The Deadly Space Between Page 13

  Iso glared at Luce triumphantly. Roehm’s perfect manners had entirely disconcerted my aunt. So did his hospitable silence and his extraordinary size. As I watched her observing him I saw how he had begun to fascinate her, as surely as if he was moving slowly from side to side, his deadly hood extended, presenting a steady unreadable gaze, his concentration fixed, his eyes pale and gleaming.

  We did not notice the passing of midnight. We did not hear the bells. The moment of Christmas was upon us, but we were absorbed in ourselves, the little drama of our domestic lives, and the careful rearrangement of our identities around the still figure of Roehm.

  I noticed how little he moved and how intently he listened. The cabinet in Vienna again appeared before me. And I wondered if the doctor sat like this, relaxed, concentrated, unmoving, listening as his hapless victims disgorged their past in broken sentences. For that was exactly what we were doing. Roehm provided the stage, the lights, the orchestra and we began to act out our lives before him. Every sentence that began ‘Remember when . . .’ necessitated, out of sheer politeness, an explanation of the circumstances and the time in which the event occurred. Characters in the action had to be described, the events anchored in landscape. We produced the back story, then the main narrative. We presented our histories to Roehm.

  He gave us his full attention, peaceful and encouraging. His attitude towards us, consoling and remote, resembled the priest whose forgiveness, however desired, is merely that of the mediator. We became convinced that we were heard by one greater than the messenger. And in his presence we ceased to be trivial and self-absorbed. Our stories became wittier, more telling, our observations more pertinent and just. We became better people than we were.

  As the night drew on we stood up, saving the presents for the coming day. We were warm, drunk, satiated and content. We slept the sleep of the righteous and for once, on that rare Christmas morning, we were at peace with one another and ourselves.

  I overheard Luce lecturing Iso in the kitchen. I smelt her cigarettes.

  ‘You mean he went home last night? I don’t believe it. And shall we see him today?’

  ‘Well, I still think he’s too old for you. But I’m fair-minded enough to admit that he’s charming.’

  ‘Just don’t get in too deep . . .’

  ‘I must say he’s been very generous . . .’

  ‘He must be very fond of you both . . .’

  ‘I have to be frank, Isobel, there aren’t many men prepared to take on another man’s half-grown child.’

  ‘And there is one thing which I did like. He was very civil to Liberty. I’m always sensitive to that. She’s so shy that people often overlook her.’

  ‘Listen, my girl, are you absolutely certain that he’s not married? He must have been married at some time in his life. He wears a wedding ring. Rather a lot of rings in fact. At first I thought there were rather too many for a gentleman, but I’m not a snob and academics are often eccentric. Nevertheless, no unmarried man knows his way around a kitchen quite so effortlessly.’

  ‘Well, you damn well should find out. Ask him directly.’

  ‘And what did you give him for Christmas? Oh, one of the larger ice paintings? Shouldn’t you have kept that for the next big exhibition?’

  ‘Good morning, Toby darling. And happy Christmas. I’m afraid your charming scientist has left us to open all those presents quite unaided.’

  The Christmas tree touched the ceiling, soaring well past the Victorian moulding. We had wedged it in a heavy box with logs, but it remained a little unstable and the needles fell in showers, over the presents, the television, the armchairs, the carpet and the fire extinguisher. It smelt of resin and outdoors. Iso doted on the stolen tree, which was the first one we had ever had. The Swiss decorations spun and shone in the firelight. We sat down in our pyjamas and dressing gowns greedily inspecting the hoard beneath the tree.

