Dead Men Don't Ski Read online

  "The mountain air is good for me," said Mrs. Buckfast, flatly. "I find ways of passing the time. It really wouldn't be fair to let poor Arthur do this trip all by himself."

  "I've often told you—" he began, but she cut him short with a "Pass the sugar please, Arthur,"that brooked no further discussion. There was a short silence, and then the Colonel tried again.

  "Been to Santa Chiara before?" he asked.

  "No."

  "Interested to know what attracted you, if you're not a keen skier. Not everybody's cup of tea—hotel stuck up all by itself at the top of a chair-lift. Can't get down to the village at all after dark, you know."

  "They told us the skiing was excellent," said Emmy, " and we wanted peace and quiet more than anything."

  "Then you certainly picked the right spot," said Mrs. Buckfast, sourly. "I dare say," she went on, with ill-concealed curiosity, "that your husband has been working very hard. Perhaps his job is a very exhausting one."

  "No more so than any other business man's," said Henry. "It's just a question of temperament, I suppose. We always like quiet holidays, off the beaten track."

  "So you're a business man are you? How very interesting. In the City?"

  "Not exactly," said Henry. "I work in Westminster."

  Mrs. Buckfast, foiled in her attempt to extract more information about Henry's profession, went on. "Quite a distinguished party going to Santa Chiara this year. Caroline Whittaker, who had that huge ball at Claridges last year, and the Honourable Jimmy Passendell—" her voice sank to a whisper— "Lord Raven's son you know. A bit wild, I understand, but charming ... so charming..."

  "The other lad seems pleasant, too," said Henry. "Roger Staines. I seem to know his face."

  "I know nothing about him," said Mrs. Buckfast, with great firmness. "Nothing" she added, "whatsoever."

  When Henry and Emmy got back to E6, the triple tiers of bunks had been set up, but the party showed no signs of going to bed. Jimmy had opened another bottle of brandy, and was leading the company in a variety of more or less bawdy songs. Henry and Emmy accepted a nightcap gratefully, and then suggested that they should retire to bed on the two top bunks, out of everyone's way. "Don't mind us old drears," said Emmy. "Sing as loud as you like. We enjoy it."

  "Jolly decent of you," said Jimmy. "Have another drink before you embark on the perilous ascent."He said the last two words twice to make sure of getting them right. Caro was smiling now, sitting in the corner and holding hands with Roger.

  In fact, the singing only went on for half an hour or so, before the whole party decided to get some rest. Caro took one of the two middle bunks, Roger and Jimmy the two lowest. Soon all was dark and quiet, except for the tiny blue bulb that burned in the ceiling, the soft breathing of the sleepers, and the thrumming wheels on the ribbon-stretch of rails. In his tiny compartment at the rear of the last coach, Edward cursed Mrs. Buckfast steadily, and with satisfaction, as he compiled his passenger list: between him and the engine driver, the sinuous length of train was all asleep.

  At breakfast time next morning they were miraculously among mountains. True, the railway itself ran through wide, flat green valleys, like the beds of dried-up lakes* but all around the mountains reared proudly, fresh green giving way to grey rock, to evergreen, and finally, high above, to glistening white snow. All along the train, voices and spirits rose. The sun shone, and the snow, suddenly real, suddenly remembered, was a lure, a liberator, a potent magic. Soon, soon....

  The Austrian border was left behind at half-past nine: by eleven the train was winding along the broad green valley of the River Inn, ringed by lofty mountains: at eleven-twenty precisely, the engine drew to a hissing, panting halt, and a guttural voice outside on the platform was shouting "Innsbruck! Innsbruck! "into the crisp, sunny air.

  CHAPTER TWO

  At Innsbruck, the compact phalanx of skiers who had travelled en masse from Victoria dispersed abruptly: hotel buses or small, energetic mountain trains bore them off to their respective Austrian resorts. Only the Santa Chiara party remained, suddenly rather desolate, suddenly rather out of place in their aggressive sweaters. Edward, who had come in for some uncomplimentary remarks from E6 on the train, now seemed like their last—and faithless—friend, as he hurriedly compiled his reports, and headed for his overnight lodgings in Innsbruck.

