The Numbered Account (31 page)

‘I like it, yes. It's competent—like you!'

‘I'm not fast!'

‘Well, you're not slow!' They laughed, once more at ease together; as the car swung up the mountain-side they heard from far below the six notes of the bus's theme-tune coming up, softened by distance.

In Beatenberg Antrobus drew up by the little
épicerie
where Julia and Watkins habitually bought sugar and Nescafé.

‘Would you very much mind walking from here to the hotel, and telling your cousin to come down and talk to me? He is in, and I told him I was coming.'

‘Not in the least—but why the precautions? We all dined together last night, quite openly.'

‘Well everything is rather hotting up now—one can't take too many precautions. Goodbye, my dear, I'll leave word with Colin where you and I are to meet tomorrow.'

‘Oh, are we going? Lovely!'

‘Yes—but I must concert everything with him first. Up to a point this is his show.'

‘Colin won't want me anywhere about,' Julia said. ‘I don't think he's ever quite forgiven me for stalling him in Morocco.'

‘Well, in the last resort he must do what I say, here. Anyhow there are no Phoenician graves in Switzerland!'

‘Goodness, what a long talk you and Hugh must have had! You seem to know every detail. Right—I'll send him along. Thank you for my good lunch.'

Later that afternoon Colin—sure enough with a very ill grace—told Julia that she was to go down on the bus which reached Interlaken soon after half-past nine—‘Then you just potter along the main street towards the Ost-Bahnhof, on the right-hand side, till he picks you up. Kerb-crawling, I call it!'

‘But you'll have started ages before that.'

‘Yes, thank God! Julia, for heaven's sake don't
please
go
and do anything silly tomorrow. This is important.'

‘Yes—and who found out where this important meeting was to be? Don't be so pomposo, Colin—really you bore me.'

‘Sorry, J. dear. I know you've been doing wonders for us. But you see this is my first really big job, and I don't want to bog it.'

‘I'm sure you won't, darling.' She planted a forgiving kiss on his dead-white cheek. ‘The Lord love you! Oh—' she paused. ‘He
is
getting you a revolver, isn't he?'

‘Yes. Was that your idea?'

‘No, June's. She says B. and W. always carry them, and I didn't want you to be at a disadvantage.'

‘It isn't usually done,' Colin said disapprovingly.

‘Well I'm glad it's going to be done this time.'

On reflection that evening Julia found herself a little disturbed about the scene at lunch. She was not pleased with the way Antrobus had behaved—why was it necessary to assume the worst, and to put it so offensively? But she was not too pleased with her own behaviour, either: perhaps she ought to have explained at once that she wanted the money for June—and wasn't he being rather charitable when he compared her to a charwoman, rather than to a fishwife? Julia knew from long experience that when people lose their hearts it makes them liable to lose their tempers too; had she reached that stage? The whole thing was on quite a small scale, but still it was disquieting. Why had he used that harsh voice, those unpleasant words, to her? And all right on top of their rose-gathering together on the Parallel-Weg the evening before. Somehow it didn't fit; there was a sense of—ugliness, almost; something wrong somewhere. As she went to bed she hoped fervently that tomorrow's excursion might show her more where he stood; alas for her, she feared she knew her own position only too well! The words ‘or crossed in hopeless love' rang in her head as she went to sleep, though she could not recall either the poet or the poem.

Well before ten o'clock on the following morning Julia, idling along the right-hand pavement of Interlaken's
pretty innocent main street, was overtaken by the Porsche. In Switzerland traffic drives on the right, hence cars have a left-hand drive; as Antrobus pulled up she got in beside him almost before the car had stopped, and they shot off again, swinging left presently over the road bridge across the Aar at the end of the Englischer Garten, to take the main road to the East along the northern shore of the Lake of Brienz. Julia had never been out of Interlaken on this side before, and looked about her with interest. Across the lake a ridge of limestone cliffs cut into the sky, with steep pastures and pine woods below the crest, on which a rounded turret of rock stood up conspicuously.

‘Oh! is that lump sticking up above the Schynige Platte the Turm?'

He leaned across her to look.

