The Beauty Room

by Regi Claire

  Goddammit, she isn’t afraid. Just shaken, dammit. But already she has lifted the receiver and pressed the memo button for Nita up in the Alps.

  She swallows hard.

  21

  CELIA’S DOG-TIRED, hardly slept after phoning Nita, then packing. She’d lain dozing amid the night noises, trying not to think about tulips and passionflowers, about Alex. Getting startled into wakefulness by the merest hum and drone of a passing car, by the street door banging shut and Carmen’s work-weary feet on the stairs. Every sound seemed magnified by the darkness. Every sound like a warning. Telling of some stone-faced monster that had crawled from the bowels of the earth, its horny paws clobbering the frozen roads towards her. She’d got up just after six. Had left the new peacock-blue shutters firmly closed until the last minute. To make sure she wasn’t followed to the station.

  As Celia steps off the train at Albula four hours later, the snow-wind lashes out at her like hands. She staggers, almost drops her travelling bag. The old brown rucksack she’s slung over one shoulder lurches heavily, a dead weight, against her side. The air feels icy after the overheated carriage, it pinches her nostrils and stabs right through her poncho, making her shiver. Her eyes have started to water from the unrelieved whiteness all round: the plateau with its twin sets of tracks and the station behind her, the fir trees, power lines, the village below and the mountains above – everything is hooded and cloaked and shod in white. It’s a narrow valley and the peaks lean into the sky far overhead, cutting out a jagged circle of deep Alpine blue.

  ‘Let me help you,’ a voice says at her elbow, in a soft mixed-up accent.

  Not a voice she recognises. Not Nita’s.

  She turns round slowly, ready to shout at whoever – half-expecting to be confronted by Granite Mask again.

  Then she relaxes. The voice belongs to a wholesome-looking woman in her thirties, small and bouncy, with big dangling cloisonné earrings.

  ‘Oh, it’s only you. Thankgod!’

  For a moment the woman stares at her, puzzled. ‘I don’t think we’ve met before,’ she says stiffly, putting up the collar of her sheepskin coat. ‘I’m Christine. Nita said you’d made her promise to pick you up but –’

  ‘Nothing wrong, I hope?’ Celia asks, suddenly weak to the pit of her stomach.

  Christine has begun to say something about Nita’s duties as a snowboarding instructor – when the wind gusts up again. Celia can’t help glancing back at the people who’ve got off the train after her. Just some families with skis in transparent plastic, sledges of all sizes, and suitcases – tourists obviously – and a group of teenagers in extra-wadded neon-bright jackets moving off along the tracks, shouting to each other in Romansch. They’re throwing around schoolbags and holdalls like crazy jugglers. Nothing to worry about.

  Christine’s eyes have followed hers. ‘Home from school for the weekend. They always go wild, especially on the pass-road sledge run at night.’ She pauses, laughs. ‘Anyway, Nita said to give you her love and a welcome-to-the-Alps hug.’

  They smile, brush cheeks three times the way friends do who want to feel safe, and noncommittal.

  Meanwhile, like a red-gleaming snake, another train has slid down the bends in the mountainside from the opposite direction, the keening of metal on metal dulled by snow and trees. It’s a single-track railway and Albula Station one of several passing points. The bells whirr into action, then the loudspeakers. At the sound of the guard’s whistle Celia whirls round. She needs to scan the faces before her train continues its journey. But her view is blocked by the new arrival and its stream of passengers. She can’t see a thing – let alone identify an unknown person, if there is one – only a dozen or so carriages with two panorama cars like glasshouses on wheels, and a blur of faces and windows behind more windows, more faces, as the train gathers speed.

  ‘Coming, Celia? You’re not a trainspotter, are you?’

  Celia tears herself away, forcing a laugh while thinking, Keep your cool, girl, he isn’t here. This is the mountains – safety!

  She can see Christine standing by the entrance to the roofed-over waiting area, chatting with the Glühwein und Bratwürste vendor. The man can’t be more than thirty, his dark good looks half-hidden under a purple headband, Raybans and a thin moustache. Close to, though, his tan has a wooden quality and his teeth seem to glisten a little too much, a little too white, when he smiles goodbye and starts to slice a crusty loaf for the lunchtime hordes of sledgers.