  Inevitably the cameraderie of isolation manifested itself. Jimmy fetched a cup of coffee for Mrs. Buckfast, the Colonel carried Emmy's overnight case up the subway for her, Roger (with a superior command of German) collected the registered baggage, and Emmy and Caro ventured together in search of the Ladies'. Henry, feeling rather out of things, contented himself with buying enough English magazines at the bookstall to keep the whole party happy until teatime, when they were due at their destination. Eventually all seven travellers, complete with luggage, were assembled on the correct platform to catch the Munich-Rome express, which was to carry them on the penultimate stage of their journey.

  Evidently not many people wanted to exchange the exhilarating sunshine of Innsbruck for the uncertain joys of Rome in January, for nobody else was waiting for the train except an elderly couple who, Henry guessed, had been marketing in Innsbruck and were probably going no farther than Brenner, the frontier town. A few minutes before the train was due, however, a flurry of porters and expensive luggage appeared from the subway, followed by a tall and very thin man, dressed in a sort of Norfolk jacket made of bright green tweed, with a fur collar, and dark grey trousers of extreme narrowness. His face was long, and creased with deep lines of intolerance, and his lean, vulpine features were crowned incongruously by a green Tyrolean hat. With him was a girl of striking beauty: she had the face of a Florentine Madonna, with deep golden hair swept smoothly back from a broad brow and coiled on the nape of her neck. She wore pale grey ski trousers cut by a master, and a little grey jacket with a collar of snow leopard that framed her face like a cloud. Her make-up—in the Italian manner-emphasised her magnificent dark eyes, and her honey-coloured skin, while her full, lovely mouth was brushed lightly with a wild-rose pink. "Very, very expensive,'* Emmy whispered to Henry, as the procession of porters swept past.

  Mrs. Buckfast gazed after the newcomers with uninhibited curiosity: Caro looked sheepish, suddenly conscious of her crumpled, slept-in trousers: the men, involuntarily, turned to admire, and were rewarded by a scowl from under the Tyrolean hat.

  When the train pulled in, dead on time, and they had secured an empty carriage for the party without difficulty, Henry and Emmy went to the window to take a last look at Innsbruck. To their surprise, Tyrolean Hat was on the platform alone, obviously saying good-bye to the Madonna, who stood, cool and beautiful, at the window of a first-class compartment. There were kisses, protestations of affection, fussings over baggage—all of which the girl received with what looked more like dutiful resignation than enthusiasm. At one point, when the man was engaged in some sort of altercation with the porter, Henry caught her looking at him with an expression of mingled contempt and dislike which was chilling in its intensity. At last the whistle blew, and the train started. The last view of Innsbruck was of a Tyrolean hat waving, somehow pathetically, on the end of a long, thin arm.

  At Brenner, after a short and amicable interlude with the Italian Customs, the whole party filed down the corridor to the dining-car. The young people secured a table for four, and the Buckfasts a table for two: Henry and Emmy, arriving last, were ushered by a smiling waiter to the last table in the car—a four-seater at present occupied by one person only, the Madonna from Innsbruck. She was ordering her meal in fluent Italian, completely relaxed, spontaneous and excited—a very different person from the cool beauty of Innsbruck station. "Like a little girl out of school," Henry thought.

  Throughout a delectable meal that started with fettucini and meandered through fritto misto con fagiolini to a creamy bel paese cheese, there was more concentration on food than on conversation. With the coffee, however, a pleasantly replete and relaxed moo
d took over; the beauty made the first move by inquiring in excellent English whether Henry and Emmy were from London, and were they holidaying in Italy? They said they were.

  "So am I," she said, with a ravishing smile of pure happiness. "I am Italian, you see. But my husband is Austrian, and there we must live, in Innsbruck."

  "I envy you," said Henry. "It must be a beautiful city."

  "Yes," said the girl, shortly. Then, smiling again— "But where do you go? Rome? Venezia? Firenze?"

  "As a matter of fact, we're going to ski," said Emmy.

  "Oh! I,too."

  "Perhaps we might even be headed for the same place," Henry suggested.

  "I am sure we are not," said the beauty. "You go to Cortina, of course. All English and Americans go to Cortina."

