Chapter 4

Thursday

Morning dawned with snow coming down in a cloud of invisibility. If it was snowing like this at the bottom, it would be awful at the top. Awful in the sense that they would not see anything, would not know if they were going up or down. It could be terrifying.

Michael Walker appeared with a limp. “Oh? Still hurt? You had better take it easy. Maybe you and Peter might ski together?” said Sarah. Yes, it was her subtle way of pulling him away from ‘that Angelique’. Helen saw the look of horror on her brother’s face.

“Peter might not want to ski in this. I know I don’t. Maybe we take time off?” Helen tried to rescue him.

“Hmm, perhaps. Peter?”

“Well, I ... I might stick to the lower, easy blues and greens.” He knew that, even with a limp, his father would not lower himself to green. Sarah looked, very briefly, daggers at her daughter. She was sure that ‘this French girl’ would corrupt her son. Had Peter known there was a possibility of that, he would have willingly accepted it. As it was, he was sure that Angelique was not ‘that kind of girl’ and their relationship was ‘just good friends’. Good friends don’t play tonsil tennis with quite the enthusiasm that the two of them had done, but he was as much of an innocent as he thought the girl was.

Michael still dressed to go out. Sarah opted to stay in. Helen and Peter agreed to ski together on the easy runs. They found it very disconcerting to slow plough to a stop at the side of a blue run and then look down and discover they were still moving. The snow was completely obliterating their normal senses. Goggles instead of sun glasses meant the snow did not drop freezing fire onto exposed eyeballs, but it did not help in seeing the bumps and lumps of the slope. They stopped for hot chocolates.

Then they did two more runs and stopped for coffee. Then they did another run and stopped again as the coffee ‘came through’. Finally the time to meet arrived, would she even be on the slopes in this? Yes, was the answer.

He skied over with his sister and kissed Angelique. He knew Helen would have no issues with that. After introductions, the three agreed that sandwiches on a rock was not what was required today. They took a lift up and skied carefully down to a mountain restaurant. It seemed a better idea than crowding into one of the overpriced cafes at the bottom. The mountain ones were even more overpriced, but at least they were on a mountain. Helen and Angelique talked. Annoyingly, Helen was good at French, Peter was excluded by the simple process of talking in that language instead. He knew they were talking about him, they looked at him a couple of times, smiled and nodded.