by Jessica Mann
June in Cambridge; the last day of the tripos examinations. Three hours at a desk in the morning in a huge hall full of gowned undergraduates, deaf to their coughs and grumbles, immune to the flies and heat, blind to anything except the printed questions and the ominous booklet in which he answered them. At midday he ate a bar of chocolate and sat by the river to re-read his final notes until it was time for the afternoon paper. How often since he had wondered what he could have done, if he had only gone back at lunchtime to the room in Parker’s Piece. When he did trail back there, weary, aimless and flat, he dawdled, unaccustomed to the absence of pressure. It was over. He would take Maria out in a punt.
The Czernins’ room was in a house full of bedsitting rooms; all the residents shared the one bathroom and, having cooked for themselves on gas rings and fireplaces, washed up their dishes in a common sink. Steven had rigged up a curtain between his couch and Maria’s bed, and by Budapest standards it was at least a two-star lodging.
It was nearly six o’clock when Steven returned that day. He edged his way between the bicycles which were stacked up against the railing, and chatted to an African girl who was sitting on the doorstep, and sympathised about the brutal Jurisprudence paper she had faced that morning. Even twenty-five years later he could remember every word they had exchanged.
It was very hot in the hallway. Only one widow, which never opened, gave onto the common stair, so that the accumulated smells of cooking and plumbing gusted through the house. That evening the smell was unfamiliar, a little salty, acrid, and idly Steven wondered who was experimenting for supper, and how. He climbed the stairs slowly to the room at the top of the house where the maids would once have slept. When he opened the door and called ‘Maria’ he saw, momentarily in the dim light, nothing, but wondered at the suddenly stronger smell. Then he heard the buzzing, the noise of hundreds of flies. And then he saw what they had settled on.
Maria had lain down on the sofa where Stefan usually slept, one hand uselessly against her agonised stomach, the other clenched against her teeth. There she had bled, and there, bleeding, died. The blood was still seeping through the saturated cushion on which she lay, drip drip drip onto the rug below.
Her hand was still warm. Steven had seen death before but could not believe it now, and he called her name again and again until the Irish boy whose room was next door came in to protest against the disturbance of his post-examination sleep.
The doctor came, and the ambulance men, and the police. After that, some of the other students who shared the house led him away so that the room could be cleared up, and when he went back there was a new mattress on the coach and polished linoleum bare beneath it, and a pervasive smell of disinfectant.
He was told later that she must have started to haemorrhage around midday, and died when he was on his way back from that last examination. The uterus had perforated in the course of the illegal operation.
‘But why didn’t she get help?’ Steven asked over and over again. ‘There were people in the house. Why didn’t she get help?’
He was told that it wouldn’t have made any difference. He mustn’t blame himself. But at the inquest the doctor said that she might have been saved if medical help had been available.
Steven was always to blame himself for not going back to the room at lunchtime on that day.
He had made good friends in Britain since November, and they were kind now. He was taken to stay at Middlewood with the Sholtos again, and the old man helped to arrange a job in Aberdeen for him. ‘The sooner you start your real life the better,’ Sholto said, and so, after an arduous walking tour in the Lake District with Gerald Greenfield, Steven went back to Cambridge at the end of the summer to collect his belongings and go north. Someone had piled his belongings into a cardboard crate, carefully so as not to disturb their arrangement. Papers were sacrosanct in this city of scholars, and when Steven unpacked in Aberdeen, he found that even his notebooks were still open at the pages from which he had done his last minute revision the previous June. On top of them were the examination papers: University of Cambridge, Tripos examination, Physical Sciences, June 4th 1957; section one 9.30 am, section two, 2.00 pm. He had put ticks beside the questions he had answered, and scribbled key words in the margin as he read hastily through, lest they should fly from his memory again. Under his two papers, between them and the notebooks, was a different paper. It was also dated June 4th, also for 9.30. It was headed English Language and Literature, paper number 6: Shakespeare.
