She struggled into her coat, dropped her handbag in the hall, gathered it up and clutched it against her, fumbling with her buttons. She pushed against the door, then remembered to pull the latch. The darkening air outside was chilly, empty. She went out into the courtyard. The fountain sprayed out almost horizontally in a gust of wind, the green plants looked dead as their leaves moved stiffly. The cold wind buffeted her, as if attempting to force her back into the house. She had seen the bodies rolled into the mass grave filled with lime on the grainy newsreel as Aubrey was speaking, the bulldozer's blade shovelling at the white, stick-like limbs and the lolling skull-like faces. The awful striped pyjamas and the Stars of David…
Now, the image would not leave her. She had seen it first as a child, part of a documentary history of the war on television. Now, it had become personal, attached to her like a leech or a disease. She could not rid herself of it. Her father did not deserve the image, not now that she knew the whole and exact truth, but everything to do with him was horrible, awful, foul…
She scuttled beneath the archway into the Stephansplatz. The cathedral's bulk was grim and sooty in the dark air, its darkness heightened by the street-lamps. Horrible. A soul in torment. Even the man who had gone to arrest him, who had killed him, had said that. Everything lost — he had lost everything — helping them — !
The voices of relatives pursued her across the Stephansplatz. Aunts and uncles, grandparents — even her grandmother on her mother's side — especially her, because her father had been anti-Semitic, that much she knew. He had admired the Nazis, befriended them — yes, she knew that, too. In the 'thirties, he had not been like many other brilliant young men — he had eschewed Communism from the beginning of his student days.
The voices clashed and reiterated in her head, and her shoulders and head ducked as if to avoid the missile-voices in the dark windy air just above her. Hurrying across the square in the beginnings of the rush-hour, she looked old, weak, and pursued by an invisible cloud of stinging insects.
The hardest knowledge of all was to know that he had been destroyed long before he was killed. That knowledge erased, cancelled out, expunged all other images of him, all his earlier manifestations. He was no longer the man she remembered, the man her mother.had gone mad through loss of… the man smiling into the camera and the sun or coming through the dappled light beneath the apple trees towards her childish swing…
Up, up — further, further — push harder, harder…
Their joined laughter on the summer air. Her dress flying up in the breeze of her upswing, obscuring the view of the Downs, his hands catching at the seat of the swing lightly, then pushing strongly — catching the ropes of the swing at last, when she was giddy and almost frightened — catching her in his arms…
He was gone, that father. It was darker here, and musty rather than fresh. The air was still… All those fathers were gone.
Destroyed. Robert Castleford had disintegrated.
Still, musty air. The reflected glow of street-lamps through high windows. Patterned windows. High, unearthly voices, as from the distant end of a tall tunnel.
She shook her head. More images of distress. She went on shaking her head, twisting her body as if she were held powerfully from behind. She was trying to escape the truth, deny it—
Because she believed!
She believed Aubrey. He had confessed to her father's murder. The rest of it, too, was the truth. Truth from an old man. She knew it was true. Just as she knew her father had been to Cliveden, had travelled and stayed with influential friends in Germany in 1937 — she had seen the snapshots; dead boars, wooden hunting lodges, feathered green hats and leather shorts or green plus-fours — black uniforms, too… her father had been laughing in almost every picture… her maternal grandmother had been half-Jewish and now she understood the old, old woman's suspicions of her son-in-law.
She believed it all.
She recognised her surroundings for the first time, as if she had only that moment opened her eyes. The cathedral — the Stephansdom. The great roof, the slender nave, the chancel — the musty, cold, still air, the boy trebles whose voices floated just below the roof.
It was something she did not believe. There was no comfort for her here, except that it was out of that apartment and out of the wind and she was almost alone. She sat wearily, perching herself on the edge of a chair, as if about to kneel on the hassock at her feet. She listened to the anthem, and the organ quietly decorating it. Dusty lights glowed faintly, running down towards the high altar. Gold gleamed dully, paint obtruded shapeless colour in patches and glimpses. There was nothing for her here—
Except the almost quiet, the almost stillness…
When she noticed that the choir and the organ had become silent, and that she was cold, despite her coat — her legs especially were chilly — she looked around her, then at her watch. It was almost six-thirty. Immediately, she thought of Paul, and she looked about anxiously, as if expecting to see him close at hand. She thought, too, of Aubrey, and of the written account he had promised her. She did not want it. She would tell him so. He could destroy it, if it helped him.
For the moment, she realised, she was drained of all feeling. She accepted her emptiness with gratitude. It was over, if only for that moment or that day. She would not anticipate its return. She stood up after chafing her cold legs. Then she turned towards the west door and left the cathedral.
The Stephensplatz was still busy. Crowds of people seemed to disappear into the maw of the metro entrance across the square. Homegoers hurried past her as she walked slowly back towards the shoe-shop and the archway and courtyard and apartment that she now felt she could confront.
She turned up her collar. The wind had not lessened. It flicked and whirled around her, lifting the skirt of her coat, as she passed under the archway. The fountain had become a weak, broken peacock's tail, and the green plants rattled in the wind. She pressed the bell.
And saw that the door was unlocked, not fully latched…
No one had answered the bell — she had not heard the catch released. The door had been open. She went in and up the stairs, rehearsing her manner towards Aubrey, especially towards Paul.
The double doors were open into the drawing-room, after the door at the head of the stairs had also been found ajar. Every door was open. The drawing-room was empty.
"Paul," she called. Then, more loudly: "Paul!" Finally, hoarse with suspicions-becoming-fears: "Paul!"
The chair on which Clara Elsenreith had seated herself was overturned. The armchairs and the sofa still bore the imprints of their three bodies. There were glasses, and a smell of whisky spilt on the huge Chinese carpet. She bent down to pick up one of the tumblers, and her fingers were red when she clutched it. For an instant she imagined she had cut herself, and then she saw the patch of blood on the pattern of the rug, almost circular and dyeing its tight pile. There was a smear of it on the chair, too, and on the arm of the chair, as if someone wounded had slumped…
It was the chair where Paul had been sitting!
She heard a faint, distant knocking, muffled and unimportant. Paul—! Where was he? Where was Aubrey—? Blood—?
She heard footsteps coming quickly, lightly up the staircase.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN:
All Our Rubicons
The sunlight gleamed on the fins and flanks of the parked and taxiing aircraft at Rome's Leonardo da Vinci airport. It was a bright, springlike day after the cold and mountains of Afghanistan. Yet for Hyde it was, also, a scene viewed through too much glass, too visible. It prompted suggestions of the imminence of surveillance and discovery, even though before entering the telephone booth he had swept the main passenger lounge a dozen times and found it clean of everyone except airport security.