The Judas Tree (37 page)

Cutting short the conversation, which she would have prolonged indefinitely, he rang the Edinburgh number, and was more successful in getting through. But here also he drew blank. Mr Douglas had delivered his lecture in Edinburgh and departed for London with his niece. They had no knowledge of his present address.

He ate a poor dinner and afterwards moved to the study, the only sitting-room which still remained habitable. Almost an hour later, while he sat brooding, suddenly the telephone rang.

His pulse missed a beat. He knew that it was Kathy, compelled by love and an instinctive awareness of his present need. He was at the phone in a second.

But, no – his heart sank sickeningly – it was not the sweet expected voice that came from the void, but the glottal accents of Stieger, his lawyer, who, detained in Munich, asked for a postponement of their appointment until Monday.

‘Naturally, if the matter is urgent, I will fly back tomorrow morning and return to Munich in the evening.'

‘No,' Moray said, struggling to recover himself. ‘There's no immediate need. Don't put yourself out. Monday will suit equally well.'

‘Then we will meet in three days' time.'

Three days, Moray reflected, as he hung up the phone; no harm could come of this brief postponement. At least it would afford him a breathing spell to recover and consolidate his forces. He was conscious of a vague feeling of relief.

A week had passed. Was it a week? Waiting like this, ready to go off, everything settled, it was difficult to keep track of the days. But of course, today was Sunday, and a wet one, drenching rain turning the snow into muddy slush, the mountains invisible behind swollen, dropsical clouds. God, what a horrible day, so damnably depressing to anyone, like himself, susceptible to weather. He turned from the window and for perhaps the twentieth time took Kathy's letter from his pocket, her solitary letter posted on the morning after she had been to Edinburgh. She must have written and mailed it immediately she got back to Markinch.

Dear David,

It was wonderful to hear your voice on the phone, and truly I have not had time to write you before. As I told you, Uncle Willie has had a real bad attack of fever. But he won't give up the lecture tour and we'll be leaving soon for our journey through England. When we get to London we'll be staying with Mr and Mrs Robertson, Scottish friends of Mrs Fotheringay's. Their address, if you are writing is, 3 Hillside Drive, Ealing, N. W.11. It is handy for London Airport. Everything is now arranged; Uncle Willie has got all three tickets and made the reservations. The flight number is AF 4329. The plane leaves on Tuesday the 21st at eleven p.m., so we shall meet you in the assembly hall one hour before the time of departure. We will be there from nine o'clock onwards so that there will be no mistake, and there must not be, for Uncle Willie is desperately anxious to leave. Things have been going from bad to worse at Kwibu and if we are to save the mission outstations in Kasai we must get back at once. I am so much looking forward to working with you out there, and to the rewards it will bring us. Dear David, this is the first time I have written you and it is difficult to say all that I mean. But you know my hopes are centred on you and that I will soon be your own true wife.

Kathy.

PS. Uncle Willie says be sure and be in time.

With a renewed sense of disappointment, Moray put down the letter which, when it arrived, he had opened so eagerly. Surely he might have expected something better than these few brief, restrained lines. Instead of the bare schedule of their departure, couldn't she have dwelt more freelingly on her love, said that she was missing him, that she longed to be once again in his arms? In all her vocabulary was there no stronger word than ‘ dear'? He admitted that she was shy, poor child, troubled by the consciousness of their intimacy – so he construed the phrase ‘I will soon be your own true wife' – and limited by the small size of the note-paper. Yet she had found space to devote to Willie – his lectures, his fever, his anxieties and arrangements, his request not to be late. Not a word, not a single inquiry as to his own state of mind and body, or the distress and difficulties he might be experiencing, away from her. Really, it was too bad. He loved her, he wanted her, and all she could do was to throw Willie at his head.

