Page 37 of The Spare

She makes a sound that’s a more polite take on a snort. ‘I’d like to see you try.’

It’s a fair comment. We went skiing with the Wentworths a couple of times when we were teens, and Slinks was fucking fantastic. Not only does her family have a gorgeous chalet in Courchevel, but she went to school at Le Rosey, the flashy-as-fuck school in Geneva that boasts a secondary campus in Gstaad where its lucky students spend winter term. If she was a decent skier before Le Rosey, you’d better believe she put in the hours during her time there.

This is excellent. Sod strolling around Paris—skiing together is a fantastic plan. It’s something we’re both passionate about. We can genuinely have a lark while spending some much-needed time alone together.

‘You’re on,’ I tell her. ‘Can we stay at your family’s place?’

‘I’m sure it’ll be fine. I’ll ask Mum.’ She’s already pulling her phone out.

‘Good,’ I say. ‘I’ve always wanted to bone you in that hot tub.’

‘Seminal album from your teenage years,’ Slinks says, pointing the bottle of Whispering Angel at me before refilling our glasses. We’re sitting on the sun-drenched south-facing terrace of Courchevel icon Le Cap Horn, enjoying a well-earned lunch after an energetic morning of skiing. The atmosphere is raucous, as always, the people-watching epic. The main difference from my previous visits is that I’m far less interested in perving over the many model-type ski bunnies dining with us and far more focused on my hot wife in her sexy AF gold-and-black Chanel ski gear.

The skiing version of Slinky is the bomb. She’s skied like a fucking lunatic all morning, and the benefits of a few days of vigorous outdoor (and indoor) activity are showing. Her face is flushed, the tip of her nose rosy with sunburn, and she has a lightness about her that I haven’t seen enough of since I marched her down the aisle. I get the impression she isn’t monitoring herself as fully as she usually does. She’s relaxed enough to just be, and I seriously dig it.

As we work our way through a variety of dishes, from oysters to the Cap Horn salad and lobster ravioli—ordering when ravenous is dangerous—we’re quizzing each other, getting to know the gaps that inevitably exist in our knowledge, no matter how long we’ve known each other.

I pick up my glass. ‘Easy. AM. No contest.’ At her blank look, I add, ‘AM? Arctic Monkeys?’

‘Oh,’ she says. ‘I’ve heard of them, but I don’t know their music.’

‘Everyone went fucking apeshit for them at school for months and months.’ Eton was an Arctic Monkeys microcosm in 2013. They dropped the album at the beginning of the school year, and everyone went instantly nuts for it.

She shrugs. ‘Happy for you. I’m sure it was great.’

That makes me laugh. I settle back in my chair, revelling in the warmth of the sun on my face and the joie de vivre all around us. Fuck, the sense of wellbeing you get from being in the mountains—there’s nothing like it. This was the right call: skiing our socks off and then après-ing with the best of them, ringed by perfect, snowy mountains. It’s the best feeling in the world. Way better than trudging around museums and churches together in freezing Paris.

‘It was,’ I tell her. ‘And you? What about you?’

‘Just as easy. 1989 by Taylor Swift.’

I roll my eyes. ‘Ahh. So predictable.’ I can see why Slinks would like Taylor. From what little I know of the latter, they both seem like Type A women who have their shit together. ‘And why is that? Was it big at school?’

‘Definitely.’ She thinks, rolling the stem of her glass between her long fingers. ‘It’s objectively a fantastic album. But it was more that some of the songs spoke to me. And, actually, I’ve been relistening a lot recently, and yeah. Let’s just say they have some relevance for us.’

I lean forward with a smirk. ‘Am I about to get some deep insight into your psyche, princess? Do tell.’

‘I’m not sure I want to. Well, “Blank Space” I was obsessed with at the time. The video is still my favourite music video of all time: old-money vibes and great fashion and a hot guy—oh, and it was all tongue in cheek, obviously. I loved it.’

I continue to grin at her. I don’t have a clue what song she’s referring to, but I love seeing her animated. I often get the feeling that I’m merely scratching the surface of Slinky’s amazing brain, and that feeling has only grown more acute since I married her.

‘But it was ‘Shake It Off’ that really got to me at the time,’ she continues. ‘It’s about all the criticism she was getting from the media and the public, and she was damned if she did and damned if she didn’t, basically. And the song was about her shaking off that criticism, and I was like, how? How the hell do you just shake this stuff off?’

I frown. ‘What do you mean?’

She makes a face before she answers. ‘You’ll think it’s silly.’

‘Try me.’

‘Well,’ she says hesitantly, ‘when I get grief, or criticism, or even when I think I might get given a hard time, I can’t shake it off. Like, it paralyses me.’ She says the last part in a voice so small I have to lean forward to hear her over the din of the music and our fellow skiers. I put my hand over hers and give it a squeeze.

‘Paralyses you how?’

She dips her head. ‘Maybe that’s the wrong word, but it… blocks me. It’s like this thought, or feedback, or criticism, or whatever, is a balloon inside my head, and it swells up and drowns everything else out, and I just get filled with this horror. Absolute horror. I can’t let it go, and I obsess over it, and I can’t make room for anything else in my head. It’s the mental equivalent of swallowing a golf ball and then trying to digest as normal.’

She still won’t look me in the eye. I squeeze her hand harder. ‘Bloody hell, sweetheart.’

‘And now you’re going to think I’m crazy.’