The Flowers of the Forest

by Joseph Hone

  ‘Nonsense, Madeleine.’ Klaus stood up and went over to her, kneeling down rather formally and taking her hand, as though rehearsing a scene from some grand opera. ‘Nonsense – you must go on and find Lindsay. You must go on, not look back. You will lose him that way.’

  ‘But –’

  ‘With me, Madeleine. We are all going on to Vienna tomorrow morning. We have a concert there the day after. It couldn’t be simpler. You can come in the musicians’ coach. They rarely check all the orchestra against their passports in any case. But if you stop now – well, you may lose him again.’

  Klaus stood up and came over to me again. ‘Peter,’ he said. ‘You tell her. You’ve brought them here so far. You shouldn’t stop now.’ He turned back towards Madeleine as though waiting half-way through a score for a tardy musician.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Why not? A sheep as a lamb,’ I added. I hardly cared any more, I was so tired just then. After Vienna, if nothing happened, we could pack the whole business in and go home. Home? Well, back to a summer of dry sherries at least, lost in the Cotswolds, and the remains of a book about the British in the Nile valley. It wasn’t much – but they were surer things than anything in Lindsay’s life, it seemed.

  ‘All right – let’s go on.’ Madeleine had revived once more.

  ‘There. You see, I knew it was the right thing. You can all come with me. And don’t worry now any more. Let me change my things and I’ll come downtown with you – we’ll have some food. And you can all camp with me here on the sofas. No need to sign any hotel registers. All right?’ He turned and smiled at Rachel.

  ‘You’re marvellous,’ she said. ‘Absolutely marvellous.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said, putting an arm round her shoulder again. ‘There is nothing really difficult. It’s all in the mind – where we have no limitations!’

  Klaus was a godsend for Rachel, I could see: and he knew it.

  *

  The huge coach was air conditioned, which was just as well, as the day had started with a cool, thin mist over the Neckar river, swirling on the water by the old bridge, which by nine o’clock had given way to a lead-blue sky, the heat shimmering already on the twisting valley road which led eastwards down the romantic river Neckar.

  I had taken Maria von Karlinberg’s diary out of Rachel’s bag – and Lindsay’s old address book which I still had with me, and I turned to the letter M now – and there she was: ‘Maria – Reisnerstrasse 32, Vienna 3.’ The same woman, I wondered? The socialist journalist of forty years before trying to get a boot in the legation door? Lindsay’s friend – or something more? Willis had been just fractionally hesitant or coy about her. Well, we were going to Vienna now. She might be still around. She might help. I could but try. Kovačič after all had clarified many things and he’d turned up out of a telephone directory. Perhaps more elderly people in Europe had survived the war than I had imagined.

  Klaus came with us in the coach for the first part of the journey – down the Danube valley, to Passau, where we were to have lunch. He sat ahead of Madeleine and me now, talking with Rachel, introducing her to some of the musicians. I saw her fingering a flute belonging to one of them, examining it with love. She was at home again. What nonsense it had been for her to suggest a future with me, ‘an audience of one’, as she had in Brussels a few days before. That had been a convenient dream of hers, far from her real nature. Rachel had become ‘unworthy’ once more – of me, or of life: she, who bloomed in a crowd, among the attention of many, as she did now ahead of me, her skin glowing in the bright morning light, playing on the long silver instrument a few delicately phrased notes which floated back down the coach like the tentative theme for a life renewed.

  After some thermoses of coffee had been passed round I got out the diary and started to look through it. Madeleine glanced at the cover. ‘That’s the book by Lindsay’s friend in Vienna?’

  ‘Yes. I wish I spoke more German.’

  There was little of the text which I understood fully, a passage here and there, and parts of one long account of a train journey the woman had made with an unnamed man to visit socialist prisoners in some provincial town in Austria – with a lot of talk about someone called Koloman Wallisch, a socialist martyr of the times, apparently, whom the authorities had executed in the provinces after the Vienna risings of February 1934.

  Later, when Klaus came down to see us, I asked him to take a look at the passage. ‘An old friend of Lindsay’s,’ I told him. ‘What does she say?’

