The Daffodil Sky (25 page)

He lifted his head a second or so too late as the car went past him. He could not see whether Susie was in it or not and he was in a state of fresh exasperation as he followed it down the road. He was uncomfortable because the whole of his pyjamas were sopping with dew and he knew that now he would have to change and get himself a good rub-down before he got back into bed.

‘God, what awful fools they make you look,' he thought, and then, a second later, ‘hell, it might not be her. Oh! hell, supposing it isn't her?'

Wretchedly he felt his legs go weak and cold again. He forgot the dew on his chest and shoulders as the slow freezing precipitation of his blood began. From somewhere the wrenching thought of a hospital made him feel quite faint with a nausea that he could not fight away.

‘Oh! Susie, for Jesus' sake don't do this any more to us. Don't do it any more——'

Then he was aware that the car had stopped by the gates of the house. He was made aware of it because suddenly, in the fuller dawn, the red rear light went out.

A second or two later he saw Susie. She was in her long heliotrope evening dress and she was holding it up at the skirt, in her delicate fashion, with both hands. Even from that distance he could see how pretty she was. The air too was so still in the birdless summer morning silence that he heard her distinctly, in her nice fluty voice, so girlish and friendly, call out:

‘Good-bye. Yes: lovely. Thank you.'

The only thing now, he thought, was not to be seen. He had to keep out of sight. He found himself scheming to get in by the side gate. Then he could slip up to the bathroom and get clean pyjamas and perhaps even a shower.

Only a moment later he saw that the car had already turned and was coming back towards him up the road. This time there was no chance to hide and all he could do was to step into the verge to let it go past him. For a few wretched seconds he stood there as if naked in full daylight, trying with nonchalance to look the other way.

In consternation he heard the car pull up a dozen yards beyond him and then a voice called:

‘Oh! sir. Pardon me. Are you Mr Carteret, sir?'

‘Yes,' he said.

There was nothing for it now, he thought, but to go back and find out exactly who the damn fellow was.

‘Yes, I'm Carteret,' he said and he tried to put into his voice what he thought was a detached, unstuffy, coolish sort of dignity.

‘Oh! I'm Bill Jordan, sir.' The young man had fair, smooth-brushed hair that looked extremely youthful against the black of his dinner jacket. ‘I'm sorry we're so late. I hope you haven't been worried about Susie?'

‘Oh! no. Good God, no.'

‘It was my mother's fault. She kept us.'

‘I thought you'd been dancing?'

‘Oh! no, sir. Dinner with my mother. We did dance a few minutes on the lawn but then we played canasta till three. My mother's one of those canasta fanatics. It's mostly her fault I'm afraid.'

‘Oh! that's all right. So long as you had a good time.'

‘Oh! we had a marvellous time, sir. It was just that I thought you might be worried about Susie——'

‘Oh! great heavens, no.'

‘That's fine, then, sir.' The young man had given several swift looks at the damp pyjamas and now he gave another and said: ‘It's been a wonderfully warm night, hasn't it?'

‘Awfully close. I couldn't sleep.'

‘Sleep—that reminds me.' He laughed with friendly, expansive well-kept teeth that made him look more youthful than ever and more handsome. ‘I'd better get home or it'll be breakfast-time. Good night, sir.'

‘Good night.'

The car began to move away. The young man lifted one hand in farewell and Carteret called after him:

‘You must come over and have dinner with us one evening——'

‘Love to. Thank you very much, sir. Good night.'

Cataret walked down the road. Very touching, the sir business. Very illuminating and nice. Very typical. It was touches like that which counted. In relief he felt a sensation of extraordinary self-satisfaction.

When he reached the garden gate the daylight was so strong that it showed with wonderful freshness all the roses that had unfolded in the night. There was one particularly beautiful crimson one, very dark, almost black, that he thought for a moment of picking and taking upstairs to his wife. But finally he decided against it and left it where it grew.

By that time the moon was fading and everywhere the birds were taking over the sky.

