A lonely bedraggled swan floated adrift beneath the jetty to her left. Ellen smiled and almost unconsciously began to hum the T. Rex melody to herself as she was reminded of the times Frank would take her mudlarking along the Thames when the tide was low. Of the shabby swans that swam past and would inspire him to poetry as he tugged an old camera from the mud. Or a broken vase. Repeated reminders of Frank that left Ellen trapped in the arms of one vast shadow.
She watched the activity around her: young families gathering for their ice cream; an elderly man and a woman admiring each other’s dogs; and out on the water a scattering of white yacht sails bobbing like lost punctuation marks against the backdrop of the mountainside.
Like a boat beneath a sunny sky. Those words from Frank came to Ellen as she watched the yachts out on the lake. They reminded her of the sunlit day they stood on Putney Bridge together. Watching the water. A solitary boat floated silently downstream. And under his breath, Frank whispered: “Still she haunts me, phantomwise / Alice moving under skies / Never seen by waking eyes.”
Ellen recalled gaping at him in bewilderment and saying something like: “Where did that come from?”
It was the first time she had noticed the trace of a soft Lancashire accent in his voice. The lilt brought memories of the Liverpool poets to mind and of the poetry readings Frank would often take her to. They were a far cry from the Coleridge and Wordsworth that she had read for A-levels. And they fascinated her. But the words he spoke now were a source of complete bemusement.
“Lewis Carroll,” Frank said. He seemed to her to be a million miles away as he spoke. “Like a boat beneath a sunny sky. It’s an acrostic. So beautiful. Such a lovely device.”
“Acrostic?”
“A poem where the first letter of each line spells out a name,” he explained.
Ellen had never ceased to marvel at Frank’s knowledge and his way with words. And he in turn had always been in awe of her memory for the lyrics of every song that she had ever heard in her entire life. He found it hard to believe she had such a total recall for words as she claimed to have. But she never failed any test to which he put her. And for all the mystery of the words that Frank had spoken then, they were no less mystifying to Ellen now, as she slowly repeated them to herself – Still she haunts me, phantomwise / Never seen by waking eyes – and gazed out at the boats beneath a sunny sky on Lago Maggiore.
What did he really mean, who was he talking about when he spoke those words? Ellen wondered.
The white punctuation marks that were yachts on the water had already turned a light shade of grey. The sun was starting to fade. Even the bedraggled swan beneath the jetty had left the water and settled down in the dry. And for Ellen, the dark mountain that draped its twilight cloak right down to the shore on the other side of the lake held shades of menace – like a black glove remorselessly squeezing out every last drop of the day that remained.
Marthe had recommended it as the perfect place to recuperate from all the heartache of the last months. And when she insisted that she would follow in a few days’ time, Ellen was persuaded. But since receiving Marthe’s phone call in the hotel to say that there had been a change of plan and she would be unable to join her after all, Ellen could see no purpose at all in being here. She felt uncomfortable in Locarno. And as she stood at the lakeside now, contemplating that sense of menace, she questioned the wisdom of ever following Marthe’s advice.
For all its beauty and conviviality, Locarno was proving a sombre place that left Ellen feeling deeply disturbed. Far from spreading out in width like Heaven, as Wordsworth might have led her to believe when she was studying for her A-levels, it seemed more like a dark underworld. Recovery seemed the last thing she was likely to find here.
Her sister Beth had suggested she go and stay with her for a few weeks to recover. But after the disaster of the last time Ellen stayed with her sister, this was plainly not an option. So she decided then and there that she must return north to Marthe’s place in Basel the next day. Then straight back home to London, where she could start picking up what pieces of normality remained in her life.
Ellen’s hotel lay about a ten-minute walk away in a narrow side street on the other side of the Piazza Grande and not too far from the railway station. But with time on her hands, she took a circuitous route that skirted around the piazza for fear of running into her cappuccino companion again. With slow deliberation, she meandered through the backstreets. The few little shops here had either closed already or were about to close. And the streets themselves were remarkably empty. The shoppers had either left for home or congregated now on the piazza just a street or two away for their après-shopping gossip. At street level, these narrow lanes that Ellen was negotiating might be considered by most people to be charming and full of atmosphere. For Ellen they spawned a sense of claustrophobic angst. And the echo of her footsteps did nothing to dispel this feeling.
When Ellen was suddenly jolted from her apprehension by another sound – like a ping-pong ball bouncing erratically across a table – she