‘Yes. You must have the beginnings of an eye for mountains to recognise it from this side.'

Julia repressed an inclination to suggest that he was being patronising—she was determined not to be what he called ‘savage' today. Instead she asked if they couldn't have the hood down—the Porsche was a model with an adjustable top. ‘We should see so much more.'

He pulled in to the side of the road at once; the hood went down practically at a touch. ‘Lovely,' Julia said— ‘much nicer.'

‘You may find it cold up on the top.'

‘Then we can put it up again. I like this push-button car of yours.'

Between gently-sloping fields studded with great walnut-trees and occasional patches of pines they came to Brienz, a hot little town tucked into an airless cauldron between the hills; on to Meiringen, up the wide trough-like valley which separates the Bernese Oberland proper, with the great peaks of the Finsteraarhorn, Schreckhorn, Wetterhorn, and Jungfrau groups, from the complex of lesser mountains to the north of it. On and on, the slopes to the south of them now clothed with a low growth of curious amorphous bushes which, as Julia rightly said, looked like green crochet; then by several huge and quite ferocious
hairpin bends they approached the summit of the Grimsel Pass. Water-filled valleys stretched away on their right, as steep-sided as Norwegian fiords; somehow they had a rather unnatural look, and Julia enquired about them.

‘Oh yes, they're artificially drowned,' Antrobus told her. ‘It's all part of the hydro-electric system. The Swiss have everything—everything to make life clean, that is to say. Limitless water-power to electrify their railways and factories, wood for building and for burning—no stinking smoke or grimy coal dust anywhere. Limitless limestone for cement, limitless meat and butter and milk and cheese. If they could strike oil they would be almost completely independent of the outside world, except for coffee and chocolate!'

‘Are they likely to strike oil?' Julia asked, as the car entered a cutting between high banks of discoloured snow.

‘Yes, geologically it's perfectly possible. But they're quite lucky enough as it is.'

The summit of the Grimsel is a rather bare and forbidding place, especially when snow lies, as it did that day, in patches between the grey outcrops of rock rising from the dark and largely barren soil; to Julia it was rendered even more forbidding by the large numbers of parked cars and the swarms of tourists in bright locally-purchased woollen caps and pull-overs. Several huge motor-buses were also drawn up in a lay-by.

‘Can one of those be them?' she asked ungrammatically, but to Antrobus comprehensibly.

‘Oh no—they'll be over the Furka by now, heading down to Andermatt. Look, there's the road up to the Furka'—he pointed out to her the white loops twining up across a slope above the valley which lay immediately below them, a valley down which another road ran. ‘That's the great through route from Eastern Switzerland into the Valais,' he said.

Julia ignorantly asked what the Valais was?

‘The whole district along the Rhône Valley, from the Lake of Geneva up to Brigue and beyond; that road in the
valley to our right goes down to Brigue, where the Simplon road—and railway—start for Italy. Surely even you know that?'

‘No, I don't—I can't see why I should. I do know that the Simplon is a pass that Byron or Tennyson or someone went over and picked a daisy on, and wrote a poem about, and that there's a railway tunnel under it now. Do you suppose the modern poets, Auden and Spender and so forth, go through in the trains and write poems about the insides of tunnels?'

He shook her elbow, laughing.

‘Your shrewd silliness! I don't know what modern poets do on their travels, but if they did pick daisies they wouldn't dare to say so! Shall we have a cup of coffee here? I've brought lunch for later on.'

They had coffee in the small restaurant, with its racks of picture post-cards and steamy windows. Julia was impressed in the ‘Ladies' to find a spotless towel and scalding water, practically on a mountain-top; when she returned to the single room where one ate or drank Antrobus was in jocular conversation with the landlord over glasses of Kirsch—another awaited her at their table. She sat sipping it while the incomprehensible syllables of Berner-Deutsch went on at the far side of the room, by the rather primitive bar; presently Antrobus came over to her, followed by the coffee.