The summer had been short and cool and where the pines parted, high up, there were still occasional thin white forks of snow. The sheer steepness of the slopes cut off from the valley locked below all view of great peaks and permanent snowfields. Pastures of acid greenness, feathered with autumn crocus, wet after rain, stepped up and up from the banks of a grey-green river until pines smothered them with thick black arms.

‘Frau Walter,' he said every morning.

‘Herr Vaughan,' she said.

Even after three weeks she could not pronounce it quite correctly. ‘Herr Von,' she seemed to say.

She always gave him breakfast in the
Stube
. From there he could look straight through the garden, with its neat grave-like beds of leek and spinach and its several plum trees on which the fruit hung in thick and mist-bloomed bunches, like gigantic purple grapes. She sometimes worked on the patches of vegetables and once
a day at least she was busy among the trees, lightening the branches of fruit or carefully picking up the grapelike plums from where they had fallen in the long, lush grasses.

It was the scrupulous, nervous way she searched for the fallen plums, sometimes even getting down on her hands and knees and parting the grass-stems as if she were looking for mislaid eggs, that first began to trouble him.

‘Would you like to have some cheese?'

Her English was very wooden. It might have been carved out of the heavy scoured pine-beams of the big
Stube
itself. Her face was wooden and unpolished too. The eyes were exactly like two dark-brown knots in the pine, the centrally parted light-brown hair like a crack in the grain.

‘You are walking somewhere today, Herr Vaughan?'

‘I think so.'

‘To the Reichenbach?'

That was always her question. He noticed that she seemed more hesitant than usual when she asked it. Nervousness always gave her eyes a bright gleam that eventually became a smile, a very apologetic smile, and she would pluck shyly and painfully, with the extreme tips of her thin hands, at her pinafore.

‘If I go to the Reichenbach I shall miss lunch,' he would say. ‘What is there for lunch?'

All this, the Reichenbach, the lunch and whether he could miss the pleasure of one for the joy of another, had become a stilted joke between them, a catechism to be correctly repeated every morning while he helped himself to the excellent breakfast of three sorts of bread,
two of confiture, coffee and vast slices of thick fresh cheese and butter.

‘Even for the Reichenbach you are not missing lunch.'

When she said this she managed to press between each word a thin fluting leaf of laughter, so that the sentence quivered.

‘You should go there, Herr Vaughan. It is very beautiful. Everybody goes there.'

That, he would try to explain to her, was one of the reasons why he did not want to go there. He enjoyed himself, if he could, without going to the places where everybody went. She did not understand that. Everybody, she said, had to see the Reichenbach. Even she, who did not get much chance in the summertime because the Gasthof was always busy and the grass always growing and the garden always crying for work and water, had seen the Reichenbach.

‘Often?' he said.

‘Just once.'

The way she said that was, he thought, exactly like the opening and shutting of a little box. It was dark inside the box; the lid was lifted swiftly, almost with a touch of guilt; but inside he felt he caught the barest glimpse of something that perhaps, he thought, she did not want him to see—at least, not quite so soon.

‘Only once?' he said. ‘Then we should both go. We should go together.'

‘I?' Her eyes were enlarged and shocked. ‘I?'

‘You could bring the boy.'

‘For that I could never have time. Never in summer. And in winter, when it is snow, persons are not going
to the Reichenbach any longer. But
you
should go. That is something for
you
, Herr Vaughan. That is something wonderful.'

‘All right,' he said. ‘I'll go if you will come with me.'

‘Oh! no, Herr Vaughan. Oh! no. That I couldn't——'

‘One day when there is no lunch.'

‘Oh! Herr Vaughan. You know that is never happening.'

His teasing gave to her flat wooden eyes the only touch he ever saw in them of anything like lightheartedness. It aggravated her shyness too, so that she put her fingers across her eyes in a protective nervous cage.

‘Well, all right. What
is
for lunch?
Forellen blau
?' he said. ‘Blue trout?'

‘You are always liking blue trouts so much, aren't you?' she said. ‘Yes, you may have blue trouts. Otto has gone already to fetch fresh ones.' She smiled slightly, with her head to one side. ‘One or two?'

