The twins had known her for years, perhaps that was why their thumbs didn’t prick. They knew her so well they’d stopped being sufficiently aware of her to question her attitudes and motives. What she offered, they accepted at its face value. Dominic had no such insulation. He walked beside her in the deepening dusk, her long, impetuous step almost a match for his, and felt some inexplicable tension drawing her taut as a bow-string.
It was at that moment that Dominic grasped, without any adequate grounds for his certainty, that she was steering this expedition carefully and patiently towards some end of her own. Hadn’t she been the one who had suggested providing the car with a carnet? Wasn’t it she who had thought of the Czech visas? Now, if he was right, she was making the next move, prodding them to hurry on eastwards into the Tatras; and if he was right, she would gently but doggedly persist until she got her own way.
“Why don’t we just steam ahead right to the mountains,” said Tossa, in the same brightly eager voice, “and take it easy on the way back? I’ve been had too many times, with the days running out because some gourmand for Gothic couldn’t be dragged away from some cathedral or other. Make sure of the remotest bits first, I say. We know we’ve got to get back, let’s make a point of getting there.”
“Toddy!”
“Hallo?” mumbled Toddy sleepily, across the bedroom window silvered down one edge with moonlight. “What’s up?”
“You know you told me Tossa’s stepfather got killed, climbing somewhere?”
“Hmm, yes, what about him?”
“Was she fond of him at all?”
A snort of laughter from the other bed fetched an answering creak out of the pale, scrubbed wood of the bedstead. “Are you kidding? She couldn’t stand him. He was so correct he made her want to throw things. Tossa left home, didn’t even see much of her mother until she left this fellow for good. Why, what about him?”
“Oh, nothing. Just wondering if she had him on her mind, or something.”
“Tossa misses him like you’d miss a rotten tooth. No, that’s a lie, too, because since her mother left him she hasn’t even felt any twinges. Even before he kicked off, he just wasn’t there any more.” A rustle of bedclothes and a lift in the sleepy voice indicated a quickening interest on Toddy’s part: “Hey, Dom, you getting to like our Tossa?”
“She’s all right,” said Dominic sedately. “Bit prickly sometimes. Tod, where did this fellow kick off?”
“Oh, abroad, somewhere. Austria or Switzerland, or somewhere. Didn’t check, actually. Does it matter?”
“Not a lot, I suppose. If you’re dead you’re dead. Good night, Tod!”
“Good night, Dom! That’s final notice!”
“OK! Pass out, I’ve finished.”
Toddy passed out with the aplomb of an exhausted child. They had had to rise in the middle of the night to drive down to the airport. Dominic, however, lay awake and alert. Toddy might not know where this chap Terrell had got himself killed, but according to Dominic’s pricking thumbs Tossa knew. Tossa knew, and stage by stage she was taking them there, to the very region, to the very spot. What did she know of the Tatras, unless that Terrell had dived to his death somewhere round their granite planes? Why mention them, unless of fixed intent?
Dominic’s father was a C.I.D. Detective-Inspector in a county force on the Welsh borders. Maybe there’s something to police parentage that sets you nosing for mysteries wherever you go. Or maybe there was really something about Tossa’s shuddering anticipation that justifiably set his flesh crawling. Whichever it was, Dominic was a long time falling asleep.
They camped the next night, a little way short of the Czech border, in the beautiful, rolling, forest-and-meadow land of the Palatinate. And in the morning they crossed the frontier.
Waidhaus was quiet, efficient and polite, the Customs house poised on the edge of a sharp dip. Beyond the barrier the road curved away into Czechoslovakia, straightened again, and immediately began to climb; and there before them, on either side all youns the way, were the white buildings of the Czech Customs offices; and drawn up in the roadway on the near side of the barriers were at least a dozen cars, buses and caravans, from which at least fifty people had spilled out to flourish carnets and passports at harassed but amiable Czech officials.
It took them an hour to get through. There were more papers to be dealt with here, passports and visas, the carnet, the insurance document, as well as a polite and good-humoured pretence at examining their baggage, and a genuine scrutiny of the car.
“For the first time,” said Christine approvingly, “I feel as if someone cares whether we’ve arrived or not. It got almost insulting, being waved from one country into another like tossing the morning paper over the gate.”
“Not so cynical as the French,” Toddy allowed judicially, in an undertone, distributing their cleared passports. “Not so disdainfully efficient as the Germans. I like to see officials who sweat over the job, and aren’t past getting excited. That immigration chap took a liking to your passport photograph, Tossa—even showed it to his mate at the other table. Come to look at it,” he admitted, studying it impartially, “it isn’t at all bad.”
“Thank you!” said the saturnine young Czech who had been feigning to examine Tossa’s suitcase, without so much as disarranging the one tissue-wrapped party dress she had popped in at the last moment “in case.”
“Everything is in order. You can proceed.”
They piled eagerly into the van again, Dominic at the wheel. The Customs man signalled to the young soldier who held the chain of the barrier, and up went the pole. Gravely they acknowledged the salutes that ushered them through into a new country, and wormed their way through the congestion of cars and under the quivering pole.
“We’re in!” breathed Christine, staggered to find it so easy.
“No iron curtain, no nothing,” agreed Toddy, astonished in his turn. “A bit like crashing the sound barrier, though.”
The van climbed out of the frontier hollow, between slopes of silver birches, under the distant shadow of the first of many castles, a gaunt ruin on a lush, wooded hill. They were surging merrily into full speed, when a second barrier loomed in sight, barring their road, and a tall wooden watch-tower beside it. The very young soldier on guard there glared with a solemnity beyond his seventeen years, as Dominic slowed to a discreet halt before the bar, and waited dutifully to see what was required of him.
With unshaken gravity the boy lifted a telephone from its stand in the box beside him, and consulted some unknown authority.
“No iron curtain?” whispered Christine, between apprehension and the giggles.
“Shut up, idiot!” hissed Toddy. “He’s only doing his job.”
The boy replaced the telephone with deliberation, walked round them, eyeing the girls with a curiosity that brought the transaction down to a completely human level, and hoisted the pole, motioning them through with only the most austere inclination of his head. He was very young, and took his duties seriously.
They saluted this gateman, too, but apart from a quickening spark in his eye he preserved his motionless dignity. Possibly he treasured the girls, acknowledging his services decorously from the rear windows; but if he did, he wasn’t admitting it. Only when they were well away from him, soaring up the slope, did he suddenly lift one arm above his head, in a wave as impersonal as the hills.
They never even saw it; all their attention was fixed eagerly ahead, as Dominic accelerated happily towards the crest of the rise, among the shimmering birch trees.
A man’s figure rose suddenly and joyously out of the ditch beside the road, and stood on the verge, energetically thumbing them to a standstill. A young, round, glowing face under a sunburst of blond hair beamed at them confidently, and had no doubts whatever of its warm and friendly welcome. A small rucksack swung from the cajoling arm that flagged them down. In the other hand he held a large open sandwich, which he balanced expertly as he ran alongside them and signalled, from ingenuous blue eyes and beaming mouth, his pleasure in having hooked so interesting, so rewarding a ride. The GB plate, the number, the girls, one glance and he had them all weighed up.