The Dark Frontier

by A. B. Decker

  “I forgot to mention,” she said, made slightly breathless by her nerves. “I will be leaving tomorrow”.

  With his hand on the door to leave, Signor Sciarone cast a slightly injured yet accusing look at Ellen.

  “You leave us? You no like it here?”

  “It’s not that. I need to get back.”

  Signor Sciarone shrugged, turned and closed the door behind him, mumbling to himself as he went.

  As she listened to his steps disappear down the stairs, Ellen began to relax. Locking the door, she went straight over to the balcony and drew the heavy curtains back together. True, the room needed light. But for Ellen the dark seclusion offered greater comfort. And since the light of the day was already fast fading anyway, she decided to have an early night in bed with a book. She took a collection of Daphne du Maurier stories out of her case and laid it on the bedside table. Not After Midnight. It seemed the perfect read.

  She slipped out of her clothes, laid them neatly on the chair beside the table and slunk into bed. Although it was more than a year now since Frank walked out of her life, she still slept naked. The only sound as she lay there was the occasional bounce of a ball in the street below. But this soon faded as the dusk deepened and Ellen became immersed in her book. It was not until she reached the third story in the collection – ‘Don’t Look Now’ – that her concentration began to wander. Set in Venice, it not only seemed so close by culturally. But more importantly it put her in mind of their honeymoon.

  She let the book fall onto her chest as she recalled that blissful sunny afternoon just a week before Christmas. They stepped out of Venice railway station to be greeted by a magical scene that gave her the feeling she had just walked into a modern-day Canaletto painting. A waterway teeming with activity, elegant old buildings rising out of the water either side of the canal washed in pastel shades of pink and yellow, and people everywhere getting on and off the boats that drew up outside the station. Ellen was mesmerised. It was the perfect honeymoon. She stood in wonderment, lost in the magic of that moment.

  “What do you think of it?” Frank asked, turning his mop of thick brown hair in her direction with a broad captivating smile. There was a slight mournfulness about his dark, gently drooping eyes that sat oddly with the smile. They always put her in mind of a loyal Basset hound. It was the eyes – and that mop of hair – that had attracted her the very first time they met: the sparkle that coalesced with a hint of sadness accentuated in turn by a certain unevenness. It was partly this asymmetry about his eyes that intrigued her – the way they were slightly skewed by a strangely buckled bridge of the nose that lay between them.

  As if he’d been shot between the eyes at birth, his father used to tell him.

  It was a cruel description that Ellen had found hard to cope with from the very first moment she heard it. But set against this Canaletto backdrop, the intriguing charm of his eyes blotted out every trace of that fragmentary vignette. Made them all the more bewitching with his smile. Ellen could find no words to express her joy.

  Frank put an arm around her waist and gave her a squeeze. He knew Venice quite well from one of his early assignments, and while Ellen was still searching for those elusive words, she found herself whisked onto a vaporetto, which carried them down the Grand Canal to their hotel. Frank wanted the very best for their honeymoon and had booked a magnificent suite overlooking the canal.

  Ellen closed the book, placed it back on the bedside table and began to conjure up their wedding night in Venice. Recalling it now in light of the last months of uncertainty and disquiet, she realised this was also the first time she saw something in Frank that hinted at a certain turmoil within him. Something deep down which she could not put her finger on. And something she had instantly put to the back of her mind for fear of opening a can of worms. Perhaps that had been her mistake.

  She had always had a certain dread of the male body during early adolescence – a sense of foreboding and anxiety born from her strict upbringing and the Catholic girls’ school she had attended. A place that had taught her little more than fear and shame. This feeling remained with her in a vestigial form into adulthood, even as she came to appreciate the fascinating nature of manhood in the fullness of time – its immanent power and independence that seemed to invest it with a mind all its own, yet made it such a completely open book at the same time. For Ellen, it was one of nature’s wonders. She held it in awe.