  Klaus stood in the gangway a minute, holding the luggage rack, swaying a little. Then he read from the diary, translating it fluently, in almost dramatic tones:

  ‘We travelled all night in that uncomfortable third-class compartment – the snow falling all the time. Do you remember? – another of our Wedding Snows – and the hills about were all covered with it next morning. But the town was gay and spring-like with fruit and vegetable stalls – and we had that small front room in the Gasthaus where we saw over the street to all those fine baroque houses and the great market cross – and beyond, the mountains, still streaked with snow. But Wallisch had died and was buried here in the cold cemetery down by the river. And there was nothing left but our love then. Our snow love – which was not cold yet.’

  Klaus looked up, surprised. ‘Poetic,’ he said. ‘In very simple German – like a child’s story.’ He looked puzzled. ‘But this Wallisch, he was a socialist agitator.’ He glanced on through some more pages. ‘Yet the “diary” here – it’s a love story,’ he said. ‘From what I can make out. A socialist love story.’ He turned back to the beginning of the book, looking at the dedication. ‘“To the Fat One at the Blue Bar of Sacher’s”,’ he read out. ‘What does that mean? Is the woman still alive?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘The “Fat One”?’ Madeleine asked, ‘Could that have been Lindsay? People used to call him “Fatty”.’

  ‘I wondered just that myself,’ I said.

  ‘This Maria must have been an old flame then – though Willis denied it, tactfully enough.’

  I wondered, though, if Madeleine had really followed all the implications. ‘If it’s dedicated to him,’ I said gently, ‘and it’s a love story – well, Lindsay must have been its subject. The man she’s talking about travelling with in that train all night and in the hotel next morning – that must be Lindsay. Don’t you –’

  ‘Possibly. Why? Is that strange? He was young enough. I’m sure he had girl-friends out there then.’

  ‘Yes. But at that time he was supposed to be with Eleanor. You remember? She was out with him in Vienna.’

  Madeleine shrugged. ‘Who knows – all the exact dates? And what does it matter anyway, forty-five years ago?’

  But I felt it did matter, though I couldn’t say why. And then it struck me. ‘What was that phrase exactly?’ I asked Klaus. ‘Our “snow love”?’

  Klaus went back to the passage. ‘“Another of our wedding snows”,’ he read out. ‘Or “wedding of snow” you might translate it.’

  And I remembered then: Aunt Susan’s description in the empty church at Dunkeld, of Lindsay’s Christmas wedding with Eleanor, in 1935, when it had snowed all day, ‘like a fairy-tale’, except for the part of the reception ‘when the sun had come out and the champagne was too cold’.

  ‘And here?’ I asked Klaus again, pointing to the end of the passage. ‘“Our snow love –”?’

  ‘“Which was not cold yet”,’ Klaus finished the sentence.

  I looked at the date on the fly-leaf: 1937 – the year of the break-up between Lindsay and Eleanor, according to Kovačič and Aunt Susan. I turned to Madeleine. ‘Eleanor studied German at Oxford, didn’t she?’

  ‘I don’t know. I think so. Modern languages. Why?’

  ‘This diary is written by her. I’m sure of it. She wrote it, some time before she died. It’s the story of her time with Lindsay in Vienna in 1934.’

  Madeleine smiled sympathetically. She took the book from me and
glanced through it. ‘But Peter, why would she have bothered to do it all in German? And why did Lindsay never tell me about it? He had nothing to hide. I didn’t know him then, after all.’

  ‘I don’t know. But I’m sure of it,’ I said. ‘Somehow.’

  ‘Well, that’s as may be.’ Madeleine gave the book back. ‘But how will it help – even if you’re right – finding Lindsay now?’

  She turned away and started to doze then, the sunlight touching her ash-gold hair through the big window. Klaus went back to the front of the coach and I sat there remembering clearly the little musty church at Dunkeld, the blinding weather and the long grass and the tall white daisies among the tombs outside the vestry door; and then that pale debutante’s face in the stained-glass window, oval-shaped, dark-haired, serene – like a thirties court photograph: ‘Eleanor Phillips: In Memoriam 1912 – 1937’ – the woman whose glass face I had looked into, in a midsummer church, who had married there in a snowstorm.

