Mrs Caliban and other stories

by Rachel Ingalls

  The game began. It looked rough: the teams seemed to hate each other.

  ‘Who are they?’ she asked.

  ‘The local boys against somebody – I think it’s Vienna.’

  She couldn’t follow the action. Men on the ice were shouting at each other and also being yelled at from the stands. A fight broke out. When another commotion started among the spectators down near the ice, she said, ‘Do you want to stay till it’s over? I’m frozen,’ and they left.

  She almost fell to her knees on the walk to the cable-car. He whispered, ‘Remember tomorrow,’ as she got in. She was numb with the cold and too tired to answer.

  *

  She woke late at night. Someone was knocking at the door. She got up and went to answer it. Her mother stood in the doorway with a baby in her arms: she said, ‘Help me.’ And she started to tell Mamie that there were people chasing her – she was in danger and needed someplace to hide. But Mamie was afraid and said she couldn’t let her in. She closed the door. She woke up.

  Later she remembered the baby her mother had been holding. The baby must have been herself. It must have been, because she’d been her mother’s only child.

  *

  ‘If you come with me,’ Katherine said, ‘we can set the pace.’

  ‘You set it too slow,’ Randall complained.

  ‘You go on ahead with Father,’ Russell told Katherine. ‘In case he needs you. Let Ray and Randy try to beat each other to the top. I’ll keep Rhoda company.’

  The sun came out. It was a wonderful day. They didn’t have to exert themselves much at all on the earlier part of the climb, but Mamie tried to go slowly anyway.

  ‘Are you sure your father’s going to be all right?’ she asked.

  ‘He’s in better shape than any of us. A walking advertisement for the health-giving properties of bourbon. Mother’s OK, too.’

  ‘Oh, I know that. She does all those exercises.’

  They came to a bend and saw that far above them two other walking parties were starting out from higher lookout posts. Russell said, ‘This is the last point where you can turn around and look up like this. All the other places are set in. You see the second and third, but there are five more after that: the dangerous ones. The view is incredible – you look right down into crevasses. You’ll see. It’s like something out of the Ice Age.’

  ‘When do you want to eat our sandwiches?’

  ‘We can do that at the next stop. There’s a picnic place and a kind of lavatory.’

  The next lap was a good deal harder. She kept plodding forward without thinking. She could tell already that she was too tired, and that she was going to be stiff and sore for days afterwards.

  The four others were waiting for them, but had started to eat. Waverley scanned the valley through his field-glasses. He broke off to take a swig from a canteen he had with him. ‘Want to look?’ he said.

  Mamie lifted the binoculars to her face. It was like seeing into another planet, like being at the movies. Everyone was unaware of the eyes watching from above.

  ‘But it’s even more surprising without them,’ she said. ‘Everything so little. I can’t believe we’ve gotten this high up, so quickly.’

  ‘There’s a lot more, and a lot wilder, beyond this,’ Russell told her. ‘But you can’t see it from here.’

  She unpacked her knapsack and started to eat. She was beginning to feel better. Katherine asked assertively whether it wasn’t exhilarating up on top of the world. Mamie said yes, definitely.

  She wished that she could take the past two years, except for the baby, out of her life and start again. Here, all in brightness, with light bouncing off the blank slopes, she could feel something approaching: it was like the moment before the curtain came down at the theatre. Whatever it was, it might fall over her past and cover it forever; and perhaps her future, too.

  ‘It looks like a long way to the end,’ she said.

  Russell stretched out his arm across the picnic table and took her hand in a strong grip. He said, ‘Rest here a while longer. I’ll stay with you.’ He smiled. The sun shone on his teeth, his hair, his tinted glasses, through which she could see his eyes. He looked very healthy. He looked as if he were enjoying himself. She nodded and said, ‘All right.’

  The others left. She divided the coffee from the thermos bottle between her plastic cup and his.

  ‘How was the casino?’ she asked.

  ‘Fine. I lost 12,000 dollars. How was the whatever-it-was?’

  ‘Hockey game. There were fights, so I came home early. I couldn’t even find Randy and Ray.’

  ‘Next year,’ he said, ‘I think I’ll choose a warmer climate.’ He looked at the view, not at her.

  She swallowed. She could believe in anything now. She wasn’t afraid, as she had been in the darkness of the hotel bedroom, but she knew: it was going to happen. Everything was going to happen.

  They set out on the climb once more. Twice they met up with the others and then they fell behind again. She had to stop to catch her breath.

  ‘Three more lookouts,’ Russell told her. ‘And you’d better hold on to me when you lean over.’

  ‘I’m OK. I don’t need to hold on.’

  ‘We’re right near the top now. Three-quarters of an hour and we should be at the end.’

  ‘Thank God,’ she said.

  ‘Are you coming?’

  ‘I’m pretty tired. I think maybe I’ll stay here for a while.’

  ‘At this stage you should keep moving. Here, I’ll help you.’

  ‘No,’ she yelped.

  He smiled. He stepped towards her. They were under the overhang, where no one could see. In front of them the snow came to an end, the whole mountain seemed to tumble away downward and then stop – ending in the air, with nothing else beyond but the tiny villages miles below.

  She thought she heard a voice. She said, ‘There’s somebody walking behind us.’

  ‘There isn’t anybody.’

