The Dark Frontier

by A. B. Decker

  “How did you react?” Marthe asked.

  “What? To being called pet?”

  Ellen became aware of herself flushing again at the memory of the first time she heard Frank use this name for her. On their honeymoon in Venice.

  “I suppose I got a bit irritated sometimes, that’s all. But it didn’t really bother me that much,” said Ellen, wincing inwardly at the discomfort of another lie.

  She sensed her face colour all the more. But Marthe appeared to ignore it. Or perhaps she was enjoying the psychiatrist’s couch routine too much to interrupt the flow.

  “Did you ever talk to him about his strange behaviour?” she asked.

  “I tried. Once.”

  Ellen’s words became involuntarily muted by her recollection of that attempt.

  “Tell me about it.”

  Ellen would have preferred not to, but she knew Marthe would not let her off that easily. And deep down, she also sensed the need to get it off her chest.

  “Do you know Cornwall?” Ellen asked. Marthe shook her head with a slightly mystified expression. But Ellen could see that she had her full attention.

  “It’s very beautiful. Full of myths and legends. I always spent my holidays there as a child. Loved the place. Then, one day, I persuaded Frank to take me back for a long weekend. You must have heard of King Arthur?”

  Marthe nodded.

  “Well, he’s supposed to have held court in a place called Tintagel. And every year, when we went on holiday to Cornwall, I was always dying to visit the place. But I never did. My parents never took me. So Frank made it an extra-long weekend and booked a lovely little cottage just outside Tintagel, because he said he’d never been there either. Actually, I think he was probably lying just to please me – he was a bit like that. Well, to tell the truth, Tintagel itself proved rather disappointing. And much smaller than in my childhood dreams.

  “But the landscape is magical. It was late autumn. A damp Saturday afternoon. And we were the only people there, except for a solitary figure sitting on a rock overlooking the ruins. I found it depressingly desolate, but this man above us seemed strangely absorbed by it. He appeared to be lost in his thoughts as he stared at the sea crashing on the rocks below. Then he caught sight of us. And instantly switched his attention. He couldn’t take his eyes off us. It made me feel very uneasy. He just sat there, watching our every move.

  “Eventually I just couldn’t stand it any longer, so I persuaded Frank we should leave and find the nearest pub for a bite to eat. Then, about ten minutes after we’d sat down in the pub with our ploughman’s lunch, in he walked. He seemed much larger at ground level, as he stood in the doorway. He wasn’t tall, but he was well-built and muscular. Quite good looking in a sinister sort of way, even though he was prematurely bald. He smiled over at us as he came in, looked enquiringly at our table, then walked over to the bar. He appeared to be talking to the barman about us, pointing and looking in our direction. And when the barman pulled a pint of beer and put it down in front of him, he picked up the glass and came to sit at the table next to ours.

  “‘Wonderful country this, isn’t it?’ he said in a broad accent from the other side of the Atlantic that took me aback. I remember wondering what on earth an American was doing in those parts. But I didn’t need to ask. He was one of those very forthcoming Americans who heap all kinds of information and worldly wisdom on you without stopping for a moment to consider whether you actually want to hear it or not.

  “‘I’m looking for inspiration,’ he said. And he stared profoundly into the ploughman’s lunch that the barman had brought over, as if he wanted to reassure us that their conversation at the bar had been nothing more than an innocent discussion of the menu. Without waiting any longer for an invitation, our new-found American friend then proceeded to let us into the whole history behind his visit to Cornwall.

  “He reached a large workman’s hand across the table and introduced himself as Bill Plattner. He was an artist, he said. Or a sculptor to be precise.

  “‘You might not think it,’ he went on, ‘but I used to be a puny little runt at one time.’

  “Actually, I have to admit that he had quite an engaging personality on the surface, as Americans so often do. But I was slightly disturbed by the way he couldn’t take his eyes off Frank. Well, in the time it took us to finish our ploughman’s lunches, we came to know practically everything there was to know about Bill Plattner – at least regarding what he considered the meaningful part of his life.

