by Ann Bridge
‘So please get cracking, darling. Wire me when you are going, darling darling. Endless love, C.’
Julia sat on her pretty shaded balcony looking out at the silver gleam of late spring snow on the mountains across the lake, and frowned over this missive. Hugh again! How tedious to be mixed up in yet another of his jobs. But neither she nor Colin had ever used their call-note ‘darling darling’ to the other in vain; if she couldn’t help Colin without helping Hugh, so much the worse—but she would help Colin, come Hell and high water. She went and procured a couple of telegraph forms from old Herr Waechter—she guessed, rightly, that he was a person who still kept telegraph forms in his house—and presently took a telegram, neatly printed in block capitals, down to the small post-office. She was careful to use Colin’s home address. The message read: ‘Yes I will darling but how tiresome stop Starting tomorrow. Love.’ She signed it ‘Darling’. The fatherly old man in the post-office put on his spectacles to spell all this out. ‘Darling shall mean Liebchen, not?’ he asked smiling—and Julia, smiling too, said ‘Jawohl’.
She refused a drive with Herr Waechter because she wanted to catch the afternoon post with a letter by air to Colin—sitting in her little salon she wrote hurriedly that she was going next day to see ‘the parson person’; it was all laid on, and she would do her best. In view of what both Petrus and Herr Waechter had said she added: ‘What I haven’t got, and must have, is a death certificate— they won’t play without. You must take my word for this; I learned it quite by accident, but I know. If you can get it in twenty-four hours, post to the Parsonage; if it takes longer than that, probably better send here.’
She paused at that point, and read Colin’s letter through again. The passage about the ‘most undesirable characters’ taking rapid action made her wonder if she ought to mention the curious episode of the girl at Victoria, but when she looked at her watch she decided that there wasn’t time; she closed her letter and ran down, hatless, with it to the post-office.
On the way back she slipped into one of the lake-side hotels, borrowed a time-table from the porter, and looked out the trains to Bellardon. It meant an early start, and she did most of her packing before she went to sit with Mrs. Hathaway before dinner; even before doing that, and while Herr Waechter was still out, she put through a call to La Cure giving the time of her train, blessing the anonymity of the Swiss automatic exchanges. If this sort of thing was going on, one couldn’t be too careful.
She was off next morning on the first boat to Lucerne, and continued by train to Berne, where she had to change. Her luggage there was carried by the same tall porter; looking from her carriage window Julia caught sight of the detective!—also seeing his luggage aboard the train for Geneva. Julia saw him first, and watched him furtively; this time he appeared to be much more definitely on the look-out for someone than he had been at Victoria. She studied his face again, and found it more attractive than ever. ‘Gothic’ was undoubtedly the word for its rather harsh angles and deeply-incised lines; it was also intelligent, and the expression at once sardonic and gay. It was curious, seeing him again like this; she wondered what he was up to. Could he be one of Colin’s undesirable characters?
Julia had time in hand, and she was hungry after a 7 a.m. breakfast; when the detective had entered his train she got out and went in search of a sandwich and a newspaper. Returning with both, hurrying through the subway which at Berne Haupt-Bahnhof connects all the platforms, she ran slap into him, coming down the steps. He stared—then gave his twisted grin, and half-lifted his hat. Clearly he remembered her. Slightly disconcerted, Julia regained her carriage.
The lowland agricultural cantons of Switzerland, like Vaud and Fribourg, are little visited by foreign tourists, and were as unexpected by Julia as Herr Waechter’s house. Sitting in the train, thankfully munching her Schinken-Brötchen, she noted with a country-woman’s interest the methods of the Swiss farmers: the fresh grass being mown by hand in narrow strips and carted off to feed the stalled cows; the early hay hung on wooden or metal triangles to be dried by air as well as sun; the intense neatness of the gardens round the houses, with rows oflettuces and shallots, and a single stick to support the French beans, at present only a green clump of leaves at its foot. The houses themselves surprised her; she had imagined all the Swiss to live in wooden chalets, but here the houses, though deep-eaved, seemed to be much more plaster than timber. Now and again, towards the end of her journey, on her right she caught glimpses of a lake which a fellow-passenger told her was Neuchâtel; and on the horizon hung the blue shadow of the Jura.
