The Partridge Kite (28 page)

‘So nobody’s ever really done it?’ he said.

‘Not successfully, no! Sometimes they go halfway down . . . about a mile or so, but they’ve got a long walk back up again. It’s not the sort of thing you do for fun. Not when it’s so comfortable on this side.’

‘But there was one who did it, went right over the other side . . . disappeared for days, she did!’ The porter’s unpleasant complaining voice startled them both. He was standing by the door to the cellar on the far side of the hallway, a full coal bucket in his hand.

‘She?’ Tom asked. ‘You said
she
did it?’

That’s right. She.’

‘Well, go on, Curdy,’ the girl said, across to him, ‘don’t be so bloody mysterious.’

‘You wouldn’t know ’bout her,’ he said, shifting the coal bucket from one hand to the other. ‘She was long before your time.’

A dewdrop fell from the end of his nose on to his upper lip. He licked it clean.

Tom’s hand went to his jacket pocket, to the wallet full of five-pound notes. But then he withdrew his hand, empty.

Best not be too anxious, he thought, or it will cost a great deal more than a fiver.

‘Oh, it doesn’t matter, really,’ he said to the girl as light- heartedly as he could. He began walking backwards towards the corridor that led to his bedroom. ‘Sorry to waste your time.’

‘You can make it up to me later,’ she said, unfolding her arms, releasing the grandeur of her breasts. He felt his hands instinctively move to catch them.

‘You can depend on it,’ he said back. ‘Remind me after lunch.’

He felt encouraged by the prospect of squeezing her plumpness and being squeezed back. He would enjoy her strength and their manoeuvring for greater pleasure in the six-by-three-foot space of his narrow single bed.

He closed the bedroom door behind him and sat on the bed waiting. Not for her, not so soon, but for the unpleasant stooping bloodhound of a porter who knew of a woman who had once skied up and over the Cairngorm summit to the snows and something beyond.

The small room was now hot and the windows had steamed out the view across the Spey Valley. It was only 11.30 a.m. but the low snow clouds made it as dark as early evening.

He sorted out his loose change and piled seven ten-penny pieces on top of the meter. It was still too light to switch on the lamps but not light enough to see every name on the finely-printed Ordnance sheets. Houses were marked but very few were named. Castles and ruins merited a title and so did the larger lodges and some farms. One of those black squares was the one he wanted.

He had begun to count them in each kilometre square of the Ordnance grid when the bedroom door opened without any precautionary knock. The porter eased his way in between the narrow opening he’d made. There seemed no reason why he shouldn’t have opened it wide and come in squarely with ample shoulder space. But it was in the nature of the man to be difficult even with himself. He closed the door behind him.

‘Come in,’ Tom said in a matter-of-fact way without looking up from the maps.

‘Come in? Right,’ he said. He squeezed the end of his nose between his thumb and forefinger and wiped them dry on his waistcoat.

‘You want to see me?’ Tom asked.

‘See you? Yes. . . yes, I do.’

‘Well, what is it?’

‘What is it? Yes, I’ll tell you what it is.’

But he said nothing, merely stood there hovering in the semi-light. Tom sat still, map on his lap, his face red from the glow of the electric bars. The porter pushed both his thumbs into the bottom right and left waistcoat pockets. He smelt of coal dust.

‘You’d like a fiver?’ Tom asked.

‘A fiver? Yes, that’ll do fine.’

Tom found the man’s habit of speech irritating, making a question out of everything Tom said and, having asked it, answered himself.

Tom gave him a five-pound note neatly folded. The porter took it and carefully unfolded the Queen from the Iron Duke, assuring himself the note was whole. He tucked it into the lower right-hand waistcoat pocket and replaced the thumb.

‘You wanted to know about this woman,’ he said, ‘the one who went over the top?’ He had turned his face sideways to Tom so that he was speaking out of the comer of his mouth. Possibly it made him feel more confidential. The light of the fire silhouetted him against the white door and he looked like a badly made-up villain in some small-time amateur dramatic production of
The Demon Barber Sweeney Todd
- except that he was far too impressive a villain to be convincing on the stage.

Tom kept looking at the fire.

