House of Green Turf

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 account 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:

‘Robin!’

He would not have believed that she could ever utter such a sound, or he provoke such a sound from her. Sick and mute, he stood and stared at his work. Whether she wanted the truth or not, they both had it now, and there was no shovelling it back into its grave.

‘Robin!’ she said in a rustling whisper. ‘So he never came… But how could I have known? He wasn’t any responsibility of mine… was he? Was he?’

She had appealed to Francis, and therefore she became aware of him again, no longer as an apocalyptic voice ripping away the layers of her forgetfulness one by one, but as a man, a live human creature shut in there with her, and one who knew more about her than any man should know. All that long-buried burden of her guilt lay there in full view between them. They looked at each other across the wreckage with horror, anger and hatred. Each of them knew what the other was seeing, and each recoiled in outrage from the violation of privacy involved. Nothing was hidden any longer, everything assaulted Maggie’s lacerated senses at once, his love, his resentment of love, his humiliation and rage at the invasion of his bleak solitude. Both his love and his antagonism were unbearable, and there was nowhere to hide.

Her body, newly schooled in the use of weakness where there remains no other weapon, found the only way of escape. Francis saw her deliberately, resolutely withdraw from him into the dark, and sprang across the room towards her a second too late. She let her hands fall, and dropped like a crumpled bird.

She came round in his arms, on his heart, aware of his agony before ever she heard his voice panting and whispering her name. Fingers light and agitated and gentle smoothed back the tumbled hair from her eyes. A broken and contrite murmur entreated her:

‘Maggie, forgive me… forgive me! Oh, my God, what have I done?’

She lay like a dead woman, and made no sign. It was the only way to keep any part of her integrity free of his touch, of his love which she did not want, of his nearness which affronted her, of his pain, of which she was mortally afraid. No one must come this close to her, no one touch her with this wounding fervour. She must get rid of him. He must know no more of her, he already knew too much. So she kept her eyes fast closed and her spirit tightly withdrawn from him, even when the shadow of his face stooped between her and the light, and he kissed her on the mouth. The touch shook her to the heart with pity and panic and distress. She held her breath and remained apart.

‘Maggie, speak to me… look at me…’

Suddenly he was up from his knees and plunging away from her across the room. She heard the faint single ring as he lifted the telephone.

‘No!’ She opened her eyes and raised herself unsteadily among the cushions of the couch, where he had carried her. ‘No, please don’t! I’m all right…’

He spun on his heel, and for an instant she saw such abject hope, relief and solicitude in his eyes that her head swam again. Then she felt as a convulsion in her own flesh the effort with which he drew down over his face the austere mask of professional detachment he normally showed to the world, and hid his nakedness from her. She thought wretchedly, we’ve destroyed each other. This proud man will never forgive me for frightening him so far off-course into humility and self-betrayal, any more than I can forgive him for penetrating so far into my jungle, and caring too much about what he found. What affair am I of his, outside the terms of the agreement? And what right had I to find my way under his skin and reduce him to this?

‘I was going to call your doctor. I think I should.’

‘No, please hang up. I don’t need anyone. I don’t want anyone.’ She sat up, smoothing her dove-grey skirt. ‘I’m sorry I alarmed you,’ she said. ‘It was only a momentary weakness. I shall be all right now.’

‘I’m afraid I’ve upset you too much. I wish you’d let me call someone.’

‘Please, no, it’s quite unnecessary. Now, if you’ll be kind enough to hand me my bag… It’s there on the piano…’

He brought it, handing it to her with fastidious carefulness not to touch, not to make any claim upon her, now that she was awake and aware. Her pallor was less extreme now, her face was calm, almost cold. The fear was gone and the hope was gone; she was past the moment of impact, it seemed, and beyond there was an emptiness, an area of shock, where as yet nothing hurt and nothing comforted.

‘Don’t worry about me, I shall be quite all right now. I’ll lie down and have a rest, after you leave. Thank you for all the work you’ve put in on my case, you’ve been most efficient, and I’m very grateful.’ She was riffling through the contents of her handbag, her head bent; and in a moment she looked up at him, holding out a sheaf of notes. ‘I hope I’ve reckoned up right. This is only the fee for the actual number of days, of course, including to-day. Please let me have the amount of your expenses, they must have been considerable. Don’t trouble to itemise, I shall be quite satisfied with a round figure. And again, thank you!’ Very courteous, very low, very final, that wild-silk voice of hers, dismissing him; but so gentle that at first he hardly understood, and when he did, he could not believe.

‘You mean you’re dispensing with my services?’ His face was whiter than hers.

‘But surely, you’ve completed your assignment very successfully. I asked you to find out for me what it was I’d done… to feel that I had a death on my hands. And you’ve done it. There’s nothing else I need.’

