Poached Egg on Toast (15 page)

Opa has looked out at Disappearing Mountain since he was a child, and he knows that it reveals itself to few. Somehow, in the old man’s mind, Wolf’s death is linked to Disappearing Mountain, even though Wolf was killed on another peak in a nearby village to the south. Some evenings, after the dishes have been dried and put away, and when the tables have been set for morning, Opa sits in the kitchen rocker and cries. He cries for Maria who is alone, and he cries for himself because he believes that sons should bury their fathers, and not fathers their sons.

“Bridget, why you didn’t wake me?” Maria asks as she hurries into the kitchen. But Bridget only grins, and hands Maria a mug of coffee.

They hear the first guests enter the dining room beyond the kitchen door—children’s voices and a mother’s firm direction. It is the one called Ruby, Bridget knows. Ruby Featherby. She and her husband, Brighton, had been first to dinner last night, as well. They had stationed themselves at a corner table at the head of which Ruby had placed herself. Brighton sat at her left, and the children faced the row of potted geraniums along the windowsill. From this position, Ruby took charge of the room as people drifted in. She introduced herself and Brighton over and over again (college sweethearts, she told everyone), urging people to give up their first names and their background cities, urging the group feeling, unity for the week they will share at the Pension.

Not all guests had responded in like manner. The German and his wife the Finn waved a hand in the air as if to wipe out their part in this unguarded familiarity, and chose a small table for two at the opposite side of the room where they spoke in low tones to each other and to no one else during the meal. Five of the six children protested with cries and complaints until they were given a table to themselves. This meant that Angela and Spence Markham, friends of the Featherbys, would now join Ruby and Brighton at their table. The other American couple, Harry and Shelby Dickinson, sat with their six-year-old son, Chippy, in the centre of the room. Shelby, although dressed in expensive sports clothes, looked drab and seemed to be unhappy. All of the Americans, Bridget had noticed, observing every detail from the kitchen, were in sock feet.

Now, at Sunday breakfast, on the stroke of seven, the door is pushed open and Maria, Opa and Bridget carry out baskets of rolls, pots of marmalade, coffee and eggs. The kitchen door, portent of cheer, reminder of Mother’s blueberry pie, swings back and forth like the refrain of a lively tune everyone has on the tip of the tongue. Maria, watching her guests, marvels as she does every week, that several are already using first names, behaving as if they have known one another a lifetime. There are shouts between tables, laughter, challenges to be taken up later, on the slopes. The Markhams are telling everyone that they had a fight in the bedroom the night before.

“My Angela’s a terror, I tell you,” says Spence Markham, stroking at his jaw and with proud mockery in his voice. “Didn’t you hear her take after me in our room last night?”

“But where,” thinks Maria, “where are their real selves? It’s as if they have all shot out from under one granny’s apron.” She wonders why, when they were children, they had never been taught to deal with their own pain. For if they give away their laughter so readily, must they not give away their sorrow as well?

Maria has difficulty these days keeping her own pain in order, but she would not dream of behaving so publicly. Even the day the village men and their women came to tell her about Wolf, she kept her pain to herself.

She had been hooking a rug in her room—it was after the extension had been built—and she’d raised her head from her work to look out at Disappearing Mountain. To her surprise, the triple-peaked hulk suddenly shone forth in the sun, and was as quickly covered again in mist and cloud. She’d felt Wolf in the room. He had stood behind her in the doorway where she could not see him, and he said, “You are not to worry, Maria. You will be all right.”

When the others came to her doorstep to tell her the news, she had already known what they had to say.

Bridget is refilling coffee cups, gritting her teeth as she passes the children’s table, teasing the lanky Mr. Featherby.

“Don’t you go and break a leg today, Mr. Featherby. With this rowdy bunch to look after.”

A frown shadows Ruby Featherby’s face at the mention of a broken leg. It is one of Ruby’s trials that she cannot control the thoughts of disaster that hang uppermost in her mind: accidents involving Brighton and the children; burning cars from which they cannot escape; decapitations; drownings. It is an ill omen, she thinks, if anyone else comes the slightest bit close to guessing her thoughts of tragedy and horror.

