by Ellis Peters
He went to the trouble to check on her family, though he felt and found that they were of no interest. Her parents were dead, the father long ago, while Maggie was still at school, the mother four years ago of heart disease. There remained a sister and a brother, Alec, both older than Maggie. The brother played the horn in a Midland orchestra, well enough to hold his place but not well enough ever to get any farther. A little probing produced a picture not at all unexpected; he had been trading on his sister’s reputation and his relationship to her ever since she emerged into celebrity. He had made one flying visit to see her in the hospital, since it wasn’t far out of his way. Rice was of the opinion that he had come for money, and hadn’t gone away empty-handed, but he did at least make himself pleasant, affectionate and cheerful while he was there.
The married sister, eldest of the three, lived in Hertfordshire with an insurance-agent husband and two children. She hadn’t visited. There was a record of telephone enquiries from her, beginning with an agitated lament on the first evening, before Maggie was up from the theatre, expressing endless devotion and the fixed intention of leaving everything and rushing to her bedside; but the tone had cooled off after it became clear that the bed was not going to be a death-bed. Mrs. Chalmers still called in with loving messages but she didn’t suggest coming. These details Francis also gleaned from Rice, who had them from the ward sister, through whom all those earlier phone calls had been channelled.
It began to seem as if all those who professed affection for her also harboured in secret a corrosive resentment. Yet everything went to show that she had remained loyal and generous to her family and early associates. Maybe that was her really unforgivable virtue. If she had shaken them off and gone her own way unimpeded, they could at least have felt that she was down on their human level, and taken pleasure in her flaws for their own comfort. People who have everything stir in ordinary mortals a venomous ambition to take everything from them, or if that’s impossible, at least to spoil what is spoilable. No, Maggie had never caused any of her tribe to lament at her shoulder in the night. They were much more likely, given the chance, to ruin and despoil her.
Then there were the others, colleagues, fellow-singers, accompanists, conductors, admirers. Would-be lovers, most of them, whether they knew it or not, though a few had the integrity and detachment to be disinterested friends to her into the bargain. God knew she had need of those, they seemed to have been few and far between in her life. The music teacher at her local school, perhaps, who had first realised what a glorious instrument she possessed, and done his best to help her develop its possibilities. And afterwards, Paul Fredericks, that eccentric and wealthy old genius who had spent the last years of his life squandering the profits of his own musical career on the musicians of the future. But how many more?
Plenty of would-be lovers, though, from the modest admirers of her girlhood, through the teeming procession of her fellow-students, to the celebrities who surrounded her now. And wasn’t there, somewhere in the sweet chorus of their devotion, a slightly sour note, too? The courting male knows his worth, and expects to make an impression, but Maggie Tressider had always stayed unattainable. They still praise and they still pursue, when the object of the pursuit is such a valuable cult image and status symbol; but after a while a slight acidity sets in, the heart goes out of the charade, and something alien comes to birth in its place. Spite?
He didn’t realise, until he tapped at the door of her room for the second time, and saw her propped on her pillows with delicately made-up face and burnished hair to receive him, exactly what it was about her that disturbed him most. He entered with his memory marking off like spent beads the names of her adorers, who were legion; and there in the white bed in the white room, tense and still, sat this one slender, solitary creature, the cobalt mirrors of her eyes waiting for a human image to reflect, so that she could be peopled. He had never known anyone round whom such numbers of worshippers revolved; and he had never known anyone so intensely and disastrously alone.
She was a good client, patient and humble. She was ready to pick up her autobiography where she had left it two days before, and even paid him the compliment of following his recipe for relaxation while she recollected, as if he had indeed been one more doctor with authority over her, if only a temporary authority. Slack in her pillows, with closed eyes, she recorded her testimony; and in the pauses, which were frequent but brief, long enough for thought but not for concealment, he watched her marble stillness, even her breath held, and thought, what would happen if one kissed this Sleeping Beauty? Would she wake up? On the contrary, she would withdraw into the hundred-year-long death-sleep at the first touch. You’d be lucky if you didn’t impale yourself on the thorns before you ever reached her mouth.