  "No," said Henry. "We're going to a little place called Santa Chiara. The Albergo Bella Vista."

  To his surprise, the girl's smile faded abruptly, and for an instant a look of sheer panic crossed her face.

  "Santa Chiara," she said, almost in a whisper. "I ... I go there, too."

  "Well, how nice," said Emmy, quickly. "We must introduce ourselves. We are Henry and Emmy Tibbett."

  "And I..."There was an unmistakable hesitation. Then the girl seemed to shake herself, like a puppy coming out of the sea, and her smile flashed again. "I am the^Baroness von Wurtberg. But you must call me Maria-Pia. When I am in Italy, I forget that I have become an Austrian."

  There was a tiny pause.

  "My children are already at the Bella Vista, with the fraulein,"the Baroness went on. "Hansi is eight, and Lotte six. You will meet them."

  "I'll look forward to that," said Emmy, suppressing her instinct to remark that the Baroness looked ridiculously young to have an eight-year-old son. "What a pity," she added, daringly, "that your husband can't be with you, too."

  Once again the panic flickered in the huge, brown eyes. "He is very busy, he cannot get away. He lets me—I mean, he likes me to return to my country each year, but he does not love Italy."

  "I bet he doesn't," thought Henry, remembering the harsh features under the Tyrolean hat. He felt very sorry tor the Baroness and did not know how to convey his sympathy without seeming impertinent: so he quickly paid his bill and, with friendly assurances that they would meet again soon, ushered Emmy down the dining-car. As they went, Henry felt, curiously, those magnificent eyes following him. At the door he turned, to meet the Baroness's quiet, quizzical gaze. She looked him full in the eyes, and raised her head very slightly, as if in defiance. Henry, somewhat embarrassed, smiled and stepped into the swaying corridor.

  At Chiusa, they made their last change. The great express rushed on southwards towards Verona, leaving the nine travellers standing in the sunshine on the little country station. All round them, the Dolomites broke the skyline with their warm, pink summits—flat rocks, pinnacled rocks, shapes whittled by wind and snow into primeval patterns of frightening strength and durability ; the strength of the very old, the very tough, that has endured and will endure, for time beyond thinking.

  From the majesty of the mountains, a shrill tooting brought the party back to reality. There, on the opposite line, stood the most endearing train in the world. The engine—tiny, of 1870*8 vintage, with a tall, slender chimney and gleaming brasswork—headed just two coaches made of pale, fretted woodwork, with elaborate iron-railed observation platforms at each end. The Gothic windows of one carriage were chintz-curtained, marking them as First Class. The seats throughout were of slatted wood, with overhead racks for skis.

  The young English exclaimed with delight, and made a concerted scramble for the train with their cases, closely followed by Henry and Emmy. Mrs. Buckfast remarked that it was high time they put new coaches on this line—the wooden seats were a disgrace. The Baroness, with every porter in the place at her heels, walked slowly across the flat railway track with an expression of pure love on her face. The luggage was loaded, the train shrilled its whistle, and the last lap of the journey began.

  As the crow flies, it is about twenty miles from Chiusa to Santa Chiara: as the railway line winds, it is over thirty —thirty miles of tortuous, twisting track, of hairpin bends on the edge of precipices, of Stygian, smoky tunnels, of one-in-five gradients, and of some of the most breathtaking views in the world. Almost at once, they crossed the snowline, among pine trees. Soon Chiusa was just a huddle of pink and ochre houses far below. Valleys opened out gloriously, houses lost their Italianate look and became steadily more and more Alpine, with wooden balconies and eyebrows of snow on their steep, overhanging eaves. Up and up the engine puffed and snorted, nearer and nearer to the snowfields and the pink peaks. At village halts, white-aproned peasant women clambered on and off the train with baskets of eggs and precious green vegetables. Then they saw the first of the skiers. Round a steep bend, a glistening nursery slope opened up alongside the railway line, peopled with tiny, speeding figures. Excitement rose, like yeast. Up and up the train climbed, through three small resort villages, until at last a pink, onion-domed church came into view, clustered about with little houses.

  "Santa Chiara," said the Baroness.

  They all craned to look. The village was set at the head of a long valley—a valley of which the floor itself was over 5,000 feet above sea-level. All round, the mountains stood in a semi-circle, at once protective and menacing. The village seemed very small and very brave, up there in the white heights.

