Ellis Peters - George Felse 08 - The House Of Green Turf (5 page)

‘I don’t remember any others. Oh, yes, the last time there was a change, because Freddy’s sister, who always used to tour with us and act as chaperone for the girls, had to go into hospital just before we left, and one of his old pupils came along with us instead. Bernarda Elliot was her concert name. I think it was her maiden name. She was a contralto… a good one, but she’d been married for quite a time then, to somebody named Felse. She was living somewhere in the West Midlands, I remember. She came along with us just to oblige Freddy, and only that once. It was the only tour Miss Fredericks missed. She died, too, only a few months after Freddy. Voluntarily, I think. You know what I mean? They’d always worked together, without him the world wasn’t worth hanging on to.’

‘I know,’ said Francis. ‘This Cherubini… that was at Covent Garden, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes, I was lucky. We recorded with the same cast, afterwards. It wasn’t the best “Figaro” ever, but it got a lot of notice.’

From then on it had been simply a climb from one eminence to another, steadily extending her range, always waiting for a few additional years to bring new works and maturer parts within her grasp. She told him about it just as she had experienced it, without either arrogance or modesty, and it dawned on him suddenly that she was not quite the gifted child he had begun to believe her, that this headlong simplicity and directness of hers was not a property of innocence, but the deliberate choice of an adult mind, the weapon of a woman with a great deal to do and only one lifetime in which to do it. Maggie Tressider had no time to waste on circumlocutions. There was it seemed, at least one quality in her which might well destroy either her or anyone who got in her way. Generous, scrupulous, loyal, all these she might be, but ambitious she certainly was. Not for herself so much as for the voice of which she was the high priestess. If ever there was a clash of interests, she would sacrifice everything and everybody to that deity, including Maggie Tressider.

By the time the bell rang to send him away, she had arrived at the present. Iris-circled, with half-transparent lids veined like snowdrops, her eyes remained closed for a moment after she was silent. The long lashes that lay on her cheeks were coloured like her hair, green-bronze-gold. When they rolled back from the wide stare that fastened unerringly on his face, the unveiled blue of her eyes was blinding.

It was then that it happened to him, sharp and clean as a knife-thrust, so that for an hour afterwards he never felt the pain.

‘I’ll contact you,’ he said, ‘as soon as I have anything to report. It may be a few days, but I’ll ring you.’

‘Yes…’ She wanted to ask what was in his mind, whether he had got anything at all out of her self-examinings; but she refrained. She had said that she trusted him, and now it was in his hands. ‘I feel better,’ she said, offering him the one encouragement and commendation she had to give. ‘Since you came I haven’t lost any more weight. And I
sleep
now. I’m going to get well.’

‘Of course!’ he said.

‘And to put this right…’ She smiled at him, a grave, grateful, impersonal smile. The burden of her confidence sagged heavily on his heart, and deep within him, secretly and slowly, the mortal wound began to bleed.

It was half-way through the evening before the numbness thawed away, and the injustice and indignity and rage and pain, the reasoned hopelessness and irrational hope, all hit him together.

He was sitting over his notebook with a full ashtray at his elbow, methodically compiling lists of names and considering the significance of the periods into which her life fell. There was always more to be gained by sitting and thinking, and evaluating what was given, than by rushing about questioning people, and he had his starting point.

‘I’ve done something awful to
him
… killed
him
…’ ‘
He’s
here with me all the time,
he
never leaves me…’ ‘It wouldn’t be so bad if I could ever see
him
clearly…’ Where there’s no precise identification the masculine pronoun can embrace the feminine, too, of course. Maybe! But that was by no means the effect of the repeated ‘he’ in her mouth. She didn’t know even the sex of her enemy; no, but some spark of her subconscious knew, all right. All Lombard Street to a china orange, X was a man.

What sort of man? Not a member of her family; those she bore with, visited occasionally, subsidised as a matter of course. Rice had suggested that there might have been some such hanger-on who chose the wrong moment, or the wrong approach, and started in her a spurt of distaste that caused her for once to lash out in rebellion against her role. But did any of them matter to her enough to make that probable? Francis thought not. And whoever provoked her into cruelty would have to matter to her pretty fundamentally.

