‘Could I have tea?’ Orla asked.
‘I will make coffee,’ Delphine replied, putting the controller back down on the thick windowsill.
‘Do you have avocado?’ Erin wanted to know.
‘Avocat,’ Delphine said. ‘The French practically invented it.’
‘Oh, that’s good! I can take photos!’
‘But we do not have here,’ Delphine said firmly.
Orla watched her sister deflate.
‘I could order, with my next delivery, if you like.’
Erin offered their hostess a smile. ‘Yes, please.’
‘Bien,’ Delphine said. ‘So, breakfast will end in thirty minutes and then I will take you to see Wolf.’
‘Thirty minutes!’ Erin exclaimed.
‘Delphine, we haven’t had time to shower yet and?—’
Orla’s sentence was cut off by the firm closing of the door as Delphine departed as swiftly as she had arrived.
‘Fuck,’ Erin said, scrabbling back out of the bed. ‘It takes me forty-two minutes to do my make-up on a good day.’
As her sister began to tip the contents of her airport liquids bag onto her bedside table, Orla really hoped she wouldn’t have to wait forty-two minutes for a coffee she was going to wish was tea.
12
JACQUES’S CABIN, SAINT-CHAMBÉRY
It was still bitterly cold outside. When Jacques’s alarm had gone off at 5a.m. he had considered going for a run, but one look at the temperature and the face of his husky dog, Hunter, and he had opted for an indoor workout. Now, holding his form, balanced on the gymnastic rings, in this dojo/home gym he looked out through the window to the freezing landscape and focussed on keeping his form.Peace. A quiet mindset. No distractions. Strength in silence. Forgetting about the past. His core trembled as soon as his brain worked with the word ‘past’. He loathed that it did that. Yes, it would be easy to erase that line from his thinking when he did this combination of a workout for the mind as well as the body but if you didn’t ever even internally confront your demons then you were leaving no room for positivity to occupy that space.
Hunter whined and Jacques was immediately distracted, even more so when his dog got up from his blanket and headed towards the body of the main house. It was the move Hunter made when someone came within fifty feet of the house. Except no one came here, apart from reluctant delivery drivers or lost hikers and if hikers were out at this time of the morning, in theseconditions, they were crazy. He refocussed, holding the rings tight, sucking in his abdomen, pulling taut…
Hunter barked once. Then two short sharp ones. It couldn’t be, could it? Jacques took one last long breath and then jumped down, grabbing his towel and wiping his torso.
‘What is it, boy?’ Jacques asked when he had reached his dog. Hunter was parading up and down by the window, stopping then starting all over again. He put his hand on the dog’s head, ruffled his fur, but Hunter didn’t flinch, didn’t acknowledge, didn’t turn to receive the affection. The animal was a lot more focussed than Jacques had been on the rings.
Hunter barked in the same rhythm as before and, being unable to see anything against the white of the snow on the ground nor the grey/white of the cloudy sky, Jacques reached for his binoculars.
As Hunter carried on barking in the same way, Jacques finally saw what his pet had sensed. There in the distance was a vehicle and it was definitely heading his way.
‘I can’t feel my face!’ Erin squealed.
‘You’re supposed to have the scarf around your face, Erin,’ Orla called back.
‘What?’
‘I said?—’
‘What? I can’t hear you with that scarf over your mouth!’
This was impossible! And it was cold like she had never experienced before. Why she and Erin were riding a tractor-type vehicle that seemed to be spraying up snow more than it was making headway to wherever they were going she didn’t know. But this was apparently Delphine’s mode of transport andthey hadn’t had a lot of say in anything much this morning. Breakfast had been approximately eight minutes long with the coffee scalding the roof of Orla’s mouth as she rushed it down. And, as nice as the freshly baked croissants were, there hadn’t been a second to savour them before their host was telling them to dress in many layers, cover their faces and come outside.
Despite the extreme cold, the landscape was breathtaking. So far, Delphine had driven them through pine woodland and skirted a frozen lake but now they were heading up a steep incline that seemed never ending when the engine of this thing sounded like it was one noisy sputter away from a breakdown. But the thing nagging at Orla’s mind was the lack of research she had done before embarking on this trip. Research was her forte. She found out everything she could about what she was stepping into, from the terrain to the possibility of local tyranny. Except she hadn’t doneanyof that, and she was about to meet a mute man and a pregnant reindeer, neither of which she had any experience with. Unless you counted ghosting as being mute…
