The Silent Land

8

The loss of Sadie seemed to be a big blow to Jake. He kept speculating aloud about where the hell she could have got to. Zoe was disappointed to lose the dog, too. To distract Jake, she suggested they find a new restaurant to eat in. They’d noticed a beautiful, chic and elegant place called, somewhat ridiculously, La Table de mon Grand-Père.

They chose grandfather’s favourite table by the window and lit candles. Zoe took up station in the kitchen and cooked up a boeuf bourguignon that would probably have given the original chef apoplexy; but it was one of Jake’s favourites and she served it with buttery mashed potatoes.

Jake waited with his knife and fork upright in his fists, even though he said he wasn’t hungry. He wanted to appear enthusiastic for her—she knew it. She kissed his forehead as she placed the plates on the table. ‘I’ve always loved cooking for you,’ she said. ‘Feeding you. Chopping it all up. Preparing it.’

‘You put love into your cooking. I can taste it.’

‘Can you still taste it? Here?’

‘I would taste its absence, if it wasn’t there.’

‘You’re taking that wine at a clip, aren’t you, mister?’

It was true. He’d uncorked a bottle of the most expensive stuff he could find in the place and had already downed two-thirds of the bottle with no help from Zoe.

‘I’m trying to get drunk. It’s not working.’

‘Why do you want to get drunk?’

‘The other night, when we drank that champagne and you attacked me in the lift—were you really drunk? Or pretending? Because no matter how much I drink here, I can’t get drunk.’

She took a sip of the wine herself. ‘I remember thinking I should have been drunk, then I felt drunk. Or maybe I needed to pretend to myself that I was drunk. So can I ask you again why you need to get drunk?’

‘Because I don’t know what the rules are here! I need to know. I feel like the ground keeps slipping. It scares me, in ways I don’t understand.’ He poured out the rest of the bottle.

She hadn’t yet mentioned to him the burning log in the hearth at La Chamade. ‘Something is changing.’

‘Yes. I sense it.’

They ate in silence. Zoe wanted to ask if he could taste his boeuf bourguignon, but thought better of it. Instead she asked him if he wanted her to describe being drunk, so that he could feel it; to which he replied he’d like to see if he could make it happen without any help. He got up from the table and came back with another bottle. She decided to join him in the profound loneliness of this hearty drinking.

Outside, a gibbous moon spread waxy light over the deep snow. Jake kept checking to see if there was any sign of Sadie. The pines cast slender shadows at the restaurant, and where the shadows didn’t fall the moonlight glittered with unsympathetic beauty on the snow crust.

‘I don’t think Sadie wandered off. I think she was taken away from us.’

‘What?’

‘That’s what I think.’

Zoe looked at him hard and long. She knew him well enough to know that he didn’t mean that some dog-fancier had kidnapped Sadie. She didn’t like any alternative idea she could come up with. ‘Consider this. Instead of thinking that she was taken away from us, maybe she was given back to you, to us, for that short time.’

He leaned over and twined his fingers in hers. ‘You always see the better way. Or choose to.’

‘But it’s like life, isn’t it? We know death is coming. And yet we always see our loved ones as taken away from us, instead of given to us for whatever time they have.’

‘You’re right. It’s just that right is hard. It’s much easier to collapse and feel sorry for ourselves.’

‘I always thought of it as a gift. Life, I mean. I don’t know from what force. But I always knew it was a gift. And somehow I think this extra space, this strange extra time right now, has been given to us. For what purpose I can’t begin to understand.’

‘Admit it. You don’t think we’re going to be here for ever, do you, Zoe?’

‘No.’

She looked into his eyes, and there was something of the moon-on-snow in his gaze as he looked back at her. Earlier when she’d been in the jewellery store and she’d had the prospect of picking out anything—Cartier, Tiffany and the rest—she hadn’t wanted any of it. What must it be like to be rich, if you could just pick this stuff up without it creasing your brow for a second? There could be no satisfaction in acquiring anything where there had been no difficulty, no struggle. You would have to have a perverse need to order a dozen or two dozen of the objects in order to feel the pinch. Or only aspire to things that take a bite out of your means. The only jewels she wanted were her husband’s eyes regarding her with admiration as he did right at that moment; the only necklace that of his breath on her skin as he kissed her throat; the only ring the simple gold band she already had. She told him all this.

