Airs Above the Ground (7 page)

The Peugeot drove off. Timothy and I turned to walk back to our hotel.

‘Do you mind?’ he asked.

‘You know I don’t. I told you I’d be glad to have you. That, at least, wasn’t a lie . . . And talking of lies, we brushed through that pretty well, wouldn’t you say? She’s a nice girl, Tim.’

‘I know that. I did mind at first. I couldn’t help it. But I don’t now, not a bit.’ We were passing the lighted windows of Prachner’s bookshop: I saw that he had a look that I had not seen in him before, buoyant and clear and free. ‘After all,’ he said, ‘he’s got a perfect right to his own life, hasn’t he? You can’t hang on to people for ever. You’ve got to let them go.’

‘Of course,’ I said.

Ay, now I am in Arden; the more fool I. When I was at home I was in a better place; but travellers must be content.

Shakespeare:
As You Like It

We drove into the village of Oberhausen at about five o’clock next day.

Now that Timothy was coming with me, I had abandoned my original plan of going by train to Bruck or Graz, and hiring a car from there. Moreover, it was Sunday, and I was not sure if such arrangements could be made on a Sunday afternoon. But in Vienna, it seemed, anything could be arranged at more or less any time, especially with the efficient and willing help of the desk staff of the Hotel am Stephansplatz.

So it came about that Timothy and I left Vienna in a hired Volkswagen shortly before noon next day, making our way out through the mercifully thin Sunday traffic with me at the wheel and Timothy, map on knee, guiding me with remarkable efficiency out along the Triester Strasse, past the car cemetery, and on to the Wiener Neustadt road.

It was a beautiful day. As we ran south-west from
Vienna along the
Autobahn
the countryside, at first dull and scabbed with urban industry, began to lift itself by degrees from the flat monotony of the plain. Beyond Wiener Neustadt we found ourselves in a rolling landscape of forested slopes, green pastures, and romantic crags girdled by silver streams and crowned with castles.

It was a scene from the idylls rather than from romance, pastoral rather than Gothic. The valley bottoms were rich with crops, and the hayfields stretched golden right up to the spurs of the hills. Even when the road – magnificently engineered – began its twisting climb to the Semmering Pass, there was still nothing in the grand manner about the scenery; the great slopes of pine forest were only a shelter and a frame for the peaceful human picture below.

We ate at Semmering – a resort which, at four thousand feet, is sunny all winter and which now, in the height of summer, had air so dizzyingly clear as to make Timothy extra ravenous even by his standards, and to restore to me something of the appetite which had been taken away by the nervous tension that I hadn’t yet admitted, but which increased steadily as we neared the end of the journey.

We were on our way again by three, descending through more and more beautiful country till, a few kilometres beyond Bruck, we left the main road and its accompanying river, and turned up the valley of a tributary.

I pulled off the road on to a verge felted with pine needles.

‘You’ve got a licence, haven’t you, Tim? Would you like to drive?’

‘Love to,’ he said promptly. ‘Are you tired?’

‘A bit. It’s a bit over-concentrated, with the left-hand drive, and driving on the wrong side, and all the cars out for the Sunday afternoon stampede. I must say you were marvellous over the road signs. I hope I’ll do as well for you, or have you got your eye in by now?’

‘I think so,’ he said as we changed over. ‘It doesn’t look as if there’ll be much traffic up this little road, anyway.’

He took a few moments to examine the controls and play with the gear-box, and then we moved off. Not much to my surprise – I had long since ceased to underrate Timothy – he turned out to be a good driver, so that I was able to relax and think about what lay ahead of me, while I pretended for pride’s sake to be admiring the scenery.

This was not difficult. The road ran at first through pine trees with a widish tumbling stream to the right, then, rounding a green bluff, it began to climb, curling along under cliffs hollowed by quarries and heavily overhung by the forests above, while beside us the stream fell ever more steeply through a series of rapids, and on the far bank the rocks crowded in.

