Bruno Crane
The Friend
Narracott wasn’t joking about the climb.
Barely had time to leave my bag in the room before he was dragging me up here.
It is so much colder at this altitude, a couple of thousand feet above the hotel.
My head spins. We’ve tackled the wall of rock that rises up behind the glacier: short and fiendish.
I felt every extra pound of flab. I’m not fit like I once was.
War keeps you trim. Despair and indolence do not.
Narracott was first on the rope. There were times, below him, when I had to try not to remember that all that lay between me and oblivion was Anthony Narracott and an inch of hemp.
But no. For the moment, at least, I think I’m useful to him.
Now we’re sitting on a largish ledge of rock and I don’t feel much less uneasy.
The white peaks of the surrounding mountains seem to enclose us.
There squats the ugly great blancmange of Mont Blanc.
Over there among the highest and most forbidding peaks is L’Ours Noir (or Orso Nero) Pass: France in one direction, Italy in the other, though at this time of year the route would be bordering on suicidal.
Far below is the hotel, the dark of the pine forest and then through a canopy of drifting clouds the town itself even further down …
my head swims. Vertigo might be one of the few mental weaknesses that hasn’t plagued me in my lifetime.
But in this moment, I’d rather be almost anywhere else.
Come to think of it, it might be more the company than the drop.
It’s so cold that it’s hard to talk. Narracott doesn’t seem to feel it at all. Is that any great surprise? He always was an unfeeling b—. And when there’s something in his sights, he’ll stop at nothing to pursue it.
‘I’d have thought it would keep you fit,’ Narracott says, as I sit here gasping at the freezing air. ‘All that running from the law. How is the,’ he smirks, ‘import-export business treating you, Crane?’
Truth is, not well. The black market’s sewn up by the East End boys now. I’m a lower-middle-class recluse nibbling at the edges, just about keeping my head above water: too respectable for them, not respectable enough for polite society.
‘You’re just as much of a crook as I am,’ I mutter.
‘What’s that, Crane?’
‘You heard me.’
‘Come on, old boy. Just a bit of friendly ribbing between chums.’ He takes a swig from his flask.
‘What’ve you got there?’ I ask him. ‘Scotch?’
He chuckles. ‘After a snifter? Wouldn’t you like that?
No, coffee. The real stuff, pure Arabica.
Can’t drink enough of the stuff, especially after all that nonsense ersatz chicory stuff in the war and the rubbish we still get at home.
I’ve worked out a little system: drop my flask off at Reception, they fill it up for me and it’s waiting by the time I’ve got my boots on in the ski room.
You could get them to make you a pot, old chap.
Here, try it! Puts hairs on your chest.’
He proffers the thing at me.
‘No,’ I say. ‘Can’t stand the stuff.’
‘I insist,’ he says. ‘You’ll like this.’ He shoves the flask at me so forcefully that on reflex, I take it. ‘Go on, man,’ he says. ‘It’ll warm you up.’
‘I don’t w—’ And then I find myself giving up. What’s the point? I realise I have no choice. Or rather, I can carry on resisting and he will carry on insisting, for the next few minutes. Or I can just give in now. I take the damned flask. He watches me, eagerly. And I think: he is enjoying this.
I sip it and of course it might be the best coffee ever produced but to me it tastes like the bitterest poison. He has always enjoyed little demonstrations of his power, little scenes like this. Finding new ways of humiliating me.
I hand the thing back so violently that a little slops over the side. I wipe my mouth. I feel like a fool, both for being made to drink it and now, acting like a child.
He screws up the flask and draws a great breath into his lungs, then throws out a hand at the view. ‘Not a bad place to have this little chat, eh? I thought we’d want to make sure we were somewhere we couldn’t be overheard.’
‘I can think of better places,’ I tell him.
I drag my gaze away from the drop only a few feet in front of us.
The ‘quick’ way back down. A frozen waterfall just below then a sheer wall of granite with a few small outcrops.
I let myself think about it for a second.
A chap falling might hit rock once, twice, before his broken body came to rest at the foot of the glacier, where the thing splits into huge chunks of frozen ice and moraine.
‘Take a look through these,’ Narracott says, handing me some binoculars. I do.
‘You see it?’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I see it.’ A small shadow in the rock, on the other side of the glacier.
The sight of it gives me a dark feeling, a tightness in my chest. There is a cloud hanging just above the peaks that looks just like the image of a howling wolf.
Though I know it’s just foolish superstition it sends a chill through me that has nothing to do with the cold.
‘Tomorrow night,’ Narracott says.
‘You don’t think tonight?’ I ask, trying to sound devil-may-care, as though my heart isn’t beating fit to burst out of my ribcage.
