She opened her eyes upon low stone vaulting that had a worn and monumental grandeur, like a feudal hall before luxury came into fashion. She was lying on a rough grey blanket spread upon a stone settle built all along one wall, and in the wall itself she saw the round fretted grooves left by the ends of barrels. The flagged floor was sifted with fine sand, the accumulated dust of wind erosion and time. The air felt moist and cool. There was a dim light from one heavily shaded electric bulb, that showed her only the side of the room where she lay, and a glimpse of a door in the corner, a door not worn at all, but surely almost new and very solid.
‘Achtung!’ said the first voice very-softly. ‘She’s coming round. Shall I…?’
‘No, let her! Company will help to pass the time until those fools go home to bed.’
She could see the pair of them only up to the shoulders, for the dark shade over the light obscured their faces. One of them stepped back accommodatingly into the shadows, the other came forward and sat down on one hip on the edge of the settle beside her feet. He saw that her eyes were wide-open and fixed upon his face, and turned the lamp deliberately to let it illuminate him fully.
‘Allow me! Is that better?’
He no longer glistened and streamed, the fall of wavy hair was nearly dry, only the unruly way it curled round his forehead showed that he had recently been out in the rain. He must have stood outside her room under the dripping trees all the while she was singing, waiting for the appropriate moment. He must, she thought, have been amused by the Mahler; a little Gothic horror would appeal to his sense of humour. He was dressed to go invisibly in the dark, in clerical grey slacks and a thick black sweater with a polo neck; the same, perhaps, in which he had prowled the woods that night he throttled and drowned Friedl.
Looking at him now, she found nothing surprising in that. He sat smiling at her, a cigarette held delicately between forefinger and thumb, narrowing his eyes slightly against the smoke that drifted towards his face in a light draught. The same boyish, regular features, the same full, mobile, strongly curling lips for ever on the edge of laughter. He laughed a great deal, always, at everything. For years she had forgotten the colour of his eyes, lowered in Friedl’s photograph, closed in that dead faun’s face over his grave. Perhaps it had cost her an extra effort to forget them, and she had managed it only because it was essential. They watched her now steadily, curiously, pale greenish-gold eyes, round and bold, a goat’s eyes, intelligent, inscrutable, malicious. The eyes laughed, too, almost without cease, but at some private joke that was not for ordinary humans. He was hardly older than he had been thirteen years ago, when she had last seen him. Why should he be, when he lived—it was to be seen in the debonair face and the cool, bright eyes—immune from all feeling and all responsibility?
She drew herself up with an effort to sit upright, her back—how appropriately!—against the wall. Never for a moment did her eyes leave his face.
‘It is you,’ she said at last, ‘it was you behind everything!’ She braced her hands against the cold stone to take fast hold of reality. She knew her situation now, and her enemy. She had marvellously recovered the fullness of life only just in time to lose it again, and feel the loss double. But also she had now a double stake for which to put up a fight. ‘So you are alive,’ she said.
‘Dear Maggie,’ he said, lazily smiling, ‘I believe so.’
‘Then what was it I heard, that night? What was it that went into the lake?
She thought for a moment that he was not going to answer her, but with a captive audience, and all the cards and all the strings in his own hands, and time to kill—but how did it happen that he had time to kill?—why not talk? After all, she wasn’t going anywhere, was she, to repeat anything he might let fall? He could indulge his fancy with no risk to himself.
‘Just one of old Waldmeister’s stacked logs,’ he said serenely. ‘The whole clearing down by the water was full of them, he surely couldn’t grudge me one in a good cause.’
‘But why?’ she said almost inaudibly, wrenching at the wanton shaft that had broken off short in her spirit as in wounded flesh, and festered ever afterwards. ‘Why play me such a trick? Why did you have to die at all? And even if you had your reasons for wanting to vanish, why stage a scene like that with me first? Why pretend you loved me? Why ask me…’ She drew breath slowly, and flattened her shoulders warily against the wall; the chill pierced her like a gust of cold air, and every such minute shock of reality helped to calm her senses and clear her mind. She, too, could talk; words were there to be used for her purposes as well as his. The more attention he gave to her, to impressing and subduing her, even to amusing himself with her, the less he would have left for imagining any counter-attack. ‘Just think,’ she said, eyeing him narrowly from under the fall of her loosened hair, ‘I might even have accepted you! What would you have done then?’
He found the recollection of that night rather flattering, she thought; maybe his memory even embroidered it. But be careful of believing that. Conceit is only a discardable toy to a man without feelings.
‘I should have married you, of course,’ he said sunnily. ‘It wouldn’t have been too great a hardship. You’d have turned out quite a profitable investment, the way things have gone. And as my wife, you wouldn’t have been asked to give evidence against me, either—would you?’
So that was one more piece of the puzzle falling into place. He had flicked it into her lap deliberately, she knew that. Nevertheless, record it, Maggie! He’s quite sure of his security, but there are things even he doesn’t know. He may yet live to regret dropping these small golden apples to distract you into running about at his will.
‘I see,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘But what was I supposed to be able to tell? I never knew there was anything to be told against you.’
He leaned back to prop himself against the wall by one wide, lean shoulder, and grinned at her amiably through the smoke of his cigarette.
‘Do you remember the spring trip we made that year with the Circus?’
‘Well, well!’ she said. ‘You’ve still got the terms pat, after all this time.’
‘Dear Maggie, I have as near as damn it total recall. I remember the whole ramshackle set-up, and you so dedicated and earnest, and such an easy touch. You remember carrying some expensive cosmetics through Customs for me, that spring? A girl could get by with declaring those jars, when a man would automatically get charged on them. And it turned out that way, didn’t it? And a friend of mine met us at the boat-train, and I handed the whole works over as a present for his sister. Dear Maggie, you can’t have forgotten that kind deed? After all, what did you ever have to declare, except sheet-music and gramophone records?’
What money had she ever had, in those days, to buy any but the most vital necessities, all of which were comprehended in music? But all she said was: ‘I remember.’
‘Well, they picked up my anonymous friend later that year with rather a lot of heroin on him. Yes, that’s what was in the jars, sealed below about an eighth of an inch of cream and stuff. We were in Basel on the autumn tour when I got word, so I had to make up my mind quickly what to do. There was no knowing for sure that he’d keep his mouth shut about me, and even if he did, there might still be something they could hook up to me. And if ever they had found their way to the Circus, you’d soon have told them how those cosmetics came into England, wouldn’t you? It all boiled down to a choice between marrying you to close your mouth, and going home and chancing my luck, or staying here and turning professional. They’d been inviting me to do that for a year or more.’