‘I didn’t say that,’ he said. ‘I only wanted to know whether it was possible to ski down the other side of the summit. Nothing more or less than that.’

‘Then why have you given me the fiver?’ He bared his uneven dull grey teeth.

‘You’re a cunning bastard,’ Tom said.

‘Canny, you mean.’

‘No, we call it cunning where I come from.’

‘What would an Englishman be doing up here without skis, asking about the top?’ he asked.

He snorted in his nose, drew mucus into his mouth and swallowed it.

‘Now look, coalman,’ Tom said. ‘Say what you have to say and then get out. In fact you can piss off now before you put me off my lunch.’

The porter stooped lower and almost whispered to Tom. ‘She was a top skier,’ he said. ‘The best they’d ever had up here. They say she was a champion, was on television and the Olympics. She didn’t come from this end of the valley, came from the far side of Grantown. Family lived there. They say she knew every inch of the mountains, used to walk and camp up there in the summer then ski the moment the snow came. That cow in reception was right in one thing anyway: you wouldn’t go over the top in the snow unless you knew it like the back of your hand in summer. And they say she did.’

He stopped, hoping perhaps that he’d come to the end of his first fiver’s worth. But Tom didn’t move except that his forefinger began wandering over the map on his lap, tracing the contour lines over the peaks and into the valleys.

The porter went on. ‘They say she would disappear for days on end. Caused quite a panic in her family when she began it, thinking that she’d lost herself. But she always came back.

Then her family moved out, no proper reason, just moved out. Went south, I think. There was lots of talk, bound to be in a place like this. Something to do with their politics, seem to remember some people here didn’t like their politics, though I can’t for the fife of me think why that should make you shift house. She stayed for a while for the winter but then she moved on. We never saw her again.’ ‘Did they ever find out where she went to when she skied over the top?’ Tom asked him.

‘No. But there’s nothing over there except mountains and burns.’

‘She must have gone somewhere for something.’

‘If she did she didn’t tell anyone ’cos no one knows. And no one went with her, I know that much. No one could. She was the best there was and she went places I reckon no one else has ever been to.’

‘And always in the same direction over the summit?’ ‘That’s right. South to south-east . . . There’s no other way you can stay with the slope, they say.’

‘And do you remember her name?’

‘Do I remember her name. Yes, I do.’

‘And?’

‘I said I remember her name.’

Tom passed him another folded five-pound note and waited for the man to repeat his intensive scrutiny. Satisfied, he then tucked it into his left-hand waistcoat pocket and dusted his hands loudly. Again the smell of coal dust. Tom wanted to sneeze.

He felt a strong urge to pounce on the dismal man, slam him hard against the door, shake him and tie the long lobes of his long ears in a knot across his long face, like a gag across the long drooping mouth. Tom closed his eyes. That’s what he’d do. He would count to five and do exactly that. He’d got to three when the porter spoke.

‘Pilkington she was.’

Thank you. And her first name?’

‘I’m not sure I remember that. Might have been Eva or Elva.’

‘Elsa?’

‘Elsa? Elsa it is. You’re damn right it is. That was her name. Elsa Pilkington.’

He peered towards Tom, his tall thin body bending at the waist like a puppet, his face coming so close that Tom could smell his bad breath.

‘I bet you’re one of the family. I bet that’s what you are. One of them come back.’

Tom pushed the man back, still refusing to look at him. ‘Then put the tenner I gave you on the table and bet on it,’ he said.

The porter laughed shrilly, coughed up phlegm and swallowed it.

Tom got up.

‘Now fuck off,’ he said quietly to the man, ‘before I take my money back. And bring me some tea.’

But as the porter backed towards the door Tom saw the dribbling wet nose and remembered the revolting habits that surrounded it.

‘Forget the tea,’ he said, ‘just get out.’

The man eased his way back through the door in the same fashion he’d arrived. Tom reached out with his toot and kicked the door shut. He looked down at the white-hot electric bars of the fire and watched tiny specks of dust explode as they touched them. So it was Pilkington, exactly as Fry had said.