  ‘Poetic – like a child’s story,’ Klaus had said. ‘A socialist love story.’ But why, indeed – if it be true – had Eleanor gone to all the trouble of telling it in German, and publishing it under an assumed name, the year she died? And I felt the scent of the chase once more, blowing about me, a strange pricking at the back of my neck, just as I had that afternoon at the little ruined church beyond Dunkeld, as though I were once again in the presence of these two people, long ago married and parted and one, if not both of them, dead now. Yet they lived again just then, in the dry air of the coach, as fully as they ever had together in life; real people joined once more, refilling all the shapes of passion and anger which they had created then, released now in a book which I felt certain commemorated them.

  And once more I wanted to discover Lindsay, to complete my vision of his life in some way – a life that appeared to me now as something vastly strange and contradictory, like a cathedral full of magnificent vistas and yet with horrors lurking in odd nooks and crannies – a marvellous edifice built on cracked foundations.

  Madeleine dozed next to me, oblivious of my thoughts. And I thought what peace she has with Lindsay: alive or dead, guilty or innocent, it didn’t matter to her. I looked at her face, sweet and calm in the light. She had that gift of total belief. Whatever happened she could not be wrong about her husband. And he? What had he done to ensure this faith in him? I thought again – if we lie, and we will, it is to those whom we are closest to that we must lie most completely.

  The border with Austria came just after Passau. It was a bad few moments. But there were many other cars and crowds of tourists lining up against the passport counters – and since we were the Bavarian State Symphony Orchestra, as Klaus had forecast, they took all the passports in a bunch, stamped them and returned them without taking a head-count. We three had mingled with the crowds, apart from the musicians, our own passports at the ready, but no one noticed us and we climbed back onto the coach with the others. It was extremely simple in the end. I was surprised, since I assumed that the Belgian police had found Huxley’s car by now and, having checked back through the Embassy, would almost certainly have discovered that he had been following us – we, who had jumped our house arrest at the Amigo Hotel. I could only suppose that either the Belgian or the German frontier police were being inefficient or that the orchestra had given us perfect cover. Or were we, I thought for a moment, because of some other ploy contrived by someone – Marcus perhaps, with the connivance of Interpol – were we being allowed to cross the frontier unhindered, so that we might lead them to Lindsay? Perhaps we were too precious as pathfinders to be stopped, no matter how many corpses littered our way.

  I sat by Rachel afterwards. We had drunk some wine with our lunch and she was tired now, the blinding afternoon sun streaking through the big window, touching her bronzed skin with fire. We had chatted about nothing and now she closed her eyes. She seemed to be sleeping.

  I said gently, ‘You remember in Glenalyth – you told me in the flower room: that we had to win, to try and win in our life, you and I, and not always settle for less: that we had to be bright?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said after several seconds, almost inaudibly.

  ‘Now it’s my turn, to tell you the same thing.’

  She opened one eye sleepily, ‘Yes,’ she said again. ‘But I seem to have lost confidence – in us,’ she said at last without looking at me.

  ‘You make me look back,’ she went on. ‘We’re never really new people to each other. And there’s too much in the past …’

  ‘That you won’t accept?’

  ‘No doubt, no doubt.’ She was sarcastic now. She took out a scented hanky and wiped her forehead. There was a vague smell of plums in the desiccated air.

  We were fighting again, the one thing we’d always been truly expert in. Our relationship, at heart, was still full of nursery antagonisms, exaggerated feelings. We had no middle way. We had to be either enemies or lovers.

  I said, ‘You’re going back into being terrified of the truth. That’s not winning in life.’

  ‘Do stop talking about terror and winning and things. You said you thought Lindsay had killed Eleanor – that’s the problem, or one of them – And the truth can hurt – too much to be worth it,’ she said severely, as if from the depths of some unquestionable knowledge.

