by Ellis Peters
‘I hardly did the choosing,’ he said. ‘Seifert’s poem chose me. I doubt if it will ever be translated, in any case. I doubt if it can be.’
The Mercedes negotiated two sides of the square, and drove through a vast stone archway, solid and plain, into the courtyard of the Town Hall. Jörg-Erich was out of the front passenger seat like a greyhound, and holding the door open for Una while the driver did the same office for Lucas. ‘We’re on stage, darling!’ Una whispered in her father’s ear, and giggled briefly to remind him of her childhood, before gathering herself magnificently to meet the reception committee which was advancing upon them down the broad steps from the main doorway. She had time for one brief glance round the court, which was overhung on three sides by wooden balconies foaming with flower-boxes, and occupied by a concourse of varied humanity more interesting, on the whole, than the descending VIPs.
She saw the fashionable elite of the town, still marvellously bucolic, and all the more reassuring for that, deployed in the galleries framing the main face of the building, solid citizen farmers and business men, merchants and craftsmen, and their wives, the men in austere black suits as though for church, the women all severely hatted and corseted and gowned, a Sunday assembly. But the further her eye strayed from this framework, the more endearing became the scenery, the grandeur dwindling through young officials in shirt-sleeves and girl typists in mini-skirts, country boys in loden, round-armed waitresses and farm-girls in the dirndl, to a fringe of comfortable older women in working black and dark blue print, and children in very little of anything. The whole community was certainly represented. The carnival procession wasn’t until this afternoon, half the town hadn’t dressed for it yet, and still had work to do before it turned out on holiday.
She withdrew her eyes from the upper tiers, and took her place discreetly a step behind Lucas, as the worthies descended upon them with vast, hospitable smiles.
The central figure could be none other than Herr Graf, and it was easy to believe that most of the compulsive energy which had turned the pre-war summer fair into this ambitious tourist attraction stemmed from him, and at his instigation had generated the initiative which had brought Lucas Corinth home to his birthplace at last. Heinz-Otto Graf was a big man in austere but immaculate lightweight suiting, in a delicate shade of grey. He terminated everywhere in extremities rather surprisingly small for his central mass, moving lightly as a gazelle upon small feet, and gesturing vigorously with small hands. Even his head, round-faced, small-featured and closely trimmed as to its thick, iron-grey hair, looked at least one size small for him, though the bulging forehead promised a sizeable brain, and the fleshy but massive and jutting jaw an obstinate and assured will. Wherever he went, in however assertive a group, he would always be noticed first.
He bore down on Lucas with outstretched hand and a broad, victorious smile. ‘Mr Corinth, may I welcome you home most warmly to Gries-am-See? I am Graf. I trust you had a pleasant journey?’
Lucas made the appropriate responses, and presented his daughter. From now on, Una realised as her hand was firmly grasped and ceremoniously kissed, she had to make use of the German she had certainly learned early from Lucas, but seldom used in recent years. No doubt someone who knew English would be in attendance on every occasion, just to be on the safe side, but some effort was also required from her. She acknowledged Graf’s inevitable compliments cheerfully, and was complimented again on her pronunciation. He had a deep and not unpleasing voice, and sounded as happy with his captive lion as he looked.
‘My wife, Frau Ottilie!’
She was a tall, willowy woman, dressed in an elegance slightly too formal for her shy manner and subdued and rather anxious face, and decidedly too warm for the day. She shook hands limply, and murmured monosyllables. They did well enough; clearly not much more was expected of her.
‘And here is our art director, Werner Seligmann. Herr Seligmann has been rehearsing your work with the orchestra and soloists for two weeks now, I think you will find they already have a good basic conception of the piece.’
Lucas knew the name, as a sound and competent provincial conductor. He held out his hand to a thin, grey, elderly man with a clever, discouraged face and a hesitant smile. In Graf’s vigorous shadow his attenuated shape and pale presence almost vanished.