But soon we were out of the narrow defile into a wide placid basin girdled by hills. Here the road ran straighter, bounded to either side only by green meadows knee-deep in white and yellow flowers. Behind the meadows rose the hills; at first softly, furred with grass, their green curves framed by the pines which
flowed downhill to fill every fold and crevice of the slopes, as if the high forest were crowding so thickly on the crests that it overflowed down every vein and runnel of the land below, like whipped cream running down the side of a pudding. At the upper limits of this dense crowded forest soared the cliffs again, shining escarpments of silver rock threaded in their turn by the white veins of falling water.

But these were still in no sense overpowering hills. They fell short of majesty, staying, as it were, on the periphery of vision, while the eye was held by the nearer landscape with its rolling, golden greens, and the cheerful domestic charm of the small houses that were clustered here and there round their churches and farms. The hay had been cut, and was drying, woven round its poles like dark gold flax round the spindles, while below it the shorn fields lay as smooth as plush. Here and there were shrines, like tiny churches cut off at the apse, with flowers in front of some painted statue, and martins wheeling in and out under the shingle roof. The village houses, too, were painted, the walls all washed with pink, or pale blue, or white, while every window had its window-box tumbling with petunias, geraniums, marguerites. Every house, it seemed, had its small orchard heavy with apples and peaches, and its apricot tree trained against the bright wall. Everything glittered, was rich, shone. The little village churches, humbly built of paint-washed plaster and roofed with wooden shingles, each thrust up a spire or an onion dome topped with a glittering gold weathercock. The cattle grazing peacefully in the fields were
honey-coloured, and bore large, deep-ringing bells. The valley scene was so rich, so sunlit, and so peaceful, that the eye hardly strayed up to the rocks behind. They were only a background to this entrancing pastoral, painted in with the long shadows of late afternoon.

The first thing I saw, as we ran into the village of Oberhausen, was the poster,
CIRCUS WAGNER
, wrapped round a tree-trunk. The second was the circus itself in a field to the right of the road, a motley collection of tents, wagons and caravans, grouped in an orderly confusion round the big top.

Timothy slowed to a crawl as we both craned to see.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘they’re still here. That’s something, anyway. What are we going to do first?’

‘Go straight through and try to find the Gasthof. Didn’t the hall porter say it was at the far end of the village? Let’s find it, and get ourselves settled before we do anything else.’

‘OK.’

The village street closed in. It was narrow, with no pavements, apart from a foot or two of beaten dust which formed a verge to either side and which was separated from the road by trees. Here and there a gabled window, or a flight of steps, thrust out to the edge of the road, forcing the people to abandon the footpaths and walk among the traffic. This they did with the utmost casualness: in fact the road, being smoother walking, was fuller than the footways, as the slow aimless Sunday crowd strolled about it at will, crossing in front of the cars without a glance. Since (as
in most Austrian villages) the use of the horn was forbidden, our progress was very slow and circumspect. Timothy’s pungent but perfectly cheerful running commentary was mercifully audible only to me.

At length we emerged from the narrows into an open square where an old well stood, and seats were set under the trees that surrounded the cobbled space. Ahead of us a church lifted a pretty onion spire with a gilt arrow from weathercock. The road divided to either side of the church.

I said: ‘I think we’d better stop and ask the way. If we go up the wrong street among these crowds, heaven knows where we’ll get to before we can turn.’

He drew carefully in to the side, stopped in the shade of a plane tree, and leaned out of his window. He hadn’t far to go for help: a cheerful trio of women was passing the time of day in the middle of the road with half a dozen children skirmishing round their skirts. They all answered him at once, with explicit gestures, while the children, apparently stricken dumb and paralytic at the sound of Timothy’s accent, crowded round, staring at us with round blue eyes.

At length he drew his head in. ‘Don’t tell me,’ I said, ‘let me guess. It’s the road to the right.’

He grinned. ‘And we can’t miss it. They say it’s very nice along there, and quiet, because the other road’s the main one. I say, I like this place, don’t you? Look at that thing in the middle, the well or whatever it is, with that wrought-iron canopy. It’s rather fine. Gosh, do you see that
Konditorei
, the baker’s shop with the café tables inside? I could do with some of those cakes,
couldn’t you? We could come out and buy something as soon as we get settled . . .’

He chattered on, pleasantly excited, leaning out of his window in the hot sun. But I had ceased to listen, or even to see. The pretty village, with its lively, milling crowds, had faded away, to become a shadowy background only for one person. I had seen Lewis’s blonde.

