The Deadly Space Between (28 page)

She handed me a wad of notes.

‘I’ll get a drink,’ I said and pushed off through the mass, leaving her pummelling the machine, which thudded and clattered in the half-dark. She was absorbed, cheerful and content.

I had a good view of the main floor of the casino from my perch in the bar. Each table was a little island, like an upturned hull in a green sea, with people in evening dress, clutching the rim. It looked like the aftermath of the
Titanic
. The croupiers all stood poised above the green. They seemed contemptuous of the punters, their white-gloved hands deft as those of a professional puppet master. Their set faces never changed. They worked to a concentrated rhythm and I calculated that they needed to keep the speed of the wheel steady at the roulette tables, so many spins per hour, so that the house went on winning, rapidly, inexorably. I began counting; the average was forty spins per hour. The point is to lose. How could Isobel see that so clearly and yet go on playing? I had lived a safe life. She had invested in our safe lives. And now, stripped of her job and our daily domesticity, my mother made what seemed, quite inexplicably, to be the easy choice: to live at risk.

I watched the wooden rods scraping the green baize tables.
Faîtes vos jeux. Rien ne va plus
. The muffled repetition of the script continued in the background, like a congregation repeating the prayers. I studied the faces of the staff, all dressed in black and white, starched, bizarre. The women wore simple sleeveless black dresses, black stockings and high heels. They watched impassive, indifferent to the concentrated passion on display before them. My mind was blurred with alcohol and unease.

Then I felt that someone was watching me.

I had already been given the once-over by staff and punters alike. My jeans, sweatshirt and trainers had already attracted disapproving stares from the bar waiters, which I had cheekily ignored. It was clear that the bouncer in the bar had wanted to send me straight back to the slot machines, where no one was wearing a tiara. But he had lost interest and was no longer glaring as if I was an unsightly blob in the decor. Someone else was watching me. There was someone out there, someone further away. I felt my face and shoulders growing colder. I looked across the floor.

He was standing next to one of the security staff by the entrance. Either he was disguised as one of the croupiers, or he really was one of them: evening dress, black bow tie, short clipped grey hair, his massive shoulders steady and inevitable. As I watched he slowly raised his cigarette to his mouth. I felt the familiar gesture in my muscles, all along the surface of my skin, I felt his cold breath sucked in, contained for a moment, exhaled – but I was too far away to see his eyes. My body became ice cold. I stood fixed, gazing intently; I could not be mistaken. His gigantic stature, the ease with which he took possession of all the space around him. This was the father I had kissed and attempted to kill. We were now standing at the crossroads with the plush green space of passion and chance between us. I considered the being who had cast me among mankind. He had sought me out, this man, the man my mother had loved, who had the will and the power to effect his own purposes of horror. He seemed to be a vampire of my own creating, my own spirit let loose from the grave and forced to destroy the person who was most dear to me. Roehm.

I leaped off the bar stool and launched myself into the mass of gamblers. I pushed and jostled the shifting stream of wealth and ageing jewelled elegance. The irritated punters huffed, glared and swore. One of the bouncers stepped forward. But I was heading straight towards him – and the door. If I had not rushed outside I would have been thrown out. I flung myself across the marble foyer, past the guarded cloakroom, the piano and the potted palms, out of the double doors and into the white night of snapping frost. Where are you? Come back, come back. On the bald, quiet boulevard the flowerbeds lay turned and dead, the barren trees opaque with frost, the blank lake, eerie, white and still. The cars passed before me with a slick, damp hiss. The mountains hung perpendicular against the black. The pavement and the steps were empty. He was gone.

I decided at once to say nothing to Isobel. When I crept back among the noisy clatter of the machines I saw her sitting jubilant among the dinosaurs, watching the jettons pumping into her lap, over her feet, onto the floor. The music chanted victory and the whirling pink lights bubbled and flashed. She had won, again and again and again.

‘Iso, let’s go back to the hotel.’

