Die Like a Dog Read Online Free Page B

in grey flannels and a blazer with an insignia on the breast pocket – walked down the aisle and paced the front like a Guards corporal. Seale, who had been twitching curtains into place, turned, collected eyes, and moved in front of the big screen.
    â€˜Good evening,’ she said. ‘And thank you for coming.’
    There was a burst of giggles from the front row. She said, in a cool, clear voice that carried to the farthest corner: ‘One more sound from you and I’ll bash your heads together.’
    There was a concerted gasp and a sigh, perhaps of pleasure. ‘There’s no introduction,’ Seale went on. ‘I can’t talk, I let the pictures do that. No questions while the show’s on, please, but you can ask as many as you like at the end. Okay? Lights!’
    She was walking to the side where her automatic control would be. The screen lit up and the room lights went out. Someone had been briefed beforehand. Miss Pink wondered who that could be – or was the girl not alone? Then she saw what was on the screen and her eyes widened. It had been deliberately out of focus, she thought. Very clever.
    There had been vague but brilliant blues and pinks, and shapes soft as coloured mists. The scene resolved to a vast stretch of sea, a vertical buttress of rosy rock and Seale, poised on the edge of nothing, turned towards them, gesturing. ‘I was explaining,’ came her laconic voice, ‘that this was not the best place for a picture.’
    A black wall superseded the blinding sea but the water was still there, sparking diamonds hundreds of feet below. Near the top of the wall a high sun picked out points like a floodlight and there she was again, illuminated, brown as a nut in a white bikini, arched backward in the act of surmounting an overhang. The rope was the palest thread, scarcely visible in the gloom below. ‘Cornwall,’ she said. A pin would have been heard to drop.
    The show lasted an hour. In bed that night it occurred to Miss Pink that Seale must be the poorest speaker in the business. The pictures seemed merely to elicit her remarks, as if she, like the audience, stared at each new situation and said the first thing that came to mind. The cool words dropped into a rapt stillness. ‘I wasn’t too happy at that point,’ or, as angry clouds came boiling over a knife-edge of ice on the Matterhorn: ‘That was hairy. The ice was rotten too. It was over a thousand feet to the glacier.’ Flash. A pattern of crevasses as in an aerial view, gaping blue and green like the jaws of putrid cadavers. Miss Pink’s brain cut in: it wasn’t the right glacier, but another, more appropriate in the context. There was more craft to this show than was apparent to the layman.
    Flick – and the screen was clumped with the fringed bells of soldanella: pale mauve, blooming in the snow.
    They winged round the Dolomites like eagles, looking down through thin air to matchstick trees beyond – too far beyond the following party: bright crash hats a couple of hundred feet below. They stared across a chasm to a sheer tower with minute figures clinging to the rock. They zoomed in on the leader but although they could now see his boots and hands, even the telephoto lens failed to bring up the holds. Click – and it was the same man, the same position but in profile with the cliff dropping out of the picture: exposure without end.
    They were transported to the Himalayas where Annapurna was a fluted triangle of pink ice in the dawn, to the Andes and the terrible soft snow of a southern face. Avalanches were explained most casually, and avalanches came rolling towards them so that Miss Pink thought she heard the rumble and cringed in anticipation of the blast.
    And then they were in California, and the remarks became a dreamy commentary as Seale – and they – lived for an indeterminate period in a world of pale and soaring walls, of domes and spires