Chapter 18
18
Speckknodel usually made everything better, but the meal was unbearable.
First, he’d brooded for half an hour about Sophie’s calm accusation: You struggle with how much you love them .
Then he’d had to watch Sophie and his mother laugh and joke – occasionally at his expense – while Sophie helped to make the South Tyrolean speciality. He had sat at the table sharing a beer with Caro and avoiding her meaningful looks.
The necessary conversation had been whispered while Sophie was in the shower:
‘You didn’t mention you were back together!’
‘I’m not – we’re not. Not really.’
‘Oh, Andreas, “not really,” isn’t going to stop her breaking your heart again!’
‘She didn’t break my heart!’ He obviously hadn’t convinced his mother and unfortunately, she had reason: she knew about the blasted emerald, had more of an idea than anyone else of exactly what he’d been through after Miro’s death.
Now they were one big, happy family around the scarred wooden table, but at least his mother had brought a nice bottle of St Magdalener from home. He just had to make sure he didn’t down his glass too quickly.
‘I always thought it must take forever to shred cabbage like this,’ Sophie commented with a tight smile when the silence stretched a little too long for her British sensibilities. She scooped up a forkful of Krautsalat, the cabbage side dish his mother had brought from home. The tangy vinaigrette with caraway seeds was another of his comfort foods, but he nearly choked on it when he caught himself staring at Sophie’s mouth as she took a bite.
‘There is a tool for that,’ his mother explained. ‘The Krauthobel. But I have a machine.’
‘A cabbage-slicing machine?’
‘All the benches in the kitchen at home have machines on them,’ Caro said with a smile. ‘We have a machine for bread, for mincemeat, for sliced meat, for peeling fruit, pitting olives, spraying cream?—’
‘I think she understands,’ Andreas grumbled.
‘So, you’re here doing research for a wedding?’ his mother asked with more than a touch of scepticism.
Sophie nodded. ‘We’ve held a few weddings in the area, but this client wanted something special involving outdoor activities, so…’
‘Ah, that makes more sense. I was picturing Andreas helping you pick out flowers!’
Sophie mercifully kept her mouth shut, although he could tell she was stifling a smile.
‘What are you doing down here?’ He tried to keep his voice casual, without much success.
‘We’re going shopping tomorrow in Verona.’
‘Do you want to come?’ Caro asked teasingly. ‘Your last pair of Armani jeans must be about ten years old now.’
‘Twenty,’ he corrected her. ‘I’ll pass. I have to sort out our equipment stores anyway.’
Then his mother opened her big mouth. ‘Would you like to come, Sophie? Do you have Saturdays off while you’re away?’
‘You know, actually I’d love to.’ She sent him a sidelong glance and then leaned over the table to speak softly to his mother. ‘But we might have to promise not to talk about… him.’
‘You can talk about what you like,’ he snapped.
‘Perhaps you could meet us for lunch?’ his mother suggested, ignoring his grumpy outburst. He should have made an effort to be civil, for Sophie’s sake, but company was not what he wanted right now. He needed to get up a mountain and stop the churning in his stomach at everything that had happened over the past few days.
‘A late lunch, maybe.’ He could do a few climbing routes from Arco in the morning, clear his head. Then see Sophie again on her day off. Damn, he wished they could have got this unexpected crackle of desire out of their systems before his family had appeared.
‘Tell me about the weddings you plan,’ Caro asked Sophie. ‘Are they all over the world? Where’s the most exotic place you’ve organised a wedding?’
‘Most of our clients don’t have an unlimited budget, so European destinations are most common, or holiday destinations in the UK, but I have been to the Caribbean and Australia for beach weddings.’
‘Beach weddings,’ his mother repeated with a nod that he nevertheless interpreted as disapproving. ‘I suppose that’s what some people want. I got married in the same church as my parents and grandparents.’
Andreas didn’t look up from his Knodel, carefully slicing into the spongy dumpling and focusing on the simple flavours of onion refined with salt, rather than the unspoken words in the air around the table.
Surprisingly, Caro had mercy on him. ‘I think a beach wedding sounds lovely.’
‘Since when do you like the beach?’ he teased her, hoping to change the subject.
‘It’s true,’ she said, turning to Sophie. ‘Most of Mama and Tatta’s friends have holiday apartments on the coast near Rimini, but our grandparents couldn’t stand the sea, so they bought this one.’
‘How can you not like the sea?’ Sophie exclaimed.
‘Our family,’ Caro continued, ‘gets uncomfortable when their familiar mountains aren’t visible any more – Tatta especially. We have a German word that means home and tradition and comfort, familiarity and history – “Heimat”. Tatta’s big on Heimat. He can name every peak around our house and he likes it that way. When you grow up cut off in deep valleys, you don’t always like to leave.’ She rolled her eyes as she said it, but Andreas knew she was carved from the same wood. ‘But not Andreas, of course,’ she added.
