The One We Fell in Love With (35 page)

‘What’s that?’ Eliza asks.

‘The mountain Phoebe worked on during her gap year,’ I reply.

‘Oh,’ she says, leaving a long pause before adding sadly: ‘I wish I’d spoken to her more that year. I hardly know anything about what she got up to.’

‘Neither did I,’ I’m quick to correct her. ‘I learnt almost everything I know from pilfering her diary. I was having too much fun at university to think twice about you
two.’ I say this teasingly, but the comment has a lot of truth to it. I also avoided Phoebe after my mortifying faux pas with Angus. Yes, shame on me.

‘What have you done since you got there?’ she asks, so I fill her in, steering clear of my freak-out yesterday.

‘When are you seeing Remy?’ she eventually asks.

‘He’s back from his climbing trip tomorrow. I’ll give him a call in a couple of days if he hasn’t got in contact by then.’

I imagine he’s less enthusiastic to meet me than I am to meet him.

To my surprise, Remy lives only a five-minute walk from where I’m staying. He’s invited me to his place for a coffee and I’m nervous as I follow his
directions through the streets of Argentière two days after my conversation with Eliza. His apartment is located within a five-storey traditional chalet, not dissimilar to mine, and when he
answers the intercom, it’s in English.

‘Hello?’

He’s expecting me.

‘Hi, Remy, it’s Rose,’ I confirm, my stomach a tangle of anxiety.

‘I’m on the second floor.’ This time I hear his French accent clearly.

‘Okay, thanks,’ I reply as the door buzzes open.

The air inside the chalet is cool, and the sound of my booted footsteps reverberates around the walls and stone floor as I make my way up the stairs. Nearing the top of the second flight, I hear
a door click open, and by the time I reach the top, Remy is standing on the landing.

He has short, dark-brown hair and a neatly trimmed beard. His eyes are startlingly blue and they widen as I smile at him. A moment later, the blood drains from his face.

‘Hello,’ I say, feeling a pang of sympathy as the triplet effect takes hold.

He starts and comes to his senses, stepping back from the door and holding it open.

‘Come in, come in,’ he says.

He’s wearing dark blue jeans and a yellow T-shirt and his face, legs and forearms are tanned and lean. The edgy feeling in my stomach intensifies as I walk into his apartment.

‘Can I get you a coffee or something cold to drink?’ he asks. He sounds uneasy, so it’s not just me.

‘I’d love a coffee,’ I reply.

‘Take a seat,’ he says, heading off into the kitchen.

His apartment is even closer to the mountains than mine is, with the same sliding doors opening up onto a large balcony. I sink onto the pale-blue sofa, the cushions having given up the ghost
some time ago. The coffee table is wooden and solid and the rug under my feet is bordering on threadbare. The walls are painted ochre and there’s graphic art hanging on them.

‘I like your apartment,’ I say when Remy returns with our drinks.

‘The furniture belonged to my grandmother,’ he tells me with a smile, handing me a mug and sitting in a faded brown leather armchair. He crosses one leg over the other, resting his
ankle on the opposite knee. It’s a relaxed gesture, but I’m pretty sure he’s anything but.

‘Thank you for agreeing to meet me.’ I decide to get straight to the point.

‘It’s okay,’ he says, placing his chin on his upended palm. His eyes keep darting away from me, like it hurts to look at me for too long, but they keep finding their way back
to my face. A morbid fascination.

I didn’t hesitate to get in contact with Remy because I already felt like I knew him, but now I don’t know what to say.

‘Sorry,’ I blurt. ‘I know this is weird. It’s weird for me, too. I’ve read so much about you that I feel like we’re already friends, but this is harder than I
thought it would be.’

‘Phoebe told you about me?’ He looks confused. He probably thinks he misunderstood me.

‘No.’ I shake my head. ‘Not really. When she came back from France ten years ago, she went straight to university. I read about you in her journal.’

He looks taken aback. ‘I remember her writing in that.’ He swallows. ‘What did she say?’

‘She wrote about everything you did together. Well, not
everything
.’ I blush. ‘But she wrote about how you met, your first date, visiting the grotto, the trails you
hiked and the mountains you climbed.’

He looks shaken, but I continue.

‘I’m trying to understand. What happened on the day she died? What happened on the night before? I know that you met her in a bar in Chamonix, but had you pre-arranged it? Did you
know she was going to be there?’

