‘You wouldn’t,’ said Bunty with the slow smile that made the freckles dance across the bridge of her short, straight nose, ‘be likely to forget her. I assure you she was already glorious. I may have contracted out myself, but I haven’t lost interest. I knew what we had with us on that trip abroad. Freddy told me, for that matter, but I’d already noticed for myself. In a way I think that particular tour was the turning point for her. She suddenly realised her full possibilities. As if everything in her had discovered its pole and fixed on it for good. She turned her back on everything except music.’
The phrase arrested his mind and his pen together; he had a couple of pages of notes on Dr. Fredericks by then, since that was where his interest ostensibly lay. By this time he could surely afford to manifest some curiosity of his own about Maggie.
‘She had her first big successes on that tour?’ he asked.
‘She did, that’s true enough. But it was more than that, something that happened inside her own mind. I should guess she had plenty of faith in herself when we set out. After all, it was her third trip with Freddy. But somewhere along the line she seemed to wake up fully, and after that she set her sights on the top of the mountain and started walking. And she’s never looked back.’
She had, though, in the end; but Francis kept that to himself. When death put its hand on her and stopped the breath in her throat on the operating table, and then changed its mind and withdrew from her after all, somewhere a forgotten window had opened and Maggie had looked back.
He closed his notebook on his knee, and sat looking at Bunty Felse over it for a moment of silence. Then he said: ‘Tell me about that particular tour. Where did you go? Where were the concerts held? Did anything out of the ordinary happen? Tell me everything you can remember about it.’
The hazel eyes, dappled with points of brilliant green in the sunlight, studied him thoughtfully. Now was the time for her to say: ‘I thought it was about Freddy you were collecting material!’ but she didn’t say it. Whatever she saw in him seemed to her logical enough reason for the change of emphasis. She didn’t even find it necessary to comment.
‘I’ve still got the whole itinerary and my working notes somewhere. It was the only time I had the job to do, so I had to get it right. I did all the secretarial work, you see, bookings, bills, the lot, as well as keeping an eye on the girls.’ She got up, and went to rummage in the drawers of the bureau. She hadn’t kept these papers as treasured souvenirs, apparently, or if she had they had long outlived her reverence for them, and found their way somewhere to the most remote corner.
‘Did you have much trouble?’ asked Francis.
She laughed. ‘Very little with the girls. There were only three of them, and they were all completely serious about their careers. Freddy’s students usually were, or they didn’t last long. There was more trouble with Freddy himself, actually, that trip. He was always excitable before concerts, and we had one rather turbulent member among the boys who was just beginning to get in his hair.’ She found what she wanted, somewhat crumpled at the back of a loose-leaf book, and came back to the coffee-table smoothing it out in her hands; a dozen or so sheets of quarto paper stapled together, a handful of hotel bills and a sketch-map of their route across half of Europe and back to Calais. She dropped the little file before him, and sat down again. ‘Take it if it’s any help to you.’ Her eyes met his levelly, and still she refrained from comment. She had her own ideas about the nature of his interest in Maggie Tressider, and who was to say she was wrong?
‘I’d like to, if you’re sure you don’t mind? I’ll return it…’
‘Don’t!’ she said, and smiled. ‘It was a nice thing to do, just once, more interesting in a way than when I went with him as a soloist myself. But I’ve finished with it now. I did just one Circus when I was nineteen, and then opted for marriage, and that was it. My son was seven years old, going on eight, that summer when Esther went to hospital. To tell the truth, I felt more flattered being asked to stand in for her than if he’d asked me to go back to singing. And my mother took over the family for me while I was away. Everything went off nicely, and it’s something to remember. But it’s a long time ago now.’
‘You were saying,’ prompted Francis, his eyes on the map, ‘that Dr. Fredericks was having a certain amount of trouble during the trip. Did something happen to upset him?’
‘Nothing very surprising. There’d been friction for some time in that quarter. We came home to England one member short, that’s all. One of the orchestra walked out on us in Austria. Well, one of the orchestra… he was our occasional ’cello soloist, too, we had to rearrange some of the programmes after he defected.’
‘I take it this was the turbulent one who was getting in the doctor’s hair? Do you remember his name?’
She leaned over to take the crumpled papers out of his hand and flick through them for the typed concert programmes she had compiled so long ago. ‘Yes, here we are… Robert Aylwin. That’s right, they called him Robin. He was quite a brilliant player, if he’d ever worked at it, but it was becoming pretty clear that he never intended to. He’d been with Freddy for two years, but that trip he was putting all his deficiencies on show, and it was plain he wasn’t going to last much longer. I doubt if he’d have lasted that long, if he hadn’t been such a charmer. That was probably his trouble, he was used to smiling at things and having them fall into his hands, not having to work for them. Music was too much like hard labour. He was getting bored with the whole thing, and treating it with distressing levity. With Freddy that was naturally heresy. They’d had words two or three times, and we all knew it. Nobody was very surprised when the boy just took himself off, one night between dinner and bedtime, and never showed his face again. There were rumours that he’d been misusing his respectability as Freddy’s protege for a little smuggling, and Freddy’s conscience was such—not to mention his natural sense of outrage—that he really might have turned the boy in. If true, of course! But one could believe it. Probably not much wrong with him except this incurable light-mindedness, but that was enough for Freddy.’
‘You mean he just packed and slipped away without saying a word to anyone? Not even to one of the other boys?’
‘Well, supposing there was anything in the smuggling rumour, and he’d come to the conclusion he’d better disappear, then he wouldn’t take anyone in the Circus into his confidence, would he? He probably wouldn’t in any case, he was a very self-sufficient young man, he ran his own show.’
‘And you’ve no idea what happened to him afterwards?’
‘Not the slightest. He was never going to hit the headlines as an instrumentalist, he couldn’t be bothered. We just went on with our schedule without him. Freddy made no attempt to trace him, after all he was over twenty-one and his own master. He probably drifted back home when he felt like it, or signed up with some small orchestra over there. He was the kind to fall on his feet, and he spoke both German and French, he’d get along all right. We weren’t worried about him.’
But the strange, the unnerving thing was that suddenly Francis was worried about him. For no reason, except that the boy had been near to Maggie, and had walked away into a long-past evening and left no trace behind him.