  We opened Roehm’s presents one after another. I think I was the only person who noticed that these gifts were ambiguous, uncanny, even disturbing. They were too perceptive, too well chosen. Iso’s raft of expensive oils and brushes in a handsome wooden box appeared conventional enough, but I could read her too well not to register the quality of her joy. They were a brand she coveted but could seldom afford. Each single tube cost over £18. But here, spread out in abundance, were the substances she desired: gold, lapis lazuli, indigo, cobalt blue, vermilion. Liberty discovered a biography by a famous American judge on the Supreme Court, which she had longed to read and been intending to buy when the UK edition came out in the following year. But this was the American hard-cover edition, autographed by the judge herself. She let out a snort of pleasure when she saw the scrawl beneath the printed name.

  ‘My God, guys, how did he know?’

  I searched my mind for any conversation I might have had with Roehm, which could have revealed their preferences. I looked hard at Iso, suspecting her of smug complicity, but she too was turning the pages in astonishment.

  ‘And it’s just what you wanted? Isn’t that weird?’

  He had given Luce a case of Rotring draughtsman’s pens. Exactly what she used. His presents to the women were expensive, but not exaggeratedly so. There was nothing there that was ingratiating, nothing which they could not graciously accept.

  I opened the parcel, which had come for me.

  It was an iBook computer in transparent white and pale blue, its innards visible like a dissected animal. This was the most expensive present. It must have cost nearly £2,000. We sat in a circle of exclamation and satisfaction. It was as if Roehm had at last decided to make a formal statement to us all and had absented himself so that we could decode his gesture.

  I took myself off upstairs and lit up the computer. The thing let out a pompous chord as it turned from black to pale blue like the coming dawn. Then the creature welcomed me into its system. The black arrow appeared in the top left-hand corner, a deep rush of purple engulfed the screen. The icons appeared one after another on the right-hand side, click, click, click. Outlook Express, Netscape Communicator, Navigator 5, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Sherlock 2. I double-clicked on the hard disc. I had begun to gloat over my new toy.

  Then my hand froze over the mouse as my own files began to appear one after the other. My A-level essays, my secret commonplace copy file, my translations of Camus and Pascal, my first attempts at writing, my little pack of card games. Roehm had downloaded everything from my old computer onto the new one. I rushed from file to file checking that my information was safe and uncorrupted.

  I stood up, frightened and enraged. When had he done this? When had he been in my room? How long had it taken him? Did Iso help him do this? What had he read? I hurtled back into my Miscellaneous Writing file to see if I had committed any of my feelings about him, or anyone else, to the screen. But there was nothing there that could have given me away. Not yet.

  The most clandestine thoughts I had were not about Roehm, but about my mother.

  I had my own locked files on the old computer that he would not have been able to access. And now I searched for these, which were hidden behind my password. Double click. But the files opened at once like Ali Baba’s secret cave and the usual box demanding my Logon and my secret password never graced the screen. He had followed me to my most secret places. He had casually opened all the doors, then left them ajar so that I should know that he had been there. I sat staring at my own words, which now seemed ragged, infantile and naked in their lost privacy. I felt manhandled by an intruder. It was as if he had assaulted me. All my pleasure in his gift had gone. I sat there before the gleaming screen and battled with my rising tears.

  The kitchen reeked of cinnamon and cloves, baking and red wine, the thin glass ball of Christmas. Only Liberty noticed that something was wrong.

  ‘What’s up, Toby?’

  ‘Nothing, nothing.’

  I managed a wooden smile.

  5

  JUSTICE

  I stood inside the ic
e and stared into its strange flesh. I had never examined the ice so closely before. It was not static and fixed in flat white planes as I had imagined, but filled with streaks of moving blue, tiny pockets of grit and bubbles of clear air. It was varied and dynamic, like a changing sky. I wanted to witness its stealthy shifting and stood, getting colder and colder, in the murky passage. There was gravel and sacking on the ice floor to prevent visitors from slipping as they wandered round the cave. It had to be re-cut every year, re-chiselled and re-designed, as the glacier crept, furtive and tense, down the hollowed slopes. I looked at the facile spotlit sculptures of dogs, armchairs, an ice bed, a real four-poster with clever pleated drapes, a sheet of hanging folded ice. Where the substance had been finely worked, it was sheer, clear, free of impurities and strangely sanitized. Only in the walls of the cave, where the halogen lights penetrated the flesh of the glacier, were its muscles clearly visible. And there it seemed alive. I stood staring into the ambiguous depths of frozen cold. I stroked the wet solidity of the glacier and touched its intimate uncanny life.

