “I had a little war.”

“Doing what?”

“Night fighter,” he said, shifting the yoke of skis a little on his shoulders. “I flew an ugly black plane across an ugly black sky. That’s the wonderful thing about the Swiss—the only thing they shoot is snow.”

“Night fighter,” Constance said vaguely. She had been only twelve years old when the war ended, and it was all jumbled and remote in her memory. It was like hearing about the graduating class two generations before you in school. People were always referring to names and dates and events that they expected you to recognize, but which you could never quite get straight. “Night fighter. What was that?”

“We flew interceptor missions over France,” Pritchard said. “We’d fly on the deck to avoid the radar and flak, and hang around airfields making the Hun miserable, waiting for planes to come in slow, with their wheels down.”

“Oh, I remember now,” Constance said firmly. “You’re the ones who ate carrots. For night vision.”

Pritchard laughed. “For publication we ate carrots,” he said. “Actually, we used radar. We’d locate them on the screen and fire when we saw the exhaust flares. Give me a radar screen over a carrot any day.”

“Did you shoot down many planes?” Constance asked, wondering if she sounded morbid.

“
Grüezi
,” Pritchard said to the owner of a
pension
who was standing in front of his door looking up at the sky to see if it was going to snow that night. “Twenty centimetres by morning. Powder.”

“You think?” the man said, looking doubtfully at the evening sky.

“I guarantee,” Pritchard said.

“You’re very polite,” the man said, smiling. “You must come to Switzerland more often.” He went into his
pension
, closing the door behind him.

“A couple,” Pritchard said carelessly. “We shot down a couple. Should I tell you how brave I was?”

“You look so young,” Constance said.

“I’m thirty,” said Pritchard. “How old do you have to be to shoot down a plane? Especially poor, lumbering transports, running out of gas, full of clerks and rear-echelon types, wiping their glasses and being sorry the airplane was never invented.”