  When she had seen Frank naked for the first time some months before their wedding, her wonderment was further enhanced by a new discovery that put every earlier enjoyment in the shade. Frank was the first man she had ever seen without that coy sheath of skin which so vainly masquerades as a cloak of male desire. There was an honesty about this one. So neat. So innocent. For Ellen, this had come as a revelation. But then in Venice, on their wedding night, Ellen found that perhaps there was good reason after all for her adolescent sense of foreboding and anxiety.

  Frank’s first instinct had been to take a shower after their journey, while Ellen unpacked their bags, divested herself of her shoes and curled up on the sofa to flick through all the hotel amenities, the Marco Polo tours on offer and the menu of the hotel restaurant. She became so engrossed that she failed to notice Frank when he emerged from the shower, still drying himself, and then lay down on the bed.

  When eventually she looked up and saw him lying there, the sight of him cast an instant spell. He was lying face up, eyes shut, head resting on his hands. He had already dozed off. The towel lay on the floor beside the bed. And in repose, nestling in that tousled charm, lay the substance of Ellen’s fascination. Captivating. So unsuspecting. Defenceless and innocent as a sleeping baby. She felt that her excitement was audible as she crept onto the bed and offered up her lingual skills in an act of pure devotion. She was aroused beyond belief in the throes of her worship. And while Frank showed no sign of stirring from his sleep, she caught the soft whispers of his voice as he began to sigh and purr, every so often calling out “pet.” It was a name he had not used for her before. She remembered thinking at the time that she was not too pleased, suspecting that perhaps it was a name he had used for some past lover. But she paid it no further attention, as she savoured every second of Frank and offered a train of reverent kisses in thanksgiving.

  Then suddenly from nowhere, Frank let out a piercing scream that startled Ellen. She looked up. Any sense of a smile had gone. In its place a strange, unsettling expression that she found hard to describe. Like a symptom of deep distress. An excruciating agony in his eyes and a look of unmitigated disgust on his lips as he cried out “Scheisse!” She almost had the feeling he was about to throw up.

  Ellen knew he could speak German, but she had never heard him utter a single word of the language before. To hear him speak it at that instant in what seemed to be a moment of such distress hinted at some dark history to which she would never be privy.

  But slowly the mood calmed again. He started to run his fingers through her hair. Ellen took this to be a mark of appreciation. And, despite that strange German expletive, this gesture enabled her to put the sense of inner conflict she had witnessed to the back of her mind. Yet vestiges of the shock and concern she had felt that afternoon in Venice never entirely went away.

  And the memory of that occasion now put her in mind of his incongruous relish for quoting Sophocles as they lay in bed together. To have a penis, he said, was like being chained to a madman. It was a quotation he frequently repeated. This and the reminder of that expression on his face hinted at a deeper side to him that would be closed to her forever.

  There had been so many things in retrospect that should have set alarm bells ringing. And now, between the sombre walls of the hotel in Locarno, her memory of the troubling undercurrent to that brief moment of wedding night bliss seemed all the more concerning. The pain. The distress. That look of rank disgust. Even the innocent name he called her. They all suggested a murky aspect to Frank’s history. Some profoundly existenti
al turmoil buried deep in his past.

  Was it this, she wondered, this sinister and troubling secret that explained his disappearance?

  She let the question sink into the darkness of the room, preferred instead to cling to the memory of their wedding night. It was the reassuring reminiscence of that bliss that eventually caressed her to sleep, allowed her to forget for a time that Frank was no longer with her and that – for some reason she might never understand – he had turned his back on their blissful companionship and chosen to disappear.

  Ellen was woken in the morning by a loud knocking sound that drifted up the staircase from the depths of the hotel. In her twilight state of mind, she struggled to get a grip on where she was. Then she recalled Signor Sciarone and his peculiar behaviour the evening before. Rubbing the sleep from her eyes, she wondered what noisy work it was that he felt compelled to do so early in the morning.

