The voice which asked for a room was very quiet and a little husky with fatigue, yet it was the most vital, vigorous and live thing about the visitor, as if it used and drove everything else. A voice that would make you prick up your ears and turn round to see if the face matched it, even if you heard it simply ordering beer in the bar.
‘How long will the lady be staying?’
‘I don’t know… several days. If I’m not asking for impossibilities, I should like to have a piano to myself somewhere. I have to practise,’ she explained with the shadow of a smile, ‘and I don’t want to disturb anyone.’
Gisela was eager. ‘If you would like it, there is a suite on the first floor which has a large sitting-room. To-morrow they could bring up a piano for you from the dining-room, there are two there. Only an upright, but it is a good tone, and in tune.’ The suite was the dearest apartment in the house, and someone who wanted a piano as part of the amenities could well afford to pay for it.
‘Upstairs?’ said Maggie doubtfully. ‘I shouldn’t like to put them to so much trouble. Won’t it be very heavy and difficult?’
‘The stairs are so wide and so shallow, there is no difficulty. Like a castle, you will see. And the suite is very nice, it looks over the lake, and has a verandah with steps down to the grounds. I will show you.’ And she whisked open the flap of her desk, picked up the two suitcases like handfuls of feathers, and started sturdily up the length of the vaulted hall.
Maggie followed the straight young back and twinkling white wool legs to the vast rear stairs, and along a broad, echoing corridor on the first floor. She had no conscious memory of anything here, yet she knew where something was changed. It was like revisiting the place of a dream, or perhaps even more like dreaming of a place so uncannily familiar as to convince her she had dreamed it before. On those long-past visits with Freddy she had slept far up on the third floor, in rooms appropriately cheap for aspiring young performers. This large blue and white room, with its verandah blazing with geraniums, the airy bedroom opening from it, the bright hand-made cover on the old, carved bed, these she had never seen before. She went out into the open air and leaned over the flowering rail, and the scent of the trees came up to her, and the glimmer of the lake refracting light to her invisible, in small, broken darts of paler green launched through the deep green dusk.
‘Dinner is over,’ said Gisela, ‘but if you would like something to eat I will tell them. You are very tired, shall we not bring you something here?’
Maggie sat down on the edge of the bed, and its firm softness drew her like a magnet. ‘I am tired. Yes, if you would be so kind, it would be very nice to eat here.’
‘And you like the room? It will do?’
‘It will do very well. But I haven’t signed, or filled in a card for you.’
‘To-morrow,’ said Gisela cheerfully. ‘And in the morning they will bring up your piano. Everything to-morrow!’ And she went darting along the corridor, in small, light thumps like a terrier running on the naked boards, and skittered down the stairs back to her switchboard.
Maggie undressed, her movements clumsy with exhaustion, wrapped herself in a housecoat, and lay down on the bed. The feather coverlet billowed round her, cool and grateful, closing her in from the world. There were no thoughts left in her at all, only this terrible weariness suddenly eased and cradled, and sleep leaning heavily on her eyelids the moment she lay down.
Only this morning she had left Comerbourne for London, picked up fresh clothes at her flat, and taken a taxi out to Heathrow in time for her flight. Then the train journey on to Bregenz, and the car to bring her up here to the border. And ever since Zurich, places and scenes familiar to her throughout the years of her fame had taken on a different, a remote familiarity, as though the nineteen-year-old Maggie had come back to savour them with another palate. A bitter taste, perhaps of poison. I am not yet well, she told herself, I see, hear, feel with distorted senses. But in her heart she knew that it was because all these places were populated now by one more person, many years forgotten.
It was five days now since she had remembered Robin living, and been brought face to face with Robin dead. Five days in which he had kept her company every step of the way.
She was discharged to her own care, she could go where she chose and take the responsibility for herself. None the less, she had gone gently and gradually about this pilgrimage, concentrating her forces to satisfy her doctors that she was fit to travel, and assuring them that her intention was to take a leisurely, convalescent holiday at a resort she already knew well, where she would be comfortable and well-cared-for, a complete rest that would set her up to tackle life again. Turning her head on the pillow and catching sight of her own drawn face in the glass, she felt certain she had not looked like this when they agreed to let her go. She must remember to send Mr. Rice a card full of reassurances to-morrow. Everything to-morrow!
She had done certain other things during those five days: cancelled a few more forward engagements, answered all her letters, arranged a transfer of money to the accounts of Alec and Dione, in case they found themselves in difficulties while she was absent.
‘While she was absent’ was how she phrased it in her own mind; but before she left England she had also made her will.
Across the water, in a room on the second floor of the Alte Post, Bunty Felse lowered the field-glasses from her eyes with a crow of satisfaction, and turned to meet George as he came into the doorway behind her.
‘She’s here, all right,’ he reported. ‘Came up in a car from Bregenz not a quarter of an hour ago, and turned up towards the Goldener Hirsch.’
‘I know,’ said Bunty, ‘I’ve just seen her. Those are her windows, almost opposite to us, see? With the flowers and the balcony. The curtains are drawn now, but when the girl brought her up and put the lights on they were open. It was the lights that made me look there. I might have mistaken the face at this distance, even with glasses, but I couldn’t mistake that hat.’
She had never been quite easy in her mind since they had taken their eyes off that hat, a thin gold halo in the back window of the taxi, on the road from Zurich airport, and allowed Maggie to be carried away towards the town without them. George had had to make a snap decision which of the two to follow, for the middle-aged hired Dodge with Francis Killian at the wheel had swung unhesitatingly north-east on the fast road to Winterthur.
‘He knew where she was heading, all right,’ said George, focusing the glasses on the pattern of lights over the water. ‘And which hotel she’d make for when she got here. Lucky we followed him in by road or we wouldn’t have known which one he’d picked for himself. As it is, you’ll be able to keep out of his sight here without any trouble.’