There was a brownish smear beside the printed questions. Somebody must have been in the Czernins’ room before Steven returned that hideous day. Someone had come to that room after taking that exam, someone who must have seen Maria and got her blood onto his hand, and then onto that paper. Someone had been there, and had neither helped nor summoned help. Whoever it was had left Maria to bleed to death.
Chapter Three
When the moon rose Rosamund edged herself out of the hay and paused in the entrance of the barn to listen and watch. Directly below a match was struck, and she saw a brief light. Not downhill, then, nor in the direction of the chalets.
Rosamund crept out along the track. A dog started to bark, but at the same moment one of the doors opened, letting an oblong of light onto the ground, and two people went, talking loudly between the houses. If they had used the local dialect Rosamund might have appealed to them, but they spoke French like Frenchmen and were discussing the bus timetable for the next day. Tourists without a car would be useless to her; worse than useless, in fact.
She worked her way across the mountain on the tussocky grass, moving slowly, bent low, listening between steps. Once she was in among the trees she felt safer, and picked her way uphill between boulders and bushes to the top of the ridge. The only paths here were cow tracks. The lights of St Jean were out of sight now, masked by the rising ground, but silhouetted against the sky were the pale peaks on the far side of the valley.
Along the ridge, she thought, and round; it will lead me to the pass and to the mountain hut perched on so steep a pinnacle that one always wondered at its builders. She and Sholto had sometimes slept there in order to make a dawn start to a climb.
The pass should be walkable, even without climbing boots, at this end of the summer. Over the pass, and down, and up again. She should be well away by dawn.
Rosamund had climbed all her life but the steady rhythm of ascent was never easily recovered by town-tired muscles, and the Andes holiday had hardly begun when she was summoned away. As she forced her feet forward, Rosamund thought that Sholto would have been ashamed of her.
She crossed one of the curves of the stream, drinking and wetting her face in its icy water. The level was low and she made her way along the bank, where pebbles lay scattered on the rough ground. She ought to strike the path soon.
The path had been enlarged. It was now a proper road. Rosamund would be prudent to avoid it. She moved towards the trees, a wretchedly sparse shelter of arolla pines, at the limit of the tree line. The going was uncomfortable, and her inadequately shod feet twisted on the slope. When she stopped she could hear only the pouring of the water in the river bed, but it would be madness to expose herself in the open. She sat in the shadow for a while. It was like a black and white film, all colour drained in the moonlight; nothing could be seen moving. Even the anthills were motionless and she wondered idly whether insects sleep. She and Sholto had been on the mountains before daybreak several times, for he liked to get a start on the day, as he put it, but in his company the bleakest landscapes seemed manageable. Once a family of marmots had hustled past, as though the resting humans were as inanimate as the rocks.
It was necessary to cross the river again, at a higher crossing place where there had been a plank bridge in the old days. Rosamund edged cautiously down to the spot where the road should cross a small gorge. She picked up a stone, and threw it towards the river where it fell with a clatter. And again, and again. Nothing else stirred, that she could
tell, and after a while she stepped out onto the grass, where her faint shadow fell before her, and ran towards the bridge.
It was not a balancing plank any more, but a proper structure for substantial vehicles to cross over. At that moment she heard a fast moving motor approaching up the mountain. A scree ahead, and a footpath at its side. The motor road was parallel, but Rosamund raced around the footpath to the shelter of some high rocks. About a hundred yards away, a car skidded to a halt. She lay face to the ground while a searchlight aimed illumination all around, slowly searching out excrescences. After a while the gears were engaged again and the vehicle went on upwards, leaving a reek of carbon monoxide behind in the clean air.
Up and up, another rest and up again. The path led away from the road. Higher and higher. The air was thinner, and Rosamund heard her own breath wheezing in and out. She was pushing her pace, forcing it, as she had learnt never to do, but she must get over the pass before the moon set.