She did not stay in the hotel at Bellardon, for the excellent reason that there is none. It is a tiny place, where tourists are unknown. At the station, where she was the only passenger to alight, Julia was met by a small dark-haired woman, rather beautiful, who said, ‘You will be Miss Probyn? I am Germaine de Ritter.’ Mme de Ritter caused the stationmaster, the sole railway employee of Bellardon, to pile Julia’s luggage onto a small hand-cart with a long handle, the exact duplicate of that used by Herr Waechter’s manservant at Gersau; this she pulled after her out into a small sunny street, saying easily—‘My husband had to take the car, but it is only two instants to the house. We are so glad that you have come to us; we are devoted to Aglaia’—which made Julia feel fraudulent. They passed along one side of a grassy open space, closed at the further end by the whitewashed bulk of a church with a tall bell-tower. ‘We think our church beautiful,’ Germaine de Ritter said; in fact, in its solid simplicity, beautiful it was.
La Cure, the Pastor’s dwelling, was a very large eighteenth-century house with painted panelling in all the rooms, and gleaming parquet floors—everything spotlessly clean. Mme de Ritter drew the hand-cart into the small front garden, saying, ‘Jean-Pierre will bring your luggage up when he returns for déjeuner —is this sufficient for now?’ and as she spoke lifted Julia’s dressing-case off the cart. She carried it herself up the broad staircase with its wide shallow treads and polished beech planks, and showed her guest first her pretty bedroom—slightly defaced by a tall cylindrical black-iron stove for heating—and then, across a wide landing, a bathroom with basin and lavatory.
‘It is a little inconvenient, only to have one bathroom, especially when the children are at home,’ she observed; ‘but you see this house is Church property, so it is not easy to have alterations made.’
Julia asked about the children. There were eight, all grown-up except Marcel, aged 15, who went daily to a Lycée in Lausanne; five were married, and living near by; two others were in jobs in Geneva, but already fiancés. ‘Our children come to see us frequently—I hope you will meet them all while you are here,’ Mme de Ritter said, and then excused herself. ‘I have to see to the déjeuner; it will be at 1.30, as my husband is late today. When you are ready, do sit in the salon or the garden; make yourself at home.’ It was borne in on Julia that her pretty hostess, so girlish-looking that seven adult children seemed an impossibility, probably had to do the cooking—she learned later that she did the entire work of the house.
Julia unpacked her dressing-case, installed herself, and then went down to the garden. Here she found a curious mixture of beauty and utility. Fine fruit-trees bordered a well-kept lawn, there were seats and wicker chairs on a flagged space under some pleached limes, and beyond these a kitchen-garden, well stocked with asparagus, lettuces, spinach and young beans, and new potatoes. But the flower-borders along the paths beside the kitchen-garden were rather neglected, and clothes-lines, from which hung an array of snowy sheets, ran down two sides of the lawn. Julia went across and felt these; they were perfectly dry. She went back to the house and found her way to the kitchen, where Mme de Ritter was busy with pots and pans on a huge stove.
‘The sheets are quite dry—shall I bring them in?’ she asked.
‘Oh, how kind you are! Yes, do. The linen-basket is in there’—she gestured with her head towards a door—‘and the bag for the pegs.’ Julia went into what had obviously onc
e been a scullery, but now housed a vast white-enamelled washing-machine, some wooden towel-horses, and several old-fashioned wicker linen-baskets; she gathered up one of these and the peg-bag, and went out again to the garden, where in the warm sunshine she took down the sheets from the lines, folded them, and laid them in the basket. As she was carrying this load back into the house she encountered her host.
‘Ah, Miss Probyn! You are very welcome. Please let me take that—Germaine has already set you to work, I see.’
‘No, I set myself,’ Julia replied, surrendering the basket, which the Pastor carried through into the wash-house.
‘Ma chère, is luncheon ready?’ he asked. ‘I must be oft again rather soon.’
