by A. B. Decker
“I have some things to do for Urs first,” Marthe explained, “but I can be with you in Locarno at the weekend.”
Chapter 28
Ellen recalled from her A-level studies that Wordsworth saw Locarno spreading out like Heaven before him. To her it seemed more like a dark underworld. And on reflection, she was quite glad that Marthe had been unable to join her after all. It left her free to focus her thoughts without any distraction. But they had proved uncomfortable thoughts, made all the more disagreeable by the strange behaviour of Signor Sciarone. So, the moment she found her seat on the train out of Locarno, she felt an instant sense of release.
And when she arrived back at Marthe’s place before making the onward journey back to England, Ellen was imbued with a sense of awakening. The start of something new – albeit tinged with sorrow. She was keen to get back home at last.
Nevertheless, even the intimacy of Marthe’s embrace that she was leaving behind only partly explained the heaviness of heart that Ellen felt when the moment finally came for her to say goodbye. A good four weeks or more had passed since Frank’s death, and she was filled now with a strangely subdued kind of eagerness as Marthe drove her to the station and the start of a new life. Already there was a hint of spring in the air, but the warmth of the sun through the windscreen was deceptive. The streets still had a colourless, dejected look about them. It was a look that seemed to reflect Ellen’s own traces of disquiet, which were still held uneasily in place by an ill-defined cocktail of guilt and a sense of regret at not having had a chance to say her farewells to Dr Zellweger. He had been called out on an emergency.
“Don’t worry about it, Ellen,” Marthe reassured her. “If it was not an emergency, he would have been too busy organising his next symposium. He does not have enough time even for me at the moment. But I will say goodbye to him for you.”
Once again Ellen put herself in her debt, but Marthe was already on another track.
“Are you going to your bank when you get home?” Marthe asked.
Ellen was thrown by the non sequitur of her question, and it took some time for its significance to sink in.
“Once I get home, of course. I hadn’t really given it much thought.”
“Do you think the bank would accept me as a customer also? Urs and I have been discussing whether to buy a small apartment in London.”
Her concentration was on the traffic, which obscured the expression in her eyes, but her lips in profile quivered slightly with what might have been a smile. Or was it nervousness? Ellen did not know what to say, but Marthe’s line of questioning intrigued her, and she could sense it teasing both of them as they continued the remainder of the journey to the station in silence.
They had to say goodbye just inside the entrance, because Marthe had forgotten to bring any identification that would allow her through customs to the platform on the French side of the border. It was the most self-effacing frontier crossing Ellen had ever seen, as if it was trying desperately to be something else. An oddly nondescript corner of the station for one of the country’s main gateways to France. It looked more like a left-luggage office that had not been given a coat of paint for fifty years. Not the kind of place for fond farewells.
Only a solitary traveller ventured down the narrow corridor ahead of them which led into France. A lady with a familiar-looking air, who evidently had no one to say goodbye to, except for the porter who wheeled her baggage along beside her.
Ellen and Marthe both watched as they vanished from sight. Neither wanted to say goodbye. And neither of them spoke. Ellen felt Marthe’s arm around her waist.
“Promise you’ll come and visit soon,” said Ellen. “Come and stay. You could look for a flat while you’re there.”
Marthe said nothing in reply, but her arm tightened around Ellen’s waist.
“Easter would be a good time,” Ellen added, and Marthe kissed her gently on the cheek. Their lips touched fleetingly as she pulled away from Ellen. It was quick and painless in the end. And silent. Not until Ellen was halfway down the corridor into France did she hear her voice.
“I promise. Have a safe journey,” she said, and Ellen turned to see her blowing a kiss.
The train to Paris was almost empty, for which she was thankful. She wanted time to herself. To relax and not have to puzzle over the mysteries of the past year or so. It was all the more inexplicable, then, that she chose to sit in precisely one of the few compartments in the train that was occupied by another passenger. Her travelling companion was the elegant lady that Ellen and Marthe had observed earlier making her way down the customs corridor. For some peculiar reason, she was instantly drawn to this woman.
Ellen put her luggage on the overhead rack, took her collection of Daphne du Maurier stories from her handbag, placed it on the seat beside her and settled down for the journey. She was looking forward at last to completing the story she had been unable to finish in Locarno. It was not until she was settled into her seat that she looked across at her travelling companion and greeted her with a smile.
“Hello my dear,” the elegant lady said, smiling back at Ellen. “It’s so nice to meet you again.”
It was then that Ellen noticed the cream-coloured silk foulard draped stylishly around the lady’s neck and the Louis Vuitton bag beside her on the seat. All at once, it dawned on Ellen why the air about the woman as she walked along beside the porter had appeared so familiar. This was the woman who had insisted her company on Ellen as she tried to enjoy her cappuccino in Locarno and to whom she had confided so much of her history.
There was no sign of surprise in the woman’s voice, but above all a deep sense of pleasure. For all her unruffled composure, however, she appeared inwardly agitated. After fussing around in her Louis Vuitton bag, which put Ellen in mind of their first encounter in Locarno, she stood up and eased another bag off the rack above her. There was a fierce independence about the busy way she dragged it down and rifled through it on the seat beside her. But the limits of her independence were rudely exposed when this search proved to no avail, and she gazed up in despair at the heavy suitcase that lay tantalisingly on the rack above her. She turned towards Ellen with a pathetically beseeching look in her eyes, but said nothing. She needed no words. Her expression was compelling enough.
