House of Green Turf

CHAPTER FOUR

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The little Scheidenauersee, a silver-blue pear-shape three-quarters of a mile long, lay in green folded hills under a late summer sky, smooth as a looking-glass and brushed clean with feather dusters of cloud. Its narrow end, where the tiny Rulenbach flowed into it, pointed south into the foothills of the Vorarlberg, and round this southern tip the village of Scheidenau lay, three short streets arranged in a Y shape, the cup of the Y filled with the water of the lake as with silver-blue wine. The northern end of the lake widened and overflowed from the cup, mirroring two or three tiny islands, and at the north-eastern corner the Rulenbach flowed gaily out again, twice its former size and bouncing down a crumpled, stony bed, to make an unexpected six-mile detour through Germany, owing to the complicated contours of the land, before returning into Austria in a series of right-handed twists, to empty itself into the Bregenzer Ach, and eventually into Lake Constance south of Bregenz. Where the three streets met there was the usual village square, with a well-head and a modest Trinity column in the middle, and on all three sides—for in fact the square was an irregular triangle, dwindling towards the south into the stem of the Y—the beautiful, exuberant housefronts and shopfronts, the overhanging eaves, the mellow dark wood and virtuoso wrought iron that makes almost any small Austrian settlement look like a stage set for operetta. There was a baroque church, of no particular merit but of pleasing appearance, one restaurant that was not also an inn and two that were, and a confectioner’s noted for its rum babas. All the down-to-earth shops like the butcher’s and the baker’s and the ironmonger’s, lined the landward street. The two roads that embraced the end of the lake, and dwindled later into footpaths along its undulating shores, found room for the villas and gardens of the better-off, for a small public park nestling in the base of the Y like the dregs of the wine, and for the two larger of Scheidenau’s three hotels, which peered into each other’s windows across the placid surface, just where the arrow-straight clay-blue line of the Rulenbach’s inflow, coloured by mountain water, foundered and became invisible in the deeper, calmer blue. The third and smallest hotel, the Weisses Kreuz, faced the church across the broader end of the square.

Outside the village the farms and fields began, rolling, heaving, foothill fields white with the shaven stubble from which the harvest had been taken, and upland pastures scalloped like fish-scales from the marks of the scythe. The highest point visible from the square was the abrupt hummock of the castle hill just to the west of the lake, with its snaggle-toothed ruin on top, meanly reduced now to its last few feet of broken wall and a tangle of overgrown rubble, useless as a tourist attraction. Outcrops of bedrock and outcrops of masonry spattered the sides of the hill over an area of a square mile or so, and because of the rich rooting of trees and bushes it was sometimes difficult to tell which was which. In parts of the forlorn shell the practical natives had dumped rubbish, and there were rats as the only inhabitants; but still that scattered rash of worked stone erupting everywhere among the grass bore witness to the formidable extent of the place in its hey-day. The Waldmeisters, who owned the Goldener Hirsch, and had been there now for seven generations, took their name from an ancestor who had once been head forester to the Lords of Scheidenau.

The Goldener Hirsch, sprawled along the lake-shore on the western arm of the Y, with its shoulder turned solidly to the remnant of old splendours on the castle mound, was in a curious state of suspension between village gasthaus and tourist hotel. To the huge traditional house, with its beetling eaves, strongly battered walls, built-on cattle-byres and carved wood verandahs, had been added a new wing in brick and stone, in an austere modern style that did not offend. Two Waldmeister daughters, still unmarried, and the wives of the three Waldmeister sons, continued to run the place with a couple of poor relations and almost no outside staff; but there was a smart little reception desk in the hall, with a smart little Austrian blonde in a mini-skirt seated behind it, darting like a humming-bird between her typewriter and adding machine on one side, and the telephone switchboard on the other.

It was already September, and the high season dwindles away very rapidly when August ends. Yes, she had a room and a smile for the unexpected Englishman who had made no reservation. But the woman who showed Francis up to his room wore the full, flowered skirt, embroidered apron and laced bodice of old custom, and had her mane of black hair coiled on her head in the old heavy bun, and to judge by the waft of warm milk and cattle-flesh that drifted from her skirt as she walked ahead of him up the scrubbed wooden stairs, she had just come in from the cows.

The first-floor corridor was wide enough for a carriage and pair, the door she flung open for him broad enough to admit them two abreast. All-white, high ceiling, spacious walls, huge billow of medium-weight autumn feather-bed on the creamy-white natural wood bedstead. He was in the old part of the house; so much the better. The window looked sidelong on a large, ebullient, untidy garden, and only a sliver of the lake winked in at him. No room in the world could have been more at peace.

‘The gentleman is English?’ His German had been hesitant, and in any case the unmistakable stamp is always there, for some reason. He owned to his Englishness; he might as well.

