"We should think of cooking dinner," David said, looking at his watch and winding it. "It's almost five. We have about an hour and a half of daylight left before we have to turn off the stove. Though I much prefer eating later, we need hot food for the night. The sun will soon be around the edge of the gully, and it will cool quickly."

"I can put together a big stew in short order. Carrots, turnips, onions, diced sausage then diced potatoes to thicken," Rachel said. "I'd love to brown the onions first, but the aroma might carry too far. Hold the garlic also. Safer to do a blander stew."

Maria pointed to a block of gabbro. "That rock over there, we can set-up the stove behind it, it's hidden from the entrance and not much more than two metres from here. We can sit inside, keep warm and out of sight while it cooks."

"And we can sit back enjoying cheese, crispbread and wine while we wait," David smiled and shrugged. "This is a spa, after all. Dining is rather refined at spas, from what I've seen. I'll try to convert a piece from that splintered tree trunk into a cheese board. You girls get dinner going."

"Have you something to cut it with?" Rachel asked.

"I have a folding knife. We have Herzog's sharp blade."

"I have a wire saw, a surgical bone saw in my pack. We use it to cut firewood up here when we're camping. I'll get it."

"Oh, my! That looks familiar," he said as she handed him the coiled piece. "Conrad had one exactly like this. He told me he got it from a surgeon from Vienna whom he used to guide in the mountains. We used it a lot in the valleys and up the ridges."

"Edom was given this one by one of his good wine customers, a surgeon from Freiburg..." Rachel paused and looked into David's eyes. "So who's Conrad?"

"An Austrian mountain guide, I met him in the mountains four years ago. The Alpine Club had brought him in to help expand its programs, summer climbing camps, instruction, guiding and so on. The club was newly founded, and he had a lot of spare time, so he climbed mostly solo until we met."

"So that's where your Austrian accent comes from," Maria said. "I was wondering."

"Yes, a wonderful friend. I learned so much from him besides the German. I wonder what he's doing now with the war..." David shook his head. "But, to present things. We have much to do."

They all went to work.

David examined the short piece of shattered tree trunk lying at the edge of the slab. He looked up to see where it might have come from and saw clinging to the cliff a thick, broken trunk with a ring of new branches reaching up toward the light past its splintered head.

Might have blown apart from a lightning strike, could be simply a windfall, but whatever the cause, it was a few years ago. The wood is now nicely seasoned.

He selected a section of a long tapering splinter and cut it off where it was about six inches wide and a little over an inch thick. With the saw a foot farther along, he made a second cut, and another foot farther along, he made a third. He had two foot-long slabs an inch and a quarter thick, one tapering from about six to seven inches wide, the other more regular.

As David sawed, he had thought of Conrad.

Strange. He's the only person I've been close with since Sister Clemencia. The only one I've felt free around... The only one I've allowed near is more the point.

He moved to a flat area of sandstone and sat to begin easing the slab's edges and corners. He then sanded the gently arched top face of the larger slab of wood.

The only one I've allowed near until Maria. So strange. Such a different closeness, though. So wonderfully different. Intimate. So many unfamiliar feelings, emotions...

He shook his head, looked at the slab, tapped the sanding dust out of it, blew it off and washed it under the waterfall. He presented the new cutting board to Rachel, saying, "It's a bit rough still, and too late for the onions, carrots and turnip, but it'll make it easier doing the sausage and potatoes."

"That was quick." She flipped the board around in her hands as she examined it. "You could do well selling these in the market, I've seen worse there."

"Back to the grindstone." He looked at her and chuckled. "We'll have a cheese board in another five or six minutes."

"The stew will be another half hour or more. Maria has the wine chilling under the waterfall. Bring it over when you come. She's inside, digging out the glasses, the cheeses and the flatbreads."

A while later, after taking a sip, David picked up the bottle to read the label. "Tell me about this. Its aroma and flavours are even more complex than the one the other night."

"The 1911 is one of the finest vintages in the region in many years, and it was our first one of any size." Rachel gazed into her glass and sighed. "The vineyards were finally maturing, the vines were then six years old. We made spectacular wine that year, from both the Riesling and the Gewürztraminer..."

"So that's how that's pronounced, guh-voorts-truh-mee-nur," he said looking again at the label. "What's Gewürztraminer?"

"It's the grape variety, it means spicy Traminer, which is another grape variety, this one is its spicy cousin."

"It certainly is. The smell reminds me of my mother's baking. But there's also a lot of fruit. A complex smell."

"You should smell ginger, cloves, nutmeg and cinnamon among the spices," Maria said as she swirled her glass and held it to her nose. "Peaches and apricots also. Swirl the glass like this to coat the inside of the bowl. You'll get a bigger aroma."

