The Silent Land

3

There was a display board on the wall near the hotel recep tion, offering day trips, toboggan events, sleigh rides and fondue evenings. There were also contact numbers for all the holiday companies represented at the resort. Thumbtacked to the board was also a list of doctors, vets, pharmacies and all the emergency services associated with Saint-Bernard. Jake snatched the list from the board. They went back up to their room with the list and Jake began calling.

There was a good, clear, throaty dialling tone on the line. He called each of the holiday companies in turn, and in each case no one picked up. He dialled the local police station, from where they’d taken the car. No joy. He dialled the national emergency number. In none of these cases did anyone pick up the phone.

‘Phone someone in England,’ Zoe said. ‘Phone your mother.’

Zoe’s parents were both dead. Her mother had died long before Jake and Zoe had even met, though he had known her dad, Archie, for a couple of years before he too had died. Jake’s elderly father, meanwhile, had died some time after divorcing his mother, the only remaining parent. She was an over-fussy but kind woman with a bad blue rinse who had moved up to Scotland shortly after an unpleasant divorce conducted while Jake was at boarding school. His mother—emotionally as well as geographically remote—had thankfully thought very highly of Zoe because she was ‘musical’. Jake figured that his mother might at least contact someone in a position of authority and let them know that the pair had been left behind after the evacuation.

‘She’ll freak out,’ Jake said, dialling the number. ‘You know what she’s like.’

‘Phone her anyway.’

After he got no reply, Jake put the phone down. ‘It’s her Whist night. She always goes to Whist at the church on a Friday.’

‘Lovely. I hope she gets nine tricks or whatever while we’re here about to be eaten alive on the side of the mountain.’

‘I’m going to call Simon.’

Simon was Jake’s old friend from college. He was a housing officer for the local authority, and he’d been best man at their wedding; and even when Simon had tried to seduce Zoe one time somehow that relationship had survived. Jake called Simon on his mobile phone, but the signal faltered. So he called him on his landline, but that too rang off.

‘What time is it? He’s probably gone straight down the Jolly Miller after work. Who else can we call?’

It was a short list. They were on good terms with their neighbours at home but they were elderly and very frail. They decided against calling them. Zoe tried calling two close friends but no one picked up.

‘No one is answering anywhere. They can’t all be throwing back pints at the Jolly Miller! Let’s switch the TV on, see if we can get some local news.’

Zoe opened the mahogany TV cabinet doors and switched on the set. She flashed through the channels but all she could get was an electrical snowstorm of a picture and the sound of static interference. Jake got up and grabbed the remote control from her, as if his pressing the buttons might produce better results. It didn’t. The TV was also programmed for radio reception, but nothing was coming through on any of the channels. Just static. White noise.

‘Look,’ Zoe said, ‘I’m not thinking straight. We’re here for the night. We need to eat something.’

‘We’ll have to cook it ourselves.’

‘No hardship. Let’s see what they’ve got in the kitchen.’

They went down to the restaurant and slipped through to the kitchens, where they’d been earlier. Everything was still the way they’d found it on their first visit. Lean cuts of red meat lay on the work counter, ready for cooking, as did a neat array of chopped vegetables. They decided to leave the stuff that had been out all day. In the chiller cabinet they found fresh fillet steaks.

Zoe poured olive oil into a huge pan while Jake popped the gas burners. He found a pristine white chef’s toque and put it on. He was living it large. ‘Everything’s runnin’. Gas. Light. Me. We may be about to die under an avalanche but I’m in the kitchen and we’re sizzling a steak.’

He served it medium rare with onions and mushrooms. Zoe meanwhile dished up green beans and butter. She had also raided the wine store and popped open a bottle of red.

‘What’s this, you cheapskate? Get back and fetch us a bottle of real wine, will ya?’

Zoe shook her head. ‘Take that hat off. You look like a twat. We’ll get billed for all this, you know.

‘I don’t care. If this is my last bottle of wine I want something good.’