‘You’re accepting this without examination? I should have thought we needed to go into it in detail, to satisfy you that it’s authentic. I was too brutal, I beg your pardon! I wanted to avoid mentioning names to see if there was any genuine memory of this incident…’

‘You have seen,’ she said, ‘that there is. It needed only to be uncovered. There is no mistake. And I am quite satisfied.’

He stood gazing down at her, and felt time and the world grinding to a stop, and only a blank before him. She continued to sit there, pale, resolutely withdrawn into herself, holding out the sheaf of notes patiently in a hand that trembled a little from weakness; and her eyes had become the heavy, opaque blue of Willow Pattern china. There was nothing he could do. He was not going to plead with her for a small corner somewhere in her life, and he could not force his way where she did not want him to go. He had not even the right to turn on his heel and walk out, and leave her holding the money she felt she owed him. He was a hired employee, commissioned, paid off and dismissed. What could he do but take his fee, and go?

‘I ought to point out,’ he said, in a voice almost as dry as the desert he saw ahead of him without her, ‘that what I’ve reported and what you may have remembered is not enough to prove what actually became of this man Aylwin. You yourself know that there were completely logical reasons for believing, as Dr. Fredericks certainly did, that he had simply walked out. Granted that you have additional knowledge, you still have no proof that Dr. Fredericks’ version is not the correct one. For all the real evidence anyone possesses, Aylwin may be very much alive and perfectly well. If you won’t allow me to follow up the possibilities for you, at least remember that.’

Did he for one moment believe what he had said? Certainly she did not. Perhaps now she knew more than he did. She remained marble-still, the notes extended gravely in her hand.

‘Thank you, you’re very kind. Please believe that I appreciate what you’ve done for me, but there’s no need to follow it up any farther. And now, I’m a little tired…’

He could not keep her waiting any longer. He took the money without a glance, and thrust it into his pocket.

‘May I know… what you intend to do?’

‘I have no plans,’ she said.

‘If there should be anything further to tell you, can I rely on finding you here?’

‘For a while, yes. I don’t know how long.’

‘If you should need me, you know where to reach me.’ She did not offer him her hand, and he did not expect it. He walked to the door without looking back. ‘Good-bye, Miss Tressider!’

‘Good-bye, Mr. Killian!’

The trouble was that he didn’t mean it, and she did. Wherever she looked for help, out of friendship or for hire, never in this world would she turn to Francis Killian again. She had crossed him out of her experience, buried him as deep as the body he’d dug up for her. After the compromising intimacy of what they’d just done to each other, he thought grimly as he walked down the stairs, it was either that or marriage.

He had taken her money, because he had had no right to refuse it, but now that he had it, it was his business what he did with it. He walked into the church opposite the hotel, and cast a sullen eye over all the almsboxes, but the combating of dry-rot and death-watch beetle and the financing of overseas missions in countries arguably more moral and likeable if not more Christian than England did not appeal to him as a job for Maggie’s money. He went down to the Salvation Army shelter by the embankment, where they had a permanent collecting-box on the wall outside, in the form of a giant tambourine, with his favourite appeal written across it in large, cheerful characters: HELP UP THE DOWN-BUT-NOT-OUTS. He pulled out the untidy wad of notes from his pocket, and stuffed them anyhow through the slot.

A disinterested-looking man sauntering past with his eyes apparently on the river took in this surprising act, and loitered to lean on the rail and the embankment and think it over, as Francis stalked away.

George Felse had been following him ever since he had shouldered his way through the revolving doors of the Lion Hotel and butted savagely through the traffic into the church opposite. It was a chance meeting only, in fact George was on his way to the car-park where he had left his car. But the apparition of Bunty’s visitor, back from Austria and striding stony-faced and hot-eyed away from an encounter with his principal, had lured him out of his course. Everybody knew from the local evening paper that Maggie Tressider had taken a suite at the Lion; and by this time George had studied Francis Killian’s photograph too thoughtfully to miss that face when he saw it cross the pavement in front of him. First the almsboxes in the church, and now this startling treatment of a fistful of money. And the desolation and rage in the worn, illusionless face. It takes a lot to wound a man without illusions. It takes a touch of madness to make most people throw money away.

George walked to his car slowly and thoughtfully. Whatever Maggie Tressider’s commission had been, it looked as if it was over. And there at the Salvation Army shelter her agent had jettisoned his pay, in anger and offence. Was it possible that Bunty had been right about him? Had he a far larger stake at risk?

And might it not be well worth while, so far as other duties allowed, continuing this unofficial watch upon him? In fact, upon both of them?

It was on Saturday, the fourteenth of September, that Laura Howard telephoned from the B.E.A. office.