‘Dr. Fredericks used to pick out a small group of his pupils every spring and autumn, and take them on a tour of the Continent. He had good connections everywhere there, and it was his way of giving us proper concert experience before we tackled the big things. Freddy’s Circus, we all called it. We used to attend some of the smaller festivals, and fill in with concerts all through Switzerland and Austria, and part of Germany too. There’d be two or three solo singers, and maybe a couple of instrumentalists, usually a pianist—one of the accompanists was always good for a concerto or two—and maybe a violinist, and a small orchestra. It cost him the earth to keep it all up, but now and again he even made a profit. I went three times. Once in 1954, in the autumn. I was eighteen. And then both the tours in 1955. After that I had my first big break, I was asked to sing Cherubini. He let me take it, so I knew I was ready. I never went abroad with him again, there were concerts, engagements, recordings… things began to go very fast. Two years later, Freddy died. In Bregenz, at the festival. There weren’t any more Circuses.’
‘And who was with you on those tours? Can you remember?’
She mentioned several names. Two of them had followed her aloft, though less rapidly. One had died in a plane crash. Some were still, and presumably for ever, lost in obscurity.
‘I don’t remember any others. Oh, yes, the last time there was a change, because Freddy’s sister, who always used to tour with us and act as chaperone for the girls, had to go into hospital just before we left, and one of his old pupils came along with us instead. Bernarda Elliot was her concert name. I think it was her maiden name. She was a contralto… a good one, but she’d been married for quite a time then, to somebody named Felse. She was living somewhere in the West Midlands, I remember. She came along with us just to oblige Freddy, and only that once. It was the only tour Miss Fredericks missed. She died, too, only a few months after Freddy. Voluntarily, I think. You know what I mean? They’d always worked together, without him the world wasn’t worth hanging on to.’
‘I know,’ said Francis. ‘This Cherubini… that was at Covent Garden, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes, I was lucky. We recorded with the same cast, afterwards. It wasn’t the best “Figaro” ever, but it got a lot of notice.’
From then on it had been simply a climb from one eminence to another, steadily extending her range, always waiting for a few additional years to bring new works and maturer parts within her grasp. She told him about it just as she had experienced it, without either arrogance or modesty, and it dawned on him suddenly that she was not quite the gifted child he had begun to believe her, that this headlong simplicity and directness of hers was not a property of innocence, but the deliberate choice of an adult mind, the weapon of a woman with a great deal to do and only one lifetime in which to do it. Maggie Tressider had no time to waste on circumlocutions. There was it seemed, at least one quality in her which might well destroy either her or anyone who got in her way. Generous, scrupulous, loyal, all these she might be, but ambitious she certainly was. Not for herself so much as for the voice of which she was the high priestess. If ever there was a clash of interests, she would sacrifice everything and everybody to that deity, including Maggie Tressider.
By the t
ime the bell rang to send him away, she had arrived at the present. Iris-circled, with half-transparent lids veined like snowdrops, her eyes remained closed for a moment after she was silent. The long lashes that lay on her cheeks were coloured like her hair, green-bronze-gold. When they rolled back from the wide stare that fastened unerringly on his face, the unveiled blue of her eyes was blinding.
It was then that it happened to him, sharp and clean as a knife-thrust, so that for an hour afterwards he never felt the pain.
‘I’ll contact you,’ he said, ‘as soon as I have anything to report. It may be a few days, but I’ll ring you.’
‘Yes…’ She wanted to ask what was in his mind, whether he had got anything at all out of her self-examinings; but she refrained. She had said that she trusted him, and now it was in his hands. ‘I feel better,’ she said, offering him the one encouragement and commendation she had to give. ‘Since you came I haven’t lost any more weight. And I sleep now. I’m going to get well.’