He laughed. ‘You’re drunk and sentimental.’

‘Nope. I’m sober, stone-hearted and clear-eyed.’

‘I love you. For longer than this is. Whatever this is.’

‘You’re the one who’s drunk. You only tell me you love me when you’re drunk.’

‘That’s not true.’

‘To hell with all that crap about a dessert and a coffee. Shall we walk back?’

They strolled back through the moon-illumined snow, a million diamonds winking on its fragile rime. Jake leaned on Zoe as if he were drunk, though he was not. Before they went inside he held her face in his hands and kissed her in the milky light. She tasted the wine on his kiss; she was sure of it. She didn’t have to remember how his kiss tasted; his kisses always tasted of red wine, silk, pepper, the scent of blood, of hope.

Back in the room Jake lurched into the toilet. She heard the sound of his urine streaming in the bowl. Jake always pissed heartily, like a horse. Zoe hung up her ski jacket and closed the wardrobe door behind her. She made to unstrap her salopettes but was interrupted by a familiar musical sound. She turned to mouth some thing at Jake, who was still busy in the bathroom.

What’s that? she had time to say to herself. It’s your… it’s your phone, you fool. Someone is ringing you on your mobile phone.

The cheerful ringtone grew louder.

‘Jake!’ she shouted.

It’s in the wardrobe, Zoe said to herself. It’s in your ski-jacket pocket. You should get it! Go on! Get it!

But she couldn’t. She was paralysed. She heard her own blood rushing in her veins. The sudden intrusion of the ringing phone had her rooted. She made to call out to Jake again. He should be the one to take this call, not her. She tried to move but she felt trapped. Physically constricted, as if something held her arms and legs in a cold grip.

The phone rang again.

‘Jake!’

She was back inside the snow tomb of the original avalanche. Packed hard with snow. Upside down, breathing the air from a tiny trapped pocket, trying to move a single finger. She moved a finger, a hand, her arm, and the hard-packed snow around her crumbled, dissolved. She fell towards the wardrobe, flinging open the door to snatch at her jacket. The mobile phone was still trilling. It was in one of her zipped-up pockets. She fumbled with the zip and reached into the pocket. Hands trembling, she flipped open the lid and the square patch of blue light proclaimed Number Withheld.

‘Number withheld,’ she murmured to herself.

She pressed the answer button and lifted the telephone to her ear. There was a voice. A man’s voice.

‘I’m sorry… I’m sorry, I…’ She shook her head in frustration. ‘Slowly please! Je m’excuse, lentement, s’il vous plaît. Plus lentement… Pardonnez-moi, monsieur… je ne comprends pas.’

‘What’s that?’ Jake shouted from the bathroom.

‘It’s a man.’

‘What?’

‘I can’t understand, his accent is so thick… Monsieur, monsieur, s’il vous plaît, parler plus lentement… no, no!’

The phone had gone dead. Zoe held the phone at arm’s length, stared at it in the palm of her hand, as if it had tried to burn her.

Jake was out of the bathroom, ridiculously holding up his trousers at the waist, wanting to know who she was talking to.

‘It was a man.’

‘A man?’

‘Yes, it was a man.’

‘A man? What did he say?’

‘I don’t know, I just couldn’t make it out.’

‘But… Holy Christ!’

‘I don’t know! I just don’t know!’

‘Did he… Was it French? Was he speaking French?’

‘Maybe! But I couldn’t… his accent was… and the line was breaking up. I didn’t catch what he said.’

‘Can you ring him back? Can you just ring back?’

‘He withheld the number.’

‘Can you get a line out? Maybe you should try to ring someone again?’

Jake was standing over her now, his fingers trembling just centimetres from her silver phone, as if he wanted to take it away from her. ‘But if someone rang in… I meant back in England. Dial someone at home. Why don’t you?’

‘Okay. Okay. But Jake—what if he’s trying to get through again? The man. What if that man is trying to ring me again? Shouldn’t I keep the line free?’

Jake collapsed back on the bed with the palms of his hands pressed flat against the sides of his head. ‘Yes… yes, leave it free. He might be trying to get through right at this moment.’