“Can I give you a hand?” Ellen asked, springing to her feet without waiting for an answer.
“That’s very kind of you, my dear. Thank you so much,” she said, and continued the hunt after Ellen placed one of the suitcases on the seat beside her and put the other bags on the rack.
“Ah, there it is,” she announced at long last with triumph. “It’s very fortunate for me that you decided to travel in this compartment. Otherwise I would not have found it until I reached my destination. And that would have been such a shame.”
She pulled out the table flap by the window as she spoke and placed on it with careful pride the bottle of red wine that she now took from her suitcase. With slight embarrassment in her expression, she looked across at Ellen.
“I’m sorry to bother you again.” She looked across the compartment and then cast her mournful eyes back up to the rack above her, where Ellen had put her other bags. Without any further bidding, Ellen leapt to her feet again.
“The Louis Vuitton bag,” she said, half-guiding Ellen with her arm.
“Thank you so much, my dear.”
And from this same bag that Ellen had seen in Locarno, studded with the initials P.R. in large gold letters, the woman took a corkscrew and proceeded to turn it into the cork of the bottle. Her wrists looked so frail that Ellen fully expected to be recruited to this part of the ritual as well, but this proved unnecessary as she removed the cork with little effort. It was only when she wanted to put the bottle back on the table top that the attentions of advancing age had their fun of her, making her misjudge the height of the flap and let the bottle go as she knocked the bottom of it on the table rim. It was fortunate that Ellen found the pantomime so riveting
. For she was following every movement so avidly that she was alerted to the danger long before her travelling companion realised what was happening. And she managed to catch the bottle without losing too much of the precious liquid.
“Thank you so much. I’m really getting very clumsy in my old age.”
Ellen pulled a tissue from her handbag to mop up the spillage for her, bringing with it from the bottom of the bag a scrap of paper that she had almost forgotten existed. Once the table had been cleared of the few small pools of wine, she picked up the scrap of paper from the floor and was about to throw it into the bin with the tissue, when she realised it was the strange verse that Frank was said to have written. She studied it again, but its meaning was no clearer to her now than it had been when she first read the scribbled text twelve months ago. And it belonged to a chapter of her life she preferred not to dwell on. She was not prepared to let her new future be haunted by some indecipherable sentiment. Without giving it any further thought, she scrunched up the paper in her hand, put it on the table in front of her, then watched as her travelling companion on the other side of the table reached forward, picked up the cork and laid it in the nest formed by this crumpled piece of paper.
The purplish-red butt of the cork lay like a dismembered torso in Frank’s first words. And in this new setting, Ellen became aware of a significance she had not seen before. The creases in the paper conspired with the sunlight shining through the carriage window in such a way that the first letter of each line stood out almost in relief. Together they spelled the name Patricia.
Ellen’s heart missed a beat. Suddenly, as if from nowhere, she recalled Frank’s words on Putney Bridge:
‘Still she haunts me,’ Ellen muttered to herself, ‘an acrostic… such a lovely device, he said it was.’
“Excuse me?” said her travelling companion.
“Sorry, I was just talking to myself.”
Ellen was excited by this discovery. It sang to her like a ploughed field that had released up some archaeological treasure. She wondered what other secrets might be buried in these words. Although she had no stomach to dig deeper, she wanted desperately to take the paper in her hand again and examine its strange message. But the elegant lady beat her to it.
It was probably the sense of tidiness that comes with age that prompted her to seize on the piece of paper, scrunch it as tightly round the cork as her slim wrists would allow, and throw both into the bin under the table.
Deep down, Ellen was grateful to the woman for sparing her the pain of any further curiosity. And, almost as if she knew what was going through Ellen’s mind, she smiled sweetly across the table at her.
For the next half an hour or so, as the train rumbled north along the foot of the Vosges Mountains and their neat tawny fringe of sleepy vineyards, they sat smiling at each other over the bottle of wine, only occasionally exchanging pleasantries.
“Are you going all the way?” Ellen asked.
“Pardon me?”
“To Paris?”
“Oh no. Only as far as Strasbourg today. I shall be travelling on to Normandy next week.”
“How on earth will you manage with all your luggage?”
“You’re quite right, my dear. Porters are not so easy to find nowadays. But I shall manage somehow.”
The words gave Ellen the distinct feeling that she was the one who would be recruited to the task. But she could not begrudge her this, especially when her travelling companion later offered to share her wine with Ellen.
“I think it’s been breathing long enough, don’t you?” she said. “Would you care to have lunch with me?” And from her Louis Vuitton bag she took two glasses, together with a small parcel. This she unwrapped and passed over to Ellen. It was a makeshift plate of sandwiches.
“Please take one. They have cheddar cheese inside. Not easy to find in Switzerland, unless you know where to look.”