‘The room will do?’ Her voice was low, abrupt and vibrant, curiously personal in uttering impersonal things.

‘The room will do beautifully, thank you.’ He dropped his bag on the luggage-stand, and felt for the keys of the hired car in his pocket, and the loose change under them.

‘A moment! I will open the window.’ The scent of her as she passed near to him was like the wild air from outside, part beast, part garden, part earth, part late summer foliage ripening towards its decline. She turned her head suddenly as she passed, so close that her sleeve brushed his, and he saw her face full, olive-dark and olive-smooth, and the great, bold, sullen, inviting eyes for once wide-open and glowing. But the next moment she was looking round the room with the glow veiled, and the faint, dutiful frown back on her brow.

‘No towels. I will bring.’

She was, he realized, a very striking woman, her tall figure as lithe as an Amazon, her features good, her hair splendid. Until he had looked at her so closely he had failed to notice that there was a flaw, for her articulation was so clear that there seemed to be no malformation in her palate. Only that small, vicious botch put in to spoil the pattern and embitter her life; her upper lip was split like a hare’s. The effect was not even ugly, prejudice aside; but prejudice is never very far aside from the hare-lip in an otherwise handsome woman.

She came with the towels, and he took them from her at the door. Her fingers touched his in the act. He was sure then that it had not been by accident that her breast, braced high by the black bodice, had brushed his sleeve as he had stepped past her into the room on entering.

‘If you should need anything, please call for Friedl. I shall be working below. I shall hear.’

‘Thank you, Fraulein Friedl. I’ll remember.’

Her eyelids rolled back for an instant, and again uncovered, so briefly that he could believe in it or not, as he chose, the buried volcano. Probably she had not much hope, but as a gesture of defiance against the world she persevered and deployed what little she had.

‘You are Herr Waldmeister’s daughter?’

The hare-lip quivered in what was not quite a smile. ‘His niece,’ she said, and walked away along the great, scrubbed corridor with her long stride, and left him there. But the slow, swaying walk, the erect back, the beautifully balanced head with its sheaf of black hair, all were still quiveringly aware of him until the moment when she passed from sight.

So that was one of the amenities, and one that wouldn’t be in the brochure, nor, he thought, available to everyone. Some special kind of chemistry had elected him. One cast-away hailing another, perhaps, for company in a huge and trackless sea. One insomniac welcoming another in the long, lonely, sleepless night.

He washed, and went down into the bar. There were voices in the garden and boats on the lake. Across the shining water the windows of the Alte Post blinked languidly in the sun. There were still plenty of visitors to keep the natives looking like deliberate bits of folklore—which emphatically they were not—but in a couple of months the stone-weighted roofs, the beetling eaves, the logs stacked beneath the overhang ends-outwards, all up the courtyard walls, would no longer look like window-dressing, but a very practical part of the seriousness of living. Soon the stocky, old-gold cattle with their smoky faces would come clanging down from the high pastures to their home fields for the winter.

The scrubbed boards of the floors were almost white in the guest-rooms. It was early afternoon, the quietest hour of the day in the bar, but there were a couple of obvious French guests sipping coffee and kümmel in one corner, and a bearded mountain man with a litre pot before him was conducting a conversation with the woman behind the bar, clear across the width of the room in the booming bass-baritone of the uplands. The woman was middle-aged, grey-haired and solid as a wall, and could be no one but Frau Waldmeister.

Francis ordered an enzian, and went straight to the point. She heard him broach his business, smiling at him a benevolent, gold-toothed smile, but as soon as legal matters were mentioned she did exactly what he had expected her to do, and referred him to her man. That saved him from having to go through the whole mixture of fact and fiction twice, and got him installed in a quiet corner of the empty dining-room, across a table from the master of the house. Old Waldmeister was something over six feet tall, with shoulders on him like a cattle-yoke, and a wind-roughened leather face decorated with a long, drooping, brigand’s moustache. Courteous and impassive, he listened with no sign of surprise or suspicion at being suddenly asked to think back thirteen years.

‘Herr Waldmeister, my name is Killian. I am representing a firm of solicitors in England, who are looking for a certain young man. A relative of his family resident in New Zealand has left the residue of his small property to him. The dead man had been out of touch with his cousins in England for some years, and we find now that the legatee parted company with his parents some time ago, and they have no idea where he is at the moment. We have advertised for him without result, at least so far. We therefore began to make enquiries in the hope of tracing him. The last record we have of him, strangely enough, terminates here, in your hotel, thirteen years ago.’

He waited to elicit some sort of acknowledgment, and what he got was illuminating. The first thing old Waldmeister had to say was not: ‘What was his name?’ but: ‘How much is it, this legacy?’

