‘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.
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.