Ellis Peters - George Felse 08 - The House Of Green Turf by Ellis Peters Page B

Zurich because he didn’t know what he was going to do, what he wanted to do, what he could bear to do. And about Friedl he thought only once during that time, with a violent tearing at his own conscience, and the shock of realising that the suppression of what galls and accuses is not so difficult or rare. That we all do it. That life would be impossible if we did not.
    On the second day he asked for a passage home, but had to wait one more night before getting one. He was glad of the respite. Because what
was
he going to do about Maggie? No use trying to shield her by lying to her, she was utterly sincere when she said she wanted the truth, that she couldn’t live without truth. Did he even want to spare her? There were times during the flight when he realised that he wanted rather to rend her, to make her pay not only for Robin Aylwin, but for his own self-torment, too, and even for poor Friedl, with the tiny blemish on her flesh and the great cancer in her spirit, and the men who had slipped through her fingers because Maggie was innocent and dedicated.
    He telephoned the hospital in Comerbourne as soon as he landed. He still had no idea what he wanted to say. It was almost a relief to get the ward sister, brisk and cheerful and immune, explaining that Miss Tressider had made rapid progress and was now discharged. Yes, she was still in Comerbourne, she could be contacted at the Lion Hotel, where she had taken a suite for a period of convalescence under supervision. She had wanted to have a grand piano, an amenity the hospital naturally couldn’t provide.
    That was no great surprise. The voice that used her as a means of communication was restless and fretful, aching for an outlet again. Had she, after all, had any choice when she kicked love away from her? Wasn’t she, from the moment she realised the incubus that rode her, a woman possessed?
    He telephoned the Lion Hotel.
    ‘Yes… Oh,
yes
!’ she said. The voice, full, clear and eager, drew her upon the air in front of his eyes. ‘Yes much better, thank you! Do come! I wondered about you. I shall be looking forward…’
     
    ‘I’ve been following,’ he said, with the even delivery of a machine, ‘the course of that last tour you made with Dr. Fredericks.’ He dared look at her only briefly and occasionally, because the blue of her eyes blinded him, so vivid and wondering and hopeful they were upon his face. ‘I stayed at a small resort called Scheidenau, near the German border. Do you remember it?’
    ‘Yes, vaguely. There was a lake… and a castle…’
    ‘And a small hotel called the Goldener Hirsch.’
    ‘You mean the one Freddy used to take us to? I’d forgotten the name, but I remember how it looked.’
    The Lion Hotel was by the Comer bridge, and her suite was above the waterside. The tremulous light, reflected from a high ceiling and white walls, shimmered over her face, which was clear and pure as crystal, without shadows. She looked marvellously more substantial than when he had seen her in her hospital bed, but still fine-drawn and great of eye, and the tension that held her seemed more of hope than fear, as if the very act of sending him out to probe her disease had somehow absolved her and set her well on the way to a cure. Perhaps for a few days, in his absence, she had even begun to feel that setting out to look for the answer was the same thing as finding it, that now she could take up her life again, that the crisis was over.
    He approached her not with clear statements, but with promptings, for what seemed to him a good reason. For Friedl, in spite of her reckless challenge to him to go back to his Maggie and ask her outright, might still have been lying. And supposing he confronted Maggie with this story, and still her memory failed or refused to fill in the blank spaces, so that she could never positively know whether the thing had happened like that or not? The last thing he wanted was to burden her with a grief she had not