by Jessica Mann
They all looked solemnly at her. Aunt Anne wiped more tears away. ‘It is all very dreadful,’ she said.
Rosamund sat down on the window seat, her hands folded in her lap. Lift up your eyes to the hills, Sholto used to say; the mountains had consoled his daughters for cut fingers and grazed knees.
The room was very quiet, with the dead noiselessness of broadcasting studios; bug-proofed. At last the silence was broken by the rustle of ash falling onto the fan of white paper in the grate, and Aidan Britton said, ‘We must talk to you very seriously, Rosamund.’
James looked at her with his judge’s stare; Anne’s eyes were on the hands clasped in her lap.
‘I think,’ James said, ‘it would be better if I speak.’
‘Certainly, sir,’ Aidan answered. They gazed at Rosamund. She felt like a chastised child. Prisoners become children, she thought.
‘Your father’s daughter – your father’s only surviving child, the only representative of Sholto’s name in the next generation …’ James Kennedy was diverted into a speech he had frequently made before about the greatness of Sholto’s name. Rosamund’s attention wandered. She tried to imagine Phoebe in this room, the perfect setting for a husband who was both a tycoon and a thrusting politician. If I had never made friends with Aidan in the first place, she thought vaguely, and her mind slid logically onto the subject of nemesis.
James was coming to an end; there was peroration in his tone. ‘You cannot be involved in political movements so alien to your great father’s name.’ He glared at Rosamund with the ferocity which had warned prisoners of twice as long sentences as their solicitors had foretold. ‘You are Sholto’s daughter. We, your family, cannot permit you to betray him.’
‘But Uncle James, I am completely apolitical. I’m not involved in anything. That was the reason I went to live in America in the first place, to get away from public affairs and politics.’ James Sholto Kennedy looked at her sadly; a liar as well, his expression said.
‘If only you had stayed at home,’ Aunt Anne mourned. ‘If only you had married Johnnie Dorset and had a family. Or that nice Crawford boy.’
‘If you had been at home,’ James said, ‘you would have been able to see Phoebe’s irrationality for yourself. You must not allow yourself to be influenced by anything she said or wrote to you in the last months of her life. Of course, her death is evidence of that in itself, poor girl. I thought it was very good of the Swiss authorities to treat it as accident. She would have wished to lie in consecrated ground.’
‘She had persecution mania,’ Aidan said. ‘She even distrusted me.’
‘It is all so tragic,’ Anne Sholto murmured.
Aidan Britton drew out a piece of paper, and put on gold-rimmed half-glasses to read from it. “‘You are the only one I can trust, Rozzie, all the rest are on his side.” And you replied, “No danger of that in my case, Phoebe.” And then she said –’
‘What is that? What are you reading from?’
‘It is the transcript of one of my poor wife’s telephone calls.’
‘You taped what Phoebe said to me? You actually –’
‘She wasn’t herself, Rosamund,’ James said. ‘It was for her own protection. We were all three agreed. Aidan has been patience itself. Phoebe would not accept psychiatric help.’
‘If only you had not encouraged her, Rosamund,’ Aunt Anne said. ‘She had gone downhill so fast in the last few weeks. It was pitiful, she was so nervy, so edgy.’
‘We had reached the stage of discussing commitment,’ James Kennedy said sombrely.
‘She got you on her side though, didn’t she?’ Aidan said. ‘They are very cunning. She wanted you to use your name, Sholto’s name, to injure me. They always turn on their nearest and dearest.’
‘They call Aidan Sholto’s heir, you know,’ Anne Sholto said.
‘You can’t do it,’ James Sholto Kennedy said. ‘We, your family, cannot let you do it. To use Sholto’s name to give aid to Her Majesty’s enemies – it’s unthinkable.’
‘We so much want to trust you, dear,’ Lady Anne said.
The two young men, or two indistinguishable young men, were still on patrol in the garden; and Rosamund caught a glimpse of another who led an alsatian dog from the corner of the house to the trees. She said, ‘I am not planning to do anything. I don’t know what you are talking about. You know that I take no interest in politics.’