‘In five minutes, Jean-Pierre. You said 1.30, and at 1.30 you will be served.’ His wife was perfectly tranquil, and equally firm. Laughing, the Pastor led Julia into the big cool solon, where the numerous chairs and settees were all stiff and rather upright—there was nothing to lounge in. On the walls were some rather attractive portraits in pretty old frames, covering, Julia guessed, at least the last three hundred years—several of them bore a striking resemblance to her host. Jean-Pierre de Ritter was a man of medium height, but he gave the impression of being small, partly because he was so excessively lightly built, with very fine narrow feet and hands; partly because of the squirrel-like rapidity of all his movements. He was handsome; clean-shaven, with merry brilliantly-blue eyes under a massive forehead, the only big thing about him; and this peculiar combination of figure and feature was repeated all round the room, on the panelled white-painted walls, looking out from dimly gilt frames in a variety of dress that spanned the centuries.
‘We will not talk about my god-daughter until this evening,’ he said at once. ‘I have to go the moment after déjeuner to the Court at Lausanne, to give evidence in a most distressing case—probably murder, a thing so rare with us.’
Julia of course said the evening would do perfectly. She looked hopefully round for drinks, after her early start; but none were in evidence, and none were offered. Her host asked suddenly—‘Do you speak French? Easily?’
‘Yes, very easily.’
‘Then we shall speak French. It is simpler for me, and even more so for Germaine; she is French, a French Protestant from the Loire valley, where as you probably know there are a number of Protestant communities.’
Julia didn’t know—however, French they talked at lunch, to the manifest relief of her hostess. It was all highly political and intellectual, and Julia was quite unable to answer many of her host’s questions on what the English thought about the raid on the Rumanian Legation in Berne, the suicide of the Swiss Chief of Police, Dr. Adenauer’s attitude to NATO, and the value of the activities of Moral Rearmament in Morocco. His own remarks on these and other subjects were shrewd, witty, and at the same time restrained—Julia remembered that Herr Waechter had called him a brilliant man. When he left at the end of the brief meal he already commanded Julia’s respect.
In the afternoon Henriette, one of the married daughters, arrived in a station-wagon with the whole of her weekly wash, to be done in the vast Pharos in the ex-scullery. In theory she merely used her mother’s washing-machine; in fact Germaine did all the actual work, pouring in the soap-powder and bestowing the linen; then rinsing and taking-out while Henriette, in the garden, kept a maternal eye on her two pretty little girls and her toddler son of 2, and did a little desultory weeding. She too talked, endlessly and very well, to Julia, who had undertaken to pick the spinach for supper; crouched over the hot crumbly earth between the rows of succulent green plants, Miss Probyn tried to make reasonably intelligent responses about the works of Kafka and Romain Rolland, and Gon-zague de Reynolde’s Qu’est-ce que l’Europe? This last she had read—and praised, throwing leaves into a basket as she spoke; Henriette was pleased.
‘Oh, I am glad!—for really he was a formidable writer. But later he became rather Fascist, and I think annoyed the English.’
‘Yes—I remember that he wrote some terrible nonsense about the Italians and Mare Nostrum and all that,’ Julia said, rising to her feet and moving two steps further along the green rows. ‘But that didn’t prevent Qu’est-ce que l’Europe? from being a splendid book.’
Henriette, much encouraged, asked if Miss Probyn admired Rilke? ‘You know that his belle amie lived at Sierre, and he visited her daily?’
Julia didn’t know—she felt rather out of her depth in the rarefied intellectual atmosphere of La Cure. She had always imagined Calvinists—surely the Swiss National Church was Calvinist?—to be terrific theologians, but completely bornés and inhibited otherwise; and here she was, being utterly stumped on politics and literature by these same supposedly rigid people. Having piled her basket with spinach, she took it in to Germaine. In the wash-house were two more of the big linen-baskets, full of clean wet sheets and towels. ‘Are these to go out?’ she asked.
‘Yes—but I will take them,’ her hostess replied.
‘What rubbish!’ Julia exclaimed. ‘Henriette!’ she called through the window, ‘Come and help me out with your linge!’ Turning, she surprised a rather startled and happy smile on her hostess’s face. When Henriette came in they carried out the two heavy baskets, and pegged the wet linen in the sun and breeze along the lines beside the lawn.