  I was the only visitor to the ice cave. Strangely enough the mountain felt deserted in the winter season. The hotel was shut. The trains, which ground up the valley from Chamonix on a rack-and-pinion railway, ran less frequently. Only the railway buffet was open. I walked down to the open-air cafe where we had spent an afternoon last summer giggling at the contrast between unsuitably dressed tourists carrying poodles and Alpine mountaineers jingling with crampons and ice axes. Half of the huge, semicircular wooden floor which spread out over the glacier had been taken up, so that I now gazed down through a network of iron girders to the snow-covered rocks and pines, hundreds of feet below. The cafe steps were blocked by a wooden barricade and awful warnings of sudden death. I climbed further out beyond Crystal Gallery, also shut, to look across the Mer de Glace. There was no one else on the eagle’s nest terrace.

  But there were hundreds of tiny sticklike figures on the valley floor, crossing the ice. The glacier buckled into ridges like a dragon’s spine, giant crevasses opening where the river rose, arched its massive back and held its breath. As the surface dipped into a smooth concave hollow the voids closed shut. It was as if the creature lay there, breathing once every two hundred years, shifting constantly, but taking care to hide its subtle exhalations. I watched the little groups of figures, riding the glacier, curving and gliding through its sudden gulfs and troughs.

  I remembered a huge block-like structure, massive as a Borg cube, which had dominated the dirty tongue of ice in the summer. We had picked it out with our binoculars. We had marvelled at its duplicitous scale. I looked and looked again at the now whitened mass of solid ice. The rock cube had gone. It had been sucked back into the glacier. For a moment I was incredulous. The thing had been over a hundred feet high by my calculations, even allowing for the deceptive distances. I shifted uneasily. My feet were getting colder and colder.

  A posse of choughs wheeled and circled over the steps beside the station buffet, searching for pochettes of abandoned, greasy chips. They called to one another, a sweet high cry in the cold air. I put some more sunscreen on my nose and watched the black birds swooping down upon a recently abandoned table. I sat down amidst the raiding party and looked up at Les Grands Montets, which were now opposite. I caught a glimpse of the red suits of distant skiers by the hut at the peak. Behind them, falling away down to the Mer de Glace, were sheer walls of rock. I noticed how the light changed dramatically during the short day. Now that the sun was descending, huge gulfs and cliffs fell into blue shadow. The crisp sparkle on fresh snow vanished and a sinister creeping blue swept across the surface of the glacier. I saw, more clearly, the dark shapes of rocks and trees swallowed up, then spat out by the creeping ice.

  ‘Do you want anything? I’m closing.’ The waiter was cold and bored.

  I stared at my wet boots.

  ‘Non, merci.’

  He shrugged, then pushed off inside. I heard the clatter of chairs banged down upon tables.

  I caught the last train back down the mountain. Four skiers and snowboarders clambered inside after the departing whistle, clutching their dangerous equipment and breathing heavily. They were too tired to talk. They just looked up at the bright white light catching the peaks as we slowly rumbled back down into the discouraging flood of liquid blue mist, which had enveloped Chamonix.

  * * *

  It was December 29th. I was buried in the alien world of winter sports without her. We had planned to spend the New Year in France. Françoise had given us the chalet in the woods at Les Praz. But at the last minute Roehm had invited her to Paris. She had packed and gone without hesitation or apology. She had never asked my opinion. I had nothing to say.

