Weeks in Naviras (13 page)

Sorry this has happened to you. You’ll be okay, I have faith in you. Luis.

I take two small steps forward into the almost-empty log cabin. The door swings back and closes quietly behind me, its latch clicking into place. It’s silent, no howl of wind outside. I expect a musty smell, old tarpaulin perhaps, or a waft of mould from melted snow, but nothing. In fact I don’t think I’ve smelt anything at all since I’ve died, no salt from the sea in Naviras, no aromatic food in Casa Amanhã. It seems odd how there’s apparently no smelling after death, while every other sense is here, sometimes in spades. I think of Luis, wonder if he’s still in the beach bar. Then I remember how the snow had been falling in Naviras and quickly turn around to push the inside handle. The door opens to reveal the same mountains, the pylons supporting the ambling gondolas, the ski resort. Nothing coming down from the sky. It’s snowing in the wrong place.

I don’t feel any panic, just a vague surprise that I’m not panicking. So far I haven’t really felt any strong emotions at all, apart from when I hugged Lottie back in the restaurant. The extreme ranges of my emotional spectrum are limited, like a car on cruise control. Actually I feel oddly relieved to be even further away from the bathroom in Room Seven and its missing alcove, which makes me think Luis doesn’t want me in Naviras. I’m also relieved to be away from Parliament, where Rav appears to be living some other man’s afterlife.

As I step outside the cabin I’m fully aware I’ve not been to this ski resort before. I only went skiing once, years before on a school trip to Switzerland and hadn’t really cared much for it. This place doesn’t look Swiss, I’ve no connection to it. I take another step forward – this time leaving faint footprints – and the door slowly closes behind me. The snow crunches underneath my sandals, spills onto my toes as I take more steps forward but my feet aren’t cold; the texture’s right, but not the sting. It’s hard to explain, similar to sand but less coarse, like caster sugar. The low clouds hover above me as I walk effortlessly towards the pylons ahead of me.

Surely James can’t be here, he never enjoyed skiing and didn’t much like the cold weather. And anyway, I’m pretty sure where he is. He’s with Rav and it’s more than pre-occupying me. If Parliament is both James and Rav’s place, what does that mean – what does that
say
? Yet it’s connected to Casa Amanhã.

So who’s place is this, Rosie’s? I try to think if I ever heard her talk about skiing, but draw a blank. Maybe I missed her saying so, or as usual had been consciously ignoring her. I keep walking, feeling like I’m on display. Two skiers are making their way towards the gondola station. I feel they should be staring at me agog, but no, they don’t give me a second glance as they pass ahead of me, even when I wave at them. I circumvent the gondola station, keeping my distance from it even though I almost feel like taking one to the top of the mountain and throwing myself off. Why not? After all, it’s unlikely I’ll hurt myself. Instead I walk downhill towards the cluster of buildings.

Another skier’s walking up the path towards me, a man, obviously heading to the gondolas. Wearing blue ski pants and a warm-looking black jacket, his skis balanced on one shoulder. One hand’s holding the ends of them to keep them level, the other’s clutching his poles. He seems to change track slightly; unlike everyone else I’ve encountered since leaving Casa Amanhã he’s actually looking directly at me. I try to walk out of his way, but he just changes direction again, deliberately approaching me.

‘Hey,’ his accent’s North American, ‘You just got here?’ As he draws near I start to make out the detail of his face. Maybe in his twenties, pale blue eyes, blond hair and eyebrows. He looks down at my clothes then back up at my face. I explain how I’ve just found myself here, pointing back at me to the log cabin. ‘That’s a weird place to start out,’ he says, stabbing his poles into the snow and letting his skis slowly slide forward off his shoulder, resting them vertically against him. ‘Not at the top of the mountain?’

I follow his gaze to the summit. ‘No, what is this place?’ I ask faintly, calmly.

‘Catseye,’ he says, as though it’s obvious. ‘British Columbia. You’ve been here before, right?’

‘No,’ I’m quite sure about this. ‘I’ve never even been to Canada and I don’t even like skiing, much.’

‘Really?’ He’s disbelieving. ‘You should try this place for size. Skiing here was always good, but
here
, it’s like..’ He glances up at the mountain. ‘You’re not really falling. You’re almost flying, like the air’s supporting you?’

‘You do know that you’re dead, don’t you?’ I’d given up worrying whether or not I sounded stupid.

‘Yeah, I got that,’ he grins, with perfect teeth. ‘I’m Rob,’ he holds out his hand.