‘Bunty? Something rather intriguing—if you’re still interested in your party? He looked in yesterday afternoon, and asked me to do exactly what you asked me to do! He wants to know if Maggie Tressider books a passage anywhere. He knows I shouldn’t do it but he was in dead earnest. And of course, I didn’t promise, not exactly, but remembering what you said last time… Well, I didn’t say I wouldn’t, either. I thought I’d better consult you, and see what was on. Because, you see, she has! This morning! She rang up and wanted a passage to Zurich next Wednesday, and I’ve got one for her on the 16.10 from Heathrow.’

Bunty had waved George over long before this point, and his head was inclined intently beside her own, listening to the distant clacking with ears stretched.

‘Well, I mean, Maggie Tressider! But he seems on the level, and he says he’s been working for her. Has he?’

‘Yes,’ said Bunty, ‘that’s right, he has.’

‘Then what do I do? Should I let him know?’

‘Ask her,’ hissed George, ‘if there’s another flight to Zurich the same day.’

‘Hallo… Laura? Is there another flight that same day?’

‘Lots… 10.10, 10.50, 14.10… and tourist night flights, of course…’

‘Tell him,’ breathed George, ‘and a thousand to one he’ll be on one of ’em if there’s a vacancy.’

‘Yes, Laura, tell him. He’s O.K. And Laura… let me know if he books a crossing for himself, will you?’

‘Oh, well,’ said Laura philosophically, ‘in for a penny, in for a pound. O.K., I’ll call him. And I’ll call you, double-quick, if there’s any trouble.’ She rang off.

Bunty cradled the ’phone, and gazed, round-eyed at George over it. ‘Now what’s going on? It doesn’t make sense for him to be peering round corners and suborning B.E.A. employees to find out what his own client’s up to. He can’t have been lying about working for her, because he wasn’t at all worried about the possibility that I might pop out and buy some flowers and go round to the Royal to visit her. In fact he suggested it. And plenty of people would have, especially after being told she’d remembered them. Now it seems he’s expecting her to go running out there herself, and not to say anything to him about it. So what is going on?’

‘I rather think,’ said George, ‘that they’ve parted brassrags.’ He recounted the incident of the Salvation Army shelter. ‘It looks as if he brought something back with him, and something that got him paid off and sent about his business. And somehow I don’t think it was book material about Paul Fredericks, do you? Anyhow, he wasn’t a bit happy about the result, you should have seen his face! And he certainly got rid of her money so fast it might have been scalding him. But now it does seem that he hasn’t exactly accepted his dismissal, doesn’t it? Far from it, he’s still going to be bloodhounding along after her wherever she goes, unless I miss my guess. Only this time unknown to her, and unpaid.’

‘I told you,’ said Bunty, ‘he’s in love with her. If she’s going to walk head-on into trouble, he’s going to be on the spot to pull her out of it.’

‘And you think she is going to be walking into trouble?’ demanded George, of himself at least as much as of his wife.

‘It looks as if he thinks so. And after all, he’s the only one who knows what he found there, isn’t he?’

‘You’re so right,’ agreed George ruefully. ‘I only wish he wasn’t. I’d give a good deal to be in the know myself.’ He sat mute for a few moments, his eyes fixed on Bunty in bright speculation; she knew him so well that she could almost see him making up his mind. ‘Bunty, how would you like a few days in the Vorarlberg?’

‘Us?’ she said, startled. ‘You and me? You mean follow them over and keep an eye on them?’

“If he decides to go after her. Yes, you and me—why not? I’ve still got a week of leave to take, some time, why not now and why not in Scheidenau? If nothing comes of it, we’ve lost nothing and had a holiday. And if something does come of it, if he’s turned up something about the disappearance of your young Aylwin… Well, who knows? If we roll one more stone over we may find Peter Bromwich, too. I’d give a good deal to close that case.’

‘We couldn’t travel on the same flight with either of them,’ pointed out Bunty. ‘He’d know me, for certain. And she just might.’

‘I was thinking rather of hopping over with one of the tourist night flights, ahead of them. They won’t all be fully booked not in September. And it would give us time to lay on a car from Zurich, ready to trail those two as soon as they land. Train or road, we can tag along once we’ve got them in our sights. What do you say?’

Bunty reviewed her responsibilities, and could find nothing against it. Dominic and his Tossa wouldn’t be home from their student trek in Yugoslavia for a fortnight yet, just in time to head back to Oxford.

‘I say yes, let’s!’ said Bunty with enthusiasm. ‘If he follows her, of course,’ she conceded with a sigh.

It was late afternoon when the telephone rang again.

‘Bunty? Laura here! How did you know? He’s booked on the 14.10, two hours ahead of her!’