He shakes his head. ‘Tomorrow we’ll have a full moon. There’s a real dump coming after that, which will make it nigh on impossible. So it has to be tomorrow.’
I try to decide whether I’m relieved to have another twenty-four hours, or whether I’d prefer it just to be over, so that I can be far, far away from this place.
Oh, how I wish I could have said no to this little reunion.
But the honest, nasty truth is I need this.
I need it so very badly. And at the same time being here takes me back to a time when I saw into the darkest recess of my own soul and it terrifies me.
‘I have been asking you about coming here for five years,’ I tell him. ‘There have been times I’ve been damn near desperate. What’s taken so long?’
‘Oh,’ he sighs, as though we’re discussing a game of golf we haven’t managed to play. ‘Life’s been busy, old fellow. Getting married, joining and working my way up the greasy pole in the Party … And to be quite honest … it hasn’t been worth the risk, you understand?’
‘Well, why the rush now?’
‘They’ve opened the hotel back up, for one. That made it feel like we shouldn’t wait any longer. And things have got a little – tighter – recently. Catherine’s trust … not what I thought it was, etcetera. Poof! Nearly all used up.’
‘I’ve been thinking,’ I say.
‘Always dangerous,’ he says. ‘Hope you didn’t hurt yourself.’ His voice is light but when I look up he’s watching me like a marksman.
‘I’m thinking there’s a lot of people staying in the hotel at the moment,’ I say. ‘I’m thinking someone’s going to see something.’
‘We don’t have a choice. We’re just going to have to be very careful.’
‘And you brought Catherine? You brought your wife? What were you thinking, man?’ He holds up a hand as though to shush me but I race on.
‘That was never the plan. You never said she would be coming too. That isn’t what we agreed.
We said we’d keep it clean, surgical. Your wife being here could jeopardise everything … ’
He simply waits there now, watching me, as though waiting for me to run out of steam.
How can he look so relaxed? I had forgotten this about him.
The appearance of grace under pressure. I suppose it’s what makes him such a good politician.
The face of an expert gambler. I have no such face, worse luck.
‘Have you quite finished?’ he asks, tolerantly, like a parent waiting for a child to end a tantrum.
‘Look. Catherine got the idea into her head that she wanted to come. Used to ski as a child, misses the Alps, London and Paris so dull at this time of year, that sort of nonsense. And there has been some talk about how it would be good to be seen and photographed with the wife a little more, in the run-up to the Party leadership bid. Besides it just looks better, doesn’t it?
Less odd than two men on their own. Less worthy of suspicion.
I find these days that I am very … observed.
Besides, she’s had some women’s troubles of late – has been up and down to a clinic in London.
Her doctor, a veritable old battle-axe, called me up and all but insisted I take her away with me for her nerves.
As it is, now you’re the one that looks odd, old fellow.
Always alone, Crane. Always alone. Any woman on the scene?
’ And then, before I have time to answer, ‘No, I imagine not.’
He could have got a message to me. He could have told me to bring someone. But perhaps it suited him not to. He’s right. What this new arrangement does instead is make me look strange. The lone wolf tagging himself onto a husband and wife’s skiing trip.
‘But how are you going to make sure your wife doesn’t get suspicious? You’re going to be keeping some odd hours. If I were her, I’d have some questions to ask.’
‘I think you can allow me to keep my house in order,’ he says, with a sardonic smile. ‘Besides, my sweet little wife has a yen for a certain little pill that knocks her out for twelve hours a night. If anything is to threaten our plans here it is going to be your love affair with alcohol.’
‘You can hardly talk of affairs.’
‘Oh that,’ he waves a hand. ‘All in the past!’
He actually doesn’t know, I realise. He doesn’t know who else is staying here. It is delicious, sitting here for a moment with this power over him, possessing, for once, greater knowledge than he.
‘You have heard who’s also here, haven’t you?’
‘Who?’
‘Sylvia Sinclair. She’s a beauty,’ I say, ‘perhaps just on the turn. They get a little windblown, don’t they? But still quite something.’
‘What?’ he manages. He looks suddenly like a man facing a firing squad.
‘But what in God’s name is she doing here?
’ Then he swears, once, but profusely – the word seeming to ring off the rocks about us.
It is rare to see him so rattled. He is always so in control.
Then he looks back at me. ‘Did you do this? Is this your work? If so, you’re a—’
‘Why would I have done it?’ I ask. ‘And how? I don’t have any silver screen sirens in my address book.’
He shakes his head. ‘Oh, for God’s sake. No, of course it wasn’t you. You don’t have the brains to be so devious.’
As he looks at me I feel the full force of his scorn. It comes to me now in a rush. He needs me … for now. Just as it was before. To do his dirty work for him. I am a useful idiot. For the time being, that is. And when I am no longer useful, what then?