Georgina, well to his rear and skiing a little more timidly, saw it all. Her heart seemed to fly into her mouth and she cried out, then formed a snow-plough of her skis and drew up alongside her husband where he sprawled. She’d stepped out of her clamps at once, dug her skis in so that she couldn’t lose them, gone down on her knees beside him. Ilya held his sides as he laughed and laughed, the tears of laughter rolling down his cheeks and freezing there.
‘Clown!’ She’d thumped his chest then. ‘Oh, you clown! You very nearly frightened the life out of me!’
He had laughed all the louder, grabbing her wrists, holding her still. Then he’d looked at his skis and stopped laughing. The right ski was broken, hanging by a splinter where it had cracked across its width some six inches in front of the clamp. ‘Ah!’ he had exclaimed then, frown-ling. And he’d sat up in the snow and looked all about, Georgina had known, then, that it was serious. She could see it in his eyes, the way they narrowed. ‘You go back to the car,’ he’d told her. ‘But carefully, mind you – don’t be like me and go banging your skis up! Start the car and get the heater going. It’s not much more than a mile, so by the time I get back you’ll have that old beetle good and warm for me. No point both of
us freezing.’
‘No!’ She’d refused point-blank. ‘We go back together. I-‘
‘Georgina.’ He’d spoken quietly, which meant that he was getting angry. ‘Look, if we go back together, it means we’ll both get back wet, tired, and very, very cold. Now that’s OK for me, and I deserve it, but you don’t. My way you’ll soon be warm, and I’ll be warm a lot sooner! Also, night is coming on. You get back to the car now, in the twilight, and you’ll be able to put on the lights as a marker. You can beep the horn now and then to let me know you’re safe and warm, and to give me an incentive. You see?’
She had seen, but his arguments hadn’t swayed her. ‘If we stick together, at least we’ll be together! What if I did fall down and get stuck, eh? You’d get back to the car and I wouldn’t be there. What then? Ilya, I’d be frightened on my own. For myself and for you!’
For a second his eyes had narrowed more yet. But then he’d nodded. ‘You’re right, of course.’ And again he’d looked all about. Then, taking off his skis: ‘Very well, this is what we’ll do. Look down there.’
The firebreak had continued for maybe another half kilometre, running steeply downhill. To both sides full-grown trees, some of them hoary with age, stood thick and dark, with the snow drifted in banks under them where they bordered the firebreak. They stood so close that overhead their branches often interlocked. They hadn’t been cut for five hundred years, those trees. Beneath them the snow was mostly patchy, kept from the earth by the thick fir canopy, which it covered like a mantle.
The car’s over there,’ said Ilya, pointing east, ‘around the curve of the hill and behind the trees. We’ll cut through the trees downhill to the track, then follow our own ski-tracks back to the car. Cutting off the corner will save us maybe half a kilometre, and it will be a lot easier than walking in deep snow. Easier for me, anyway. Once we’re back on the track you can go on skis, a gentle glide; and when the car’s in sight, then you can go on ahead and get her going. But we’ll have to get a move on. It will be gloomy now under those trees, and in another half-hour the sun will be down. We won’t want to be in the wood too long after that.’
Then he’d hoisted Georgina’s skis to his shoulder and they’d left the firebreak for the shelter and the silence of the trees.
At first they’d made good headway, so good in fact that she had almost stopped worrying. But there was that about the hillside which oppressed – a quiet too intense, a sense of ages passing or passed like a few ticks of some vast clock, and of something waiting, watching – so that she only desired to get down off the hill and back out into the open. She supposed that Ilya felt it, too, this strange genius loci, for he had said very little and even his breathing was quiet as they made their way diagonally