All at once Clare put down the teapot and said: 'I think that handkerchief had wanted to go with him, I've a great mind to take that hint. '
'Don't be silly,' said Mr Sheldon.
'Why not?' she asked.
If you mean that you want to catch the same train,' began Miss Pratt…
'Why not,' Clare repeated. 'I have forty minutes in which to do it. I'll dash to my place, pack a thing or two, bolt into a taxi…
And she did it. What happened at Victoria is not known, but an hour or so later she rang up Sheldon who had gone home, and told him with a rather pathetic little laugh that Sebastian had not even wanted her to stay on the plaform until his train left. I have a very definite vision somehow of her arriving there, with her bag, her lips ready to part in a humorous smile, her dim eyes peering through the windows of the train, looking for him, then finding him, or perhaps he saw her first…. 'Hullo, here I am,' she must have said brightly, a little too brightly perhaps…
He wrote to her, a few days later, to tell her that the place was very pleasant and that he felt remarkably well. Then there was a silence, and only when Clare had sent an anxious telegram did a card arrive with the information that he was curtailing his stay at Blauberg and would spend a week in Paris before coming home.
Towards the end of that week he rang me up and we dined together at a Russian restaurant. I had not seen him since '1924 and this was 1929. He looked worn and ill, and owing to his pallor seemed unshaven although he had just been to the barber. There was a boil at the back of his neck patched up with pink plaster.
After he had asked me a few questions about myself, we both found it a strain to carry on the conversation. I asked him what had become of the nice girl with whom I had seen him last time. 'What girl?' he asked. 'Oh, Clare. Yes, she's all right. We're sort of married.'
'You look a bit seedy,' I said.
'And I don't give a damn if I do. Will you have "pelmenies" now?'
'Fancy your still remembering what they taste like,' I said.
'Why shouldn't I?' he said drily.
We ate in silence for some minutes. Then we had coffee.
'What did you say the place was called? Blauberg?'
'Yes, Blauberg.'
'Was it nice there?'
'It depends on what you call nice,' he said and his jaw-muscles moved as he scrunched a yawn. 'Sorry,' he said, 'I hope I get some sleep in the train.'
He suddenly fumbled at my wrist.
'Half past eight,' I replied.
'I've got to telephone,' he muttered and strode across the restaurant with his napkin in his hand. Five minutes later he was back with the napkin half-stuffed into his coat-pocket. I pulled it out.
'Look here,' he said, 'I'm dreadfully sorry, I must be going. I forgot I had an appointment.'
'It has always distressed me', writes Sebastian Knight in Lost Property, 'that people in restaurants never notice the animated mysteries, who bring them their food and check their overcoats and push doors open for them. I once reminded a businessman with whom I had lunched a few weeks before, that the woman who had handed us our hats had had cotton wool in her ears. He looked puzzled and said he hadn't been aware of there having been any woman at all…. A person who fails to notice a taxi-driver's hare-lip because he is in a hurry to get somewhere, is to me a monomaniac. I have often felt as if I were sitting among blind men and madmen, when I thought that I was the only one in the crowd to wonder about the chocolate-girl's slight, very slight limp.'
As we left the restaurant and were making our way towards the taxi-rank, a bleary-eyed old man wetted his thumb and offered Sebastian or me or both, one of the printed advertisements he was distributing. Neither of us took it, both looked straight ahead, sullen dreamers ignoring the offer. 'Well, good-bye,' I said to Sebastian, as he beckoned to a cab.
'Come and see me one day in London,' he said and glanced over his shoulder. 'Wait a1minute,' he added, 'this won't do. I have cut a beggar….' He left me and presently returned, a small sheet of paper in his hand. He read it carefully before throwing it away.
'Want a lift?' he asked.
I felt he was madly anxious to get rid of me.
'No, thanks,' I said. I did not catch the address he gave to the chauffeur, but I recall his telling him to go fast.
When he returned to London…. No, the thread of the narrative breaks off and I must ask others to tie up the threads again.
Did Clare notice at once that something had happened? Did she suspect at once what that something was? Shall we try to guess what she asked Sebastian, and what he answered, and what she said then? I think we will not…. Sheldon saw them soon after Sebastian's return and found that Sebastian looked queer. But he had looked queer before, too…
'Presently it began to worry me,' said Mr Sheldon. He met Clare alone and asked her whether she thought Sebastian was all right. 'Sebastian?' said Clare with a slow dreadful smile, 'Sebastian has gone mad. Quite mad,' she repeated, widely opening her pale eyes.
'He has stopped talking to me,' she added in a small voice.
Then Sheldon saw Sebastian and asked him what was amiss.
'Is it any of your business?' inquired Sebastian with a kind of wretched coolness.
'I like Clare,' said Sheldon, 'and I want to know why she walks about like a lost soul.' (She would come to Sebastian every day and sit in odd comers where she never used to sit. She brought sweets sometimes or a tie for Sebastian. The sweets remained uneaten and the tie hung lifelessly on the back of a chair. She seemed to pass through Sebastian like a ghost. Then she would fade away as silently as she had come.)
'Well,' said Sheldon, 'out with it, man. What have you done to her?'
12
Sheldon learnt nothing from him whatsoever. What he did learn was from Clare herself; and this amounted to very little. After his return to London Sebastian had been getting letters in Russian from a woman he had met at Blauberg. She had been living at the same hotel as he. Nothing else was known.
Six weeks later (in September 1929) Sebastian left England again and was absent until January of the following year. Nobody knew where he had been. Sheldon suggested it might have been Italy 'because lovers usually go there'. He did not cling to his suggestion.
Whether Sebastian had some final explanation with Clare, or whether he left a letter for her when he departed, is not clear. She wandered away as quietly as she had come. She changed her lodgings: they were too close to Sebastian's flat. On a certain gloomy November day Miss Pratt met her in the fog on her way home from a life-insurance office where she had found work. After that, the two girls saw each other fairly often, but Sebastian's name was seldom mentioned. Five years later, Clare married.