Lace (11 page)

Maxine’s new nose and figure greatly increased her self-confidence, and she now concentrated on losing more weight. She ate and drank as little as possible, she was on skis as often as
possible, every night and morning she would sit on the floor of her bedroom and roll her plump thighs away with a wooden kitchen rolling-pin. “Ninety-eight . . . ow, ninety-nine . . .
il
faut souffrir pour être mince,
ouch, a hundred. Pouf! Now where are my ski socks?”

“Surely you’re not going to ski today?” Kate asked. “It looks like an upended paperweight outside. It’s a Sunday for staying by the fire.”

“I only lost half a kilo last week, look at my chart on the wall. Five more kilos to lose.”

Maxine trudged off to the ski lift. She had decided to try a longer, more advanced run so she caught the
gondelbahn
cable car to the top of the Wispile. The top of the mountain was gray
and threatening with black clouds lacing the sky behind. Marine shivered and looked at the signpost, a Christmas tree of coloured arrows nailed to the post that pointed to different ski runs. The
yellow runs were easy, the red ones more difficult and the black runs were only for very experienced skiers.

Maxine, who had only been skiing for a couple of months, thought that the black track didn’t look all that difficult—in fact it looked quite easy and much the prettiest. And so it
was for the first two hundred yards, then the
piste
took a sharp turn to the left and Maxine found herself in a rutted ice path that fell steeply through the forest. For a moment she thought
of climbing back, then she was going too fast and couldn’t stop; her skis clattered over the ruts. She was frightened of wrapping herself around a tree; it hadn’t occurred to her that
there might be nobody else on the
piste.
She jerked over a bump, fir trees loomed, she floundered and fell.

She pulled herself to her feet, shot forward—again too fast—on the corrugated ice track and fell again, bruising her hip. Although she wore two pairs of woolen mittens inside her ski
gloves, she couldn’t feel her numbed hands and her cheeks and forehead already ached with the cold. She pulled herself up again and for the next ten minutes she managed to ski slowly and
carefully with a great deal of side-slipping. Then it started to snow, which limited visibility until she could only see a few yards in any direction; the
piste
was quickly covered by snow
and she could see no arrows. As snowflakes fluttered down remorselessly, the lack of sound was eerie and she felt frightened.

Suddenly, a lone, black-clad skier with an orange-peaked cap shot past her. She waved her ski poles after him and shouted, but he didn’t stop. Maxine groped her way onward and downward,
following the direction the man had taken. She found herself alone on a steeply sloping field of icy bumps, but she didn’t dare take it straight. She started to traverse it slowly. Each time
she reached the edge of the field, she did a laborious kick turn and clumsily levered herself down a couple of feet. Her knees started to tremble with the effort but she zigzagged on, all thought
of style forgotten. She had just reached the bottom of the field when the man with the orange-peaked cap slipped gracefully past her.

“Au secours,”
she shouted.
“Help!”
But the skier didn’t seem to hear, so again Maxine followed in the direction that he had taken and soon found
herself on the edge of the steepest slope she had ever been on.

She was terrified. She considered climbing back, but downhill, she reasoned, would be easier than uphill, so she took her skis off and dragged them behind her, kicking footholds with the heels
of her ski boots, terrified lest she drop a ski, because it would undoubtedly shoot off down the glassy mountain and be lost forever. As perhaps she was herself. . . .

Although she was heading downhill, she had a nasty feeling that she might be going the wrong way. It was now three hours since she had left the top of the mountain. She was soaking wet,
she’d got snow down the back of her neck and could no longer even feel her feet. Cold, forlorn and frightened, she sat down to rest in the snow, worrying about frostbite and peering into the
thick grayness all about her.

This time, because she wasn’t skiing, she heard the orange-hatted skier descend. She scrambled to her feet, waved and screamed at him.

“Stop,
stop,
please
stop
.”

He pulled up by her side.

“Could you please tell me the easiest way down?” Maxine asked anxiously.

He looked at her through yellow goggles and said in French, “There
is
no easy way down. You’re on the black run. Why did you pick the black, why not one of the easier
runs?” He sounded exasperated. “Look, you’d better follow me or you’ll never get down. Put your skis on.”

