“I know a Portuguese tart who enjoys that tying-down stuff, if that oils your rooster,” says Chetwynd-Pitt.
“Misogynist and unfunny,” says Fitzsimmons, inhaling vapors from his vin chaud. “Splitting up’s an utter bitch.”
Chetwynd-Pitt sucks a cherry. “Specially if you buy an opal necklace Christmas prezzie and get dumped before you can turn the gift into sex. Was it from Ratners Jewellers, Olly? They issue gift tokens for returned items, but not cash. Our groundsman had a wedding called off, that’s how I know.”
“No, it wasn’t from bloody Ratners,” growls Quinn.
Chetwynd-Pitt lets the cherry stone drop into the ashtray. “Oh cheer up, for shitsake. Sainte-Agnès plus New Year equals more Europussy than the Schleswig-Holstein Feline Rescue Society would know what to do with. And I’ll bet you a thousand quid that the feeling-conflicted line means she’s got another boyfriend.”
“Not Ness, no way,” I reassure poor Quinn. “She respects you—and herself—way too much. Trust me. And when Lou dumped you,” this is for Chetwynd-Pitt, “you were a train wreck for months.”
“Lou and I were serious. Olly ’n’ Ness lasted what, all of five weeks? And Lou didn’t dump me. It was mutual.”
“Six weeks, four days.” Quinn looks tortured. “But it’s not time that matters. It felt … like a secret place just us two knew about.” He drinks his obscure Maltese beer. “She fitted me. I don’t know what love is, whether it’s mystical or chemical or what. But when you have it, and it goes, it’s like a … it’s like … it’s …”
“Cold turkey,” says Rufus Chetwynd-Pitt. “Roxy Music were right about love being the drug, and when your supply’s used up, no dealer on earth can help you. Well: There is one—the girl. But she’s gone and won’t see you. See? I do know what poor Olly’s suffering. What I’d prescribe is”—he waggles his empty cocktail glass—“an Angel’s Tit. Crème de cacao,” he tells me, “and maraschino. Pile au bon moment, Monique, tu as des pouvoirs télépathiques.” The plumper waitress arrives with my hot wine, and Chetwynd-Pitt deploys his smart-arse French: “Je prendrai une Alien Urine, et ce sera mon ami ici présent”—he nods at me—“qui réglera l’ardoise.”
“Bien,” says Monique, acting bubbly. “J’aimerais bien moi aussi avoir des amis comme lui. Et pour ces messieurs? Ils m’ont l’air d’avoir encore soif.” Fitzsimmons orders a cassis, and Olly says, “Just another beer.” Monique gathers the used dishes and glasses and off she’s gone.
“Well, I’d fire my unsawn-off shotgun up that,” says Chetwynd-Pitt. “A cuddly six and a half. Yummier than that Wednesday Adams lookalike Günter’s also taken on. Frightmare or what?” I follow his gaze down to the skinnier bargirl. She’s filling a schooner of cognac. I ask if she’s French, but Chetwynd-Pitt’s asking Fitzsimmons, “You’re the answer man tonight, Fitz. What’s this love malarkey all about?”
Fitzsimmons lights a cigarette and passes us the box. “Love is the anesthetic applied by Nature to extract babies.”
I’ve heard that line elsewhere. Chetwynd-Pitt flicks ash into the tray. “Can you do better than that, Lamb?”
I’m watching the skinny barmaid making what must be Chetwynd-Pitt’s Alien Urine. “Don’t ask me. I’ve never been in love.”
“Oh, listen to the poor lamb,” mocks Chetwynd-Pitt.
“That’s crap,” says Quinn. “You’ve had lots of girls.”
Memory hands me a photo of Fitzsimmons’s yummy mummy. “Anatomically, I have some knowledge, sure—but emotionally they’re the Bermuda Triangle. Love, that drug Rufus referred to, that state of grace Olly pines for, that great theme … I’m immune to it. I have not once felt love for any girl. Or boy, for that matter.”
“That’s a pile of steaming bollocks,” says Chetwynd-Pitt.
“It’s the truth. I’ve never been in love. And that’s okay. The colorblind get by just fine not knowing blue from purple.”
“You can’t have met the right girl,” decides Quinn the idiot.
“Or met too many right girls,” suggests Fitzsimmons.
