House of Green Turf

something, something heavy, plunging into the water and going down…’

She had turned in his arm, tensed and brittle against him, and he felt her eyes searching his face even in the dark, experimental, inimical and savage. Suddenly the night had engendered, seemingly out of her very flesh, a small, murderous wind that chilled him to the bone.

‘I don’t believe you,’ he said, ‘you’re making it up.’

‘You think I am lying? Ask her! When you go back to her, ask her!’

‘You’re crazy! What have I got to do with a woman like that? If this had been true you’d have told somebody about it then. Did you? Did you go down to the water to look for him? Did you tell what you knew when he failed to come back?’

‘What did I know? What did I know? That there were voices, that I heard a splash, nothing more. No, I never told anyone I was here in the trees that night. No, I did not wait to see, I did not try to find out anything. I ran back to the house, and I held my tongue. And so did she! Why should I speak? I wanted no part in it. What did I owe to any of them? Better to be quiet and keep out of trouble. So they never dragged the lake, they never even looked for him, he was simply the one who was out of favour and ran away. But something went into the lake that night. And she heard, as I did, and wanted not to hear, as I did, but with better reason. And he never came back for his baggage, did he? And he never will!’

She drew herself out his arm suddenly and roughly. ‘I’ve told you everything I know. I must go back.’

‘I still think you’re lying,’ he said, but without anger, and without conviction, only with an almost insupportable weariness and sadness.

‘Then ask her, when you go back to her. You will see.’

He could have denied Maggie a second time, but what was the use? Friedl was as sensitive as a dog to the presence of ghosts.

‘Help me do up my hair. They will be looking for me.’

He stood behind her and drew back the great fall of her hair, smoothing the sheaf between his hands; and then for a moment her hands were on his, guiding them, her body leaned back against him warm and yielding, and she turned her head and laid her cheek against his. Without movement and without sound she was weeping.

‘Friedl…’

‘No…’ she said. ‘You cannot help…’ Silenced under his kiss, her marred mouth uttered one lamentable moan, and clung for an instant before she pulled herself away. She thrust the comb into her heavy coil of hair. ‘Don’t come with me!’ she spat back at him, and was gone, abrupt and silent between the trees.

CHAPTER FIVE

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So now he knew what lay at the bottom of Maggie’s memory like truth at the bottom of a well. She, too, dazed and enchanted with her vision of fame, impatient with the importunate boy who blundered into her dream in defence of his own, had heard that muted splash round the curve of the lake-shore. And she had chosen to bury it, not to understand, not to remember. Not because she didn’t know what she had done, but because she did!

Surely she must have loved him!

All the way across Switzerland in his hired car, Francis was eaten alive by the knowledge. What else could explain the obsession that rode her now? Nothing less than love, recognised too late, could have made this disaster so terrible to her. And yet there was some excuse for her. There had never been any proof, never any body, everyone else had taken it for granted that Aylwin had simply decamped, and their acceptance had made it the most reasonable course for her to accept that probability, too.

Only in her heart she knew that he hadn’t!

Every time the knowledge surfaced she must have thrust it under again, until at last it drowned, and stayed down. Her conscious mind had succeeded in sloughing the memory utterly; but deep below the surface something in her had relentlessly remembered and reproached and grieved, and at the point of death had bestirred itself again to struggle into the light and challenge her with her debt.

He lingered a day in Zurich because he didn’t know what he was going to do, what he wanted to do, what he could bear to do. And about Friedl he thought only once during that time, with a violent tearing at his own conscience, and the shock of realising that the suppression of what galls and accuses is not so difficult or rare. That we all do it. That life would be impossible if we did not.

On the second day he asked for a passage home, but had to wait one more night before getting one. He was glad of the respite. Because what was he going to do about Maggie? No use trying to shield her by lying to her, she was utterly sincere when she said she wanted the truth, that she couldn’t live without truth. Did he even want to spare her? There were times during the flight when he realised that he wanted rather to rend her, to make her pay not only for Robin Aylwin, but for his own self-torment, too, and even for poor Friedl, with the tiny blemish on her flesh and the great cancer in her spirit, and the men who had slipped through her fingers because Maggie was innocent and dedicated.

He telephoned the hospital in Comerbourne as soon as he landed. He still had no idea what he wanted to say. It was almost a relief to get the ward sister, brisk and cheerful and immune, explaining that Miss Tressider had made rapid progress and was now discharged. Yes, she was still in Comerbourne, she could be contacted at the Lion Hotel, where she had taken a suite for a period of convalescence under supervision. She had wanted to have a grand piano, an amenity the hospital naturally couldn’t provide.

That was no great surprise. The voice that used her as a means of communication was restless and fretful, aching for an outlet again. Had she, after all, had any choice when she kicked love away from her? Wasn’t she, from the moment she realised the incubus that rode her, a woman possessed?

He telephoned the Lion Hotel.

‘Yes… Oh, yes!’ she said. The voice, full, clear and eager, drew her upon the air in front of his eyes. ‘Yes much better, thank you! Do come! I wondered about you. I shall be looking forward…’

‘I’ve been following,’ he said, with the even delivery of a machine, ‘the course of that last tour you made with Dr. Fredericks.’ He dared look at her only briefly and occasionally, because the blue of her eyes blinded him, so vivid and wondering and hopeful they were upon his face. ‘I stayed at a small resort called Scheidenau, near the German