The more he thought about it, the more clearly did X put on the likeness of the one person who was so conspicuously absent from Maggie’s life. A face so rigidly excised from memory might well belong to the one man who wasn’t there.

Plenty of men had loved Maggie, but not one of them, by her own account and the world’s, had Maggie ever loved. Never once had she mentioned the word ‘love.’ And that in itself was remarkable enough to arrest attention. Here was a gifted, beautiful woman, still defensively alone at approaching thirty-two. On the face of it that was the most mysterious thing about her. Why did she never marry? Because she was married to her art? Even so, why did she never, apparently, even consider taking husband or lover, never let any of the candidates get within arm’s-length of her? Take a step too near her, and she would take three away from you, and then keep retreating until she was out of sight. He had seen it for himself, and so, if he wasn’t mistaken, had Gilbert Rice. So what was wrong with her? What was the block that shut men out? The same that blotted out the face of X?

And if the hunt for X was the hunt for the invisible, the non-existent lover, the only one who got past her guard, where was he most likely to be found? Somewhere fairly far back, or she could not have expunged him so completely and for so long. In the world’s eye not, perhaps, a very great figure in her life, or, again, she could not have forgotten him so successfully; yet great enough in retrospect to turn her whole life barren afterwards.
What was it she had done to him
?

No need to look back as far as childhood or early adolescence, either, because this was a thing that had fixed its claws into her adult being, and pierced deep. Somewhere at the emergence of the woman, say at eighteen or nineteen, when her career suddenly opened before her and she knew she was going to be great, when she was intoxicated and dazzled by music, and men, perhaps, faded into the background just when they should have been growing clear and important. Twelve or thirteen years ago. In twelve years she had had time to suppress a lot of regrets, to forget genuinely a lot of once-important people.

He performed, almost idly, the small exercise of looking back twelve years in his own life. Where had he been then? More to the point, with whom? He found a narrow boat on a Midland canal, a summer frittered away on an antique business that had folded under him because he didn’t work at it, and a woman who had been the reason for his lack of application; but when it came to recalling the woman, she was only a small, blank, woman-shaped space without face or name. Nothing but an empty shape and a bitter taste, and no guilt except the guilt he felt for the squandering of whatever promise he’d ever had, and that held no mystery.

And then, abruptly, like a flower bud opening marvellously under the camera, the pale non-recollection put on colour and form and life, the head flushed into the incredible colour of oak foliage in spring, the burning blue eyes pierced him as they had pierced him an hour ago, and the searing realisation of his position broke out like blood at last, and he knew he was lost. Who had he thought he was, writing off women so confidently? Who did she think she was, writing off men?

For the first time in his life he hadn’t seen it coming, hadn’t side-stepped and dictated the ground on which it should approach him, and the terms on which he would entertain it. Now it was too late to do anything but stop the bleeding by force of will, and somehow claw his way back to the job in hand. Because he had just established to his full satisfaction that no man alive had a dog’s chance of getting within Maggie Tressider’s guard. Want her as he might, want would have to be his master, as it had been many another’s.

Or would it
? If he played his cards intelligently, hadn’t he certain advantages?

She trusted him
! She’d said so, and meant it. Who else had her ear as he had? Who else had access to her as he had? The hunt for X could be prolonged until his position was secured, and the uncovering of X could be so handled—assuming he was found, and in whatever circumstances—as to serve the interests of Francis Killian no less than those of Maggie Tressider. Yes, he had unique advantages…

And unique disadvantages, his own saner self warned him tartly. You’re taking her money to do a job for her, the only trust she has in you is the trust intelligent people place in competent professionals bound to them by contract. Take one step out of line, to-morrow, next week, ever, and she’ll be gone. And you’ll be a bigger heel even than you’ve ever been before. At least until now you’ve kept your business clean.

I shall still be doing that, he persisted strenuously, fighting off his better judgment. I’m not proposing to cheat her. The job I’ve taken on for her I’ll finish, if it can be done at all. But while it lasts I’ve got her ear, I’ve got a measure of her confidence, and I’ll earn more. I’m wronging nobody if I conduct my own campaign alongside hers.