‘It is terrible to me to hear you lie,’ James Kennedy said. ‘Aidan has shown us proof that you have allied yourself to the American supporters of the Irish Republican Army. This terrible fascination that well-bred girls have for criminals and agitators …’
‘Your father would have wished us to restrain you,’ Anne said. ‘You must be under some baneful influence. You are possessed. Like poor dear Phoebe.’
The three unforgiving faces ranged against her were suddenly frightening. ‘Poor Phoebe,’ Rosamund echoed, meaning it. She stood up. ‘I am exhausted,’ she said. ‘And you must be too. Why don’t we talk about all this later? I really must have a breath of air.’
‘I shall come with you,’ Aidan said.
‘All right. Just let me change my shoes.’
Rosamund’s case had been unpacked while she was in the living room, on trial; indeed, on trial, condemned and sentenced. There would be no free pardon, she thought, from this one of the Queen’s advisers.
Rosamund left her clothes where somebody had placed them, in Phoebe’s shelves, but put on her coat, and changed into the stoutest shoes she had thought to bring, a pair of suede brogues. Nothing in the room seemed familiar or attractive, except the one picture which might have been Phoebe’s own choice, a miniature painting of Sholto as a young man, on the dressing table: Sholto the dreaming mountaineer, by Lavery. Rosamund put it in her coat pocket, and slung her bag over her shoulder.
Aidan was waiting for her in the hall, and one of his staff opened the front door for them, making the gesture which was not quite a salute as he and Rosamund passed.
They walked together through the trees, on the padding of larch needles.
‘Do you keep sentries in the woods?’ Rosamund said.
‘Only the usual security checks.’
The path came out into a field, down towards a waterfall, over a plank bridge and up again to a steep escarpment of the mountain, where the metalled road met the path. A bench was set onto the gravel of the passing place. They walked towards the edge. The vegetation below was scarred, and Rosamund could see where branches had been torn from the trees, and tufts of grass uprooted from the jutting outcrops of rock.
‘Was it here?’
‘She fell,’ Aidan answered. ‘I was some way away, talking to one of the men. And when I looked round, she just … fell.’
‘One of the men?’
‘He saw it too. He said that she swayed and stumbled over the edge.’
Visible far below was a path of bare ground scarred by tyre tracks. Beyond it in the village, smoke rose from chimneys and bonfires, and above, on the distant slopes, Rosamund could see a trail of climbers on their way down at the end of the day. She said, ‘Had she been ill?’
‘Not that she told me. But the housekeeper at the flat said something about her time of life. The doctor said it might upset her. At her age, you know …’
Phoebe had been one year older than Rosamund, who experienced no physical symptoms of middle age. Both had been familiar with the mountains since childhood; neither was likely to balance at that edge when she was feeling unwell.
‘Do you mind the height?’ Aidan said. He gestured over the sheer drop with his stick, a shepherd’s crook which he swung to and fro, and up and down, and sometimes threw like a bandleader, catching it by the tip. How easily that crook, designed for a sheep’s leg, could catch a human knee, and twist and push. Rosamund stepped back from the edge.
‘Sometimes,’ she said.
They walked on. On an eminence, below the mountain peak, but overlooking the whole of the
St Jean valley, stood a tiny whitewashed chapel, no bigger than a gardener’s tool shed, with a madonna, freshly wreathed with flowers, against its outside wall. Her statue was protected by chicken wire, but behind its trellis the smile was as pretty and meaningless as Rosamund remembered.
‘Time to go back,’ Aidan said. ‘You’ll have to stay here for a while. No doubt you can understand why.’
‘I should like to see the treasure again,’ Rosamund said. Aidan pushed the heavy door open for her and followed her in. She stood in the doorway, looking round the shadowed cubicle. Aidan, as visitors usually did, walked towards the purple and red transparency of the mediaeval glass above the altar. Rosamund stepped noiselessly outside. Half a lifetime ago there had been an iron bar … there was still an iron bar. She pushed it through its solid wooden slots. He’d break the glass to make himself heard, and briefly Rosamund wondered whether her freedom was worth the ancient window. But Aidan Britton would be breaking more than that if she let him.
