The Sea Cave

by Alan Scholefield

  The foyer was not much brighter in full daylight, but she was able to read that the Chronicle was on the second floor. She took the lift and stepped from it into a long corridor. She could hear the noise of typewriters. As she walked along the passage the noise grew in volume until it seemed there were typewriters all around her. She passed several glass doors on which were the names of newspapers of which she had never heard.

  Then she reached one which was labelled, Chronicle, London. She knocked and a woman’s voice told her to enter.

  She went in. The office was divided into two by a partition. On one side was a desk, unoccupied, with a typewriter in the corner; on the other side, a woman was seated at another desk. It was the woman she had seen the previous evening. Close up, she was even prettier than she had appeared in the café. Her skin was perfect, her eyes large, with long lashes and under her summer dress, her breasts were full. For a second, Kate was reminded of Miriam. Her eyes flicked to the woman’s hands. There was no ring on the left, but several on the right. She knew that Continentals wore their rings in a different way from the British, but could not remember how.

  The young woman had been watching her, and waiting. Finally she said, ‘Bitte?’

  ‘Do you speak English?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I was looking for Mr. Austen.’

  ‘He is not in.’

  ‘When do you expect him?’

  ‘I do not expect him. He does not come in today. It is Saturday.’

  Kate realised she had lost all sense of time.

  ‘Not at all?’

  ‘Not at all.’ There was an arrogant quality in her tone.

  ‘Is he at home?’

  ‘I do not know where he is. It is not my business to know.’

  ‘Could you give me his home address?’

  ‘I am sorry. We do not give away such information.’

  ‘I’m an old friend of Mr. Austen’s from Cape Town.’

  ‘Where is that?’

  ‘In Africa. I knew him when he worked there.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I cannot help.’

  ‘When will he be in again?’

  ‘Not for two weeks. He takes his vacation. We close this office today. The work will be done by an associate on Die Welt.’

  She seemed to decide that she had wasted enough time on Kate, and turned back to her typewriter.

  ‘I can’t wait for two weeks!’ Kate said. ‘I must see him now, today!’

  The woman glanced up again. ‘I told you I cannot help.’

  Recognising triumph in her eyes, Kate turned and left the office, shaking with anger and frustration. Tom was somewhere in this city, but she was not going to be allowed to see him.

  The door opposite opened and a man stepped out into the corridor. He was tall and thin and elegant, with a monocle hanging on a black ribbon. As he closed the door she saw the words Daily Mail, London, stencilled on the glass.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘Do you speak English?’

  He raised the monocle and looked at her, then smiled. ‘I believe so.’

  ‘I’m looking for Mr. Austen of the Chronicle.’ She explained briefly who she was and what had happened.

  ‘Ah, you have seen the beauteous Fräulein Necker. Naturally she would not give his address to another beautiful woman. Fräulein Necker has a schwarm for Tom Austen.’

  Kate was not sure what schwarm meant, though she could guess. The most important word he had uttered was fräulein.

  ‘I wish I could help you,’ he said. ‘He moved recently. I had his old address, which was somewhere in the Genzgasse. Would you like me to find it?’

  She followed him into a room similar to the one she had just left, except that this was ankle deep in copy paper and old newspapers which had been read and dropped on the floor. It was in marked contrast to the elegance of its occupier.

  ‘My name’s Fellowes, by the way.’ He offered her a hand, then went to his desk. The top was covered by a typewriter and pieces of paper. He searched through several drawers, churning up the contents.

  ‘I could do with Fräulein Necker to look after me,’ he said. ‘We all make advances, but she has her eye on Austen. Never could understand it. Ah, here we are.’ He pulled out an address book, wrote Tom’s former address on a piece of paper and gave it to her. ‘That’s the best I can do. Hope it helps.’

  *

  The Genzgasse was in the north-west of the city, a street of shops and apartment houses. She was hot and sticky by the time she reached the block of mansion flats where Tom had lived. Again she found herself in a dismal foyer where there was an elderly lift with a slot in it. A notice in German and English stated that it cost one Austrian schilling to use the lift.

