just trees and brambles and a hut rotted by the weather.
The back of my throat ached, and I struck a match and lit my pipe. It was something to do, some physical action which might relieve the tension.
Behind me, in the wood, a pair of jays began to call harshly to each other; and above me, in a tall oak, I heard the vigorous rustling of a squirrel shaking the leaves. A descendant, I supposed, of the squirrels I had known and sometimes shot, though always with reluctance, and only to please old Georges Durois; for of all the creatures which look ugly and pathetic dead, and pretty alive, squirrels head the list. I know they do harm, but the harm always seems to me negligible compared with the joy of seeing them about.
Then the jays ceased calling, and the squirrel moved to another tree, and except for the occasional whine of a mosquito the world was still.
I moved back to the path from the remains of the tennis courts, and stood for a moment watching the bend in the path ahead. Surely Ingrid, my loved Ingrid, would come round the corner, in her pleated white tennis skirt, radiating all the glory of her eighteen-year-old vitality; and behind her, plodding heavy-footed but purposeful, dear old slow-witted Danish Hans; and behind him, in a group, Mary, the vivacious little dark-eyed American girl; and Bob, the son of a Bradford wool merchant; and perhaps Freddie Harris, the ambitious cockney who worked in a bank and spent his annual holidays at the chateau to learn French and improve his prospects. And loping along to catch them up, always late, always gentle and good-tempered, would come any moment now old Rolf, the giant Norwegian with the build of an ancient Viking.
But not Philip Bartels. Not yet.
I didn’t expect to see Bartels yet, for Bartels would be dressed in an old pair of flannel bags and an open- necked shirt, sitting by the lake, trying for the fish he so rarely caught.
Then I realized that I was all wrong. It was now about seven o’clock. No wonder they didn’t come. They would be changed for dinner, lounging on the terrace, in the soft evening sunshine, waiting for Madame to invite them into the dining room. So I walked slowly on, more quietly than ever, and turned the bend and stood, partly concealed by a rhododendron bush, and gazed at the house.
It lay quiet and still, bathed in the waning sunlight, the walls glowing warmly, surrounded by the decorative moat. The little light wooden drawbridge, which one man could raise quite easily, was in position, connecting the terrace and the back of the chateau to the broad path which circled the reed-fringed lake and led to the drive between the poplars.
At the far side of the house I could see the hedge of the vegetable garden, where Madame had assigned a small plot of earth to those who wished for it; where I had grown the radishes. I was quite keen on keeping fit in those days, and used to get up at about 8.15 and put on a pair of shorts, and run a couple of times round the lake, and then go and pick some of my radishes.
I would wrap some of them in a handkerchief, and toss a pebble lightly against Ingrid’s window, and when she put her head out, still tousled with sleep, I would throw them up to her. She used to like to eat them with her morning
Apart from anything else, I knew from my correspondence with the family that Ingrid, whom I had lost, was married and living in Oslo; and loyal but slow-witted old Hans had found the Gestapo too much for him, and was dead. I did not know about Freddie, the bank clerk, but Bob had died at Alamein. And Mary, twice divorced, disillusioned, and hurt, was in Chicago.
But I peopled the terrace with my ghosts, just the same. I stood in the shadow of the rhododendron bush, and brought them all out, and made them stroll up and down and converse, and listened, from where I was, to the sound of their voices and to the occasional laughter.
Later, when I had had enough, I would allow them to drift into the house, and I would go to the most important rendezvous of all, to the place we called L’Etoile, because several paths converged there, so that it bore some resemblance to a star. There, Ingrid would come to meet me, as so often before, walking slowly through the woods with her hands clasped in front of her, arms at full length, a smile upon her face.
Looking back on that visit to the chateau now, seeing myself as I stood watching the empty house by the light of the dying sun, I agree that, at first, it was a pretty maudlin exhibition. I certainly piled it on a bit thick. I had come for sweet suffering, and I saw to it that I got it.
But then, though I fought against it, it all changed, and as the shadows lengthened, the suffering was no longer sweet, but grim.
Some of the figures which I imagined once more upon the terrace were blurred, but Philip Bartels was clear enough.
We used to keep on the terrace one or more long, flexible rods, about six feet tall, which we cut from saplings. A length of thin string was tied to the top of each, and on the other end of the string was a little piece of red flannel. When we had five minutes to while away, we would lean over the side of the terrace and dangle the bit of flannel in front of the numerous frogs which lived in the moat. If a frog bit the flannel, mistaking it for a winged insect, we would whip it out of the water while its mouth was still entangled in the flannel, and then catch it in the grass by the side of the moat.
It didn’t do the frogs any harm or us any good-only once did we decide to catch and kill enough to eat-and the skill lay in trying to deceive the frog by a lifelike manipulation of the bait.
Bartels, the keen fisherman, was naturally the most enthusiastic. He would always stroll out in his dinner jacket for a few minutes with the frogs before dinner. He was very good at frog-fishing. Sometimes Ingrid would lean over the terrace wall to watch him; and I would stroll out and join them both, because I was terribly jealous where Ingrid was concerned.
Bartels was my best friend. But Ingrid was my love. However, I realize now that I need not have worried. Knowing how I felt, Bartels was always scrupulously correct in his attitude to Ingrid.
All this I remembered, that wonderful summer night when I revisited the chateau: the chateau which was so quiet, and yet so alive to me who watched from the shadow of the rhododendron bush. I recalled, too, that the time came, many years later, when I myself was not so punctilious; when I acted craftily towards my best friend, with results which even to this day I find it difficult to assess.
I saw Bartels clearly that evening.
He stood out sharp-cut from the rest, leaning over the terrace wall. Once, he looked up and glanced for several long seconds towards where I stood, and so real did he seem that even now there are occasions when I wonder whether he was really summoned to the scene only by my imagination.
I saw him, a slenderly built figure of nineteen, with a lean face browned by the summer sun. He was not good-looking; indeed, in some ways there was something slightly comical about him. His features were reasonably regular, and the nose was straight and delicately chiselled; but he wore spectacles, of which the frames were of tortoiseshell and the side-pieces of gold; and although he kept his hair fairly well ordered, there were some hairs, on the crown of his head, which insisted upon sticking up. He had, too, a very wide mouth, of which the lips were rather thin and bloodless. So that sometimes, with his unruly hair and big mouth, he bore a faint resemblance to a cross between Donald Duck and one of the frogs he was so keen on catching.
I think his voice was his most attractive feature, that and his gentle, generous nature and ready sense of humour. His voice was deep and rich, and he always spoke very slowly and deliberately, and, when he looked towards me that evening, I seemed to hear him call to me, as he had often called before: “Come and look here, Pete-there’s a big one here going to bite!”
Yet although he was keen on gun and rod, I have seen him painstakingly rescue a drowning fly from a glass of wine, and place it on the window ledge in the sun. On another occasion I saw him spend five minutes trying to manoeuvre a daddy-long-legs out of a window. And once, in the autumn, when a butterfly which had flown into the drawing room fluttered into the fire, Bartels swung away from the grate with a gasp of horror, his hands over his face.
It was pain and suffering, for any living thing, which he abhorred, not death. He was unimpressed by death.
“What the hell difference do a few more days or years of life make in the limitless infinity of time?” he said once. “Death is of no consequence. It only seems of consequence because people decline to recognize its inevitability. They fight against it, instead of accepting it for what it is, as normal an event as birth.”