  Christine, it turns out, is joint owner of the Crusch Alva, the White Cross, a former barn converted into an ethnic restaurant with small funnel-shaped windows, black-painted rafters, cowbells hanging from metal-embossed leather collars, burnished brass Engadinersonnen with big grins and flames for hair, a couple of dull-eyed ibex heads mounted next to the bar as if for company, and – Celia flinches at the sight of them – masks. Large soot-stained masks carved from wood and trimmed with bits of fleece or fur into gargoyle faces. They’d have scared the hell out of anyone, even the mountain spirits that cut climbers’ ropes, chase animals over precipices and set off avalanches.

  ‘Museum pieces by now. I inherited them from an aunt who collected curios.’ Christine hands Celia a glass of grappa. ‘Cheers! It’s on the house.’ Then she checks herself. ‘How very thoughtless of me. Nita’s told me about your mother, I’m so sorry …’

  Celia takes a long soothing sip before nodding a curt thankyou, her eyes glazed over to preclude any more offers and advances of commiseration.

  Afterwards they talk about her plans for the weekend. She has none – apart from trying to enjoy herself without fear. ‘Certainly not skiing. Or snowboarding.’ She can feel the grappa sear her throat, fire up her body. ‘I broke a leg skiing when I was eleven, an arm at thirteen. After that, my mother refused to let me go, and I’d had enough myself. Something of a heresy in this country, being a non-skier!’ She laughs, has two quick sips. Wouldn’t you say so, Christine?’

  But had she really had enough? It was her mother who’d hated winter, hated frost and cold with a ferocity Celia had never understood. If friends invited them for trips into the snowy mountains, to the Toggenburg or up the Säntis, say, her mother would sneeze-and-grimace in a politely restrained manner. ‘As if we didn’t have enough snow down here,’ she’d whisper, then spin a graceful excuse in public.

  Christine is smiling, telling her there aren’t actually any heresies unless you let others dictate to you, and she, by goddess, has always fought authority. Her cheeks have flushed a fervent apple-red and the heavy cloisonné earrings swing emphatically. I must have touched a nerve somewhere, Celia muses, pleasantly drowsy now from the grappa.

  ‘I don’t believe in marriage, for one,’ Christine carries on. ‘Nothing to do with faithfulness, I simply don’t like its institutionalised status. You aren’t married, are you?’

  ‘Married?’ The question jerks Celia out of her semi-slumber. ‘Oh no. I’m not married.’ She tries to look suitably shocked at the notion and thinks of Alex. She can feel the rucksack pressing up against her left calf. Franz’s rucksack. It nudges her like a reminder.

  Having surveyed the other guests in the restaurant, Christine confides in a low voice, ‘You see, when I came to live in this village, seven years ago, I brought two daughters with me from a previous relationship. Tom, my partner, is local. From Preda. But people here didn’t exactly make things easy for us. They’re pretty conservative – “narrow-valleyed”, if you get me. It was only after that soap was filmed in the area some years back that they started regarding themselves as part of the real world!’ She laughs, pushes back her chair and says loudly, ‘Anyway, I’d better go – time to get my kids some lunch. Ciao for now.’

  Celia’s thanks are lost in a clatter from the salad buffet near the bar where, with urgent haste, a young blonde waitress is depositing plates and big glass bowls of lettuce, French beans, grated carrot, sliced tomato, pepper and cucumber. Celia rests her head against the whitewashed wall. Thankg
od for those motherly duties. A discussion of relationships, love and parenthood is the last thing she needs. Her table is at the back of the room, well away from the men with their pipes and dark old faces, playing cards and chalking up their scores on the slate inlay of the Stammtisch. She shuts her eyes, tired to the bones, and lets her whole body slump against the wall.

  Something is tickling the side of her cheek: a piece of fleece. Christ, not another mask! Had it been there, so close to her, all along? It’s small, oval rather than round, quite unlike the others. Not the least bit grotesque or frightening. The wood feels satin smooth …

  Next thing she knows, she’s lifted the mask off its hook and placed it over her face. It’s not at all heavy, perhaps a centimetre thick, with perfect hollows for her jutting chin and cheekbones. As if it had been made to measure, her measure. Greedily Celia inhales the sweet-sharp pine smell. When she peers through the eye slits, the interior of the Crusch Alva fragments into / the brassy grin of an Engadinersonne / half a man’s face and pipe cupped in a leathery hand / an aerial photo of a gorge whose river seems to drain into the folds of a curtain / then nothing. Someone’s passed right in front of her. Celia whips the mask away.