The German and the Finn sit silently throughout breakfast. They are heavy, bulky people and are dressed in thick ski clothing, bracing themselves, it seems, for the day ahead.

The English couple is having problems with conversation, because Mrs. Allenby refuses to answer a question her husband thinks perfectly innocuous, even solicitous and kind.

“Did you sleep well, my dear?” is all that he has said, shaking out his table napkin. Now he keeps on at her under his breath. “Answer me, Geòrgie, talk to me. Never mind your silent act. I’ve had enough of that. I know you can hear me. You damned well answer.”

But Georgina will not; she is harbouring a grudge as she is wont to do, because the night before, when they had lain side by side, he had fallen asleep while she had been telling him her deepest and innermost feelings of regret about how her life has turned out. She has never had this conversation with him before. She’d had the whole long drive to think about her life (he had done all the driving; she had only to sit and stare out the window), and at night she chanced it, hopeful that the act of sharing her sorrows would also take them away. It was only after she cleansed herself of grief—even making up things as she went along, she’d been so caught up in her woes—that she realized, when he did not answer, that he’d been asleep throughout the most important revelation of her life. And now, at breakfast, he can’t understand why she is angry.

Young Chippy Dickinson begins to raise his voice at the table, and his parents, heads lowered threateningly, try to hush him, but do not seem to know how to go about this in any practical, workable way. The two Markham children jab each other with fists, spill their orange juice, and then, breakfast is over. The tables empty; the guests run upstairs for toques and mittens, and grab their ski poles; the men huddle over coughing engines and frosted rear windows and drive out of the parking lot one after the other, heading for the ski school, where lessons begin punctually at eight thirty.

Opa stays in the kitchen to clean up while Maria and Bridget tug laundry baskets out from under the stairs. They begin the week’s work, trying to create the illusion of neatness in rooms above. Rooms which, without exception, have been left in that macaronic state familiar to any of us who has spent days or weeks or months delving up to our elbows in suitcase laundry.

By Friday, the guests at the Pension have been through their share of successes and mishaps. There have been individual glories on the hills, but the Pension can now account for one broken ankle (Mrs. Allenby), and one pulled tendon (Mr. Featherby). Chippy Dickinson cannot take his final ski lesson because of a slight fever; his mother, Shelby, has volunteered to stay behind so her husband can have a day to himself. Mr. Dickinson, embarrassed but cheered at finding himself detached from the usual responsibilities of family, winds several lengths of scarf about his neck and leaves in the morning, whistling.

Mr. Featherby begins to drink whisky about eleven in the morning and, by three, he is dragging his swollen leg up and down stairs looking for Bridget, who, he has learned, does not mind listening as he tags after her.

“There isn’t a person who truly cares about me, Bridget,” he says, sorrowfully. “Even the children side with their mother. Oh yes, they know where the power lies in this family. Truth is, my Ruby is a bitch, Bridget, in every sense of the word.”

“Oh now, Mr. Featherby, you watch what you say,” says Bridget, agreeing with him nonetheless. What she has seen in six days this week is enough to rot your socks and more. She doesn’t wonder Mr. Featherby turns to drink whenever he can get away from his Ruby.

“She’s all perfume and smiles on the outside,” he says, “but behind closed doors she wields her power until she has the children and me gasping for breath. At home, she leaves notes for me everywhere:
Pick up after yourself. I asked you to clean the oven two weeks ago. When are you going to fix the lid on the mailbox? Keep your dirty socks in pairs or wash them yourself
. She puts No Smoking signs on the kitchen wall, and tapes them over the toilet roll in the bathroom. There are so many notes lying around at one time they depress even her because she’s forced to read them herself.”

Mr. Featherby starts down the stairs to sign out another shot of whisky. Bridget plugs in the iron and dabs at it with a finger of spit until she is satisfied with the sizzle and the smell. She pushes the iron back and forth, wondering vaguely if she should do something about Mr. Featherby. Maria is away for two days, having gone to Salzburg to visit a friend and to bring back supplies.

