Barry Maitland: Bright Air

‘I wanted to hold his hand or something, but there was nothing of him that I could touch. Tears filled my eyes. He must have registered this because his lips moved again. He said, No regrets . You remember how we used to say that?’

‘I remember.’

‘I repeated it back to him, No regrets. They felt pretty hollow now, those stupid words. He closed his eyes and I thought he was gone, but the machines were still pumping away. Then, after a long while, his lids flicked open again and his eyes were wide and bright. Only one , he said. I asked him what that was, thinking he’d say something about his children, but instead he said, Luce .

‘I wasn’t sure if I’d misheard, and I repeated, Luce? Yes , he said. I thought I saw her on the mountain, just before I fell. Snow dazzle … But what if I do meet her again? What can I say? I didn’t know how to answer. He gave a sigh and said, We killed her, you know .

‘I thought he was getting confused, and I said, No, Owen, it was an accident, like this, the same as you. No, no , he said. That’s what we told everyone, but it wasn’t true . He was staring straight into my eyes and he seemed quite coherent. It didn’t happen that way, Anna. You see, he knew my name, he knew who I was.’

‘He actually said “We killed her”?’ I asked, incredulous. The story made my skin creep, even though I simply couldn’t believe it. I sensed myself edging away from it, something that I really didn’t want to hear.

‘Yes, exactly as I’ve told you. I started to tell him he was wrong, but he just closed his eyes and gave another big sigh and said, Forgive me, Luce . He didn’t speak or open his eyes again. At about two in the morning the machines let off an alarm, and the nurses made me leave. He died soon after.’

We sat in silence for a while. Lights were coming on in the windows across the bay, and I said, feeling how incongruous the words were, ‘I have to switch on the hotel lights, Anna. Hang on, I’ll be back in a minute.’

As I went around the house I thought about what she’d said. It was awful, surely too awful to be taken seriously. Yet Anna clearly did. I tried to imagine what it must have been like to listen to Owen’s words, and then to dwell on them all through the following traumatic days. No, Anna wasn’t now the same girl I’d known as a student. Thinking about the way she’d handled this, I realised how much she’d changed in those four years. There had been no trace of melodrama in her telling of it. She seemed so much more serious, more deliberate-more adult, I supposed.

I returned to the terrace with the bottle of wine and refilled her glass.

‘Who else have you told about this, Anna?’

‘No one. I’ve been wrestling with it for the past ten days, quietly going mad.’

‘I can imagine. You haven’t spoken to Damien, or Marcus?’

She shook her head, but didn’t elaborate. ‘The other day I remembered your aunt saying you were coming back, and I had to come into town today, and I thought, if you were here, I’d mention it to you.’

I thought it odd, not only her not talking to Damien but also not phoning the hotel to make sure I’d be in, as if she were so reluctant to share this that she had left it in the hands of fate.

‘I’m glad you did, Anna. Look, he was delirious, surely. His brain would have been scrambled by the fall-how far did they fall anyway?’

‘About forty metres.’

‘There you are then.’

‘Into snow. No, his brain was about the only bit of him that they didn’t seem too worried about. And he really did sound clear-headed, just for those few minutes.’

‘Doesn’t mean he wasn’t hallucinating. He’d have been stuffed full of drugs, massively traumatised, on the point of death.’

‘I’ve tried to convince myself of that, but you weren’t there, Josh. You didn’t hear the certainty in his voice.’

I decided to try another tack. ‘There was an inquest into Luce’s death, wasn’t there? Did you attend?’

‘Yes, every day.’

‘Was there any suggestion of doubt? Any hint of foul play?’

‘No. But they never found a body, and the rest of the group all told the same story, so there was no reason to doubt it.’

Curtis, Owen and Damien, the three who’d been climbing with Luce, and the organiser of the trip, Marcus Fenn. That was about all I knew of what had happened, that and the place-Lord Howe Island, out in the Pacific, five hundred kilometres off the New South Wales coast. Of the six of us who used to climb together, Anna and I were the missing pair. I wondered if she felt as guilty about that as I did. But then, she had no reason to.

‘It’s preposterous, Anna, to suggest that they would have deliberately done anything to Luce.’

‘I know …’ She shook her head helplessly. ‘How much do you know about her accident?’

‘Not a lot. Mary sent me a newspaper cutting.’

‘I remember she came to the service.’

‘Oh, yes, that’s right. She told me about it, how so many people were there.’ But not me. Not me.

Anna reached into her shoulder bag and pulled out a blue plastic folder. She handed it to me. ‘I kept some cuttings.’

‘Ah.’ I stared down at the file but didn’t open it. It only weighed a few grams, but it felt much more, and I understood why she looked so tired.

‘Have a look-not now. Read it and maybe we can talk again.’

‘All right, but I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about. I mean, you just have to remember how we all were, Anna. There’s no way …’

We swapped phone numbers and she got to her feet and began to make for the door. I followed, thinking that the hotel felt strangely quiet. It was as if the place were under a spell.

I opened the front door for her, and she turned and gave me a little smile, sad and wistful. ‘I’m sorry, Josh. I had to tell someone.’

‘Oh sure, of course. I’m very glad you did.’ But that wasn’t true.

We walked together across the forecourt of the hotel, what had once been a front garden but was now brick-paved to provide a few parking spaces for guests. Cars hummed past in the street, their headlights on in the fading twilight.

At the pavement she glanced back at the hotel. ‘This is a wonderful place, isn’t it? We all came here once, didn’t we? Your aunt gave us lunch.’

‘Yes, I remember.’ The memory tugged at me, a warm and happy day, and on an impulse, as she turned to go, I added, ‘Look, apart from this business, Anna, we should catch up, have a drink or a meal or something.’

She nodded without much enthusiasm, and I realised that she must have been as reluctant as I to make this contact, to cross that chasm back to the past.

Anna was right, it was a fine old building, though it seemed somewhat forbidding now as I returned to the front door, its upper floor balconies dark like empty eye sockets. Mary had carefully researched its story, and had a summary printed in little pamphlets she gave to guests. She had also had a number of old photographs illustrating its history enlarged and framed and hung along the hall, and I paused over these now as a distraction, hesitating to approach the file that Anna had left for me.

The first picture was of the architect, an elderly man with a white beard in the Edwardian style, and I imagined him deciding to let rip on this final grand commission, for he chose an extravagant version of the Federation Queen Anne style that was already going out of fashion at the time. The house’s two storeys were a pattern book of wall finishes-shingles, roughcast render and tuck-pointed brickwork-and its roof was embellished with extravagant chimneys, attic windows and ridge tiles. It had oriel windows, bay windows and dormer windows, and its many balconies were draped with ornamental brackets and posts elaborated with curvilinear Art Nouveau decoration.