  Luce and Liberty immediately settled into their winter rhythm of blazing log fires, vats of mulled wine, ski de fond expeditions with a very patient instructor who, as far as I could see, was paid not to shout at them, silly horror novels and channel-hopping. The chalet was made of wood. The walls were piles of polished logs, but presumably the structure was lined with cavernous insulation, as it was very warm. Françoise had fleets of aged retainers who cleared up our dirty snow tracks in the hallway and recoated our duvets with soft cotton covers, smelling of lavender. We couldn’t understand any of the faithful servants because of their murky local dialect. So Luce left little piles of 100-franc notes under the mirror in the dining room with messages saying, Merci pour tout. The notes disappeared and the house was cleaned daily with exaggerated fanaticism.

  There wasn’t very much to do. So I spent the evenings buried in the sagging sofa reading whichever horror novel the women had just finished. Luce specialized in sinister tales with a religious slant. I had two favourites: The Footprints of Satan, a no-holds-barred saga of demonic possession, and a dog-eared quest novel full of religious revelations called If It Were So, We Would See Jesus, in which a young boy lost his faith when his mother died, but was comforted by a pederastic priest, who worked with a Twelve-Step Plan for Regaining Your Faith in God. Finally, the boy succumbed to the priest’s persuasive blandishments and became convinced that God had helped him to win a rowing competition. They ended up with clasped hands, embraced by the True Fellowship of Christ, forming a Holy Tableau of Revelation. The priest’s last words bore an uncanny resemblance to the final passage in a Rider Haggard novel, but I couldn’t remember which one. ‘Beyond the night the Royal Suns ride on, ever the rainbow shines about the rain. Though they slip through our hands like melted snow the lives we lose shall yet be found immortal, and from the burnt-out fires of our human hopes shall arise a heavenly star. Faith is necessary, for we have not The Presence. Blessed are they that have not seen and yet they have believed.’

  Luce read it, enthralled.

  ‘Fearful guff, really,’ she admitted, ‘but it brings back my childhood. Your mother doesn’t like me talking about the Saints. Especially not to you. But we were brought up in a sect that was even madder than the Moonies. They’d burn homosexuals with gusto if it were legal.

  ‘Are you still moping because your mother’s gone?’ Luce sounded irritated. ‘Really, Toby, you shouldn’t let yourself get so tied up in her life. You’re eighteen now. I expected you to be the one bringing home a boyfriend.’

  I shrank into the sofa and then crept quietly off to bed.

  I had carried the menacing iBook with me. It took me a day or so to find a Continental adapter that would allow me to illuminate the thing without running down the batteries. I had become convinced that Roehm had left me a message inside the computer. Otherwise why would he have gone to all that trouble to eliminate my passwords yet give me back my opened secrets? I sat wondering why, if he had something important to tell me, he didn’t just say it outright. Nothing, not even my feelings, made sense. Iso would never have looked inside my computer any more than she would have dreamed of examining my excreta or the contents of my intestines, nor, my intuition told me, would she have allowed Roehm to do so. So I had tried ano
ther line of attack. Did she know how Roehm had managed to download my files into the new computer? She had looked surprised, perhaps a little puzzled. But she had thought no immediate evil of Roehm. ‘Oh, did he? How clever! But how can he have done that? He’s never been up to your room, has he? Did you show him your computer? You’ve always been there when he’s come to the house.’

  And I thought, No, not always. Once I was watching you from the bottom of the garden.

  But I said nothing.

  Instead, I began to search the Internet. The answer came easily. Whenever I accessed my empty email box an icon appeared labelled MY FAVOURITE SITES. Most of these were linked to Yahoo shopping offers, classified ads and the Internet Job Centre. But there was one site on the tendentious list, which I had never visited. It sat there hidden like a rabbit trap.

  http://www.hautmontagne.irs.org.ch

  The white-gloved hand tapped twice upon the doors. I watched the blue line slowly filling at the bottom of the screen. The small black and white ball twirled in dead space. Then the screen opened up before me.