Mrs. Allenby is also in the Pension this day. She emerged tentatively from her room at noon, asking Bridget for a bowl of broth. No one has brought food to her, and she feels deserted and comfortless. She is still holding her grudge against Mr. Allenby and has been miffed most of the week, feeling that he is somehow responsible for her broken ankle, even though he wasn’t on the same slope when she fell. Now, in a below-the-knee cast, she is confined to her room, reading and resting during the day, multiplying new grudges until the pre-dinner hour when the remaining healthy skiers return frozen-fingered to the Pension and sit together over a glass of wine or beer before dinner.

And what do the members of this group discuss as they rub at aching muscles, as they try to ignore significant and painful signs of the body’s deficiencies?
Which of the duty-free airports in Europe stock Spence Markham’s brand of pipe tobacco? Who are the worst drivers in the world—the French or the Turks? Do little red-haired girls really have fiery tempers? Which are the best topless beaches in France between the fourteenth of July and the twenty-eighth of August?

Mr. Featherby returns to the landing, where Bridget is still ironing. He sets a glass of gin beside the heap of freshly folded linen, and raises his whisky to his lips.

“Come on, Bridget,” he says. “We’ll have one together. We’ll drink to the merry day when men and women will be free to look one another in the eye and say ‘Screw off,’ when the going gets tough. Down the hatch, Bridget. You’re a damned fine woman, and the hour for respectable drinking has descended upon the house.”

“Ah,” Bridget thinks, as she clinks glasses with Brighton Featherby, “why is it that the world is never just? Why does Opa rock himself to sleep in the kitchen chair every night with sorrow in his heart; why should Maria have to climb the stairs to an empty room, while Ruby Featherby makes her husband and children knuckle to her iron will?”

But Bridget has been called upon to witness her own behaviour often enough; it is not in her to pass long-term or serious judgment on others. For she knows that Brighton Featherby will in all likelihood carry out his wife’s orders for the next twenty-five years, that Geòrgie Allenby will forgive her husband once her ankle bone mends, that Opa will suffer until the day he is laid to rest beside his son in the shadow of Disappearing Mountain, and that most other injustices of the world will never be rectified. She has known for a long time that the world does not turn the way decent men and women think it should, that evil often triumphs over purity and truth, that the power-hungry, the stupid, the self-righteous and the boring will always make themselves heard.

After the ironing is done, Bridget takes some prohibitive action. She locks the doors of the liquor cupboard against Mr. Featherby’s invasion; she makes a pot of coffee, but even while she pours his cup, he sneaks up behind her and pats her on the bum. He tries to lay his head on her breast, but she sits with him at the bottom of the stairs while he drinks two cups of coffee, and she listens while he continues to talk about Ruby who, he tells her, was a nurse in her younger years—before the children.

“She was a surgical nurse, Bridget. She worked on a fortybed ward and often came home at night telling me what it was like getting those poor souls ready to go under the knife. For years, I pictured her making rounds in the early mornings with a market basket over her arm, collecting false teeth and other prosthetic devices.
Any glass eyes? Wooden legs? Dildos?’
I know that is probably not the way it was, but it always seemed that way to me. She’s forty-two if she’s a day, though she’d never admit it. But who, in this day of root canal and matched crown, would know how many teeth are her own and how many are cemented in?”

Brighton Featherby and Bridget enjoy a muffled and wicked laugh, despite the fact that Brighton’s own wife is the target of the laughter. And now, Bridget thinks, even a little wistfully, if Mr. Featherby were not quite so drunk, she might consider going to bed with him. Yes, she has learned to keep worry and discontent at arm’s length; they do not weaken and distract her as they once might have. She knows enough of her place in the world of survivors to act above regret, and to rise in the morning without lingering over past, present and future wounds. In other words, she can imagine herself sleeping with him, in perfectly good conscience.

Mr. Dickinson is having trouble with Chippy before dinner. The six-year-old has humiliated his father in a full games room, and Bridget has come upon them in the first-floor hall. The two, father and son, are in sock feet, facing each other. Mr. Dickinson, not much taller than Chippy, leans over him, holding him by the shoulders. In an apologetic voice, he questions the child’s behaviour.

Bridget thinks, for a moment, that Mr. Dickinson might be close to tears. Chippy had overturned the chess set when caught cheating, had flung the pieces at one of the Featherby children—his opponent—and had run out of the room. Cries of “He’s a cheater, a cheater! “ had followed him out.