‘And you’ve no idea what happened to him afterwards?’
‘Not the slightest. He was never going to hit the headlines as an instrumentalist, he couldn’t be bothered. We just went on with our schedule without him. Freddy made no attempt to trace him, after all he was over twenty-one and his own master. He probably drifted back home when he felt like it, or signed up with some small orchestra over there. He was the kind to fall on his feet, and he spoke both German and French, he’d get along all right. We weren’t worried about him.’
But the strange, the unnerving thing was that suddenly Francis was worried about him. For no reason, except that the boy had been near to Maggie, and had walked away into a long-past evening and left no trace behind him.
‘Didn’t his family want to know what you’d done with him?’
‘He had no close family, as far as I know. He’d been knocking about on his own for two or three years already.’
‘What was this boy like? You haven’t a photograph?’
She shook her head. ‘No photographs. I had loads of publicity pictures at the time, of course, but obviously I didn’t file them. It’s a long time ago. I remember him as a very attractive young man, and well aware of it. Girls liked him.’ She added after a moment’s thought: ‘He laughed a lot.’
‘And where did this happen… this walking out?’
‘We were staying in a little resort in the Vorarlberg, a place called Scheidenau. You’ll find it all in the papers there. Freddy always used the Goldener Hirsch as a convenient base for all our concerts round there—Bregenz, Bludenz, Vaduz, St. Gallen, Lindau, all those places. It’s very near to the German border, and quiet, and rather cheap.’
‘And he walked out between dinner and bedtime? Just like that? Did you notice anything different about him at dinner? Nothing to show what he had in mind?’
By this time, he realised, she ought to have been asking questions herself, and the very fact that she was not had drawn him into deeper water than he had intended venturing. He smiled at her, shaking away the betraying tension of his own concentration. ‘It seems such an odd time to cut his moorings.’
‘All he seemed to have in mind at dinner,’ said Bunty, disconcertingly remaining grave, ‘was ingratiating himself with Maggie. He’d been paying her special attention for several days, that I do remember. Not that there’s anything remarkable in that. She was… she is a most beautiful person. All our boys were a little in love with her.’
He kept his eyes steady and faintly amused on hers, his hands placid on the papers they held, with an effort of will that left him no energy for speech for a moment. And he wondered if she could have hit him so hard and so accurately without knowing exactly what she was doing. Not out of malice, perhaps, just by way of experiment; there are other ways of satisfying one’s curiosity, besides asking direct questions.
‘I’m sure they must have been,’ he said evenly, when he had his voice under control again. Let her wonder, too, by how much she had missed her target. ‘And what about Miss Tressider? Did she respond?’
‘Maggie had other things on her mind by then. She knew what she wanted. She was nineteen,’ said Bunty, ‘she liked being liked, and she was a very nice, patient, quiet girl who would in any case have been kind to him. But she never took her eyes from her objective, for him or anyone.’
Her voice was gentle, deliberate and detached. It was more than time to work his way back unobtrusively to Paul Fredericks for ten minutes or so, and then take himself off, before he gave her more than he was getting out of her. She was altogether too perceptive. He managed his retreat with finesse, but finesse was not enough. Never mind, she had made it clear that she sympathised, and also held it to be no personal business of hers; and he was never going to see her again closer than across a Comerbourne street.
‘Of course,’ said Bunty Felse disconcertingly, seeing him out at the door, ‘after all this time she may have changed.’
It did not occur to her that there was anything to disturb her in this interview, for fully an hour after it was over. Her visitor was presumably what he purported to be, and it was only his misfortune that an aching preoccupation of his own had side-tracked him from the master to the pupil. If there hadn’t been something she had liked about him she might not even have noticed, much less felt obliged to warn him that she had. But after he was gone her mind began to nag at the curious implications of their conversation. Surely everything he had learned from her about autumn, 1955, Maggie already knew at least as well, and he must have known she would need no help in recalling details, supposing that she was serious about this book. No, that probe had been for his own satisfaction. And granted he had his own unhappy reason for wanting to talk about Maggie rather than her teacher, why just that incident, and why with so much controlled intensity? Why dwell so insistently on Robin Aylwin, who was of no significance whatever? Why want a photograph of him? The more she thought of it, the more it seemed to her that their conversation had gathered and fixed upon that enigmatic young man with quite unjustified interest.
She had not been asked to treat the interview as confidential. So she told George about it over tea, as she did about most things that stirred or puzzled her. George, who had had a fairly boring day, listened to her with pleasure and affection, but with only one ear, until a single harmless word unexpectedly caused all his senses to prick into life together. He came erect out of a faint blue cloud of cigarette smoke.
‘Scheidenau?’ he repeated sharply.
‘Scheidenau,’ agreed Bunty, opening her eyes wide. ‘Why? Ring a bell, or something? I must have mentioned it ad nauseam at the time, but of course it’s a long time ago. Anyway, it’s only a tiny little resort, nothing special about it. What made you sit up and take notice suddenly?’
‘Who did you say this fellow was? The one who came to see you?’
‘Name of Francis Killian, a sort of private enquiry agent from Comerbourne. I told you, he’s working for Maggie Tressider, collating all this stuff about Freddy, she’s thinking of doing a book about him.’
‘Oh, Killian, yes, I know the name. Never met him, but as far as I know he’s all right. But how did you get on to Scheidenau? I’d clean forgotten you’d ever been near the place.’
‘So had I, until I got the records out to show him. Was that just a jab from your subconscious, when you sat up and barked Scheidenau?’
‘That’s it,’ agreed George amiably, blinking at her through dissolving smoke. ‘It reminds me of a recurrent nightmare—Dom eight years old and in temper tantrums, and you twenty-nine and as pretty as new paint, shaking a loose leg in the Vorarlberg. I had the horrors all the time you were away.’
‘There wasn’t a soul around you need have worried about,’ Bunty assured him scornfully, ‘even if I hadn’t been up to the neck in bills and transport arrangements. Just Freddy, and all those callow young men years younger than me. Not to mention the competition! Only three girls, but two of them were presentable, and the third was a beauty. Still is,’ she said, abruptly recalled to the serious consideration of her afternoon’s entertainment. ‘He’s in love with her.’
‘Killian? With Maggie Tressider? How do you know?’
‘Killian. With Maggie Tressider. And I know, all right. Oh, he wasn’t obvious in any way, but there it was. I liked him,’ said Bunty, who always knew her own mind, and added, relevantly enough: ‘Poor boy!’ That he was her own age, within a year one way or the other, did not invalidate the sentiment. ‘I knew you weren’t listening,’ she said, ‘I told you all this.’
‘I’m listening now. Tell me again.’
She told him, well aware that this was not a game. She had touched some recollection which had nothing at all to do with her own stay in that remote Austrian village.