‘Ellie,’ His glove’s fuzzy and soft. ‘But I wasn’t here until a minute ago, I was somewhere else.’

‘That’s normal, that’s where you died, right?’

‘No,’ I say, exasperated. ‘I was already dead, then I stepped through a door, to here.’ I gesture behind me towards the log cabin, knowing it sounds ridiculous as Rob frowns. ‘That’s why I’m wearing these clothes, there’re other places I’ve been to.’

‘Can we go see?’ He goes to pick up his skis again.

‘You know, you don’t have to carry those everywhere,’ Rob looks at me blankly. ‘Look,’ I will the skis to disappear and almost immediately they’re gone. Rob jumps. ‘I don’t suppose anyone’s told you,’ I say, smiling to myself and thinking about Luis.

I turn and head back for the log cabin, even though I’m sure it’s pointless. Rob’s beside me, asking me questions about how I made the skis disappear. I try to answer as best I can before asking him why nobody’s told him about that trick. Rob says he’s been up to the top of the mountain a few times and skied back down. He wants to get as many runs in as possible before the sun goes down behind the mountains. I tell him I don’t think the sun will ever move, trying to work out exactly how long it’s been since I first stepped out of the sea in Naviras. I ask Rob how long he thinks he’s been here.

‘Good question,’ Rob’s looking away from me again, up at the mountain. ‘I’ve been up and down, what, five times, now?’ He looks back at me, uncertainly. ‘I used to work here, when I was in college. It’s about two hours from San Francisco by plane. Great runs, good people, off the beaten track, you know?’

Yes, I know that feeling well, I think. ‘I’m not supposed to be here, obviously,’ I say, looking down at my inappropriate clothes. ‘And where I was before, I wasn’t alone. I was with friends.’

‘Well, you’ve got one over me, then, because there’s nobody here I know,’ Rob doesn’t seem too upset about this. ‘Not so far, anyway. I was wondering how long I should wait, you know? To see if anyone else comes.’

‘You know how it works, then?’

‘Sure, I spoke to a woman at the top station, she told me how people come and then leave,’ he says, grinning. ‘Or they just stay, like she has.’

‘That’s what I was told,’ I say. ‘But it was quite different where I was before, things happened which aren’t true, they were never true.’ Am I thinking about Rav or the alcove in Room Seven? It’s hard to say.

We arrive at the log cabin. ‘This is where I appeared,’ I say, as Rob pulls open the door, revealing the same interior as before. Rob just looks around the inside of the cabin. I ask him if he’s seen it snow here so far and he says yes, but it stopped a while ago. Then there’s a faint noise coming from above, like the sound of a distant aircraft. Both of us turn to look up at the mountains, where snow is tumbling down the side of one of the peaks. It’s only a small avalanche, one that’s fairly self-contained and far from the gondolas and the ski runs. I watch as the avalanche slows and stops at the meeting point of two high peaks, snow powder forming little white puffs. The rumbling sound’s still echoing around the valley. ‘Do you think we’re in danger?’

Rob rubs his chin. ‘Not sure. I’ve never seen an avalanche in Catseye. Not now, not before.’ He turns around. ‘You wanna go check the hotel, see who’s there? I’ve not been inside, so far.’

We turn and start walking towards the buildings down the hill. I say I’m surprised Rob’s never seen an avalanche if he’s been here so much, he says he was only in Catseye during ski season, he’s never seen the big thaw that comes every April. Tentatively I ask him how he died, he says he can’t remember; all he knows is he went to bed one night, the next thing he knew he was flying down the mountainside with skis on, thinking it was a dream.

I tell him I was able to recall my death vividly when I first arrived back in Naviras, but that I’m struggling to remember the details now. I know the memories are there but I can’t seem to quite get at them; they’re like an old movie I’ve seen but can’t remember the name of. In fact I’m struggling to remember large chunks of my life, the most recent bits. The memories seem to burn out when they’re recalled too often.

Rob says he understands. ‘I think when I was skiing earlier, I remembered how I died. But it’s gone.’

We’re heading straight for the largest building in the resort, walking past smaller cabins similar to the one I’d found myself outside. Rob explains that we’re walking to the main hotel and bar. ‘At least it used to be the only one,’ he adds. ‘Later on they built a lot more of them.’

I don’t say much, wondering instead about whether my little journey will turn out to be one-way, if I won’t be able to return to Naviras. Perhaps I’ve just left, in the same way Jean and Bill had described other people doing, in which case it seems unlikely that I’ll get to return.