  She wandered through the foyer and down some steps into a deserted basement. There was no sign of a caretaker. Back on the ground floor, she knocked on one of the apartment doors. It was opened by an old woman dressed in lace and amber beads, who shook her head angrily when Kate asked her if she spoke English, and closed the door.

  She went out into the street. Next to the block of flats was a gasthaus. In its window a notice said, ‘Ici on parle Francais. English spoken.’ She went in. A woman was sitting behind a cash register.

  ‘Ach, Herr Osten!’ she said. ‘Ja, I know him. Every morning he takes coffee.’

  ‘But he has left now,’ Kate said.

  ‘That is true. So sad.’

  ‘I’m his sister, and I haven’t got his new address. Do you know anyone who has it? Perhaps someone who sends on his mail?’

  ‘But of course! Here is Herr Vogel.’ She indicated a man who was sitting at a corner table eating a pastry. ‘He is, what do you say? manager of the apartments.’

  Kate followed her across to the man and stood silently as she spoke to him in German. He was small and bald and wore heavy spectacles. At first he shrugged and shook his head, looking suspiciously at Kate. The woman’s voice grew louder and suddenly he gave in, took a small notebook from his pocket, paged through it, then wrote an address on a white paper napkin and handed it to Kate.

  *

  Potzleinsdorf lay in the hills to the north of Vienna. As the taxi drove towards it, she realised she was leaving behind the city’s built-up area. The gardens in which the houses stood became bigger, there were trees overhanging the road, vineyards, orchards. By the time her taxi stopped at the end of a grassy lane, she might have been in deep countryside. Behind her lay the smoky haze of the city, ahead the gently rising hills covered in hardwoods. She walked along the lane. The day was warm. Apple and pear branches, heavy with fruit, gave dappled shade.

  She reached a gate, and paused. The house stood in a large garden. It was single-storeyed, with a classical pediment, and painted dark yellow. All the windows were open and wooden shutters were pinned back. The garden was an old orchard of gnarled apple trees, tall grass and Flanders poppies. Over everything was the dreamy summer sound of bees and birds.

  Her heart was racing as she opened the gate and approached the house. Then, above the summer sounds, she heard the tack-tack-tack of a typewriter coming from somewhere to the rear.

  She walked through the long grass and stopped at the corner of the house. She found herself looking at a small back garden. The lawn had been mown and there was a lily pond in the middle. To one side stood a wooden summer house shaded by a horse-chestnut tree.

  Inside the summer house, Tom sat, typing. He was wearing only a pair of baggy old shorts. She stood watching him for some minutes, remembering how she had watched him type in the hotel bedroom in Helmsdale. As far as she could see, the typewriter was the same machine he had used there, and she found herself envious of it: wherever he had gone since leaving the Cape, it had been with him.

  The fixity of her gaze penetrated his concentration and he turned and saw her. They looked at each other over a distance of about twenty yards. There was an expression of total disbelief on his face.

  Slowly, he rose to his feet. To anyone
else, he might have appeared ludicrous dressed as he was, but not to her.

  ‘Kate?’ he said. ‘Is it you?’

  ‘I’m not a ghost.’

  He moved tentatively towards her. ‘Is your husband with you?’

  There was a heartbeat’s pause and then she said, putting into words, acknowledging for the first time, something she subconsciously knew had already happened, ‘No, I think I may have left him.’

  ‘I don’t know what to say . . .’ he said. ‘I don’t know where to start . . . I mean . . .’

  She laughed and a blackbird flew scoldingly away. ‘That’s not like you.’

  ‘You might have dropped from Mars.’

  ‘I have come a long way. You could start by kissing me.’

  He kissed her and at the same time lifted her completely off the ground. When she caught her breath she said, ‘You’d better put me down.’

  ‘I can do a damn sight better than kisses.’

  They laughed together. They stood by the lily pond, laughing, and a red squirrel poked its head out from the branches of a beech tree to see what was happening.