His mother’s expression pinched and he stifled a sigh. When she opened her mouth to speak, he cut her off, ‘Maybe we can skip the criticism of Andreas tonight? Especially since Tatta would miss out.’ He felt Sophie’s curious eyes on him as though they scratched his skin.
‘I was going to say that you haven’t been away as much recently. Perhaps you’ve discovered the value of home and don’t need to prove yourself in the earth’s most isolated corners.’
His leg twitched and he had to fight to stop his knee bouncing restlessly under the table.
Then Sophie opened her mouth and said entirely the wrong thing. ‘But what about Manaslu?’
Caro’s head jerked up. ‘Manaslu?’
His mother went white.
‘You’re going again?’ Caro prodded. ‘When?’
‘In the autumn,’ he answered as casually as he could.
‘Who with?’
‘Brzezinski and Kastelic so far – Dexter might join. We don’t have a firm plan yet.’
‘We need Andreas in mid-September to be one of the guides for a wedding party,’ Sophie added, trying desperately to smooth over her mistake. ‘I hope he’ll be able to. I made a bet that he’d cry at the wedding,’ she added with a smile, but his throat closed all over again. If she said anything about the terms of that bet in front of his family…
He stood abruptly, his chair scraping on the terracotta tiles. He would have had another dumpling or two, but the conversation had turned into a treacherous snow bridge on a glacier, where one wrong step could see him falling into a crevasse.
‘Andreas at a wedding?’ his mother commented lightly as he dumped his plate in the sink and started running the water. ‘You must be very persuasive.’
‘No, he’s only doing this for Willard – his overdeveloped sense of responsibility.’
‘His sense of responsibility doesn’t extend to some things,’ his mother said tightly. ‘No mother likes to imagine her son frozen or in pieces, in some place on another continent that God left behind. We have plenty of mountains right here at home and they’re not enough. Nothing is enough for my son.’ Her voice trailed off.
He’d heard it all before, but this time, he was desperate to know what Sophie made of it all while dreading finding out. He glanced at her, but she had that expression of wide-eyed dismay on her face that reminded him of the day he’d told her he wouldn’t marry her. She would understand his mother’s sentiment. Nothing is enough for Andreas .
But she also understood more: You struggle with how much you love them.
She stood, grasping her plate. ‘Can I help with the washing up?’
‘No, we had a big day. You should rest, if Caro and Mama are going to drag you around to a thousand shops tomorrow.’
‘I do have quite a lot of stamina when it comes to shopping, you know.’
‘Well, I’m glad I don’t have to take you,’ he quipped, but kicked himself when her cautious smile slipped. But I would, if you asked me. I’m going to drive an hour and a half to meet you for lunch. I want to spend all the time with you, except my mother’s right and you’re right and I can’t give either of you what you need.
She stifled a yawn.
‘Go,’ he said gently, ‘read your book. I’ll be there soon.’
* * *
When he slipped into the bedroom an hour later after nursing a schnapps on the balcony, the room was dark and Sophie was a stretched-out shape on the far side of the bed. He should have come earlier so they could talk, rather than being the coward he usually was when it came to feelings, but there were just too many feelings, all conflicting.
When he peeled off his T-shirt and jeans and slipped into the bed, his thoughts unexpectedly calmed to a still day on the lake, rather than the stormy sea he’d been since his family had interrupted them. Sophie rolled over, her hand landing on his bare arm and absently stroking his skin, making the warm, calm sensation spread through him like syrup.
‘Andreas,’ she sighed sleepily.
‘I’m sorry.’
She stilled and he wanted to take her hand and move it along his arm until she understood that she should keep touching him. ‘For what?’
‘Everything,’ he said with a sigh. ‘ Me .’
The sheets rustled as she propped herself up on one elbow and peered down at him. The dim glow through the shutters illuminated only patches of her face. ‘You don’t need to apologise,’ she said, her voice even. She was fully awake now. ‘I shouldn’t have said anything about Manaslu.’
He liked her remorse even less than his own. ‘I should have told them already. I just didn’t want?—’
‘That reaction from your mum. I get it. I really do.’
‘She’s right, though,’ he added softly. ‘I don’t even know why I put them through it. Did you know the death rate for Gasherbrum is 9 per cent?’ His voice trailed off. ‘Nine in every hundred people who attempt it never come back.’ Miro had been one of them. ‘When we lost Miro—’ His throat closed. It was a miracle he’d got the first four words out, that a concerningly reckless part of him wanted to keep talking.
‘You had to tell Toni.’
He crumbled, pulling away from her unconsciously. ‘I had to tell her over the phone, from the hospital and then… bring him back to her.’
‘But it wasn’t your fault, was it?’
He shook his head.
‘You did what you could.’ The conviction in her voice faded the longer he was silent.
Rubbing a hand over his face, he replied, ‘I don’t feel guilty. It’s not as simple as that. He was killed by falling ice – a risk that’s always present and impossible to predict. We all take responsibility for ourselves on the mountain. In the death zone, you even have to leave the bodies. I managed to get Miro down with ropes and a plastic sheet for a sled, but I would have left him if I’d had to. He would have left me, if our positions had been reversed.’