  Nita has already sat down. ‘Well, well,’ she chuckles, ‘you certainly can’t be trusted on your own, Cel. Hiding behind masks now!’ Then she leans over for the three-kiss ritual. ‘Sorry I couldn’t meet you off the train. I had to stand in for one of my colleagues. Poor sod hurt his ankle on the sledge run last night.’

  ‘You look great,’ Celia blurts out, noting the vermilion lipstick, the cropped and hennaed hair.

  After the blonde waitress has poured Nita some spring water, smiling broadly and exchanging a few words, Nita says how she’d always admired Celia’s mother: ‘She was the most glamorous mum I ever saw.’

  And amorous, too, Celia can’t help thinking. Forcing the memory of the Carnival Ball and the Valentine cards from her mind, she replies, ‘That’s very kind of you. I’m sure my mother would have appreciated it. Yes, I guess glamour was her problem. She couldn’t bear being ill, especially once the lumps began to disfigure her.’ Then, aware of how bitter she must sound, she adds hurriedly, ‘Don’t get me wrong, Nita, I did feel sorry for her. She suffered, and not just physically. All the visitors she had! Quite a few of them former clients come to gloat because even the most professional make-up couldn’t save her any more. And the smells …’

  Nita’s brightly painted lips seem to have sighed in sympathy. Celia blinks and rubs her eyes – for a fleeting moment she had glimpsed her mother again, holding the tarnished silver hand-mirror up to her face, sobbing and bleeding from a shapeless-nose. ‘Just picture it, Nita: the aging beautician plastering her hair over the sides of her nose with gluey gel to conceal the swollen bits before visiting hours. Towards the end she asked me to do it for her, but by then nothing and no one could have made any difference. That was the saddest of all.’

  Nita hasn’t seen Celia for more than a year and is surprised at the change in her. She looks lost and uncertain. Looks her age too, nearer forty than herself, with eyes rimmed pink despite the mascara and kohl, and a forehead puckered faintly in distress. Still, she’s got those chiselled features that promise beauty in later life. Nita smiles as she pats Celia on the shoulder.

  ‘I’ll do my best to get you back on your feet, don’t you worry. Even if it means teaching you the basics of snowboarding!’ Noticing that Celia’s glass is empty, she motions to the waitress, ‘Could we have two grappas, please?’

  Celia’s eyes haven’t stopped blinking and now they’re wet and she has to keep blinking to stop the wetness, and to wipe away the image of her mother propped up in bed, nostrils flared by wads of gauze, mouth painfully open, a handkerchief in one hand, the silver mirror in the other.

  ‘I’m sorry, Nita, I don’t mean to cry. Sorry.’

  Nita just squeezes her shoulder.

  They sit in silence for nearly a minute.

  When the waitress sidles up with their drinks at last, her furtiveness reminds Celia of Angelina and how she’d tiptoed round the office after that anonymous phone call, so obsequiously discreet. They can stuff their bloody concern, she doesn’t want it. She seizes the mask still lying on the table beside her, places it over her face once more and –

  ‘Boo! Boo! Boo!’ she snarls. The wood vibrates and the sound that escapes through the mouthhole is more like boohoohoo, but Celia can’t hear.

  The waitress has retreated behind one of the tables, with a baffled look towards Nita, who shrugs apologetically.

  Already, though, Celia has turned away to put the mask back up on the wall, taking her time to rearrange the bits of fleece. Then she smiles at the two women and sits down, pointedly ignoring the card players staring in her direction.

  ‘Too much grappa on an empty stomach,’ she announces. The words slip out quite easily. Perhaps they’re even true.

  Nita’s left front tooth is chipped, Celia observes. They’re having Gerstensuppe à la Crusch Alva, a belly-warming, thick and slimy broth of barley and vegetables that comes with wheaten rolls and a mixed salad, in Celia’s case a modest portion of French beans, red and yellow pepper strips.

  Nita says why don’t they go sledging tonight. ‘Five kilometres in all, down the pass road. It’s glorious – as long as you use cushions to keep your bum from getting knocked black and blue!’

  Celia laughs and spikes up a length of red pepper. ‘Sounds fun. I haven’t been on a sledge for years.’ But will she be safe out in the dark and cold? Somewhere in a corner of her mind she sees her mother shake her head, No-no-no, her mouth pursed in shell-pink disapproval. When Celia lowers her fork, its prongs glint back at her challengingly. Of course she’ll be safe. All she needs is a weapon.