‘When cleared it should be in the region of fifteen hundred pounds.’ Not so great as to turn out the guard in a full-scale hunt for him, but great enough to pay the expenses of a solicitor’s clerk as far as Scheidenau, in these days of off-peak tourist bargain travel.’ The old man nodded weightily. Property is property, and the law is there to serve it.

‘How is he called, this young man?’

‘His name is Robert Aylwin.’

‘I do not remember such a name. The last record of him, you say? It is a long time ago. To remember one visitor is impossible.’

‘You will remember this one, when I recall the circumstances.’ And he recalled them, very succinctly and clearly. There were names enough to bolster everything he had to say. Fredericks had regularly used this inn on those tours of his; neither he nor his students would be so easily forgotten. ‘I understand from a man called Charles Pincher, who shared a room here with him, that Aylwin left his suitcase and his ’cello in the room when he went away, and that Dr. Fredericks gave them into your charge, expecting the owner to come back to collect them. Is that so?’

‘It is so,’ said the old man without hesitation. ‘The name I had forgotten, but this of the cases and the Herr Doktor, that I remember.’

‘In that case I’m hoping that you can help me to the next link in the chain, that he gave you at any rate a forwarding address, when he came back for them.’

‘He did not come back for them,’ said Waldmeister, and volunteered nothing more.

‘He didn’t? Then in all these years you’ve had no word from him?’ The chill at the back of his neck, like icy fingers closing there, made Francis aware that he had never believed in this. Considered it, yes; believed in it, no.

‘No word. That is right.’

‘Did you… expect to?’ What he meant was, did you know of any reason why it would be no use expecting it.

‘I expected, yes. People do not just go away and leave their belongings. You understand, it is a very long time since I have thought of this matter. No, he did not come, and I knew no way to find him. I kept the things for him, that was all I could do. But he did not fetch them.’

‘Then… you still have them?’

‘Come with me!’ said the old man, and rose and led him from the room, out to the broad stone passage-way with its homespun rugs and its home-carved antique chairs and spinning-wheels and boot-jacks, over which a London dealer would have foamed at the mouth. Up the uncarpeted, scrubbed, monumental back stairs, spiralling aloft with treads wide enough at the wall end for a horseman to negotiate. One flight, a second, a third, and they were up among the vast dark rafters, in a series of open attics that hoarded rubbish and treasure together in the roof.

‘Here,’ said Waldmeister simply, and pointed. The ’cello-case, leaning sadly against a scratched wooden box, might have been covered in grey felt, but when Francis drew a dubious finger along its surface the blanket of dust came away clean from a finely-grained black leather. Of good quality, expensive, and surely almost new when the owner abandoned it here. A medium-sized black suitcase, its upright surfaces still almost black because it was of glossy, plastic-finished fibre-glass, stood beside the ’cello.

‘This is his? May I look? Under your supervision, of course. All I want is to see if there is anything there to suggest a further line of enquiry. Are they locked?’

‘They are not locked.’

Of course, they would be as he had left them in his room, and in a hotel room which is itself normally locked, not everyone bothers to make doubly sure with individual keys. And the keys themselves he must have taken away with him, in his pocket.

The contents of Robin Aylwin’s luggage had little enough to say about him. He travelled light. The slacks, lambswool sweater, shirts, were good but not expensive, and kept about as carefully as most young men of twenty or so keep their clothes. Black dress shoes for concerts, a dinner jacket, shaving tackle, handkerchiefs, a Paisley dressing-gown, pyjamas, a Terylene raincoat, all folded and packed so carefully that Francis detected the hand of some female member of the Waldmeister family.

‘Had he packed these? Or were they simply lying about in his room?’

‘They were in his room, as in use. We packed everything as you see it, to wait for him.’

No passport, no documents, no wallet, no keys, no letters. All those he would most probably keep on him, whatever clothes he was wearing. The dinner jacket being here meant nothing; he almost certainly wouldn’t wear it for the evening here, when resting between engagements. Probably it was only there for the concerts. There were writing materials, a folder of stamps both English and Austrian, two local postcards, unwritten; but not one written word, to him or from him, to help to establish that he had ever really existed at all.

Francis got what he could from the remnants. The shirts were size fifteen and a half, the shoes nine, the slacks were long-legged and small-waisted and made to measure, but from a firm of mass tailors with shops everywhere. The wearer must have been nearly six feet in height, if not an inch or two over, and on the slim side, though by the evidence of the sweater, which was a forty-two inch chest, he had needed accommodation for good wide shoulders. And that was all there was to be discovered about him here. The ’cello, silent in its case, was just a ’cello, and the pockets that filled in its curves contained only resin, strings and a spare bridge in case of damage.

