by Ellis Peters
He lit a cigarette to simplify the process for her, and the act shook him for a moment into full consciousness of what he was doing. He was on Maggie’s business, and if there was anything here to be found he must find it. He needed Friedl’s testimony for Maggie’s sake and for his own. But Friedl had her own needs, and as good a right to make use of him as he had to make use of her. Whichever way you look at it, he told himself derisively, you’re not going to find anything to be proud of, and since when have you started breaking your heart over a bit of necessary, ambiguous disloyalty? Get what you have to get, and pay whatever you have to pay for it. That’s what Friedl will be doing. Maggie will never know. You will, of course, but what sort of drop will this be in the ocean of what you know already about yourself?
He felt her close to him before ever he heard or saw her. His senses homed on the awareness he had that she was there, and then he found the tall, motionless darkness, the two pale flowers of hands quiet at her sides.
‘Herr Killian…’ A muted breath hardly as loud as a whisper; and not a question, she knew who was there.
‘Fraulein Friedl…’ he said as softly.
She crossed the few yards that still separated them, and as she came the greenish, reflected light flickered over her face twice, tremulous and faint; it was like seeing a drowned face float through clear, shallow water. Thus delicately touched, Friedl achieved beauty. The flaw did not show at all, the enchanted light brushed her weatherbeaten skin with its own liquid jade.
‘Herr Killian,’ said the dream-like murmur, ‘I can tell you about the man called Aylwin… if you want to know…’
‘Yes…yes, Friedl, I want to know…’
He went the necessary, the imperative step to meet her. She walked into his arms.
‘The last time I sat here with a man,’ she said,drawing fiercely on the cigarette Francis had just lit for her, ‘it was with him. With Robert Aylwin.’
They were sitting on a felled tree in a half-circle of bushes some distance along the lake-side, looking out through a filigree of branches over the water. She had brought him there by the hand, moving like a hunting cat, silent and certain in the dark.
‘They were here three, four days. He was nice to me. We came to this place together. He was not like me, he was gay, always gay.’
No one, thought Francis, could accuse us of that particular indiscretion. Something was there with them, heavy and fatal, something of warmth and tenderness and bitterness and pity that left an indescribable, rank flavour on the night. But most surely no gaiety.
‘Aylwin had been here two or three times with Dr. Fredericks,’ he said. ‘Hadn’t you met him before?’
‘I was not here until that summer. I came when my father died. I had nothing, you understand? Not even a human face. Who would want me? But he was lively, and funny, and kind. On that last evening I was late finishing the dishes, and I saw him go out, across the terrace, down the path… as you did to-night. And when I was finished I followed him.’
‘You had an arrangement?’ asked Francis, lifting the heavy sheaves of her unbound hair in his hands.
‘No, we had no arrangement. Simply, I hoped he might come here and wait. But before I reached this place, a little way back there among the trees, I heard his voice. And another voice. A girl’s… So I drew back a little, not to break in on them, but it was quiet there, and I was among the bushes. I didn’t want them to know, and I could not get away quickly because of the branches… they would have heard me…’
His throat was dry. ‘Could you see them?’
‘No. It was also September, and a little later in the evening. No… but both voices I knew. His, of course. And hers… you could not mistake it, even speaking. She was the one from his own party, the one they said was going to be a great singer.’
He heard his own voice saying with careful concentration, for fear he should frighten her away from the issue by too great an intensity: ‘Could you hear what they were saying?’
‘No, most of the time not. All was in undertones, and it was he who talked, and she who listened, only now and again she said some few words, and with her it was impatience and disbelief…you know? He was arguing and pleading. And she did not want him, she was sending him away, but he would not go. At the end he forgot to be quiet, he cried out loudly at her: ‘… if you don’t want me!’ And she said, ‘Hush, don’t be a fool!’ And he said: ‘No, I won’t be fool enough to endure it. There’s always an alternative! That is what he said, and like that. Do you think I could imagine that?’
‘No,’ he said. His voice felt and sounded thick and muffled in his throat. ‘No, I don’t think you could.’ Carefully, carefully now, or she would catch the spark of passion and take fire, and he would get nothing more. ‘And what did she say?’
He never knew what it was that betrayed him.
Not the voice, that was level and light, interested but detached, under complete control now. Not even the mere fact that he should ask after her reactions, when it was in Robin Aylwin’s movements he was supposed to be interested. Something deeper and more fundamental than any such details, something she felt through the almost indistinguishably altered tension of the arm that circled her, a dark lightning striking from his blood into hers. This was a creature who felt with her blood and thought with her bones and flesh, and saw with some intuitive third eye under her heart like a child. For suddenly all the air was still about them, with something more than mere silence, and very slightly and stealthily all her sinews drew together, contracting into her closed being, lifting the confiding shade of her weight from his shoulder. She did not move away from him; she did not even lift her head. It would have been less frightening if she had. But all the essence of herself that she had spilled so prodigally about her on the night air, as securely as if she had been alone, drew back like ectoplasm and coiled itself defensively within her. There was a third person there, almost palpable between them.
‘She laughed,’ said Friedl in a clear hard voice.