Slowly Maxine inched her way after him down the hellish mountain. He would ski forward then stop and wait, watching her as she jerked, slid and wobbled forward, her new teeth gritting with
determination as the gray obscurity started to thicken into darkness. Then suddenly her knees gave way and she collapsed into the snow. She gave a little sob.

“I’m afraid I can’t go on. I’ve got to rest. I’m sorry, but I can’t move anymore.”

The black skier’s voice became gentle and persuasive as he urged her on. “Come on,” he said, “you’re doing wonderfully well, we’re nearly at the halfway
station, it’s just around the next bend, then you can ride on the
gondelbahn
back to the bottom!”

So they slowly inched forward until Maxine fell again. She ached all over. “I can’t go on,” she muttered, then buried her face on her knees and rolled over in the snow, curled
in a fetal position.

The skier sighed, unclipped his skis and stuck them upright in the snow. “Here, let me rub you warmer,” he said. He rubbed each arm, then her back until she ached with the pain of
it. Then he roughly rubbed her legs until she could feel them again and helped her stand.

Slowly, painfully, they progressed onward. The halfway station wasn’t around the next bend or the one after that. It was almost an hour before they turned around a bend and saw it. Maxine
almost crawled into the station, but her rescuer said he was going to ski down the remainder of the
piste.
He would join her in the bar at the bottom, if she liked.

Effortlessly, he slipped downhill and away from her.

At the bottom of the ski lift Maxine, slightly recovered, headed for the nearby bar and staggered to the cloakroom. She took off her cap, goggles, scarf and extra sweaters, washed her face in
warm water—oh the bliss of it—and fluffed out her hair as best she could. Then she clumped into the steamy, pine-lined bar. Because no one was stupid enough to ski in such dangerous
weather, the bar was empty except for a husky black figure leaning against it, dangling an orange cap and yellow goggles.

“Hot buttered rum for you, I think, tea for me,” he said, as she smiled her newly irresistible grin. “I must admit that I never expected to find a pretty girl under that
collection of old horse blankets you were wearing.”

His bronzed face was ringed with neatly curling blond hair. Maxine took one look into the clear, blank blue eyes and fell in love with him on the spot.

The added bonus was that Maxine’s savior was a reserve on the Swiss ski team, and every girl in l’Hirondelle would have killed for a chance to meet any member of the team.
Wait
until she told them! she thought.

But she didn’t tell them because Pierre Boursal sat with her, alone in the deserted bar, until it was time to go back to school for supper, then walked her back, carrying her skis, while
Maxine prayed that he would ask to see her again, and by the time he did—not to ski, mind you, once was enough—he had become too important to her to boast about. She didn’t even
tell Kate or Pagan in case it was tempting fate. Or Kate or Pagan.

From then on, Maxine met Pierre whenever she could—after the last ski lift stopped, of course. Pierre had not intended to get involved with a girl. He took his training seriously. He
didn’t smoke, didn’t drink and didn’t intend to be distracted by women. Maxine’s virtue was splendidly safe with him, thanks to his training, she thought, longing for him as
they clung to each other on some tiny dance floor or she sat with his muscular arm around her waist in the darkest corner of some tearoom. At such times she clearly saw how very, very easy it would
be to be wicked.

If only she ever got the chance.

The slalom race was due to start at ten o’clock that morning. Urged by Maxine, wearing her best yellow ski jacket and her beautiful silver fox hood, the girls were again
on top of the Eggli. Shepherded by the sportsmaster, they had caught the little green bus from Gstaad, up the mountain to the funicular, which carried the skiers even farther up. At times the dark
green pines shuddered and snow fell silently from their branches.

