Ilya hired a car for a couple of days – a beat-up old Volkswagen beetle – and skis, and by 1.30 P.M. on that fateful fourth day they had motored up into the foothills. For lunch they stopped at a tiny inn on the northern extreme of lonesti, ordering goulash which they washed down with thick coffee, followed by a single shot each of sharp slivovitz to clean their mouths.
Then on higher into the hills, to a region where the snow still lay thick on the fields and hedgerows. And there it was that Ilya spied the hump of low grey hills a mile or so to the west, and turned off the road on to a track to try to get a little closer.
Finally the track had become rutted under the drifted snow, and the snow itself deeper, until at last Ilya had grunted his annoyance. Not wanting to get bogged down, revving the little car’s engine, he’d bumpily turned it about in its own tracks, the better to make an easy getaway when they were through with their sport.
‘Landlaufen!’ he’d declared, getting down their skis from the roof rack.
Georgina had groaned. ‘Cross-country? All the way to those hills?’
‘They’re white!’ he declared. ‘Glittery with dust over the hard, firm crust. Perfect! Maybe half a mile there, a slow climb to the top and a controlled, enjoyable slalom through the trees, then back here just as the twilight’s coming down on us.’
‘But it’s after three now!’ she’d protested. Then we’d better get a move on. Come on, it’ll be good for us . . .’
‘Good for us!’ Georgina sadly repeated now, his picture still clear in her mind a year later, tall and darkly handsome as he lifted the skis from the beetle’s roof and tossed them down in the snow.
‘What’s that?’ Anne Drew, her younger cousin, glanced back at her over her shoulder. ‘Did you say something?’
‘No,’ Georgina smiled wanly, shaking her head. She was glad for the intrusion of another into her memories, but at the same time sorry. Ilya’s face, fading, hung in the air, superimposed over her cousin’s. ‘Daydreaming, that’s all.’
Anne frowned, turned back to her driving. Daydreaming, she thought. Yes, and Georgina had done a lot of that over the last twelve months. There’d seemed to be something in her, something other than little Yulian, that is, which hadn’t come out of her when he had. Grief, yes, of course, but more than that. It was as if she’d teetered for twelve months on the very edge of a nervous break-down, and that only Ilya’s continuation in Yulian had kept her from toppling. As for daydreams: sometimes she’d seemed so very far away, so detached from the real world, that it had been difficult to call her back. But now, with the baby . . . now she had something to cling to, an anchor, something to live for.
Good for us, Georgina said again, but this time to herself, bitterly.
It hadn’t been ‘good’ for them, that last fatal frolic in the snow on the cruciform hills. Anything but. It had been terrible, tragic. A nightmare she’d lived through a thou-sand times in the year gone by, with ten thousand more to come, she was sure. Lulled by the car’s warmth and the purr of its motor, she slipped back into her memories . . .
They’d found an old firebreak in the side of the hill and set out to climb it to the top, pausing now and then with their breath pluming, shielding their eyes against the white blaze. But by the time they’d pantingly reached the crest the sun had been low and the light starting to fade.
‘From now on it’s all downhill,’ Ilya had pointed out. ‘A brisk slalom through the saplings grown up in the firebreak, then a slow glide back to the car. Ready? Then here we go!’
And the rest of it had been . . . disaster!
The saplings he’d mentioned were in fact half-grown trees. The snow, drifted into the firebreak, was far deeper than he might have guessed, so that only the tops of the pines – looking like saplings – stood proud of the powdery white surface. Half-way down he’d skied too close to one such; a branch, just under the surface, showing as the merest tuft of green, had tangled his right-hand ski. He’d upended, bounced and skittered and jarred another twenty-five yards in a whirling bundle of white anorak, sticks and skis, flailing arms and legs before grabbing another ‘sapling’ and bringing his careening descent to a halt.