Free The Deadly Space Between by Patricia Duncker

leaves it out. He doesn’t tell his reader that he was a member of the SS either. He says other things that are true. Ordinary people don’t usually understand mountaineers. They don’t understand why we do it in the first place. But the mountains are the most beautiful pure space I have ever known. The rock face, snow, ice, the avalanches and the storms, they bring you face to face with the limits of who you are. You are stripped of all pettiness. The mountain reduces you to simplicity. That’s a very liberating thing.’
    He stopped.
    ‘Go on,’ I said.
    Roehm smiled slightly. ‘Why are you so fascinated?’
    We marched past the YMCA.
    I suddenly felt childish and naive. Never in my life had I ever wanted to hunt, shoot or fish. I loathed outdoor sports. I had barely learned to ski. I had never played football for pleasure. In fact I had never done anything that men were supposed to do. I hardly ever went to pubs. I had never had a girlfriend. And so far as our trips to the mountains were concerned, only Liberty actually enjoyed skiing or snowboarding with the French entourage. My mother spent her time walking in the snow, then struggling back to the chalet to paint what she had seen. When we returned from the morning walk I just sat in my mother’s room, reading. Luce enjoyed the endless aperitifs and actually drank cocktails at lunchtime. She then settled down to spend the afternoons channel-hopping on satellite television. Her favourite foreign channels were Spain and the United Arab Emirates: Spain because the women paraded about in revealing clothes wiggling their breasts and bottoms in a permanent sensual fit that looked very odd, and the Arab states because they broadcast public prayers and had long stretches of the Koran simply pasted up on the screen. Luce found the koranic script very soothing. She said that an hour or two of the Koran was like having a hot bath and she dozed off in front of the descending scroll. We enjoyed the fresh air and the views. No one had ever felt driven to climb one of the mountains. And no one ever went hunting.
    Yet I found it hard to imagine Roehm as part of a milieu that dressed up in furs and strode across cols and glaciers, tracking ibex and chamois. His skin was too perfect, too white, too smooth. He smelt of indoors.
    We turned up Gower Street. Now the pavements were empty. Roehm increased his stride. I realized that I was in fact only a head shorter than he and that I could keep pace easily. It was his overall size that diminished me. Beside him I was insubstantial, like a thin thread of ectoplasm, easily dissolved. Roehm squeezed my arm gently, acknowledging my hesitation. He always appeared to know things, without being told, and it was this uncanny intuition, even sympathy, that increased my confidence in him. Everyone loves someone who listens, but the quality of his attention was in itself seductive. He persuaded me that, under his surveillance, I could never come to harm. Yet he was not in himself an altogether safe presence. I felt that no amount of explanation would ever quite tell me who he was. I did not and never would have quite enough information.
    ‘You’re not tired? It’s just here.’
    ‘No. I want to see where you work.’
    It was as if he was presenting me with a gift. We turned suddenly into the side gates of a hospital. The porter on duty simply nodded at Roehm, who produced a set of keys and opened the first door. We strode onto a long outstretched corridor of polished green linoleum as if we were visiting politicians arriving on the carpet. Now it was the Minotaur who led me on, into the heart of the labyrinth.
    Hospitals always smell the same. We could have been anywhere. I followed him past the trolleys heaped with soiled linen and rooms furnished with pinboards and computers. The lights were on, the computers were running, the in trays were full and the papers neatly stacked. But there was no sign of the night staff. We saw no one. Wherever