IT’S NEARLY DARK when Celia gets back from the ice rink next day. Another first. She had to hire skates. To begin with, she’d felt like a toddler trying to walk. Then, once she dared let go of the handrail, like an ice-pick on legs, steel blades hacking into the slippery surface for extra balance. In the end she’d managed to do figures again, even some slow-spun pirouettes, and hardly knocked into people. Not bad after almost twenty years. It was the cold that drove her home eventually. Too much like being in a deep freeze. The cold and, perhaps, the music too, treacle-dripping from the speakers through a maze of Valentine-Day fairy lights and heart-shaped balloons on to the heads and shoulders of couples gliding round, glove in glove.
The phone starts to ring just as she is savouring the thick salty dregs of the minestrone she’d cooked to get the chill out of her bones. Celia sighs. She is sitting slumped on the floor-level mattress in her bedroom, the now empty soup bowl in her lap, on the night table a glass of Féchy and a plate that holds her Valentine treats from Bänninger’s – slices of Tipo di Milano salami laid out around a small mound of purple grapes, a pile of white asparagus topped with a swirl of mayonnaise. The portable TV in a corner of the bookshelf is giving the news round-up.
With another sigh she unslumps herself to fetch in the phone on its extension cord.
‘Hello,’ she says, a little breathlessly, flicking the ‘mute’ button on the remote control. The weatherman gulps like a fish out of water, nods and twitches his head at the map with its pig outline. (Sun symbols in the south, clouds with cartoon snowfalls for the rest of the country.)
‘Celia?’ The old man’s voice is hesitant.
‘Uncle Godfrey! How are you?’ (Night temperatures around freezing in the Mittelland, up to minus ten in exposed areas.)
‘I phoned earlier but there was no reply,’ he whines. What’s the matter with him? He doesn’t normally talk to her like this, petulant like a jealous old woman.
‘I spent the afternoon at the ice rink, that’s all. I was going to call you myself, later.’ (Danger of avalanches in the Alps.)
While he inquires, rather nervously, about the details of the Thirtieth Day, the memorial service he had requested for his sister, Celia takes a sip of the Féchy. The weatherman has vanished and it’s the local news now, with a frozen-looking reporter in a suede jacket and flowery skirt at the Carnival Parade.
‘A week on Tuesday, Uncle. Seven thirty in the evening. I’ll speak to you beforehand, don’t worry.’ She reaches for the plate with her Valentine treats, selects a piece of asparagus and licks off the mayonnaise, ‘You don’t mind me eating, do you?’ The asparagus is short and fat and succulent. It oozes apart deliciously when she squelches her tongue along its length, leaving the head, smooth, taut with the faintest trace of roughness, for last.
‘No, no, of course not. Bon appétit! It’s good to hear you’re well and … and … how is the flat doing, the decorating? Everything all right with you, Celia?’ Followed by a grunt.
For a moment the slice of salami wadded between her thumb and forefinger reminds her of liver-spotted skin. Whyonearth is her uncle so uncharacteristically concerned about her?
‘Sure I’m fine. Or shouldn’t I be?’ She closes her eyes, then shoves the salami into her mouth and chews with determined savagery. It suddenly dawns on her what’s wrong with the old man. He sounds guilty. Guilty? What about?
She watches the TV camera panning across the riot of colours: the costumes and bunting, the snow glittering in the watery sunlight against the red roof tiles of the Bürgerhäuser, the verdigris dome of St Nikolaus’s. Hundreds if not thousands of people are lining the main street and surging around the Sämannsbrunnen like a new crop that’s wildly propagating. Some of them grimace, a few smile and wave, craning their necks, others throw confetti. The floats start off with the Lady leading the Lion on his gold chain – as if the two of them had stepped straight out of the town’s coat of arms.
Celia leans her head against the wall. Quite composed now, she states: ‘So, I suppose you’ve heard from Walter. Complaining about me, was he?’ Her tongue squishes an asparagus against the roof of her mouth. Then another.
Finally he stammers, ‘Well, yes. Yes, Walter did get in touch. He phoned me after your row. Terrible, terrible thing to have a row like that, Celia.’
