Nine Coaches Waiting (34 page)

He went. I picked up my coffee-cup absently, but the stuff was cold and skinning over. I set it down again. A log fell in with a soft crash of sparks. No movement now outside in the corridor. I looked at the clock. It had stopped.
The world-without-end hour… Nor dare I chide the world-without-end hour, whilst I (my sovereign) watch the clock for you…

"Linda," said William. He came and sat beside me on the sofa. He reached out and took both my cold hands in his. Safe, gentle hands; steady, sensible hands. "Linda," he said again, and cleared his throat.

I woke to the present as to a cold touch on the shoulder. I sat up straighter. I said: "William, I want to thank you most awfully for what you've done. I don't know what I'd have done without you tonight, honestly I don't. I'd no business to call you in the way I did, but I was so terribly on my own, and you were my only friend."

"It's a friend's privilege to be used," said William. He loosed my hands. There was a pause. He said: "If you are going to stay with Philippe, I might see you now and again, mightn't I?"

"I don't suppose I'll be staying."

"No?"

"No."

"I see." He got to his feet and smiled down at me. "Shall I run you down to the Villa Mireille now in the jeep?"

"No, thanks, William. I-think I'll wait."

"Okay. I'll say goodnight, then. You'll look me up before you leave, won't you?"

"Of course. Goodnight. And-thanks a lot, William. Thank you for everything."

I forgot him almost as soon as the front door shut behind him. Someone had come out of the library. I could hear Hippolyte's voice, and Raoul's, talking quietly. They were coming along the corridor together.

My heart was hurting me. I got up quickly and moved towards the door. Hippolyte was talking, saying something about Héloïse. I shrank against the wall to the side of the door so that they wouldn't see me as they passed.

“… A nursing-home," said Hippolyte. "I left her with Doctor Fauré. He'll look after her." There was something more-something about an allowance, a pension, and "somewhere away from Valmy, Paris or Cannes," and finally the words, dimly heard as they moved away along the corridor: "her heart," and "not very long, perhaps…”

They had reached the hall. Hippolyte was saying goodnight. I went softly out into the corridor and hesitated there, waiting for Hippolyte to leave him. I was shaking with panic. Léon and Héloïse might have faded already into the past, poor ghosts with no more power to terrify, but I had a ghost of my own to lay.

Raoul's voice, now, asking a question. Seddon's answer, almost indistinguishable. It sounded like
"Gone."
A sharp query from Raoul, and, clearly, from Seddon: "Yes, sir. A few minutes ago."

I heard Raoul say, grimly: "I see. Thank you. Goodnight, Seddon."

Then I realised what he had been asking. I forgot Hippolyte's presence, and Seddon's. I began to run down the corridor. I called: "Raoul!"

My voice was drowned in the slam of the front door. I had reached the hall when I heard the engine start. Seddon's voice said, surprised: "Why, Miss Martin, I thought you'd gone with Mr. Blake!" I didn't answer. I flew across the hall, tore open the great door, and ran out into the darkness.

The Cadillac was already moving. As I reached the bottom of the steps she was wheeling away from the house. I called again, but he didn't hear-or at least the car moved, gathering speed. Futilely, I began to run.

I was still twenty yards behind it when it slid gently into the first curve of the zigzag, and out of sight.

If I had stopped to think I should never have done what I did. But I was past thinking. I only knew that I had something to say that must be said if I was ever to sleep again. And I wasn't the only one that had to be healed. I turned without hesitation and plunged into the path that short-circuited the zigzag.

This was a foot-way, no more, that dived steeply down the hillside towards the Valmy bridge. I had taken it with Philippe many a time. It was well-kept, and the steps, where they occurred, were wide and safe, but it could be slippery, and in the dark it could probably be suicide.

I didn't care. Some kind freak of chance had made me keep Philippe's torch in my pocket, and now by its half-hearted light I went down that dizzy little track as if all my ghosts hunted me at heel.

Off to the left the Cadillac's lights still bore away from me on the first long arm of the zigzag. He was driving slowly. The engine made very little sound. I hurtled, careless of sprains and bruises, down through the wood.