She was pausing beside the well to speak to someone, an old woman in black, who carried an armful of flowers. She was half facing the other way, and was some forty yards off, but I thought I could not be mistaken. Then she turned, and I was sure. This was the girl I had seen on the news reel. Moreover, in the flesh, and in the bright light of day, she was prettier even than I remembered. She was of small to medium height, with a slender curved young figure, and fair hair tied neatly back in a pony tail. Gone was the kinky look that the waterproof and dishevelled hair had given her; she was charmingly dressed now in the traditional white blouse, flowered dirndl, and apron. She looked about eighteen.

As I watched her, she bade a laughing goodbye to the old woman, and came straight towards the car.

‘Tim,’ I said softly, ‘pull your head in and shut the window. Quick.’

He obeyed immediately.

‘That girl coming towards the car, the pretty one, the blonde in the blue dirndl – that’s the girl I saw in the news reel. No, don’t stare at her, just notice her, so that you’ll know her again.’

She came straight towards us, through the banded
shadows of the tree trunks, and passed the car without a glance. I didn’t turn, but I saw Tim watching her in the driving mirror.

‘She’s going straight on down the street. Shall I wait?’

‘Yes. Try to see where she goes.’

After a pause he said: ‘I can’t see her any more, there are too many people milling about, but she was heading straight down the street, the way we came in.’

‘Towards the circus field?’

‘Yes. Would you like me to do a quick “recce” and see just where she goes?’

‘Would you?’

‘Sure thing.’ He was already half out of the car. ‘I’ve always fancied myself in the James Bond line, who hasn’t? You stay there and pay the parking fine.’

The door slammed behind him. I tilted the driving mirror so that I could watch his tall young figure striding back down the middle of the street with all the magnificent local disregard for traffic. Then he, in his turn, was lost to view.

I leaned back in my seat, but not to relax. It was no surprise to feel myself trembling a little as my eyes reluctantly, yet feverishly, searched the crowds.

It was true, then, that my eyes had not deceived me: so much of it was true. Now that I had this confirmation, I found it a profoundly disconcerting experience. The sight of Lewis and the girl in the dark cinema, that flickering brief scene still echoing with ugly tragedy and made more mysterious by its foreign setting, had been like a dream, something distant,
unreal, gone as soon as seen, and believed no more than a dream in daylight. And as always, the light of day outside the cinema had set the dream even further apart from the world of reality. My own hasty action in coming out to Austria had seemed even while I did it as unreal as the dream itself; and up to now the enchanting strange prettiness of the country had helped the illusion that I was still far astray from reality.

But now . . . Oberhausen, the circus, the girl herself . . . And next, Lewis . . .?

‘What, no parking ticket?’ It was Tim, back at the window.

‘No parking ticket. You made me jump. I never heard you.’

‘I told you I’d found my vocation.’ He folded his length beside me into the driving seat. ‘I shadowed your subject with the greatest possible skill, and she did go to the circus. I think she must belong there, because she went straight in through the gate and then round towards the caravans. The village people – quite a lot were there with children – were being allowed in, but they all went to the other side; there’s a menagerie or something there, open to the public. There was a man taking the money at the gate, but I didn’t ask questions. Was that right?’

‘Yes, quite.’

‘And I’ve got news for you. They’re leaving tomorrow. There was a sticker across the poster, last performance tonight at eight o’clock.’

‘Oh? We’re just lucky, then. Thanks a lot, Tim.’

‘Think nothing of it. It was fun. I tell you, I’ve come
to the conclusion I’ll be wasted on the Spanish Riding School. James Bond isn’t in it – though as a matter of fact, Archie Goodwin’s my favourite detective; you know, Nero Wolfe’s assistant, handsome and efficient and a devil with women.’

‘Well, now’s your chance,’ I said. ‘If we don’t fall over Lewis pretty soon, I’ll send you after the girl.’

‘What they call “scraping an acquaintance”? Can do,’ said Tim cheerfully. ‘Golly, if this road gets much narrower, we’ll scrape more than that . . . Wait a moment, though, I believe this is it.’