This strange feeling that he had been deserted was intensified by the isolation of his present existence. His normal routine was broken, he had said goodbye to his friends in Schwansee, no one came to see him, they had all written him off as a departed member of their group. And Frida – for more than a week he had not set eyes upon her, although on several occasions, in the hope of meeting her, he had essayed a halting walk in the rain round the lake shore towards her domain. He missed the companionship she had so freely given and which, now above all, when certainty and uncertainty chased each other across his mind, he so sorely needed. Bitterly he regretted the rift between them, the result of a few outspoken words on her part which, realising their purpose, he had already condoned. Surely he could not leave her without attempting to resolve their differences. Time was getting so short, so very short; in two days he would be off. He ought to go up the hill to visit her. Yet something, pride perhaps, a restraining gleam of caution, had hitherto intervened.

The summons to lunch recalled him. He ate in abstracted silence, without appetite; then, as was his Sunday habit, took a short nap. Awakening about three he saw that the rain poured down more mercilessly than ever. He got up, moved about the house, checked his packed suitcases, smoked a cigarette, tried to kill time, but gradually his spirits sank, reached their lowest ebb and, after resisting during the hours of daylight, as the miserable grey afternoon turned to sodden evening, he succumbed to the craving for one word of human comfort. Frida would give it. She was, had always been, his friend. They would not argue, would discuss nothing involving controversy, would simply spend in sympathy one last quiet restorative hour of human intercourse.

Hurriedly, before he could change his mind, he put on his Aquascutum, took an old golf umbrella from the stand and, letting himself unobtrusively out of the house, hobbled off. The ferry took him across the lake, but for a lame man it was a long walk and a stiff climb up the steep, winding path to the schloss. Yet he was there at last, trembling at the knees like a horse after a stiff pull. God, he thought, what a wreck I've become.

Almost lost in the low clouds, the tall Seeburg towered above him. Built of rough mountain granite in the seventeenth century Swiss style, with a machicolated roof and twin pepperpot towers, it had, in the swollen darkness, a spectral, haunted air, an impression heightened by the harsh croaking of drenched ravens sheltering beneath the overhang of the eaves. Advancing on the mossy terrace outside the narrow double windows that gave on to her sitting-room, he drew up with a catch of breath. Yes, there she sat, alone on the sofa, beside the antique tiled stove, working at her needlepoint under a single shaded light that barely illuminated the large and lofty apartment, sparsely furnished with heavy high-backed walnut chairs and a great Bavarian armoire. Her favourite little weimaraner, Peterkin, lay on the rug at her feet with his nose between his paws.

The sombre domesticity of the scene touched Moray. With an agitated hand he tapped on the pane. Immediately she raised her head, turned towards the outer darkness; then, putting down her work, she came slowly forward and opened the tall window. For a long moment she looked at him fixedly, then in a calm, firm voice, totally devoid of solicitude, she said:

‘My poor friend, how ill you look. Come! I will help you. So.' Taking his arm she guided him towards the sofa. ‘ Here you must sit and rest.'

‘Thank you,' he muttered, breathing with difficulty. ‘As you see, I'm rather under the weather. You may remember I hurt my back. It hasn't quite cleared up.'

‘Yes,' she said, standing over him. ‘Three times I have seen you by the lake, attempting to take your walk. I said to myself, unfortunate man, soon he will come to me.'

No note, no sign of triumph was evident in her tone or manner, but a kind of calm protectiveness, as though she were dealing with a favoured yet refractory pupil.

‘I felt I must come,' he defended himself hurriedly. ‘I couldn't bear to leave the breach between us permanently unhealed. I . . I am due to go the day after tomorrow.'

She did not answer but sat down beside him on the sofa and took his hand, holding it with strong, compelling fingers. For several moments there was absolute silence; then, gazing at him intently and speaking with the calm conviction of accomplished fact:

‘My poor friend, you are not quite yourself. And now it is for a woman who knows and understands you, who has for you the best and strongest feelings, yes, it is now time for her to save you from yourself.'

‘From myself?' he repeated, confused and startled.

‘You have been led foolishly into a bad situation. Because you are an honourable man and, although ill, would wish to be a brave one, you want to go through with it. Even when it is plain you will not survive.' She paused quietly. ‘ But for that I will not stand aside.'

In the ensuing silence, compelled by a strange mixture of attraction and revulsion, he forced himself to raise his head and look at her.

