The Piper on the Mountain

Chapter I

THE MAN WHO FELL OFF A MOUNTAIN

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Herbert Terrell went to spend his annual summer leave climbing on the Continent, and fell off a mountain in Slovakia. He was traversing a fairly steep rock face by a narrow path at the time, and it seemed that he must have missed his footing at a blind turn where the rock jutted abruptly. They found him fifty feet below, lying on a shelf at the foot of the slope. The shelf, being of white trias limestone, had predictably got the better of the collision. Terrell was impressively and conclusively dead.

Since there was nothing else they could well do for him, the local police did the obvious things. They took a long, cool look at the circumstances of his death, made a full report in the right quarter, popped the body in cold storage, and settled back to await instructions.

In due course, and through the appropriate channels, the news made its way back to all the interested parties in England; and between them, after their own fashion, they compiled Herbert Terrell’s obituary.

Sir Broughton Phelps, Director of the Marrion Research Institute, received the news on a Sunday morning in his London flat. Immaculate from church, he sat at his desk and ploughed his way with disfavour through the surplus of work that had kept him in town over a fine week-end, when he would very much rather have been in his garden in Berkshire, sunning himself in a lawn chair. However, he was a hard-working, serious minded and efficient public servant, very well aware of the responsibilities of his office, and the sacrifice of an occasional Sunday was something he accepted as part of the price of eminence.

For one moment, as he cradled the telephone, his whole mind was concentrated upon Herbert Terrell. He saw him more clearly than he had ever seen him in the flesh: forty-five or so, middling tall, even-featured, obstinately unmemorable; a useful, reliable subordinate, thorough, valuable, arid and uninteresting. He saw again the dry, tough methodical body, the austere face, the humourless eyes. Can there be such a thing as a civil servant who has ceased to be anything separate from his office? Where the human qualities are feeble and ill-developed, perhaps the function eats them. Phelps saw his Chief Security Officer clearly as never before, but he saw him for only a moment. The features began to fade at once, until all that was left was the empty outline of a man, the vacancy that would have to be filled immediately.

The Marrion Research Institute was one of those hybrids so frequent in English public and social life. Old man Marrion had founded and endowed the place out of his oil millions, to prospect in dynamics and fuels for the future. The government had taken advantage of an optimistic director’s over-spending to muscle in on this profitable field, and propped up the Institute’s temporarily shaky finances in exchange for a watching brief and an option on all the results the Marrion computers, drawing-boards and laboratories produced. And this uneasy and contentious engagement had culminated in a slightly embittered marriage a year later, when the Ministry assumed the husband’s role, and the Institute’s scientists and mechanicians found themselves islanded and fenced in by considerations of national security, who had ingenuously considered themselves, up to then, as dedicated to human advancement. They had felt, some of them, like the children of an autocratic Victorian household, strictly confined in a world where the cheerful and ungifted ran free. And some of them, Sir Broughton remembered, had rebelled. For a little while.

Circumstances had exalted Herbert Terrell’s office, as circumstances had placed him in it. Where security precautions are so tight and vital, the sudden death of one man cannot be allowed to disrupt essential services. To-day only a skeleton office staff and the maintenance men were in, tomorrow someone else must be securely installed in Terrell’s place, that man-shaped outline, faint as a wraith now, solidly filled again, another hand on the curbs, another sharp eye on the most secret of secret files, the private personnel file.

He supposed he’d better contact the Minister, and ensure that his authority to appoint could not be questioned. The old man didn’t care a damn, if the truth were told, but could be awkward if his perquisites were infringed or his nominal authority by-passed.

Sir Broughton Phelps picked up the telephone again, and switched on the scrambler before he asked for the number of the Minister’s country house. No doubt where he’d be on a fine Sunday in July.

“Just a few minutes, darling, ” he said across the desk to his decorative and influential wife, who had put her head into the library to call him to lunch. “Something’s come up unexpectedly. I won’t be long.”

She made a face at him, not entirely playfully. Not even on Sundays did his time belong to her, but she still considered that it should. “Something bad?”

“No, no, ” he said soothingly. “Nothing serious. Just a vacancy that’s cropped up and has to be filled, that’s all.”