Zoe laid the phone on the table. Then she sank down next to Jake, gripping his arm. Together they waited, staring at the phone on the table, willing it to ring again, terrified that it might.

They watched the phone for twenty minutes. Then Jake sighed and suggested she try to put a call through to England. So she did that; but the results were the same as before. The telephone rang and no one picked up.

‘What did the man sound like?’ Jake was desperate for tiny details.

‘He was hard to understand.’

‘But he was French?’

‘Possibly.’

‘Or Catalan?’

‘Might have been Catalan. Or Occitan, for all I know.’

‘He spoke French?’

‘If it was, he had such a strong accent and the line was so bad I couldn’t make any of it out.’

‘But how did he sound? What was his demeanour?’

‘His demeanour?’

‘Yes! His fucking demeanour! Was he agitated? Calm? Urgent?’

‘He didn’t seem agitated. But he didn’t sound calm either.’

Jake took the silver mobile telephone from her hands and examined it, willing it to yield more detail than it could.

They were in no mood for sleeping. They dressed again and went downstairs. Jake quizzed her over and over about the phone call. He’d not heard the phone ringing, only Zoe talking. She asked him how it was possible that he could not have heard the phone. She was almost angry with him that he hadn’t heard it. It was important to her. If only he’d heard it, then she couldn’t possibly have imagined it.

‘Do you think you might have imagined it?’

‘That is such a stupid question!’

‘No it isn’t. Look what happened earlier.’

She ignored the reference to the morning’s events. Or non-events. ‘I imagined the phone ringing, and then I imagined a voice on the end of it? No, it isn’t possible. If you say that again I’ll smash you in the face.’

They drank a beer at the bar. Jake served it from the pression taps. Wanting to shift the subject away from the mysterious phone call, he started talking about the taste of the beer. He said he would remember the taste of it for her, but when he said hops and barley she said that meant nothing to her. So he said: Acorns, malt vinegar, sugar, autumn leaves, copper pennies, grief, weak sunlight, laughter, the crust on a loaf of bread… until she said, Stop, I’ve got it.

‘There’s so much in everything,’ she said. ‘When you take a moment to remember it.’

‘Remembering all of this life, or this life that was: it’s like trying to unpack an infinite box.’

‘Can you have an infinite box?’

‘Look,’ he said, ‘there’s only you and me here to say whether you can have an infinite box or not. There’s no one else to say we’re wrong.’

‘Now I think about everything like that. Every detail, every word, seems intense and packed with significance. I think I was asleep most of my life. If there is a hell, that’s the thing I’ll be punished for most.’

‘Come here. You’re on edge. You need to relax.’

They finished their beers and decided to take a sauna. They went down to the spa, where low lights illuminated the swimming pool. They undressed and had a swim while the sauna was heating. Jake had asked so many times where all this energy—the energy that warmed and lit the pool, fired the sauna, heated the hotel—was coming from; so many times that he didn’t like to ask the question again. But some part of him knew that it couldn’t arrive from a vacuum. With Nature there was always an account; and he said that ultimately they still inhabited a corner of that same infinite box that was Nature.

They made a few lengths of the pool and spent a few minutes floating before going into the sauna. After half an hour in the sauna they found a way out of the spa onto the moonlit snow.

‘I’ve always wanted to do this,’ Zoe said. ‘Naked in the snow.’

‘I still can’t feel the cold.’

‘It’s the effects of the sauna.’

‘No,’ Jake said firmly. ‘It’s the effects of being dead.’

‘Want me to flog you with birch twigs? You’d feel that.’

Under the flooding light of the moon, Jake did appear to her as a wraith, pale but shining with an inner life. His skin was white like a porcelain carving, but there was a radiance glowing under his skin, and a sheen in his eye that made him seem quick and alive compared to her.

He caught her staring. He smiled. ‘Do you think we can fly?’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Since we’re dead. Can we jump off the mountain and fly, if we think hard enough about it?’

‘I’m absolutely certain we can’t. So don’t try it.’

‘I think it might be possible here.’

She suddenly felt flushed with cold. The effects of the sauna were fading. She pulled a towel around her and stood up. ‘Promise me you won’t even try such a thing!’

