Beyond the High Blue Air Read Online Free PDF Page A

comfortingly unreal: delicately ornate façades of buildings in the traditional Tyrolean style suggest a make-believe world far from the morning’s reality. A sign hanging from one of the buildings draws my attention: ‘Goldener Adler’ is inscribed in Gothic lettering and soon I find myself standing outside an old stone inn on the edge of a cobbled plaza. Entering the dim interior I see a chubby young woman at the reception desk who could be Heidi; her dirndl and shining golden plaits speak of mountain peaks and sunny pastures and innocence uncontaminated by pain. Can I help you? she says, and I hear myself replying that I need a room, some rooms. For which date, and for how many nights? she asks efficiently. I don’t know, I answer. Indefinitely. She looks at me with concern. My son is in hospital. I didn’t want to say that, I haven’t had to say it until now; it feels too private. She takes a key from the board behind her and says with such kindness I must fight back my tears, I hope you will be happy here. I think I have a room you will like.
    She does. A corner room that looks out over the plaza, large windows on each wall and a sitting area with sofa, armchair and desk, it is spacious and light. We could retreat here. The station hotel Ben and Charlie booked us into is perfectly suitable, closer to the hospital and with more amenities, but it is deadening. A businessman’s hotel, its airless decor and efficiency leave nowhere in which to hide away and make private. I hadn’t thought it out until this moment, but some primitive maternal instinct warns me that we could not hold ourselves together for long in such a place, and here we might. How ancient is this instinct to provide a refuge, a burrow, a nest, anything hidden away and safe from the dangers that lurk prowling and snarling in the dark outside? Stepping out of the Goldener Adler into the chill afternoon air I have a sense of having restored a kind of order, exerted some small control over the calamitous events that have overtaken us. Goldener Adler, golden eagle: light, strength. Miles would like that.
    Early that Tuesday evening Ron arrives from London. I have missed him; we’ve spoken on the phone but it is his presence I need. Now he is flying out to see Miles, and to see me. Watching him walk across the airport arrivals hall I think again how distinguished he looks, his integrity so obvious that it gives him his particular gravitas, but to know him is to know the ridiculous fun one can have in his company. When we meet I see the pain reflected in his eyes, complicated by his concern both for Miles and for me. How have you been? he says. How is the boy? He takes me in his arms and I feel stilted, different, I’m not the same as before; I am damaged. He was widowed two years before he met me when his wife died of cancer after many years of illness; theirs had been a long and stable marriage and for him and his two now adult daughters, Belinda and Amelia, it was a deeply painful time. I wish he did not have to suffer again on our behalf.
    Ron had waited these two days before coming here out of respect for David, that at such a time it should be Miles’s father who sees Miles first with all of us together, the original family. Such consideration is typical of him, though I know Miles would want him here from the beginning. All four children love Ron as a father as well as a friend and confidant; he is an integral part of our family now. David and I separated eight years ago and our lives have settled into their different ways. To be suddenly thrown together again is an unnatural and painful accretion to an already painful situation. To any curious fellow guests on the first morning before Ron arrives we look like just another family on holiday, father, mother and children sharing a hotel breakfast and later setting off together for a walk through the town; that our group is