  “He said he had studied art in California. And on his way into art school in San Diego every day, he said, he always passed a gym. One day, one of the men who worked there was standing on the door and started to make fun of him, told him he should take more pride in his own body, it was God’s gift, and all that kind of thing. And the taunting got to him so much that he was eventually persuaded to go inside one day and take a look.

  “And he never looked back, or so he said. Apparently, he started working out every day, and took such pleasure in the fruits of his bodybuilding that it influenced the whole direction of his studies. And so he became a sculptor. He rambled on about the ‘unique interaction between my bodybuilding and my art’,” Ellen said attempting to imitate an American accent. “I had difficulty following him sometimes. But Frank seemed engrossed. And that surprised me, because he’s usually so dismissive of people like that.

  “Anyway, to cut a long story short, he had spent a year of his studies in Europe, ‘doing Florence’ and that sort of thing. And on what he called a pilgrimage to the south-west of England (he was into Barbara Hepworth and wanted to ‘soak up some of the ambience that had inspired that wonderful lady’ as he put it), he’d been completely knocked out by the bleakness of the moors. Especially by the granite rocks that jut out of the hills. And the weird shapes they make – ‘born of fire and yet so cold’ he kept saying.

  “In fact, he was so taken by the place that he decided to invest the proceeds of his first big commission in a small cottage on the edge of Dartmoor. I suppose he must have been quite a successful artist to afford that. And he turned it into a studio, where he worked for at least two or three months every year with the local granite.

  “‘You must come over and see it some time,’ he kept saying. And his invitation always seemed to be addressed more to Frank than to me. ‘It’s another world,’ he said, ‘right on the edge of the moor. Bleak, depressingly beautiful. The west winds breathe this curious, almost silent susurrus through the grass, not a tree to be seen for miles.’ I remember those words to this day. Not so much strange as pretentious, I felt. As if he was trying to impress, trying to prove something.”

  At that moment, Ellen recalled the peculiar verse that Frank was supposed to have written in the clinic – Pneuma, silent susurrus, whispers ancient legends of what might have been: Tristan in Tintagel for example. The words were etched indelibly on her mind. Not a day went by without her wondering what they could possibly mean.

  “Would you excuse me for a moment? There’s something I must show you,” she said. And she left Marthe hanging in mid-story, as she went to fetch a copy of the piece of paper that Professor Abegg had shown her when she met him for the first time in the clinic.

  “Here, maybe you can make sense of it.” Ellen handed it to Marthe when she returned and resumed the story while Marthe digested the words.

  “Well, eventually Frank persuaded me that we should accept his invitation. I have to admit that I was very curious. But also a little apprehensive.”

  “Why?” Marthe asked, looking up from the piece of paper with a quizzical expression in her eyes.

  “I’m not sure. There was just something about the man that disturbed me, but I couldn’t put my finger on it at the time. And he could actually be quite entertaining. The setting for his studio was certainly just as he had described it. Bleak and depressingly beautiful.

  “And for all his pretentious posing, he was really quite modest. I don’t think he genuinely
saw himself as a very talented artist.

  “‘No one can come anywhere near the talents of Nature,’ he used to say. ‘Nature will always be the only sculptor of any note. She can do anything – from the human body to the Bowerman’s Nose.’ That was one of his favourite rocks on the moor. ‘What can we hope to achieve against that? We’re nothing more than poor copyists,’ he used to say.

  “Well, some weeks after that trip, Frank suddenly announced, quite out of the blue, that he had arranged to visit Bill Plattner again at the weekend. I didn’t even know they had kept in touch. And I was very much against him going. Apart from anything else, I already had plans for that weekend.

  “‘Fine. Then you won’t be bored if I’m not here,’ he said.

