• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1402 0

they’d both been excited. Jennifer was fit, an effortless long-distance runner, with a couple of half marathons under her belt, and she enjoyed lots of the sports they’d tried together, especially in their earlier years. Stephen had been good at everything. He had that natural sporting ability thing. He’d been a Scout at school, and done the Duke of Edinburgh awards scheme, and he’d taken to almost everything he’d tried. He had persuaded her to have a go at wind-surfing and then, when that had been a hit, kite surfing, and paragliding, and, while she knew she wasn’t particularly good at any of them, she loved trying. Loved being with him, too. She knew she had no problem with speed, nor with heights…just with speed, heights, and snow. The feeling she got, standing at the top of a run that was anything beyond green, with the snow falling away from you at an angle that its bright whiteness made it almost impossible to calculate—but which you knew for sure was too bloody steep—was like nothing she had experienced before.

Maybe she was too old when she started. Amanda could ski, having been taken by a boyfriend’s family when she was eighteen, and although she’d never actually seen her do it, she knew she was of a reasonable standard. She’d even done some instructor’s course, in New Zealand, a few years ago when she was traveling, so she had to be pretty good. Hannah had been going with the school since she was twelve and was obviously excellent. She always said she’d rather be on the beach, but she was nevertheless a competent skier. Even Mark could do it. Jennifer had started in her thirties. Maybe it was just asking too much of an old dog in the way of new tricks.

Not that Stephen had felt the same way, predictably enough. Duck to water. He’d only stayed in ski school for a couple of days that first time, then he’d been off with his mates—leaving after breakfast and returning, full of stories of daring, late in the afternoon. He had loved it from the first day—when, incidentally, he had not fallen once. The end of that first week, she’d watched him, from the haven of a café on the piste, swoosh down the run, legs tight together, knees bent at the perfect angle, turning effortlessly, huge wide grin on his face, and she’d known she was in trouble.

Every year the conversation went more or less the same way. They were carefulish with their money—they had plans and schemes, and they put away a larger chunk than most peers of their salaries into pensions and savings plans. They allowed themselves one “grand” holiday each year. When they’d started, after a luxurious, beyond-their-means honeymoon in the Maldives, they’d agreed that they should do what they could, before children came, because afterward, it was Devon and Cornwall for them, the self-catering cottages of their childhoods, for the foreseeable future. They didn’t say that anymore, obviously—mustn’t mention the C word—but the principle remained. Jennifer would collect brochures, for Hawaii and the Seychelles, for Capri and South Africa. And Stephen would get the Snowline brochure his mates were passing around at work and figure out which part of the three valleys he wanted to conquer next. She had never pushed. She knew how much he adored skiing. She just wondered, annually, why he hadn’t quite worked out how much she hated it.

The other people in the chalet were okay. There were changes, every year—a couple would drop out, or be somewhere else—but a caucus of four or five couples remained faithful. They were quite nice, actually. The evenings were always fun. Someone else was cooking a ludicrously old-fashioned three-course meal, with sparkling wine and canapés, and peach schnapps flowed. It was the only place in the world, apart from at home with Hannah, that Jennifer played, and enjoyed, games—she was even pretty good at charades. The trouble was that after the big meal, and the copious quantities of alcohol, and the late night, you were expected to get up, before eight, shrug yourself into four layers of restrictive, unflattering clothing in a too-hot chalet, and