by Ann Bridge
‘No—I came up to have a look round. It seems a cheerful little place.’
‘Yes, I think it’s delightful—so unspoilt. Where are you staying, then?’
‘Interlaken—a most charming town.’
Dead-pan double-talk! Julia pushed ahead.
‘So you know my cousin?’
‘Who?—that beautiful young man? Your cousin, is he? No, we just fell into talk as we sat here—he said he was waiting for someone.’
‘And are you waiting for someone?’ Julia asked recklessly, still rather unnerved by his appearance at this critical moment. Why was he everywhere when the impersonators were about? She glanced up the zigzags behind her—at last Wright had appeared, poor June again slung over his shoulder. Antrobus’s glance followed hers; June’s pretty face was hidden, of course, but Wright’s handsome Near-Eastern visage was clearly visible. The man turned back to her.
‘No,’ he said, looking her full in the face. ‘I was simply idling—Fatima!’
The name that in Geneva she had looked forward to hearing from him came, now, like a blow. Wounded, Julia blushed—her apricot blush that was so beautiful under her lion-coloured hair. She was also at once angry and suspicious—was he lying, and trying to embarrass her because he was lying? She mastered her temper, and thought very fast; well before Wright and his burden had reached the bottom of the zigzags she had taken a decision—not to conceal her acquaintance with that pair. Two buses, already half-full of passengers, were drawn up in the lay-by across the road, one for Interlaken, one for the Beatenbucht funicular—as Wright reached the level she went straight up to him and June.
‘Let me help you, Mr. Monro. The left-hand bus is the one for Interlaken.’ Breathing rather heavily, the young man set June down; Julia took her arm. ‘Miss Armitage, how do you feel now? Come on, we’ll get you a seat close to the door.’
All this was well within earshot of Antrobus; in fact Julia spoke rather loudly, on purpose. She and Wright together supported the girl across the road to the lay-by, where Julia spoke in German to the flirtatious blond bus-driver. ‘The Fräulein has had a Fuss-Brechen on the Niederhorn; she should have a seat by the door.’ The driver hopped out, heaved June in, and placed her on the front seat. The little thing leaned forward from the door to speak to Julia.
‘Oh Miss Probyn, you have been so kind! I’ll never forget it—never! If there’s ever anything I can do for you, just let me know, and I’ll do it!’
‘I’ll remember,’Julia said. ‘Goodbye, dear. Take care of yourself.’ Impulsively, she mounted the step of the bus, leaned in, and gave the nice, silly little thing a kiss. Then she turned to Wright, who stood by with an open air of concentrated ill-temper not commonly seen outside Athens and the Middle East.
‘Mr. Monro, do get a doctor to look at that ankle. I’m sure it ought to be seen to at once.’
‘O.K.’ Wright said sulkily. ‘Mind you, it’s all her own fault.’
‘Oh don’t be an ass!’ Julia exclaimed angrily. ‘It’s entirely your fault for going off to amuse yourself, and leaving her alone. And is that the way to talk about your fiancée, anyhow?’
Wright crumbled at once.
‘Sorry,’ he said apologetically. ‘Yes, I did go farther than I meant, and—and it’s all been a bit upsetting. Of course I’ll get a doctor to her the moment we get down. Goodbye—thanks for looking after her.’ He got into the bus and sat beside June; the blond driver gave out tickets and collected cash in a leather wallet, and the huge vehicle pulled out into the road and rolled away.
Antrobus too had strolled across the road, and presumably overheard the whole interchange—his question as the bus rolled off suggested this.
‘Friends of yours?’ he asked expressionlessly.
‘Which, the idiotic little girl or the revolting young man?’ Julia asked rather sharply.
‘Well really I meant both. They seemed rather a unit as they came down that path.’
Julia could not help laughing.
‘I ran into the girl up on the mountain today, and succoured her when she sprained her ankle,’ she said; for once the truth was completely non-committal. ‘But I never met her before—Bluebeard!’
He laughed loudly.
‘Very good! Only you see you kissed her just now, and then you addressed her rather dreadful escort as Mr. Monro. Your so infinitely more attractive cousin said his name was Monro, too.’
Julia was worried by all this, but tried not to show it.
‘Monro is a fairly common name in Scotland, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Like Antrobus.’
He laughed again.