The Minister’s private secretary was a dashing young man whose native flippancy was held in check by his unerring sense of occasion. He had more respect for Sir Broughton Phelps than for most people, but even that wasn’t saying very much. He intended, however, to rise in his profession, and he was good at official languages. It didn’t matter that Sir Broughton could disentangle his utterances at the other end of the line just as effectively as the scrambler could unscramble it. What is said, not what is meant, goes in the records.

“I’m extremely sorry, Sir Broughton, but the Minister’s just gone out for some urgently needed air and exercise. He’s been hard at it all morning. Is it anything urgent? Should I try to find him? Or can I convey a message, and get him to call you back later?”

Fishing, thought Sir Broughton, mentally translating. Slept all morning, and won’t come in until dusk. Could be over at Patterson’s with his horses, but more likely fishing.

“I’d be obliged if you could get word to him. I just heard from Prague that the Institute’s Security Officer has had an accident on holiday there, climbing in the mountains. I must make some arrangements to fill his place at once. No, it won’t be a temporary appointment. Terrell’s dead. If you could reach the Minister, I should be glad. My own nomination would be Blagrove, but of course I defer to his judgment.”

The secretary unscrambled that into: What does the old devil care, as long as the job’s done properly? Go and get his OK for me, and he can doze off again.

So he went. His thoughts, as he walked down the fields towards the river, were speculative and pleasurable. He had his eye on a certain promotion job himself, but unfortunately the most hazardous thing the present incumbent ever did was to play a moderate game of golf. A pity!

The Minister was flat on his tweedy back in the lush, vivid turf by the river, his rod carefully propped beside him. He opened one speedwell-blue eye, startlingly young under its thick grey brow, and trained it forbiddingly on his favourite assistant.

“No touts, no hawkers, no circulars!” he said, in the buoyant and daunting voice he had only acquired in his old age, after a lifetime of watching his step, and one liberating instant of abandoning every such anxiety.

“No, sir, I promise you needn’t move. It’s Phelps on the secret line. I wouldn’t call what he has a problem. It could be a slight jolt. His right-hand man’s died on him—Terrell, his Security Officer.”

“Nonsense!” said the Minister, closing the eye again. “Terrell’s out of England somewhere, the Caucasus, or some such outlandish region. Climbing. Does it every year. Never could understand people taking up such unintellectual hobbies. What’s in a lump of rock? What does he get out of it?”

“A broken neck, sir, apparently. It seems he fell off one of his pitches this time. They picked him up dead. No, sir, there’s no doubt. Sir Broughton’s had the official report. He’s concerned about the vacancy, and would like your authority to appoint.”

“Hmm, yes,” owned the old man after a moment’s thought, “I suppose we shall have to be thinking about that. Did for himself finally, did he? I always said it was an idiotic way of passing one’s time. Why do they do these things? I take it Phelps has someone in mind for the job?”

“He mentioned one Blagrove, sir, if you approve.”

“Old Roderick’s boy. Might do worse. Used to work with Terrell before his promotion, I remember. All right, tell him he can go ahead, I approve.” He closed both eyes again, and lay soaking in sun. Not fishing weather, of course, but you can’t have everything. “Oh, and, Nick…” He opened one eye again, reluctantly.

“Sir?”

“There’s a wife. Widow, rather. Terrell’s, I mean. Seem to remember they separated, about a year ago. If Phelps knows where to contact her, perhaps he should break the news, otherwise they may have trouble locating her.”

“Of course, I’ll suggest it to him.”

“Good boy!” said the Minister vaguely, and closed his eye again, this time with unmistakable finality, having taken care of everything. “Not that I think she’ll be fearfully interested,” he said honestly, and returned his mind gratefully to his own intellectual and productive hobby.

Chloe Terrell, formerly Chloe Barber, born Chloe Bliss and soon to be Chloe Newcombe, turned her key in the door of her Chelsea flat about eleven o’clock that night, and heard the telephone buzzing at her querulously. She towed Paul Newcombe across the hall after her, and plunged upon the instrument eagerly. One of the most disarming things about her was that even at forty-three she still expected only pleasant surprises. Telegrams, sudden knocks on the door at late hours, letters in unknown hands from unknown places, all the things that make most people’s blood run cold, merely made Chloe’s eyes light up, and had her running to meet benevolent fortune half-way. Fortune, hypnotised like the audiences from whom she conjured applause simply by expecting it, seldom let her down.