She then poured the wine and handed Ellen one of the glasses. “A rather special Bordeaux. Couldn’t resist opening it now.”
Ellen lifted the bottle and examined the label. Château Haut-Brion 1913. She knew nothing about wine, but it seemed a trifle old to her. And the scepticism in her face did not escape her companion.
“You’ll find it’s survived the passage of time rather well,” she assured Ellen. “I picked up a job lot of six bottles at an auction. Quite a stroke of luck.” Then she raised her glass to Ellen and took a sip. “It goes rather well with the cheddar, don’t you think?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know very much about wine,” Ellen confessed, but at once the lady put her at her ease.
“Between you and me, even if it had not been jolted around over the last few days, it could not be said in all honesty to have aged awfully well. But it’s a very special vintage for me, and sentiment plays funny tricks on an old woman.”
“Would it be very indiscreet of me,” Ellen said, “if I asked where you learned to speak English so well? I remember you said you had a very good teacher, but I can’t imagine you learned it in school.”
Frank had always admonished her for being too inquisitorial. She knew that, had he been with her now, she would certainly never have been so bold. But her travelling companion did not seem at all put out by Ellen’s clumsy question. On the contrary, she beamed a sweet smile across the compartment and broke into a litany of nostalgic reminiscence so private that Ellen almost felt something of an intruder.
“I did warn you that I can be rather sentimental,” she said, as if to apologise for causing Ellen any discomfort. “England was home for me during the war,” she continued, “thanks to a dear old friend who took me in when the rest of Europe was under threat. He was a colonel in the British army. Retired. A very dear friend.”
“Judging from the slight trace of an accent, I assume your home before the war was France.”
“I suppose it was, yes.” It seemed an oddly uncertain answer to Ellen.
“That is to say, if you mean my country of birth. But I spent much of my childhood in Germany and also studied in Switzerland, so I have always been a little rootless. That’s why those years in England were so important to me. They gave me somewhere I could put down roots when the rest of Europe was being devastated. They even gave me a surrogate father. They were probably the happiest years of my life.”
“Did you not have a father?” Ellen asked, and instantly sensed that her tactlessness had gone too far. It seemed to have touched a central nerve. “I’m sorry. Please forgive me. You must think me terribly nosy.”
“Oh, it’s all such a long time ago now, my dear.” She paused, as if in need of time to find the right words. “A lot of ghastly things were happening in Europe at the time. That’s why my father sent me to Switzerland to study. Unfortunately, I was unable to keep an eye on him while I was there.” She paused again, only for longer this time, before adding: “I did what I could.”
Ellen sensed a tearfulness in her eyes and had the impression she wanted to say more, then thought better of it. She rearranged the scarf around her neck instead and turned her gaze to the grey industrial estates that slid past the window as the train rolled quietly through the outskirts of Colmar.
“Why didn’t you stay in Switzerland?” (Oh Frank, you would be so ashamed, Ellen said to herself.)
“I couldn’t.”
The reply was abrupt when it came, and Ellen sensed the sweet sentiment of her companion turn sour with unspoken memories. She was reluctant to interrupt the long pause that followed. And stared out through the silence now at the vineyards speeding past north of Colmar.
“My English colonel kept in touch, you see,” Ellen’s travelling companion added at last, as if this explained everything. “We corresponded quite frequently for some months. And then, almost a year to the day after we first met, I received a very concerned letter. I remember the day well. It was a Saturday in February 1938. Schuschnigg had just come to an agreement with Germany, and the colonel worried that it was only a matter of time befo
re Hitler marched into Austria. From there it was just a short step to Switzerland, he wrote, and urged me to move to England as soon as possible.”
“So you just upped and left?”
“There was no one to keep me there any longer,” she replied. Ellen could not escape the audible sadness that crept into her voice with those words.
“I’d lost interest in my studies by then as well. And the colonel was right. It felt very unsafe living right on the border in those days. So I left my apartment at the end of the month. And a few days later I got on this same train to Paris and made for England.
“It was a good time to leave, just before the carnival, which can be very tiresome for a foreigner. But more importantly, it was barely a week before Germany marched into Austria, as the colonel had predicted.”
“Did you ever marry your English colonel?” Ellen asked, wanting to bring her back onto the gentler slopes of her past. And her colonel proved to be the right cue. Her eyes twinkled with a private merriment, as she adjusted her scarf again.
“No. He was very much older than I. Just a wonderful friend to me.”
“Age doesn’t have to be an obstacle. A lot of women like to marry a father figure.”
“No, I never married, my dear.” And the twinkle in her eye suddenly faded again as quickly as it had appeared, like the embers of a fire that had long since ceased to burn. Only deep down, beneath the ash, was the trace of an occasional spark exposed by a passing breeze that spoke of the flames which must have danced in her heart at one time. So sad, yet somehow warm and content in her resignation.
“Only once might I have come close to marrying,” she added in a deep reflection that seemed to shut Ellen out entirely. “But I lost him. Poor little squirrel. That’s what I used to call him. But he was more of a swan really. An injured swan adrift in strange waters. Such a fool he was. In the end it was probably his foolishness that betrayed him. Then he just disappeared. As so many people did in those days.”