He pauses and Celia slowly counts to ten, fighting to contain her anger. The TV camera has skimmed across the crowd again, capturing someone in a carmine robe beside a chic older woman with red hair – Margaret, Lily’s mother! – before it zooms in on a muffled-up man in a wheelchair who is peering at a float of rappers and breakdancers and clapping his thin parchment hands to the silent beat.
Just as quietly, Celia munches a few grapes, having decided to bide her time.
‘If only poor dear Gabrielle, God bless her soul, had been a little more … forgiving,’ her uncle says in a shaky tone. Then he clears his throat. ‘I think it’s up to you now, Celia. You’ll need to show your brother that you don’t intend to … perpetuate things.’
A gigantic poison-green crocodile on three sets of legs is clacking its long plastic teeth at the TV camera.
‘Walter’s obviously not told you everything, Uncle. Because I did offer him a fairer share of the money, but he wouldn’t bloody listen!’
Forgodsake, why’s the man defending Walter? She’s done her best to be accommodating, dammit – pretty generous of her, too.
‘I am sorry, Celia dear. I ought to have talked about this sooner. Sorry. I just didn’t feel –’ There’s the crash of a door and his voice drops to a whisper: ‘That’s my Housekeeper from Hell back from the Carnival Parade. I’d better hang up. Bye.’
Why is he so anxious to get off the phone? The new home-help must have overheard dozens of his conversations by now. Unless – here Celia’s frown turns into a smile and she bursts out laughing – unless the woman has designs on him and he’s retaliating with evasive action, safeguarding his seventy-six years of bachelorhood. Whatever, she’ll ring him back some other time.
As for Walter, she has already posted her letter to him and Lily; the ball’s in his corner, et voilà. She presses the ‘mute’ button, drains her glass of white and finishes her meal.
The house is old and at night it creaks. It seems to creak at the touch of a moonbeam, the settling of a snowflake, a few scatters of needle-thin rain.
Now, though, a different kind of creaking has started. Celia can’t ignore it. Not after she’s been roused from her sleep by Rolf and Carmen’s homecoming, their laughter as they’d stumbled up the stairs, crooning snatches of songs. The creaking is getting more vigorous by the second. There are no voices, just the breathless straining of wooden slats near breaking point.
Like a child’s rocking horse. A rocking horse. Rocking and rocking. This is how Celia tries to stop herself from getting all hot and tangled up in the bedclothes. But it’s no use tonight. The horse is clattering out of control. It scrapes and bangs against the wall. Celia’s lower legs twitch. They kick instinctively, like in some reflex test. Then she can’t bear it any longer. She jumps out of bed and puts on the kingfisher-blue kimono (Franz’s last present, brought back from a climbing expedition in the East).
In the lounge the snow light filtering through the window clashes with the purple shadows of the ceiling and the warm yellow glow from the corridor. As she pads past the faintly luminous sheets spread over the furniture, she has a distinct sense of déjà vu. And, gazing out at the street and gardens freshly coated in white, at the flounces of ice crystals along tree branches and the curved necks of streetlamps, it’s easy for her to picture her mother in that ghostly Carnival dress of long ago, silhouetted against the plum-coloured curtains of the casino. For all Celia knows, her mother never even realised she’d been spied on.
She is about to turn away from the window when her eye falls on the apartment block opposite. Its tenants are a ‘strange sort’, as her mother used to lament – with what moral right, Celia has no idea – the police and social workers visit freely, removal vans and self-drives clog up the bicycle lane most weeks. Last October they had a sale on in one of the first-floor flats: EVERYTHING MUST GO a notice screamed in red capitals. Deli-Doris, who’d been and got herself a ‘virtually new’ mattress for her massages, told Celia that the couple had done a moonlight flit after falling into arrears with their rent and credit payments.
Nothing suggests any hurried departures tonight: most of the lights are out or the shutters down, and the balconies look like sad cold swallows’ nests vacated for winter. But one of the windows on the top floor, with a close-meshed net curtain, has suddenly become brighter. As if someone had been standing there a minute ago and wasn’t now. Celia blinks: beyond the streetlamps’ haloes she can feel the presence of veiled stars. When she glances over once more, the window is dark.