“Oh, Sir Broughton—how very nice! Have you been calling me earlier? I’m so sorry! Such a lovely day, we ran out to Windsor.”

She hoisted brows and shoulders at Newcombe across the pleasant, pastel-shaded room, to indicate that she couldn’t make out what this caller could possibly want with her. Off-stage and on, her voice had made such a habit of intimacy that she never could remember to moderate the tone, whether for dukes or dustmen.

“Get yourself a drink, darling, and make yourself comfortable. One for me, too, please, and I’ll be with you…” The telephone clucked at her, and she took her smooth, cool palm from the mouthpiece again. “No! But really? Oh, no, it’s impossible!”

She was a belle laide, brown, slender and sudden, with an oval, comical, elf’s face, a blinding smile, and huge, purple-brown eyes. The eyes grew larger and larger now, dilating in pure astonishment, without, as yet, any suggestion of either consternation or delight. You would have been willing to hazard, however, that she enjoyed being astonished. A blazing smile touched her parted lips and lingered, but that could have been the reflex of disbelief.

“You’ve taken my breath away. I don’t know what to say. Well, that’s very understanding of them, and very kind. I think I should like to go out there, yes. I do think I ought to, don’t you? Where was it you said? Just let me write it down.” She scribbled indecipherably on the margin of the telephone directory, and whistled soundlessly at the outlandish spelling involved. “Thank you so much for letting me know, Sir Broughton, and for your sympathy. So kind of you! So very kind! Good-bye!”

She put down the receiver, and stood staring at Newcombe over it, wide-eyed, bright-eyed, open-mouthed.

“Paul, the maddest thing! Herbert’s gone and got himself killed!”

Paul Newcombe spilled his whisky. A few drops flicked from his shaky fingers and spattered the large photograph of Chloe Bliss as Viola, which stood on top of the cabinet. She made a delicious boy.

“What did you say? Terrell killed?”

“Yes, darling! Had a fall, climbing somewhere in some impossible place.” She spelled out from her own hieroglyphics, not without difficulty, and with a very engaging scowl: “Zbojská Dolina—can that be right, do you think? In something called the Low Tatras, in Slovakia. He’d worn out all the ordinary Alps, you know. He was quite good, so they said. But this time he fell off a traverse, or something. Anyhow, they picked him up dead.”

“Look, honey, are you quite certain? Who came through with this? Can you rely on it that it’s true?”

“Of course it’s true. That was the head of his Institute on the line, and he had it officially. Poor old Herbert, who’d ever have thought it!”

“Dead! Well, I’m damned!”

“I know! And, darling, there’s another thing, he says the Czechoslovak authorities are prepared to make it possible for me to go out there immediately, if I like, and see about the arrangements for bringing him home. Isn’t that something? And I’ve never been to Czechoslovakia, so why not? After all, they’ve asked me—”

“Chloe,” he said, appalled, “you don’t realise what this really means.”

“Oh, yes, I do. But I didn’t do it to him, you know. I didn’t do a thing, it just happened. I can’t make it unhappen. So what’s the use of being hypocritical about it? In a way it’s very convenient, you can’t deny it. Now I shan’t have to bother about trying to get him to agree to a divorce, we can get married whenever we like. And he did have a certain amount of money, besides being insured. Not that I’d have wished anything bad to happen to him just for that—or even at all. But why not admit to being interested in the results, now that it has happened? I hate humbug. Money’s useful, and being a widow makes it easy to be your wife. And I want to be your wife, and you want me to—don’t you?”

Newcombe put down his whisky, tilted her head back gently by a fistful of her thick, dark, straight hair, and kissed her vehemently. She emerged smiling.

“Well, then! And you will come with me to this place in Czechoslovakia?”

In a couple of weeks more he had, in any case, to undertake a protracted buying tour on the Continent—he manufactured and imported gloves, handbags, brief-cases and other small leather goods—but of course if she wanted him to he would go. She always got what she wanted out of him.