“Human beings,” I inhale my wine’s nutmeggy steam, “are walking bundles of cravings. Cravings for food, water, shelter, warmth; sex and companionship; status, a tribe to belong to; kicks, control, purpose; and so on, all the way down to chocolate-brown bathroom suites. Love is one way to satisfy some of these cravings. But love’s not just the drug; it’s also the dealer. Love wants love in return, am I right, Olly? Like drugs, the highs look divine, and I envy the users. But when the side effects kick in—jealousy, the rages, grief, I think, Count me out. Elizabethans equated romantic love with insanity. Buddhists view it as a brat throwing a tantrum at the picnic of the calm mind. I—”
“I spy an Alien Urine.” Chetwynd-Pitt smirks at the skinny barmaid and the tall glass of melon-green gloop on her tray. “J’espère que ce sera aussi bon que vos Angel’s Tits.”
“Les boissons de ces messieurs.” Lips thin and unlipsticked, with a “messieurs” that came sheathed in irony. She’s gone already.
Chetwynd-Pitt sniffs. “There goes Miss Charisma 1991.”
The others clink their glasses while I hide one of my gloves behind a pot-plant. “Maybe she just doesn’t think you’re as witty as you think you are,” I tell Chetwynd-Pitt. “How does your Alien Urine taste?”
He sips the pale green gloop. “Exactly like its name.”
THE TOURIST SHOPS in Sainte-Agnès’s town square—ski gear, art galleries, jewelers, chocolatiers—are still open at eleven, the giant Christmas tree’s still bright, and a crêpier, dressed as a gorilla, is doing a brisk trade. Despite the bag of coke Chetwynd-Pitt just scored off Günter, we decide to put off Club Walpurgis until tomorrow night. It’s beginning to snow. “Damn,” I say, turning back. “I left a glove at Le Croc. You guys get Quinn home, I’ll catch you up …”
I hurry back down the alley and get to the bar as a large party of He-Norses and She-Norses leaves. Le Croc has a round window; through it I can see the skinny barmaid preparing a jug of Sangria without being seen. She’s very watchable, like the motionless bass player in a hyperactive rock band. She combines a fuck-you punkishness with a precision about even her smallest actions. Her will would be absolutely unswayable, I sense. As Günter takes the jug away into Le Croc’s interior she turns to look at me so I enter the smoky clamor and make my way between clusters of drinkers to the bar. After she’s wiped the frothy head off a glass of beer with the flat of a knife and handed it to a customer, I’m there with my forgotten glove gambit. “Désolé de vous embêter, mais j’étais installé là-haut”—I point to the Eagle’s Nest, but she doesn’t yet give away whether or not she remembers me—“il y a dix minutes et j’ai oublié mon gant. Est-ce que vous l’auriez trouvé?”
Cool as Ivan Lendl slotting in a lob above an irate hobbit, she reaches down and produces it. “Bizarre, cette manie que les gens comme vous ont d’oublier leurs gants dans les bars.”
Fine, so she’s seen through me. “C’est surtout ce gant; ça lui arrive souvent.” I hold up my glove like a naughty puppet and ask it scoldingly, “Qu’est-ce qu’on dit à la dame?” Her stare kills my joke. “En tout cas, merci. Je m’appelle Hugo. Hugo Lamb. Et si pour vous, ça fait”—shit, what’s “posh” in French?—“chic, eh bien le type qui ne prend que des cocktails s’appelle Rufus Chetwynd-Pitt. Je ne plaisante pas.” Nope, not a flicker. Günter reappears with a tray of empty glasses. “Why do you speak French with Holly, Hugo?”
I look puzzled. “Why wouldn’t I?”
“He seemed keen to practice his French,” says the girl, in London English. “And the customer is always right, Günter.”
“Hey, Günter!” An Australian calls over from the bar football. “This bastard machine’s playing funny buggers! I fed it my francs but it’s not giving me the goods.” Günter heads over, Holly loads up the dishwasher, and I work out what’s happened. When she returned my ski on the black run earlier, she used French, but she said nothing when my acce
nt gave me away because if you’re female and working in a ski resort you must get hit on five times a day, and speaking French with Anglophones strengthens the force field. “I just wanted to say thanks for returning my ski earlier.”
“You already did.” Working-class background; unintimidated by rich kids; very good French.
“This is true, but I’d be dying of hypothermia in a lonely Swiss forest if you hadn’t rescued me. Could I buy you dinner?”
“I’m working in a bar while tourists are eating their dinner.”
“Then could I buy you breakfast?”
“By the time you’re having breakfast, I’ll have been mucking out this place for two hours, with two more hours to go.” Holly slams shut the glass-washer. “Then I go skiing. Every minute spoken for. Sorry.”