  ‘Yes, there is.’ She rushed away from him, slid back down the way they had come, and kept going. He called after her, ‘It’s only a little way to the top. Come on, Rhoda.’

  She skidded sideways around the corner and fell. As she got to her feet, she saw Carter moving up along the path. She opened her arms.

  ‘Did you do it?’ he said.

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘What the hell are you doing? You got everything all wrong. You were supposed –’

  ‘Please,’ she said, ‘let’s go. Let’s just go back down, please.’

  ‘We can’t. We’ve got to go up.’

  ‘He’s there,’ she whispered.

  He moved his lips silently, asking, ‘Where?’

  ‘Around the corner.’ He’d be standing right there, listening. He wouldn’t have gone on without her, and he couldn’t have seen Carter, because the view was blocked where they were.

  ‘All right,’ Carter said. ‘I’ll get him. You stay here.’

  ‘No,’ she wailed. She fell down again and clung to his legs. ‘No. We’ll get a divorce.’

  ‘I don’t want the divorce,’ he said. ‘I want the money.’ He kicked her hard in the ribs.

  She let go, staggered to her feet, and tried to steady herself by grabbing his shoulder. He went backwards, his mouth open. He was sliding, falling. He went over the edge. She slithered farther down the path, calling out to him, and landed heavily against a mound of snow.

  He was gone. There was nothing. The drop was sheer, the precipice so angled that he would have fallen nearly to the bottom of the mountain. She couldn’t believe it. He hadn’t made a sound. She kept staring as if he might reappear.

  ‘Perfect,’ Russell said. He was standing at the bend in the path. He might even have seen it happen. She looked up and saw that he was grinning.

  ‘Beautiful,’ he said. ‘So, that’s him out of the way.’

  ‘He just slipped.’

  ‘Now there’s only you.’

  ‘He kept sayin
g you’d killed your first wife.’

  ‘Sure. She made some joke about being insured and I realized it would work. It was a gamble. The big ones always pay off, remember? Let’s go. We’ll have to report it.’

  She moved carefully towards the outside of the path, near the edge.

  ‘Watch out,’ he said. ‘That’s dangerous.’

  ‘Why should I wait for you to do it some other way?’ She was excited and terrified, nearly prepared to throw herself off into the emptiness behind her. She raised one foot, put it down and lifted the other, as if dancing. She said, ‘He was always a real bastard to me, but I loved him.’

  ‘Don’t,’ he told her.

  ‘Why not? If I jumped, you’d be in it up to your neck, wouldn’t you? Two wives going over the brink the same way – I don’t think the insurance companies would like that.’

  ‘I’d say he did it.’

  ‘They wouldn’t believe you, Ross.’ She took another step backward, intoxicated by fear. She could feel the open space drawing her away as if a tide were racing out behind her, pulling. It reminded her of the repeating dream he’d told her about; his nightmares had become hers to live out. She was slipping. She could go, any minute. She played with the last few feet, the last inches. It was like being in the spotlight, surrounded by deathly brilliance, watched by the whole world.

  ‘Don’t step back,’ he shouted. He started to move towards her.

  ‘I loved him,’ she said. ‘And Jesus was he good in bed – he didn’t have to get it out of a book.’

  He came at her, his arms held in front of him, the hands set, ready to push her over.

  She waited until he was almost touching her, then she feinted to the side, just as Mr Moto had taught her to, and knocked his leg out from under him with a sharp kick.

  He flew straight into the air, out across the chasm and down. He howled as he went over. And she scrambled to safety; up the path and around the corner. The rescuers would trample on all the prints, so that was all right, and they’d have to take her word for it that the two men had been quarrelling about the death of the first wife, but she was pretty sure people would believe her.

  She took a deep breath, threw back her head and screamed, a long trembling call of horror. If they’d been in the avalanche season, she could have brought down the mountainside with it. It made no difference now, at this time of year: let them hear it back in the villages and up in the resort hotels. It was the one thing she was good at.

  She was crying; bereaved, pretty, a young mother: this time she was the star. Everyone would respect her grief. They’d all be kind to her. When she told her story, saying that Carter and Russell had been fighting, she’d be standing centre stage where the brightness of the sky, the white shine from the ice peaks, would beat upon her like limelight on a heroine; like truth itself; till she outshone the light-reflecting surfaces of nature: candid, diamond-dazzling, pure. She screamed and screamed.

  About the Author

  Rachel lngalls grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She has had various jobs, from theatre dresser and librarian to publisher’s reader. She is a confirmed radio and film addict and has lived in London since 1965. She is the author of several novels and collections of short stories.

  Copyright

  This collection first published in 1993

  by Faber and Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74-77 Great Russell Street

  London WClB 3DA

  This ebook edition first published in 2013

  All rights reserved

  © Rachel Ingalls, 1982, 1985, 1987, 1993

  The right of Rachel Ingalls to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  ‘Mrs Caliban’ was first published by Faber and Faber in 1982; ‘I See a Long Journey’, ‘On Ice’ and ‘Blessed Art Thou’ were first published in Three of a Kind, Faber and Faber, 1985; ‘Friends in the Country’, ‘An Artist’s Life’, ‘In the Act’ and ‘The End of Tragedy’ were first published in The End of Tragedy, Faber and Faber, 1987.

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571–29983–6