‘I think we can manage this lot.’ She closed the boot, locked the car, and stopped. More specifically, Bear stopped. He sat down and refused to move.
‘Bear, come on, it’s cold, let’s get in the cable car.’
He whined back at the car.
‘Are you kidding me? You couldn’t wait to see the back of it earlier!’ Alice tried to pull him but instead he lay his tummy down in the snow, not breaking eye contact. ‘Oh my God, are you actually lying down to stop me from moving you? Bear, we can’t stay here. What’s the problem?’
Nothing. Nothing but a fixed stare and a big sigh.
She opened the back of the car again to fetch a bag of his treats she knew was in there somewhere, something she could use as a bribe, and Bear leapt up, pushed his head around her and clutched his bed with his teeth.
‘Don’t eat that, it’s your bed,’ cried Alice. But Bear was already pulling it out of the car. She wrestled with him to try and stuff it back in, but he wasn’t letting go. ‘You are so stubborn. Come on, I can’t carry that as well, we’ll get it in the morning.’ She waved a treat under his nostrils, which he ignored.
‘I amnotcarrying these bags, and you, and that whopping great bed tonight. I’m tired, and it’s dark, and we don’t know where we’re going. I’m not doing it.’
Five minutes later, Alice was trying to hold her temper as she carried her bags, the dog lead, and the whopping great bed to the exit of the car park. Bear skipped along next to her, pleased with himself for getting his own way.
At the entrance to the station, Alice put down the bed that was wedged precariously under her lead-wielding arm and studied a map and a timetable before giving up and making her way to the counter, leaving everything but the dog in a heap by some stairs.
‘Hello,’ she said to the lady manning the enclosed ticket booth, wrapped in a thick black jacket. ‘We need to go to Mürren?’
‘Do you ski?’ the lady asked.
‘Not really,’ answered Alice.
‘If you want I will give you return ticket with pass to use the cable cars and chairlifts as much as you wish?’
‘Actually, I just want a one-way. I have to collect some more things from my car tomorrow, but other than that I’m not coming back down.’
‘Oh okay!’ The lady pressed a few buttons and Bear balanced on his back legs to put his paws up on the counter, the nosy thing. ‘Hello,’ the lady addressed him. ‘You are moving to the mountain too?’
Alice nodded. ‘We’re here for the winter.’
‘Wonderful. You will love it very much.’
The lady pointed Alice and Bear up the stairs to the waiting area, under a large sign that read,Gimmelwald-Mürren-Birg-Schilthorn. To reach the very top of the mountain, the Schilthorn, you needed to take four different cable cars. Alice dragged their belongings up the steps, hoping the change at Gimmelwald wouldn’t take long. She needed a wee.
They had about twenty-five minutes to wait (twenty-three minutes, to be precise, and from what she’d heard of Swiss rail travel, precise was how it would be running) and the waiting area was deserted. The cold air crept in through the wooden-panelled walls, and she could see her and Bear’s breath billowing in front of their noses. The lights were stark and large black and white images of the mountains acted as decoration alongside a Nescafé hot drinks dispenser and a vending machine containing interesting Swiss nibbles.
‘Ovomaltine,’ she whispered aloud, reading an orange-wrappered chocolate bar. Was that the same as Ovaltine? Did they have Ovaltine chocolate here?
She led Bear to a large window and peered outside, straining to see if she could make out a cable car approaching from the heavens. Bear jumped up, paws on the window, which she probably shouldn’t let him do but he was a nice hugging height when he was all stretched tall like this.
Outside was the inky outline of the Eiger, one of the most impressive mountains in the Bernese Alps. Barely visible at this time of night, it was almost impossible to imagine the scale.
‘Wait until you see it in daylight,’ said an accented man’s voice, and Alice turned to see a cableway worker sweeping the clean floor of the terminal. ‘You are just visiting, yes?’
‘Sort of, we’re staying a while.’
‘Showing your handsome dog where he is from?’ The man bent down to say hi to Bear.
‘Yep,’ said Alice. ‘It’s really quiet around here, though, I was expecting more tourists.’
‘The snow it came earlier than expected this year. All the holiday companies will be trying to pull in their staff and start the ski season as soon as they can. You will have a lot of company up there in no time.’ He smiled and went back to work.
Alice turned back to the window and snuggled into Bear. ‘Until then it’s just me and you, okay? Shall we go up the mountain?’
