By Light Alone (2 page)

2

They took lunch with Ysabella and Peter, and also with a couple from England called the Horner-Kings. She was Emma Horner-King, and she was as quietly hesitant as her name implied; but
he
was called, of all things, Ergaste. They made him say it, and spell it, and explain that it wasn’t an Anglo-Saxon king, or some fairy tale giant (very good, not heard that one before), that, he said, ‘it had some obscure literary significance to my parents’. Ergaste took all the ribbing in good spirit, and the mood of the sixsome waxed jolly. Good to hit it off with people; spontaneity its own reward. They all drank Chianti, and it was as cold and bright and elevating as the mountain itself. They ate blue grapes, and little spears of compressed caviar dripped in a creamed-chilli sauce. Peter liked to roll a grape around the inside of his mouth, push it with his tongue such that his upholstered cheeks bulged alarmingly.

There was a good deal of laughter.

They dined on a balcony, shielded from the full glare of the glitter-freeze by an awning. There was something indulgently
parental
about the peak of the mountain itself, watching over them from its distance.

‘Tomorrow,’ said Marie, leaning back in her chair, ‘I shall try the ice-cream slopes.’

‘Mobbed,’ said Ergaste, with his ridiculously fruity accent. ‘Always. Not worth it.’

‘Oh,’ his wife added, ‘except to say you’ve
done
it, you know. Ski it, and have a nibble too.’

‘Not good
skiing
snow,’ said Ergaste, drawing a thumbnail through his close-cropped red hair. ‘Is my point. And nor is the mix very
tasty
. They have to mix it, jewsee, to make it skiable at all. One of those horrible
compromise
plays.’

‘You’ll excuse my husband’s Shrek-y mood,’ said Emma.

‘The
problem
I have with the ice-cream slopes,’ said Peter, loudly, ‘is the machinery.’

‘At the top, you mean?’

‘
Loud!
’ said Peter, loud himself. ‘I mean, let’s appreciate they’ve to generate the stuff somehow. I can appreciate ice cream’s not going to
fall from the clouds by itself
. But still.’

‘Agree,’ boomed Ergaste. ‘Surely, this dayn
age
, they could make the stuff less
noisily
.’

A waitress came to clear their table. She bent to gather the plates, almost as if presenting her centre-parting to George’s scrutiny. Ink-black hair, a strip of pale brown scalp.

‘I really
flew
down the slopes today,’ George announced to the whole group, apropos of nothing. ‘
Positively
flew.’

‘I don’t believe they’re allowed to wear their hair like that.’ Ysabella said. As she leant forward to retrieve her wine glass a Y-shaped vein blued and swelled slightly beneath the plaster-white skin of her brow. ‘I mean, when they’re
working
? Aren’t there any rules against it? It’s disgusting, really.’

‘Fucking leafheads,’ said Ergaste without violence.

‘Sunny day,’ said George, absently.

‘But I mean – when they’re working? I’d say they might tie it decently away when they come to—’ She searched for the right word, before alighting, in a way that seemed almost to surprise her, on: ‘us.’

‘Oh,
plenty
of sunlight in these latitudes,’ said Ergaste, sarcastically.

‘Oh I’m sure they’re
fed
,’ said Marie. ‘Oh I don’t doubt they take actual food as part of their wages. Don’t you think?’

‘We could ask, I suppose,’ said George, without the least intention of doing anything of the sort. He found himself wondering why, when he could clearly see his own shades reflected in Emma’s shades, he couldn’t see
her
shades reflected in the reflection of
his
shades in her shades. It seemed to him that he ought to be able to do that.

‘It’s a
little
indecent,’ Ysabelle said, vaguely.

‘Not that you’re
prejudiced
,’ boomed Peter.

‘I’m sure they’re fed,’ said Marie again, as if this point were important to her.

‘I’m sure food is the height and length and breadth
of
their wages,’ said Ergaste. ‘That and a shared dorm room in which to sleep. I’m sure no actual
money
changes hands.’ He seemed to find this richly amusing.

‘I know it’s a shocking thing to say,’ Ysabella went on. ‘But I find it wasteful for them to eat
actual
food. It’s not as if they
need
to. Perhaps they may crave the . . .’ But here her conversational powers really did fail her, and she fell silent.

‘Women,’ said Ergaste. ‘The men are too lazy to do it. The women work, to build up bodyfat.
Greedy
little leafheads.’ He looked about. ‘Not greedy for food, ysee,’ he clarified. ‘Greedy for
babbies
.’

But nobody was really very interested in this. George drained his drink. Wherever he placed his wine glass on the polished table it fitted neatly onto the base of its reflected self. There was something satisfying about that. It said something about the innate harmony of the cosmos. The day’s skiing had left a distant ache in his thighs. Intensely satisfying. Real work, real hard physical work – and actual danger too. And it
had
been dangerous, for all that MediDrones floated nannyishly over every bulge.

The conversation had moved on to food production. Ergaste was expatiating, in his clipped style, on the role of the gentleman farmer these days. His main point was, staples were right out. Right out. No margin in them any longer. Pretty much all food production geared to the luxury market now; which had had the strange consequence that staples had
become
luxury foods – for faddists, or religious cultists, or people who had mad reasons for needing it. Wheatgrain weight-for-weight was caviar-expensive. He knew people groused about this, but it was an inevitability. Get with the programme, or get out of the game altogether. No margins in staples any longer. Not now that the world had the hair.

‘It’s a blessing,’ said Emma.

‘Certainly it’s the way the world is, now. For good or ill,’ said Ergaste.