‘No,’ he says firmly. ‘I was stunned to see her.’

‘She claimed that she wasn’t very surprised to see you.’

‘She wasn’t,’ he acknowledges, leaning forward in his seat. He rests his elbows on his knees, clasping his hands together.

‘She said it felt like fate,’ I add.

He stares ahead in a daze. ‘It did.’

‘You know she was getting married, right?’ I didn’t mean that to sound as sharp as it came out.

‘Of course. She told me,’ he frowns. ‘I wasn’t trying to win her back. I was just pleased to be able to catch up with her. We hadn’t seen each other in years, but
I’d thought about her often and I was glad to see her again. She seemed happy.’

‘She was,’ I say in a tiny voice.

He looks pained and a second later his blue eyes fill with tears.

I press on, but more gently. ‘She asked to go climbing with you, right?’

He nods, his eyes spilling over. He brushes his tears away, but his bottom lip is trembling and I have an urge to go over and hug him.

‘I should have said no.’ He looks down at his hands for a long moment before lifting his eyes to meet mine again. ‘I didn’t know she hadn’t climbed in years. Why
did she stop? She used to love it so much.’

To my alarm, I realise that he actually expects me to answer this question.

‘Er, I don’t know.’ I think for a moment. ‘Angus didn’t climb,’ I tell him, feeling like I’m betraying Gus by admitting it.

He nods thoughtfully, but the gesture transforms into a headshake.

‘What?’ I prompt.

He looks full of despair. ‘We used to work so well as a team, but that morning we lost a lot of time. She was holding the group up. There were three other experienced climbers, but she
didn’t have the speed or the ability to keep up with them, although she was trying. She was embarrassed, but she didn’t want to give up.’ He shakes his head again, fighting back
tears. ‘I didn’t even think to ask if she was fit enough because I just assumed that she would be.’

‘Could her death have been avoided?’ I feel shell-shocked. ‘Was it her fault?’

‘No, Rose, it was
my
fault!’ He raises his voice, anguished. ‘She shouldn’t have been up there in the first place! I’m a mountain guide. I should know
who’s fit to climb and who’s not. That’s my job!’

This time I do get up and go over to him because I can’t bear to sit there watching him suffer alone. I kneel at his feet and put my arms around his neck, and a moment later he breaks
down, his arms encircling my back. We hold each other as we sob – two strangers who are unfamiliar, yet so familiar to each other in the most unusual of ways. I
look
like his lost
love, I
feel
like his lost love, and it’s like
I
know
him
intimately, because I’ve been inside my sister’s head reading about him.

‘I should have said no to her,’ he cries, his voice stifled by my shoulder.

I tighten my grip on him. ‘No one ever said no to Phoebe.’

For some reason, my comment seems to calm us both down, and only a minute or so passes before we gather ourselves together. Remy excuses himself to go and get a box of tissues, and when he
returns, we both blow our noses loudly and smile at each other shyly as I return to my spot on the sofa.

But the worst is not yet over.

‘How did she die? I want to know everything,’ I remind him with quiet but strong determination. If ever there were a time when my curiosity could burn me, this would be it, but
there’s no suppressing that part of my personality now.

‘We were caught in an avalanche,’ he says.

I already know this, but I want to understand what it was like and I say as much. ‘Please tell me everything you can remember. Every detail.’

He swallows and stares ahead in a daze. ‘It was like being hit with wet cement. Heavy. And we could hear it coming. It sounded like snakes hissing.’

My eyes widen. ‘So she knew she was going to die?’

He shakes his head, glancing at me. ‘Yes, she was frightened. The look in her eyes haunts me at night. But Phoebe was such a positive person, such a fighter. She hadn’t changed
that
much. I don’t believe she thought she would die. Your father taught her avalanche survival techniques – I remember her repeating his advice on one of our climbs years ago,
things like try to swim through the snow and keep an air gap in front of your mouth...’

He’s more animated now, like his mind is on what he knows and what he’s comfortable with, rather than our difficult subject. I bring him back to the hellish reality of it soon
enough.

‘I keep having nightmares about her being stuck under the freezing snow, trying to get out,’ I say, as a new stream of tears begins to cascade down my cheeks.

He shakes his head. ‘It wasn’t like that, at least, not for Phoebe. For Phoebe it was quick. It was instant.’