‘No…!’ he said involuntarily. There seemed to be two Friedls there now, one of them warm against his shoulder with the black waterfall of her hair streaking across his chest, one of them standing off at the edge of the clearing, watching him narrowly, waiting to see him react in anger or pain. There was not much she did not know now, in that dark blood-knowledge of hers, about his relationship with the absent woman who had laughed.
‘Yes! You wished to know about him, I am telling you what happened. Nobody else can tell you, nobody else knows. She laughed at him, that girl. And then I heard the bushes crashing as he turned and ran away from her, down towards the lake. Only for a few moments, because the ground drops there, and this hillock where we are cuts off sound. There was this thrashing among the bushes, and sometimes his feet stumbling against a tree-root, and then it was quiet because he was down there close to the water, under the curve of the ground. But if there are voices in a boat on the lake, then you hear them. That night there were no boats, no voices, it was already dark. It was another kind of sound we heard, that girl and I, coming up from the water. A splash. Not so great a sound, clean, not broken, not repeated… but all the same, it was not a fish rising, even though there are very big fish in the lake. It was too late, too dark, and besides, one gets to know all such sounds. No, this was something, something heavy, plunging into the water and going down…’
She had turned in his arm, tensed and brittle against him, and he felt her eyes searching his face even in the dark, experimental, inimical and savage. Suddenly the night had engendered, seemingly out of her very flesh, a small, murderous wind that chilled him to the bone.
‘I don’t believe you,’ he said, ‘you’re making it up.’
‘You think I am lying? Ask her! When you go back to her, ask her!’
‘You’re crazy! What have I got to do with a woman like that? If this had been true you’d have told somebody about it then. Did you? Did you go down to the water to look for him? Did you tell what
you knew when he failed to come back?’
‘What did I know? What did I know? That there were voices, that I heard a splash, nothing more. No, I never told anyone I was here in the trees that night. No, I did not wait to see, I did not try to find out anything. I ran back to the house, and I held my tongue. And so did she! Why should I speak? I wanted no part in it. What did I owe to any of them? Better to be quiet and keep out of trouble. So they never dragged the lake, they never even looked for him, he was simply the one who was out of favour and ran away. But something went into the lake that night. And she heard, as I did, and wanted not to hear, as I did, but with better reason. And he never came back for his baggage, did he? And he never will!’
She drew herself out his arm suddenly and roughly. ‘I’ve told you everything I know. I must go back.’
‘I still think you’re lying,’ he said, but without anger, and without conviction, only with an almost insupportable weariness and sadness.
‘Then ask her, when you go back to her. You will see.’
He could have denied Maggie a second time, but what was the use? Friedl was as sensitive as a dog to the presence of ghosts.
‘Help me do up my hair. They will be looking for me.’
He stood behind her and drew back the great fall of her hair, smoothing the sheaf between his hands; and then for a moment her hands were on his, guiding them, her body leaned back against him warm and yielding, and she turned her head and laid her cheek against his. Without movement and without sound she was weeping.
‘Friedl…’
‘No…’ she said. ‘You cannot help…’ Silenced under his kiss, her marred mouth uttered one lamentable moan, and clung for an instant before she pulled herself away. She thrust the comb into her heavy coil of hair. ‘Don’t come with me!’ she spat back at him, and was gone, abrupt and silent between the trees.
CHAPTER FIVE
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So now he knew what lay at the bottom of Maggie’s memory like truth at the bottom of a well. She, too, dazed and enchanted with her vision of fame, impatient with the importunate boy who blundered into her dream in defence of his own, had heard that muted splash round the curve of the lake-shore. And she had chosen to bury it, not to understand, not to remember. Not because she didn’t know what she had done, but because she did!
Surely she must have loved him!
All the way across Switzerland in his hired car, Francis was eaten alive by the knowledge. What else could explain the obsession that rode her now? Nothing less than love, recognised too late, could have made this disaster so terrible to her. And yet there was some excuse for her. There had never been any proof, never any body, everyone else had taken it for granted that Aylwin had simply decamped, and their acceptance had made it the most reasonable course for her to accept that probability, too.
Only in her heart she knew that he hadn’t!
Every time the knowledge surfaced she must have thrust it under again, until at last it drowned, and stayed down. Her conscious mind had succeeded in sloughing the memory utterly; but deep below the surface something in her had relentlessly remembered and reproached and grieved, and at the point of death had bestirred itself again to struggle into the light and challenge her with her debt.
He lingered a day in Zurich because he didn’t know what he was going to do, what he wanted to do, what he could bear to do. And about Friedl he thought only once during that time, with a violent tearing at his own conscience, and the shock of realising that the suppression of what galls and accuses is not so difficult or rare. That we all do it. That life would be impossible if we did not.
On the second day he asked for a passage home, but had to wait one more night before getting one. He was glad of the respite. Because what was he going to do about Maggie? No use trying to shield her by lying to her, she was utterly sincere when she said she wanted the truth, that she couldn’t live without truth. Did he even want to spare her? There were times during the flight when he realised that he wanted rather to rend her, to make her pay not only for Robin Aylwin, but for his own self-torment, too, and even for poor Friedl, with the tiny blemish on her flesh and the great cancer in her spirit, and the men who had slipped through her fingers because Maggie was innocent and dedicated.
