booked not in September. And it would give us time to lay on a car from Zurich, ready to trail those two as soon as they land. Train or road, we can tag along once we’ve got them in our sights. What do you say?’
Bunty reviewed her responsibilities, and could find nothing against it. Dominic and his Tossa wouldn’t be home from their student trek in Yugoslavia for a fortnight yet, just in time to head back to Oxford.
‘I say yes, let’s!’ said Bunty with enthusiasm. ‘
It was late afternoon when the telephone rang again.
‘Bunty? Laura here! How did you know? He’s booked on the 14.10, two hours ahead of her!’
CHAPTER SIX
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Second Cousin Gisela, of the mini-skirt, the blonde ponytail and the white wool knee-stockings, heard the car drive through into the courtyard of the Goldener Hirsch, and whirled her stool round to see who was arriving. The French couple from the second floor had left this morning, and most of the currency-starved English were already gone. The slight chill of approaching autumn fingered thoughtfully at the roofs of Scheidenau. A new arrival was not only profit, but entertainment, too.
The driver, a frequent visitor here during the season, brought in two cases of modest size but excellent quality, and his manner indicated that he had been more than adequately tipped. Gisela reviewed the accommodation she had to offer, and looked up with hopeful brightness as the new arrival came into the hall. English, a lady alone, very beautiful, very pale, very fragile. She wore a fashionably simple little tube of a dress in fine wool jersey, printed in rich warm tones of rust and amber and peach that did their best to reflect some colour into her face, but Gisela could see that without that reflected glow she would have been ashen, with lavender hollows in her cheeks and deeper violet shadows under her eyes. Her clothes, from the narrow black shoes to the small, gold-rimmed halo of a black hat, spoke of money. Her face, white, remote and abstracted, seemed not to belong to the picture, even though everything she wore had been carefully chosen to set it off at its best. Gisela had the feeling that she had seen that face before in magazines, and that it was famous and ought to be recognized, but the firmament of opera and the concert platform was not her world, and she had no memory for the stars that revolved in it.
The voice which asked for a room was very quiet and a little husky with fatigue, yet it was the most vital, vigorous and live thing about the visitor, as if it used and drove everything else. A voice that would make you prick up your ears and turn round to see if the face matched it, even if you heard it simply ordering beer in the bar.
‘How long will the lady be staying?’
‘I don’t know… several days. If I’m not asking for impossibilities, I should like to have a piano to myself somewhere. I have to practise,’ she explained with the shadow of a smile, ‘and I don’t want to disturb anyone.’
Gisela was eager. ‘If you would like it, there is a suite on the first floor which has a large sitting-room. To- morrow they could bring up a piano for you from the dining-room, there are two there. Only an upright, but it is a good tone, and in tune.’ The suite was the dearest apartment in the house, and someone who wanted a piano as part of the amenities could well afford to pay for it.
‘Upstairs?’ said Maggie doubtfully. ‘I shouldn’t like to put them to so much trouble. Won’t it be very heavy and difficult?’
‘The stairs are so wide and so shallow, there is no difficulty. Like a castle, you will see. And the suite is very nice, it looks over the lake, and has a verandah with steps down to the grounds. I will show you.’ And she whisked open the flap of her desk, picked up the two suitcases like handfuls of feathers, and started sturdily up the length of the vaulted hall.
Maggie followed the straight young back and twinkling white wool legs to the vast rear stairs, and along a broad, echoing corridor on the first floor. She had no conscious memory of anything here, yet she knew where something was changed. It was like revisiting the place of a dream, or perhaps even more like dreaming of a place so uncannily familiar as to convince her she had dreamed it before. On those long-past visits with Freddy she had slept far up on the third floor, in rooms appropriately cheap for aspiring young performers. This large blue and white room, with its verandah blazing with geraniums, the airy bedroom opening from it, the bright hand-made cover on the old, carved bed, these she had never seen before. She went out into the open air and leaned over the flowering rail, and the scent of the trees came up to her, and the glimmer of the lake refracting light to her invisible, in small, broken darts of paler green launched through the deep green dusk.
‘Dinner is over,’ said Gisela, ‘but if you would like something to eat I will tell them. You are very tired, shall we not bring you something here?’
Maggie sat down on the edge of the bed, and its firm softness drew her like a magnet. ‘I am tired. Yes, if you would be so kind, it would be very nice to eat here.’
‘And you like the room? It will do?’
‘It will do very well. But I haven’t signed, or filled in a card for you.’
‘To-morrow,’ said Gisela cheerfully. ‘And in the morning they will bring up your piano. Everything to-morrow!’ And she went darting along the corridor, in small, light thumps like a terrier running on the naked boards, and skittered down the stairs back to her switchboard.
Maggie undressed, her movements clumsy with exhaustion, wrapped herself in a housecoat, and lay down on the bed. The feather coverlet billowed round her, cool and grateful, closing her in from the world. There were no thoughts left in her at all, only this terrible weariness suddenly eased and cradled, and sleep leaning heavily on her eyelids the moment she lay down.
Only this morning she had left Comerbourne for London, picked up fresh clothes at her flat, and taken a taxi out to Heathrow in time for her flight. Then the train journey on to Bregenz, and the car to bring her up here to the border. And ever since Zurich, places and scenes familiar to her throughout the years of her fame had taken on a different, a remote familiarity, as though the nineteen-year-old Maggie had come back to savour them with another palate. A bitter taste, perhaps of poison. I am not yet well, she told herself, I see, hear, feel with distorted senses. But in her heart she knew that it was because all these places were populated now by one more person, many years forgotten.
It was five days now since she had remembered Robin living, and been brought face to face with Robin dead. Five days in which he had kept her company every step of the way.
She was discharged to her own care, she could go where she chose and take the responsibility for herself. None the less, she had gone gently and gradually about this pilgrimage, concentrating her forces to satisfy her
