the Emigrants Read Free

with hotplates, some kind of patented design dating from the Thirties. She was wearing her grey full-length apron and went about her work in a silence which she broke only once or twice to mutter something to herself. She lit the candles and shuffled out, as she had come in, without a word. We served ourselves, passing the dishes along the table to one another. The first course consisted of a few pieces of green asparagus covered with marinated leaves of young spinach. The main course was broccoli spears in butter and new potatoes boiled with mint leaves. Dr. Selwyn told us that he grew his earlies in the sandy soil of one of the old glasshouses, where they reached the size of walnuts by mid April. The meal was concluded with creamed stewed rhubarb sprinkled with Demarara sugar. Thus almost everything was from the neglected garden. Before we had finished, Edwin turned our conversation to Switzerland, perhaps thinking that Dr. Selwyn and I would both have something to say on the subject. And Dr. Selwyn did indeed, after a certain hesitation, start to tell us of his stay in Berne shortly before the First World War. In the summer of 1913 (he began), he had completed his medical studies in Cambridge, and had forthwith left for Berne, intending to further his training there. In the event, things had turned out differently, and he had spent most of his time in the Bernese Oberland, taking more and more to mountain climbing. He spent weeks on end in Meiringen, and Oberaar in particular, where he met an alpine guide by the name of Johannes Naegeli, then aged sixty-five, of whom, from the beginning, he was very fond. He went everywhere with Naegeli - up the Zinggenstock, the Scheuchzerhorn and the Rosenhorn, the Lauteraarhorn, the Schreckhorn and the Ewigschneehorn - and never in his life, neither before nor later, did he feel as good as he did then, in the company of that man. When war broke out and I returned to England and was called up, Dr. Selwyn said, nothing felt as hard, as I realize now looking back, as saying goodbye to Johannes Naegeli. Even the separation from Elli, whom I had met at Christmas in Berne and married after the war, did not cause me remotely as much pain as the separation from Naegeli. I can still see him standing at the station at Meiringen, waving. But I may

    only be imagining it, Dr. Selwyn went on in a lower tone, to himself, since Elli has come to seem a stranger to me over the years, whereas Naegeli seems closer whenever he comes to my mind, despite the fact that I never saw him again after that farewell in Meiringen. Not long after mobilization, Naegeli went missing on his way from the Oberaar cabin to Oberaar itself. It was assumed that he had fallen into a crevasse in the Aare glacier. The news reached me in one of the first letters I received when I was in uniform, living in barracks, and it plunged me into a deep depression that nearly led to my being discharged. It was as if I was buried under snow and ice. But this is an old story, said Dr. Selwyn after a lengthy pause. We ought really, he said, turning to Edwin, to show our guests the pictures we took on our last visit to Crete. We returned to the drawing room. The logs were glowing in the dark. Dr. Selwyn tugged a bell-pull to the right of the fireplace, and almost instantly, as if she had been waiting in the passage for the signal, Elaine pushed in a trolley with a slide projector on it. The large ormolu clock on the mantelpiece and the Meissen figurines, a shepherd and shepherdess and a colourfully clad Moor rolling his eyes, were moved aside, and the wooden-framed screen Elaine had brought in was put up in front of the mirror. The low whirr of the projector began, and the dust in the room, normally invisible, glittered and danced in the beam of light by way of a prelude to the pictures themselves. Their journey to Crete had been made in the springtime. The landscape of the island seemed veiled in bright green as it lay before us. Once or