It couldn't be done, of course. He was still below me when he took the first bend and the headlights bore back to the north, making the shadows of the trees where I ran reel and flicker so that they seemed to catch at my feet like a net.

The path twisted down like a snake. The whole wood marched and shifted in his lights like trees in a nightmare. Just before he wheeled away again I saw the next segment of my path doubling back ten feet below me. I didn't wait to negotiate the corner with its steps and its handrail. I slithered over, half on my back, to the lower level, and gained seven precious seconds before the dark pounced again in the wake of the retreating car.

The third arm of the zigzag was the longest. It took him away smoothly to the left without much of a drop… I would do it. At the next northern bend I could be in the road before he got there.

I flung myself down a steep smooth drop, caught at a handrail to steady myself, and then went three at a time down a straight flight of steps. The rail had driven a splinter into my hand, but I hardly felt it. A twig whipped my face, half-blinding me, but I just blinked and ran on. Down the steps, round, along over a little gorge bridged with a flagstone… and the great headlights had swung north again and the shadows were once more madly wheeling back and away from me. But I was below him now. I could do it. Only fifty yards away the track ran right to the bend of the road, where a high bank held the cambered corner.

The shadows blurred and wavered, caught at me like the ropes of a great web. My breath was sobbing; my heart-beats hammered above the sound of the oncoming car.

Here was the bank, head-high. Beyond it the road lay like a channel of light in front of his headlamps. I had done it.

But even as I put my hands on the bank-top to pull myself over into the road, I heard the engine's note change. He was gathering speed. Some devil of impatience had jabbed at him and he let the Cadillac go for just those few seconds-just those few seconds.

She went by below me with a sigh and a swirl of dust and I fell back into the darkness of the wood.

If reason had spoken to me then I would have stayed where I was. But reason could not be heard for the storm of my heartbeats and the silly little prayer on my lips.
"Please, please, please,"
it was, and it spun in my brain like a prayer-wheel to the exclusion of any kind of sense or thought.

I didn't stop. Two more sweeps of the zigzag, and the Valmy bridge and-he was away. I left the path and simply went down the shortest way between my bank and the next northerly hairpin. That it was a reasonably smooth slope carpeted with nothing worse than dog's-mercury and last year's beech leaves was my luck-and better than I deserved. I fetched up against the trunk of a beech near the banked-up road while the car was still only half-way down to it, but I made no attempt this time to climb the bank into the road.

My beech-tree was at the edge of a rocky little drop, and below me lay the bridge itself. The white mist that marked the river swirled up into silver as the Cadillac took the bend beside me and bore away again for the last steep bend to the Valmy bridge.

I went over the drop. The stone glowed queerly in the light that came off the mist. The rock was rough and steeply-piled, but it was solid enough, and easy to scramble on. I suppose I got scratches and knocks, I don't know. I do know that I slipped once and gripped at a holly-bush to save myself and even as I bit off the cry I heard the shriek of the Cadillac's brakes.

I found out later that something had run across the road. I like to think it was the same anonymous little creature that had been there the first time Raoul kissed me. At any rate it stopped the car for those few precious seconds…They were enough.

I dropped into the road just as his lights swept round the last curve. '

I ran onto the bridge. The mist swirled up waist-high. It was grey, it was white, it was blinding gold as the glare took it.

I shut my eyes and put both hands out and stayed exactly where I was.

Brakes and tyres shrieked to a stop. I opened my eyes. The mist was curling and frothing from the car's bonnet not three yards from me. Then the headlights went out and the grateful dark swept down. In the small glow of the car's sidelights the mist tossed like smoke. I took three faltering, trembling steps forward and put a hand on her wing. I leaned against it, fighting for breath. The little prayer-wheel still spun, and the prayer sounded the same:
"Please, please, please"
… But it was different

He got out of the car and walked forward. He was, on the other side of the bonnet. In the uncertain, fog-distorted light he looked taller than ever.

I managed to say: "I was… waiting. I've got to… see you."