He telephoned the hospital in Comerbourne as soon as he landed. He still had no idea what he wanted to say. It was almost a relief to get the ward sister, brisk and cheerful and immune, explaining that Miss Tressider had made rapid progress and was now discharged. Yes, she was still in Comerbourne, she could be contacted at the Lion Hotel, where she had taken a suite for a period of convalescence under supervision. She had wanted to have a grand piano, an amenity the hospital naturally couldn’t provide.
That was no great surprise. The voice that used her as a means of communication was restless and fretful, aching for an outlet again. Had she, after all, had any choice when she kicked love away from her? Wasn’t she, from the moment she realised the incubus that rode her, a woman possessed?
He telephoned the Lion Hotel.
‘Yes… Oh, yes!’ she said. The voice, full, clear and eager, drew her upon the air in front of his eyes. ‘Yes much better, thank you! Do come! I wondered about you. I shall be looking forward…’
‘I’ve been following,’ he said, with the even delivery of a machine, ‘the course of that last tour you made with Dr. Fredericks.’ He dared look at her only briefly and occasionally, because the blue of her eyes blinded him, so vivid and wondering and hopeful they were upon his face. ‘I stayed at a small resort called Scheidenau, near the German border. Do you remember it?’
‘Yes, vaguely. There was a lake… and a castle…’
‘And a small hotel called the Goldener Hirsch.’
‘You mean the one Freddy used to take us to? I’d forgotten the name, but I remember how it looked.’
The Lion Hotel was by the Comer bridge, and her suite was above the waterside. The tremulous light, reflected from a high ceiling and white walls, shimmered over her face, which was clear and pure as crystal, without shadows. She looked marvellously more substantial than when he had seen her in her hospital bed, but still fine-drawn and great of eye, and the tension that held her seemed more of hope than fear, as if the very act of sending him out to probe her disease had somehow absolved her and set her well on the way to a cure. Perhaps for a few days, in his absence, she had even begun to feel that setting out to look for the answer was the same thing as finding it, that now she could take up her life again, that the crisis was over.
He approached her not with clear statements, but with promptings, for what seemed to him a good reason. For Friedl, in spite of her reckless challenge to him to go back to his Maggie and ask her outright, might still have been lying. And supposing he confronted Maggie with this story, and still her memory failed or refused to fill in the blank spaces, so that she could never positively know whether the thing had happened like that or not? The last thing he wanted was to burden her with a grief she had not deserved. So he came towards his point by inches, waiting for a spark of understanding and enlightenment to kindle in the blue, attentive eyes; and the name he held back to the end. If she spoke it first, then they would both be sure.
‘That was a very important tour for you, wasn’t it? You had your first great successes, and you knew what they were worth. You began to see a really great future ahead of you, quite rightly. Do you recall anything else of importance that happened to you on that trip?’
‘In Scheidenau?’ She was watching him closely, her lips parted. The faint hint of an eager smile quivered and died, two pale flames of anxiety burned up in her eyes. He saw her fine brows draw together, painfully frowning. ‘I can’t think…’
‘In Scheidenau. On the last evening before you left. No? In the woods along the shore of the lake, below the hotel. There is a maid at the hotel named Friedl, a niece of the family. You remember her?’
She was harrowing all the recesses of her mind for anything that could accou
nt for his gravity. Every line of her, from the long fingers tightly clasped in her lap to the pearly curve of the skin over her cheekbone, strained thinner and whiter with mounting tension. ‘Please!’ she said. ‘If you know something, tell me!’
‘Are you sure,’ he said harshly, ‘that you want to know?’ He had meant to be gentle, but the rage and pain came up into his throat like gall. And now not only was she afraid, but also there was something deep within her stirring in response to his passion, tearing her in its frenzied attempts to get out, the deep-buried knowledge heaving into wakefulness at last. It was on its way to the light, and nothing could keep it imprisoned now.
‘Yes, I want to know.’
‘Friedl says that she was in that strip of woodland that night, the night before the Circus was due to leave. She says that she heard two people talking there, and that one of them was you. The other was one of the boys who toured with you. She says that he was arguing and pleading his cause with you, and that you were trying to get rid of him. She says he cried out at you that something would happen “if you didn’t want him!” He said—she remembers the words—“I won’t be fool enough to endure it. There’s always an alternative!”…’
Maggie’s lips moved, but there was no cry. She clutched the edges of the stool and leaned forward, trying to rise. He would never forget the sudden blind, blank stare of her eyes, lancing clean through him after another face, another accuser.
‘… and then he ran away from you down the slope towards the lake, and she heard—and you heard, didn’t you?—the splash of something falling into the water. And he never came back, that night or ever…’
She was torn suddenly erect before him, the convulsion of knowledge passed shudderingly through every nerve of her body and flamed into her eyes. She clutched her cheeks hard between her palms, and a wailing cry came out of her, thin and lamentable:
