The Piper on the Mountain

Trot out at speed all the mitigating circumstances, and pray that she isn’t feeling maternal, or you’ve had it. Tossa and her fellow-students had been planning this holiday abroad all the term, and shelled out the money already for the air passage across the Channel, but one unpredictable impulse of mother-love on Chloe’s part could still wreck it. Well, even if she quashed their plans, Tossa was determined she wouldn’t go with her to Menton, to play chaperone for her and her next-man-in, before she’d even shucked off the present incumbent. She couldn’t help it, and Tossa knew she couldn’t, and didn’t hold it against her. But, my God, how it complicated things!

“Tossa, love, there’s something I’ve got to tell you. Darling, I have to go abroad, very soon, to-morrow if we can get a passage. You must try to be brave for me. I know you can. It’s Daddy…”

Christ! thought Tossa, she is coming over all cosy and motherly. She can’t have made it up with him? Even for her that would be an all-time, way-out crazy reaction. Even when she was gone on him she never tried this “Daddy ” business before—never in life!

“… something happened to him on holiday. He had an accident. He’s dead, sweetheart!”

Never in life, no, just in death. That made sense, anyhow. Death called for a gesture, and Chloe Bliss wasn’t the one to turn a deaf ear. Tossa stood frozen, clutching the receiver to her ear like some cosmic seashell bringing in the wavelengths of other worlds. And after a while she croaked faintly into the wood-dove’s muted cooing: “You mean it? He’s dead?”

“Yes, darling. He had a fall in the mountains, and was killed. Everybody’s being terribly sweet to me, his chief rang me up himself to break the news, and the Czechoslovak authorities have offered to give immediate clearance if I want to go out and arrange about bringing him home myself. And I do think I ought to, don’t you, dear? I’ve said yes, and Paul is arranging everything, and coming out there with me. I should feel so inadequate, alone. You do understand, darling? You mustn’t let it spoil your holiday, you know, I shouldn’t like that.”

“No! I see,” said Tossa numbly, and fumbled for the nearest available exit. “I’m sorry, Mother! It’s quite a shock. How long do you think you’ll be away?”

“Only a few days, I expect, maybe a week.”

“And you don’t mind if I go right ahead with this trip with Chris and the boys? It won’t be immediately, there’s ten days or more yet.”

“Of course, go, darling. I know you’ll be all right with Christine and her brother. Just take care, that’s all I ask.”

“Mother, I am sorry! About Mr. Terrell—Herbert….”

There wasn’t anything, not one single thing in the world, she could decently call him. The field between them had been as arid as that. And whose fault was it?

“Yes, sweet, I know you are. But there it is, these things happen, that’s all. Now, promise me you’ll get a proper sleep to-night, and not brood about anything?”

“No, I won’t brood. You know we weren’t close. I’m just sorry it had to happen to him. Mother, where did it happen?”

Chloe repeated punctiliously the names she had to spell out carefully each time from her own cramped handwriting. Zbojska Dolina, Nizke Tatry, Slovakia. Strange, far-off places. But not really so far-off, in these days of circling the globe, like Puck, in eighty minutes.

“I’ll send you a postcard, darling. Now good night, and God bless! Don’t stay up too late!”

“I won’t, Mother. Good night! I’m terribly sorry!”

She was the first and last to say that about the death of Herbert Terrell, and mean it. She stood for a long time with her hand still pressing the telephone receiver down on its rest, and she knew what she had said for truth, but still she didn’t know why. They had never come within touch of hands or minds, she and the dead man. He had been everything she hadn’t been used to and couldn’t get used to, precise, cold, methodical, thorough, pedestrian. He had courted her doggedly in ways that had only succeeded in alienating her still more implacably. But whose fault was it? Whose? A little more effort, no, a little more willingness, and she might have met him and achieved contact, she might have tapped unsuspected warmths in him. And now it was too late, he was dead. You couldn’t make new discoveries about people when they were dead, and you couldn’t make amends to them, either.

Well, no use dithering here like a wet hen, there was nothing she could do about him now. She marched back doggedly to her own bed-sitter, where her friends were sprawled happily over an outsize map of Europe spread out on the floor, the Mather twins in full cry. Tossa coiled herself once again in her place in the circle, and propped one elbow in the Aegean, and the other in the sea off Rimini. The soft, heavy wings of straight, dark hair swung forward and shadowed her face.

“Anybody interesting?” asked Christine, returning with capricious suddenness from Dubrovnik.

“No!” It came out so abruptly that it sounded like a snub, and she hastened to soften the effect, and made a mess of that, too. “Only my mother.”

It was simply that she didn’t want to talk about it, not yet, perhaps never. Think, yes, but talk, no. But to her own ears, and especially when she considered the fourth person present, who had never met her until this evening, it sounded distinctly ungracious, even a little shocking. Why did she have to be so maladroit? Chloe Bliss could and did put her foot in it right, left and centre, but always in the drollest and most disarming ways. Her daughter, it seemed, had to trip over everything, even the simple answer to a straight question. This friend of Toddy’s wasn’t going to find himself charmed or disarmed by rough cracks like that.

She cast a side glance at him from under the protective shadow of her hair. His name was Dominic Felse, and he was reading English literature. She didn’t know much more about him, except that it seemed he was a useful man in a boat, and Toddy thought well of him. He came from some river town somewhere in the Midlands, where all the grammar schools crewed racing eights, fours and pairs as a matter of course, hence his prowess. He was in his first year, like herself, and probably within a couple of months the same age; rather tall and a little gawky still, with a bush of cropped, reddish-brown hair, hazel eyes that didn’t miss much, and a fair skin that freckled heavily across the cheekbones and the nose. What he was thinking of her was more than she could guess.

His reaction, if she could have known it, was not one of shock, but of honest surprise. His own mother was a gay, sensible extrovert, who caused him nothing but pleasure, satisfaction and security, so all-pervading that it had never even occurred to him to notice them at all. The revelation that this sullen, bright, brown imp of a girl had no such serene relationship with her mother came as an eye-opener, no matter how open eyes and mind had always been, in theory, to the infinite variety of humankind.