‘Quite true. But that young man doesn’t look enormously Scotch, would you say?’
Julia also laughed.
‘No. But don’t Jews often take Scotch names? They seem to have a penchant for them.’
‘That young man isn’t a Jew,’ Antrobus said positively. ‘A lot of other probables, but not that.’
‘What are your probables?’ she asked.
‘Levantine; or English father and Syrian mother, or English mother and Greek father—almost any Middle-East permutation and combination. But definitely not a Jew.’
Odd that he should speculate like this to her, if he really was in with them, Julia thought—but perhaps it was just a blind. Anyhow two could ask questions.
‘And have you never seen them before?’ she said, remembering with almost passionate vividness the passage of three people down the platform at Victoria, under his very nose.
Before Antrobus could answer Colin came hurrying up to them, a flowered-paper parcel in his hand.
‘There you are!’ he said, thrusting it at Julia. ‘It wasn’t just up the road, it was at least half a kilometre!’ He saw that the Interlaken bus had gone, and looked at her enquiringly.
‘Oh thank you, darling. Well look, we’d better hurry, or we shall miss our bus. Goodbye,’ she said coolly to Antrobus.
Colin also made his farewell to the detective.
‘Goodbye,’ he said, much more warmly than Julia, and holding out his hand. ‘You might do worse than come up here, if you want flowers and walks—I don’t know about the birds yet. Let us know if you do—we’re at the Silberhorn.’
‘Right—I certainly will, if I do come up. And don’t forget to take your old friend who’s so keen on flowers up to see the Alpine Garden at the Schynige Platte—she would love it. I’m probably going there tomorrow myself.’
‘Damn, there’s our machine moving!’ Julia exclaimed. ‘Come on!’—and she and Colin, running, leapt aboard their bus.
Chapter 7
The Schynige Platte
‘Why did you push me off?’ Colin began at once. ‘Did you see them up on the top?’
‘Yes—and learned a whole bagful. Tell you when we get in—no, it must wait till after lunch; we’re fearfully late. But I pushed you off because I didn’t want them to see you—him, rather; she’s just a little cipher.’ She glanced round the bus. ‘What’s all this about the Schynige Platte?’ she asked—an English couple were sitting close behind them.
‘Oh, it’s some place above Interlaken where they’ve made a rock-garden and naturalised the wild-flowers and put labels on them, so that you can see what everything is; and there are little paths to walk about, and seats. He’s mad on wild-flowers—and birds—and when I mentioned that Mrs. H. was keen on flowers too he said we ought to take her up. I think she could go; there’s a railway right up to it, and a restaurant at the top.’
‘A good idea,’ Julia said. But both she and Colin found it rather a trial to have to sit through lunch talking on indifferent matters, when she was bursting with her news, and he was impatient to hear it. The Schynige Platte seemed a useful topic with which to entertain Mrs. Hathaway, since neither of them could tell her much about the Niederhorn; that lady was charmed with the idea, and when she went to rest declared that she should read it up in Baedeker while she was lying down. Colin and Julia repaired to a field below the hotel garden
and sat in the shade of a mountain ash—the walls of the Silberhorn bedrooms, like those of many Swiss mountain hotels, were about as sound-proof as paper.
‘Well now, what?’ Colin asked.
Julia recounted her rescue of June Phillips, and the silly child’s revelations. ‘Obviously Mr. Borovali, or whoever employs him, went round all these advertising agencies and flipped through their photographs of girls with Pekes or outside banks, till they had the luck to find one who was passably like Aglaia. Then they engaged her for a month, and fitted her out, and brought her along as a sort of corroborative dummy.’
‘Wouldn’t she have had to speak a part at the bank?’
‘Not much, would she? Aglaia’s a minor still. I expect they just coached her up a bit. Heiresses don’t have to be clever!’
‘And why do you suppose they picked on this Wright person? Is he like me?’
‘Not in the least, except that he’s tall and has black hair. I imagine,’ Julia said, remembering June’s words about Wright not being ‘like anyone’, and her vexation at his larger salary, ‘that they routed round till they found someone with a knowledge of these oil countries; and as he’s been fired from a job out there and has a chip on his shoulder, what could be better? I think June said something about his knowing these parties who are coming here to collect the blue-prints—that alone would be ample recommendation, wouldn’t it? And he’s just the sort of creature to be ready for any crookery, I should say; I feel sure he’d sell his mother’s corpse before it was cold for her eyes, for that new operation.’