“Darling, this won’t be business, not exactly. And I’ll be there. It’s fashionable to go behind the Iron Curtain this year, everybody’s doing it. And it’s the least we can do for poor old Herbert. The most, too,” she added reflectively.

“I thought you hated humbug! Oh, all right, of course, if you want to go…”

“Darling!” murmured Chloe, hugging him happily. “It’ll be wonderful! I must get lots of beautiful black. I look well in black, and they’re sure to be rather conventional in Central Europe. But I’ll be a fiancée, as well as a widow! What superb timing!” She held him off for a brief instant to get a good look into his swarthy, self-confident, faintly wary face. “Are you sure you didn’t pop over and push poor old Herbie off his mountain?”

He took it that she was playing games of fancy with him, and stopped her mouth the easiest and pleasantest way; but afterwards, on his way out, he had a queasy feeling that she might not have been joking. Either she was an immoderately silly woman with pockets of cleverness, aa most people supposed, or she was an inordinately deep one who enjoyed appearing naïve. He could never quite make up his mind. Possibly she was both at the same time, or both in alternation. Whatever she was, she was irresistible, so he might as well give up speculating.

It was he who remembered, as he was leaving, that there was one more person who ought to be notified. The girl wasn’t Terrell’s daughter, of course, she belonged to Chloe’s first marriage, and her father had been a quite distinguished scholar in his provincial way, Professor Henry Barber, the sort of middle-aged, shabby, eccentric, companionable wit for whom young and ambitious actresses fall with a resounding but transitory bang. He’d died when his daughter was twelve years old, which meant she was turned eighteen now. She hadn’t, by all accounts, got on at all well with her first step-father. Took herself off to Oxford, so Chloe said, largely to get away from him; after old Barber’s unpredictable and exciting vagaries, this one’s cool, correct orthodoxy had infuriated her. Newcombe hoped profoundly that the second stepfather was going to be more of a success with her, but the thought of confronting a self-possessed and hypercritical eighteen-year-old frightened him more than he would have liked to admit.

“I suppose we ought to let Tossa know as soon as possible,” he said. The “we” was partly a deliberate assumption of Chloe’s responsibilities, and partly a pious prayer for harmony.

“Yes, of course, I’ll call her in the morning. It’s much too late to-night. She’ll take it in her stride,” said Chloe sunnily. “She never could bear him.”

Adrian Blagrove came back from his leave on Monday morning, clocked his mechanical way through the Marrion Institute’s defences in depth, and reported prompt at nine to his own office in the secretariat. He had been there no more than three minutes when he was sent for to Sir Broughton Phelps’s office in the most august and sacred recesses of Building One, and acquainted first with the fact of Herbert Terrell’s demise, and then with the probability of his own permanent appointment to the vacancy thus created. Both pieces of information he received with the appropriate awe, gravity and gratification, nicely tempered with a modesty which was far from native to him. Bursting with health and lightness of heart after his fortnight’s holiday, he felt capable of virtuoso performances. This job was what he had wanted for years. The frivolity with which he played his graceful little comedy of accepting it was entirely unconnected with the tenacity with which he would hold fast to it, and the intensity with which he would perform it.

“The appointment is at present temporary, pending confirmation. You understand that, of course.”

“Of course!”

“But if you acquit yourself as well as I believe you will, I can say there’s very little probability of confirmation being withheld. You’ve worked with Terrell, you know his methods and you know the organisation of his office. It’s vital that someone shall be able to step straight into his shoes without a falter in the apparatus or its working. Can you do that?”

“I think I can. I’ll do my best.”

He was a lanky but graceful fellow, not as tall as he appeared, but marked everywhere by noticeable length; long hands, long feet, long neck, long face in the best aristocratic tradition. A little like a well-bred horse, but with certain indications that the horse was by a sire with intelligence out of a dam with devilment. He was forty-one, and still a bachelor, in itself a diplomatic achievement, especially in view of the social life he led, and the fact that he was, as the Minister had remarked, old Roderick’s boy, and old Roderick’s only boy, at that.

“Then you’d better move in at once, and take over. The secretariat is geared to carry your absence a week longer, by which time we shall have made a new appointment there. Well, good luck, Blagrove!”

“Thank you, sir!”