‘I look forward very much to reaping where you’ve been so kindly sowing for me. I hope,’ said Lucas warmly, ‘that you’ll conduct the final performance yourself, and let me have the experience of hearing my music properly.’
‘I hope you won’t have to undo too much of what I’ve done,’ said Seligmann, smiling. ‘I must say you make great demands on your musicians.’
‘I’m sure both you and they are quite equal to them.’
Lu was being a little too gracious, and committing himself a little too rashly, Una thought critically. The effort to be social cost him such an expenditure of energy that he was inclined to overdo it, and find himself launched into minor situations he had not intended. He’d be all right after one drink. And there were so many others waiting to be presented that he could hardly spend long enough with any one of them to get in too deeply. He was himself aware of his tendency, and always knew when he was overstepping, as a singer with true pitch knows when he is straining above the note, even if he can’t therefore centre his voice and correct the fault.
Some of the names struck echoes in Lucas’s ears. Some of the faces he could fit to the names, though it was a painful effort to grope his way back to the old days, and recall the families that had lived in Gries for generations. With some of these people he must have gone to school. He allowed himself to be steered up the steps and into the building, Graf’s short, powerful hand firmly grasping his elbow.
‘You would like to freshen up before our little party. Oh, a very brief and modest affair, we know we must not tire you out completely. Jörg will show you, and bring you to the hall when you: are ready. And here may I present Fräulein Lohr, who will take care of Miss Corinth. Fräulein Lohr speaks excellent English – yes, I know it may sometimes be fatiguing to continue always in German! – and she will be attached simply to you during your stay, to arrange all your appointments for you, have cars ready, take care of your correspondence – everything! You will find her very efficient. She is one of our best secretaries.’
The girl stood still and indifferent to be displayed to them thus, and neither smiled nor frowned. His manner had not been at all condescending, merely practical, but rather as though he were recommending a piece of office furniture than a person; and she kept her face as placid and noncommittal as if she were no more than that, though excellent of her kind. She was several inches taller than Una, and probably six or seven years older, a slender person in an unobtrusive dress of fine, creamy wool, sleeveless and simply cut. She had not the ample build or the light-brown colouring of most of the local women. The long, smooth hair coiled on top of her head was almost blue-black, and the eyes that seemed to fill half of her oval face were of the same profound colour.
‘I shall be very glad,’ she said, looking neither glad nor sorry, and in a voice cool and low and dutiful, ‘to be useful to you in any way I can while you stay here.’
Detailed off for the job, thought Una, as she went away in Fräulein Lohr’s correct company to wash off the dust of travel, straighten her hair and the seams of her stockings, and put on a new face. Maybe she’s had to postpone her own holiday, or something. Or maybe she just doesn’t want to presume on her selection for the job. For it seemed to her unlikely in the extreme that there could exist any girl who would not jump at the chance of being picked out to attend on Lucas. Not that proximity ever did any of them any good. He might notice a girl if she could sing like an angel, or play the harp like a seraph, but even then he wouldn’t recognise her by her looks if he met her on the street.
‘My name’s Una,’ she said briskly, smoothing powder over one tanned cheekbone. Begin as you mean to go on! ‘What’s yours?’
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br /> She could see the calm oval face in the mirror, and it was watching her with interest, but not as yet giving away anything of what went on behind it.
‘You won’t mind if we use first names? It’s so much more friendly. And I hope this fortnight’s going to be as pleasant for you as for us.’
‘My first name,’ said the girl accommodatingly, ‘is Crista.’
‘That’s nice! It suits you.’ And indeed she had a crystalline quality about her, her spareness, and polish, and that fastidious reserve that gave her so clear and pure an outline. ‘I think it was a lovely idea to let us borrow you all the time we’re here. Do you work here in the municipal offices usually?’
‘I’m only here for the season. As a shorthand-typist in the festival office. Not the senior, but I happened to have the best English.’
They were speaking English, and she used it freely and almost without accent, apart from a precise attention to every consonant, and a reluctance to throw away syllables. For the first time she smiled. It was a very grave and thoughtful smile, but it softened every line of her face. ‘I think everyone in the office volunteered. I was lucky to be chosen, I’ve been working here only a few months.’