‘Of course!’ he said.
‘And to put this right…’ She smiled at him, a grave, grateful, impersonal smile. The burden of her confidence sagged heavily on his heart, and deep within him, secretly and slowly, the mortal wound began to bleed.
It was half-way through the evening before the numbness thawed away, and the injustice and indignity and rage and pain, the reasoned hopelessness and irrational hope, all hit him together.
He was sitting over his notebook with a full ashtray at his elbow, methodically compiling lists of names and considering the significance of the periods into which her life fell. There was always more to be gained by sitting and thinking, and evaluating what was given, than by rushing about questioning people, and he had his starting point.
‘I’ve done something awful to him… killed him …’ ‘He’s here with me all the time, he never leaves me…’ ‘It wouldn’t be so bad if I could ever see him clearly…’ Where there’s no precise identification the masculine pronoun can embrace the feminine, too, of course. Maybe! But that was by no means the effect of the repeated ‘he’ in her mouth. She didn’t know even the sex of her enemy; no, but some spark of her subconscious knew, all right. All Lombard Street to a china orange, X was a man.
What sort of man? Not a member of her family; those she bore with, visited occasionally, subsidised as a matter of course. Rice had suggested that there might have been some such hanger-on who chose the wrong moment, or the wrong approach, and started in her a spurt of distaste that caused her for once to lash out in rebellion against her role. But did any of them matter to her enough to make that probable? Francis thought not. And whoever provoked her into cruelty would have to matter to her pretty fundamentally.
The more he thought about it, the more clearly did X put on the likeness of the one person who was so conspicuously absent from Maggie’s life. A face so rigidly excised from memory might well belong to the one man who wasn’t there.
Plenty of men had loved Maggie, but not one of them, by her own account and the world’s, had Maggie ever loved. Never once had she mentioned the word ‘love.’ And that in itself was remarkable enough to arrest attention. Here was a gifted, beautiful woman, still defensively alone at approaching thirty-two. On the face of it that was the most mysterious thing about her. Why did she never marry? Because she was married to her art? Even so, why did she never, apparently, even consider taking husband or lover, never let any of the candidates get within arm’s-length of her? Take a step too near her, and she would take three away from you, and then keep retreating until she was out of sight. He had seen it for himself, and so, if he wasn’t mistaken, had Gilbert Rice. So what was wrong with her? What was the block that shut men out? The same that blotted out the face of X?
And if the hunt for X was the hunt for the invisible, the non-existent lover, the only one who got past her guard, where was he most likely to be found? Somewhere fairly far back, or she could not have expunged him so completely and for so long. In the world’s eye not, perhaps, a very great figure in her life, or, again, she could not have forgotten him so successfully; yet great enough in retrospect to turn her whole life barren afterwards. What was it she had done to him?
No need to look back as far as childhood or early adolescence, either, because this was a thing that had fixed its claws into her adult being, and pierced deep. Somewhere at the emergence of the woman, say at eighteen or nineteen, when her career suddenly opened before her and she knew she was going to be great, when she was intoxicated and dazzled by music, and men, perhaps, faded into the background just when they should have been growing clear and important. Twelve or thirteen years ago. In twelve years she had had time to suppress a lot of regrets, to forget genuinely a lot of once-important people.
He performed, almost idly, the small exercise of looking back twelve years in his own life. Where had he been then? More to the point, with whom? He found a narrow boat on a Midland canal, a summer frittered away on an antique business that had folded under him because he didn’t work at it, and a woman who had been the reason for his lack of application; but when it came to recalling the woman, she was only a small, blank, woman-shaped space without face or name. Nothing but an empty shape and a bitter taste, and no guilt except the guilt he felt for the squandering of whatever promise he’d ever had, and that held no mystery.