  “That got me so angry. I think it was the only really serious argument we had. We hardly spoke for the rest of that week, except to heap abuse on each other. So anyway, despite my protests, he went. And I stayed behind – that is, until I could stand it no longer. Much against my better judgement, the thought of a Saturday night alone drove me to follow him. It wasn’t easy to find the place on my own through the rambling lanes of Devon. When eventually I got there, it was already quite late, and I was exhausted. The door was open. I remembered Bill saying he never locked it, so I just walked in. The place seemed cold and deserted, but I could hear voices coming from the studio.

  “The studio was actually a converted barn directly adjoining the cottage. And when I went through the passageway that Bill had created between the living area and what he liked to call his workshop, the sight that greeted me was so comical I don’t know why I didn’t split my sides. Bill was sitting beside a huge lump of his favourite granite, making sketches. Around him and at his feet lay dozens of discarded sheets of paper containing what looked like unfinished sketches of the same model. And the model in question was my Frank. Stark naked. Stretched out on a sofa. I couldn’t believe my eyes.

  “‘Hi Ell,’ Bill said, friendly as ever and completely unabashed. ‘I thought Frank was coming down alone this trip.’ Bill insisted on calling me Ell from the very first time we met, and I hated it. But I didn’t bother to make my feelings known the first time since I didn’t even remotely imagine we would be seeing him ever again. Let alone under such circumstances. So the name stuck, along with a growing antipathy towards him.

  “Well, Frank very sheepishly pulled his clothes on, and it became one of the strangest weekends I’d ever experienced. Frank and Bill spent a lot of time alone together, and on the few occasions they were with me they behaved like two giggly schoolgirls. I’d never seen Frank behave in such a silly way before. In retrospect, I suppose it was embarrassment.”

  “You say you tried talking to Frank about his behaviour.”

  “Yes, that was when I tried talking to him – after we got home. Before that, we spent the time either in silence or skirting the issue with meaningless chatter. Or in Frank’s case, silliness.”

  “Which issue were you trying to skirt?”

  “Well, there was only one. That cosy little scene on the sofa.”

  Ellen detected in her own voice an involuntary disbelief that Marthe even felt the need to ask such a question.

  “I mean, how would you feel suddenly finding you were married to a queer?” Ellen asked.

  “Is that how you put it to him?”

  “More or less.”

  “And what was his reaction?” Marthe asked. “You know, just because he was posing naked for an artist doesn’t mean that he’s homosexual.”

  “That’s what he said. Those very words. And when I calmed down and thought about it, I managed to convince myself that he was right, that I had probably been exaggerating. A bit like that Geordie girlfriend I dreamed up. But don’t you see? He was acting so strangely. I had to find explanations for his behaviour.”

  “You didn’t try to ask Frank for explanations?”

  “Of course, but none of them made much sense. And when I pressed him on his ‘modelling scene’” (Ellen sensed each syllable breathe contempt as she spoke the words) “all he said was ‘Ask my mother. She never liked the clothes I wore’. I mean, what a strange thing to say.”

  “Do you often press him for explanations?” The way Marthe borrowed her word ‘press’ – and lingered on it – bothered Ellen. Was it an uncertain command of the language? she asked herself. Or did it betray an implicit reproach?

  Marthe appeared to glean a certain satisfaction from Ellen’s hesitation. And she promptly followed up with another line of questioning before Ellen had time to consider her reply.

  “What was his mother like?”

  “A bitch.”

  Ellen’s response this time could not have been swifter. But the eagerness of her reply concealed a reluctance to continue what had become a rather tiresome interview.

  “Marthe,” she said. There was a new firmness in her voice, “I was lying in bed this morning, thinking things over. And I came to the conclusion it would probably be a good idea if I disappeared for a week or two. My sister lives in North Germany. Her husband’s in the army. So I thought it might be a good idea to go up and visit her. It would give you a break from me. And maybe if I come back in a week or two, your husband might have some news for me.”

  Marthe still had the piece of paper in her hand that Ellen had given her. She appeared to be too engrossed in it to absorb what Ellen had just said.