And you think you’ve got so much as a dog’s chance? asked his
doppelgänger
venomously. You know what that woman is, a world figure, a beauty, a towering artist. Do I need to tell you? And you know what you are, don’t you? Or maybe you’ve forgotten. It’s a long time since you looked in a glass!

There wasn’t a mirror in the room, or in the flat apart from the one in the bathroom. But he didn’t need a glass, he knew what he looked like, and what he was. A man of forty-one, average height, light weight, not bad to look at as average men go, if he hadn’t spent all his adult life being knocked about by circumstances, and knocking himself about when circumstances let up. All that kept him from looking and being seedy was the odd vein of austerity that persisted from his Nonconformist upbringing, still unsubdued after a life-long battle with chaos and self-indulgence, and that basic dislike of dirt that would have been glad to believe itself a virtue, but sadly realised it was no more than a foible.

‘Yes, agreed his demon, reading his thoughts, you’ve had things cleaned up for the past five years, from artistic squalor into monastic order, and it cost you plenty to do it, and you know damned well the value you put on it. There was going to be no more of that! How much of your soul will you still own, if you let love break in here now? Don’t you recognise a disaster when you see one? Take a look round this cell of yours. It’s more than it looks, it represents the only safety you’ve got, because it’s the only order, it’s what’s left of your morality, it’s your identity. Open the door and let love into that, and it’ll kick the whole structure apart before you can say: Maggie!

And he knew it was true. Only a fool could welcome in the invader of his painfully-won privacy, and run to meet the power that humiliated and outraged what he had made of himself at so much cost. And for such an impossible hope! He knew, none better, that he would never reach her. If he regrouped his defences now, while there was time…

But there was no time left. It was already too late.

All right, he said defiantly to his double, sit back and watch. A little patience, a little craft, a nice mixture of blackmail and gratitude, and you’ll be surprised what I can do, when I want something enough. What will you bet me I don’t get her in the end?

And if you do, said the demon, with the finality of ultimate, unquestionable truth, what you get won’t be what you want. It will be only to possess and enjoy, you know that, don’t you? And spoil! Never to unite with her.

All right, damn you
! said Francis, setting his teeth,
then I’ll settle for that
!

So from then on he had two people’s interests to serve, Maggie’s and his own; and for the time being they were identical. If ever the two interests should diverge, God only knew what he would do, or which of them he would put first. There was no sense in trying to anticipate the event, and no comfort, either.

Back to the business in hand, then. If X was an injured lover, he belonged somewhere at the threshold of success. Ever since she was twenty years old she had lived in the sun, known exactly where she was going, and needed no claws. The more he thought about it, the more he was left with two formative years, the last two she had spent under Paul Fredericks.

What wouldn’t he have given to be able to question the old man, or even his sister who had worked with him? Perhaps especially his sister, for an elderly woman sees more of what goes on inside ambitious girls of genius than does a doting old man whose protégées they are. But they were both dead long ago. Francis had, however, the lists of names of those who had accompanied Maggie on her three tours with Freddy’s Circus. He began with the last, in the autumn of 1955. The last for an excellent reason, because after it she had been invited to sing Cherubini at Covent Garden, and Freddy had acknowledged that she was ready. That was also reason enough why Francis should consider it first.

And there in the list, if he couldn’t have Esther Fredericks, was the woman who had taken her place on the trip. Bernarda Elliot. Now Bernarda Felse. If Freddy had turned to her in a crisis, she must have a good head on her shoulders, as well as a contralto voice in her throat. And hadn’t Maggie said that she lived—or had then been living—somewhere here in the Midlands? Felse is not a very common name.

He looked in the regional telephone directory. Felse is not a common name at all, he found. There was just one of them in the whole of two border English counties and a large slice of mid-Wales. George Felse, of 19 Prior’s Lane, Comerford. In the circumstances it wouldn’t be much of a trick to find out whether his wife’s name was Bernarda.