‘I must admit,' he said, trying to assert himself, ‘with this lameness, I'm … almost in doubt. I mean, it has crossed my mind as to whether I'll be
able
to go as arranged, or whether I should follow later.'

‘You are no longer in doubt, my friend. I do not intend to let you go.'

A complex shock passed through him, a combination of opposites, positive and negative charges of electricity perhaps, anyhow a decided shock.

‘But I'm committed … in every way,' he protested.

‘Yes, you have been wrong.' She lifted a forefinger in admonition. ‘And stupid also. But listen. When you are walking in the mountains and discover yourself upon the wrong road, do you continue and fall into a crevasse? No. When you have asked directions of someone who knows better you turn and go back. That is what you will do.'

‘No, no. I couldn't. What would Kathy and Willie think of me? Even the people here, after all the talk, my speech at the party, the publicity in the
Tageblatt.
I'd be the laughing-stock of the canton when they still saw me around.'

‘They will not still see you around,' she answered, almost casually. ‘For you must go away for a long holiday … with me.'

Again he started visibly, but she held him silent with a faint calm smile, went on in the same even, conversational tone.

‘First we go to Montecatini, where there are wonderful baths for your back, and also, once you are better, a fine golf course where I will walk with you and admire your play. After, we take a cruise on that nice select little ship the
Stella Polaris.
Only then, in the Spring, do we return here, by which time all the silly business is finished and long forgotten.'

Immobilised by those hypnotic eyes he stared at her as though in a trance, yet perceiving, for the first time, that her hair had been freshly rinsed and set, that – as if she had expected him – she wore a new mauve silk dress, high in the waist, full and pleated in the skirt, a dress at once classic and correct, which enhanced her natural distinction. Certainly a fine figure of a woman and still beautiful – at a distance. Yet from close range his dilated pupils mirrored the commencing stigmata of middle-age; the faint reticulated network beneath the orbits, the slight sag of the muscular neckline, the speckled discoloration of the strong even teeth. How could this be compared with that other sweet face, that frail, fresh young body? An inward sigh shook him. And yet – in his present lamentable state – wasn't she a haven, an anchorage, a lady too, cultured, distinguished, and, in the ultimate analysis, not unbedworthy? He drew a sharp breath, was about to speak when, with a gleam of ridicule, she forestalled him.

‘Yes, I am a reasonable bargain. And I will be the proper wife for you – by day and by night. Have I not also had strong longings during the years I have lived alone? We shall fulfil together. And what an interest for us both to restore and redecorate the Seeburg, to fill it with your beautiful things! We shall have a salon more famous than was Coppée in the days of Mme. de Stael.'

He still mumbled a protest.

‘I'm terribly fond of you, dear Frida. But …'.

‘But, yes, my poor man, and I of you. For once and all, I will not let you go out there to destroy yourself.'

A silence. What more could he say, or do? He felt overpowered, dominated, possessed, yet filled with a slow, creeping tide of comfort. The plan she presented was so sane, so agreeable in all respects – vastly different from that dark future which, during these last few days, he had come to dread. Acceptance would be like sliding into a warm bath after a long exhausting journey. He closed his eyes and slid. The relief was indescribable. He lay back on the sofa.

‘Oh, my God, Frida … I feel I want to tell you everything … from the very beginning.'

And he did, at length, with feeling.

‘Ah, yes,' she murmured, sympathetically if ambiguously, when he concluded. ‘I see it all.'

‘You're the only woman who has ever understood me.'

As he spoke the dog stirred from sleep, looked up and, with a bark of recognition, jumped on to his knees.

‘You see,' she nodded, ‘Peterkin accepts you also. Now you are tired. Rest while I bring something to restore you.' She was soon back, glass in hand. ‘This is from your own country, very old and special. I have kept it for you for a long time. Now, to please me, you must drink all.'

The one spirit he detested was whisky – it always disagreed with him, soured his stomach, upset his liver. But he did need a stimulant, and he wanted to please her; besides, he hadn't the will to resist.