Patience is the hunter’s ally. “Understood. Anyway, I wouldn’t want your boyfriend to misinterpret my motives.”
She pretends to fiddle with something under the counter. “Won’t your friends be waiting for you?”
Odds of four to one there’s no boyfriend. “I’ll be in town for ten days or so. See you around. Good night, Holly.”
“G’night,” and piss off, add her spooky blue eyes.
December 30
THE BAYING OF THE PARISIAN MOB drains into the drone of a snowplow, and my search through French orphanages for the Cyclops-eyed child ends with Immaculée Constantin in my tiny room at the family Chetwynd-Pitt’s Swiss chalet telling me gravely, You haven’t lived until you’ve sipped Black Wine, Hugo. Then I’m waking up in the very same garret groinally attached to a mystifying dawn horn as big as a cruise missile. A bookshelf, a globe, a Turkish gown hanging from the door, a thick curtain. “This is where we put the scholarship boys,” Chetwynd-Pitt only half joked when I first stayed here. The old pipe lunks and clanks. Dope + Altitude = Screwy Dreams. I lie in my warm womb, thinking about Holly the barmaid. I find I’ve forgotten Mariângela’s face, if not other areas of her anatomy, but Holly’s face I remember in photographic detail. I should have asked Günter for her surname. A little later, the bells of Sainte-Agnès’s church chime eight times. There were bells in my dream. My mouth is as dry as lunar dust and I drink the glass of water on the bedside table, pleased by the sight of the wedge of francs by the lamp—my winnings from last night’s pool session with Chetwynd-Pitt. Ha. He’ll be eager to win the money back, and an eager player is a sloppy player.
I pee in my garret’s minuscule en suite; hold my face in a sinkful of icy water for the count of ten; open the curtains and slatted shutters to let in the retina-drilling white light; hide last night’s winnings under a floorboard I loosened two visits ago; perform a hundred push-ups; put on the Turkish gown and venture down the steep wooden stairs to the first landing, holding the rope banister. Chetwynd-Pitt’s snoring in his room. The lower stairs take me to the sunken lounge, where I find Fitzsimmons and Quinn buried under tumuli of blankets on leather sofas. The VHS player has spat out The Wizard of Oz, but Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon is still playing on repeat. Hashish perfumes the air and last night’s embers glow in the fireplace. I tiptoe between two teams of Subbuteo soccer players, crunching crisps into the rug, and feed the fire a big log and crumbs of fire lighter. Tongues of flame lick and lap. A Dutch rifle from the Boer War hangs over the mantelpiece, whereon sits a silver-framed photograph of Chetwynd-Pitt’s father shaking hands with Henry Kissinger in Washington, circa 1984. I’m pouring myself a grapefruit juice in the kitchen when the phone there discreetly trills: “Good morning,” I say cutely. “Lord Chetwynd-Pitt the Younger’s residence.”
A male voice states, “Hugo Lamb. Got to be.”
I know this voice. “And you are?”
“Richard Cheeseman, from Humber, you dolt.”
“Bugger me. Not literally. How’s your earlobe?”
“Fine fine fine, but listen, I’ve got serious news. I met—”
“Hang on, where are you? Not Switzerland?”
“Sheffield, at my sister’s, but shut up and listen, this call’s costing me a bollock a minute. I was speaking with Dale Gow last night, and he told me that Jonny Penhaligon’s dead.”
I didn’t mishear. “Our Jonny Penhaligon? No fucking way.”
“Dale Gow heard from Cottia Benboe, who saw it on the local news, News South-West. Suicide. He drove off a cliff, near Truro. Fifty yards from the road, through a fence, three-hundred-foot drop onto rocks. I mean … he wouldn’t have suffered. Apart from whatever it was that drove him to do it, of course, and the … final drop.”
I could weep. All that money. Through the kitchen window I watch the snowplow crawl by. A well-timed young priest follows, his cheeks pink and breath white. “That’s … I don’t know what to say, Cheeseman. Tragic. Unbelievable. Jonny! Of all people …”
“Same here. Really. The last person you’d expect …”
“Did he … Was he driving his Aston Martin?”
A pause. “Yeah, he was. How did you know?”
Be more careful. “I didn’t, but that last night in Cambridge, at the Buried Bishop, he was saying how much he loved that car. When’s the funeral?”
“This afternoon. I can’t go—Felix Finch has got me tickets for an opera and I could never get to Cornwall in time—but maybe it’s for the best. Jonny’s family could do without an influx of strangers arriving at … at … wherever it is.”
