The Piper on the Mountain

Saarbrucken, and get on to the southern branch of the autobahn, and then go north to Frankfurt.”

“It’s miles longer.”

“Yes, but hours faster.”

Dominic, who had never yet driven on the Continent, said nothing, but sat back and let them argue it out. So it happened that he was the only one who did not miss the look on Tossa’s face when she re-entered the room with the coffee tray, to find the twins deep in discussion of the various ways of reaching the Czech border quickly, and the possibilities presented once they had crossed it. He saw the small, fevered spark that lit in her eyes, the brief vindicated smile that touched the corners of her mouth, and ebbed again even more rapidly, leaving her fixed and sombre.

Tossa had what she wanted. But what it gave her was not pleasure, it seemed to him, only a brief and perilous sense of accomplishment, as if she had just taken the first step on a very uncertain journey.

Chapter 3

THE MAN WHO THUMBED A LIFT

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They came spiralling down over France at about nine o’clock on a fine Thursday morning, craning to see the bewildering expanses of the blown sand-dunes revolve below them, starred with little salt pools and furry with pines. The estuary of the Canche dipped under one wing and vanished, the bridge and its crawling beetles of cars disappeared. By dazzling glimpses the white, urbane, anglicised villas winked at them from among the trees, and the long beach trailed a golden ribbon along the lacy edge of the sea. Le Touquet would never be so beautiful again.

Twenty-five minutes after they had left England they were creeping gingerly round the snack-bar called “L’Aubette,” and into the groves of pines, round whose braced feet the waves of sand broke like a patient and treacherous sea. The first gendarme eyed them warily as they rolled decorously round his concrete bollard, and bore away towards the golf links. Left turn after left turn, until you cross the bridge over the Canche, and then sharp right. And you’ve started. You’re heading for Montreuil-sur-Mer and the main Paris road; for Brussels and Aachen and the Cologne-Frankfurt autobahn, and all points east.

“We’re in France!” said Dominic, shattered and transported, for the first time relaxing the grim concentration with which he was keeping to the right. “We’re abroad!”

They ran off the autobahn for their first night at the rest-house at Siegburg, and thwarted of a bed there—it seemed one must stop at about four o’clock to be sure of a room anywhere immediately on the motorway—cruised down the hill into the town, under the Michaelburg, and fetched up in an embarrassingly narrow and difficult yard off the glittering main street. Toddy parked the van gingerly in a cramped corner, and hugged himself at the thought of Dominic manipulating it out into traffic next morning. Every man for himself!

They strolled through the surprising glitter of the streets, still lively at past eight in the evening, and climbed the Michaelburg in the dusk to the fortress church.

And out of the blue Tossa made her next move.

“Wouldn’t it be fine to go all the way east into Slovakia?” she said suddenly and fondly, as they sauntered down again through the silent gardens. “As far as the Tatras, anyhow. We couldn’t go back without seeing the mountains.”

“If we have time,” agreed Toddy accommodatingly, willing to entertain all suggestions. “We’ve got to see Prague first.”

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!”