Arriving at the large chalet I look through one of the windows to see a plush interior, with a couple sitting on a sofa by a log fire, talking and smiling. We walk up the short set of wooden stairs and Rob pushes open one of the two large double doors. Inside it seems warmer, an odd sensation because it hadn’t been unpleasantly cold outside. Still, there’s something comforting about it; the warmth’s inside me, like downing a warm drink.

Rob suggests we go upstairs to the main bar, since there’s nobody in the vestibule he recognises. It’s a wide wooden staircase with a right-angled turn halfway up, a black carpet runs all the way up its centre.

‘They used to be so strict about ski boots in here,’ says Rob. ‘If you got caught upstairs booted, the manager would send you back down.’

‘I’m sure you never broke the rules like that.’

‘Oh, a couple times. I used to be fun.’ We’ve reached the upstairs bar where a handful of men and women wearing figure-hugging thermals are sitting about, enjoying drinks and chatting. There’s a couple more people outside on the balcony, their backs to us, admiring the view. It reminds me of the beach bar, apart from the mountainous landscape visible through the large windows on all sides. The atmosphere’s the same though, pleasant but muted. The view’s impressive, beautiful even. The fur trees dotted around the mountains cast longish shadows on the snow. From my new elevation I see how the clouds are undulating around the peaks, which vary markedly from giant and jagged to smooth and gentle. But looking to my left I notice the valley beneath us is still covered by low-lying fog.

I tell Rob that the view’s stunning, am about to say I can see why he loves it here when he gives a little roar and walks across the room, opens the large glass door and steps out. The door slides shut and I watch as he walks up to a man, who turns away from the view and breaks into a smile before embracing Rob. It’s Gavin Cross, the First Gentleman of the United States.

The first time I saw Morgan Cross in the flesh she was walking with James toward me down a hot and stuffy office corridor in Portcullis House, the office block for MPs adjacent and connected to Parliament. James had only been an MP for a few months and had very little public profile, but I’d been aware of Morgan for a while. She’d already been a Congresswoman more than four years and had made a name for herself in DC after a stint on the Foreign Affairs Committee.

She always walked fast, but particularly so as she almost hurtled toward me down that corridor. I wondered if James would have to break into a run to keep up with her. ‘Mrs. Weeks,’ she shook my hand firmly. ‘It’s so wonderful to meet you, I’ve heard so much about you.’ That was an exaggeration, and delivered with a fake smile of affected awe. Yet I didn’t mind, told her to call me Ellie, please.

‘Of course, Ellie, and please call me Morgan. None of that Congresswoman bullshit.’ She was already long married by that point and had taken her husband’s name, but Gavin wasn’t in London with her on that trip and I wouldn’t meet him for several more years. She was in town as part of summit to deal with part of the Middle East crisis; one so serious even the Russians had turned up. I forget which particular disaster they were mishandling but as usual no-one was prepared to bang heads together. I remember how officially the Americans were opposing intervention, but Morgan had already spoken against her party’s line and it had been picked up by the news. She was no less sure of herself then, perhaps slightly more polite
and aware of her surroundings. ‘You know what? I just love this place,’ she was looking around widely as we walked through the colonnade from Portcullis House to Parliament. ‘It’s so much more social than on the Hill. You just get to meet different people here, it’s refreshing.’

Parliament was far from refreshing that afternoon, the whole building was cooking in a heatwave. James took us for a drink on the terrace where there was only a faint breeze to cool us off. The sun was shimmering on the pods of the London Eye across the river; the water had a sheen, resembling liquid steel. The sky was turning peach, the coloured lights on the slowly turning wheel opposite us were coming on, gently pulsating.

I remember Morgan having only iced water, it would’ve be unlike her to imbibe among relative strangers. The only time her mouth seemed to close was when she took tiny sips, otherwise she’d be talking, or smiling furiously at everything James said. As he talked she punctuated him with nods and the occasional clipped ‘Yeah,’ couched in a way that made it obvious she didn’t agree with him, but that he was entitled to his view. Really it was her way of steering the discussion, to ensure that she could take over whenever she felt like it.

‘But you know, James, unless there’s intervention we’ll just end up running around in circles, it’ll just keep coming back. I don’t see why foreign policy mis-steps from the past should rule out similar actions in the future, you know? The circumstances are different.’ She often started or ended sentences with ‘you know,’ which really meant, ‘
I know
, and I’m going to get you to agree with me.’

She’d contacted James ahead of her trip to London, asked whether he’d be interested in taking part in a cultural trip to Washington. As she described the programme to us on the terrace it all seemed quite innocuous, but when I looked it up later its significance became clear very quickly. Only a select few were asked to take part, many of its previous attendees had gone on to become world leaders.