‘They didn't hand over the stuff here, anyhow,' he said, looking cheerful. ‘Borovali and Wright certainly came in and had coffee—they're rather recognisable—and B. was carrying the brief-case, still very fat indeed. The
patron
thinks he saw them just speak in passing to a woman at another table, but he won't swear to that—he's always so rushed when a bus comes in.'

‘A woman!—what sort of woman?' Julia asked in surprise.

‘Fat; middle-aged; ill-dressed—German, he thought. She had a little man with her.'

‘But would they use a woman for this sort of job?'

‘Oh yes—and a middle-aged couple of German tourists
is an excellent disguise, especially if the woman is the senior partner. So un-German!'

‘Had she a
big
handbag? I mean, she'll have to have something to put the papers in.'

‘Oh blast!—I never asked about that.'

‘Can't you ask him now?'

‘The
patron
? No, one mustn't go back over questions. I had to pretend that B. and W. were friends of mine, who might have joined some other people on the trip.'

After their coffee they walked some distance across the bare slopes, beyond the range of most of the tourists, looking for flowers. Little was out at this altitude so early in the season, but Julia exclaimed in delight over some tiny things only three or four inches high, with small veined white chalices, golden hearts, and narrow upright channelled leaves of a blueish silver, three to each stalk—she knelt down on the damp black earth to examine them more closely.

‘How lovely! I never saw anything so exquisite. What on earth are they? Some sort of baby lily?'

‘No, it's
Ranunculus pyraenaeus
. They are beautiful, aren't they? I'm glad you've seen those—they're not very common.'

Julia, still on her knees, looked up at him with incredulity.

‘John, don't be absurd! One of the few things I do know is that a Ranunculus is a buttercup; and they are yellow, and have
round, green
leaves, with dents in the edges.'

He laughed at her delightedly, as she knelt there on the cold sodden ground, her tawny-gold head profiled against the blue ranges beyond the valley, worshipping the little plant.

‘All the same it is a Ranunculus, darling.' He stooped and picked one, and as he did so the delicate veined petals fell off, exposing the tiny comical seed-head, still covered with golden stamens. ‘There—isn't that exactly like the heart of one of your yellow buttercups with the round green leaves?' And Julia had to admit that it was precisely like.

‘Could I pull one up?' she asked. ‘Mrs. H. would so love it. But if the flowers fall it's no good.'

‘One won't matter—let's find a plant in bud.' He took her hand and pulled her to her feet. ‘Look—you've gone and muddied your good skirt!' Presently they came on two plants with closed buds, and with a pocket-knife Antrobus carefully extracted one from the soil—it had three white thong-like roots.

‘How extraordinary!—three leaves and three roots,' Julia said.

‘I never noticed that before. Amusing.' He took a small polythene bag from his pocket and stowed the small object in it, closing the top with an elastic band. ‘Polythene bags are the answer to carrying flowers about,' he observed; ‘perfectly airtight; they'll keep unwithered for twenty-four hours or more.' From another pocket he took out a small cardboard box, put bag, flowers and all into it, and replaced it in his pocket.

On returning to the car they doubled back on their tracks, down the valley up which they had come. Julia would have liked to go farther and see more, but Antrobus said No. ‘We've sent a man up to Andermatt, where there's the long halt to eat, in case your cousin needs reinforcements there; you and I, I thought, would have lunch up on the Süsten-Pass, where the view is rather good, and then go down and loiter in the Aares-Schlucht, in case they come that way.'

‘Would they be likely to do the hand-over in a place like that?'

‘You never know. Anyhow there's a bird there that I should like to see if I could.'

‘Oh—combine business with pleasure!' Julia said blithely, as the big car hummed gently off down the hairpin bends.

It was a brilliant day in early June; the sun was so hot that in the valley Julia threw off her green nylon windcheater and sat in the open car in her thin pull-over—up near the Süsten-Pass, however, she put it on again when they paused a little below the actual summit to watch the
skiers climbing up and spinning down the snowy slopes of the Stein-Gletscher, which at its lower end forms a great white bowl between the mountains.

‘Fancy ski-ing now!' Julia said enviously.

‘It's a late year. There was a big fall of snow in April, and another about a fortnight ago. Usually it's over down here long before this.'