Colin laughed.
‘But anyhow, now we know where they are,’ Julia said. ‘So what next?’
Colin considered.
‘Could he have had the papers on him today?’
‘Definitely not, coming down. Pale corduroy slacks, silk shirt, and a silk wind-cheater—with no bulges! But where could he put them up there, and why?’
‘Only that he went off alone like that.’
‘She says he always does—anyhow they’ve had a week to find a much better place to stow them in than the Niederhorn Ridge! How big would the papers be, by the way?’
‘I’ve no idea, I should imagine a fair thickness, though.’
‘And foolscap size.’
‘Julia, I don’t know.’
‘Well do find out. You and your department and your imaginings!—I never heard of anything so amateurish. I expect Mister de Ritter-Borovali has them in a briefcase in the safe at the Fluss, along with Jewesses’ better diamonds.’
Colin grinned, wryly. ‘How could we have seen them? They’ve been locked up in this damned bank.’
‘Oh well. Anyhow, hadn’t you better ring up your firm in Berne, so that they can cause the appropriate department to pounce?’
‘M’m. Yes—yes, I had. They may know more now about how long the delay is likely to be.’
‘But why delay at all? Why not pounce tonight, or at least tomorrow?’
‘It’s not as simple as all that, in a foreign jurisdiction,’ Colin said soberly, rather impressing Julia. ‘However, I will get onto them.’
‘Well when you do, do ask if they know anything about this Antrobus man. Have you ever met him before?’
‘No—we just got talking.’
‘He doesn’t belong to your outfit?’
‘Not to my knowledge. Why should he?’
‘Only because he keeps on turning up whenever your sham fiancée is about.’ She recounted the episode at Victoria; seeing him entrain at Berne for Geneva, ‘on the very day, mark you, before these stooges went to the bank’; his presence at the Bergues, and also at Nethersole’s luncheon. ‘And now he turns up here, again on the very day that June and the emetic Wright go up to the Niederhorn. You’d think he was watching them; if he isn’t, he must be watching out for them—keeping cave, as one used to say at school. Anyhow, I’d like to know where he stands.’
‘It is all a bit odd,’ Colin said thoughtfully. ‘But he struck me as a very decent sort of man. He’s a member of the Alpine Club.’
‘Did he tell you that?’
‘Well it emerged.’
‘You could have that checked.’
‘Yes, of course—I will.’ He brooded. ‘How well do you know this party who asked him to meet you in Geneva?’
‘Not well at all—I met him a few times with Geoffrey. He’s an archaeologist, when he isn’t with UNO. And I remember that Antrobus said he was a tremendous Arabic scholar,’ Julia said, trying to bring out all her few facts about Nethersole.
‘Isn’t he permanently with UNO?’
‘I don’t think so—no. They lay him on when they want him, I gathered, and he goes if he isn’t too busy digging up Jericho, or deciphering Qumran scrolls.’
‘The Qumran scrolls aren’t in Arabic,’ Colin objected.
‘Not? Oh well, anyhow he’s in those parts a lot of the time.’
‘Middle East again,’ Colin said gloomily. ‘And of course a UNO part-timer could really be anything. Yes, I expect we ought to keep an eye on Antrobus.’
‘That shouldn’t be difficult, as he seems to be keeping an eye on us,’ Julia said briskly. ‘But ask, Colin.’
‘I will. I’ll go and ring up now, and see what I get on him—and give them this Interlaken address. They ought to be pretty pleased, J. dear.’ He strolled off up the steep field.
Julia remained under the mountain ash, looking across at the white peaks of the Blümlisalp range, glowing like praising souls under the sun; she felt relaxed and happy. Colin’s ‘they’ certainly ought to be pleased at this windfall. Of course it was not due to any skill of hers, merely to Wright’s lack of conscientiousness—well what could you expect, with that face?—and poor little June’s incredibly low I.Q. (She hoped that bloody youth really had got a doctor to look at the sprained ankle.) But it was a scoop, all right—quite a major scoop.
Colin, sooner than she expected, came slouching down across the meadow.
‘Were they pleased?’ Julia asked as he came up.