He swirled and nosed again. "Wow! I see all those." He took a sip and looked up. "I really like this. It smells so sweet, but it has such a crisp flavour, not sweet at all. Not like that insipid stuff they call tea south of the border... Wow! I love this."

"It was my first wine," Maria said. "My first wine that wasn't watered-down. We had it on my sixteenth birthday, soon after we had begun harvesting the 1912. I much prefer the 1911, particularly from this barrel — I miss Dada so much."

She set her glass down, tried to staunch the flow of tears, then gave up and let them pour down her cheeks as she sat staring blankly. Her shoulders twitched, then she surrendered, allowing deep sobs to convulse her whole body.

Leaning over, she pressed her head against her mother's shoulder, under her chin and continued sobbing, gradually more quietly. Rachel ran her fingers through Maria's hair and hummed a soothing tune into her ear, rocking with her gently.

Maria slowly calmed and lay there for a long while before she said, "Thank you, Mama. You haven't hummed Pachelbel to me for many years, not since before we left Switzerland... That seems so long ago now."

"We're almost back there again, Sweetheart," Rachel said. "So close I can almost taste it."

"Taste — that's what we need to do," Maria said, as she sat up, leaned over and kissed David, then continued, "I'm so delighted you like Dada's wine... Sorry for the outburst, but I do miss him so much."

He put his glass down, wrapped his arms around her and said nothing as he gently kneaded her back with his hands.

"Cheese..." She shook her head. "We have a delicious selection of cheeses: Munster, Appenzeller, Gruyère, Butterkäse, all laid out on a nice board — an old family board we picked up at a spa in the Black Forest on a May Day back in '15. We also have knäckebrot. It will all go wonderfully with the wine."

She picked up her glass, looked at it and continued, "I'm running low, who's hogging the bottle?"

With glasses replenished, Rachel introduced and described the cheeses; two hard ones from Switzerland, a crusted soft one from the Vosges mountains across the Rhein in Elsass and a soft buttery-sweet one from Baden.

"Your cheeses are so much more delicious than the one I had chosen," he said. "Such wonderful flavours. Wild, complex flavours. They're so different from the bland cheddar we had in England and the boring things they fed us in Belgium."

Rachel got up twice to stir the pot and to add more water to the stew. On a third trip, she took the stew pot off and put on a lidded pot of water to boil for tea.

They leaned back against the rock, which was still slightly warm from the day's sun, and enjoyed their second course with spoons from deep bowls. David got up and turned the stove off when he heard the rattle of the lid as the water came to a boil. He dropped in the tea ball, brought the pot over and continued with his stew.

As they sat sipping their tea and nibbling pieces of dried fruit, Rachel said hesitantly, "You seem rather experienced and casual with sex, David — you're still young — I don't know if you're even out of your teens. I'm curious."

"I'm twenty. I had formal training at school."

"Formal training?" Maria asked in close harmony with Rachel. They all laughed.

Maria was the first to continue. "They do that in Canada? They don't even talk about it in school over here."

"It was private tutoring after class."

"Private tutoring?" Again asked in harmony.

"I was taken aside by one of the nuns when I was a few weeks into my tenth school year. A Catholic school. I had just turned sixteen, and she told me I needed additional work after school to improve my grasp of some subjects."

He took another sip of tea. "Partway into our first session, she told me she had noticed how I sometimes had trouble hiding myself in my trousers. She asked me if I needed assistance with learning ways to handle it." He looked at them, waiting for a response as they sat in silence with strange expressions he couldn't read.

Each is different, both unfamiliar to me.

"I guess I simply let it happen. I spent a lot of time after school taking private tutoring from Sister Clemencia. She started by hand, then by mouth, then a few sessions later, she hoisted her habit. She was quite young, probably not much more than twenty, and she was very hungry. Her mother and grandmother had forced her into the convent to finish her schooling, to become a novitiate and finally to take her vows as a nun."

"Why did she go along with their wishes?" Maria asked. "Why didn't she stand up for herself? Simply leave the convent when she realised... When she..."

"She talked about how it would ruin the family image, destroy her mother and grandmother if she left. As the second daughter, the tradition was that she become a nun, so she had crossed her fingers during the vows, hoping for a later escape. That's four years ago now — I wonder if she's still holding herself captive."

David paused and stared into his tea mug. "It's strange thinking back to that now. She was so embarrassed about having me look at her. Shame had been deeply drilled into her head, so I had to close my eyes and try not to touch her except with my..." He shook his head. "I guess I was too weak to refuse, and I allowed her to use me. No feelings but the physical ones. Great sensations they were, but so confusing. I'm probably still confused by it all."