He said: "They told me you'd gone." He added unemotionally "You little fool, I might have killed you."

My breathing was coming under control, but my legs still felt as if they weren't my own. I leaned heavily on the wing of the car. I said: "I had to tell you I was sorry, Raoul. It's not exactly -adequate-to tell a man you're sorry you suspected him of murder… but I am. I'm sorry I even let it cross my mind. And that was all it did. I swear it."

He had his driving-gloves in his hand and he was jerking them through and through his fingers. He didn't speak.

I went on miserably: "I'm not trying to excuse myself. I know you'll not forgive me. It would have been bad enough without what-was between us, but as it is… Raoul, I just want you to understand a little. Only I don't somehow know how to start explaining."

"You don't have to. I understand."

"I don't think you do. I was
told,
you see, told flatly that you were in it, along with your-with the others. Bernard had said so to Berthe. He told her that you had done the shooting in the wood. I imagine he realised, even when he'd gone so far, that he'd better not own to
that
.
And he may have thought you
would
condone the murder once you saw the advantages of it. I didn't believe it, even when she told me flatly. I couldn't. But the rest was so obvious, once I knew about… them, I mean, and there was nothing to prove you weren't in it with them. Nothing except the-the way I felt about you."

I paused, straining my eyes to see his expression. He seemed a very long way away.

I said: "I don't expect you to believe it, Raoul, but I was fighting on your side. All the time. I've been through a very private special little hell since Tuesday night. You called it a 'damnable exercise', remember? Everything conspired to accuse you, and I was half silly with unhappiness and-yes, and doubt, till I couldn't even trust my own senses any more… Oh, I won't drag you through it all now; you've had enough, and you want to be done with this and with me, but I-I had to tell you before you go. It was simply that I couldn't take the chance, Raoul! You do see that, don't you? Say you see that!"

He jerked the gloves in his fingers. His voice was quite flat, dull, almost. "You were prepared to take chances- once."

"Myself, yes. But this was Philippe. I had no right to take a chance on Philippe. I didn't dare. He was my charge-my duty." The miserable words sounded priggish and unutterably absurd. "I-was all he had. Beside
that
,
it couldn't be allowed to matter."

"What couldn't."

"That you were all I had," I said.

Another silence. He was standing very still now. Was it a trick of the mist or was he really a very long way away from me, a lonely figure in the queerly-lit darkness? It came to me suddenly that this was how I would always remember him, someone standing alone, apart from the others even of his own family. And, I think for the first time, I began to see him as he really was-not any more as a projection of my young romantic longings, not any more as Prince Charming, the handsome sophisticate, the tiger I thought I preferred… This was Raoul, who had been a quiet lonely little boy in a house that was "not a house for children", an unhappy adolescent brought up in the shadow of a megalomaniac father, a young man fighting bitterly to save his small inheritance from ruin… wild, perhaps, hard, perhaps, plunging off the beaten track more than once… but always alone. Wrapped up in my loneliness and danger I hadn't even seen that his need was the same as my own. He and I had hoed the same row, and he for a more bitter harvest.

I said gently: "Raoul, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have bothered you with this just now. I think you've had about all you can take. What can I say to you about your father, except that I'm sorry?"

He said: "Do you really think I would have shot him?"

"No, Raoul."

A pause. He said in a very queer voice: "I believe you do understand."

"I believe I do." I swallowed. "Even the last twenty-four hours-with the world gone mad and values shot to smithereens -I must have known, deep down, that you were you, and that was enough. Raoul, I want you to know it, then I'll go. I loved you all the time, without stopping, and I love you now."

Still he hadn't moved. I turned back towards the chateau. I said: "I'll leave you now. Goodnight."

"Where are you going?"

"Someone'll take me to the Villa Mireille. Your Uncle Hippolyte asked me to go there. I-I don't want to stay at Valmy."

"Get into the car. I'll take you down." Then, as I hesitated: "Go on, get in. Where did you think I was going?"

"I didn't think. Away."

"I was going down to the Villa Mireille to look for you." I didn't speak; didn't move. My heart began to slam again in slow painful strokes.