‘I see great things ahead for you, James. Amazing potential.’ Morgan spent much of that hour talking up my husband’s prospects to him, like a boxing coach. She didn’t seem to mind that James’s worldview was more dovish than hers. When she disagreed with him she prefaced her dissent with platitudes. ‘I just feel that we have to support democracy however it tries to break through…’ or ‘I think maybe there is another view on Egypt.’

It was in the middle of one of these mild rebukes that she stood up quickly, pushed her chair back behind her. A bumblebee was hovering above our table, flying in little zig-zags around Morgan’s drink. ‘Jesus, get that thing away from me, please James!’

‘It’s fine, just ignore it and it’ll fly off,’ I said, not moving.

‘No, you don’t understand,’ Morgan hurried behind her chair. ‘I’m allergic and I don’t have my adrenaline with me.’

I tried to tell her it was just a bee and it wouldn’t ever sting her - it had already settled on one of the coasters in front of us - but James was already getting up. He walked to another table where someone had left a fairly thick committee report. ‘Hold on to your drinks,’ said James, and I picked up my wine glass as he brought the report down on the bee, flattening it with a slam. Morgan’s drink rocked from side to side, not tipping over but some of the water sloshed onto the wooden table, dripping through its slats onto the paving slabs underneath. I was silently furious.

‘Oh thank God for you, James,’ Morgan still looked stricken as she came to sit back down. ‘Honestly if that thing had stung me, I would’ve been away in an ambulance.’

‘I’m sorry about that, it’s been going on for a few days,’ James was embarrassed. ‘There must be a nest somewhere nearby and they still haven’t exterminated it. Let me get you another drink, Morgan.’ He stood up and hurried off into the bar.

I felt awkward being left alone, with her still breathing heavily across from me. I looked down at the committee report. It was titled
Britain’s Mounting Energy Crisis: Some Scenarios
.

Morgan said she was afraid of bees coming from California, where they’d all become Africanised. ‘But I don’t like that term myself, it’s unhelpful,’ she added, beginni
ng to regain her composure, maybe embarrassed I’d seen this frightened side to her. She smiled at me, not her usual for-show smile but a genuine one, probably underused since she entered politics. ‘James always talks so highly of you, Ellie. I can see he’s blessed with good judgement in all kinds of ways, meeting you.’

She
pulled her phone out of her jacket pocket and looked at it, alarmed for a moment, before frowning. ‘More bad news coming out of Tehran,’ she sighed. ‘Last thing we need is them getting involved. Do you agree with your government on this one?’

I was surprised at how Morgan clearly and genuinely wanted to know what I thought, she looked at me so directly, her hair and forehead perfectly still. ‘I think our economies would be better off not spending money on wars,’ I said.

‘Well, that’s what we’re going to get for a while, I think, so congrats.’ Morgan didn’t look bitter, more dismayed. She said the intergovernmental was frustrating, lost in side issues. ‘But Ellie, let’s have this conversation again in a few years and check up on the economy, if the West withdraws in on itself.’ The public smile was back. ‘Because Ellie, I would love to meet you again and I’m pretty sure I will.’

I was struck by how few women I’d met like her; Morgan seemed to have no need to conceal what she felt, didn’t have to navigate her words, get tangled up in wonk. Everything had a bottom line and she was quick to get to it. Her talent lay in not making her hawkishness seem ideological. She’d travelled widely and decided much of the planet needed laundering, that too many governments were medieval. She used that word a lot when talking about Middle Eastern countries. Some people found her anti-Islamic but really Morgan had no time for any religion, one reason why she was doing so well. No-one else in her party seemed quite so prepared to take on its evangelical wing. I suspect it was a calculation to win over swing voters but it wasn’t fabricated, just over-emphasised.

It certainly seemed to be working, with mounting speculation that she’d run for the Senate? More likely she’d try for governor in California, I thought. She had a winning manner about her, like a benevolent mother-eagle. I think the establishments in both London and DC already knew she was something else. From the moment I met her I honestly thought she’d go all the way, it was just a question of how. I liked her, even if she didn’t make it particularly easy for people to like her. She wasn’t
lovely
, a quality people often felt was required among women in ascendency. Although she wasn’t cruel or aggressive - far from it - Morgan simply never felt the need seek validation through loveliness, and that seriously terrified a lot of people.