  *

  Now began a period that Kate was always to look back on as a time of magic. One brilliant, hot summer day followed another, and they lived a kind of life she had never even known existed.

  They turned time inside out. The nights were for talking and making love, and they slept in the heat of the day.

  Tom showed her the house that first day with the pride of new ownership. ‘I’ve bought it,’ he said. ‘There’ll be times when I’ll have to go away, either for the Chronicle or gathering material, but it’ll always be here to come back to.’

  It was smaller than she had thought, and older. He told her it had once been a hunting lodge. ‘They say it dates back to the mid-eighteenth century. They called this colour kaisergelb. And look at those floors.’

  He saw the house in male terms, she thought: the solidity of the structure, the thickness of the walls, the soundness of the timbers. She saw a rather spartan house, that needed warmth and lightness. She helped him to choose curtains, paint and wall-paper, and did all the things she had longed to do for him when he had moved into the house in Cape Town.

  They cleaned out the big lily pond and filled it with fresh water and used it as a bathing pool, floating naked in the shallow water.

  They did a lot of their cooking outside, for Tom had taken to the South African way, and they grilled spicy debrecina sausages and frankfurters and drank the good, cheap Austrian white wine.

  There were moments when she knew she had never been so happy. And then, sometimes, a shadow seemed to fall as she remembered Saxenburg.

  *

  Sometimes Tom would question her about what she was planning for herself. The word ‘I’ became ‘we’. But she did not respond. ‘I’m not thinking beyond this moment,’ she said.

  In those first days, they did nothing but get to know each other, both physically and mentally – and Kate established that there was no other woman in his life.

  ‘Fräulein Necker?’ he said, smiling. ‘Well, I won’t deny I’ve tried. Every member of the foreign press corps has tried, but she’s looking for a baron. She knows exactly what she wants. She wants an apartment in Vienna, a mansion in the country, servants, a title, a Rolls Royce and a chauffeur. In the meantime, she’s a wonderfully loyal and efficient secretary.’

  ‘And there’s no one else?’

  ‘I’d be lying to you if I said there hadn’t been. But no one important. There never has been. There never will be.’

  He was writing a book about a journey he had made the year before through the Caucasus and he returned to it after a few days. He liked to get up early and work in the cool of the morning. Kate did not mind, in fact, she loved it; it gave her a sense of being part of his real life. She would go off in the mornings to the small group of village shops and bring back hot rolls and give him his breakfast in the summer house. About noon he would stop for the day and they would immerse themselves in the lily pond, have lunch and sleep away the heat of the afternoon. Then he would take her for drives up into the hills to Weidling and Klosterneuburg, Sievering and Grinzing. As the sun dipped, glowing yellow on the gold onion domes of the little churches, they would come back into the foot-hills closer to the city and sit in the heurigers under the vines and drink the new white wine.

  ‘There’s no other city like it,’ Tom said. ‘Imagine London with small vineyards all over St. John’s Wood.’

  But the past could not be excluded; the idyll could not be total, the isolation could not be complete.

  Kate wrote to her bank in London, giving Tom’s address for forwarding mail. She had enjoyed the feeling of having dropped out of the world, but knew it was self-indulgent.

  Late one afternoon, as they sat in a heuriger overlooking a church in Neustift am Walde, she said, ‘Tell me about Joyce.’

  He told her, and it was not as she had feared. Joyce had not killed herself, but died of pneumonia.

  ‘When?’ she said, feeling that at last she could exist with the knowledge.

  ‘Three days before I telephoned you. Why didn’t you call me back?’

  ‘It was my wedding day. Why didn’t you telephone again?’

  ‘Who answered my call?’

  ‘Lena, the maid.’

  ‘The first thing I asked was if you were in. She said yes, that she’d call you. Then she came back and said you weren’t in and was there a message. Well, that was plain enough.’ He refilled his glass from the flask on the table. ‘I’ve often wondered what would have happend if I’d spoken to you that day.’