He got up. When he came back she’d lit a candle at the table. He was still wearing his toque, and was carrying a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. She wanted to look at the wine list to see what his choice might have cost them, but he grabbed it off her and skimmed it across the empty restaurant, telling her to just pour it. She in turn snatched the toque from his head and tossed it the way of the wine list.

‘We’ll get thrown out of here,’ he said, clinking glasses.

‘Survivors,’ she said.

‘Survivors.’

‘This is surreal.’

‘But it’s not a dream.’

‘When I think of all the places we’ve had dinner together. Meals at home. Dinners out. Fancy restaurants. Cheap cafés. Picnics. This is the one I’ll remember above any of them. It’s like we’re the last people in the world.’

‘And the snow outside is still falling. If you were with the right person you might even find this romantic.’

The candlelight wavered slightly, and she saw the catch-light flicker in his bloodshot eyes, and she remembered that they had come on this holiday with a job to do. There was something they had to sort out. Something they were meant to discuss. But she knew that right now was the wrong moment. She let it go.

‘How’s your steak?’

‘Perfect. You know,’ he said, ‘I think I’ve always been secretly afraid of the avalanche. This is what, almost my twentieth skiing break? And right from when I was a beginner I’ve always known it was there. Like something in your dreams, crouched, waiting behind you, waiting to snatch it all away from you.’

‘Are you still afraid of it? After what happened today?’

‘Put it like this. I think we should move into one of the rooms across the hall. I really don’t think the snow is going to crash down on us. But if it did, we’d be safer on that side.’

‘Right. That’s a very nice wine.’

‘Really? Doesn’t taste of much to me.’

‘Nonsense. Let’s go two bottles.’

‘You sure? I don’t want you drunk.’

‘Yes you do. You want me drunk.’

They commandeered a new room, where they lay on the bed with the curtains open, should there be any movement or activity or patrols in the night. Zoe was anxious at every creak of the hotel, in case it heralded the big slide of snow. Jake was oddly resigned. He didn’t think it was going to happen: he didn’t know why he thought that, he just felt that despite the evacuation, it wasn’t a threat.

Two bottles of red wine were enough to sedate them, though sleep didn’t come easily. They lay kissing for hours. Just kissing, not wanting to speak, not wanting to take their mouths away from each other’s lips, which was of course a way of speaking. Then Jake did something he’d never done before, which was to lift her and carry her from the bed so that they fucked against the wall, standing up, with Zoe balanced on her toes.

Then they fell back into bed, and finally fell asleep.

‘Wake up!’

Jake blinked at her. It was morning. Zoe pulled off her wool hat and opened her ski jacket. She’d been outside, to a pharmacy, to get some drops for their bloodshot eyes.

‘You been out?’

‘I got you this. Put your head back and open your eyes. Man, that looks sore. Your eyes are like piss-holes in the snow.’ She let three drops fall into each of his eyes, then screwed the dropper back into the bottle.

‘Anyone out there?’

‘Nope.’

‘What time is it?’

‘Not late.’

Jake tossed back the covers. ‘You shouldn’t have let me sleep.’

‘I thought you needed it. I think you’re still traumatised.’

‘I’m not.’

‘I think you are. You’re behaving differently.’

‘Like how?’

Zoe raised an eyebrow.

He dressed hurriedly. ‘We need to get that car back on the road and get going.’

‘Okay. I brought you some breakfast from the kitchen.’

There was a tray on the table: coffee, juice and scrambled eggs on toast under a silver dome. ‘You know what? You could almost get to like it here. If you didn’t have to scarper.’

He ate breakfast quickly, pulled on his thermal under wear, his salopettes and ski jacket and together they went out to take a look at the car. It was still snowing but only very lightly now. Tiny flakes billowed in the air, barely contributing to the thick, feathery deposit that layered the road and the pavement. There were plenty of patches of blue in the sky between the low-lying grey clouds. They stuck to the middle of the road, trudging through the thick snow.

After twenty minutes they came upon the police car and Zoe gasped as if she’d been punched in the stomach.

‘Holy heaven!’

Jake just blinked.