  ‘We could ask Christine along if she’s free. And Silvan. Silvan’s my man of the season.’ Nita giggles. ‘You might have seen him at the station: guy behind the food-and-drink stall, purple headband –’

  ‘– moustache, Alpine tan and Raybans,’ Celia interrupts. That chip in Nita’s tooth is pretty bad. The result of one of her snowboarding excesses, no doubt – and the perfect advert for recklessness. Then it hits her: she is jealous! Jealous of little Nita, who used to wear hand-knitted woolly tights that sloughed round her ankles like dead skin!

  Pulling herself together, she jokes, ‘Tall, dark and handsome, and no stranger! Young, too.’

  She finishes her salad, then starts to shine her fork and knife on a paper napkin. The prongs seem a lot duller suddenly, a lot less pointed – not much of a weapon. But the blade cuts through the soft tissue like butter. If anything, she’ll take the knife.

  Nita has launched into an account of what she calls ‘the frissons of seasonal love’, which Celia can’t help associating with fruit and veg, and some of the more daring bedroom games she and Lily used to play when bananas were still a winter treat. Does Nita remember the afternoon she’d joined them, dressed in her sloppy tights, and didn’t have a clue, wouldn’t stop whining, ‘But how? How?’? Does she remember Lily’s soft puppy sounds and the snow shutting them in, a bit like now?

  ‘Hi there, Nita.’ It’s Christine. ‘Enjoyed your meal?’ And she’s off again, carrying away their plates, soup bowls and cutlery. But not Celia’s knife. At the last moment she’d sneaked that under her place mat. To be borrowed or left behind, at her own discretion.

  The restaurant is filling up. Chairs scrape the slate floor and there’s the ding-dong, ding-dong of some cowbells swinging away on their beams for the camcorder of a Japanese tourist. The locals seem to have fled, their peaceful card games replaced by children beating tattoos on tables with fingers and spoons and getting shouted at by frantic parents.

  Their cappuccinos arrive. Now’s the time, Celia decides. Now she’ll tell Nita about her stalker. Her mother’s death is only the beginning, after all. She isn’t sure yet whether she’ll mention Alex.

  Nita laughs when she hears about Granite Mask. ‘It’s just
fun and games, Cel,’ she says. ‘You’re taking this way too personally. So you got a scare, well, fair enough. But then, you also got a glass of champagne – nothing sinister about that, is there?’ She laughs again, blows into the frothy milk in her cup. ‘We all need to let off steam once in a while, that’s why Carnival is so healthy. It’s a safety valve.’

  Celia licks some chocolaty foam off her spoon. ‘And what about the black tulips sent for the funeral? The bunch left on my doorstep?’ she asks. ‘What about the phone calls and now the passionflowers? That’s more than a hoax, I can feel it in my guts.’ For an instant she can almost hear Jasmin’s therapy-speak: Too right you’re feeling it in your guts, girl. You’re in denial, that’s what.

  Nita is gazing at her with a mixture of pity and compassion, doing her utmost to be considerate, Celia realises.

  ‘There’s something else, Nita …’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Last night I found a whole bundle of anonymous Valentine cards in my mother’s bedside table. All with the same design: black tulips.’

  Nita’s tongue presses up against the chipped tooth and Celia watches as a slither of red appears on the white. Somewhere in the front of the restaurant a child has started wailing for more chips and there’s the hiss of a woman’s voice: ‘Enough, that’s enough!’

  Moments later Nita has recovered her usual poise. ‘Mmm,’ she says, sipping her cappuccino, ‘sounds rather messy. Though I don’t think you’re in any real danger.’ Then she brings up the police as a last resort. ‘Just relax, Cel. You’re here now. I’ll ask Silvan to be your bodyguard for tonight. Okay?’

  Celia is on the verge of declaring she doesn’t want a bodyguard, and certainly not Silvan with his face all headbanded, moustached, and Raybanned-up. But she bites back her remark and thanks Nita for being so generous.

  * * *

  Christine agrees to meet them for the sledgers’ train to Preda at quarter past seven, when the pass road is again closed to cars. Avalanches don’t seem to be a problem in Albula Valley, Celia notes with relief.