  We were coming towards Linz, the old Danube fortress town in the middle of the huge river, straddling it with narrow bridges either side, one of them crossing over to the far bank and onto the Salzburg-Vienna motorway. Rachel turned away from me and looked at the view of spires and baroque cupolas, glittering in the late afternoon light, rising up ahead of us. She had become that haughty, distant cousin to me once more, sarcastic and severe by turns, driven to hurt by the hurt in herself which she would not admit.

  I put my hand on hers. It was very warm. It had been lying there in her lap, in the same position, directly in the sun for half an hour, cradling the plum-scented hanky.

  ‘I love you,’ I said.

  She turned on me brightly. ‘And I love my father. Is there anything to be ashamed of in that?’

  She spoke loudly, with harshness almost and her eyes were bright with anger and with fear.

  ‘No,’ I said. But I knew she was adrift again now, tremulous, terrified – and yet excited by the venture, the daring cause she had taken on once more: a cause that lay in some terror or unsatisfied longing in childhood and had formed her real search ever since: the need for reassurance so deep that it was impossible to assuage through the mechanics of real life. It could only be satisfied now, as in the past, by that fictional relationship she had maintained with Lindsay – where, like a warm toy or a perfect character in a child’s book, he could be made to rise from some nursery world, day or night, and bring her an incredible comfort, a joy not subject to change or decay, wondrous and freely imagined. She could be an artist with her father, dealing in inspiration and miracles. With me, she knew, the fiction would run out after a while: rain would fall all day on a cracked window pane somewhere and there would be scum round the edge of the bath that night.

  I squeezed her hand and was bright. But I was not bright at all.

  5

  We came to Vienna in the evening, running down the long slopes of the Salzburg motorway into a huge flat valley which lay beneath us like a plum-coloured sea, with a pale blue velvet haze all over it, pricked everywhere with light, as if thousands of little ships had crammed a vast harbour for the night.

  The coach had been largely silent for the last hour, cruising the smooth motorway, its passengers dazed with heat or half-asleep after the long day. But now they stirred in mild anticipation, gathering their bits and pieces carefully about them – newspapers, cameras, and summer hats – like tidy little animals clearing up before venturing out into an exciting dark.

  Most of the orchestra were staying at the Hilton next the air terminal, a little to the east of the city. From there, having seen them off for the evening, Klaus took a taxi back to th
e inner city with us, then up Schwarzenbergstrasse and finally out onto a huge, ruined platz with a glittering fountain rising up in the middle.

  ‘Schwarzenberg Platz,’ Klaus said. ‘And the new metro.’ Spotlights illuminated great stacks of girders and piles of sand, with little builders’ huts perched everywhere among the debris. The earth thudded with drills underground and the oven of summer air was thick with dust. But soon, circling this battlefield, we drove up into a darker street away from the city before swinging round into some thick bushes where there was a meagre light above a small sign: ‘Palais Schwarzenberg Hotel.’ Beyond this a short drive circled round to a gravel forecourt where a silver Mercedes lurked in the porch light from a low two-storey building, the yellow stucco crumbling slightly between the tall shuttered windows, the whole finished with delicate architraves and other baroque doodles.

  The night was dark and almost silent here, hidden away behind the hedges and trees. It was as if we had suddenly come into the country, to spend the evening in some rural estate.

  ‘Come.’ Klaus gestured from the porch, for we had stood there in the forecourt, looking around uncertainly at the clumps of bushes and the ghostly umber-coloured building in front of us.

  ‘This is a wing of the Palace. The family still live in the rest of it. Over there.’ Klaus pointed beyond the undergrowth to where we could just see a much larger edifice looming up in the shadows.

  ‘Come on in. I’ve made all the arrangements.’

  I thought of Willis Parker a week before in Brussels, standing outside the Amigo, in similarly welcoming attitudes, and I wondered when our luck was going to run out – or Klaus’s.

  Inside, the illusion of being in a guest wing of a country house was almost complete. Taste predominated in the beautiful eighteenth-century furnishings in the narrow hallway – followed some way behind by a little luxury in the shape of huge bowls of orchids and other hothouse flowers everywhere, with ugly modern facilities hardly in evidence at all, though I noticed a telex behind the reception desk where a young man in a dark coat and pin-striped trousers welcomed Klaus like a courtier.