The wheel of the police car on the driver’s side dangled in space above a clean drop of fifteen metres down a smooth face of granite. Had it continued over, the car would have hit more granite rocks at the bottom, and from there it would have plunged down a steep tree-lined slope. Maybe it would have hit a tree trunk head on; maybe not. A rounded tooth of amber-stained limestone poking out of the snow in front of the passenger-side wheel had stopped any further onward motion of the car. The rock blocking the wheel looked like a carved tombstone, but their names weren’t chiselled there because it had been their salvation.

Zoe kneeled on the snow and covered her ears with her hands. ‘I don’t believe it.’

‘You’d better.’

‘We must have an angel watching over us. I swear.’

‘Well, I don’t believe in angels. But you’re right.’

Zoe scrambled to her feet again and grabbed Jake’s arm. They stared down at the car, and the drop beneath it, without another word.

Jake was trying to calculate if he might be able to reverse the police car back onto the road. The front passenger wheel was blocked, sure enough, but the vehicle was pointing downwards and looked ready to slip sideways. The prospect of climbing into the car, starting the engine and trying to back out was terrifying.

He watched Zoe go round to the driver’s side. ‘No,’ he said.

‘Maybe it will.’

‘Don’t even think about it.’

They walked back to the village discussing alternatives. They could try to find another vehicle. It was entirely possible that there might be more keys hanging around in one of the many stores that remained unlocked. Or they could simply walk out and follow the road across the mountain.

There were cars parked near their hotel. They checked them all out. They were all locked. They knew their chances of finding an unlocked car with its keys dangling in the ignition were pretty slim, but not impossible.

Yet within just twenty minutes they found a car with its keys winking in the ignition. Jake swung into the driver’s seat and turned the key, but the battery was completely flat. They tried bump-starting the car on a short hill, but nothing happened. They abandoned the car at the bottom of the rise and resumed their search.

Jake let out a cry when he stumbled upon a parking lot with eighteen identical black snowmobiles. ‘Here’s our ride out!’ he shouted. ‘Take your pick, they all look the same.’

But his enthusiasm was premature. All eighteen snowmobiles were linked by a thick chain and a massive padlock. They could find neither keys for the snowmobiles nor the key for the padlock. The search briefly turned to thoughts of a bolt-cropper, but this idea was abandoned when they realised that even if they did find a bolt-cropper they still had no ignition keys.

After three hours they were ready to admit defeat, at least for the day.

‘What will we do?’ Zoe asked.

‘Do? We’ll go back to our room in the hotel for another night. Drink some more of their fuckin’ fabulous tasteless wine. Then we’ll get up bright and early and we’ll hike out of here once and for all by following the road.’

They linked arms, and in a kind of neurasthenic trance they trudged back to the hotel.

They used the sauna to get warm again, and then swam in the spa pool. The water made a hollow lapping noise in the absence of any other guests; the changing rooms echoed oddly; the padding of their feet on the tiles was a lonely sound.

Afterwards they spent an hour using the hotel’s computers to get online. The computers failed to connect. While Zoe persisted in her efforts, Jake went through the entire series of phone numbers all over again. One by one the lines rang and rang and no one answered. No one answered anywhere.

‘It’s the local exchange. The fault has to lie with the local exchange,’ Jake said. ‘It must be out of commission otherwise somebody would pick up.’

They were no more successful with their mobile phones.

Jake found the toque Zoe had thrown on the floor and cooked again that night. He defrosted chicken and discovered spices to rustle up a sweet-and-sour stir-fry. He found a CD player and cranked the volume up high, banging pots and pans and cracking the imaginary heads of poor little kitchen boys to get his spirits up. There was a CD of classical operatic stuff sitting in the machine, offering a soaring mezzo-soprano diva vocalising beautiful words he couldn’t understand. He turned up the burners on the cooker and flamed oil in a skillet as if it was all theatre.

The stainless-steel kitchen work surface still offered the lean cuts of meat and chopped vegetables laid out from yesterday. Everything looked and smelled as fresh as if it had just been prepared moments earlier, but he left it lying there and cleaned himself another work surface across the kitchen.