He left the presence very demurely. In the long, soundless corridors of Building One he danced a little when there was no one else in sight, but it was a sarabande rather than a jig, and his face remained bland, intent and fierce with thoughtfulness. He knew exactly what he would do with the Security Office; he had had his own ideas ever since he had worked with Terrell on a certain dossier, and found the differences between their minds sharpening at every contact. It was that dossier, he remembered, that had put Terrell in charge of security at the Marrion in the first place.

He moved his own personal things into the office which had been Terrell’s. Temporary the appointment might be, and pending confirmation, but Blagrove spent a coolly happy hour rearranging things to his liking, taking down Terrell’s few mountain photographs from the walls, installing his own yachting colour pictures in their place. The beautiful Chloe Bliss—he’d kept her picture in its place even when she left him—went into a desk drawer with the rest. Of Miss Theodosia Barber, Tossa to her friends and contemporaries, there were no pictures, or he might have been tempted to secrete one for his own private pleasure when he had his predecessor’s effects packed up for delivery to the widow.

By noon he had made a clean sweep. As far as the Marrion Research Institute was concerned, Herbert Terrell was not merely dead, but buried, too.

Chloe spent the whole of Monday shopping for glamorous mourning, and quite forgot about telephoning her daughter until late in the evening. While she waited for the operator to get the number of Tossa’s Oxford digs she practised looking appropriately widowed and murmuring: “Poor Herbert!” There was a mirror suitably placed opposite the telephone for this exercise, so it wasn’t time wasted. Shopping had acted as a tonic; she was looking blooming. Pathetically blooming, of course, but blooming. A pity about the name, though. What could you possibly do with “Herbert?” And yet how like him, how decorous and dull. Even death, even a sudden death like this, couldn’t get such a name off the ground.

The telephone sputtered in her ear, and Tossa came on the line, sounding defensively grim, as usual. Unexpected calls at this hour of the evening could only be from home.

“Tossa Barber here. Mother?”

Where did the child get that gruff voice, like a self-conscious choirboy just stricken by puberty? She might make a hit on television some day, if she could learn to use her natural oddities, but she’d never make it on the stage. You couldn’t fill a theatre with that bashful, suppressed baritone stammer.

“Darling, yes, of course it’s me. Did I interrupt something for you?”

“No, nothing much, we were just planning this foreign route. And arguing a lot, of course. The boys want to drive and drive, they don’t see any point in stopping at all, really. But it doesn’t matter, once we’re across to Le Touquet we can go wherever we like, and change the plans as much as we like. We’ve got the car, that’s the main thing. It’s a VW van, third-hand, but it’s been looked after. And you won’t have to worry about us at all, because we’ve got two first-class mechanics.”

Trot out at speed all the mitigating circumstances, and pray that she isn’t feeling maternal, or you’ve had it. Tossa and her fellow-students had been planning this holiday abroad all the term, and shelled out the money already for the air passage across the Channel, but one unpredictable impulse of mother-love on Chloe’s part could still wreck it. Well, even if she quashed their plans, Tossa was determined she wouldn’t go with her to Menton, to play chaperone for her and her next-man-in, before she’d even shucked off the present incumbent. She couldn’t help it, and Tossa knew she couldn’t, and didn’t hold it against her. But, my God, how it complicated things!

“Tossa, love, there’s something I’ve got to tell you. Darling, I have to go abroad, very soon, to-morrow if we can get a passage. You must try to be brave for me. I know you can. It’s Daddy…”

Christ! thought Tossa, she is coming over all cosy and motherly. She can’t have made it up with him? Even for her that would be an all-time, way-out crazy reaction. Even when she was gone on him she never tried this “Daddy ” business before—never in life!

“… something happened to him on holiday. He had an accident. He’s dead, sweetheart!”

Never in life, no, just in death. That made sense, anyhow. Death called for a gesture, and Chloe Bliss wasn’t the one to turn a deaf ear. Tossa stood frozen, clutching the receiver to her ear like some cosmic seashell bringing in the wavelengths of other worlds. And after a while she croaked faintly into the wood-dove’s muted cooing: “You mean it? He’s dead?”