Francis closed the lid again and restored the case to its corner. He dusted his hands and looked at Waldmeister.

‘No, nothing. When he didn’t turn up, I expect you looked through them, too.’

‘I also told it to the Herr Doktor, when he came again. He knew nothing of the young man, either. He said keep them still, so we kept them.’

‘Herr Waldmeister, there is always the possibility that some member of your household may have talked with Aylwin while he was here, and may be in possession of some detail that might help me to find him. It’s a long time ago, and your staff may have changed, of course, but still there may be someone who remembers, and may be able to add to what we know. Will you be kind enough to tell them, all those who were here at that time, that I am trying to trace this man, and for a reason which makes it to his advantage that I should find him?’

The old man’s heavy shoulders lifted eloquently. ‘I will do so. But I do not think, after all this time, they will have anything to tell.’

‘I’m afraid you may be right. But please ask them to come to me if they do remember anything. I shall be here for two or three days.’

‘I will ask them,’ said Waldmeister.

He had reckoned on the force of curiosity to bring them to him even if they had nothing to tell, and would have bet on the women being in the lead. But the eldest Waldmeister son was the first to bring his stein over and join the newcomer in the bar, after dinner that evening. He could surely have nothing to tell about a chance guest in the hotel, since he spent all his time well outside it, running a timber business which was merely one of the multifarious Waldmeister activities. What he wanted was to have a closer look at the English solicitor, and at least offer his desire to be helpful, if he could do no better. Frau Waldmeister and two of her daughters-in-law made roundabout approaches during the next day, to the same effect. None of them knew where Aylwin might have gone, none of them knew why. Francis doubted if they really remembered anything about him at all, beyond that he had left in the attic tangible evidence of his stay. The third daughter-in-law hadn’t then been married to her Johann, and the two youngest Waldmeister girls must have been still at school.

The one person for whom he had trailed the bait held aloof. Friedl, somewhere in her mid-thirties now by his estimate, must have been turned twenty at the time, and not the girl to miss a personable young man. Aylwin had been, by Mrs. Felse’s testimony, of striking and engaging appearance, and even at twenty Friedl, the dowryless niece with the hare-lip, must have been half-way to the hungry, embittered woman she was now. Deprived enough to reach out for whatever man she could, and not yet crushed into acceptance of her lot, and schooled to limiting her reach to waifs like herself. If anyone here knew anything about the good-looking and light-minded young man who laughed a lot, the odds were it would be Friedl.

He knew she would come. She was only biding her time. He had caught her dark, sullen glance upon him several times in passing, but she had made no sign. He understood. Where the Waldmeister family was within earshot or sight, no one would get anything out of Friedl. They were perhaps hardly more the enemy to her than was the rest of the world, but she would make no move where they might get wind of it. It was not a matter of the importance of anything she might have to say, but rather of preserving the integrity of her own secret life, which had nothing to do with them. She might have nothing to tell, but she would come, all the same, given the chance, because he had, and deliberately, offered her a reason for approaching him.

There was no real difficulty. After dinner was cleared away he sat with a kirsch on the verandah that overlooked the tip of the lake, until she came out, off duty at last, to enjoy the luminous air of the evening. He had seen her emerge the previous night at this hour, and he felt reasonably sure that it would be the same to-night. All she had done was to stroll in the garden and talk a little with such guests as were solitary, but she had done it in a smart black wool dress, with a gold chain and cross round her neck, and her great mane of hair coiled in a glossy chignon on her nape; a manifestation at least that she did exist as a human being, like them.

She was a little later in appearing to-night, but she came. As soon as he saw her in the doorway, Francis moved away to the rail of the terrace, where the steps led down into the long slope of trees between the inn and the lake-shore. It was already dusk, but the afterglow had turned the western sky to a pale, glowing green, and its reflection from the lake, calm as a looking-glass laid down among the hills, cast a subtle radiance up through the trees. Without haste and without looking back, Francis went down the path.

The Goldener Hirsch stood on a bluff, higher than the Alte Post on the other side of the lake, but equally close to the thin yellow line of gravel that bordered the water. Sixty yards wide and gradually broadening as he penetrated deeper into it, the belt of trees wound along beneath the balconies and windows of the new wing, and the path, narrowing, wandered diagonally down it to the water. Not there, it would be too light there. Somewhere here in this curious woodland world quivering and swimming in greenish gleams, like a weedy aquarium. He had already left the evening strollers behind. There might be a pair of lovers holed up somewhere in the twilight, but there was room for them. He let the path slip right-handed away from him, towards the dappled, moon-pale water, and took to the grass beyond, moving at leisure among the trees. He didn’t know how far behind she might be, but he knew she would find him.

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.