‘I’m awfully glad it was you. And I hope to make you just as glad, before we leave. There, I’m ready! I suppose we’d better go and circulate. Will you stay with me? I’m sure Herr Graf isn’t going to let go of Lu for a moment, so he won’t need you.’
The party proved, after all, quite surprisingly enjoyable, even if she had to work at it by attempting, for the first time in years, to think in German. In the great salon, heavy small-town baroque in white and tarnished gilt, its ornamentation oddly attractive and harmonious in spite of its honest crudity – or perhaps because of it – some fifty or sixty people circulated in comfort, nibbled voraciously at the light savouries and weighty sweets of a discreet buffet, too restrained to inhibit the solid lunches that would certainly follow, and drank, instead of sherry, a good Austrian white wine. And Crista Lohr, without visible reluctance or regret, hung attentively at Una’s shoulder, furnished the names she omitted to memorise, prompted her when she fumbled for a word, saw that her glass stayed just sufficiently primed to discourage any ardent young man from refilling it, and steered her diplomatically away from the more boring encounters, on plausible grounds, after only a few moments.
As for Lu, he was surrounded three deep whenever she caught a glimpse of him. It was only to be expected, but it worried her, all the same. He had surely accepted this situation, with his eyes open, when he agreed to come here. Lions have to pay for being lions, he knew what he was inviting. If only he had a real skin, tough and elastic, like other men!
‘At a quarter to one,’ said Crista Lohr in her ear, softly and reassuringly, ‘the car will be at the door for you, and I shall cut him out quietly from whoever is detaining him. It is part of my job,’ she said, confronting the startled and almost daunted stare of Una’s grey eyes, ‘to protect the town’s guest from every kind of pressure. We are only five minutes’ drive from the Grand Hotel, where your reservations are made. At ten minutes to three I shall come back with the car to bring you here to see the carnival procession. Lunch is already ordered for you in your suite at the Grand, for one o’clock, and I hope you will have time to rest and relax before I come. This afternoon all you will have to do is watch, and listen, and take photographs.’
‘Bliss!’ said Una. ‘That I can do with both hands tied behind me. He really does need a pause to breathe, you know. Coming back here was a terrific step for him to take. I don’t know if you can understand that.’
‘Yes,’ said Crista simply, ‘I can understand it. It has been a long time. The whole world has changed. There were stresses. And people do not always forget well enough.’ She said, after a brief and thoughtful pause, in the same low and limpid voice: ‘You are very fond of him.’
‘He’s my father,’ said Una. And in sheer self-defence she said it with the hard, resigned lightness of the trapped young, acknowledging the debts they resent. For her it was a profanation and a lie, but she could not expose herself any more fearlessly than that.
‘I understand,’ said Crista politely. ‘One does revere one’s father. Naturally!’
CHAPTER TWO
The Grand Hotel was on the lake front, the windows of its best suites looking out over the Himmelsee towards the island. It was the only hotel in Gries with the slick, elaborated modernity of the postwar years, and though its design was solid and its whiteness inoffensive, it looked out of place after the narrow, intimate streets, and the gabled, iron-signed guesthouses. The only possible lodging for the son the town delighted to honour, though he would certainly have preferred any one of the stooping, comfortable inns he had known long ago.
He sat up stiffly at first sight of the glossy frontage. Crista’s oddly-phrased comment had been, in its way, very accurate, Una reflected. People do not always forget well enough. Lu could not forget Gries as he had known it, and whatever defaced that image jarred and affronted his senses, underlining that he had become an alien.
‘This is new,’ he said, ‘since my time.’
‘It belongs,’ said Crista from the front seat, without turning her head, and without any inflection that could be held to imply a comment, ‘to Herr Graf.’
‘Ahh!’ he said in a sharp, understanding sigh. And after a moment of thought, reassembling this curve of the lake-shore as it had once been: ‘There was a boat-house, and beyond, nothing but the fields, and inland the farm. This land belonged to the Sulzbachs. It was the very rim of the town.’ It looked out now upon new villas, even a new street of shops, and a prolongation of the promenade.