And then, abruptly, like a flower bud opening marvellously under the camera, the pale non-recollection put on colour and form and life, the head flushed into the incredible colour of oak foliage in spring, the burning blue eyes pierced him as they had pierced him an hour ago, and the searing realisation of his position broke out like blood at last, and he knew he was lost. Who had he thought he was, writing off women so confidently? Who did she think she was, writing off men?
For the first time in his life he hadn’t seen it coming, hadn’t side-stepped and dictated the ground on which it should approach him, and the terms on which he would entertain it. Now it was too late to do anything but stop the bleeding by force of will, and somehow claw his way back to the job in hand. Because he had just established to his full satisfaction that no man alive had a dog’s chance of getting within Maggie Tressider’s guard. Want her as he might, want would have to be his master, as it had been many another’s.
Or would it? If he played his cards intelligently, hadn’t he certain advantages?
She trusted him! She’d said so, and meant it. Who else had her ear as he had? Who else had access to her as he had? The hunt for X could be prolonged until his position was secured, and the uncovering of X could be so handled—assuming he was found, and in whatever circumstances—as to serve the interests of Francis Killian no less than those of Maggie Tressider. Yes, he had unique advantages…
And unique disadvantages, his own saner self warned him tartly. You’re taking her money to do a job for her, the only trust she has in you is the trust intelligent people place in competent professionals bound to them by contract. Take one step out of line, to-morrow, next week, ever, and she’ll be gone. And you’ll be a bigger heel even than you’ve ever been before. At least until now you’ve kept your business clean.
I shall still be doing that, he persisted strenuously, fighting off his better judgment. I’m not proposing to cheat her. The job I’ve taken on for her I’ll finish, if it can be done at all. But while it lasts I’ve got her ear, I’ve got a measure of her confidence, and I’ll earn more. I’m wronging nobody if I conduct my own campaign alongside hers.
And you think you’ve got so much as a dog’s chance? asked his doppelgänger venomously. You know what that woman is, a world figure, a beauty, a towering artist. Do I need to tell you? And you know what you are, don’t you? Or maybe you’ve forgotten. It’s a long time since you looked in a glass!
There wasn’t a mirror in the room, or in the flat apart from the one in the bathroom. But he didn’t need a glass, he knew what he looked like, and what he was. A man of forty-one, average height, light weight, not bad to look at as average men
go, if he hadn’t spent all his adult life being knocked about by circumstances, and knocking himself about when circumstances let up. All that kept him from looking and being seedy was the odd vein of austerity that persisted from his Nonconformist upbringing, still unsubdued after a life-long battle with chaos and self-indulgence, and that basic dislike of dirt that would have been glad to believe itself a virtue, but sadly realised it was no more than a foible.
‘Yes, agreed his demon, reading his thoughts, you’ve had things cleaned up for the past five years, from artistic squalor into monastic order, and it cost you plenty to do it, and you know damned well the value you put on it. There was going to be no more of that! How much of your soul will you still own, if you let love break in here now? Don’t you recognise a disaster when you see one? Take a look round this cell of yours. It’s more than it looks, it represents the only safety you’ve got, because it’s the only order, it’s what’s left of your morality, it’s your identity. Open the door and let love into that, and it’ll kick the whole structure apart before you can say: Maggie!
And he knew it was true. Only a fool could welcome in the invader of his painfully-won privacy, and run to meet the power that humiliated and outraged what he had made of himself at so much cost. And for such an impossible hope! He knew, none better, that he would never reach her. If he regrouped his defences now, while there was time…
But there was no time left. It was already too late.
All right, he said defiantly to his double, sit back and watch. A little patience, a little craft, a nice mixture of blackmail and gratitude, and you’ll be surprised what I can do, when I want something enough. What will you bet me I don’t get her in the end?
And if you do, said the demon, with the finality of ultimate, unquestionable truth, what you get won’t be what you want. It will be only to possess and enjoy, you know that, don’t you? And spoil! Never to unite with her.