‘Three.'

‘Herr Vaughan, Herr Vaughan.' Once again she managed to insert small leaves of laughter between the words. ‘Oh! Herr Vaughan.'

‘At half-past twelve?' he said. ‘Is that all right?'

‘Whenever you like, Herr Vaughan.'

She gave him lunch in the
Speisesaal
, a long bright room with an enormous blue-tiled stove in front of the house from which he could see directly and without obstruction up the entire pine-locked valley. She herself brought in the slate-coloured trout in their steaming copper pan. Dumbly the boy followed her with a dish of brown clarified butter kept hot by a methylated flame.

‘Ah! a lady.'

The trout curled on his plate had its mouth open. That was another joke and she always said:

‘You are knowing it now very quickly which is the lady. With the mouth open.'

That had been the first time he saw her smile: the day she had served him a trout with its mouth gaping and asked him if he knew how to tell, in trout, the male from the female. The second time had been when she showed him the small white saucer of flesh in the cheek of the fish: the piece for the connoisseur, she said, the most delicate piece of all.

The boy was twelve or thirteen: perhaps a year or two older. It was very hard to tell. The structure of the thick features, coarse and strong, seemed to break down about the mouth, which sagged spongily. The eyes were jellied and globular. The jaw sank itself into a short squat neck that went up at the back like a pipe that had been scoured.

The hands, which were enormous, generally bungled the little dish of butter, burning themselves against hot metal.

‘Go now, go now,' she said. She spoke in a low voice, with apologetic gentleness. ‘Bring bread for Herr Vaughan. There is no bread.'

On feet that were like those of a bear shod in metal the boy clumped out across the bare wood floor.

‘It would help if he could speak English,' she said, apologising for him a second time.

Some of the bread, when it came, slid out of the basket and his big muscle-bound hands to the floor.

When meals were over the boy and his father worked mostly on the pasture at the back of the house, the man
mowing the grass in strips with a broad short scythe, the boy clumsily tossing and feathering with a wide wooden fork the lines of yesterday's hay. The father, Otto, had a breadth of back and a thickness of neck, covered with shaved salt-and-pepper hair, that made him seem even shorter and squatter than perhaps he was. It was hard, as with the boy, to tell how old he was: perhaps fifty or fifty-five, twenty or twenty-five years older at any rate than Frau Walter, who spent some part of every afternoon scouring the grass for fallen plums.

When the grass immediately behind the house had been mown the man and the boy moved farther up the slope, a quarter of a mile away. They toiled up there at the grass until darkness fell. With enormous sluggish hands the boy tossed clouds of grass that rained delicate spits of fading crocus bloom. A day or two later the grass came home in great bundles, borne on the shoulders by the man and the boy like burdens on the backs of oxen.

‘It is very hard work with the grass,' he said to Frau Walter.

‘Oh! yes,' she said. ‘But then, that is our life. Without the grass there would not be much for us. We are too high to grow corn. The summer is too short for it.'

‘There are wonderful machines now for cutting grass,' he said.

‘Such machines are not for Otto, I think.'

‘They save work,' he said. ‘And after all work is time. And time is money. But then, I think the Swiss like to work.'

‘I am not Swiss,' she said.

For the second time it was like the opening of a little
box: except that this time, he thought, the aperture was slightly wider.

‘I am really German,' she said. ‘I still don't speak Swiss-German well. Not really well. It is still rather strange for me.'

‘But English—you speak that well.'

‘That I learned in High School,' she said.

‘Where?' he asked her. ‘Which town?'

‘In München. Munich. I was a student there. That was before the war. That was the time when there was not so much work for German girls. That was when I came here. Many German girls are coming to Switzerland. Even now.'

Almost every time he came back from walking he would hear the voice of the father, Otto, goading the boy. Its short animal barks might have been snarling at a mule.

‘Franz! Franz! Franz!'

Even from the pastures farther up the slope, where hay-forks clawed the air and drew out of it whirling explosions in pale green clouds, he could hear it grunting and barking down the clear alpine air.