The Bone Clocks (22 page)

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 accent 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.

T
HE BAYING OF THE
P
ARISIAN 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.”

T
WO P.M.
T
HE
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.

G
ONE 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.”

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?”

T
HE SKI LIFT
guy clicks our rail into place, and I resist a joke about being swept off my feet as Holly and I are swept off our feet. December 30 has lost its earlier clarity and the summit of the Palanche de la Cretta is hidden in cloud. I follow the ski lift cable from pylon to pylon up the mountainside. The ravine opens up below us and, as I’m mugged by vertigo and grip the bar, my testicles run and hide next to my liver. Forcing myself to look down at the distant ground,
I wonder about Penhaligon’s final seconds. Regret? Relief? Blank terror? Or did his head suddenly fill with “Babooshka” by Kate Bush? Two crows fly beneath our feet. They mate for life, my cousin Jason once told me. I ask Holly, “Do you ever have flying dreams?”

Holly looks dead ahead. Her goggles hide her eyes. “No.”

We’ve cleared the ravine again and pass sedately over a wide swath of the piste we’ll be skiing down later. Skiers curve, speed, and amble downhill to Chemeville station.

“Conditions look better after last night’s snow,” I say.

“Yeah. This mist’s getting thicker by the minute, though.”

That is true; the mountain peak is blurry and gray now. “Do you work at Sainte-Agnès every winter?”

“What is this? A job interview?”

“No, but my telepathy’s a bit rusty.”

Holly explains: “I used to work at Méribel over in the French Alps for a guy who knew Günter from his tennis days. When Günter needed a discreet employee, I got offered a transfer, a pay hike, and a ski pass.”

“Why ever would Günter need a discreet employee?”

“Not a clue—and, no, I don’t touch drugs. The world’s unstable enough without scrambling your brain for kicks.”

I think of Madam Constantin. “You’re not wrong.”

Empty ski chairs migrate from the mist ahead. Behind us, Chemeville is fading from view, and nobody’s following us up. “Wouldn’t it be freaky,” I think aloud, “if we saw the dead in the chairs opposite?”

Holly gives me a weird look. “Not dead as in undead, with bits dropping off,” I hear myself trying to explain. “Dead as in your own dead. People you knew, who mattered to you. Dogs, even.” Or Cornishmen.

The steel-tube-and-plastic chair squeaks. Holly’s chosen to ignore my frankly bizarre question, and to my surprise asks this: “Are you from one of those army-officer families?”

“God, no. My dad’s an accountant and Mum works at Richmond Theatre. Why do you ask?”

“ ’Cause you’re reading a book called
The Art of War
.”

“Oh, that. I’m reading Sun Tzu because it’s three thousand years old, and every CIA agent since Vietnam has studied it. Do you read?”

“My sister’s the big reader, really, and sends me books.”

“How often do you go back to England?”

“Not so often.” She fiddles with a Velcro glove strap. “I’m not one of those people who’ll spill their guts in the first ten minutes. Okay?”