This time it’s he who gets up and comes over to me. He sits beside me and closes his warm hands around mine, turning me to face him.

‘She was killed by a large block of ice, Rose.’ He swallows. ‘I saw it happen.’

‘Oh God.’

He increases the pressure on my hands. ‘It was quick. I promise you, she didn’t suffer.’

‘But she was scared?’ I ask.

‘Momentarily, yes. But icefall struck us before the snow. The size of the block that hit her... She could never have survived it. We were roped together and both of us were torn clean off
the mountain. We cartwheeled down with the snow. I’d sent the rest of our group on ahead, so they saw what happened and contacted mountain rescue. I was wearing an avalanche transceiver and
we weren’t buried very deep so they managed to locate us relatively quickly and dig us out. If they hadn’t, I would have died, too.’

‘But you say Phoebe never stood a chance?’ I ask in a choked voice.

‘No. She was still tethered to me, and I knew with the utmost certainty that she was already gone.’

I gulp back a sob and a moment later we both break down.

I was too anxious to eat lunch today, so when Remy asks if I’d like to go out for a bite to eat with him, I agree. We walk down the hill to Argentière’s
small town centre and into a bar.

‘What can I get you?’ Remy asks me.

‘A white wine, please.’

‘Go grab us a table. I’ll bring the drinks over. Here, take a menu, too.’

After we’ve placed our food order, we settle in for a chat, and I feel more relaxed now that we’ve got the hard stuff out of the way. Remy asks where I’ve been since leaving
the UK so I fill him in about Paris and I’m aware of him searching my face, studying every tiny detail as he tries to make sense of the fact that I look exactly like the girl he used to
love.

‘It’s uncanny, isn’t it?’ I say softly. ‘If Eliza were here, you’d be even more freaked out.’

He jolts, startled. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to stare. Yes, it is strange, and that top you’re wearing... Is it...?’

‘Hers,’ I confirm. It’s this damn grey hoodie again.

‘I thought it looked familiar. I think she was wearing it the night I saw her again. The night before...’

‘I’m so sorry,’ I say with concern. All of Phoebe’s possessions from her hen trip were returned to Angus – this top included. ‘I didn’t even think twice
when I put it on this morning. Do you want me to take it off?’

He waves me away. ‘No, it’s fine. Really, it’s fine,’ he tries to reassure me. ‘So how do you like Chamonix?’

‘It’s not quite how I expected,’ I reply a little downheartedly.

He looks intrigued, and slightly perturbed, perhaps because I’ve been talking quite enthusiastically up until now. ‘In what way?’

‘It’s beautiful,’ I’m quick to acknowledge. ‘I mean, it’s absolutely stunning. But I sort of expected to come here and walk in Phoebe’s shoes. I thought
it would make me feel closer to her, but so far she’s seemed all the more alien to me. She and I are
so
different. Practically the only thing we have in common is how we
look.’

He reaches across the table and presses my hand. ‘I’m sorry. I hate to think of you having a bad experience here. How much longer are you planning on staying?’

‘Another week or so.’

‘I have a few days off. Perhaps I could show you around a bit? Show you the Chamonix I know?’

‘I’m not going rock climbing,’ I state firmly, just to make it perfectly clear.

He shakes his head and looks away from me, very serious all of a sudden. ‘No,’ he says. ‘No, there’s no chance of that.’

The next morning, Remy is in a brighter mood when he turns up outside my chalet in a silver-grey Nissan X-Trail. There are two mountain bikes perched on the roof racks.

‘What are they for?’ I ask him warily.

‘Can you ride a bike?’ he asks in return, a twinkle in his bluer than blue eyes.

‘Yes,’ I reply hesitantly.

‘Then hop in,’ he says with a grin.

‘I haven’t ridden in a long time,’ I warn as he pulls out of the car park.

‘It’s not something you forget,’ he teases. ‘And I promise you it’s not a difficult ride.’

We’re going to Le Tour, which Remy tells me is a ski area in the winter and a great place for hikes in the summer. It’s only around a five-minute drive to the upper end of the
valley. When we arrive, Remy unloads the bikes from the roof, while I fumble around with the helmet he’s brought for me.

‘Here, let me help you,’ he says, coming over to adjust the chinstrap. I’m struggling.