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.