Up on this mountainside, Sholto used to take deep gulps of the clean air, counting to himself as he held it in his lungs. Whenever she smelt even the cheapest pine bath essence, Rosamund would remember him standing with his head thrown back, re-invigorated. Then he would go on, with his mountaineer’s stride, across the grass. There was a summer settlement up here, a clump of tiny chalets and plank built granaries which were raised on stone pedestals to keep the rats away. Sholto would chat in his fluent French, and share the farmer’s cider.
Rosamund Sholto ran across the meadow, doing mental arithmetic. Three hundred metres an hour, going up. If she turned down towards the village, it would be twice as fast. But was there the slightest hope of being able to approach it without being seen by motorised pursuers? And the Britton boys were stationed on the mountain.
Aidan would have been released. They would already be after her. A quarter of a century before, Sholto had left a group of journalists to cool their heels in the barred chapel while he and his daughters finished their interrupted outing, then, being Sholto, he had given them the most informative interview of their lives, so that they had thanked him and said the confinement was a small price to pay.
And here was one of the mazots, the hay stores, isolated in a mown field. Rosamund pulled the string latch to open the door and climbed up over the sill to burrow in the loose, unbaled hay. It was sweet smelling, having dried in the sun and air as it hung draped over a wooden framework before going into store, but there would be spiders and other insects, even if the rodents could not climb up over those stone toadstools. Rosamund pulled the hay close after her and lay still under its itchy protection. After a while exhaustion overcame fear and she dozed off.
She woke to the thrumming of a helicopter, and the sound, close by, of voices. It was dark; Rosamund was enclosed in blackness. There were men outside. Had they got bayonets to poke through the hay? The farmer must have come across to see what was going on. There was Aidan Britton’s voice. He spoke correct, careful French. Had anyone seen a lady, the dead lady’s sister? He was afraid that she was lost. Strangers did not understand how quickly darkness fell in these parts.
A surly answer in a thick dialect which was like a different language. Nobody had been seen. He was ordering them away. He would set the dogs on them.
Rosamund willed him to caution. Be careful, oh be careful, you independent peasant with centuries of neutral democracy in your folk-memory. You may not recognise the threat of violence when you see it.
Sholto had always warned of the thin armour around civilisation, and experience had taught his younger daughter that the armour was easily breached. A woman of her time knew a lot about barbarism. Aidan Britton, fearing Rosamund, would not be deterred by any consideration other than practical ones, and neither Rosamund, nor any Swiss farmer, was safe in his way.
The voices faded away into the night; for the moment, at least, the searchers had gone to look elsewhere.
Chapter Two
In this part of the world, so alike in its poverty to the other far-flung places visited by Steven Courtney, so unlike in its own unique tradition, its own unforgettable smells and sounds, the hotel rooms had plumbing equipment installed but no running water, bath plugs but no waste pipes; nor were mosquito nets provided. But there was a functioning television set, which showed almost nothing but a continuous series of very old gangster movies.
Jim Broseley had come to watch with his boss. Both men were irritable, on account of overwork and lack of success, and because of the heat that was unrelieved by air-conditioning vents which were not wired into the electrical system. Together the two men slumped on the beds, drinking warm, flat beer from imported cans. They watched cars chasing each other across endless deserts of sand, and deserts of tarmac. Presumably the film was pleasurably escapist for the mass audience of a country, few of whose inhabitants would ever travel by motor car, let alone drive one.
‘If we don’t get supplies up country by early next week it will be too late,’ Jim Broseley said.
Steven Courtney nodded. How many lorry loads, aircrafts-full, mercy missions, had he dispatched in the last years, knowing how urgent was the need and how rapidly the food would dissipate like dust in dust? At last he said, ‘I shall go back to London tomorrow.’
‘Yes, you’d better. I’ll stay to make the pious promises. God,’ Broseley cried, passionate suddenly despite heat and frustration, ‘if those smug bastards in London knew –’
‘I know, don’t think of it. It doesn’t help.’