The wobble in his voice alarmed him and he willed Sophie not to touch him. He wouldn’t cope with that undeserved tenderness right now.
‘If you don’t feel guilty, why the turmoil?’ she asked, thankfully matter-of-factly.
He paused, hesitating one last time before admitting the truth – the reason she should stay well away from him. ‘I don’t feel guilty because I understand the choice he made. I’ve made that choice hundreds of times myself. I can’t control the elements, but I go up anyway. I just don’t know if it was fair to Toni.’
‘Ah,’ she said softly, although he was bewildered by what she thought made sense in his admission. ‘You’re scared of yourself.’
‘What does that even mean, Sophie?’ he harrumphed.
‘Would you prefer it if they didn’t love you? If you could just go up a mountain and no one would miss you?’
‘Of course not!’ But it would be simpler.
‘You feel responsible for their worries.’
‘I am responsible for their worries – as they constantly remind me. I could just stay down.’
Her reaction was not what he’d expected. ‘No, you couldn’t.’
‘You’re right. I couldn’t.’ He stared at her, what he could see of her face. He thought she was frowning, but something in her tone, in the way she defended him, reminded him of the old Sophie. ‘Nothing really makes sense to me in the valley,’ he admitted. ‘People. They don’t make sense to me.’
‘I’ve seen you, Andreas,’ she said, a smile in her voice this time. ‘Not right up high, but I’ve been with you in the valley and up a mountain.’
‘But with my parents, they don’t see me up a mountain. I used to climb with my father, but we did the same routes, the ones he learned on when he was a boy, the routes he taught me when he was young. It’s not the same as the split-second decisions, the confrontation with the fragility and resilience of life.’
‘That could be the name of your biography.’
He scrunched his brow. ‘What biography? I want a climbing route named after me and that’s all.’
‘That’s all ?’
‘I’ll leave my invisible footprints on the mountains, the bits of my soul. But I’m a disappointment to my parents. I’m a disappointment to just about everyone. Even my sponsors want me to post on Insta-whatever and I disappoint them .’
‘You didn’t disappoint me.’
Although her words crawled into a dark space inside him and nestled there, his first reaction was a snort. ‘Sophie, I turned down your marriage proposal. There’s no bigger disappointment than that.’
‘I meant today,’ she clarified. ‘You really don’t have to apologise. I wanted to meet your family when we were together for the wrong reasons – as a statement you didn’t want to make. But I know, now, that nothing’s perfect. My eyes are open. No disappointment, just enjoying this between us for a little while, having my nosy questions answered. You’re not responsible for me and I won’t expect commitment.’
‘I thought you liked commitment? You plan weddings. You married Rory Brent.’
‘I keep my hopes and dreams for other people these days,’ she responded drily. ‘And you can shut up about Rory. I did a lot of stupid things when I was younger.’
He got the message, but the idea that Sophie had no hopes and dreams for herself didn’t sit right with him either.
She flopped back onto the bed. ‘But if you want to apologise for something, then apologise for your mum’s terrible timing. They couldn’t have arrived an hour later?’
He met her gaze across the pillow, his eyesight now adjusted enough to make out her lips, curved into a smile. The valley air pressure, the feeling that he couldn’t breathe properly eased and his chest rose and fell with deep breaths.
‘An hour?’ he responded, his voice pitched now. ‘You’re optimistic. Don’t you know climbers are shit in bed?’
‘For someone who believes he can climb any mountain on earth, you are remarkably humble about some things – that or you’re just scared.’
It was his turn to hop up on an elbow. ‘Scared? Of what?’
‘Great sex,’ she replied cheekily, draping her arms around his neck. ‘Good enough to keep you in bed in the morning instead of heading out to scale a rock face.’
He lowered his head until he was a breath from her lips. ‘I am terrified of you,’ he admitted, safe in the knowledge that she didn’t understand how deeply he meant the words. ‘Terrified of wanting you so much that I could ignore the presence of my mother in the other room.’
Pressing a kiss to her mouth, he lingered for a long moment, savouring the softness, but he didn’t push deeper.
‘It’s better if we don’t, isn’t it?’ she asked with a gratifying note of frustration in her voice.
‘They won’t stay long.’ He would make sure of it. ‘I don’t think I’d be able to keep you quiet.’ A grin stretched across his mouth when she rolled her eyes. But his smile faded as he studied the shadowed lines of her face. ‘I don’t want to be thinking about my family if we… cross that line again.’
She nodded, threading her fingers in his hair until he wondered if he’d melt from the affection. ‘Then I do hope they don’t stay long.’ She pressed a light kiss to his lips. ‘Because as soon as they leave, we’re crossing that line.’
With a groan, he collapsed back onto the bed and tugged her close. Her head settled on his shoulder, the past and the present mingling in him with that simple action. Despite the heightened emotions of the day, he drifted off easily. Even his final thought before sleep claimed him couldn’t disrupt the warmth of wellbeing glowing in him: You struggle with how much you love them.