  “And I need to speak to my employer again, as well,” Ellen added. “They’ve extended my leave until the end of the month. But I’m not sure how much longer they’ll be prepared to wait for me to return.”

  “Did your husband write this?” Marthe said, ignoring Ellen’s words. “It’s very beautiful in a way. But very personal. Not easy to understand. Quite fascinating really,” and she handed it back to Ellen. “Why don’t you show it to your sister? Maybe she can help throw some light on it.”

  Ellen could not imagine how Beth might be in a position to throw even the merest hint of a light on the situation. But Marthe’s words at least showed she had been listening. And Ellen took them as a sign that her plan had met with approval.

  “Madame Doll will be pleased,” Marthe said.

  “Pardon?”

  “Madame Doll. My cleaning lady. Since you’re here, she’s been complaining of the extra work.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t realise.”

  “Please!” implored Marthe. “You must not apologise.” She leaned over with a smile and touched Ellen’s arm. But Ellen caught a hint of reproach under this camouflage. Or was she being oversensitive?

  “These frontaliers are all the same,” Marthe added, sensing the need for some kind of explanation. “Either we are making too many demands or we are not trusting them. They’re never satisfied.”

  “Who?” asked Ellen, confused by this sudden digression.

  “The frontaliers. I’m sorry, ‘frontier workers’ was the expression I think you used. The people who cross the border for work.”

  Ellen nodded. She welcomed this trivial departure, which allowed her to avoid talking any more about Frank. Looking back on this confessional kind of atmosphere with Marthe, she had to concede that the relationship had its strange moments. To an outsider like Marthe, the strangeness must have been even more apparent. So Ellen was pleased to have the opportunity to make her excuses and go upstairs to begin preparations for her journey north.

  The following day, Ellen left. Marthe had kindly let her use the phone to warn her sister she would be coming. The call from Switzerland came as something of a surprise to her sister. Ellen had not even told Beth about Frank’s disappearance in the first place. And although she did not seem overjoyed at the prospect of her sister’s visit, she was clearly burning with curiosity to know what was going on – so much so that Ellen was even able to convince herself that, deep down, her sister cared and was really looking forward to seeing her.

  Dr Zellweger appeared genuinely disappointed when Ellen told him of her intention to leave a
t such short notice, and not only because he had obviously come to look on her as a companion for his wife.

  “What a shame,” he said, “I have become so accustomed to see you around the house.”

  She found the remark rather odd since he was so often in the clinic that they rarely ever saw each other. Even at the weekends he was out in the country looking after his mysterious protégé. Ellen therefore assumed he was simply trying to be excruciatingly polite.

  Although he could only have been about forty, Dr Zellweger seemed to come from another age. It was not simply the clothes he wore – the bow tie, waistcoat and watchchain, or the moustache so neatly trimmed and slightly stained with nicotine from years of pipe-smoking. Most of all perhaps it was his attitudes, his behaviour, the way he kept his wife at home. And it irritated Ellen that Marthe seemed happy to put up with this. She wondered whether this might change now that women had been given the vote.

  But Dr Zellweger was always very correct and courteous. And, of course, it went without saying that he would see Ellen safely to the railway station.

  “It can be a little confusing,” he explained as they drove to the station. “It’s not a big city, but we have three big stations here. There is one for Switzerland and one for each country that has a border with the city.”

  So he drove her to the German station. And in his impeccably considerate way, Dr Zellweger insisted on accompanying her to the ticket office and waving her off. Ellen could not put her finger on it, but the station interior gave off a feel and a mood that was at odds with the city outside.

  “It’s different.”

  Ellen spoke these words almost under her breath. They were not intended for conversation. But Dr Zellweger was quick to pick up on them.

  “As I said, it’s the German station. It’s owned by Germany. Even the track is owned by Germany. And the customs post is here in the station.” He pointed over to the far end of the ticket hall, where two official-looking men stood in uniform, complete with peaked caps.