“Tredavoe. Did Penhaligon leave a note?”
“Dale Gow didn’t mention one. Why?”
“Just thought it might shed a little light.”
“More details will emerge at the inquest, I suppose.”
Inquest? Details? Sweet shit. “Let’s hope so.”
“Tell Fitz and the others, will you?”
“God, yes. And thanks for phoning, Cheeseman.”
“Sorry for putting a downer on your holiday, but I thought you’d prefer to know. Happy New Year in advance.”
TWO P.M. THE passengers from the cable car pass through the waiting room of the Chemeville station, chattering in most of the major European languages, but she’s not among them, so I direct my mind back to The Art of War. My mind has ideas of its own, however, and directs itself towards a Cornish graveyard where the skin-sack of toxic waste recently known as Jonny Penhaligon is joining its ancestors in the muddy ground. Like as not it’s howling with rain, with an east wind clawing at the mourners’ umbrellas and dissolving the words of “For Those in Peril on the Sea” Xeroxed yesterday onto sheets of A4. Nothing throws the chasm between me and normals into starker relief than grief and bereavement. Even at the tender age of seven, I was embarrassed by—and for—my own family when our dog Twix died. Nigel wept himself sore, Alex was more upset than he had been the time his Sinclair ZX Spectrum arrived minus its transformer, and my parents were morose for days. Why? Twix was out of pain. We no longer had to endure the farts of a dog with colon cancer. Same story when my grandfather died: a tearing-out of hair, gnashing of teeth, revisionism about what a Messiah the tight-arsed old sod had been. Everyone said I’d handled myself manfully at his funeral, but if they could have read my mind, they would have called me a sociopath.
Here’s the truth: Who is spared love is spared grief.
GONE THREE P.M. Holly the barmaid sees me, frowns, and slows: a promising start. I close The Art of War. “Fancy meeting you here.”
Skiers stream by, behind her and between us. She looks around. “Where are your highly amusing friends?”
“Chetwynd-Pitt, which rhymes with Angel’s Tit, I notice—”
“As well as ‘piece of shit’ and ‘sexist git,’ I notice.”
“I’ll file that away. Chetwynd-Pitt’s hungover, and the other two passed through about an hour ago, but I slipped on my ring of invisibility, knowing that my chances of sharing your ski lift up to the top”—I twirl my index finger towards Palanche de la Cretta’s summit—“would be a big fat zero if they were here too. I was embarrassed by Chetwynd-Pitt last night. He was crass. But I’m not.” r />
Holly considers this and shrugs. “None of it matters.”
“It does to me. I was hoping to go skiing with you.”
“And that’s why you’ve been sitting here since …”
“Since eleven-thirty. Three and a half hours. But don’t feel obligated.”
“I don’t. I just think you’re a bit of a plonker, Hugo Lamb.”
So my name has sunk in. “We’re all of us different things at different times. A plonker now, something nobler at other times. Don’t you agree?”
“Right now I’d describe you as a borderline stalker.”
“Tell me to sod off and off I will duly sod.”
“What girl could resist? Sod off.”
I do an urbane as-you-wish bow, stand, and slip The Art of War into my ski jacket. “Sorry for embarrassing you.” I head out.
“Oy.” It’s a lightening more than a softening. “Who says you’re capable of embarrassing me?”
I knock-knock my forehead. “Would ‘Sorry for finding you interesting’ go down any better?”
“A certain type of girl after a holiday romance would lap it up. Those of us who work here get a bit jaded.”
Machinery clanks and a big engine whines as the down-bound cable-car begins its journey. “I understand that you need armor, working in a bar where Europe’s Chetwynd-Pitts come to play. But jadedness runs through you, Holly, like a second nervous system.”
An incredulous little laugh. “You don’t know me.”
“That’s the weird part: I know I don’t know you. So how come I feel like I do?”
She does an exasperated grunt. “There’s rules … You don’t talk to someone you’ve known five minutes like you’ve known them for years. Bloody stop it.”
I hold up my palms. “Holly, if I am an arrogant twat, I’m a harmless arrogant twat.” I think of Penhaligon. “Virtually harmless. Look, would you let me share your ski lift up to the next station? It’s, what, seven, eight minutes? If I turn into a date from hell, it’ll soon be over—no no no, I know, not a date, it’s a shared ski chair. Then we’ll arrive and, with one expert thrust of your ski poles, I’m history. Please. Please?”