Could this be the same mountain on which she and Sholto had experienced such joy? She remembered the muscular control, the smooth limberness of his stride. ‘Twenty steps, and then another twenty,’ he would urge when she was small. But she had not needed much urging. He always knew how to set targets that people could hope to reach. If only she dared to rest; if only she had the mountaineer’s iron rations in her pocket, instead of … she felt what was in her pocket, the miniature of Sholto, and took it out to squint at it in the faint light. No surrender, he would have said. Never give up.
The path turned into rough hewn steps. They were new. This had been an unimproved wilderness. Rosamund came to a platform, narrow, and not natural stone but concrete, with a metal handrail; and on the other side, filling the valley from rock wall to rock wall, was water.
I might have known, she thought, I should have guessed. Another miracle of Swiss engineering, a hydro-electric scheme probably with the bonus of the elaborate subterranean defences necessary for a small, neutral, country. They have turned our mountain into a fortress, she thought, and panted out a weak laugh.
‘I am glad it amuses you,’ Aidan Britton’s voice said. He was standing at the far end of the platform. Behind him was the massive wall of the dam, and he was suddenly silhouetted in the searchlight from his car’s roof. He was leaning against the guard rail. ‘Time to go back to the chalet now. No doubt you are tired after the dance you have led us.’
Behind him a head rose above a boulder, and ducked again. Men like Britton never carry their own weapons, she thought, they don’t do their own dirty work. She turned away, and he said sharply, ‘This way, Rosamund. Don’t let’s have any more trouble.’
Rosamund’s profession had led her to read about, and to visit, other hydro-electric schemes, sometimes combined with military installations, of this kind. She knew how they tended to be protected. She waited to collect her breath, and then bounded, bending low, along the platform, down, and towards the barrier which marked the limit of a tourist’s freedom. She heard a sound, as of air rushing from a burst bag. She did not know what a narrow miss felt like, or the sound of any but a sporting gun, and as she ran told herself that even Aidan would not dare to have her shot. But the sound came again, as she swerved and wavered. And then she was at the barrier, and pushed herself against the red and white obstruction, and realised that if this did not work she was done for.
She was not done for yet. The siren began to wail instantly, when the photoelectric cells sensed her intrusion. Arc lights sprang on all around the water, and in their light she saw the guard house, and men running towards her from its open door.
Chapter Four
The comfortable friendships of youth revive as easily as they turn to enmity. But Placidus Reichenbach had been a friend long before Aidan Britton met any of the Sholtos, and he proved a true friend now.
The non-commissioned officer, gun uncertainly pointed, had not known whether he was confronting a mad English tourist, immediately to be re-united with the political big-wig who lived down the hill, or whether to arrest her as a saboteur caught in flagrante delicto. Aidan Britton’s command had been authoritative; but eventually the boy realised that the authority was not that to which he owed obedience, and he directed Rosamund into the guard house; her ‘friends’ were asked, most politely, to remove themselves and their vehicle.
Placidus Reichenbach was on duty as the roster engineer for the water system. He recognised Rosamund at once.
‘I went to the funeral this – no, yesterday afternoon. I was always fond of your poor sister.’ Without embarrassment he crossed himself. The young soldier returned, now carrying not a machine-gun but a tray of coffee. Rosamund felt its reviving effect pump through her body, and began to believe that she would be able to move again.
‘When was all the work done here?’ she asked. ‘It came as a complete surprise to me.’
The soldier looked suspicious, but Placidus told him, ‘My friend is an engineer herself. Naturally she is interested.’
‘But for what reason?’
‘I,’ said Placidus Reichenbach, drawing himself up to his full height of five foot three, ‘I vouch for Rosamund Sholto with my life. With my career, which is as much to me as my life. We are childhood friends. Her father was my benefactor.’
‘You are mine now,’ Rosamund said. Placidus fetched a set of engineering drawings and began to spread them out. Rosamund protested that she was only an architect, but he brushed her quibble aside. She could read a plan, couldn’t she? And she’d like to? He was deeply proud of his work.