“Yes, darling. He had a fall in the mountains, and was killed. Everybody’s being terribly sweet to me, his chief rang me up himself to break the news, and the Czechoslovak authorities have offered to give immediate clearance if I want to go out and arrange about bringing him home myself. And I do think I ought to, don’t you, dear? I’ve said yes, and Paul is arranging everything, and coming out there with me. I should feel so inadequate, alone. You do understand, darling? You mustn’t let it spoil your holiday, you know, I shouldn’t like that.”

“No! I see,” said Tossa numbly, and fumbled for the nearest available exit. “I’m sorry, Mother! It’s quite a shock. How long do you think you’ll be away?”

“Only a few days, I expect, maybe a week.”

“And you don’t mind if I go right ahead with this trip with Chris and the boys? It won’t be immediately, there’s ten days or more yet.”

“Of course, go, darling. I know you’ll be all right with Christine and her brother. Just take care, that’s all I ask.”

“Mother, I am sorry! About Mr. Terrell—Herbert….”

There wasn’t anything, not one single thing in the world, she could decently call him. The field between them had been as arid as that. And whose fault was it?

“Yes, sweet, I know you are. But there it is, these things happen, that’s all. Now, promise me you’ll get a proper sleep to-night, and not brood about anything?”

“No, I won’t brood. You know we weren’t close. I’m just sorry it had to happen to him. Mother, where did it happen?”

Chloe repeated punctiliously the names she had to spell out carefully each time from her own cramped handwriting. Zbojská Dolina, Nizké Tatry, Slovakia. Strange, far-off places. But not really so far-off, in these days of circling the globe, like Puck, in eighty minutes.

“I’ll send you a postcard, darling. Now good night, and God bless! Don’t stay up too late!”

“I won’t, Mother. Good night! I’m terribly sorry!”

She was the first and last to say that about the death of Herbert Terrell, and mean it. She stood for a long time with her hand still pressing the telephone receiver down on its rest, and she knew what she had said for truth, but still she didn’t know why. They had never come within touch of hands or minds, she and the dead man. He had been everything she hadn’t been used to and couldn’t get used to, precise, cold, methodical, thorough, pedestrian. He had courted her doggedly in ways that had only succeeded in alienating her still more implacably. But whose fault was it? Whose? A little more effort, no, a little more willingness, and she might have met him and achieved contact, she might have tapped unsuspected warmths in him. And now it was too late, he was dead. You couldn’t make new discoveries about people when they were dead, and you couldn’t make amends to them, either.

Well, no use dithering here like a wet hen, there was nothing she could do about him now. She marched back doggedly to her own bed-sitter, where her friends were sprawled happily over an outsize map of Europe spread out on the floor, the Mather twins in full cry. Tossa coiled herself once again in her place in the circle, and propped one elbow in the Aegean, and the other in the sea off Rimini. The soft, heavy wings of straight, dark hair swung forward and shadowed her face.

“Anybody interesting?” asked Christine, returning with capricious suddenness from Dubrovnik.

“No!” It came out so abruptly that it sounded like a snub, and she hastened to soften the effect, and made a mess of that, too. “Only my mother.”

It was simply that she didn’t want to talk about it, not yet, perhaps never. Think, yes, but talk, no. But to her own ears, and especially when she considered the fourth person present, who had never met her until this evening, it sounded distinctly ungracious, even a little shocking. Why did she have to be so maladroit? Chloe Bliss could and did put her foot in it right, left and centre, but always in the drollest and most disarming ways. Her daughter, it seemed, had to trip over everything, even the simple answer to a straight question. This friend of Toddy’s wasn’t going to find himself charmed or disarmed by rough cracks like that.

She cast a side glance at him from under the protective shadow of her hair. His name was Dominic Felse, and he was reading English literature. She didn’t know much more about him, except that it seemed he was a useful man in a boat, and Toddy thought well of him. He came from some river town somewhere in the Midlands, where all the grammar schools crewed racing eights, fours and pairs as a matter of course, hence his prowess. He was in his first year, like herself, and probably within a couple of months the same age; rather tall and a little gawky still, with a bush of cropped, reddish-brown hair, hazel eyes that didn’t miss much, and a fair skin that freckled heavily across the cheekbones and the nose. What he was thinking of her was more than she could guess.

