Evie blinks back a tear. The child called her ‘Maman’ – she has not asked her to do that – where did that come from? Maybe it is just playfulness.
Soft piano music permeates from above. She gazes up at the vaulted ceiling, from the centre of which hangs a chandelier fashioned from stag antlers. The sound tickles the air, as light as feathers burst from a pillow. Something she could reach out and pass her hand through.
She recognises it as Beethoven’s Für Elise. Indeed, the piece is more than just familiar, she knows it inside out as being a favourite she spent long hours shaping and reshaping as a way of passing the hot afternoons last summer. The doors of the music room standing wide open to the garden. The lingering exchange of air allowing, during quiet interludes, the slow snip of Daniels’s shears to pervade.
She hums along, anticipating each beat. Playing the piano is a passion. She was competent the morning she arrived, but her skills and sensitivity have blossomed since.
Looking out of the window, the memory of a music teacher fills her mind – a sour little man notable for his desire to torment. A typical incident would start with something minor and his pimply cheeks would glow hot. One minute she might be ‘slouching’ – even though her back was stiff – and he’d poke her in the waist with his ‘baton’ (a thirty-centimetre wooden ruler), just because he could, then another day it would be something else.
One morning he accused her of letting her hands slope. He took small bronze coins – one groschen pieces – from his waistcoat pocket and balanced them on the dimples of her knuckles with his podgy fingertips. When one slipped off, which one soon did, he brought the edge of the ruler down on her with the enthusiasm of a workhouse overseer.
Her injured fingers had leapt to her mouth, sending the remaining coins rolling across the oak floor. Sucking on her throbbing hands to confuse the pain, chest rising and falling, she’d refused to look at him. He’d put the tip of the ruler under her chin, forcing her head up. She’d stared back with fury. ‘Zis temper of yours, Fräulein,’ he’d said, the waxed tips of his moustache quivering, ‘I vill it tame.’
He took on the wrong fräulein in his cruel pastime; she’d engineered that he be caught, her father entering the room at this exact moment. Afterwards she’d watched from the window as he was booted, literally, out of the house to land face first in the road.
Of course, the terrible teacher was never real – or at least not to Evie. His spiteful games were a memory implant. The pupil was the clever Evelyn, whom no one could get the better of for long. But sitting here now, Evie recognises, without a shadow of doubt, the view of the steps where he had his comeuppance and had afterwards ludicrously waved his fist up at her window.
The music pauses and she surfaces from her reverie. How long has she been waiting? She’s lost track of time.
The maid collects her and leads her along the corridor.
They leave the old building through a feudal arch, cross a gravelled courtyard in noon shadow and enter again through a shiny automatic near-silent sliding door, back into the light. The cool air after the heat of the sun moistly brushes her skin.
The doors to the final room are open. As she descends shallow steps, the view opens out until the panorama of the lake and snow-capped mountains stretches to the edges of her vision.
Evie is in a glass-walled space. The white ceiling, some twenty feet above, is dappled by reflections off the lake, which reflect in turn off the polished floor and play over her ankles, so that it seems she paddles through shallows.
She swivels on her heel, gazing around. The end walls, also of glass, blend seamlessly with the one ahead, so that the view has no limits. If she didn’t know what she knows, she’d wonder if it was all fake, the room giving her what she wants to see, like the one in Paris.
So far, of the myriad new things she has encountered, this is the most awe-inspiring, both in its sheer beauty and for its manifestation of power over one’s surroundings.
Only as she completes her rotation does she notice that she is being watched. From behind. She falters, stretching out an arm to regain her balance.
Maier stands thirty feet away in the corner, his hand resting on the back of a chair, almost the only furniture in the room.
They examine each other silently. Apart from the image in the library and the incident with the music teacher – in both of which he is frustratingly hazy – she has only the memory of them riding together in the mountains.
She compares the man in front of her with his younger self – searching his face.
Maier is deeply tanned, the effect made more pronounced by his white open-necked shirt. His sleeves are rolled to his elbows, exposing strong, sleek forearms. His silver hair is combed back from his forehead. While his dark eyes attempt to penetrate her, his lashes flicker uncertainly. He has been presented with an impossibility. The world, which he is otherwise able to control, has been tipped on its head.
She smiles as naturally as she can.
He remains stiff-lipped. ‘Who are you?’
‘I am Evie.’
His face twitches. ‘No, you are not.’ But he doesn’t seem to quite know what he is denying.
She smiles more strenuously, keeping her lips pursed but allowing the corners to lift so that dimples form in her cheeks. She knows how to do ‘innocent’, and what’s not in her programming she has cultivated from studying old Audrey Hepburn movies watched in bed with Matthew.
‘What kind of hoax is this?
‘I am… Evie.’ She takes a couple of steps towards him and, in doing so, the sunlight gleams on her face, making her appear spotless. Untouched.
‘Evie,’ he repeats, a little breathless from what he is witnessing. ‘Yes, we’ve had that bit already.’
She takes another step, shuffling uncertainly one foot against the other, her hands clasped behind her, so that her upper body is pressed forward guilelessly. Something the devious little Sola does. There is much she is learning from that one!
He swallows hard. ‘Who put you up to this?’
‘No one,’ she murmurs.
‘No one,’ he repeats.
She tilts her chin, regarding him shyly. ‘I wanted to see you.’
She looks down to allow him a chance to take her in – the living replica of the daughter he last saw forty years before – and observes him wipe his eye with a handkerchief. Her own eyes water too. The loneliness since the death of Matthew and Daniels, quenched temporarily by the brief company of David and now Sola, rises again to the fore.
‘Come closer,’ he murmurs, holding out his hand. The same tanned hand, albeit more wrinkled, that he had lain over hers, all those years before.
She approaches until she is just a yard from him.
‘Are you a dream?’ he asks, shaking his head slowly.
Evie is close enough to see a tear slide down his cheek and she gazes back, wide-eyed. ‘No dream,’ she murmurs, blinking and half-blind herself.
33
Maier leads her outside and down a further set of steps onto an expanse of decking suspended above the water. A cluster of rattan chairs are grouped around a low table. He rings a bell, and when the maid appears sends her away again to bring drinks.
‘Where are you from?’ he asks.
‘England.’
‘England,’ he repeats. His movements remain slow, stunned, as if she had told him she had escaped from the underworld. ‘I presume you know who you resemble, I presume you are prepared to admit that?… unless of course you really don’t.’