‘I suppose we’d better. It’ll take me three days to lose this lot.’

One of the house officials dimly helped her to load up her loot into buckets. There was no way she could have cheated the machines. She was just lucky.

‘How much have you won?’

We waited for the jettons to be counted up by the rapid, red-nailed fingers of the cashier.

‘Oh, about £11,000. All told.’

‘What?’

‘I was playing one hundred quid a shot. If you win when you’re playing for high stakes then you really can win a lot of money. I was gambling with Roehm’s cash. The money that was paid over to me by the gallery in Germany – for my ice pictures.’

‘It seems he can’t lose.’ I did not attempt to hide my anger.

‘What’s the matter with you?’

‘Nothing. I just hate this place. It’s like being in hell. The croupiers look like undertakers.’

‘OK. We’ll go,’ said Isobel.

_{*  *  *}

We awoke to the clear winter day. The Mont Blanc tunnel was still shut after the fire, years before, but the pass above Martigny was kept open into France. It was too cold to snow. We formed a plan of sorts. Françoise had given us the chalet in January and was not coming back down from Paris until Easter. We rang the neighbour who did the cleaning and told her that we were coming back. She didn’t pose any questions at all, she simply reassured us that she would turn the central heating on and make up the beds. We had secured a refuge. Iso decided that the best thing to do was to hide out in Chamonix for a week or so, then ring Luce again. She was calmer, in charge again. There was no sign of the police. Obscurely I was still expecting to be arrested. Isobel knew that this was impossible. I could not fathom what she knew. But she never suspected that I might have seen Roehm.

I felt more secure in the daylight world. It seemed oddly unsurprising that Roehm should have appeared in the casino. He moved in the night. I was not afraid of him, we were too intimately bound to one another for me to fear him, but I was afraid of what he might do. His motives and his movements were inscrutable, unknowable. I could not even guess at them. But it was as if I was taking up a role in a script that was already written. All I had to do, even if I could never grasp Roehm’s part in the script, was discover the point we had reached in the story. The son could kill the father, but the father could never raise a hand against his son. My mother was, obscurely, no longer part of the geometrical figure. She had been written out of the plot. I watched her with tenderness, but from a terrible distance. I had lost all my need to touch her. It was as if her body were a lush field I had already crossed, and now she lay, fallow and abandoned, miles and miles behind me.

Iso had not obviously changed. But she was thinner, fragile. I watched her blonde head jerking sideways as she changed lanes, yanking on the gears. She was running away from the man whom she had once loved, but no longer did, dragging me with her. I was unwillingly clutching her spindle wrist, looking back.

The Renault’s engine stammered and gasped in second gear as we inched up the crawler lanes, around the hairpin bends. We scrabbled on the recent grit, strewn across the frosty asphalt. When the road ceased to be dual carriageway we collected long trails of irate motorists behind us. I stopped looking at the serpent made of cars and gazed up at the mountains.

The Alps above loomed like a gigantic granite castle, turrets, ramparts, parapets and pinnacles. The sky at midday was solid and sharpened, ice-axe cold. Even the melting streams on the steep road were half-hearted. Where the earth lay in shadow the ice remained, shining, immobile. I gazed at the high rock faces and their uneven surfaces of cracks, ribs and ridges. As my eyes traversed the cliffs I saw two tiny red dots, impossibly attached to the rock face, overhanging a grim vertiginous drop. They moved, centimetre by centimetre, across and then up. I shaded my gaze and fixed them in my sights, like a sniper. For almost twenty minutes as we too crawled up the lower snow slopes of the mountains I could see the climbers, high above us, executing a series of terrifying shifts and steps in slow motion, like dancers suspended over nothingness. Then we turned into the last bend; a gigantic spur of golden granite swept clear of snow by the wind hid them from view.