His reaction, if she could have known it, was not one of shock, but of honest surprise. His own mother was a gay, sensible extrovert, who caused him nothing but pleasure, satisfaction and security, so all-pervading that it had never even occurred to him to notice them at all. The revelation that this sullen, bright, brown imp of a girl had no such serene relationship with her mother came as an eye-opener, no matter how open eyes and mind had always been, in theory, to the infinite variety of humankind.

She might, he conceded, studying her covertly as she scowled down at Central Europe, be quite capable of contributing her fair share to any friction that was hanging around. He wasn’t sure yet whether he was going to like her, though any friend of the Mathers was practically guaranteed in advance. But he was quite sure she was the most delightful thing to look at that had come his way since he’d arrived in Oxford.

Tossa would have been staggered to hear it. Brought up on the legend of her mother’s charm, she had never been able to see anything in herself but the laide, and nothing at all of the belle. That hadn’t soured her, she had sighed and accepted it as her fate. She had even convinced those of her friends who had known her from childhood, like the Mathers, that her view of herself was a true one. But you can’t fool a young man you are meeting for the first time, without a preconception in his head about you, or any predisposition to take you at your own valuation.

So Dominic Felse saw Tossa as belle, and not at all as laide. Chloe’s pale golden complexion became olive-bronze in her daughter, and smoother than cream. Chloe’s rounded slenderness was refined in Tossa to the delicate, ardent tension of something built for racing, and anguished with its own almost uncontainable energy. Tossa still was like a coiled spring. It would be nice to teach her relaxation, but it was nice to watch her quiver and vibrate, too. Her face was a regular oval with wonderfully irregular features, lips thoughtful and wry, so that you missed the sensitivity of their moulding unless some sudden change in her caused you to look more closely; huge, luminous, very dark brown eyes. Her hair was a straight bob, just long enough to curve in smoothly to touch her neck; very dark brown like her eyes, heavy and soft and smooth, with a short, unfashionable fringe that left her olive forehead large and plaintive to view, an intelligent child’s knotty, troubled forehead, braced squarely against a probably inimical world.

No, Dominic was in no doubt at all about Tossa, she was beautiful enough to stop any sane man in his tracks for another look, before she vanished and he lost his chance for ever. All the more effective because she didn’t even know it. She might have a pretty good opinion of herself in other ways, for all he knew, but she hadn’t the faintest notion that she was lovely to look at.

“She won’t go and muck this trip up at the last moment, will she?” asked Christine, suddenly sitting bolt upright and abandoning the map, her grey eyes narrowing with suspicion.

Well, that was sound evidence, in its way. Christine had known Tossa’s family almost since her infant school days.

“Oh, no, that’s all right! She gave me her blessing. Don’t worry about her, she’s going abroad herself, anyhow.” Tossa scowled even more fiercely, and stooped her weighted brow nearer to the map, only too plainly annoyed, thought Dominic, that she had volunteered something she needn’t have volunteered. “How far did we get?”

“Oh, we needn’t plan all that closely. As long as we’ve got all the papers we even may need, we can go where we like, and see how the time works out.” Toddy drew up his long legs and hugged his knees. He was his sister’s senior by an hour, and a good year ahead of the other two, and inevitably, or so it seemed to him, he was cast as the leader of the expedition. “Everybody’s got valid passports, and I’ve applied for the insurance card. Anything else we need?”

Tossa stooped her head even lower towards the map. The heavy curtain of hair swung low and hid her cheek, drooping like a broken wing. She followed the west-east road through Nuremberg, and on towards the border, over the border and on through Pilsen and Prague, until the edge of the map brought her up short of the Slovak border, baulked of her objective. What was the use, anyhow? His death was an accident, and no fault of hers. If she’d somehow failed him, that was incurable now.

But if she’d only given him a chance to be liked! Not everybody can do that by warm instinct, most of us have to be helped.

She hadn’t done much to help him, had she?

With a sense of wonder and disbelief, as if her mind had taken action without her will, she heard her own voice saying with careful casualness: “It wouldn’t do any harm to have a carnet for the van, would it? Just in case we wanted to go farther afield? After all, we might—mightn’t we?”