A male voice states, “Hugo Lamb. Got to be.”
I know this voice. “And you are?”
“Richard Cheeseman, from Humber, you dolt.”
“Bugger me. Not literally. How’s your earlobe?”
“Fine fine fine, but listen, I’ve got serious news. I met—”
“Hang on, where are you? Not Switzerland?”
“Sheffield, at my sister’s, but shut up and listen, this call’s costing me a bollock a minute. I was speaking with Dale Gow last night, and he told me that Jonny Penhaligon’s dead.”
I didn’t mishear. “Our Jonny Penhaligon? No fucking way.”
“Dale Gow heard from Cottia Benboe, who saw it on the local news, News South-West. Suicide. He drove off a cliff, near Truro. Fifty yards from the road, through a fence, three-hundred-foot drop onto rocks. I mean … he wouldn’t have suffered. Apart from whatever it was that drove him to do it, of course, and the … final drop.”
I could weep. All that money. Through the kitchen window I watch the snowplow crawl by. A well-timed young priest follows, his cheeks pink and breath white. “That’s … I don’t know what to say, Cheeseman. Tragic. Unbelievable. Jonny! Of all people …”
“Same here. Really. The last person you’d expect …”
“Did he … Was he driving his Aston Martin?”
A pause. “Yeah, he was. How did you know?”
Be more careful. “I didn’t, but that last night in Cambridge, at the Buried Bishop, he was saying how much he loved that car. When’s the funeral?”
“This afternoon. I can’t go — Felix Finch has got me tickets for an opera and I could never get to Cornwall in time — but maybe it’s for the best. Jonny’s family could do without an influx of strangers arriving at … at … wherever it is.”
“Tredavoe. Did Penhaligon leave a note?”
“Dale Gow didn’t mention one. Why?”
“Just thought it might shed a little light.”
“More details will emerge at the inquest, I suppose.”
Inquest? Details? Sweet shit. “Let’s hope so.”
“Tell Fitz and the others, will you?”
“God, yes. And thanks for phoning, Cheeseman.”
“Sorry for putting a downer on your holiday, but I thought you’d prefer to know. Happy New Year in advance.”
TWO P.M. THE passengers from the cable car pass through the waiting room of the Chemeville station, chattering in most of the major European languages, but she’s not among them, so I direct my mind back to The Art of War. My mind has ideas of its own, however, and directs itself towards a Cornish graveyard where the skin-sack of toxic waste recently known as Jonny Penhaligon is joining its ancestors in the muddy ground. Like as not it’s howling with rain, with an east wind clawing at the mourners’ umbrellas and dissolving the words of “For Those in Peril on the Sea” Xeroxed yesterday onto sheets of A4. Nothing throws the chasm between me and normals into starker relief than grief and bereavement. Even at the tender age of seven, I was embarrassed by — and for — my own family when our dog Twix died. Nigel wept himself sore, Alex was more upset than he had been the time his Sinclair ZX Spectrum arrived minus its transformer, and my parents were morose for days. Why? Twix was out of pain. We no longer had to endure the farts of a dog with colon cancer. Same story when my grandfather died: a tearing-out of hair, gnashing of teeth, revisionism about what a Messiah the tight-arsed old sod had been. Everyone said I’d handled myself manfully at his funeral, but if they could have read my mind, they would have called me a sociopath.
Here’s the truth: Who is spared love is spared grief.
GONE THREE P.M. Holly the barmaid sees me, frowns, and slows: a promising start. I close The Art of War. “Fancy meeting you here.”
Skiers stream by, behind her and between us. She looks around. “Where are your highly amusing friends?”
“Chetwynd-Pitt, which rhymes with Angel’s Tit, I notice—”
“As well as ‘piece of shit’ and ‘sexist git,’ I notice.”
“I’ll file that away. Chetwynd-Pitt’s hungover, and the other two passed through about an hour ago, but I slipped on my ring of invisibility, knowing that my chances of sharing your ski lift up to the top”—I twirl my index finger towards Palanche de la Cretta’s summit—“would be a big fat zero if they were here too. I was embarrassed by Chetwynd-Pitt last night. He was crass. But I’m not.”
Holly considers this and shrugs. “None of it matters.”
“It does to me. I was hoping to go skiing with you.”
“And that’s why you’ve been sitting here since …”
“Since eleven-thirty. Three and a half hours. But don’t feel obligated.”
“I don’t. I just think you’re a bit of a plonker, Hugo Lamb.”
So my name has sunk in. “We’re all of us different things at different times. A plonker now, something nobler at other times. Don’t you agree?”
“Right now I’d describe you as a borderline stalker.”
“Tell me to sod off and off I will duly sod.”
“What girl could resist? Sod off.”
I do an urbane as-you-wish bow, stand, and slip The Art of War into my ski jacket. “Sorry for embarrassing you.” I head out.
“Oy.” It’s a lightening more than a softening. “Who says you’re capable of embarrassing me?”
I knock-knock my forehead. “Would ‘Sorry for finding you interesting’ go down any better?”
“A certain type of girl after a holiday romance would lap it up. Those of us who work here get a bit jaded.”
Machinery clanks and a big engine whines as the down-bound cable-car begins its journey. “I understand that you need armor, working in a bar where Europe’s Chetwynd-Pitts come to play. But jadedness runs through you, Holly, like a second nervous system.”
An incredulous little laugh. “You don’t know me.”
“That’s the weird part: I know I don’t know you. So how come I feel like I do?”
She does an exasperated grunt. “There’s rules … You don’t talk to someone you’ve known five minutes like you’ve known them for years. Bloody stop it.”
I hold up my palms. “Holly, if I am an arrogant twat, I’m a harmless arrogant twat.” I think of Penhaligon. “Virtually harmless. Look, would you let me share your ski lift up to the next station? It’s, what, seven, eight minutes? If I turn into a date from hell, it’ll soon be over — no no no, I know, not a date, it’s a shared ski chair. Then we’ll arrive and, with one expert thrust of your ski poles, I’m history. Please. Please?”
THE SKI LIFT guy clicks our rail into place, and I resist a joke about being swept off my feet as Holly and I are swept off our feet. December 30 has lost its earlier clarity and the summit of the Palanche de la Cretta is hidden in cloud. I follow the ski lift cable from pylon to pylon up the mountainside. The ravine opens up below us and, as I’m mugged by vertigo and grip the bar, my testicles run and hide next to my liver. Forcing myself to look down at the distant ground, I wonder about Penhaligon’s final seconds. Regret? Relief? Blank terror? Or did his head suddenly fill with “Babooshka” by Kate Bush? Two crows fly beneath our feet. They mate for life, my cousin Jason once told me. I ask Holly, “Do you ever have flying dreams?”