Zoe sat at the table in the restaurant; the table was laid, with crisp linen and silver cutlery all in place. Her hands were folded under her chin. She’d found a bottle of champagne.

‘Don’t ask the price. We’ll hide the empty bottle. No one will ever know.’

With the operatic vocals soaring above their candle-lit table and the darkness thickening outside, they ate their second meal in the deserted restaurant. The music had a phantom beauty, swooping between the empty rows of tables. Without a word Zoe got up and changed it, pointedly, for some upbeat Pixies tunes.

‘Why has no one come for us?’ she said.

‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’

The champagne went to Zoe’s head. They guzzled it, and Zoe fetched a second bottle.

‘Enjoy this,’ she said, pouring freely, ‘because the cost of those two bottles amounts to roughly the same as the cost of this holiday.’

‘You’re joking.’

‘I’m not. They’re on what’s called the “reserve list”.’

‘What’s a “reserve list”?’

‘Well, there’s the wine list and then there’s the reserve list. It’s for special occasions. If you can’t find anything expensive enough on the wine list you ask for the reserve list. It’s for special people with a discerning palate and a big fat arse.’

‘You do realise we’re going to get landed for this?’

‘No we’re not. We’ll deny everything. And I’ll tell you something else. For these two nights I’ve felt like you and I were the last two people on earth. I have you totally to myself, with not even a waitress to distract you. And some perverse part of me has really enjoyed it. Tomorrow it’s going to be over and there will be things I’ll wish I’d said to you when I had you to myself.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like how long ago was the avalanche?’

‘Uh? Only yesterday morning. Incredibly.’

‘Exactly. Only yesterday morning. And it feels like an incredibly long time ago.’

‘You’re right. It does.’

‘A long time ago since we almost lost each other. We almost died, Jake. And every second since then seems to have expanded, and it’s because there’s just you…’ She held her glass up, a little unsteadily, to clink it with his. ‘And me.’ She looked around the empty restaurant. ‘Everyone else sucks our time from us. I could almost stay here a few more days, just out of bloody-mindedness.’

‘Do you think we’re on a reserve list?’

‘What?’

‘God’s reserve list. Nature’s reserve list. Like everyone else is on the ordinary menu and we’ve been kept back here cos we’re on the reserve list.’

‘That’s a weird idea.’

He half-smiled at her. ‘All the other people will be back soon.’

‘I know. And we’ll leave first thing in the morning. Come on, let’s go to bed.’

‘You’re drunk.’

‘Bring the rest of that bottle since it cost so bloody much.’

She was indeed drunk. When the elevator doors opened she pushed him inside and lunged at him. With the lift doors closing she leapt on him and bit his lip, fumbling with his belt and hoiking down his trousers. Falling to her knees she fellated him. His elbow hit the lift buttons and the doors opened.

Jake froze. ‘Excuse me, sir,’ he said, ‘my wife will be finished in a moment.’

Zoe stopped and looked up as if she half-expected to see a shocked guest in the lobby. She took a swig of bubbling champagne from the bottle, swallowed, and put his dick back in her mouth.

The elevator bell chimed and the doors closed again.

‘Wake up.’

Zoe groaned. Her head felt like someone had split it with an ice-axe. Jake was dressed, standing over her, holding a mug of gently steaming coffee under her nose. ‘What time is it?’

‘Time to go.’

‘Really?’

‘It’s snowing again. We don’t want to leave it too late. We’re going to have to hike for maybe four hours before we get to the next village. It’s snowing heavily and with all this snow coming down, all the time we’re here the avalanche risk increases. So please get your sweet, shiny arse out of that bed.’

‘That cheap champagne went to my head,’ she said, dragging herself off to the shower.

He’d brought up a breakfast of toast and rolls, and cheese and salami. He’d packed a rucksack. While she slept he’d been out and found the rucksack, a torch and a magnetic compass in a store.

Before they left she made him sit and tilt back his head while she applied eye-drops. ‘You still look like a zombie. Red then blue then black. Like an archery target.’

‘That’s not an archery target.’

