Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well. Well, he would not have to fail at trying to write them either. Maybe you could never write them, and that was why you put them off and delayed the starting. Well, he would never know, now.
‘I wish we’d never come,’ the woman said. She was looking at him holding the glass and biting her lip. ‘You never would have gotten anything like this in Paris. You always said you loved Paris. We could have stayed in Paris or gone anywhere. I’d have gone anywhere. I said I’d go anywhere you wanted. If you wanted to shoot we could have gone shooting in Hungary and been comfortable.’
‘Your bloody money,’ he said.
‘That’s not fair,’ she said. ‘It was always yours as much as mine. I left everything and I went wherever you wanted to go and I’ve done what you wanted to do. But I wish we’d never come here.’
‘You said you loved it.’
‘I did when you were all right. But now I hate it. I don’t see why that had to happen to your leg. What have we done to have that happen to us?’
‘I suppose what I did was to forget to put iodine on it when I first scratched it. Then I didn’t pay any attention to it because I never infect. Then, later, when it got bad, it was probably using that weak carbolic solution when the other antiseptics ran out that paralysed the minute blood vessels and started the gangrene.’ He looked at her, ‘What else?’
‘I don’t mean that.’
‘If we would have hired a good mechanic instead of a half-baked kikuyu driver, he would have checked the oil and never burned out that bearing in the truck.’
‘I don’t mean that.’
‘If you hadn’t left your own people, your goddamned Old Westbury, Saratoga, Palm Beach people to take me on—’
‘Why, I loved you. That’s not fair. I love you now. I’ll always love you. Don’t you love me?’
‘No,’ said the man. ‘I don’t think so. I never have.’
‘Harry, what are you saying? You’re out of your head.’
‘No. I haven’t any head to go out of.’
‘Don’t drink that,’ she said. ‘Darling, please don’t drink that. We have to do everything we can.’
‘You do it,’ he said. ‘I’m tired.’
Now in his mind he saw a railway station at Karagatch and he was standing with his pack and that was the headlight of the Simplon-Orient cutting the dark now and he was leaving Thrace then after the retreat. That was one of the things he had saved to write, with, in the morning at breakfast, looking out the window and seeing snow on the mountains in Bulgaria and Nansen’s Secretary asking the old man if it were snow and the old man looking at it and saying, No, that’s not snow. It’s too early for snow. And the Secretary repeating to the other girls, No, you see. It’s not snow and them all saying, It’s not snow, we were mistaken. But it was the snow all right and he sent them on into it when he evolved exchange of populations. And it was snow they tramped along in until they died that winter.
It was snow too that fell all Christmas week that year up in the Gauertal, that year they lived in the woodcutter’s house with the big square porcelain stove that filled half the room, and they slept on mattresses filled with beech leaves, the time the deserter came with his feet bloody in the snow. He said the police were right behind him and they gave him woollen socks and held the gendarmes talking until the tracks had drifted over.
In Schrunz, on Christmas day, the snow was so bright it hurt your eyes when you looked out from the weinstube and saw everyone coming home from church. That was where they walked up the sleigh-smoothed urine-yellowed road along the river with the steep pine hills, skis heavy on the shoulder, and where they ran that great run down the glacier above the Madlener-Haus, the snow as smooth to see as cake frosting and as light as powder and he remembered the noiseless rush the speed made as you dropped down like a bird.
They were snow-bound a week in the Madlener-Haus that time in the blizzard playing cards in the smoke by the lantern light and the stakes were higher all the time as Herr Lent lost more. Finally he lost it all. Everything, the skischule money and all the season’s profit and then his capital. He could see him with his long nose, picking up the cards and then opening, ‘Sans Voir’. There was always gambling then. When there was no snow you gambled and when there was too much you gambled. He thought of all the time in his life he had spent gambling.
But he had never written a line of that, nor of that cold, bright Christmas day with the mountains showing across the plain that Johnson had flown across the lines to bomb the Austrian officers’ leave train, machine-gunning them as they scattered and ran. He remembered Johnson afterwards coming into the mess and starting to tell about it. And how quiet it got and then somebody saying: ‘You bloody murderous bastard!’
Those were the same Austrians they killed then that he skied with later. No, not the same. Hans, that he skied with all that year, had been in the Kaiser-Jägers and when they went hunting hares together up the little valley above the sawmill they had talked of the fighting on Pasubio and of the attack on Pertica and Asalone and he had never written a word of that. Nor of Monte Corno, nor the Siete Commum, nor of Arsiedo.
How many winters had he lived in the Voralberg and the Arlberg? It was four and then he remembered the man who had the fox to sell when they had walked into Bludenz, that time to buy presents, and the cherry-pip taste of good kirsch, the fast-slipping rush of running powder-snow on crust, singing ‘Hi! Ho! said Rolly!’ as you ran down the last stretch to the steep drop, taking it straight, then running the orchard in three turns and out across the ditch and on to the icy road behind the inn. Knocking your bindings loose, kicking the skis free and leaning them up against the wooden wall of the inn, the lamplight coming from the window, where inside, in the smoky, new-wine smelling warmth, they were playing the accordion.
‘Where did we stay in Paris?’ he asked the woman who was sitting by him in a canvas chair, now, in Africa.
‘At the Crillon. You know that.’
‘Why do I know that?’
‘That’s where we always stayed.’
‘No. Not always.’
‘There and at the Pavillion Henri-Quatre in St. Germain. You said you loved it there.’
‘Love is a dunghill,’ said Harry. ‘And I’m the cock that gets on it to crow.’
‘If you have to go away,’ she said, ‘is it absolutely necessary to kill off everything you leave behind? I mean do you have to take away everything? Do you have to kill your horse, and your wife and burn your saddle and your armour?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Your damned money was my armour. My Swift and my Armour.’
‘Don’t.’
‘All right. I’ll stop that. I don’t want to hurt you.’
‘It’s a little bit late now.’
‘All right then. I’ll go on hurting you. It’s more amusing. The only thing I ever really liked to do with you I can’t do now.’
‘No, that’s not true. You liked to do many things and everything you wanted to do I did.’
‘Oh, for Christ sake stop bragging, will you?’
He looked at her and saw her crying.
‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Do you think that it is fun to do this? I don’t know why I’m doing it. It’s trying to kill to keep yourself alive, I imagine. I was all right when we started talking. I didn’t mean to start this, and now I’m crazy as a coot and being as cruel to you as I can be. Don’t pay any attention, darling, to what I say. I love you, really. You know I love you. I’ve never loved anyone else the way I love you.’
He slipped into the familiar lie he made his bread and butter by.
‘You’re sweet to me.’
‘You bitch,’ he said. ‘You rich bitch. That’s poetry. I’m full of poetry now. Rot and poetry. Rotten poetry.’
‘Stop it. Harry, why do you have to turn into a devil now?’
‘I don’t like to leave anything,’ the man said. ‘I don’t like to leave things behind.’
It was evening now and he had been asleep. The sun was gone behind the hill and there was a shadow all across the plain and the small animals were feeding close to camp; quick dropping heads and switching tails, he watched them keeping well out away from the bush now. The birds no longer waited on the ground. They were all perched heavily in a tree. There were many more of them. His personal boy was sitting by the bed.
‘Memsahib’s gone to shoot,’ the boy
