I remember… but there is nothing about that day until the evening that I can forget… for instance I remember the slight altercation I had at the Hotel Corbetta with the waiter because I wanted a window seat from which I could watch the road she would come along from the foot of the piste at La Cierne. The table had just served a previous occupant, and there was a used cup and saucer which I suppose the waiter didn’t want to clear. He was a surly man with a foreign accent. I expect he was a temporary employee, for Swiss waiters are the most agreeable in the world, and I remember thinking that he wouldn’t last long.
The time passed slowly without Anna-Luise. I grew tired of reading and I persuaded the waiter with the help of a two-franc piece to keep the table for me, and I added the promise that two of us would soon be taking a snack there when lunchtime came. A lot of cars were now arriving with skis on their roofs and quite a long queue had formed at the ski-lift. One of the rescue team, who are always on duty at the hotel, was gossiping with a friend in the queue. ‘Last accident we had was Monday,’ he said. ‘Boy with a broken ankle. You always get them in the school holidays.’ I went to the little shop next to the hotel to see if I could find a French paper, but there was only the Lausanne daily which I had already scanned at breakfast. I bought a packet of Tobler one for us to eat as a dessert, for I knew that at the restaurant there would be only ice-cream. Then I took a walk and watched the skiers on the piste rouge. She was a very good skier: as I’ve already written her mother had taken her out for the first time and had begun teaching her at the age of four. An icy wind was blowing and I went back to my table and read suitably enough Ezra Pound’s Seafarer: “Hung with hard ice-flakes, where hailstones flew, There I heard naught save the harsh sea And ice-cold wave…”
After that I opened the anthology at random and reached Chin Shengtan’s 33 Happy Moments. To me there always seems to be a horrible complacency about oriental wisdom: ‘To cut with a sharp knife a bright green water-melon on a big scarlet plate of a summer afternoon. Ah, is not this happiness?’ Oh yes, if one is a Chinese philosopher, well-to-do, highly esteemed, at ease with the world, above all safe, unlike the Christian philosopher who thrives on danger and doubt. Though I don’t share the Christian belief I prefer Pascal.
‘Everyone knows that the sight of cats or rats; the crushing of a coal etc. may unhinge the reason.’ Anyway, I thought, I don’t like water-melons. It amused me, however, to add a thirty-fourth happy moment just as complacent as Chin Shengtan’s. ‘To be sitting warm in a Swiss cafe, watching the white slopes outside, and knowing that soon the one you love will enter, with red cheeks and snow on her boots, wearing a warm sweater with a red band on it. Is not this happiness? ‘
Again I opened The Knapsack at random, but the sortes Virgilianae do not always work and I found myself faced with The Last Days of Doctor Donne. I wondered why a soldier should be expected to carry that in his knapsack for comfort or reassurance and I tried again. Herbert Read had printed a passage from one of his own works called Retreat from St Quentin, and I can still remember the gist, though not the exact words, I was reading when I laid the book down for ever. ‘I thought this is the moment of death. But I felt no emotion. I recalled once reading how in battle when men are hit, they never feel the hurt till later. ‘I looked up from the page. Something was happening by the ski-lift. The man who had spoken about the boy with a broken ankle was helping another man to carry a stretcher to the ski-lift.
They had laid their skis on the stretcher. I stopped reading and for curiosity I went out. I had to wait for several cars to pass me before I got across the road and by the time I reached the ski-lift the rescue team was already on the way up.
I asked someone in the queue what had happened. No one seemed very much interested. An Englishman said, ‘Some kid has fallen a cropper. It’s always happening.’
A woman said, ‘I think it’s a practice for the sauveteurs. They telephone down from above and try to catch them off their guard.’
‘It’s a very interesting exercise to watch,’ a second man said. ‘They have to ski down with the stretcher. It takes a lot of skill.’
I went back to the hotel to get out of the cold - I could see just as well from the window, but most of the time I was watching the ski-lift because almost any moment now Anna-Luise would be joining me. The surly waiter came and asked me whether I wanted to order: he was like a parking meter which indicated that my two francs of time had expired. I ordered yet another coffee. There was a stir among the group at the ski-lift. I left my coffee behind and went across the road.
The Englishman whom I had heard making his guess that a child had been hurt was now telling everyone triumphantly, ‘It’s a real accident. I was listening to them in the office. They were telephoning for an ambulance from Vevey.’
Even then, like the soldier at St Quentin, I didn’t realize I had been hit, not even when the sauveteurs came along the road from La Cierne and laid the stretcher down with great care for the sake of the woman on it. She was wearing quite a different kind of sweater from the one I had given Anna-Luise - a red sweater, ‘It’s a woman,’ somebody said, ‘poor thing, she looks bad,’ and I felt the same momentary and automatic compassion as the speaker.
‘Pretty serious,’ the triumphant man told us all. He was the nearest to the stretcher. ‘She’s lost a lot of blood.’
I thought from where I stood that she had white hair and then I realized that they had bandaged her head before bringing her down.
‘Is she conscious?’ a woman asked and the Englishman who knew all about it shook his head.
The small group diminished in number and curiosity as people took the ski-lift up. The Englishman went and spoke to one of the sauveteurs in bad French. ‘They think she’s hurt her skull,’ he explained to all of us, like a television commentator translating. I had a direct view now. It was Anna-Luise. The sweater wasn’t white any more because of the blood.
I pushed the Englishman to one side. He grasped my arm and said, ‘Don’t crowd her, man. She has to have air.’
‘She’s my wife, you bloody fool.’
‘Really? I’m sorry. Don’t take it rough, old man.’
It was a matter of minutes, I suppose, though it seemed hours, before the ambulance arrived. I stood there watching her face and seeing no sign of life. I said, ‘Is she dead?’ I must have seemed to them a bit indifferent.
‘No,’ one of them assured me. ‘Just unconscious. A crack on the head.’
‘How did it happen?’
‘Well, as far as we can make out, there was a boy who fell up there and sprained his ankle. He shouldn’t have been up on the piste rouge - he should have been on the piste bleu. She came over a rise and she hadn’t much time to avoid him. She would have been all right probably if she had swung right, but I suppose she had not much time to think. She swung left towards the trees - you know the piste - but the snow is hard and tricky after the thaw and the freeze and she went right into a tree at top speed. Don’t worry. The ambulance will be here any moment now. They will fix her up at the hospital.’
I said, ‘I’ll be back. I’ve got to go and pay for my coffee.’