It was; though most people, he discovered, seemed to know her as Bunty. And her husband—well, well, who would have thought it?—turned out to be a detective-inspector in the Midshire C.I.D. A far cry from Freddy’s Circus to a modest modernised cottage in the village of Comerford, only a few miles out of the county town, and just in sad process of becoming a town itself. Thirteen years is a long time; George Felse must have been a bobby on the beat when this girl—and Maggie had said she was good—decided he was what she wanted most.

So it can happen
!

Don’t build on it, Francis, he warned himself grimly, it couldn’t happen to Maggie. A little interlude of a few months—even a year or so—you might get if you’re lucky and clever, but not a lifetime, don’t look for it.

He called the number in the book. The voice that answered was lighter than Maggie’s, and more veiled. ‘Yes, I’m Bernarda Felse. But how did you know?’

A good question, but for some reason a daunting one. He might have to be on his guard with a woman like that, in case he gave away more than he got from her.

‘My name’s Francis Killian. I got your name from Maggie Tressider. You know she’s in hospital in Comerbourne, after an accident? I do private research for anyone who needs it, in connection with books, indexing, that sort of thing. While she’s laid up, Miss Tressider is compiling material for a possible monograph on Doctor Paul Fredericks. She’s using me to do some of the donkey work for her. I believe you knew him well?’

‘I studied under him,’ said the distant voice, with pride, with affection, with gaiety; entirely without regret. ‘He was one of the world’s darlings. But irascible as the devil! No, come to think of it, the devil wouldn’t be, would he? Somebody ought to put Freddy on record, that’s a fact.’

‘It would be a great help if I could talk to you about him. May I come over and see you, some time?’

‘Any afternoon that suits you,’ said Bunty Felse. ‘Today, if you like?’

The moment he set eyes on her he stopped wondering if she had any lingering doubts about her bargain. She was one of the few people he’d ever seen who looked as if they had never regretted anything in their lives. She was about his own age, a slender person of medium height, with a shining cap of glossy hair the colour of ripe conkers, and a few engaging silvery strands coiled in the red here and there. Her eyes, large and brightly hazel, looked straight into his over the coffee-cups and declared her curiosity quite openly, and the effect their candour had upon him was of a compliment.

‘Will she really ever do anything about it?… this book on Freddy?’

‘Ah, that’s another question,’ admitted Francis. ‘Not for me to ask.
You
could, if you went to visit her. I think she’d be pleased.’

‘That,’ said Bunty, reaching for an ashtray from the bookcase, ‘one doesn’t do. I have just about as much claim on Miss Tressider as I have on half the big names in music to-day—I once studied for three years under a man they all knew and valued. So did dozens, maybe hundreds of others, most of them as obscure as I am. No, I contracted out, and you can’t have it both ways, and personally I’ve never even wanted to. Well… hardly ever, and then only for a day or so. I never really knew the girl, in any case. I was married some years before she even came to Freddy. It was only the accident of Esther’s illness that made us acquainted at all.’

‘But you remember her? As she was then?’

‘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 protégé 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.

‘Didn’t his family want to know what you’d done with him?’

‘He had no close family, as far as I know. He’d been knocking about on his own for two or three years already.’

‘What was this boy like? You haven’t a photograph?’

She shook her head. ‘No photographs. I had loads of publicity pictures at the time, of course, but obviously I didn’t file them. It’s a long time ago. I remember him as a very attractive young man, and well aware of it. Girls liked him.’ She added after a moment’s thought: ‘He laughed a lot.’

‘And where did this happen… this walking out?’

‘We were staying in a little resort in the Vorarlberg, a place called Scheidenau. You’ll find it all in the papers there. Freddy always used the Goldener Hirsch as a convenient base for all our concerts round there—Bregenz, Bludenz, Vaduz, St. Gallen, Lindau, all those places. It’s very near to the German border, and quiet, and rather cheap.’

‘And he walked out between dinner and bedtime? Just like that? Did you notice anything different about him at dinner? Nothing to show what he had in mind?’

By this time, he realised, she ought to have been asking questions herself, and the very fact that she was not had drawn him into deeper water than he had intended venturing. He smiled at her, shaking away the betraying tension of his own concentration. ‘It seems such an odd time to cut his moorings.’