I remembered what Roehm had told me about the mountains. The mountains are the most beautiful pure space I have ever known. The ice fields, snow, sheer rock, the avalanches and the storms, they bring you face to face with your own limits. You are stripped of all pettiness. The mountain reduces you to simplicity. That’s a very liberating thing. I brooded on the mountaineers. They were as obsessive and concentrated as gamblers. Chamonix was filled with them in summer. They were rarer birds in winter, but could still be spotted, roped together, plodding across the glaciers or clanking on the tiles in the post office. I had seen them close up in January. We had been sitting next to a gaggle of mountaineers in one of the cafes. They were drinking sugary tea, surrounded by heaps of material, layers of discarded clothes, nylon ropes, ice axes, crampons, drying out on the floor, and apparently talking in tongues. They discussed nothing but the weather, the climbs they had mastered, the rock faces they intended to assault. They smelt musty and wet. Their fingers were like steel claws. They were all men.

Luce had scooped the chocolate off her cappuccino and sneered at their bulky thighs and shoulders.

‘Don’t eavesdrop, Toby. And don’t stare. It only encourages them.’

We stalked out of the cafe. She turned to me and growled, ‘If you have any mountaineering ambitions, you can forget them at once. I will not have you scaling sheer cliffs with a lot of macho psychopaths.’

I had been bemused by the strength of her reactions, but now, upon reflection, gazing at the untouchable purity of the mountains, the desire to embrace them did not seem irrational or mad. We descended through the snow walls of the valley of Vallorcine towards Argentière. The chalets were hooded in snow with long ice spikes suspended from the roofs. Many of the houses were shut up. I looked out for the smoking chimneys and dirty gritted driveways. But the valleys were largely deserted. The French
vacances de ski
were over. There was a lull in the holiday market. It was low season.

All the other cars had snow tyres. Ours were almost bald. Iso drove perilously close to the centre of the road where there was no ice and the fresh sand gave her worn tyres some grip. This was safe enough when we could see a long way ahead, but terrifying on the bends. There was little traffic crossing into France. I rubbed a clear patch in our smoky windows and looked out down the long drops of fresh snow, spattered with outcrops of rock, and random clumps of dark pine. The world had been redrawn with elegance and lucidity, reduced to single elements, ice, rock, pine, snow. High up, I watched the buzzards circling. Their wingspan was huge, unnatural. They turned and turned, riding the thermals in the upper air.

The light sky was fading, becoming paler in the milky afternoon and only the highest peaks were still lit by late sun when we trundled round the last bends into Chamonix. We paused at the Spa. I stood guard over the car while Iso rushed round the shelves. The very normality of what we were doing, buying supper, along with everybody else, was enough to reassure me. The yellow buses were still running, the green cable cars, packed with skiers, were descending from La Flegère, the chalet shutters were open, and the house was warm. Everything seemed stable, familiar; we were on safe ground. We lit the fire, filled up the kettle, turned on the television and sat down in our remote cocoon, to smile at one another.

We spent the first day spread across the sofas, lazy as successful crooks who had pulled off a daring robbery and could now afford to chill out, counting the loot. The temperature rose and it began to snow. We felt comfortable and secure. I built up the fire and made us herb teas sweetened with honey. The snow curtained the windows and increased the silence. I found one of Luce’s discarded novels, which she had abandoned seven weeks before.
Behold, Thou Shalt Find Me
. . . The title continued inside after three suggestive dots . . .
Even on the Roof of the World
. This was an American production, produced by Christian Vision Books. The cover said it all: two young men, roped together with snaky coils, exhausted and gasping on a snow cliff. They were both reaching out towards a bright light just in front of them on a mountain peak. It was aimed at twelve- to sixteen-year-olds. The author was Bill Tyler III, Ph.D. I read the back.

Simon Peters has one overriding ambition, even as a boy, to climb Everest, the world’s highest mountain. Everything else comes second, his Mom and Dad, his pals at school, even Candy, the girl he takes out to the Drive-In Diner, Then he meets Jeremy, who runs the local mountaineering club, and the chance to scramble up something more than boulders seems within his grasp . . .