My father said: “Looks as if she’s funked it. Can’t say I blame her.”
My mother gave him one of her “be quiet” looks, announced that this was our evening for speaking French and asked me in that language to pass her some bread, if I pleased.
I had my back to the door and my hand on the breadbasket. All I knew was that the room went quiet.
“Don’t turn round,” my mother hissed in English.
I turned round and there she was, in black velvet and diamonds.
Her hair, with more streaks of gray than I remembered from the year before, was swept up and secured with a pearl-and-diamond comb. The previous year, before the thing happened, my mother had remarked that she was surprisingly slim for a retired opera singer. This year she was thin, cheek-bones and collarbones above the black velvet bodice sharp enough to cut paper. She was inclining her elegant head toward the headwaiter, probably listening to words of welcome. He was smiling, but then he smiled at everybody. Nobody else smiled as she followed him to the table in the far, the very far, corner. You could hear the creak of necks screwing themselves away from her.
No entrance she ever made in her stage career could have been as nerve-racking as that long walk across the hotel floor. In spite of the silent commands now radiating from my mother, I could no more have turned away from her than from Blondin crossing Niagara Falls. My disobedience was rewarded, as disobedience so often is, because I saw it happen. In the middle of that silent dining room, amid a hundred or so people pretending not to notice her, I saw Silver Stick get to his feet. Among all those seated people he looked even taller than before, his burnished silver head gleaming like snow on the Matterhorn above that rock ridge of a nose, below it the glacial white and black of his evening clothes. Square Bear hesitated for a moment, then followed his example. As in her lonely walk she came alongside their table, Silver Stick bowed with the dignity of a man who did not have to bow very often, and again Square Bear copied him, less elegantly. Square Bear’s face was red and flustered, but the other man’s hadn’t altered. She paused for a moment, gravely returned their bows with a bend of her white neck, then walked on.
The silence through the room lasted until the headwaiter pulled out her chair and she sat down at her table, then, as if on cue, the waiters with their tureens came marching through the swinging doors and the babble and the clash of cutlery sounded as loud as war starting.
At breakfast I asked Mother: “Why did they bow to her?” I knew it was a banned subject, but I knew too that I was in an obscurely privileged position, because of the effect all this was supposed to be having on me. I wondered when it would come out, like secret writing on a laurel leaf you keep close to your chest to warm it.
When I was fourteen, eighteen?
“Don’t ask silly questions. And you don’t need two lumps of sugar in your café au lait.”
Father suggested a trip to the town down the valley after lunch, to buy Christmas presents. It was meant as a distraction and it worked to an extent, but I still couldn’t get her out of my mind. Later that morning, when I was supposed to be having a healthy snowball fight with boring children, I wandered away to the back terrace overlooking the ice rink. I hoped that I might find her there again, but it was occupied by noisy beginners, slithering and screeching.
I despised them for their ordinariness.
I’d turned away and was looking at the back of the hotel, thinking no particular thoughts, when I heard footsteps behind me and a voice said: “Was that where you were standing when it happened?”
It was the first time I’d heard Silver Stick’s voice at close quarters.
It was a pleasant voice, deep but clear, like the sea in a cave. He was standing there in his rough tweed jacket and cap with earflaps only a few yards away from me. Square Bear stood behind him, looking anxious, neck muffled in a woolen scarf. I considered, looked up at the roof again and down to my feet.
“Yes, it must have been about here.”
“Holmes, don’t you think we should ask this little girl’s mother?
She might…”
“My mother wasn’t there. I was.”
Perhaps I’d learnt something already about taking the center of the stage. The thought came to me that it would be a great thing if he bowed to me, as he’d bowed to her.
“Quite so.”
He didn’t bow, but he seemed pleased.
“You see, Watson, Miss Jessica isn’t in the least hysterical about it, are you?”
I saw that he meant that as a compliment, so I gave him the little inclination of the head that I’d been practicing in front of the mirror when Amanda wasn’t looking. He smiled, and there was more warmth in the smile than seemed likely from the height and sharpness of him.
“I take it that you have no objection to talking about what you saw.”
I said graciously: “Not in the very least.” Then honesty compelled me to spoil it by adding, “Only I didn’t see very much.”
“It’s not how much you saw, but how clearly you saw it. I wonder if you’d kindly tell Dr. Watson and me exactly what you saw, in as much detail as you can remember.”
The voice was gentle, but there was no gentleness in the dark eyes fixed on me. I don’t mean they were hard or cruel, simply that emotion of any sort had no more part in them than in the lens of a camera or telescope. They gave me an odd feeling, not fear exactly, but as if I’d become real in a way I hadn’t quite been before. I knew that being clear about what I’d seen that day a year ago mattered more than anything I’d ever done. I closed my eyes and thought hard.
“I was standing just here. I was waiting for Mother and Amanda because we were going out for a walk and Amanda had lost one of her fur gloves as usual. I saw him falling, then he hit the roof over the dining room and came sliding down it. The snow started moving as well, so he came down with the snow. He landed just over there, where that chair is, and all the rest of the snow came down on top of him, so you could only see his arm sticking out. The arm wasn’t moving, but I didn’t know he was dead. A lot of people came running and started pushing the snow away from him, then somebody said I shouldn’t be there so they took me away to find Mother, so I wasn’t there when they got the snow off him.”
I stopped, short of breath. Square Bear was looking ill at ease and pitying but Silver Stick’s eyes hadn’t changed.
“When you were waiting for your mother and sister, which way were you facing?”
“The rink. I was watching the skaters.”
“Quite so. That meant you were facing away from the hotel.”
“Yes.”
“And yet you saw the man falling?”
“Yes.”
“What made you turn round?”
I’d no doubt about that. It was the part of my story that everybody had been most concerned with at the time.
“He shouted.”
“Shouted what?”
“Shouted ‘No.’”
“When did he shout it?”
I hesitated. Nobody had asked me that before because the answer was obvious.
“When he fell.”
“Of course, but at what point during his fall? I take it that it was before he landed on the roof over the dining room or you wouldn’t have turned round in time to see it.”
“Yes.”
“And you turned round in time to see him in the air and falling?”
“Holmes, I don’t think you should…”
“Oh, do be quiet, Watson. Well, Miss Jessica?”
“Yes, he was in the air and falling.”
“And he’d already screamed by then. So at what point did he scream?”
I wanted to be clever and grown-up, to make him think well of me.