The Dark Frontier by A. Decker (best books to read non fiction .txt) 📕

Frank lay on his slab of steel, savouring the stillness of the ice, letting the sun warm his back and filter out these images from his mind. Only the precious clarity of the air washed over him. He felt strangely purified.

“Come on, old man. You can’t stay here all day. The next chap will be on his way down before long.” It was the colonel. He put a hand under Frank’s arm to help him up. “Come on, let’s go and have that drink. You’ve earned it. Did jolly well. Beat my best time by a good two seconds.”

The colonel clapped him on the back as he imagined he would pat his pet dog. And Frank felt an urge to growl and gnarl at his master.

“What’ll it be?” he asked, as he led Frank onto the sunny terrace of the Kulm. The place thronged with steely Titans of the Cresta Run toasting their prowess and others who were there just to bask in the sun and the excitement. Aromas of coffee and cigar smoke mingled with the oily fragrance of sun creams. Hardly a free seat was to be had. But the colonel had the hawk eye of a military strategist and a bearing that commanded respect. He led Frank straight to a couple of seats at the end of a table that was otherwise exclusively French. Frank thought of Patricia, and wished she was here.

“This is my invitation, colonel,” he said. “And since I have something to celebrate, let’s have a bottle of champagne.”

“Well, that’s jolly decent, old chap. Don’t mind if I do.” And as the waitress departed with the order, he added: “Must confess, old boy. That was a splendid run. The Germans could do with you in their bob team this week.”

At that very moment, Frank’s eyes fell on the vain expression of a face he knew so well at the far end of the terrace. He was with a group of jovial back-slapping people, none of whom he recognised, and was himself in mid-slap as their eyes met. What promised to be a swaggering all-American thwack on some poor unsuspecting shoulder was suddenly sapped of all energy. The joviality hollowed out to a shell of disbelief, as his grin took on the appearance of a crevasse in one of the Bernina glaciers. The shoulder was reprieved.

“Colonel, you see that man over there, coming towards us?”

Frank nodded discreetly in the direction of Silverstone, who was already battling his way through a large crowd of expectant newcomers just arrived on the terrace in search of a table. The woman Frank had seen with him at the station in Basel was trailing along behind.

“Tall, about fifty, wearing a green pullover.”

“Got him, old boy,” he said, as if he had just spotted one of the enemy. The colonel’s curiosity was aroused, and Frank sensed he had him on his side.

“He’s an American, called Silverstone. He won’t leave me alone, follows me wherever I go. You know the type. Could you do me a favour and distract him while I go to the toilet? We’ll meet back at the hotel and have our champagne there,” he added. “With Patricia.”

“American, you say? My pleasure, old boy.”

Suddenly the colonel was fired with the prospect of adventure. A mission to be accomplished, however small. His fingers fidgeted and his eyes flashed with the excitement, allowing Frank to slip away from the terrace, confident that the colonel would fulfil this mission with dedication.

With grudging reluctance, he was beginning to feel deeply indebted to the colonel, a man who irritated him intensely and stood for everything he disliked about the English.

‘What’s the American doing here?’ Frank asked himself. Whatever it was, he would plainly be seeking revenge for their last encounter. Frank knew he would need to tread carefully for the rest of his brief time in St Moritz.

But he had only one goal in mind. And it was this that occupied his thoughts as he walked back up to the hotel. Nothing would divert him from his goal now he knew that he had the substance and the passion to achieve it.

It was a discovery that filled him with impatience – as if his life had been one huge tangled ball of thread that he had only now taken into his hands to consider the practicalities of unravelling it. And he was consumed with an urgency to get the job done. He needed to find Patricia and share the galvanism of this discovery.

So much greater was his disappointment when she refused to come and celebrate his triumph over the Cresta Run with the colonel. Her eyes seemed darker and more beautiful than ever. But he failed to appreciate either the depth or the quality of her sadness.

“I told you, Frank. I want nothing to do with your plans,” was all she had to say. It both irritated and mystified him, since it was she who gave him the motive and encouragement. And it was she who stood to gain from all the fretwork. Now he saw the delicate inlay cracked and broken by a ferment he had not anticipated. It was a damage he failed to understand. He had no idea how deep it ran, nor how it should be measured. He knew only that he had to repair the damage before he left. And that would take time. Champagne celebrations would certainly not help. So he made his excuses to the colonel later that day.

The rest of their time in St Moritz he devoted to Patricia, to the restoration of the precious sparkle in her eyes and the defiant sensuality of her lips. They spent many hours walking the most deserted circuitous paths they could find in the snow, circumventing all the issues that teased at the forefront of his mind. And he let her lead him back into her dream world of Baudelaire. Or to her childhood in Normandy, catching crabs in the rock pools and picking wild primroses in the woods.