  She got up and drew back the heavy curtains. The doors onto the balcony were still slightly open. She shivered slightly. But the cool morning air was so refreshing on her skin she felt a new lease of energy. And the morning outside was so inviting that she decided to take a last stroll before leaving the Italian ambience of Locarno behind her and heading back north.

  It was quite chilly when Ellen got down to the lake. In the early morning light, the dark mountain facing her looked every bit as menacing as it had the day before. But there was a resonance to the air that promised a warm spring day ahead. It gave her heart. She headed on to the Piazza Grande for a last taste of this strangely ambivalent town and to enjoy a coffee before she left. There was not a lot of activity on the piazza at that hour. While the cafés were open, none of the tables outdoors were occupied, and a restful silence hung over the place, punctuated only now and then by occasional footsteps. Although it was still on the chilly side, Ellen was loath to sit indoors, so she sat at the table she had occupied the day before. As soon as the waiter had taken her order of a cappuccino, the silence gave way to a music from inside the café that was so light it was barely audible. The sound of a keyboard and guitar that strained even to compete with the occasional footsteps on the piazza. Ellen thought she recognised it.

  She looked back at the café and saw that the waiter who had taken her order was not the same man as yesterday. This one was older, wore his hair long and sported a five-day shadow that seemed out of keeping with the dress of a Swiss waiter. What looked like a permanent snarl on his lips underlined this impression. It occurred to her that this was probably not a waiter at all, but simply the owner opening up for the morning. And the music perfectly matched the sense of a slow start to the day. As Ellen observed him moving around the bar, she had the sense that he was enjoying the early-morning freedom of doing as he liked. Playing his own music. Not having to concern himself with the clientele. She was grateful for that.

  As she continued to watch, the music slowly built into a mysterious, captivating atmosphere. It lent a new dimension to the piazza. The footsteps around her slowly lost their power. It was the emergence of the trumpet that did it for Ellen. The sparing mournful tones gradually eased their way into the music, then skittered into the foreground like a little girl in search of somewhere to belong. ‘In a Silent Way’. It instantly put her in mind of Frank. It was his kind of music. He had introduced her to Miles Davis not long before that day he left for Switzerland. The memory evoked by those eerie, almost menacing sounds of the trumpet, guitar and electronic keyboards gave Ellen a strange sense of comfort.

  She relaxed into the music, took out her book and started reading where she had left off the night before at the third tale in the collection. ‘Don’t Look Now’. As the music weaved its mystery and Ellen became engrossed in the story, still waiting for her cappuccino to arrive, she became aware of a figure approaching the table.

  “Good morning. May I join you?”

  It was the elegant lady from the day before. She was now wearing a coat over her Chanel two-piece, but still clutched the same Louis Vuitton bag emblazoned with the initials P.R. Without waiting for a reply, she sat herself down in the chair next to Ellen. There was a presumptuousness about it that irritated Ellen. But having made up her mind to leave Locarno that day, she felt more at ease with the world this morning.

  “I must apologise for being so unfriendly yesterday,” Ellen said, overcoming her irritation as the Louis Vuitton lady made herself comfortable.

  “I was not aware that you were. But it did seem to me that you were a little troubled.”

  The words were broken by the man from the café, with the snarl on his lips, placing Ellen’s cappuccino on the table. She left the remark to hang in the air, as she contemplated the froth and the dusting of cocoa in silence, listening to the mournful trumpet that encroached increasingly onto the piazza air. She saw the man who put the cappuccino on the table in a different light now. The snarl broke into a smile of casual nonchalance. And he took her uninvited companion’s order. Caffè e latte.

  “I lost my husband recently,” Ellen said, as the man returned to the bar with the order.

  The words were intended as an explanation. But the moment she blurted them out, it struck Ellen that she was really speaking them for herself. They provided a release.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry. I should not have intruded. Do forgive me.”

  “It’s all right. It was a long process,” said Ellen, adding with dubious conviction: “I’m sure it’s good for me to talk about it. And probably easier to do so with a stranger.”