‘Rilke my elbow!’ Julia thought to herself. ‘Why not do one’s own work?’ She was becoming quite a partisan of her beautiful hostess. Henriette, as they stretched out sheets, continued to talk, now about her family, and from her lively chatter Julia learned yet other aspects of Swiss life. The Iron-workers’ Guild in Berne had given Henriette a small dot when she married, and were going to do the same presently for Marguerite, who was already fiancée; and they were helping to pay for Marcel’s education, as they had done for that of his two elder brothers. Julia was much more interested in this than in Rilke. Were there still Guilds in Switzerland? she wanted to know. Henriette was a little vague.
‘Well at least there were, and there are funds still existing, to help those whose families have always belonged to the Guild. It is an hereditary thing—for of course Papa is not an iron-worker,’ Henriette said, with a disarming girlish giggle. ‘But he is really a Bernois, and his family have belonged to this Guild for—oh, for centuries; so they help with the boys’ education, and our dowries. It is very convenient, en tout cas, for we are so many, and Papa and Maman are not rich.’
However, there was Kirsch, locally made and excellent, with the coffee after supper, before the Pastor bore Julia off to his study, where a business-like desk with a typewriter and two shabby leather armchairs were looked down upon by shelves-ful of books going up to the ceiling: masses of theology, but also plenty of modern stuff in French and German, and in English too—Winston Churchill, Osbert Sitwell, Virginia Woolf, and of course Galsworthy, for whom Continentals have such a surprising enthusiasm. ‘But this Miss Burnett—why has she such réclame?’ the Pastor enquired, fingering a row of modern novels. ‘Clever dialogue, yes; but it is needlessly confusing if one does not know who speaks. And it seems to me that she has little to say except that children often disagree with their parents, and that governesses may be more intelligent than their employers! This last the Brontës told us long ago, and with greater simplicity—and genius.’
Julia already delighted in the Pastor, and would have asked nothing better than to spend the evening discussing books with him, but the urgency of Colin’s letter was strong on her; also she had been greatly struck by the welcome and hospitality so freely shown her, without any explanation of her presence being given. She agreed hastily about Miss Burnett, and then pulled out of her bag the copy of Mr. Thalassides’ will, and the letters from Aglaia’s lawyers and bankers. ‘As she is still technically “an infant”, and as I was coming out to Switzerland anyhow, I was asked to look into it,’ she said, realising how lame the words sounded even as she spoke them.
M. de Ritter drew up one of the old armchairs for her; then he sp
read the papers out on his desk, and studied them.
‘The authorisations are quite adequate,’ he said at length. ‘But I am a little surprised that my god-daughter’s lawyers did not come to deal with this matter themselves.’ He looked up at her, with a shrewd gaze.
‘For one thing, I’m not sure that they even knew of the existence of this numbered Konto till they were told,’ Julia said bluntly.
‘Who told them, then?’ he asked quickly.
‘Aglaia, I imagine.’
He tapped on the table, thinking; then he gave a sudden laugh.
‘And if they do not know, how do you know? And why did they authorise you?’
Julia laughed too—she liked him so much. But as she laughed she was thinking. Yes, obviously she must come out into the open—nothing could be done without him.
‘Oh, why indeed?’ she said cheerfully. ‘Monsieur de Ritter, it’s no good my fencing with you. In fact there is more to this than Aglaia’s fortune.’
‘The oil question, I suppose?’ he said. ‘Oh dear yes, that was bound to come up. But again’—he looked at her, in her cool summer frock of lime-green silk, sitting so beautiful and relaxed in the shabby leather chair—‘Why you? Are you a very close friend of Aglaia’s?’
‘No. I told you a lie about that—I’m sorry. I’ve never even met her,’ Julia said candidly.
‘Tiens! De plus en plus drôle! Well, there must be a reason—even for your telling a lie! What is it?’
‘Her fiancé is a cousin of mine, and as I was coming out here, he asked me to undertake this errand.’
The Pastor pounced on the fiancé aspect.
‘Your cousin, you say, is her fiancé? What is he like? Is he well-off?—rich?’
‘Yes, he’s quite well-off; he has a very large property in Scotland. He doesn’t need Aglaia’s money in the least, Monsieur de Ritter,’ Julia said crisply.