Although it was early, the girls shared a mug of hot, red
Glühwein
as soon as they reached the summit restaurant, for they knew they would soon be numb with cold. Their sportsmaster
explained again that ski racing was a combination of trained technique, superb physical fitness, the best equipment—and favourable weather conditions. On a gray day, when visibility was low,
a skier would be able to see only a short way ahead. The hazy white sky would merge with the snow and it would be impossible to see where the track ended and the sky started, whether there was
mountain ahead or a vertical drop. In bad conditions, luck was more important than when the weather was perfect, for the sunlight showed up uneven ground so that every bump, ridge, dip and rut was
clearly defined by shadows on the snow.

When the girls left Gstaad that morning, the steep icy slopes had glistened in what had been the first sun of the week. But by the time they reached the summit, the sun had disappeared between
low clouds and it had started to snow—not hard, but just enough to reduce visibility. The officials at the top of the slalom course decided to start the race twenty minutes early before the
snow worsened.

The only sound on the muffled mountain was the crunch of snow under their skis as the girls glided down to the finishing post. On either side of the course a soft beige row of fencing leaned
away from them and disappeared up the quiet white mountainside. The 300-yard course with a drop of 300 feet was staked out to the right of a clump of pine trees. Fifty pairs of coloured slalom
poles had been driven into the snow to make fifty “gates” at five meter intervals. This race, the Men’s Slalom, was an individual event. Each skier would not only be competing
against the other racers but against his own best time as he skied alone down the first course, then the adjoining course. The fastest aggregate time would decide the winner.

Pierre Boursal didn’t think he had much chance of winning. There were thirty-seven starters, including three members of the team and the other reserve. However, one reserve would need to
qualify for a team place, because the day before Leist had broken his collarbone in a car crash.

Suddenly impatient, Pierre thought why wait when he could ski? He went up in the funicular and streaked down the
piste.
More than anything else in the world he loved silently slipping
downhill on skis, using only his body and earth’s gravity to flick like a hawk over the magical white surface. For him, it was the ultimate physical exultation, that thrill of constant risk
and deliberate danger when he allowed himself to go a little too fast and just out of control. He had first been put on skis when he was a tiny child and quickly discovered that it was the only way
he could escape from his glamorous mother and her insufferable hordes of would-be lovers, crowding the smarter parts of Saint Moritz every year. Rather than be dragged along in the wake of that
mob, Pierre used to take his skis and seek the solitude and purity of the snow at the top of a mountain, and hear in that celestial silence only the faint noise of his skis as he carved his own
path through the virgin snow.

Pierre was not a good scholar and by the time he was thirteen, his only source of joy and satisfaction was skiing. Afterward, carrying his skis through some village street, he loved to notice
two responses from passersby; sometimes he would see a little group staring up at his trail and hear them exclaim, “Only a madman would attempt the Scharnfürts today,” or
“Did you see how fast his descent was?” Sometimes, in ski villages where he was known, Pierre would notice that he was being pointed at in the street, that men were muttering and
turning their heads to look at him from the opposite sidewalk.

Only his mother and father were unaware that their son skied like a demon.

It was not until the president of the multinational company that was sponsoring the junior team congratulated Monsieur Boursal at a banker’s dinner in Zurich on being the father of a
future champion that Pierre’s father realised his son was neither untalented nor lazy—he was merely not interested in scholastic subjects.

Now, Pierre moved down the Eggli with perfect style and breakneck speed, skiing to the limit—and a little beyond. Unlimbering before the race, Pierre swung around the most difficult bumps,
then veered off the
piste
and into the deep virgin snow, leaning backward so that his ski tips wouldn’t catch the powder. The snow plumed up behind him, a silent diamond spray. He cut
back onto the
piste,
then crouched low, elbows to knees, into a final
schuss
with skis flat and fast, head down and sticks tucked under his arms. His anxiety was forgotten. All he
felt was the sheer physical sensation of his body, the snow and the heady, cold champagne-sparkle of the winter air at this high altitude.

Carrying his skis, Pierre walked up the side of the course, trying to memorise it, because competitors weren’t allowed a trial run down. The right route would only become apparent when he
was on it, flashing through the maze of bamboo poles. As he waited his turn, he would watch the skier before him, trying to work out the course from his movements. Total concentration was essential
because the gates were pitched irregularly and often closely together; it was very easy to crash into a pole or miss a gate.