  There followed a long, awkward silence as the two women stared into their coffee cups. Around them, activity on the piazza was beginning to grow. Two more guests arrived and sat down at a table nearby. A delivery van pulled up at the café next door. And the man and woman Ellen had seen the day before admiring each other’s dogs were now walking their animals together.

  “Where did you say you learned such good English?” Ellen eventually asked.

  “A very good friend,” the lady said with an enigmatic smile. “I lived with him in South Devon for some years. But when he passed away, I moved back to France.”

  “Do you know London at all?”

  “A little.”

  “I live in Fulham,” said Ellen.

  “Oh, I know Fulham. On the few occasions we went to London, my friend would take me to see a polo match there.”

  “Polo?” said Ellen with a look of surprise. For her, this was a sport that belonged to a bygone age, to the days of the British Empire. Yet looking now at this lady in her stylish clothes with her Louis Vuitton bag, she could well imagine her at the Hurlingham polo club.

  “Really? I live just down the road from there. At the less fashionable end.”

  This unexpected connection between the two women gave Ellen heart to open up a little more. She began to speak of the events leading up to the morning when Frank stepped out of her life just over a year ago:

  She was working in Richmond at the time. In a boring secretarial job with the local council, typing letters and minutes of meaningless meetings. There was little work left to do that afternoon, and just as she was about to cook up a story about feeling unwell so she could leave work early and beat the rush hour, Frank phoned. He said he had to leave on an assignment early next morning. That was at 4.30. By quarter to five she was already on the train to Putney.

  Putney station was quieter than usual for a Friday afternoon that February. Most of the noise at the entrance to the ticket hall came from the newspaper hoardings that cried out their standard tales of gloom: ‘Rolls Royce collapse’, ‘Government takes on unions’ and so on. A nation in a permanent state of decline. But no one was bothered enough to pay much attention. Least of all Ellen as she strode through the ticket hall and out into Putney High Street. She had other news on her mind: the call from Frank; the hurried nature of his words; a certain breathlessness in his voice, similar to the shortness of breath she had heard when he called three weeks earlier to say that his mother had died. But this was different.
It was not the Frank she knew.

  When she asked him what it was all about, what kind of assignment, he just added a quick “I’ll tell you all about it when you get home.” Then hung up.

  And it was these words that preyed on her mind, reverberated endlessly around her head for the whole journey on the train and pursued her along the street down to the river. By the time she reached Putney Bridge, the early evening mist had already announced its impending arrival in gentle wisps that gathered on the water. Ellen watched as they wrapped spirals around the boats tied up at the water’s edge, promising to blanket the Thames in the hours to come. They spelled concealment and mystery. Apprehensive of what awaited her at home, she stopped and contemplated the river and the wisps of early fog.

  For a good ten minutes, she pondered the magic they weaved on the water. Eerie shapes and patterns moving along the banks of the river, over the ripples of the Thames – like novice monks assembling in a silent ritual, privy to some arcane knowledge. Seagulls mewing and wailing as they dived and wheeled around the boats and drew erratic circles in the air, resembling cryptic messages that evaporated in the slipstream of their flight.

  She normally enjoyed the walk across the bridge – the bustle of the Thames, the endless flow of water beneath her feet, the sound of the gulls. She often liked to stop here and watch the gulls. She found it one of the happiest places on Earth. It was this spot, on this bridge, that marked the start of a new life for Ellen. For it was here that Frank had asked her to marry him.

  But every movement on the river now whispered puzzlement. She kept dwelling on Frank’s words. For no reason that she could fathom, they troubled her. Gave her a sense of foreboding. Why so enigmatic, she asked herself, and reached into her bag for the comfort of a cigarette – then it dawned on her that she had kicked the habit weeks ago. Her hand hit instead upon the cold metal of the front-door key, reminding her that she was almost home, and she moved on across the bridge.