  ‘I have, too. I’m glad I didn’t.’ She told him about her family. ‘Duggie would have died without the operation. The infection was creeping up his leg. I had to marry Charles.’

  The past, having re-asserted itself, would not let them alone. That night, as they lay in the big, wooden bed, he said, ‘Are you serious about leaving Charles?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Does he know that?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘You never really loved him, did you?’

  ‘No. But I think we could have lived together. What Smuts would have called “making a go of things.” But . . .’

  ‘But?’

  She told him about the manhunt, about the three men on the rock who wanted to use the drowning body for target practice.

  She lay amid the hot, rumpled sheets, remembering her horror, remembering, too, the feeling that what had happened was somehow her fault, that if she had helped Jonas when he asked her to, he might still be alive. On the other hand, they might have hanged him; perhaps she had done him a favour.

  ‘I suppose he did it?’ Tom said, echoing her own thoughts.

  ‘I suppose so. He always denied it. I’d never liked him, you know. He’d always made me feel undressed, somehow. But there were moments when I believed him.’

  ‘If not Jonas, then who?’

  ‘It had to be him,’ she said. ‘There was no one else.’

  ‘Do you mean no other person, or no white person?’

  ‘Why would anyone want to kill Miriam?’

  ‘Why do men rape women?’

  Sometimes in the late afternoons they walked among the beech trees on the hills and would lie down in the warm, scented grass and look out over the city. Once he took her to Tulln, on the Danube, and they had lunch on a terrace overlooking the great, grey-green river and watched the barges come down from Basle on their way to Budapest and Bucharest and the Black Sea.

  ‘When I see them, I always want to move on. Just keep going,’ he said. ‘What made you leave Saxenburg? What broke the umbilical cord? Or is it broken?’

  It was something she had asked herself many times since she had arrived in Vienna. It was one thing to say she wanted to leave Charles, another that she had broken all her ties with Saxenburg – and was the one thing possible without the other? And if she acknowledged the break, was she not already replaci
ng it with a future? If so, what was the future? She did not know.

  Leaving Charles could be construed in many ways. She could leave his bed, leave him emotionally, but still live on at Saxenburg. What she could not do was simply walk away from her responsibilities and her guilt.

  ‘The trouble is, it’s not Charles’s fault, it’s mine,’ she said.

  ‘You didn’t make him what he is.’

  ‘Someone did.’

  She told him about the party and Freda’s death and her own broken bones.

  ‘My God, I turn my back on you and everything goes to pieces,’ he said, trying to inject lightness into what he was beginning to recognise as a nightmare.

  She smiled. ‘I’m sorry, but you asked about Charles.’ After a pause, she said, ‘Have you ever had an affair with a man?’

  He shook his head. ‘Cross my heart and hope to die. At school there were the usual liaisons, but nothing after that. I’ve known bisexuals, of course.’

  ‘I should have guessed. He was always going to District Six, or talking about it. He and Jerry. Freda thought Jerry was having an affair with a woman.’

  They ordered coffee and drank the last of the Kremser and she said, ‘I can’t help feeling sorry for him. I can’t help feeling it all stems from the past, from things that happened to him long ago.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘His father seemed to hate him after what happened to his brother Hugo.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I thought you’d know.’

  ‘Drag out your skeletons and let’s have a look at them.’

  She told him about the fire and how Charles had been blamed for not fetching his mother sooner. The change in his father. The black-edged cards on his birthdays that were not to wish him happy returns, but in memoriam for Hugo.

  ‘I can see what you mean,’ Tom said. ‘But you can’t live with someone out of pity.’ He took her hand across the table. ‘Look, you’ve seen the sort of life we could have. You know I want you to marry me. You say you love me; you say you’re going to, or have already, left your husband. Yet you won’t commit yourself.’

  ‘Give me time to get used to the idea,’ she said.

  One day they had been shopping in Kärntnerstrasse for linen and Tom had decided to drive home a different way from the one he normally took.