‘Is it a piste-basher?’
They listened again, and the drone became a rumble, sounding indeed like an approaching piste-grooming tractor, but without the beeping electronic alarm. The deep rumbling had an eerie low frequency, muffled and unsettling. It was as if someone had stuffed cotton wool in their ears.
‘That’s no piste-basher,’ Jake said. ‘That’s the sound of snow moving.’
The low rumbling got louder and brought with it another layer of sound, like a hissing, and when that came the entire restaurant quivered. The bottle and the glasses that Jake had placed on the table began to clink together and work their way to the edge of the table.
The restaurant was shaking. Jake and Zoe were both already on their feet, peering through the window up the mountain. There was nothing to see, but everything to hear. Bottles, crated or racked behind the bar, shivered and clinked. The wine bottle and glasses fell from the table to the wooden floor without breaking. One of the glasses went rolling.
Jake shouted that they should lie down in front of the bar, which lay between them and the source of the sound. He dragged a large table across the floor and jammed it against the bar. They scrambled underneath the table.
‘Sadie! Here, girl! Come here!’
The dog was trembling. The rumble had evolved into a cushioned booming, like sustained thunder, and the hissing sound was like that of a huge commercial aeroplane taking off right outside the door.
Bottles tumbled and smashed behind the bar. Plates and other equipment crashed and fell in the kitchen. They heard the wood of the log-built walls actually begin to groan and split. The restaurant threatened to shake itself into matchwood. Zoe and Jake crouched under the table, holding on to each other as the roaring and the sound of splitting wood engulfed them.
At last the shaking subsided, and with it the great hissing and the deep, low roar began to diminish, and pass on over them. They stayed under the table wrapped in each other’s arms, both holding the dog.
In less than a minute the sound of the avalanche had dropped to a low thrumming, and then was gone. But the sounds that followed were less easy to identify. There came on the log wall of the restaurant three clear, dull thumps, and then a skittering sound, perhaps like a bird scrambling for bread on the roof. Then silence.
‘What just happened?’
‘Don’t know. Let’s wait here a little while longer.’
They stayed under the table until they felt ready to explore. Jake scrambled out, looking uneasily at the roof. Then he stepped over to the wall that had resisted the main burden of snow. The plaster and lath had been smashed in and the snow had forced a gap between the outer logs, reaching long white fingers between them,probing the interior of the restaurant. It was as if the snow had made a grab for them.
‘Look at that!’
They couldn’t get out of the door through which they’d come in. A wall of snow blocked their way. They left by the kitchen door at the back and skirted the restaurant to see the mounds of snow piled high against the wall.
Zoe was about to remark that that was the second avalanche they’d survived, when she remembered they hadn’t survived the first one. Instead she said, ‘Can you die twice?’
He turned and looked at her, and snorted.
‘Do you think it’s like the layers on an onion? That if that avalanche had claimed us, we’d still be here? Or would we be somewhere else? Once I had a dream and in the dream I went to bed and fell asleep and was dreaming. And I knew it. I knew I was dreaming inside a dream. Do you think it’s like that? Do you?’
‘Are you okay?’ he asked, squinting at her.
‘I’m fine.’
‘You’re chattering, that’s all.’
‘I’m okay. That thing that happened where I thought all the people had come back. It upset me, Jake.’
‘Shall we get the hell out of here?’ Jake said. ‘I’m kind of done with dying today.’
‘Done with dying?’
‘Skiing. I said I’m done with skiing.’
‘No, you said “done with dying”.’
‘No I didn’t.’
‘Yes you did. You may have meant skiing but you said dying.’
‘Zoe, you’ve just escaped an avalanche and you’re talking gibberish.’
‘No I’m not. I’m clear as a bell. I know what I’m saying and I know exactly what you said.’
‘Can we please go?’
‘Sure we can. Let’s get Sadie.’
They went back inside, but they couldn’t find her. She was nowhere. They searched the place, calling her name. They knew she was safe because she had been with them under the table. She hadn’t emerged from that spot until they did. But now she couldn’t be found.
‘She must have gone outside.’
They hunted for Sadie in front of and behind the now semi-derelict restaurant building, calling her name across the lengthening shadows of the trees, into the cold. There was no trace, and no paw tracks either. Jake was dismayed by her disappearance, but concluded she must have gone down the mountain.
Zoe made one last search of the restaurant. As she was checking under the tables she heard a burning log spit in the hearth. She turned and looked at the fire. The log that had for so long leaned unmoving against the other had split and fallen, and rolled just a centimetre from its brother.
No more than a centimetre.
8
The loss of Sadie seemed to be a big blow to Jake. He kept speculating aloud about where the hell she could have got to. Zoe was disappointed to lose the dog, too. To distract Jake, she suggested they find a new restaurant to eat in. They’d noticed a beautiful, chic and elegant place called, somewhat ridiculously, La Table de mon Grand-Père.
They chose grandfather’s favourite table by the window and lit candles. Zoe took up station in the kitchen and cooked up a boeuf bourguignon that would probably have given the original chef apoplexy; but it was one of Jake’s favourites and she served it with buttery mashed potatoes.
Jake waited with his knife and fork upright in his fists, even though he said he wasn’t hungry. He wanted to appear enthusiastic for her—she knew it. She kissed his forehead as she placed the plates on the table. ‘I’ve always loved cooking for you,’ she said. ‘Feeding you. Chopping it all up. Preparing it.’
‘You put love into your cooking. I can taste it.’
‘Can you still taste it? Here?’
‘I would taste its absence, if it wasn’t there.’
‘You’re taking that wine at a clip, aren’t you, mister?’
It was true. He’d uncorked a bottle of the most expensive stuff he could find in the place and had already downed two-thirds of the bottle with no help from Zoe.
‘I’m trying to get drunk. It’s not working.’
‘Why do you want to get drunk?’
‘The other night, when we drank that champagne and you attacked me in the lift—were you really drunk? Or pretending? Because no matter how much I drink here, I can’t get drunk.’
She took a sip of the wine herself. ‘I remember thinking I should have been drunk, then I felt drunk. Or maybe I needed to pretend to myself that I was drunk. So can I ask you again why you need to get drunk?’
‘Because I don’t know what the rules are here! I need to know. I feel like the ground keeps slipping. It scares me, in ways I don’t understand.’ He poured out the rest of the bottle.
She hadn’t yet mentioned to him the burning log in the hearth at La Chamade. ‘Something is changing.’
‘Yes. I sense it.’
They ate in silence. Zoe wanted to ask if he could taste his boeuf bourguignon, but thought better of it. Instead she asked him if he wanted her to describe being drunk, so that he could feel it; to which he replied he’d like to see if he could make it happen without any help. He got up from the table and came back with another bottle. She decided to join him in the profound loneliness of this hearty drinking.