The plans showed water courses and tunnels only, but would have been impressive even to one who did not know that complicated secret mechanisms and hide-outs shared the mountain with them. Rosamund forgot herself in professional fascination. She had never been concerned with such a contract herself, but had studied them. In Cuba, on an international architects’ conference, the guards at a similar installation had been so indiscriminate in their suspicion that the busload of visitors had gone away having learnt only how effective the defences were; luckily for Rosamund, as it turned out.
She commented, ‘The scale of all this is astonishing,’ and Placidus looked as smug as when he had brought Sholto to the lurking clumps of a wild flower Phoebe had sought in vain. His profession suited him. Always work with a man’s grain, Sholto used to say.
Rosamund was soothed by professional and academic conversation. After a while the soldier began to ask her questions. If she told him the truth, he would mark her down, she thought, as a paranoid schizophrenic and hand her back into the care of that respected local tax-payer her brother-in-law.
‘Let me have a word,’ Placidus suggested. He steered the other man from the room. Rosamund tried to clean up her face with a corner of the napkin which had been brought on the coffee tray. It was a miracle that Placidus had seen enough of her features to recognise. He came back into the room alone.
‘He’ll do,’ he said. ‘He’s a good chap. But I suppose you did not feel able to say anything against Mr Britton in front of him.’
‘How did you –?’
‘I often saw him on the mountain with your poor sister. Not that I eavesdropped, you understand. But sometimes you cannot help overhearing.’
Placidus had spent much of his childhood roaming the mountains alone, watching birds, finding flowers, noticing the minuscule daily changes of a wild habitat. Nothing went on there that the boy did not know, Sholto had said.
‘Your sister was not kindly treated. I saw it over the years. She grew meek. I do not like to say it of your father’s child, but she was afraid.’
‘Of her husband?’
‘I think, yes.’
‘Then, Placidus, you at least may not think that I am mad or bad if I tell you that I’m frightened of him too. Sholto’s daughter I may be, but that is not enough to protect me from him. I wanted to get away. I hoped to cross the Little Pass.’
‘It is still easily done. It is a popular excursion. In another hour you will see
many family parties on their way up. It is no longer lonely here.’
Together they remembered the snow wastes of their childhood. ‘Look, already,’ Placidus said. He showed her, through the window, a family party on the other side of the water, well ahead with their day’s ascent, with fat father in the lead followed by obedient mother and younger child. Behind, trailing, radiating scorn, an unwilling teenager. All had brilliantly coloured back-packs and carried alpen stocks, all had scarlet socks folded down over their climbing boots. Rosamund looked at her own thin shoes.
‘That family shows the way for many more,’ Placidus said.
‘Your English is so good,’ she commented idly.
‘I practise it when I have the chance. Unluckily for Phoebe’s husband that I could understand his reproofs to her.’
When the soldier came back, Placidus arranged that he should leave Rosamund to civilian care. ‘We evade those who wait,’ he said. ‘It is settled.’
When Placidus went off duty, he drove with an experienced contempt for the hairpin bends, waving at his friends on the way. ‘Next week they go down the mountain,’ he muttered, his lips hardly moving around the stem of his pipe. ‘I have made a study of transhumance. It is a pity you cannot be here for the festival.’
Rosamund was surprisingly comfortable crouched on the floor behind the driving seat, with a soft blanket smelling of sun dried laundry over her. The Swiss are so clean, she thought, snuggling down.
Placidus still lived in the house where he had been brought up by his widowed, now dead, mother. ‘My wife teaches in the infant school, until we have our own children,’ he explained. ‘Then she will stay at home. I can provide for my family.’ Apparently his wife slept at her parents’ house when Placidus was on the night shift, and his own house would be empty, but they had decided that Rosamund had better not be seen at all, and she waited in the car while he went in. He had thrown himself efficiently into conspiracy. ‘Always I go into the house and shower and eat. Then sometimes I go out again. Who is to know where I go this time?’