I told James he’d been foolish to kill the bee as we got the tube home. ‘Well she appreciated it, and I didn’t want to lose her.’ He wouldn’t say what that meant. I think he was already feeling a bit frustrated as an MP, he’d scraped the by-election with a majority of just over a thousand, but this was considered a triumph given the state of the polls at the time. It did Labour substantial damage since they knew they couldn’t win the next election without retaining seats like Eppingham. It made James a minor political celebrity for a week; admittedly some bemoaning how a bland Tory officeboy had managed to become an MP, jokes about how James’s sort were hatched from pods, but James seemed to come across well in the few interviews in the wake of his election. I found myself on the national news the day after the election, kissing him on the podium as he celebrated.

Your life as you know it is over
, Gail texted that morning,
I’m joking, of course
, she added quickly in a second message, but she hadn’t been joking at all and in fact had been completely correct. I still hadn’t managed to find myself a job in the intervening weeks, and once James was elected he suggested I should run his constituency office in Eppingham. ‘There might be some stick about me employing you,’ he said, ‘But it’d be good for us both to have an income, and I’d love to have someone I trust completely manning the ship.’

I gave it some thought for a few days. Rav was certainly keen, saying I was more than qualified and would find it varied and interesting. ‘Because it’s so near London, the constituency office will be the main hub,’ he insisted. ‘There’ll be loads to do, at least for the first few years.’

I came round to the idea, particularly since I knew being the wife of an MP would come with all kinds of oblique duties. And at that point I was still relatively sold on James’s career, enjoyed being a part of it, even. Ultimately there seemed few reasons not to do it; what exactly was I holding out for, after all? I’d already been doing the job to some extent, helping to set up the office in Eppingham and dealing with minor business.

It was irksome having to commute out of London to Eppingham each day, but handling the casework from constituents was varied and often interesting. I was shocked at how people lived their lives; the spiral of debts they accrued and their apparent lack of knowledge in how to deal with it. My legal background helped enormously and I actually helped people, helped them turn their lives around. There’s a lot to be said for that, and in any case it was just nice to be working finally, doing something productive. Sometimes I’d meet up with Gail – by then a junior barrister and seriously making a name for herself – and wonder how things might’ve been different, but only in a speculative way, not through any real regret.

Once the publicity of his election faded James found he couldn’t get on a committee easily and it took him a few weeks to get a feel for the networks inside parliament. He was happy during those months, though, the newest intake always seemed less cynical, more energised. I think it was his brushes with Morgan that prompted my husband to stop people calling him Jamie. It was something he just deleted overnight, after six months in Parliament he changed his name formally in the register. I remember the first time he addressed himself like it to me, in a voicemail. Then a fortnight later he picked me up when I apparently mistitled him at a constituency dinner.

‘Jamie’s a bit infantile, L,’ he said as he drove us back into London. ‘It makes me sound like a weasel.’ I just smiled to myself.

His induction to Washington would take place at the beginning of the following year, Rosie had clearly been angling to go with him but he knew well enough not to risk a row with me by inviting her. She and I had got off to a bad start and James knew he was largely to blame for that. A few people at Westminster knew he’d had a brief history with Rosie, but they mentioned it to me casually enough. I wasn’t paranoid about the two of them, actually I was more suspicious of Rav. He and James both turned thirty-five that year, and Rav’s singledom was becoming ever more glaring.

A fortnight after Morgan’s visit to London the Commons rose for summer recess and James and I headed out to Naviras. Our work schedules meant big holidays were impossible most of the year, and the political climate meant every MP was fearful of jetting off to exotic locations. In any case all James wanted to do on holiday was read policy papers, no adventurous treks or strange timezones.

Being so obscure and off the beaten track meant Naviras was a good recourse, and we would go for long weekends twice a year. Other people came out, including Rosie. She brought another new boyfriend with her, this time a wonkish bespectacled policy analyst in the Foreign Office; very much a rising star but painfully dull with it. The two of them didn’t spend much time in the village and instead drove around the region, frantically exploring. We accompanied them on a boat trip around the cost, taking in various grottos and deserted beaches. Rosie took countless photos with a ridiculously oversized camera.

Ultimately that visit reassured me. Like a lot of male MPs James had put on a fair bit of weight since entering Parliament. Constant snacking and too many canapés had given him a pot belly and his chest had begun to sag, his nipples almost sticking out sideways and resembling little snouts. By contrast Rosie’s boyfriend was svelte with a washboard stomach; he tanned quickly and easily, while James just went a bit red and freckly as usual. I caught Rosie looking at him at the beach bar late one afternoon, I’m sure she was wondering what she’d ever seen in him.