He remembered her voice, her despairing telephone call, a charred body in the Leicester fire, the face on the front page of an evening newspaper. He saw her in her kapok suit and tinted goggles pushing with her sticks over the four-thousand-foot hump, then plunging and swerving through snow that nobody else had ever touched, for a destination no one else would ever see. Skiing over ice and through powder waist high, but always moving by instinct in the right direction, independent of the first sense of sight.

She had skied from the summit to CORDON’S Headquarters and had always kept her secret. Until she pointed the way that moment she committed suicide by setting herself on fire.

There was a loud click and the white-hot electric bars turned red, the red pink and the pink into nothing. The room went dark and cold as Tom began fumbling with the coins.

He had lunch, and then the girl. He ate the finest oxtail he reckoned he’d ever tasted, and finished with a very adequate gooseberry crumble. The girl was everything she’d promised to be and he hoped he had done well by her too.

She was certainly athletic, and very clean-smelling, so that when he was obliged to comply with her many and very diverse requests he wasn’t put off. After Kate, her roundness and sheer weight made it seem as if he was having sex for the very first time. He couldn’t ever remember climbing on to a woman before. At least, that’s what it felt like in those last totally exhausting moments before their happily shared climax.

Her lunch break over, she went contentedly back to her reception duties. The drooping porter stood just inside the front door watching her, well aware of the reason for her good humour.

He had listened to their noisy love-making, standing in the dark corridor outside Tom’s bedroom door, his hands fumbling excitedly in his trouser pockets. What he had heard and the pictures he’d put to it would serve his own purposes in his own bed for many nights to come. And when that had outlived its utility he would exchange the story bit by bit for a dram of malt whisky in the local bar.

Tonight, though, he would merely whet the appetite of those locals who wouldn’t normally pass the time of day with him. A little about the easy tenner and the Englishman who was one of the Pilkington family. The woman’s brother, couldn’t be anyone else. For what other reason should he come here asking about her? Or maybe her lover? Maybe that would make the story better. He would decide on it later.

But why was the Englishman so worried about what the woman had been doing over on the other side? Well, Heavens knows! Probably someone in the bar tonight would know what it was all about. But it would be
his
story. He was looking forward to his drink this evening. He’d be quite at the centre of things.

Tom slept as she’d left him, naked on the bed. He woke up with a start, cold and angry. He hadn’t intended to sleep, and swore at himself for being so energetic after such a heavy lunch.

He had a quick wash down from the makeshift pink rubber hoses connected to the bath taps which passed as a shower, and stood in front of the wall mirror cupping his face in his hands. The beard was rough. He had shaved haphazardly in the tiny sink of the sleeper early that morning and needed another but he couldn’t be bothered. He splashed after-shave and talcum powder over himself instead.

It took him less than two minutes to dry and dress. The room was icy cold and he needed no other encouragement to hurry. He buttoned up his overcoat and tied Kate’s scarf tightly around the collar and opened the door to leave. He hesitated, went back into the bathroom and came out with the tin of talcum powder, knelt down at the door and pulled back the carpet.

As he had hoped, it was foam-backed. He shook the talc on to the bare floorboards in an area eighteen inches wide, carefully replaced the carpet, stepped over it into the corridor, locked the door, pocketed the key and left the hotel.

Kingussie is small, the neat little eighteenth-century capital of Badenoch, famous for its ‘black houses’. Typical Hebridean cottages that got their name because they had no chimneys, only a hole in the thatch, so thick layers of soot built up on the ceilings.

The hotel and the post office were at opposite ends of Kingussie and it took Tom half an hour of gingerly walking through the snow to get to it. Three times he lost himself in the unlighted streets and three times he asked passers-by the way. He was directed in a language he did not understand, though by the accent he took it to be Highland English.

The telegram he sent was short.

‘RECEIVED YOUR OVERNIGHTER WITH THANKS STOP SAFELY INSTALLED AND WAITING TO BE MET STOP MCCULLIN’

He addressed it to a non-existent firm at an address in Victoria Street, London SW1. It would be received and opened first thing tomorrow morning by a Mrs Hayes, who sat long hours in a small office overlooking the red-topped buses, sipping tea, powdering her nose and not missing in the slightest her former employer who had died in mysterious circumstances some days before.