And unique disadvantages, his own saner self warned him tartly. You’re taking her money to do a job for her, the only trust she has in you is the trust intelligent people place in competent professionals bound to them by contract. Take one step out of line, to-morrow, next week, ever, and she’ll be gone. And you’ll be a bigger heel even than you’ve ever been before. At least until now you’ve kept your business clean.
I shall still be doing that, he persisted strenuously, fighting off his better judgment. I’m not proposing to cheat her. The job I’ve taken on for her I’ll finish, if it can be done at all. But while it lasts I’ve got her ear, I’ve got a measure of her confidence, and I’ll earn more. I’m wronging nobody if I conduct my own campaign alongside hers.
And you think you’ve got so much as a dog’s chance? asked his doppelgänger venomously. You know what that woman is, a world figure, a beauty, a towering artist. Do I need to tell you? And you know what you are, don’t you? Or maybe you’ve forgotten. It’s a long time since you looked in a glass!
There wasn’t a mirror in the room, or in the flat apart from the one in the bathroom. But he didn’t need a glass, he knew what he looked like, and what he was. A man of forty-one, average height, light weight, not bad to look at as average men go, if he hadn’t spent all his adult life being knocked about by circumstances, and knocking himself about when circumstances let up. All that kept him from looking and being seedy was the odd vein of austerity that persisted from his Nonconformist upbringing, still unsubdued after a life-long battle with chaos and self-indulgence, and that basic dislike of dirt that would have been glad to believe itself a virtue, but sadly realised it was no more than a foible.
‘Yes, agreed his demon, reading his thoughts, you’ve had things cleaned up for the past five years, from artistic squalor into monastic order, and it cost you plenty to do it, and you know damned well the value you put on it. There was going to be no more of that! How much of your soul will you still own, if you let love break in here now? Don’t you recognise a disaster when you see one? Take a look round this cell of yours. It’s more than it looks, it represents the only safety you’ve got, because it’s the only order, it’s what’s left of your morality, it’s your identity. Open the door and let love into that, and it’ll kick the whole structure apart before you can say: Maggie!
And he knew it was true. Only a fool could welcome in the invader of his painfully-won privacy, and run to meet the power that humiliated and outraged what he had made of himself at so much cost. And for such an impossible hope! He knew, none better, that he would never reach her. If he regrouped his defences now, while there was time…
But there was no time left. It was already too late.
All right, he said defiantly to his double, sit back and watch. A little patience, a little craft, a nice mixture of blackmail and gratitude, and you’ll be surprised what I can do, when I want something enough. What will you bet me I don’t get her in the end?
And if you do, said the demon, with the finality of ultimate, unquestionable truth, what you get won’t be what you want. It will be only to possess and enjoy, you know that, don’t you? And spoil! Never to unite with her.
All right, damn you! said Francis, setting his teeth, then I’ll settle for that!
CHAPTER THREE
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So from then on he had two people’s interests to serve, Maggie’s and his own; and for the time being they were identical. If ever the two interests should diverge, God only knew what he would do, or which of them he would put first. There was no sense in trying to anticipate the event, and no comfort, either.
Back to the business in hand, then. If X was an injured lover, he belonged somewhere at the threshold of success. Ever since she was twenty years old she had lived in the sun, known exactly where she was going, and needed no claws. The more he thought about it, the more he was left with two formative years, the last two she had spent under Paul Fredericks.
What wouldn’t he have given to be able to question the old man, or even his sister who had worked with him? Perhaps especially his sister, for an elderly woman sees more of what goes on inside ambitious girls of genius than does a doting old man whose protégées they are. But they were both dead long ago. Francis had, however, the lists of names of those who had accompanied Maggie on her three tours with Freddy’s Circus. He began with the last, in the autumn of 1955. The last for an excellent reason, because after it she had been invited to sing Cherubini at Covent Garden, and Freddy had acknowledged that she was ready. That was also reason enough why Francis should consider it first.
And there in the list, if he couldn’t have Esther Fredericks, was the woman who had taken her place on the trip. Bernarda Elliot. Now Bernarda Felse. If Freddy had turned to her in a crisis, she must have a good head on her shoulders, as well as a contralto voice in her throat. And hadn’t Maggie said that she lived—or had then been living—somewhere here in the Midlands? Felse is not a very common name.
He looked in the regional telephone directory. Felse is not a common name at all, he found. There was just one of them in the whole of two border English counties and a large slice of mid-Wales. George Felse, of 19 Prior’s Lane, Comerford. In the circumstances it wouldn’t be much of a trick to find out whether his wife’s name was Bernarda.
It was; though most people, he discovered, seemed to know her as Bunty. And her husband—well, well, who would have thought it?—turned out to be a detective-inspector in the Midshire C.I.D. A far cry from Freddy’s Circus to a modest modernised cottage in the village of Comerford, only a few miles out of the county town, and just in sad process of becoming a town itself. Thirteen years is a long time; George Felse must have been a bobby on the beat when this girl—and Maggie had said she was good—decided he was what she wanted most.
So it can happen!
Don’t build on it, Francis, he warned himself grimly, it couldn’t happen to Maggie. A little interlude of a few months—even a year or so—you might get if you’re lucky and clever, but not a lifetime, don’t look for it.
He called the number in the book. The voice that answered was lighter than Maggie’s, and more veiled. ‘Yes, I’m Bernarda Felse. But how did you know?’
A good question, but for some reason a daunting one. He might have to be on his guard with a woman like that, in case he gave away more than he got from her.
‘My name’s Francis Killian. I got your name from Maggie Tressider. You know she’s in hospital in Comerbourne, after an accident? I do private research for anyone who needs it, in connection with books, indexing, that sort of thing. While she’s laid up, Miss Tressider is compiling material for a possible monograph on Doctor Paul Fredericks. She’s using me to do some of the donkey work for her. I believe you knew him well?’
‘I studied under him,’ said the distant voice, with pride, with affection, with gaiety; entirely without regret. ‘He was one of the world’s darlings. But irascible as the devil! No, come to think of it, the devil wouldn’t be, would he? Somebody ought to put Freddy on record, that’s a fact.’
‘It would be a great help if I could talk to you about him. May I come over and see you, some time?’
‘Any afternoon that suits you,’ said Bunty Felse. ‘Today, if you like?’
The moment he set eyes on her he stopped wondering if she had any lingering doubts about her bargain. She was one of the few people he’d ever seen who looked as if they had never regretted anything in their lives. She was about his own age, a slender person of medium height, with a shining cap of glossy hair the colour of ripe conkers, and a few engaging silvery strands coiled in the red here and there. Her eyes, large and brightly hazel, looked straight into his over the coffee-cups and declared her curiosity quite openly, and the effect their candour had upon him was of a compliment.