‘It should help!’
‘You have to accept it. Short of transporting the lot of them to watch children die from starvation before their eyes, it’s hopeless. We just do what we can.’
‘They buy soap powder from advertisements. Why can’t we sell them charity? Compassion? The barest human sympathy?’
Three cars tumbled down the ravine like marbles on a marble run. An advertisement for hair-spray was followed by one for powdered baby food. Steven reached to switch the set off, but Broseley said, ‘Let’s see their idea of news.’
Local party rallies; loyal party speeches; a disloyal riot by some superannuated students. The Pope visiting one country, the President of the United States another. The eruption of a volcano. A funeral, with a background of white mountains; some faces in close-up, under hats: the Minister, and his late wife, and Rosamund Sholto. Steven Courtney drew in his breath sharply, and Broseley glanced across at the older man.
‘Didn’t you once mention knowing her?’
‘Yes, I knew her. I knew the family. The Sholtos were very kind to us when we arrived in Britain, my sister and myself.’
‘I never knew you had a sister, Steven.’
‘She died long ago.’
‘I am sorry.’
‘Thank you. It’s strange; after all I have seen, it ought to seem less sad, but it doesn’t. One death among so many.’
Steven Courtney often thought about his dead sister. In the years since she died his life had been full, he had married, he was a father, he had even been re-united with his mother and other sisters, for after a few years visiting became possible. Some of his own generation of refugees had even gone back to live in Hungary. Steven’s mother and sisters lived, by the standards of the places Steven’s work had taken him to, quite comfortably. The agency’s clients, or supplicants, would think the Czernin family well off. As for his own life in England – Steven could hardly bring himself to think of it when he was out in the field. He did try to live without waste or ostentation, but the simplest British existence was luxurious. ‘Take your empty jam jars out there then,’ Myra had cried once when he had retrieved one from the dustbin. ‘I won’t have all this junk cluttering up my house. All these things that you won’t let me throw away. What’s the use? They aren’t any good to me. If they would be precious in some Indian village then for God’s sake send them there.’ Both the children were materialists too. Those of Steven’s friends who throve on affluence were despised by their c
hildren as prisoners of their possessions, but the Courtneys could never get enough junk food and junk. Steven told himself that needs must if the devil drives. Those busy consumers, Nicolas and Barbara, would manage if fate made them refugees and penniless. They would have survived that first year in a strange country. They were tough.
Maria had seemed tough too; but she did not survive.
Steven, still Stefan Czernin then, had learnt English as a scientific tool, and found that he spoke almost too accurately. Maria had begun English at school, though of course Russian was taught as the first foreign language. After a couple of weeks in England she could follow a conversation if not join it, but she was quiet and observant by nature and did not miss quick-fire back-chat. When she started housekeeping for the two of them she made do with odd words and gestures. Steven had hoped that she would start a training course of some kind and planned to give the matter serious thought once his exams were out of the way.
Maria had come into exile with her brother unwillingly, but he, and their parents, and eventually the girl herself, had agreed that those who could go, should go. Mrs Czernin could not leave her sick husband; the younger children could not leave her. But Steven would take care of Maria, and part of his horror at her death had been because he had failed in that. He had not even known that she had a lover; he had hardly realised that she knew any men. Until too late, he had no idea how she had spent the long evenings and Sundays when he was making the most of his turn at the laboratory benches. He had not guessed that she was in love.
As English summers go, it had been a fine summer. Steven had no standard of comparison at the time, but at home, too, the exam season was perversely scheduled for the hot season and he took it for granted that one laboured over books and experiments while the sun shone outside, and while Cambridge laid out its seductions of lawns and river. Steven would have worked hard anywhere, it was in his nature, but in Cambridge he was anxious to prove his worth and to repay kindness. Success was vital. He studied for eighteen hours a day. He ate what Maria gave him without tasting it, and without noticing her at all. No later searching of his conscience-stricken memory produced a picture of her getting fatter, or being sick, or showing any signs of her condition.