‘Herr Graf has bought up all this parcel of land, and more beyond. He is building another big hotel close to the castle. And the island, the Himmelhof – he has bought that, too. He is beginning to modernise it – oh, not to spoil the baroque quality, I mean to modernise with electric power and heating, and bathrooms. He will make that, too, into a luxury hotel. He says it could be as great an attraction as Isola Bella.’ Her low, muted, deliberate voice avoided all coloration that could be interpreted as taking sides one way or the other. She reported scrupulously, and that was all.
Lucas said: ‘I see!’ in much the same tone, fastidiously aloof, refraining from judgment. Though of course he must be making his own assessments, how could he avoid it? One big new hotel functioning, two, including one superlative effort, in preparation. And the first ambitious July Festival already launched. And what else planned? Oh, yes, Gries-am-See was due to be placed on the tourist map in a very big way. It was not therefore necessary to conclude at once that Lucas Corinth was merely being employed as advertising matter. For all I know, Una thought, charitably and cheerfully, Heinz-Otto Graf genuinely loves music, and is busy combining all his interests to the general good of his town. In which case, good luck to him! The Grand Hotel was not, in fact, at all a bad effort, if he could keep up the standard.
The Mercedes drove into a pleasant, cool forecourt and crackled to a stop on golden gravel. Two small porters in loden came scurrying down white steps to take their luggage, and a shadowy foyer green with miniature trees and potted palms received them. Crista saw to everything, and did not leave them until they were installed in their lakeside suite, two bedrooms, bathroom and sitting-room, with a balcony over the water, with drinks and ice ready on a tray, and lunch on delivery at the touch of a bell.
‘If there is anything that has been forgotten, please ask at once, and it will be done. They have orders to meet all your wishes. At ten minutes to three,’ she said punctiliously, ‘I shall come with the car for you. It will be the opening procession, with music and dancers, and decorated floats, and we have places reserved for you on the mayor’s balcony at the Town Hall. It will last perhaps an hour and a half. All the people from the fair will be there, too, the show men, the animals, the gypsies, the bands – I think you will like it.’
‘I’m sure,’ said L
ucas, moved to painful personal consideration rather rare in him, ‘that we shall like it very much.’
The girl withdrew in immaculate order, trim and self-contained from the rear view as from the front view, with a gait peculiarly proud and private, as though she reserved all her own personality immune from them. Lucas looked after her until she vanished beyond the white and gold door of the suite, his brows drawn together in a fretting frown that suggested headache. ‘God!’ he said, in a half-voice he used only to himself. ‘How I need a drink!’ He had made one and a half glasses of wine see him through all that benevolent minor hell, and the half-glass had been deposited intact when Crista had cut him out of the social whirlpool like a selected steer out of a herd. Very efficiently, no doubt about that. And he had been grateful to her. He was grateful.
Una drew the curtains wide, and stepped out over the shimmering water, which stretched away before her into the green folds of the hills. A lace of little white hotels fringing the green, all of them at least a hundred years older than this one, and a ladder of little blonde landing-stages prickling the blue. And half-withdrawn into the soft haze of the upper air, the sheer faces of the mountains. The Silvretta haunted this view, distant, brilliant and aloof, sky-diamonds.
There were flowers in their sitting-room, lunch appeared at the touch of a bell, and was well cooked and excellently served. There was every possible indication that Gries had made elaborate arrangements for the comfort of its prodigal son now that he had been lured home.
‘All this,’ said Una, glancing out from the window at the surrounding splendour, ‘and VIP treatment, too! I always thought prophets weren’t honoured in their own countries, but they’ve certainly rolled out the red carpet for you. Great man comes home! Welcome our wandering boy – a hero at eighteen and genius at forty-odd!’
‘Stop talking nonsense!’ said Lucas, with an unaccustomed snap of exasperation.