‘I was just speculating—’

‘Promise me! Promise me you won’t dare risk something like that.’

‘Okay. I promise. Okay.’

She walked back into the spa. ‘Come on. I’m ready to go to bed.’

They left the spa and rode the lift back up to their room. The telephone call had not been mentioned again, but the incident had barely strayed from the forefront of either of their minds. Zoe laid the phone on the bedside table, plugged in, charging, still expecting it to ring again at any time.

Still wanting it to ring again.

It didn’t ring, but Zoe didn’t need it to keep her awake. With Jake snoring lightly beside her, she lay looking through the window at the ghostly winter landscape. They had taken to sleeping with the curtains open. Old habits were falling away. There was no need for privacy and the light now had become a property of value, a thing that traded in the currency of life rather than death. It seemed an affront to want to keep it out, so the curtains stayed open.

With no snow falling for a couple of days the snow on the ground had become shaped, wind-sculpted now, like a beast that had relaxed its great wings and shoulders and hunkered down. Its smooth edges took a curve, like the roll on white candle wax, and the moon above the trees seemed to make everything brittle, as if at any moment the entire landscape might craze like the paintings of an Old Master.

She had a sudden and dear wish that she could populate that landscape. She felt her belly, trying to detect the smallest sense of bloating or just a little swelling. She placed her fingers on her belly and looked at the moon in the dark sky. Perhaps she was going to have to say something to Jake.

She had lifted a number of tester kits, using them to check herself every day, and every day confirmed the same thing. Positive positive positive. She’d hidden the supply of tester kits at the foot of the wardrobe. She would tell him, she decided again, when the time was right. If they were still in this strange place in a few months’ time, her condition would announce itself. With the moon shining brilliantly outside, she fell asleep.

But then she woke and something made her sit up in bed. She felt she had only been asleep for a few minutes but the moon had radically shifted position in the sky, as if working on a different timescale from hers. Some movement, some change of pressure had woken her.

She looked outside and then looked back at the door to their room. The door was open.

Framed in the doorway was a tall man.

There was a moment when her own terror flashed at her and cut her inside like a cold, sharp blade. She made to scream but only a choking sound came out of her mouth. She kicked at her sleeping husband and the physical release made her scream come loud and clear; but now she was up off the bed and ready to fight the apparition in the doorway.

‘What? What? What?’ Jake was holding her shoulders.

‘There was a man! In the doorway.’

For sure the man had gone now, but the door was still open. Jake knew his wife well enough to trust her first report. He sprang to the door and looked up and down the corridor. There was no one, and no sound. He listened hard for doors closing, for footsteps, for elevators. The hotel was silent as the grave.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes. I just woke up and saw him.’

‘Did he attack you?’

‘No, he was at the door. He didn’t come in.’

‘What was he doing?’

‘He was reaching an arm into the room. Slowly. That’s all.’

‘What did he look like?’

‘He wore black. All-black ski gear. His face was in shadow. I don’t know.’

‘Heck. Well, he’s not there now, darlin’. I swear to you he’s not there now. Okay?’

She nodded.

He put his big hands either side of her face. ‘I think you could have dreamed it.’

She shook her head, no.

‘I think you could easily have dreamed it. We’re in a strange place in our heads right now. You could have dreamed it and woken and thought you saw him at that moment.’

‘No.’

‘You know that place, that moment between dreaming and waking? That’s it. That’s where we see these things. That’s exactly where these things live. You know it.’

‘The door was open, Jake! It’s still open.’

It was the hole in his reasoning, the gaping puncture. He looked over his shoulder at the open door. ‘Did we close it? Did we close the door before we went to sleep?’

‘Of course we did.’ She marched over to the door. ‘Look! Look here!’

On the carpet just outside the door were a few small chunks of dirty snow-ice, just beginning to ooze from crystal to water. ‘It’s not possible that was from our boots.’ Her voice was keening. ‘Any snow from our boots would have melted hours ago. There was a man here. That snow says there was a man here.’

Jake turned her around and pressed her back into the room. He closed the door behind him, and dropped the lock and secured the chain on the door for the first time since before the avalanche.

‘There are other people here,’ Zoe said.

‘You don’t know that.’

‘Yes I do. Other people are here.’