The early afternoon sun was splendorous. Away at the far end of the balcony, two waitresses stood with their backs to the sun. One swivelled her face towards the other and whispered something into her ear. The other, holding her tray like a chivalric shield before her torso, clapped a hand to cover her mouth: shocked, or perhaps amused, by what she had heard. George wondered what the gossip was. Had they been looking in his direction? Probably not. Plenty of other busy tables on the balcony.

At this point Marie decided abruptly that she
must see
Ezra. She had her Fwn out and had called up to his room before George could intervene. ‘It’s his naptime, darling,’ he said. But it was too late. ‘I haven’t seen him since yesterday,’ she told him – or rather, she told Peter, pushing George’s shoulder with her free hand. ‘A mother has emotional needs and instincts. Only a monster would stifle the free expression of my maternal instincts.’

‘Since there are instincts,’ said Emma, cheerfully, ‘then why aren’t there
out
stincts?’

They all chuckled at this, because it actually was rather amusing, and clever, at least coming from somebody as mousy as Emma. Ergaste laughed loudest, boomingly even, and Emma slapped his lapel with the back of her hand. But it was all terribly jolly, it really was.

The sunlight was as sparkly as a
white firework
, and gemstones of brilliance twinkled across the entire snowfall.

And here was Arsinée, carrying a
very
grumpy-looking Ezra across the balcony towards their table. ‘Here’s my little package of loveliness,’ cried Marie. Arsinée presented the baby to its mother rather after the manner of a wine-waiter offering an unusually expensive bottle to a diner, and for a minute or so Marie cooed and poked a finger into the dimples of the thing’s little face. Miraculously Ezra did not bawl. Which is to say: he
did
screw up his little eyes against the brightness of the day, and he did ready his hands for an imaginary munchkin boxing match, but no sound accompanied the opening and closing of his mouth. Marie redirected her attention back to Ergaste, and Arsinée hovered for a moment, uncertain whether she was required to stay or to go.

‘I want to see mine too,’ Emma declared, pulling a Fwn from her sleeve.

‘Oh for fucking out loud,’ groaned Ergaste.

‘Language!’ his wife chirruped.

‘We
had
her for
breakfast
.’

Emma pulled out her Fwn and briskly instructed somebody called
Shirusho
to bring Charlie down to the balcony restaurant, darling, right
now
?

‘We had her
all through
breakfast,’ said Ergaste

‘Is Leah your one and only?’ Ysabelle asked George.

‘Don’t listen to my ogre husband,’ said Emma. ‘It wasn’t even five minutes at breakfast.’

‘She kicked my chococross right off the plate,’ boomed Ergaste.

‘It was an accident and it was
delightful
actually, really, it was spontaneous physical comedy.’

George turned his face from Emma and Ergaste’s little squabble. ‘Two,’ he replied, meeting Ysabelle’s eye. ‘Ezra, there. We’ve a daughter as well.’

‘Two!’ repeated Ys, as if this number were one of those mind-stunning statistics you hear on documentaries about the vastness of interstellar space.

‘Physical comedy
bollocks
,’ announced Ergaste, in a slightly too-loud voice.

‘Language!’

‘A man’s entitled to breakfast!’

‘Who’s for some after-lunch skiing?’ Marie put in, brightly, her attempt to break this unseemly display of discord. Arsinée, looking from person to person for further cues, wrapped Ezra up and slipped away off the balcony.

‘I
simply
don’t see it’s too much to ask,’ said Ergaste, sitting back in his chair as a bearish lump, ‘that a fellow be allowed to break his
fast
in peace.’

‘I’ll have another go skiing,’ said Peter, loudly. ‘That Chianti has set me up nicely.’ His sticky-out-ears had changed colour, chameleon-like, to match the pink of the awning.

‘Not me,’ said Ysabella. ‘That Chianti has set
me
up for a little nap.’ She trailed her gaze languidly around the little group, and, just for a moment, her eye met George’s. There was a little electro-something, a spark. ‘A little
lie down
,’ she repeated.

‘Why, Ysabella,’ he said, testing the instinct. ‘Surely you haven’t overindulged, winily speaking?’

Ysballe looked him straight in the eye. ‘It was too tempting,’ she said, with a slight, voluptuous slur in her words.

‘Alcohol,’ he agreed.

George had met her for the first time only days earlier. But this – this was the inward vertigo, that exciting and alarming sense of hurtling into something new. Everything was all about exciting possibilities. ‘What about you, darling?’ he said to Marie.

‘I’ve not come all this way to
lie down
,’ she replied, sharply. ‘I can lie down at home.
I’m
giving the slopes another bash.’

‘You could try the ice-cream slope,’ he prompted – because, after all, that was a whole hill away, more distant from the hotel, which would give him that much more time alone. To cover the obviousness of this gambit, he added: ‘It’s the big feature, after all. People come from all over the world to, and so on, and so forth.’

‘Maybe tomorrow. Regular piste will suit me for now. Will you?’

‘No, I’ve done my death-dicing today,’ he announced. ‘I’ll go and see what’s happening in the games room. Or maybe just catch up on the news.’

News
was a dirty word, and the group flapped their hands disapprovingly. Life was too short for
news
. But news was one of George’s little eccentricities, and he was perfectly aware of the mild distinctiveness it gave his otherwise blandly unmemorable character. And now Marie was on her feet, so Peter scrabbled to his legs too, with just too much eagerness. And Ysabella bade them all good afternoon and wandered over towards the lifts. So George got up and sauntered away, carefully picking a trajectory across the balcony that made it look like he wasn’t simply following Ys. That was all part of the game, of course. And it was a splendid game. The Horner-Kings’ carer was emerging into the light carrying a wriggling bundle of tiny Horner-King – superfluously now, of course; for the point in having her brought down in the first place was to show off to the others.