‘Oh shut up. Now you do me.’

They were out on the road by seven-thirty that morning. The snow had thickened. The clouds overhead were like buckled steel and though the flakes were light they were falling in thick profusion. A fine mist came along with it.

They followed the road. Pretty soon they passed the police car with its wheel dangling over the precipice. The snow had made a thick crust on the windscreen and on the bonnet. Jake stopped and looked at the vehicle wistfully. The mist was thickening and Zoe told him not to even think about it.

The road climbed steeply. After another half an hour of ascending the mountain road the snow-mist became impenetrable. It had that same oyster-grey quality,with traces of iridescence where the light played. They walked on steadily, but couldn’t see where they were going.

Jake stepped off the road and turned his ankle.

‘I don’t like it,’ Zoe said. ‘We’re walking blind.’

‘It’s okay. I’m okay. We just follow the tarmac.’

‘I can’t even see the tarmac. Or feel it underneath me.’

Jake took his compass out of his bag. He squatted down and placed it on his knee. ‘That’s north and we want to go west. This is okay. Let’s press on.’

There was confidence in his voice, but Zoe neither shared it nor trusted it. He was made of different stuff from her. He’d had an upbringing that had taught him to simulate confidence when he didn’t feel it in his bones, and she knew the difference. She had been taught to trust her instincts, and to be guided by them. She thought that her way got it right or wrong just as much as his way.

They took it slowly, holding hands, sometimes following the outer curve of the road. The road twisted wildly, a serpentine track winding around and across the mountain, and they followed it almost blind, reduced to a shuffling pace. Then Zoe must have put a foot off the road because her boot went through snow up to her thigh.

‘This scares me, Jake. It scares me. I feel like we could easily walk off the road. Why don’t we take shelter for half an hour? See if the mist lifts a little?’

‘It’s not going to lift.’

‘How the hell do you know that?’

‘This is in for the day. You can see that. If we hunker down we’ll just get cold. We have to press on.’

So they did. And after another ten minutes there came a gust of wind that for a tantalising moment revealed the road parting in opposite directions. Then the image of the parting in the road was instantly swallowed up by the thick mist. The snow came down harder.

Jake squatted in the road again and took out his compass.

‘What’s this?’

Zoe squatted beside him, peering at the compass. The needle was circling the compass, hunting.

‘You haven’t got it level. Put it down flat.’

Jake cleared some snow from the road with his ski gauntlet and placed the compass down on the snow. The needle continued to hunt, moving steadily clockwise across the face of the compass. Then it stopped. Almost immediately it resumed its hunting, now moving anticlockwise.

‘What does that mean?’ Zoe said.

Jake didn’t answer.

She grabbed it; shook it; put it down on the snow again. The needle continued to hunt for its magnetic home, without coming to rest.

‘It’s fucked.’

‘It was working fine when I picked it up,’ Jake said. ‘It was working fine.’

‘Right.’

‘It was. It was working fine.’

‘Nevertheless.’ ‘Nevertheless? What does that mean? Nevertheless?’

‘It means we’re turning back.’

‘Like hell!’

‘Jake, we’ve been walking for what, an hour? We haven’t gone more than a kilometre or two. If you think we’re going to get anywhere in this you’re stupid. I’m not carrying on in this. And as you say, we can’t stay here.’

She turned from him and began to retrace her steps. Within seconds they couldn’t see each other. After a moment he started yelling after her.

‘I’m just here!’ she shouted.

He loomed out of the mist and grabbed her coat. ‘Don’t do that, Zoe!’

‘Don’t do what?’

‘Don’t just walk off like that! We have to stay together. You don’t seem to realise that I could lose you in this. It could happen in seconds! This is the mountain and there’s no one around! No one! This isn’t a walk to the shops!’

‘Okay.’

‘You have to respect the mountain.’

‘I said okay, didn’t I?’

They stood in the billowing snow, their noses perhaps fifteen centimetres apart but barely making out the expression on the other’s face. In the mist, each appeared to the other like a faded and fading grey photograph.

‘We’re going back,’ said Zoe.