‘No—I mean neither of the two chaps was in. I shall go in myself; whatever you may say about the Swiss telephones, I don’t care about that box here. The door won’t shut, and there’s always someone in the Bureau next door. It’s only about three hours, anyhow, if I go down by the funicular and get a boat across to Spiez. I’ll let you know what goes on—I don’t imagine the Bureau-Fräulein speaks Gaelic!’
Mrs. Hathaway took Colin’s sudden departure as calmly as she took most things, when Julia told her of it over Cinzanos upstairs before supper. She had a corner room, with Watkins’s cell next door, so the question of being overheard hardly arose; Watkins was getting a little deaf, and was totally incurious about ‘Master Colin’ and his affairs.
‘How nice that his work should bring him here just now,’ Mrs. Hathaway said as she sipped, gazing happily out of the window. ‘The only thing that surprises me is that there should be anything for the Secret Service to bother with, here; the Swiss could hardly get into mischief, one would have thought, because they’re so busy; over things like cleaning their cows.’
Julia enquired about this.
‘Oh yes—a peasant we met on the road told me all about it, this morning. Have you noticed those iron rings in that high wall above the road, just beyond our little shop, next to the glen with the waterfall in it?’
Julia nodded.
‘Well those are where they moor their young beasts, before they take them down to the market; they bring cloths, and buckets to fetch water from the glen, and slosh the creatures down, there on the road-side. Isn’t it charming?’
Julia thought it was, and said so. But she had a notion of her own in her head.
‘Did you read up about the Alpine Garden at the Schynige Platte? If it’s fine tomorrow I thought we might go.’
‘Indeed I did!—and it is something I really do want to see. Yes, do let us go tomorrow.’
‘You’re sure you’re up to it?’ Julia felt a little guilt
y over her own initiative about making this particular expedition.
‘Well even if I do get a little tired, doing something I enjoy will do me good,’ Mrs. Hathaway said. ‘There are wise ways of spending one’s strength, just as there are of spending one’s money—and really the art of living is to recognise both.’
The next day was superb, and they set out in good time, on the musical bus. The town of Interlaken, small as it is, possesses two railway-stations: the West-Bahnhof, whence one entrains for Spiez and Berne, and the Ost-Bahnhof, or East Station, which serves Meiringen, Grindelwald, and the Lauterbrunnen valley, including Wengen and Mürren. The Post-Autos all pull up in the big open Platz outside the West-Bahnhof, and trains flit fairly often from one station to the other, rattling across an open street and thundering, twice, over the milky-green Aar on iron bridges—Mrs. Hathaway, however, who knew her way about in Switzerland, insisted on taking an open horse-cab from one station to the other. A row of these ancient vehicles is always standing in the Platz, the equally ancient horses drooping their heads, the drivers smoking cheroots and gossiping; in one of them they clop-clopped along the main street between small expensive shops full of souvenirs and summer sportswear, and innumerable hotels, some also small, some large and rich-looking. But what startled and fascinated Julia about Interlaken was that the whole town was full of the scent of new-mown hay. The meadows are all round it, and here and there impinge on the streets, so that the fresh sweet country smell is everywhere, in what is indubitably a town. Towards the end of their drive they passed a building with the words ‘Hotel zum Fluss’ across its façade; Julia gazed at it with deep interest. Beastly Wright, the enigmatic Mr. Borovali, and poor June were all housed behind that yellow front.
To reach the Schynige Platte one takes the train from the Ost-Bahnhof for Lauterbrunnen, but leaves it after a few minutes at Wilderswyl, a village at the farther side of the flat sedimentary plain between the lakes of Thun and Brienz—part of this plain is occupied by a military airfield, whose hangars are turfed over to look like grassy mounds. Julia observed them with amusement; appar-ently the Swiss hadn’t yet got round to stowing their operational aircraft in the bowels of mountains or at the bottom of lakes. But she was really keeping an eye open for Antrobus; there had been no sign of him at the Ost-Bahnhof. What a bore if he didn’t come, after all! But at Wilderswyl, where they got out and stood on the wide platform, waiting to be allowed to enter the funny little coaches with their red-and-white blinds which carry one up the mountain, there he was; and was introduced to Mrs. Hathaway. It was hot there in the sun, but when an official unlocked the doors of the small train he said—‘Have you a wrap, Mrs. Hathaway? If so put it on—it’s often fearfully cold going up.’