  There was not, strictly speaking, a station. The train, showing signs of exhaustion, clanked and rumbled to a halt in the middle of a snowfield near the church: here, by a small green-painted shed, several hotel porters waited with their big luggage sledges, while skiers returning to the village for tea zoomed in an uninhibited manner across the railway line.

  As the Baroness got out of the train, there was a sudden flurry as two diminutive skiers hurtled down the slope, crossed the railway tracks, and swung round in perfect parallel cristiania turns to stop dead in a spray-shower of snow beside the train.

  "Mamma! Mamma!" they yelled, and the Baroness dropped her white pigskin dressing-case in the snow and rushed to embrace them. The reunion was noisy, sentimental and rather moving: it was not for several moments that Henry noticed a slender, dark girl in black who had skied quietly but extremely competently down to the train behind the children, and now stood a few paces away, silently watching the out-pourings of affection. She was very pale, in sharp contrast to the bronzed faces all round her, and she wore no make-up. She might have been beautiful, Henry thought, had she taken even the most elementary steps to make herself so: as it was, she seemed to concentrate on self-effacement, on anonymity.

  The first greetings over, the Baroness—one arm round each of her children,—beamed at the dark girl and spoke to her in German. Then she said to Emmy, "I go now with Gerda and the children for tea. The porter will take you up to the Bella Vista, so I shall see you at dinner."

  She gave instructions in rapid Italian to a burly porter who had "Bella Vista "embroidered in gold on his black cap, and then, as the children skied slowly down the hill to the village street, she ran after them, laughing and teasing, trying to keep up with them. The dark-haired Gerda let them get near the bottom of the slope, then launched herself forward with a lovely, fluid movement, and took the gentle hillside in a series of superbly-executed turns, gathering speed all the way, so that she was waiting for the others at the bottom, as still and silent as before.

  As the porter loaded the baggage on to his sledge, Colonel Buckfast spoke for the first time that Henry could remember since Innsbruck.

  "Look," he said, pointing upwards.

  They all looked. Behind the railway line, the mountains reared in white splendour: by now, the sun had left the village, but lingered on the rosy peaks and on the high snow-fields. Far up the mountain, where the trees thinned out, just on the dividing line between sunshine and shadow, was a single, isolated building, as dwarfed by its surroundings as a fly drowning in a churn of milk.
/>
  "The Bella Vista," said the Colonel, almost reverently.

  There was a silence.

  "I didn't realise it was so far up," said Emmy at last, in a small voice. "How do we get there?"

  "We get there," said Mrs. Buckfast, "in a diabolical contraption known as a chair-lift. Every year I say I'll never do it again, and every year Arthur talks me into it. The very thought of it makes me feel sick. This way."

  The Monte Caccia chair-lift, as all the brochures emphasise, is one of the longest in Europe. The ascent takes twenty-five minutes, during which time the chairs, on their stout overhead cable, travel smoothly and safely upwards, sometimes over steep slopes between pine trees, a mere twenty feet from the ground, more frequently over gorges and ravines which twist and tumble several hundred feet below. About once a minute, the strong metal arm which connects the chair to the cable clatters and bumps as it passes between the platforms of a massive steel pylon, set on four great concrete bases and equipped with a fire-broom and a sturdy snowshovel in case of emergencies. For parts of the trip, the lift travels above the pistes, or ski runs, giving the passengers a bird's-eye view of the expertise or otherwise of the skiers below. It is one of the coldest forms of travelling known to man.

  Henry was amused to see the varying reactions of the party (including himself) when faced with this ascent— especially when the first-timers grasped the fact that the chairs did not stop at any point, but continued up and down on an endless belt, so that one had to " hop " a moving chair as it passed.

  The Colonel slid expertly into his chair, and waved his hand from sheer exhilaration as he soared skywards: Mrs, Buckfast took her seat competently, but with resignation, having grudgingly accepted the bright red blanket proffered by the attendant. Caro, glancing at the seemingly endless cables stretching up the mountainside, turned rather pale and remarked that she hadn't imagined it would be quite like this, and that heights made her dizzy.